My Personal Thesaurus

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Initially I saw it as a color wheel for words. No doubt versions of it exist both online and on paper. Standard stuff, I imagine, in creative writing courses. Specific guides for writers and poets. A quick glance at Google reveals reams of candidates divided by age, discipline, audience and intent. But there is this problem. When you look at a classic color wheel for example, they all look the same: red across from green, yellow across from purple, blue across from orange. The whole Roy G Biv dominated world that tells us what colors “should” maintain “proper” relationships with other colors. Now go look at a sunset. Hmm. Seems nobody told the sunset about the color wheel. Every color on the wheel, and seemingly many that aren’t quite there, are slap bang up against each other and somehow it just comes out awesome.

I suspect that we would find the same phenomenon at work in the world of writing. The truly creepy world of AI that mimics literary greats or discerns an author from a few pithy snippets notwithstanding, I cling to the belief that the miracle of words on a page mystically link author and reader; that subtext, the heartbeat felt between the lines equals, and sometimes exceeds, exchanges born in the here and now.

To step sideways for a moment, I am currently composing what will be my last syllabus for a communication course at NC State University, where I have taught since 1981. The course is an online course, and in the syllabus I break several rules that have slipped into being for the online environment. Primary among them is the notion that videos should be brief and should not substitute for lectures. Not only are my online videos long - often over an hour - but they blatantly are the lectures. Even more egregious, they are sometimes lectures pulled from previous semesters - a few from years ago. Which brings us back to the motivation for My Personal Thesaurus.

Doing a live lecture to a large class is clearly live theater. Being an undergraduate theater major myself that never bothered me, except for the fact that you carried all those “live theater” anxieties with you when you went off stage. “Damn. I have done that bit on the influence of the Western on early film better.” “Did I make the distinction between Edison and Tesla clear enough?” One of the real benefits of online teaching is that I can, and shamelessly do, go back and pull what I hope were the days I hit a lecture just right, and paste that lecture into the current syllabus. And yes, I do warn the students that they will be seeing a number of “golden oldies,” during the course and that guy with varying haircuts etc., is really just different versions of me.

Back to the Personal Thesaurus; I have been doing what passed, for me, as creative writing for more than 60 years. The earliest publication, as I have mentioned here on the Wall before, was a poem in the school newspaper when I was in either 5th or 6th grade in The American International School in Vienna, Austria circa 1960 or '61. Thing is, I hope I have gotten better since then. But nowadays often when I finish a piece, prose or poetry, and think about sharing it with you here on the Wall I am often beset by those “live theater” anxieties: "I think I said that better before!" "What was that word?"

Ah, yes. "What was that word?” And hence my personal thesaurus. It is not as if I want to go back and steal a “better line” from a previous post - but a better word? Sure! Why not? So, I start this personal thesaurus. The current organizational structure is random. And that is a good thing. Something more structured may evolve, but I think I will resist it. After all I’m not really after a color wheel here - rather, more a sunset.

Harmony

Whippoorwill 

Dappled

Serenity 

Moonlight

Tranquility 

Enlightenment 

Intimacy 

Transcendence 

Gentility

Gentle

Silky

Silken

Enfolded

Thunder

Transfixed

Starlight

Shaded

Soft

Animation

Animated

Drowsy

Dozing

Dream

Dreaming

Dreamy

Smooth
Suspended 

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Weaving a Narrative in Our Personal Spacetime

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Back in the late 1980s communication scholar Walter Fisher gracefully wove together his own and other’s observations into the assertion that “we are the people of the story.” It is a theory that has stood the test of time well in the swirling, competitive arena of communication scholarship where the newest, shiniest perspective tends to garner the “buzz.” For those of you who want to explore the “narrative paradigm” in more detail, look up either Fisher or his intellectual forerunner Kenneth Burke in Google or Google Scholar. Fascinating reading but admittedly sprouting in some pretty tall cotton. After all, they did need to get published.  But in this post, while admitting that some of my rambling can be traced to the works of those to illuminaries, I am going to try to stick close to the third tenet of Distilled Harmony: Distill Complexity.

So here we go.  As we move from infancy to aged, we live one intricate story. Many times it seems that it is a story whose evolving plots and interweaving characters could put Game of Thrones to shame.  But, no, it is really just us.  Occasionally, from some high point or major crossroads in that story, we glance back over our shoulder and see the countless tributaries of our narrative Mississippi twisting and turning through the forests, wheatfields and bayous of our lives until, lo' and behold, there it is, running between our feet. We weave the fabric of that story from our beliefs and behaviors. Our choices. We often explain those choices to ourselves and others through a variety of symbolic narratives - these days often through the Internet, Facebook, emojis, etc., that whole constantly shifting panorama of the digital delta. The dominant foregrounded narrative is what we consider our “real” life.

However that “most obvious” narrative - the Mississippi between our feet - isn’t the “whole story.” Elsewhere here on the Wall I have toyed with the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics. That view of reality asserts that every time we chose a path down the Mississippi, other versions of ourselves floated off up the Ohio, the Arkansas, or somehow even found their way over to the Nile and the Danube. 

Today I am particularly focused on the choices we make when we create narratives that  are admittedly fictional. The often playful narratives that spring from our imaginations - fanciful depictions of other “unlived” stories in our narrative. The would-have-beens, might-have-beens, could-of-beens, should-have-beens, of our narrative river. These imagined narratives are our art. We imagine a whole universe of stories that might have unfolded from the roads not taken. In these artistic imaginings we become the puppet master, deciding the script, motivation, and actions of all the players. We can even create the players themselves, from “whole cloth” as it were.

Of course, there is no “reality” against which those imaginings are measured, so they become their own reality. And as we give them life in any of a variety of forms they become literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, etc. Accepting that multifaceted notion of our personal narrative requires no great intellectual or creative stretch. Two-sides of a coin, mask of tragedy, mask of comedy, bass clef, treble clef - we do that all the time. Real world, world of the imagination; no big deal unless we start to conflate the two allowing our imagined narratives to infringe upon the harder edges of the real world inhabited by others. Wander too far down those paths and the guys with the butterfly nets show up.

But perhaps we should not be quite so hasty. The many worlds version of quantum mechanics would seem to allow for just such a conflation of the “real” and the “imagined.” According to my, no doubt incomplete, understanding of this aspect of quantum mechanics, our choices in the “real” world do determine the immediate course of our existential Mississippi, but they not simultaneously render the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Nile, etc., fictitious. Those “rivers not taken” continue to flow along carrying alternative versions of ourselves into alternative futures nestled within our personal spacetime.

Hence it occurs to me that our personal "quantum narrative" is a tapestry woven from all the lived, and the imagined narratives that reside in our spacetime, including those narratives that are the ‘unchosen siblings’ of those other lived and imagined narratives.

