Colonial Williamsburg and the Ur-chord

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A little backstory: I had mentioned our recent trip to Williamsburg to my friend, Ken, who is here on The Wall.  He replied: Concerning the solitariness of Williamsburg in the rain, I would very much like to hear your reflections. Probably a subject for the wall.

No problem, I thought. And thought, and thought. And now 3 weeks later here is where I am.  Despite having placed major ideas in the "deal with in another post" pile, I am aware that this post needs another pass of the "distill complexity" comb.  But wanted to share this before 2013 turned into 2014.

Cheers,

RLS

Colonial Williamsburg and the Ur-chord 

It is our tradition to celebrate our wedding anniversary in Colonial Williamsburg.  This year that visit coincided with "The Grand Illumination." The "GI" lived up to its advance billing.  Fife and drum corps accompanied sunset.  Single white candles winked in every window up and down Duke of Gloucester Street. Wrought iron cressets held flaming knots of pine, maybe oak. Their golden glow danced across the cobblestones while rosenous smoke drifted up into a cloudy sky - a sweet and tangy Fall perfume long since eliminated by local burning ordinances across the country.

The drums fell silent when, from the Palace, the Capitol and the Powder Magazine, fireworks arced high above the town.  All right, the degree of coordination across the three sites made one suspect that pyrotechnic enhancements beyond the ken of Williamsburg's mythical reality of circa 1775-1776 were involved, but it was quite lovely.  However, as we strolled back down Duke of Gloucester street toward the King's Arms tavern the Grand Illumination morphed into the Great Inundation.  The skies opened up and it poured for the next three days.

While the town must have taken a financial hit from from the poorly timed monsoon, we soon came to appreciate its effects. You see, we try to time our visits to the Colonial city to avoid peak visiting times - an inclination no doubt drawn from our unfortunate visit one incredibly hot, wall-to-wall people, July 4th.  Initially, the rains of the Great Inundation simply drove the visitors inside, crowding the shops and craft houses along the main streets.  But as the downpour continued the next day and youngsters grew bored, the town began to empty out, and in that emptying a strange transition began.  There is, it seems, a Williamsburg behind Williamsburg.  A smokey reality, behind the verisimilitude.  Let me try to clarify.

Think about Disney World for a moment - any of them, it doesn't matter which one.  And that is precisely the point.  Disney World is a "reality" based upon a fantasy.  It is the ultimate escapism.  Peer beneath the veneer of Disney World and you will find the asphalt of L.A., a swamp in Florida, the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong or a bemused Parisian.  With enough lights and fountains, glitter and tinsel, anyplace can support a Disney fantasy.

Williamsburg is different.  We know that Bill Barker isn't really Thomas Jefferson, Richard Shumann is pretending to be Patrick Henry. Carnegie's Washington and Hull's Wythe are interpretations.  Yet, the people upon whom those interpretations are based did live here. They occupied this space, sat in that pew, had their horse shod over there, downed an ale across the street.

That difference became tangible as the tourists, even the interpreters, sought shelter indoors.  We, however, opted to unfurl our big umbrellas and wander the empty streets.  It became one of those rare moments when the difference between loneliness and solitude becomes poignantly apparent.  You are obviously alone, but far from lonely. Despite the deserted thoroughfares and empty alleyways, you are certain, almost, that someone just disappeared around that corner.  The muffled clop of horses hooves and steaming droppings on the cobblestones provide further evidence of a world just slightly out of sight.  The solitude becomes a lens that enables us to somehow peer back in time, moving, like Dicken's Yuletide ghosts, unseen among the lives of others.

I was, for awhile, content to simply revel in the sensation.  But one nagging responsibility  of the proponent of a "theory of everything," is that eventually you need to attempt to explain the phenomena you encounter.  How then, does my theory of universal resonance come to grasps with the soft reality that seeming lurks behind the historically defined re-creation that is Colonial Williamsburg?  I am currently drawn to insights offered by the cosmic microwave background and the theoretical notion of cosmic wormholes, or the Einstein-Rosen bridge.  Yes, this would probably be a good time to refresh your eggnog or grab another cookie.

OK.  Wikipedia tells us that the cosmic microwave background is the thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang that permeates the universe equally in all directions.  Although that certainly simplifies the phenomenon, it is probably sufficient for this conversation.  As I understand it, the cosmic microwave background provides a spacetime reference point for events that lie between the background and an observer anywhere in the universe.  I will admit to not being completely clear as to just what all we learn from being able to place a cosmological event between ourselves and the cosmic microwave background.  We place the event in time, we locate it in relationship to ourselves, etc. But it is the fact that the relationship exists, rather than the specifics of it that is important. There is a background and an event.  Being able to locate those two points gives us increased information about both.

It would seem that the notion of  symmetry in quantum mechanics demands a parallel relationship between the universal harmony of the universe and the ongoing construction and expression of our own chord.  This assertion springs from my consistent position that the unfolding of the universe as defined by special relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory, and the composition of or ordering of our personal chord or harmony are, in fact, simply differing manifestations of the same process.  If we pursue that line of thought we inevitably arrive at the conclusion that there is a harmonic equivalent to the cosmic microwave background - harmonics radiating so as to permeate the universe equally in all directions. This ur-chord, if you will, stands in a constant referential relationship to our personal, unique, unfolding chord.

I have written elsewhere about moments of powerful spontaneous harmonies and moments of sudden discord.  We "fall in love" with a stranger on a train, or feel "at home" in place we have never been before.  Conversely, an innocuous stranger "gives us the creeps," or a shiver convinces us that someone "just stepped on my grave." These sensations are, I would contend, rooted in the ur-chord. Consideration of the somehow sentient solitude of Williamsburg leads me to an explanation that also has roots in this ur-chord.  And this is where we jump over to wormholes.

Wormholes are conceptual shortcuts through spacetime revealed in the equations of general relativity. For a simple analogy consider a water balloon.  Not a "filled-tight, careful-not-to-squeeze-it-or-it-will-burst" water balloon, but a "squishy-sloshy-floppy" water balloon.  That water balloon is the universe.  Now take a marker and make two Xs on the balloon, as far apart as possible.  Rest the balloon on a counter top.  Put your finger on one of the Xs and squish the balloon around until you can push down on the other X. The two formerly widely separated parts of the "water balloon universe" are now cheek-to-jowl. That's a cosmic wormhole. Jean-Claude Van Damme used them to hop around the universe in Timecop. The problem with wormholes is that while they are mathematically solid; outside of Hollywood, there is no observational data of their existence.  So while we "know" they are out there, we've never seen one.

This brings us to the observational-reality conundrum.  Books like Richard Panek's The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, point out the extent to which our perception of reality is constrained by the tools we have to observe and measure phenomena.  We have, particularly in the sciences, tied ourselves to the notion that if we cannot observe "it" - ideally directly, but at least an indirect observation of its impact on other entities - then "it" isn't there.  The Higgs Boson only became "real" once we could "observe" evidence of what we believed, almost knew, was there.  Good theory leads - eventually - to observational, experimental confirmation.  But too often we get pulled into a narrow perspective and miss some really fascinating stuff lying slightly askew to our line of observation.  Great discoveries often occur by accidents that shove us off our theoretical tracks.

Remember the drunk, the lamp post and the car keys?  It's midnight.  Drunk is down on hands and knees, searching for his car keys under the lamppost.  Cop comes along, offers assistance and asks "Are you sure you dropped them here?"

"No, I dropped them back there," the drunk responds gesturing back into the shadows.

"Then why are you looking here?" inquires the incredulous officer.

"The light is better here."

We have, in my opinion, restricted our consideration of the nature of the universe and existence to the area under a rather restricted lamp post.  If we insist on seeking to explain moments of intense harmonic resonance with tools developed to track distant galaxies or the Higgs boson buddies, then we will never "discover" the literal music that knits the universe together.  We will remain "color-blind" to the spectrum we seek.  And that hidden spectrum may well be the one that reveals the broader nature of certain phenomena that continue to escape our search beneath the current lamppost.

(Something we need to keep in mind, and at the moment I can think of nothing more artful than this clumsy aside:  The ur-chord I propose below rests directly upon the harmonic manifestation of the "strings" of string theory.  Strings are the smallest discrete entities in the universe and, as such, are utterly undetectable with our contemporary observational tools.  We can no more directly observe a single string than a Neanderthal could observe a molecule.  Like wormholes, we are convinced that strings exist because the math says they do. Keeping that in mind, let us move on.)

Consider this possibility.  Perhaps "wormholes" are far more common in the harmonic spectrum.  But let's not call them "wormholes," - a terrible name for such incredible structures.  Let us call them "harmonic bridges," that allow us to "listen" easily across the vast separations of spacetime.  I would hypothesize that we "hear" most clearly the powerful resonances and significant discord that jump between the ur-chord, our own developing chord, and a third entity that forms the harmony bridge between us and the ur-chord.

Examples? Those mentioned above, stranger on a plane, steps on our grave - and the echos of the past in Williamsburg.  Those are all examples of the "third entity," the "sound system," if you will, that creates the harmony bridge between the ur-chord and our personal harmony. The idea is that chords can linger.  A sort of hologram in a harmonic field - not unlike the Higgs Field - that, when aligned along a harmonic bridge with a particularly resonant or discordant, unique chord (yours or mine), moves to some extent into our perceptual field.  We "sense" something.  The existence of such phenomena could certainly lend insight into incidents reported as "paranormal," which, thus demystified, would simply draw them into the realm of the normal.

