Foster Harmony - The Most Harmonious Candidate

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The “harmony” from which Distilled Harmony takes its name has its roots in science, physics, philosophy and theology. Searching this site for “harmony” will send you wandering down myriad paths through each of those heritages.  But for our current purpose - how can Distilled Harmony guide us in the voting booth - I will try to stay more focused.  The first, and preeminent, tenet of Distilled Harmony is Foster Harmony.  At the risk of sounding like a beauty pageant contestant, this tenet calls upon us to do whatever we can to ensure "world peace" - from the personal level of harmony in our own home, to harmony in the global community of which we are all a part.  But unlike the stereotypical pageant contestant, the tenet asks that we actually take steps to “foster harmony.” And holding any candidate for public office, certainly the highest in the land, to a commitment to foster universal harmony is certainly a good place to start.

I have been a member of the same academic department for almost 40 years. As such I have been part of dozens of faculty “search committees.”  These are fascinating exercises. The candidates craft letters of application, often wonderfully designed works of semi-fiction, to present themselves in what they hope is the very best light light given the often “big net” qualifications we often include in the announcement of the position. The selection committee then tiptoes around personal and professional preferences to come up with a short list of candidates to bring to campus for an interview.

It is only in the rearview mirror that I have come to see how important those interviews can be.  At 40 years, my professional affiliation with my colleagues far exceeds the length of many marriages. By hiring a colleague, we are inviting an individual who we often know only through their self-affirming narrative and letters of reference provided by - one assumes - supportive colleagues in the discipline, to share perhaps the rest of our professional, and often personal, life. It is a very, very important decision. And while our "marriage" to our President is limited to, at most, 8 years, it is - in the big picture - more important than hiring a colleague. Nonetheless, we might gain some insight by applying some “interview assessment issues” to the huge “interview” that is a political campaign.

Like a letter of application and supporting letters of reference, a political campaign is the candidate’s charm offensive, their attempt to appear wonderful in our eyes.  Attempting to separate fact from fiction in these beauty pageants is becoming more difficult in the digital age. There is no letterhead on the electronic "letters of reference" that flood the Internet. It is quite difficult to “source” support or detraction by individual, political party, or even nation. My suggestion is to watch how the candidate acts when they think nobody is looking.

We always take our invited interviewees out to a series of meals. Some rather casual lunches, other more formal dinners with the search committee that will make the final recommendation on hiring.  In these situations I made it a point to carefully observe how the candidate treated the wait staff. Most candidates are savvy enough to keep their game face on over meals with those who may hire them, but the way they treat the wait staff, who have no power in the hiring process, is sometimes revealing.  A candidate can affirm, and even research and publish works that advocate a compassionate and harmonious worldview. But that same candidate can be short and demeaning to those who bring the food, pour the wine and fill the water glasses.  These contradictions tend to be warning signs that there is a problematic disconnect between the public mask and the private person behind the mask. They also tend to reveal candidates with whom I would not risk spending decades. 

A political campaign is a closely related species. A political candidate will always say what they believe the voters want to hear, attempting to juggle messages to their “base” which tends to cling to the most extreme positions of the party, and the hyper-valuable “undecided voters” whose adherence to party orthodoxy is mercurial at best. The candidate's speeches and media campaigns will attempt to tout that strangely bifurcated worldview. It is our job to ascertain to what extent the candidate's actions - in current or previous political offices or the private sector - match their words, their commercials, their formal speeches, press conferences, informal comments, tweets, etc.  It is those specific actions, legislative history, executive actions, business practices and personal behavior, that are the political parallels to “how they treat the wait staff.”

Foster harmony asks us to look at each candidate in terms of how his or her “treatment of the wait staff” reflects or predicts an individual who sees the world through gentle, harmonious, and compassionate eyes; reveals a candidate who, when in office, will seek a genuinely harmonious relationship with their fellow office holders, our fellow citizens, and the community of nations with whom we share this fragile globe.  

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Mind Like a Steel Trap, or a Large Plastic Garbage Bag

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Both have their place.

When you are in the midst of your occupation, working for the Yankee dollar, you are expected to be in steel trap mode. But as you slide into your “golden years” the garbage bag tends to becomes the more germane metaphor. I call my mental garbage bag “the hopper,” not to be confused with Dish TV’s digital assistant of the same name. My hopper is my mind - or better perhaps, my memory. Just about everything and everyone I have ever known is in there somewhere. I’m just not exactly sure where. The point is that in most instances I really don’t need to know what I am looking for right then - my self-imposed expectation of immediate recall is a relic of the steel trap days. They went something like this:

Student: Dr. Schrag, what did you say was our first globally shared disaster?

Me: The sinking of the Titanic which was broadcast around the world almost immediately via the new medium of radio.

Student: And when was that?

Me: 1912, between the late hours of April 14th and into the early hours of the 15th.  The ship was captained by Captain Edward Smith who died in the disaster.

Student: Thank you.

Me: No problem.

The “hopper days” work somewhat differently: 

For example, there is a large black lab puppy in our neighborhood. And when I say large I mean REALLY big. His paws are the size of dinner plates and his tongue seems quite capable of slurping up a Smart Car. Labradors and Newfoundlands are both descendants of the St. John’s Water Dog, so share some DNA, but this guy definitely leans toward his Newfie cousins.

Anyhow, I like black labs, so I fuss over him and play “dodge the feet and tongue” when I encounter him out on his walk. I really like the pup, but I have trouble with his name. For some reason I first came to believe his name was Casper - sort of the opposite of the very white cartoon character, Casper the Friendly Ghost. In reality the dog’s name is Gaston. There is a Lake Gaston nearby and perhaps there is a relationship there, I dunno. So now when I encounter said canine I toss a "BOLO (Be On Lookout For) large lab puppy’s name" into the hopper. Fortunately both my daughters were addicted in their youth to the movie Gigi that featured a male protagonist named Gaston. (played by Louis Jourdan opposite Leslie Caron - “Ah, yes. I remember it well!” Actually, they didn't sing that song, Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold did. Anyhow.) So fairly quickly the hopper churns “big lab+not Casper+dude from Gigi+big lake nearby” together, and Gaston pops out. Sometimes in time for me to call the pup by name. Sometimes not. No big deal. I have learned not to stress over it. I don’t “need” the name right now, and it won’t be on the test.

I have been introduced to Gaston’s humans a couple of times. I have no idea what their names are. Hey, not everything makes it into the hopper. You still have to prioritize. 

