Pen to Paper

.
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.
.

Distillations Part 6

.

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.

. 

The Early Multiverse

.

RL Schrag 2009

.

Distillations Part 5

.
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.
.

.

Self Portrait

. 

RL Schrag 2003

Distillations Part 4

.

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.

.

The Musician

RL Schrag 2001

Distillations Part 3

.

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.

.

Off Ocracoke, NC

RL Schrag 2003

.

Distillations Part 2

.

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

.

 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: