Corralling the Geese

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It has been a growing irritation – at least weeks in duration, if not longer.  It has moved past being nibbled to death by ducks to being dope-slapped by geese – the big angry geese that used to chase us around the yard at my uncle’s farm.  It is akin to that jittery feeling you get when you have about a half a cup too much coffee; an uncomfortable kind of "zing."  I thought maybe if I could describe it, I could deflect it: “Bit off more than I could chew this semester.” “A perfect storm of trivial imperatives.”  It didn’t work.  The irritation continues to compound.  Zing. Zing. Zing.

You need to realize the extent to which this is an aberration for me.  A woman, who knew me more than well, once asserted that I was the sanest human being she had ever met.  While I like that notion, she, no doubt, overstated the case. Still, it is true that tranquility is a core value with me.  Hence, being irritated and on edge drives me nuts!!

Then this morning I happened upon these two sentences in a blog on the LinkedIn News page: “Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the Internet, people, and other forms of distraction.”

How droll.  I cannot count the number of times I have preached that sermon, yet I had to see it on another’s screen for it to re-emerge. 

Gradually, things began to refocus.  I am teaching a new graduate course, so my class preparation and time in front of students is up by about 30%.  My technology-oriented blogs are being reposted on Senior Correspondent, so they demand a more “professional” level of attention.  I have begun writing a textbook for one of my standard classes.  I have changed texts in another course so new support materials had to be developed for that course.  We took some dear friends on their first visit to Chicago.  Those are all new “distractions” and are added to the norm: We will cook Thanksgiving dinner for an undetermined number of friends and family.  Two other couples will join us on our annual anniversary sojourn to Colonial Williamsburg.  And the beat goes on and on and on.

Now, all of the above are things I have freely chosen.  Yet, what I failed to account for was what had to be “compressed” in order to accommodate those evolving choices.  And what is being compressed is my sacred interruption-free space. 

What deceived me, and would likewise fool the casual observer, was that if I look at my days, little appears to have changed.  I spend most of my day in front of students or in front of my “screens.”  We watch our "DVR-ed" shows. I still read before sleep and meditate on either side of sunset and sunrise. But the invisible distortion of increased distraction is a strain on both my attention and intentions.  Much of what demands my attention is now what others often blithely label "the real world", and much of my effort is expended to affect the prosaic and the mundane spaces of that reality.  I realize the import of those slices of existence – they pay the bills and teach the students, but, nonetheless, I call them prosaic and mundane for good reason.

To what other arenas might I direct my attention to reduce irritation? My scribbled, and sadly ignored, midnight notes suggest some options like:

“The only truth embedded in the old saw that ‘God never gives you a burden too heavy to bear’ is that God never gives us burdens. Why would God do that? Life, not God, presents us with seeming discordances. Only a fool would seek them out; pain, hunger, deprivation, etc.  Who needs them? But when confronted with them, the task is to discover the perspective that reveals their inevitable harmony.”

And,

“If what we call the Devil is in the details, then it stands to reason that what we call God is in the overview.”

Or,

“I always meditate before going to sleep, it closes out the day.  Mindfulness trips the shutter of consciousness, and, in doing so preserves a snapshot of that iteration of our life, allowing us to observe and assess.  Our vision should revolve, inward and outward, as we contemplate the moment, giving us insight regarding our progress on life’s journey and allowing us to appreciate the nature of the landscape through which we have chosen to travel. Mindfulness demands becoming a thoughtful – selective - photographer of our life.”

Those are the beginnings of engaging thought journeys that are being driven off by the squawking geese that currently infest my life.  Hopefully I will discover the shepherd’s crook needed to drive the feathered furies back into a more manageable corral, and thus, leaving irritation behind, I will find the strength of will necessary to take up my more accustomed place in the shady glen of reflective serenity.
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The Credit Downgrade: And Where From Here?

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If you work your way though the news releases, it seems clear - even to those of us without degrees in economics - that Standard & Poor's downgrading the nation’s credit rating is based on the belief that Washington can no longer be trusted to act in the best interests of the nation and the world.  Well, duh, get in line.  Polls recently reported in the New York Times place the “post debt-ceiling debacle” disapproval rating of Congress at 82%. 

Perhaps it is time to something unheard of, something really radical, something transformative – waaaay outside the box.  Wait! Wait! I’ve got it!  Let’s reward cooperation!  Think about it for a moment.  Wasn’t that how we were raised? Isn’t that what we teach our children?  Play nice?  Share your cookies?  Nobody likes a bully?  Robert Fulghum may have said it best in the title of his bestseller: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  Why is it then that our politicians seem to be more in tune with the cultural sensibilities of prison gangs? 

And what do I know about prison gangs?  Come on now, I watch the National Geographic Channel.  [How did that happen anyhow?  What happened to all the animals? But I digress.]  The point is this, prison gangs serve only the interest of their own inflexible, xenophobic constituency; and they protect those interests through violence and intimidation.  Fraternize with “the other” and you may well find yourself bleeding in the hallway, or worse.  Sounds a lot like what we have been hearing out of Washington for the last decade or so, and increasingly from Statehouses across the nation: Reach across the aisle and you will get your hand chopped off.

And who does that benefit?  According to the conservative bean-counters at Standard & Poor’s, nobody.  Predictably our “leaders” are already blaming those on the “other side” of the aisle for the downgrade.  Who do they think they represent?  The Aryan Brotherhood?  La Nuestra Familia? 415 KUMI?  When did this whole “my way or the highway” mentality enter mainstream politics?  When did protecting a shrinking, radicalized, “base” come to trump the good of the nation? If you think about it, “old political warhorses” like Clinton, Bush 1, Bob Dole, and Gerald Ford [as represented in Betty Ford’s memorial service] seem more than little embarrassed by the offensive behavior of their political heirs. Who’d a’thunk it!?

If I were younger, and angrier, and had more money I would start a new political party called The AVCD: Associated Victims of Collateral Damage.  The idea is that while the prison gangs that currently have a stranglehold on any meaningful compromise in Congress throw shivs at each other, the nation gets blasted by the backdraft.  We are the collateral damage in their petty wars.

But I am older, more prone to seek calm than conflict, and have no expendable resources to speak of.  So what I am going to do is this: before each election, at all levels, I am going to research the voting record of all the candidates. I will pull the lever for the individual – regardless of party – who has shown the greatest evidence of compromise. I will support the candidate most inclined to reach across the aisle, who behaves least like a bully, who shares their cookies, who plays nice.  Who acts for the greater good, beyond the dictates of party affiliation.  Who, come to think of it, fosters harmony, enables beauty and opposes harm.  And I will email them, and their opponents, and inform them of how I voted, and why.  Talk about revolutionary.  I suggest you join me. 

