In Times of War: How Will This End?

This was originally posted in April, 2022, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine was getting underway. It seems just as urgent now. 

At best, uncertainty is a difficult emotional state. We live in a world of routines, reliable cause-and-effect, and pattern recognition. We don’t need to test gravity every time we take a step, which is a good thing. We make assumptions about how people we know well (or people in general) are going to behave, based on their past actions. (Erratic behavior, whether due to mental illness, substance abuse, or misreading body language, can be traumatic, especially for children.) We anticipate many things, from the functioning of traffic lights to our own digestion to the reaction of a deer suddenly come upon in a meadow, based on our understanding of “how things work.” We use these strategies all the time without thinking about it. Having a reasonable sense of how events will unfold frees up mental (and physical) energy and gives us a sense of control over our lives.

Unexpected things happen, of course. Most of the time they’re ordinary bumps and bruises like burned dinner, a sprained ankle, a higher-than-normal electricity bill, or a traffic ticket.  They can be terrible: 9-11, a hurricane, the wildfires that swept through my part of the country a couple of years ago and resulted in my family evacuating for a month. A death in the family. Often we have little or no advance warning: it’s over, leaving us stunned or horrified or grief-stricken. We don’t get to vote on what happened, we only get to pick up the pieces afterwards. At other times, we have advance notice, like the wildfires or other weather events (but not earthquakes, lived through a couple of big ones, too) or Covid-19. We grab the kids and the pets and get out of town; we wear masks and stay home, and so forth. Even if there’s nothing we can do to protect ourselves, we often have a pretty good idea how things are going to go. Not always, of course. I remember staying glued to local news while camped out in our hotel room, anxiety eating away at me as the fires got closer to our house; I’d go to sleep certain that in the morning, our place would be ashes (but it survived with only a little storm damage).

I think war is fundamentally different. On a day-to-day basis, for those in the fighting zones, it must be like a monstrous union between the Chicxulub impact, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the Black Death. Adrenaline fight-or-flight panic overload survival time, one blast at a time. But for those of us watching the catastrophe unfold from afar, anxiety takes over as the dominant emotion. Watching one horrific event after another taxes our ability to pay attention to the present moment, and that is normal. It’s in our DNA to anticipate what will happen next. In our minds, we flee to the future.

Where will Russia strike next? What weapons will they use? What can we do to shield Ukrainian civilians? Will anything come of the peace talks? What will China—or India—do?

Enter the pundits and op-ed writers, predicting everything from the economic collapse of Russia and Putin being deposed, to Russia bludgeoning Ukraine into surrender to plots, to assassinate Zelenskyy to even wilder speculations. They speculate about increasingly grim futures: Is this a prelude to nuclear war? The collapse of Russia and a worldwide recession? We gobble up the columns, even though they often leave us feeling even more anxious and wretched than before.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

I think the answer lies in how predictability lowers anxiety, and the greater the stakes, the stronger the allure of a promised outcome. Not-knowing is a hellish limbo, and all too often it’s more intolerable than believing an authoritative voice with a fixed answer, no matter how grim.

I’ve started avoiding those opinion pieces. I see headlines while I’m scrolling through news, but I’m getting better at not clicking on them. Instead, I remind myself that masking anxiety with visions of doom is not likely to help anyone, beginning with myself. The truth is that I don’t have a crystal ball—and for sure the pundits don’t, either.

Working myself into a lather harms impairs my ability to think clearly. It cannot affect the outcome of the war.

Powerlessness is hard, and in evolutionary terms it’s dangerous. But when it is our true condition, the best way to manage it is by seeing it for what it is, and then finding ways to make a big difference in our own lives through good self-care and a small difference in the world.

Book Reviews: Two Fantasies by Martha Wells

Martha Wells has become one of my favorite authors. I loved her “Raksura” series and was bowled over by her “Murderbot” novellas. I thought I would follow her across genres. Two of her recent releases soar in terms of world-building imagination, but fall short in dramatic shaping and plot structure.

Witch King, by Martha Wells (Tor)

Witch King opens with a mystery as demon Kai (not “a” demon, THE demon) wakes up in captivity with a mage attempting to seize control of his magic. His immediate goal is to free himself and locate his companions. This proves to be both easier and far more challenging than it appears on the surface. For one thing, Kai’s last (dead) host body has been murdered and he’s in another, quite unfamiliar (and much less fit) body; for another, he has no idea how much time has elapsed since he’s been unconscious (a lot), what political changes are afoot in the world, and where the wife of his closest ally has disappeared to.