And why, we might well ask, hasn't this path been more rigorously explored? Well, it has, perhaps most obviously in the 1800s.  When early experiments in electricity began to reveal power "hidden in the ethers," intellectuals naturally began to consider that death was also an "ether-bound phenomenon, hence a relatively simple transition from "our side" to "the other side," and conversations across the ethers might be possible, like a telephone call or a radio broadcast - wonders were already transforming everyday life in the 1800s.  Why not reach to another area previously thought impossible and talk with dear-departed Aunt Ruth or Granddaddy? The people posing these questions were not "fruitcakes." Consider this entry in Wikipedia:

Many scientists who investigated the phenomenon ( of spiritualism) also became converts. They included chemist and physicist William Crookes (1832–1919), evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) and Nobel-laureate physiologist Charles Richet. Nobel laureate Pierre Curie took a very serious scientific interest in the work of medium Eusapia Palladino. Other prominent adherents included journalist and pacifist William T. Stead (1849–1912) and physician and author Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930).

Conan Doyle, who lost his son as a result of the war, was also a member of The Ghost Club. Founded in London in 1862, its focus was the scientific study of alleged paranormal activities in order to prove (or refute) the existence of paranormal phenomena. Famous members of the club have included Charles Dickens, Sir William Crookes, Sir William Fletcher Barrett and Harry Price. Pioneering American psychologist William James studied spiritualism, publishing supportive conclusions. The séances of Eusapia Palladino were attended by investigators including Pierre and Marie Curie. The celebrated New York City physician, John Franklin Gray, was also a well-known and prominent Spiritualist in New York City.

So the problem with the early examinations of certain unexplained phenomena was not the caliber of the minds posing the questions. These respected intellectuals saw "spiritualism" as an opportunity to turn the new and exciting eyes of science to questions that had long intrigued us.  What happens after death? Is it simply an "on off" switch?  How do we explain intense personal emotional experiences? What are these experiences that "feel" real but offer no tangible evidence of causality? Or even evidence that anything actually "happened"?  Are my senses deceiving me? Am I a "hysterical" woman? A "shell-shocked" soldier?

There were several reasons why these early lines of investigation died out.  First, consider this.  If these phenomena, these echoes of the ur-chord, are manifestations of activity at the string level of the universe, they are still vastly beyond the pale of our very best 21st century observational "lampposts," of space-based telescopes, of immense particle colliders.  What chance did the rudimentary 19th tools have of detecting "ripples of strings in the ethers?"

Second, the possibility for, and instances of, fraud were immense.  People who sought out spiritualists were often over-wrought and desperate to contact a dead loved one - a parent, spouse, lover, or child. They also tended to be well-to-do, and well-read.  They wanted to believe, and were willing and able to pay to "reach someone on the other side."  With marks that willing, the con artist is unable to resist. I have no idea if there exists anything like a true "medium," someone who does have the ability to sense harmonics on a string level, and interpret them in such a way as to help folks advance the tuning of their own chord.  If there are, and if they were practicing in the 1800s, their insights were surely drowned in the cacophony of the fakirs.

Finally, any research that might have established a scientific tradition of searching for the ur-chord was completely overwhelmed by the whirlwind success of research in electronics, physics, mathematics and the related practical applications that drove the industrial revolution.  In the academic-industrial complex, the money follows empirical results that can be turned into marketable products or research grants. Few institutions have the intellectual will and even fewer corporations have the fiscal courage to "throw good money after bad" - to engage in science whose "payoff" lies decades down the road, if it exists at all.  As a result over the next 200 years the line between physics and meta-physics, between math and philosophy, between technology and theology, became deeper and more distinct.  The resultant fallacy became orthodoxy: there is the real and the imaginary, and they are discrete and separate entities.  I am reading/listening to Walter Isaacson's biography of Albert Einstein, and Einstein, who reveled in the arrogant questioning of authority, would be appalled by this current retreat from curiosity.

I am firmly convinced that were Einstein to be walking along the streets of Williamsburg on a smokey, rainy evening, and from out of the bright doorway of a tavern, or softly from around a shadowy corner, or whispering through the high branches of an old oak tree, he heard the faint call of the ur-chord, he would not dismiss it as some sort of perceptual aberration.  "What was that?" he would inquire. "Did you hear something?  That had to come from somewhere. That has to mean something. That has to be accounted for in any theory of everything."

Yes, it does.
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On Forgiving and Forgetting

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It was a forgetful incident that drove me to this reflection.  I awoke in the little hours, 1:30 maybe 2:00 from a dream of some sort of confrontation. Heart pounding, mind a blank, I struggle to remember what I had for dinner, because I read somewhere - probably on the Internet - that if you can remember what you had for dinner you aren't getting senile.

I finally think my way back to a Wich Wich sandwich, hot roast beef on wheat, pepper jack and provolone, spinach, tomato, spicy mayo, crispy onion strips, BBQ sauce, salt, pepper and garlic. I'm feeling pretty good about myself until I remember that that is what I always order at Wich Wich. So no magical feat of memory there - other than remembering that we ordered out from Wich Wich.

So I'm lying there awake at maybe 2:15, fixated on memory.  Naturally, I cycle back to the dream that woke me and begin to recreate the dialogue - please tell me you do that too.

I'm apparently talking to person A - let's call him Tom, about person B - we'll make her Pricilla. There are still no actual identities that I recognize, only emotional clusters.  Apparently Pricilla did me wrong, and, despite Tom's urging, I cannot let go of that anger.

"Well," Tom finally bursts out, "I don't know why we're having this argument.  She'll never know the difference."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"She's in deep dementia.  Doesn't recognize the people that she loves.  She wouldn't know you from Adam."  With that, Tom conveniently disappears.

Suddenly, the idea of forgiving Pricillia seems almost trivial.  The sympathy for someone, anyone,who loses the memory of everything they once held dear, sweeps away whatever issues had estranged us. Forgive Pricillia? Of course. Nothing could be easier.

But, I then realized, nothing could be more meaningless.  I thought back on others who, in my mind, had "wronged" me. The easy examples were mostly professional - colleagues who had failed to support me for this or that. Things that, with the passage of time, had grown trivial as most "on the job" conflicts do. We had forgiven each other. But we had not forgotten the original discord. And that is imperative in true forgiveness. The harder issues were personal. Painful still. The original conflicts remained raw.  Forgiveness remains a remote possibility somewhere down the road.

It is vital that we recall that the saying goes "forgive and forget." There is a moral chronological imperative to that aphorism. It is not forget and forgive. There is no honor, no ethical high ground, in forgiving someone whose wrong you have forgotten. Forgiving a demented Pricilla was dust and ashes, it was "winning" a battle of wits when confronted with an unarmed opponent.

It was then that I realized I still had work to do on this particular path to a harmonic life.  I've gotten better, but there are still a few Pricillas and Marys, Freds and Tommys out there that I have not managed to forgive, and whom, I strongly suspect, have yet to forgive me. We remain moments of discord in each other's lives.  It would be better to forgive and forget. But that is far easier said than done.  Still, there is some honor in continuing to try to forgive, or at least in thinking about trying.

So, I roll over, make a few notes here on the iPad and wonder .  .  .  .   so what did I have for lunch yesterday?
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Stalking The Transient Transcendent Moment

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Music begins to disappear at the moment of its creation.  The history of recording is the history of our desire to capture that ephemeral moment, and to repeat it at will -  to capture the flow of harmony. It strikes me that the successful capture of a musical moment implies our ability to, perhaps even mandates an attempt to, similarly capture and reproduce other transient, transcendent moments that amaze and define us.

Consider love. Falling in love, being in love, realizing love.  Young love, first love, true love. These phrases seek to pinpoint moments of pure harmony.  Central to the human condition is our attempt to freeze those moments - to record, photograph, paint, tweet, or post them.  Those many efforts are but different facets of the same inclination seen in recorded music: our desire to capture a transcendent moment that is innately transient - to catch lightening in a bottle.

Futile though it may be, this desire lies behind many of humanity's crowning achievements. Furthermore, it is this inclination that most clearly distinguishes us from our fellow travelers here on this great blue orb. Our compulsion to capture the magical transient transcendent moment undergirds all of humanity's highest expressions. It prompts our music, our art, sculpture, and architecture. It forms our philosophy, our theology; it guides higher math, and physics.

Inherent in the creative drive to capture the transient transcendent moment, is the twin desire to reproduce it. We are driven by a need to be able to release those notes again into the air, to gaze once more upon that face or form, to see light dance again across that vista, down those halls and across that landscape, to catch again the subtle scent of evening flowers, of fresh cut grass.  In these acts of of attempted representation we hope, we seek, to recreate the transient transcendent moment that inspired its artistic replica.

Alas, such recreations may lie beyond the reach of even the best of us.  I do not for a moment seek to besmirch the obvious genius of the works that have delighted our senses across the centuries and amaze us with contemporary brilliance.  I simply need to point out that those creations are works inspired by the transient transcendent moment, they are not the transient transcendent moment itself.

