.
I'm sitting in El Puerto, a Mexican restaurant in Fox Lake, Illinois - about a 20 minute drive north of my sister's home. It is a fairly typical upper mid-western lakeside restaurant. Swimwear is acceptable, the lakeside wooden tables are equally impervious to wet swimsuits and sloshed beer. Jet skis whine their way around what might otherwise be a tranquil setting. No doubt the local critters scavenge the area at night in search of dropped nachos, or a discarded corner of burrito. More important to me is the fact that it is located just a couple of miles from Paradise Park, the retirement home/care center where my Dad has lived for the eight or nine years. Also of note is the fact that they make their own margaritas - none of that mix stuff in a jug.
That is of particular importance today as I have just returned from visiting my father, who will celebrate his 100th birthday on Saturday. Actually, that's not completely accurate. His children, grandchildren, his great-grandchild and their significant others will celebrate his birthday. He will be in attendance, but I have no idea how he will experience it. You see, just now, he had absolutely no idea who I was. True, after the chemo my hair has come back in quite curly. But even after, "It's Rob, your son, from North Carolina. My daughters, Andrea and Emily will be here in a couple of days," there was no hint of recognition. He was, as always, quite the gentleman. "Thank you for coming," he said. He wasn't angry or upset. If anything he just seemed slightly uncomfortable with this person who seemed to know him, but whom he could not place. I suppose I could have pushed the issue, "Come on Dad, I'm your son, Rob! For cryin' out loud, you know me." But, obviously, the odds of breaking through seemed slight. Pursuing the issue would, at best have been unkind; at worst, cruel. I gave him a hug and left.
It was a deeply unsettling experience. Ordinarily, when we interact with people who are approaching, for whatever the reason, the end of their life, our own sense of mortality intrudes. We recoil from the thought that somehow we will be snatched prematurely from life. A visit such as this provokes a fundamentally different fear; the fear that we will linger on in life, long after the joy of living has departed.
.
Friday, June 28, 2013
Sunday, June 23, 2013
The Clarifying Simile
.
When I try to get a grip on a particularly vexing or abstract concept I find myself thinking that it - the concept - is "like" something something something . . . That "like" is not to be confused with the linguistic bane of the last decade, often used with its partner in semantic assault "totally." As in "So, I was, like, totally blown away. It was, like, awesome. . . . totally." Rather, I use "like" as the introduction to a clarifying simile. Then when I reflect on the relationship between the simile and the more abstract notion that is bedeviling me, the brain gets unstuck and I make some progress.
It is in that sense that I have come to the conclusion that the "distill" in the fourth pillar "distill complexity" is like the traditional method of making balsamic vinegar, even though that process is fermentation and not technically distillation. Let me explain.
When we were in Italy a few years ago, my wife and I went to a "wine and balsamic vinegar tasting" in Florence. The wine tasting was fun though pretty standard. However, the balsamic tasting was truly fascinating. In it we learned that a traditional gift - birth? wedding? that got garbled in translation - is a large wooden cask of "must," the juice from recently harvested white Trebbiano grapes that has been boiled down to between a half and a third of its original volume. Included in the gift is a set of 10 to 25 progressively smaller casks. The casks are meant to be placed in a room - preferably an attic - that has neither heating nor air conditioning, exposing the "must" to the hot sultry summers and chilly winters of the region. The casks are not sealed, but have openings in the top that are covered with porous cloth. Some specifics of the process were again lost between our guide's English an our feeble Rosetta Stone Italian, but over a period of 12 to 25 years, the cask keeper, each year, removes the aged vinegar from each cask and moves it to the next smaller barrel before topping off the largest cask with new "must." This process of gradual fermentation and evaporation eventually results in the emergence from the smallest cask of the wonderful, and very valuable, nectar we call balsamic vinegar. I really wish we had another name for it, because "tastewise" it is about as far from vinegar as it gets. I mean, go out to the kitchen and pop the top off a bottle of white vinegar, which we also use to clean floors, and take a whiff. Whew! It is not even in the same universe as the contents of that last cask of balsamic! I think I will call the good stuff balsamic nectar and be done with it.
