Trump's Backhanded Boost to Science

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Whoa! Wait, wait, wait a minute. You’re going to spill coffee all over your lab coat. Hear me out here. Yes, I know that the  White House just released a budget that puts America’s science profile roughly on  a par with Paraguay - unless you are part of the military, or own a construction company along the Mexican border. But you see, that is exactly the point.

It s important  to realize is that there is a significant degree of freedom in finding yourself in the middle of an argument that you simply know you cannot win.  I often find myself embroiled in one such repeating “discussion” with some of my students. I have been teaching about media for almost 40 years, stretching from helping them set up a darkroom to develop 35mm film to current discussions about the “black mirror,” aka smartphone, that seems permanently welded to their hands.  It is that bit of technology that lies at the center of an intractable argument.  You see, despite the fact that my classes are about technology, the students in my classrooms are permitted the use of nothing more sophisticated than paper and a suitable, non-internet-connected, marking implement.

Occasionally a student will assert that such a technology prohibition is “not fair,” by which they actually mean “stupid, old-fashioned, and mean.”  I point them to the rather sizable body of research that indicates that students attempting to “multitask” - e.g. answer email, text, follow sports scores, etc., - during class, invariably retain less course content, perform more poorly on test and quizzes, and distract their fellow students. To which they respond, “Well, I don’t believe that.”  Because I am "the teacher" the prohibition stands. But I do not believe for a moment that I have “won” the argument, that I have changed their minds. As in most cases, their belief will trump any data that contradicts that belief. 

And that it why one has to think twice about the value of employing data-based science arguments with members of the current administration.  Think about it: the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t believe that the environment really needs all that much protection. Believes than “clean coal” is not an oxymoron.  The new head of the Federal Communication Commission apparently believes that “net neutrality” defines the no parking zone around the tennis courts at his country club. And the Oval Office, despite the total disagreement of the American Medical Association [AMA], the American Hospital Association [AHA], the Congressional Budget Office [CBO], and the American Association of Retired People [AARP], and a growing list of Republicans, still believes that the ill-defined Donaldcare is necessary to rollback the equally ill-defined predations of the demonized Affordable Care Act.  These are the strongly held beliefs of people in positions of power. Arguing data with them is as futile as my fruitless attempts to convince my smartphone-addicted students that the world will be unaffected, and they will be better informed, if they go off the grid for 75 minutes.

So, in the current climate, what do you do to “make American science smart again?” Well, there are at least a couple of options. You can attempt to confront the irrational triumph of belief over data by complaining to everyone within ear shot about the administration.  I have friends who, for the last 8 years, were able to blame everything - including the number of handicapped parking spaces at McDonalds and the pace of lines at airports and supermarkets - on “Obamacare.”  So far as I could tell, their complaints never changed the speed at which they got their Big Mac, their carry-on stashed above their seat, or their produce bagged.  They just made others around them uncomfortable.  

There is a better way.  But we have to look over our shoulders to find it - so hop into the WayBack Machine, Sherman, and set the date for April 15th, 1874. [Wooowoooowoooowoooo]. 

“Gosh, Mr. Peabody, who are those guys with the paintbrushes?”

“We call them Impressionists, Sherman. Though until this date they were better know as failures.”

Well, you get the idea.  In the 1870s any artist who was anybody had to display their work in the Salon de Paris.  The problem for one hardy crew of renegades - including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro - was that the powerful group of critics who controlled acceptance to the Salon did not believe in the painting style that would come to be called Impressionism.  Those few Impressionist paintings that had previously been accepted  by the Salon were hung high on the walls out of sight, or in a remote room the size of a closet, or were soon removed altogether.  It eventually became obvious to our merry band of paint slingers that it was pointless to confront the current beliefs of the powerful. So on April 15th, 1874, they opened their own competing exhibition.  The reviews were mixed. But the point is that there were reviews. The Co-operative Company of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc. - as they called themselves - had slipped out from under the thumb of the gatekeepers of the Salon de Paris.  They sold a few painting at the exhibition and some of the artists went on to enjoy productive careers during their lifetime. But I doubt that even the most optimistic among them could have predicted the joy ride the future had in store. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book David and Goliath, estimates that if the 160 to 200 paintings displayed at that first renegade exhibition were to be sold in the current market one would need somewhere around a billion dollars to acquire them. 

So, what can we take away from our little jaunt in the Wayback Machine?  Particularly when we think about the government and its relationship to science? Well, first we simply need to accept the fact that the “Science Salon” currently in power in Washington will do nothing to advance the cause of scientific research. The appointed heads of the government agencies designed to oversee and advocate for science and technology are neither scientists nor technologists. Since they neither understand, nor believe in, the scientific method, the results of scientific research become, for them, flexible talking points in policy discussions.  Hence, evolution - a scientifically demonstrable fact, and Creationism - a set of specific Judeo-Christian theological concepts - become different, but essentially parallel, “beliefs” that can be debated. In the minds of this new Washington Science Salon many other long established clusters of scientific fact can become alternative beliefs that are up for grabs.  In 1874, the Impressionists decided that they could not be true to their art and continue to bend their work to the arbitrary dictates of the Salon.  So they took their game elsewhere. If the current Science Salon makes it impossible for scientists to be true to their art, perhaps it is time for the scientific community to take their game elsewhere.

I do not make that suggestion lightly.  I am well-aware that the power the current Washington Science Salon holds over the community of research scientists is drawn from the same dual sources as the Salon de Paris - fame and fortune.  Whose work gets published? Whose grants get funded? To a huge degree the professional success of research scientists depends upon the wishes - and beliefs - of the Washington Science Salon.

So where would science go if it were to take its game elsewhere? Well, obviously it needs to find a locus that has deep pockets and an interest in scientific research. Hmmm.  Sounds a lot like Silicon Valley to me.  I know, I know. The idea of panhandling to the likes of Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple kind of creeps me out as well.  But then I thought, creepy as compared to what? To assure full disclosure I need to state that I see the issue from a campus perspective. 

I work in, have always worked in, a university.  It is a family tradition. Counting my father and two uncles who spent much of their lives in college classrooms, the family has racked up more than a century in front of students. Add in my sister who advised university students for 30 or so years, and we may push 150 family people-years in a campus environment. So, yes, that is my perspective. And when it comes to the relationship between the university and the Washington Science Salon it is a perspective with which I find myself growing increasingly uncomfortable. 

Back in January of 1961 President Eisenhower warned of the "military industrial complex," an intertwining of military and business interests that could come to compromise or overshadow the needs of, and benefits to, the general population. I doubt he would be pleased with how poorly we have heeded his warning.  The lines between the government, the military, business, and the university are becoming faint enough to be nonexistent.  And not surprisingly it is money that has blurred the lines.  

The brightest stars in the academic firmament these days tend not to be those asking the most interesting questions or providing the most tantalizing answers.  Rather they are those individuals or “teams” who can craft the grant proposals that fit most neatly into the categories that funding agencies - most often member agencies of the various Washington Science Salons - wish to encourage. To complete the analogy, they are the artists who routinely have their works accepted by the Salon de Paris. They paint what they are suppose to paint. They think what they are supposed to think. Maybe it has always been so. Maybe that was what spooked President Eisenhower back in the midst of the last century. I would like to believe that that was not always the case, that once universities were the places where the best and brightest followed the most creative twists of curious minds. But if it were once so, sadly, it is no longer. Grantsmanship has turned us into salesmen. The Salons are the markets and the product for sale is our intellect.

