From Poetry to Physics: A Linguistic Continuum

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A young bibliophile friend recently pointed me to The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini.  It is a “high fantasy" series usually classified as “young adult fiction.”  And, given that Paolini wrote the first draft of the first book while still a teenager, the moniker fits. But it is wrong to write the series off as “Tolkien-lite.”  The well-written tale travels nicely over a couple of thousand pages following dragons, dragon riders, humans, elves, dwarves, magicians and Urgals [orc-like bad guys who turn out to be good guys] on a complex telling of good versus evil.  

I found Paolini’s treatment of language particularly insightful.  Not the language in which the work is written, but rather his recognition of the power of language as a plot element.  In the world Paolini creates there is an “ancient language” of great power.  You cannot lie using the ancient language, the most powerful spells are spoken in the ancient language, and knowing the true name of an entity in the ancient language gives you unique power over that entity. The idea is engaging and got me thinking about the ways in which language has played a variety of roles in my life.

I really cannot think of any period in my life when words did not play a central role. Reading them on a page, speaking them on a stage or in front of a class, writing them, singing them, seeking just the right one, seething over their misuse by a variety of charlatans, staggered by their beneficial power in other works - words have been the warp and weft that weave my relationship with the world. And the tapestry they weave changes, as my needs and desires likewise shift.  But despite those changes language, and my use of it, seems to always find its place on a continuum that runs between the poles of poetry and physics. Let me explain.

Poetry expresses experience in the language of beauty. Physics describes the universe in the language of mathematics. Everything else falls somewhere in between, with various disciplines and professions engaging in a call and response cacophony that seeks to position their adherents firmly on the preferred path to truth, wisdom and enlightenment. As chaotic as that sounds it is not necessarily a bad thing. We have advanced from images sketched behind the smokey hearth of caves to startling projections of the edges of the universe via the often confusing application of assertion, investigation, revision and new assertion. Language is the hammer, forge and anvil with which we construct our conception of the world, and the worlds beyond our own.

But my focus at the moment is not so much universal as it is personal. Eventually each of us makes our way in the world in part by personally choosing the language which seems most appropriate to our life’s work and our personal search for meaning. It would be nice if we, like the inhabitants of Paolini’s novels, had an ancient language that could guarantee that our musings would be free of falsehoods or deceit. If that seems a bit much to ask, I would settle for a language that would simply handle the complexities of life’s shifting sands with equanimity.

There, too, the request meets unexpected challenges. My formal education; BA in Theater, MA in Mass Communication, and PhD in Radio, TV and Film, while bearing different names, were all articulated using varying shades of the same rainbow; and I engaged the various concepts addressed in those disciplines in the language of beauty, in poetry. I went so far as answering an African History exam question regarding the religious beliefs of the Mbuti with a series of 20 or so rhymed couplets. Fortunately, my professor was equally enamored with the poetic end of the continuum.

When I eventually moved to the other side of the desk, I was, for a number of decades, able to maintain my fealty to the language of beauty - exploring with my students the idea of communication as an art form. I taught photography, radio and TV production, media criticism and special seminars on M*A*S*H and Northern Exposure - always with an eye and ear toward Ray Charles’s insistent question: “What does it sound like, Baby?” What does it sound like? What does it look like? How beautiful is it?

But nothing lasts forever.  When I first arrived here at NC State in 1981, our department was, primarily, a small cadre of idealists committed to sharing the delightfulful world of human communication with students who were embedded in an institution totally dominated by disciplines that would eventually become known as STEM. Our Head once informed me that I would do well to realize that my job was not to do research, but to create curiosity in the classroom, to get to know and teach my students.  But as I said, nothing lasts forever.  Perhaps we did our job too well.  It wasn’t too many years before our little “service” department had more than a thousand majors, far more than any STEM department, and the numeric equal to some entire STEM colleges. Neat, huh?

That depends upon how you define neat.  With our swelling enrollments, came the swelling of our heads, and in the ensuing decades we garnered a Masters Program and a Ph.D program. And in the world of the 21st Century University those are significant achievements indeed.  But that is not the lens I’m using today. Today I am thinking about how we use language and how that usage shapes us. As my professional world followed its path to success within the academy, the dominant language used on the highways and byways of that world began to shift. Where initially our faculty had been actively discouraged from doing research, we soon began to look like our colleagues on the STEM side of campus where publication was a prerequisite to survival. And publication demands a particular, formalized kind of language - one that slides away from poetry towards physics.  Additionally, to argue for a graduate program, on our campus, we had to overcome the skepticism of our STEM colleagues who felt we weren’t “really” a discipline. To prove our legitimacy we needed even more research, more publication, and in addition grants, attempting to address increasing pressure to become a “profit center.” Common academic challenges, and ones we met, and are meeting, successfully. So what is my problem?

Well, I never really left the poetry end of the continuum and those corporate successes have mandated both professional and pedagogical language shifts, all skewed to the physics end of the language continuum. Don’t get me wrong, I am fascinated by physics.  I subscribe to New Scientist, Science News and Science Daily, fascinating stuff.  And I will often re-read a sentence or paragraph - just blown away by the insight contained therein. But I cannot remember a single instance in the past 20 or 30 years when I have read a sentence in those, or other STEM-related  sources and said “That is just a beautifully written sentence. I wish I had written it!" Whereas it is a rare Billy Collins poem in which a line or stanza fails to elicit a “Damn. That is just gorgeous. How does he do that?” Dylan Thomas has the same impact, as do some 19th century “popular press” novelists.

That’s not to say that I have spent the last 30 years repressing my poetic voice. Not at all. I still write poetry and songs, I sculpt, I draw. I even manage to sneak some of the poetic voice into my classes, which, in response to those corporate pressures already mentioned, have ballooned to seats in the hundreds. But I realize that over the years, the poetic voice became the avocational voice as the dominant professional and pedagogical voices of my world were asked to slide further toward physics.

Today, as I explore this interesting new world of phased retirement, I sense those voices beginning to realign. My future no longer lies in meeting the expectations of the academy. Realistically, I “owe” the university a few dozen more weeks in the classroom over the course of a year and a half. More importantly, those interactions will be, as they were 38 years ago, primarily with my students.

In my mind, the linguistic implications are refreshing. I need not concern myself with the secondary audiences of "the discipline" or the institution. I can return to the exciting challenge of inciting curiosity, free from the sometimes subtle, but still niggling, presumptions of disciple and institution.

