.
I was talking with a friend yesterday about an article he is writing with another colleague that focuses on the impact of Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition that was here at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science over the winter. Some of the ideas they are examining put a sharper point on some thoughts on mortality that have been bouncing around in my head over the last year. Well, maybe longer, but the last six months have added to the sharpening. Among the "sharpeners" was, of course, my second stem cell transplant, and a colleague's first run through that procedure. Then my wife, Christine, walked away from an accident that could well have been fatal. All that, added to my father's 100th birthday, about which you have already heard, lured me into further musing about mortality, and im-, and how those notions fit into a harmonic view of life.
The primary realization is that the first casualty of any traumatic event - whether it threatens us, those close to us, or strangers in an event that somehow becomes personal - is our own sense of immortality.
Watch the Winter X-Games. Check it out on YouTube if you haven't seen them. It should come as no surprise that most of the top performers are children. OK, we're not talking toddlers, but we are talking teenagers with the "aging icons" topping out in their mid to upper twenties. Look at what they do. No one in their right mind does that kind of stuff. But actually, it is not a question of a "right mind." It is a question of a "different mind," a mind in which they are still immortal. Other people get injured, other people die. Not them. They walk with the gods - until they don't. In our sports fixated popular culture we have all heard the somber commentator note: "He [or she] is certainly 100% physically, but how are they mentally? Have they been able to forget that terrible day when, well, let's just watch the tape." And we watch some horrific moment in a "game" when a human body bends or bounces in ways never intended.
When that body is our own and it suffers insult, physical or biological, we are forced to consider that there is not necessarily always another tomorrow. Hopefully our body returns to reasonable competence, but our notion of immortality may well be forever gone. And that is not necessarily a bad thing - harmonically speaking.
"Slacker," Google's Ngram tells us, is a word that has become increasingly popular over the last decade. The Urban Dictionary defines it thus: "Someone who puts off doing things to the last minute, and when the last minutes comes, decides it wasn't all that important anyways and forgets about it." Slacker is used most often to describe young people - age-mates of the X-Games participants. That should not surprise us. Like flinging yourself into the air over a sheet of ice on concrete, the slacker's laissez-faire approach to life demands the assumption of endless tomorrows: Should something meaningful actually happen to come along, there will always be a tomorrow in which to engage it.
Once some trauma disabuses us of the notion of immortality in this life, the inclination to "put it off until tomorrow" goes into a deep spiral. The preciousness of the moment takes on new meaning. I find myself editing "truths" both trivial and significant. "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" becomes "Today could be the rest of your life." Not a shift of many words, but certainly a shift in focus.
I find that the most significant change resulting from my own loss of presumed immortality in this life has been a steep decline in my attention to external authority. What is "expected" of me by others becomes far less important than the transcendent quartet of foster harmony, enable beauty, distill complexity and oppose harm that we talked about a few posts ago. Interestingly, that shift seems - in my mind anyhow - to have resulted in me being a better teacher, writer, artist, husband, father and friend. Less traditional in many ways, which often confuses those I contact in those various guises - but in the long run, better - more honest.
For those of you paying close attention, let me briefly touch on the textual shift from "immortality" to "immortality in this life." Yes, the difference is intentional. And yes, my strange blend of physics and metaphysics demands an existence that transcends our current existence. It is a matter not of an afterlife as depicted in many traditional faiths - a land of hedonistic indulgence or a recreation of the family Thanksgiving dinner we always wanted, but never quite managed to pull off. My conception, rather, is a continuation of life demanded by supersymmetry and the inherent nature of the universe. Immortality - OK, yes, but you're still never going to see me attempting a fakie ollie at the Winter X-Games.
.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Revisiting Father
.
OK, I'm willing to admit that my post "The Idea of a Century" was a touch dark. But I really can only report what I see at the moment, and the moment was dark. Fortunately, the story didn't stop there. A series of bizarre events, too complex to report here, kept me up in Chicago for a few weeks longer than anticipated. But those days contained some delightful exceptions to the idea of a century, replacing that idea with an affirmation of harmony.
First, Dad's 100th birthday party itself went off far better than any of us could have anticipated. It was held in a neighboring building, necessitating a wheelchair ride of maybe 30 yards. Father hadn't left "his building" in several months, and balked at the idea of such long distance traveling. But the staff helped my sister Margaret get him comfortable in his wheels. He brightened perceptively when Margaret rolled him into what must have appeared to be a sea of smiling faces. We have come to realize that Margaret is really the only person he consistently recognizes. Last night my older daughter Andrea, who bears a striking resemblance to her aunt, pointed out to me that Margaret still looks very much as she did when Dad was in his far more focused early nineties. That, and the fact that he sees her regularly, may well keep her "gentle on his mind." So Margaret stayed at his shoulder as the line of grandchildren, spouses, and his sole great-grandchild filed by in small, non-threatening groups. He seemed to enjoy being the center of attention and, as usual, had no trouble feeding his sweet tooth on cake and ice-cream. All in all it was as good an outcome as we could have wished for.
However, even more comforting was the visit on the day just before Christine and I returned to Raleigh. Margaret and I agree, the party notwithstanding, that Dad does best with small groups of particularly precious people. So we seek to protect him from unwanted intrusions and overwhelming numbers. It is interesting that social complexity, once his academic speciality and delight, is now simply a source of anxiety. Perhaps it is because he thinks he should understand, but just doesn't. Anyhow, on this day there were only four of us. Margaret and her husband Bill, the family he sees most often, and Christine and me. Bill served as primary photographer, while Christine floated off my shoulder - in sight but not "crowding." Margaret perched by Dad's "good ear," while I knelt on the other side of his chair. What resulted was what Margaret and Bill report as his best day in months, if not longer. The conversation was fascinating, albeit only tangentially related to reality. On this day he recognized me several times - and as several different people. As we looked at the video later we agreed that most often I was his youngest brother Calvin. Margaret and Bill report that he often gets us confused in photographs.
