Fore! Three, Two, One, - Deep Cleansing Breath.

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A friend recently posted on Facebook that his doctor had suggested that he resume playing golf in order to help lower his blood pressure. At first blush this seems a lot like suggesting that an alcoholic add a couple martinis to the evening routine to help combat insomnia.  I mean, really, play golf to lower your blood pressure?  It has been my experience that even really good golfers don’t play golf to lower their blood pressure. Good golfers play golf to lower their score, and they tend to be quite competitive about it.  Let us say you agree to play in a charity golf event. One of those things where you pay an entry fee to play a round of "friendly golf," win some goofy prizes, eat barbecue and drink a cold one or two.  Unless you bring friends along, you are often placed in a foursome with three other charitable souls.  However, god forbid you should get placed in a group with “real golfers;” those folks behind the phrase “shoot a round of golf.”  With these players, you do need to check their golf bags for long guns as well as long irons. The words “Oh, heck. Try that one again,” have never crossed their lips.  The day will be long and your blood pressure will be screaming in your ears.

So, I ask again, resume playing golf to lower your blood pressure?  But then I remember that one of the prominent items on my bucket list is to walk the Augusta National Golf Club course in the Spring. Notice I did not say to play the Augusta National Golf Club course in the Spring. There is a world of difference between walking and playing Augusta, the site of The Master’s.  Serious golfers, both professional and amateur, can spend entire lifetimes pining away to play Augusta, only to die unfulfilled.  I am secure in the knowledge that walking Augusta, like over-wintering in Yellowstone, and singing with Nora Jones, will not come to be, so I don’t let the absence of the possibilities bother me. Mine is a Zen approach to Augusta, and Zen and golf are unlikely bedfellows - but should not be.   

My wanting to walk Augusta has nothing to do with a desire to slam a 300-yard drive down a fabled fairway and chip in from a half mile away for a world-shaking Albatross. [I even had to look up Albatross - three under par for the hole. A “Condor" is four under par on a hole. A hole-in-one on a par five is all I can come up with.] No, I want to walk Augusta because it is beautiful, literally-take-your-breath-away beautiful. There are beautiful gardens in manor houses and palaces all around the world. Augusta is quite comfortable in their company.  It is not hard to understand how a physician could suggest that a patient walk a golf course to lower blood pressure.  The exercise can’t hurt, and even lesser courses than Augusta are designed, in part, for pleasing vistas.  But play golf to lower your blood pressure?

Yes, perhaps, but only if you bring Zen onto the course, into the playing and not just the walking.  When my father passed 90 - years of age, not a golf score - he forgot that golf was, after all, just a game and not terribly important in the grand scheme of things. Until then he and I often played Zen golf. Zen golf meant forgiving errant shots - "Oh, take that one again" - and forgetting exactly what we had on that last hole - "Five? No, I think you had a four.”  It also meant seeing beyond the game, beyond the fairway to the garden around us:  “What do you think that squirrel is up to?” “What are those purple flowers? Your Mother would have known.”

A famous bit from the song Ya Got Trouble from the musical The Music Man goes like this as Prof. Harold Hill decries the creeping influence of horse racing and  -

“ .  .  .  horse-race gamblin'.

Not a wholesome trottin' race, no!

But a race where they set down right on the horse!

Like to see some stuck-up jockey'boy

Sittin' on Dan Patch? Make your blood boil?

Well, I should say!"

If we pay attention we know what makes our “blood boil,” and hence we know what lowers our blood pressure.  Anger, frustration, fear - these negative emotions all make our blood boil, raise our blood pressure.  Happiness, forgiveness, love, calm - we can feel our heart slow, our breathing ease, our boiling blood cooling down.  In the final analysis then, lowering our blood pressure is not tied exclusively to what we do. How we do it also plays an important role.  And it goes far beyond golf - it is about how we live life.  Maybe the idiot who cut you off on the freeway isn’t really an idiot. Maybe they just got word that a loved one had been taken to the hospital. So instead of raising our blood pressure with ancient Italian hand gestures, we should lower it with a murmured “God speed and good luck!”  I tend to think that most of the slights we imagine in life are just that - imagined. Letting them slide off your back is a really great way to lower your blood pressure.

So it would seem, after all is said and done, that you actually can play golf to lower your blood pressure; but only if you wrap it in forgiving and forgetting and treat yourself to an occasional meander off the fairway out into the garden.

“No, no. That’s OK, I meant to hit it over here. A mulligan? Sure. Thanks! I’ll be back in a minute. There’s a little frog over here .  .  . "

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Use All the Words You Need

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It is, I suppose sufficiently ironic to warrant a millennial's eyeroll, that coloring, an activity I pursue specifically to avoid technology-driven undertakings, has thrown me into the maelstrom of Web 2.0, social media and maybe even Web 2.0534, the "Thingy Internet.” As I explore with my publisher the various ways of marketing Color Me Chilled Out online, I am rediscovering parts of the digital world that I had forgotten. It is certainly a world creating its own norms, and that is as it has always been with the media.  