Yours for the AVCD :-)
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Living In The World

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One of the three lovely golf courses that bejewel our community is currently closed for renovations preceding some PGA event in the Fall.  That is delightful because it means I need only step out the door to wander down paths that wind among ponds and streams, flowers and forests, and baronial homes – some of which actually remain within the limits of good taste.  I am struck each morning by how breathtaking a golf course can be without the golfers.  Herons, hawks, and rabbits all conspire to irritate the crows.  Turtles flop about the ponds and yes, “Muskrat Suzie, Muskrat Sam, Do the jitterbug at a Muskrat Land” and then flee as my shadow crosses the bridge.

I suppose one might, therefore, find it a little strange that during this morning’s walk my thoughts turned to agoraphobia.  While dictionaries will lead one into some splitting of hairs, all would agree that an agoraphobic would find my morning golf course ramble terrifying.  Fear of open spaces, of social situations, fear of being out in the world, these all pop up in definitions of the condition.  Perhaps my thoughts turned in that direction since agoraphobia is the existential opposite of universal resonance, and I was struck by how debilitating it would be to be trapped inside that perceptual reality.

The agoraphobic, I imagine, retreats into a home or a room because everything beyond the door is a manifestation of a “fearful otherness.”  Universal resonance, quite to the contrary, informs us that we are in harmony with everything that surrounds us, that we need merely to open our eyes to recognize the symphony.

As the cart path winds behind one green, it passes a cutoff where some older equipment is stored – some good “rustique” methinks, for Dan Coyle, my oldest friend and fellow artist who fancies such things.  Across the path, within hazard markers that foretell a future spraying with RoundUp, a resilient thicket of pokeweed reaches up knee high.  Universal resonance finds a representational still life in this little slice of the world.  Machinery, meticulously engineered and fabricated, spirals into decay in the still of the afternoon as the pokeweed thrives in that same neglect.  Decay and renewal, for awhile, until the mechanics come along, refurbish the machines, which will then beat the weeds down to make way for the sculptured turf of the fairway.  Decay and renewal.  And I walk between, enjoying the smooth sway of my body, the machine that carries my chord, which will, itself, decay and renew until – finally exhausted - it will give up my chord to another renewal beside another fair way, as yet unknown.  It is a peace utterly alien to the agoraphobic, and that realization casts a bit of a shadow on my ramble.

Still, I realize, bringing light to the shut-ins of the world is above my pay grade.  It would be counter-productive for me to head back to school in the hope of, sometime in an uncertain future, hanging out my therapist’s shingle. Universal resonance asserts that we strive for a rational relationship between the mandate: foster harmony, enable beauty and oppose harm; and our own choices and abilities.  I now accept that I write, I teach, I occasionally make art.  I am interested in finding new pathways to share my efforts and the efforts of others.  And that is how I best beat back the darkness; that is how I foster harmony, enable beauty and oppose harm.  That, and of course rambling along .  .  .  .
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Superconductivity, or the 96% Solution

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As Colonel Hannibal Smith of A-Team fame was wont to say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”  You see, for years now I have been aware that my whole “Chord Theory/Universal Resonance explanation of the universe and existence” notion often foundered on the shoals of lack of pragmatic evidence.  When the whole construction rests on interactions too small to be measured – the behavior of strings – well, eyebrows tend to be raised, chortles are stifled, or not. 

New paths show promise in countering those reactions.  First, evidence that the status quo is flawed opens the door to alternative explanations, such as those I propose.  And, the more humongous the previous errors, the greater the wiggle-room provided.  Second, testable hypotheses generated by the alternative explanation are presenting themselves.

I am now willing to assert that the now widely-accepted notion that some 96% of the universe made up of dark matter and energy had escaped the observational efforts of the scientific community, qualifies as a humongous error. [See link.] 

And now even more recent data from the Kepler mission points to yet another elephantine oversight.  The May 20th issue of Science News carries an article entitled: Stellar Oddballs, in which Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley says, “There are so many stars that show bizarre, utterly unexplainable brightness variations that I don’t know where to begin. These phenomena have never been seen before, or never with such clarity.” Or in other words – “Oops, our bad.” [See link.] 

The point is not so much that “they got it wrong,” as it is that everything we were sure of yesterday can change tomorrow.  Certainty isn’t; which gives greater rein to hypothesizing about the uncertain.  Hence, this hypothesis:

As I understand it, little of what we know about the cosmos – or thought we knew – is based upon actually looking at a phenomenon.  That’s very old school, very Galileo.  Today, we measure the results of interactions or shifts in interactions and then define and identify the phenomenon by interpreting the interactions.  We don’t “see” particles collide in the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], rather reactions are “detected” that are consistent with what theory asserts should occur when specific particles collide – the actual collision is inferred, not observed.  That oblique ascertainment of “reality” applies in our everyday life as well.  I am looking at a pen that is blue.  But blue is actually the color that the pen is not.  The pen absorbs – takes into itself - all the other color wavelengths and reflects back those that are not “of it” – blue.  We see, and name the object’s color, by the reflected wavelength, by the characteristic it does not possess, blue.  Hence, Picasso’s blue period was really his “every color but blue period.” 

The objective of the foregoing is not a semantic game, rather it is an attempt to demonstrate how we might have missed most of the universe, and further, how we misunderstood much of that which we thought we had observed.  The issue is important since the data – as far as we can trust them – now seem to assert that our portion of the universe, the 4% we imperfectly observe, is different from the other 96% that we have not observed.  [A cautionary note seems important here.  There is no reason that I can see, to assume that the other 96% is made up of uniform “otherness.”  There may be a wide variety of “othernesses” in play.  But let us leave that for another time.]

The observational imperative of the 4/96 split would seem to be that we avoid attempting to observe the hidden 96% of the universe using the norms we have ascertained here in our 4%.  To do so is to become, once again, the midnight drunk searching for the car keys only where the light is best; searching using the flashlight of theories that now seem, at least, incomplete.

Chord theory, universal resonance, suggests a different observational strategy.  Our 4% solution rests on the observations of reactions, of collisions, of resistance.  The observation of discord, not harmony.   Universal resonance asserts a wider universe in which harmony is the norm and resistance the aberration. So, perhaps we should ask ourselves, what is the observable opposite of resistance?  What phenomenon might reveal a universe of harmonic normalcy? Conductivity seems to raise a hand. And superconductivity – that state when resistance disappears completely, when there are no collisions or reactions, defining a universe where harmony reigns, but is, to us, invisible. 

That is, of course, the nature of the ultimately harmonic universe posited by universal resonance.  The question remains: What does that universe “look like”?  What lampposts shed light on the other 96%?  I would hypothesize that the other 96% - or at least significant portions of it – are cloaked by superconductivity, perhaps even hyper-conductivity that would allow more than one object to commonly occupy the same space at the same time.  Yes, yes, we know that is wrong – at least so it seemed yesterday.  But continued “head-stuck-in-the-4-percent” attempts to prove such bizarre notions impossible, simply impede progress toward discovering how we might observe them once they rudely assert their reality.

