Pen to Paper

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By most measures, I should be doing other things.  I have lectures to prepare, papers to grade.  I must pack for a trip only hours in the future.  So, naturally, I have taken my large leather-bound journal to the table, dimmed the lights, lit the candles and taken pen in hand.  An opera I do not quite recognize drifts softly from the next room, rain patters around outside in the darkness.

It was a strange vision that sent me here.  My wife has preceded me to Chicago, so I bumble about in an easy return to my unscheduled single days.  Yet, I had neglected my medication and so found myself in the kitchen, in pain, loading the dishwasher.  I retreated upstairs, put on the classical music channel, and lay down on the bed waiting for the pill to kick in.  It was simple to drift off into what I now think of as hyperconsciousness, a state poised between waking and sleep that has been my favorite haunt since childhood.

I am in a sleigh, or so it seems.  There are no creatures hitched before, but I glide through a snowy moonlit wood.  It is tranquil, quite soothing.  Apparently I steer by will as a subtle inclination guides the craft across a meadow, then back into more sheltered ways.  The barriers between experience and perception melt and I am where I am.  A comfortable completeness.

Gradually I become aware of the music and the drumming of the rain on the roof.  What we call consciousness intrudes, nudging me toward responsible activity.  I mount my usual protests that this voyage is far more important.  Coming downstairs to write seems a reasonable compromise.

I do not think it is entirely generational that I find these creamy sheets of handmade paper far more enticing than the cursor blinking at the first line of a newly opened document. Certainly there is the physical pleasure of forming the letters upon the page – the pen tracing an individuality totally beyond the ability of any “family of fonts.”  But it is more than that.  There is a feeling of permanence.  I, more than many, am aware of the incongruity of that assertion.  This book is fragile.  Fire or flood could undo it utterly.  It could be lost, discarded, rendered asunder in a dozen different ways.

Furthermore, I know that its digital incarnation will slip up into the cloud of the worldwide computer where web-bots and widgets, spiders and data miners will stuff its 1s and 0s into servers with no apparent masters; confined in seeming perpetuity.  Yet, the Internet conveys an accidental immortality – existence without intention.  Perhaps that is why I see the cursor’s welcome as more of a wink than a blink.  It knows.

But an honest pen to a new sheet of paper?  The possibilities overreach the universe.
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Distillations Part 6

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The Soul

The entity that most religions call the soul is recognized, in universal resonance, to be a physical reality; a cluster of those unimaginably tiny strings that uniquely encodes our deepest beliefs, feelings and insights. It is a minute morsel of matter whose size and resonance allows it, on the occasion of the demise of its current body, to migrate among the multiple dimensions demanded by the math of string theory, thereby actualizing immortality.

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The Early Multiverse

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RL Schrag 2009

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Distillations Part 5

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The Self

The self is the symphony we compose with the choices of our life.  Inclined by biology, we take from our DNA the realization that we are utterly unique.  Each breath we draw, each hope we cherish, our fears, the thoughts we think, all trigger cascades of discernible physical reactions that strum the very strings of our self, creating and recreating us anew each moment.

Though buffeted by both choice and chance, we are the composers of our life’s symphony.  It is a role we are powerless to relinquish.
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Self Portrait

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RL Schrag 2003

Distillations Part 4

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Oppose Harm

Harm is anything that compromises harmony and beauty. Sometimes active opposition, though seemingly discordant, is the necessary path to harmony. But, whenever possible, opposition should be graceful, gentle, even beautiful.

Remember, opposition forced into the public sphere usually indicates a failure to blunt harm in a more private and graceful manner.

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The Musician

RL Schrag 2001

Distillations Part 3

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Enable Beauty

This tenet mandates our active participation in making the world more beautiful. A broad conception of beauty is implied, one that transcends culture, market and current taste.

The route to beauty winds through throngs and past lonely places.  Where and how we choose to follow is unimportant.  That we do follow is imperative.

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Off Ocracoke, NC

RL Schrag 2003

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Distillations Part 2

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Foster Harmony

This guides all our behavior. It shapes what we do and what we should refrain from doing: We seek harmony.

Implicit in the exhortation to foster harmony is the realization that we cannot choose for others. The only chord you can tune is your own.

Harmony rarely frowns. She is not selfish, arrogant or disdainful. Harmony could be rather tedious were she not so willing to laugh at herself.

Distillations Part 1

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 Those of you who have been around for the past eight years know that The Wall grew out of notes that I would actually stick on "the wall" above my desk at home.  Those notes grew into the book The God Chord that some of you have had the persistence to read.  I thank you for that effort.


