A Dangling Conversation About Chuck Close and An Exploration of the Self

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It all started when my wife sent me a link to a July 13th essay by Wil S. Hylton in the New York Time. The essay is titled The Mysterious Metamorphosis of Chuck Close - an artist whose work I hadn't really encountered before.  I loved the essay for a couple of reasons.  First, Mr. Hylton is an obvious devotee of long-form writing. And second, he uses all those words to paint an utterly fascinating portrait of an immensely talented and, apparently, equally conflicted portrait artist.  So, to fully play along with this conversation you should read that essay: http://nyti.ms/29EJ2ST

It might actually be best to read that essay and then take a break to mull it over a bit. As I say, Wil is a long-form kind of guy.  So after I had mulled it over for awhile, I sent it along to Ken Zagacki, my friend, colleague and Department Head here at State with whom I delight in musing about things artistic.  With his permission I’ll share his response:

"I like the theory, posed by the author, about Close's fractured identity as he ages and especially as both his mind and body wither. More specifically, on the one hand the brightly colored ("lurid?") self portraits affirm life at the end; on the other hand the somewhat faded color of "Self-Portrait (No Glasses)," with eyes peering from the background darkness, depict the artist slipping into oblivion.

You're an artist: What do you think?"  

So I thought about that for awhile, and made this contribution to the conversation:

If I am experiencing any type of artistic experience that parallels Close's portraiture, it seems to manifest itself more in my writing than in my images. Close has been a painter all his life, hence his artistic/philosophical/spiritual evolution is perhaps best revealed in his painting.  While I taught photography and television production for a number of years early in my career, my own interest in drawing, etc., - actually putting my hand to paper - is relatively new, maybe 10 or a dozen years. [See www.colormechilledout.com] So as a newbie, my efforts in that arena are relatively unsophisticated. However, I have been playing with poetry, juvenile novels, essays, short stories, scholarly articles and textbooks for almost 60 years.  So words, more than images, may better capture my own evolution. 

That being said, what resonates most with me in this story is Close's seeming desire to explore "that which he does not understand."  I suppose that as a teacher and an academician, I tend to try to give the impression that I understand what I am talking about - and in the classroom, anyhow, I usually do.  These days, however, I am far more interested, as Close seems to be, in that which I do not understand. Hence my more meaningful writing on this blog springs most often from what seems to be a shadow of a truth tethered rather tenuously to that which I think I know or believe. Close now chops his self-portraits into grids, and then seems to explore how the self being represented shifts as he fills in the various squares. For me the verbal parallel is a process of weaving of exploratory sentences around that initial shadow of truth; a process that allows me to better understand my represented self. Sometimes that results in some type of progressive understanding of life and existence, other times it simply shifts the direction of subsequent inquiries. 

From that perspective, my essays here are parallels to Close's self-portraits, in that they are verbal snapshots; progressive written explorations of that with which we are in continual contact, that which we pretend to understand, but which, in reality, is the shrouded subject of continual exploration - the self.

And yes, there is an increased intensity of focus that comes with age, illness, and an increased awareness of mortality.

And that is what I think, at the moment anyhow .  .  . 

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Retiring in Garlic or Clover

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"And so what do you do?" 

Conversation allowing, this question follows swiftly upon most introductions. That is unless the answer has been supplied in the introduction as in: "This is my friend, Delilah. She is an agent with the CIA."

What someone does for a living seems to create a cultural niche which allows us hang a lot of assumptions on them.  Level of education, intelligence, status, income, even religious or political affiliation; all these we often infer from one's occupation.

There are a couple of reasons why these inferences may have outlived whatever tentative legitimacy they once possessed. First, the retirement speech that begins "Looking back over my 30 years here at Maxoworks . . . " is swiftly becoming a thing of the past. Someone beginning their "life's work” today, in the early years of the 21st century, can expect to have 5, 10, maybe even a dozen different jobs during their careers. So the response "I'm a graphic artist with Pixar," is most likely temporary and incomplete. The current "artist" may end up, a few years down the road, wearing a suit in the board meeting of a multinational corporation, selling sketches on the street in Paris, or creating flame resistant textiles for NASA. 

"So what do you do?" suddenly becomes more complicated.

But while multiple occupations are one complicating factor in the “what do you do” game, "no occupation” can be equally perplexing. The issue is not so much the unemployed, as it is the retired. The unemployed can define themselves as being "between jobs at the moment," or as "reassessing their options." Our culture is OK with that. It is seen as a pause between identities. But being "retired" is a life space we have never really fully defined.  In the days before vaccines, antibiotics, microsurgery and the insurance programs to pay for them, retirement was a brief span of years after your "work life" before you died. However, my father lived 30 years after retiring at age 70. This extended retirement seems to be an increasing trend in the industrialized world.

More and more we seem to be facing retirement with tolerable economic and physical reserves. But I wonder if we are emotionally ready for it? There is a certain smugness in the responses that the newly retired bring to the question "So what do you do?" "Nothing!" they smirk. "I'm retired!” I’ve even seen T-shirts to that effect.

