Schrag Porch : An Introduction

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I started posting to Schrag Wall a decade ago. I don’t know how many of you have been along for the whole ride, but even if you have been here for that ride, it isn’t really the whole ride. The composition you see as Schrag Wall actually began back in 2001 or so when I began writing the book The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart. [Drop me a note and I’ll send you an e-copy. It provides some vocabulary that makes the early posts easier to understand.] The note-taking system I used back then was to write a phrase or sentence that I felt should go in the book somewhere on a sheet of paper and I would tape it onto the wall - hint, hint - above my computer monitor.  Many of those notes eventually became the blog Schrag Wall - but the blog didn’t start until 2006. So there are 5 years of notes floating around here on my hard drive or up in The Cloud somewhere which never - or at least probably never - made it onto the blog.

A few entries have appeared on Schrag Wall over the years that reveal my perhaps exaggerated fondness for the front porch of my childhood home. I wrote, not long ago, about never having found the place where I felt completely at home.  The porch is probably the exception. However, a bright red 8 x 12 foot [maybe?] slab of concrete doesn’t quite seem to fit the mystic notion of “coming home to a place you’ve never been before.”  It was more like a place I had always been - maybe a launch pad to that mystic home that still eludes me? Anyhow, I feel a digression coming on, so let me rein in a bit.  If you see a post that is labeled Schrag Porch instead of Schrag Wall, it means that I have wandered back into the “lost years” between 2001 and 2006 and pulled a "feels like home" golden oldie off of the front porch for you.  If I can find a specific date, I’ll post it. Otherwise just think “old stuff.”

I notice that many of the earlier works were much shorter than the current Wall posts. You may find a good thing :-)

Here are a few very early ones from 2001:

Rescuing

A surprising number of rescuers are pulled under by those they would save. The lesson is not "let them drown." The message is "Throw them something that floats, but keep to the shore.”

Possession

Implies maintenance.

Awkward Neighbors

Genius and insanity live in the same building. Sometimes they wander into the wrong apartment. If you love those chats with genius, you must also learn to tolerate the occasional bouts with insanity.

Emotion and Passion
Passion is not an emotion in its own right. It is rather a degree of intensity that can be brought to any emotion. Unmodulated passion dominates any chord of which it becomes a part. Unmodulated passion draws notes, situations, and people into a composition that is dominated or defined by the emotion that unmodulated passion has hybridized. Modulated passion intensifies the chord but does not overwhelm it.

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Trump's Backhanded Boost to Science

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Whoa! Wait, wait, wait a minute. You’re going to spill coffee all over your lab coat. Hear me out here. Yes, I know that the  White House just released a budget that puts America’s science profile roughly on  a par with Paraguay - unless you are part of the military, or own a construction company along the Mexican border. But you see, that is exactly the point.

It s important  to realize is that there is a significant degree of freedom in finding yourself in the middle of an argument that you simply know you cannot win.  I often find myself embroiled in one such repeating “discussion” with some of my students. I have been teaching about media for almost 40 years, stretching from helping them set up a darkroom to develop 35mm film to current discussions about the “black mirror,” aka smartphone, that seems permanently welded to their hands.  It is that bit of technology that lies at the center of an intractable argument.  You see, despite the fact that my classes are about technology, the students in my classrooms are permitted the use of nothing more sophisticated than paper and a suitable, non-internet-connected, marking implement.

Occasionally a student will assert that such a technology prohibition is “not fair,” by which they actually mean “stupid, old-fashioned, and mean.”  I point them to the rather sizable body of research that indicates that students attempting to “multitask” - e.g. answer email, text, follow sports scores, etc., - during class, invariably retain less course content, perform more poorly on test and quizzes, and distract their fellow students. To which they respond, “Well, I don’t believe that.”  Because I am "the teacher" the prohibition stands. But I do not believe for a moment that I have “won” the argument, that I have changed their minds. As in most cases, their belief will trump any data that contradicts that belief. 