The point is this - you cannot just sprint from the large, raw and cumbersome cask number one, to the small, exquisite, cask number twenty-five. There is no gigabyte network speed "app" for that. It takes twenty-five years. The process is incremental, evolving mysteriously though a series of ever smaller casks made of various types of wood. I have come to realize the the same is true with the 4th pillar: distill complexity. Distilling the complexity of our lives is a process of indeterminate length. It moves in fits and starts. As we reflect on the increasingly complex issues of our lives - why we are here? what we are meant to do? what is truth? love? beauty? does transcendent wisdom reside within us? somewhere else? does consciousness survive death? - we, like the casks that ferment balsamic nectar, change. The "wood" that defines our cask of the moment shifts as our chord is tuned - the product that is "us" concentrates into ever sweeter essences in smaller, less-cluttered spaces.
But let me hasten to clarify; the result of the distillation of complexity is not simplicity, it is not some childish certainty drawn from whiter teeth, tighter abs, faster cars, better wine and brighter bling; from the more fervent declarations of simple jingoistic slogans of faith or politics. Rather the result is harmonic parsimony, the most complete explanation of complex concerns expressed with the least deviation and the greatest clarity. The nectar of this distillation is the clearest expression of our best selves, our deepest beliefs, drawn with beauty, grace, humility, and hopefully - to avoid an abundance of somber notes - a touch of humor.
So where does this "clarifying simile" lead? A few lessons seem obvious, like, totally:
First we must realize that it is difficult, as we assess our lives at any one moment, to accurately discern from which cask we are dipping. We have an inclination in our culture to be fascinated with "coming of age" narratives. They tend, however, to focus on the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Our callow protagonist is forced to look deep into his or herself and discovers some truths that will guide them as they pursue their life. Welcome to cask number three, maybe four. But we treat the narrative as though the protagonist has magically leapt to cask twenty or twenty-five. We see it in the media when some teenage phenom from the X-Games declares "This is something I have worked for my entire life!" I must admit I tend to chuckle. A life peaking at 16? I certainly hope not. Wisdom from cask number 4? I somehow doubt it. So we need to realize that while we have a tendency to believe we are always sipping from cask twenty-five, in truth we are often somewhere closer to the beginning or middle of the process.
Other cultures, interestingly often cultures older than our brave new young experiment here in America, seem more inclined to realize that wisdom is found down the line, in those smaller, older, sweeter barrels. The wisdom of the elders is valued. Patience and reflection are prized above noise and flash. And that often makes sense, but not always. Age itself is no guarantee of "the clearest expression of our best selves, our deepest beliefs, drawn with beauty, grace, humility and humor." Some of the least distilled, most hidebound, vitriolic declarations of "truth" have spewed out of the mouths and minds of some pretty old casks. In those casks, somewhere along the line the essence soured, went bad, turned - call it what you will. The point is this: we can only be where we are. None of us is born at cask twenty-five, it is a long journey. Also, we probably never really reach cask twenty-five. Even those enlightened souls whose wisdom seems transcendent can be further distilled. You see cask twenty-five is no more "the end" than was cask three or thirteen or twenty-three. The road to enlightenment, heaven, nirvana, whatever, is infinite. As Tolkien said, "the road goes ever on and on."
So, since we can only be in our current cask, and since there is no finite end to the row of casks stretching out before us, the only option we have is to tend to the current cask. Explore it as completely as possible with the tools you have - art, math, science, literature, philosophy, theology, the law; whatever your particular interests and gifts. Use them to poke into every corner of your cask. Stir it up. Increase the fermentation and evaporation. Do that, and one day you will wake up and find yourself sloshing into a new cask, smaller, sweeter, and most worthy of your attention and investigation.
.
When I try to get a grip on a particularly vexing or abstract concept I find myself thinking that it - the concept - is "like" something something something . . . That "like" is not to be confused with the linguistic bane of the last decade, often used with its partner in semantic assault "totally." As in "So, I was, like, totally blown away. It was, like, awesome. . . . totally." Rather, I use "like" as the introduction to a clarifying simile. Then when I reflect on the relationship between the simile and the more abstract notion that is bedeviling me, the brain gets unstuck and I make some progress.