All of which brings me to this assertion, which may well form the opening of another, even stranger Wall post:

Spacetime can be envisioned as a onion of infinite narrative layers each part of which is contiguous with every other part. And, it would seem to follow that that which we define generally as “enlightenment" is the ability to sense, and/or make sense of, those contiguous points.   

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Prayerful Profanity

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We have always had a complicated relationship with profanity. Consider early cartoons. A character would drop an anvil on his or her foot, and a text bubble appears overhead: “#**!!&#!” The message is clear, the character is swearing, but you, gentle reader, must be protected from the actual words. “Oh, my gosh and golly!” or even “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!”  

This semantic pussyfooting stems from the fact that not all profanity is the same. In fact, I would assert that it is a rather large genre of human expression. Unfortunately, we have all been exposed to what I think of as “casual profanity” f* this and f*in'  that, or that SOB and those SOBs did this or that. Long ago a dear friend suggested that “casual profanity” stemmed either from linguistic laziness when one lacked the intellectual drive to consider a more specific bon mote, or worse, was an indication that one’s vocabulary was itself insufficient to the task of expressing elegant negativity. I have come to agree.  

Additionally, there is “affiliative profanity.” This type of profanity draws upon the same lexicon, but employs it to express affiliation, belonging to an admired group. It is most common among young adolescents and their older brothers and sisters attempting to demonstrate the current version of what was once defined as “cool” or “in” or, to reach back even further, “hip.” It is also quite common among performing artists attempting to market their own version of “cool-in-hip” to a market increasing dominated by the aforementioned youngsters.  And it spirals from performer to audience and back again. Sort of a linguistic carousel. 

But, I would like to propose a third major category of profanity, and this one strays a bit beyond the more common varieties: “prayerful profanity.” Just play along with me for a minute. Say you are approaching a sharp bend in a rural two-lane highway and as you round the bend - whoa! there is a huge truck passing another car and coming straight at you! It swerves back into its own lane seconds before hitting you head on! Or perhaps you are crossing a busy intersection, and your friend grabs your arm, jerking you back just in time to keep you from being pancaked by a city bus. The exhortations that escape you in those situations, moments when you truly believe you just cheated death, may indeed be those drawn from the vocabulary of both casual and affiliative profanity. However they may also include phrases from what I call “prayerful profanity,” or what others might call “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” 

Consider this; in those life-or-death situations we are doing anything but “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” We have never been more intensely prayerful, never more truly hopeful that we are not taking the Lord’s name in vain, but rather are seriously seeking some kind of immediate divine intervention. I’m not really sure where I am going with this, maybe just re-emphasizing the old saw that there are no atheists in foxholes. But maybe it goes a bit further, maybe I am suggesting that those “spontaneous spiritual exhortations” are not really profane, but instead possibly sacred. I read Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and The Profane when a young undergraduate and while my recollections have no doubt faded over the years, I don’t think he would object to my asserting that there is far more than just a seeming oxymoron in the notion of “prayerful profanity.” Perhaps such prayerful profanity is actually a window to spirituality, a moment of insight that can be further explored as an avenue to the sacred. To steal a concept from theoretical physics, maybe prayerful profanity is a kind of “wormhole” between the sacred and the profane. Something we might want to consider after our roadside near death experience - once our heart rate returns to something approaching normal. 

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Breaking Free From Fairy Tales

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There used to be a TV show called Fractured Fairy Tales. It was part of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, which aired between 1959 and 1964. Fractured Fairy Tales featured “re-tellings” of classic fairy tales that confronted some of the questionable assertions contained in those timeless narratives. We are only now beginning to fully realize the impact of those classic tales which condemned generations of men to combat in the forest outside the castle, while shackling women to the drudgery within. But the task is not yet complete. Consider this possible ending to a seemingly sanitized tale:

“So, the self-identified prince and the princess drew their nano-quantum powered light sabers and removed all the dead wood from the environmentally managed forest, and used it to build a wind and solar powered castle in which they lived happily ever after.”

Better, but still needs our attention. You see, the last phrase will never come to be because living happily ever after is an emotional impossibility. Wait, wait, least you think I am a misanthropic frog with no hope of a kiss from well-meaning princess, I am open to this slight editing of the sentence: 

Princess, prince, light sabers, forest, wind power, yadda, yadda, OK here we go, here is the edit: “in which they lived contentedly ever after.” Contentedly ever after, there is a concept we can work with.

The problem with “happily ever after” is at least two-fold. First, in “happily ever after world” or HEAW, how would you even know you were happy? Happy is a comparative emotional state that we can only recognize when we compare it to “unhappy” or, heaven forbid, “sad.” Second, once we realize that there are other emotional categories, HEAW, requires that one lives constantly at the top end of the scale. Whoa, that seems exhausting, like living life in some sort of perpetual “river dance” frantically beating our feet across the floor to traditional Irish music with a huge Gaelic grin on our faces. Furthermore, HEAW seems existentially questionable, like the assertion from Lake Woebegone, that “all the children are above average.” Is it really possible, without brain surgery or powerful drugs, to be continually, unceasingly happy? Somehow I don’t think so.

Now, living contentedly ever after is a horse of a different color. Maybe even a Pinto, yeah, I like Pintos. Gorgeous creatures. OK, living contentedly ever after is a Pinto. First of all, and most importantly, contentment isn’t really an emotion, it is a state of mind, an attitude that we control. A wise friend once pointed out to me that we really have little control over the slings and arrows that life tosses our way, but we do control our reaction to those insults. Combine that notion with Niebuhr’s serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” and we are well on the way to contentment. 

As we live any kind of normal life, we are going to encounter events and individuals who make us sad, even angry. If we eschew mandated happiness and instead take Niebuhr’s advice we can walk away from those inevitable encounters, perhaps not happy, but serene - and I am content with that. You should be too, especially during those moments when you realize , “Hey, This isn’t really ‘Happily Ever After.’"

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The World Behind My Eyelids

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They spool out like reels 

From a summer film festival.

Comedies, romances, mysteries

Thrillers, adventures, docudramas,

And the occasional campy horror flick.

They startle me awake.

I catch my breath.

Pulse settles back

To what passes for normal,

And the sights and sounds recede.

When, in nap, or night, or meditation 

They flicker once again to life,

These Hi-Def vistas behind my eyelids,

I know that they are not “real.”

But then again what is?

When starring in these private movies,

I laugh, I cry, I bleed,

I rejoice, I despair 

Occasionally with people

That I recognize -

Other times with apparent strangers

Who seem nonetheless 

Somehow intimate.

What is the searing difference,

I ask, between these worlds?

