The Clarifying Simile

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When I try to get a grip on a particularly vexing or abstract concept I find myself thinking that it - the concept - is "like" something something something . . .   That "like" is not to be confused with the linguistic bane of the last decade, often used with its partner in semantic assault "totally."  As in "So, I was, like, totally blown away. It was, like, awesome. . . . totally."  Rather, I use "like" as the introduction to a clarifying simile.  Then when I reflect on the relationship between the simile and the more abstract notion that is bedeviling me, the brain gets unstuck and I make some progress.

It is in that sense that I have come to the conclusion that the "distill" in the fourth pillar "distill complexity" is like the traditional method of making balsamic vinegar, even though that process is fermentation and not technically distillation.  Let me explain.

When we were in Italy a few years ago, my wife and I went to a "wine and balsamic vinegar tasting" in Florence.  The wine tasting was fun though pretty standard.  However, the balsamic tasting was truly fascinating. In it we learned that a traditional gift - birth? wedding? that got garbled in translation - is a large wooden cask of "must," the juice from recently harvested white Trebbiano grapes that has been boiled down to between a half and a third of its original volume.  Included in the gift is a set of 10 to 25 progressively smaller casks.  The casks are meant to be placed in a room - preferably an attic - that has neither heating nor air conditioning, exposing the "must" to the hot sultry summers and chilly winters of the region.  The casks are not sealed, but have openings in the top that are covered with porous cloth.  Some specifics of the process were again lost between our guide's English an our feeble Rosetta Stone Italian, but over a period of 12 to 25 years, the cask keeper, each year, removes the aged vinegar from each cask and moves it to the next smaller barrel before topping off the largest cask with new "must." This process of gradual fermentation and evaporation eventually results in the emergence from the smallest cask of the wonderful, and very valuable, nectar we call balsamic vinegar.  I really wish we had another name for it, because "tastewise" it is about as far from vinegar as it gets.  I mean, go out to the kitchen and pop the top off a bottle of white vinegar, which we also use to clean floors, and take a whiff. Whew! It is not even in the same universe as the contents of that last cask of balsamic!  I think I will call the good stuff balsamic nectar and be done with it.

The point is this - you cannot just sprint from the large, raw and cumbersome cask number one, to the small, exquisite, cask number twenty-five. There is no gigabyte network speed "app" for that. It takes twenty-five years. The process is incremental, evolving mysteriously though a series of ever smaller casks made of various types of wood. I have come to realize the the same is true with the 4th pillar: distill complexity.  Distilling the complexity of our lives is a process of indeterminate length.  It moves in fits and starts.  As we reflect on the increasingly complex issues of our lives - why we are here? what we are meant to do? what is truth? love? beauty? does transcendent wisdom reside within us? somewhere else? does consciousness survive death? - we, like the casks that ferment balsamic nectar, change.  The "wood" that defines our cask of the moment shifts as our chord is tuned - the product that is "us" concentrates into ever sweeter essences in smaller, less-cluttered spaces.

But let me hasten to clarify; the result of the distillation of complexity is not simplicity, it is not some childish certainty drawn from whiter teeth, tighter abs, faster cars, better wine and brighter bling; from the more fervent declarations of simple jingoistic slogans of faith or politics. Rather the result is harmonic parsimony, the most complete explanation of complex concerns expressed with the least deviation and the greatest clarity. The nectar of this distillation is the clearest expression of our best selves, our deepest beliefs, drawn with beauty, grace, humility, and hopefully - to avoid an abundance of somber notes - a touch of humor.

So where does this "clarifying simile" lead?  A few lessons seem obvious, like, totally:

First we must realize that it is difficult, as we assess our lives at any one moment, to accurately discern from which cask we are dipping.  We have an inclination in our culture to be fascinated with "coming of age" narratives. They tend, however, to focus on the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Our callow protagonist is forced to look deep into his or herself and discovers some truths that will guide them as they pursue their life.  Welcome to cask number three, maybe four.  But we treat the narrative as though the protagonist has magically leapt to cask twenty or twenty-five.  We see it in the media when some teenage phenom from the X-Games declares "This is something I have worked for my entire life!" I must admit I tend to chuckle. A life peaking at 16? I certainly hope not. Wisdom from cask number 4? I somehow doubt it. So we need to realize that while we have a tendency to believe we are always sipping from cask twenty-five, in truth we are often somewhere closer to the beginning or middle of the process.

Other cultures, interestingly often cultures older than our brave new young experiment here in America, seem more inclined to realize that wisdom is found down the line, in those smaller, older, sweeter barrels.  The wisdom of the elders is valued. Patience and reflection are prized above noise and flash.  And that often makes sense, but not always.  Age itself is no guarantee of "the clearest expression of our best selves, our deepest beliefs, drawn with beauty, grace, humility and humor."  Some of the least distilled, most hidebound, vitriolic declarations of "truth" have spewed out of the mouths and minds of some pretty old casks.  In those casks, somewhere along the line the essence soured, went bad, turned - call it what you will.  The point is this: we can only be where we are.  None of us is born at cask twenty-five, it is a long journey. Also, we probably never really reach cask twenty-five.  Even those enlightened souls whose wisdom seems transcendent can be further distilled. You see cask twenty-five is no more "the end" than was cask three or thirteen or twenty-three. The road to enlightenment, heaven, nirvana, whatever, is infinite. As Tolkien said, "the road goes ever on and on."

So, since we can only be in our current cask, and since there is no finite end to the row of casks stretching out before us, the only option we have is to tend to the current cask.  Explore it as completely as possible with the tools you have - art, math, science, literature, philosophy, theology, the law; whatever your particular interests and gifts.  Use them to poke into every corner of your cask. Stir it up. Increase the fermentation and evaporation.  Do that, and one day you will wake up and find yourself sloshing into a new cask, smaller, sweeter, and most worthy of your attention and investigation.
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A Fallacy in 88 Notes

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Towards the end of the DVD Tom Dowd and the Language of Music, Dowd is sitting in front of a huge digital mixing board that contains all the separate tracks from Layla featuring the guitar work of Eric Clapton and Duane Allman. Despite the fact that he had mixed the song himself back in November of 1970, Dowd is entranced.  He slowly removes everything except the guitar tracks; they wail on, hovering just this side of pain.  "Listen to that," he murmurs, "those notes aren't on the instrument. Those notes are off the top of the instrument."

It is his surprise that surprises me.  Perhaps because I never mastered a musical instrument [unless you allow me the kazoo] it seems to me quite natural that gifted artists find a way to cheat the limitations of a physical instrument and and produce notes that "aren't there."  Think about it for a moment in terms of basic string theory - the universe is made of tiny vibrating strings, of music; and in terms of super-symmetry - that the music that is the universe, permeates harmonically and symmetrically through space and time and other dimensions yet undreamed of.  So any instrument - piano, guitar, synthesizer, whatever - simply grants us access to a tiny artificially restricted portion of an unlimited, universal harmonic realm which we will call the U2HR.

Consider the saxophone, an instrument I briefly tormented. But it is not really "an" instrument. Adolphe Sax actually invented 14 instruments in 1846, from tiny to humongous, each designed to capture its own particular chunk of the U2HR.  I cannot help but believe that a gifted sax player - or the guitarists in Layla - cannot "cheat" a few notes above or below the "intended range" of each version of the instrument. However, to most, each version of the instrument is a barrier, a machine with a finite musical limit.

If we think about the 88 keys on a piano - another instrument that has suffered at my hands - those keys reduce the U2HR to 88 notes, from the 4th A below middle C to the 4th C above middle C.  Now obviously, folks have done some pretty awesome things with those 88 notes, but at the same time the instrument teaches plodders, like my 9- or 10 year-old self, that "music" occurs within those 88 sounds. Surely nothing can lie beyond the challenge of the Tarantella!

There was, however, one instrument that did come naturally to me - my voice.  I was just able to sing, I don't know why.  We rarely question our innate gifts - until they begin to fade.  I have a friend who is a wonderfully talented artist. When I ask him how he does it, he simply responds, "I dunno. I just could always draw." I want to hit him. But I digress.  I could just always sing.  For most of my life I could sing across a wide variety of discretely defined voices: so-so bass, solid baritone, tolerable tenor. In falsetto, alto was a bit rough but a better than average soprano.  Point is, that when I sang I was never aware of barriers to the U2HR.  I knew there were points above and below "my range" denied to me by the physical structure of my vocal cords . But I could hear those "unsingable" notes quite clearly in my head and I would continue to run the appropriate amount of air across my vocal cords so that - had they been physically able - they would have produced notes "off the instrument."

Sadly, things have changed.  Remember that scene at the end of White Christmas when Bing Crosby says to one of the children in the chorus, "Give me a nice high C." The kid complies and Crosby says, "Ah, those were the days." Remember that?  I'm sort of there now.  The voice has gotten older, I have no route to an audience, and a particular necessary medication compromises both my speaking and singing voice. But here is the interesting part. While my actual physical vocal range has diminished, my perception of the U2HR remains quite clear.  So I can still "sing" wide swaths of the U2HR - albeit silently.