But here is the problem: having spent so much time sliding toward the physics end of the linguistic continuum, I find my use of the poetic has grown somewhat rusty, a touch hoarse if you will. Theoretically speaking, it is as if a concretion of STEMistic verbiage has stealthily wrapped itself around the thesaurus of my mind inhibiting poetic articulation.  Jeez! See what I mean?!  

But I am assuming I will recover. I have been consciously seeking an appropriate metaphor to assist in that recovery, an image from the poetic end of the continuum that I can call up when I feel myself sliding inappropriately toward the language of physics. Initially I was drawn to the 17-year cicadas. I mean these noisy critters bury themselves underground for 17 years and then emerge to climb up into the trees and overwhelm the night with their raucous serenade. There is a lot to like about that image. But if you zoom in a bit or search for an image of a 17-year cicada, well, call me “humanist,” but those are really ugly critters. I mean sci-fi horror flick ugly, and the second tenet of Distilled Harmony is “Enable Beauty.” So I really can’t go there.

However, Freckles, by Gene Stratton-Porter, a book published in 1904, that my mother gave to me 50 or 60 years ago, contains a lovely description of a Luna moth leaving its cocoon. To paraphrase - a mysterious form emerges, barely discernible appendages move slowly in the sunlight, gradually taking on the shape and the pale green hue that will define wings that can span your hand. Soon the orchid-colored ribs that arch above each wing come into view, as do the slightly disconcerting, centrally positioned eye-spots. The wings raise and lower, testing the breeze of the gathering evening, and then, without warning, the seeming fragile creature ascends aslant a moonbeam, vanishing into the night on the understanding of good-bye.

Yes, that is better.

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Partial Poetry

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My sister Margaret and I were talking about my recent post “Of Photographs and Memory.” I told her that while I often labored for days or even weeks on the prose posts, poetry often presented itself to me pretty much finished, needing only a bit of spit and polishing before getting tacked up on the Wall. 

That isn’t quite the whole story. I’m not really sure where the poetry comes from, but apparently sometimes something gets lost in transmission. For example this came flitting into my head around midnight:   

Upon (or around) the slender shoulders of memory 

We (or I) drape (or wrap) dreams that might have been. 

It is now 3:12 AM, and I’m still here with these two lines. The obvious problem is that this appears to be a fragment of a longer work. It flirts with the proper number of syllables for a haiku, but possible edits make it a touch too close to call.  And even if it is an enigmatic haiku-type construction, the narrative is frustratingly incomplete. What memory? Whose shoulders? Which dreams?  But even without answering those questions the parentheses indicate that, as a rather mysterious fragment, some editorial decisions remain:  

Around instead of upon? If you put something “upon” the shoulders of another, it is a burden as in “the whole world is upon my shoulders.” But if we place something “around” the shoulders of another it becomes a protective gesture, as with a child or a lover. 

We or I? “We,” of course, is more universal which implies a greater truth - a statement that is true for all. On the other hand “I” is personal, so the action is the result of my personal choice and may imply an interaction with a specific memory, a particular person who receives this dream memory. 

And finally, drape or wrap? “Drape” has a more formal feel to it, as if a set designer or an interior decorator were poking the memory, trying to get it to hang just right between the present and the past. “Wrap” seems more protective, and so fits better with “around” than with “upon.” 

Hence we really have two different treatments of this poetic intrusion. First the more formal: 

Upon the slender shoulders of memory 

We drape dreams that might have been. 

And, more personally, 

Around the slender shoulders of memory, 

I wrap dreams that might have been. 

I prefer the second, but that could change before the rosy-fingered dawn starts doing pull-ups on my windowsill. Consider the notion that shoulders need not necessarily be “slender.” Sandburg intrudes with his “broad shoulders.” Whole different ball game.  

Wish these damn things came with instructions, or I could learn not to write them down. Just roll over and go back to sleep. You know I’d forget the whole thing by morning. 

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Of Photographs and Memory

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There was a time when  

Faces were frozen in memory. 

When light and shadow  

Sketched contours on a page 

Painting precious portraits  

You carried in your heart. 

Photographs that faded, if at all, 

Into softer patinas, 

Gently smoothing the 

Harder edges of reality. 

Pressed between pages, 

Sweet surfaces traced 

By loving fingers 

Again, and yet again.

Immune to the 

Willful distortion of 

Pixels flitting across 

An endlessly malleable,  

Constantly updating,  

Screen, that daily 

Presents us with images 

Slowly sliding into strangers. 

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H2O - O, Oh My!

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It was very strange. I was walking through the grocery story and passed a “reduced for quick sale” cart. You know, where they take a cart and fill it up with stuff they want to get rid of so they can restock the shelves. I noticed that this cart was half full of bottled water. Further along I noticed waist-high displays of more bottled water being blithely ignored by the patrons off in search of cheese or pasta or frozen pizza, or sundry other items for dinner. The soft drink aisle featured your more tony water options in artsy bottles for 5 or 10 bucks a pop. And what is so strange about that, you ask? Well, you see we had just flown into Chicago the day before from our home in Raleigh, North Carolina - one of the recent and unwilling states that bore the wrath of Hurricane Florence. 

In the days before Florence we had come to think of water very differently.  While it turned out that Raleigh, very much in the middle of the state, was lightly brushed by the storm, our grocery store shelves had been stripped of all forms of bottled water several days before the hurricane made landfall.  As a number of old timers predicted, Florence came ashore as mere shadow of the “storm of the century” much ballyhooed by local and national meteorologists. But then we watched in disbelief as our neighbors along the coast and up the rivers were inundated with rains, storm surges, and flooding of biblical proportions. Cities like Wilmington and New Bern, just “a quick run” down Interstate 40, were cut off from the rest of the world. News reports leaked out of people waiting in long lines for drinking water, of ice being bartered like bitcoins. 

I was nudged ahead by another customer, who I noticed, had purchased a single liter bottle of Evian water.  “Sorry,” I said and headed off to the produce section. Later as I was checking out, I said to the young clerk, “You guys certainly have a lot of bottled water!” 

“Yes, sir,” he replied politely, giving me a look that spoke volumes about letting weird old guys out in grocery stores by themselves. I thought about explaining before I walked out, but there were folks behind me in line. Instead as I hustled out, I opted for a quick prayer for the discomforted and dislocated folks back home who were still in harm’s way. Then I hurried back to our temporary comfortable abode to sip, with a new sense of appreciation and thanks, a simple glass of ice water. 