A more fruitful path would be for those with the appropriate skill sets to seek for “cosmic background superconductivity,” as they have previously sought cosmic microwave background radiation.  How?  I haven’t the slightest idea.  But there are some wickedly brilliant people out there who can probably get their heads around it.  I look forward to their work!
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The Fascination of the Small

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The southern summer has settled in with a vengeance, spawning tornadoes that swept northward like latter-day Jeb Stuarts taking the war to the Yankees.  The thermometer puts up numbers of which students only dream, and you can soak a shirt walking out to get the mail.   All in all, it seemed a strange time to take my camera for a stroll.  But Christine has been gone for awhile, up in the Second City doing “Aunt Chris” duty, and I have succumbed to cabin fever.  So I made it a two-stop day.  First, I walked a short loop over by Lake Crabtree, then the “Investigator” path through the meadow and woods adjoining the North Carolina Museum of Art. 

The lake trail was peacefully deserted, save for a few other mad dogs and Englishmen jogging and biking the perimeter.  There is a calming silence to heat.  It would be oppressive indoors, but out here it seems a filter – nothing expends energy on unnecessary sound.  All that remains is important and worthy of our efforts to listen.  The smell of pine and honeysuckle steep together nicely in the quiet; trumpet vines and mimosas splash pink and scarlet among shade upon shade of green and brown. Several times I raised the camera to frame a shot, only to let it fall.  I began to realize that, today at least, simply pausing and watching would suffice.  More and more these days, when I take a photo it has a way of sinking into the voracious, multi-layered and cross-indexed “Pictures” file, never to be seen again.  Better to gaze, to breathe, and to listen.

Coming around a bend, I chanced upon a biker in full Lance Armstrong regalia; Area 51 styled helmet, spandex this and wicking that, all held together with Velcro and clever clips.  His stylish steed rested lightly against him as he fiddled with ear buds looping down to something small and digital.  I nodded, but he seemed oblivious to my awesome walking staff and raffish fedora.  A yard or two past him a flashy bluebird perched above a spectacular thicket of poison ivy draped with honeysuckle. I stopped and peeked through my viewfinder.  Damn near dropped the camera as a huge heron exploded from an eddy just behind her tiny blue buddy.  She screamed, and beat her way into the air.  I turned to see if Lance, too, had avoided a coronary, only to find him head down, staring intently at his digital doodad, thumbs flying.  It struck me that had we invented cellphones first, we would never have tamed fire – the saber-tooth tigers and cave bears would have been picking us off like jellybeans as we texted our way to extinction.

The path embracing the art museum was more populated, but still not crowded.  The large sculptures scattered across the landscape lay baking in the sun, pieces pulled from some gigantic kiln, cooling under Carolina blue.  Dogs, which had no doubt started the day straining the leash, now toiled up slight inclines, tongues panted to full extend.  Parents pushed, pulled and carried children among ponds and plantings perhaps a tad too obviously designed to tempt modern-day Monets.  Still, I caved, and took a couple of shots as background for a new set of images I am drawing.

I suppose it was the sleepy little ones being toted through the lush landscape that took me back to the first serialized fiction I can remember reading, Thorton Burgess’s Old Mother West Wind stories.  Burgess, a naturalist and author from Massachusetts, penned the tales over a stretch of almost 50 years, starting in 1910.  I first encountered Little Joe Otter, Spotty the Turtle, Billy Mink, Peter Cottontail, et al., in 1954, when I was still several months shy of my sixth birthday.  My father had taken a summer teaching position in California, and our rented home was not far from the local library.  My mother used books the way modern moms use DVD players, and so we read the summer away.

I am struck by the differences between then and now, between those stories and today’s.  The Mother West Wind tales made the small large – they created an entire world in a meadow or along a stretch of riverbank.  It is a characteristic shared with Kenneth Grahame’s British classic, Wind in the Willows, published in 1908, and Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, from 1926. These works all appear to have their roots in a close observation of nature writ small.  I envision Burgess, Grahame and Milne, children when the 19^th century turned 20, forced to go outside and play without things plastic or electric. They were, no doubt, initially bored.  But boredom, like necessity, often proves the mother of invention.  And they invented entire worlds in the gardens, meadows and streams that surrounded them – worlds that later flowed from their pens onto receptive pages, worlds they shared with me, waiting anxious and unknowing, across the decades. 

I wonder if, when even the youngest of children can touch the wide world through today’s magic screens, do we deny them the fascination of the small?  Do we ever allow them to become bored enough to track an ant across the garden?  To follow the flight of the bluebird? To imagine the throat that gives voice to thunder, or the world to which a rabbit hole allows entry? Have we become so averse to leaving our children alone with themselves that we impair their ability to discover who they are, and by what small thing they may be fascinated? And is the same true for you, and for me?

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Observing the Elephant, or, WiiinWim

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The fable of The Blind Men and the Elephant teaches an important to truth – to children.  As nimble fingers explore the pachyderm those tracing the side find a wall, a tusk becomes a spear, the trunk a snake; leg, tree; ear, fan; tail, rope – until the poor beast is totally and inaccurately deconstructed.  The implicit assertion is that could we but see the entire creature we would somehow “know” what it “is.”  And that is a valuable lesson for kids – “Get all the information before reaching a conclusion.” But seen from another perspective, the fable itself becomes an illusion.  No mere observation of the elephant would reveal the matriarchal social structure, the navigational nuances, or the communicative sophistication of the species that we are only now beginning to understand and appreciate.   So the story of the elephant and the blind men leads us into a WiiinWim situation.  Ah, no, again, not a typo – just another example of my love of acronyms.  WiiinWim stands for “What It Is, Is Not What It Means.”  And I am, again, talking about the universe – this time the optometrist’s universe.

The Optometrist’s Universe is a simplistic metaphor. An optometrist provides the lenses that allow us to read.  However, the ability to make the glasses is completely separate from the ability to read and comprehend whatever text is made legible by the lenses.  The most skilled uni-lingual American optometrist can peer through her finest lenses and still find French a mystery. Seeing the text is not the same as reading the words, and neither equates to understanding the sentence, let alone the paragraph or the book.  The same, I would posit, is true about astronomers and cosmologists and the universe: seeing is not directly correlated to understanding.  WiiinWim. 

This current musing drifts from my recent reading of The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, by Richard Panek.  The book simultaneously fascinated and embarrassed me.  The fascination comes from the fact some of the smartest cosmologists, astronomers, mathematicians, and scientists somehow overlooked 96% of the universe. Even more fascinating; how easy and understandable was the error.  The embarrassment stems from the fact that these were “family” to a certain extent – members of the academic family – and much of the error was compounded because they expended incredible amounts of energy fighting over “grants and glory.”  At times the whole process wasn’t so much a “chase for the truth” as it was an effort to “affirm my version of the truth.”