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Distilled Harmony in The Voting Booth

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If you examine the course of great nations and empires over time there is an obvious pattern of rise and fall. The Romans, The Greeks, The Mayans, Dynastic Egypt and China, The British Empire, all rose to dominance and then, for a variety of fiercely debated reasons, fell. No doubt the reasons for decline were multifaceted, but one assertion seems to maintain credibility in most, if not all, the cases: the government was insufficiently flexible to deal with evolving social, geological, and political changes. A military leader - like an Alexander the Great, or Kublai Khan - dies and there is no political process in place to provide for a transition of power.  Or a ruling family is deposed through military or political means and what was once great is brought low. 

There are those who assert that America stands on the brink of such a fall and there are disconcerting signs that point in that direction. Primary among those indications are a political system that seems paralyzed. The billionaire-backed radical right rants about an immigrant invasion that threatens to well-being of “real Americans,” while the hard core left, still seeking to be all things to all people, bemoans the aberrant autocratic behavior of the Trump dominated Executive and Judicial branches of government. Neither extreme is the disease, both are symptoms. The disease is that as a nation we have lost our way, stagnated, fractured our political will. Such observations do seem to give weight to the assertion that the time of America’s ascendancy is past and we will follow those other great nations of the past into decline and irrelevancy.

There is a significant difference. Unlike every other dominant culture that preceded us, America is a democracy.  In previous dominant empires the power of the empire was seen as descending from God to the monarch, emperor, chief, whatever the title, of the supreme, often divine, ruler.  That changed with the American Revolution.  When exiting the Continental Congress of 1787 Benjamin Franklin was asked “What type of government have you given us?”  His response “A republic, if you can keep it.” And the truth is that after 250 years the republic is still ours to keep or lose. And if we continue to support the extremists on both sides of the aisle who paralyze the government we will lose it.

The Declaration of Independence asserts that in a democracy government “derives its power from the consent of the governed.” That is us. We are the governed. Every elected official from school board to the county commissioner, to the mayor, to the White House derives their power from us - the governed.  It is our most sacred duty to choose those upon whom we bestow power wisely. That wisdom has become increasingly questionable, for while we seek to blame the country’s ills on our political leaders the truth - to steal from the Bard - “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Somebody has to elect these people and - to steal again, this time from the comic strip Pogo - “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Or at least the enemy are the organizations that we often mistake for “us” - political parties.

It is interesting that about every political debate at every kitchen or dining room table often descends into accusations that “the democrats” want to do this or “the republicans” want to do that. It is true that one often finds greater comfort in one political party or the other, but it is foolish to assume that party membership in some way obligates us to support either an individual or a position advocated by a particular party.  Objectively, there are no doubt sincere, patriotic, compassionate, thoughtful people in both parties. The problem in recent years has become prying those individuals free from the ideological purity demanded of the parties - a cohesion enforced by access to the billions of campaign finance dollars controlled by the national party bosses and the financiers who exert such power within those parties.

The nation would be best served by the abolishment of political parties, political action committees, and the electoral college. Despite the attractiveness of that daydream, I realize that that is not going to happen - certainly not within my lifetime. Rather, something that could happen within my lifetime is that we actually begin to consider the extent to which each candidate - again from the school board and the county commissioner to the White House - espouses opinions and programs that are consistent with our own beliefs and values.

And yes, you caught me, this post is really only the introduction to the four posts that will follow, each in their own good time, that will explore how each of the four tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm can be employed as a sort of political sieve to separate the gold from the dross as we consider the choices that will face us next year. 

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Art's Highest Aspiration

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First, I should acknowledge that to claim to write inclusively about “art” is folly. It is like claiming to write about “life,” or, certainly these days, “truth.”  Art is, perhaps more than any of life’s experiences, in the eye of the beholder. The creator of an object or an experience need only to declare it “art” and, for the most part - wanting to see ourselves as urbane, thoughtful, broad-minded denizens of the 21st century - we nod sagely and let it go. 

I will spare you both my rant declaring how, for much contemporary art, the accent should be on the first syllable, and the story of how upon taking my 93- or 94-year old father to an admittedly pretentious “contemporary" art gallery he loudly proclaimed, “I wouldn’t hang that in my toilet!” Rather, I would like to muse a bit about a less controversial but under-examined aspect of the wide world of “art.”

We are in Colonial Williamsburg where, as usual, we are attending lectures by the Founding Father’s alter egos who seek to remind us of the radical nature of the experiment that became the United States. Interestingly, Patrick Henry, George Mason and James Madison all seemed particularly interested in the last of the inalienable rights guaranteed in the Virginia Declaration of Rights and later in the Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness.

Simply because Happiness trails Life, Liberty, and in Virginia anyhow, Property, does not mean that it is in any way secondary to those other inalienable rights. I would go so far as to argue that the possession of those other rights pale into insignificance if we have not Happiness. Even further - happiness is the ultimate goal of life, of liberty, and of the acquisition of property. We often get that twisted these days believing that the acquisition of property automatically results in happiness, or that life and liberty can meaningfully coexist with profound sadness and in the absence of happiness. 

It follows that, for me, art’s highest aspiration should be the fostering of this most central of the inalienable rights enshrined in the central documents of our democracy - happiness. 

I realize that I am in a bit of a minority here. Much contemporary art, even the works of serious intention, seem dystopian. Cries regarding - and for me a bit repetitively - everything that is wrong with life in the 21st century. And no, I am not suggesting that we close our eyes to the very real challenges of global warming, the distortion of truth in the highest office in the land, the pernicious denial of scientific findings, simmering racism, and all those other slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. These are vital issues that demand redress at the ballot box and the judiciary - we remain a democracy, and demagogues who forget this do so at their professional peril. But the works depicting the rise of Slytherin’s Dark Arts are not ones I would chose, to use my father’s words, to hang in my toilet or anywhere else.

I infinitely prefer the works of those who have chosen to beat their swords into pallet knives in pursuit of our inalienable right to happiness.  And just who might those artists be?  I take a great deal of comfort from the fact that Jeff Koon’s has again claimed the title of "most expense living artist." I know, I know, he can rub you the wrong way and just how much money do you have to have to spend 91 million dollars on a three-foot tall shiny rabbit? But at least when you look at Rabbit or most of Koon’s other works you smile, you get nudged, if only for a little while, toward happiness.

And there is a much less expensive option, a free one: Bob Ross.  

For those of you unfamiliar with the name, you will recognize him as the Mister Rogers of the painting world, the guy with the big hair and the soporific voice.  He was the host of a PBS program called The Joy of Painting that ran for 31 seasons from 1983 to 1994 and lives on via YouTube. Ross demonstrates landscape painting - completing a painting in each 27 minute program - using a wet-on-wet method. One could easily get the impression that Ross made up “wet-on-wet,” but in reality the method had been around for centuries used by such high fliers as Frans Hals, DiegoVelázquez, Caravaggio, Paul Cezanne, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, and Ross’s own mentor, Bill Alexander. One would never confuse Ross’s half-hour one-offs with the works of Caravaggio, although there are a few Cezanne and Monet moments. But the fact that Ross’s half-hour works rarely, if ever, rise to the level of timeless art isn’t really the point. The point is that the programs, almost without fail, do rise to the level of happiness.