Once we accept that sad fact, turning our back on the Washington Science Salon doesn’t seem quite so bizarre. Surely our universities still have more in common with the curiosity that drives the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley than we have with the beliefs of the conservative political fundamentalists who control, at least for the next few years, the handouts of the Washington Science Salon. Why not pitch genuinely motivated “pure science” proposals to the Silicon Valley Salon? Some of them already have the mechanism in place. Sure, they are in it for the money, but using the current funding models, so are the universities. Silicon Valley at least seems to realize that the market is driven by innovation, and that you innovate by turning the unfettered creative intellectual exploration of wide ranging ideas into something that may become products and processes that people want. And furthermore, why do we need to limit ourselves to an alternative Salon run by companies, even if those companies are larger and richer than most nations?  We are a nation “of the people” aren’t we? How about crowdsourcing for science? 

These are radical changes. Changes we would never have seriously considered had the Trump Administration not decided to gut American science by creating an environment that is toxic to academic freedom. These are changes that most universities would, and will, initially resist since most large universities have patterned their research and fiscal practices and policies to stay in lock step with the big funding Salons in Washington. You do not bite the Salon that feeds you. But what do you do when, as currently seems the case, the Salon declares that not only do you need - as has long been the case - to study what the Salon decrees you need to study; but now you also need to present and publish only the answers the Washington Science Salon believes to be true? To break the chains of exclusivity currently enjoyed by the Washington Funding Salons and their slightly less dominant, but allied corporate kin, universities would have to devise new models and processes designed to support relatively unfettered research. But surely we can muster the will to do that.  Just how deep does our institutional avarice and intellectual cowardice really run?  Hopefully not that deep. 

Trump seems determined to throw science under the bus - to tell the eggheads “You’re fired!”  Certainly we need to resist those appointments and budget cuts through the traditional routes of political activism. But the reality is that despite those efforts there seems to be some freefall in the future. The least we can do is give some serious consideration as to how and where we choose to land.

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Finding Home

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In Rocky Mountain High, John Denver sings of "coming home to a place he'd never been before."  Denver and co-author Mike Taylor seem to be echoing the gentle, poetic notion that you can "come home" to a place where you were not born, nor had you ever lived. You look around, you take a deep breath and wonderfully, everything just feels right. You are home. 

I don't doubt that.  It must be almost two decades ago that we hired a young woman with the ink barely dry on her Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She was a western gal, through and through. However, not long after joining our faculty she made her first visit to Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks. Upon returning she declared that she had "come home." Nothing she has done since would contradict that assertion. So again, I do not question the notion that one can "come home to a place you've never been before." I am just jealous. 

I have lived in Raleigh since 1981 - so 36 years. Both my daughters were born here. My professional life is defined by my years at NC State. Still, it doesn't really feel like "home" in the mystical sense of Denver's paean to the Rocky Mountains. Don't get me wrong, it has been, and continues to be, a nice ride. It just doesn't have the spiritual, transcendent "home" feeling that Denver ascribes to his mountains. No place does. But that is probably my fault. I may have set my sights a bit high, or perhaps in the wrong direction altogether. 

You see, the events that define a Denveresque sense of "home" for me are not so much cases of where, as they are of when. Scattered throughout my life are moments of intense harmony, when everything feels perfect, when I am "home." We, as spiritual creatures, have a tendency to turn the places where those harmonic moments occur into sacred spaces.  So we have shrines to which we make pilgrimages. "Home" in Denver's sense turns that notion upside down. "Home" becomes a semi-sacred place where harmonic moments occur more frequently than anywhere else in the world. In Denver's world, you do not travel to the shrine. The shrine is the home. I simply have not found mine. 

Those moments that do seem to manifest a Denveresque kind of "home" for me do not share a common locale. Many are harmonic moments that I recall from my childhood, and I realize that I tend remember those events through rose-colored synapses, perhaps even to the point of bending historical fact to fit the tenets of Distilled Harmony. Still, to "come home to a place I've never been before," I would have to encounter a place that would echo those recalled harmonies. 

For example, my memories of rainy days on the front porch in Springfield, Ohio demand that "home" would need to be rainy - like this:

Rain

It is a gentle, cleansing rain.

The air is softer for it. 

The acrylic carved landscape 

Fades aptly to watercolor. 

Insects fight its somnolent call 

To buzz and bumble apace. 

I find myself stirred not so much to sleep, 

But to its less insistent cousin, 

A quiet nap.

Drops are interrupted  

High in the canopy. 

Dancing off leaves  

They gather in crooks and crannies 

Until they overflow  

Into bark's craggy channels 

And dance a zig-zag path  

To the forest floor.

It is a softly soaking rain

Filling the valley at lambing. 

The bright blush of motherhood  

Is rinsed away in rills among the clover, 

Trickling down to brooks, then streams, 

To rivers that lead to the distant imagining  

That is the sea. 

But then some magic moments in the donkey pasture above Clearwater Ranch in Philo, California demand it be sunny - like this:

The Meadow

If you lie 

On your back 

And hold very still 

With your eyes 

On the blue  

Bowl above, 

You may hear 

A quiet sort  

Of curious buzz, 

Preceding  

The funniest 

Bumblingest  

Bee 

Who bumps 

From flower to flower 

Before disappearing  

Back into the sky 

Trailing her buzzing 

Behind her. 

A ladybug eyes 

An Everest of grass 

And slowly  

Begins her ascent. 

Upon claiming  

The peak 

She spreads  

Spotted wings 

And soars off to 

A sheltering tree. 

Thus she avoids 

Toasty fates 

For her brood 

And decades of 

Deep therapy. 

The mockingbird  

Knits  

A complete  

Symphony  

With songs stolen 

From here  

And from there, 

That echo about 

In the morning's  

Soft light 

Accompanying  

The sweet  

Scented air.

Nowhere is sunlight 

Transformed 

Into life 

More magically  

Than 

In a meadow,  

In the morning.

Perhaps you see my problem. It seems that there are folks lucky enough to have a particular place they call home. A physical space where everything feels right. The mountains, the sea, even a particular structure on a particular piece of land. Home is right there. They can point to it.

For me home is in my head. 

"Lucky you!” I hear you saying. "You carry “home” around with you. Wherever you go, you are home.”  True to a certain extent.  Home is up there between my ears.  But strangely I can’t always get “there” from “here.”  That transcendent space of “inner peace” has a way of playing hide-and-seek with us.  "Ha! Ha! Here I am between your ears but you can’t find me for love nor money!”  

I keep looking.  Reike, meditation, a big sheet of blank paper with lots of colorful markers, calm and gentle music, fighting the inclination to enter into debates with those seeking victory or angry affirmation instead of insight.  All the time carrying “home” around between my ears. From the outside it looks a lot like napping, but inside - whoa! We’re climbing the Himalayas in here! 