One is dominated by trivial realities.

Should I drive that far? 

Should I cut my hair?

Was the meeting today? 

Do I really care?

The other swaps mundane for sublime.

Can I fly that high? 

Swim that far? 

Scale that mountain?

Touch that star?

Both worlds are constructed

In the mystery of my mind.

A shifting set of stimuli,

The neurons do engage,

To swirl mind and body

From ecstasy to rage,

From lethargy to energy,

From love through ennui 

The nerve ends do determine 

Each clear reality.

So which one is the real reel?

Do I awake from each

Convinced the world 

Around me marks the center of my life.

While other “me-s” awaken,

In another place and time

Convinced that they’re 

The “real deal” 

And the world just dreamed

Is mine? 

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You're Not The Boss of Me -- Anymore

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“You’re not the boss of me!” It was certainly not a declaration I heard in my childhood. And just as certainly it was not a phrase or concept that we taught our children. Yet both seem to be relatively common in today’s world. It can be encountered when you come across a child - oh, say somewhere north of 4 but not yet ten - engaged in a questionable activity like playing “dodge ‘em” on the freeway, or setting fire to the neighbor’s cat.

“Hey!” you say, “Cut that out!”

The little darling, or mini-mafioso, places his or her hands on hips, glares at you and declares, “You’re not the boss of me!” Or the slightly more expanded version, “You’re not my parent, so I don’t have to do what you say!” Realizing that in the current permissive society you could wind up behind bars for swatting the brat on the butt, you refrain from doing so since the mini-mafioso might well be being encouraged by parents of the maxi-mafioso variety whose understanding of “Stand your Ground” might extend to “Kill the cat that pees on the begonias.” Besides, you know you are supposed to get down on brat level, look same in the eyes, and say something like: 

“Use your big words and your indoor voice and tell me why you want to kill the nice kitty.” 

I’m not really sure when or how this enabling of childhood incivility began. I assume it was initially a well-intentioned response to the archaic notion of “spare the rod and spoil the child.” But as is often the case, well-intentioned policies can have unintended results. One such result of the “You’re not the boss of me” meme is the implication that the “boss” is entitled to tell us what to do; the “my way or the highway”- the MYOTH - style of organization or management.  

So it is not unreasonable to follow this “MWOTH” notion into a strategy in adolescence and adult life where one seeks to become the BOSS, the one who gets to tell everyone else what to do.  “Success" comes to mean acquiring power. It is a mindset in direct opposition to the first and dominant tenet of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony.

We see the negative effects of MYOTH all around us. On one level it doesn’t really matter if you are CEO of a major corporation, the president of a university, President of the PTSA, or President of the USA - power corrupts, and as the 1st Baron Acton put it “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Hence it is disheartening to realize that the path to success in contemporary culture can also be the path to corruption. There is, no doubt, a world of possible discussion there: Is it possible to rise to power in an organization or a nation and remain free of corruption? Is the current MeToo! movement a confrontation of power or an accumulation of power by new group equally at risk of corruption? Interesting issues, but not where I want to go right now.

I started this post with an observation of children. I would like to close it with an exploration of their grandparents, or of people at least old enough to be grandparents. Here is the paradox: seniors, as we now call old people - and among whom, at a few days shy of 71, I strangely find myself - have a nuanced view of “bosses” and MYOTH. We have either been bosses or have had a lifetime of watching other bosses do it wrong. Completing the paradox, at least for those of us who are retired - or again like myself, just a few months shy of that state - we no longer have anyone to boss. “My Way” no longer commands a view of “The Highway.” So we try to boss each other.

Eavesdrop on a table of seniors, or listen to the conversations around you if you are “of a certain age.” It is a silver-haired debating society. Each of them - or each of us - is busy advocating a specific approach to the issue at hand, whether it be the President of the USA, or the President of the Condo Board, the best diet to control diabetes, or the best way to combat roaches seeking indoor shelter in the winter months - each speaker has “truth.” It is not that any of the various “truths" presented are necessarily data free or “wrong.” But they are truths constructed from the memoirs I defined in the previous post.  “Truths distilled and constructed from experience remembered,” truths that “when I was boss” could simply be stated to “those of whom we were boss” and were then accepted. But now we boss no one and are bossed by no one. So the “debate” is usually “won” by the person who can talk uninterruptedly and at a vocal level that simply overwhelms the competition. It is a form of interaction that is often depressing and rarely reaches a productive conclusion.

It is also a form of interaction that is, as mentioned earlier in this post, in direct conflict with the first tenet of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony. It is relatively easy to rail against the “ignorant other.” It is more difficult to try to understand how the “other" came to possess a version of the truth that, to you, is obvious lunacy. More difficult still is the ability to see past this particular area of disagreement to Harmony.

One option is to focus on the notion of the musical chord - since that is the fundamental element upon which Foster Harmony rests. I find it helpful to consider an orchestra or a choir. As an audience member, regardless of our own expertise, we usually know when something sounds “right” and when it doesn’t. A soft violin passage is interrupted by a clash of brass. The discordancy may be intentional, but it is nonetheless discordant. And, of course, there is the ultimately discordant moment when an instrument or voice pops in fortissimo, but just a couple of beats too soon. A meeting of the silver-haired debating society, or any conversation that turns competitive for that matter, can be seen as a musical composition. To defuse the various discordant attempts to become “boss”of the interaction we need to make a conscious effort to bring harmonious notes to the conversation. Rather than jumping in to “correct" another voice, or to demonstrate how we had an even better example of the issue under consideration, we should try, “That’s fascinating. What happened then?” or “That’s right! I had a similar experience, but not quite that powerful.” We don’t need to always play the solo. Often the chord becomes richer, the path to Harmony smoother, when instead we become a contributing voice in the chorus.

 Additionally, I sometimes find it helpful to look to the second tenet: Enable Beauty. This, like surrendering the solo to become a voice in the chorus, also requires that we try to get over ourselves, and swallow that stinging retort we just know will bring them to their knees and say, instead, something like: "Has anyone seen the new movie, book, exhibit, etc., at the wherever? I hear it is fascinating.” OK, it is a blatant attempt to change the subject and steer the conversational ship into the welcoming harbor of the aesthetics that underlie Harmony.  Your table mates may well recognize it as such. But there is usually a positive reason that you all have gathered together at this place and time, and you may all be willing - even desirous - to leave acrimony behind.

