Wandering and Wondering

 Wandering Around the Carolinas

Sorry to have been away for so long. I have been wandering around the Carolinas visiting family and memories. The family part has been delightful, seeing daughters, spouses and granddaughters in both Carolinas. The trip down to Greenville, SC prompts a bit of “travelers advice.” Greenville lies west and south of Raleigh. The logical route is to take I-40 to I-85, then down into Greenville. This is one of those times when logic, and your gps will risk both your life and your sanity. Mine took me west out of Raleigh via NC 64. Hmm, thought I, not what I might have chosen, but much more scenic and relatively traffic free, so I cruised along until another state route dumped be out onto I-85 headed in the right direction, well perhaps “proper direction” is a better description. I-85 is an unending stretch of concrete under construction which had apparently claimed several lives that week. Somewhat hard to understand as I don’t think I exceeded 20 mph during the entire stretch. Total travel time from Raleigh to Greenville about 5.5 hours. Upon my arrival my daughter informed me that a friend had taken even a “shorter as the crow flies route” and clocked in excess of 7 hours! Return Solution: Go North young traveler! From Greenville, SC head north to Asheville, NC and pick up I-40 straight into Raleigh. A word of caution however, from Asheville I-40 tilts straight downhill to the ocean. I often needed to concentrate on keeping my decades old 4-cylinder Yaris under 80. Between road tripping the visits with both “grand families” were wonderful. I will not go into detail least I go into stereotypical raves about how wonderful, beautiful, brilliant, and much like me are my grand babies. Their parents are also doing well. :-). But I do want to briefly explore another facet of my wandering.

My work life differed from many in that I spent 40 years teaching on the same campus, in a series of offices and classrooms no more than a half mile apart. Hence many of the milestones of my adult life took place in a geographical milieu more akin to a small town than the large state university of 30,000 students that surrounded my little world. This morning, after visiting a exquisite field of sunflowers that has been planted across from the state penitentiary - I’m not even going to go there - I ignored my gps that was set on “take me home,” and wandered back through the campus that had been my home, workplace and occasional refuge for 4 decades.

I suppose I should not have been surprised that the experience was such an emotional roller coaster. One turn would confront me with a gleaming new structure that had no business being there, another would send me to hidden vistas that forced me to pull over, catch my breath, and blink away some suspicious mistiness before moving on with a rueful smile. Again, an unsurprising reaction as I had encountered some of my most precious friends and, perhaps not strangely, disappointing acquaintances in that small town within a huge university. Logically unsurprising, but still somehow unexpected. Well, so much for wandering. Now let me head over the wondering that had followed me down from Burr Ridge.

Tapping the Matriarchal Memory

I am rather addicted to nature documentaries. To my mind David Attenborough has the best job in the world! So it should come as no surprise that this post originally began as a musing about the shared characteristics of this seemingly disparate cluster of mammals and insects: Elephants, Sperm whales, Bonobos chimps, Lemurs, Meerkats, Lions, Mole rats, Spotted  Hyenas, Orcas, termites, Honey Bees and The Temple Monkeys of Katmandu. The reflection would have been more challenging had the media not, when the post began, been paying so much attention to the herd of elephants wandering around China. A paradoxical aside grows out of that particular story as we see cadres of local Chinese actively guiding the herd, tolerating crop destruction and closing roads to avoid endangering the endearing pachyderms. Yet at the same time China provides the largest market for carvings crafted from poached elephant ivory and powdered elephant ivory for applications in traditional medicine. Twin grey-market demands that threatens the global existence of the species. Still history has never argued for human consistency. 

Nevertheless, media coverage of the wandering Chinese elephants has provided a pretty big hint as to what unifies this seemingly disparate brotherhood of life forms.  And that is a bit of a backhanded hint in its own right: The answer? Brotherhood is no big deal because all of these creatures live in groups that are largely or totally matriarchal.  Any Y chromosomes that show up take their place on the back benches when it comes to decision making, and are largely tolerated because they are necessary to make more females.

Since the Chinese elephants are getting all the press these days let's consider them first. All indications are that the elephants leading this 15 critter contingent are all mature females, which pretty well mimics what we know about wild elephants. The oldest matriarch leads the herd because she has the "herd memory" apparently passed down to her from the previous herd matriarch.  She can remember the routes to water and the foliage necessary to fulfill the normal elephant daily requirements of between 250 and 300 pounds of green stuff and 20 to 50 gallons of water. Talk about the notion that a woman’s work is never done! In the meantime, the guys mostly hang out on their own, unless they are occasionally needed to knock down trees during droughts so the rest of the herd can reach the leaves. 

Ah, but then there is the old "a guy's gotta do what a guy 'musth' do." "Musth" among elephants seems to be a lot like a really bad frat party. It is a "normal" condition in adult male elephants in which they are suddenly flooded with 10 times their normal level of testosterone, causing the dudes break up the furniture and aggressively pursue anything in the elephant equivalent of a skirt. Perhaps a rock band “after party” becomes a better analogy. But it is probably unfair to unilaterally paint the elephants as “beastie boys.” We could probably find a bunch of similar examples of “boys behaving badly” if we were to research what happens when males hopped up on testosterone encounter the rest of the matriarchal herd, pod, hive, pride, or what have you. And that was where this post was kind of headed, until I got side-tracked by, for me, a more interesting question: do matriarchal and patriarchal societies manifest the two dominant tenets of Distilled Harmony - Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty - differently? And if so, how so? And does it matter?

I know. A rather sudden shift of gears there. It sort of snuck up on me too, but I think it is interesting to think about. Before matriculating to Kalamazoo College as a freshman (We were all freshmen back then. 50th reunion coming up in October Hornets!) we received a book list of books we had to read before coming to campus. (Like, books on paper with pages and everything - totally rad. )  Anyhow, one of the books was If the South Had Won the Civil War by MacKinley Kantor. An interesting “alternative history” novel. For some reason, bumping around in the weird pathways of my mind, I began to think about alternative histories that might have evolved had the societies that influenced Harmony and Beauty and, of course Art, been matriarchal, rather than the patriarchal societies and traditions that filled those cultural niches.

Now, let me acknowledge right up front that I realize that gender studies is an incredibly hot topic these days, and I am straying far afield from my own academic training. I mean, I only learned the word “cisgender” today, and I am still not sure exactly what it means. So please read the following as the musings of a interested layperson (Can I still say layperson?) and forgive any distortion of current academic debate. It is unintentional.

