Blasts from the Past

 Smitty: [Working on crossword puzzle] Did you know that April is National poetry month?

Me: No, I didn't.

A little further explanation. As I have mentioned previously our family spent 1959 - 1961 in Vienna, Austria. While there I attended, with my siblings Margaret Akerstrom nee Schrag and Jim [1943 - 1984]. Brother Jim served as editor of the school newspaper, The Gladiator . I have no idea how the name evolved, but Jim's editorship may explain how these two of my early efforts at poetry came to grace its pages in 1961:

The Voice of Nature

Listen to the lone wolf,

As he howls at the moon;

Listen to the lone wolf,

As he circles the lagoon;

Listen to the lone wolf,

As he gives his hunting call;

Listen to the lone wolf,

The cruelest of them all.

Listen to the wind,

Wailing in the pine;

Listen to the wind,

In the wild night time;

Listen to the wind,

As it screams to the plain;

"Listen to me!

Or I ne'er shall blow again!"

This is the sound

Of Nature with her own;

The wind and the lone wolf

Which used to we have grown.

Go away from nature,

Put away your hunting knife,

Grow away from nature

And you'll throw away your life!

[I believe this was written the year I took one of those tests that are supposed to plot your interests and possible future employment. I was tagged as a forest ranger. Which is sort of like a college professor.]

March

Spring cleaning strikes the terror deep

In every masculine heart,

Good-bye the beefsteak roasted rare,

Good-bye the cherry tart,

For in this time of cleaning up

A female has no heart.

Men and boys alike are plunged

To dust and sweeping toil;

'Til walls and floor alike are free

Of any trace of soil.

From attic trunk to cellar floor,

Down each hallway through each door,

The dust rag does its endless chore.

So if you hear some blackguard sing

About those wondrous days of spring

The weeks that pass all full of fun

And filled with joy for everyone,

Please tell him in a voice quite strong

You really think that he is wrong!

[I really have no idea what prompted this rather unenlightened paean - perhaps the normative sexist perceptions of 1960. It certainly did not spring my home life where neither cooking nor cleaning took precedence over reading novels. But then I was only 12.]

Leo and Mona: Shifting the Narrative

 One of the many stories I recall having been told about Leonardo da Vinci is that during the last few decades of his life he hauled the unfinished portrait of Mona Lisa with him leaving it, still unfinished, when he died in his late 60s in May of 1519.  One version of his life has him starting the painting 1503 - which would mean he was “fine tuning” the work for some 16 years! While most of the details of da Vinci’s life are - well, “fuzzy” to say the least, I am particularly fond of this one. As I once said in a faculty meeting, to the delight of my colleagues, “I love it when the data seem to support my theory!”  My theory here, perhaps more honestly a bias, is that the “truth” of what any artwork “means” shifts every time the artist touches it.

It is certainly true of my own work that is at least partially created in a "studio" chock full of digital tools and techniques unavailable to da Vinci and the other great artists living and working during the Renaissance. But before addressing the unique aspects of my “studio” I need to talk a bit about the time involved in creating each image, a discussion that answers, in part, the oft repeated question, “What is taking you so long down there!?”

A few factors influence the time required to finish each image. First, where did the originate? There are 2 primary answers to that question.  To be perfectly honest my earliest images were in a sense the result of deceptions that would be difficult to pull off today. They began back in 1961 when Dad took a temporary position through the American Friends Service Committee to serve as Director of Quaker House in Vienna, Austria. I was never actually quite sure what he did there, but the family spent 1959 through 1961 living in Vienna. We three kids attended The American International School, 5th and 6th grade for me. I quickly discovered that in that school one was expected to “take notes.”  It also soon became clear that the teacher never checked what it was that covered the pages of my notebook. Doodles. Lots and lots of doodles. Having completed my formal education, up through my Ph.D, prior to Gates, Jobs and Wozniak birthing the personal computer, I filled hundreds and hundreds of notebooks with hand-drawn doodles. Increasingly, towards the end of that time period, actual academic content found its way into the notebooks. Many of my contemporary images reflect what happens when an addicted doodler gives free reign to that long suppressed inclination.

The next major source for my images grew from my equally long interest in photography. Many of my images started as digital photographs that I pulled into Photoshop, isolated and "erased" various portions of the photos which left a varying number of “holes” in the image. I then filled the holes with designs, many of which looked strikingly similar to various doodles I had created years before. The final step in finishing off images from both lineages was to add color to the doodle/designs.

Both types of designs gradually increased in both size and complexity, greatly increasing the “guesstimate answer” to the response to the question “What is taking you so long down there.” It is the images that take me so long.  At least dozens of hours and - I am somewhat embarrassed to admit - sometimes hundreds of hours.

OK, on to the studio. It is a curved desk/counter with a roll around chair, maybe 15 feet in overall length.  It holds a 36 x 24 drawing surface, a 24-inch graphics tablet and a similar-sized, high definition monitor hooked to a MacBook Pro, which is also hooked to an 8 gig hard drive that holds copies of 4 or 5 hard drives from "ancestral" computers - complete copies, images, texts - everything.  Also the desk holds a few dozen 16-ounce canning jars that hold - roughly organized by color and shade - all my markers. I roll amongst the various stations depending on the stage of each project.

Now a few words about my “artistic style.”  First, being a self-taught (read that as ‘untaught’ artist) my “skills” limit what I can draw and how long it takes me.  You may notice that there are few, if any, quasi-realistic faces in my work. That is because I can’t draw them. Those that do exist owe both their place and appearance to old theater make-up courses and creating practice faces for the characters I played on stage. Second, I use “markers” almost exclusively when I draw. They work pretty well - for me anyhow - eliminating “blending” to change colors. A few of my marker sets do have markers labeled “blender” or words to that affect. I have yet to figure out how to use them. I’ll put that particular skill on my “to do” list.