I am reminded of Edmond Rostand's play, Cyrano de Bergerac.  Cyrano is a gifted poet in love with the beautiful Roxanne.  But he mortified by his face, defined mostly by a immense nose. Convinced that Roxanne will never love him, he helps his handsome but poetically challenged comrade-in-arms, Christian, win her love by becoming Christian's "ghost writer."  Cyrano goes so far as to accompany Christian to a tryst beneath Roxanne's balcony.  Cyrano whispers verses to Christian who repeats them to the lovely Roxanne, who listens above. Cyrano is the transient transcendent moment, Christian is the recording, the captured and reproduced transient transcendent moment.  Christian proves an acceptable surrogate and wins the lady, but he is not Cyrano. There is a lesson here.

Our attempts to capture the transient transcendent moment have resulted in some of the world's finest art and moments of deepest human insight and understanding - they are windows on the wondrous, they provide glimpses of the divine.  Only a fool would find fault there.  But I continue to be nagged by the realization that even the greatest art is but an "at arm's length" representation of the transient transcendent moment that inspired it.

Let us return to music, to the harmony that underlies the universe.  We have all had the experience. The tune is stuck in our head.  It may be a soaring aria, a pop tune, or it may be a jingle from a beer commercial. But we are stuck with the melody until, miraculously, it disappears - or is replaced by another.  The point is that the transient transcendent moment was a moment of pure harmony within us - a moment when chord and experience were accurately mirrored. And, in all likelihood, the transient transcendent moment lurks, like the tune stuck in our head, within us still.  It remains transient in that it is no longer front and center.  But the transcendent power of the perception, the clarity of the previous realization, keeps it safe, deep within us.  If you have the skills, paint your way to it, write your way to it, play your way to it, dance or sculpt or compute your way to it.  Those efforts may well produce results with their own significant worth.

However if, like most of us, the artistic genius chips had all been handed out before they got to you, there are other ways to recapture a transient transcendent moment.  First, as I said above, it is vital to remember that, as a defining note in your chord, the transient transcendent moment is still in us somewhere.  I often think of my mind as a rambling old Victorian mansion; simultaneously lovely and disorganized.  In such a structure a transient transcendent moment may be hanging out down some forgotten corridor, or sitting on an end table, next to the name of your first grade teacher; perhaps it is stuck in the bushes over there between the houses on your 7th grade paper route. But It is your mansion and the transient transcendent moment is in there somewhere.  The trick is finding it.

I use a three-step process.  It is rooted in Reike, which for 30 years now has marked the way I end my day.  I get into bed, immerse myself in music and run through my Reike routine, which involves both touch and visualization.  That preparation actually precedes the three steps for recapturing the transient transcendent moment.  The purpose of the Reike ritual is to distance myself from the distractions of the day, to relax, to enter the world of my chord, to meditate.  Reike experts and meditation gurus alike might well quibble with my ritual - but it works for me. You choose your own relaxation process, whatever allows you to leave day-to-day behind and start wandering around in those special spaces where wonder is more important than work, where intuition trumps data.

OK. Once you are there let your mind wander back to the particular transient transcendent moment you wish to recapture - that moment that you remember was wonderfully important, but has faded with time. Don't try to grab it head on - if you could do that, none of this would be necessary, right? Instead, ease yourself down on the other end of the bench and begin to read your book or feed the squirrels. You and the transient transcendent moment are just sharing a bench in the park. No big deal. No expectations.

But every once in a while you steal a glance over at the transient transcendent moment, just a quick look to capture a fast detail.  Got it?  OK.  Now open a canvas in your mind, and stick that detail on the canvas.  The great thing about this step is that even though you may not be able to draw your way out of a paper bag, the detail looks just fine there on your mental canvas.  You do this for awhile. Quick glance. Stick it on the canvas. Repeat. Again. And again.  This is step one.

Now once you have a few details over on the canvas, stop glancing over at the transient transcendent moment.  Look at the canvas.  Study it, reflect upon it.  Move the details around.  They will begin to make sense, more sense than the shadowy figure at the other end of the bench. This is step two.

Actually, by this time the figure at the other end of the bench may have gone off to get a hotdog or ride the swan boats. No problem. You don't really need them anymore, as the real transient transcendent moment is taking shape on the canvas.  Now you use your memory to add the details to the transient transcendent moment.  What feelings, smells, sounds, physical sensations, can you recall? Put them up on the canvas in your mind. This is step three.  This is the recreation of the transient transcendent moment. I usually react to the completion of step three in one of two ways: Most often I fall asleep, which isn't a bad thing. Other times I get up and try to write or sketch pieces of the transient transcendent moment to prevent it slipping out into the backyard or up into the many attics of my mansion.

It is through the latter efforts - of which this is one - that I have come to realize that I am not always recreating that exact transient transcendent moment. Often I am creating a representation that defines or reflects the part of the chord that lies behind the transient transcendent moment.  For example, I will often create this scene: A cabin stands beside a lake.  It rains, there is thunder in the background. There is a breeze.  It is not enough to chill me, but it adds comfort to the light cotton blanket in which I wrap myself as I rest on the porch. It is twilight. A fire crackles in the middle of the floor. Fragrant piñon smoke traces patterns against a log ceiling. A bird I cannot identify calls softly across the water. Crickets chirp quietly, but other than that there are no insects. Nothing hurts. I can close my eyes, yet still see the scene that enfolds me.

I have never been to this place, and yet I am more "at home" there than in any place I have actually inhabited. This place is not "real." Rather it is what my chord would look like if my chord were a cabin, if I could occupy perfect space.  And thus it is, I believe, with all transient transcendent moments. They are moments sufficiently aligned with the perfect construction of our chord that, just for a moment, we see through the construction to the purity of the unadorned chord.  And it is that transient perception that strikes us, amazes us and defines us.
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Thoughts on My Father Dying Old

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My sister Margaret calling in the middle of the afternoon could only mean one thing, and it did: a few months into his one hundred and first year, Dad had passed away. It was hardly a surprise. His weight had been dropping steadily, food held no interest, and even when he was awake he spent less time "here" and more time in Alternia. [See: http://schragwall.blogspot.com/2011/05/travels-in-alternia.html] Still, no matter how expected the news, no matter how much "a blessing" it is, the voice breaks and the tears, strangely, creep up your nose and leak out your eyes. Weird. But that's alright. You are crying for yourself, and that is just fine.

My recollections of "Dad in my life" are pretty much all over the place. When I was young, I remember him most in the summertime.  During the school year he was largely "at the office," or "at a meeting" where he either taught sociology or tried to bring social change to a middling city in middle America.  But in the summer he was much more ours as we set out to California where he "swapped" summer school assignments, or to "the home place" in South Dakota or Tower Hill Camp on the shores of Lake Michigan.  During those times he was often a very funny guy, like when he allowed himself to be "ambushed" by the waves on Lake Michigan. It wasn't until years later that I learned he couldn't swim. So, okay, funny and a little bit foolish.  Then there was the disappearing pipe. Dad always smoked his pipe, ALWAYS.  Unless we were in South Dakota  - where his Dad, the very Reverend John Schrag, could see him. So, funny, a bit foolish, and a little bit careful.

Then came the middle decades. Those years in which I came to believe the unintentional message that attentive parents instill in their children. I bought into the unfortunate assumption that my life was more important than his. That his importance lay in the fact that he had fathered me. I know, bizarre, but it somehow feels sane in the middle decades. My jobs, my family, my aspirations seemed to shove Dad and Mom aside. Oh, Dad could certainly never have been accused of being a "helicopter parent" hovering over my life, micro-managing my choices. That era, and the mobile phones that made it possible, had yet to dawn. But neither did I attempt to draw him into my life. Mothers often get that call, but rarely fathers. He was sort of out there, an all purpose resource to be tapped for advice, or time, or money whenever I wandered too far off the tracks. I regret those years now, they were too busy, too distant, and it was too much my fault.

I suppose it is not strange, in retrospect, that I feel I actually came to know Dad best after Mom died. Until then they seemed very much "OK." Going to Elder Hostels, Dad playing golf and puttering in his workshop. Mom folding the origami cranes she couldn't con Margaret into doing. The two of them watching Masterpiece Theater together.  There was some sort of poetic closure to the fact that she went out as they were watching Middlemarch.

But Dad didn't seem quite so omnipotent after Mom died. And I finally realized that he never really was. A lot of it had been "dodging waves in Lake Michigan." Pretending that life was funny and easy, to shield us from how frightening and hard it could be. I suppose it was that realization that started me reaching out to him a bit more after she passed away. Being a "professional media scholar" I began to take advantage of the fact that a telephone works in two directions.

Several years later, when we were both bachelors together for awhile, I began to share both The God Chord and the postings here on the SchragWall with him. No, he never joined the computer age, so he was the only person to ever receive my ramblings in print. His thoughts and responses were insightful and delightful. And I am thrilled to have had those remarkable moments with him.

But, in all truthfulness, it has been several years since those flashes of recollection and reflection drew us together. He had been fading while I pretended he wasn't.  I have written before about Tolkien's Bilbo working on his memoirs, waiting to cross over to the Grey Havens, and gradually becoming transparent. Dad was like that. Just fading, fading, fading. And now he is gone. But not really.

I have come to see death as a transformational moment.  I know, I know, no significant insight there. But think about it this way.  When one half of a relationship dies, we simply have no data about how death transforms the dying entity.  We have a myriad of belief systems that provide their beliefs about an afterlife, but no data. As you know, I have my own. Still, it's all guesswork. And that's fine. But I am also concerned with the other half of the dyad, the surviving half - with me. Does death sever that relationship for the living? I don't think so. For years now, despite his being "still with us" Dad's answers to my ongoing questions had been drawn largely from my memories of previous discussions: "He would have wanted me to do this .  .  .  . He always felt that .  .  .  . " That "advice" remains as available to me today as it was last week, or last year, or the year before.

