The Limits of Comfort

It’s possible that comfort began its life as a verb, the praiseworthy human instinct to help ease and alleviate another’s suffering and distress. It’s life as a noun grew as the physical conditions of life became less arduous and people grew accustomed to a state of ease, of pleasant living conditions. And as physical ease became the standard of living in both public and private, it was a short leap to insist that any conversation about ideas be comfortable or else we’ll set off “you’re triggering my trauma!” alarm. 

 

Of the three definitions, I’m all in on the first and okay up to a point with the second. I enjoy a nice chair and pleasant weather as much as the next person, but the most memorable moments of my life— running my first cross-country race, sitting meditation with crossed legs for some 15 hours a day, seven days in a row at a Zen Center, Day 2 of the Macchu Picchu hike at 61 years old, backpacking with my daughter and granddaughter at 70 years old eating meals sitting on hard granite—were as far from comfortable as possible. And thus forever remembered. 

 

But it's the third obsession with comfort of all kinds— physical, emotional, intellectual— and at all costs, that worries me greatly. Everybody, be they to the left or the right of the political spectrum, seems to be jumping on that bandwagon. Trust me,  the wheels are rickety and the band’s music is bad. 

 

As far back as 1911, the composer Arnold Schoenberg was already worried about such things. In the Preface to his book Theory of Harmony, he writes:

Our age seeks many things. What is has found, however, is above all: comfort. Comfort, with all its implications, intrudes even into the world of ideas and makes us far more content that we ever should be. We understand better than ever today how to make life pleasant. We solve problems to remove an unpleasantness. But, how do we solve them? And what presumption, to think we have really solved them! Here we can see most distinctly what the prerequisite of comfort is; superficiality.

 

Comfort as a philosophy of life! The least possible commotion, nothing shocking.

 

Yet the first task of the teacher is to shake up the pupil thoroughly. The teacher’s own unrest must infect the students.’

 

The poet Miguel de Unamuno agrees: 

 

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast.”

The sociological studies, first-hand reports from teachers and testimony of kids themselves reveal a picture of students of all ages who lack resilience, courage, drive, determination. They want their learning style served on a platter, their neurodivergent needs catered to, 

their fragile emotions coddled. 

I believe in all of the above—up to a point. I call it the 50-yard line, where I do my part to understand their needs and they do their part to step up to work through their challenges. That’s where we meet. But if one of us has to move further down the field, I prefer it to be the student. I’ll only teach them for a year or more, but they’re the ones who need to cultivate their lifetime learning habits and develop the strength, resilience, determination to meet life’s inevitable storms head-on. 

The excessive coddling teachers are being encouraged to offer does exactly no one any good. Especially in these days where public policy is shaping itself around not disturbing the children. God forbid that they’re uncomfortable learning what people of one skin color have done to the other, when people of one gender have done to the other, what people of one privileged class have done to the other. If no unrest is set in motion, no shaking up happening in the lesson, no sense of disturbance or agitation, education is mere baby-sitting and mindless entertainment.

 

So to re-affirm my personal mission statement, I turn to The Irish journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne: 

 

“The job of a journalist (teacher) is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” 

Me and John Henry

If you ever need an overly-rambunctious group of 5-years-olds calmed down, give me a call. I’ll gather them together, take out my guitar and have them sitting quietly with mouths open while I sing the song John Henry, the old folk song about a battle between man and machine. The captain of the railroad crew is about to replace his workers with a mechanical steam drill, who will do the work with no lunch breaks, health benefits or sick days. John Henry challenges the machine to a drilling contest. If he beats the steam drill, his and his co-workers job will be saved. The stakes are high and the drama is riveting. I won’t tell you the ending. 

