Stalking The Transient Transcendent Moment

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Music begins to disappear at the moment of its creation.  The history of recording is the history of our desire to capture that ephemeral moment, and to repeat it at will -  to capture the flow of harmony. It strikes me that the successful capture of a musical moment implies our ability to, perhaps even mandates an attempt to, similarly capture and reproduce other transient, transcendent moments that amaze and define us.

Consider love. Falling in love, being in love, realizing love.  Young love, first love, true love. These phrases seek to pinpoint moments of pure harmony.  Central to the human condition is our attempt to freeze those moments - to record, photograph, paint, tweet, or post them.  Those many efforts are but different facets of the same inclination seen in recorded music: our desire to capture a transcendent moment that is innately transient - to catch lightening in a bottle.

Futile though it may be, this desire lies behind many of humanity's crowning achievements. Furthermore, it is this inclination that most clearly distinguishes us from our fellow travelers here on this great blue orb. Our compulsion to capture the magical transient transcendent moment undergirds all of humanity's highest expressions. It prompts our music, our art, sculpture, and architecture. It forms our philosophy, our theology; it guides higher math, and physics.

Inherent in the creative drive to capture the transient transcendent moment, is the twin desire to reproduce it. We are driven by a need to be able to release those notes again into the air, to gaze once more upon that face or form, to see light dance again across that vista, down those halls and across that landscape, to catch again the subtle scent of evening flowers, of fresh cut grass.  In these acts of of attempted representation we hope, we seek, to recreate the transient transcendent moment that inspired its artistic replica.

Alas, such recreations may lie beyond the reach of even the best of us.  I do not for a moment seek to besmirch the obvious genius of the works that have delighted our senses across the centuries and amaze us with contemporary brilliance.  I simply need to point out that those creations are works inspired by the transient transcendent moment, they are not the transient transcendent moment itself.

I am reminded of Edmond Rostand's play, Cyrano de Bergerac.  Cyrano is a gifted poet in love with the beautiful Roxanne.  But he mortified by his face, defined mostly by a immense nose. Convinced that Roxanne will never love him, he helps his handsome but poetically challenged comrade-in-arms, Christian, win her love by becoming Christian's "ghost writer."  Cyrano goes so far as to accompany Christian to a tryst beneath Roxanne's balcony.  Cyrano whispers verses to Christian who repeats them to the lovely Roxanne, who listens above. Cyrano is the transient transcendent moment, Christian is the recording, the captured and reproduced transient transcendent moment.  Christian proves an acceptable surrogate and wins the lady, but he is not Cyrano. There is a lesson here.

Our attempts to capture the transient transcendent moment have resulted in some of the world's finest art and moments of deepest human insight and understanding - they are windows on the wondrous, they provide glimpses of the divine.  Only a fool would find fault there.  But I continue to be nagged by the realization that even the greatest art is but an "at arm's length" representation of the transient transcendent moment that inspired it.

Let us return to music, to the harmony that underlies the universe.  We have all had the experience. The tune is stuck in our head.  It may be a soaring aria, a pop tune, or it may be a jingle from a beer commercial. But we are stuck with the melody until, miraculously, it disappears - or is replaced by another.  The point is that the transient transcendent moment was a moment of pure harmony within us - a moment when chord and experience were accurately mirrored. And, in all likelihood, the transient transcendent moment lurks, like the tune stuck in our head, within us still.  It remains transient in that it is no longer front and center.  But the transcendent power of the perception, the clarity of the previous realization, keeps it safe, deep within us.  If you have the skills, paint your way to it, write your way to it, play your way to it, dance or sculpt or compute your way to it.  Those efforts may well produce results with their own significant worth.

However if, like most of us, the artistic genius chips had all been handed out before they got to you, there are other ways to recapture a transient transcendent moment.  First, as I said above, it is vital to remember that, as a defining note in your chord, the transient transcendent moment is still in us somewhere.  I often think of my mind as a rambling old Victorian mansion; simultaneously lovely and disorganized.  In such a structure a transient transcendent moment may be hanging out down some forgotten corridor, or sitting on an end table, next to the name of your first grade teacher; perhaps it is stuck in the bushes over there between the houses on your 7th grade paper route. But It is your mansion and the transient transcendent moment is in there somewhere.  The trick is finding it.