Elsewhere in these pages I write about Mom and brother Jim serving as angels on my shoulders. They are "advisers made of memory" to whom I can turn at any moment for guidance. Dad now joins them, and, in a wonderful inversion of the laws of physics, I have come to realize that the more angels we have resting on our shoulders, the lighter our load.
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A Freaky Fable for Our Times

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Back and forth, back and forth, we swang.  Faces wreathed in frosty exhalations, blankets stuffed all around us.  I could occasionally glimpse his face when my arc edged ahead, allowing me to glance across my porch to his. We said nothing.  Not terribly surprising, we were 3, maybe 4, months old.

Our fathers were both young assistant professors at the local university.  Our mothers were "homemakers," tending to us and our older siblings.  That, too, is not terribly surprising, it was 1948 and our fathers were the first "professionals" in their  respective families. 

We grew up as brothers.  Our siblings were set apart by either age or gender, and our lack of actual "kinship" seemed to remove the jealousy and competitiveness that so often clings to those who live down the hall or intrude on "your room."

As we grew up you rarely saw one of us without the other being nearby.  My family spent 1959 through 1961 in Vienna, Austria; his spent a later year in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  Upon each return our friendship was untouched and unaffected.  Despite sworn efforts to do otherwise, similar tastes and emerging data processing conspired to make us college roommates our freshman year.

However, we both married our high school sweethearts, I suppose we should have been warned by the fact that despite all of us attending the same high school we had never double-dated.  Turns out the women shared a mutual distaste for one another.  We did the typical guy thing, and drifted apart for a couple of decades.

We next encountered each other when our older daughters entered college.  My daughter chose a school down the road from his house, his, a school a few miles from mine.  It would have been foolish not to take advantage of the new opportunity to reestablish contact - besides, by now email had been invented and we both found ourselves doing the 9 to 5 in technology related fields.  He in the Media Cartel; I, in Big Education. 

                         

Again, the friendship failed to miss a beat, despite the fact that our wives still showed no inclination to bury whatever hatchet kept them estranged.  Not long after this last reestablishment of our friendship, my friend lost his wife to cancer, though not before - I am thankful to say - she and I had established a delightful friendship of our own.  About the same time I lost my wife to irreconcilable differences.

The point is that we have led almost mirror lives, strangely connected, strangely parallel without any effort on our part to make it happen.  How did Paul Simon put it? "Some folks' lives roll easy as a breeze, Drifting through a summer night . . Heading for a sunny day."  Certainly, he and I have both been bruised by life and circumstance, but when it comes to our friendship - well, that rolls easy.  Which brings me to the rather bizarre circumstances of the last week.

It was probably over the weekend when I got an email from him.  "Short question - do you remember your phone number in our home town?"  [I'm going to change the specifics here for reason that will soon become clear.] 

Well, of course I did.  When we were growing up, in the days of dial phones, your "phone number" consisted of an "exchange" - a name that identified a grouping of 10,000 customers - and then 5 numbers.  In Glenn Miller's hit "PEnnsylvania 6-5000"  PEnnsylvania is the exchange - you would dial the first two letters of the Exchange P=7, E=3, and then 65000. So the number was 736-5000.  But when you told someone your phone number you would often just say "Pennsylvania 6-5000."  And they would know what you meant. 

So I wrote him back, "Of course.  My number was CLaremont 6-7885 and yours was CLaremont 9-8226."

I didn't hear anything from him for a few days and then I noticed that he had called my cellphone.  It is not unusual for me not to hear or answer my cell.  When I record lectures or teach, I turn the phone to silent mode and often forget to turn it back on.  So I simply hit the callback icon.  It didn't ring. It didn't give me an answering machine.  It didn't give me a busy signal.  Instead it gave me that "Wha, wha, wha" that you get when somebody's phone is off the hook or has been disconnected.  "Weird," I thought.  Tried again, same thing.  Went about my day.

Later that night I tried again with the same result.  So I sent him an email: Did you call me? I see a call from you on my phone, but when I try to call you back all I get is "Wah, wah, wah."

This what he wrote back:

"No, I didn't call you.  I called your old number, CLaremont 6-7885, and eventually it rang your cellphone."

Yes, that's right. He dialed the number of a phone I had last used 45 years ago, in a city I have not even visited for 30 years, a number that had never been registered in my name since it was my father's phone, a number that didn't even have an area code - and my cellphone rang.

That moves beyond weird and creepy to more than a little bit scary.  I have used that combination of letters and numbers as my password in two places: on my now defunct Facebook account and on my still active Google+ account.  But just think of the levels and degree of connectedness and collusion that have to exist for my 45 year-old landline number to cause my 2013 cellphone to ring.
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Clarification on Ugly and Grotesque

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When I contend that the ugly and the grotesque are discordant, I am making that assertion in the creative context of the second pillar, Enable Beauty.  I am moved to that declaration by some of the works of the surrealists, older artists such as Hieronymous Bosch, and CONtemporary artists such as Andres Serrano.  There is no doubt intentionality in their works.  But life is short and I choose to spend my time enabling that which, as I said, makes me smile. 


Similarly, I find that when we look and listen our way around the world, much that we encounter that seems at first blush ugly and grotesque, is more an issue of cultural preference and scale than actual discord.  I am not drawn to the digeridoo, but it is obvious that my preference for the violin and the guitar is taught.  The fault, dear Brutus, is in ears I see in the mirror - not in the funky ancient aboriginal instrument.  And consider the common housefly - now consider that same housefly at a 1000x magnification. Incredible. We often can find harmony aka beauty where we least expect it.

So, in an attempt to honor the third pillar, distill complexity: I do not argue the existence of discord in our lives, I simply assert that there are better ways to spend one's time than giving discord a platform.

Bye-the-bye, NPR might take heed.  I know that bad things happen to good people, but our local station's seemingly unrelenting somberly intoned reportage of the woes of the world is beginning to bring me down. And I have to wait through, again "seemingly unrelenting," non-commercials that sound a lot like commercials before the next story gets a chance to further depress me.

Enable Beauty.  Make me smile.
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The Flow of Harmony: Part II

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Before addressing the dominance of harmony and the internal tension between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm, let me jump back to the four pillars that I assert define both our internal harmony and our relationship to the universal harmony that defines existence and the universe.

[Brief digression: My "before sleep" ritual ends with a half-hour or so musically guided Reike session. Basically, I put on my headphones and go through a Reike routine while listening to the music that strikes me as right for the night and my mood.  I've been doing it for over 30 years.  A couple of nights ago my wife asked me what I thought about during the sessions, as apparently my face is not passive. She is right - unlike most meditative rituals, mine neither precludes nor demands the "emptying of the mind." Recently those evening thoughts have been turning to the issues I am sharing with you today.]

Quickly then,  the notion of universal harmony rests on four pillars: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm.  Of course, I see them as self-explanatory, but I also cling to the fantasy that my students have done the reading. More realistically, definitions are in order.

Foster Harmony.  While harmony is the natural state of existence, harmony grows from the interplay of varying notes and competing chords.  It is a fundamental task, in a life lived harmonically, to find the most harmonic path through each day, to live gently and comfortingly with those individuals and situations we encounter.

Enable Beauty.  Harmony does not thrive in the presence of the ugly or the grotesque.  While such realities exist in life, living harmonically demands that we do not willing advance their cause.  Hence the violent message explained by its auteur as "anti-war," the grotesque image championed as "revelatory of the human condition," are disingenuous and must be seen as standing in opposition to harmony.  There is an emotional and physical reaction when we encounter beauty - we smile.  The heart rate can increase or decrease, but neither presages the inclination to "fight or flight."  Beauty is happy, it is comfortable.

Distill Complexity.  Often, in movie fight scenes, one participant gains an advantage by flinging sand it their opponent's eyes.  The same thing happens in faculty meetings - no, people don't actually throw sand, they throw details: "Well, in 1998 at the University of YaddaYadda, they attempted to implement a similar procedure with disastrous results when .  .  . blah blah."  Most likely boardrooms host similar scenes, there is no doubt that family dining rooms do.  The devil is not merely in the details, the devil is the details. The pillar Distill Complexity seeks to undo such nefarious strategies.  The notion is that we should seek to explain in the fewest words or symbols and with the greatest clarity the points that are germane to any situation, and then proceed to insight or solutions on the basis of that parsimonious perception. The road to harmony runs through succinct clarity. [And yes, I am aware of the irony of my asserting this point.  I'm working on it, I'm working on it, really.]

Oppose Harm. Edmund Burke said it well. "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for a few good men to do nothing." And confronting the inclination for good people to do nothing has always been a motivating factor for those who would champion discord.  It lies behind every fear appeal and every negative campaign.  In a strange way, faith in the ultimate triumph of harmony can lull good people to inaction in the face of discord.  But we will address that later.

These four pillars then, define for each of us the dynamic entity that is our "chord," our essence, our soul. And it is vital to bear in mind the dynamism of the construction.  I often doodle in Powerpoint which, in a strange and diametric opposition to Word, seems to "play nice" with other applications. Lets see how it works here [Oops, I had to cycle through Photoshop]:

OK, those then, are the four pillars of harmonic stability that define our chord.  The arrows represent the the interconnectedness of the pillars.  The dotted line between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm will be addressed later.  Right now I am more interested in talking about the dynamism of the chord. In that it defines harmony, the underlying organizational element of the universe, it is natural to see the chord as our link to the cosmos:

However, if we are going to rest easy with the idea of our "chord in the cosmos" we have to have a certain degree of certainty regarding the place of harmony in the cosmos. I assert that once we can "see" the other 95% of the cosmos we will be able to affirm that the existential arc of the universe is infinite and that it tracks to harmony. We can all stay tuned for those revelations from the folks in the multi-billion dollar labs.

