Over on Distilled Harmony [www.distilledharmony.com] I assert that “ever since I was a small child I have been forever ambushed by moments of pure harmony.” I do not mean to imply that I exist in a constant harmonic state - would that it were so! Rather, those moments of pure harmony have always been transient impressions - like a moment of extended slow motion.
When I was younger my reaction was often “Whew! That was weird! Cool, but weird.” I recall one such harmonic moment when I was was 17 or 18, working at a treatment center for emotionally disturbed children up in Philo, California. My participation was through an American Friends Service Committee summer program, so every morning we “Friendlies,” as we were known, would have a “few moments of silence.” One morning we hiked up the creek a short ways for our moment of silence. It was warm but not hot. The sun was bright, dancing off the small rapids that ran around the rocks where we had perched. And then a soft transition; sight, sound, air on my skin, and mist. Pure harmony, intense and extended.
At some point the “adult leaders” stood to indicate it was time to start the day, and everyone else moved on back downstream. I don’t know how long I remained behind. It couldn’t have been too long, because I had no trouble catching up. But when I tried to engage the others in conversation about the magical moment, blank if not suspicious stares were the response. Well, we were in constant contact with “emotionally disturbed children.” In retrospect I can’t blame my fellow friendlies for being a bit put off by my babbling.
As I grew older I learned to discuss these harmonic moments in less weird and more mainstream terms - art and the intellect. But when I nudged past the half-century mark, I began to consider the notion that these moments of harmony, of “rightness” if you will, were not aberrations. Rather they were moments when the “me of the moment” coincided with the “me I am supposed to me.” They were transcendent moments. That, I have decided, is what I mean by moments of pure harmony. It now strikes me that, for a variety of reasons, art is inclined to seek out and attempts to capture, such transcendent moments.
It is a daunting task. Even photography, that can freeze a moment, freezes but that single moment, carving it away from the greater gestalt that contained the moment. In "Ansel Adams: Photographer." Adams makes a significant distinction between "scenic moments" and "artistic photography.” As Adams had been trained as a concert pianist, some of his friends were taken aback by his decision to turn to photography full-time. “Ansel,” they opined, “a photograph cannot express the depth of the human soul.”
“Perhaps not,” he replied. “But maybe a photographer can."
Adams realized that photography, even contemporary ultra high-speed photography, or the staggering images beamed back from the Hubble Telescope and it’s high tech kin, are not push button portals to a transcendent moment - to pure harmony. It is different from that. And, yes, the phrase “more complicated than that” did spring to mind for that last sentence. But capturing a transcendent moment is not more complicated than the layers upon layers of science and engineering that are necessary to operate the Hubble. But transcendent moments are however quite different.
As I said before, I had always been aware of “ being in a harmonic moment” although I had not yet defined them as such. But it wasn't until sometime around my 50th birthday that I began to explore ways to make them stay a little longer. I tried to put myself in that “extended slow motion.” Breath lightly and slowly. Don’t focus intensely on anything, but try to remain aware of everything. Light, slow, open. And then when it was gone, smile. It would be nice to be able to remain permanently “in the moment,” and I do not dismiss, out of hand, claims of very extended harmonic states - they just seem to be beyond me at the moment. So I try to “save the memory.” And this is where the notion of memory begins to dominate.
Often, as we seek our own path to transcendence, to recognize and perhaps give form to a transcendent moment, we turn to memory. I suppose that this is because transcendent moments neither arrive from, nor float off to, some mysterious, alien realm. Quite the contrary actually. Transcendent moments are those moments when our chord sounds most clearly. The path to more extended transcendence lies in recognizing those moments and discerning their common elements. It is, however, important to realize that we will discover the transcendent moment not in the memories whose details we grasp most clearly, but rather in those memories that resonate most strongly with our unique chord. The specific "internal movie" may be fleeting, unclear, even confusing as a solitary entity - as in “What happened back there? When we were all sitting on those rocks by the creek?"
The important distinction is between recall and memory. Recall is factual. Extreme recall is out there on the spectrum, as in hyperthymesia. Wikipedia tells us that "hyperthymesia is the condition of possessing an extremely detailed autobiographical memory. Hyperthymestics remember an abnormally vast number of their life experiences.” Facebook, Twitter and other social media encourage a kind of artificial hyperthymesia as they encourage users to dutifully note the trivia of their lives. That is not to say that highly significant moments are ignored, but they do run the risk of being overwhelmed by restaurant menus, momentary observations, celebrity spotting and images of a friend’s friend’s friend’s child’s cat.
I think we often err in attempting to engage seniors in issues of recall. Far more fruitful, for them and for our understanding of them, might be discussions of memory - particularly, expressionist memory. Recall seeks a reconstruction of "what happened," and "what happened" often has little to do with what an event or series of events came to mean to an individual. I would assert that a far more important type of memory is what I call “expressionist memory.”