I use a three-step process.  It is rooted in Reike, which for 30 years now has marked the way I end my day.  I get into bed, immerse myself in music and run through my Reike routine, which involves both touch and visualization.  That preparation actually precedes the three steps for recapturing the transient transcendent moment.  The purpose of the Reike ritual is to distance myself from the distractions of the day, to relax, to enter the world of my chord, to meditate.  Reike experts and meditation gurus alike might well quibble with my ritual - but it works for me. You choose your own relaxation process, whatever allows you to leave day-to-day behind and start wandering around in those special spaces where wonder is more important than work, where intuition trumps data.

OK. Once you are there let your mind wander back to the particular transient transcendent moment you wish to recapture - that moment that you remember was wonderfully important, but has faded with time. Don't try to grab it head on - if you could do that, none of this would be necessary, right? Instead, ease yourself down on the other end of the bench and begin to read your book or feed the squirrels. You and the transient transcendent moment are just sharing a bench in the park. No big deal. No expectations.

But every once in a while you steal a glance over at the transient transcendent moment, just a quick look to capture a fast detail.  Got it?  OK.  Now open a canvas in your mind, and stick that detail on the canvas.  The great thing about this step is that even though you may not be able to draw your way out of a paper bag, the detail looks just fine there on your mental canvas.  You do this for awhile. Quick glance. Stick it on the canvas. Repeat. Again. And again.  This is step one.

Now once you have a few details over on the canvas, stop glancing over at the transient transcendent moment.  Look at the canvas.  Study it, reflect upon it.  Move the details around.  They will begin to make sense, more sense than the shadowy figure at the other end of the bench. This is step two.

Actually, by this time the figure at the other end of the bench may have gone off to get a hotdog or ride the swan boats. No problem. You don't really need them anymore, as the real transient transcendent moment is taking shape on the canvas.  Now you use your memory to add the details to the transient transcendent moment.  What feelings, smells, sounds, physical sensations, can you recall? Put them up on the canvas in your mind. This is step three.  This is the recreation of the transient transcendent moment. I usually react to the completion of step three in one of two ways: Most often I fall asleep, which isn't a bad thing. Other times I get up and try to write or sketch pieces of the transient transcendent moment to prevent it slipping out into the backyard or up into the many attics of my mansion.

It is through the latter efforts - of which this is one - that I have come to realize that I am not always recreating that exact transient transcendent moment. Often I am creating a representation that defines or reflects the part of the chord that lies behind the transient transcendent moment.  For example, I will often create this scene: A cabin stands beside a lake.  It rains, there is thunder in the background. There is a breeze.  It is not enough to chill me, but it adds comfort to the light cotton blanket in which I wrap myself as I rest on the porch. It is twilight. A fire crackles in the middle of the floor. Fragrant piñon smoke traces patterns against a log ceiling. A bird I cannot identify calls softly across the water. Crickets chirp quietly, but other than that there are no insects. Nothing hurts. I can close my eyes, yet still see the scene that enfolds me.

I have never been to this place, and yet I am more "at home" there than in any place I have actually inhabited. This place is not "real." Rather it is what my chord would look like if my chord were a cabin, if I could occupy perfect space.  And thus it is, I believe, with all transient transcendent moments. They are moments sufficiently aligned with the perfect construction of our chord that, just for a moment, we see through the construction to the purity of the unadorned chord.  And it is that transient perception that strikes us, amazes us and defines us.
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Thoughts on My Father Dying Old

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My sister Margaret calling in the middle of the afternoon could only mean one thing, and it did: a few months into his one hundred and first year, Dad had passed away. It was hardly a surprise. His weight had been dropping steadily, food held no interest, and even when he was awake he spent less time "here" and more time in Alternia. [See: http://schragwall.blogspot.com/2011/05/travels-in-alternia.html] Still, no matter how expected the news, no matter how much "a blessing" it is, the voice breaks and the tears, strangely, creep up your nose and leak out your eyes. Weird. But that's alright. You are crying for yourself, and that is just fine.