He looked at me for a moment, and then his eyes lit up, "It is so good to see you! Your long hair had me confused there for awhile." Well, my hair, still returning post-chemo, remains far shorter than it has ever been - but no doubt longer than his memories of Calvin's even shorter locks. Still, there were some moments when I seemed to be a blend of Uncle Calvin, also a university professor, and myself. Dad patted my arm and told the audience - Christine, Margaret and Bill - "This young man needs to realize that his teaching years, well, they will be . . . well." He teared up a bit, still smiling, overcome with the memories of his own years in the classroom.
But then, dum ba dum, - "And there was your brother Si - he was very tall."
We're back to basketball in South Dakota. OK, I'm game.
"Yes, my brother Si was very tall." I replied.
"Well, I was almost as tall." Dad asserted. [The difference was at least 6 inches] "So I had to play like the dickens!"
Long pause. "We're going to go over there and play those boys at Marion High School . . . we'll show them."
And so we drifted along as he recalled his teaching days, playing baseball against the traveling team from the House of David, remembering his three kids reading on the couch by the Christmas tree. He faded in and out for another ten minutes or so; not unlike a radio on scan, sharing this, remembering a scrap of that. But finally he noticed that dinner was being served in the next room and we lost out to the promise of dessert. The staff helped him into his chair to roll over to dinner. I leaned down to give him a hug.
"I love you, Dad."
"I love you too, Rob."
I have written before about a place I imagine called Alternia. It is a place, I choose to believe, to which those afflicted with the broad range of maladies we define as dementia retreat when the world is too much for them. I choose to believe that on the bad days, when Dad is somewhere far away, that he is romping around in Alternia, hitting two-handed set shots against Marion High School, rapping out a double against The House of David, and sharing with decades of students the products of a truly remarkable mind.
.
OK, I'm willing to admit that my post "The Idea of a Century" was a touch dark. But I really can only report what I see at the moment, and the moment was dark. Fortunately, the story didn't stop there. A series of bizarre events, too complex to report here, kept me up in Chicago for a few weeks longer than anticipated. But those days contained some delightful exceptions to the idea of a century, replacing that idea with an affirmation of harmony.
First, Dad's 100th birthday party itself went off far better than any of us could have anticipated. It was held in a neighboring building, necessitating a wheelchair ride of maybe 30 yards. Father hadn't left "his building" in several months, and balked at the idea of such long distance traveling. But the staff helped my sister Margaret get him comfortable in his wheels. He brightened perceptively when Margaret rolled him into what must have appeared to be a sea of smiling faces. We have come to realize that Margaret is really the only person he consistently recognizes. Last night my older daughter Andrea, who bears a striking resemblance to her aunt, pointed out to me that Margaret still looks very much as she did when Dad was in his far more focused early nineties. That, and the fact that he sees her regularly, may well keep her "gentle on his mind." So Margaret stayed at his shoulder as the line of grandchildren, spouses, and his sole great-grandchild filed by in small, non-threatening groups. He seemed to enjoy being the center of attention and, as usual, had no trouble feeding his sweet tooth on cake and ice-cream. All in all it was as good an outcome as we could have wished for.
However, even more comforting was the visit on the day just before Christine and I returned to Raleigh. Margaret and I agree, the party notwithstanding, that Dad does best with small groups of particularly precious people. So we seek to protect him from unwanted intrusions and overwhelming numbers. It is interesting that social complexity, once his academic speciality and delight, is now simply a source of anxiety. Perhaps it is because he thinks he should understand, but just doesn't. Anyhow, on this day there were only four of us. Margaret and her husband Bill, the family he sees most often, and Christine and me. Bill served as primary photographer, while Christine floated off my shoulder - in sight but not "crowding." Margaret perched by Dad's "good ear," while I knelt on the other side of his chair. What resulted was what Margaret and Bill report as his best day in months, if not longer. The conversation was fascinating, albeit only tangentially related to reality. On this day he recognized me several times - and as several different people. As we looked at the video later we agreed that most often I was his youngest brother Calvin. Margaret and Bill report that he often gets us confused in photographs.
He looked at me for a moment, and then his eyes lit up, "It is so good to see you! Your long hair had me confused there for awhile." Well, my hair, still returning post-chemo, remains far shorter than it has ever been - but no doubt longer than his memories of Calvin's even shorter locks. Still, there were some moments when I seemed to be a blend of Uncle Calvin, also a university professor, and myself. Dad patted my arm and told the audience - Christine, Margaret and Bill - "This young man needs to realize that his teaching years, well, they will be . . . well." He teared up a bit, still smiling, overcome with the memories of his own years in the classroom.
But then, dum ba dum, - "And there was your brother Si - he was very tall."
We're back to basketball in South Dakota. OK, I'm game.
"Yes, my brother Si was very tall." I replied.
"Well, I was almost as tall." Dad asserted. [The difference was at least 6 inches] "So I had to play like the dickens!"
Long pause. "We're going to go over there and play those boys at Marion High School . . . we'll show them."
And so we drifted along as he recalled his teaching days, playing baseball against the traveling team from the House of David, remembering his three kids reading on the couch by the Christmas tree. He faded in and out for another ten minutes or so; not unlike a radio on scan, sharing this, remembering a scrap of that. But finally he noticed that dinner was being served in the next room and we lost out to the promise of dessert. The staff helped him into his chair to roll over to dinner. I leaned down to give him a hug.
"I love you, Dad."
"I love you too, Rob."
I have written before about a place I imagine called Alternia. It is a place, I choose to believe, to which those afflicted with the broad range of maladies we define as dementia retreat when the world is too much for them. I choose to believe that on the bad days, when Dad is somewhere far away, that he is romping around in Alternia, hitting two-handed set shots against Marion High School, rapping out a double against The House of David, and sharing with decades of students the products of a truly remarkable mind.
.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Naming God in the Hubble Calendar
.
You're sharing time with close friends. The kind of friends who really defined the word until Facebook stole it. The conversations drift, nobody seems to feel the need to dominate with a "better" story in the same genre. And so eventually you get there. It may take most of the night and some sort of mind altering activity or substance - Madeira, medication or meditation - but talk turns to God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha - Wikipedia has a list of 101 names for God. Someone says something as innocent as "God only knows," or "Let's leave that in God's hands," and suddenly there it is, the elephant in the room: God.
