Two Negatives Equal a Positive━Really?

I used  to teach the idea that English has characteristics just like mathematics, but I do not any longer because, as you might suspect, every English rule, unlike mathematics, has exceptions. While 1 + 1  always did, always does, and always will = 2,  honest writing teachers must admit to their students that language is far more subjective, all too often laden with uneducated opinion and fraught with majority- or authority-rule tastes. 

Take the rule claiming two negatives make a positive, just like math. Saying "I am not unaware" means I am aware, saying "I cannot make a mistake" asserts I want to do something correctly, and saying "I will not hurt you" implies you will be safe with me. 

But you can't count on two negatives making a positive. For example, you can imagine an astronomy professor facetiously saying, "Galileo did not err when he distanced himself from heliocentrism during the Inquisition." In fact, you can't even depend on two positives making a positive. If you asked whether I was willing to freefall from the roof of a 14-story building, you can picture me ironically replying, "Sure I would do that."

Too much depends on context for insisting on right-wrong rulings for English usage. Ain't that right?

Pleasures of Being Home, Part 4: More Seeing Time

Besides death and near-death occurrences during the coronavirus pandemic, one of the worst setbacks was the loss of freedom of movement. We all missed either eye-opening vacations to exotic locales, or simple walks along tree-lined neighborhood sidewalks with friends; inspirational excursions to museums, cathedrals, or monuments; or warming visits to the homes of family or friends. So many missed moments. In other ways, I believe many of us with the advantage of a computer and the willingness to stay connected saw more than we ever had just by staying home more. 

I saw more of loved ones through Zoom meetings than I did when the expectation of such such meetings required physical contact. Those meetings continue to this day, over 100 weekly ones on Sunday night with four groups of family members, nearly 60 biweekly ones on Wednesday night with six friends from the old neighborhood, and nearly 60 biweekly ones of Saturday evening with five friends from the old job. We all continue to show up when we can, so the increased facetime means something to all of us. 

From my backyard patio, I have seen so much of nature that I usually did not have or take the time to enjoy. I saw a crow descend on a hole in my lawn to peck for baby rabbits when the mother rabbit emerged from apparently nowhere and dashed toward the encroacher to defend her brood. After a quick skirmish causing the crow to lose a feather or two, it flew away with nothing for its trouble. I saw squeeze out of a 15-millimeter-diameter hollow 5 meters up my maple tree a full-sized squirrel, followed by another full-sized squirrel, followed by a third full-sized squirrel. I saw in midday sunlight two robins engage in the most elaborate dance from one end of my 27-meter lawn to the other, the first one leaping over the second, the second hopping in a circle around the first, both of them bouncing in a circle while facing each other like two boxers ready to attack, and then repeating and exchanging these moves while continuing to the starting point of the dance before flying into the leafy shade of my oak tree.

I also saw art with the focused attention that it deserves. While I admit that nothing beats seeing an original artwork, I took to my old books that I had not opened in years to examine the paintings or drawings of Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Audrey Flack, Chuck Close, Kerry James Marshall, and Jean-Michel Basquiat to challenge my assumptions and affirm my convictions about their artistry.

I never had to leave my home to experience new sights and reimagine old ones. Tragedy can breed triumph.

Pleasures of Being Home, Part 3: More Listening Time

The coronavirus is nothing to ignore. It has already taken more than 6 million lives globally and still accounts for some thousand deaths daily. It also has given unexpected pleasures: more reading and writing time, among many other delights. Yet while most people have not read as much as they could have, and even more have not written much even in a pandemic, most working adults have had more time to listen in the solitude of their home during the quarantine. 

Besides the endless barrage of Netflix or Amazon miniseries, what have we listened to? For one, sounds of nature. Just yesterday morning, I heard a persistent drumming I thought was coming from inside my house. When I approached my opened window, I realized the sound was the rain smacking the roof above me. I've also grown familiar with different types of winds slashing against my house and I've begun naming them: rumble, tumble, grumble, jumble, crumble, fumble, stumble, mumble, and humble, in descending order of strength. In addition, I sense contrasting silences at 4:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m., mainly because my tinnitus tends to hum early in the morning and scream late at night. And while the mourning dove's call has been a staple sound in the 38 years I have lived in my house, I have not heard so distinctly as now the heckling song of the mockingbird, the persistent hammering of the woodpecker, and the sharp scratching of claws as squirrels chase each other in dizzying circles up and down my backyard maple and oak trees. 

No less pleasurable is the sound of music, which has become much more than just background noise to my reading and writing and household chores. I marvel at the mysteries of life revealed to me through the magical notes of Bill Evans's piano ebbing and flowing through Some Other Time, John Coltrane's soaring tenor saxophone opening My Favorite Things, and Billie Holiday's velvet voice pleading in Love for Sale. I now hear progression, not repetition, in Philip Glass's String Quartet #4. I feel blood course through my veins throughout Duke Ellington's orchestration of Sunset and the Mocking Bird and weep at the climax and resolution of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.

More important than any of these pleasures, listening to you has become a sought-after activity and an improved skill, not because I am getting older and wiser but because I am home more, and more relaxed, patient, contented. What you are saying sounds more purposeful, more interesting to me. You make sense to me, so I think more before responding, cringe more when responding lamely, and smile more when just listening to the silence that follows your wisdom. Less talking, more listening: a good recipe for relationships.

Pleasures of Being Home, Part 2: More Writing Time

The extra reading time of being home brings us pleasures that not only enhance our leisure time but can transform our thinking and, in effect, our lives. Any newfound time at home also offers opportunities to write more. We can find time at unexpected moments, so we need to take full advantage of them whenever they arise. And we can approach this good fortune in several ways and at various moments of the writing process.

Planning Stage

Those of us who are serious about writing have probably for a long time been listing ideas for essays, scribbling dialogue for playscripts, storyboarding or drafting treatments of screenplays, describing scenes for poems, and synopsizing novels. Now's the time to pull out those notes from years ago, see what's changed since then, and add or delete as needed to keep those plans fresh. Maybe such a review will send us to the library, our own bookshelves, or online to cultivate our research on those plans, adding to the content of our notes and sharpening the focus of our premise.  

Drafting Stage

Moving beyond the planning stage, we can choose to draft a few pages of our writing project: more dialogue, observations about the characters, twists in the plot, extra layers to the context. During this stage, we are not expecting much more than to produce content.

Rewriting Stage 

Suppose we have a draft that seems complete but has not found a home in a publication or a production company. We can reread our draft critically with an eye for trying to see why it hasn't seen the light of  publication or production. This approach in no way suggests that our piece needs improvement (although it probably does). In fact, the practice gives us a chance to keep working at our craft. Chances are we'll want something new, something more, or maybe something less, in our piece.