And then there is the acoustic variable. I never work in silence. Sometimes I listen to audio versions of magazines, New Scientist, gets a lot of air play as does National Geographic. An occasional novel, maybe a short story.  But music is far and away my most common audio stimulus. My choices are wildly eclectic from classical to early rock to folk to bluegrass - just about anything with the exception of rap or heavy metal. Remember the second tenet of Distilled Harmony is Enable Beauty.  I think - no clear cut data here - but I strongly suspect that what I am listening to affects my art, possibly changing the overall look of the piece. The sounds reframe it’s story somehow.

OK, you get the idea. Every time I touch an image during the hours of its development, I may well change the look, the feel, the meaning, the truth of the image.

I do have a few “time-jumped” images. By that I mean images originally created a few years before I run them through Photoshop to create the contemporary “marker-based” images I am doing now.  But it is much more common for me to spend 10 or a dozen days in bursts of 8 or 9 hours to finish an original work - so probably no radical changes from initial idea to finished image. But remember - and let’s give this sentence it’s own line:

Da Vinci hauled the Mona Lisa around with him for 15 or 16 years!

I would dearly love to have a stop frame version, say from every week, to see how his image of Mona changed over a decade and a half of Leo hauling, gazing, wondering and thinking of her. I cannot help but think that they wrote to each other, with each interaction perhaps shifting the narrative of the image. Maybe just a little. Maybe a radical reconstruction. Maybe an inclination to just throw the damn thing away, only to awake in a grateful cold sweat, rushing to the easel, to assure himself that he had not followed through on that brief flash of insanity. Then standing there thinking, “Maybe the background is too dark. Perhaps just a tiny touch of light on the river. Silver? Gold? Let me light a lamp. Just a few minutes.  .  .”

Demystifying the Object

Demystifying the Object

I saw a particularly impactful video on Curiosity Stream tonight called Nefertiti: The Lonely Queen.  The three-part video explores the various complex issues surrounding the repatriation to the countries of origin or the original owners of thousands of artifacts housed in what I learned were called the encyclopedic museums of the world; The British Museum, The Louvre, in the US the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery. In other words, the major museums housing huge international collections gathered, one might say looted, in the heyday of globetrotting collectors in the 18 and 19 hundreds.

All three episodes are interesting and well worth watching, but I must confess that the first episode; Conflicts and Resolutions reported an incident so exceptional that it staggered my ability to give the rest of the series the attention it deserves. Not surprisingly, Nefertiti’s bust is a dominant character in the series, and a great amount of attention is paid to the security that surrounds the bust in her home, the Neues Museum in Berlin. That discussion is immediately followed by a segment with two artists who managed to evade all that security and, using a commercially available gaming platform concealed under an overcoat, create a high resolution, 3D replica of the bust which, with a high resolution 3D-printer, allowed them to create exact replicas of the bust of one of Egypt’s most famous rulers.  In true “artistic radical” style, the artists uploaded the code to the Internet so that now anyone willing to expend the technology and energy could have their own exact copy of the bust of Nefertiti.

I paused the video and sat back gazing at my own images on my studio wall. In order to share them with you here on The Wall, I have created high resolution versions of many of them.  Versions you can print out, mount, and hang in your studio, or wherever, creating versions no different from the images hanging across the room from me. 

So, naturally I thought “What is the difference between the original bust of Nefertiti and a digitized exact replica of the bust?” The queen herself might choose - time travel issues aside - to paraphrase a particularly germane lyric from Paul Simon, “‘The difference is all inside your head,’ she said to me. The answer is easy if you take it logically.  I’d like to help you in your struggle to see me. There must be 50 ways to see your lover.’”

It was late, and I am still dealing with a very graphic siege of insomnia - I actually dreamed I sang a song from South Pacific after finally falling asleep around 4:15. Naturally, I woke myself with that rendition. I share the incident simply to illustrate the current fragile nature of my internal thought processes, so you may understand how I jumped from consideration of the 3D recreation of Nefertiti’s bust to the idea of entire museums dedicated to exacting replicas of works of art that currently exist only as “one-offs” in widely spread “encyclopedic” museums available for viewing by only a tiny fragment of the world’s population.

Next I envisioned something like an artistic, global, “re-wilding” of the Great Plains. Bringing back the buffalo, but instead of millions of thundering quadrupeds, there would be thousands of museums with millions of paintings, etchings, photographs, sculptures, etc.

So, perhaps you will understand how I began to see a rather direct parallel to prohibition here in the states in from 1920 until 1933, and the current “decriminalization” of cannabis. In both cases the value of each commodity was directly related to one’s ability to possess it. Once the commodity was widely available and barriers to possession were removed, the value of the commodity took a nose dive. And the criminal world lost interest, turning it’s attention back to procuring and marketing commodities that were still illegal; like cocaine, heroin, and prostitution, or whose potential for profit, though often uncertain, was sufficient to attract the truly greedy, like bitcoins.

I was further struck by the notion that great art was/is valued, at least in part, by that same value-based dynamic. A variety of variables, collectively defined in a work’s provenance; who created it, when, from what materials, and, often most importantly, was the work unique? determine the “value” of a particular work. The more I thought about it the more it seemed to me that all those elements that defined a work’s provenance and value were usually not obvious in the work itself. They were of concern to, and even then often ferociously debated by and among “experts.” Our attention, however, is most often focused on the work itself.