OK, follow along, because here is the leap.  Just as we are conditioned to believe that music/harmony stops at the end of the keyboard, we similarly are conditioned to truncate harmony - universal harmony - in other areas of our lives. We are taught that certain chords, certain perceptions and relationship are acceptable because they are "built into the instrument." Others are not.  I beg to differ. The reality is that resonance is infinite: U2HR. The potential for harmonic manifestations  - relational, expressive, physical, creative, intellectual - is infinite; spinning out symmetrically and harmonically all around us. You would think we would stumble across them daily. But in reality those deeply harmonic instances are rare, precious, unique, and sadly, often transitory.

The often transitory nature of deeply harmonic manifestations springs from the fact that tuning our own chord is a lifelong process, one that inevitably changes us.  Perhaps the clearest evidence of that, for me anyhow, springs from memories of things I have done in my life that still make me shudder. In those often youthful indiscretions, I do recognize myself. Still, I wish I could tear that page from the notebook of my life.  The point is that over the decades, my chord has evolved to the point where it would find earlier moments of itself discordant. Strange, not? Those self-discordant moments are, however, more the exception than the norm.

More disconcerting is the fact that throughout my life I have encountered people who will forever be precious to me, but who - oddly - will remain forever isolated from each other because of physical or cultural barriers.  My wife will never know my mother or my brother who died before she and I had even met, let alone married.  So time truncates certain harmonies. Jealousy precludes other potentially harmonic interactions.  As adults, sexual, possessive jealousy naturally springs to mind.  I find it hard to imagine King Henry's wives being able to all kiss and make up, even if we ignore the various missing heads.  But if we are really honest, jealousy can precede, and often trumps, hormones.  The idea of a "best friend" probably comes with preschool, and getting "jilted" for another of the same or another gender is no less painful than the later, more passion laden, fractures of adult life. When it comes to "best friends forever," the end of forever is always painful.

But again, for me, more pleasant resolutions seem more often the norm - well, if you don't count the divorce.  My oldest and closest friend and I were born seven days apart to parents who shared a duplex.  We spent most of the first two decades of our lives in almost constant companionship. I was always much closer to him than to my brother - who was five years my senior. My friend's first wife, who had shared many of those growing years with us, confessed to me, when we were all in our forties, that she had long been jealous of her husband's obvious pleasure in my company. Thankfully she and I were able to smooth that bump in the road - of which I was blissfully unaware - and build a sincere and caring friendship before she died several years later. He and I remain "BFFs" despite frequent and varied gaps in our interactions.

Let me struggle to again regain focus here - I'm rusty. I've been away for awhile doing various "medical and professional necessities of the real world"  Also, I need to practice "distill complexity" more.  Perhaps the reason it took me so many years to articulate the 4th pillar, is because I'm not very good at it!

Anyhow, the blend of string theory and super-symmetry demands that there is only one all encompassing U2HR, and the senses through which we currently perceive it are, like the 88 notes of the piano, artificial limitations - barriers if you will - to fully sensing the U2HR.  But we need to keep trying. Our primary objective in life should be to play, and hear, notes that are off the top, and below the bottom of the instrument. To approach the U2HR in as many ways as possible.

Do you write your way there? Play, sing, dance, think, cook, love, or code your way there - to that higher perceptive and communicative state?  Damned if I know.  I suspect that we follow the expressive route, milieu, palette that we simply cannot leave alone, and the one that, initially at least, comes easily.  We love that modality, and we push it as far as we can, picking up new skills and harmonic inclinations along the journey. And while we realize that each and every palette is legitimate, we remember that they still yield only incomplete windows to the total U2HR; which, at least this time around, we will never fully grasp. Yup, it is beyond the ken of one mere mortal lifetime.  Sorry, but the deck is stacked against us.  Our cultures, religions, politics, philosophy and art are all too "rule and norm centric" to allow us to venture too far "off the top of the instrument."

But we keep trying. We keep listening for what we cannot hear. We keep looking for what we cannot see. We keep singing silently past our vocal chords. We keep missing the recreation of the image in our head. Depressing?  Not at all. Actually, I see in our optimistic striving to surpass the capabilities of our instrument strong evidence of our own immortality.  Consider Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto, line 98:

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"
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Little Things Mean A Lot - Sometimes

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It's an old Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutz song from the early 1950s, Little Things Mean a Lot.  It starts like this:

Blow me a kiss from across the room
Say I look nice when I'm not
Touch my hair as you pass my chair
Little things mean a lot.

And they do, when they are reflective of what we feel or believe.  But then, when they do that, they aren't "little things" at all, are they?  They are big things.  The idea came to me last night when I was doing my evening meditation before falling asleep.  I am in a phase right now when I listen to music with lyrics - acapella stuff where words dominate.  I was listening to a The High Kings slightly celtic version of Richard Thompson's From Galway to Graceland.  The "hook" in the  song is the repeating line "She'd left everything from Galway to Graceland to be with the King."  The song is classic quasi country/pop - a woman obsessed with Elvis, ["She was humming Suspicion, that's the song she liked best, She had 'Elvis I Love You' tattooed on her breast."] walks away from her life in Galway ["Twenty years married and she never thought twice, She sneaked out the door and walked into the night",] flies to America, makes her way to Graceland, and repeatedly stakes a vigil at Elvis's grave until the security guards have to intervene ["When they dragged her away, it was handcuffs this time."]

When you parse it out like that it seems trivial, another maudlin bit of "Elvisanalia." However when the song is performed well that line "From Galway to Graceland to be with the King" takes on an ethereal quality; quite painful yet poignant and beautiful.  It is a little thing, but it means a lot.

And that, of course is the point.  Little things can mean a lot but only if we work at crafting that "little thing."  I am currently engaged in crafting a "little thing."  It is an introductory media textbook with my co-author and longtime colleague Ed Funkhouser.  For those of you who live in my world "little thing" and "introductory media textbook" would seem to define mutually exclusive concepts.  Most introductory media textbooks can easily double as doorstops.  I used one for awhile as a display pedestal for a piece of sculpture. Big hulking things.  Big expensive hulking things.  My vision for this textbook is an inexpensive graceful little thing.  A textbook that will actually be enjoyable to read.  Stop that.  Laughing is impolite.  I am committed to this notion.

The idea is to start with the little thing, well, the next to, next to, the littlest thing.  The littlest thing in writing is the single letter, the next is the word, and then we arrive at the sentence.  That is the "hidden agenda" of this little graceful textbook.  Each sentence needs to gracefully articulate the intersection of my understanding of how media function in the world and my belief about how we should express ourselves in that world. When we speak, when we write, draw, sing; in every creative expression we should seek to foster harmony, enable beauty, and by doing so oppose harm.  How will that play out in this graceful little book?  Well, the one arena, how media function in the world should be obvious to all who encounter the work.  The other arena will, I assume, be largely opaque to the reader. Hopefully though it will inform the quality of the prose: harmonic, beautiful, graceful. 

I'll let you know how it works out :-)
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The Circle of Life and Death

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As we assemble our own unique belief system, we often look with special curiosity to those moments about which we have no data - before birth and after death.  At the end of The God Chord I assert that the fully composed chord is analogous to what traditional faiths name the soul.  I further posit that after death the sentient chord then takes its conscious place with The God Chord as an integral partner in the transcendent harmony that is the uni- or multiverse.

Thinking about that notion kept me up most of the night last night.  I am still fairly content with that notion of transcendence "here at the end of life as we know it."  But somehow it fails to address some fairly pity issues.  Like why "my life," why here, now, why in these particular circumstances?  I have some fairly New Age friends [and no, I don't claim that mantel myself] who assert that we pick our parents.  That smacks too much of the universal intervening directly in the lives of the unique and particular.

Here's where I am right now - and I do have to start at the end of our lives on Earth.  I'm still not pulling completely away from the the evolved sentient chord taking a conscious place in the transcendent harmony of the universe, but I am stopped from fully embracing that concept because of the infinite variety of ways in which we leave this world.  I shiver a bit every time I hear the radio blurb, "A marine from Camp Lejeune was killed in Afghanistan today, 24-year old .  .  . "  or "A truck carrying 12 passengers careened off the road in Dare county killing eight .  .  .  .  ."  I spent time as a lap parent at the local hospital just holding tiny, tiny premies.  Not all of them made it.

The point is this - too many lives end too quickly for them to have composed a chord that has the maturity ready for partnership in the transcendent harmony of the universe.  So where does that chord go?  Does it, as my New Age friends assert, circle the earth scoping out a harmonic womb?  That model does not really fit with FHEBOH, or the essential tuning of the chord.  Again the universal intruding on the particular.  The youthful, or older but still undeveloped chord, must continue to evolve, and neither the sad and inconvenient reality of a premature death, nor the passing of a aged but arrested chord, must be allowed to stop the compositional process. 