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Composing the Symphony of Our Life

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One of Pandora's most irritating features can also be one of its most endearing. When you create a channel - say for Dan Fogelberg - you don't just get Dan Fogelberg songs. You also get songs that Pandora's algorithms and human assistants decide are "in the style of" Fogelberg.  It is sort of like the difference between a painting by Rubens and a painting from Rubens's studio.  A “real” Rubens is worth millions, the studio piece - a fraction of that.  But, as I said, while sometimes being irritating, Pandora channels can also serve up an occasional treasure. 

Sometime last week I was listening to my Burl Ives channel, which has become a sort of a hodgepodge of "feel good" songs - good voices, nothing harsh. Must have been at night because I had my headphones on. Anyhow, I was suddenly immersed in an incredible version of “Amazing Grace.” Superb voices, wonderful clarity of diction. A capella. It was like a tall glass of ice water on a muggy summer day. Just gorgeous.

So I grabbed my iPad and learned that the artists were a female a capella group from Brigham Young University called Noteworthy.  And that they truly were. So, as I often do, I created a Noteworthy Pandora channel to se e what Pandora’s algorithm/human chimera would come up with. As with Renaissance painters, the studio didn’t quite live up to the master.  Pandora chose to emphasize the fact that Amazing Grace, a song heard from honky-tonks to carnival midways all over the country, is actually a Christian hymn composed in 1799 by John Newton, a former slave trader turned clergyman.  So the Noteworthy Pandora channel runs with those roots and tosses in a lot of gospel music of uneven quality into the Noteworthy channel, making the channel far less, well, noteworthy.

Yet, sacred music of any persuasion often provides incredible acoustic experiences.  And that makes perfect sense in a Distilled Harmony view of the world.  Distilled Harmony follows string theory to an assertion that the universe is literally made of music.  The vibrations of an uncountable number of strings constitute the music of the spheres. So music aimed at expressing a unity with the overarching harmony of the universe often exceeds the musical norms of the day simply because it aims higher than the expressions of popular music, which often restricts itself to more prosaic topics..

That is not to say that secular songs cannot hit those wonderful heights.  Consider opera - classic Italian opera.  I am always amazed by the transcendent voices, astonished that they can be so perfect.  It helps that my Italian is currently limited to the Rosetta phrase, "Is that the red bicycle?" since those breathtaking arias often translate to something like "Alas, the Toad Prince approaches, we must flee!"  

However, I did have an experience similar to the "Amazing Grace Pandora event" with a secular song.  It was a long time ago, because the clock radio went off.  Old technology, former life.  Anyhow, I suddenly became aware that "Somewhere Over the RainBow” was floating around the room - but it wasn’t the classic old 1939 version that Judy Garland sang in The Wizard of Oz - this was much better.  I know for some of you that is blasphemy - but this really was much better. The artist was Eva Cassidy, a prodigious, yet fragile, vocal talent tragically struck down in 1996 by melanoma when she was in her early 30s. Her channel - unlike Noteworthy’s - remains towards the top my Pandora list.  She drifts from sacred tunes to those prosaic pieces that chronicle the foibles of the human heart.

Not that there is anything wrong with love songs. Far from it. For many, falling in love is indistinguishable from a transcendent spiritual, religious experience. And songs that speak to either event, no doubt, share many characteristics.

Shakespeare, who often gets it right, makes Juliet 13 years old, with Romeo seeming not much older.  Apparently during those emotionally turbulent years ‘twixt 12 and 20 we lay down a storehouse of songs that will remain with us all our lives. Some recent studies indicate that we store music - those 12 to 20 songs included - in their own special part of the brain. In the last few weeks of my older brother’s life - he died of a glioblastoma in the early 1980s - he found conversation quite difficult, but he could sing 1950s rock and roll songs note and letter perfect.

But here is the point of all this: The central premise of distilled harmony is that the universe is both harmonic and sentient. And that the primary objective in our existence is to bring our own chord - manifested in music, thought, word and deed - into harmony with the over arching universal chord.

Thanks in great part to digital technology, we can now surround ourselves with music much of our daily lives, and that music becomes the soundtrack of our broader life. It colors and influences how we think, how we feel, who we are. We should pay close attention to it. It is no more "just music" than hate speech, violent video games and movies are "just talk and games and movies."  Music is even more central to our identity and worldview than those rants and entertainments because we are absorbing music even when we "aren't really listening."  

I wondered why, in some of my meditation music channels, there were gongs seemingly randomly spaced throughout the compositions. One explanation I have since encountered is that the gong is a "Stop. Look. Listen." marker. Attend to what is in the space around you. The physical environment, and the acoustic environment. Really pay attention. I would assert that it is harmful to live your life in a soundtrack that is hateful, chaotic and confrontational - even if it is "only" a speech, a tweet, a song, a movie, or a TV show.

So stop, look, listen.  It is your soundtrack. Make it the one in which you really want to live.

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The Artist and The Muse

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I have always believed that all artists go through cycles of experience and interpretation.  It isn’t that those are mutually exclusive activities, rather it is that when we are deeply immersed in one, the other tends to slide onto the back burner.

If you have just spent the day prowling the strange, wonderful, confusing callis of Venice, topped off by some squid ink pasta and local white wine, the odds are that you won’t be able to do much beyond stashing away a few random thoughts and images before you crash. And that is fine.  And on the flip side, if you have managed several high-energy creative hours word-smithing, or painting, or composing, or choreographing, or whatever your muse dictates - it is equally unlikely that you will seek out activities that demand your “artist focus.”  Rather some meditation, or mindless dancing, something that lets the creative juices rest, regroup, ferment for the next focused effort.

So if you hit a time - a day, a month, a year - when the muse seems to have taken a vacation, that is perfectly alright.  Go walk the Appalachian Trail - or maybe just a bit of it.  Buy a puppy and teach it to talk. Buy a parrot and teach it to bark and roll over. :-)  You get the idea.  I have always told my students that no one chooses to be artist. That life can - and often does - make you crazy, but only if you let it.  If the muse has chosen you, realize that it is a partnership. The muse will make demands of you, but you too can make demands of the muse.

And it is important to realize that the muse is the Art - not an individual.  Oh, I know, history is rife with tales of one artist’s muse or another. Manet's Victorine Meurent, Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse Walter, Stiegitz and O’Keeffe - though who was the muse and who the “musee” in that relationship remains an open question.  But I wonder if the person was truly the muse? Or was the "human muse" the person whose relationship with the artist enabled him/her to enter a transcendent space in which the essential muse in the guise of a particular medium - poetry or prose, paint, music, dance, stone, clay - was manifested in the joint artistic, creative actions of artist and muse.

The point is that experiencing the world around you is a mandatory stage in the life of any artist - without experience what becomes the subject/object of your art? We all have had a mentor - if only in middle school - who told us “Write what you know.” And you cannot truly know something without experiencing it. [I will back off here a bit. I do not advocate cutting off your ear, or engaging in other self- or other- destructive behavior. Remember your muse can make you crazy - but only if you let it.]

Another important aspect is we can easily forget the “message of the moment.”  To quote that well-known scholar of literature and art, Willie Nelson, “Pickin’ up hookers instead of my pen, I let the words of my youth fade away.” The more general, less hooker-oriented, message here is "don’t trust your memory." And here technology can really be an aid.  I don’t generally advocate for a particular software application but I will make an exception in the case of Evernote.  Evernote [Green square with a black elephant head in the center - get it? Elephants never forget?] Is a note taking app that lives simultaneous on all your devices. Mine currently resides on my phone, my iPad, and my MacBook.  I am rarely without at least 1 of those three devices, and on all three I can enter - via keyboard or voice - notes.  I can then later access those notes on all or any of those three devices.