It would be foolish to contest the notion that in the west we owe much of our iconic art to religious patriarchies. Kings, Pharaohs, Emperors, Pontiffs, Khans and other male nobility around the globe and throughout history decreed that  portraits, sculptures, poetry and palaces be created to glorify either themselves or their gods - which, not surprisingly - were often one and the same. And, also not surprisingly, these art works often portrayed the ruler in the role of a military hero - smiting the appropriate villain of the age and thrashing the villain’s celestial supporters.  Let me make it clear, I am not advocating that we try to designate “appropriate” art and “inappropriate or bad art.” That was/is, we need to remember, something that Hitler and the Taliban have in common. Hitler wanted to create Der Fuhrermuseum, which would house all the world’s “good art” while neglecting or destroying the art which the Nazis decided were, I guess, “not good.” The Taliban just blows up the things they do not like. Sounds like something that would be easy to avoid, right? Actually, it’s not simple at all, it is very very complicated. Down in Carolina version of my neck of the woods, folks are a bit rabid about removing all the remnants of the confederacy - statues, names of buildings, streets, etc., and replacing them with art and designation more in line with our more enlightened times. I’m not really comfortable with that kind of artistic scourged earth policy. I have some trouble working my way around a couple of concerns. First, it smacks of a head in the sand approach to history. Personally, I’m glad the South didn’t win the Civil War. But if we are to allow our nation to evolve beyond the racist beliefs that were so entwined in that conflict, we cannot simply pretend that the Civil War - the war that killed more Americans than any conflict before or since - never happened. And hence advocate a “cleansing” such that the complexity of that conflict had failed to be reflected in significant works of art.

Second I have trouble with the fact that the quality of the work, the simple chisel to stone, brush to canvas, ink to parchment,issues are rarely if ever raised. I do not share the worldview of the Roman who build the Coliseum, the Greeks who built the Parthenon, Pope Alexander III who lay the cornerstone for Notre Dame. So if somehow I became ruler of the world, should I just knock ‘em down? Off with their heads!? I hope not.

But my major thought in this post is not what the art of the past tells us about what was, rather I wonder what all was left out, and what we stand to gain if we correct that artistic editing. I am talking about the voice of the matriarchy. I don’t mean to ignore the significant works of female artists whose works are making their way into the canon. Women like Elisebeth Vigee Le Brun, Camille Claudel, Mary Cassatt, and the more modern works of Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe. But, truth be told, much of the energy that these women could have put into creating art was siphoned off to avoid or leap over the barriers created by the art establishment. I wonder what art would could have seen had ALL their energy gone into their art?

OK. Back to the nature documentaries. There appears to be a fairly common difference between matriarchal and patriarchal nonhuman societies. Matriarchal societies seem to focus on caring for the group. Often the “aunts” or older sister will assist the biological mother in childcare, even if that means sacrificing their own opportunities to reproduce. To chose perhaps the worst possible example, lions invade this matriarchal model by occasionally killing cubs to bring the females back into heat, thus allowing the male to father his own cubs. To over simplify, matriarchal societies seem to favor supportive, open, group oriented behavior. Patriarchal societies favor competitive, dominant, individually dominant behavior. To make a fairly large leap from there to human behavior in the arts, I end up with this supposition:

It is obvious, even if only from the few example cited above, that artistic ability is not gender specific. As any currently practicing artist can tell you the greatest challenge is not doing the art, it is getting the art to an audience - or to a market if you will. The social and behavioral norms of matriarchal societies are more conducive to bringing art to the public than the exclusive, power centered norms of the patriarchal norms of the traditional art market.

So what? I’m not really sure. I am afraid that the pendulum of “public taste” in the art will have to swing back past “center balance” before the truly matriarchal “what brings the most and the best art to the public” will find its place. Most of the art market and gallery websites that come across my screen either feature, or solicit, “work from young artists from previously unrepresented groups.” As an old white guy, this is not a particularly welcoming environment. So the best option seems to be to wait on the pendulum - something that gets a little more difficult every year for us “Artists of a Certain Age.”

Big Honey Suckle Rose

 Here it is!

Schrag Wall PPP Catch Up

 Hi all - 

I have been neglecting the photos/drawing portion of the Wall so here, hopefully are some catch-up pieces.

First, Honey Suckle Rose. This series got started from this photo up in Vito's favorite ball chasing spot:

I cut a strip out from there and whited out the parts I didn't want:

And drew in the designs I wanted:

And added color:

The color and resolution on these are terrible, so I will send a single copy in a separate email.

 

Dancing With Complexity

The third tenet of Distilled Harmony is Distill Complexity. I tend not to write about it as often as Foster Harmony on Enable Beauty, because, well, because it is complicated. Then something happens out there in the “real world” that forces you to consider complexity more closely. This time we get to blame Google - with a little help with their buddies at Harvard - for something other than losing an order. Seems that they have managed to capture the most accurate 3D image of the brain to date. To be specific, according to Singularity Hub.com, they:

“published an intricate map of every cell and connection in a cubic millimeter of the human brain. . . to make the map, the teams sliced donated tissue into 5,300 sections, each 30 nanometers thick, and imaged them with a scanning electron microscope at a resolution of 4 nanometers. The resulting 225 million images were computationally aligned and stitched into a 3D digital representation of the region.”

Wow, that is waaay more pictures than I have on my computer, maybe even more pictures of my grand-daughters that my daughters have posted on Facebook. A simple Google search will take you to all the information about this accomplishment necessary to either warm the cockles of your techie heart, or put you to sleep.  I come down somewhere in between: Speechless at the complexity that we carry around between our ears. But while the grace and beauty of the science is truly awesome, for me it pales almost to insignificance in comparison to what those physical structures, revealed by the science, allow us to participate in. Everything we create, experience, believe, feel, realize, everything we are, springs to life only as electrical and chemical impulses flash across those billions and billions of pathways at incompressible speeds. If that isn’t complexity, it will have to do until something better comes along.

So I imagine myself able to sort of amble around in my brain, wandering among those billions and billions of connections (perhaps aka b&bcs? ) of my lives lived, experienced, or perhaps passed by, but still somehow stashed as the “what might have, could have, should have beens up there in the ‘billions and billions of connections’ of brain land.” They stretch out before me, images, poems, writings, people, places waiting for my presence to animate them. Or, if we let the quantum theory notion of "many worlds" sneak in, what happens/happened to those entities/realities I chose not to pursue? Or those for which I have insufficient time?

Whew. I’m not sure when you first begin to question your own immortality. It is an awkward consideration, since, in truth, we have always experienced ourselves as immortal beings. I wake up and there I am. Never been anywhere else - unless you want to count a few confused moments in the 60s. I am fascinated by the literature on near-death experiences, but never having had one - just a couple of minsdiagnosises a couple of decades ago - near death experiences remain just literature to me.

More common and more comfortable, we often tend to create labels for those moments that our lives have in common with those experienced with or by others; angst, love, etc. For example - the notion of a midlife crisis springs to mind.  Nice, pat, and probably inaccurate and insufficient. It seems more likely that the time-honored “midlife crisis” occurs when a newly encountered awareness of one’s mortality (something we tend to ignore) intersects with the time necessary to actually consider the slipping of sand through the hour glass. And “so are  the Days of Our Lives.” Just kidding, but it is interesting that the time-worn hokey opening of one of television’s longest running daytime soap operas points to a very complex set of issues that most of us will experience, have experienced, or are experiencing.