Again as asserted in The God Chord our chord is encoded at the level of strings within our DNA, and is relatively unimpeded by the death of the body.  It moves smoothly out into the other 6 or 7 dimensions predicted by the math of string theory and supersymmetry, out into the particle dynamics that define the universe.  So where does it go from there?  Well, remember that the first mandate of FHEBOH is Foster Harmony.  And harmony results from strings being attracted to harmonic strings, that then are attracted to further harmony that eventually coalesce to ever greater harmonic units.  And those units would eventually be drawn to clusters of harmony that hold the greatest attraction for the growing harmonic entity.  Hence, the prematurely truncated or arrested chord is drawn to that next form of existence that contains a promising path to transcendent harmony, to the completion of the chord.  They are born into an existence that provides a positive pathway to transcendent harmony.

I have mentioned "the arrested chord" a couple of times above.  An arrested chord is one that has abdicated the nature of the harmony it pursues.  The keepers of such chords are "harmonic fundamentalists."  They have allowed religious or political dogma to determine the "correct chord."  They no longer seek their unique chord, rather they seek to bend their chord to echo that demanded by their political or religious leaders who, sadly more often than not, are driven by personal desire for money and power.  An arrested chord is a deep spiritual sickness, as it guarantees a partnership with discord.  It is to correct that discord that the arrested chord finds a place alongside the truncated chord in between "compositional sessions" in subsequent existences.

Traditional notions of reincarnation bring us back to Earth to "get it right."  There is a discordant, almost punitive aspect to that.  In seems counter-intuitive from a Foster Harmony perspective.  If Earth had been the right place for this chord, wouldn't have things worked out better the first time around? 

Well, wherever we end up in the next "world into which we are born" our choices in that reality are the compositional acts that further the tuning of our chord.  The tasks remain the same in every existence.  Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Oppose Harm.

Okay, so I was about to drop off to sleep - maybe 3 AM.  And then I thought, certainly everyone born here on Planet Earth does not encounter an equal path to success.  Even in this age of digital egalitarianism a staggering number of entrepreneurs trace their roots back to elite schools on the right and left coasts and to deep-pocket investors with ties to those institutions.  India's technological elite can see cesspools of abject poverty from their crystal towers.  China's economic elite are still joined at the hip to the political bosses.  The playing field on Planet Earth seems far from level. Then is struck me: To assume an "advantaged" birth is to wrongly assume that the end state so advantaged lies on the path to transcendent harmony.  Money and power have little relationship to harmony.  We need only scan the headlines from the last few years to see that those who glittered most brightly on the world's financial scene were - how does one put this delicately, glazed turds.

Perhaps to be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth is more a curse than a blessing, as one is taught early by those one loves, that money can buy anything, that power is the objective. If one is fortunate enough to be able to unlearn that fallacy, one cannot help but bemoan the compositional time one wasted shedding that discord.  That is not to say that money and power cannot be used to foster harmony.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation seems to be making great headway in that direction.  In the final analysis though, neither wealth nor poverty give one a step up towards harmony.  The divine right of kings and the noble savage are both fallacies. You craft your chord in an existence in which transcendent harmony is possible.  The choices are yours.

Okay, 4:30 and getting a bit drowsy.  Which is when it struck me that the manifestation of your chord must not constrain the legitimate manifestation of another's.  But I'm going to save that for another time.

Foster Harmony. Enable Beauty, Oppose Harm.

Ages of Enlightenment

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I believe it is an old German proverb: We grow too soon old, and too late smart.  There is, no doubt, some wisdom there.  We often shudder at the memory of the follies and arrogance of our youth.  And yet it strikes me that there should be no hard and fast age requirement for enlightenment.  Consider that the space of a life is infinitely varied, from a few feeble moments to those who find their way into triple digits.  Can we reasonably assert that we have to live x number of years before we can sense and begin to tune our unique harmonic relationship to the universe?  Are wisdom and enlightenment the sole prerogative of age?  And before you answer in the affirmative, remember that it wasn't all that long ago when the "elders of the tribe" were those who had seen 30 or 40 seasons

It seems far more reasonable to assert that our lives are riddled with wormholes of wisdom.  The wormholes of theoretical physics improbably provide direct connections between widely separated points in spacetime. Through a wormhole, thousands of lightyears of distance vanish into the space of a single step. Wormholes bend spacetime as we fold a map and, by doing so, place New York and Tokyo slap up against each other.  Wormholes of wisdom are moments of essential harmony, moments of spontaneous unity with our fully developed chord that pop into our lives regardless of our age or awareness.  They allow our chord to unfold before us in all its perfection. The trick is recognizing it for what it is.

That recognition is, I believe, clearer in hindsight.  The longer we live the more often we stumble upon our own particular wormholes of wisdom.  Hopefully, we get better at recognizing them.  As I make my way through my seventh decade, the second of my conscious pursuit of my chord, I meet instances of harmony at every turn.  This morning's sunlight, yesterday's storm, the laughter of friends and family, a Mozart harpsichord piece plinking away in the background - I'm awash in harmony.  All one needs is focus, attention and appreciation.  However, prior to my intentional search for harmony, my chord often had to attract my attention with a smart smack about the head and shoulders: "Hey you! Deaf guy! Pay attention! This is your harmony speaking! Get with the program."

The God Chord opens with a series of vignettes that I attribute to a variety of people.  In reality they are all my own experiences. They were all moments that I now recognize as wormholes of wisdom - moments when my chord forced its way into my unprepared consciousness.  Recently I have made a conscious effort to push back before writing The God Chord to recall more of those moments, moments of harmonic purity that slipped by unnoticed.  A few have surfaced:

A night, perhaps a composite of several, when I count my life in single digits.  I sit out on our screened-in porch.  I am reading a novel about a dog, perhaps Lad, A Dog, by Albert Payson Terhune. Through the open door I  hear my mother noodling about at the piano in the living room.  Rain patters on the roof.  The rare car eases by on wet and whispering tires. A root beer float sweats companionably by my elbow.

Another night, again perhaps a composite.  I lie on the floor of my daughter's room, waiting for her breathing to fade into sleep.  The muted light from the hallway illuminates a mobile - above the crib?  Maybe at the center of the ceiling?  The indistinct objects that anchor the cross-pieces circle lazily in a breeze from somewhere.  No other job intrudes upon this treasured task - easing my child into slumber.

I now weave the reconstruction of these harmonic moments into my evening meditations. I find they ease the transition from the sharper moments of the day into Alternia's quieter shadows.  Give it a try, reach back to those moments when unacknowledged harmony came calling.  It can be quite lovely.
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Of Gentlemen and Thugs

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A friend and I recently exchanged emails bemoaning the seeming pervasive crassness of contemporary culture.  We both felt alienated from a society in which it apparently is “OK” to ignore the pain your behavior and decisions inflict upon others.  Our particular exchange was prompted by the recent vote on gay marriage here in North Carolina where a majority of, I assume, straight voters decided that it was OK to prevent their gay friends and neighbors from getting married.

I wrote about my disappointment in the vote not long ago, and won’t rehash the issue here.  But it was only one in a depressing stream of “acceptable uncivil incidents” that clutter our social landscape.  From our driving, to our politics, to business meetings, to those who sell us our morning coffee, afternoon groceries, or evening repast, to our online interactions, we seem to be morphing into the land of the ruthless rude.

So maybe my nerves were on edge when I stumbled upon something called King of The Rock, on CBS the other night.  The premise was simple – the finals of a one-on-one “streetball” aka basketball tournament played on the exercise yard of Alcatraz.  It was played at night, with harsh lighting appropriate for a defunct maximum-security prison.  That same lighting made it hard to tell, but I think all but one of the finalists were African-Americans.  Before the final match a rapper did a rap stressing that murderers had “stalked this very yard.” Then there was a great deal of glaring and generally thuggish posturing mixed with stunningly mediocre basketball which culminated in some guy who went by the name “Baby Shaq” beating some man of simpler sobriquet who occasionally had the good grace to appear embarrassed to be there.  Maybe he threw the game, ‘cause Baby Shaq had told the audience “I really need the money.”

I was offended by the whole thing, and I’m a 63-year-old white guy.  I hope that enough African-American parents were incensed enough that the sponsor, Red Bull, sees a boycott.  Given, however, that this was the third year of King of The Rock, I doubt that will be happening.  Still, racial squeamishness aside, it was another in the string of public celebrations of thuggish and rude behavior erupting across the nation and beyond.  “We really ought to be embarrassed,” I thought. “Please tell me that somewhere out there the parents of the players, performers, producers and sponsors of this fiasco are sunk in despair, shaking their heads and muttering, ‘I taught you better than that!’”  

And that is when it struck me.  Maybe nobody “teaches better than that” anymore.  I mean “ruthless rudeness” can’t be just the spinoff from increasingly clueless media.  Maybe thugs and slackers are the natural Darwinian offspring of hippies and yuppies.  I mean there have to be some strong genes for rudeness and ruthlessness in that pool, right?!  I started to hyperventilate, so I took myself out for a walk.