True, my notes are often too cryptic for me to understand. There is one there now in the “scratchpad” file that says “Existential product design flaw. Only one front burner. Hundreds of back burners.” I’m not really sure what I meant - but at least that much is there for me to mull over.

I would also like another technology tool to help with writing, and am trying to find a grad student to help out - I call it My Boswell: Here is what currently exists over on Evernote:

My Boswell or Fishing in the eddies of the Internet.

As older media are drawn into the converged digital stream, their original form is often appropriated by hobbyists and artists.  For example when the instant photography niche was appropriated by digital cameras and then smartphones, the previous "king of the mountain," Polaroid, quickly fell into obscurity. However, photographers who loved the unique polaroid palette, banded together in a group called Project Impossible to create cameras and papers capable of producing "polaroid" images in sizes up to 24 x 20 inches. And though it seems that, after a few years, Project Impossible proved to be just that, there is no reason to believe that such repositioning of traditional art forms will cease as the internet continues to evolve.

It might seem strange to view "writing" as a traditional form that is being repositioned. But I believe such a case can be made.  Polaroid was repositioned not because "pictures" had fallen from favor.  Far from it.  Literally billions of photographs are uploaded to the internet everyday. Rather, polaroid was repositioned in order to assure the survival of a particular type of image, of a unique form of artistic expression.

Similarly there are probably more words generated every day now than in the hundreds of years since the invention of movable type. But the technologies that support the creation and distribution of those words are overwhelmingly slanted in support of fast and short bursts - tweets, texts, and other evolving forms.

I am interested in developing an application that acknowledges that word processing has become the preferred platform of many serious "long form” writers. And so it makes sense to develop a digital app that can advantage writers who wish to create long form works in a digital environment.

The problem:

One of the hats I wear is that of an essayist. In current parlance that is often seen as the same thing as a “blogger."  That is not quite right. A blog really just defines a niche in digital space where the owner of the space can “post" a variety of messages, messages which may share only the fact that they are distributed via the internet. So a video blog shares digital video. Ello is a social media platform that shares a variety of two dimensional works.  By asserting that I am an essayist, I affirm that I write essays. Essays are text messages longer than tweets or social media posts, but shorter than short stories or, certainly, novels.  But always based on the written word.  I have been writing my primary text-based blog "Schrag Wall" for more than a decade, the last seven or eight years on Blogger.

The total page count for Schrag Wall over that period is well over a thousand pages.  So the problem becomes that I will be mid-essay and will suddenly become convinced that I have said this better before.  But where is the file that holds that earlier, perhaps better version?  Clicking the magnifying glass at the upper right-hand corner of my Mac simply launches an exercise in futility. If I enter a search term into the Spotlight Search tool it will return too much information - documents, files, applications, weird truncated things from anywhere on my machine, my back-up drive, etc.

The solution:

I want to scream “Boswell! Get in here!” James Boswell, (1740 - 1795), the 19th Laird of Auchenlech was a biographer and diariest. His biography of his contemporary Samuel Johnson is often pointed to as the pinnacle of the biographical form. Boswell knew everything about Johnson’s voluminous papers.  I need a Boswell for my computer, I need an app that will find the files I need, but ignore the ones I don’t need. I have learned from an old friend who spent his life among such critters, that what I am talking about is an “automatic indexing tool.”  Several proprietary ones exist - Lexis-nexus and Proquest use them - very expensive.

I want MyBoswell - and yes, that will be the app’s name - to be sleek, powerful, unobtrusive and inexpensive, if not free.  A quick click, and there are all the files to which I have given Boswell access that contain my search terms.  And I write on, editing, including or ignoring.

So for an artist the experience and the expression are simply two sides of the same artistic coin. Both necessary, neither more important than the other. We may feel that we are spending an inordinate time on heads. Not to worry. Tails will turn up in its own good time.

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The Wonder of Words

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I have a friend with a literary bent who once asserted that the use of profanity was merely the mark of limited vocabulary.  Over the years I have come to realize that she was right.  Mind you, I’m not saying that I have abandoned swearing altogether. It is not as if, when heading for the bathroom at 2 AM and smashing my overly-sensitive foot against the door jam, I shriek,  “Oh, most high creator of the universe, if you would, please consign this copulating architectural feature to Dante's nethermost circles! Such exquisite agony!" No,  like many of us, I still burst out with the more prosaic: "GD f-ing door! Damn, that hurts!" But that is an expletive, not a conscious linguistic choice - not many considered synapses firing there. 

On the other hand in everyday, and certainly in professional conversation and composition our vocabulary is an indication of our education, our credibility, and more than we realize, our nature and personality. So we should choose our words carefully, with specific intent. In my field we speak of linguistic accommodation - adjusting vocabulary, sentence structure, speech, vocal patterns, gestures, etc., to accommodate the expectations of others.  In truth, in the academy we often take the practice to rather absurd extremes, peppering our conversations with the latest jargon to make it perfectly clear that, yes, I have read Professor Fuzzywort's latest work on the bandersnatchian dynamics inherent in the evolving, but still underrepresented, jabberwocky.

The point is this: words are tools and the more tools we have in our toolbox the better we can express our, initially inarticulate, feelings to a variety of audiences. There are certainly enough tools out there.  The Oxford English Dictionary flirts with 180,000 entries while the Global Language Monitor asserts that English acquired word number 1 million back in 2009. One shudders to think of the academic cat fights fueled by those wildly varying numbers. But that is not where I'm heading. I am more interested in how we acquire and use whatever words we do have.

For example, let us consider poetry.  And here I must admit a bias.  I am well aware that poetry can easily be a language of rage, a voice of the powerless against the powerful. A call to battle against injustice, bigotry and hatred. And, often, it should be.  Consider Bob Dylan, a wandering, renegade, youthful, troubadour whose calls to conscience bounced back decades later bearing a Nobel Prize for Literature. Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and the Gutheries, Woody and Arlo - rough-edged poets to stir the blood and raise the banners of resistance.

But no longer for me. Once, perhaps. In years gone by - pre-Internet days - a colleague and I engaged in a contest of "columns of righteous indignation." The idea was to craft an essay of overt confrontation on issues of social consciousness, but to do so with sufficient grace to allow the editor of our local paper to actually publish it. My partner in aggressive sarcasm has, sadly, passed on, but even were he about to egg me on, I think I would pass.  As I wander into my 7th decade, the call to vindictive prose grows faint. It is simply not worth the inevitable anger, the stomach acid, the spikes in blood pressure, the restless nights wrestling with the Furies of "Damn! What I should of said was .  . "

Instead, in what I hope will be my first full decade of Distilled Harmony, I think I prefer to explore the role of an agent of calm.  That role carries unique demands if one seeks to create not only prose, but also poetry of calm. When it comes to poetry, I tie myself firmly to the first and  second tenets of Distilled Harmony - Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty.  And that effort demands emphasizing a vocabulary of the calm; a tall order in this age of cyber bullying, internet trolling, and policy debates conducted in angry bursts of 146 characters or so.