Ask a "person of the cloth" about God and they will most likely provide you with the acceptable response vetted by their faith. But more truthfully, I think most of us see "the deity" more clearly in a paraphrase of a well-known American president: "Well, Senator, that depends on what you mean by 'God.'" I doubt that there has ever been a time in the history of sentient humankind when we have not agonized over what we mean by God. To attempt a comparative presentation would be foolhardy, since it would necessarily imply that I know what others mean by God. So, my discussion must begin with my first definitional assumption: god is in both definition and relationship uniquely personal. (And, yes, the drop to lower case is intentional. Since God is only one of the myriad names for god it seemed that continuing to use the predominantly western Christian version would get the discussion off on an unintentionally constrained footing.)
So back to the elephant. Our relationship to a deity is personal because, despite any shared liturgy or prayers spoken in unison, those words take unique meaning deep within us. Unique because, as I have written elsewhere, we are an N of one, utterly unique in the universe. That inescapable scientific fact, embedded countless times within our DNA, mandates a unique experience of any stimulus, and that includes our relationship to and/or definition of a deity. As we are unique in the universe, so our relationship to the deity must also be unique.
Now, if you were paying attention, you realize that science a.k.a. DNA, just pulled a chair up to the table. And how could it not? Most of the sacred writings of the world's dominant faith's were written long before the periodic table of elements. The theistic faith expressed in those early texts sometimes, for "believers," trumps science. Often that is the case not because "sacred texts" are demonstrably more legitimate, but simply because they were earlier, seemingly authoritative, stabs at answering the same perplexing questions with which science still struggles. The fundamentalist argument seems to run that if science doesn't have all the answers, well, then we can ignore those it does provide. I can empathize with that inclination, but not the conclusion. One of the most daunting challenges for any scholar, scientist or theologian is admitting that you were wrong. The earth was not created in six days, nor does it lie at the center of the universe. Those are painful admissions for both the authors of the ancient texts and the users of the earliest telescopes.
Still those shared disappointments reveal that the mystic and the mathematician are kindred spirits, that science and theology stalk the same prey: Why does the world work the way it does? How do I reconcile what I observe around me with what I feel inside me? From where does life spring, and where does it go when it leaves here? Are we alone in the universe? And, as Lieber and Stoller wrote for Peggy Lee, "is that all there is?" The fact that we articulate the questions raises this perplexing issue: from whom do we expect an answer?
The faith-based assertion was often that the primary prophet of the faith had, with the help of the deity, indicated the general direction for the best guess at the answers. Science tends to believe that, at least, it has rejected the obviously erroneous conclusions. And then we stumble upon the "earth was created in six days and sits at the center of the universe" dual theology/scientific fallacy, and it seems that both lines of investigation may have led us astray. But probably not.
The fallacies are, for the most part temporary, the result of a transient hubris born of the fleeting belief that our particular niche of existence is somehow exceptional. Consider the calendar that is most likely displayed by the device through which you access this text. Mine defines the year as 2013. Through whose eyes? Well, Christian eyes. The eyes of admittedly biased scholars who assert that their prophet was born roughly two thousand years ago. 2013 AD, After the Death of Jesus of Nazareth. Is the currently politically correct 2013 BCE, "before the common era" any more accurate? Whose common era? Different lenses yield different results. It is the Jewish year 5773, Muslims, Hindi, Chinese - all draw a theological or cultural line in the sand that asserts from this moment the calendar begins, often because, for their faith, at that moment truth became visible. Those are faith-based delineations, drawn from millennia of theological assumptions that occasionally reflect constrained science.
Constrained how? In the most pragmatic sense, constrained by what we could see and measure. We thought ourselves the center of the universe because we could see no further than the objects in the night sky discernible by the unaided human eye. Anything smaller than a grain of sand or pollen became mere conjecture. However, as we devised tools to see further past each end of our experiential spectrum, both faith and science revised their conclusions and commentaries to avoid the inevitable collisions with the evolving empirical evidence. It is in the spirit of that inevitably flawed yet necessary demarcation of the human interaction with existential reality and the passing of time, that I would like to propose a new line in the sand: The Hubble Calendar. It would give dates using BH and AH - Before Hubble and After Hubble. And I mean the telescope. That makes this the year 24 AH. Why pick the launch of the Hubble Telescope as the calendrical set point? Because it was the day when, in very important ways, truth became visible. Work with me here.
At their core, most religions assert that they draw two central truths from their conception of the deity: First, a definition of the universe that the deity has created, and, second, rules or guidelines that define how you are supposed to live in that world. My estrangement from organized religions grows from an inability to accept the legitimacy of either truth as presented by the world's established faiths. The stumbling block for the first truth comes from the fact that the early theologians were utterly ignorant of the nature of the universe in which they lived. Mind you I did not say the world in which they lived. I am as amazed as anyone by the growing evidence of the depth knowledge reflected in the artifacts from ancient civilizations - the math of Stonehenge, what appear to be ancient electric batteries in the pyramids. Fascinating and mystifying. But those are tiny mysteries when compared to the new celestial and quantum data that seem to greet us daily to interpret and reinterpret the nature of the universe. Hence, if the ancients were babes in the woods when it came to the nature of the universe in which they lived, how can we place any faith - big and little f - in their assertions regarding how we live a moral and ethical life in that world? Mind you, I'm not saying that the ancient works must reach flawed conclusions, but I am saying that there is no data to support the conclusions that they do reach.
Let me also point out that I don't propose Hubble as a demarcation of certainty - actually the opposite. Hubble and all the other remarkable advances of Big Astronomy and Little Quantum Mechanics, keep us aware of how much we do not know, not only what we can see, but what we still cannot see - maybe Hubble Humility? Remember that a vital element of "truth" is realizing that it is always hedged by "doubt." Theology encourages us - in times of incomprehensible trauma - to accept "god's plan." Science gives us "levels of significance." Truth is hedged by doubt. Let us consider for the moment the following thought: perhaps the Hubble telescope brings us no further to the 'edge of all things' than did the telescopes of Galileo's time. Perhaps we are, relatively speaking, equally ignorant of the actual nature and limits of the universe as were the ancient scholars whose views we now find quaint. It is certainly possible. So, aside from the visible and the still hidden, what does the BH/AH line in the sand divide?