And that it why one has to think twice about the value of employing data-based science arguments with members of the current administration.  Think about it: the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t believe that the environment really needs all that much protection. Believes than “clean coal” is not an oxymoron.  The new head of the Federal Communication Commission apparently believes that “net neutrality” defines the no parking zone around the tennis courts at his country club. And the Oval Office, despite the total disagreement of the American Medical Association [AMA], the American Hospital Association [AHA], the Congressional Budget Office [CBO], and the American Association of Retired People [AARP], and a growing list of Republicans, still believes that the ill-defined Donaldcare is necessary to rollback the equally ill-defined predations of the demonized Affordable Care Act.  These are the strongly held beliefs of people in positions of power. Arguing data with them is as futile as my fruitless attempts to convince my smartphone-addicted students that the world will be unaffected, and they will be better informed, if they go off the grid for 75 minutes.

So, in the current climate, what do you do to “make American science smart again?” Well, there are at least a couple of options. You can attempt to confront the irrational triumph of belief over data by complaining to everyone within ear shot about the administration.  I have friends who, for the last 8 years, were able to blame everything - including the number of handicapped parking spaces at McDonalds and the pace of lines at airports and supermarkets - on “Obamacare.”  So far as I could tell, their complaints never changed the speed at which they got their Big Mac, their carry-on stashed above their seat, or their produce bagged.  They just made others around them uncomfortable.  

There is a better way.  But we have to look over our shoulders to find it - so hop into the WayBack Machine, Sherman, and set the date for April 15th, 1874. [Wooowoooowoooowoooo]. 

“Gosh, Mr. Peabody, who are those guys with the paintbrushes?”

“We call them Impressionists, Sherman. Though until this date they were better know as failures.”

Well, you get the idea.  In the 1870s any artist who was anybody had to display their work in the Salon de Paris.  The problem for one hardy crew of renegades - including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro - was that the powerful group of critics who controlled acceptance to the Salon did not believe in the painting style that would come to be called Impressionism.  Those few Impressionist paintings that had previously been accepted  by the Salon were hung high on the walls out of sight, or in a remote room the size of a closet, or were soon removed altogether.  It eventually became obvious to our merry band of paint slingers that it was pointless to confront the current beliefs of the powerful. So on April 15th, 1874, they opened their own competing exhibition.  The reviews were mixed. But the point is that there were reviews. The Co-operative Company of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc. - as they called themselves - had slipped out from under the thumb of the gatekeepers of the Salon de Paris.  They sold a few painting at the exhibition and some of the artists went on to enjoy productive careers during their lifetime. But I doubt that even the most optimistic among them could have predicted the joy ride the future had in store. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book David and Goliath, estimates that if the 160 to 200 paintings displayed at that first renegade exhibition were to be sold in the current market one would need somewhere around a billion dollars to acquire them. 

So, what can we take away from our little jaunt in the Wayback Machine?  Particularly when we think about the government and its relationship to science? Well, first we simply need to accept the fact that the “Science Salon” currently in power in Washington will do nothing to advance the cause of scientific research. The appointed heads of the government agencies designed to oversee and advocate for science and technology are neither scientists nor technologists. Since they neither understand, nor believe in, the scientific method, the results of scientific research become, for them, flexible talking points in policy discussions.  Hence, evolution - a scientifically demonstrable fact, and Creationism - a set of specific Judeo-Christian theological concepts - become different, but essentially parallel, “beliefs” that can be debated. In the minds of this new Washington Science Salon many other long established clusters of scientific fact can become alternative beliefs that are up for grabs.  In 1874, the Impressionists decided that they could not be true to their art and continue to bend their work to the arbitrary dictates of the Salon.  So they took their game elsewhere. If the current Science Salon makes it impossible for scientists to be true to their art, perhaps it is time for the scientific community to take their game elsewhere.

I do not make that suggestion lightly.  I am well-aware that the power the current Washington Science Salon holds over the community of research scientists is drawn from the same dual sources as the Salon de Paris - fame and fortune.  Whose work gets published? Whose grants get funded? To a huge degree the professional success of research scientists depends upon the wishes - and beliefs - of the Washington Science Salon.

So where would science go if it were to take its game elsewhere? Well, obviously it needs to find a locus that has deep pockets and an interest in scientific research. Hmmm.  Sounds a lot like Silicon Valley to me.  I know, I know. The idea of panhandling to the likes of Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple kind of creeps me out as well.  But then I thought, creepy as compared to what? To assure full disclosure I need to state that I see the issue from a campus perspective. 

I work in, have always worked in, a university.  It is a family tradition. Counting my father and two uncles who spent much of their lives in college classrooms, the family has racked up more than a century in front of students. Add in my sister who advised university students for 30 or so years, and we may push 150 family people-years in a campus environment. So, yes, that is my perspective. And when it comes to the relationship between the university and the Washington Science Salon it is a perspective with which I find myself growing increasingly uncomfortable. 