So far, so good, and Wells does a superb job in introducing complex characters, an unusual system of magic, and millennia of history and world-building without dumping expository lumps on the reader.

Wells then shifts to the distant past when Kai inhabited a volunteer body and lived in a rich, joyful, and emotionally warm culture. From here, the two timelines alternate chapters. A few characters, such as Kai who is almost immortal, appear throughout, but many others (many, many others) are specific only to one. Still more are alive and active in the past but distant memories in the present. Because the focus is on Kai and a few others who are present in both times, I had to search for other clues as to where and when I was.

Both storylines are filled with action and wonderful characters, situations, and relationships. Each one would be more than enough for a novel in itself. Some readers will love the weaving back and forth and all the myriad ways the past informs and shapes the present. I was one of them, but only at first. As the book went on, however, I found it increasingly frustrating trying to orient myself—which time is this? what’s been going on? who’s still alive? and, most importantly, what is the present goal or threat for the protagonist? There didn’t seem to be a single plot arc, a building dramatic tension that carried through in both past and present. It didn’t help that my favorite character from the past is long since dead in the present. Within each timeline, unrelated problems arise and are resolved. I could never figure out what the overall “Big Bad” was, especially after one candidate villain after another is eliminated. The “Big Bad” at the end seemed to come out of nowhere. Mark Twain famously said that life is “one damned thing after another.” Fiction must play by a different set of rules.

Witch King is hugely ambitious, filled with imaginative elements, compelling personal drama, and a huge landscape across time as well as space. Wells handles these elements with the effortless skill of a seasoned professional, but fails to shape them into a single dramatic story.

 

Wheel of the Infinite, by Martha Wells (Tor)

Wheel of the Infinite starts with a fortuitous encounter on the road between Maskelle, a confident and immensely powerful magic wielder, and handsome, enigmatic swordsman Rian. After she saves his life, he and a band of motley other characters accompany Maskelle to the heart of the Celestial Empire. Much later, we learn that she’s returning from exile after being judged a traitor and much, much later, that her task is to help remake the beautiful, orderly mandala known at the Wheel of the Infinite, thereby ensuring peace and harmony for the Empire. At turns, the action moves swiftly with leaps of dramatic tension or as slowly as any travelogue. In this, it reminded me of The Lord of the Rings (the books, not the movies), which alternated between seat-of-the-pants action and pages upon pages of passing scenery. Also that there’s a quest, although in Rings, the mission is much more clear and consistently present.

Maskelle was one of my favorite characters in a long while. She’s an older woman, always a plus with me, she’s quite comfortable with her sexuality (double plus), and she’s terrifyingly competent as a magician (triple plus). Once the question of whether she’ll decide it wise to take Rian as her lover is settled, he pales by contrast as a character. Many, many other characters appeared (and disappeared, some temporarily, others not so much) but weren’t around for long enough to engage my sympathy.

As with Witch King, the premise, world-building, magical system, and protagonist in Wheel of the Infinite were all marvelous. The book is highly ambitious, offering fresh, original takes on time-honored tropes. Its sheer size and scope break down under their own weight. It’s as if Wells, whose novellas and shorter novels are tightly plotted gems, hasn’t quite made the leap to books of this length and complexity. Nevertheless, both are enjoyable reads with many twists and innovations. While neither worked perfectly for me, I’m eager to read her next project.

Excerpt: Meditations on the Wise Use of Power

 From Rebecca Solnit's marvelous blog, Meditations in an Emergency:

 Here's another thing about power; the power the Trump Administration has is largely what we give it. They often cave when it is not given or when it's taken away by the courts. And they're spending power, not tending it, by breaking alliances, support, relationships, treaties. their threats to seize Greenland. They may desire to make the US weaker, because they may think a weakened country with undermined institutions may be easier to dominate, but as the heads of government they're also making themselves weaker. The administration has sabotaged relationships with our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and with NATO and EU allies. So they're losing the power of alliances abroad, along with the power of public support at home.

 They seem to have miscalculated--so far as I can tell by assuming their power is boundless, to be endlessly spent, never built up and protected, as political leaders normally do. Take the threats to seize Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, which in turn is part of the European Union and NATO, so that any invasion of the indigenous-majority island would be an attack on these powerful alliances. The loud threats have infuriated and alienated Greenlandic and Danish and many other people around the the world. The stunt whereby the administration decided to send the vice president's wife to Greenland for what was clearly a publicity campaign pretending to be a little holiday backfired badly. 