In the name of full disclosure I must admit that I often find it difficult to follow the advice in this post. But I have an excuse. I have been a college professor for almost 50 years. It was my job to sing the solo part. These days it has become more fashionable to be “the guide at the side,” rather than “the sage on the stage.” That makes for a neat lyric, but I have problems with it - largely because I have spent the last decade or so teaching new undergraduates, often in their first college class. They are utterly unprepared to share the solo line. Many of them cannot even read music. So I have grown used to the necessity of singing solo to that particular audience. But as I come to spend more time with my peers, who are often completely, and rightly, unaware of, and unimpressed by, my academic credentials, I too, need to get over myself, and work on becoming more adept at becoming a contributing choral voice in eight-part Harmony.

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The 3Ms of Meaning

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I am often fascinated by the paths we take to our perception of “truth.” For example, I had my hair cut the other day by a young woman whose accent implied that she was from “somewhere else.” I inquired - perhaps politically incorrectly - where she was from. “Ukraine.” she replied. 

Naturally, I asked what she thought of the current brouhaha. “Ah,” she said, “Is all fault of Ukrainian president.” And then launched into a lengthy analogy about what one should do if you saw someone climbing up a ladder into your neighbor’s daughter’s bedroom several times each week. I had no idea what she was talking about, but she had scissors in her hand at the time, and was waving them around my head. So I remained mum. Her insights, it sadly became evident, did not translate to much facility in cutting hair. But I was intrigued with the fervor with which her analogy reflected, to her at least, an obvious path to the “truth” of a complex situation. The more I thought about it, the more I came to consider that, despite the varying way-stations along the route, our path to truth seems to traverse a common countryside. I now think of that path as the 3Ms of meaning. Let me share. 

The first M is “moment.” Meaning has to start somewhere, and I think for us big-brained apes that somewhere is an experiential moment. Something happens to us that is of such import that we stash it away somewhere up in those billions of cells between our ears. Think of it as a still photo. And, like many of the still photos in the dusty photo albums in our closets, or in the “photos” file on our phone, tablet or computer, that may well be the end of it. But occasionally something - a conversation, a movie, a similar instance, jogs the grey matter, and out pops that photo, and that leads us to the second M: Memory. 

Memory is unique. My wife can remember, it seems to me, every meal she has ever eaten, who was present, what they had to eat, how it was prepared and if each person liked their meal. For me, I assume that I usually have somewhere between 2 and 5 meals a day - and have done so most of my life. However, if pressed, yes, I can remember the bistecca alla fiorentina we had in Florence, in the Spring of 2000 something - “Ah, yes, I remember it well.” On the other hand I really do remember the tune and most of the lyrics to every top-40s hits from 1957, when my big brother was a teenager. So, memory is unique and certainly not infallible. In our photographic analogy, memory is like those little videos everyone now shoots on their phones. Little fragments of the past, moments digitally strung together, but still not “the whole thing.” We construct the whole thing. And the “whole thing” that we create is not so much an accurate reconstruction of the reality we lived as it is the “truth” we cobble together from moment and memory. It is the third M: Memoir. 

Memoir is one of the building blocks of our truth.  It is our life remembered, and, to certain extent reconstructed. Unless you are among that small population of folks blessed, or cursed, with a photographic or eidetic memory, we forget far more than we remember. And that is probably a good thing. We grow, we change, we evolve.  It is most likely not healthy to constantly remember a previous version of ourself that is at odds with the person we are now, or hope to be in the future. 

This notion of a “truth” and an “identity” largely based on these evolving and flexible memoirs has always fascinated me.  Most interesting is the implication that we are different, or at least differing, people at 6, 16, 60, 86, 106, etc., as our evolving memoirs construct evolving versions of truth and reality. Long time readers of these posts may sense a potential conflict here with the notion of “chord theory,” the variation of string theory upon which Distilled Harmony is based. Very, very basically, chord theory asserts that at the final, irreducible, physical level, we are uniquely constructed of tiny vibrating strings. Vibrating strings produce musical notes, hence, we are made of music. Furthermore, that unique music, that “chord” is the purest definition of the “self.” The potential conflict could arise with the evolving memoir’s impact on the self, and hence potentially upon the chord which is a physical construction. I resolve that possible conflict by remembering that memoir is a constructed reality. We use both moment and memory to construct memoir. It is the chord that guides that construction, which provides a fundamental consistency to the differing realities - differing selves - that we construct from 6 to 106.  

That assertion puts to rest a lingering concern I have always had regarding our evolving identity and mortality.  I am less comfortable with some of my past identities than the current version. Yet, neither am I content to define the current version as the final form. Both situations raise the uncomfortable question of “the interrupted self.” What happens to these evolving memoirs and their codependent versions of the self when we die? I find comfort in the following points:

The chord is constant and utterly unique to you. Like our DNA, which is itself built on the strings that express the chord, the chord may be subject to some evolutionary shifts, but those would be minor and consistent with the dominant tonality of the chord. So every expression of the chord in our lives, no matter how immature, retains the legitimate core of the chord, so death, “the interrupted self” is not the end of the story, particularly when you consider:

This life is only the most current expression of your chord. Distilled Harmony always cycles around to the notion that one lifetime is insufficient to the task of becoming a fully evolved entity. So, obviously, we must experience more than one lifetime. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Which segues neatly into another reoccurring Distilled Harmony meme (a word I swore to resist - but sometimes it just works): That which we call enlightenment, or nirvana, or inner peace, or ultimate oneness, or whatever, is that state of existence when we become aware of our previous existences and the truths, selves, identities, lessons, accumulated in those lives.

And, if we want to get really strange, in a “many worlds” view of existence it seems likely that we only die in one world at a time, hence our “self” and “identity” continue to evolve in those other worlds. And perhaps true enlightenment occurs when we come to realize that the many worlds are not really divergent, but are rather “covergent” paths leading .  .  .  well, somewhere. 

So, in any case, the 3Ms of meaning provide me with a seemingly never-ending supply of interesting “what ifs” to consider when sleep eludes me in the tiny hours of morning. Occasionally, I think I stumble upon meanings. Occasionally, I remember to write them down.

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Schrag Wall: Uncle Ben in a "Big Car"

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OK, this is a "full disclosure" post from my "Legacy" series of drawings.  The original photo remains unchanged.  Here it is:

I had always believed that this was a picture of my mother in one of her father's taxis - he ran a cab company. I posted the image with that description. Not too long after, my sister Margaret - the family archivist - contacted me to say she wasn't sure of the image or its provenance. So she began to search through her archives.

Eventually in one of Mom's journals she found the original image with this caption:

"Bennie in a really BIG CAR.

1917"

So the picture is obviously of her brother Benjamin, who died young, before she married and naturally before I or any of my siblings were born. The provenance of the car remains a mystery. One of the family taxis remains logical, but year, make and model all remain mysteries. Obviously, some type of touring car manufactured in 1917 or earlier. A friend pointed out that the valve on top of the radiator might be a diesel escape valve. The multiple intake valves on the side of the hood might also might point in that direction. But still a mystery.