Two important answers spring to mind. First the line should divide arrogance (BH) from humility (AH). It is like the standard scene in many films and videos: The protagonist for some reason or another picks a fight with a seated stranger. The stranger ignores the protagonist for as long as possible, but then stands up revealing that he is two or three times the size of our protagonist. Before Hubble (BH) we, at least most of us, thought we knew about the universe. "Come on, guy! Wazza matter? Ya chicken? Come on!" Then Hubble stands up and removes the scales from our eyes revealing a universe of inconceivable, unimaginable vastness (AH). "Oh, my! I thought you were someone else. Can I buy you a drink?" So, as we consider the universe from an AH perspective we should attempt to remain humble regarding the scope of our knowledge and understanding.
Humble, yes - but not foolishly so. It isn't a case of "we're not worthy, we're not worthy!" It is more a case of "we're not certain, but here is an intriguing guess . . . ." For me the intriguing guess comes not from the "monstrously large" revealed by Hubble, Kepler, and their swiftly multiplying telescopic kin, but rather from the mind-blowingly microscopic world of string theory and particle physics. As I address the details of these issues in mind-numbing detail in The God Chord (search for Robert Schrag on Feedbooks.com or email me at robert.schrag@gmail.com for a free copy) let me simply give you the Twitter version here: String theory implies that the universe, however large, is made of tiny vibrating strings, of music, and that the particles that construct all existence are attracted to, or repealed from, each other by the song they sing. Supersymmetry implies that this celestial harmony goes on forever and ever, from inconceivably tiny to the unimaginably humongous, throughout the multiverses - song without end.
I believe it is this unending harmony that we are trying to identify as we craft our endless names for god. It is a pointless endeavor. The harmony is - there is no point in naming it, in limiting it, or in claiming it. There are more intriguing issues to consider. And those are, of course, the second major piece of every theology or secular philosophy; knowing the nature of the universe - super-symmetrical harmony - how are we to behave in that universe? Again, I would refer you to earlier posts for my answer: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. If we can accomplish at least one of the four everyday then we can rest somewhat humbly assured that we are moving along the path of being in tune with the universe.
And why bother? Who cares? That leads to . . . what is it by now? The mastodon in the room? The most intriguing question: Is the universe sentient and self-aware, and do we eventually become contributing, sentient, self-aware portions part of that entity? Do we eventually become part of a universal soul?
Ridiculous! Absurd! Heresy! Theologians will seek to dissect or dismiss the science that nudged me to the question and scientists will decry the lack of evidence or data that even suggest the hypothesis, let alone ways to test it. Poppycock!
Maybe, maybe not. Let's save that for another time. I've claimed your eyeballs enough for today, July 27, 24 AH
.
You're sharing time with close friends. The kind of friends who really defined the word until Facebook stole it. The conversations drift, nobody seems to feel the need to dominate with a "better" story in the same genre. And so eventually you get there. It may take most of the night and some sort of mind altering activity or substance - Madeira, medication or meditation - but talk turns to God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha - Wikipedia has a list of 101 names for God. Someone says something as innocent as "God only knows," or "Let's leave that in God's hands," and suddenly there it is, the elephant in the room: God.
Ask a "person of the cloth" about God and they will most likely provide you with the acceptable response vetted by their faith. But more truthfully, I think most of us see "the deity" more clearly in a paraphrase of a well-known American president: "Well, Senator, that depends on what you mean by 'God.'" I doubt that there has ever been a time in the history of sentient humankind when we have not agonized over what we mean by God. To attempt a comparative presentation would be foolhardy, since it would necessarily imply that I know what others mean by God. So, my discussion must begin with my first definitional assumption: god is in both definition and relationship uniquely personal. (And, yes, the drop to lower case is intentional. Since God is only one of the myriad names for god it seemed that continuing to use the predominantly western Christian version would get the discussion off on an unintentionally constrained footing.)
So back to the elephant. Our relationship to a deity is personal because, despite any shared liturgy or prayers spoken in unison, those words take unique meaning deep within us. Unique because, as I have written elsewhere, we are an N of one, utterly unique in the universe. That inescapable scientific fact, embedded countless times within our DNA, mandates a unique experience of any stimulus, and that includes our relationship to and/or definition of a deity. As we are unique in the universe, so our relationship to the deity must also be unique.
Now, if you were paying attention, you realize that science a.k.a. DNA, just pulled a chair up to the table. And how could it not? Most of the sacred writings of the world's dominant faith's were written long before the periodic table of elements. The theistic faith expressed in those early texts sometimes, for "believers," trumps science. Often that is the case not because "sacred texts" are demonstrably more legitimate, but simply because they were earlier, seemingly authoritative, stabs at answering the same perplexing questions with which science still struggles. The fundamentalist argument seems to run that if science doesn't have all the answers, well, then we can ignore those it does provide. I can empathize with that inclination, but not the conclusion. One of the most daunting challenges for any scholar, scientist or theologian is admitting that you were wrong. The earth was not created in six days, nor does it lie at the center of the universe. Those are painful admissions for both the authors of the ancient texts and the users of the earliest telescopes.
Still those shared disappointments reveal that the mystic and the mathematician are kindred spirits, that science and theology stalk the same prey: Why does the world work the way it does? How do I reconcile what I observe around me with what I feel inside me? From where does life spring, and where does it go when it leaves here? Are we alone in the universe? And, as Lieber and Stoller wrote for Peggy Lee, "is that all there is?" The fact that we articulate the questions raises this perplexing issue: from whom do we expect an answer?
The faith-based assertion was often that the primary prophet of the faith had, with the help of the deity, indicated the general direction for the best guess at the answers. Science tends to believe that, at least, it has rejected the obviously erroneous conclusions. And then we stumble upon the "earth was created in six days and sits at the center of the universe" dual theology/scientific fallacy, and it seems that both lines of investigation may have led us astray. But probably not.