My wife Christine, coming from the marketing side of life, has often opined that if I really wanted peole to read the work, I should consider the reader staring at those 240 plus pages that meander through physics, philosophy, art, occasional comedy and unintended tragedy.  Jeez.  Everybody is an editor.  I have however taken her advice and distilled 246 pages down to 719 words.


I am still quite fond of the 246 pages, but I am going to share the 719 words here on this blog.  Not all at once, of course, but chapter by chapter:


Here is the first: 

The Flight of the Milkweed Seed: Definitions of Immortality

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They would float like parasailing fairies across the late afternoon fields of my childhood, milkweed seeds on summer breezes.  It is only this lifetime later that I realize the deeper nature of their fragile assurance.

Chord theory tells us that the concentrated essence of that which we have come to call the soul, finds its physical reality in the replicated strings that echo through the utterly unique billion iterations of our DNA.  The theory also asserts that the word is the thing, that the representation of the conception, emotion or belief shares its chord, and is thus subsumed therein.  Likewise is the metaphor subsumed within that which it expresses.  Hence does the flight of the milkweed seed both define and become the cosmic liberation of the soul.

Consider the jade plant.  Place a severed leaf in receptive soil and the whole is regenerated from the differentiated fragment.  Can we similarly reconstitute the stag from its discarded horns?  At first blush, certainly not.  But then consider the stem cell infused into an injured organ. Somehow, the appropriate course to healing evolves.  It is our inclination to seek explanations in complexity.  Simplicity may be the better teacher.  At a level far below the molecular, the strings of the chord reconstitute the symphony.  The jade plant, the neuron, the bone marrow is made whole again.

When death releases us, the living and left behind seek comfort in complex imaginings that reconstitute the departed, whole cloth, in some divine replication of our terrestrial nursery; some shared destination to which they too can aspire.  I find the milkweed seed a more instructive guide. Our soul released to countless voyages, sentient flights across the universes, glides across infinite possibilities taking root again in the most auspicious loam

Seek No Seer

All right, it is not a unique insight.  But it came to me quite suddenly in the quiet of evening the other night.  It was one of those moments when you stop breathing and run the thought through your brain again.

"Oh my, Piglet! How amazing!"

You see, it occurred to me that there has been no one in my life who I saw as "the teacher," the one who had all the answers.  The notion was somewhat unwelcome.  It would, after all, be more comfortable to acknowledge an authority; to be able to turn to a trustworthy source with a reasonable expectation of veracity.  That is an assertion common to much philosophy, religion and Google: there is enough data, there is a right answer.  But I have never been in such a relationship.

Facts may be discerned.  Relationships among facts and processes can reveal essential commonalities, but truth, I fear is unique.  The only chord you can tune is your own. 

Mine may be an unusual observation from one who has spent his life as "a teacher."  There is, however, a profound difference between "a teacher" and "the teacher."  I had many good teachers in my life - but I always saw them as peers, as fellow travelers on the winding road to insight.  They provided paving stones, and the occasional trestle with which I constructed my ramshackle road to personal truth.  I got along swimmingly with those who shared that perspective.  The road was less tranquil with those who sought to demonstrate their incredible perception.

I have no doubt that my recent "Ah ha!" moment was driven in part by the extent to which I have been called upon to play the role of "the Teacher" in recent days.  A number of elements conspired.  I started using a new Learning Management System - the digital equivalent of a classroom, office, mailbox and gradebook - to organize my classes, and I began to teach a new course that I spent much of the last six months designing: Communication Media in A Changing World.  To maximize both pedagogical and intellectual flexibility, I designed a series of assignments with both chronological and conceptual options - ie. the students could choose both the content they wished to address and - within some boundaries - when they would turn them in.  Many appear to be out there quietly carrying out those tasks - or they are bearing their confusion docilely.  But a minority are utterly undone.  Multiple and frequent emails endlessly reprise this refrain: How do I do this alone? What do you want me to write about? What do you want me to think about?  In short, what should I believe is true?

The ancient admonition "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" has always been a bit illusive for me.  It fades in and out of apparent relevance.  I think I understand a bit more now.  Accepting that some teacher always knows "the truth," or even "the right answer" is cripplingly comfortable.  It makes our own journey unnecessary.  Someone else has found truth.  I'll just take a nap.  Forever.  I am still too much the pacifist to condone killing the Buddha.  But I would warn against following him - that way lies a quiet kind of suicide.