Remember, the second tenet of Distilled Harmony is Enable Beauty, and that is where we most often focus: Is the work beautiful? Does it enchant? Does it make me feel good? Happy? The point is that if a work checks all those boxes it is suddenly irrelevant if the “object” is an “original” created a dozen, or a thousand, several thousand, or a million years ago. Our digitally perfect bust of Nefertiti brings us as much pleasure as the original.

That is not to say that physical verisimilitude is the only variable informing the pleasure an artwork brings. Sometimes a work encourages one to experiment with an artist’s particular style or approach to creativity. That is often the case with me when looking at Jackson Pollock’s work. How? Why? And so I will close by sharing with you one of my homages to Pollock’s work. Let me quickly point out that the intent is to imitate, not recreate an "original Pollock." 

Gallery Proposal: Artists of a Certain Age [ACA]

I suppose it has something to do with my having turned 74 last week, but that would be too obvious. Perhaps a better explanation would be that I have grown tired of stumbling across titles such as “Best Young Artists Under 30” or under 40, or 15, or something equally as foolish. 

They all remind of my students’ occasional declaration that something “had to be so” since they had believed it “all their life!” A span of something between 18 or 28 years. An interesting perspective of “all one’s life”. But there were moments of rational exception. I once knew, between marriages, a young woman about half my age, more lover than friend as it's turned out, who actually wrote, and had published by a well-known house, her “coming of age novel.” Being a bit smitten, obviously I was biased, but it was well done. Still not to put too fine a point on it, here was “a coming of age novel,” penned by an exceptionally bright young woman who really hadn’t finished that stage of her life yet. “Best Young Artists Under 30,” has that same sort of not-quite-finished taste to it. “Better set the timer, for another decade hon,  and we’ll take another peek.”

I mean come on now, Bob Dylan had to wait until he was 75 before he received the Nobel Prize for literature.  I don’t know if they were running a list of “Best Young Writers under 30” back in 1971, but Bob didn’t win. Sometimes you have to wait for the good stuff to roll around. Bob did. The point is that some galleries, influencers, and “taste-makers” of various stripes might better serve the art world by setting the timer for another decade and then returning to take a less hurried look.

But I’m drifting again. The point is that many artists, from many genres, don’t really begin to produce their “best” work until later in their lives. Consider the notion that one needs to live a significant part of a life before one is really ready to make a meaningful artistic comment upon that life.  I spent more than 50 years as a performer, artist, creator, author, researcher and educator of varying ability before I began to produce, and continue to produce on occasion, what I would begin to consider “some of my best work.” I had to reach “a certain age” before presuming to make meaningful comment on what had gone before.

So I would like to propose, either as a stand-alone space, or as a contained unit within a larger entity, a juried gallery called “Artists of a Certain Age,” which would feature just such “long view works” produced by Artists of a Certain Age - let’s use the traditional retirement age of 65+ until something better comes along. The works would be available for acquisition as either traditional “hang on the wall” works, free-standing sculptural pieces, non-fungible tokens, or whatever meets current market styles and taste.

Obviously ACA would eventually seek to acquire works from a wide range of artists from a wide variety of “ACAers”.  But I would like to propose a selection of my own works as a possible representative core of offerings - having a plethora of options to choose from. I will include copies here in this proposal some of my self-selected “best works” mostly from my last active years as a Professor Emeritus in the Communication Department at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.  

I will wrap up the proposal with a copy of my last “formal” resume from my academic career for those who may comforted by that more traditional structure.

It is important to emphasize that this is, as the title of the post indicates, a proposal. It is one I hope finds its way to reality. Hence, if you have friends, entrepreneurs, gallery owners, or other acquaintances who might be interested in making ACA a reality, this would be the time to contact them and encourage their participation.  Obviously, if you yourself are an ACA, pre-publication submissions are encouraged. [I know, I know, as mentioned above it is a slippery concept. Some entities mandate "certain age" for retirement purposes - 65, 72. Others which should, like the Supreme Court and most universities, allow one to stumble along well into one's dotage. I'm going to put this on the back-burner until things become "more real." But when in doubt - submit.]

ACA Representative Gallery

The news, no doubt unintentionally, offered a delightful place to start providing some examples. On February 27, 2020 then President Trump when asked about this new affliction Covid-19, declared, “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle - it will disappear.”  Medical reality notwithstanding, I chose to use this mythologizing of Covid as an opportunity to imagine what a range of “Miraculous Covid Critters” might look like.  These are free-hand 19x14” pen and marker “imaginings.”

Miraculous Covid Critters

This is how I envisioned the entity that started the whole thing. A flighty little critter. 18x16 inches. Hand drawn and colored.

These images, also 18x16 hand done, are how I imaged the little infectious critters running around inside us. I never did get around to images of the vaccines.

Pen and Marker works.  These works are again free-hand. Like the “Miraculous Covid Critters,” they were created by drawing “cartoons” of the images which were then “filled-in” with a variety of markers. These images were just for fun. Stimulated I guess by the free-form critters above. The Harlequin Bottles measures 3x4 feet. Got a little carried away there.

Harlequin Bottle

But that excess didn’t really deter me. This next work, Giant Iris was a bit of a transition piece - half free form and half manipulated photos. 36x39 inches.

Manipulated Photos. All these works started life as digital photos. Often taken while traveling. Originally I chose them as photographs - selected for what I considered their photographic quality and composition.  But then they started to surprise me. I’m not quite sure why I opened the images in Photoshop, but I did. And I discovered, as you have if you wandered down that path, that there are images within images within images.  And you can erase pieces of them.  I remember being stunned to learn, back in some art history class, that all those gleaming white marble statues - the David, Venus de Milo, etc. - had all once been brightly paint.  Discovering Photoshop’s ability to turn color photos into black and white images begging to be painted was no less staggering.  So using  that application I “erased” various portions of the image. I then created designs for those newly vacated spaces which were again “filled-in” with a variety of paints and markers. I realize the capabilities of various graphics applications currently far outstrip my imagination, but I am currently content.