It is not that we never actually consider the awesome complexity of our lives and the staggering array of possibilities embedded in that complexity. We do. Two iterations come to mind:  one time is a fairly accurate “everything is possible” moment, the other is a transient illusion. Strangely we often get them backwards.  First the illusion, for which we can usually blame our parents, but unfortunately in doing so, those of us who have children, must usually fess up to handing off the same illusion to our progeny. It’s the old “You can be anything you want to be fallacy!”  In pursuit of the Distill Complexity tenet, I’d suggest the acronym YCBAYWTB to sort of simplify.

The problem is this, the YCBAYWTB fallacy neglects the hard reality of prerequisites, something with which my half century in various roles in various classrooms has made me very familiar.  So let me use the academic iteration for a quick and dirty example. Say in response to the YCBAYWTB the “7th grade you” decides you want to be the next Elon Musk.  OK. If we just want to do the money side the three richest folks in the world are - in a shifting kind of order, Elon Musk (Tesla motors, Space X, PayPal, Solar City,  Neuralink, etc.) Jeff Bezos, (who may be slipping given the divorce-  Amazon, Blue Origin, Whole Foods, etc.  ) and Bernard Arnault (No, I didn’t recognize him either.  Google says he is the chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton SE, the world's largest luxury goods company.) They are each worth about 200  billion. OK, none of those guys just started printing money. They had to deal with the prerequisites. They had to somehow get their first job in order to buy their first company to make their first million, or billion or whatever, and in order to do that they probably had to pass algebra, or calculus, or French, or Latin, or etc., etc., etc.  Do you see where I am going here? The grand assertion that YCBAYWTB tends to leave out considerations of the prerequisites, all those things you have to do BEFORE YCBAYWTB! So, before we tell our children, or our students YCBAYWTB, in good conscience, we need to tell them about the prerequisites necessary to reach that goal.

And then there is the whole "luck" thing. I used to give a class assignment specifically designed to combat the YCBAYWTB fallacy prevalent among my students, as evidenced by the fact that they had a tendency to change majors every other semester.  In the assignment, they had to define exactly what it was that they wanted to be - and then list the prerequisites that they needed to complete to reach that goal. But I specifically forbade "stardom" either in athletics or the arts as their chosen goal. Strange for the guy who seriously considered "God's gift to the musical theater" as a legitimate life goal? Not really. I had come to realize that the pastry of stardom was heavily leavened with the yeast of good fortune.  So the next star in any of those performance fields had to use their "fall back option" for this exercise. MVP of the Super Bowl your first choice? Then use a legitimate route to coaching for this exercise. Though, in retrospect, I guess I should have made an exception for Russell Wilson. But how often does that happen? The point is that when advocating for the YCBAYWTB fallacy, it is only fair that one point out the prerequisites that pave the path to that "anything," the hurdles that turn the fallacy into a reality.

So what about the time when YCBAYWTB isn’t an illusion? It is still a bit of an illusion, but at least it is an informed illusion, and it lies at the other end of one’s professional life -  retirement.  Now let me admit right up front that I  know that I have lived, to date anyhow, a pretty charmed life. Born as a white male in a middle class family that believed, and provided for, an education that was not seen as complete until one had a doctorate degree. And also having reached the plateau of 3 score and 12 years with only a few health hiccups, accompanied along the way by folks who cared about me perhaps more than I deserved. Yeah, it has been a pretty nice ride so far, a fortuitous clambering past the prerequisites necessary to reach this iteration of YCBAYWTB.

Don't get me wrong, I realize that there are some things I might want to be that are no longer on the table. Broadway has yet to come calling. But I really don't see that as a bad thing, as that would be a "job." And no "job" really fits in my current YCBAYWTB perspective.  As a matter of fact, anything that requires me to march to the beat of someone else's drum is not going to make the cut. Even though the life of a tenured college professor was a pretty "self-controlled" ride, I can't imagine having to be somewhere I didn't want to be - AKA, meetings, classes, etc. Same can be said of playing point guard in the NBA. I never could go to my left, and the highlight reels rarely feature exhausting hours in the weight room, and let’s not even think about the whispered commentary accompanying the gruesome injuries. So what does fit in my personal view of YCBAYWTB as seen from this side of retirement?

Fortunately, the parameters are pretty "me friendly," and not surprisingly, in close step with the tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. And that really is the key to turning this "senior YCBAYWTB" from an illusion into a reality: Determine what you have come to believe and engage in behaviors that manifest those beliefs.

So let’s start with Foster Harmony. Yeah, yeah, it should be pretty simple - just chill, be mellow. However, this one is often a challenge for me and hence I draw a great deal of pleasure and comfort from those times when I actually pull it off. You see the challenge of behaving in a way that Fosters Harmony comes from the fact that in much of the world, and certainly in America, we are taught the oppose. We live in an incredibly competitive world. To quote that famous gentle soul Vince Lombardi - “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!” - a phrase he apparently stole from UCLA football coach Red Sanders.

The point is we are taught that winning is what is important in life - beating the others, being the best, thrusting your fist into the air! Me, me, me! But no, no, no. To truly Foster Harmony you have realize that winning just isn’t that important. Mind you, I am not advocating losing here. Rather you just need to shift the objective. Winning isn’t the goal. Rather, doing whatever you choose to do to the best of your ability - that is the goal. And you reach that goal best by listening, not talking. And when you feel compelled to talk, practice phrases like: “That’s a neat idea!” “What would you like to do?” “I hadn’t thought of that” and "I think you're right!" And even more important, try not to get the last word, even if you are tempted to mutter it as you leave the room.  I know - I think of it as "tough harmony."

Sounds kind of wimpish. But one thing I learned in half a century of teaching is that truth and certainty have a way of swiftly changing in the face of more evidence, better research, greater wisdom. So crow, and my own words spoken in haste, are two things I am working on keeping off my dinner plate as I work my way to fostering Harmony.

Enabling Beauty is the tenet that is by far the most fun, because it is the one that implores us to facilitate making the world a more beautiful place. Basically it breaks into two closely related sets of endeavors: doing and supporting. “Doing” is just that. Mess around in any medium, draw, paint, sing, compose, dance, write. But keep two things in mind. First remember that in a Distilled Harmony view of the world, the objective is to create beauty. As I have said and written often before; I don't do horror, I don't do dark. Sorry Guernica, you get no space on my wall. In 1937 maybe it was the primarily role of the artist to draw attention to the horrors of the wars that would soon engulf the world. Today with the mandate of “if it bleeds, it leads,” media. We need merely to glance at the nearest screen, or art exhibit. Ugliness? The advocates of certainty from both left and right seem to have that that covered. Time to take a stand for Beauty.