But I digress, as always.  What I found most troubling about the work was the “Blind Men and the Elephant-ness” of it.  Perhaps trapped by the metaphor of his title, The Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, Panek seems to assert that once we learn to “observe” and measure the other 96 percent of the universe we will have “seen the elephant,” and that vision will put to rest pesky questions regarding the meaning of existence, the nature of love, the existence of God, and all that jazz.  I must object.

Here is my concern: the technology that reveals the extent and structure of the universe, and the individuals who operate the equipment and analyze data, do not necessarily reflect the skill sets and knowledge bases best-suited to understanding the meaning of the universe.  Now, I certainly do not wish to reduce the astronomer's role to mere lens grinder or image-maker, no, the skill involved in the conception and creation of contemporary telescopes and other sensing devices is quite incredible.  To image the various guises of the universe we can see and to even contemplate the tools necessary to perceive the other 96% that we cannot see, is a manifestation of technical and scientific skill of the first magnitude.  The astronomer's labor is worthy of daily admiration, and occasional awe.

But while those exceptional efforts bring the text into focus, they do not automatically provide insight into the meaning of the text resolved by the device.  I’m not advancing the general semanticist's old saw and simply asserting that, "the word is not the thing."  As a matter of fact, I’ve come – well, maybe not 180 degrees from that – but certainly, 155, maybe 160.  I am far more comfortable with my own perspective, drawn from my writings on Chord Theory and Universal Resonance [drop me a note, I’ll send you the links]; that while the word it is certainly an inherent part of the thing, it is just as surely not the whole thing.  To discern the symbol is not synonymous with understanding the symbol.  Were that the case, Dan Brown would be a far less wealthy man today.

Let us explore another metaphor.  Let us consider Maxfield Parrish's Sunlite Valley from 1947.

 I choose it because it is not Rembrandt or Van Gogh.  It isn't even J.M.W. Turner or Thomas Cole. It is an unabashedly romantic landscape, which if painted today might be accused of some photoshopping - a little heavy on the saturation, a bit defuse on the sky - but I like it. It is sort of painting “comfort food.”  The point is this: you could take the physical elements used to construct the painting and put them in a room.  The tubes of paint, or perhaps the pigments and binders used to make the paint, the canvas, the brushes, the stretchers for the frame, the varnishes.  Throw in the wood for an easel. Maybe add some lights.  Everything. Dump it there, in the room.  Let all those elements stand for everything that makes up the universe or the multiverses or whatever.

When the astronomers and astrophysicists finally manage to define all of those elements for us, then they will have cataloged the materials in the room, they will have marked the paint in Parrish's studio.  When they isolate the forces that pull elemental particles into larger clusters and reveal the actions and reactions that suture up the galaxies and the unimaginably immense super strings of galaxies, then they will have discerned what holds the paint together, what allows it to cling to the brush and adhere to the canvas.  They may have even have glimpsed the nature of Maxfield's technique, his brushstrokes, and his preferences for hue and texture.  But unanswered still is the question of why the artist chose to paint that particular scene and for what purpose? What, if any, was the intelligence that stretched from conception to execution?

And that, of course, brings us back to WiiinWim - what it is, is not what it means.  If you have followed these posts for long you know that they stem from my own efforts to merge the physics with the philosophy.  And those efforts have led me to a number of assertions about "what it means."  I wait, with not much patience, to learn the nature of that 96% of the universe that remains cloaked.  I am curious to see if it seems to “confirm or deny” my guesses about “what it means.” If you have forgotten the nature of those guesses, you can download the long version The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart, [200 – 300 pages depending on font size] for free here:

http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/624/the-god-chord-string-theory-in-the-landscape-of-the-heart

But, in short, the work concludes with this thesis: Foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm: these are not the only truths, but without them all others come undone.

It is an assertion regarding appropriate human attitude and behavior that is drawn from what physics reveals about the nature of reality. You see, the recurring theme is that each time the best and brightest observers of the universe assert the primacy of chaos and the eventual demise of existence - those lynchpins of nihilism - newer evidence, better data, and a broader view reveals transcendent harmony and order. I continue to scour the emerging literature from the LHC, Hubble, et. al.  To date, the dominant chord still echoes harmonics.  And in that echo sounds the human mandate: Foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm.
 
The God Chord has been downloaded some 16,000 times, and is, I assume, also occasionally read :-)   So the foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm message is inching along through cyberspace. But my wife, Christine, requested a shorter version a couple of years ago, “You know, one regular people might actually enjoy reading.” 

Let me close with the 700 words that were the result of that request as they sum up my take on Wim "What it means":

Distillations: An Acknowledgement of Universal Resonance

by

RL Schrag

September, 2009

Being a tiny little book that attempts to present Universal Resonance, the worldview formerly know as Chord Theory in a more accessible form.

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Distillations

“Even small works can be beautiful if they point the way.”

Foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm: these are not the only truths, but without them all others come undone.

The object of this work is to distill universal resonance to its most parsimonious essence.  The guiding principles will be brevity and clarity, the objective, a work you can hold in the palm of your hand.
 

Universal Resonance

From the string theory of physics I accept the assertion that at the irreducible core of all things rests the string.  Unimaginably tiny, it vibrates.  Its existence mandates that the universe be defined by resonance; that we are made - as is every other thing in the universe, no matter how great or small - of music.

Existence, therefore, is best understood in terms of harmony and discord with no artificial distinction drawn between physics and metaphysics.

Universal resonance sees the division between physics and metaphysics as an intellectual artifice, a relic of wars between dueling arrogances:  Metaphysics asserts that truth is beyond measurement, while Physics fails to imagine the instruments equal to the task.

Universal resonance anticipates a world in which the unimaginable will become measurable, and the unbelievable is rationally explained.  It has happened so often in the past, it seems foolhardy to assert the contrary.

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.

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.
 

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 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.

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 Universe

Is the encompassing resonant harmonic entity of which we, as individuals, are and will always remain, a unique, sentient part.

The universe expands beyond the multi-verse of our theorizing, and yet is reflected in the infinitesimal perfection of the soul.

Our knowledge of the universe is evolutionary.  We are disabled by the belief that we can imagine the horizon of understanding.  Our belief in complexity blinds us to the insight suggested by simplicity.

Wisdom

We gain wisdom as we explore the three truths.  It is an exploration that is ambiguously poised between the private and the public.

We are unique entities suspended amidst unimaginable billions – unlike any other, yet in evolving concert with all.

Perhaps wisdom is best seen as unfolding harmony, comprised of works accomplished, commentaries on those works and the thoughtful anticipation of works yet to be.
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Travels in Alternia

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I am often unaware of making the trip.  But suddenly I am back again, standing in the kitchen, wondering what brought me here.  Other times I will be deeply engrossed in the trying task of finding exactly the right word to express a subtle perception hiding just around a bend in my mind, when the beep of a horn or a knock on the door returns me to my chair, disoriented, dislocated, disassociated.  I would be more concerned were this a phenomenon of recent inception, but I cannot remember a time when it was not part of my life: "Robby, are you listening to me?  Robby, I have asked you three times now to let the dog in.  I swear that boy .  .  .  ."

