H2O - O, Oh My!

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It was very strange. I was walking through the grocery story and passed a “reduced for quick sale” cart. You know, where they take a cart and fill it up with stuff they want to get rid of so they can restock the shelves. I noticed that this cart was half full of bottled water. Further along I noticed waist-high displays of more bottled water being blithely ignored by the patrons off in search of cheese or pasta or frozen pizza, or sundry other items for dinner. The soft drink aisle featured your more tony water options in artsy bottles for 5 or 10 bucks a pop. And what is so strange about that, you ask? Well, you see we had just flown into Chicago the day before from our home in Raleigh, North Carolina - one of the recent and unwilling states that bore the wrath of Hurricane Florence. 

In the days before Florence we had come to think of water very differently.  While it turned out that Raleigh, very much in the middle of the state, was lightly brushed by the storm, our grocery store shelves had been stripped of all forms of bottled water several days before the hurricane made landfall.  As a number of old timers predicted, Florence came ashore as mere shadow of the “storm of the century” much ballyhooed by local and national meteorologists. But then we watched in disbelief as our neighbors along the coast and up the rivers were inundated with rains, storm surges, and flooding of biblical proportions. Cities like Wilmington and New Bern, just “a quick run” down Interstate 40, were cut off from the rest of the world. News reports leaked out of people waiting in long lines for drinking water, of ice being bartered like bitcoins. 

I was nudged ahead by another customer, who I noticed, had purchased a single liter bottle of Evian water.  “Sorry,” I said and headed off to the produce section. Later as I was checking out, I said to the young clerk, “You guys certainly have a lot of bottled water!” 

“Yes, sir,” he replied politely, giving me a look that spoke volumes about letting weird old guys out in grocery stores by themselves. I thought about explaining before I walked out, but there were folks behind me in line. Instead as I hustled out, I opted for a quick prayer for the discomforted and dislocated folks back home who were still in harm’s way. Then I hurried back to our temporary comfortable abode to sip, with a new sense of appreciation and thanks, a simple glass of ice water. 

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This Wormhole We Call Love

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An obvious linguistic misfortune. But that is what happens when you let physicists name some of the most fascinating possibilities of the universe. According to general relativity, they tell us, widely separated pieces of space-time occasionally rub up against each other. This allows a “wormhole” to form which would enable - still theoretically - instant movement between these seemingly vastly distant points in space-time. I love the idea, I hate the name. Let us use “portal" instead. And now let me try to explain why I think that what we call love is just such a portal.

My nighttime meditation ritual combines meditation and Reiki. After arranging my side of the bed for maximum sleeping comfort, I slip on my headphones and select the musical background for my half-hour or so “on-myself Reiki session.”  I use Pandora. Sometimes I go for a purely instrumental playlists, but other times I listen to playlists that include vocals, which are, if we stop and think about it, simply poetry set to music. It is probably no exaggeration to say that more than 95 percent of the songs that pop up on these playlists are love songs. They are poems about finding love, losing love, looking for love, being in love, loving a certain woman, loving a certain man, loving a prophet from a particular faith, loving God, loving your car for crying out loud. You name it and there are love songs to celebrate the relationship.  

This poetic obsession with love always leaves me wondering just what it is we, or they, are talking about.  I mean really, “Love. It’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru?” What am I missing here?  I often think of the quote from the old TV show Family Ties when Alex [Michael J. Fox] struggles to tell his Mom about falling in love with a classmate: “Love, Mom? Gee, I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love. I loved that puppy we got when I was six. But this is completely different.” Are all those love songs about "something completely different?”  I’m not sure.  Songs from the mid-60s will trigger the Alex-like emotions from those heady teenage days when I found myself “in love," for the first time, somewhere I had never been before. But then a John Denver or James Taylor poem can mirror those same emotions in a very non-human context - love of places and spaces.  Sacred music from a variety of faiths can call up a deep feeling of an expansive harmony.  And that is where I usually end up - at the intersection of what we call love, and the world view I call Distilled Harmony. 

Distilled Harmony grows from string theory which posits a universe constructed at its most fundamental level from infinitesimal tiny vibrating strings.  Distilled Harmony, as articulated in my book, The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart, goes on to assert that we are each, molecule, mouse, mountain, Mars, galaxies, suns, black holes, literally made of music, constructed of the billions and billions of tiny vibrating strings demanded by string theory.  It is not a great stretch to assume that what some folks have come to call the music of the spheres, is a shared harmony articulated by the strings that underlie all existence. 