The supporting part is also great fun. Go to local concerts, community theater. Go to art shows. Buy something, even if your walls are full. Gift it forward.

Also, don’t compare your own work to genius. Just take your best shot at creating Beauty. Lombardi and Sanders were both wrong. The reality is that winning is sometimes a minor by-product of doing your best at what is truly meaningful and important. And while watching sports is enjoyable - guilty here - and incredibly profitable to a small handful of folks, it isn’t really meaningful or important. So perhaps better to increase our focus elsewhere. Maybe by focusing on simply enabling beauty, you may surprised how and when that illusive thing we call genius might emerge. 

Perhaps the illusive third tenet - Distill Complexity - may simply be manifested by clarifying your own beliefs and attitudes and then exploring how you can bring those beliefs and attitudes into the more dominant two initial tenets: Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty.

So for my particular senior "YCBAYWTB,"  I read, draw, write and listen to music - all the time. To be truly content, and, yes, happy, I have to have a Wall post or two, or three, percolating here on my screen, a drawing evolving between my photos, graphics app, and my drawing tablet, and a book - often a mystery - following me on iPad and iPhone, all to the tune of whatever I choose to be listening to a the moment. And, equally important, when any of those three activities seem to generate something worth sharing - I do so. Like now.

Hmm, Maybe not really all that complex after all.

Wondering

Sometimes nodding turns to dozing,

And then dozing turns to dreams

Of lives not really lived at all.

Yet in those dreams it seems

Mystic moments wink an eye,

Of the lessons partly learned

On the paths we might have taken

If our lives had that way turned.

So waking finds one wondering

Of the lives you left behind,

And we poke the coals of memory

Not knowing what we’ll find.

There are ripples and tsunamis,

To startle and surprise

With promises and questions

From long forgotten eyes.

Did we really miss the turning

That led some other way?

To lives with different endings?

To new dawns of other days?

Could the casts of other dramas

Lure me down that shady stream,

Where tranquil waters call me,

Back to sleep, perchance to dream.

The Voynich Manuscript

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I watched an intriguing video last night on my iPad's Curiosity Stream app - which I am sad to report is not available on Dish. It was about a strange manuscript called the Voynich Manuscript. I had seen other reports about it, but this one seemed more current and in-depth. Briefly Wikipedia tells us this:

The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an otherwise unknown writing system, referred to as 'Voynichese'.^[18] The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and stylistic analysis indicates it may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance.^[1][2] The origins, authorship and purpose of the manuscript are debated. Various hypotheses have been suggested for the text, including: an otherwise unrecorded script for a natural language or constructed language; an unread code, cypher or other cryptography; or simply a meaningless hoax.

Last night's episode, entertaining as it was, added nothing of significance to that Wikipedia entry, except perhaps to report how throughly the manuscript has been studied. It concluded by saying, in essence, this is a fascinating document, but we have no idea what it means. That put me in mind of the Holmesian fallacy, attributed to Sherlock Holmes, but, of course, penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his famous detective:

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

It strikes me that this may well be the case with the Voynich manuscript, and the remaining improbable truth is that the manuscript has no meaning - at least not it the traditional "these characters translate to these letters, which make words that create sentences in this language that have this meaning." It strikes me as far more probable that the document is a fantasy construction, literally a fanciful construction of - given the cost of the various elements at the time of its construction - a wealthy member of the gentry who became enchanted with the way the various media could come together to create "something like" the idea of these new things called "codexes."

We tend to guess at the meanings in mysteries by looking at them through the eyes of our own experiences. My guesses about the Voynich manuscript are no exception. There was a time when I lived in Vienna, Austria. 1959- 1961. I attended school at The American International School.  I’m not sure how early the grades started. I, the youngest in our family, attended 5th and 6th grades. My brother, the eldest, graduated from high school, so perhaps 1st through high school?  Classes were held in English, and there were students and faculty from perhaps a dozen countries. The families were drawn from mostly the diplomatic corp or the military.

It was here that I invented my "fantasy script." I’m not sure why I invented it. Perhaps to make me appear somehow unique in this very varied cluster of kids, some of whom wrote in languages using symbols that were, well, Greek to me.   I say “script” as opposed to alphabet or language because the my symbols were completely random, although I would construct them on a page as though I were taking notes. I used no consciously English symbols and any resemblance to other scripts was purely accidental. Now when I encounter other fictional linguistic constructions, Elvish, Klingon, etc., I am reminded of my youthful gibberish. Yet I realize that those literary “languages” had/have real, complex structure and meaning. Mine did not, I simply liked the way it looked and the feel of writing it. The symbols seemed to glide over the pages. It was really fun. As both my sister and I are "mid-moves" I am relatively certain that no examples of my secret language exist in boxes in attics anywhere. I sort of see it in my "minds-eye," but that is far from 20-20.

So my curiosity remains. Perhaps the very serious and erudite scholars, linguists, code breakers and technologists seeking to reveal the meaning hidden in the mysterious Voynich manuscript have eliminated the impossible, and the improbable truth that remains is that there is no conscious meaning, no "real message" there.

Now, just why someone would go to the time, effort, and expense to create such an elaborate artifact does raise interesting questions - but the answers to those questions may be more amenable to examination by art scholars, philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists.

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The Consistency of Harmony

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(An observation.  Before I retired there was a bit of a kerfluffle going on at the University about “trigger warnings.” These were proposed additions to course materials to “warn” students that they might encounter content that could - well, I was never sure what we were supposed to warn them about. Maybe new information? Big words? Anyhow, this a “lengthy warning.” That means go pop some corn or grab some chips or other munchies and a beverage of your choice, ‘cause this one gets a bit wordy. Can you imagine?)

Just a quick refresher; Distilled Harmony is a lifestyle philosophy driven by four basic tenets. They are, in order of primacy: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty; Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. The belief is that behaving in accordance with these four tenets we come ever closer to sharing the central Harmony that organizes existence.

I was doing a little time-traveling on my walk this morning, courtesy of the Pandora Hits of the Sixties channel. That put me back at the end of high school, and the beginning of my college career. It was, in some ways, a visit with parts of my life that had been "out of sight, out of mind" for more than half a century. Images of faces and places presented themselves with sufficient clarity to elicit chuckles, sighs and groans as I followed my younger self through the triumphs and disasters of those musically enabled moments.

OK, we are talking about a significant span of years, but how could I have been so many different people during those times? Sometimes a total jerk, at other times a relatively insightful young man, often somewhere in between. A span of identities with different hopes, different dreams, different plans, different certainties, different doubts. Different everything it seemed. Until I stopped walking, took off my headphones, and sat down and realized that in each of my different selves there was a least a kernel of the older guy who eventually came to cherish harmony. And recognizing that kernel, sometimes just a fragment of an identity that cherished harmony, started me thinking about the many faces of harmony.