 Usha Vance was going to attend a dogsled race, show herself about, and then the vice president decided to join her. Greenlanders made it so clear they were so unwelcome that they limited their tour to a few hours at the isolated US military base for a pathetic photo op. It was a fool's errand and they showed their weakness by backing down from something that was always a dumb idea and maybe one that shows they lack intelligence in the ordinary sense of being smart and the specific sense of having good analysis of the political situation and the consequences of given actions. Or maybe they think their power is irresistible, but a small indigenous population resisted it effectively. They certainly failed, again, to anticipate both public reaction to their conduct and the fact that the public has power too. 

 Elon Musk has helpfully just proven how resistible power is, or the folly of confusing mountains of money with outright power. He had an apparent meltdown last night over his failure to buy the Wisconsin supreme court election, in which his candidate didn't just lose but lost in a landslide. And earlier he choked up on Fox News talking about the protests against Tesla and the impact it's having on the company's valuation. Both these things demonstrate the limits of his power and the scope of our power. The Tesla protests are working. People have the power. 

Article summary: The cognitive resilience of older women

Silent X chromosome genes 'reawaken' in older females, perhaps boosting brain power, study finds

This is an excerpt from the above-titled article in Live Science. I highly recommend clicking through to read the whole thing!


Females have one active X chromosome and one dormant X chromosome in each cell. But a study suggests that genes on the dormant X get "reawakened" later in life, potentially giving the brain a boost.

Dormant genes on the X chromosome may reawaken in old age, potentially giving the aging female brain a boost that the male brain doesn't receive. This phenomenon may help to explain why, on many measures, females show a higher level of cognitive resilience in old age than males do.

There seem to be fundamental differences in how males and females age. When it comes to the brain, females have lower rates of various forms of dementia than males do, even though females live longer, on average. One exception is that females have higher rates of Alzheimer's disease than males do, although females with Alzheimer's tend to survive longer than males with the condition.

Males typically carry one X and one Y in each cell; they inherit the X from their mother and the Y from their father. Females, on the other hand, usually carry two X chromosomes — one from mom and one from dad. But each cell needs only one X to be active, so in females, the second X is "silenced," leaving only the maternal or paternal X switched on.

Among the 22 reawakened genes, one called PLP1 carries the instructions to make a key component of myelin, the fatty insulation that helps neurons send signals efficiently. It's known that mutations in PLP1 can decrease the amount of myelin in the brain, resulting in intellectual disability. It's also known that myelin can be compromised in aging and that loss of myelin function can contribute to cognitive decline.

To see if the reawakening of PLP1 might boost cognition, scientists confirmed that older female mice had more PLP1 activity in their hippocampi than the older male mice did. They artificially increased PLP1 using gene editing in both old males and old females found that both sexes performed better on tests of learning and memory after that boost.

To see if any of the findings extended to humans, the team looked at data previously collected for a large study of human brain tissue. Data weren't available for the hippocampus, but the brain tissue immediately surrounding the hippocampus showed more PLP1 activation in older women than in older men. So that hints that the same phenomenon might be unfolding in people.

Book Review: A tour-de-force of the heart

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman (Penguin)

This marvelous debut novel is mainstream, not genre, but with overtones of “domestic thriller” and superb handling of an unreliable narrator. The growth of the central character skillfully parallels the gradual revelation of her past.

At first, Eleanor Oliphant seems to be a tediously bland, often annoying office worker. Her social skills leave a great deal to be desired, she’s compulsively routine-bound, and she rebuffs every effort at friendship. Although she insists to herself and to everyone else that she is completely fine, her weekly phone chats with her emotionally abusive Mummy result in weekly bouts of heavy drinking. Her doomed infatuation with a third-rate singer provides more fodder for Mummy’s manipulations.

At first, I thought that her problem was that she was a functional alcoholic, but the situation turned out to be much more complex and nuanced. From the beginning, there are hints of a deeper, darker story. When Eleanor and Raymond, a big-hearted if physically unattractive IT guy, rescue an elderly man who collapses on the street, Eleanor gets drawn into new social circles and relationships. The walls she has built around her profound emotional damage begin to crumble. Needless to say, in Honeyman’s capable hands, there is more than one surprise along the way.

Highly recommended. A tour-de-force of the heart.