And that move into gentleness and happiness is quite intentional.  During a lengthy military career Ross was the guy who hollered: "Do this! Do that! Clean this! Clean that!"  Ross decided that if and when he got out of the military he would never raise is voice again, and he would use that gentle tool to guide his listeners toward their inalienable right to happiness.  He goes on to report: “I got a letter from somebody here a while back, and they said, "Bob, everything in your world seems to be happy." That's for sure. That's why I paint. It's because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. Shoot, if you want bad stuff, watch the news.” 

I doubt if any of Ross’s students end up making a living selling their paintings. But again, profit really isn’t the objective, happiness is.  In my classes we often had cause to think about why artists created.  A few points often surfaced. There is a group of artists - living and dead - whose works appeal to collectors who buy art with their ears: 

Guest: “Is that a [insert name of hot artist]?”

Smug owner: “Yes it is. Don’t you just love his/her work? Set me back a pretty penny, I’ll admit.”

Those artists, if living, can hardly be faulted for taking advantage of these “commissions from the marketplace,” and creating similar works to cash in on those demands. There is however another group of creators who listen to what Ansel Adams called “commissions from within,” expressions of thoughts and feelings that the artist feels compelled to create. Many of today’s dystopian artists fall into this group. Rage, anger, and sorrow color many of their commissions from within.

Fortunately there is that other set of creators who hear a different internal muse.  They are Bob Ross’s creative kin who "can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it.”  It is important to point out that Ross’s painting is in some ways secondary to the almost lullaby narrative that accompanies his demonstrations.  I watch The Joy of Painting in bed via YouTube with my iPad propped on my stomach, ear buds crooning softly.  Inevitably I will doze off, startled awake by the iPad tumbling onto my chest.  I return my gaze to the screen amazed that entire mountain ranges, or rivers, or forests have appeared on Ross’s canvas in the interim. I shake my head, determined to attend more closely:

Ross: And look, maybe, maybe, maybe, yes, here it is, another little bush over here. And he needs a friend, so let another one fall out of your paint brush here - or wherever you’d like it. Because this is your world and you can make it however you want it to be .  .  .  

Slowly your eyelids conspire against your artistic will and you drift off to sleep wrapped snugly in your inalienable right to happiness.

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Nero's Fiddle

I am listening to Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra. Quite nice, however, I blame it for this bit of doggerel that popped into my head in the tiny hours of the morning:

Nero's Fiddle

The repugnance one feels

Over history’s assertion 

That Nero fiddled

While Rome burned,

Varies, in inverse proportion,

To the geographic,

Philosophic, political

And moral affinity 

One retains for that
Fabled metropolis. 

Stuck Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

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While grading final papers this evening I encountered, far from the first time, one of a group of aphorisms I think of as “sophomore certainties.” They aren’t actually restricted to second year college students. In reality they can occur at many, or at any, time in a life. But college students, actively seeking “truth” of one kind or another, seem uncommonly prone to embrace them. This one goes something like this: “Do what you love for a living, and you’ll never work a day in your life!” I haven’t actually seen it on a T-shirt or a coffee mug yet, but I have no doubt they are out there somewhere. So in providing a comment on the paper I did my standard “Let’s unpack this a bit” response. That is where I try to draw a distinction between a beloved avocation that shelters us from those “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” and the reality of turning that shelter into an occupation. The devil, I opine, is in the details. One may love teaching, but hate lesson plans and faculty meetings. Love singing, but hate life on the road. Love painting, but hate marketing. Very few of us are Enya who loves making music, and confronts her paralyzing stage fright by self-producing and marketing her music from the safety of her home studio while keeping her audience at more than arm’s length. For most of us the devil is in those mundane “but” details, details that have a nasty habit of turning that activity we love into something called “work.”

So here at about 2:00 AM, I am toying with the idea that I am facing a similar, but inverted, version of the “beloved avocation versus work” paradigm.  When I talk with friends and family about the inevitable anxiety of retiring after having spent literally my entire adult life on one side or the other of a desk in a college classroom, they often respond along the lines of “But think of all the time you will have for drawing and writing!” Well, let’s unpack that a bit.

It is not as if I want to go on teaching. We are currently binge watching Boston Legal, and while I am enjoying it, I must admit to occasional moments of uncomfortable identification with Shatner’s character, Denny Crane, who is grappling with what he chooses to call “Mad Cow Disease.” In reality it appears to be more the very common “Where Did I Put My Keys?” or the “What’s That Student’s Name?” disease.  Anyhow, in one of the episodes we watched tonight Denny says to his buddy Alan Shore, “l wish I had never been great.” The notion, at least the one I heard, was if he had never been great, he wouldn’t have to confront the possibility that he was great no longer. I’m not sure how my “teacher-now” stacks up against the “teacher-used-to-be” who won a sack full of teaching awards, but I do know that “teacher-now” has to work harder at it, and frankly doesn’t carry the same passion into the classroom. So it is time to move on. The sticking point is move on to what?

Yes, I am looking forward to exploring my beloved artistic and literary avocations. But will that turn them into work? Will the devil be in those details? I find no guidance in the ads I see aimed at “people my age” that show tanned seniors playing golf and tennis, hiking the Appalachian trail, climbing Kilimanjaro, sketching the Parthenon, surfing and sipping cocktails at the club. They strike me as saccharine, verging on nauseating. I also find my colleagues who hang around the edges of the university into their 80s a bit creepy - sort of like the elders still allowed around the edges of the campfire, but being gradually nudged further and further from the meaningful flames. I guess I feel a bit like I am trapped in that old Peggy Lee song: “Is that all there is?”

The trouble is I don’t know what else I want there to be. A dear friend who preceded me in leaving the academic life gave me a bit of advice which, at the time, I found strange. He said “For six months after you retire, do nothing.” It doesn’t seem so strange to me anymore. Doing nothing seems a hell of a lot easier than trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

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The Not So Secret Garden

Not long ago our niece, Rosemary, was awarded tenure at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Yah! You go girl! For those of you outside the academic world that is a lot like getting your driver's license. You get to drive wherever you want and you have to do something terrible before they can take your license away.  In the giddy aftermath of that liberation, Rosemary signed up to teach classes at the local hoosegow, jail, lock-up, whatever you want to call it.  It would be nice, she opined, to have students who really wanted to come to class. Ah, yes!  Anyhow, she also asked for suggestions for purely creative outlets. Which I took to mean the freedom to create things that would not have to be submitted to an editorial board.  It was in response to that query that I shared with her the following process:

Spoiler alert: You need a digital graphics tablet hooked to your computer to do the first few steps, altho' I bet there are those of you out there who could figure out an analog work around.