Moving on. A dominant assumption in these last two posts is that the Stringville Field is seeded by strings, some of which are in harmony with their neighbors. Others are "out of sync," or discordant with those strings that surround them.  Why do I claim that the Stringfield Field eventually imparts harmony, and not discord, to the universe?  It goes back to the third pillar, "distill complexity."

That pillar asks that we seek the least convoluted explanation for the questions we pose.  The symmetrical replication of harmonious systems throughout the 5% of the universe we now seem to understand argues that harmony is creative, while discord is destructive.  If discord were the dominant force, then our known 5% of the universe would be dying, winding down, collapsing. There seems to be no evidence of that.  Rather it seems that our little peeks out into the universe reveal that not only is the universe expanding, but it is expanding with such a burst of creative energy that we have had to postulate dark matter and dark energy and stick them out there in the hidden 95% of the universe in order to explain the robust nature of the expanding universe. Harmony even beyond our current understanding. Again, very cool.

We can find further support for the primacy of harmony over discord if we pull our attention from the expanding edges of the universe and take a 13 billion-year glance back over our shoulders to the first milliseconds after the Big Bang.  Apparently the fight of that moment featured matter versus anti-matter. Every time a particle of matter collided with a particle of anti-matter we had mutual assured destruction. It was a war of attrition, the side with the most particles won.  And wasn't it lucky that we had a few more particles of matter than the opposition had anti-matter?  Well, no, of course it wasn't luck.  A variety of detail-rich theories explain why matter came to dominate and resulted, eventually, in us, and puppies and pancakes.  I have neither cause nor the expertise to dissect and confirm the theories.  Rather the distilled explanation is that matter is harmonic, anti-matter is discord.  Harmony wins again, hands down.

OK, here comes the Big Leap: God, Yahweh, Buddha, Allah, Jehovah [pick your own favorite from the thousands of names we have created to define the "divine entity"] didn't plan the harmony that dominates the universe. Rather the entity that we call by those many names is the harmony that dominates the universe.

So harmony is "God's word," and if we wish to become part of that universal harmonic structure, we must make "the word" - harmony - real in our lives. We must attend to our own internal harmonic structure, our chord.

As we consider the chord within, I am going to leave Enable Beauty and Distill Complexity out of the mix for the moment.  I do this because there is no tension between either of them and the other three pillars.  The same is not true of the relationship between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm, which is in a constant state of flux.  Most often I conceive of them as a sausage-shaped water balloon with Foster Harmony written on one end and and Oppose Harm written on the other.  Squeeze one end and the other grows large.  Getting them balanced is quite the task.  But it may well be that the energizing dialectic of universal resonance is that tension between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm.  Action versus patience.  The problem seems to be that action taken in opposition to harm is easily inclined to discord.  Another drawing:

The drawing is meant to reflect the idea that the chord does not - or at least should not - exist in isolation.  That has always been my problem with a monastic life - which certainly has is attractions. It seems that living a harmonic life becomes far less complicated if you simply withdraw from the world.  If "the order" sees to all the details - food, shelter, healthcare, family, even death and taxes - harmony is well within reach.  However, for most of us, outside the walls, harmony is challenged - seemingly daily - with interactions with "discordant entities."

A discordant entity is anything that, or anyone who, advocates or manifests beliefs and behaviors that are in discord with your chord. Thankfully, much discord can be overcome by the first pillar and fourth pillars, Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm, working in concert: If they really need the parking place that badly, let them have it.  Do they need to dominate the dinner conversation? No problem, enjoy the wine.  Do they insist on being the lone voice of negativity is a sea of accord? Fine. This too will pass. The serious problems arise when the issues are not trivial, when to acquiesce to the discordant entity damages not only your own chord, but allows ripples of discord to distort and damage larger arenas of existence.  This is when opposition to harm becomes mandatory, and one's perspective must become long-range.  This is where King and Ghandi succeed while most of us fail. It is very, very difficult.

You see, I hate conflict. My own life experiences would argue that open conflict simply damages both parties and anyone else in the field of fire.  There is an earthy aphorism that warns us against open conflict with personal antagonists: Never get down in the mud to fight with a pig. The pig will love it, and all you will get is dirty.  On the other hand larger issues affirm Burke's warning and King and Ghandi's efforts. How many lives would have been spared if Hitler had been opposed earlier? How much blood and treasure would have been, and can still be, spared if we require Presidents to always get congressional approval before committing our forces overseas?

And this is why the arrow between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm is dotted.  It is dotted because a solid line - a line in the sand - as politicians and generals are wont to call it - is a recipe for disaster when one seeks to Foster Harmony with a discordant entity.  A sausage-shared water balloon may be inelegant, but even a good smack with a hammer will simply move the water around.  Encase the same fluid in the crystal vase of a line in the sand, and even a modest tap of the hammer will shatter any possibility of future harmony.

My intense distaste for conflict has often led me to err on the side of compromise.  I want to "fix things" quickly, to simply make the hurting stop.  In doing so I have sometimes compromised in areas that allowed me to attain a certain level of personal harmony, but have also allowed harmful perceptions to remain with others outside the realm of my internal, personal chord.  I think I have shaken that "compromise seen as acquiescence" behavior.  It remains to be seen.  My personal shift is the direct result of this emerging notion of the flow of harmony.

Consider a river. In our "conquer the wilderness mode," damming rivers was all the rage.  It still is in places like China and India where the hunger for the energy to make and consume things feeds a very Western frenzy.  More harmonic efforts, here on Washington's Elwha River and in places like Iraq's marshes, are reversing that "conqueror inclination" as dams are removed and natural flows are allowed to resume. The idea of the flow of harmony is not simply an analogy. It reveals the harmonic realty of the universe. It is foolishness to move against the flow.  Eventually the water carves the canyon, the debris is swept away by harmony.

So how does that inform our interaction with a discordant entity? Again, in an attempted nod to the third pillar, Distill Complexity: Don't do bad things. Do not allow yourself to be forced into complicit compromises that damage the internal harmony of your own chord. At the same time, leave some space in the water balloon. Avoid lines in the sand and crystal vases. Three characteristics prevent compromise from becoming acquiescence, from allowing opposing harm to threaten the fostering of harmony. They are compassion, flexibility and patience.

Compassion must derive from our realization that the entity we find discordant may well be acting out of a firm conviction of their own harmonic legitimacy.  Flexibility retains the possibility of legitimate compromise.  When we first hear, say, 12-tone music, it may sound discordant to us.  But if we try really hard to learn about it, if we really listen to it, we may come to realize that - although it will never crack our top ten - it isn't completely intolerable.  We may even find a piece we like. Patience is, for me anyhow, the most difficult.  When we are dealing with chords in conflict, change can be glacial, but even glacial change is the result of flow, right? A real slow flow? The same can be true with chords in conflict. Months, years, decades. Point is you need to open a legitimate channel of interaction and then leave it alone. Neither exclude nor mandate interaction with the discordant other.

The Beatles said, "Let it be."  My interpretation? Trust the flow of harmony.
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The Flow of Harmony: Part I.

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As we meander along the path of life we come to accept the natural and inevitable aspect of some of the realities we encounter: The Arrow of Time. The Pull of Gravity. The Speed of Light. Death and Taxes. Some, like death and taxes, we experience as events to which we must attend, and we give both their due in the appropriate time and place, with the significance of the former muting the more transient irritation of the latter.

The others infuse themselves into our existence in more subtle ways.  We grow older, not younger. The cup of coffee we accidentally nudge off the counter, fails to hover comfortably by our elbow and falls to earth. We observe the stars in the midnight sky, stars that do not currently exist in the guise we observe - they may no longer exist at all. Much will have changed in the millions or billions of years that have passed since the light we now observe left its own star to go hurtling at a constant 700 million miles an hour across space and time, only to be interrupted by our glance. But we rarely pause to think about those verities that wrap us in the eternal mandates of existence. Something startling is needed to convince us to put down our smartphone and attend to time and gravity and light.

The confirmation of the discovery of the Higgs particle on July 4th of 2012 was such an event. Yet perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this much ballyhooed occurrence is that, rather than revealing something new and revolutionary, it simply confirmed what we already suspected - that the Higgs field exists, and that it is "a field that permeates the universe, imparting certain subatomic particles with mass while letting photons and other massless particles pass unimpeded." [See the Science News citation at the end of this post.]

The fascination, for me, comes from the confirmation that we exist immersed in, dependent upon, and defined by a "field," a physical environment of which we are completely unaware.  We cannot see it, feel it or taste it. Yet, there it is.