Harmony is a pretty broad brush with which to paint a life.  Distilled Harmony presumes to contain all four tenets, and does in many ways, but I find it a good idea to remind myself that all four tenets point to creating, finding, and maintaining harmony. This is particularly important when we realize that the path to harmony rarely runs straight, rarely manifests itself in a consistent guise. Rather we wrap various shifting realities around the relatively constant core of our harmonic self.

So through much of the 60s I was this confident youngster who knew the world would soon recognize that he was God's gift to American musical theater and he would live out life as a modest celebrity with a compliant and supportive woman at this side. So, OK, sometimes each of our various identities gets it a little wrong.

But that kid - aka myself at that age - also got some of it right.  Musical theater in the 60s was a pretty joyful place: The Sound of Music, Bye Bye Birdie [full disclosure - I played Birdie in High School :-)], Hello Dolly, Man of La Mancha. Bright lights, happy dancers, romance, applause, curtain calls - aka Harmony. The fact that the world failed to recognize his/my integral place in that world wasn't really our fault. For a while, in my more grandiose moments I would believe myself to have been the most talented performer to graduate from Springfield North High School. And then John Legend came along, sigh. So first there's John and then me, and, truth be told, probably a host of equally, if not more talented, kids between the two of us.

But looking back on my recent musically induced magical mystery tour, I think that even then I was beginning to recognize that the path to harmony was shaped by two insights; first, that harmony and love are synonymous concepts; and second, they both can find reciprocity in different places and people.

This might be a good place to remind us, and for some of you disclose for the first time, that The Schrag Wall came into being back in 2008. I had just published, The God Chord, String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart.  I had managed the construction of that work by posting notecards of “to be included” items on the wall behind my computer desk. Well, the book was completed but related ideas kept coming. That reality, and the fact that my wall was completely obscured by notecards, gave birth to this online blog.

It is in a way comforting that the intervening 13 years of Schrag Wall retain many of the central notions of The God Chord. (If you would like a copy of that work, drop me a note at robert.schrag@gmail.com) and I’ll shoot a digital copy out to you.) Perhaps most significant is the idea that our most central “self” can be thought of as our personal chord - an evolving compilation of thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, values and experiences that are, ideally, moving us closer and closer to the constantly observable and knowable Harmony that underlies the universe. Hence - Distilled Harmony.

Again, perhaps inspired by Pandora’s Hits of the Sixties, I have been visited, during naps, nights, and dozing, by reflections, visual flashes and recollections of moments, people and experiences - individual “notes” if you will -  that struck particularly close to, and have remained tightly entwined with, what I believe are the central notes of my own chord.

First there is Jimmy.  During the summers of 1966 and 1967, I worked as a volunteer/counselor at Clearwater Ranch in Philo, California. The ranch was a permanent treatment center for “emotional disturbed” children. I’m sure those descriptors have been changed over the past 50 years, but essentially the ranch was where the sent kids in “the system” that no one else wanted. I worked - basically babysat - a group of the youngest. A group I came to think of my “itsy-bitsy-skitsies.” Jimmy was one of those kids. He was a little tow-haired five-year-old with huge blue eyes that would just melt your heart. He sort of became my shadow.  Nights were chilly in Northern California, and on particularly cool nights Jimmy would say, “Bob, I’m cold!” which was our private speak for “Give me your sweater.”  And I would hand over my yellow sweater.

There was a female counselor about my age who also had a special relationship with Jimmy. She and I were friends, but had no special feelings for one and other. Yet we seriously, well as seriously as two 17-year-olds could manage, discussed getting married so we could adopt Jimmy and take him away from the ranch. Remember this was California in the 60’s when everything seemed possible! Still, after many long discussions with each other, and two sets of nonplussed parents, we realized that without jobs, education, incomes, etc., we would be doing Jimmy no favor by essentially kidnapping him from the State of California. So at the end of the summer I had to say goodbye to Jimmy as I stepped into the van to take me down to San Francisco to begin my trip back to my new life at Kalamazoo College. It can also be hot in Northern California, and this was a scorcher. I hugged Jimmy goodbye.

He looked up at me. “Bob, I’m cold.” I dug into my knapsack and surrendered the sweater. Jimmy struggled into it, using the floppy sleeves to wipe his eyes.

So the chord “love can break your heart, but that is better than turning your back on love” got filed away in my “central Harmony chord.” Still there, still functioning.

And then there as the night at the outdoor stage at NCMA - North Carolina Museum of Art. We were listening to an excellent Beatles cover band, either Fabfest or Beatlesque, I forget, it was a long time ago, probably a dozen years. Anyhow, the weather was perfect, humidity under 30%, a rarity for Raleigh, temperature maybe 75. No clouds, lots of stars. Perhaps a dozen local breweries had set up stalls around the upper perimeter of the seating area and we had sampled their wares. As the band swung into “All You Need is Love,” I resisted the possibly beverage induced urge to jump up and holler “Tell it like it is, brother!” Instead I reflected on the fact that the wonderful chords that unite to define our central Harmony can pop up in a variety of venues - you need not travel far nor spend a fortune. This was one such moment. If the asteroid had taken that moment to plop down on Raleigh, I would have gone out with a smile. The trick is not so much to seek these unique moments out, but rather to recognize and acknowledge them when you are lucky enough to find yourself in their presence.

And then, of course, most importantly, there are the people who share your life, and the notes and chords they contribute.  One of the songs Pandora sprung on me was Gale Garnett’s “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.” Not actually a one-hit wonder, but pretty close. Back in the mid 1960s, when the tune was enjoying its brief burst of popularity, and I was a junior or senior in high school falling in and out of love with stunning regularity, I had always found this lyric weird:

“I will never love you,

The cost of love’s too dear.

But though I’ll never love you,

I’ll stay with you one year.

And we can sing in the sunshine.”

"How strange," thought my 1960-ish self, who had been raised on adventure/romance novels from the early 1900s, top 40 tunes, and Broadway musicals, all of which touted the “now and forever” brand of love. What place does the lyric “I will never love you” have in a love song? And even more so, an expiration date, “I’ll stay with you one year.”  Really? Thanks so much!

My 21st century self, not surprisingly, has a rather different take on the whole question of loving the people in your life.

Love/Harmony is always a condition of the moment. It cannot be delayed, and rarely resuscitated. Hence, we must always seek to behave according to the dictates of each version or variation of the central Harmonic chord. Yet, we are all prone to error. We sometimes behave in ways that are dissonant to that central chord, as sometimes do the people that we love. So Harmony also favors forgiveness, of others and of ourselves. But forgiveness should not translate to self-deception. Forgiving constant deviations from the central chord, both in ourselves and in those we love, is destructive. Sometimes, as Ms. Garnett perhaps overstates, “The cost of love’s too dear." The tricky part - in the long run - is reconciling the insights shot from the hip of our youthful selves with our current, more thoughtful and evolving understanding of manifesting loving harmony in our relationships with the vital others in our lives.