It is in that sense that I have come to the conclusion that the "distill" in the fourth pillar "distill complexity" is like the traditional method of making balsamic vinegar, even though that process is fermentation and not technically distillation. Let me explain.
When we were in Italy a few years ago, my wife and I went to a "wine and balsamic vinegar tasting" in Florence. The wine tasting was fun though pretty standard. However, the balsamic tasting was truly fascinating. In it we learned that a traditional gift - birth? wedding? that got garbled in translation - is a large wooden cask of "must," the juice from recently harvested white Trebbiano grapes that has been boiled down to between a half and a third of its original volume. Included in the gift is a set of 10 to 25 progressively smaller casks. The casks are meant to be placed in a room - preferably an attic - that has neither heating nor air conditioning, exposing the "must" to the hot sultry summers and chilly winters of the region. The casks are not sealed, but have openings in the top that are covered with porous cloth. Some specifics of the process were again lost between our guide's English an our feeble Rosetta Stone Italian, but over a period of 12 to 25 years, the cask keeper, each year, removes the aged vinegar from each cask and moves it to the next smaller barrel before topping off the largest cask with new "must." This process of gradual fermentation and evaporation eventually results in the emergence from the smallest cask of the wonderful, and very valuable, nectar we call balsamic vinegar. I really wish we had another name for it, because "tastewise" it is about as far from vinegar as it gets. I mean, go out to the kitchen and pop the top off a bottle of white vinegar, which we also use to clean floors, and take a whiff. Whew! It is not even in the same universe as the contents of that last cask of balsamic! I think I will call the good stuff balsamic nectar and be done with it.
The point is this - you cannot just sprint from the large, raw and cumbersome cask number one, to the small, exquisite, cask number twenty-five. There is no gigabyte network speed "app" for that. It takes twenty-five years. The process is incremental, evolving mysteriously though a series of ever smaller casks made of various types of wood. I have come to realize the the same is true with the 4th pillar: distill complexity. Distilling the complexity of our lives is a process of indeterminate length. It moves in fits and starts. As we reflect on the increasingly complex issues of our lives - why we are here? what we are meant to do? what is truth? love? beauty? does transcendent wisdom reside within us? somewhere else? does consciousness survive death? - we, like the casks that ferment balsamic nectar, change. The "wood" that defines our cask of the moment shifts as our chord is tuned - the product that is "us" concentrates into ever sweeter essences in smaller, less-cluttered spaces.
But let me hasten to clarify; the result of the distillation of complexity is not simplicity, it is not some childish certainty drawn from whiter teeth, tighter abs, faster cars, better wine and brighter bling; from the more fervent declarations of simple jingoistic slogans of faith or politics. Rather the result is harmonic parsimony, the most complete explanation of complex concerns expressed with the least deviation and the greatest clarity. The nectar of this distillation is the clearest expression of our best selves, our deepest beliefs, drawn with beauty, grace, humility, and hopefully - to avoid an abundance of somber notes - a touch of humor.
So where does this "clarifying simile" lead? A few lessons seem obvious, like, totally:
First we must realize that it is difficult, as we assess our lives at any one moment, to accurately discern from which cask we are dipping. We have an inclination in our culture to be fascinated with "coming of age" narratives. They tend, however, to focus on the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Our callow protagonist is forced to look deep into his or herself and discovers some truths that will guide them as they pursue their life. Welcome to cask number three, maybe four. But we treat the narrative as though the protagonist has magically leapt to cask twenty or twenty-five. We see it in the media when some teenage phenom from the X-Games declares "This is something I have worked for my entire life!" I must admit I tend to chuckle. A life peaking at 16? I certainly hope not. Wisdom from cask number 4? I somehow doubt it. So we need to realize that while we have a tendency to believe we are always sipping from cask twenty-five, in truth we are often somewhere closer to the beginning or middle of the process.