Fortunately, the more gentle portions of my vocabulary hail from previous centuries.  It is mostly my mother's fault.  You see, in the basement of the modest home in which I was raised, stood a large green bookcase filled to overflowing with books. Books of all shapes and sizes, books that were already "golden oldies" in her childhood. Novels from the late 1800s, the early 1900's. Books written when grammar still held sway and when the rough edges of life were written gently. James Oliver Curwood, Gene Stratton-Porter, Harold Bell Wright, maybe a touch of Zane Gray. These were not, mind you, Dickens or Austin - though they did prepare me for later encounters with those more complex voices. Rather, they were in many ways the pulp fiction of their era. The plots utterly predictable, the stereotypes would curl your hair. But these were my earliest composition tutors; purists when it came to the rules brought to parsing prose.  Remember diagramming sentences?

And the words! Oh my, what a surfeit of words! Consider this conclusion to Curwood’s The River’s End (1919):

"He looked away into the shimmering distance of the night, and for a long time both were silent. A woman had found happiness. A man’s soul had come out of darkness into light.”  

OK, so it scores off the chart on the “sappy scale,” but for me, a youngster who would polish off a couple of the far more prosaic Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew mysteries before lunch it was, well, mysterious. Multisyllabic, with the sentence construction just a shade askew.  And then, not much later, I wandered, leaning heavily on Longfellow’s even older shoulders, along the  "shores of Gitche Gumee, Of the shining Big-Sea-Water.” So, while Dickens and Austin were lurking just around the corner, if you held still and listened ever so closely, there - did you hear it? It might have been the faint echo of an approaching Melville.

And speaking of words, there might be a few too many in this post already so let me close with an analogy [which started out shorter - but, oh well .  .  . ]:

When I was a kid in maybe 3rd or 4th grade, part of the Fall ritual was buying school supplies. My buddy Dan and I would hop on our bikes and pedal down the alley to Patton’s.  I don’t know if there was anything further to the store’s name, for us it was always just "Patton's." It was in many ways a remnant of the old general store era, as was Mr. Patton himself. He was, in our callow eyes, ancient - so, what, maybe 40? Slight of stature, with hooded eyes that would follow you suspiciously around the store. There was an old open-top soda machine. The bottles were suspended in icy water and you would put in your money and slide the bottle along a serpentine track to the open spot where you could pull out the bottle. YooHoo Chocolate Soda! I vaguely remember notions - thread and stuff.  And candy - lots of candy. Baseball card bubble gum.

But in the Fall it was school supplies. Somehow, no doubt as a result of a list distributed by the school board, Patton’s carried “pre-packaged school supplies.”  What this meant was that there were paper bags labeled - 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, etc., into which Mr. Patton, or one of his minions, had sorted the various tools we would need to confront the challenges of the coming year. Tablets, rulers, pencils, etc.  Starting in, oh, maybe 2nd grade, nestled among the tools was a tin of Prang watercolors. A black metal case with eight basic colors and a brush.  Those eight colors, and whatever soup we could make by mushing them around, defined the palette we employed in "Art class." If you couldn’t make the “right” color with that limited palette and our even more limited abilities - well, it just wasn’t going to happen. After “Art" we would move on “English” and the dreaded spelling/vocabulary test. The comparison to our Prang watercolors is direct and accurate. Here in “English” we began to construct the linguistic palette with which we were to describe the physical world unfolding around us and the emotional world bubbling within us. And, for the most part, we got the linguistic equivalent of those 8 basic colors.

Now, let us jump ahead 50 or 60 years. According to Google Earth the alley still runs north from my old house, but there is now a State Farm Office where Patton’s used to be.  Prang still sells an 8-color watercolor set, but as we edit our contribution to the roughly 1 billion digital photos uploaded to the Internet daily, or create original works in any digital paint program, the idea of having anything less than "millions of colors" is absurd. We click our cursor over a portion of an image and the ubiquitous color wheel appears, inviting us to select the precise shade we desire from a palette limited only by the resolution of our screens. However if, upon completing the image, we want to move beyond simply sharing it, and tell our friends what we were thinking or feeling, why we composed the image the [way we did, we access our Twitter account or some other text app usually limited to 146 characters and/or spaces. Not words. Characters or spaces.] - that is the number of characters between those brackets that intrude upon the preceding sentences.

Consider for a moment the radical difference between the chromatic palette provided for the most basic visual computer program and the extreme restrictions placed on the texting applications; those applications that keep my students' eyes endlessly affixed to the glass rectangles attached to their palms. With their linguistic options so crippled, is it any wonder that “texters” have reverted to extreme contractions or modern pictograms aka emoticons or emojis? Those unique constructions speak well of texting creativity within severely limited communication spaces. Yet those same linguistic accommodations give me pause concerning the future of the more arcane genres of poetry and prose.

There really is only one way to build a rich, functional, linguistic palette.  You must read. You must read a lot. Novels, biographies, non-fiction works, histories - all of it. Oh, I get a number of “word of the day” emails. I enjoy crossword puzzles. But neither of those linguistic “vitamin pills” empower our own expressive skills. To jump back to the visual palette analogy - words of the day and crossword answers are like color swatches. They provide colors in isolation but say little about composition, about communication.  Similarly films and videos slide swiftly across our consciousness, requiring multiple viewing or a visit to the "quotes from" Internet site to add that awesome bit of repartee to our personal, functional stash of words

So we must read, and be especially thankful for the authors who make that an enriching and enjoyable experience, for ourselves - and for today's "teched-out" children.  I suppose one should be Catholic to nominate someone for Sainthood, But, if permitted, I would like to nominate J.K. Rowling for that, and any other relevant honors. 

It was approaching midnight on the night of July 7th, 2000.  When the clock struck 12 it would be July 8th and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire would be released to the public - all 616 pages of it. I was pretty far back in the line, my lack of costume marking me as a muggle of the first order.  But it was a magical night, so I was less startled than I might have been otherwise to see a copy of the book floating toward me through the hazy southern night.  It was not until the book came to rest a yard or two in front of me that I realized it had feet, and behind the open book was the intense face of a little girl. She seemed not much larger than the book itself. Yet, you could almost see the words being sucked off the page into her enchanted eyes. Thank you, Ms. Rowling.

So writing well, conversing widely, articulating - for ourselves and for others - those thoughts that define us, requires words, lots and lots of words. We also need to practice slapping them up against each other in unique sentences to explore which have natural affinity and which rasp against each other - fingernails on a literary blackboard.

All the images in my coloring book - Color Me Chilled Out - began as doodles, and eventually grew into more complex and colorful works.  Every post here on SchragWall started life as a verbal doodle, an “I wonder .  .  .” moment.  A phrase that eventually acquired more words, longer sentences, analogies of varying clarity, until finally - at long last - I stop and send them winging off to you.   

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When Belief is Stronger Than Data

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We live in a world that is now, and has always been, shaped by competing narratives.  Maybe "always has been” is a bit too strong. We really are just guessing about prehistory. If our ancestors left the equivalent of their journals or Facebook pages lying around we haven't figured them out yet.  Some good guesses perhaps, but nothing really solid.  However once writing became the norm - hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and all that - the messages become much clearer, and sadly redundant. Many of the messages chronicle competition and carnage and most often the winner writes the history. 