I’m not sure that the gondoliers would make of what I did with their Gondolas on the Grand Canal, but I had fun! 36x12 inches.

I’m not positive where in Venice this is. I’ll check. OK, 24x36 inches. “To the right when you cross that big bridge.” Is about as good as we can do right now.

And then much of the silliness is mandated by artistic by the mood of the artist.

Here are a few random examples:

And of course, literally dozens more I am leaving out, although I do want to note that the Iris image right above is somewhat unique. It started as a photo that was “erased and painted” and the “rephotoshoped” that allowed me to use Photoshop’s clarity to create that very sharp-edged image.

The Resume

A somewhat artificial but traditional barrier that often stands between an artist and an audience is the resume - a paper that seeks to answer the question "What have you done for me lately?" The longer you remain in an occupation the more creative and strained the work becomes. I was going to include one of my last such compositions here as illustrative of the genre. However as that would necessitate shifting applications which has the potential to destroy everything else here, I will send in a separate message.

Dreams Without Regrets

They are interesting phenomena — these dreams without regrets.  A brief example from today’s nap dream. Remember dreams are incredibly fluid in terms of the “real world” that surrounds them. OK, in today’s dream I had been charged with making sure that - hmm, the name escapes me at the moment. She was a miniature dachshund that my first wife and I  had sort of inherited from her owner. Her name will come to me.  I want to call her Gretel, but that may well be just “nationality breed association.” (No, wait! Wait! Her name was Nigel! Thank you, 4 AM memory goddess!) Anyhow, I had been instructed by my current wife’s stepdaughter to keep the puppy from eating something - maybe a plate of cookies?

An interesting point was that my current wife’s stepdaughter had not been made aware of these instructions. Partially, perhaps, because the stepdaughter and wife number one had never actually met in “real life.” Interesting how folks who never met in “real life” have no trouble interacting with each other in “dream world,” - completely unbothered by those “unreal - real” conflicts. 

Anyhow, the Nigel ate the forbidden fruit, or the forbidden sandwiches, or the forbidden whatever, while I was napping. But neither the current stepdaughter nor the previous wife held the other responsible, in the dream, for Nigel’s behavior, nor, strangely, did my somnolent culpability come up. Then I woke up.

There is a message in here somewhere. Perhaps related to my long-standing assertion about snoring - that being that one cannot be held responsible for what one does while asleep. Perhaps the corollary is that dreaming is a “blameless state.” Related, somehow, to the notion of “brother, you can’t go to jail for what you are thinking.” Or, by extension, “Shut up and let the dog eat the cookies.” After all it’s just a dream, right?

Interesting however, is the fact that folks who never met in “real life” have no trouble interacting in “dream world.” Anyhow, Nigel ate the dream-based cookies, apparently with great enjoyment. And, also interestingly, nobody cared. The dog ate the cookies. Yes. That is so. Nobody said “Bad dog!” Nobody expressed disappointment that I had failed to prevent the great cookie consumption. As a matter of fact, the cookies disappeared without so much as wrinkling the ephemeral fabric of the dream. And perhaps that is the lesson of dreaming:

The world of dreaming is, well, perhaps not so much value-free, as it is blameless. It is a world where “you can’t go to jail for what you’re dreaming.” You cannot be held accountable for your dream. The dream can still touch you. It can still make you laugh or cry. But you are the dreamer, not the dream. In our waking judicial system, truth is the ultimate defense. While sleeping, it is the various decrees of the dream state.

Druids Over the Top

 Druids Over the Top

Sometimes I like to browse through images I made a few decades ago to see if a “do over” would result in something new and interesting. The original “Druids” image is a BW image from about 20 years ago. There are several versions of it floating around on various hard drives, clouds, drop boxes, etc.  The new colored version still reflects my inability to draw faces 🤪.

Old version.

New version

The Power of Silence: A Cautionary Tale

I read today that Meta/Facebook’s new generation of VR headsets will be able to read your facial expressions, purportedly to allow your avatar to more realistically portray emotions in whatever virtual world you have chosen to experience. Let me put aside for a moment the fact that I feel that this kind of information gathering is at least “a step too far,” if not a couple of marathons too far, and simply look at it as simply another digital information gathering device for which we are the entity being probed for information. 

Much of this information we provide voluntarily to make our lives easier. Our contacts list eliminates the need to dial - strange archaic term - our phone. We simply say “Call Joe.”  In turn our “find my” app locates our digital devices, and those of our friends and hence, usually their location. Our smartwatch monitors our breathing, temperature, and, for couples seeking to start a family their ovulation calendar. Our mattress reacts to our sleeping behavior, adjusting position and temperature to enhance REM sleep. Our smart fridge tells us when the milk has spoiled. MyChart lets us know when we are running low on meds, the pharmacy automatically reorders the meds and then either mails them to us or sends us an reminder to come pick them up, which prompts us to hop into the car where the gps will guide us to the drug store, turn on our favorite music channel, and ask us if we would like it to read us any email we have received.

I found this post in this morning’s email: “Imagine riding an Apple e-bike while your Apple AR glasses share turn-by-turn navigation, your Apple Watch provides biofeedback, the bike itself tracks information on output, speed and air quality — and maybe the coffee shop up ahead sends a discount coupon to entice you to stop by.”