Other cultures, interestingly often cultures older than our brave new young experiment here in America, seem more inclined to realize that wisdom is found down the line, in those smaller, older, sweeter barrels. The wisdom of the elders is valued. Patience and reflection are prized above noise and flash. And that often makes sense, but not always. Age itself is no guarantee of "the clearest expression of our best selves, our deepest beliefs, drawn with beauty, grace, humility and humor." Some of the least distilled, most hidebound, vitriolic declarations of "truth" have spewed out of the mouths and minds of some pretty old casks. In those casks, somewhere along the line the essence soured, went bad, turned - call it what you will. The point is this: we can only be where we are. None of us is born at cask twenty-five, it is a long journey. Also, we probably never really reach cask twenty-five. Even those enlightened souls whose wisdom seems transcendent can be further distilled. You see cask twenty-five is no more "the end" than was cask three or thirteen or twenty-three. The road to enlightenment, heaven, nirvana, whatever, is infinite. As Tolkien said, "the road goes ever on and on."
So, since we can only be in our current cask, and since there is no finite end to the row of casks stretching out before us, the only option we have is to tend to the current cask. Explore it as completely as possible with the tools you have - art, math, science, literature, philosophy, theology, the law; whatever your particular interests and gifts. Use them to poke into every corner of your cask. Stir it up. Increase the fermentation and evaporation. Do that, and one day you will wake up and find yourself sloshing into a new cask, smaller, sweeter, and most worthy of your attention and investigation.
.
Monday, June 10, 2013
A Fallacy in 88 Notes
.
Towards the end of the DVD Tom Dowd and the Language of Music, Dowd is sitting in front of a huge digital mixing board that contains all the separate tracks from Layla featuring the guitar work of Eric Clapton and Duane Allman. Despite the fact that he had mixed the song himself back in November of 1970, Dowd is entranced. He slowly removes everything except the guitar tracks; they wail on, hovering just this side of pain. "Listen to that," he murmurs, "those notes aren't on the instrument. Those notes are off the top of the instrument."
It is his surprise that surprises me. Perhaps because I never mastered a musical instrument [unless you allow me the kazoo] it seems to me quite natural that gifted artists find a way to cheat the limitations of a physical instrument and and produce notes that "aren't there." Think about it for a moment in terms of basic string theory - the universe is made of tiny vibrating strings, of music; and in terms of super-symmetry - that the music that is the universe, permeates harmonically and symmetrically through space and time and other dimensions yet undreamed of. So any instrument - piano, guitar, synthesizer, whatever - simply grants us access to a tiny artificially restricted portion of an unlimited, universal harmonic realm which we will call the U2HR.
Consider the saxophone, an instrument I briefly tormented. But it is not really "an" instrument. Adolphe Sax actually invented 14 instruments in 1846, from tiny to humongous, each designed to capture its own particular chunk of the U2HR. I cannot help but believe that a gifted sax player - or the guitarists in Layla - cannot "cheat" a few notes above or below the "intended range" of each version of the instrument. However, to most, each version of the instrument is a barrier, a machine with a finite musical limit.
If we think about the 88 keys on a piano - another instrument that has suffered at my hands - those keys reduce the U2HR to 88 notes, from the 4th A below middle C to the 4th C above middle C. Now obviously, folks have done some pretty awesome things with those 88 notes, but at the same time the instrument teaches plodders, like my 9- or 10 year-old self, that "music" occurs within those 88 sounds. Surely nothing can lie beyond the challenge of the Tarantella!
There was, however, one instrument that did come naturally to me - my voice. I was just able to sing, I don't know why. We rarely question our innate gifts - until they begin to fade. I have a friend who is a wonderfully talented artist. When I ask him how he does it, he simply responds, "I dunno. I just could always draw." I want to hit him. But I digress. I could just always sing. For most of my life I could sing across a wide variety of discretely defined voices: so-so bass, solid baritone, tolerable tenor. In falsetto, alto was a bit rough but a better than average soprano. Point is, that when I sang I was never aware of barriers to the U2HR. I knew there were points above and below "my range" denied to me by the physical structure of my vocal cords . But I could hear those "unsingable" notes quite clearly in my head and I would continue to run the appropriate amount of air across my vocal cords so that - had they been physically able - they would have produced notes "off the instrument."