The competitive narratives that sent our forbearers out upon the field of battle were most often commercial, political or philosophical in nature.  Someone had something, better grazing, access to a port, whatever, that someone else wanted. And, having been absent when their preschool class learned about sharing, they mounted up an army and rode out to take it - blood for treasure. 

While many conflicts were at least in part commercial,  they often were heavily glazed with a political or philosophical or theological patina. The "other" was "bad" and ones own people were "good." The reasons were often a bit foggy, but the result was sadly predictable - the bodies of young men (usually) dead upon the battlefield, and the bodies of civilians dead in the cities. And the victors writing the history. 

Most regrettable - certainly from a long view of history - is the fact that every so often a figure arises that fits the "monster" view of history that is used to justify war.  Hitler can claim that mantle - pure hatred of any "other" outside his narrow view of "one of us." The war to stop the spread of his diseased worldview eventually even drew active opposition from the poster boy of "radical pacifism," Albert Einstein. No doubt others can provide their own names from other times in human history that should appear on that list of "true monsters."  

The problem is that those horrific historical realities are used to justify making war on opponents whose only real transgression is that they wish to possess the same material benefits that we covet, or even more intolerable, they worship in a different manner than do we. 

Do not get me wrong. I am not arguing that the world is free of oppositional groups willing to drag the world into chaos if that is the price of advancing their perception of "truth."  What I do wish to emphasize is that such opposition is the product of a clash of beliefs in which objective data plays little or no role. 

Belief derives from a personal perspective that one is in possession of the truth.  Many faith-based communities draw their beliefs from a particular document - their "good book."  Problematic for life in the 21st century is that none of these dominant works were written in what is now the real world.  Rather they were philosophical works designed to explain a world millennia removed from the one that greets us every day.   

And that is, or at least should be, the shared goal of philosophy, religion and science: To advance our understanding of the present world and clarify the role of humanity in that world.  We cannot, despite the attraction of the perspective, declare existence frozen. I am afraid that the Christian doxology's claim "as it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be," simply flies in the face of the data of the experience of the last two thousand years. Similarly flawed is Islam's assertion that "truth" was finally decreed some 1400 years ago. Pick any ancient and revered text  from any faith and you will often find wonderful insight compromised, if not crippled, by a simple ignorance of the natural world. Yet it is often a work seen as a theological line in the sand beyond which inquiry cannot pass. 

Examine the intellectual position of a modern day fundamentalist - of any of the world's major faiths - and you find a mind willingly submerged in ignorance, shackled to beliefs coined by the best and brightest minds - of thousands of years ago.  Brilliances that struggled to discern the meaning of the universe from data which could penetrate no further than the next town, bolstered by fantastic tales embroidered by merchants who traveled the mysterious trade routes that probed beyond the near horizon. 

Science, philosophy and theology all should seek to create narratives that can lead us to a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, the staggering complexities of the universes.  But for those narratives to be anything other than fairytales they must rest upon everything we know about our universe - know, not simply believe. The sciences, physical and social, lead us to what we know and right up to the very edge of the unknown. Philosophy and theology should explore why what we know is important, and in doing so point science’s quest for what in new and unique directions. 

The problem, of course, is that the edge of the unknown can be a frightening place.  Global warming as a result of human activity? The Zika virus? A world population spiraling beyond our ability to feed all those mouths? An increasing demographic skew between the "haves" and "have nots" that points eventually to revolution and chaos or repressive totalitarianism? No, I'd rather not think about that. I would much prefer that you tell me a story in which I, or at least the group with whom I identify, plays the heroic role. 

And so those in power or seeking power do just that.  The recent American presidential election is only the most recent example of this time-honored chicanery.  The Trump campaign, whether attacking fellow republicans in the primaries or Clinton in the general election, crafted a narrative from xenophobic falsehoods and pseudoscience - alternative facts. It is a narrative in which Trump himself was cast as the only hero who could defend America from the alien hordes gathering on the horizon. Neither his republican opponents in the primaries nor the Clinton campaign could appreciate the impact of such a dark narrative on an American electorate seemingly fearful of its place on the world stage. 

When science works to provide the "what" to philosophy and theology's reflections on the "why," cultural narratives tend to be thoughtful and flexible. Data helps to guide and temper belief.  But when belief dictates what should be true, what science is permitted to address, the cultural narrative becomes a farce. That way lies madness. 

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Transforming the Vanities

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[While I think it works as a “stand alone,” this post will make more sense if you are familiar with Richard Adams’s novel Watership Down.  If you haven’t read it, your library should have copies. Printed versions tend to be a bit pricey, but it is a good book for your home library. I found an e-version on Amazon for about $5.00.  As a last resort Wikipedia does a nice “reminder synopsis."  But do give yourself the gift of snuggling down with the book for a nice winter read. It is not always a cozy read, but "all’s well that ends well.”]  RLS

When I heard, this past Christmas Eve, that Richard Adams had died, I promised myself that I would reread Watership Down. I used to show the video in my media criticism class, and upon recalling that it had been a VHS cassette, I realized just how long it had been since I had encountered the narrative.  The work is sometimes classified as juvenile or teen fiction, and often can be found on middle school reading lists. Bad call. I remember that when I wrote Taming the Wild Tube back in 1990 I specifically warned parents that despite being animated and featuring rabbits this is not a video for children! It will give them nightmares. My older daughter, a thirty-something attorney who just gave birth to her own daughter, would still have trouble with it. 

But having just finished the novel again, I am reminded that it is a beautiful, thoughtful, mature work. One is first struck by the grace of Adams' descriptive prose. It is painterly. Layer of articulate description follows layer after layer until the literary equivalent of a Hudson River School landscape emerges from the pages. Beautiful. 

My previous interactions with the work were pre-chord theory and Distilled Harmony. But it will surprise you not a whit to learn that my recent reading found harmonic resonances leaping from every page.  First, we need to agree that the work is not merely a story about rabbits. Rather it is an allegory, with Hazel, our primary protagonist working his way past a variety of challenges in pursuit of the transcendent harmony advocated by the mythological god character, Frith. 

I’m going to resist the temptation to launch into a “close reading” that would tickle my colleagues with a literary criticism bent - instead I want to play with the idea of what Hazel’s journey has to say about finding our own way to harmony. 

Adams makes it clear that, initially, Hazel seems a strange choice to lead a ragtag band of rabbits across the threatening English countryside in pursuit of a new, safe warren. Hazel is neither the most senior, nor the biggest, strongest rabbit in the band.  Others have prescient, psychic gifts, are better fighters, and are more skilled in rabbit “survival skills.” But Hazel has a unique gift - he senses how to turn flaws into desired attributes. Hazel values the unique characteristics of others and never insists on competing with the notes more obvious in others. Rather, Hazel realizes the value of blending those individual notes into shared harmonies that benefit of the entire warren. 

As I read the work it occurred to me that rather than seeing it only as a study of how individuals can work together harmoniously for the common good, it also encourages us to consider how we might blend our various “selves" together into a more harmonic individual identity. 