There is a delightful analogy, often credited to theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, that is used to clarify the nature of the Higgs field and our awareness of it.  He asks us to imagine an "ocean world," no land, no atmosphere, everything is water.  The world is inhabited - naturally - by aquatic creatures. But very bright, intelligent aquatic creatures; damn smart fish who build cities and gather together not simply in schools, but in universities, research centers, and, we would assume, think tanks. The question Wilczek poses is "How would they discover water?" If water was as natural to them as - well, breathing - how would they come to consider it as something apart from themselves?"  And that is, of course, the genius of the very idea of a Higgs Field: The intellectual act of conceiving of something all encompassing that we could not sense without the aid of the sharpest of cutting edge science - the Large Hadron Collider, that was still just a dream when Higgs conceived his field. That Higgs could imagine such an invisible field that wraps around us and defines us - well, that, as they say, that there is genius - and exceptionally cool.

Some theorists are, nonetheless, disappointed that the Higgs particle seems to have simply put the bow on the package that is the standard model of physics.  How short-sighted.  Those same physicists will admit that  "The standard model of physics explains about 5 percent of the mass energy content of the universe. The rest is a mystery." [See Science News again.]

To my mind it doesn't get much better than that - a fairly stable 5% platform from which we can now feel around for the mysteriously missing other 95%.  A less-forgiving perspective might find fault with a discipline that admits to being ignorant of 95% of its object of study.  Still, it may be that some physicists are simply being more forthcoming than their colleagues in other disciplines. I, for one, am delighted that the notion of a "Higgs-like" field has been confirmed.  Not only because of the characteristics of the Higgs field itself with its implications for mass, but because of what may be found in the deeper levels of what we are calling the Higgs field.

Consider, if you will, the ageless theoretical treatise by Dr. Suess, Horton Hears a Who.  In this groundbreaking work Suess postulates a world, "Whoville," almost unimaginably tiny, that underlies our normal world.  If we make the particles that inhabit the Higgs field the "normal world," it becomes possible to imagine an underlying "Stringville" inhabited by the unimaginably tiny vibrating strings of string theory.  String theory allows us to shrink this far, but no further.  What then would this "Stringville Field" impart to the worlds and universes hovering above it, as the Higgs Field imparts mass to ours?

If we accept the notion that strings are the smallest elemental units of the universe and that they are drawn together or repelled from one another depending upon their rate of vibration, then it does not seem beyond feasible conjecture that the vibrations emanating from this seminal Stringville Field are passed along to the larger but contiguous fields that lead eventually to and through the Higgs Field, to us, on through the observable 5% of the universe we have "discovered," and finally outward to "infinity and beyond."  What I am trying to say is that I would cautiously assert that a Stringville Field - with a more serious scientific name - imparts resonance to the universe, it imparts harmony - as natural, powerful, and unalterable as gravity, the arrow of time and the speed of light. It is the source of the flow of harmony.

But, of course, I couldn't let it go at that.  Two questions continued to keep me tossing into the tiny hours of the morning. First, the Stringville Field is home to both harmonic and discordant patterns. How do I explain my assertion that harmony, and not discord, becomes the flow that dominates the cosmos?  And, two, what are the "real life" implications for the apparent unavoidable tension between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm?  And, I'll share my thoughts on those issues with you in Part II.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/350985/description/Hard_Times_for_Theorists_in_a_Post-Higgs_World
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Catterel

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 Dogg Catterel

I would never own a cat. Yes, 'tis true, I am allergic to them. They make me sneeze. My eyes get red. Sensing that, they weave between my legs, they leap into my lap spreading dander like a sandstorm on Arrakis.

But those are not the reasons
I would never own a cat.
Rather, it is jealousy.
I must admit to that.

Their splendid isolation. Napping in the sun. They wake and yawn and stretch, completely self-contained and self-satisfied. Fully aware they were once gods in Egypt.  "And why not?" their haughty glances say.

You see, I simply cannot imagine
That cats feel stressed at all.
If they do they mask it well,
While strolling down the hall.

If the sun has been so bold as to move . . an incredible intrusion.  The cat may deign to find another pool of sunlight to further charge its purr. A lick, a stretch, it curls up . . . serenity made flesh.

We complicated humans
Make pretzels of our minds
Trying to achieve
That quietude and peace
That cats appear to simply catch
Each time they fall asleep.

So I plainly could not have one.
It would drive me close to mad,
To have a clawed reminder
That skulks about the house,
Transcendent as the Buddha,
With no more effort than a louse!
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The First Casualty

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I was talking with a friend yesterday about an article he is writing with another colleague that focuses on the impact of Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition that was here at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science over the winter. Some of the ideas they are examining put a sharper point on some thoughts on mortality that have been bouncing around in my head over the last year. Well, maybe longer, but the last six months have added to the sharpening. Among the "sharpeners" was, of course, my second stem cell transplant, and a colleague's first run through that procedure. Then my wife, Christine, walked away from an accident that could well have been fatal. All that, added to my father's 100th birthday, about which you have already heard, lured me into further musing about mortality, and im-, and how those notions fit into a harmonic view of life.

The primary realization is that the first casualty of any traumatic event - whether it threatens us, those close to us, or strangers in an event that somehow becomes personal - is our own sense of immortality.

Watch the Winter X-Games. Check it out on YouTube if you haven't seen them. It should come as no surprise that most of the top performers are children. OK, we're not talking toddlers, but we are talking teenagers with the "aging icons" topping out in their mid to upper twenties.  Look at what they do. No one in their right mind does that kind of stuff.  But actually, it is not a question of a "right mind." It is a question of a "different mind," a mind in which they are still immortal. Other people get injured, other people die. Not them. They walk with the gods - until they don't. In our sports fixated popular culture we have all heard the somber commentator note: "He [or she] is certainly 100% physically, but how are they mentally? Have they been able to forget that terrible day when, well, let's just watch the tape." And we watch some horrific moment in a "game" when a human body bends or bounces in ways never intended.

When that body is our own and it suffers insult, physical or biological, we are forced to consider that there is not necessarily always another tomorrow. Hopefully our body returns to reasonable competence, but our notion of immortality may well be forever gone. And that is not necessarily a bad thing - harmonically speaking.

"Slacker," Google's Ngram tells us, is a word that has become increasingly popular over the last decade. The Urban Dictionary defines it thus: "Someone who puts off doing things to the last minute, and when the last minutes comes, decides it wasn't all that important anyways and forgets about it." Slacker is used most often to describe young people - age-mates of the X-Games participants. That should not surprise us. Like flinging yourself into the air over a sheet of ice on concrete, the slacker's laissez-faire approach to life demands the assumption of endless tomorrows: Should something meaningful actually happen to come along, there will always be a tomorrow in which to engage it.

Once some trauma disabuses us of the notion of immortality in this life, the inclination to "put it off until tomorrow" goes into a deep spiral. The preciousness of the moment takes on new meaning. I find myself editing "truths" both trivial and significant. "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" becomes "Today could be the rest of your life." Not a shift of many words, but certainly a shift in focus.

I find that the most significant change resulting from my own loss of presumed immortality in this life has been a steep decline in my attention to external authority.  What is "expected" of me by others becomes far less important than the transcendent quartet of foster harmony, enable beauty, distill complexity and oppose harm that we talked about a few posts ago. Interestingly, that shift seems - in my mind anyhow - to have resulted in me being a better teacher, writer, artist, husband, father and friend.  Less traditional in many ways, which often confuses those I contact in those various guises - but in the long run, better - more honest.

For those of you paying close attention, let me briefly touch on the textual shift from "immortality" to "immortality in this life." Yes, the difference is intentional. And yes, my strange blend of physics and metaphysics demands an existence that transcends our current existence. It is a matter not of an afterlife as depicted in many traditional faiths - a land of hedonistic indulgence or a recreation of the family Thanksgiving dinner we always wanted, but never quite managed to pull off. My conception, rather, is a continuation of life demanded by supersymmetry and the inherent nature of the universe. Immortality - OK, yes, but you're still never going to see me attempting a fakie ollie at the Winter X-Games.

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Revisiting Father

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OK, I'm willing to admit that my post "The Idea of a Century" was a touch dark.  But I really can only report what I see at the moment, and the moment was dark.  Fortunately, the story didn't stop there.  A series of bizarre events, too complex to report here, kept me up in Chicago for a few weeks longer than anticipated. But those days contained some delightful exceptions to the idea of a century, replacing that idea with an affirmation of harmony.

First, Dad's 100th birthday party itself went off far better than any of us could have anticipated. It was held in a neighboring building, necessitating a wheelchair ride of maybe 30 yards. Father hadn't left "his building" in several months, and balked at the idea of such long distance traveling. But the staff helped my sister Margaret get him comfortable in his wheels. He brightened perceptively when Margaret rolled him into what must have appeared to be a sea of smiling faces. We have come to realize that Margaret is really the only person he consistently recognizes. Last night my older daughter Andrea, who bears a striking resemblance to her aunt, pointed out to me that Margaret still looks very much as she did when Dad was in his far more focused early nineties. That, and the fact that he sees her regularly, may well keep her "gentle on his mind." So Margaret stayed at his shoulder as the line of grandchildren, spouses, and his sole great-grandchild filed by in small, non-threatening groups. He seemed to enjoy being the center of attention and, as usual, had no trouble feeding his sweet tooth on cake and ice-cream.  All in all it was as good an outcome as we could have wished for.