My recollections of "Dad in my life" are pretty much all over the place. When I was young, I remember him most in the summertime.  During the school year he was largely "at the office," or "at a meeting" where he either taught sociology or tried to bring social change to a middling city in middle America.  But in the summer he was much more ours as we set out to California where he "swapped" summer school assignments, or to "the home place" in South Dakota or Tower Hill Camp on the shores of Lake Michigan.  During those times he was often a very funny guy, like when he allowed himself to be "ambushed" by the waves on Lake Michigan. It wasn't until years later that I learned he couldn't swim. So, okay, funny and a little bit foolish.  Then there was the disappearing pipe. Dad always smoked his pipe, ALWAYS.  Unless we were in South Dakota  - where his Dad, the very Reverend John Schrag, could see him. So, funny, a bit foolish, and a little bit careful.

Then came the middle decades. Those years in which I came to believe the unintentional message that attentive parents instill in their children. I bought into the unfortunate assumption that my life was more important than his. That his importance lay in the fact that he had fathered me. I know, bizarre, but it somehow feels sane in the middle decades. My jobs, my family, my aspirations seemed to shove Dad and Mom aside. Oh, Dad could certainly never have been accused of being a "helicopter parent" hovering over my life, micro-managing my choices. That era, and the mobile phones that made it possible, had yet to dawn. But neither did I attempt to draw him into my life. Mothers often get that call, but rarely fathers. He was sort of out there, an all purpose resource to be tapped for advice, or time, or money whenever I wandered too far off the tracks. I regret those years now, they were too busy, too distant, and it was too much my fault.

I suppose it is not strange, in retrospect, that I feel I actually came to know Dad best after Mom died. Until then they seemed very much "OK." Going to Elder Hostels, Dad playing golf and puttering in his workshop. Mom folding the origami cranes she couldn't con Margaret into doing. The two of them watching Masterpiece Theater together.  There was some sort of poetic closure to the fact that she went out as they were watching Middlemarch.

But Dad didn't seem quite so omnipotent after Mom died. And I finally realized that he never really was. A lot of it had been "dodging waves in Lake Michigan." Pretending that life was funny and easy, to shield us from how frightening and hard it could be. I suppose it was that realization that started me reaching out to him a bit more after she passed away. Being a "professional media scholar" I began to take advantage of the fact that a telephone works in two directions.

Several years later, when we were both bachelors together for awhile, I began to share both The God Chord and the postings here on the SchragWall with him. No, he never joined the computer age, so he was the only person to ever receive my ramblings in print. His thoughts and responses were insightful and delightful. And I am thrilled to have had those remarkable moments with him.

But, in all truthfulness, it has been several years since those flashes of recollection and reflection drew us together. He had been fading while I pretended he wasn't.  I have written before about Tolkien's Bilbo working on his memoirs, waiting to cross over to the Grey Havens, and gradually becoming transparent. Dad was like that. Just fading, fading, fading. And now he is gone. But not really.

I have come to see death as a transformational moment.  I know, I know, no significant insight there. But think about it this way.  When one half of a relationship dies, we simply have no data about how death transforms the dying entity.  We have a myriad of belief systems that provide their beliefs about an afterlife, but no data. As you know, I have my own. Still, it's all guesswork. And that's fine. But I am also concerned with the other half of the dyad, the surviving half - with me. Does death sever that relationship for the living? I don't think so. For years now, despite his being "still with us" Dad's answers to my ongoing questions had been drawn largely from my memories of previous discussions: "He would have wanted me to do this .  .  .  . He always felt that .  .  .  . " That "advice" remains as available to me today as it was last week, or last year, or the year before.

Elsewhere in these pages I write about Mom and brother Jim serving as angels on my shoulders. They are "advisers made of memory" to whom I can turn at any moment for guidance. Dad now joins them, and, in a wonderful inversion of the laws of physics, I have come to realize that the more angels we have resting on our shoulders, the lighter our load.
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A Freaky Fable for Our Times

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Back and forth, back and forth, we swang.  Faces wreathed in frosty exhalations, blankets stuffed all around us.  I could occasionally glimpse his face when my arc edged ahead, allowing me to glance across my porch to his. We said nothing.  Not terribly surprising, we were 3, maybe 4, months old.