Back in January of 1961 President Eisenhower warned of the "military industrial complex," an intertwining of military and business interests that could come to compromise or overshadow the needs of, and benefits to, the general population. I doubt he would be pleased with how poorly we have heeded his warning.  The lines between the government, the military, business, and the university are becoming faint enough to be nonexistent.  And not surprisingly it is money that has blurred the lines.  

The brightest stars in the academic firmament these days tend not to be those asking the most interesting questions or providing the most tantalizing answers.  Rather they are those individuals or “teams” who can craft the grant proposals that fit most neatly into the categories that funding agencies - most often member agencies of the various Washington Science Salons - wish to encourage. To complete the analogy, they are the artists who routinely have their works accepted by the Salon de Paris. They paint what they are suppose to paint. They think what they are supposed to think. Maybe it has always been so. Maybe that was what spooked President Eisenhower back in the midst of the last century. I would like to believe that that was not always the case, that once universities were the places where the best and brightest followed the most creative twists of curious minds. But if it were once so, sadly, it is no longer. Grantsmanship has turned us into salesmen. The Salons are the markets and the product for sale is our intellect.

Once we accept that sad fact, turning our back on the Washington Science Salon doesn’t seem quite so bizarre. Surely our universities still have more in common with the curiosity that drives the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley than we have with the beliefs of the conservative political fundamentalists who control, at least for the next few years, the handouts of the Washington Science Salon. Why not pitch genuinely motivated “pure science” proposals to the Silicon Valley Salon? Some of them already have the mechanism in place. Sure, they are in it for the money, but using the current funding models, so are the universities. Silicon Valley at least seems to realize that the market is driven by innovation, and that you innovate by turning the unfettered creative intellectual exploration of wide ranging ideas into something that may become products and processes that people want. And furthermore, why do we need to limit ourselves to an alternative Salon run by companies, even if those companies are larger and richer than most nations?  We are a nation “of the people” aren’t we? How about crowdsourcing for science? 

These are radical changes. Changes we would never have seriously considered had the Trump Administration not decided to gut American science by creating an environment that is toxic to academic freedom. These are changes that most universities would, and will, initially resist since most large universities have patterned their research and fiscal practices and policies to stay in lock step with the big funding Salons in Washington. You do not bite the Salon that feeds you. But what do you do when, as currently seems the case, the Salon declares that not only do you need - as has long been the case - to study what the Salon decrees you need to study; but now you also need to present and publish only the answers the Washington Science Salon believes to be true? To break the chains of exclusivity currently enjoyed by the Washington Funding Salons and their slightly less dominant, but allied corporate kin, universities would have to devise new models and processes designed to support relatively unfettered research. But surely we can muster the will to do that.  Just how deep does our institutional avarice and intellectual cowardice really run?  Hopefully not that deep. 

Trump seems determined to throw science under the bus - to tell the eggheads “You’re fired!”  Certainly we need to resist those appointments and budget cuts through the traditional routes of political activism. But the reality is that despite those efforts there seems to be some freefall in the future. The least we can do is give some serious consideration as to how and where we choose to land.

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Finding Home

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In Rocky Mountain High, John Denver sings of "coming home to a place he'd never been before."  Denver and co-author Mike Taylor seem to be echoing the gentle, poetic notion that you can "come home" to a place where you were not born, nor had you ever lived. You look around, you take a deep breath and wonderfully, everything just feels right. You are home. 

I don't doubt that.  It must be almost two decades ago that we hired a young woman with the ink barely dry on her Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She was a western gal, through and through. However, not long after joining our faculty she made her first visit to Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks. Upon returning she declared that she had "come home." Nothing she has done since would contradict that assertion. So again, I do not question the notion that one can "come home to a place you've never been before." I am just jealous. 

I have lived in Raleigh since 1981 - so 36 years. Both my daughters were born here. My professional life is defined by my years at NC State. Still, it doesn't really feel like "home" in the mystical sense of Denver's paean to the Rocky Mountains. Don't get me wrong, it has been, and continues to be, a nice ride. It just doesn't have the spiritual, transcendent "home" feeling that Denver ascribes to his mountains. No place does. But that is probably my fault. I may have set my sights a bit high, or perhaps in the wrong direction altogether. 