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This Wormhole We Call Love

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An obvious linguistic misfortune. But that is what happens when you let physicists name some of the most fascinating possibilities of the universe. According to general relativity, they tell us, widely separated pieces of space-time occasionally rub up against each other. This allows a “wormhole” to form which would enable - still theoretically - instant movement between these seemingly vastly distant points in space-time. I love the idea, I hate the name. Let us use “portal" instead. And now let me try to explain why I think that what we call love is just such a portal.

My nighttime meditation ritual combines meditation and Reiki. After arranging my side of the bed for maximum sleeping comfort, I slip on my headphones and select the musical background for my half-hour or so “on-myself Reiki session.”  I use Pandora. Sometimes I go for a purely instrumental playlists, but other times I listen to playlists that include vocals, which are, if we stop and think about it, simply poetry set to music. It is probably no exaggeration to say that more than 95 percent of the songs that pop up on these playlists are love songs. They are poems about finding love, losing love, looking for love, being in love, loving a certain woman, loving a certain man, loving a prophet from a particular faith, loving God, loving your car for crying out loud. You name it and there are love songs to celebrate the relationship.  

This poetic obsession with love always leaves me wondering just what it is we, or they, are talking about.  I mean really, “Love. It’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru?” What am I missing here?  I often think of the quote from the old TV show Family Ties when Alex [Michael J. Fox] struggles to tell his Mom about falling in love with a classmate: “Love, Mom? Gee, I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love. I loved that puppy we got when I was six. But this is completely different.” Are all those love songs about "something completely different?”  I’m not sure.  Songs from the mid-60s will trigger the Alex-like emotions from those heady teenage days when I found myself “in love," for the first time, somewhere I had never been before. But then a John Denver or James Taylor poem can mirror those same emotions in a very non-human context - love of places and spaces.  Sacred music from a variety of faiths can call up a deep feeling of an expansive harmony.  And that is where I usually end up - at the intersection of what we call love, and the world view I call Distilled Harmony. 

Distilled Harmony grows from string theory which posits a universe constructed at its most fundamental level from infinitesimal tiny vibrating strings.  Distilled Harmony, as articulated in my book, The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart, goes on to assert that we are each, molecule, mouse, mountain, Mars, galaxies, suns, black holes, literally made of music, constructed of the billions and billions of tiny vibrating strings demanded by string theory.  It is not a great stretch to assume that what some folks have come to call the music of the spheres, is a shared harmony articulated by the strings that underlie all existence. 

Most faiths and philosophies share a couple of underlying principles that then tend to get lost when the politics of dueling prophets bloody the scene - the whole distasteful "my God is better than your God" absurdity.  Strip that foolishness away you will usually find a couple consistencies. First, there is an individual component - the soul or the self. Second there is a universal component in which the individual component experiences the universal - hears the music of the spheres.  Some belief systems demand that you die before you get to the second phase.  I have never been comfortable with that - nobody is going to convince me to drink the Kool Aid to get to the mothership. 

Distilled Harmony has much more in common with those belief systems that assert that via focused reflection, or meditation, or prayer, or music, or dance, the individual can glimpse - and experience for a while - the universal.  And it is here that love plays a major role.  You see? You thought I’d never get back to love, right? 

Distilled Harmony asserts that we find a state of grace when our own individual chord [the tiny vibrating strings that make up every part of us] sounds in harmony with the omnipresent chord of the universe.  Grace is a state when we are in harmony with the overarching vibrations of the universe - that point where science, faith, and philosophy merge in a single harmonic reality.  As I mentioned above, there are probably a number of routes to that unity.  Oftentimes the path is arduous and time-consuming and the temptation to seek shortcuts beckons a siren song. This gives charlatans of every stripe the opportunity to beguile the unsuspecting with quick fixes - chemical, mystical or military.  Distilled Harmony advocates a better way to glimpse the universal, and it is there in all those poems, in all those love songs. 

Love is the portal that takes us from wherever we are to a state of grace, ignoring all the laws of time and space, the quarrels among conflicting philosophies, faiths and theologies. That is why we write about it over and over in our poetic love songs, why we seek it so, agonize so when we lose it, want so desperately to make it for forever; ’til death do us part, for ever and ever amen.  Would that it were always so.  Love, aka grace, is all around us, all the time, but the “necessities" of life often distract us from experiencing grace.  In the 1989 Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating  says “. . . medicine, law, business, engineering, are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life.  But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” Wise words often overlooked in our currently STEM-obsessed world. 

Love is like a sunrise and a sunset. Awesome, shimmering, but transient, always shifting. We pay it homage through the arts, but those attempts to pin it down it are artifice.  We make our encounters with love more probable, more long-lasting, by the way we live our lives.  It comes as no surprise to you that I advocate that we Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. 

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Oppose Harm

Oppose Harm, the fourth tenet of Distilled Harmony, is often the most difficult to consider, because to do so is to tacitly admit that the three preceding tenets, Foster Harmony. Enable Beauty and Distill Complexity, have failed to establish the desired state of harmonic tranquility. Yet as Edmund Burke put it, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” It is in such times that it is necessary to oppose harm. This is one such time. Political primaries swirl across the country, and if we wish to remain the world’s flagship democracy, we must attend and participate.

I believe that all truly meaningful politics are local.  The mayor, the town council, the school board, these are the people whose decisions have an impact on our daily lives. At least that is the way it used to be.  An often hidden flaw of a two-party system is that when, for either party, party loyalty becomes more important than rational policy, the people suffer.  Donald Trump has taken that flaw of loyalty in politics a step beyond anything we have seen in the last century. Party loyalty has given way to his demands for personal loyalty. “My way or the highway” to put it mildly. Strangely, the Republican Party has pretty much caved on this issue, largely it would seem because the Trump wing of the party controls the money pots. If a Republican candidate wants access to the various deep pockets of the Republican right wing, they must toe the president’s line.

Unfortunately, that now makes most politics national, and makes all but the most independent-minded Republican candidates surrogates for the president.  Still it remains that all politics are personal. I alone remain responsible for my behavior in the voting booth. So before I could consider casting a ballot for one of his local surrogates, I must evaluate President Trump’s performance in office to date through the lens of my personal ethical guide: Distilled Harmony.  You need to do the same. Not necessarily through Distilled Harmony, but through whatever moral and ethical model guides your behavior. Here is how I see it:

Foster Harmony.