The fallacies are, for the most part temporary, the result of a transient hubris born of the fleeting belief that our particular niche of existence is somehow exceptional. Consider the calendar that is most likely displayed by the device through which you access this text. Mine defines the year as 2013. Through whose eyes? Well, Christian eyes. The eyes of admittedly biased scholars who assert that their prophet was born roughly two thousand years ago. 2013 AD, After the Death of Jesus of Nazareth. Is the currently politically correct 2013 BCE, "before the common era" any more accurate? Whose common era? Different lenses yield different results. It is the Jewish year 5773, Muslims, Hindi, Chinese - all draw a theological or cultural line in the sand that asserts from this moment the calendar begins, often because, for their faith, at that moment truth became visible. Those are faith-based delineations, drawn from millennia of theological assumptions that occasionally reflect constrained science.
Constrained how? In the most pragmatic sense, constrained by what we could see and measure. We thought ourselves the center of the universe because we could see no further than the objects in the night sky discernible by the unaided human eye. Anything smaller than a grain of sand or pollen became mere conjecture. However, as we devised tools to see further past each end of our experiential spectrum, both faith and science revised their conclusions and commentaries to avoid the inevitable collisions with the evolving empirical evidence. It is in the spirit of that inevitably flawed yet necessary demarcation of the human interaction with existential reality and the passing of time, that I would like to propose a new line in the sand: The Hubble Calendar. It would give dates using BH and AH - Before Hubble and After Hubble. And I mean the telescope. That makes this the year 24 AH. Why pick the launch of the Hubble Telescope as the calendrical set point? Because it was the day when, in very important ways, truth became visible. Work with me here.
At their core, most religions assert that they draw two central truths from their conception of the deity: First, a definition of the universe that the deity has created, and, second, rules or guidelines that define how you are supposed to live in that world. My estrangement from organized religions grows from an inability to accept the legitimacy of either truth as presented by the world's established faiths. The stumbling block for the first truth comes from the fact that the early theologians were utterly ignorant of the nature of the universe in which they lived. Mind you I did not say the world in which they lived. I am as amazed as anyone by the growing evidence of the depth knowledge reflected in the artifacts from ancient civilizations - the math of Stonehenge, what appear to be ancient electric batteries in the pyramids. Fascinating and mystifying. But those are tiny mysteries when compared to the new celestial and quantum data that seem to greet us daily to interpret and reinterpret the nature of the universe. Hence, if the ancients were babes in the woods when it came to the nature of the universe in which they lived, how can we place any faith - big and little f - in their assertions regarding how we live a moral and ethical life in that world? Mind you, I'm not saying that the ancient works must reach flawed conclusions, but I am saying that there is no data to support the conclusions that they do reach.
Let me also point out that I don't propose Hubble as a demarcation of certainty - actually the opposite. Hubble and all the other remarkable advances of Big Astronomy and Little Quantum Mechanics, keep us aware of how much we do not know, not only what we can see, but what we still cannot see - maybe Hubble Humility? Remember that a vital element of "truth" is realizing that it is always hedged by "doubt." Theology encourages us - in times of incomprehensible trauma - to accept "god's plan." Science gives us "levels of significance." Truth is hedged by doubt. Let us consider for the moment the following thought: perhaps the Hubble telescope brings us no further to the 'edge of all things' than did the telescopes of Galileo's time. Perhaps we are, relatively speaking, equally ignorant of the actual nature and limits of the universe as were the ancient scholars whose views we now find quaint. It is certainly possible. So, aside from the visible and the still hidden, what does the BH/AH line in the sand divide?
Two important answers spring to mind. First the line should divide arrogance (BH) from humility (AH). It is like the standard scene in many films and videos: The protagonist for some reason or another picks a fight with a seated stranger. The stranger ignores the protagonist for as long as possible, but then stands up revealing that he is two or three times the size of our protagonist. Before Hubble (BH) we, at least most of us, thought we knew about the universe. "Come on, guy! Wazza matter? Ya chicken? Come on!" Then Hubble stands up and removes the scales from our eyes revealing a universe of inconceivable, unimaginable vastness (AH). "Oh, my! I thought you were someone else. Can I buy you a drink?" So, as we consider the universe from an AH perspective we should attempt to remain humble regarding the scope of our knowledge and understanding.
Humble, yes - but not foolishly so. It isn't a case of "we're not worthy, we're not worthy!" It is more a case of "we're not certain, but here is an intriguing guess . . . ." For me the intriguing guess comes not from the "monstrously large" revealed by Hubble, Kepler, and their swiftly multiplying telescopic kin, but rather from the mind-blowingly microscopic world of string theory and particle physics. As I address the details of these issues in mind-numbing detail in The God Chord (search for Robert Schrag on Feedbooks.com or email me at robert.schrag@gmail.com for a free copy) let me simply give you the Twitter version here: String theory implies that the universe, however large, is made of tiny vibrating strings, of music, and that the particles that construct all existence are attracted to, or repealed from, each other by the song they sing. Supersymmetry implies that this celestial harmony goes on forever and ever, from inconceivably tiny to the unimaginably humongous, throughout the multiverses - song without end.
I believe it is this unending harmony that we are trying to identify as we craft our endless names for god. It is a pointless endeavor. The harmony is - there is no point in naming it, in limiting it, or in claiming it. There are more intriguing issues to consider. And those are, of course, the second major piece of every theology or secular philosophy; knowing the nature of the universe - super-symmetrical harmony - how are we to behave in that universe? Again, I would refer you to earlier posts for my answer: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. If we can accomplish at least one of the four everyday then we can rest somewhat humbly assured that we are moving along the path of being in tune with the universe.
And why bother? Who cares? That leads to . . . what is it by now? The mastodon in the room? The most intriguing question: Is the universe sentient and self-aware, and do we eventually become contributing, sentient, self-aware portions part of that entity? Do we eventually become part of a universal soul?
Ridiculous! Absurd! Heresy! Theologians will seek to dissect or dismiss the science that nudged me to the question and scientists will decry the lack of evidence or data that even suggest the hypothesis, let alone ways to test it. Poppycock!
Maybe, maybe not. Let's save that for another time. I've claimed your eyeballs enough for today, July 27, 24 AH
.
Friday, July 5, 2013
Heading Home to Harmony
.