Step one: Take a picture. A close-up of some nature subject is perhaps the best way to start. You don't want a landscape like that "perfect day" picture I sent you the other day. Backgrounds just get in the way. Let's start with an iris:

Step two: Now, you load that picture into your computer and open it in Photoshop or Gimp or whatever painting program you use. Add a "layer" which is like putting a transparent surface over the picture - glass, plastic wrap, whatever analogy works best for you. Then click on the new layer, so you are sure you are about to draw on the new layer.  This is where I use my Wacom graphics tablets, though those of you with steadier hands and awesome mouse skills might be able to do this on your computer. If any of you are good enough to do it on your phone - don't tell me!

What you are going to do now is trace the outline of the flower. I just use the photoshop brush tool in black.  Again in Photoshop you can click the color version off and on so you can see how you are doing. 

Step three: When you are done tracing click the color layer off, or just throw it away.  Now print the tracing layer.  You should get something that looks sort of like this:

If you get shading around your tracing you can add another layer and fill it with white.  If it makes your tracing go away you have put the white layer on top of the tracing. Drag the white layer below the tracing and print it again - that should clear it up.  I use drawing paper to print the tracing. You will use your favorite coloring medium on the tracing so try to match your paper choice with what you will use to draw.

Step four: Turn off your computer - Yay! - and take your tracing over to your drawing table. 

Step five: I can't really show you this because it disappears with the last step. But essentially you are going to fill in the tracing however you want. No surprise, I take a black fine tip .01 marker and create little designs within the spaces within the tracing until I have a pretty detailed [in the examples below the entire image is about 4x6 inches and the smallest spaces are filled with a single dot from those .01 markers] coloringbook-like and then I color it in with other fine tip markers until you get  something like this:

I'm not sure why I am choosing to go tiny on these images. Maybe a reaction to the images I had printed on the sides of busses several years ago. I listen to music and novels while I'm drawing. Gets nice and zen-like after awhile .  .  .  I dunno.

Anyhow, I'll try to leave you with a couple of other examples. I'm not sure how the Blogger software will react.

Peace to you.

Cabbage

Photo:

Tracing:

Colored:

Paper Mulberry

Photo (I flipped this one for drawing)

Tracing

Colored:

To a Perfect Day

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I remember sitting, many years ago now, outside on the deck of the Columbia Yacht Club in Chicago. A friend had invited my wife, my daughter, Andrea, and I for lunch.  It was a perfect day.  A mild breeze was blowing off Lake Michigan that glittered gold and impossibly blue below us.  Sailboats sporting flags of many colors played tag across the water.

“Wow,” Andrea opined. “If every day was like today everyone would want to live in Chicago!”  No one mentioned Michigan Avenue in February.

Today was such a perfect day here in Raleigh.  The sky was paintbox blue, if there were clouds they had drifted over to Chapel Hill, or maybe Durham. Here, everything was in bloom, but nary a breeze stirred the pollen that biology declares must accompany such flowerings. Greenery of varying heights and hues competed to carpet the glades shaded by the petaled trees. Variations on “What a glorious day!” echoed out of windows and down the dappled paths.

I can also recall perfect days in Albuquerque, NM, when a thunderstorm, backlit with lightening, swept down the Sandias. Perfect days in Freeman, SD, perched upon the ridge of my cousin’s barn, trying to call the fickle storm clouds, far out on the horizon, closer to our fields which could surely use a drink. Springfield, Ohio when nighttime summer showers blew breezes through the porch screens carrying strange aromas from beyond our city streets. Kalamazoo, MI, where heaping banks of lilacs perfumed huge swaths of the town. Everywhere, if we play careful heed, nature bestows her gifts of perfect days.

And it is those perfect days in varied perfect places that become the canvases upon which memory paints the scenes of our perfect moments. On days such as these memory moves her slight-of-hand with such grace that we may be deceived, for just the shadow of an instant, into believing that we have been transported back to one such moment. We stand transfixed, every sense alert, waiting for the missing players to take their places, so the fairy tale can unfold again - again perfect. Then a bird sings, a car drives by, or the voices of strangers intrude, and the scene dissolves; remembered perfection replaced with the merely exquisite present. With a shake, we move on about life, our memories trailing along, into the glory of yet another exceptional day.

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The Island of Lost Poems

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Lost: Late night composition. Sort of a haiku. 15 -19 syllables. Two of the words ended in the syllable “ate” like “potentate” or “refrigerate” .  .  . maybe. There was some kind of allusion to Helen of Troy, or the Trojan war in general. Reward for its undamaged return.

I know better. You know I know better. We’ve been through this before. I told myself “You are going to forget this if you don’t write it down.” But the bed was so cozy and sleep the mere turn of the pillow away.

“No, really,” I said to me. “I can do this. It’s a short little thing. If I just repeat it to myself a few more times I know I will remember it in the morning.”

And so I did. Sure enough as the morning sun swept crystalline in through the windows I remembered . . . having thought about something before falling asleep. A shopping list? Maybe a doctor’s appointment? What I was going to make for breakfast? The name of that girl who stole my heart in 5th grade? Pat? Pam? I dunno. It was only when my stomach called me to lunch that the notion of a poem tickled the old cranium. It was later still when the few fragments noted above straggled in.

Where do they go, these seemingly timeless bursts of poetic purity that vanish behind the simple shade of sleep?  I think it was back in August of 2012 that I first wrote about Alternia, an iteration of the multiverse that I posited was the flip side of dementia. Invisible to us in the current dominant universe, it was the place to which I supposed my father increasingly slipped away for pleasant conversation as he eased past his hundredth birthday. Closed to us. I could not accept that his insightful and witty responses had simply ceased to be. It comforted me to assert that I could possibly slip over an existential sidewalk, and chat again with him as my bare feet explored the soft green grass of Alternia.

Is it so unreasonable to posit that perhaps there is a gentle island not far off the shores of Alternia? Sandy beaches covered with pastel sands that somehow fail to stick to surf-slicked bodies? Soft breezes slide through palm fronds that have never known hurricane or tsunami? And there, quietly bobbing along the rainbow shoreline, are myriad sunset-colored bottles containing the rolled scrolls of all those poems that we carelessly set free in the lazy hours after midnight. It is, I choose to believe, the Island of Lost Poems.