 

The other night, my wife and I cooked delicious Burmese food for my daughter Talia and her boyfriend Matt along with a neighborhood couple their age (Marta and Drew) who we particularly like. Indeed, that couple helped me organize a Neighborhood Sing during the pandemic and John Henry was one of the songs I sang with them, their two children and some six other families. (Back then, we sang once a week and five years later, still gather once every few months.) As mentioned in my Back to Earth post, some of the spirited discussion had to do with the creeping and creep influence of AI and other technologies in our lives. 

 

The next day, Drew sent an e-mail thanking us for the dinner that included an AI-generated poem a la Shakespeare. On one level, the poem was impressive. But the gauntlet was thrown down. Man versus Machine. Could I beat it? 

Here’s the poem he sent: 

 

Hark, gentle friends, and lend thine ears to praise! 

For yesternight, a tapestry of mirth, 

Didst weave its spell through all our happy ways. 

The viands served did prove their sterling worth, 

A feast for kings, each morsel did delight. 

Our tongues, in converse sweet, did find their flight, 

Like birds aloft on currents warm and bright. 

And then the games, which did our souls ignite 

With playful jest and laughter's joyful sound. 

For such a night, where pleasures did abound, 

My deepest gratitude doth now resound!

 

After singing with his daughter’s 2^nd Grade Class in a neighborhood school, I walked back through Golden Gate Park and began composing my rebuttal. Below is my first-draft. It’s not amazing, but two points in case you’re judging the contest.

 

1)   The machine depends wholly on the previous accomplishments of human beings who take their lived experience through the neurons of their brain circuitry to create something new. If we raise an entire generation of children who have sold their creative power to a machine, there will be no more new poems for machines to plunder. 

 

2)   Drew’s own brain and heart may have been amused by a poem generated by a click on a phone, but would not undergo any notable transformation. I, on the other hand, felt as humans always do engaged in the creative act— involved, uplifted, energized, with the profound sense of accomplishment that any creative act offers.

 

These just some of the issues that we fail to discuss when we are mindlessly fascinated by our clever machines. Read on. 

 

REBUTTAL TO AI POEM ABOUT A DINNER PARTY

                        © 2025 Doug Goodkin

 

Since gold and steel and chips with epo-xy

Are all that gives to you your power.

How with outrage might beauty hold a plea

Whose song arises beholding a flower. 

O, how shall summer’s honeyed breath sing out

Against the techno-siege of our darkening days,

When you have no lungs to sing or shout,

No comforting touch or voice to praise. 

 

A sad pretense to read your words

Oh cold machine, why should we care?

With no tongue that tasted, no laughter heard. 

You did not live it, you were not there. 

A poor imitation my humble poem might be,

Yet the glory is, it came from me!

 

National ______ Day

 

I hope this week that everybody has dutifully eaten Chocolate Parfaits, Tuna, Truffles and abandoned their diet. Also recited some nursery rhymes, went to the gym, tipped their babysitter, appreciated their school principal, went to the museum and read the collected works of Doonesbury. According to the calendar of Special Days, the above and more was worthy of your attention: 

 

• May 1: International Labor Day (also known as May Day), Loyalty Day, Law Day, National Chocolate Parfait Day, National Mother Goose Day, and School Principals' Day. 
• May 2:  National Brothers and Sisters Day, World Tuna Day, Baby Day and National Truffle Day
• May 3: World Press Freedom Day, World Asthma Day, Sun Day
• May 4: International Firefighter's Day, Intergalactic Star Wars Day, and National Weather Observers Day. 
• May 5: Cinco de Mayo, Museum Lovers Day, Cartoonist Day
• May 6: International No Diet Day, International Space Day. National Teachers Day
• May 7: National Babysitters Day, National Fitness Day, and Astronomy Day. 

 

Yesterday was Teacher’s Day. This Sunday is Mother’s Day. Oh, how we love to give something a day, increase Hallmark’s revenue, mention something in passing and never think about it again while we continue to organize our society around thoroughly disrespecting teachers and do nothing to support the extraordinary demands of motherhood. The hypocrisy is stunning.