The most helpful insight perhaps is the one contained in the previous paragraph. Our central chord is of the moment, and is based in self-aware, forgiving, openness.  When interacting with the loved ones in our life, we should try to meet each moment of each day, each interaction - or lack thereof - in the hope of finding new, or confirming, evidence of our enduring coherence with the universal Harmony of existence.

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A Kind of Hurry

I’m in a kind of hurry

To just slow down a bit.

Since all through life I  worried

That things might fail to fit -

All the living and the loving,

The wondering ‘bout each bit,

Of life’s pictures, and it’s poems,

Of where they’d be arranged,

Since every day, and every way

They’ve kept my mind engaged,

With who and why and wherefore,

With the hopes and goals to meet,

With the myriad potentials of

The paths before my feet.

They’ve kept the brain cells churning,

Neglecting needed sleep.

So now I am a'hurryin' -

To just slow down a tad.

To gently put behind me

The paces of the lad.

To pause and shift my glances

From the towering  tops of trees

To studying small treasures

Lurking down below my knees.

Secret nests of little songbirds,

‘Neath small flowers, tiny eggs,

Will soon be mouths demanding

Bugs, and worms, and crawly things,

That fuel the bright clear music

Of the birds that sing in Spring.

So don’t worry, rush on by me.

Pray, do scurry past my bower.

For I’ll be here to rest and watch,

For nigh onto an hour.

The passing minutes move me not,

They leave me free from worry.

Though again it seems I must confess,

That I’m really in a hurry -

To just slow down a bit.

SchragWall: PPP - Azaleas on Azaleas

As a postscript to my last wall post about the Internet it has taken me about an hour and a half to reconcile snafus with my Apple ID, iCloud ID and various USB readers to be able to send you this. But moving on . . .

The image was originally a photo I took in the azalea garden at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, NC. Neat venue, weddings, graduations, etc. I pulled a strip out of that photo. Pulled it into Photoshop and sort of "abstracted" it and stretched it to 12x36 inches. Then, in that larger format, I "whited out" the portions into which I wanted to draw designs. I then printed out the version with the blanks. I then drew the designs in the blank spaces and added color with a variety of pens, markers, etc.

With an image this size I would advise pulling it and enlarging it so you can see the small details.

Cheers,

Robert

 

The Internet is Breaking

For most of my forty-odd years as a university professor, I spent my time thinking about, teaching about, reading about, and writing about the media. It was a fascinating world in that it was always changing, always evolving into something new. I used to wonder how my colleagues in say, English, for example, avoided going crazy teaching courses like The English Language Novel in the 19th Century. I mean, aside from exploring evidence of the influence of novels from the 19th century on contemporary prose, it seemed a lot like doing the same thing over and over. Which would, I suppose, leave you a lot of time to work on your own novel which many of my colleagues in that department had stashed on their hard drive somewhere.

Anyhow “the media” had a far different problem, at least in the last couple of decades since the internet went public in the mid-1990s. It changes all the time. I used to start my lectures by saying, “OK, let’s talk about what changes we have seen in the media over the last couple of days.” And I always had something to talk about.  During the last couple of years of my teaching career I had been struggling with trying to find a model that would allow my students to understand just why and how those changes came about. And so in about 2018 my colleague Ed Funkhouser (who is out there on The Wall with you - Hi Ed!) wrote a textbook - digital access only, naturally - called The Process: Understanding Technology and the Media.  In that work we propose a model of eight steps of media evolution, steps charting the course of the development of all communication media, from the first evidence of proto-writing to the Internet. Cool huh? We think so - blush, blush.

Anyhow the 8 steps, in order go like this:

1. Need. Some  entity, individual person, group or organization feels compelled to communicate with another entity.
2. The Creators. The folks in the "back room," carvers, painters, bicycle builders, engineers, programmers, examine what is available in their time and place and cobble the available pieces together into what becomes
3. The medium. Print, film, radio, TV, etc.
4. The gatekeepers. Every medium moves through the hands of gatekeepers, the pharaoh, pontiff, church, lawyers, what have you, who decide what media are "allowed" in the culture and who gets to use them. Those decisions get codified into
5. The law. Which is what it sounds like.
6. The entrepreneurs.  After learning what the restrictions and laws surrounding the new medium are, the entrepreneurs figure out how to package the new medium in to a profitable product and bring it to
7. The marketplace where sales people of various stripes try to convince us that we really must have it.
8. We open our pocketbooks to purchase the new gizmo and begin to use it, which invariably leads us back to #1. e.g. "Hey this radio thing is cool - I wish it had pictures." And bing bang we work through the following 7 steps to television.

If we apply this model to understand how the Internet came about we learn how it might be fracturing along some important lines. First this huge entity came into being, like all other media from step 1 Need. But this wasn't a huge societal, organizational, governmental need. It was the need of one guy: Tim Berners-Lee, or Sir Tim as those of us close to him call him. [Lying here, Sir Tim doesn't know me from Adam, but a fellow can dream right?] Berners-Lee has had so much written about him it is hard to separate fact from fiction - it is truly worth a google search. But what is fairly well agreed upon is that what we call the internet first came to light in 1989 when he was working for CERN. His job required him to create hundreds and hundreds of files pertaining to his work. He, like all of us, became frustrated with the repeating questions of "What did I call that file" and "Where did I put it?" 

Unlike us, who just stomp out and get coffee or something stronger, Bernes-Lee solved the problem by devising a system of giving the files unique names so he could search for them on his computer more easily. The system had two major parts; Hypertext Mark-up Language - which gave each file a unique name, and a Universal Resource Location which let his computer know where he had put the file.

One day, or so the legend goes, he typed the name of a file into his computer and the file popped up. But he soon realized the file wasn't on his computer, it was on the computer of a colleague in another location to whom he had sent a copy of the file. A truly unique moment, for which among his other accomplishments, he was knighted in 2004 and in 2013 received the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, sort of the Nobel prize for Engineering. Because, if you haven't guessed by now, Hypertext Markup Language became more widely known as HTML and the Universal Resource Location as URL; two tags that, although we rarely actually type them out these days, are tools that we use dozens, if not hundreds, of times every day to  work our way around the internet.

So things sailed along through the model pretty smoothly with the creators of proto-internet remaining the professional geeks in universities and government labs refining these cool tools that allowed them to communicate easily with each other. But then in 1994 the government, aka gatekeepers, decided that the medium, aka the internet, was now robust enough to open the doors to all of us, and the world-wide-web was born.  And things got a little crazy.