Back in 1975 The Righteous Brothers wrote, bemoaning the deceased luminaries of their genre, “If there’s a rock and roll heaven, You know they’ve got a hell of a band.” It staggers me to imagine the poetic riches scattered along the beaches of the Island of Lost Poems. The collected verse of all our sincere, but futile promises: “I’ll remember you in the morning. Really, I will. I promise!” That beach catalog would, I think, rival the Great Lost Library of Alexandria which, who knows, may rest only an Island or two away - just over the horizon. 
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Lost on Campus

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When I reached the lofty position of “upperclassman” at the small private college in southwestern Michigan where I attended undergraduate school, I occasionally engaged in “spoofing the freshmen.” I have come to learn that our pranks could not even pretend to reach the level of what is now called “hazing” at the nation’s “white shoes” private institutions. But then we were mostly nerds, intellectuals, and artists at Kalamazoo College. There were no fraternities or sororities, just some “social clubs” the nature of which I have forgotten.  Hence, rather than subjecting the freshmen to strange rituals of questionable taste we would attempt to sell them elevator passes. Our campus, founded in 1833, had at that time, no buildings that sported elevators. We chuckled our sardonic upperclassmen chuckles and meandered off across the brick paths that crisscrossed the shade-dappled quadrangle. 

I have returned several times in the four decades since my graduation. The school remains small - around 1500 students and 100 faculty, a ratio to be devoutly desired among the mega-universities that increasingly define American higher education. But even Kalamazoo College has acquired new elevator-equipped buildings among which I can lose my way. So I tend to linger on the quad and pretend that time has somehow faded back to that more simple time. 

NC State, on the other hand, pushes up new buildings like mushrooms suddenly sprouting after a summer storm. One day there is parking lot or a cluster of picturesque, albeit just a shade shabby, old homes. The next a gaudy new structure of brick and glass complete with name plate and academic affiliation squats in their stead. I am occasionally tempted to peer around the foundations to see it any remnants of the former structures oozed out when the current occupant was suddenly dropped upon the site. One would think I would be used to these phenomena. Apparently not. 

Tonight I drove into campus a bit early for my evening class. I needed to pop into the library to pick up a dvd. I parked in the lot across the street, and jay-walked through traffic to slip down the sidewalk that would funnel me around to the library entrance. I was caught up short by a chain link fence behind which glowered the wide toothed maw of a backhoe on steroids. It was perched atop mounds of asphalt that had previously lined the path that led down to the library. It seemed somehow evil, a primordial carnivore guarding its cache. I don’t know why it bothered me so.  I followed the fence around, hoping to slip through it somehow and regain my intended route. No luck. I was shuttled down the street past a shiny new cluster of campus bus stops. They carried signs not unlike the DC metro: blue line here, B and C route over there. Students strode purposely to their appointed spots. I finally broke free around the far end of the library, but only after peering through a window in a weird shot of deja vu that glimpsed down the basement hallway that had, 39 years ago, led to my first office here at State. 

I secured my dvd and set off back to my car, stopping for a moment to glance at the “natural area” that was once the site of Harrelson Hall, a strange round classroom building. Picture the bottom two floors of the leaning tower of Pisa, but without the 12th century architectural appeal. Now it is an open space awaiting, no doubt, its own giant mushroom. I skirted west around the back side of the library and eventually defeated the fencing and made it back to my car. I drove past two immense new apartment buildings, parked across the street from my office, bought a bagel, and hurried inside. 

I am not sure why the experience set me so on edge. Perhaps it was the notion that while I have grown accustomed to new buildings appearing in the urban equivalent of fallow fields, I was unsettled when places I had previously walked with students, friends and colleagues were ripped open to make way for yet another building. Strange, eh? It was as if I had become enured to the idea that one could “pave paradise to put up a parking lot,” but it bothered me when they tore up “my” parking lot to build another building?  I think, more than that, I resented the fact that places with which I had a past were being destroyed in order to create new structures with which, the inevitability of time decrees, I will have no history.  

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Thoughts on Turning Forty

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Ha! That got your attention, right?  But, no, I am not in the midst of a psychotic break. I do realize that it is my older daughter who will confront that milestone in a couple of years. But in an email and phone conversation with a dear friend who I consider my “non-biological daughter” I have come to realize that there are those among us here on The Wall for whom 40 seems both old, and just a touch scary.

Consider this an post open letter of comfort to them and a gentle reminder for those of us for whom forty is but a shifting memory fading into a distant past:

First, Grasshopper, with luck, you too will come to see forty as a faded photograph whose “certainty” was revised time and time again, passing through many decades to finally arrive at the realization that the best we can hope for is to discern a set of guiding principles that help us through the ever-evolving paths of wonder that come to define our unique life and the mystery of existence.

I have found it helpful to cobble those principles into a kind of aphorism that I confront on a regular basis - the ubiquitous “email sig.” Here in the early years of the 21st century, we all have one. Well, most of us do, and if you are reading this you most likely among the “sigged.”  At the very least you see mine, the “signature” that gets tacked to the end of each email telling you that another edition of Schrag Wall has arrived.  Too often these signatures devolve into ”phatic” communication; a social ritual devoid of any real meaning. For example, we say “Hi there. How’s it going?” expecting to hear “Fine, and you?” To which we will reply “Fine” as we head into Starbucks for our morning jolt of caffeine. We certainly don’t expect a real dissertation on the state of their home life, professional challenges, or god forbid, their philosophy of life.

Yet, often at some time or another - certainly in our personal, as opposed to our professional email - we do give serious consideration to the pithy assertion that accompanies our name on each message that we send whirling off into cyberspace. At one time I used a quote from Thoreau, a writer whose work I admire. But that has been so long ago that I no longer remember exactly which of his delightful insights I borrowed.  

For the last decade or so I have used a “sig” of my own composition that serves as much as a personal reminder of my guiding principles as it is a gentle suggestion to the recipient.  As I said before, you see it at the end of each email that sends you the link for this blog. But since it is always the link and not the sig that is foregrounded, I thought I would take this opportunity to elevate what is usually “the end” of a message to a place of more prominence and talk about it a little, especially for those of you for whom the big “4-0” looms large and potentially disconcerting.

First, the “sig” itself:

“Who we are is a quality of the moment. What we have done in the past cannot be undone, and what we have promised for the future remains but a promise. So live each moment in the awareness that it defines you.”