Whether this is heaven or hell or somewhere in between is a matter of personal preference. My concern at the moment is my realization that we are often, waking or sleeping, attending or ignoring, consciously or subconsciously, in a state of constant communication.  And we have come to, what, expect it? Want it? Can’t live without it? I don’t know. We have all heard of the dreaded FOMO - aka Fear of Missing Out. At an extreme level we have all been irritated by it - friends who sit down at lunch and immediately put their phone on the table. Jeez.

But the intent of this post is to explore the opposite of all this frenetic communication: the sounds of silence. I read today - New Scientist, I believe - how folks are paying for some time in isolation chambers. They claim to emerge refreshed, calmer, less stressed, less depressed. That’s really kind of neat. Had me looking around for my noise canceling headphones, until I realized that I usually used them to listen to music or nature sounds, storms, even trains. Not quite silence. So I kept drawing and listening to the podcast about silence. Strange, eh?

Anyhow, it was awhile until I was struck by another, even stranger idea: the weaponization of silence.  Bear with me here.  We live, for the most part anyhow, in a two closely related auditory worlds. There is the world of ambient sound, environmental sound.  This is everything that creeps into our ears, from the gentle rush of the AC or heat whooshing on, the dishwasher whirring, lawnmowers and leaf blowers intruding, traffic, all that ambient sound. We “hear” it but are largely unaware of it until the curtain of sound is disrupted - the microwave, dryer, dishwasher, email, or whatever dings, or beeps, or chimes. And we attend.  I have seen a commercial - I think for a HVAC system. The video pans through a home, regular middle-class house, dog asleep, no movement, no audio. Then the audio fades in: ”This is the sound of the yadda yadda home heating system.” The implication is that there is no sound and that is unique. Reminds me of another spot where a harried Mom escapes from a, what, playground maybe? Anyhow, she slips into the front seat of her rather plush auto and shuts the door, closes her eyes and sighs. Both spots acknowledge the intrusive nature of ambient sound and present an option to catch some silence.

More interesting to me is the second acoustic world in which we exist: the acoustic world we voluntarily create. I am perhaps more attuned to this world because I rarely - indeed if ever - step out of it. It is a soundscape made possible by technology. I am writing this on my iPad as the clock leaves midnight in the rear view mirror - and Pandora plays a gentle spa music track in the background.  When I decide to stop writing I will leave Pandora on activate some similar track, meditative, spa-ish, instrumental stuff and then will overdub that with a NatureScapes track of wind or rain or a stream or crickets or whatever - which I will leave on all night. So, yes, I am sound dependent. It isn’t that I am silence averse, I just see no reason to seek it.  Although writing this post has convinced me to give it a whirl. But, I am wandering off course here a bit. I wanted to be talking about the weaponization of silence.

There is an interesting parallel notion in the acoustic world we create. There is a communicative aspect component to it. We seek sound based input that confirms, aids, or enhances our life. Reminders from our smartphone, watch, or whatever, keeps us “on task,” music that we enjoy passes time pleasurably, videos entertain us, while actual phone calls, voicemails, posted images, text messages, and video chats keep us connected to the important people in our lives. And it is this last cluster of communicative interactions that can be weaponized. Let me explain.

There was a time when a person might live their entire life in the village where they were born. An "adventure" might be defined by hiking a mile or two down a dirt track to the next village over. Maybe to trade excess produce, maybe to seek a spouse. This lack of mobility was transformed as transportation and communication options evolved. Living in the 21st century those twin evolutions have resulted in the somewhat uncomfortable reality that we often live at significant distance from those we hold most dear.  Hence the digital communication tools mentioned above become increasing vital in initiating and maintaining relationships. All kinds of relationships.

The covid pandemic drove significant segments portions of the population "home." Business, school, shopping, all found themselves becoming internet activities. As such, they became more vulnerable to unique, often unwelcome, interruptions as hackers and scammers took advantage of their ability to hide their nefarious activity behind their internet anonymity and keyboards. Both businesses and software applications have taken steps to insure our privacy when communicating via those digital avenues. And significant protective progress has been made in those reciprocal initiatives. But that is not the weaponization arena that concerns me - it is in interpersonal communication.

Let me provide an unintentional example of which I found myself a part. We have dear friends both of whom just celebrated their 90th birthdays. They still live in Raleigh, NC which is where our friendship was initially nurtured with shared dinners. He is an accomplished artist and luthier, still turning out commissioned paintings and repairing damaged string instruments for local colleges and orchestras. He is, however, and not terribly surprising, completely computer illiterate. She continues to take care of the house to the best of her ability, which has become increasingly compromised by swiftly failing sight. This also curtails another of her favorite activities - surfing the internet. She has gradually increased the font size and magnification on her screen. But now the situation is such that most relevant content gets shoved beyond the margins of her screen and so out of sight. Actual phone conversations are also difficult. He has memory and hearing issues that make following a conversation difficult and we have learned that she - because of similar issues - used lip-reading to a far greater extent than we had previously realized. A strategy severely compromised in phone-based conversations. As a result our interactions with them have, sadly, decreased markedly. So meaningful interactions are possible only when we make one of our own increasingly rare trips back to Raleigh. And on those instances when we appear at their door we are inevitably greeted with wails of "We thought you were dead ! We thought you didn't love us anymore!" Hence much time must be spent with assurances of our continuing affection.

Now, it is important to remember that all this is the result of unintended communication glitches among folks who really wanted to remain "in touch." That is not the case in what I refer to as the weaponization of silence.