 

But it is possible that soon we’ll grow nostalgic for at least pretending that we cared about such things. Now there seems to be something new under the sun. Simply posting a sign about welcoming all students can get a teacher fired, kindness is now spoken out loud as a weakness, empathy is deemed (actual Republican quotes) as "toxic and sinful" and an "existential threat to Western civilization." 

 

It's possible that a new calendar in the near future might be as follows:

·      National Elect a Fascist Day

·      National Deport Innocent People Day

·      National Get Away with Bribery, Sexual Assault and Treason Day

·      National Celebration of Ignorance Day

·      National Bullying Day

·      National Mass Shooting Day

·      National Opioid Addiction So Drug Companies Get Rich Day

·      National Homophobia Day

·      National Preserve the Patriarchy Day

·      National Storm the Capitol and Get a Pardon Day

·      National Lying Day

·      National Denial of Climate Change Day

 

We may soon look back in nostalgia at National Chocolate Parfait Day. Oh, wasn’t that a time!

  

Back to Earth

Where does one look to for solace, for insight, for some sense of meaning in times that defy common sense? For me, music, poetry, teaching, walks in the park—and mythology. Discovering Joseph Campbell in the late 1980’s was a turning point in my intellectual life, intellectual insight married to soul. I still turn to some myths from all times and all cultures that astoundingly, speak to today’s news, carrying truths far beyond any particular time and place. 

 

With some friends at dinner last night, one was talking about a recent article about our rapidly careening out of control technologies. Titled An Age of Extinction Is Coming by Rous Douthat, it gives us dire warning about how the technologies we’ve given our souls to in some Faustian bargain are slowly eliminating everything that is truly valuable in this life. Friendship, romance, family life, art, literature, culture and more. Well, yes, I’ve been saying the same for a long time and it has only gotten worse. But still in my world, I see kids still delighting in making elemental music with their own body and voice, navigating through instruments made from wood, metal, skin and string both playing elemental music and creating their own. I see them still capable of working well with other kids, asking good questions, following their curiosity to answers that lead them to the next question. And the adults I teach in workshops also. Of course, I also see the toxins in the electronic air we breathe affecting us all in concerning ways. But like the call to American citizens to grow their Souls larger in the face of diminishing freedoms, so does the call to humans everywhere ask us to step up and claim what is truly valuable in the face of its erosion and possible disappearance.

So the myth that rose up for me was the old Greek one of a wrestling match. 

Antaeus is the child of Gaia, the Goddess of the Earth. He wrestles with Hercules and every time he is thrown to the ground, he rises up stronger. That contact with his mother the earth, with the very ground of his being, is what gives him strength and courage. But Hercules figures out what’s happening and lifts up Antaeus, spinning him around in the air and ultimately crushing him in a bear hug. 

 

Well, there it is. When we exchange our three-dimensional physical contact with Mother Earth for the virtual cyberspace that has us in its bear hug, we grow weaker. All the tastes and textures and smells and touches of our world are narrowed and reduced to the two-dimensional screens. To slip towards another myth, they are the bewitching Sirens calling us to our doom and we’re forgetting to tie ourselves and the children to the mast. 

 

So whether it be music, dance, poetry, art, literature, deep friendship, beautiful romance and of course, time out in the world in company with birds and bugs and flowers and trees, we all would do well to remember that ground of our being and spread out the picnic blanket. Often. Screens are designed for addiction, tapping into our ancient survival brain that reacts to loud noises, bright lights, excessive movement and those damn IT developers who know exactly what they’re doing sleep in their fancy houses oblivious to the way they’re sucking the soul out of our lives. The only antidote is when we train ourselves to appreciate the slow, the sublime, the splendid simplicity of that things that feed our genuine deep hungers and thirsts. 

 

So beware of Hercules and the Sirens and let’s refuse the mass lemming drive over the cliffs to our demise. Consciously walk the path down to the beach instead. Without our phones. 