Our fathers were both young assistant professors at the local university.  Our mothers were "homemakers," tending to us and our older siblings.  That, too, is not terribly surprising, it was 1948 and our fathers were the first "professionals" in their  respective families. 

We grew up as brothers.  Our siblings were set apart by either age or gender, and our lack of actual "kinship" seemed to remove the jealousy and competitiveness that so often clings to those who live down the hall or intrude on "your room."

As we grew up you rarely saw one of us without the other being nearby.  My family spent 1959 through 1961 in Vienna, Austria; his spent a later year in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  Upon each return our friendship was untouched and unaffected.  Despite sworn efforts to do otherwise, similar tastes and emerging data processing conspired to make us college roommates our freshman year.

However, we both married our high school sweethearts, I suppose we should have been warned by the fact that despite all of us attending the same high school we had never double-dated.  Turns out the women shared a mutual distaste for one another.  We did the typical guy thing, and drifted apart for a couple of decades.

We next encountered each other when our older daughters entered college.  My daughter chose a school down the road from his house, his, a school a few miles from mine.  It would have been foolish not to take advantage of the new opportunity to reestablish contact - besides, by now email had been invented and we both found ourselves doing the 9 to 5 in technology related fields.  He in the Media Cartel; I, in Big Education. 

                         

Again, the friendship failed to miss a beat, despite the fact that our wives still showed no inclination to bury whatever hatchet kept them estranged.  Not long after this last reestablishment of our friendship, my friend lost his wife to cancer, though not before - I am thankful to say - she and I had established a delightful friendship of our own.  About the same time I lost my wife to irreconcilable differences.

The point is that we have led almost mirror lives, strangely connected, strangely parallel without any effort on our part to make it happen.  How did Paul Simon put it? "Some folks' lives roll easy as a breeze, Drifting through a summer night . . Heading for a sunny day."  Certainly, he and I have both been bruised by life and circumstance, but when it comes to our friendship - well, that rolls easy.  Which brings me to the rather bizarre circumstances of the last week.

It was probably over the weekend when I got an email from him.  "Short question - do you remember your phone number in our home town?"  [I'm going to change the specifics here for reason that will soon become clear.] 

Well, of course I did.  When we were growing up, in the days of dial phones, your "phone number" consisted of an "exchange" - a name that identified a grouping of 10,000 customers - and then 5 numbers.  In Glenn Miller's hit "PEnnsylvania 6-5000"  PEnnsylvania is the exchange - you would dial the first two letters of the Exchange P=7, E=3, and then 65000. So the number was 736-5000.  But when you told someone your phone number you would often just say "Pennsylvania 6-5000."  And they would know what you meant. 

So I wrote him back, "Of course.  My number was CLaremont 6-7885 and yours was CLaremont 9-8226."

I didn't hear anything from him for a few days and then I noticed that he had called my cellphone.  It is not unusual for me not to hear or answer my cell.  When I record lectures or teach, I turn the phone to silent mode and often forget to turn it back on.  So I simply hit the callback icon.  It didn't ring. It didn't give me an answering machine.  It didn't give me a busy signal.  Instead it gave me that "Wha, wha, wha" that you get when somebody's phone is off the hook or has been disconnected.  "Weird," I thought.  Tried again, same thing.  Went about my day.

Later that night I tried again with the same result.  So I sent him an email: Did you call me? I see a call from you on my phone, but when I try to call you back all I get is "Wah, wah, wah."

This what he wrote back:

"No, I didn't call you.  I called your old number, CLaremont 6-7885, and eventually it rang your cellphone."

Yes, that's right. He dialed the number of a phone I had last used 45 years ago, in a city I have not even visited for 30 years, a number that had never been registered in my name since it was my father's phone, a number that didn't even have an area code - and my cellphone rang.

That moves beyond weird and creepy to more than a little bit scary.  I have used that combination of letters and numbers as my password in two places: on my now defunct Facebook account and on my still active Google+ account.  But just think of the levels and degree of connectedness and collusion that have to exist for my 45 year-old landline number to cause my 2013 cellphone to ring.
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