I will admit that none of those issues concerned me during the 4 million hours - OK, maybe only 2 million - I spent creating the Legacy image below. Finished mere minutes ago :-)!

The image is 9.5 x 15 inches. The color is the result of several types of markers on heavy water color paper.

Enjoy!

The Human Singularity in Many Worlds - Or The Body Entangled

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It is like seeing a landscape through a fog. You can make out shapes and perhaps movement, but nothing is quite clear. Then a breeze sweeps away the mist, and you now see things in a different light. Isolated insights weave together in a pattern that may still be fragmented, but is somehow better, more complete than what you had before. I had one such moment when Google recently announced, but then recanted, a claim that it had achieved “quantum supremacy.” At first I thought it meant that Google had released a new Jason Bourne film - anything would better than the last one. But after reading a number of articles on quantum supremacy, I realized that that was not the case.  However, it also became clear that it would take a long time for me to understand the marriage of quantum mechanics and computer science that such supremacy would represent. However, since the claim quickly dissolved into a kind of Internet “Oops,” I wasn’t overly concerned. I’ll worry about it a bit more once we see a “We really mean it this time!” post.

What did happen, though, was that a number of previous, semi-connected “quantum-esque” musings came together in ways, that while probably still incomplete, seemed a tad clearer than before. Let me try to share them and hopefully retain at least a bit of that clarity. Let’s start with the “many worlds theory.” In this version of quantum mechanics there is no such thing as the path not taken. When we make an important decision - when path A is chosen, paths B, C, D, etc., - the other decisions we could have made - are also simultaneously taken, but those decisions play out in different worlds, in different - or at least somewhat hidden - universes. OK, hold on to that for a moment and let’s jump to the “human singularity.”

In the Big Bang theory of the universe, before the big bang itself, all matter, space-time, the whole enchilada, was compressed into an infinitely tiny small point - a physical singularity. Then quantum fluctuations within the singularity caused the Big Bang throwing all the contents of the singularity out into an inflation that, in an incredibly minuscule blink of time, resulted in the humongous universe in which we exist and can observe.

OK, trudging on to yet another quantum condition - entanglement. This is the one that Einstein initially resisted but later accepted and defined as “spooky action at a distance.” Wikipedia defines it thus: 

“Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.”

To simplify, particles that are “entangled” react to any stimulus identically and instantaneously regardless of their degree of separation - inches, miles, light years, makes no difference. Do something to one of a pair or group of entangled particles and the other entangled elements react identically and instantaneously regardless of their degree of separation. Thus, entangled particles seem to toss information back and forth playing fast and loose with the speed of light and other cosmic niceties. No wonder Einstein found it “spooky.”

I haven’t run across any sources that assert that the contents of the original physical singularity which inflated into the universe we know were entangled, but they certainly shared “intense spatial proximity” in the original singularity. So I wouldn’t be surprised at all to read that someone had discovered evidence that the entire universe is entangled. If that pops up, remember you heard it here first! Or drop me a note and let me know where you read about it years ago.

Anyhow, I don’t want to focus on the possible entanglement of the physical universe. Well, not directly anyhow. I am more interested in the possibilities of what I think of as the human singularity.  Let me jump back almost 20 years to the original publication of The God Chord. Stealing from string theory, I asserted in that work that we were literally made of music. That our own unique Chord was the result of the vibration of the strings that formed the smallest unique divisions of each replicated particle in our bodies.  Now, these couple of decades later, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to posit that all these tiny harmonic particles in our body are “generated, interact, or share spatial proximity” in such a way as to be entangled. After all, the particles were generated together, constantly interact, and share the spatial proximity of our body. Seems a strong argument for “the body entangled.” There are obviously tempting possible paths here for medicine, genetics, science and physics here. But that is not the path that intrigues me. I am more interested in the metaphysical spin implied by these entanglements.

Let us assume that we are composed of entangled particles. Let us further suppose that the many worlds theory - or the multiverses theory - is right. So that when we make specific life choices that lead us down path A, entangled versions of our selves simultaneously head off down paths B, C, D, etc.  I am willing to admit that that is strange. But not nearly as strange as this: if we are entangled with those other versions of ourselves shouldn’t we - at some level - be experiencing elements of the lives of those alternative choices? Down paths B, C, D, etc.?

What happens when we choose a major, a career, a partner? In a many worlds reality we simultaneously chose a different major, a different career, a different partner. When we marry “many worlds” with “entanglement” we simultaneously make all those different choices and entangled versions of our self are living those different lives in different worlds in different universes. 

My most intense curiosity at the moment focuses on possible evidence of being able to sense - via entanglement -  what is going on in my “other lives in other worlds.” Those entangled harmonic worlds I created by not choosing them.  Do I experience them through dreams, sleeping or waking? Visions? Trances? Prayer? Creative impulses and works? Meditation? What are those intensely “real seeming” experiences that feature precious people in alien situations, or hyper-realistic dreams of familiar situations inhabited by strangers? 

I said that I consider these musings to live more in the realm of metaphysics than traditional or classical physics. But that may well be a spurious distinction. If one world yields up its secrets to the probing of physics, might that choice in itself give rise to other entangled worlds governed by “spookier” paths to understanding? An alternate type of physics? metaphysics? philosophies? Why not? After all, Halloween is just around the corner!

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Me and Mikey Angelo

In my last post I introduced you to my notion of The Three Ps: Poetry, Prose and Painting. They are not new companions. I have been dabbling with them for as long as I can remember. Well, that is a bad yardstick. It puts me in mind of situations when I am required to correct a young student’s effort at say, punctuation or footnote format and they respond “But I’ve done it that way all my life!” I usually refrain from inquiring “And just how long is that?” So, in this instance it would be more accurate to say that I have been fiddling around with poetry, prose and painting for far longer than I can remember, and I will trust in your good manners not to inquire “And just how long is that?” Which would force me to ask you to repeat the question.

I do remember having a poem published in the school yearbook when I was in 5th grade in The American International School in Vienna, Austria. So about 1960. I remember the final lines went something like, 

“Did the wolf eat the moon? 

That chapter’s not written.

Can’t say, it’s too soon!”

I have no idea what great conflict preceded that dire conclusion, and unless my sister Margaret - the family archivist - saved that particular yearbook, that is one of those literary inquiries destined to go unanswered. The same is true, no doubt of my early efforts in prose which I’m sure were created in response to such timeless impulses as “Write a paragraph about what you did on your summer vacation.” or “Write a description of your favorite pet.” No doubt that since those assignments were given after the invention of both the magnet and refrigerators, that was the publication route for those early epistles. Around the same time as the perhaps sadly lost “Wolf and the Moon” poem I must have expressed a interest in drawing, because my parents hired a young woman to give me drawing lessons. Well, that’s not exactly true. More accurately they hired a young woman to paint a portrait of my sister. Perhaps as a Christmas present? I seem to recall a branch of a Christmas tree in the background. My drawing lessons may have been an afterthought. The portrait, I assume, resides in Muse Schrag out in North Barrington, Illinois. Alas, no records exist of my own artistic work from that era.

