Parking lots, perspective, perception and pain

In A Serious Man, Rabbi Scott, the junior rabbi, tells Larry that what he needs is a fresh perspective, such as "a person who isn't familiar with these autos and such" would have if that person looked at the parking lot outside.  This scene ends with Rabbi Scott turning around to look again at the parking lot outside his window, saying with great admiration and wonder, "Things aren't so bad, just look at that parking lot!"

I have looked at parking lots with a fresh perspective myself, long ago.  I was at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, which like most universities, has vast spaces covered with asphalt for the purpose of parking cars.  My fresh perspective was to think about what would happen if the force of gravity were to stop attracting those cars just on that parking lot, which was one of the faculty lots close to the classroom buildings.  I imagined the cars just floating off, rising slowly from their marked-off rectangular spaces, bumping into one another softly as they rose.  It was just one of those physics-related thoughts.  I still have them, but not as often.  Here's one, also about gravity:  Pick up something near you, preferably something heavy, and move it up and down a little bit.  What's really happening? 

What's really happening is a matter of perception, and this is the word Larry uses in his stoned conversation with Mrs. Samsky about what Rabbi Scott had told him.  The rabbi said perspective, Larry says perception.  As in Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, about his experience with hallucinatory drugs (well, just mescalin as far as I recall).  Two different things, perspective and perception.

The ideas behind the words "relative" and "subjective" are also different.  I consider some things that people often refer to as relative to be more properly classified as subjective.  The experience of pain, for instance.  It is certainly subjective, but can it also be called relative?  That "One to Ten" scale that a nurse might ask you to use to quantify the pain you're feeling for instance--that's a subjective sort of measurement, although bringing in the "scale" attempts to quantify it and make it relative.

I thought about the experience of pain after my snakebite on September 8.  The bite didn't hurt.  It felt like nothing I've ever felt, but it was more like a slight poke with a stick--that was one of the instantaneous thoughts I had when it happened. So, because the bite didn't hurt, I wasn't angry at the snake, and I probably hurt it worse than it hurt me, since the reason it bit me was that I stepped on it.  When I looked down it was kind of writhing in the leaves that had kept me from seeing it on the trail.  After seeing it was a small copperhead, I left the snake alone, and left.

When people asked me why I didn't kill the snake, one of the things I said was that its bite hadn't hurt.  If it had hurt a lot, for instance, I would have been angry--hurt is surely a prime cause of anger--and might have wanted to beat the innocent snake to death with a stick (innocent, because it was my fault that I stepped on it).  And this is the thing about pain and anger I was thinking about:  how I don't understand other people's anger because I don't understand where their pain is coming from.  Something I might do that wouldn't cause me pain if it was done to me might cause another person pain, and it would be a mystery to me where that person's anger had come from.

Scene titles in A Serious Man; Hotel Trulock

On the DVD, A Serious Man is divided into 20 segments for the purpose of choosing particular scenes.  They are numbered of course, but I'm just going to write the titles of the scenes, separated by commas.  Yep, back to the subject matter, at least the Serious Man part.  I do hope to get back to the Schroedinger's Cat part soon also. 

Scenes from A Serious Man:  Cursed, In Good Health, Family Life, Let's Talk Divorce, Consequences, Fuzzy Reception, Practicalities, Have Faith, The First Rabbi, Death Around the Corner, The Second Rabbi, Simply Disappear, Nothing Adds Up, New Freedoms, Some Good News, Marshak, Can't Escape, Be A Good Boy, It's Darkest Before the Storm, End Titles.

And a bit of Coen Bros movie trivia:  Pine Bluff is mentioned in their movie version of True Grit, along with Monroe, Louisiana.  This is also true in the book, but the order of mention of the two towns is reversed (by Mattie).

MOVIE:  LaBoeuf: ... He dallied in Monroe, Louisiana, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas before turnin' up at your father’s place.
Mattie Ross: And why did you not catch him in Pine Bluff, Arkansas or Monroe, Louisiana?
LeBoeuf: He is a crafty one.
Mattie Ross: I thought him slow-witted myself.
LeBoeuf: That was his act.
Mattie Ross: It was a good one.


BOOK: "'... He dallied in Monroe, Louisiana, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas before turnin' up at your father's place.'

"I said, 'Why did you not catch him in Monroe, Louisiana, or Pine Bluff, Arkansas?''

(end of quote)  Yes, total trivia!  But, on the other hand, you watch or listen for things like that if you are investigating the mysteries of the universe.  You wonder, "Why is this different?" 

P.S.  If Tom Chaney in True Grit had been a real person, he could have stayed at the Hotel Trulock when he was in Pine Bluff.  A letter and envelope from 1894 written at the Hotel Trulock were sent to Jefferson County Historical Society recently from Walnut Creek, California, along with historical info on the man who wrote the letter and his son, to whom he sent the letter:

My father's books, and birthday

My father would be 90 years old today, if he had lived this long.  He was born in Davis Hospital in Pine Bluff, which was built in 1908 and torn down a couple of years ago.  My brother Steven was also born in that hospital in 1956.  Brothers Greg and Arch were born in the newer Jefferson Regional Medical Center (just called Jefferson Hospital when it opened in 1960). My older brother Jeff and I were born in the George Washington University Medical Center.

The former site of Davis hospital, on the west side of Cherry Street between 11th and 12th avenues, is only three blocks from where I live now.  It's a grass-covered vacant lot, belonging to the city of Pine Bluff.  Eventually the lot will be put to good use I expect.  Anyway, it's significant to me somehow that I currently live three blocks from where my father was born.

Among the books I kept from my parents' small library when the house was finally sold in 2007 (the house is also on Cherry Street, between 40th and 41st) was a small group of books that sat by itself on the highest shelf of one of the two built-in bookshelves.  I don't recall taking a good look at these books until the house was being sold.  They are a mixture of old textbooks that Daddy used at Columbia University (he was in graduate school there in 1949-51 studying international relations, then went to work for the U.S. State Department for four years),  and maybe also the economics text he used at Hendrix College, plus some others from the 1950's and early sixties, a couple of which were gifts from my mother.

In July of this year I wrote down the titles of the books, year of publication, and inscription if there was one.  Here's the list, photocopied from my current journal:

And here are two photos from what I think is Christmas 1959 (could be '58).  Steven is in the Indian suit (back to camera in both photos), I'm in the cowboy vest and chaps, and Jeff (back to camera in second photo) is also in cowboy clothes. 

'tis the season to dance

4 Trulocks, 3 generations

Thanks to my brother Greg for copying this photo and giving it as a Christmas present last year to the four of us other brothers:

The date scrawled at the bottom is December 18, 1943, one day after my father's 22nd birthday. The men are, from left, my uncle Leo Andrews Trulock, my father Walter Nichols Trulock III, grandfather Walter Jr, and great-grandfather Walter Sr.  Daddy was serving in the Navy at this time, so he must have been home on leave.  In his short and very incomplete memoir (a total of nine single-spaced pages), he describes coming home on leave in 1943 after his first combat mission on the destroyer called the Laub, but that would have been a month or two earlier than this trip.  The photo was taken at Drake's Landing, a duck hunting club near Dewitt, Arkansas.  The clubhouse, with kitchen and living room (with a fireplace of course) and sleeping rooms wasn't built until 1953.  They used tents up until then.  The club was formed in the 1920s, with my great-grandfather as one of the nine original members.  There are still just nine members, my brother Greg among them.