Most faiths and philosophies share a couple of underlying principles that then tend to get lost when the politics of dueling prophets bloody the scene - the whole distasteful "my God is better than your God" absurdity.  Strip that foolishness away you will usually find a couple consistencies. First, there is an individual component - the soul or the self. Second there is a universal component in which the individual component experiences the universal - hears the music of the spheres.  Some belief systems demand that you die before you get to the second phase.  I have never been comfortable with that - nobody is going to convince me to drink the Kool Aid to get to the mothership. 

Distilled Harmony has much more in common with those belief systems that assert that via focused reflection, or meditation, or prayer, or music, or dance, the individual can glimpse - and experience for a while - the universal.  And it is here that love plays a major role.  You see? You thought I’d never get back to love, right? 

Distilled Harmony asserts that we find a state of grace when our own individual chord [the tiny vibrating strings that make up every part of us] sounds in harmony with the omnipresent chord of the universe.  Grace is a state when we are in harmony with the overarching vibrations of the universe - that point where science, faith, and philosophy merge in a single harmonic reality.  As I mentioned above, there are probably a number of routes to that unity.  Oftentimes the path is arduous and time-consuming and the temptation to seek shortcuts beckons a siren song. This gives charlatans of every stripe the opportunity to beguile the unsuspecting with quick fixes - chemical, mystical or military.  Distilled Harmony advocates a better way to glimpse the universal, and it is there in all those poems, in all those love songs. 

Love is the portal that takes us from wherever we are to a state of grace, ignoring all the laws of time and space, the quarrels among conflicting philosophies, faiths and theologies. That is why we write about it over and over in our poetic love songs, why we seek it so, agonize so when we lose it, want so desperately to make it for forever; ’til death do us part, for ever and ever amen.  Would that it were always so.  Love, aka grace, is all around us, all the time, but the “necessities" of life often distract us from experiencing grace.  In the 1989 Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating  says “. . . medicine, law, business, engineering, are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life.  But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” Wise words often overlooked in our currently STEM-obsessed world. 

Love is like a sunrise and a sunset. Awesome, shimmering, but transient, always shifting. We pay it homage through the arts, but those attempts to pin it down it are artifice.  We make our encounters with love more probable, more long-lasting, by the way we live our lives.  It comes as no surprise to you that I advocate that we Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. 

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Oppose Harm

Oppose Harm, the fourth tenet of Distilled Harmony, is often the most difficult to consider, because to do so is to tacitly admit that the three preceding tenets, Foster Harmony. Enable Beauty and Distill Complexity, have failed to establish the desired state of harmonic tranquility. Yet as Edmund Burke put it, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” It is in such times that it is necessary to oppose harm. This is one such time. Political primaries swirl across the country, and if we wish to remain the world’s flagship democracy, we must attend and participate.

I believe that all truly meaningful politics are local.  The mayor, the town council, the school board, these are the people whose decisions have an impact on our daily lives. At least that is the way it used to be.  An often hidden flaw of a two-party system is that when, for either party, party loyalty becomes more important than rational policy, the people suffer.  Donald Trump has taken that flaw of loyalty in politics a step beyond anything we have seen in the last century. Party loyalty has given way to his demands for personal loyalty. “My way or the highway” to put it mildly. Strangely, the Republican Party has pretty much caved on this issue, largely it would seem because the Trump wing of the party controls the money pots. If a Republican candidate wants access to the various deep pockets of the Republican right wing, they must toe the president’s line.

Unfortunately, that now makes most politics national, and makes all but the most independent-minded Republican candidates surrogates for the president.  Still it remains that all politics are personal. I alone remain responsible for my behavior in the voting booth. So before I could consider casting a ballot for one of his local surrogates, I must evaluate President Trump’s performance in office to date through the lens of my personal ethical guide: Distilled Harmony.  You need to do the same. Not necessarily through Distilled Harmony, but through whatever moral and ethical model guides your behavior. Here is how I see it:

Foster Harmony.