So the intent of this post is to bring you up to date on my current efforts in the Three Ps. We can leave poetry and prose alone since The Wall contains examples enough for a very large book. One I am actually attempting to compile, a task I am discovering is somewhat Herculean in nature. But then Dad lived to be 100, perhaps there is time enough.

So, right now I am focusing on a series of images tentatively called Legacy. They are the result of a multi-step process. The first step in the process is a photograph. With the exception of the one taken of my mother when she was maybe five years old, they are all mine. The second step is to pull the photo into Photoshop where I add a layer to the image and trace the portion of the image that will contain the colored portion of the final image. Third, I “erase” the major spaces that will be colored. Fourth, I put a white layer behind the other layers and print out the image. Fifth, I draw designs in the “empty spaces, and sixth, I color the designs.

I have had folks ask me “How long does that take?” My glib response is “Don’t ask.” But a little more seriously is it quite time consuming - one of those 3 P tasks requiring hours of uninterrupted time I mentioned in the previous post. But there is also a trick. You never consider the whole task at once. Consider Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. If you google “how many square feet are there in the Sistine chapel ceiling?” You will get a number of responses - well, you will get a number of websites, but only 2 responses: 5,000 sq. ft. or 12,000 sq. ft. I have no idea why only those two answers pop up. I assume there are a couple of seemingly credible sources out there that all the others are cribbing from. No matter. Either number is an intimidating number of square feet to paint, even with a roller!

I have no doubt that when Mikey came to work and clambered up the scaffolding he did NOT say to himself “Well, I better get cracking. Got to crank out a couple hundred square feet of mural before the Pope sticks his big nose in here.” Tho’ Mikey and I are not quite as close as I imply - all those centuries and stuff - I am pretty sure he began each day with a particularly artistic objective in mind. It would have been more like, “I’m going to get those damn hands right today if it kills me!” That “focus on one thing at a time” concept is no doubt the only thing the Legacy images have in common with Mikey’s ceiling. You color one particular section - a wheel, a spoke, some one thing - at a time and over the course of an indeterminate time - Ta Da! It’s finished! Well, almost, just a couple more dots .  .  .

But writing about the process is probably not the best way to go. Let me show a couple examples.

This is a photograph that I took of some old farm equipment that my Dad and his brothers used as youngsters growing up on the family farm. My cousin Dean has rescued much of that machinery, and, last I knew he still has them on his farm in South Dakota.

I hadn’t planned on saving the interim steps so this stage of the image has been both Photoshopped and hand-drawn and painted with portions erased so they can be colored, and some of the white spaces colored in.

And this is the final version. It is 8.5 x 11 inches.

This series of images gives you a bit more complete view of the process. The original image has a couple mysteries attached to it. I have always believed it to be my mother “driving” one of the Taxi’s from her father’s cab company. My sister - who was not sure of the photo’s provenance - thought it might be Mom’s brother Benn. But the image seems to be clearly a young girl of 4 or 5 years of age. The vehicle itself appears to be a Ford from the early 30s. Anyhow this is the seminal image for this study.

This is the image with the darker lines drawn in - in Photoshop - and the blank spaces whited out in preparation for drawing.

And this is the current state of the drawing.  It is 9.5x15 inches.  From here I think I will either move to the rear tire and fender or the space below the windshield. Mikey and I will talk it over and let you know!

Poetry, Prose and Painting

These days education seems to be all about STEM: science, technology, engineering and math. Kids tap and swipe on a variety of dancing screens, stumbling, it seems, past the world they live in and the people they live with, focused on other places and faces. Back in the day it was the “3 Rs - reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic.” Slates, then blackboards and ruled yellow tablets with yellow #2 pencils and pink erasers captured penmanship, vocabulary tests, multiplication tables and decimal equivalents.   

The tools designed to enable and manifest human intellect and creativity are constantly evolving. Indeed, come January, I will teach my last class at NC State. It will focus on that very notion of how - from the crude symbols scratched millennia ago at the ever more receding dawn of “humanity” to this week’s new phone, app or “smart appliance” - we strive for new ways to enhance human interaction. It is a tad ironic that the course, dealing with the nuances of human communication, will be conducted entirely online, across a variety of screens. But I digress - no surprise there. 

The point is that now, after 40 some years in the classroom - and on computer screens - I am drawn to a new model for my personal “manifestation of human intellect and creativity.” I call it The 3 Ps.” Poetry, Prose and Painting. 

We tell our children, and were no doubt told by our parents that “You can be whatever you want to be. Follow your dreams!” However, as we go through the formal education process it soon becomes clear that instead of that being an ever-broadening road exploring more and more options in existence, we are actually funneled through a series of choices that require us to focus ever more tightly on a particular area of interest, a particular vocation; on making our reputation and enhancing our income via a tightly focused specialization. In the academy that specialization spiral increasingly reflects a Pygmalion-like inclination to facilitate the hatching of a new generation of academics remarkably similar to ourselves. Oops, another digression. 

The point is that this web of specialization inclines us to trust our hobbies or avocations to provide a more Renaissance experience among the wonders that surround us. The 3 Ps reverse that track, encouraging us to shake off the rust and see, savor and create in that all encompassing “everything is possible” world that we were promised as children but that somehow slipped away. 

This inclination of the senior cohort to “re-experience life” has not gone unnoticed by the leisure industry. Cruises, lecture series, hiking vacations for the “mature set” abound, and no doubt provide excellent profits for those purveyors of silver from the silver-haired. I don’t know why I find the idea a touch creepy - but I do. Maybe I just don’t like being part of a “targeted demographic.” Instead I find myself increasingly drawn to the avocations for which I stole time while locked in the demands of the specialization spiral. Don’t get me wrong, the life of a tenured university professor is a wonderful life. I know of none other that offers more freedom to think, create, and reflect. It is sort of like being one of the Medici, but without the money or the power, and with an obligation to publish within the shifting confines of your discipline. So I see my “almost here” retirement as a liberating opportunity to truly think, reflect and create; hence the 3 Ps. 