The media, despite lovely slogans like "freedom of the press!" and "the pen is mightier than the sword!" has always been primarily about money and advertising, and the Internet provided opportunities for both in previously unimaginable degree. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s I used to do a lecture about the "cartel" - BND-TV which was an acronym for Bertlemann, Newscorp, Disney, TimeWarner and Viacom; five companies that, at the time, controlled somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of all the news and information outlets in the country. They fought viciously with each other to provide products that would allow them to steal each other's audiences, advertisers, and profits.  They are all mostly around in some form or another, often as pieces within their former competitors. [Do a search for Columbia Journalism Review/ Who Owns What for some eye-opening data. https://beta.cjr.org/resources] 

But they are all dwarfed by the new kids on the block - companies birthed by the 1994 opening of the Internet, the new cartel - Apple, Amazon and Google, with Microsoft sliding in and out. How big are the new kids on the block? Probably shifts day to day, but I read yesterday that Tim Cook was before Congress trying to explain why the App Store's weekly take of 1 billion dollars was not excessive. But that is not really why I think the Internet is breaking. The COVID pandemic drove millions of us to our keyboards to shop, to go to the doctors, etc. and the Big Three little 4 - AAGm - did that pretty well. But they often demanded that we use their unique system of hardware and software, and we were supposed to figure out how to work each of their systems. In short, the big three little 4 forgot they were supposed to be communication companies. Companies that allow each of us to communicate with each other easily - that was the original need that drove MaBell and her competitors forward.

The geeks in the backroom often forget that they are supposed to be communication specialists, not computer engineers. I lived through that bias during the early years of my 4 decade stay at NC State. When computers began to shoulder some of the communication tasks at the university. The system was designed by, and seemingly only for, engineers. You had to work on a computer running the UNIX operating system to access the university system. You may remember the scene from Jurassic Park when the young girl, attempting to corral the raging dinos, sat down in front of a computer and exclaimed, "I know how to work this! This a UNIX box!" And she busily typed away. At State it took years of conflict before PCs running the Windows operating system were allowed on the system, even longer until the "arty" Mac system cleared the isolationist hurdles.

AAGm is currently raising similar exclusionary barriers but more subtly than was the case in the old software wars. But the negative impact on "we the people" is no less frustrating. You see, rather than becoming different kinds of companies, each honed for a different task, AAGm all became slightly different companies designed to do the all the same tasks. That is a bit of an exaggeration. The companies do look a bit different "under the hood" but we, as ordinary people, rarely experience the those differences. For us, each company appears to be trying to do the same thing - communicate with people and places.

And they do that, but unfortunately in doing so they have reverted to the old software wars. Just answer one question: How many passwords do you have? Now break the question out a bit. How many Apple IDs do you have? I, unfortunately, have two. My current one attached to my Goggle gmail account and another still existing one attached to my old University email address. I was chagrined to learn that I could have even more. Makes it difficult to answer the prompt: "What is your Apple ID?" What is the password to your Goggle account? May be different from your gmail account. Or you may have to access your Goggle account to get to your gmail ID. What is your Amazon password? And if you are an Amazon Prime member what is your five digit Amazon Prime pin number? And once you have jumped all these hurdles to get to say, your doctor, what is your MyChart user name and password? And no your "password saver" software is not the answer because AAGm, and the various entities you reach through them, are prone to requiring you to change your "easy to hack password."

"Please enter the last password you can remember for this site. Now enter a new password that you have not used on any site in the past decade. It should be 37 characters long, using special characters, both upper and lower case, and should not contain the names of anyone in your immediate family, pet names or birthdays, or proper nouns in this or any other recognizable language except Klingon."

Now do you understand why I drink? My particular issue is getting this blog to you. I wrote in a previous post that I feel really lucky to have just about everyone I care about on the SchragWall list. But having you on the list is not really a guarantee that you actually get the post. I use Blogger and gmail, both Google products, so I try to keep it as simple as I can on my end. But the blog is really is a sort of "broadcasting model." I create a post and "broadcast" it out to y'all. However, you may have changed your email address, or your provider may have implemented a "new and improved version which does not talk to "Blogger/gmail." You may have been busy and sent it to your "read later" mailbox that you last accessed sometime before New Years." I do not use any kind of tracking software that would tell me if you received the post and opened it. If I wanted to work for the CIA I would have applied long ago. Nor do I frequent some other international tracking organization. Because the Wall is actually international. To date it goes to, in alpha order:

Argentina

China

Canada

Italy

Kazakhstan

USA

And I really have no idea if any of those ex-pats or internationals are receiving the post with any regularity - unless they respond on the page or send me an email directly to robert.schrag@gmail.com.  Some are on Facebook, some use a Facebook App, WhatsApp, some use Signal, some may use something else. Oh, and by the way, if you use Internet Explorer [AKA Internet Exploder during the software wars] you need to change since Microsoft has announced it will terminate the app next summer. I have no idea how they plan to transition current users.

I remember and old commercial by Lee Iacocca when he was CEO of Chrysler Automotive. In essence he said, "If your commuter stops working they tell you to turn it off and turn it back on again. We don't do things that way at Chrysler!" 

I am afraid we are approaching those Bad Old Days on the Internet. The never-ending search to be the biggest kid, the newest kid, the richest CEO appears to be creating an Internet Tower of Babble held together by greed, conspiracy mongers, hysteria, and fake news. I know that is true because I read it on Qanon.

But seriously, I am concerned that unbridled competition amongst some very selfish, very greedy, totally unregulated companies and individuals will endanger my ability to reach you. That saddens me.

Wandering Around in the Memory Palace

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Since my last post on synesthesia, and messages from a couple of you reporting your own experiences with that fascinating condition, I have been thinking a lot about the mysterious realm that follows us everywhere, hanging out above our shoulders and between our ears.  Mostly I've been reflecting on that intriguing possible mental relationship between synesthesia and memory. Specifically the ability of certain stimuli to call up little memory vignettes; smells, sounds, sights, whatever, that transport you back to another place and time. For me lilacs, dill pickles, newly cut grass, burning leaves, and wood burning fireplaces are particularly powerful aromas that trigger memory floods. I close my eyes, focus on the smell and wait to see where it takes me.  Which, of course, raises the question of where do those aromas take me, and how, and maybe why? Here’s an idea.

The idea of a memory palace is an ancient one. Google tells us that Cicero (106 - 43 BCE) described the Memory Palace technique in his writings on rhetoric, called De Oratore.  However, my earliest recollection of the notion is far more prosaic; Jerry Lucas on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which Google also informs me took place on May 14, 1971. [Which, of course raises the question of why, with Google, do we really need a memory palace?, but let's let that go for now.] For those of you who have not yet attained "a certain age," Jerry Lucas was a basketball star at Ohio State, the NBA and the Olympics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who later gained renown for his remarkable memory. Lucas attributed his feats of memory to the memory palace technique.