It seems the current vogue to assert that we all possess the same suite of abilities.  Just show up and you will get a “certificate of participation.” The reality is that we are better at some things than we are at others.  I had always believed that, given the time and opportunity, I could be a wonderful saxophone player.  So after securing my first full-time, real, tenure-track teaching position I went out and rented a sax and prepared to loose the new “Bird” upon the jazz world. It soon became evident that the best use for my saxophone “Certificate of Participation” would be to use it to gently wrap up the instrument as I returned it to the music store where it might find its way into more “sax-enabled” hands.  As I said, we are better at some things than we are at others. And it is those things at which we are most adept that come to structure and define our identities. 

There is a problem with this relationship between ability and identity. The problem is that the line between identity and vanity is very fuzzy. And the fuzz only gets thicker as our experience, and perhaps our peers, affirm the legitimacy of a particular facet of our identity. The slide into vanity is easy when given a nudge.  And, I suppose, a touch of vanity does no harm. After all self-esteem, a feeling of self-worth, is healthy. However, the link between vanity and identity can be problematic when vanity turns to arrogance.  

Two primary examples from the Watershed Down narrative:

First, rabbits are great storytellers, and throughout the novel Adams uses the stories to acquaint us with the rabbitkind's oral traditions and mythology. In one story we learn that rabbitkind’s precarious place in the world is itself the result of vanity sliding into arrogance.  El-ahrairah [In rabbit mythology El-ahrairah is the Prince of Rabbits] is forever bragging about the fecundity of “his people.” Lord Frith requests that El-ahrairah rein in the unchecked spread of rabbitkind. El-ahrairah responds with his usual “my people are the best in all the world” mantra. This arrogance angers Frith and causes Frith to divide the previously congenial animal kingdom into competing groups. Under this edict many animals become predators - “Elil” in lapine - leaving rabbits as prey who must be continually on guard, able to survive in this newly dangerous world only by cunning and speed. 

And then there is General Woundwort. Woundwort is the Chief Rabbit of Efrafa, a totalitarian warren that our protagonists encounter in their wanderings, and from whom the Watershed Down rabbits eventually steal the does needed to ensure the future of their warren.  Woundwort’s vanity regarding the invincibility of his prerogatives as Chief Rabbit and his own physical strength, makes this violation of Efrafa intolerable. So Woundwort leads a retaliatory raid on the Watership Down warren.  Hazel conceives a plan that leads the vicious dog from a nearby farm up the hill to the Watership Down warren just in time to catch Woundwort's warriors exposed above ground.  Those who are not killed, flee - except for Woundwort whose vanity cum arrogance drives him to fling himself at the dog hollering “Dogs aren’t dangerous!”  While his body is never found it would appear that Woundwort chose "death by Elil" - a voluntary, terminal confrontation with a lethal predator - in preference to any further damage to his arrogant self image. 

Hazel is the opposite of arrogance.  His leadership hinges on his ability to transform potentially negative vanity into skills that serve the group, while simultaneously freeing the individual from the constricting bonds of vanity.  It was this last part that struck me most in this recent reading of the work. How do we free ourselves from the constricting bonds of vanity? 

We live in a competitive world.  We may choose to believe that “certificates of participation” make everyone feel warm and fuzzy. That is, I am afraid, an illusion. As a young competitive swimmer, one of my daughters became intrigued with having at least one of each color of the ribbons awarded after each race. Competition, and her own evolving abilities, allowed her to collect every color but black - the ribbon awarded to sixth, and in the confines our pool, last place. She simply could not allow herself to intentionally lose in order to collect her missing black ribbon. Despite our attempts to “level the playing field,” our children quickly come to realize that they are “differently abled.”  

I continue to believe that that is a good thing. I like it that my oncologist seems to be at the very top of his field. I am simply unable to fix my car and so am pleased that others have that ability. I am delighted that university hires people far more competent than I to untangle the increasingly complex relationships among the various pieces of technology that enable my everyday activities.  On the other hand I would be loathe to let any of those folks edit these essays 😃  

Is that vanity? I don’t really know. I know it is not yet arrogance as I am quite able to read the works of others - like Watership Down - and be amazed to the tune of “I could never do that!”  So maybe a healthy perspective is to attempt to examine those abilities we do possess that may be inclined toward vanity - and the slippery slope to arrogance -  and assess not why this makes us better than those around us, but rather to reflect on how we might both improve the ability and use it to benefit the whole warren. How we can, like Hazel, transform vanity into a truly worthy ability. 

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Everything's a Waltz

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After the champagne has gone flat, the beginning of the year can be a trying time, especially in this world of digital processing and the Internet of things. After last year's flurry of massive hacks, a number of entities are asking us to change passwords or add an additional level of security with multiple passwords. My students have to log onto new course sites often encountering a "new normal" mandated by software "updates." Same with your "smarter than you are" phone. A visit to the doctor or your pharmacy often requires a new insurance card and a strong suggestion that you "go paperless" and conduct your business online. Ditto your bank. In short, the stress can be a bit overwhelming.  

This is where you think I am going to direct you to my coloring book and suggest you set aside time each day to color, meditate and relax. And that is an excellent idea, but it isn't where I am headed right now.  Rather I am thinking about a particular country song - or more accurately what we used to call a "country western” song.

No, I am not thinking of the “perfect country western” addition to You Never Even Call Me by My Name that Steve Goodman added for David Allen Coe so he could sing the perfect country western song. That additional piece goes like this:

"Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison

And I went to pick her up in the rain

But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck

She got runned over by a damned old train”

Good for a giggle perhaps we admit as we smugly acknowledge that we really don’t listen to David Allen Coe very often - or country music for that matter.  Well, if you don’t you are missing some delightfully insightful poetry. And remember Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for Literature - something that no doubt has my parent’s generation spinning in their graves.  The lyric I am referring to is from an infectious little song [co-written with wife Patsy and Ron Peterson] that Ed Bruce sang called When You Fall in Love Everything’s A Waltz.  It opens like this:

"We don't dance the two-step anymore

All we need's a small part of the floor

The band can go on playin' almost anything it wants

When you fall in love everything's a waltz"

And here is the “easing into the New Year” part.  The notion is that your emotional state can transform everything around you.  So when you start running into all those “starting the year” hassles enumerated above, do everything you can to actually talk to a human being about your concerns, and make the conversation a waltz.  Remember, these folks are people who deal with complaints all day long. They are accustomed to people hollering at them.  Don’t be one of those people.  

When they say “How can I help you?” or just even “Hello.” Answer in three-quarter time: “Boy, I hope you can help me. I think I may have done something wrong.” That already disarms them as they are used to people assuming thatthey have not only done something wrong, but have done so with malicious intent.  I find they often respond to a waltz opening with something like, “Well, let’s see what is going on,” and then go out of their way to help you. 

Continue the conversation in waltz time, remembering that this is the person who can help you. Truth is I doubt that the person who answers complaints to pay the bills rarely sees that job as defining themselves. More likely there is a wannabe poet, musician, novelist, or struggling single parent on the other end of the line.  Inviting them to waltz through your problem may not only solve your problem, but puts a little waltz into their day as well.

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The Illuminated Dark Ages, or The Day the Internet Died

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It wasn’t even the “major cathedral” there in Regensburg.  That would be St. Peters, a structure along the classic gothic lines of St. Stephens in Vienna.  This was St. Emmeram, a 13th century Abbey.  We had opted to take the afternoon as “free time” to wander around and explore the truly delightful Christmas Market that wrapped around the Abbey - far the best market of the cruise.  My boyhood favorite Kristkindle Mart in Vienna had sadly gone the way of county fairs.  I mean, cotton candy and Disney figures? Really. But that is another story. 

