Peaceful Wolverine I needed a name that wasn’t mine to experiment with publishing my own words. At the time, I was working as a reporter for someone else, so it was a responsibility thing, even though I was writing about completely different topics.
My middle name is Allen, and Schyf was my grandmother’s maiden name.
I also, if I’m being transparent, needed to think of myself as someone else. I realized quickly that I do not want to be one more fool shouting into space… I guess that’s what Peaceful Wolverine is for. In my defence, almost all of society’s time is spent obsessed with the relationships of fictional, or near-fictional people. I also recognize I need no defence — that’s left over from my other grandmother, who was an amazing woman, and who scoffed when I ventured, many years ago, that I might try to write fiction. If I’m recalling correctly, she had just got back from — or had recently seen? — one of the Minions movies.
She loved it. Very confusing.
In order to differentiate Allen Schyf, I decided to apply the rules I’ve outlined in my first pinned episode. Or to try and apply them. In that sense, I’m indulging an instinct I’ve learned (correctly) to smother in real conversations: That of establishing everyone’s definitions, in the interests of clarity. Or making rules. I briefly ran a club called The Art of Conversation at Dalhousie, with the stated goal of easing social awkwardness. I think it worked. Through exposure therapy. It ran out of juice because I realized I don’t really enjoy “socialising” in large groups. As far as I can tell, no offence… it just means talking about nothing in particular for several hours, while rotating conversational partners once things start getting stale. Most people enjoy some form of inebriation for these rituals, and it’s not hard to understand why.
So, I am Allen Schyf. That’s the part of me that really doesn’t care what you think about a particular topic, as long as our conversation is cogent — clear, defined, consistent. If we end the conversation without changing our views, great, fine — but if you insist the refrigerator works because there’s a frost demon trapped inside it, and you’re too stubborn to admit that it is, in fact, a technology understandable and replicable through the reliable application of physics… I am frustrated. I am willing to be called intolerant of wilful ignorance, if that’s what that makes me in your eyes.
If you want to discuss climate change, or the lack of it, but you don’t know anything about the wonderful layers of the atmosphere, differentiated by heat and moisture and flowing over and among each other without mixing, and the insane depths of our oceans, where currents differentiated by salinity and temperature carry petajoules of energy in loops around the continents, or the fact that all of this is just a vanishingly thin shell — a crust, a coating, a rind? probably too substantial — on a magmatic platform hundreds of kilometres thick that could destroy it all without noticing if it burps too hard… well, then I don’t think we’re ready to discuss climate change yet. We’d be arguing about a headline, not a planet.
I lost my train of thought, but the point is that I would like my co-discussors to be informed. Because this is a complex, difficult, beautiful world that none of us come “naturally” prepared for. It requires decades of mandatory education to turn each fresh primitive ape into an eyes-open member of society, and we take that for granted. Without curiosity, effort, and gradual, layered understanding, it is just easier for us to believe that Thor is throwing lightning bolts, or that God is testing us personally with each new storm, or that a rockfall is a consequence of your moral failings. It’s much harder to try and visualize, however hopeless that is in practice, the chain of physical causalities that is our weather.
Not that I will stick to climate change. It’s not a fixation of mine — it’s just kind of an unavoidable “don’t look up” situation. My next major topic of unfolding is the story of Israel and Palestine. Yes, I recognize what a dreadful idea it is to raise one’s hand on that. I will give no opinion/verdict on the subject, but an overview of the history of the two sides. If you’ve ever been curious about when and why Israel and Palestine were both supposed to come into being, one established, one not, how the two sides have gotten along since then, and even what each side is saying about the current war, along with a host of other questions — well, that’s the journalism and history I’m also trying to understand. Remember that almost everyone these days, from the IDF to Hamas, organises through social media like Telegram, awaiting only translation.
I’ll also tackle just how it is that people we’d all readily call good can and do do (teehee) destructive things on a daily basis, with the agreement of everyone around them, also people we’d readily call good, because it’s “just business” or tradition, or religion, or something else, and the other ways we all do what we have to; the many inherited assumptions that we would like to question, but can’t articulate enough to; the nature of consciousness, which is really weird to try and understand because, well, I’m in it; a breakdown of how we’ve used the same logical tools that make discussions worthwhile to build our modern society; and some WOW episodes, on topics like India’s diversity, the size of the universe, how the language you speak shapes and restricts what you think; and oodles more, from optimistic nihilism and Buddhism to the confusing and contradictory goals of our current economic systems.
I’m not recruiting for any of those. They’re cases, not causes, and I mean to bring the same tools to each one — definitions first, the strongest version of every side, no thumb on the scale. I’ll hold no position without good reasons to hold it.
I won’t do that as my usual opinionated, passionate, geeky “Gordon Edgar” persona, is what I’m expressing.