Still, it would be foolish to deny that moving into my seventh decade here on planet Earth has not focused my attention more closely on the phenomenon.  Can it really be creeping senility, dementia, or Alzheimer's if I have done it all my life?  And am I really doing it more often, or do advancing years simply make us paranoid about these flights of reflective fancy as "that boy" has somehow become "the old guy."

There was a family reunion in South Dakota last April.  My father, who will be 98 in June, could not make the trip.  But we took videos of recent conversations with him to the reunion via my tablet computer.  They were such a hit that we showed them to him when we returned to Chicago.  However, watching himself on the screen seemed more confusing than entertaining. It wasn't that he didn't grasp that we had taped the conversation, it just seemed, perhaps, irrelevant.  In that moment of his disorientation, I saw myself struggling to return to "everyday" when I had been "away."

I think that was when I first began to play - more consciously anyhow - with the question of what I have come to think of as "travels in Alternia." Is there, I wondered, another space/reality where we venture when we lose contact with everyday reality?  It must certainly be something considered by those whose loved ones get lost behind the tragic curtain of Alzheimer's; that hope that they are "somewhere else" and are "all right."  That is part of the conversation.  But is it merely a protective fancy to conjecture that senility in this realm of consciousness may not mandate universal senility?  More positively, can we posit an actual realm that is home to dreaming, and creativity - and my daily flights of walkabout?  "Well, perhaps," you say, "But another 'reality'"?  Stranger things are dreamt of.

We have learned only recently that 96% of the universe is made up of energy and matter that lies beyond our perceptual abilities and imaging technologies.  That which we can see - what we believed to constitute the entire universe, all of heaven and earth - is actually only 4% of what is "out there."  We have been the drunk in the old joke:

Late one night, a police officer happens upon an obviously inebriated gentleman on his hands and knees, creeping studiously about beneath a streetlight.

     "Sir, is there a problem?" enquires the officer.

     "Most certainly," replies the gentleman. "I have dropped my keys."

      The officer looks carefully around. There is obviously nothing on the ground.

     "Where did you drop them, sir?"

      The drunk gestures towards the dark shadows over his shoulder, "Back there."

     "Then why are you looking over here?"

     "The light is better here."

We look for explanations where they are most easily seen.  We have defined reality based on what falls within the glow of immediate lamplight. In doing so we seem to have missed 96% of the universe.  Perhaps we have made a similar error as we explore human consciousness.  Consider the notion of "cloaked consciousness."  [I think "dark matter" and "dark energy" are unfortunate choices to name the other 96% of the universe, the part that lies outside the comforting circle of our lamppost. Too much Darth Vader in those monikers.] I borrow "cloaked consciousness" from Rowling's world of Harry Potter.  Harry's invisibility cloak makes him invisible in one world, but in no way reduces the totality of his "presence in reality." "Cloaked consciousness" is how I conceive of the home to those experiences that leave no footprints here beneath the lamp, "cloaked consciousness" is the home to dreaming, and creativity and walkabout.  It is Alternia.

In Alternia, one lives unencumbered by the frailties of the awakened world. One leaps and creates and seeks truth differently. In Alternia one does not hear voices, it is not delusion. Rather one senses silent and affirming audiences who share your interest, and that interest propels you on.  Alternia remains invisible until we recreate its insights on this side of the curtain. Does that make one place illusion and another truth?  I doubt it.  But belief does not reality make.  How long did we point our telescopes into the heavens before the analysis of the data revealed that something - something huge - was missing?

I do not know where we may find acceptable evidence for Alternia.  But I do know that is isn't here, beneath the same old streetlight. Perhaps it is time we looked elsewhere.
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The Gray Flannel University

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I spent 5th and 6th grade at the American International School in Vienna, Austria.  During those years, 1959 – 1961, Vienna was still remaking itself after the physical and social devastation of World War II.  One of my favorite places was the Secret Garden that surrounded the ruins of a grand mansion down the block from our apartment building.  The house was a gutted shell, but, if you climbed the still intact walls, you found yourself amid thigh-high grasses surrounding the cracked marble-lined pools that captured rainwater.  Rambling roses draped otherwise immodest statuary.  The city was like that, pocked with ruins, yet still beautiful.

Through my young eyes the citizens appeared grimly determined; gray somehow.  The pace was stolidly slow and steady, measured, orderly – as though by working hard and “staying between the lines” a person could still find a way to the glittering future that had inexplicably descended, with ashes, into ashes.  There was still, after all, the utterly entrancing Staatsoper, with crystal chandeliers, seemingly stories high, hung amid the voices of angels.  Maybe one was supposed to keep your head down, but your eyes and ears in the heavens.

Perhaps it was the fact that my school was located in the heart of the city, that, we too, found ourselves in an orderly, controlled and measured environment.  For example, when we took a test the results were posted the next day outside the classroom door – by name, starting with the best grade and descending to the worst.  Black lines marked the cutoff for each letter grade.  A brusque red line defined one’s slide into failure.  The laudatory individualized marginalia of “good effort,” and “like what you are doing here” were decades away.

It was, then, with a strange feeling of déjà vu that I read a recent email:

"Each year, the Chancellor's Office requests an Annual Report from the College.  In the past, the Dean has included highlights from each department/unit in the report.  The College will continue that tradition. Therefore, the Dean has asked that each faculty member complete the attached Productivity chart. The Head will use the charts to create a department annual report, which will be sent to the Dean.  Please send your completed productivity chart back by May 1.  If you will put your information into the correct boxes it will make it easy to copy and paste it into the final chart document."

I opened the Productivity Report file and found a form that had a variety of columns: Books, Articles, Book Reviews, etc., even Poems and Short Stories. It was, despite lacking a column for Whimsical Paintings, or Pooh Bear Hums, quite a comprehensive list.  Nonetheless there were a couple of chilling aspects to it.  First, all of my colleague’s names were printed in one column, meaning, of course, that we were to enter our “productivity items” into our line.  Second, it was clear that we were simply to enter numbers into each “productivity box”.

I found those aspects depressing and disconcerting because I could see in my mind’s eye a list of names with numbers after them; black lines marking the cutoff for each letter grade, and a brusque red line defining one’s slide into failure.  The fact that the form mandated the use of numbers divorced from any reference to content, title, or venue, smacked of “keeping your head down and staying between the lines.”  It seemed a gray depiction of my professional world.  Keep turning out widgets that can be counted.  Count your particular widget and put it in a box.

I would be far less disturbed if I thought this chart were the bizarre construction of misguided administrators in my university.  Then I could simply shake my head and wait for them to fade away into the inevitable mist of retired administrators.  My fear, alas, is that this list is the norm, not the exception.  It is an accounting solution to the vexing national problems of “assessment” and “accountability.”  Legislators, alumni, Promotion and Tenure Committees; they all need information to make decisions that are vital to both universities and the constituencies they serve.  This method provides numbers that seem to inform those processes.