You see, the events that define a Denveresque sense of "home" for me are not so much cases of where, as they are of when. Scattered throughout my life are moments of intense harmony, when everything feels perfect, when I am "home." We, as spiritual creatures, have a tendency to turn the places where those harmonic moments occur into sacred spaces.  So we have shrines to which we make pilgrimages. "Home" in Denver's sense turns that notion upside down. "Home" becomes a semi-sacred place where harmonic moments occur more frequently than anywhere else in the world. In Denver's world, you do not travel to the shrine. The shrine is the home. I simply have not found mine. 

Those moments that do seem to manifest a Denveresque kind of "home" for me do not share a common locale. Many are harmonic moments that I recall from my childhood, and I realize that I tend remember those events through rose-colored synapses, perhaps even to the point of bending historical fact to fit the tenets of Distilled Harmony. Still, to "come home to a place I've never been before," I would have to encounter a place that would echo those recalled harmonies. 

For example, my memories of rainy days on the front porch in Springfield, Ohio demand that "home" would need to be rainy - like this:

Rain

It is a gentle, cleansing rain.

The air is softer for it. 

The acrylic carved landscape 

Fades aptly to watercolor. 

Insects fight its somnolent call 

To buzz and bumble apace. 

I find myself stirred not so much to sleep, 

But to its less insistent cousin, 

A quiet nap.

Drops are interrupted  

High in the canopy. 

Dancing off leaves  

They gather in crooks and crannies 

Until they overflow  

Into bark's craggy channels 

And dance a zig-zag path  

To the forest floor.

It is a softly soaking rain

Filling the valley at lambing. 

The bright blush of motherhood  

Is rinsed away in rills among the clover, 

Trickling down to brooks, then streams, 

To rivers that lead to the distant imagining  

That is the sea. 

But then some magic moments in the donkey pasture above Clearwater Ranch in Philo, California demand it be sunny - like this:

The Meadow

If you lie 

On your back 

And hold very still 

With your eyes 

On the blue  

Bowl above, 

You may hear 

A quiet sort  

Of curious buzz, 

Preceding  

The funniest 

Bumblingest  

Bee 

Who bumps 

From flower to flower 

Before disappearing  

Back into the sky 

Trailing her buzzing 

Behind her. 

A ladybug eyes 

An Everest of grass 

And slowly  

Begins her ascent. 

Upon claiming  

The peak 

She spreads  

Spotted wings 

And soars off to 

A sheltering tree. 

Thus she avoids 

Toasty fates 

For her brood 

And decades of 

Deep therapy. 

The mockingbird  

Knits  

A complete  

Symphony  

With songs stolen 

From here  

And from there, 

That echo about 

In the morning's  

Soft light 

Accompanying  

The sweet  

Scented air.

Nowhere is sunlight 

Transformed 

Into life 

More magically  

Than 

In a meadow,  

In the morning.

Perhaps you see my problem. It seems that there are folks lucky enough to have a particular place they call home. A physical space where everything feels right. The mountains, the sea, even a particular structure on a particular piece of land. Home is right there. They can point to it.

For me home is in my head. 

"Lucky you!” I hear you saying. "You carry “home” around with you. Wherever you go, you are home.”  True to a certain extent.  Home is up there between my ears.  But strangely I can’t always get “there” from “here.”  That transcendent space of “inner peace” has a way of playing hide-and-seek with us.  "Ha! Ha! Here I am between your ears but you can’t find me for love nor money!”  

I keep looking.  Reike, meditation, a big sheet of blank paper with lots of colorful markers, calm and gentle music, fighting the inclination to enter into debates with those seeking victory or angry affirmation instead of insight.  All the time carrying “home” around between my ears. From the outside it looks a lot like napping, but inside - whoa! We’re climbing the Himalayas in here! 

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Composing the Symphony of Our Life

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One of Pandora's most irritating features can also be one of its most endearing. When you create a channel - say for Dan Fogelberg - you don't just get Dan Fogelberg songs. You also get songs that Pandora's algorithms and human assistants decide are "in the style of" Fogelberg.  It is sort of like the difference between a painting by Rubens and a painting from Rubens's studio.  A “real” Rubens is worth millions, the studio piece - a fraction of that.  But, as I said, while sometimes being irritating, Pandora channels can also serve up an occasional treasure. 