Three sentences. I think I will start by dissecting the middle one: "What we have done in the past cannot be undone, and what we have promised for the future remains but a promise.”  The first phrase is an affirmation of the notion that life has no rewind button.  We cannot go back and undo that which we have done in the past. It is vital to accept that frustrating reality. The foolish, and sometimes hurtful, things I did 20, 30, 40, - hell, even 50 or 60 years ago, have a way of dive-bombing my consciousness as I pull on my socks or rummage along down the frozen food aisle at the grocery store. Far too often the offended party has left my life, either figuratively or literally, making any realistic attempt at rapprochement both impossible and meaningless. There is no rewind button. Similarly, regarding those who have wounded you, unfairly accused you of nefarious behavior or motIvations; those realities live only in the rear view mirror of your life. Ignore them. The harm lies in letting the anger remain in your heart. So regarding both types of discordances, the lesson is simple: Let them go but - Don’t. Do. That. Again.

Turning to those promises about the future; there is an old Yiddish saying that roughly translates to “Man plans and God laughs.” Neither that, nor the phrase in my sig “what we have promised in the future remains but a promise” should be read as tacit permission to wander through life as a feckless bumpkin whistling tunes from old Disney movies. It suggests that rather than seeing the future as some laser straight, predictable, pathway - point A to point B, zip zip - we should envision it as a fireworks display. Point A to possible points B, C, D, .  .  .  Z.  Oh, and look over there! Points AA, BB, CC, etc. You get the idea, to see only one path forward comes close to guaranteeing that you will miss a turn somewhere in the enchanted forest that is our future.

The two phrases of that middle sentence serve as a bridge between the first and third sentences: “Who we are is a quality of the moment,” and “So live each moment in the awareness that it defines you.”

And what does that mean? Increasing, for me for the past couple of decades - a realization that certainly eluded me in those decades preceding 40 - it means trying to make sure that belief and behavior are firmly linked.  I can recall far too many instances in “my younger days” when I could passionately articulate a personal, social or political belief and yet somehow manage to behave in ways that were, if not clearly contrary to those assertions, certainly sailed close to the wind.

The tricky part of keeping belief and behavior synchronized is, of course, clarifying just what it is that you do believe. And this is where passing the big 4-0 is a milestone devoutly to be wished. Having spent most of my life in classrooms packed with twenty-somethings, I have no doubts regarding the passion of their beliefs in a variety of arenas. But, having maintained contact with a goodly number of them, I am equally assured that those positions do a fair amount of shifting as life unfolds before them. It is a phenomenon not absent from my own history.

However, I can say that the further I get from forty, the shifts in the palette of my beliefs become less dramatic, and the relationship between my beliefs and my behavior becomes more consistent. These days I do my best to behave in ways that manifest the four major tenets of Distilled Harmony, the personal philosophy that has come to guide my life. And to remind us all, those tenets are, in order of salience: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. The tenets, while increasing consistent, are not carved in stone. Let me briefly share, or reaffirm, some current capstone concepts from each.

Foster Harmony - This tenet is first because it is both most important and most difficult. It asks us to be kind and gentle to those with whom we share the planet and our lives. Often the difficulty arises from the fact that “kind and gentle” can look very different through different eyes and lenses. It is only natural to see our own behavior as “kind and gentle” and the behavior of others as sometimes less so. The objective is to keep on trying to reduce the distance between those varying perspectives.

Enable Beauty - Whenever you can. I read a fascinating article recently about examples in nature where the manifestation of beauty held no Darwinian advantage. The beauty did not seduce a mate, or lure a pollinator. It did not attract prey, or bestow advantage upon your progeny. Beauty seemed to be its own endstate, needing no other reason to exist. Being beautiful was enough. I think as we shape our lives, our homes, our walls, our offices, and our environment we should keep that notion in mind. Sometimes just being beautiful, or creating beauty, is enough.

Distill Complexity - There is a sardonic saying in the academic world: If you cannot bowl them over with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. It is an attitude that spreads far beyond the ivory tower. Read any legal agreement you sign. Leaf through the program of a meeting of a professional association. Listen closely to the swiftly read tag at the end of any pharmaceutical product advertised on TV. There may well be brilliance in there somewhere, but it is often hidden beneath a few tons of “baffles.” Einstein is said to have asserted that if you could not explain a concept clearly to a six-year old then you yourself did not fully understand the idea. We need constantly to try to strip the fluff away from both our beliefs and our behavior. As stated above in the second tenet, art is to be profoundly desired. The correllary “artifice is to be avoided at all costs,” is equally germane. We need to become simplistic, childlike, without becoming childish. For a delightfully uncluttered presentation of this tenet I strongly recommend the children’s book Simple Pictures are Best by Nancy Willard, illustrations by Tomis dePaola. 

Oppose Harm - Edmund Burke, reknowned Irish political theorist and philosopher, warned us that “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” A lovely bit of distilled complexity. To gild the lily just a touch, when fostering harmony, enabling beauty and distilling complexity fail to thwart the excesses of individuals, governments or corporations we must actively oppose them. To affirm the unique glory of our nation we need to more clearly recall that the central documents and the better history of the Republic assert that we muster this opposition in respectful public debate, in non-violent protest, in the court of law, or at the ballot box. When we fail in this regard we become a distorted funhouse mirror reflection of that which we seek to oppose.

So Grasshopper, as you can see, manifesting those four tenets to the best of your ability - even figuring out just what the four tenets mean to you individually - is certainly too much to accomplish in the blink of a 4 decade eye. Hence, as you blow out that 40-candle conflagration threatening to melt your cake, whisper a little prayer that you will have at least four more decades ahead of you to get the wonderful challenges of that job done.

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Why Else Would We Call It Enlightenment?

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When I was an undergraduate back in 1968, Carlos Castenadas’s book The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, had just been published and was all the rage on college campuses. Castenadas, a strangely reclusive figure who nonetheless went on to publish 14 more books, proved that the Yaqui way of knowledge was also a yankee way to wealth and fame. The books, which some critics claim were largely fictional, included and glorified a version of shamanism that emphasized physical deprivation and the use of psychotropic plants and herbs to induce a euphoric state. As I recall there was a lot of sweating and throwing up involved.  

I do not understand why, over the centuries and in many different cultures, so many came to believe that the path to enlightenment should be dark. Where did that idea spring from? This notion that the road to nirvana or heaven or wisdom or whatever you choose to call it should be paved with pain? Sackcloth? Horsehair shirts? Tattoos and mutilation? Rituals of deprivation, snakes and strychnine? Hard beds, cold rooms, hot deserts? The belief that we had to abuse our bodies to free our minds? Or that we had to cloud our minds to glimpse the beauty of our souls? I can think of nothing less in tune with the music of the spheres. 

Similarly I am profoundly amazed by our seemingly fearful obsession with how the universe will end. Will all the stars slowly drift apart until unimaginable distances cast existence into static isolation? Or will the opposite be it’s fate? A "reabsorbtion" of all the matter and all the energy of all the universes into an infinitely tiny point that either reignites in a cosmic “do over” or winks out into a chilling darkness beyond all darkness? 