I say, “seem to inform” with great intentionality.  The problem is that when data are gathered, people will proceed as if those data had meaning.  Our productivity chart, and the others like it that I am sure are being employed at most universities, generate data that will easily be used to equate “numbers in a box” with “productivity” at a university.  I would assert that any such relationship is coincidental.  The flaws in such thinking are myriad.  Let me just note a few of the most obvious.  An article is not an article is not an article.  Some journals are wonderful founts of information and insight, others are “huckster-esque” resume building buffoons.  Still a publication in each warrants a mark in the same box.  And now, how does one measure the academic worth of a poem?  Is it the same as an article? Surely not a book – I mean, think of all the words in a book.  Poems have far fewer.  Are they of similar import? Let me count the ways .  .  .  .

The point is simply this: in the university we do not make widgets.  We are charged with nurturing the flames of curiosity, knowledge and creativity.  The product of our labors is to enable the more measurable productivity of others.  I realize that such a perception is laughably quaint in the modern university.  Which is one reason why, to quote Maurice Chevalier in Gigi,  “I’m glad I’m not young anymore!”
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It's Not You, It's Me!

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It is an awkward situation.  A graduate student asks me to serve on their graduate committee, and I must refuse.  The refusal is awkward because the request is a compliment.  Something in your interaction had struck a chord with the student and they are asking you to become, at least, a semi-mentor.

My reasons for refusing - and I almost always do so - are complicated.  First, I am deeply immersed in undergraduate teaching, and find that quite rewarding. So, my reasons for saying no to graduate students are not always selfish reasons.  As a matter-of-fact the primary reason is usually in the student’s best interest: I simply do not possess the information necessary to the task.  The next reason, though, is selfish:  I have no interest in obtaining that missing information.  Both reasons deserve further explication.

Communication is a discipline in continual evolution.  I teach a course in communication technology, and on the first day of class I announce, “In this course, you will wake up everyday out of date; that is both inevitable and OK.”  It doesn’t take profound insight to grasp that concept.  “Tech Stuff changes, everyday.”  Best Buy is running a series of ads right now pushing their “BuyBack Policy.”  When your old gizmo gets outdated, they will buy it back so you can get the new one.

What is less obvious is that the intellectual underpinnings of the discipline are driven by those same winds of change.  The Economist reports that 64,000 PhDs were awarded in the US last year – a few thousand of those were in communication.  Here’s the tricky part.  To get a Ph.D. you are required to make an original contribution to the field, you are required to “change” the discipline somehow.  To continue to advance in your career you do research and publish – and again an important criterion is presenting something new, continuing the cycle of change.  This is, for the most part, a good thing.  I cannot think of an instance when it has been a good idea to draw a line in the sand of human curiosity and say: “Go no further!  This way be dragons!”  Were there such a line, graduate students and young faculty would be required to cross that line, to seek out the dragons and tame them in service to the discipline.  Change is mandatory.

Yet, there is a difference between intellectual curiosity and mandated change.  In my world that difference is more complex than it appears at first blush.  No one enters the academy without intellectual curiosity – it is a fundamental prerequisite.  I’m sure there are exceptions, just as there are probably linemen in the NFL who weigh less than 280 lbs., but they would be both uncommon and disadvantaged.  The curious come to the academy because they are accepted, understood and advantaged.  To a point.  Most often intellectual curiosity, the advancement of knowledge, and the evolution of the discipline go hand-in-hand.  I would go so far as to say that, as broad social variables, intellectual curiosity and the advancement of knowledge always go hand-in-hand, just as the laws of classical physics are always adequate to describe to world outside our window.

But when we observe intellectual curiosity on an individual level, it shows an increasingly common tendency to diverge from the prescribed course of mandated change.  Physics found quantum mechanics to describe this fascinating world that operates beneath the radar of ordinary reality. Perhaps we need a quantum mechanics of the mind, if you will, for the academy to recognize and benefit from the individualized curiosity that percolates, largely invisible, beneath the unified surface of discipline-mandated change.

And that is my next reason for saying no to graduate students.  My individualized curiosity has led me away from the “hot ticket items” of the discipline where graduate students must focus their efforts.  Hence, in my own mind, I become a bad choice to teach the novitiates this particular catechism.  The other reason, the fact that I no longer find the center of my discipline’s intellectual life interesting, requires a deeper dip into the quantum mechanics of the mind – both metaphorically and literally.

Change is both a physical and existential mandate.  To live is to change.  To steal a notion from Heraclitus, you cannot draw breath twice in the same universe.  First because you are different with every breath you take, molecules rush about, cells die and are born, electric impulses drive thoughts and movement.  We are constructed by change.  Secondly, the universe is in continuous flux around us.  Galaxies, solar systems, stars and planets shift as swiftly as the change within us.  The edge of the universe recedes with incomprehensible rapidity.  The only constant in existence is change.  I change, therefore I exist.  That being said, not all change is worthy of our consideration, and thankfully so, as we are often hard pressed to consider the change that is worthy of our attention.

So now let us consider change within an academic discipline.  There is a light side and a dark side.  On the dark side, the path of change is mandatory, even coerced.  This path is informed by my world’s harshest possible perspective: what you think in the academy is unimportant, all that matters is that your work is published and your research is funded.  If on this path, the canny graduate student or junior faculty member links his/her wagon to an established or a rising star, a publishing or grant getting machine, and hangs on for dear life.  Individual curiosity be damned, direct your attention to whatever game is currently in vogue, for that way lies tenure.

On the light side, the academy in its most flattering aspect, academic change occurs quite differently.  One assumes that there is a liked-minded cohort out there in the academy to encourage and support any intellectual bent.  The wise novitiates read whatever fascinates him or her, and eventually they find a caring sympathetic mentor who helps them answer the questions that most fascinate them within a department that welcomes them. Both extremes exist, but the norm lies somewhere in between.

While my first four or five years in the academy were spent in places more intellectually dark than light, my professional life has been spent largely in that middle ground; often encouraged, almost always tolerated.  It is therefore somewhat droll that during my “senior” years in the academy I find myself increasingly tepid as to the burning issues of the discipline.  Today’s young communication scholars are often focused on issues about which I simply cannot summon the energy to care.  So, does that mean I am no longer curious?  No, quite the contrary as a matter of fact.  I am far more curious than ever before.  But my intellectual path has pulled me off the roads being explored by my colleagues.  Let me share the basics with you.

Somewhere in the middle of my career I encountered – firmly in the middle of the discipline – narrative analysis.  This approach to the world asserts that human beings construct stories that both contain and manifest the beliefs, attitudes and values that, for us, define reality.  There’s a lot more to it than that – but that covers the main points.  I wrote and published about the various aspects of that perspective for a number of years.  But, like all academic tides, this one began to wane, and the change demanded by all those still unwritten Ph.D. dissertations swept on to new stories about the nature of reality in the discipline.  And that was fine by me.  By that time I was a full professor with tenure, able to withstand even those few bad years when the dark knights ruled my little corner of Camelot.