Deep calming breath.  Nice clouds.  One, no, two hawks hanging motionless above the trees.

You see there was a time when, even in ruthless, highly competitive sports, there was at least the idea of a gentleman.  In 1892, “Gentleman Jim” Corbett knocked out John L. Sullivan in the 21st round to claim the World Heavyweight Title.  Gentleman Joe Palooka played a similar role in the nation’s newspaper funny pages throughout the 1930s and 40s.  For decades the cry before the Indianapolis 500 was “Gentlemen, start your engines!”

“Whither,” I mused pensively, “today’s ‘gentleman’?”

That naturally took me to Ngram.  What’s an Ngram, you ask?  Excellent question.  One of which I have to remind myself every few months.  Ngam, at http://books.google.com/ngrams, is one of Google’s lesser known, but very cool, products.  It is, as you can tell from the URL part of Google’s “books” project; their typically understated attempt to scan every book in the entire world.  The Ngram piece lets you enter a word or series of words into a text field and when you hit return, you get a graph that shows you the extent to which that word was used in books from 1800 until 2000. Fascinating, try it.  No, no, not now.  Let me finish, please, gentle reader.

OK, so I go to Ngram and enter the word “gentleman.”  The result starts with the “gentleman” of the 1800s high atop the left hand side of the graph.  From there he performs an Olympic downhill slalom run sliding into near obscurity by the year 2000.  I try his counterparts from the fairer sex; gentlewoman and Lady.  They too sweep majestically downhill.

I think you see where I’m going here.  I wonder if, when the words associated with a pattern of behavior decline in a culture, does that mean that the behavior itself also declines?  It seems logical.  If a thing, a referent, remains important in the world then the number of words that identify or make reference to that thing should remain constant.  OK, I realize there are issues here, since Ngram only uses the data from the books that Google scanned.  But such a consistent pattern of usage decline in words associated with a specific type of behavior – etiquette, manners and polite, show only slightly less precipitous Ngram drops – has to mean something; especially since I want it to.  I next entered “crass” and “greed” into Ngram, and the trend reversed. 1800 was the valley and 2000 was the top of the mountain.  Another confirmation of my bias: Our world is sliding into “thugishness,” in language and behavior.  [“Thug” itself, after a seemingly aberrant flurry of popularity in 1820, follows the pattern of crass and greed. “Thugish” and “Thugishness” apparently appear only in this essay.]

While it may be a faint cry in the wilderness, I would like to advocate a return to the use of the word “gentleman.”  Not in the paternalistic sense that may have swelled its usage in the Age of Jane Austin. Rather I propose its use in simpler sense, in a sense that recognizes that “gentleman” is a compound word that refers to an individual who is both male and gentle.  Perhaps, if we breathe new life into the word, the behavior will follow.

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Gone to See the Elephant

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Walking a donkey into the room won’t raise nearly as many eyebrows as an elephant. And that may be why Presidential wannabe, Rick Santorum, trotted his uniquely pious pachyderm out into the center of the Republican primaries.  With his usual mild and self-deprecating style he opined that John Kennedy’s 1960 assertion that church and state should be separate made him “want to vomit.” I would be less concerned were Mr. Santorum merely running for the office of “First Hurler,” but no, he seeks the presidency of the United States. He wants to follow in the footsteps of other “deciders.” Now, one would be a fool to assert that religion played no role in American politics.  It always has, and always will.  But it was usually an elephant kept behind the curtain in a vain hope, I suppose, that we might avoid further shredding whatever tatters remain of civil discourse in American political campaigning.  But St. Rick seems bent on washing the clerical undergarments in public. 

That is truly a shame, because nothing good will come of it.  Here in the Carolinas Franklin Graham – who sadly possesses little of his father’s oratorical skills and seemingly none of his compassion – openly wonders about the sincerity of President Obama’s Christianity.  “The President [pause, pause] says he is a Christian,” Graham muses, and anyone who has spent any time in the Old North State hears in that subtle pause the great Southern qualifier “Bless His Heart!”  

The Founding Fathers were, for the most part, men whose feelings about the place of religion in politics had been formed by living in countries or colonies where one stripe of belief or another was routinely privileged over others.  They had experienced theocracy first hand, lived where your manner of prayer could be fined, land you in the stocks, or even get you killed. It is hardly surprising that they wove into the documents of our young nation the notion that religion should stand apart from government.  Those who tell we have “always been a Christian nation under one god” are either ignorant, lying, or both.  The blood spilt to create this nation gave us the freedom to worship god as we chose, or not to worship were we so inclined.  Theocracy demands religious fealty of all citizen to one faith, one god, one right, and usually lots of wrongs.

We must never lose sight of the fact that the history of theocracies is writ in varying shades of blood.  Ancient examples span the globe, from the Mayans to the Conquistadors to the Crusades to the Inquisition.  And the beat goes on.  Catholics kill Protestants, who return the favor. Sunnis kill Shiite, while the Sufis spin madly around trying to keep an eye on the Druze. Hindis and Muslims rattle the nuclear saber over Kashmir.  Generic "Christians" kill generic "Muslims" who attack generic "Infidels."  And everyone seems to attack the Jews.  Humans are killed because books are inadvertently burned. Tibetan monks burn themselves alive to confront religious oppression.  Muslim women and children blow themselves up to fast track themselves to paradise.  And now Santorum wants the nomination because he is "more Christian" than all the other candidates?  Have we all really checked our brains at the door?

Our government utilizes a system of checks and balances.  Congress, the legislative branch, checks on the Judicial Branch.  The Justices keep an eye on the President, who appoints the Supreme Court and must sign off on the laws passed by Congress.  Nobody has all the toys.  The idea is if we can’t have all the toys, perhaps we will be willing to share.  OK, that’s not going so well right now, but that is the idea.

These partitioned forms of government grow out of the seemingly cynical but ultimately truthful notion that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. So poles of power must be kept at least partially isolated.  Most human cultures seem to consistently evolve four pillars upon which society rests: Marketplace, Military, Religion and Government.  The reality of power in human society plays out through a shifting set of alliances that form, dissolve and form again as each pillar seeks its own advantage.  We have no historic record of a culture in which one of the pillars subsumed the roles of the other and ruled successfully.  It is true that dictators, strong men, and god kings have seized all four pillars for brief heady bursts of absolute power.  But the Greeks seemed to have gotten that part right – those who rise to the heights of the gods, will be cast down with a viciousness that mirrors their meteoric rise.  It seems that in addition to absolute corruption, absolute power holds the seed of its own disaster.

Some of my evangelical friends seem compelled to ask if I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  I must reply, “No, but I am quite close to his father.”  My point, all kidding aside, is that religion is an intensely personal aspect of an individual’s life.  One should not wrap it around you like a new outfit – “Oh, how nice! Don’t you look godly?” “What a pious petticoat!”  My spirituality is intensely important to me, and it is utterly private.  I prefer not to pray, or be prayed for, in public, prayer should be a private conversation, not a doctrinal pep rally. 

To pick a president, or any other elected official, on the basis of the public fervor of their religious conviction is sheer insanity.  Choosing our elected officials is our most important public task and should be split apart completely from the private issues of faith and belief.  The road to an American theocracy is paved with religious litmus paper tests of the kind implied by Santorum and Graham. I encourage you to think long and hard before you set your feet on that icy, narrow path.  Not only does theocracy lead us down the slippery slope to jihad and crusade, to Inquisition and its secular twin, the Reign of Terror, but it also leads us to an inevitable coalition among Faith, Government, Marketplace and the Military.  And that, my friend, is an unholy alliance that dies bitterly and hard, sweeping the streets with the blood of the innocents.

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Corralling the Geese

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It has been a growing irritation – at least weeks in duration, if not longer.  It has moved past being nibbled to death by ducks to being dope-slapped by geese – the big angry geese that used to chase us around the yard at my uncle’s farm.  It is akin to that jittery feeling you get when you have about a half a cup too much coffee; an uncomfortable kind of "zing."  I thought maybe if I could describe it, I could deflect it: “Bit off more than I could chew this semester.” “A perfect storm of trivial imperatives.”  It didn’t work.  The irritation continues to compound.  Zing. Zing. Zing.

You need to realize the extent to which this is an aberration for me.  A woman, who knew me more than well, once asserted that I was the sanest human being she had ever met.  While I like that notion, she, no doubt, overstated the case. Still, it is true that tranquility is a core value with me.  Hence, being irritated and on edge drives me nuts!!

Then this morning I happened upon these two sentences in a blog on the LinkedIn News page: “Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the Internet, people, and other forms of distraction.”

How droll.  I cannot count the number of times I have preached that sermon, yet I had to see it on another’s screen for it to re-emerge. 