Sadly, things have changed. Remember that scene at the end of White Christmas when Bing Crosby says to one of the children in the chorus, "Give me a nice high C." The kid complies and Crosby says, "Ah, those were the days." Remember that? I'm sort of there now. The voice has gotten older, I have no route to an audience, and a particular necessary medication compromises both my speaking and singing voice. But here is the interesting part. While my actual physical vocal range has diminished, my perception of the U2HR remains quite clear. So I can still "sing" wide swaths of the U2HR - albeit silently.
OK, follow along, because here is the leap. Just as we are conditioned to believe that music/harmony stops at the end of the keyboard, we similarly are conditioned to truncate harmony - universal harmony - in other areas of our lives. We are taught that certain chords, certain perceptions and relationship are acceptable because they are "built into the instrument." Others are not. I beg to differ. The reality is that resonance is infinite: U2HR. The potential for harmonic manifestations - relational, expressive, physical, creative, intellectual - is infinite; spinning out symmetrically and harmonically all around us. You would think we would stumble across them daily. But in reality those deeply harmonic instances are rare, precious, unique, and sadly, often transitory.
The often transitory nature of deeply harmonic manifestations springs from the fact that tuning our own chord is a lifelong process, one that inevitably changes us. Perhaps the clearest evidence of that, for me anyhow, springs from memories of things I have done in my life that still make me shudder. In those often youthful indiscretions, I do recognize myself. Still, I wish I could tear that page from the notebook of my life. The point is that over the decades, my chord has evolved to the point where it would find earlier moments of itself discordant. Strange, not? Those self-discordant moments are, however, more the exception than the norm.
More disconcerting is the fact that throughout my life I have encountered people who will forever be precious to me, but who - oddly - will remain forever isolated from each other because of physical or cultural barriers. My wife will never know my mother or my brother who died before she and I had even met, let alone married. So time truncates certain harmonies. Jealousy precludes other potentially harmonic interactions. As adults, sexual, possessive jealousy naturally springs to mind. I find it hard to imagine King Henry's wives being able to all kiss and make up, even if we ignore the various missing heads. But if we are really honest, jealousy can precede, and often trumps, hormones. The idea of a "best friend" probably comes with preschool, and getting "jilted" for another of the same or another gender is no less painful than the later, more passion laden, fractures of adult life. When it comes to "best friends forever," the end of forever is always painful.
But again, for me, more pleasant resolutions seem more often the norm - well, if you don't count the divorce. My oldest and closest friend and I were born seven days apart to parents who shared a duplex. We spent most of the first two decades of our lives in almost constant companionship. I was always much closer to him than to my brother - who was five years my senior. My friend's first wife, who had shared many of those growing years with us, confessed to me, when we were all in our forties, that she had long been jealous of her husband's obvious pleasure in my company. Thankfully she and I were able to smooth that bump in the road - of which I was blissfully unaware - and build a sincere and caring friendship before she died several years later. He and I remain "BFFs" despite frequent and varied gaps in our interactions.
Let me struggle to again regain focus here - I'm rusty. I've been away for awhile doing various "medical and professional necessities of the real world" Also, I need to practice "distill complexity" more. Perhaps the reason it took me so many years to articulate the 4th pillar, is because I'm not very good at it!
Anyhow, the blend of string theory and super-symmetry demands that there is only one all encompassing U2HR, and the senses through which we currently perceive it are, like the 88 notes of the piano, artificial limitations - barriers if you will - to fully sensing the U2HR. But we need to keep trying. Our primary objective in life should be to play, and hear, notes that are off the top, and below the bottom of the instrument. To approach the U2HR in as many ways as possible.