Back to St. Emmeram - which is now more widely known as the Castle of Thurn and Taxis as the result of a Medieval Cathedral Naming Rights Deal in the 1500s. From the outside it looked, well, very "13th centuryish.”  We came in what turned out to be a side door, rough plaster covered the outside corridor which held a wide variety of carved plaques filled with Latin. We stepped inside - the only two people in a staggeringly beautiful, breath-taking space.  Arches swept up - and I try not to exaggerate - fifty feet to ornately frescoed ceilings. The alter which seemed miles away - okay, so I do exaggerate - glittered like a fairy tale treasure trove. But no dragon stood guard over this golden hoard. Rather we walked past a host of saintly statutes, each seeming more elaborate than the one before. Golden gild and brilliant colors enveloped us. There was no haze of incense or murmured Latin liturgy - but it didn’t take much imagination to supply them both.  

It wasn’t long until some other 21st century souls invaded our private audience, so we tiptoed out, heading for the equally delightful but far more prosaic indulgences of the Gulgwein and cosy open fires of the Christmas market. 

Later that night I was reading up on St. Emmeram’s Abbey and learned that among the highlights of its long history was the fact that it was the site of the first Mass ever conducted in German. Fresh on the heels of our visit to St. Emmeram’s, that little factoid made me realize anew that for centuries the Catholic church was a purely visual experience for all but the priestly class versed in Latin. For everyone else in the community, God was virtual reality experience. The priest would tell the faithful Bible stories, walking amidst lavishly illustrated artistic wonders like those that adorned St. Emmeram’s.  And what did God sound like? Well, like Latin, of course. 

That is until that first German mass, right there in the abbey of St. Emmeram.  Suddenly  "God's words" were intelligible to people other than the priests. And when words can be understood, people will create questions.  I don’t know exactly how many years transpired between that first German mass and Martin Luther’s impertinent accusations at the Diet of Worms in 1517, but the road between Regensburg and Worms is a direct path. 

And what, you may well ask, does that have to do with the “death of the Internet?” 

Well, you sort of have to work with me here.  Prior to the "vernacular articulation” of the Catholic liturgy, faith for that community was a tangible, visual reality.  Faith was made real in places like St. Emmeram’s Abbey. With the coming of religious texts that were accessible to all literate individuals, questions, even doubt, invaded that formerly inviolate sphere.  It is important to note that Christendom did not die off with the coming of the vernacular liturgies and Bibles.  The Catholic Church flourished alongside upstarts like Luther’s new reading of faith.  But the church changed - radically.  That huge community of “the faithful” now spans a spectrum ranging from ultra-conservative evangelicals through Catholic and Protestant traditionalists to very flexible Unitarians. But that innocent trust reflected in the purity of the Abbey of St. Emmeram has, if not vanished, been significantly reduced. 

It would seem an equal display of naivety to still consider the Internet an “information superhighway.”  When Brin and Page set out to “organize” all human information, there was an implied purity to the undertaking.  Google’s first mantra “Don’t be evil,” now rings with the simplicity of a fairy tale. If there is a single notion that remains solid throughout the study of human communication it is that information equals power. And an equally consistent corollary is that a major portion of that power derives from the ability to define truth and reality.  

The first Obama election revealed to America, and its politicos and pundits, that the Internet was a powerful tool for shaping and driving political action. The controversies surrounding the recent Trump election reveals that it is an equally powerful tool for shaping the body politic’s perception of reality. Last December an armed young man from my home state of North Carolina barged into a Washington pizzeria because he had read a “news story” on the Internet that Hillary Clinton was running a child slavery/pedophile ring out of the establishment. Facebook currently finds itself embroiled in a controversy driven by its seemingly lackadaisical approach to allowing such “fake news stories” to be posted on its site - a site that, were it a country, would be the 2nd largest country in the world. And a site that, along with other corporately and politically motivated Internet entities, is increasingly influencing our perception of reality and our definition of truth. 

And that is what I mean by the day the Internet died.  When the fictional illuminations of "seemingly real" events distributed over the Internet overwhelm scientific and social scientific evidence in the competition to define "reality," the Internet, as originally conceived of as an objective repository of humanitity's accumulated knowledge, died. 

Obviously, the Internet is not going away.  If anything our dependence on interconnected digital technologies will increase.  What needs to change is our perception of “it.”    First, we must abandon the St. Emmeram-like notion of some type of "pure truth" out there on the “Internet.” There simply is no singular entity that is "the Internet." Rather there are innumerable entities creating their version of the truth, of reality, each seeking to win us to their banner.  And they have tools at their disposal that make St. Emmeram’s Abbey look like tinker toys.  Two related items: 

Item 1: I was standing in the check-out line at Michael’s Art Supply store yesterday and I noticed, hanging there by the now ubiquitous memory sticks and phone chargers, Virtual Reality viewers.  True they were versions of the old Google cardboard viewers. But at $3.75 a pop they provide, in conjunction with most smartphones,  a nifty realistic experience of limited content. 

Item 2: I read earlier today that United Airlines is going to provide Virtual Reality viewers - the real deal immersive type stuff - to travelers in their Business Class waiting lounges. No, I don’t know what they would be watching. Maybe travel videos of their destination which would have been relayed to the VR device via their phones. I dunno. 

Remembering that “the Internet” is simply a massive collection of vested interests seeking to define reality for target audiences, Virtual Reality brings a whole new dimension - or perhaps three or four of them - to the game. If “virtual reality” becomes a normal adjunct to “old-fashioned reality” how do we know which is which? As Charlie Brown would say, “Arrrrrrrgggh!” 

But before you look around for high places off of which to fling yourself, let me perhaps surprise you by saying, “Wait. This is not all bad news.” As a matter of fact it could be great news.  Think about it.  What happened when those folks back in St. Emmeram’s heard the mass in German?  Right. They had to think about it. They began to consider alternative interpretations. They began to take an active role in the construction of their reality, in their notion of faith and truth.  As we begin to realize the ease with which technology allows any group to portray a particular notion of reality, we must become evermore curious as to “what’s in for them?”  Increasingly the internet is the only game in town when it comes to presenting “truth” or “reality” to large numbers of people.  And while, yes, that does create unparalleled opportunities for hucksters and haters, it provides the same opportunities for what I still believe is the majority of people around us -  people with a shared desire to create a better, kinder, more harmonic world. 

There is a great old movie from 1969 - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - which, thanks to "the Internet,” you can watch whenever you want.  There is a scene in which Butch and the Kid have used every trick they know to dodge a pursuing posse.  Looking back over the wasteland they have just traversed, they see the telltale dust cloud of the pursuing posse. Butch turns to the Kid and says: “Who are those guys!?” 

That, more than anything else, needs to be our guiding light as we consider the seemingly limitless number of alternative realities presented to us by the evolving digital world: Who are those guys? What’s in it for them, and how does that mesh with the world I believe in and wish to help create? To whom do I attend, and who do I ignore? We may never return to the simple world of St. Emmeram, but if we learn to become thoughtful, critical consumers of today's “Internet" we may actually find our way to a better world for all.

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