Briefly the technique is said to work like this: you call to mind a structure with which you are intimately familiar. You know every crook and cranny. No problem there, I often amuse myself when settling down to sleep by mentally “walking around” in the house and neighborhood in which I was raised. Next, when you want to remember something you stash it somewhere in that structure - AKA your memory palace. OK. Now it is getting a little “iffy.” So if I want to remember when my daughters were born I take those dates and stash them in the bottom drawer of the big built-in drawers in my sister’s bedroom where the cat had kittens. All right, maybe. But now when I need to remember those dates I need to bop over to the memory palace and haul those dates out of that drawer - top or bottom or wherever I put them. I may have that somewhat distorted, which may be why it has never worked for me. It always seemed to me that with the memory palace, instead of just remembering one thing - the dates - I now needed to remember where in the memory palace I had put the dates, so now instead of just remembering one thing - daughter dates - I now need to remember two things - drawer and dates. Something rotten in that particular state of Denmark, not?

But like many interesting concepts, the memory palace notion provides some delightful points for reflection.  First and foremost I love the metaphor of a palace as the place in which our memories reside. It is a narrative device that resonates strongly with me. My acquaintance with scripture is sketchy at best, but for some reason the phrase “My father’s house has many mansions.” (John 14:2 - thanks again Google) has always spoken strongly to me, both for its inclusive theme, and for my visual imagining of a structure with a plethora of hallways and doorways, windows and mirrors -  exciting and still a bit frightening. The house in Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is a delicious example.

So if you combine the idea of this slightly spooky memory palace with my assertion in the previous post about the time-traveling synesthetic potential of music you end up - potentially anyhow - with a synesthetic memory palace in which a song, a dream, an image, color or flavor can catapult you into one of the many rooms of your own unique memory palace, landing you in the lap of a long-ignored, yet still present, memory.

This somewhat fanciful construction has the added benefit of bringing comfort to those of us on the far side of a “certain age” about the accessibility of our memory palace. The memories are there. Oh, I’m not saying that the particular noun for the round bread product that is kneaded, then shaped, baked and boiled, the, the, the, bagel! dammit! won’t occasionally escape you. But the larger more important memory of breakfasts shared where, when and with whom, are still there in the palace, just waiting for the right synesthetic key to turn the lock, swing the door open, revealing the rest of the memory and the absolutely wonderful opportunity to wander around in that time and place one more time.

All of which brings me to both the greatest frustration and the most tantalizing possibility of this whole memory palace notion. The greatest frustration is that I can't choose when to enter my synesthetic memory palace, it just sort of happens when I happen to encounter the key. Nicely serendipitous, but potentially awkward; "Pardon me, miss, but could I sniff your neck?" I'm thinking that some combination of guided meditation/relaxation/reike might provide a path and I play around with those elements sometimes during my night time sleep ritual, however without success to date.

The tantalizing piece comes when I have been fortunate enough to stumble into the palace and walk into one of those lovely, but long forgotten, memories and discover that that particular space leads to other spaces - sort of like a memory maze. The people and places in that first memory lead to other people, places and spaces, and I can wander through that delightful cascade of memories until I am disturbed by some intrusion from what we arrogantly call the "real" world.

Well, that's where I am with the whole memory palace thingy, and I better get this post out to you now, lest I forget . . . .  

Faces and Places in the Chord

Dictionary definitions of synesthesia center on the ability to, or the condition of, simultaneously interpreting sensory input through two ordinarily separate modalities. Most often a blending of visual and auditory senses. So a “synesthete” in the presence of a c-sharp chord, for example, would both hear the tone as we would, but would also “see,” perhaps, a bright blue. I first came across the idea when using Gene Youngblood’s seminal work Expanded Cinema as a text back in 1970. Buckminster Fuller wrote the Introduction, a tour d’force in its own right.

Anyhow, I have remained fascinated by the notion ever since. It is one of those things I wish I had been born with - like perfect pitch, a photographic memory, or the ability to draw recognizable scenes, objects or people. But as is often my wont, I have learned how to fake it. Here’s how that goes:

One of my great frustrations is the “tyranny of the eyelids.” No doubt many of you share this condition. There you are, reading along in the tiny hours of the morning, 2:30, maybe 3:00, and your eyelids just ring the curtain down. Slam! Your brain is still up for “the rest of the story,” but "No Way!" say the eyelids - Slam, bang, locked up, like those metal curtains in front of little shops around the world. "Wait! Wait!" cries my brain, but alas in vain.

OK, despite my best efforts I still haven’t figured out how to read through my eyelids, but I have figured out how to use what may be some vestigial synesthesia ability to continue some entertainment after hours. As I have mentioned before, I have music or nature sounds playing all night long. The synesthetic part comes in when I draw rather complex scenes behind my eyelids as I listen to the music. Well, I’m not really drawing behind my eyelids - yech, a little Hannibal Lecter-ish. Rather, I’m imagining a variety of scenes, sometimes animated, sometimes “real life,” as the music supplies the soundtrack. 

There are a couple of advantages to this system. First and foremost, behind my eyelids, I can draw anything in any style. From Disney to Da Vinci to Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun to Picasso - you name 'em, I can paint 'em all behind my eyelids. My problem has never been imagining the images. The problem has always been moving those imaginings in my head to the paper in front of me. That doesn't work so well. However, behind my eyelids, all I need to do is think and, ta da, there it is.  On paper what I end up with are my own rather strange efforts, some of which I share with you here on Schrag Wall. 

Second, when I am drawing behind my eyelids I never forget how I did something.  The issue is this, I can look at look at a drawing that I did years or decades ago - often a blend of photoshop and hand drawing like some of the ping pong paintings I have shared with you. Sometimes multiple blending of those images, and I wonder "How did I do that?" "Clicking what keys in what sequence and in what order?" "How many layers?"  Time was my fingers just remembered the sequences. Like what I imagine touch typing is like. Something else I never mastered. Nowadays often my reply to myself is "I have no idea."  Incredibly frustrating. When drawing behind my eyelids, no problem. I just think it.

However, recently I have become more aware of what may be the most fascinating, empowering, enjoyable aspect of my truncated version of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a time machine.  I have mentioned that I do a blend of meditation, relaxation, reiki, etc., before going to sleep. And as with everything, I play music throughout the exercise.  Every once in a while, while my attention is elsewhere, a song will fight its way to the foreground, and flings me into the WayBack Machine where I find myself reliving some previous part of my life. These are incredibly powerful recollections? recreations? lucid moments? I'm not sure which. I, invariably, am startled out of my revery. I cling to these moments longer than my "normal dreams." Long enough to wonder who was that? Where was I? When was I? I can usually figure out parts of it.  I do know that the “when” was always in the past. The who and where usually boil down to more of a multiple choice question.  Both answers obviously were incredibly powerful moments, strongly harmonic with my chord sometime and somewhere in the past.

I'll have to think about it; to sleep, perchance to dream.

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