But I remained fascinated with the stories that we tell ourselves about the nature of truth and reality.  You see, I have lived my entire academic career outside the sciences, over in the worlds constructed by story.  In communication or philosophy or literature, there is no “proof” there is only “interpretation” and “belief.”  Throughout most of human history the great events and precious personal moments have centered on belief.  Wars are fought, empires rise and fall, lives are bound together and split asunder all on the basis of belief.  Where are the data that define love?  Show me the evidence for god.  There is none – yet the belief endures.  Fascinating.

The physicists on the other hand have been poking around for what they modestly called “the theory of everything.”  Thanks to some wonderful writers and editors who could translate theoretical physics for “mathaphobics” like me, I began to read about these “theories of everything” and was soon delightfully enthralled with string theory and super symmetry, black holes and branes.  I rambled there for a few years until I began to seriously build bridges between those two broad narratives: a world defined by belief and a universe revealed by data.  I wrote, and published on the internet, the book that defines my conception of how those two narratives come together: The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart.  The point of this essay is not to hawk that particular worldview.  Rather, it is to point out that there is no home in the academy for the work.  It is simply “not of interest” for formal physicists and communication scholars alike.  It lacks an intellectual lineage in both disciplines.  And that, of course, is the final reason I say no to graduate students.  They must focus within boundaries that bore me.

From a broader perspective, I am concerned that the academy has built an efficient knowledge creation engine with tracks too rigid to accommodate at least one natural extension of an intellectual life.  And when I say “one natural extension” I do not mean my personal intellectual wandering.  Rather, I mean “folks like me.”  I have met a cluster of them over the last few years, academics who view their lifelong disciplinary homes with ennui.  We seem to share a variety of characteristics.  We are usually in our late 50s through our 60s.  We are established in our careers. We seem not, or no longer, tied to administrative responsibilities.  And our curiosity has led us beyond the ordinary boundaries of our discipline.  And, most importantly, we are thinking about strange and interesting things.  It is in many ways a lovely life.  Yet, somehow sad in that we are often lonely among our colleagues.
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Finding Your Fulcrum

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I usually hate it when the right words are already taken, but this time it may have been helpful.  It started when I stopped listening to music while doing my evening Reike.  You see, for the last 30 years or so I have done the same ritual every night before I go to sleep. It is a truncated Reike session that helps me relax and ease into sleep.  Until a week or so ago I would perform the ritual - which involves placing my hands on my head and slowing my breath - while listening to music.  A form of meditation, if you will.

Interestingly, I had noticed that there were times when the music seemed to run counter to relaxation.  You see, you are supposed to shift your hand position every three minutes, and it seemed that knowing where I was in the music would make me impatient to get relaxed - and yes, I realize how oxymoronic that is.  Anyhow, we have one of those “nature sound” generator things by the bed.  It will do rain, surf, wind, summer night, etc., etc.  We often run it at night and so I started just doing my Reike/relaxation/meditation to “summer night.”  It seemed to work quite well, which, naturally, got me thinking.

Thunderstorms, real ones with rain and wind and all that are incredibly somniferous events for me.  Love that word, "somniferous," sleep-inducing; the word itself is somniferous, I’m yawning here typing it.  But again, I digress.  Thunderstorms put me to sleep.  But then I thought about it a bit more.  They don’t actually put me to sleep – they relax me so completely that sleep often follows, but not always.  Same with crickets at night, some music, and, when I was young, the murmur of my parents voices drifting in my window screen as they talked out on the porch.  Some sounds seem to transport me to specific and utterly tranquil places.  The whole storm thing whisks me away to a lake I do not recognize from my “real” life, but is as familiar to me as any place I have ever been:

It is a Northern lake, similar to, but not specifically from, places I have visited in Northern Michigan and Wisconsin.  There is a boathouse rocking between two flanking docks, fragile yet unquestionable in its security from the wind and rain.  I am in a hammock, gently rocked, but not chilled, by the cool breeze. I know it is not real because there are no mosquitoes.  Still, I am quite content to rest wrapped in serene “somniferousness.”

Certain smells – lilac for example, no, not lavender, lilac – does the same thing.  Comfort foods are comfort foods because they, too, bring comfort and that feeling of somniferous well-being.

There is obviously a chord theory/universal resonance issue going on here.  After all, if it is a theory of everything, it has to be a theory of everything.  So, Chordman, how do you explain these seemingly spontaneous onsets of somniferous well-being?  I’m glad you asked.

This is, however, where I began to run into the problem of the right words having already been hijacked.  The thought that originally came to me was that this phenomenon was a wormhole notion.  Wormholes are tunnels through spacetime that allow for nigh unto instantaneous movement across light years of distance.  Spontaneous onsets of somniferous well-being could be similar shortcuts to harmony.  One cuts through lengthy sessions of meditation, reflection, etc., and moves directly to a centered sense of well-being.  Hence, these paths transcend the normal spiritual pathways to enlightenment – they are transcendent.  So I originally thought to call them “transcendors.”  Unfortunately I run into a lot of semantic issues if I follow that path because this is precisely where most of the words have been claimed by other “theories of everything.”  Transcendent, transcendental, transformative, -- all are the “property” of some other worldview.  So even if I could lay claim to transcendors, it would probably seed more confusion than clarity.

I was also having problems with the word “wormhole,” I just don’t like it.  I know, I know – beyond trivial.  But universal harmony asserts that the “thing” is a complete totality – the painting is the wood, the canvas, the paint and the varnish, in addition to the thoughts, emotions and the brushstrokes of the artist.  The map is a real component of the territory, the word is an important aspect of the thing.  So the word “wormhole” had to fit the phenomenon being expressed, and it didn’t.  “Holy Dune, Batman!  Would you look at the size of that wormhole!”  I just couldn’t go there.  So potential confusion in the transcendent camp and a trivial sense of discord with the word wormhole sent me poking around for better discourse to explain the phenomenon in question.  Here’s what I came up with.

A wormhole asserts a movement from one point in space-time to another.  The different locales in the universe, particularly when observed from points removed from the wormhole, lie at great distance from one another.  However, universal harmony asserts that the universe is a single harmonic whole, so it follows that discord is resolved by shifting perspective, not location.  Harmony, if you will, is in the mind of the beholder and is not dependent upon the location of the observer in the cosmos.  Hence, moments of somniferous well-being are functions of perspective, not location.  I need not scour the ends of the earth to find the lake of harmony whose shores welcome me each night, it is always there in my head.

