Schrag Porch : An Introduction

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

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

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

Here are a few very early ones from 2001:

Rescuing

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

Possession

Implies maintenance.

Awkward Neighbors

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

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

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