When any communication system reaches a position of cultural dominance, it both shapes and reflects the culture of which it is a part. Newspapers boomed in conjunction with public education.  A literate audience advantaged all print based communication.  The emergence of radio, television and film brought audio and video to center stage. And now we have the Internet - or the Web - all those enchanting, distracting sights and sounds on our computers, tablets and smartphones - and yes, when appropriate, you may remind me that I refused to use the word “phablet."

My current concern is that a loosely-defined cadre of “experts" is defining a set of digital compositional assumptions with which I take exception.  I actually taught a course on writing for the Internet a few years ago - 2010? 2011? - using Christopher Johnson’s Microstyle  and a couple other then-cutting-edge textbooks. Anyhow, also having taught the first HTML course at my university back in 1994, it struck me that it was time to see how the process of putting words and images on screens had shifted in the last decade or so. Sadly, the emerging norms appear to lean in the direction of “quick and dirty,” although that “meme” has been massaged into “immediate and impactful.” 

I am not so much an old fogey that I would suggest that we will find excellence only by looking over our shoulder.  And one positive insight we can take away from new media assertions is the notion of the 360 degree perspective. When we do that we come to realize that there are models for excellence lurking at every point of the compass. Sure, texting invents “words" that may or may not be around next year, or even next week. But Shakespeare is credited with creating new words when they suited his fancy - when they aided the message. The fascists of the 1930s and 40s also moulded the then currently available media to craft a xenophobic milieu that seemed to convince the local populace to tolerate their later atrocities more passively. Current politicians are using the same strategies with modern media to Trumpet an equally hateful agenda. So yes, everything old is new again. Hence, we need to take a 360 degree perspective when looking at both the old and the new in order to design our own “best practices” for digital communication.  And that certainly applies to blogging.

Katy Munger, an old friend of mine - and the current NC Piedmont Laureate - recently wrote an insightful series of posts regarding the place of novelists and other writers in an Internet world. [see http://bit.ly/1Q5drvM]. Among her excellent suggestions is that we keep in mind our intended audience. It should not surprise us that the intended audience demographic at which much of the content currently available on the Internet is aimed is the18-to-30-year-olds for whom “Sit there quietly and read your book,” is a punishment.  My oldest friend, for whom the phrase “brother from another mother” is most appropriate, once told me that his idea of heaven was a room filled with an inexhaustible supply of novels. He is out there with you on “SchragWall,” and serves as an excellent definition of my intended audience; thoughtful, educated, humorous - an audience that loves to read.

It is an audience that gets stopped in its tracks by an artfully constructed phrase, sentence, paragraph, poem or novel.  Try making a list of the "Oh, my! That is just excellent!" moments you have encountered in the world of literature.  Among others on my list I find:

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, the "love is not love" one.

Billy Collins' wonderful poem on Forgetfulness.

Elizabeth Bennet's delightful rebuke of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice.

The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear - in Frank Herbert's Dune.

Well, I could go on, as no doubt you can as well.  The point is that none of these owe much to the ideas of "short sentences," "simple words," 146 characters, and emojis.  My assertion is not that the Internet prohibits meaningful literary moments. Most haikus fit comfortably within the restraints of a tweet. Rather, my concern leans increasingly to software constraints that mandate a particular advocacy of "short form composition."  If you are reading this post in the original blog, there is a text block somewhere on the page titled "About Me" where I was encouraged to "tell your readers all about yourself." I had written what I felt was a nice bio for another of my websites “Agent of Calm," and thought I would use it in the About Me block on SchragWall. Not so fast, buckeroo! What they really meant was tell your readers everything about yourself that fits in 1200 characters - letters, punctuation and spaces!  

This is where the Internet turns the old adage "form follows function" on its head. The function is to tell your readers all about you, so the form should enable whatever amount of text, images and music are necessary to complete the function. That was one of the original wonders of the Internet. Back in 2002, when I was the editor of the Journal of The American Communication Association, we were giddy - “No page limits, bring on the images, trot out the music!”  Not, apparently, on your Blogger “About Me” block. I had originally fulfilled the function of “About Me” on the Agent of Calm website in around 3300 “characters.” But here on Blogger the form dictates that the function fit into a form that holds only 1200 letters, spaces and punctuation.  This new "formalism" is evident everywhere throughout the Internet, nudging us all to "short form” constructions. Hvn 4bid! :-(

Mind you, I am not arguing that we should make the academic notion of “Why use 2 words when 15 work just as well?” the norm on the Internet. I am simply asking that we retain places on the Internet where “long form” composition is seen as the future of serious literature and not simply as an interesting relic from days gone by.  Ebooks certainly have a role to play here, but so does blogging. And while in today’s parlance I claim the title of “long-form Blogger,” it would have been great fun, in the 1700s and 1800s, to be an essayist. To be sitting on a overstuffed chair before a fire on a winter's day, chewing on the end of a quill pen, gazing over a frosted pond or garden, and looking down my nose at those infernal mechanical writing machines.