I would assert that neither the dark and painful road to enlightenment nor the tortured tale of the universe's demise will come to pass. Simply because both are discordant. I do not argue with the current insights made possible by the telescopes, satellites and computers of modern cosmology.  We now know more about the structure and nature of the physical universe than ever before and that is awesome. The intellectual retreat advocated by the “flat-earthers” and the “climate-change deniers” would be an unprecedented act of existential cowardice.   

Similarly, I would not gainsay the wisdom enshrined in ancient rituals. However, those rituals were part of a cultural whole and to extract portions of them from that nurturing environment and attempt to transplant them into the strange soil of “apps” and iExistence seems a travesty on a par with the great cultural rapacity of the Anglo expansion across America in the early years of our nation, and similar vainglorious adventures throughout history and around the globe. 

It occurs to me that the simple reality is that in the realms of both these wondrous mysteries - the physical and the metaphysical - we have not yet discerned the answers for which we long, and we grow increasingly impatient. I would counsel patience and a longer view.  After all it took us a long time to realize that we would not sail off the edge of our little speck of rock whipping around our life-giving sun, and even longer to realize that we were on a little speck of rock whipping around that minor star. So I would suggest a refocusing of some of our efforts. 

It occurred to me the other night, well, actually very early the other morning, while musing on the fickle nature of dreams and where they went when I woke up, that the complexity of enlightenment is an optical illusion. You know, like those little books you can buy at the check-out at the grocery store.  There is a picture of an ornate goblet, but if you gaze at it long enough and allow your eyes to defocus just a bit, you see instead the silhouettes of two faces staring at each other. And then, for life of you, you can’t see the goblet anymore. 

We have been staring at the silhouettes for so long that we can no longer see the goblet. The silhouettes have their history in that path to enlightenment that runs through deprivation and pain, through gods and realities that require us to suffer to gain entry to that “better place” that we murmur about at funerals, “s/he is in a better place,” - you know the one.  Perhaps the goblet is a better option. 

The third tenet of Distilled Harmony is “distill complexity.” Most often the tenet gets invoked in the service of the first two - Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty. This is no exception. We need to let our eyes defocus a bit to see through the complexity of painful enlightenment to the more harmonic, simpler enlightenment beyond.   

It would seem that there are a couple of basic concepts that underly the notion of enlightenment. Fundamentally, enlightenment implies an understanding of, and being in harmony with, the nature of existence. The four tenets of Distilled Harmony - foster harmony, enable beauty, distill complexity, and oppose harm - define my understanding of how we can come to live our lives in that enlightened space. However, if we unpack the word a bit further some other issues suggest themselves. And here I freely admit I am stepping outside the boundaries of my good buddy The Oxford English Dictionary.  But think about it for a minute: en-lighten. To make lighter. Perhaps to both make something brighter, more observable, and to make it weigh less, be less cumbersome. 

Back it the 1940s the imminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger, he of the famous cat, had the unmitigated gall to suggest that the second law of thermodynamics, that everything tends toward decay and disorder, may not have gotten it exactly right. In his book What is Life he opines that when it comes to life “We must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it.”  Right on, Erwin! My bias obviously is that everything eventually tends to order and harmony. And, taking the long view, science supports my bias. Every major scientific discovery of the last quarter of a century or so has grown from hypotheses drawn from the notion that "given what we already know, this is how it should be.” Still, we continually look for evidence that Einstein’s notion of an orderly universe might have been wrong. But doggone it, the little guy keeps coming up right! And it might be well to remember that he was the one who wrote, “God does not play dice with the universe.” The more we think the universe is riddled with complexity, the more we run up against the relatively simple E=mc2 - an inscription that makes the task of understanding the universe lighter. 

It does not seem unreasonable to assume a corollary assumption to Einstein’s assertion: the universe does not play dice with god.  If we assume “god” to be that universal, harmonic orderliness of the universe. Why would that orderliness demand that we travel through pain and darkness to observe and understand the light? Why would that orderliness reveal its light to one group of individuals and not to others? Surely that contrary perspective does tend toward decay and disorder. More inviting is an orderliness that advocates that we foster harmony, enable beauty, distill complexity and oppose harm. In following that path we can more easily see, and join in, the harmony of existence. Why else would we call it enlightenment? 

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Dreamtime

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I have discovered, when hibernating in some pleasant moments between waking and sleeping, or the other way around, t’ween sleeping and waking, that at such moments, time allows itself a natural freedom and runs forwards and backwards and from side-to-side quite willy-nilly. It occasionally indulges in somersaults, and cartwheels. It is, after all, TIME and, despite physicists best efforts to - as Jim Croce begged back in 1973, - “save it in a bottle,” time apparently can do whatever it wants.  

The dreams that share that lovely little corner of spacetime with me - and dreams I suppose they must be, although I am loathe to imply with that designation any tint of fantasy or deception to their enchanting narratives - those dreams slide with equal facility among a variety of worlds. Some worlds I fully recognize, and are peopled by individuals whose names, forms and faces are well-known, and often quite dear to me. Then there are other worlds inhabited by entities whose particulars, if not on the tip of my tongue, do lurk somewhere close behind my eyelids, and with whom I would claim a passing, though fuzzy, familiarity. Those worlds are followed, but not terribly often nor closely, by worlds with landscapes and inhabitants which, while utterly alien, feel nonetheless somehow like home.

As I lie there, futilely trying to lure the fading sprites back to the playground, I find myself assuming that there was some meaning in these frolics along the paths I did not take, or, that perchance, lie along trails that still await me out among the multiverses. First galaxy to the right and straight on ‘til morning, or Neverland, whichever comes first.

The notion that currently most intrigues me is the suspicion that, despite the seeming daunting hurdle of my father’s five score years, perhaps time is just “messin’” with us. That these places and spaces, these envisioned faces and cosmic traces that flit about me during these gentle “t’ween” times are fleeting, teasing invitations to more worlds, more moments, more laughter, and, yes, perhaps more tears. But, then, honey grows sweeter when tempered with the saltiness of tears.

Scientists increasingly tell us to pay attention to our sleep. Choose your source and you will discover that you should be getting 8, 9, 10 or even more hours of sleep a night. Methinks it is not so much the sleeping to which we need attend. More likely ‘tis the dreaming.

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Selling Out Socrates

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I find myself in a rather unique situation this semester. I am teaching two undergraduate classes that represent the best and the worst of contemporary higher education.

On the best side of the ledger is a special topics course, Media and the Creative Mind,  that explores the creative relationship between artists and the tools that enable the art they create. Unlike many courses with similar titles the course is not focused primarily on the “meaning” or “message” of the works. Rather we explore how the artist, message in mind, uses the technology available at the moment - brushes, chisels, keyboards, whatever - to manifest the intended message.