I use "expressionist memory" to define a cognitive unit, a belief, a meaning-making entity that coalesces over time as a result of related recollections. Portions of those conceptually-related recollections are the palette from which we paint or construct the more powerful, selective "expressionist memory" that becomes the "reality" that supersedes the hyperthymesial recollections.
OK, it is obviously time for an example. You are walking down the street, and you pass by a couple of kids sitting on either side of a big cardboard box. You look into the box. Puppies! Cute, wiggly, soft, warm, unconditionally loving, cuddly puppies. If your “expressionist memory” of all those positive parts of “puppy-ness,” overwhelms the more pragmatic hyperthymesiatic recalling of soiled carpets and spoiled sleep, midnight walks and veterinary bills; you may find yourself the somewhat surprised new owner of a little "wiggler."
This fairly simplistic example should not detract from the powerful role that expressive memory plays in the important decisions of our lives, and its central place in our construction of reality. Expressive memory is a path to the existential objective of Distilled Harmony, which is to bring your own chord into harmony with the universal chord - the ultimate music of the spheres, if you will. Consider the image of a mystic, seated in repose, eyes closed or focused on something we cannot see. There is no movement. “Ooomm, ooomm.” It is a common theme in Western storytelling. We even married it to the traditional American western in the 1972 TV show, Kung Fu. It is from distorted depictions such as this that we create the misconception that transcendence is somehow passive, an empty stillness.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Transcendence is an act of creative transformation. It is a blending of the notes of the self with the song of the universe. Transcendence manifests one's chord. I must, however, admit to a teensy, weensy little problem: I am not sure how one does that consistently. If I did maybe I wouldn’t be here pecking, two-, three-, sometimes even four-fingered at the keyboard. Or maybe that is part of the process, and I do have some thoughts about the process.
I am pretty convinced that personal transcendence is closely linked to using expressive memory to define our harmonic self, the person we would most like to become. And further, to become that person we need to consciously construct those pieces of expressive memory that define our most harmonic self.
Descriptions may work better than definitions here:
Tranquility and Harmony. I think that the iconic "rocks in the stream" moment provided some hues to the palette from which I construct my expressive memory of harmonic tranquility. For me harmonic tranquility carries a "rightness with nature" component. A cabin in the pines at Tower Hill Camp, close by the shores of Lake Michigan. Summer breezes passing through the screened in porch of my childhood home. The moon painting a path on the Manistee River, as I paddled with a cohort of companions through Michigan forests. A cold midnight surround of stars during a youthful ski trip in the Austrian Alps.
These moments obviously describe highly personal recollections scattered across many decades. And my internal movies of the events may take extreme liberties with any hyperthymesial documentaries that could have captured the scenes from a more objective perspective. Which is of little or no importance, as expressive memory trumps hyperthymesial recollections every time. Expressive memory does far more than reconstruct the past, it provides a transcendent path into the future.
That path is paved with the cobblestones of expressive memory: Tranquility and Harmony, Love, Honor, Success, Truth, Beauty. And each cobblestone is an intensely personal construction fashioned by the life we have lived, the moments we have experienced. I have been thinking more about the process through which we construct these cobblestones and an intriguing analogy sprang to mind. The Large Hadron Collider. No, really. Hang with me for a moment.
As I understand it, the LHC smashes atomic particles into one another at speeds approaching the speed of light. It is in the aftermath of the collisions, in the residue, that new or deeper meaning is revealed - like the Higgs Boson. A major objective of all this science, personnel, and treasure is to discover the nature of dark matter.
Dark matter is one of those things so far beyond our ordinary experience that, most often, we choose not to think about it. But let’s think about it for just a moment. Richard Panek points out in his nifty book The Four Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality that everything we can see of the universe is only 4% of all that is out there beyond our standard methods of observation and perception. So modern science - and particularly the guys and dolls of CERN and the LHC - seeks to ferret out the deeper nature of reality, the form and void of the universe if you will, by examining the tantalizing residue of particle collisions in an attempt to glean what visible matter can tell us about invisible matter.
OK. Let us make “recall” visible matter - the Facebook Timeline/hyperthymesial recalled particles rushing around in the LHC of our minds. Ten-year old truth collides with 35 year-old truth, 18-year old beauty crashes into 50-year old beauty, 40-year old honor smashes into 75-year old honor as they all glance off of various versions of tranquility and harmony. Expressive memory springs to light and life in the collective residue of those collisions. Expressive memory constructs the deeper nature of our reality, fills in the form and void of our personal existence, makes visible and cohesive that reality which previously was invisible and disjointed.
I now have two options. I can try to con a grad student into inserting some footnotes into this incredibly long post and try to find a journal that might consider publishing it, or I can just stop and send it out to you in the hopes that some of you will tough it out from beginning to end and find it interesting, perhaps even enjoyable 😃!
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