I have mentioned to some of you my intention to do a sort of 2nd edition of the God Chord. It is beginning to feel like it will be a whole new book, maybe Finding Harmony or Home to Harmony or something like that. Either way there will be numerous drafts, outlines, ruminations, etc. And while I do not have much faith in crowd sourcing, I do put trust in "small group sourcing," and you are the small group I trust. So here are some initial thoughts on what will be four of the major sections of "that Harmony book" Feedback, as always, is welcome :-)
===============================================
Heading Home to Harmony
There is a hierarchy to the construction of a harmonic life. The four principles are, in order:
Foster harmony.
This means that in every human interaction seeking harmony, seeking a mutually beneficial path, is our first obligation. The difficulty inherent in this first mandate is obvious in the fact that many common synonyms for seeking harmony, such as compromise and win-win solutions, are often read as code for weakness. The cultural roots for this strange moral inversion are many and deep. Anthropologically speaking they probably reach back into the mists of time, to our earliest ancestors, for whom dominance over stronger creatures meant food, clothing and survival. I find it most ironic that as species we have managed to forget that successfully hunting the mastodon hinged on cooperation. Yet, as Aesop's fox taught us long ago, we disparage those grapes which seem beyond our reach. Hence we paint our most difficult task with derision: Seeking harmony, pursuing the mutually beneficial path is a sign of weakness. Wimp. Geek. Chicken. Nothing could be further from the truth since nothing is quite so difficult as finding in your heart the solution that benefits your antagonist as it benefits you. So if you would truly reveal your strength, foster harmony.
Enable beauty.
Similarly it seems currently déclassé, artistically speaking, to represent beauty. Angst, alienation and a healthy dose of self-loathing seem to be all the artistic rage these days, as is rage. I will be the first to admit that I am something of a traditionalist when it comes to art. I lean toward representational works, and ones that make me happy, slow the pulse rate, calm the soul, infuse me with harmony.
Hence, you can understand my concern when I walk into an upscale gallery or a more informal installation and encounter a ten-foot tall rusted metal construction, splashed with lavender paint entitled #432. Mind you, I have no objection to abstract art per se - I dabble in it myself on occasion. But it strikes me as only fair to let the observer know, via a title, which corner of the universe you are playing in. So I looked at #432 for awhile, making sure that others were looking at it too. It is important to appear hip at these kinds of installations, and I remain haunted by the memory of the time in the National Gallery when I spent ten minutes gazing thoughtfully at what appeared to be a pile of trash. Then the maintanence staff came and swept it into a trash can. I need to trust my first impressions.
But there seemed to be a fair sized crowd looking at #432, and some were still there - as was #423 itself - when I left awhile later. So the current adage still seems to be if you do representational work keep it edgy and uncomfortable. And if you can't manage that, create something abstract that is angular, jarring and discordant and name it as ambiguously as possible. Numbers work, but words like Encounter, Leaving, and Adage are good too.
I find this current fascination with the ugly interesting because it requires the artist to work in an incredibly limited focal plane. A peek at the Orion Nebula through the Hubble telescope, or at a butterfly's wing through a telescope reveals the universal dominance of beauty. Yet many of our current artists seem obsessed with the discord reflected in the narrow experiential plane of humanity's inhumanity. Of course that reality exists - but do we resist or confront it by relentlessly representing it? It seems more likely that our excessive representation of the discordant only draws our attention away from the overwhelming, transcendent beauty of existence. It also defies the first, preeminent mandate: foster harmony. There is no harmony in the ugly, so enable beauty.
Distill Complexity
This is the concept that I have been calling the fourth pillar, but only because it occurred to me after the three original principles. Yet, it goes here in third place. Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty predominant because they are "all in a day's work." Everyday we can do something to foster harmony and reduce discord even if it something as simple as putting your dishes in the dishwasher, or telling the people you love that you love them. Enable beauty as well need not entail hours before an easel or pushing images around in photoshop, agonizing over the perfect poem. A $3.00 stem of flowers from the grocery store, a $1.99 track from iTunes, a haiku on a napkin, all these enable beauty.
Distilling Complexity, though, is a bit more difficult. As you know I often fall back on similes, analogies and convenient paraphrases to make my points. Today is no different. Aristotle is credited with the phrase I will distort today. In Metaphysica 2 he says "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." Since he is not around to disagree, I am going to stand that on its head and assert that "the meaning of the whole is less than the sum of its parts."
Let's begin with an analogy. Consider a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle. You open it up and dump it out on a table. But the table must be three times as big as the final puzzle you wish to construct since the pieces spread out higgeldy-piggeldy across the table. It is only after you figure out how the pieces are designed - how they fit together - that you can distill the complex chaos of those thousand pieces and place them so as to construct an image that makes sense. And, low and behold, the image is less than, smaller than, the undistilled, complex, spread out, sum of its parts.
It has, of course, to do with the process of distillation. Distillation reduces complexity to its essential core. Despite my own inability to mimic Hemingway's sparse prose, I have always distrusted the philosopher, sage, prophet or scientist who requires a library the size of Alexandria's or a specialized language to reveal truth. I am always suspicious that there really are devils lurking down there in the details. There are movements in a variety of notoriously arcane areas - the law and medicine to mention two of the worst offenders - to "speak real English." They are distillation movements to be praised and supported.
In our own lives we need to seek articulations, expressions of our own beliefs, that do not hide behind rituals and inflexible generalities. We need to parse our worldview precisely: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity - and, Oppose Harm.
Oppose Harm.
You may find it strange that I leave this for last as it is the rallying cry that has sent us off to kill each other for millennia. And that is precisely why I leave it for last. In his work Foundation, Isaac Asimov asserts that "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." It is a glorious pronouncement and I wish it were true. However, violence is also the first choice of the desperate, the disenfranchised, and those who have fallen for the devil words in the undistilled complexities of their "great books."
Harm must be opposed or the bullies, at home and abroad, will destroy the world through armed conflict, environmental neglect, or unimaginable greed. Still I place it fourth. Why? My reasoning is hopefully distilled and not merely simple: If we can, in significant numbers, bring the first three principles into the world: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty and Distill Complexity; we will create a world that is increasingly toxic for those who turn at first blush to violence. A world that rests firmly on the first three principles will undoubtedly be called upon to Oppose Harm; but hopefully less often, and with less virulent results.