I do, however, need to point out that the 3 Ps, are not easy task masters. Pick any of the three, and you quickly discover that each requires significant effort and long stretches - hours, not fractions thereof - of uninterrupted concentration and reflection. Finding that kind of time - even in a retired world - is incredibly difficult. That is particularly true because it often appears to others that the “3 P involved individual” is doing nothing at all, or at the least isn’t doing anything that cannot be interrupted or put off. So you can see why those AARP and Smithsonian cruises, tightly scheduled to fill the days, are the antithesis of a 3 P lifestyle: 

“Ready for the breakfast buffet? 

“No.” 

“How about a tour of the cathedral?” 

“No.” 

“Yoga?” 

“No.” 

“Lecture on the structure of black holes?” 

“No.” 

“Water aerobics?” 

“No.” 

“Antique shopping spree? 

“No." 

“Would you like me to leave?” 

“Yes.” 

“Close the door?” 

“Please.” 

So this, bit by bit, day by day, is becoming my life: the 3 Ps.  A blank screen, a clean sheet of paper, a rainbow of paints or markers, music lilting in the background magically creates a mysterious, ideally timeless, world of creative potential; words and rhymes, images and lines. Everything lies beneath my fingers, and once again, like the first day of school, anything is possible. 

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Napping in the Guest Room

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Napping in the guest room is akin to taking a vacation, like hanging a sign on your door that says “Gone Fishin’.” It is not the nicest room in the house. We have spent more time and resources on just about every other room. But is a perfectly acceptable room. Nice lighting, good view of the McMansions and the golf course across the street. Comfy bed, just a step away from a full bath. It would make for a great B&B. But perhaps more than any other room in the house, it doesn’t say much about us. And maybe that is why I sometimes choose to nap there.

A nap is not simply catching up on sleep. The parents of any infant or toddler can tell you that. Napping is a transformative activity. It is closer kin to meditation than to actual full on nighttime snoozing. Done properly a nap refreshes the soul, allows a smile to come more easily, paints the world in brighter, happier colors, restores our rose-colored glasses that can easily be knocked askew by the hurly-burly of everyday. 

But we ignore the notion of “done properly” at our peril. “Hurry up and take your nap!” is an invitation to disaster - again consult anyone tasked with the care of young children, or, I now realize, the partner of any truly committed napper. Napping cannot be hurried, and even done properly, is easily disrupted.

One of the primary characteristics that my napping shares with my form of meditation is what I call clearing the screen. Despite my ongoing love affair with words, I am a very visual person.  Closing my eyes has little to do “making it dark.” Rather it simply raises the curtain on my inner world. Inevitably that stage is at least partially populated by the issues and individuals lurking on the other side of my eyelids. Hence the need to clear the screen.

I do this with music. Sleep specialists are probably tearing their hair out - but tough, it is my nap. So I play music - most often classical, exclusively instrumental or sung in a language I do not understand. As the music plays I consciously turn the screen behind my eyelids white. I try to hold that for a bit - but then, little by little I begin to paint the scene. Most often they are tranquil naturescapes, forest glades, seashores, mountains, quiet cabins on placid lakes, meadows streaked with golden sunlight, knee-high grasses waving in a gentle breeze, snow falling through a moonlit clearing. You get the idea. And it is when people stroll into my images and begin to speak that, on some level, I know that I am asleep.

These are very real constructions for me, but they are, unfortunately, at least initially, also very fragile. An unexpected flash of light, the complaining warble of a cellphone, an intrusive TV “therapy” confrontation or gun fight, a car door crashing shut down the street, all can untie the shades of my eyelids and send them, and my heart rate, shooting skyward. And I must begin again.

Which brings me back to why I am napping in the guest room. If my nap is disrupted in normal living space - say the couch by my desk, or even the bedroom - the real world creeps in. If that world is fairly under control then restarting the nap ritual can be a minor irritation. However, too often that brief glimpse is enough to trigger the litany of thoughts that plague daily life. The “to do” list from which there is little escape. Groceries to be bought, lightbulbs to change, cleaning to be picked up, emails to answer; the death by a thousand little cuts that are the true bane of life in the 21st century. You can kiss your nap goodbye.

But if you are napping in the guest room, you open your eyes to a rather bland reality. Paintings hung here because they are B-list images. Photos of someone vaguely familiar, at a young age and in a place you don’t really recognize. Nothing at all that screams you should be up doing something. You can close your eyes, encounter the blank screen, listen to the music and begin again. Maybe a path somewhere between a meadow and a forest. Perhaps there is a stream over there, a gentle rain beginning - yes, that’s good.

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Tales of a Memory Hunt

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It is a somewhat strange image. I am on a path, holding my favorite hiking staff, the one I bought at a medieval fair in Wisconsin a few years ago. It is wood, dark walnut stain, spiral top with a leather grip, my name carved below the grip - it stands a bit taller than I. The air is neither warm nor cool - neutral enough to be nonexistent, so I am dressed in jeans and a comfortable long-sleeved shirt, running shoes and my trusty compression socks. There is a water bottle on my belt and I carry a light pack filled, I assume, with things I like to eat. I am in a forest glade, and while sunlight dapples on the area immediately at my feet, the myriad paths that lead away from the clearing are quickly lost in mist. It is not quite fog. The tops of the surrounding trees remain sunlit for the most part, but descend into the mist as I try to peer down each path. 

I know why I am here.  A note was slipped under the door of my consciousness, just as I was trying to slide into my afternoon nap.  It was neither long nor complex - ironically I don’t recall the specifics at the moment. A name, a face, a room, a vista, a flavor, a tune, one of those - or something closely related. So here I am on this path inside my head. You can take comfort from the fact that it is nothing like those pictures of the brain you encounter in books, or magazine articles, or on the Internet. Nothing grey and squishy, and if there are crevasses and convolutions they must be far above me, beyond the tree tops and what I assume is a sun up there. 

Having procrastinated as long as possible, I move on down the path.  This is not as simple as it may sound. The path has a disconcerting habit of bifurcating, and trifurcating, and whatever furcating comes next: No, not here. Maybe over there. It might have looked like this, smelled like that, felt somewhat similar to that other thing. This was the dominant color. No, maybe a shade more blue. A touch of turquoise. Maybe a bit of crimson. Now add just a bit of the smell of a Spring morning, a touch of Fall when you could still burn leaves, and maybe a hint of that first snowfall that started a bit after midnight when you were coming home late - or were supposed to have been in bed hours ago. Hold that. That seems about right. 

But, oh, wait. Through the trees. Over there. Is that a different path? A better one? Is there less mist over there? Doesn’t that seem a bit more like what I am trying to recall? Yes. No. Maybe. So I take my staff and poke around the edge of the path. It seems solid so, using little baby steps, I make my way through the trees and am soon standing on the other path. Now, right or left? Straight ahead or backwards? Sure, but which is ahead and which is backwards?  Maybe, if I return to the nap I can figure it out. OK.  Sleeping now, I think.