Gradually, things began to refocus.  I am teaching a new graduate course, so my class preparation and time in front of students is up by about 30%.  My technology-oriented blogs are being reposted on Senior Correspondent, so they demand a more “professional” level of attention.  I have begun writing a textbook for one of my standard classes.  I have changed texts in another course so new support materials had to be developed for that course.  We took some dear friends on their first visit to Chicago.  Those are all new “distractions” and are added to the norm: We will cook Thanksgiving dinner for an undetermined number of friends and family.  Two other couples will join us on our annual anniversary sojourn to Colonial Williamsburg.  And the beat goes on and on and on.

Now, all of the above are things I have freely chosen.  Yet, what I failed to account for was what had to be “compressed” in order to accommodate those evolving choices.  And what is being compressed is my sacred interruption-free space. 

What deceived me, and would likewise fool the casual observer, was that if I look at my days, little appears to have changed.  I spend most of my day in front of students or in front of my “screens.”  We watch our "DVR-ed" shows. I still read before sleep and meditate on either side of sunset and sunrise. But the invisible distortion of increased distraction is a strain on both my attention and intentions.  Much of what demands my attention is now what others often blithely label "the real world", and much of my effort is expended to affect the prosaic and the mundane spaces of that reality.  I realize the import of those slices of existence – they pay the bills and teach the students, but, nonetheless, I call them prosaic and mundane for good reason.

To what other arenas might I direct my attention to reduce irritation? My scribbled, and sadly ignored, midnight notes suggest some options like:

“The only truth embedded in the old saw that ‘God never gives you a burden too heavy to bear’ is that God never gives us burdens. Why would God do that? Life, not God, presents us with seeming discordances. Only a fool would seek them out; pain, hunger, deprivation, etc.  Who needs them? But when confronted with them, the task is to discover the perspective that reveals their inevitable harmony.”

And,

“If what we call the Devil is in the details, then it stands to reason that what we call God is in the overview.”

Or,

“I always meditate before going to sleep, it closes out the day.  Mindfulness trips the shutter of consciousness, and, in doing so preserves a snapshot of that iteration of our life, allowing us to observe and assess.  Our vision should revolve, inward and outward, as we contemplate the moment, giving us insight regarding our progress on life’s journey and allowing us to appreciate the nature of the landscape through which we have chosen to travel. Mindfulness demands becoming a thoughtful – selective - photographer of our life.”

Those are the beginnings of engaging thought journeys that are being driven off by the squawking geese that currently infest my life.  Hopefully I will discover the shepherd’s crook needed to drive the feathered furies back into a more manageable corral, and thus, leaving irritation behind, I will find the strength of will necessary to take up my more accustomed place in the shady glen of reflective serenity.
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The Credit Downgrade: And Where From Here?

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If you work your way though the news releases, it seems clear - even to those of us without degrees in economics - that Standard & Poor's downgrading the nation’s credit rating is based on the belief that Washington can no longer be trusted to act in the best interests of the nation and the world.  Well, duh, get in line.  Polls recently reported in the New York Times place the “post debt-ceiling debacle” disapproval rating of Congress at 82%. 

Perhaps it is time to something unheard of, something really radical, something transformative – waaaay outside the box.  Wait! Wait! I’ve got it!  Let’s reward cooperation!  Think about it for a moment.  Wasn’t that how we were raised? Isn’t that what we teach our children?  Play nice?  Share your cookies?  Nobody likes a bully?  Robert Fulghum may have said it best in the title of his bestseller: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  Why is it then that our politicians seem to be more in tune with the cultural sensibilities of prison gangs? 

And what do I know about prison gangs?  Come on now, I watch the National Geographic Channel.  [How did that happen anyhow?  What happened to all the animals? But I digress.]  The point is this, prison gangs serve only the interest of their own inflexible, xenophobic constituency; and they protect those interests through violence and intimidation.  Fraternize with “the other” and you may well find yourself bleeding in the hallway, or worse.  Sounds a lot like what we have been hearing out of Washington for the last decade or so, and increasingly from Statehouses across the nation: Reach across the aisle and you will get your hand chopped off.

And who does that benefit?  According to the conservative bean-counters at Standard & Poor’s, nobody.  Predictably our “leaders” are already blaming those on the “other side” of the aisle for the downgrade.  Who do they think they represent?  The Aryan Brotherhood?  La Nuestra Familia? 415 KUMI?  When did this whole “my way or the highway” mentality enter mainstream politics?  When did protecting a shrinking, radicalized, “base” come to trump the good of the nation? If you think about it, “old political warhorses” like Clinton, Bush 1, Bob Dole, and Gerald Ford [as represented in Betty Ford’s memorial service] seem more than little embarrassed by the offensive behavior of their political heirs. Who’d a’thunk it!?

If I were younger, and angrier, and had more money I would start a new political party called The AVCD: Associated Victims of Collateral Damage.  The idea is that while the prison gangs that currently have a stranglehold on any meaningful compromise in Congress throw shivs at each other, the nation gets blasted by the backdraft.  We are the collateral damage in their petty wars.

But I am older, more prone to seek calm than conflict, and have no expendable resources to speak of.  So what I am going to do is this: before each election, at all levels, I am going to research the voting record of all the candidates. I will pull the lever for the individual – regardless of party – who has shown the greatest evidence of compromise. I will support the candidate most inclined to reach across the aisle, who behaves least like a bully, who shares their cookies, who plays nice.  Who acts for the greater good, beyond the dictates of party affiliation.  Who, come to think of it, fosters harmony, enables beauty and opposes harm.  And I will email them, and their opponents, and inform them of how I voted, and why.  Talk about revolutionary.  I suggest you join me. 

Yours for the AVCD :-)
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Living In The World

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One of the three lovely golf courses that bejewel our community is currently closed for renovations preceding some PGA event in the Fall.  That is delightful because it means I need only step out the door to wander down paths that wind among ponds and streams, flowers and forests, and baronial homes – some of which actually remain within the limits of good taste.  I am struck each morning by how breathtaking a golf course can be without the golfers.  Herons, hawks, and rabbits all conspire to irritate the crows.  Turtles flop about the ponds and yes, “Muskrat Suzie, Muskrat Sam, Do the jitterbug at a Muskrat Land” and then flee as my shadow crosses the bridge.

I suppose one might, therefore, find it a little strange that during this morning’s walk my thoughts turned to agoraphobia.  While dictionaries will lead one into some splitting of hairs, all would agree that an agoraphobic would find my morning golf course ramble terrifying.  Fear of open spaces, of social situations, fear of being out in the world, these all pop up in definitions of the condition.  Perhaps my thoughts turned in that direction since agoraphobia is the existential opposite of universal resonance, and I was struck by how debilitating it would be to be trapped inside that perceptual reality.

The agoraphobic, I imagine, retreats into a home or a room because everything beyond the door is a manifestation of a “fearful otherness.”  Universal resonance, quite to the contrary, informs us that we are in harmony with everything that surrounds us, that we need merely to open our eyes to recognize the symphony.

As the cart path winds behind one green, it passes a cutoff where some older equipment is stored – some good “rustique” methinks, for Dan Coyle, my oldest friend and fellow artist who fancies such things.  Across the path, within hazard markers that foretell a future spraying with RoundUp, a resilient thicket of pokeweed reaches up knee high.  Universal resonance finds a representational still life in this little slice of the world.  Machinery, meticulously engineered and fabricated, spirals into decay in the still of the afternoon as the pokeweed thrives in that same neglect.  Decay and renewal, for awhile, until the mechanics come along, refurbish the machines, which will then beat the weeds down to make way for the sculptured turf of the fairway.  Decay and renewal.  And I walk between, enjoying the smooth sway of my body, the machine that carries my chord, which will, itself, decay and renew until – finally exhausted - it will give up my chord to another renewal beside another fair way, as yet unknown.  It is a peace utterly alien to the agoraphobic, and that realization casts a bit of a shadow on my ramble.

Still, I realize, bringing light to the shut-ins of the world is above my pay grade.  It would be counter-productive for me to head back to school in the hope of, sometime in an uncertain future, hanging out my therapist’s shingle. Universal resonance asserts that we strive for a rational relationship between the mandate: foster harmony, enable beauty and oppose harm; and our own choices and abilities.  I now accept that I write, I teach, I occasionally make art.  I am interested in finding new pathways to share my efforts and the efforts of others.  And that is how I best beat back the darkness; that is how I foster harmony, enable beauty and oppose harm.  That, and of course rambling along .  .  .  .
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Superconductivity, or the 96% Solution

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As Colonel Hannibal Smith of A-Team fame was wont to say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”  You see, for years now I have been aware that my whole “Chord Theory/Universal Resonance explanation of the universe and existence” notion often foundered on the shoals of lack of pragmatic evidence.  When the whole construction rests on interactions too small to be measured – the behavior of strings – well, eyebrows tend to be raised, chortles are stifled, or not. 

New paths show promise in countering those reactions.  First, evidence that the status quo is flawed opens the door to alternative explanations, such as those I propose.  And, the more humongous the previous errors, the greater the wiggle-room provided.  Second, testable hypotheses generated by the alternative explanation are presenting themselves.