Do you write your way there? Play, sing, dance, think, cook, love, or code your way there - to that higher perceptive and communicative state? Damned if I know. I suspect that we follow the expressive route, milieu, palette that we simply cannot leave alone, and the one that, initially at least, comes easily. We love that modality, and we push it as far as we can, picking up new skills and harmonic inclinations along the journey. And while we realize that each and every palette is legitimate, we remember that they still yield only incomplete windows to the total U2HR; which, at least this time around, we will never fully grasp. Yup, it is beyond the ken of one mere mortal lifetime. Sorry, but the deck is stacked against us. Our cultures, religions, politics, philosophy and art are all too "rule and norm centric" to allow us to venture too far "off the top of the instrument."
But we keep trying. We keep listening for what we cannot hear. We keep looking for what we cannot see. We keep singing silently past our vocal chords. We keep missing the recreation of the image in our head. Depressing? Not at all. Actually, I see in our optimistic striving to surpass the capabilities of our instrument strong evidence of our own immortality. Consider Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto, line 98:
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"
.
Towards the end of the DVD Tom Dowd and the Language of Music, Dowd is sitting in front of a huge digital mixing board that contains all the separate tracks from Layla featuring the guitar work of Eric Clapton and Duane Allman. Despite the fact that he had mixed the song himself back in November of 1970, Dowd is entranced. He slowly removes everything except the guitar tracks; they wail on, hovering just this side of pain. "Listen to that," he murmurs, "those notes aren't on the instrument. Those notes are off the top of the instrument."
It is his surprise that surprises me. Perhaps because I never mastered a musical instrument [unless you allow me the kazoo] it seems to me quite natural that gifted artists find a way to cheat the limitations of a physical instrument and and produce notes that "aren't there." Think about it for a moment in terms of basic string theory - the universe is made of tiny vibrating strings, of music; and in terms of super-symmetry - that the music that is the universe, permeates harmonically and symmetrically through space and time and other dimensions yet undreamed of. So any instrument - piano, guitar, synthesizer, whatever - simply grants us access to a tiny artificially restricted portion of an unlimited, universal harmonic realm which we will call the U2HR.
Consider the saxophone, an instrument I briefly tormented. But it is not really "an" instrument. Adolphe Sax actually invented 14 instruments in 1846, from tiny to humongous, each designed to capture its own particular chunk of the U2HR. I cannot help but believe that a gifted sax player - or the guitarists in Layla - cannot "cheat" a few notes above or below the "intended range" of each version of the instrument. However, to most, each version of the instrument is a barrier, a machine with a finite musical limit.
If we think about the 88 keys on a piano - another instrument that has suffered at my hands - those keys reduce the U2HR to 88 notes, from the 4th A below middle C to the 4th C above middle C. Now obviously, folks have done some pretty awesome things with those 88 notes, but at the same time the instrument teaches plodders, like my 9- or 10 year-old self, that "music" occurs within those 88 sounds. Surely nothing can lie beyond the challenge of the Tarantella!
There was, however, one instrument that did come naturally to me - my voice. I was just able to sing, I don't know why. We rarely question our innate gifts - until they begin to fade. I have a friend who is a wonderfully talented artist. When I ask him how he does it, he simply responds, "I dunno. I just could always draw." I want to hit him. But I digress. I could just always sing. For most of my life I could sing across a wide variety of discretely defined voices: so-so bass, solid baritone, tolerable tenor. In falsetto, alto was a bit rough but a better than average soprano. Point is, that when I sang I was never aware of barriers to the U2HR. I knew there were points above and below "my range" denied to me by the physical structure of my vocal cords . But I could hear those "unsingable" notes quite clearly in my head and I would continue to run the appropriate amount of air across my vocal cords so that - had they been physically able - they would have produced notes "off the instrument."
Sadly, things have changed. Remember that scene at the end of White Christmas when Bing Crosby says to one of the children in the chorus, "Give me a nice high C." The kid complies and Crosby says, "Ah, those were the days." Remember that? I'm sort of there now. The voice has gotten older, I have no route to an audience, and a particular necessary medication compromises both my speaking and singing voice. But here is the interesting part. While my actual physical vocal range has diminished, my perception of the U2HR remains quite clear. So I can still "sing" wide swaths of the U2HR - albeit silently.