Sometime last week I was listening to my Burl Ives channel, which has become a sort of a hodgepodge of "feel good" songs - good voices, nothing harsh. Must have been at night because I had my headphones on. Anyhow, I was suddenly immersed in an incredible version of “Amazing Grace.” Superb voices, wonderful clarity of diction. A capella. It was like a tall glass of ice water on a muggy summer day. Just gorgeous.

So I grabbed my iPad and learned that the artists were a female a capella group from Brigham Young University called Noteworthy.  And that they truly were. So, as I often do, I created a Noteworthy Pandora channel to se e what Pandora’s algorithm/human chimera would come up with. As with Renaissance painters, the studio didn’t quite live up to the master.  Pandora chose to emphasize the fact that Amazing Grace, a song heard from honky-tonks to carnival midways all over the country, is actually a Christian hymn composed in 1799 by John Newton, a former slave trader turned clergyman.  So the Noteworthy Pandora channel runs with those roots and tosses in a lot of gospel music of uneven quality into the Noteworthy channel, making the channel far less, well, noteworthy.

Yet, sacred music of any persuasion often provides incredible acoustic experiences.  And that makes perfect sense in a Distilled Harmony view of the world.  Distilled Harmony follows string theory to an assertion that the universe is literally made of music.  The vibrations of an uncountable number of strings constitute the music of the spheres. So music aimed at expressing a unity with the overarching harmony of the universe often exceeds the musical norms of the day simply because it aims higher than the expressions of popular music, which often restricts itself to more prosaic topics..

That is not to say that secular songs cannot hit those wonderful heights.  Consider opera - classic Italian opera.  I am always amazed by the transcendent voices, astonished that they can be so perfect.  It helps that my Italian is currently limited to the Rosetta phrase, "Is that the red bicycle?" since those breathtaking arias often translate to something like "Alas, the Toad Prince approaches, we must flee!"  

However, I did have an experience similar to the "Amazing Grace Pandora event" with a secular song.  It was a long time ago, because the clock radio went off.  Old technology, former life.  Anyhow, I suddenly became aware that "Somewhere Over the RainBow” was floating around the room - but it wasn’t the classic old 1939 version that Judy Garland sang in The Wizard of Oz - this was much better.  I know for some of you that is blasphemy - but this really was much better. The artist was Eva Cassidy, a prodigious, yet fragile, vocal talent tragically struck down in 1996 by melanoma when she was in her early 30s. Her channel - unlike Noteworthy’s - remains towards the top my Pandora list.  She drifts from sacred tunes to those prosaic pieces that chronicle the foibles of the human heart.

Not that there is anything wrong with love songs. Far from it. For many, falling in love is indistinguishable from a transcendent spiritual, religious experience. And songs that speak to either event, no doubt, share many characteristics.

Shakespeare, who often gets it right, makes Juliet 13 years old, with Romeo seeming not much older.  Apparently during those emotionally turbulent years ‘twixt 12 and 20 we lay down a storehouse of songs that will remain with us all our lives. Some recent studies indicate that we store music - those 12 to 20 songs included - in their own special part of the brain. In the last few weeks of my older brother’s life - he died of a glioblastoma in the early 1980s - he found conversation quite difficult, but he could sing 1950s rock and roll songs note and letter perfect.

But here is the point of all this: The central premise of distilled harmony is that the universe is both harmonic and sentient. And that the primary objective in our existence is to bring our own chord - manifested in music, thought, word and deed - into harmony with the over arching universal chord.

Thanks in great part to digital technology, we can now surround ourselves with music much of our daily lives, and that music becomes the soundtrack of our broader life. It colors and influences how we think, how we feel, who we are. We should pay close attention to it. It is no more "just music" than hate speech, violent video games and movies are "just talk and games and movies."  Music is even more central to our identity and worldview than those rants and entertainments because we are absorbing music even when we "aren't really listening."  

I wondered why, in some of my meditation music channels, there were gongs seemingly randomly spaced throughout the compositions. One explanation I have since encountered is that the gong is a "Stop. Look. Listen." marker. Attend to what is in the space around you. The physical environment, and the acoustic environment. Really pay attention. I would assert that it is harmful to live your life in a soundtrack that is hateful, chaotic and confrontational - even if it is "only" a speech, a tweet, a song, a movie, or a TV show.

So stop, look, listen.  It is your soundtrack. Make it the one in which you really want to live.

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