I am now willing to assert that the now widely-accepted notion that some 96% of the universe made up of dark matter and energy had escaped the observational efforts of the scientific community, qualifies as a humongous error. [See link.] 

And now even more recent data from the Kepler mission points to yet another elephantine oversight.  The May 20th issue of Science News carries an article entitled: Stellar Oddballs, in which Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley says, “There are so many stars that show bizarre, utterly unexplainable brightness variations that I don’t know where to begin. These phenomena have never been seen before, or never with such clarity.” Or in other words – “Oops, our bad.” [See link.] 

The point is not so much that “they got it wrong,” as it is that everything we were sure of yesterday can change tomorrow.  Certainty isn’t; which gives greater rein to hypothesizing about the uncertain.  Hence, this hypothesis:

As I understand it, little of what we know about the cosmos – or thought we knew – is based upon actually looking at a phenomenon.  That’s very old school, very Galileo.  Today, we measure the results of interactions or shifts in interactions and then define and identify the phenomenon by interpreting the interactions.  We don’t “see” particles collide in the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], rather reactions are “detected” that are consistent with what theory asserts should occur when specific particles collide – the actual collision is inferred, not observed.  That oblique ascertainment of “reality” applies in our everyday life as well.  I am looking at a pen that is blue.  But blue is actually the color that the pen is not.  The pen absorbs – takes into itself - all the other color wavelengths and reflects back those that are not “of it” – blue.  We see, and name the object’s color, by the reflected wavelength, by the characteristic it does not possess, blue.  Hence, Picasso’s blue period was really his “every color but blue period.” 

The objective of the foregoing is not a semantic game, rather it is an attempt to demonstrate how we might have missed most of the universe, and further, how we misunderstood much of that which we thought we had observed.  The issue is important since the data – as far as we can trust them – now seem to assert that our portion of the universe, the 4% we imperfectly observe, is different from the other 96% that we have not observed.  [A cautionary note seems important here.  There is no reason that I can see, to assume that the other 96% is made up of uniform “otherness.”  There may be a wide variety of “othernesses” in play.  But let us leave that for another time.]

The observational imperative of the 4/96 split would seem to be that we avoid attempting to observe the hidden 96% of the universe using the norms we have ascertained here in our 4%.  To do so is to become, once again, the midnight drunk searching for the car keys only where the light is best; searching using the flashlight of theories that now seem, at least, incomplete.

Chord theory, universal resonance, suggests a different observational strategy.  Our 4% solution rests on the observations of reactions, of collisions, of resistance.  The observation of discord, not harmony.   Universal resonance asserts a wider universe in which harmony is the norm and resistance the aberration. So, perhaps we should ask ourselves, what is the observable opposite of resistance?  What phenomenon might reveal a universe of harmonic normalcy? Conductivity seems to raise a hand. And superconductivity – that state when resistance disappears completely, when there are no collisions or reactions, defining a universe where harmony reigns, but is, to us, invisible. 

That is, of course, the nature of the ultimately harmonic universe posited by universal resonance.  The question remains: What does that universe “look like”?  What lampposts shed light on the other 96%?  I would hypothesize that the other 96% - or at least significant portions of it – are cloaked by superconductivity, perhaps even hyper-conductivity that would allow more than one object to commonly occupy the same space at the same time.  Yes, yes, we know that is wrong – at least so it seemed yesterday.  But continued “head-stuck-in-the-4-percent” attempts to prove such bizarre notions impossible, simply impede progress toward discovering how we might observe them once they rudely assert their reality.

A more fruitful path would be for those with the appropriate skill sets to seek for “cosmic background superconductivity,” as they have previously sought cosmic microwave background radiation.  How?  I haven’t the slightest idea.  But there are some wickedly brilliant people out there who can probably get their heads around it.  I look forward to their work!
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The Fascination of the Small

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The southern summer has settled in with a vengeance, spawning tornadoes that swept northward like latter-day Jeb Stuarts taking the war to the Yankees.  The thermometer puts up numbers of which students only dream, and you can soak a shirt walking out to get the mail.   All in all, it seemed a strange time to take my camera for a stroll.  But Christine has been gone for awhile, up in the Second City doing “Aunt Chris” duty, and I have succumbed to cabin fever.  So I made it a two-stop day.  First, I walked a short loop over by Lake Crabtree, then the “Investigator” path through the meadow and woods adjoining the North Carolina Museum of Art. 

The lake trail was peacefully deserted, save for a few other mad dogs and Englishmen jogging and biking the perimeter.  There is a calming silence to heat.  It would be oppressive indoors, but out here it seems a filter – nothing expends energy on unnecessary sound.  All that remains is important and worthy of our efforts to listen.  The smell of pine and honeysuckle steep together nicely in the quiet; trumpet vines and mimosas splash pink and scarlet among shade upon shade of green and brown. Several times I raised the camera to frame a shot, only to let it fall.  I began to realize that, today at least, simply pausing and watching would suffice.  More and more these days, when I take a photo it has a way of sinking into the voracious, multi-layered and cross-indexed “Pictures” file, never to be seen again.  Better to gaze, to breathe, and to listen.

Coming around a bend, I chanced upon a biker in full Lance Armstrong regalia; Area 51 styled helmet, spandex this and wicking that, all held together with Velcro and clever clips.  His stylish steed rested lightly against him as he fiddled with ear buds looping down to something small and digital.  I nodded, but he seemed oblivious to my awesome walking staff and raffish fedora.  A yard or two past him a flashy bluebird perched above a spectacular thicket of poison ivy draped with honeysuckle. I stopped and peeked through my viewfinder.  Damn near dropped the camera as a huge heron exploded from an eddy just behind her tiny blue buddy.  She screamed, and beat her way into the air.  I turned to see if Lance, too, had avoided a coronary, only to find him head down, staring intently at his digital doodad, thumbs flying.  It struck me that had we invented cellphones first, we would never have tamed fire – the saber-tooth tigers and cave bears would have been picking us off like jellybeans as we texted our way to extinction.

The path embracing the art museum was more populated, but still not crowded.  The large sculptures scattered across the landscape lay baking in the sun, pieces pulled from some gigantic kiln, cooling under Carolina blue.  Dogs, which had no doubt started the day straining the leash, now toiled up slight inclines, tongues panted to full extend.  Parents pushed, pulled and carried children among ponds and plantings perhaps a tad too obviously designed to tempt modern-day Monets.  Still, I caved, and took a couple of shots as background for a new set of images I am drawing.

I suppose it was the sleepy little ones being toted through the lush landscape that took me back to the first serialized fiction I can remember reading, Thorton Burgess’s Old Mother West Wind stories.  Burgess, a naturalist and author from Massachusetts, penned the tales over a stretch of almost 50 years, starting in 1910.  I first encountered Little Joe Otter, Spotty the Turtle, Billy Mink, Peter Cottontail, et al., in 1954, when I was still several months shy of my sixth birthday.  My father had taken a summer teaching position in California, and our rented home was not far from the local library.  My mother used books the way modern moms use DVD players, and so we read the summer away.

I am struck by the differences between then and now, between those stories and today’s.  The Mother West Wind tales made the small large – they created an entire world in a meadow or along a stretch of riverbank.  It is a characteristic shared with Kenneth Grahame’s British classic, Wind in the Willows, published in 1908, and Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, from 1926. These works all appear to have their roots in a close observation of nature writ small.  I envision Burgess, Grahame and Milne, children when the 19^th century turned 20, forced to go outside and play without things plastic or electric. They were, no doubt, initially bored.  But boredom, like necessity, often proves the mother of invention.  And they invented entire worlds in the gardens, meadows and streams that surrounded them – worlds that later flowed from their pens onto receptive pages, worlds they shared with me, waiting anxious and unknowing, across the decades. 

I wonder if, when even the youngest of children can touch the wide world through today’s magic screens, do we deny them the fascination of the small?  Do we ever allow them to become bored enough to track an ant across the garden?  To follow the flight of the bluebird? To imagine the throat that gives voice to thunder, or the world to which a rabbit hole allows entry? Have we become so averse to leaving our children alone with themselves that we impair their ability to discover who they are, and by what small thing they may be fascinated? And is the same true for you, and for me?

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Observing the Elephant, or, WiiinWim

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The fable of The Blind Men and the Elephant teaches an important to truth – to children.  As nimble fingers explore the pachyderm those tracing the side find a wall, a tusk becomes a spear, the trunk a snake; leg, tree; ear, fan; tail, rope – until the poor beast is totally and inaccurately deconstructed.  The implicit assertion is that could we but see the entire creature we would somehow “know” what it “is.”  And that is a valuable lesson for kids – “Get all the information before reaching a conclusion.” But seen from another perspective, the fable itself becomes an illusion.  No mere observation of the elephant would reveal the matriarchal social structure, the navigational nuances, or the communicative sophistication of the species that we are only now beginning to understand and appreciate.   So the story of the elephant and the blind men leads us into a WiiinWim situation.  Ah, no, again, not a typo – just another example of my love of acronyms.  WiiinWim stands for “What It Is, Is Not What It Means.”  And I am, again, talking about the universe – this time the optometrist’s universe.