This is the first and dominant tenet of Distilled Harmony.  Put simply, we each need to seek, in our professional and personal lives, to create an environment that enables friendship and compassion. You cannot compartmentalize this tenet.  By that I mean you cannot say “I will foster harmony in my personal relationships, but my profession is really competitive, so I need to be thick-skinned and cut throat.”  Nor can you put on the garb of a “fair weather friend” who maintains harmonic relationships when things are going well but shows a very different attitude when times are tough. In reality it is during times of stress and hardship that we come to know, by their compassion and support, our true friends.

Unfortunately, President Trump has, since early in the Republican primaries back in 2015, proved himself the poster child for behavior that stands in direct opposition to Foster Harmony. In public forums, debates, and via his twitter storms, he proves himself time and time again a xenophobic, sexist, racist, abrasive bully. 

The examples are myriad, but perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than in his long-standing, mutually antagonistic, relationship with the late Republican Senator from Arizona, John McCain. During the primaries he called McCain war record into question by asserting: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Then after McCain’s death he communicated to the family, “My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!”  Still, it was not until public protests surfaced that the President ordered the flag at the White House to be returned to half-staff. It had been returned to full staff after the minimum day required after the death for all sitting members of Congress. 

You can’t have it both ways. While “politics as usual,” for this President, might say it is OK to send these conflicting messages, Foster Harmony mandates very different behavior. For each of us, and particularly for the President whose behavior serves as a tacit model for the country of what is acceptable, Foster Harmony is an “at all times and everywhere” mandate. You can’t be Dr. Jekyll one day and Mr. Hyde the next. That is, admittedly, a difficult assignment at which we often fail. Nonetheless, we need to give Harmony our best effort, and certainty, unlike President Trump, avoid serving as a model for the opposite - the sowing of distrust and discord.

Enable Beauty

For most of us this is a personal tenet that is manifested by our personal relationship with the arts. I encourage my students to go to art fairs. I urge them to collect the art they fall in love with even if it strains a young budget. Surrounding yourself with beautiful things creates an environment in which Distilled Harmony naturally thrives. The President of the United States, however has power far beyond our personal efforts. FDR used the office of the President to establish the Works Progress Administration, which provided jobs for hundreds of writers and artists and resulted in classic examples of American architecture, sculpture and painting. President Trump has used the office to propose drastic funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Public Broadcasting— three entities that most directly reflect anything resembling a national policy on art and beauty. So here again, President Trump stands in direct opposition to the tenets of Distilled Harmony.

Distill Complexity 

Some would argue that here, at least, the President lines up favorably with the tenets of Distilled Harmony. But they hang their hats on the President’s simplistic assertions on sweeping issues of public policy. Among those are the President’s assertions that polices that calls for environmental protection, both in the area of global warming and the endangered species act, are based on overly complex if not outright “fake” science. Unfortunately for the President, most reputable scientists disagree with these strange distillations.  Einstein once asserted that unless you could teach a concept to a six-year old, you didn’t really understand it yourself. In my 40-year teaching career, I often struggled with this charge. But I always attempted to overcome my uncertainty by seeking more information from the best, most respected researchers in the field. President Trump chooses instead to seek simplistic input from fringe researchers who already agree with his personal preconceptions. Since his election he has even gone so far to deny government funding to scientists who wish to pursue research that might yield results that would call those preconceptions into question, and actively opposes the publication of such results. 

Einstein asked for the simplification of complex issues that would yield statements of childlike simplicity, understandable to all. Trump has opted for the childish pique of “It is true because I say it is true. And if you disagree I will do everything in my power to keep you from being heard, or, should you be heard, I will disparage your results.”

So, in my analysis President Trump does not simply fail to manifest the tenets of Distilled Harmony, he stands in active opposition to them. He represents a figurehead for a broad position one might call Orchestrated Antagonistic Discord. For me the path to opposing harm at this point in time is to make sure that I take a firm stance against any candidate who presents as a Trump apologist. Then, after eliminating any such candidates, I will return to the notion that all politics are local, and see how the positions of the remaining candidates from either major party, minor parties, or independents measure up to the tenets of Distilled Harmony.

Now it is your turn.  Pull out your own moral and ethical guidelines and compare them to this President’s words and deeds. Consider your local candidates and their declarations to support or confront those words and deeds. Then mark your ballot.

What I Did - and Didn't Do on My Summer Vacation

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Having spent my entire life in the academic community the idea of “summer vacation” has remained more salient for me than for most adults.  Folks in the business community often hold this fantasy notion that those of us in education have the summer “off.”  Would that were so.  In reality - as I used to tell my junior colleagues - the quality of your Fall semester is determined by the time you put in preparing over the summer.  I never actually took a summer off. I taught summer school every year. It was an economic necessity, and in recent years, the students needed the summer school courses to meet their graduation target. But still in my life there was always this feeling of summer off even if the work load didn’t change.   

This summer was different. Since I am in “phased retirement” I don’t see students again until January. So for the first time since I was a student myself back in the mid-1970s, I actually had a summer off. I had big plans. Well, I actually had two plans. I was going to draw more. This was a particular challenge because, truth be told, I can’t draw. Oh, I can create sometimes pleasing images and enjoy doing so. What I mean when I say I can draw is I can look at something and create a recognizable recreation of the thing before me on paper or canvas.  So I was going try to take some steps toward that goal. My second big plan was to make significant progress on getting this blog into a manuscript form. The idea is to keep the original posts, no matter how embarrassing they might be in retrospect, but to clean up typos, etc.

So I packed up my necessary tools and tech and we took off to our home away from home up in Burr Ridge, IL, where Merle Smith, puts up with the chaos we bring along with a grace and generosity I hope one day to be able to emulate.  

Well as Bobby Burns put it, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.” or, “If something can go wrong it will go wrong.” As you know from previous posts - I did not plan to get pneumonia and visit the hospital. But I did. That pretty well put the kibosh on the editing plans. There is something about wide-spectrum antibiotics and editing prose that just does not go together.  I did however, largely pre-pneumonia get some work done on the drawing so I thought I would share that with you. So:

The Drawing I Did on My Summer Vacation

First,  I had to decide it was I wanted to draw. Fortunately, there was this really lovely statute out side our bedroom door. At first I thought it was a copy of James Earle Fraser's, The End of the Trail. But a closer look reveals that it isn’t; no native American, no spear. But the influence is obvious. 

