When Amish youth hit sixteen, they typically begin “running around.” This is the famous Rumspringa period, during which they can do almost whatever they please, because they are no longer under the rule of their parents, but nor have they been baptized officially into the church. I didn’t know before that they don’t do this alone; they join “gangs.” According to Donald Kraybill:
About twenty-seven youth groups, called “gangs,” ranging in size from fifty to a hundred and fifty members, crisscross the Lancaster settlement. By the age of ten, an Amish child will be able to name some of the groups––Bluebirds, Canaries, Pine Cones, Drifters, Shotguns, Rockys, and Quakers––and even describe some of their activities. Youth are free to join the gang of their choice. Young people from the same church district or family may join different groups. The gangs become the primary social world for teens before they marry, but the groups vary considerably in their conformity to traditional Amish values.
Have you ever noticed something that is objectively incorrect, and it really irritates you, and yet the wrong thing is in a package that is either a) not interested in being correct and/or b) is kind of ridiculous and inconsequential? And yet still, the urge to correct this wrong thing feels really strong? I’ll give you two examples from my own life, not because I am going to use this phenomenon as a jumping off point to discuss something actually important, but because I just really want to point out how wrong these dumb things are in the public sphere. The itch is too strong not to scratch!
First, a long while ago, I watched a movie on Netflix Called Private Life, about a couple struggling to conceive a baby who hire one of their nieces (?) as a surrogate. It was… fine. Anyway, in an early scene, the couple, played by Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giametti, are in a fertility clinic waiting room filled with characters who are supposed to represent, I don’t know, some panoply of New York City life. A Haredi couple nearby, and the wife is affectionately rubbing her husband’s arm. And of course, I was like, um, no way! A Haredi couple would NEVER touch one another in public! Where was their Haredi advisor, ahem?!
I was reminded of this particular kind of irritation when I recently watched––wait for it––the M. Night Shyamalan movie Old. My understanding from the little I read of the reception was that it was a silly, very Shyamalan-y movie. That wouldn’t be enough to put me off, because I can occasionally get into the silly, especially if it’s horror-related, but a friend of mine whose taste I really respect told me she thought it was actually Good. So I decided to watch it as I was doing household chores.
It was, again, fine. Sort of what you would expect from a Shyamalan flick. The ending was wildly dumb. In case you aren’t familiar with the premise, it goes something like this: a group of seemingly random people staying at a tropical resort are taken by a tour guide to a beach, where they begin to age rapidly. They quickly figure out that on this beach, time moves at some exponentially faster rate than it does elsewhere. Insanity and decay ensue.
A view through a ribcage
One of the people on this beach is a rather tense-seeming British cardiologist (or maybe cardiothoracic surgeon, which I’m sure is different in some way that it is above my pay grade to describe). There are references made throughout the early parts of the film to his being “stressed” and to dealing with tension at work, which manifests in erratic behavior: he slashes another beachgoer with a knife, he loses his concentration in the middle of a tense moment and starts babbling about film. So my first thought is, obviously, some kind of dementia, that his family (also on the beach) was in denial about. But then at the end of the movie, another character reveals that the doctor actually had paranoid schizophrenia.
I GUESS you could make this work, but it’s just way less sensible than having him having some kind of dementia, which would also potentially cause erratic behavior. First, the guy is in at least his late forties, and schizophrenia, in a majority of cases, develops in late adolescence or early adulthood, around 16-20. So this means this guy’s backstory is that he either developed schizophrenia in middle age––again, unlikely––or that he developed it in the typical range, but then made it through university, medical school, and potentially more than a decade of work in a high-stakes field only to then develop schizophrenia? Meh! Also, the way his familiars on the beach are talking about the “pressure” sort of implies that his schizophrenic break came about as a result of his job stress. I would never deny the impact of external circumstances on mental health, but that’s not really how schizophrenia works.
But so here’s the thing though: this is a cheesy body-horror flick from M. Night Shyamalan, the guy who brought you “I see dead people” and Mel Gibson running through cornfields looking for aliens or Jesus or whatever. It’s probably more dumb of me to expect medical textbook-level rigor from him than it is for him to choose the less-logical malady for one of his characters to suffer from. (Also, the movie is based on a graphic novel, so perhaps the original character had schizophrenia and Shyamalan felt locked into that.) I can see how a certain type of person might feel the need to go on a crusade about this, but personally I just feel like the odds that this misstep has any real consequences in life are so, so slim. And yet still, the urge to correct prevails, because here I am, ranting about it on the Internet.
Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann and her cohort developed something called the Sensory Delight Scale, a kind of counterpart/complement to the Tellegen Absorption Scale, that measures “who is more able, by temperament and choice, to have vivid experiences of gods and spirits.” If you answer yes to all of these, you might be a mystic!
When I’m listening to music, I like to imagine the sounds taking shape and moving in the air around me.
When I finish reading a really powerful book, I find that the ordinary world around me seems oddly unfamiliar.
Sometimes I feel like my body is weightless, as if I’m floating, even when my feet are firmly on the ground.
I like to watch the shapes and movements that sunlight makes reflecting off the water.
Sometimes the world seems intensely present to me.
I like to think that the trees in a forest are talking with each other.
I have had a distinct sense of a watchful presence.
Sometimes when I am at a concert, I find that the music has ended a few seconds ago and everyone is clapping before I notice.
The sounds of different languages seem to be connected to different colors in my mind.
Sometimes I feel like the air is full of little bubbles of light.
Sometimes I feel like I can sense the passage of time almost tangibly.
When I hear the waves lap against the shore, I sometimes think of how much those waves might know.
I find joy in little things, like a newly opened flower.
Exquisite pleasure sometimes floods my senses.
I can get lost watching a spider lower itself on a thread.
Sometimes I feel the arms of the universe embrace me.
When I dance, I like to feel that my body is simply responding to the music.
My four-year-old son likes to play a game in the bathtub in which he pretends to be an ice cream man making ice cream and selling it to me. Here are some of the flavors he makes:
Yellow Fire
Blue Ocean
Salt White
White Cloud
Seaweed Green
Orange Setting Sun
Purple Rising Sun
Pink Grapefruit (this one is the most ordinary)
Mud Brown
I feel like I am forgetting some! My favorites I’ve tried so far are Orange Setting Sun, Salt White, and actually Seaweed Green is surprisingly good.
“And one day Wulfhild, having dropped off the rents with Marie, stops in the scriptorium to kiss Gytha on the cheek, to slide a packet of candied fennel seed into the mad nun’s pocket. Gytha smiles bluely. Later, when in weariness Wulfhild takes off her leather tunic at her house at night, out falls a tiny painting of a fantastical beast on a cut-up old letter, a green tighter with a human smile or a porcupine playing the lute, which her daughters will one day pin to their collection on the wall. Some nights, going in to kiss her girls in their sleep, she will stop and look and feel before these many bests of Gytha’s something akin to what she felt as a child when the nuns sang their most beautiful, most awesome psalms, a slow internal pouring of ecstasy. Awe. If only she had time to examine this feeling, Wulfhild thinks ruefully; but she does not have time, she never has time, her children call, the business of the abbey calls, the hungers and fatigues of her body call. She will come closer to god when she is old, in a garden among the flowers and the birds, she tells herself; yes, some day she will sit in silence until she knows god, she thinks, lying down in her bed to sleep. Just not now.” ~Lauren Groff, Matrix
Let’s start with the obvious: everyone loves the Cholmondeley Ladies. Painted in the early 17th century by an unknown British artist, the Cholmondeley ladies were said to be sisters, though not much else is known about their identities beyond this.
And now, Israeli-American artist Andi Arnovitz’s take, if one of the sisters had been infertile:
Also, a really interesting interview with Arnovitz over at Hey Alma.
If I ever took a dance class again, I’d want the prompts to be similar to what Spike Jonze told Margaret Qualley to do when she auditioned for that Kenzo video:
“The only note I got from my agent was that they wanted me to dance like a tree,” said Leftovers actress Margaret Qualley, star of the original, viral Jonze-directed Kenzo World perfume ad, which featured her dancing and contorting her limbs with a back-bending frenzy…
“I get to Spike’s apartment and he’s there. I’m terribly nervous because I’m such a massive fan. We sit down and talk, I filibuster while I try to calm myself and tell him bizarre anecdotes about my father that have nothing to do with why I’m there. He gives me a vague idea of the story and concept. He plays the song [the same one heard in the ad] and is like, ‘Okay, want to improvise?’ He records it on his iPhone. I dance like a psychopath for about an hour, literally until his phone dies.
“During it, he was saying things like, ‘Now you’re a vampire, now your arm is trying to attack you, and you’re eating your pinky.’ I’m crawling on his floor, jumping on his chairs, it’s winter and I’ve got a turtleneck and stockings on and by the end, I’m drenched in sweat and out of breath. Then I get up and he’s like, ‘Nice to meet you.’ I’m like, ‘You too,’” says Qualley.
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