OK, follow along, because here is the leap. Just as we are conditioned to believe that music/harmony stops at the end of the keyboard, we similarly are conditioned to truncate harmony - universal harmony - in other areas of our lives. We are taught that certain chords, certain perceptions and relationship are acceptable because they are "built into the instrument." Others are not. I beg to differ. The reality is that resonance is infinite: U2HR. The potential for harmonic manifestations - relational, expressive, physical, creative, intellectual - is infinite; spinning out symmetrically and harmonically all around us. You would think we would stumble across them daily. But in reality those deeply harmonic instances are rare, precious, unique, and sadly, often transitory.
The often transitory nature of deeply harmonic manifestations springs from the fact that tuning our own chord is a lifelong process, one that inevitably changes us. Perhaps the clearest evidence of that, for me anyhow, springs from memories of things I have done in my life that still make me shudder. In those often youthful indiscretions, I do recognize myself. Still, I wish I could tear that page from the notebook of my life. The point is that over the decades, my chord has evolved to the point where it would find earlier moments of itself discordant. Strange, not? Those self-discordant moments are, however, more the exception than the norm.
More disconcerting is the fact that throughout my life I have encountered people who will forever be precious to me, but who - oddly - will remain forever isolated from each other because of physical or cultural barriers. My wife will never know my mother or my brother who died before she and I had even met, let alone married. So time truncates certain harmonies. Jealousy precludes other potentially harmonic interactions. As adults, sexual, possessive jealousy naturally springs to mind. I find it hard to imagine King Henry's wives being able to all kiss and make up, even if we ignore the various missing heads. But if we are really honest, jealousy can precede, and often trumps, hormones. The idea of a "best friend" probably comes with preschool, and getting "jilted" for another of the same or another gender is no less painful than the later, more passion laden, fractures of adult life. When it comes to "best friends forever," the end of forever is always painful.
But again, for me, more pleasant resolutions seem more often the norm - well, if you don't count the divorce. My oldest and closest friend and I were born seven days apart to parents who shared a duplex. We spent most of the first two decades of our lives in almost constant companionship. I was always much closer to him than to my brother - who was five years my senior. My friend's first wife, who had shared many of those growing years with us, confessed to me, when we were all in our forties, that she had long been jealous of her husband's obvious pleasure in my company. Thankfully she and I were able to smooth that bump in the road - of which I was blissfully unaware - and build a sincere and caring friendship before she died several years later. He and I remain "BFFs" despite frequent and varied gaps in our interactions.
Let me struggle to again regain focus here - I'm rusty. I've been away for awhile doing various "medical and professional necessities of the real world" Also, I need to practice "distill complexity" more. Perhaps the reason it took me so many years to articulate the 4th pillar, is because I'm not very good at it!
Anyhow, the blend of string theory and super-symmetry demands that there is only one all encompassing U2HR, and the senses through which we currently perceive it are, like the 88 notes of the piano, artificial limitations - barriers if you will - to fully sensing the U2HR. But we need to keep trying. Our primary objective in life should be to play, and hear, notes that are off the top, and below the bottom of the instrument. To approach the U2HR in as many ways as possible.
Do you write your way there? Play, sing, dance, think, cook, love, or code your way there - to that higher perceptive and communicative state? Damned if I know. I suspect that we follow the expressive route, milieu, palette that we simply cannot leave alone, and the one that, initially at least, comes easily. We love that modality, and we push it as far as we can, picking up new skills and harmonic inclinations along the journey. And while we realize that each and every palette is legitimate, we remember that they still yield only incomplete windows to the total U2HR; which, at least this time around, we will never fully grasp. Yup, it is beyond the ken of one mere mortal lifetime. Sorry, but the deck is stacked against us. Our cultures, religions, politics, philosophy and art are all too "rule and norm centric" to allow us to venture too far "off the top of the instrument."
But we keep trying. We keep listening for what we cannot hear. We keep looking for what we cannot see. We keep singing silently past our vocal chords. We keep missing the recreation of the image in our head. Depressing? Not at all. Actually, I see in our optimistic striving to surpass the capabilities of our instrument strong evidence of our own immortality. Consider Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto, line 98:
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"
.
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