Still I liked it, so I decided I would draw that. Now the thing that always screwed me up with drawing was the idea of being exact, details, details, details.  So I decided that I wouldn’t “draw” the statue. Instead I would sketch it.  You know free your inner DaVinci, move the pencil quickly. Talk to the pencil - “No, don’t go there!” Erase, erase, brush brush away the crumbs.

Oh, by the way, I went Michaels and bought their cheapest 11x14 plastic frame and drew a grid of 1 inch squares on it, marked the center with a red dot.  Every once in awhile I would hold it up and center the dot on the small piece of masking tape I had used to mark the center of the statue. That let me keep the sketch in proportion. 

So I sketched and sketched and came up with this:

OK, not terrible, but I didn’t like the head, so I went over and looked straight down on the head from the top.  I didn’t like the tail either. So. Erase, erase, erase, brush, brush. Sketch, sketch. And, voila:

I still knew that this was never going to turn into a “realistic drawing” so I took my eraser and my brush and my black ultra thin Sharpie and turned the sketch into the cartoon type drawing that I had used in my coloring book “Color Me Chilled Out” [Still available in some stores and from the author - moi!] That created the next step:

Then I took my cool new even thinner black marker purchased at Blick’s Art supplies in Wheaton, IL where I think I have cousins, and began to add the geometric details that I would later color:

And then I began to color. Always having been a fan of Gustav Klimt, I added some metallic markers to my palette. They look neat in the sun. And I got to this point:

And then I got sick. I actually was feeling better the last couple of days before we left and did a bit on the more on the drawing, I look forward to getting back to it.

Editing the Wall? Hmm. Do you realize that the year 2006 alone is more than 500 pages long? Let me think a bit more on that!

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All My Life

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It is something all teachers eventually encounter. You are telling a student that you don’t write an academic essay in the first person. Or that you need to provide references for those “Obama Was Born in Nigeria, Trump is an ISIS Agent, Hillary Ran a Child Porn Ring Out of a Pizza Parlor in New Jersey, Putin is a Robot” stories. The standard response can spring from any number of classroom situations, but eventually this surfaces: “But I’ve done it this way all my life.”

They are truly unaware of the irony, that “all their life” from a “big picture, student in the real world perspective” is maybe 6 or 7 years. But you don’t hassle them about that, you just point out that there rules and conventions in academic writing that allow us to be sure that we are all speaking the same “language.”

It is a completely different dynamic when each person at the dinner table is looking back at an “all my life” of 50, 60, 70, even 80 or more years. Again the response can be motivated by any number of discussions, from the proper way to mix the salad dressing, to intricate issues of public policy, through the “do’s and don’ts” of child rearing. It is nonetheless the same response delivered with the same certainty as that of the college sophomore: I have done it this way all my life.

“All my life” is an incredibly powerful piece of evidence for each of us. It is the natural outgrowth of the notion that “experience is the best teacher.” The problem is that for both the college sophomore and life’s seniors “all my life” is utterly unique, as is the “truth” it seems to reflect. 

The problem, of course, is that my “truth” gained over the experiences of “all my life” is potentially “true” only for me. For example, somewhere back in my life I apparently had a bad experience with vinegar. Hence, I have not liked vinegar “all my life.” This “truth” expanded, perhaps purely rhetorically, to all things “vinegarish,” like “vinaigrette.” When it came to salad dressing, I was a Ranch or Caesar man. Had been “all my life.” Imagine my amazement when sitting in the Bacchanalia Italian Restaurant the other night here in Chicago, I filched a forkful of salad from my wife’s plate:

“Wow. That’s really good. What kind of dressing is that?”

“It’s really great isn’t it? It’s the house vinaigrette.”

An obvious lie. I don’t like vinaigrette. I haven’t liked it “all my life.”

So what lingering notions did I pack into my doggy bag along with my left over lasagna? (That is just a figure of speech. Vito, the big black dog, ain’t gettin’ none of this lasagna.) A few come to mind:

Experience is a wonderful teacher. It’s the whole “nothing teaches you not to touch a hot stove better than touching a hot stove” idea. But it is not always a totally reliable teacher. Somewhere back in my life, experience had taught me that I did not vinegar. As I said, I then expanded that to all things that sounded like vinegar. Hence, I came to pre-judge all things in that culinary-rhetorical category. Pull out the hyphen and we are right there cheek to jowl with prejudice.

That little exercise shows us that while the experiences of “all our life” can keep us from burning our fingers on the stove, it can also lure us down the slippery slope of becoming mindless vinegar haters.

So, how do we guard against being deceived by the seemingly solid evidence that we have gathered and lived by “all my life?” You will not be surprised by the notion that I look to the tenets of Distilled Harmony for guidance.

First, delightfully, “all my life” is still unfolding. This means that none of my experiential assumptions should have morphed into certainty. And that, of course, is the mistake made by both the college sophomore and life’s seniors; the notion that the repeated implications of life’s experiences have led to certainty. My pre-judgements accurate. All vinegar is bad. I possess truth.

On the other side of the ledger we encounter that the first and dominant tenet of Distilled Harmony is “foster harmony.”  Insisting on the veracity of the prejudices you have clung to “all my life” is the antithesis of fostering harmony. This does not mean that you necessarily acquiesce to the “all my life” verities of others, but it does require us to at least consider the notion that our own “almost certainties” still have room for amendments.

The challenge then is to persuade those involved in the dialogue - be they students or guests around the dining room table - to move along through the other tenets of Distilled Harmony: Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm.

Give it a try. It sometimes works. Trust me on this. I have been doing it for several years of the last couple decades of all of my life. 

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Body Talk

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Maybe 4:30, maybe 2:30. Definitely AM.  Thunderstorm rolled through about an hour ago. Light around the windows. Could be the rosy-fingered dawn, the moon, or a streetlight.  Anyhow, .  .  .   

Body: Yo, Roberto! You awake? 

Me: Go away. 

Body: Come on guy, rise and shine! 

Me: Go away. 

Body: Time to get cracking.  It’s you and me, buddy. One for both or whatever.

Me: Do you know how much I hate you? 

Body:  Is that any way to talk, after all I’ve done for you?

Me: All you have done for me!? 