The course currently has 9 students enrolled, a luxury traditionally reserved for graduate seminars. I realize that were my department head less flexible, and were I not in my last couple of semesters of phased retirement, the course would have never been allowed to get on the books. But it is up and running and is in form, and I hope in content, what college is supposed to be about: the Socratic method. The Socratic method is driven by a cooperative environment of debate. Question, answer, discussion, advocacy and compromise. It is the world I remember from my own undergraduate days at Kalamazoo College back in the 1960s. And it is a method that, no matter how much we might which it were otherwise, cannot be “teched" or “AI-ed” together and fed to an intimate class of several hundred or several thousand students.

On the worst side of the ledger is Technology and Communication, a large online general education course. Let me hasten to point out - in my own defense and in defense of the couple of dozen teaching assistants who have more than ably aided me over the couple of decades of the life of the course - the course is a fine example of the genre. What lands the course on the “worst” side of the ledger is the simple fact that it is of the genre “courses on digital steroids” with hundreds of students. These courses have become increasingly common - and in some large state schools are the norm in undergraduate education.

I have heard it asserted, in one case from a colleague in my own department who had the unenviable task of reporting to me that some of my students felt I was “distant,” that large classes could be designed to be as intimate and personal as their much smaller ancestors. She is a bright and gifted young academician and will, no doubt, go on to design excellent courses. But she, and many like her around the country, have been sold a bill of goods. And as a result they put much honest and productive work into creating meaningful educational experiences in a basically flawed system.

One can legitimately argue that for certain isolated populations for whom - for geographical or physiological reasons - attendance in a small class is impossible, large online classes have a place.  However, if we are honest about it, the huge class model, particularly at state institutions, is simply a way for universities to generate revenue, to become in present parlance, “profit centers providing a revenue stream.” You attempt to put as many tuition paying students in the seats - or before digital screens - as possible and teach them using the cheapest labor available, graduate students. This frees your “real faculty” to teach Socratic courses to tiny clusters of graduate students while selling their brains by seeking grants from private and government funding agencies to gerrymander compensation at a far higher rate than legislatures are willing to provide for faculty.

It’s just good business, right? Supply and demand decrees that universities work that way, and the kids still turn out OK, right? Not really. Well, maybe so. Maybe the kids do turn out OK.  But as a recent spate of AT&T TV ads assert, there are situations when just OK isn’t good enough. The quality of education in America’s colleges and universities is one of those situations.  I would opine that there is a correlation between the fact that President Trump seems to be able to lie repeatedly and with impunity and the sorry state of higher education. While it is true that the president doesn’t do well among voters with college degrees, a sizable chunk of sheepskin toters did pull the lever for a guy whose response to overwhelming national and international scientific data regarding the human role in global warming is a simplistic “I don’t believe it.”

It is true that Socratic educations are still for sale in American higher education - “sale" being the operant word. According to The College Board, the average cost of a degree at a private four-year school college is five time the cost of a degree at a state school. And that is just an average. If you want to rub shoulders in small privileged classrooms with the children with the 1% at places like Northwestern, Duke, Harvard and Yale be prepared to pony up another 10 or 15 thousand dollars a year.

We are a democracy, and a democracy depends upon an educated citizenry. Not an “OK” educated citizenry, not a citizenry where the wealthy are educated, but a nation where all the citizens are educated. That may not be a case of “college for all.” In my 45 years in college classroom I have encountered many students who would be better served in trade schools and apprenticeship programs. We need to explore those options more fully. But the citizenry is not well served by the current “profit-center huge digital classrooms” model gaining ascendancy in our large state universities. We need to bring back Socrates into smaller classrooms and pay the cost to bring senior faculty into those classrooms with him. State legislatures - mine more than most - are going to have to realize that slowly strangling their universities is a sure way of debasing the democracy and hastening America down the slippery slope to irrelevance. 
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The Twin You Never Met

Science News recently reported - December 21, 2018 - that the quantum state of “entanglement” had been obtained in a crystal made up of ten billion atoms. Verrrrry interesting, for a couple of reasons. First, entanglement itself is as fascinating as it is counterintuitive - Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” And it is. When two particles are “entangled,” when you do something to one of the particles, the other particle demonstrates the affect of that “something” instantaneously - regardless of the distance between the particles. Yeah, Einstein got it right again - very spooky.  Seems like information is moving faster than the speed of light, which is supposed to be a major no no. Scientists have been messing around with the distance part of the phenomenon for quite awhile, and now claim to have entangled earth-bound and satellite particles that are 750 miles apart.

The second shocker is the “10 billion atoms” part.  10 billion is a little deceptive for us lay people - I mean 10 billion is a big number for everyone except politicians, oligarchs and hedge fund managers.  But ten billion atoms is still a pretty tiny cluster of matter. You certainly can’t see it with the naked eye. Still, the story got me thinking - what if we let the guys and gals in the back room have free reign and unlimited resources? How far are we from being able to entangle something as big as, well, a human being?

If we assume that technology will continue to evolve as swiftly as possible with little regard for ethical boundaries - CRISPR babies in China, for example - how long will it be until we can create "entangled twins"? And what might that look like? Or more precisely, what might we - us and our entangled twin - look like? And who would get to decide what actions we would take that would instantly be manifested in our twin? If meA fell in love, would meB fall as well? And with whom? And would the object of meA’s affection reciprocate? And would that individual’s entangled other have anything to say about the relationship? Or relationships?

Even stranger, let us consider the multiverse. See where I’m going here? Twins, or trips or quads entangled across various universes? Sharing experiences across incredibly vast variances of space-time. Obviously the stuff of science fiction. But then it wasn’t that long ago that the same was true of radio, television, audio/video/text communication computers you could carry in your pocket, and self-driving cars.  

In Wonder of Thunder

In Wonder of Thunder

Low rumbles that nibble

At the very edge

Of hearing.

I wonder if this is how

Elephants talk?

All the way from the plains

And forests of Africa

To the fairgrounds

Alongside the train tracks

Across from the lumberyard?

Children’s faces pressed

Against the screen,

Seeking warning flashes

In the tossing breezes 

and branches just outside.

Hatchwork impressions on

Flushed cheeks

Affirm the fragile barrier holds.

Ancient conflicts resolved,

Chaos held at safe remit

Beyond the bedroom walls.

One thousand, two thousand,

Three thousand, four

We knew that there was nothing more

To tracking a storm.

A mile per second

Childhood’s certainty that

Confounds dry science’s

Assertion that if you 

Can hear it, fear it.

If you can see it, flee it.

Where, pray tell,

Lies the exultation in that?