I have relatively recently become aware of something called "ghosting." It is far from the cuddly notion of Casper the friendly ghost or the Halloween decorations of the season. For those of you who are, as I was, unfamiliar with this phenomenon let me provide a brief description. First we need to realize that often the internet is a primary mode of communication between intimate couples. A situation significantly accentuated by the recent, and somewhat continuing, covid pandemic, and the resultant disruption of traditional avenues of communication with a loved one. Provides a whole new spin on "Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo?" "Ghosting" is a modern, high tech version of a lovers quarrel. In "ghosting" one person in the couple feels they have been slighted. It is not always evident who "started it," but as the song says "somebody done somebody wrong." And the aggrieved party breaks off communication with the "wrong doer." And often it is the technology aspect of the quarrel that weaponizes this type of interaction. In the BI - "Before Internet" - days it was not terribly difficult to find a route to your lover's side and hopefully repair the rift in a face-to-face interaction. But pandemic mandated lockdowns, or the reality of long-distance relationships decrees that "ghosting" takes place is the digital domain. In digitized "ghosting" s/he who is doing the "ghosting" breaks off all digital contact with the "other."

In old mysteries or police procedural movies, where one of our protagonists is in prison, ghosting was accomplished by tossing the protagonist into "solitary confinement." No contact with the outside world. Ghosting is a digital, personal version of solitary confinement. The ghoster, or in this case, jailor, alienates the prisoner from any digital contact between the prisoner and the jailor. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Easiest, but still irritating to the jailor, is to simply ignore any attempts at communication from s/he who is being ghosted. More complicated, but perhaps more effective in the long run, is to block the prisoner's email and other contact information from the jailor's communication applications. This not only keeps the prisoner in his/her specific cell, but spares the jailor from any future reminders of his/her existence.

If you find this weaponization strategy repugnant - as do I - it may be because it stands in direct opposition the the first and primary tenet of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony. Obviously, it is impossible to foster harmony with someone whose existence you are essentially denying. If we explore the tenet of foster harmony more closely we soon discover that it is conceptually linked to another related idea: forgiveness.

The current scope of human callousness, reflected in the "news stories" in our morning emails and TV news shows, does tempt one to see the concept of forgiveness as, if not a fantasy, then at least a sadly futile undertaking. How does one forgive a nation, a government, a multinational corporation, whose behaviors are harming the physical integrity of the planet and endangering if not actually terminating the lives of millions of inhabitants - human and non- human but potentially sentient entities? Perhaps by reducing our focus. By attempting to doing more to forgive on a smaller scale, on a one-to-one scale. Most, if not all, "somebody done somebody wrong" fights are a matter of perception. Both sides see themselves as the wronged party - and are loath to give up that argumentative "high ground" by admitting to fault, seeing that as a step too far.

Forgiving is compromise. It stems from the consideration that perhaps one's life was better with the other in it. As Willie Nelson sang: "Love is hard to find. Love of any kind." Forgiving opens the door to the possibility of loving. The mechanics of forgiving can be complicated and are unique to each relationship. But there is one element that is common to every act of potential forgiveness - communication. 

Forgiveness cannot occur in a "ghosted" environment. Back in 1987, President Reagan, standing by the wall that had divided East and West Germany for decades said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" To world's amazement Gorbachev did just that, and friends, families, and lovers streamed across the newly-opened divide into each other's arms. Ghosters should ask themselves, "Is what separates me from this formerly precious person more intractable than the wall which divided an entire nation?" 

 Tear down your walls.

Seeking Sunset Shades of Harmony

I know when it is time to stop drawing when I can no longer decide which color belongs where. That is an indication that my logical mind is attempting to impose its will on my artistic inclination. It means I am beginning to think that certain colors "belong" together while others do not. I am letting myself, either consciously or unconsciously, get sucked into the fallacy of the color wheel, you know that pie-shaped wheel of primary colors that shows the relationship among colors, which go together and which don’t. I call it the fallacy of the color wheel not so much because it is wrong, but because it is limited. It implies artificial boundaries, aesthetic divisions. I much prefer the implications of a sunset.

Next time you see a really fine sunset, one that just takes your breath away, stop and stare a bit. Think about the colors. Are any of them “wrong?”  Do any of them “not go together?” See what I mean? The sunset tells us that all colors go together. All colors can be woven together in a pleasing harmonious construction. The same is true of people.

Ah, caught you a little by surprise there, right? But a "sunset perception of humanity" is really what lies at the center of our old friend Distilled Harmony - most particularly in the notion mandated by the first and primary tenet - foster harmony. These days I suppose I am drawn to a need to take a closer look at Harmony by its seeming decline in the world around us. Particularly this morning where I encountered a news post about 6 people being shot down on a greenway in Raleigh, NC, where I spent 40 odd years of my working life. The shooter was himself 16 years old. 

That is exceptionally upsetting , yet each morning’s news of the latest shenanigans of the Putins, the Trumps, the Xi Jinpings and the other anti-democratic, authoritarian “would be dictators” currently strutting across the world stage is more than sufficient to curdle your cornflakes. I find it incredibly depressing that, seemingly, significant numbers of individuals, both here at home and increasingly around the globe, are rallying to these Ill-conceived, morally bankrupt philosophies. But more than simply depressing, I find that “the world is too much with me.” 50 years ago I would have been - and was - out on the streets marching, protesting, getting in peoples’ faces. Power to the people and all that. Nowadays it’s more like “stop the world, I want to get off.”

It is, I suppose because I am older, maybe a bit wiser, and certainly more cynical, that I find I do not fit comfortably in any “political group.”  The Trump-led rising fascism of the alt-right here at home is repugnant, and the all encompassing social brief of the populist left seems at times to strain credulity. So finding myself “groupless,” it is not strange that I find myself strongly inclined to re-dedicate myself to a purely personal implementation of the first tenet of Distilled Harmony - foster harmony. But as the title of this post indicates, and my brief foray into sunsets and color wheels also implies, a personal approach to fostering harmony is not quite as simple as it might appear at first blush.