Body: Well, you’ve lost ten pounds right? How long have you been trying to do that?

Me: This is not exactly the diet I had in mind! 

Body: And you're feeling better right? 

Me: Of course, I’m feeling better. That’s what is supposed to happen when you do time in the hospital. You just lay there with wide-spectrum antibiotics dripping into your arm. I was just bored and groggy. No big victory for you.

Body: Picky, picky. But, hey!  Remember the sixties? California? Good times then, dude! 

Me: I don’t mean to seem ungrateful - but that was more than half a century ago! 

Body: True, but we still some great times not that long ago. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge!

Me: How about we step off memory lane for a moment and focus on the last decade? Multiple myeloma, back surgery, two stem cell transplants, and now this dollop of pneumonia?  And speaking of the pneumonia, what was with those dreams?! I mean people I never knew and places I have never seen before! 

Body: Yeah, well, technically, dreams are not part of my portfolio. 

Me: What? 

Body: Your dreams are actually designed and implemented by a multi-member existential panel whose membership is somewhat fluid . . . 

Me: WHAT!? 

Body: Oops. I really shouldn’t say any more . . . Probably said too much all ready. 

Me: No, wait. Tell me more about this dream panel. 

Body: Listen, you should probably rest. I’m tired, and if I’m tired - hey, hey, you’re tired. Am I right, or am I right? I’ll stop back later. 

Me: No, hold on a second, what do you mean you’ve said to much already? 

Body: Really tired man, we’ll talk more when you’re feeling better .  .  . 

Me: No, no, no, no, let’s talk now. A dream panel with flexible membership? What the heck does that mean?

Body: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz 

Me: I really do hate you right now! 

Body: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz 

Skip a Rope

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Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch the ground

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn around.

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, show your shoe,

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, that will do!

Children’s rope skipping rhyme.

New Scientist tells us that another step has been taken in understanding dreams. In the July 21st issue they report that our most powerful dreams, theta wave/REM partnerships, appear to be linked with recent life experiences. From there they hypothesize that those dreams have a semi-therapeutic function, allowing us to “process” those experiences. And, in a bit of “blue-sky” theorizing, they wonder if these findings bring us a step closer to using hyper-lucid dreaming to ease our deeper anxieties.

I love it when they do stuff like that - leap to frolicsome assertions out at the very edges of the data - as I consider that tacit permission for me to do the same.

I don’t know if it is an age thing, or a retirement adjustment thing, but my dreams seem increasingly strange these days, particularly after my afternoon nap. In contrast to New Scientist’s assertions that our dreams help us work through our recent issues, my dreams have a tendency to call up a cast of characters from long ago and far away. As a matter of fact, sometimes from so far away that both the characters and the plot line are total mysteries. I awake shaking my head, muttering, “Where did that come from!?”

Here’s a possible answer. Think about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this view of reality every possible version of our life exists, branching out into an infinite number of universes. The implications for dreaming seem obvious - well, maybe not. But the clue is in the title of this post. Here’s the idea.

Dreams are glimpses between the seams of those various universes. In dreams the alternative realities seep together, asserting themselves and reflecting the others. Sometimes the dominant reality of the dream is the same one to which we awake. There is enough similarity to the past we had experienced only a few hours ago that we simply sigh “Weird!” and get on with waking life. Other times the dream reality was so firmly anchored in one of our other “could-have-been, might-have-been, was-in-a-different-time-and-place” realities that you need to just sit for awhile, take a few deep breaths, look around and gradually recognize that yes, this is the reality in which I spend most of my time.

I have come to think of dreams as raising and lowering a curtain on these various realities. We stand inside the jump rope of our existence. The rope passes over our heads, pulling a version of reality along in its arc. We jump and the rope passes beneath our feet. We land. We wake up. Maybe we have returned to the reality we left when dozing off. But maybe we moved a bit forward, or perhaps a shade backward, forward or sideways, up or down into a different version of our infinite number of possible worlds and their associated realities. There really is no way of knowing in which “where-when” we are, and it wouldn’t matter anyway.

That may seem a little disconcerting but it need not be. It is not as if the rope turns and suddenly we find ourself in a reality we do not recognize, gazing at some alien landscape. Our “here and now” will always feel like the correct  “here and now.”  Also we would do well to remember that no matter where we go, we take ourselves along, and we simply need to remain true to that self.  Another source of comfort for me is that no matter where or when the rope may send me skipping, it is most likely that the tenets of Distilled Harmony - and the behaviors they mandate - Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm - like the laws of physics, remain constant throughout our many possible realities.

Sleep tight, sweet dreams.

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The Provenance of Genius, or They Broke the Mold When They Made That One!

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It is an old expression that has hung around because it captures a feeling so nicely. Yet the precise feeling remains illusive, along the lines of “I don’t know what  “it” means (supply your own ‘it’), but I know it when I see it!”

I found myself thinking about the idea of an undefinable “it” the other day while reading an amusing story about a lovely snafu at the US Postal service. Seems that the recently released “forever” stamp bears the likeness not of the iconic lady who welcomes, hopefully not sarcastically, the tired, poor and huddled masses to America, but rather of her imitation who welcomes tourists to the Las Vegas strip. A little “oops” that cost the USPS 3.5 million in royalties to the creator of the Vegas version.

But it did get me thinking about the seemingly shrinking distance between the “real thing” and imitations. It is a distance that has all but disappeared in the spooky land of the digital - where there is, in theory, no difference at all between a digital “original” and the millionth “copy” derived from the same digital code.

I wonder, and indeed hope, that we have gotten this one wrong.  I choose to believe, that even in the creepy valley of the digital clones there is still an original “mold” created by a genius that, when broken, leaves behind an “original,” ineffably different from all the seemingly identical copies that may follow.

I remember being face-to-face with our old friend Michelangelo’s David in Florence. Well, not literally. He is much taller than I, and his face - and everything else - is much bigger. But it was definitely one of those “I can’t define art, but I know it when I see it!” moments. There is a presence in his presence that is able to transcend even the prattle of parents who somehow feel it is important that their infant child see the David. And who knows, maybe the baby brain is somehow attuned to that mysterious presence.