A concluding passing fancy: We have read much in the past few weeks about how governments - our own and others - can seemingly eavesdrop on our most private conversations at will. Still at night we glance up at the myriad of stars above, and realize that that myriad is but a tiny fraction of the stars that inhabit the multiverses. Any notion that we are the best and the brightest kid in the room swiftly falls away. And it doesn't take an Asimov to imagine entities out there with skills far beyond the NSA's, monitoring our behavior. Maybe a prerequisite for contact with those advanced cultures that live beyond our feeble glances toward the stars, is the ability to demonstrate - like a mentally ill patient - that we are no longer of any danger to ourselves or others.
.
I have mentioned to some of you my intention to do a sort of 2nd edition of the God Chord. It is beginning to feel like it will be a whole new book, maybe Finding Harmony or Home to Harmony or something like that. Either way there will be numerous drafts, outlines, ruminations, etc. And while I do not have much faith in crowd sourcing, I do put trust in "small group sourcing," and you are the small group I trust. So here are some initial thoughts on what will be four of the major sections of "that Harmony book" Feedback, as always, is welcome :-)
===============================================
Heading Home to Harmony
There is a hierarchy to the construction of a harmonic life. The four principles are, in order:
Foster harmony.
This means that in every human interaction seeking harmony, seeking a mutually beneficial path, is our first obligation. The difficulty inherent in this first mandate is obvious in the fact that many common synonyms for seeking harmony, such as compromise and win-win solutions, are often read as code for weakness. The cultural roots for this strange moral inversion are many and deep. Anthropologically speaking they probably reach back into the mists of time, to our earliest ancestors, for whom dominance over stronger creatures meant food, clothing and survival. I find it most ironic that as species we have managed to forget that successfully hunting the mastodon hinged on cooperation. Yet, as Aesop's fox taught us long ago, we disparage those grapes which seem beyond our reach. Hence we paint our most difficult task with derision: Seeking harmony, pursuing the mutually beneficial path is a sign of weakness. Wimp. Geek. Chicken. Nothing could be further from the truth since nothing is quite so difficult as finding in your heart the solution that benefits your antagonist as it benefits you. So if you would truly reveal your strength, foster harmony.
Enable beauty.
Similarly it seems currently déclassé, artistically speaking, to represent beauty. Angst, alienation and a healthy dose of self-loathing seem to be all the artistic rage these days, as is rage. I will be the first to admit that I am something of a traditionalist when it comes to art. I lean toward representational works, and ones that make me happy, slow the pulse rate, calm the soul, infuse me with harmony.
Hence, you can understand my concern when I walk into an upscale gallery or a more informal installation and encounter a ten-foot tall rusted metal construction, splashed with lavender paint entitled #432. Mind you, I have no objection to abstract art per se - I dabble in it myself on occasion. But it strikes me as only fair to let the observer know, via a title, which corner of the universe you are playing in. So I looked at #432 for awhile, making sure that others were looking at it too. It is important to appear hip at these kinds of installations, and I remain haunted by the memory of the time in the National Gallery when I spent ten minutes gazing thoughtfully at what appeared to be a pile of trash. Then the maintanence staff came and swept it into a trash can. I need to trust my first impressions.
But there seemed to be a fair sized crowd looking at #432, and some were still there - as was #423 itself - when I left awhile later. So the current adage still seems to be if you do representational work keep it edgy and uncomfortable. And if you can't manage that, create something abstract that is angular, jarring and discordant and name it as ambiguously as possible. Numbers work, but words like Encounter, Leaving, and Adage are good too.
I find this current fascination with the ugly interesting because it requires the artist to work in an incredibly limited focal plane. A peek at the Orion Nebula through the Hubble telescope, or at a butterfly's wing through a telescope reveals the universal dominance of beauty. Yet many of our current artists seem obsessed with the discord reflected in the narrow experiential plane of humanity's inhumanity. Of course that reality exists - but do we resist or confront it by relentlessly representing it? It seems more likely that our excessive representation of the discordant only draws our attention away from the overwhelming, transcendent beauty of existence. It also defies the first, preeminent mandate: foster harmony. There is no harmony in the ugly, so enable beauty.
Distill Complexity
This is the concept that I have been calling the fourth pillar, but only because it occurred to me after the three original principles. Yet, it goes here in third place. Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty predominant because they are "all in a day's work." Everyday we can do something to foster harmony and reduce discord even if it something as simple as putting your dishes in the dishwasher, or telling the people you love that you love them. Enable beauty as well need not entail hours before an easel or pushing images around in photoshop, agonizing over the perfect poem. A $3.00 stem of flowers from the grocery store, a $1.99 track from iTunes, a haiku on a napkin, all these enable beauty.
Distilling Complexity, though, is a bit more difficult. As you know I often fall back on similes, analogies and convenient paraphrases to make my points. Today is no different. Aristotle is credited with the phrase I will distort today. In Metaphysica 2 he says "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." Since he is not around to disagree, I am going to stand that on its head and assert that "the meaning of the whole is less than the sum of its parts."
Let's begin with an analogy. Consider a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle. You open it up and dump it out on a table. But the table must be three times as big as the final puzzle you wish to construct since the pieces spread out higgeldy-piggeldy across the table. It is only after you figure out how the pieces are designed - how they fit together - that you can distill the complex chaos of those thousand pieces and place them so as to construct an image that makes sense. And, low and behold, the image is less than, smaller than, the undistilled, complex, spread out, sum of its parts.
It has, of course, to do with the process of distillation. Distillation reduces complexity to its essential core. Despite my own inability to mimic Hemingway's sparse prose, I have always distrusted the philosopher, sage, prophet or scientist who requires a library the size of Alexandria's or a specialized language to reveal truth. I am always suspicious that there really are devils lurking down there in the details. There are movements in a variety of notoriously arcane areas - the law and medicine to mention two of the worst offenders - to "speak real English." They are distillation movements to be praised and supported.