Intoxicated Woodpeckers

“Confucius supposedly said that the rectification of society starts with the rectification of its language. This suggests that a careful use of words comes before new laws, new programs, and new leaders. Laws and programs begin in words, and if the words of our leaders are entangled in garbled speech, intoned as nasal whining, bereft of inspiration and wit, and flatter than the commercials that surround them, then we can’t expect the society to prosper.”

-       James Hillman; The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

 

 Amidst all the horrors of our current time, the debasement of language gets scant attention. Lunatic ravings on Twitter that would draw the disapproval of any elementary school English teacher now are par for the course for the leaders in the land. While people are struggling for their very livelihoods and in some cases, lives, worrying about poor speech seems rightfully low on the list of proper fuel for our anxiety. But it is a significant part of the whole catastrophe. In contemporary vernacular,” it, like, really sucks!”

 

I had the supreme pleasure yesterday of watching my nephew Damion’s superb performance in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. 

Besides the fine performances from all the casts and the engaging comedy-of-errors story, it was so refreshing to hear the “inspiration and wit” so typical of times gone by and so sorely lacking in our “awesome” contemporary culture. 

 

This on my mind having looked through an intriguing book on my shelves titled The Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time by Nicolas Slonimsky. It is a collection of reviews by both critics and fellow composers of new works by composers who became famous. On one hand, it reveals the critics’ inability to accept and understand new developments in musical language as they lambast works that went on to become classics in the repertoire. It likewise exposes their abusive mean streaks as they thoroughly deride in no uncertain terms the composers’ sincere attempts at sublime musical expression. 

 

But, oh, the eloquence and wit with which they do it! Sheer poetry! Far beyond the reach of their contemporary counterparts. At the same time that one might laugh at how wrong they were and criticize them for being so mean-spirited, one can’t help but admire their genius in describing the musical sounds they found intolerable. Here is a short list of how they described pieces by giants like Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Mahler, Gershwin and more:

 

 “Absolute bewilderment, acoustical shock, agonized bravura on a pocket handkerchief, agony, alcoholic stimulus of a big baboon, babblings of a deranged man, ballyhoo vulgarity, bassstubathetic, bestial outcries, bloodcurdling nightmare, caterwauling catastrophe in a boiler factory, communist traveling salesman, creaking of rusty hinges, crime against music, curiosity shop of tangled harmonies, demented eunuch, demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, etiolated and emasculated shreds of sound, fierce whiskers stained with vodka, filthy pencils writing on lavatory walls, frog-legs thrown into violent convulsions, gallery of harmonized abortions, hideously writhing dragons, hurricane of wrong notes, inebriated persimmons, intoxicated woodpeckers, masochistic aural flagellation, mass snoring of a naval dormitory, mournful banqueting on jam and honey, outrageous agglomeration of unresolved discords, pandemonium of cross-eyed devils, puffs and snippets of melody, putrefactive counterpoint, raging satanic fury, regurgitation of a water closet, scotch terrier worrying poultry scratching of a glass plate with a sharp knife, self-torture of a flagellant, sticky frog-like sexuality, stuttering tonal delirium, tortured mistuned cackling, ungreased wheelbarrow, wheezy hurdy gurdy…”

And that’s not even the half of it!”

 

So if you feel the need to put other people and their work down, the least you can do is be inventive and expressive. And if you need a cheat sheet, there is one about Shakespearean insults where you choose one adjective from column one, another two-word-hyphenated adjective from column two and a noun from column three, with some 50 words in each column and all their possible combinations. Next time somebody irritates you, feel free to call them a beslubbering beef-witted boar-pig or a craven clapper-clawed clack-dish or a saucy swag-bellied strumpet.

 

Hopefully while listening to the intoxicated woodpeckers in Edgar Varese’s composition Integrales. 

Refuse Refuse

I like to think of myself as an active, doing, person and as a teacher, I have to be. But as these Blogposts testify, I also enjoy roaming the landscape of the mind and thinking about (and then writing about) things. When it comes to action for social justice, I feel that the things I write about it are an action of sorts, posing questions and giving information that helps others consider points of view that help build a narrative that can deeply influence action. 