The primary problem is that fostering harmony is an exercise in persuasion. The challenge is to convince people that treating people humanely and gently is a better way to live than bullying, berating, or beating them into some questionable semblance of an appearance of agreement. Right, but how do you accomplish this persuasive task?  Before retiring I observed that a significant number of our majors were beginning to specialize in public relations - which is one of the current academic pigeonholes for folks seeking a career centered on persuading audiences, clients, customers, publics, etc., to feel favorably about the product, company, or person who is paying their salary. It was, at least back then, primarily a corporate path. Big companies had PR departments, often called something else, like Community Relations, or Public Outreach. Advertising departments usually lived somewhere in these corporate niches, because, obviously the sole purpose of advertising is to persuade us to think positively enough about a person, product or philosophy to open our wallets to acquire or support said person, product or philosophy.

Anyhow I didn’t think that the best route for me to foster harmony lay in any of those directions. First of all it would seem to imply getting a job.  No. Been there, done that, albeit in one of the most “boss free,” “do your own thing” environments around - the increasingly endangered professional environment of a university campus. Still, shudder, no. No job. So, ha, ha, I laugh at your idea of some PR-ish job. And even if one were to become staggering successful in the corporate world, that is no guarantee that you could, or would, persuade people to live a more gentle, harmonious life. Need I say Elon Musk? Mark Zuckerberg? Jeff Bezos? Bill and Melinda Gates are delightful exceptions - but sad that they seem to be outliers. 

I probably cannot leave a discussion of this world of public persuasion without mentioning the latest - to me anyhow - critters in the corral - influencers. As I understand them, “influencers” are individuals who have created a large enough public persona that influences folks to behave like, believe like, and most often shop like the influencer, emulating their purchases, appearance, style, etc.  Ah, brave new world that has such people in it! They thrive most obviously in digital space, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, etc.  An internet search revealed that I know none of the current top influencers - with the possible exception of actors and athletes hawking various versions of cryptocurrency or sub-sandwiches.  So seeking to join their ranks in my personal attempt to increase global Harmony, would seem an ill-fated sojourn.

So, what’s a guy to do? Here’s an idea: Get small. Think inside the box. I have noticed, and written about here on the Wall, an interesting notion seemingly shared by an overwhelming number of faiths and philosophies. The notion is varyingly expressed; the phrases vary, some long, complex and flowery, some wrapped in supplications, some poised as commandments, some as the inescapable results of scientific examinations and the resultant algorithm, some irrefutable logical conclusions, but all these many flavors of assertions all point in one direction - a desire for a peaceful harmonic world; a world free from fear and want, a world in which humanity lives in concert with one and other and with the natural world.

Right. So how do we get there? Again, get small. Think inside the box. My ethical upbringing springs from Judeo-Christian roots so I first encountered this “shared interesting notion” thus: “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” Attributed to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, but found in both the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. However, I have found similar versions in the writings of virtually every faith and philosophy I have had the pleasure of reading; Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Quakers, Hinduism, and all the versions and divisions thereof have their own versions of that simple truth: Treat others as you would like to be treated - gently, compassionately, with respect and tolerance.

But I still come up against a problem. Who are these “others?” Apparently that is not a simple question. Human history is fraught with examples of armies - philosophically pure or religiously devout - bent upon the destruction of other armies apparently less philosophically pure or religiously devout.  As a species, we seem to have an unfortunate inclination to be rather restrictive in our designation of the “others” with whom we wish to include in our reciprocal harmonious “doing unto.” Far too often the “others” are pretty well restricted to us - others who look, think, and believe like us. An old Pogo cartoon condensed that subtle bias beautifully: “We have met the enemy and they are us!” and sadly, from Alice in Wonderland - "Off with their heads!"

How do we avoid this unfortunate inclination towards self-deception and mutual destruction? Again, get small. Think inside the box. Look out your window. Get in your car - or better - hop on a bus, or a streetcar, tram, trolley. I don’t really care what you call it. Go grocery shopping. Walk past a park, a playground. Go have a burger at a fast food joint. Get a pizza, eat in, don’t take out. Visit a part of town where you just don’t feel comfortable. Look around. These are the others. These are the folks we need to “do unto as we would have them do.” 

How do we accomplish that? I find myself less drawn to public harangues and chanting. My knees aren’t much good for marching anymore. These days I’m more drawn to the idea of personally striving for new harmonic norms in our everyday lives. Adopt polite behavior, kind behavior, responsible behavior, tolerant behavior. Let the harried parent with three kids in the giant SUV have the parking place close to the door. At restaurants, be nice to the service people. On the road merge gently - a behavior much in need of encouragement here on the freeways of Chicagoland. Smile. Recycle. Sweat the little stuff. You know what I mean. We know how we want to be treated - so we really do know how to treat others. Sow harmony in little varied bits of harmonious behavior with the actual people with whom you share your neighborhood and your life. Who knows we might just discover that those little bits could one day flower into a lovely sunset of harmony.

In Lieu of Hibernation

It was Wednesday evening, so I trundled the trash cans out to the curb, and for the first time in more than a year thought, “Brrrr. It’s cold!” Well, not really cold. I had taught for 2 years at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, located, for those of you unfamiliar with that state, about 110 miles north of Madison and 2 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Come winter - which could arrive in early September - you plugged your car into a block heater to keep the oil from freezing, for crying out loud!  So, not that kind of cold, but different enough from what we had been having to qualify as “cold.”