But then, eventually, you find your way to the gift shop, and there row after row of Davids greet you in varying sizes and finishes. And that is when I wonder about the relationship between those mini-Davids and the big guy down the hall. I mean, in this instance the difference is obvious - in size and the medium if nothing else. But what about the difference between any two of the seemingly identical Davids on the shelves? Those made from the same mold and shipped to shops all over Florence? Around the world? Would there be a difference between a poster made from a photo of the real David, and a seemingly identical poster made from a photo of one of the mini-Davids? Especially if both posters were digital prints?

I choose to believe that there is a difference. And, no, I have no data to support my belief, other than my firm conviction that every element in existence is reducible to its essential chord composed of an absolutely unique cluster of strings - those indivisible units from which all other matter is constructed. I do not deny that digital and genetic clones appear identical - but the reality is “not really real.” 

Consider the simple examples of the “corrupted” computer files that need to be downloaded repeatedly before they will perform in a manner “identical” to the original. Or consider the uncertain relationships that exist between the “same” image on your smartphone, laptop, desktop, or printer output. One can argue that the “source code” for all those images is identical and the variation in the images is the result of improper calibration in the presenting technology - laptop, printer, whatever. But does not the notion of “identical copy” imply an ability to present to an audience of one - you or me, or someone else, or more - all your “friends” - multiple identical copies?

As usual, I need to approach my discomfort with this assertion with an analogy, or more accurately, a story - true story. When my younger daughter was little, two realities clashed. The first was that she was subject to rather serious allergies and related attacks of asthma. The second was that she, like many kiddos that age, had a special stuffed animal. Her’s was a white bunny, big floppy ears, pink satin inserts - AKA Bunny.

One day her allergies and asthma sent her to the hospital. I remember pulling night duty in her room, faux sleeping in her room, while actually anxiously listening to her every breath as various machines whirred and the chaos of a hospital made any real sleep a fantasy. Morning brought a return to normalcy for us all, and our preparations to return home. It was then that we discovered that Bunny was missing. We never found Bunny. To this day I have no idea what happened to Bunny. My inclination was to blame the hospital staff. Bunny tangled in hundreds of sheets sent to the laundry. Or Bunny snatched by a psychotic stuffed-animal thief who roamed the pediatrics ward. I still do not know where Bunny went. But I do know some things about Bunny.

First, I know that at that time nowhere on the Internet or in brick and mortar stores was there a stuffed animal that duplicated Bunny.  Maybe now, some twenty years later, search engines and social media might have evolved to the point where I could find a Bunny clone.  But not then.  Second, I know that despite the fact that my daughter eventually moved beyond Bunny, initially, none of the seemingly similar Bunny substitutes ever approached the original.

We have, of course, moved far beyond my search for Bunny. Today folks seem willing to go to truly incomprehensible lengths to replace the irreplaceable. If we are willing to try to clone our pets - google it, truly  creepy - can trying to clone our children, partners - ourselves, be far behind? It would remain a sci-fi fantasy if we could just realize that the essential chord that truly defines all existence - from Michelangelo to Rover to the original David - is absolutely unique; lies beyond duplication.

As I point out in The God Chord, our chord, built of the vibrating strings replicated in their billions throughout every cell in our body, evolves constantly. I suppose our hubris and technology might one day simultaneously evolve to the point that would allow us to “grab a chord of the instant.” But, as in the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, it seems highly likely that any entity associated with that captured chord would evolve in its own unique path, unassociated with the entity from whom the chord had been snatched.

Let me try to summarize the assumptions contained within this strange ramble, which was even longer and more tortured in its creation, than in your reading of it.

First, the “originality" of creations of genius resides more in process than in product. The original is deeply imbued with the chord of its creator, at a level we still cannot measure or observe. Hence we cannot begin to replicate that original - digitally or otherwise. So after that original creative marriage of process and product, the mold is broken, never to be truly duplicated.

Second, the further from the creation of original - time, medium, method -  the unique chord of the copy becomes an ever fainter version of the original chord. Consider numbered prints— say 1/50. Why is 1 of 50 still seen as “better” than 25 of 50?  Here the notion of the digital clone does challenge the common production assertions that as the plates wear out the edges of the etching become less distinct, hence making the lower numbered prints “better.” However, Distilled Harmony would assert that later copies of the original - even digital copies - are further removed from the creation of the original work and hence contain ever fainter versions of the original chord. And that assertion reaffirms the greater the harmonic value of earlier, lower numbered, copies.

Finally, somehow we would know the difference. Maybe we need to think about the idea of a diminished chord, as implied above. A friend of mine used to write the classical music reviews for the local paper. In the last few years of her life CDs were just coming into prominence. She refused to use them to inform her reviews. I do not know if she knew that the process of digital recording deletes some of the auditory signal present in analog recording. After all the amount of signal lost in a digital recording is supposed to be “undetectable” to the human ear. But she could tell that something was missing.  And in this instance what she was hearing was that increased distance from the original performance that caused the original chord to grow fainter, to diminish.

In that instance the fading of the chord was literal in a musical sense. But Distilled Harmony asserts that whether it is David, or Mozart, or perhaps even Bunny, there is a difference between the original work popped out of that first mold, and the copies that follow. The process of genius creates the chord captured in the original work; subsequent copies attempt to replicate the original. It is an effort doomed to a certain degree of failure. But we should remember the value of those failures, for without them we would be denied even the echo of the original.

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When the Arrow of Time Flies Backwards

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If you got Einstein and Aristotle together for a little time traveling tête-à-tête the one thing they probably would agree on would be time. They would both assert that the arrow of time flies forward. Aristotle would be on solid ground given the state of theoretical physics circa 300 BCE. Einstein, not so much so. After all he was the guy who turned time into a variable in an equation that could be flipped back and forth over the equal sign like a spirited rally at Wimbledon. But when push came to shove, match point, and all that, Albert might be forced to admit that there was nothing that would, mathematically, prevent time from running backwards. The fly in that intriguing ointment is that we have never been able to catch time pulling off that, theoretically possible, maneuver. In the wild, in the lab, despite the best efforts of the men in black and women in white, time seems to continue to trudge doggedly down its oneway street.