Yet, hold on.  What’s that? Over there, at the edge of consciousness. A note! Here, let me see. What does it say? I can’t quite make it out. Maybe if .  .  .   

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A Bench by the Side of the Road

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Just a bench without plaque or notation  

Of events either stirring or grand.

Nor is it a rough-hewn construction  

Inclining a traveler to stand. 

It rests at the point of conjunction  

Of many a well-traveled path, 

But gives no real hint of direction  

Of what future should follow the past. 

So I sit in the twilight of evening 

Watching fireflies welcome the night, 

And suppose that I ought to be leaving 

But somehow it just seems to be right 

To linger awhile while believing  

That one path or another will tempt me 

As the moon fills the sky with her light. 

‘Til then I will try to stay peaceful, 

While enjoying this lack of a load, 

And keep time with the call of the crickets 

As I rest on this bench by the road. 

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Oppose Harm in the Voting Booth

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This final tenet of Distilled Harmony has a vital place in the voting booth.  Oppose Harm is the last of the four tenets because in some ways it is a tacit admission that the first three were unsuccessful. We need to remember that the primary objective of Distilled Harmony as a belief system is to enable and encourage a kinder and more gentle world. It calls upon us first to foster harmony, then to enable beauty, next clarify our understanding of the world via studying and reducing the needless or deceptive “smoke and mirrors” of political and social agendas. 

Sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes in politics we find ourselves confronted with candidates who simply do not believe in a kinder and more gentle world, or even worse, believe that such a world should be the sole province of those who are members of the candidate’s specific demographic categories: ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, political party, etc.  These are the “my way or the highway” candidates who may pretend to want to “reach across the aisle” to advance a shared view for America but in reality believe that there is only one proper view of America and it is their special property. They are bullies.

In the history of American politics there are plenty of examples of bullies in all political parties. Some parties and religious organizations, mostly no longer with us to any meaningful degree, were actually founded to advance the agenda of one gang of bullies or another, like Charles Coughlin and his radical quasi-Catholic National Shrine of the Little Flowers, a vocal Canadian/American front for Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party [Nazis] which swept into power in Germany in the middle third of the 1900s. Hitler’s Nazis, while not a unique instance, are perhaps the most visible example here in the West of what can happen when a “bully-centered” party is able to capture a country’s significant political and military power.

For those of us who hold Distilled Harmony as an important and viable belief system, the 2020 presidential election is a complex decision, but not for the usual reasons. While ballotpedia [ballotpedia.org] reports that 107 Republicans have filed to run for president, the site admits that there are a lot of pseudonyms and “fake candidates” on that list. And despite former Governor Weld of Massachusetts having thrown his hat into the Republican ring, no one seriously considers any serious challenge to Trump. For those of us who believe in the four tenets of Distilled Harmony, or values closely allied to those tenets, President Trump has removed himself from consideration. He ran unabashedly as a racist bully, and his administration has created a dark “Bully Pulpit” unlike anything Teddy Roosevelt could have imagined. Demanding absolute personal loyalty and pulling “truth” from the most malevolent corners of the Internet, he provides a textbook example for everything Distilled Harmony opposes.

Still, the Democrats are’t making it easy. As I write this, there are 271 Democrats who have filed with the Federal Election Committee as presidential candidates. Among those 271 are 25 or 30 who appear to be serious possibilities. While it is true that all of the serious candidates fall closer to the ideals and tenets of Distilled Harmony than our current President, they are by no means a cluster of Stepford Candidates, clones cut from the same cloth. They all do hope that folks who voted for Trump last time around are suffering from some degree of voter's remorse - “I didn’t think he was actually that much of a racist bully.” But there real differences among these serious democratic candidates, and I appear to be on all their mailing lists. While I do have some early favorites, I am nowhere near a final choice. I have a lot more reading to do - comparing policy statements and proposals and researching past behaviors as they relate to the four tenets of Distilled Harmony. Hopefully my eventual favorite will survive the primaries relatively unscathed and come Election Day I will be able to fill in the little circle next to the name of a genuinely harmonious candidate.  

Well, that is it for my “Voter’s Guide According to Distilled Harmony.” I hope you found it helpful. I will now return my attention to painting and poetry, both of which are more in harmony with sleeping well and lowering my blood pressure. By the way, did you know that almost all of Bob Ross’s paintings live in a small warehouse in Northern Virginia? And no, you can’t buy one. You are supposed to paint your own. :-)

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Distill Complexity in The Voting Booth

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Political campaigns often represent the dark side of this tenet of Distilled Harmony. In the usual context of Distilled Harmony this tenet asks us to examine the seeming complexity of life and distill it to its least complex truth. What do we mean by things like truth, happiness, love, honor? In the context of politics the notion of distilling complexity requires us to examine issues that are often presented - in the bills that actually eventually reach Congress - in quite complex language. We should attempt to distill that linguistic complexity in an effort to discern the potential impact of those bills on policy and law. Political campaigns are something else completely. Campaigns craft “slogans” designed to allow supporters to graft their own perceptions and objectives onto the often amorphous identity of the candidate. Some recent examples:

Bill Clinton: 1992 “For People, For a Change” “It’s Time to Change America”

Bush 2004 “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America.”

Obama 2008: “Yes, We Can.” “Change” “Hope”  

Romney 2012: “Believe in America”

And most recently:

Hillary Clinton: “Fighting for America.”

Trump: “Make America Great Again.”

One would be hard pressed to take exception with any of these slogans, yet they represent candidates who would implement radically different policies in pursuit of very different visions for America. The slogans obviously shift for incumbents urging us to “stay the course” and challengers who want to “throw the bums out!" but the shared intent is to craft a slogan broad enough to morph comfortably with the beliefs and values of a candidate’s core supporters as well as those of the all-important undecided voters. Quite the exercise in saying nothing specific but seeming to say just what your audience hopes you mean.

That makes things more difficult for us, often resulting in "voter’s remorse": I didn’t think that was what s/he meant by “ ________ for America!” In this instance it is our task is flip the distill complexity tenet on its head and paint a little complexity on the simple slogans. We need to define our own priorities and then examine the candidate’s past performance in regard to those issues - what does each candidate advocate for America regarding our priorities? Healthcare? Education? Climate change? Immigration? Social security? Student loans? Where do we stand on these issues and what has each candidate done in the political or business arenas to advance our priorities? Is their "great, safe, changed” America the same as our "great, safe, changed" America? Or have they championed policies and behaviors and political appointees that contradict our view of the best possible America?

Once we come to understand that more complex view of the candidate’s view of America, then we can distill that complexity into a simple decision: open your wallet, attend the rally, mark your ballet. 

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