The Optometrist’s Universe is a simplistic metaphor. An optometrist provides the lenses that allow us to read.  However, the ability to make the glasses is completely separate from the ability to read and comprehend whatever text is made legible by the lenses.  The most skilled uni-lingual American optometrist can peer through her finest lenses and still find French a mystery. Seeing the text is not the same as reading the words, and neither equates to understanding the sentence, let alone the paragraph or the book.  The same, I would posit, is true about astronomers and cosmologists and the universe: seeing is not directly correlated to understanding.  WiiinWim. 

This current musing drifts from my recent reading of The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, by Richard Panek.  The book simultaneously fascinated and embarrassed me.  The fascination comes from the fact some of the smartest cosmologists, astronomers, mathematicians, and scientists somehow overlooked 96% of the universe. Even more fascinating; how easy and understandable was the error.  The embarrassment stems from the fact that these were “family” to a certain extent – members of the academic family – and much of the error was compounded because they expended incredible amounts of energy fighting over “grants and glory.”  At times the whole process wasn’t so much a “chase for the truth” as it was an effort to “affirm my version of the truth.”

But I digress, as always.  What I found most troubling about the work was the “Blind Men and the Elephant-ness” of it.  Perhaps trapped by the metaphor of his title, The Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, Panek seems to assert that once we learn to “observe” and measure the other 96 percent of the universe we will have “seen the elephant,” and that vision will put to rest pesky questions regarding the meaning of existence, the nature of love, the existence of God, and all that jazz.  I must object.

Here is my concern: the technology that reveals the extent and structure of the universe, and the individuals who operate the equipment and analyze data, do not necessarily reflect the skill sets and knowledge bases best-suited to understanding the meaning of the universe.  Now, I certainly do not wish to reduce the astronomer's role to mere lens grinder or image-maker, no, the skill involved in the conception and creation of contemporary telescopes and other sensing devices is quite incredible.  To image the various guises of the universe we can see and to even contemplate the tools necessary to perceive the other 96% that we cannot see, is a manifestation of technical and scientific skill of the first magnitude.  The astronomer's labor is worthy of daily admiration, and occasional awe.

But while those exceptional efforts bring the text into focus, they do not automatically provide insight into the meaning of the text resolved by the device.  I’m not advancing the general semanticist's old saw and simply asserting that, "the word is not the thing."  As a matter of fact, I’ve come – well, maybe not 180 degrees from that – but certainly, 155, maybe 160.  I am far more comfortable with my own perspective, drawn from my writings on Chord Theory and Universal Resonance [drop me a note, I’ll send you the links]; that while the word it is certainly an inherent part of the thing, it is just as surely not the whole thing.  To discern the symbol is not synonymous with understanding the symbol.  Were that the case, Dan Brown would be a far less wealthy man today.

Let us explore another metaphor.  Let us consider Maxfield Parrish's Sunlite Valley from 1947.

 I choose it because it is not Rembrandt or Van Gogh.  It isn't even J.M.W. Turner or Thomas Cole. It is an unabashedly romantic landscape, which if painted today might be accused of some photoshopping - a little heavy on the saturation, a bit defuse on the sky - but I like it. It is sort of painting “comfort food.”  The point is this: you could take the physical elements used to construct the painting and put them in a room.  The tubes of paint, or perhaps the pigments and binders used to make the paint, the canvas, the brushes, the stretchers for the frame, the varnishes.  Throw in the wood for an easel. Maybe add some lights.  Everything. Dump it there, in the room.  Let all those elements stand for everything that makes up the universe or the multiverses or whatever.

When the astronomers and astrophysicists finally manage to define all of those elements for us, then they will have cataloged the materials in the room, they will have marked the paint in Parrish's studio.  When they isolate the forces that pull elemental particles into larger clusters and reveal the actions and reactions that suture up the galaxies and the unimaginably immense super strings of galaxies, then they will have discerned what holds the paint together, what allows it to cling to the brush and adhere to the canvas.  They may have even have glimpsed the nature of Maxfield's technique, his brushstrokes, and his preferences for hue and texture.  But unanswered still is the question of why the artist chose to paint that particular scene and for what purpose? What, if any, was the intelligence that stretched from conception to execution?

And that, of course, brings us back to WiiinWim - what it is, is not what it means.  If you have followed these posts for long you know that they stem from my own efforts to merge the physics with the philosophy.  And those efforts have led me to a number of assertions about "what it means."  I wait, with not much patience, to learn the nature of that 96% of the universe that remains cloaked.  I am curious to see if it seems to “confirm or deny” my guesses about “what it means.” If you have forgotten the nature of those guesses, you can download the long version The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart, [200 – 300 pages depending on font size] for free here:

http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/624/the-god-chord-string-theory-in-the-landscape-of-the-heart

But, in short, the work concludes with this thesis: Foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm: these are not the only truths, but without them all others come undone.

It is an assertion regarding appropriate human attitude and behavior that is drawn from what physics reveals about the nature of reality. You see, the recurring theme is that each time the best and brightest observers of the universe assert the primacy of chaos and the eventual demise of existence - those lynchpins of nihilism - newer evidence, better data, and a broader view reveals transcendent harmony and order. I continue to scour the emerging literature from the LHC, Hubble, et. al.  To date, the dominant chord still echoes harmonics.  And in that echo sounds the human mandate: Foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm.
 
The God Chord has been downloaded some 16,000 times, and is, I assume, also occasionally read :-)   So the foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm message is inching along through cyberspace. But my wife, Christine, requested a shorter version a couple of years ago, “You know, one regular people might actually enjoy reading.” 

Let me close with the 700 words that were the result of that request as they sum up my take on Wim "What it means":

Distillations: An Acknowledgement of Universal Resonance

by

RL Schrag

September, 2009

Being a tiny little book that attempts to present Universal Resonance, the worldview formerly know as Chord Theory in a more accessible form.

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Distillations

“Even small works can be beautiful if they point the way.”

Foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm: these are not the only truths, but without them all others come undone.

The object of this work is to distill universal resonance to its most parsimonious essence.  The guiding principles will be brevity and clarity, the objective, a work you can hold in the palm of your hand.
 

Universal Resonance

From the string theory of physics I accept the assertion that at the irreducible core of all things rests the string.  Unimaginably tiny, it vibrates.  Its existence mandates that the universe be defined by resonance; that we are made - as is every other thing in the universe, no matter how great or small - of music.

Existence, therefore, is best understood in terms of harmony and discord with no artificial distinction drawn between physics and metaphysics.

Universal resonance sees the division between physics and metaphysics as an intellectual artifice, a relic of wars between dueling arrogances:  Metaphysics asserts that truth is beyond measurement, while Physics fails to imagine the instruments equal to the task.

Universal resonance anticipates a world in which the unimaginable will become measurable, and the unbelievable is rationally explained.  It has happened so often in the past, it seems foolhardy to assert the contrary.

Foster Harmony

This guides all our behavior. It shapes what we do and what we should refrain from doing: We seek harmony.

Implicit in the exhortation to foster harmony is the realization that we cannot choose for others. The only chord you can tune is your own.

Harmony rarely frowns. She is not selfish, arrogant or disdainful.  Harmony could be rather tedious were she not so willing to laugh at herself.

Enable Beauty

This tenet mandates our active participation in making the world more beautiful. A broad conception of beauty is implied, one that transcends culture, market and current taste.

The route to beauty winds through throngs and past lonely places.  Where and how we choose to follow is unimportant.  That we do follow is imperative.
 

Oppose Harm

Harm is anything that compromises harmony and beauty. Sometimes active opposition, though seemingly discordant, is the necessary path to harmony. But, whenever possible, opposition should be graceful, gentle, even beautiful.

Remember, opposition forced into the public sphere usually indicates a failure to blunt harm in a more private and graceful manner.

The Self

The self is the symphony we compose with the choices of our life.  Inclined by biology, we take from our DNA the realization that we are utterly unique.  Each breath we draw, each hope we cherish, our fears, the thoughts we think, all trigger cascades of discernible physical reactions that strum the very strings of our self, creating and recreating us anew each moment.

Though buffeted by both choice and chance, we are the composers of our life’s symphony.  It is a role we are powerless to relinquish.

The Soul

The entity that most religions call the soul is recognized in universal resonance to be a physical reality; a cluster of those unimaginably tiny strings that uniquely encodes our deepest beliefs, feelings and insights. It is a minute morsel of matter whose size and resonance allows it, on the occasion of the demise of its current body, to migrate among the multiple dimensions demanded by the math of string theory, thereby actualizing immortality.

The Universe

Is the encompassing resonant harmonic entity of which we, as individuals, are and will always remain, a unique, sentient part.

The universe expands beyond the multi-verse of our theorizing, and yet is reflected in the infinitesimal perfection of the soul.