However, even more comforting was the visit on the day just before Christine and I returned to Raleigh.  Margaret and I agree, the party notwithstanding, that Dad does best with small groups of particularly precious people. So we seek to protect him from unwanted intrusions and overwhelming numbers. It is interesting that social complexity, once his academic speciality and delight, is now simply a source of anxiety. Perhaps it is because he thinks he should understand, but just doesn't.  Anyhow, on this day there were only four of us. Margaret and her husband Bill, the family he sees most often, and Christine and me. Bill served as primary photographer, while Christine floated off my shoulder - in sight but not "crowding."  Margaret perched by Dad's "good ear," while I knelt on the other side of his chair.  What resulted was what Margaret and Bill report as his best day in months, if not longer. The conversation was fascinating, albeit only tangentially related to reality.  On this day he recognized me several times - and as several different people.  As we looked at the video later we agreed that most often I was his youngest brother Calvin. Margaret and Bill report that he often gets us confused in photographs.

He looked at me for a moment, and then his eyes lit up, "It is so good to see you! Your long hair had me confused there for awhile."  Well, my hair, still returning post-chemo, remains far shorter than it has ever been - but no doubt longer than his memories of Calvin's even shorter locks.  Still, there were some moments when I seemed to be a blend of Uncle Calvin, also a university professor, and myself.  Dad patted my arm and told the audience - Christine, Margaret and Bill - "This young man needs to realize that his teaching years, well, they will be .  .  . well."  He teared up a bit, still smiling, overcome with the memories of his own years in the classroom.

But then, dum ba dum, -  "And there was your brother Si - he was very tall."

We're back to basketball in South Dakota.  OK, I'm game.

"Yes, my brother Si was very tall." I replied.

"Well, I was almost as tall." Dad asserted. [The difference was at least 6 inches] "So I had to play like the dickens!"

Long pause. "We're going to go over there and play those boys at Marion High School . . . we'll show them."

And so we drifted along as he recalled his teaching days, playing baseball against the traveling team from the House of David, remembering his three kids reading on the couch by the Christmas tree. He faded in and out for another ten minutes or so; not unlike a radio on scan, sharing this, remembering a scrap of that. But finally he noticed that dinner was being served in the next room and we lost out to the promise of dessert. The staff helped him into his chair to roll over to dinner.  I leaned down to give him a hug.

"I love you, Dad."

"I love you too, Rob."

I have written before about a place I imagine called Alternia.  It is a place, I choose to believe, to which those afflicted with the broad range of maladies we define as dementia retreat when the world is too much for them. I choose to believe that on the bad days, when Dad is somewhere far away, that he is romping around in Alternia, hitting two-handed set shots against Marion High School, rapping out a double against The House of David, and sharing with decades of students the products of a truly remarkable mind.

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Naming God in the Hubble Calendar

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You're sharing time with close friends.  The kind of friends who really defined the word until Facebook stole it.  The conversations drift, nobody seems to feel the need to dominate with a "better" story in the same genre.  And so eventually you get there. It may take most of the night and some sort of mind altering activity or substance - Madeira, medication or meditation - but talk turns to God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha - Wikipedia has a list of 101 names for God.  Someone says something as innocent as "God only knows," or "Let's leave that in God's hands," and suddenly there it is, the elephant in the room: God.

Ask a "person of the cloth" about God and they will most likely provide you with the acceptable response vetted by their faith.  But more truthfully, I think most of us see "the deity" more clearly in a paraphrase of a well-known American president: "Well, Senator, that depends on what you mean by 'God.'"  I doubt that there has ever been a time in the history of sentient humankind when we have not agonized over what we mean by God.  To attempt a comparative presentation would be foolhardy, since it would necessarily imply that I know what others mean by God. So, my discussion must begin with my first definitional assumption: god is in both definition and relationship uniquely personal. (And, yes, the drop to lower case is intentional. Since God is only one of the myriad names for god it seemed that continuing to use the predominantly western Christian version would get the discussion off on an unintentionally constrained footing.)

So back to the elephant.  Our relationship to a deity is personal because, despite any shared liturgy or prayers spoken in unison, those words take unique meaning deep within us.  Unique because, as I have written elsewhere, we are an N of one, utterly unique in the universe.  That inescapable scientific fact, embedded countless times within our DNA, mandates a unique experience of any stimulus, and that includes our relationship to and/or definition of a deity. As we are unique in the universe, so our relationship to the deity must also be unique.

Now, if you were paying attention, you realize that science a.k.a. DNA, just pulled a chair up to the table.  And how could it not?  Most of the sacred writings of the world's dominant faith's were written long before the periodic table of elements.  The theistic faith expressed in those early texts sometimes, for "believers," trumps science. Often that is the case not because "sacred texts" are demonstrably more legitimate, but simply because they were earlier, seemingly authoritative, stabs at answering the same perplexing questions with which science still struggles. The fundamentalist argument seems to run that if science doesn't have all the answers, well, then we can ignore those it does provide.  I can empathize with that inclination, but not the conclusion. One of the most daunting challenges for any scholar, scientist or theologian is admitting that you were wrong.  The earth was not created in six days, nor does it lie at the center of the universe.  Those are painful admissions for both the authors of the ancient texts and the users of the earliest telescopes.

Still those shared disappointments reveal that the mystic and the mathematician are kindred spirits, that science and theology stalk the same prey: Why does the world work the way it does?  How do I reconcile what I observe around me with what I feel inside me?  From where does life spring, and where does it go when it leaves here? Are we alone in the universe?  And, as Lieber and Stoller wrote for Peggy Lee, "is that all there is?"  The fact that we articulate the questions raises this perplexing issue: from whom do we expect an answer?

The faith-based assertion was often that the primary prophet of the faith had, with the help of the deity, indicated the general direction for the best guess at the answers. Science tends to believe that, at least, it has rejected the obviously erroneous conclusions.  And then we stumble upon the "earth was created in six days and sits at the center of the universe" dual theology/scientific fallacy, and it seems that both lines of investigation may have led us astray. But probably not.

The fallacies are, for the most part temporary, the result of a transient hubris born of the fleeting belief that our particular niche of existence is somehow exceptional. Consider the calendar that is most likely displayed by the device through which you access this text. Mine defines the year as 2013. Through whose eyes? Well, Christian eyes. The eyes of admittedly biased scholars who assert that their prophet was born roughly two thousand years ago. 2013 AD, After the Death of Jesus of Nazareth. Is the currently politically correct 2013 BCE, "before the common era" any more accurate? Whose common era? Different lenses yield different results. It is the Jewish year 5773, Muslims, Hindi, Chinese - all draw a theological or cultural line in the sand that asserts from this moment the calendar begins, often because, for their faith, at that moment truth became visible. Those are faith-based delineations, drawn from millennia of theological assumptions that occasionally reflect constrained science.

Constrained how?  In the most pragmatic sense, constrained by what we could see and measure. We thought ourselves the center of the universe because we could see no further than the objects in the night sky discernible by the unaided human eye. Anything smaller than a grain of sand or pollen became mere conjecture. However, as we devised tools to see further past each end of our experiential spectrum, both faith and science revised their conclusions and commentaries to avoid the inevitable collisions with the evolving empirical evidence. It is in the spirit of that inevitably flawed yet necessary demarcation of the human interaction with existential reality and the passing of time, that I would like to propose a new line in the sand: The Hubble Calendar. It would give dates using BH and AH - Before Hubble and After Hubble. And I mean the telescope. That makes this the year 24 AH. Why pick the launch of the Hubble Telescope as the calendrical set point?  Because it was the day when, in very important ways, truth became visible.  Work with me here.

At their core, most religions assert that they draw two central truths from their conception of the deity: First, a definition of the universe that the deity has created, and, second, rules or guidelines that define how you are supposed to live in that world. My estrangement from organized religions grows from an inability to accept the legitimacy of either truth as presented by the world's established faiths. The stumbling block for the first truth comes from the fact that the early theologians were utterly ignorant of the nature of the universe in which they lived. Mind you I did not say the world in which they lived. I am as amazed as anyone by the growing evidence of the depth knowledge reflected in the artifacts from ancient civilizations - the math of Stonehenge, what appear to be ancient electric batteries in the pyramids. Fascinating and mystifying. But those are tiny mysteries when compared to the new celestial and quantum data that seem to greet us daily to interpret and reinterpret the nature of the universe. Hence, if the ancients were babes in the woods when it came to the nature of the universe in which they lived, how can we place any faith - big and little f - in their assertions regarding how we live a moral and ethical life in that world? Mind you, I'm not saying that the ancient works must reach flawed conclusions, but I am saying that there is no data to support the conclusions that they do reach.

Let me also point out that I don't propose Hubble as a demarcation of certainty - actually the opposite.  Hubble and all the other remarkable advances of Big Astronomy and Little Quantum Mechanics, keep us aware of how much we do not know, not only what we can see, but what we still cannot see - maybe Hubble Humility?  Remember that a vital element of "truth" is realizing that it is always hedged by "doubt." Theology encourages us - in times of incomprehensible trauma - to accept "god's plan." Science gives us "levels of significance." Truth is hedged by doubt. Let us consider for the moment the following thought: perhaps the Hubble telescope brings us no further to the 'edge of all things' than did the telescopes of Galileo's time. Perhaps we are, relatively speaking, equally ignorant of the actual nature and limits of the universe as were the ancient scholars whose views we now find quaint. It is certainly possible. So, aside from the visible and the still hidden, what does the BH/AH line in the sand divide?