And considering the geographical variable is important. More than a few of my friends have viewed our move from North Carolina to the suburbs of Chicago with disbelief. “Chicago? You’ll freeze to death!”  One replies with art, theater, restaurants - which unfortunately Covid has somewhat curtailed. But let’s stick to weather for the nonce. We are not taking jobs in Chicago - we are retiring. Snow and ice and cold are certainly problematic if you must for some reason leave the fireside. However, if, on the other hand, you are a kind of climatic tourist, toasting your tootsies in front of the fire as the wind and snow goes wurthering around the house, the word that comes to mind is “cozy.”

So I scurried back inside, nursing the flicker of “cozy,” gave Vido, the large and very cozy black lab stretched out on the living room floor a quick rub - he thumped his tail approvingly - and settled back onto the couch. Maybe it was that quick little unexpected “burr” that drew my attention to an article - National Geographic? Curiosity Stream? Not sure which, but the general theme was how various critters were dealing with the approach of winter.  And as is often the case with my iPad browsing I began to skip around. 

First, I perused a video about the black bear population on Vancouver Island - there are quite a lot of them. And the amount of salmon they consume in preparation for their winter hibernation. The phrase “mass quantities” springs to mind from somewhere. Beldar? Perhaps?  The same can be said of the nuts and berries stashed away by all manner of furry critters; squirrels, mice, rabbits, moles and voles, which themselves became entrées for the pre-hibernation feasts of bigger critters.  There was even an article about how bears regulate their insulin to maintain slumber throughout winter. Which got me thinking, why not? If bears do it, bees do it, squirrels up there in the trees do it, why shouldn’t we do it? Let’s do it - let’s hibernate! OK. Getting a little punchy. But really, with CRISPR, and tech barons flirting with cryogenically induced immortality, would some version of human hibernation be such a big deal?

Now, in the name of full disclosure, I must admit that sleeping ranks up there among my favorite activities  - along with dozing, napping, dreaming, etc. So advocating human hibernation fits right in there with one of my wife’s favorite mantras: “anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” But hibernation is not as simple as it might seem at first blush. There are some concerns. First, a number of “hibernators” actually give birth while hibernating. Being male, this would not be an issue for me, but considering my other nocturnal visits to the BR, there is cause for concern. This concern remains despite knowing that bears themselves do take some “hibernation walk-abouts” during the winter. Second, housing. Caves seem fine for furry critters and bats, ponds for amphibious hibernators, eaves for our feathered friends; but I fear we have moved beyond the archaic shared hearths of our progenitors. We seem to have grown overly dependent upon beds that move and shift, warm and cool us, driven by data gleaned from our smartphones, intelligent watches, and brain-reading ear buds. Whoa! I am quickly talking myself out of human hibernation. Maybe, I need to turn away from AI hibernation and pay more attention to “the inner world” of hibernation.

There the attraction remains. When my daughters were young, they were both charter members of BSA (bad sleepers anonymous) and needed help drifting off to sleep. So I would often read to them. However on occasion they - particularly the younger - would request “a story out of your head, Daddy!” And so Mouse Tales was born. Mouse Tales came to be what I called “adventures in lullaby.”  I would tell stories of Papa Mouse, Mama Mouse, Sister Mouse and Brother Mouse who seemed to always be seeking shelter at night as a winter storm was blowing in.  They would scamper up a pine tree, discover a "cosy" abandoned woodpecker hole, filled with warm, soft pine needles.  They would snuggle down into the pine needles, and listen to the wind as the tree swayed gently back and forth and back and forth and back and forth . . . with me repeating the “back and forth” refrain gradually more slowly and quietly until I was able to slide out of the room without one of them popping up to inquire “Then what happened, Daddy?” You get the idea.

I have retained significant aspects of this ritual as I seek to ease myself to sleep. Those of you who are curious about the solitary nature of this ritual have apparently not moved through another of life’s common evolutionary stages: “The Who is Snoring Ritual.” This along with the “God, It’s Freezing in Here Ritual ” partner to the “God I’m Sweating to Death Ritual” or the “l Can’t Sleep Without White Noise Ritual” all of which go a long way to explaining why couples in affluent cultures have separate bedrooms. So bear with me as I share my “could be the seed of human hibernation ritual.”

I target 10 pm as the starting point. I toddle downstairs to my studio cum gallery cum bedroom, a nice finished lower floor, which does unfortunately lack a bathroom, but is acoustically isolated from the rest of the house. Hey, you have to make some trade-offs!  At 10:00 I fire up the iPad, turn on Curiosity Stream, and choose my video. Tonight I am engrossed in a series of Secret Society episodes - The Masons and Knights Templar. That takes about an hour. Sometimes, I’ll opt for a double-feature, but that will run me right up to midnight and endangers my reading hour.

My reading hour is usually dedicated to serialized fiction - mysteries most often. The reading hour also triggers audio elements. Again, iPad centered which allows me to blend classical music with NatureScapes Holographic Audio - rain, wind, water, cicadas, storms, whatever, that forms the background for my reading. OK, so we are now coming up on midnight which is meditation time. And here I do another bit of blending- a Reiki meditation session often backed by a folk music channel from, oh, early 1960s, to maybe mid-70s.  That takes me off toward the tiny hours and I drift off to sleep. Unless, god forbid, somewhere along the line I stumble across an idea that I want to share with you. Then I fire up Evernote and start to write. If I can hold myself to just sketching the main ideas, 2 AM is a reasonable target. But, if I really get into it, just beating sunrise is a more likely goal.

So, really not hibernation at all. More like aestivation - a state of being awake, active. And how terribly, terribly strange is that: throwing myself into a state of aestivation in the pursuit of human hibernation. I am doing something very wrong. Oh? What? Just a shade after midnight. Time to meditate. Maybe Eva Cassidy Songbird, or Live at Blues Alley. I’ll let you know. Night, night.