Until this past week. Now, before I share this seemingly remarkable event with you, I do need to clarify some definitions. "Ah, yes, what is ‘time' Grasshopper?’" No, but seriously, if we want to look for something frolicking forward and backward, we ought to have some sort of operational definition of what this critter “time” looks like. We have moved from “sand through the hour glass,” and shifting shadows on a sun dial, to marks on a candle, to springs unwinding, pendulums swinging, and now to, I believe, the decay of ytterbium atoms to mark the passage of time. The the problem I see here is that all these gizmos are one way devices. It is like plotting traffic in a town with only oneway streets and in cars with no reverse gears. In such an exercise it would be easy to come to the conclusion that traffic could only move forward.  We seem to have put our trust in measurement devices that can only measure “time as we know it” and then declared that time can only follow the path those devices have been designed to measure - flee forward you arrow of time! Seems a little pointed-headed to me.

So let us take a slightly different approach to the definition of time. And here I am going to engage in one of my favorite activities - making stuff up.  We are all familiar with DNA  - deoxyribonucleic acid, and RNA - ribonucleic acid - those miraculous strings of acids that code our physical characteristics. I would like to suggest a new member of the team, ENA - Exceptional Neurological Activity. ENA occurs as we experience life.

Think about it for a moment. Experience occurs in the brain. Everything else that we “experience” is the result of the transmission of information to the brain. Eyes -  directly hard wired to the brain via the optic nerve, ears, same thing for sound.  Smell, taste, pressure, pain, pleasure, everything gets picked up by the billions of little “radio telescopes” of our nervous system and is beamed back to the brain that codes it into the specific events that we experience in our lives. I would posit that these events get laid down in the brain as bits of ENA, most likely as unique electrical clusters part of which includes the duration of the experience. OK, now hold that thought as I jump way out into the outfield.

As I have mentioned before, after having spent every month of the last 51 years of my life either being a college student or teaching college students, I am entering phased-retirement.  This has directly or indirectly triggered several activities. First, the on-going effort to organize the last 20 years or so of this blog into a quasi-book form. Another shout out to sister Margaret who kept all the emails. Second, gathering and categorizing the various drawings, sketches, photographs and doodles created over those previous 50 or so years. Yeah, I kept those old class notebooks. Third, as I move out of the big office I garnered over the years, I am again laying hands on the images and sculptures I have created, and lived with, for the last few decades.

What I am now encountering in those essays, images and sculptures is refined ENA. I have written elsewhere that a work of art is a repository for the artist’s chord.  Hand me a huge block of marble and an array of hammers and chisels and, no matter how many Red Bulls you pour down my throat, David is not going to leap out. That iconic work is the result of a bit of refined Michelangelo ENA - Exceptional Neurological Activity;  a unique synthesis of Michelangelo’s chord, including his skills and intuition and the marble itself infused in that unique harmonic “Michelangelo creative construction.” 

So here is the interesting part. As I encounter my earlier works - the product of my chord and the moment in which the drawing, doodle, poem, whatever, was created - the original refined ENA fires up again. Through my current interaction with these artifacts, I am there again, in that moment. This is different from memory, or recall. This is a duplication of the original ENA, and as such, I would hazard to assert, is the arrow of time flying backward. Obviously, I am not physically transported back to the moment in which those works were created. But to make that a deal breaker is to give into the corporeally dominated oneway street mandate of previous definitions of time - time as we know it. I am becoming increasingly fascinated by the idea of “time as we don’t know it.”

If we mark time not as the decay of atoms or the other physical devices from the past, but rather as the unfolding of experience, then to “re-experience” an event is to literally move to a different point in time. I am intentionally trying to avoid the phase “go back in time” as that will give unintended credence to the “oneway street” notion of time. It might be more accurate to think of time as all possible routes through experience.  Hence time only becomes oneway when we choose a particular experiential route, and remains oneway only as long as we choose to remain on that route, to engage with experience on that route.

I do need to admit that we probably cannot “unchoose” a route we have already traveled. We cannot unbreak the glass, we cannot unspill the wine, we cannot call back the unfortunate words. But what has occurred on a route we have already traveled need not pre-ordain the route we next choose.  The “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics, which purports that part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is that there is not just the world of our here-and-now, but countless alternative worlds in which some versions of our self explores the “roads not taken,” is very much like the notion of time I am suggesting.  After all quantum mechanics does live in the space-time continuum, and who is to say that our ENAs cannot slip along that highway? So when I pick up a drawing from 2006, touch a sculpture from 2000, I’m not saying I return to those points on the calendar, rather I am saying that I experience again that particular, unique, perhaps folded, place in time.  Which, now that I think about it, implies that we just might be able to learn how to unbreak the glass and unspill the wine - just in time for dinner.

An analogy. Deep breath - here we go. 

The Velcro Sphere:  Imagine each Exceptional Neurological Activity - ENA - event as a snippet of velcro. Both sides, the side with all the tiny hooks and the side with all the tiny loops that the hooks attach to.  One side of the velcro is the historic moment when the ENA was completed. The other side is the artifact that was created as a result of the ENA.  OK, so once the ENA is completed, the two sides of the velcro separate and get tossed into a universe-sized snow globe - you know those glass things with a scene inside, you shake it and little flakes of fake snow swirl around so it looks like it is snowing inside? The two halves of the ENA are now out there in existence. Swirling around. Could be they hook up with another harmonic snippet out there and become a new insight or inspiration for someone else in another place and time - interesting - but I don’t want to go there right now.

Rather I am intrigued with what happens when I encounter the artifact that I created at an earlier point in time - a drawing, a piece of broken sculpture, a poem, anything that was the product of an earlier ENA.  I would like to hypothesize that at that moment those separated snippets of velcro reconnect. I do not “remember” that previous ENA - I live it again.  The historic moment and the artifact reconnect, generating a new ENA in which that which we have learned to call “the past” becomes a part of "the present," with a continued potential to become part of "the future.”

And, yes, I am aware of how truly strange that sounds.  My intention is not to assert that there are other limited particular paths for the fabled “arrow of time.” My intent is the opposite. I would posit that like the “many worlds” theory in quantum mechanics, time is an entity of many paths for many arrows; forward, backward, right, left, up, down, and off into all those dimensions we have yet to discover. And so why haven’t we discovered them? Consider blinders. Driving those forward-only cars down oneway streets.  I see only that which I expect to see. Alternative visions of time and experience - rather common in non-traditional, non-western, views of the world, time and existence - are often written off as “mythology" or “primitive epistemologies." 

Maybe. Maybe not. But certainly worth our consideration and our “time.” Or to quote a proverb from someone, somewhere in a somehow different time - “There are none so blind as those who will not see."

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Note:  [New Scientist just posted in its June 30, 2018 issue has a neat article on how to think about time.]

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