Two important answers spring to mind.  First the line should divide arrogance (BH) from humility (AH). It is like the standard scene in many films and videos: The protagonist for some reason or another picks a fight with a seated stranger. The stranger ignores the protagonist for as long as possible, but then stands up revealing that he is two or three times the size of our protagonist. Before Hubble (BH) we, at least most of us, thought we knew about the universe. "Come on, guy! Wazza matter? Ya chicken? Come on!" Then Hubble stands up and removes the scales from our eyes revealing a universe of inconceivable, unimaginable vastness (AH). "Oh, my! I thought you were someone else.  Can I buy you a drink?"  So, as we consider the universe from an AH perspective we should attempt to remain humble regarding the scope of our knowledge and understanding.

Humble, yes - but not foolishly so.  It isn't a case of "we're not worthy, we're not worthy!" It is more a case of "we're not certain, but here is an intriguing guess .  .  .  ."  For me the intriguing guess comes not from the "monstrously large" revealed by Hubble, Kepler, and their swiftly multiplying telescopic kin, but rather from the mind-blowingly microscopic world of string theory and particle physics. As I address the details of these issues in mind-numbing detail in The God Chord (search for Robert Schrag on Feedbooks.com or email me at robert.schrag@gmail.com for a free copy) let me simply give you the Twitter version here: String theory implies that the universe, however large, is made of tiny vibrating strings, of music, and that the particles that construct all existence are attracted to, or repealed from, each other by the song they sing. Supersymmetry implies that this celestial harmony goes on forever and ever, from inconceivably tiny to the unimaginably humongous, throughout the multiverses - song without end.

I believe it is this unending harmony that we are trying to identify as we craft our endless names for god. It is a pointless endeavor. The harmony is - there is no point in naming it, in limiting it, or in claiming it. There are more intriguing issues to consider. And those are, of course, the second major piece of every theology or secular philosophy; knowing the nature of the universe - super-symmetrical harmony - how are we to behave in that universe?  Again, I would refer you to earlier posts for my answer: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm.  If we can accomplish at least one of the four everyday then we can rest somewhat humbly assured that we are moving along the path of being in tune with the universe.

And why bother?  Who cares?  That leads to . . . what is it by now? The mastodon in the room? The most intriguing question: Is the universe sentient and self-aware, and do we eventually become contributing, sentient, self-aware portions part of that entity? Do we eventually become part of a universal soul?

Ridiculous! Absurd! Heresy! Theologians will seek to dissect or dismiss the science that nudged me to the question and scientists will decry the lack of evidence or data that even suggest the hypothesis, let alone ways to test it.  Poppycock!

Maybe, maybe not.  Let's save that for another time. I've claimed your eyeballs enough for today, July 27, 24 AH
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Heading Home to Harmony

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I have mentioned to some of you my intention to do a sort of 2nd edition of the God Chord.  It is beginning to feel like it will be a whole new book, maybe Finding Harmony or Home to Harmony or something like that.  Either way there will be numerous drafts, outlines, ruminations, etc.  And while I do not have much faith in crowd sourcing, I do put trust in "small group sourcing,"  and you are the small group I trust.  So here are some initial thoughts on what will be four of the major sections of "that Harmony book"  Feedback, as always, is welcome :-)

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Heading Home to Harmony

There is a hierarchy to the construction of a harmonic life.  The four principles are, in order:

Foster harmony. 

This means that in every human interaction seeking harmony, seeking a mutually beneficial path, is our first obligation.  The difficulty inherent in this first mandate is obvious in the fact that many common synonyms for seeking harmony, such as compromise and win-win solutions, are often read as code for weakness. The cultural roots for this strange moral inversion are many and deep.  Anthropologically speaking they probably reach back into the mists of time, to our earliest ancestors, for whom dominance over stronger creatures meant food, clothing and survival.  I find it most ironic that as species we have managed to forget that successfully hunting the mastodon hinged on cooperation.  Yet, as Aesop's fox taught us long ago, we disparage those grapes which seem beyond our reach. Hence we paint our most difficult task with derision: Seeking harmony, pursuing the mutually beneficial path is a sign of weakness. Wimp. Geek. Chicken. Nothing could be further from the truth since nothing is quite so difficult as finding in your heart the solution that benefits your antagonist as it benefits you.  So if you would truly reveal your strength, foster harmony.

Enable beauty. 

Similarly it seems currently déclassé, artistically speaking, to represent beauty.  Angst, alienation and a healthy dose of self-loathing seem to be all the artistic rage these days, as is rage.  I will be the first to admit that I am something of a traditionalist when it comes to art.  I lean toward representational works, and ones that make me happy, slow the pulse rate, calm the soul, infuse me with harmony.

Hence, you can understand my concern when I walk into an upscale gallery or a more informal installation and encounter a ten-foot tall rusted metal construction, splashed with lavender paint entitled #432.  Mind you, I have no objection to abstract art per se - I dabble in it myself on occasion.  But it strikes me as only fair to let the observer know, via a title, which corner of the universe you are playing in.  So I looked at #432 for awhile, making sure that others were looking at it too.  It is important to appear hip at these kinds of installations, and I remain haunted by the memory of the time in the National Gallery when I spent ten minutes gazing thoughtfully at what appeared to be a pile of trash.  Then the maintanence staff came and swept it into a trash can.  I need to trust my first impressions. 

But there seemed to be a fair sized crowd looking at #432, and some were still there - as was #423 itself - when I left awhile later.  So the current adage still seems to be if you do representational work keep it edgy and uncomfortable. And if you can't manage that, create something abstract that is angular, jarring and discordant and name it as ambiguously as possible.  Numbers work, but words like Encounter, Leaving, and Adage are good too.

I find this current fascination with the ugly interesting because it requires the artist to work in an incredibly limited focal plane.  A peek at the Orion Nebula through the Hubble telescope, or at a butterfly's wing through a telescope reveals the universal dominance of beauty.  Yet many of our current artists seem obsessed with the discord reflected in the narrow experiential plane of humanity's inhumanity.  Of course that reality exists - but do we resist or confront it by relentlessly representing it?  It seems more likely that our excessive representation of the discordant only draws our attention away from the overwhelming, transcendent beauty of existence. It also defies the first, preeminent mandate: foster harmony. There is no harmony in the ugly, so enable beauty.

Distill Complexity

This is the concept that I have been calling the fourth pillar, but only because it occurred to me after the three original principles.  Yet, it goes here in third place. Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty predominant because they are "all in a day's work." Everyday we can do something to foster harmony and reduce discord even if it something as simple as putting your dishes in the dishwasher, or telling the people you love that you love them. Enable beauty as well need not entail hours before an easel or pushing images around in photoshop, agonizing over the perfect poem. A $3.00 stem of flowers from the grocery store, a $1.99 track from iTunes, a haiku on a napkin, all these enable beauty.

Distilling Complexity, though, is a bit more difficult.  As you know I often fall back on similes, analogies and convenient paraphrases to make my points. Today is no different. Aristotle is credited with the phrase I will distort today.  In Metaphysica 2 he says "The whole is more than the sum of its parts."  Since he is not around to disagree, I am going to stand that on its head and assert that "the meaning of the whole is less than the sum of its parts."

Let's begin with an analogy.  Consider a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle.  You open it up and dump it out on a table.  But the table must be three times as big as the final puzzle you wish to construct since the pieces spread out higgeldy-piggeldy across the table.  It is only after you figure out how the pieces are designed - how they fit together - that you can distill the complex chaos of those thousand pieces and place them so as to construct an image that makes sense. And, low and behold, the image is less than, smaller than, the undistilled, complex, spread out, sum of its parts.

It has, of course, to do with the process of distillation. Distillation reduces complexity to its essential core. Despite my own inability to mimic Hemingway's sparse prose, I have always distrusted the philosopher, sage, prophet or scientist who requires a library the size of Alexandria's or a specialized language to reveal truth. I am always suspicious that there really are devils lurking down there in the details. There are movements in a variety of notoriously arcane areas - the law and medicine to mention two of the worst offenders - to "speak real English."  They are distillation movements to be praised and supported.

In our own lives we need to seek articulations, expressions of our own beliefs, that do not hide behind rituals and inflexible generalities.  We need to parse our worldview precisely: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity - and, Oppose Harm.

Oppose Harm.

You may find it strange that I leave this for last as it is the rallying cry that has sent us off to kill each other for millennia. And that is precisely why I leave it for last. In his work Foundation, Isaac Asimov asserts that "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."  It is a glorious pronouncement and I wish it were true.  However, violence is also the first choice of the desperate, the disenfranchised, and those who have fallen for the devil words in the undistilled complexities of their "great books."

Harm must be opposed or the bullies, at home and abroad, will destroy the world through armed conflict, environmental neglect, or unimaginable greed.  Still I place it fourth.  Why?  My reasoning is hopefully distilled and not merely simple: If we can, in significant numbers, bring the first three principles into the world: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty and Distill Complexity; we will create a world that is increasingly toxic for those who turn at first blush to violence.  A world that rests firmly on the first three principles will undoubtedly be called upon to Oppose Harm; but hopefully less often, and with less virulent results.

A concluding passing fancy:  We have read much in the past few weeks about how governments - our own and others - can seemingly eavesdrop on our most private conversations at will.  Still at night we glance up at the myriad of stars above, and realize that that myriad is but a tiny fraction of the stars that inhabit the multiverses. Any notion that we are the best and the brightest kid in the room swiftly falls away. And it doesn't take an Asimov to imagine entities out there with skills far beyond the NSA's, monitoring our behavior.  Maybe a prerequisite for contact with those advanced cultures that live beyond our feeble glances toward the stars, is the ability to demonstrate - like a mentally ill patient - that we are no longer of any danger to ourselves or others.
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