This is the first and dominant tenet of Distilled Harmony.  Put simply, we each need to seek, in our professional and personal lives, to create an environment that enables friendship and compassion. You cannot compartmentalize this tenet.  By that I mean you cannot say “I will foster harmony in my personal relationships, but my profession is really competitive, so I need to be thick-skinned and cut throat.”  Nor can you put on the garb of a “fair weather friend” who maintains harmonic relationships when things are going well but shows a very different attitude when times are tough. In reality it is during times of stress and hardship that we come to know, by their compassion and support, our true friends.

Unfortunately, President Trump has, since early in the Republican primaries back in 2015, proved himself the poster child for behavior that stands in direct opposition to Foster Harmony. In public forums, debates, and via his twitter storms, he proves himself time and time again a xenophobic, sexist, racist, abrasive bully. 

The examples are myriad, but perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than in his long-standing, mutually antagonistic, relationship with the late Republican Senator from Arizona, John McCain. During the primaries he called McCain war record into question by asserting: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Then after McCain’s death he communicated to the family, “My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!”  Still, it was not until public protests surfaced that the President ordered the flag at the White House to be returned to half-staff. It had been returned to full staff after the minimum day required after the death for all sitting members of Congress. 

You can’t have it both ways. While “politics as usual,” for this President, might say it is OK to send these conflicting messages, Foster Harmony mandates very different behavior. For each of us, and particularly for the President whose behavior serves as a tacit model for the country of what is acceptable, Foster Harmony is an “at all times and everywhere” mandate. You can’t be Dr. Jekyll one day and Mr. Hyde the next. That is, admittedly, a difficult assignment at which we often fail. Nonetheless, we need to give Harmony our best effort, and certainty, unlike President Trump, avoid serving as a model for the opposite - the sowing of distrust and discord.

Enable Beauty

For most of us this is a personal tenet that is manifested by our personal relationship with the arts. I encourage my students to go to art fairs. I urge them to collect the art they fall in love with even if it strains a young budget. Surrounding yourself with beautiful things creates an environment in which Distilled Harmony naturally thrives. The President of the United States, however has power far beyond our personal efforts. FDR used the office of the President to establish the Works Progress Administration, which provided jobs for hundreds of writers and artists and resulted in classic examples of American architecture, sculpture and painting. President Trump has used the office to propose drastic funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Public Broadcasting— three entities that most directly reflect anything resembling a national policy on art and beauty. So here again, President Trump stands in direct opposition to the tenets of Distilled Harmony.

Distill Complexity 

Some would argue that here, at least, the President lines up favorably with the tenets of Distilled Harmony. But they hang their hats on the President’s simplistic assertions on sweeping issues of public policy. Among those are the President’s assertions that polices that calls for environmental protection, both in the area of global warming and the endangered species act, are based on overly complex if not outright “fake” science. Unfortunately for the President, most reputable scientists disagree with these strange distillations.  Einstein once asserted that unless you could teach a concept to a six-year old, you didn’t really understand it yourself. In my 40-year teaching career, I often struggled with this charge. But I always attempted to overcome my uncertainty by seeking more information from the best, most respected researchers in the field. President Trump chooses instead to seek simplistic input from fringe researchers who already agree with his personal preconceptions. Since his election he has even gone so far to deny government funding to scientists who wish to pursue research that might yield results that would call those preconceptions into question, and actively opposes the publication of such results. 

Einstein asked for the simplification of complex issues that would yield statements of childlike simplicity, understandable to all. Trump has opted for the childish pique of “It is true because I say it is true. And if you disagree I will do everything in my power to keep you from being heard, or, should you be heard, I will disparage your results.”

So, in my analysis President Trump does not simply fail to manifest the tenets of Distilled Harmony, he stands in active opposition to them. He represents a figurehead for a broad position one might call Orchestrated Antagonistic Discord. For me the path to opposing harm at this point in time is to make sure that I take a firm stance against any candidate who presents as a Trump apologist. Then, after eliminating any such candidates, I will return to the notion that all politics are local, and see how the positions of the remaining candidates from either major party, minor parties, or independents measure up to the tenets of Distilled Harmony.

Now it is your turn.  Pull out your own moral and ethical guidelines and compare them to this President’s words and deeds. Consider your local candidates and their declarations to support or confront those words and deeds. Then mark your ballot.