So the various triggers of somniferous well-being do not, wormhole-like, take me anywhere. Rather, they alter my perception of the space I currently occupy. They enable and affirm my recognition of the harmonic universe that surrounds me.  They provide balance.  And, ah ha, that calls forth another concept.  When we think about Archimedes and his lever to move the earth, we do tend to get overwhelmed by the lever.  That is understandable, the scale of the thing would be awesome.  We think less about the fulcrum.  Yet, obviously, without the fulcrum, a lever – no matter how long - is just a board.  It is the fulcrum that enables balance.  Shades of playgrounds past; the yelling softens as light mellows through recess dust. Then, carefully, there is neither teeter nor totter, set the table; there is balance, there is harmony.

So, I have come to this – the thunderstorm, the lilacs, the crickets, some music, and maybe grilled cheese sandwiches – these are my existential fulcra.  They balance my life, they shift my perspective in ways that allow me to simply “be” there in the midst of harmony; calm, balanced and relaxed.  How did Simon and Garfunkel put it?  “All dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.”  Furthermore, to the extent that constructed representations of those fulcra are accurate; the sounds in the “sleep machine” or lilac candles or infusers, they too can become fulcra, balancing and relaxing, affirming harmony.
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Mural Musing #5

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Finnish Ain’t No Language in Europe!

OK, I’m not really sure where that came from – other than looking at the mural this morning.  Tape had reappeared – see?  Over there:

I took a closer peek and was suddenly submerged in a world of déjà vu.  8 or 9 years ago I was working on this piece called “Beltline Boogie” that now hangs down here in the lower level den:

The image started life as an 8 x 10 inch pen and ink doodle done during a faculty meeting. I then scanned the drawing into Photoshop, where I added color and texture.  Eventually it became the 48-by-36 inch giclee that hangs on the wall.  Here is the issue.  When you work in Photoshop you can zoom in as close as you want – until you are working at a pixel by pixel level.  So you see those little tiny cars way in the background?  I could blow each one up to fill my 20 inch screen and work in teeny-tiny detail, like this:

Mind you this isn't the large car in the foreground, it is a slightly different, tiny, clone waaaay in the back. You can't really make it out here on the screen.  As it turned out, in this instance my obsession with detail was worthwhile.  This particular image ended up wrapping a city bus here in Raleigh as part of the "Art on The Move Project."  So one incarnation of Beltline Boogie ended up being 40 feet long!

Point is this – I would be embarrassed to tell you how many hours I spent working on the image.  Were it my "job", no problem – I could be labeled a “real go-getter,” a workaholic who always gave you his best effort.  I was, however, working on the image for the sheer pleasure of bringing to life the image inside my head.  When I would occasionally share my progress with someone, they would often inquire, “When will you finish?”  I had no answer. Every time I would open the image and zoom into that engulfing world – well, there was always something more to tweak.

Here is a quick glance at the current state of the image in Paul’s head that is springing to life on our walls:

Is that just unbelievably cool, or what? Were it not for the tape on the door handles you wouldn't see them at all.  We cannot wait for the first time a guest asks to use the restroom and we tell them to go out behind the trees! 

When will Paul "finish"?  I have no idea.  "Finnish ain't no language in Europe."  It is a moment that occurs in the mind of the artist, when the image on the canvas, screen or wall bears sufficient resemblance to the image inside the artist's head to be deemed "finished."  Judging by the tape in the  image that begins this post, I would guess that that moment will not occur today.  And we are more than willing to enable Paul's obsession for detail .  .  .  . 

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Mural Musing #4

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It has been while since I last attempted to recount for you the progress on the mural.  My excuse for neglecting the blog was initially a legitimate one – the holidays and all that.  Christmas here in Raleigh, then a delightful trip to Ocracoke Island to share New Year’s with dear friends and their family.  And I will cling to at least a portion of that prevarication.  But in truth, the larger issue is that I have been more than a little overwhelmed by it all.  Three seemingly unrelated narratives wind through my current reflections.  Let me share them with you and then try to explain how they are related.

First, is an iconic rural story about the farm boy whose favorite heifer finally gives birth to her first calf.  However, as is often the case in these situations, the little one is sickly, and the first-time mother less-than-adept.  Well, the lad bottle feeds the tike and takes to carrying the little critter around with him, so he can keep an eye on her.  She’s just a mite of a thing and he is strong.  And so it goes for weeks.  Come autumn, the neighbors are amazed to see the lad casually moving about the farm while carrying a strapping, yearling shorthorn cow across his shoulders.

Second is the story of a colleague of mine who is an excellent golfer.  I remember asking him if he had ever considered chasing the PGA star.  He admitted that he had, until he had chanced, while in college, to play a round with a classmate who actually went on to play rather successfully on the tour for a number of years after graduation.  During those few hours my colleague became painfully aware of the incredible gap between his best efforts and those of his friend, the future pro.

Finally, there is the well-known tale of Michelangelo and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor who occasionally did some painting.  Pope Julius II saw him as the painter best suited to adorn the ceiling of PJ’s home church.  Michelangelo got sucked in by the challenge and spent four years of his life, away from his beloved stone-cutting,  painting immortal images for this pushy guy with a pointed hat.

As I watch Paul work on the mural, each of those stories echoes in my head at various times.  The heifer story rings loudest when I remember the foyer wall of a couple weeks ago, featureless – your basic wall with a couple of distracting doors.  And then I think about the snakes of blue tape crawling over the lines traced upon the wall and Paul “killing the white” with a tan base:

Then incrementally blocks of color appear intersecting with streaks of increasing definition:

And more dabs appear, tying those streaks together until they became tree and branch, leaf and sky that spread like Spring across the wall:

And then, more recently, they slowly resolve as though being “focused” and viewed through an old, pre-digital SLR camera:

Seems like that wall was a little baby calf just yesterday, where is this awesome, full-grown critter coming from?

Obviously the golf story comes into play as I realize I do not have the slightest idea how he makes it happen.  I mean, I like to create my images, and I choose to believe that the pleasure they contribute moves beyond the immediate sphere of my own joy in creating them.  But this is a whole different level of “game.” How do the lines morph into branches?  How does flat become round?  That whole “crooked places straight and rough places plain” thing?  Paul explains patiently that the light is coming from the upper left so the dark values have to lie at the lower right of each branch, tree, or leaf, and then the lighter values round the object as you proceed to the upper left.  “Of course,” I think.  “And do you want fries with that?”  Still, I understand a bit more each day.

Finally, the Sistine Chapel story sometimes strikes a bit too close to home.  Last night as the four of us gathered again for dinner Paul did sigh and admit, “I wish I could get back to building my guitars.”  Despite the fact that we had all spent time discussing the possible perils to our friendship that lay in his undertaking the task, I still felt a bit like the pompous Pope who just wanted a cool ceiling.  This morning, however, we talked and he admitted that the pressure to get the mural "just right" came from within:

“I am cursed,” he admitted, “by knowing what I am capable of, and, once started, I cannot stop until I have achieved that.”

"Hmmm," mutters my evil twin.  "Step into my chapel, please, this will just take a minute .  .  .  ."
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