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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