In our own lives we need to seek articulations, expressions of our own beliefs, that do not hide behind rituals and inflexible generalities. We need to parse our worldview precisely: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity - and, Oppose Harm.
Oppose Harm.
You may find it strange that I leave this for last as it is the rallying cry that has sent us off to kill each other for millennia. And that is precisely why I leave it for last. In his work Foundation, Isaac Asimov asserts that "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." It is a glorious pronouncement and I wish it were true. However, violence is also the first choice of the desperate, the disenfranchised, and those who have fallen for the devil words in the undistilled complexities of their "great books."
Harm must be opposed or the bullies, at home and abroad, will destroy the world through armed conflict, environmental neglect, or unimaginable greed. Still I place it fourth. Why? My reasoning is hopefully distilled and not merely simple: If we can, in significant numbers, bring the first three principles into the world: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty and Distill Complexity; we will create a world that is increasingly toxic for those who turn at first blush to violence. A world that rests firmly on the first three principles will undoubtedly be called upon to Oppose Harm; but hopefully less often, and with less virulent results.
A concluding passing fancy: We have read much in the past few weeks about how governments - our own and others - can seemingly eavesdrop on our most private conversations at will. Still at night we glance up at the myriad of stars above, and realize that that myriad is but a tiny fraction of the stars that inhabit the multiverses. Any notion that we are the best and the brightest kid in the room swiftly falls away. And it doesn't take an Asimov to imagine entities out there with skills far beyond the NSA's, monitoring our behavior. Maybe a prerequisite for contact with those advanced cultures that live beyond our feeble glances toward the stars, is the ability to demonstrate - like a mentally ill patient - that we are no longer of any danger to ourselves or others.
.
Friday, June 28, 2013
The Idea of a Century
.
I'm sitting in El Puerto, a Mexican restaurant in Fox Lake, Illinois - about a 20 minute drive north of my sister's home. It is a fairly typical upper mid-western lakeside restaurant. Swimwear is acceptable, the lakeside wooden tables are equally impervious to wet swimsuits and sloshed beer. Jet skis whine their way around what might otherwise be a tranquil setting. No doubt the local critters scavenge the area at night in search of dropped nachos, or a discarded corner of burrito. More important to me is the fact that it is located just a couple of miles from Paradise Park, the retirement home/care center where my Dad has lived for the eight or nine years. Also of note is the fact that they make their own margaritas - none of that mix stuff in a jug.
That is of particular importance today as I have just returned from visiting my father, who will celebrate his 100th birthday on Saturday. Actually, that's not completely accurate. His children, grandchildren, his great-grandchild and their significant others will celebrate his birthday. He will be in attendance, but I have no idea how he will experience it. You see, just now, he had absolutely no idea who I was. True, after the chemo my hair has come back in quite curly. But even after, "It's Rob, your son, from North Carolina. My daughters, Andrea and Emily will be here in a couple of days," there was no hint of recognition. He was, as always, quite the gentleman. "Thank you for coming," he said. He wasn't angry or upset. If anything he just seemed slightly uncomfortable with this person who seemed to know him, but whom he could not place. I suppose I could have pushed the issue, "Come on Dad, I'm your son, Rob! For cryin' out loud, you know me." But, obviously, the odds of breaking through seemed slight. Pursuing the issue would, at best have been unkind; at worst, cruel. I gave him a hug and left.
It was a deeply unsettling experience. Ordinarily, when we interact with people who are approaching, for whatever the reason, the end of their life, our own sense of mortality intrudes. We recoil from the thought that somehow we will be snatched prematurely from life. A visit such as this provokes a fundamentally different fear; the fear that we will linger on in life, long after the joy of living has departed.
.
I'm sitting in El Puerto, a Mexican restaurant in Fox Lake, Illinois - about a 20 minute drive north of my sister's home. It is a fairly typical upper mid-western lakeside restaurant. Swimwear is acceptable, the lakeside wooden tables are equally impervious to wet swimsuits and sloshed beer. Jet skis whine their way around what might otherwise be a tranquil setting. No doubt the local critters scavenge the area at night in search of dropped nachos, or a discarded corner of burrito. More important to me is the fact that it is located just a couple of miles from Paradise Park, the retirement home/care center where my Dad has lived for the eight or nine years. Also of note is the fact that they make their own margaritas - none of that mix stuff in a jug.
That is of particular importance today as I have just returned from visiting my father, who will celebrate his 100th birthday on Saturday. Actually, that's not completely accurate. His children, grandchildren, his great-grandchild and their significant others will celebrate his birthday. He will be in attendance, but I have no idea how he will experience it. You see, just now, he had absolutely no idea who I was. True, after the chemo my hair has come back in quite curly. But even after, "It's Rob, your son, from North Carolina. My daughters, Andrea and Emily will be here in a couple of days," there was no hint of recognition. He was, as always, quite the gentleman. "Thank you for coming," he said. He wasn't angry or upset. If anything he just seemed slightly uncomfortable with this person who seemed to know him, but whom he could not place. I suppose I could have pushed the issue, "Come on Dad, I'm your son, Rob! For cryin' out loud, you know me." But, obviously, the odds of breaking through seemed slight. Pursuing the issue would, at best have been unkind; at worst, cruel. I gave him a hug and left.
It was a deeply unsettling experience. Ordinarily, when we interact with people who are approaching, for whatever the reason, the end of their life, our own sense of mortality intrudes. We recoil from the thought that somehow we will be snatched prematurely from life. A visit such as this provokes a fundamentally different fear; the fear that we will linger on in life, long after the joy of living has departed.
.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
The Clarifying Simile
.
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.
.
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.
.
Monday, June 10, 2013
A Fallacy in 88 Notes
.
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?"
.
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?"
.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Little Things Mean A Lot - Sometimes
.
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 :-)
.
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 :-)
.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
The Circle of Life and Death
.
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.
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.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Ages of Enlightenment
.
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.
.
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.
.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Of Gentlemen and Thugs
.
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.
.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Gone to See the Elephant
.
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.
.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Corralling the Geese
.
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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Saturday, August 6, 2011
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 :-)
.
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 :-)
.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
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 . . . .
.
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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