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The Alien's Dilemma: Part Two

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So we last left Zoron circling our solar system attempting to ascertain earth's potential to eventually abandon bloodshed as its dominant form of conflict resolution.  Such an evaluation could span centuries, and during that time Zoron might have encountered the broadcast signals of old radio and TV shows that would only now be making their way to the scout craft.  Among them might be early cartoons such as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. Elmer's lisp might not make it past today's PC censors, but my generation delighted when Bugs out-foxed Elmer, leaving the frustrated hunter fuming "Dwat, that wasscally wabbit!" 

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Zoron might have, in the scout's early attempts to understand our spoken language, mistaken "wabbit" for "yabbit" - and Zoron had heard yabbit over and over throughout our sordid history. Zoron had come to realize that "yabbit" often was included in the rhetoric that preceded violent conflicts in earth culture.  It could be heard in predictive patterns - almost a call and response, from playgrounds to battlegrounds: "We are peace loving people who believe in friendship and freedom. Yabbit, they started it!" At which time the two sides clobber each other with baloney sandwiches, small arms fire, or nuclear devices, depending on their resources and lack of self-control. 

I hope you will pardon my use of what must be one of the worst extended puns in the short history of blogging, but shifting Elmer and Bugs' wabbit to yabbit and then to the painful moral equivocation of “ Yeah But" allows me to sneak up on what might be the only solution to the Alien's Dilemma that gives us any hope of avoiding a lonely life of galactic isolation - and far more likely - self-destruction. 

Anyone who has studied history know that advocates of peaceful co-existence have arisen more than once here on our fortuitously positioned third planet out from the sun. But with stunning regularity they and their movements - political, religious or philosophical - are eventually confronted with violent opposition. Sometimes the MLKs and Ghandis of the world prevail at least to the extent of creating significant, but never total, change. But much more often the glimmer of peaceful coexistence crumbles before one horrific "Yeah But" or another. 

Consider Einstein. A cultural, largely unobservant, Jew, Einstein was the darling of the radical pacifist movement of the 1930s and early 1940s. He was an early personification of the 1960s slogan, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" And then Hitler, Stalin and The Empire of Japan unleashed upon the world a level of barbarous brutality previously unknown in history.  Einstein's pacifism crumbled before the onslaught.  We responded with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, crushed by weapons based, in part, on Einstein’s brilliance. “Yeah But they started it!" And “Yeah But it would have been worse if we had invaded the mainland!" 

The problem with "Yeah But,” is that it is occasionally nigh onto irrefutable. Hitler, Stalin and Imperialist Japan, did have to be stopped, and they did start it. But somehow those global affirmations allows "Yeah But” to gain traction in other, far less certain, arenas. The mainstream West, across belief systems, sees ISIS as evil entity who “started it” and so we launch our drones. The affects of the drones allows the radical leaders of ISIS to holler “Yeah But they started it!" and they ratchet up their level of mayhem. And so it trickles all the way down to “Yeah But” he cut me off on the freeway, and “Yeah But” she meant to spill her chocolate pudding on my sandwich. 

I do not know why we remain enslaved to such an intellectually and morally bankrupt worldview. We may caught in Darwinian shackles, carnivores destined to react violently to any perceived threat.  Maybe there is a “Yeah But” gene that CRISPR can excise. I do not know. Perhaps Zoron, and the other intelligent members of the Galactic Empire are descended from beings who resolved their “Yeah Buts” through shunning.  A bully, whether on the playground or in their pinnacles of power, was shunned by all, and for Zoron’s people this was fatal.  Their bullies simply shriveled into dust and drifted away on an uncaring breeze. Of course, if this is the case we are in trouble. We would simply be an unacceptable risk for such a non-violent culture, and Zoron would soon throttle up, up and away. 

For those of us left here, it is not really a case of “nowhere to run to.”  Much of what we have accomplished as a species we have accomplished in spite of our occasional descents into mindless violence.  Like the slowly maturing children of exasperated parents, we really do know that “Yeah But” leads eventually to death and destruction. We know that we need to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to its siren song; we need to shun those who jump up and down, pointing at the “different other" next door hollering “Yeah But! Yeah But!”  We need to greet each day and meet each “Yeah But,” with the tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm.  A cultural norm, after all, is only the sum of our personal perspectives. We can live each day in such a way as to add make harmony the norm, to shun “Yeah But,” to give Zoron, and Earth a glimmer of hope. 

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