Our knowledge of the universe is evolutionary.  We are disabled by the belief that we can imagine the horizon of understanding.  Our belief in complexity blinds us to the insight suggested by simplicity.

Wisdom

We gain wisdom as we explore the three truths.  It is an exploration that is ambiguously poised between the private and the public.

We are unique entities suspended amidst unimaginable billions – unlike any other, yet in evolving concert with all.

Perhaps wisdom is best seen as unfolding harmony, comprised of works accomplished, commentaries on those works and the thoughtful anticipation of works yet to be.
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Travels in Alternia

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I am often unaware of making the trip.  But suddenly I am back again, standing in the kitchen, wondering what brought me here.  Other times I will be deeply engrossed in the trying task of finding exactly the right word to express a subtle perception hiding just around a bend in my mind, when the beep of a horn or a knock on the door returns me to my chair, disoriented, dislocated, disassociated.  I would be more concerned were this a phenomenon of recent inception, but I cannot remember a time when it was not part of my life: "Robby, are you listening to me?  Robby, I have asked you three times now to let the dog in.  I swear that boy .  .  .  ."

Still, it would be foolish to deny that moving into my seventh decade here on planet Earth has not focused my attention more closely on the phenomenon.  Can it really be creeping senility, dementia, or Alzheimer's if I have done it all my life?  And am I really doing it more often, or do advancing years simply make us paranoid about these flights of reflective fancy as "that boy" has somehow become "the old guy."

There was a family reunion in South Dakota last April.  My father, who will be 98 in June, could not make the trip.  But we took videos of recent conversations with him to the reunion via my tablet computer.  They were such a hit that we showed them to him when we returned to Chicago.  However, watching himself on the screen seemed more confusing than entertaining. It wasn't that he didn't grasp that we had taped the conversation, it just seemed, perhaps, irrelevant.  In that moment of his disorientation, I saw myself struggling to return to "everyday" when I had been "away."

I think that was when I first began to play - more consciously anyhow - with the question of what I have come to think of as "travels in Alternia." Is there, I wondered, another space/reality where we venture when we lose contact with everyday reality?  It must certainly be something considered by those whose loved ones get lost behind the tragic curtain of Alzheimer's; that hope that they are "somewhere else" and are "all right."  That is part of the conversation.  But is it merely a protective fancy to conjecture that senility in this realm of consciousness may not mandate universal senility?  More positively, can we posit an actual realm that is home to dreaming, and creativity - and my daily flights of walkabout?  "Well, perhaps," you say, "But another 'reality'"?  Stranger things are dreamt of.

We have learned only recently that 96% of the universe is made up of energy and matter that lies beyond our perceptual abilities and imaging technologies.  That which we can see - what we believed to constitute the entire universe, all of heaven and earth - is actually only 4% of what is "out there."  We have been the drunk in the old joke:

Late one night, a police officer happens upon an obviously inebriated gentleman on his hands and knees, creeping studiously about beneath a streetlight.

     "Sir, is there a problem?" enquires the officer.

     "Most certainly," replies the gentleman. "I have dropped my keys."

      The officer looks carefully around. There is obviously nothing on the ground.

     "Where did you drop them, sir?"

      The drunk gestures towards the dark shadows over his shoulder, "Back there."

     "Then why are you looking over here?"

     "The light is better here."

We look for explanations where they are most easily seen.  We have defined reality based on what falls within the glow of immediate lamplight. In doing so we seem to have missed 96% of the universe.  Perhaps we have made a similar error as we explore human consciousness.  Consider the notion of "cloaked consciousness."  [I think "dark matter" and "dark energy" are unfortunate choices to name the other 96% of the universe, the part that lies outside the comforting circle of our lamppost. Too much Darth Vader in those monikers.] I borrow "cloaked consciousness" from Rowling's world of Harry Potter.  Harry's invisibility cloak makes him invisible in one world, but in no way reduces the totality of his "presence in reality." "Cloaked consciousness" is how I conceive of the home to those experiences that leave no footprints here beneath the lamp, "cloaked consciousness" is the home to dreaming, and creativity and walkabout.  It is Alternia.

In Alternia, one lives unencumbered by the frailties of the awakened world. One leaps and creates and seeks truth differently. In Alternia one does not hear voices, it is not delusion. Rather one senses silent and affirming audiences who share your interest, and that interest propels you on.  Alternia remains invisible until we recreate its insights on this side of the curtain. Does that make one place illusion and another truth?  I doubt it.  But belief does not reality make.  How long did we point our telescopes into the heavens before the analysis of the data revealed that something - something huge - was missing?

I do not know where we may find acceptable evidence for Alternia.  But I do know that is isn't here, beneath the same old streetlight. Perhaps it is time we looked elsewhere.
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The Gray Flannel University

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I spent 5th and 6th grade at the American International School in Vienna, Austria.  During those years, 1959 – 1961, Vienna was still remaking itself after the physical and social devastation of World War II.  One of my favorite places was the Secret Garden that surrounded the ruins of a grand mansion down the block from our apartment building.  The house was a gutted shell, but, if you climbed the still intact walls, you found yourself amid thigh-high grasses surrounding the cracked marble-lined pools that captured rainwater.  Rambling roses draped otherwise immodest statuary.  The city was like that, pocked with ruins, yet still beautiful.

Through my young eyes the citizens appeared grimly determined; gray somehow.  The pace was stolidly slow and steady, measured, orderly – as though by working hard and “staying between the lines” a person could still find a way to the glittering future that had inexplicably descended, with ashes, into ashes.  There was still, after all, the utterly entrancing Staatsoper, with crystal chandeliers, seemingly stories high, hung amid the voices of angels.  Maybe one was supposed to keep your head down, but your eyes and ears in the heavens.

Perhaps it was the fact that my school was located in the heart of the city, that, we too, found ourselves in an orderly, controlled and measured environment.  For example, when we took a test the results were posted the next day outside the classroom door – by name, starting with the best grade and descending to the worst.  Black lines marked the cutoff for each letter grade.  A brusque red line defined one’s slide into failure.  The laudatory individualized marginalia of “good effort,” and “like what you are doing here” were decades away.

It was, then, with a strange feeling of déjà vu that I read a recent email:

"Each year, the Chancellor's Office requests an Annual Report from the College.  In the past, the Dean has included highlights from each department/unit in the report.  The College will continue that tradition. Therefore, the Dean has asked that each faculty member complete the attached Productivity chart. The Head will use the charts to create a department annual report, which will be sent to the Dean.  Please send your completed productivity chart back by May 1.  If you will put your information into the correct boxes it will make it easy to copy and paste it into the final chart document."

I opened the Productivity Report file and found a form that had a variety of columns: Books, Articles, Book Reviews, etc., even Poems and Short Stories. It was, despite lacking a column for Whimsical Paintings, or Pooh Bear Hums, quite a comprehensive list.  Nonetheless there were a couple of chilling aspects to it.  First, all of my colleague’s names were printed in one column, meaning, of course, that we were to enter our “productivity items” into our line.  Second, it was clear that we were simply to enter numbers into each “productivity box”.

I found those aspects depressing and disconcerting because I could see in my mind’s eye a list of names with numbers after them; black lines marking the cutoff for each letter grade, and a brusque red line defining one’s slide into failure.  The fact that the form mandated the use of numbers divorced from any reference to content, title, or venue, smacked of “keeping your head down and staying between the lines.”  It seemed a gray depiction of my professional world.  Keep turning out widgets that can be counted.  Count your particular widget and put it in a box.

I would be far less disturbed if I thought this chart were the bizarre construction of misguided administrators in my university.  Then I could simply shake my head and wait for them to fade away into the inevitable mist of retired administrators.  My fear, alas, is that this list is the norm, not the exception.  It is an accounting solution to the vexing national problems of “assessment” and “accountability.”  Legislators, alumni, Promotion and Tenure Committees; they all need information to make decisions that are vital to both universities and the constituencies they serve.  This method provides numbers that seem to inform those processes.

I say, “seem to inform” with great intentionality.  The problem is that when data are gathered, people will proceed as if those data had meaning.  Our productivity chart, and the others like it that I am sure are being employed at most universities, generate data that will easily be used to equate “numbers in a box” with “productivity” at a university.  I would assert that any such relationship is coincidental.  The flaws in such thinking are myriad.  Let me just note a few of the most obvious.  An article is not an article is not an article.  Some journals are wonderful founts of information and insight, others are “huckster-esque” resume building buffoons.  Still a publication in each warrants a mark in the same box.  And now, how does one measure the academic worth of a poem?  Is it the same as an article? Surely not a book – I mean, think of all the words in a book.  Poems have far fewer.  Are they of similar import? Let me count the ways .  .  .  .

The point is simply this: in the university we do not make widgets.  We are charged with nurturing the flames of curiosity, knowledge and creativity.  The product of our labors is to enable the more measurable productivity of others.  I realize that such a perception is laughably quaint in the modern university.  Which is one reason why, to quote Maurice Chevalier in Gigi,  “I’m glad I’m not young anymore!”
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