 

My wife, by contrast, is a doer. Her response to the political climate has been to write postcards with a group, work at a foodbank and recently, join a garbage clean-up group called Refuse Refuse. (That’s a verb followed by a noun.). Now she organizes clean-ups once every six weeks or so. I’ve gone to most of them and can report that they’re very satisfying and a good antidote to sitting around in weepy despair. Just get out and do something, even if it be as simple as picking up garbage.

 

Besides the social benefits of meeting your neighbors in a 4 or 5 block radius, I find it super-fun to pick things up with these grabbers. (See the person 6 people in from the left with her grabber.) Amazing how they are so fine-tuned as to easily pick up a tiny cigarette butt. And so I wandered my neighborhood streets, eyes peeled for every scrap of paper or plastic, grabbed it with the grabber and dropped it in the bag. Sometimes we’d pass people who thanked us for our work and that was nice, though unnecessary. No one was doing this looking for credit and praise. It just feels like an easy and satisfying way to be of use, with the benefit that the next day, the streets we walk will be more pleasant to walk through. 

 

So if you’re feeling hopeless and paralyzed with despair, get a group together, put on an orange vest, grab your grabber and go out to make the world a more beautiful place, one cigarette butt at a time. 

Teacher's Oath

Back in November, I was absolutely convinced that we were finally ready to break that damn glass ceiling and elect a black/ Indian woman with a beloved teacher running mate. How sweet that would have been. How different these last few months would have been and the next four years. 

 

The quote that keeps coming up for me is "Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know." I thought we had finally learned it. That kindness is better than cruelty. Simple living better than excessive greed. Knowledge better than ignorance. Justice better than tyranny. Truth better than lies told without shame and believed without thought. Accountability better than privileged immunity. Things like that. 

 

I was wrong. 

 

And so, like so many, overwhelmed by the shock of it all, trampled by the constant assault on every single front—education, immigration, economy, human rights, civil liberties, constitutional rights, outraged at 80 million of my fellow citizens and furious with 90 million more who didn’t vote. My strategy was to carefully monitor my news intake, accentuate the positive in my active teaching life, soothe and comfort myself and others through music, escape through an all-engaging TV series (This Is Us). And recently, go to a rally just about every week.

 

But now I feel something new on the horizon. A slowly growing surge of those genuinely resisting the onslaught and doing it together. The brave individuals and institutions who are choosing not to cave in and ignore, from Costco to Harvard to the thousands of lawyers in cities throughout the country retaking their oaths to uphold the Constitution. The despots trying to take the country down are depending on our silent complicity, their ability to sow fear and strike terror into our hearts to ensure our compliance, our inability to stay focused on what matters as we distract ourselves with mindless entertainment. 

 

But it looks like we’re not going down without a fight. As citizens in a country that began as organized resistance to tyranny, that amidst all its flaws, mostly guaranteed free speech and encouraged lively debate in schools and public discourse, we have a long history behind us that just maybe we’re not willing to give up. The image of the lawyers retaking vows is so powerful. It’s the moment to ride that wave and have every profession do the same. Doctors have their oath—“First do no harm,” teachers have their Mission Statements to promote critical thinking, foster a safe and inclusive environment, the Unions have their old slogan “Don’t mourn— organize.” 

 

I wish I had the skills and outreach to organize teachers. How I would love to see a national outpouring of teachers throughout the country, cities and towns alike, all on the same day, take an oath to re-affirm their determination to teach American students American history, re-instate lively debate, nurture comfort with uncomfortable truths and cultivate genuine critical thinking. 

 

Anyone out there know how to do that? Another Union slogan—“In unity there is strength” —and the tyrants are depending on us to sit quietly afraid for our jobs. We need to all stand up together or they will win. If we don’t, the children we have vowed to nurture and protect simply by becoming teachers will be the losers. Anyone with me here?