It is a perspective that seems to work for awhile. Still, I remember, in the days before “digitized" bedrooms, when "Go to your room!" was a punishment. When “doin' nothing" was a banishment from human society; an acknowledgement that to do nothing was to be nothing.  And this is the existential crisis that needs attention when the bloom fades from the "Doin' Nothing!" retirement rose.

I have noticed that AARP has been running commercials that focus on retirement as a "new beginning."  That is certainly a step in the right direction, but I still worry about a kind of whiplash as we move from a profession designed to enhance income and reputation, to a life experience that provides an opportunity to explore the maturation of the self. The problem is that, in all honesty, most of us spend our lives trying to succeed at “a job," which may or may not have a great deal to do with the oracle's admonition to "know thyself." This unfortunate path leads to, upon retirement, our sharing our skin with a stranger.

I have a couple of suggestions as to how we might slip into that skin a bit more easily. In the interest of full disclosure, while quite eligible, I have not yet retired, and have been in the same job, teaching, for almost 45 years, 35 at the same university.  Still my unique situation has given me some experience with my first major suggestion: Practice retiring.

By “practice retiring” I don’t mean calling in sick and going to the movies - that is the “Doin’ Nothing!” phase and needs, it seems, no practice. Rather, I mean practice doing things differently than in your previous experiences.  As I mentioned, today's young job seekers will have this "opportunity" thrust upon them as they negotiate the swiftly evolving job market.  I have been fortunate to teach what used to be called Radio-TV-Film.  As a result I have had to move through various incarnations of that world.  “Image production and distribution” has moved from developing film in a darkroom with batches of distinctly aromatic chemicals, and then cutting the processed film with razor blades and gluing the ends together to make a “whole thing”;  to a new world of pushing buttons on a flat piece of glass called a smartphone or tablet to achieve the same results. The message analysis side of the discipline has fragmented into a variety of areas ranging from incredibly sophisticated algorithm-driven marketing to the equally sophisticated albeit well-nigh impenetrable ramblings of French philosophers from the last century.  The point is that every few years the latest and greatest new technology or critical perspective would raise its head and we would scurry around trying to imagine the world from that new perspective.  That is very similar to what I mean by "practicing retiring.”

Practicing retiring means practicing seeing the world from new perspectives and imaging what in that world might be fun and engaging. It means letting those new perspectives lead you to newly enriched lives.  Most recently, and perhaps furthest removed from my professional training, I have become a professional author of coloring books for adults. [http://www.colormechilledout.com].  The experience literally has me looking at the world differently. My professional background in photography and television had me looking at the world through the eyes of a realist - how does one capture the reality before the lens most honestly?  When you are in coloring book mode, you see the world as broken up into spaces to be colored. It is an experience not unlike those refracting glasses that were popular back in the psychedelic 1960s, but without the munchies.  So rather than creating images that duplicate reality, I attempt to create images that allow others to reinterpret an imagined reality. Practicing retiring is a similar process as we practice seeing the world through new eyes, eyes beyond the blinders of our old “real jobs."

Second suggestion - and perhaps most important: Let the trivial remain trivial.  A couple of weeks ago I saw a couple - seemingly of retirement age - nearly come to blows over whether it was better to get loose garlic heads or those already packaged in boxes of three. The debate seemed to revolve around the benefit of testing the individual heads for firmness, or supporting the notion of the consistency of quality one could assume from mechanical sorting, processing and packing.  I fear it would have been worth my life to step between them and assert “You realize these are only heads of garlic, right?”  The sad truth may be that in the diminished world of their retirement, garlic heads might actually seem that important.  

That is not to say that garlic heads are necessarily unimportant.  When we cook a standing rib roast we insert peeled garlic cloves into slots that have been carved into the meat. Yummy! So, in that instance, the quality of the garlic used in the recipe is important - but not important enough to fight about in a grocery store! It is not an important enough issue over which to raise your voice.  It is, in almost every rational assessment of life, trivial.

Bottom line: if you hear someone - particularly in a public place - raising an argumentative voice - and if, to your embarrassment, you realize that the voice is yours, stop it. First, there is a public nuisance issue here. Think of all those times in restaurants or at symphonies when you asked your partner, or yourself. “Can’t they make that kid shut up?” When “the kid” is you, shut up, or take yourself out to the car until you calm down.

But more importantly there is an existential garlic issue involved here. Before proceeding with a “loose versus packaged” type of harangue I need to ask myself a couple of questions. First, is this my battle? Or even my concern?  Or am I "helping" someone else see the light, by giving them the "benefit" of my insight? Rarely do people actually want that type of assistance, and on those infrequent occasions they will ask for your help. Wait for it.

Secondly, just how trivial is this issue? How important is this garlic moment in the grand scheme of things? And what does my angry passion about these particular garlic heads say about the state of my life?  There is, of course, the chance that I will proceed, certain in my conviction that the relative merits of garlic heads warrant my untoward and boorish behavior.  But at least I will have given harmony a chance.

And it does all come back to Foster Harmony.  Retirement is, by definition, the rest of our life.  We are learning that we need not fill it with “Doin’ Nothing!” We can fill it with a variety of activities that enrich our lives day by day, that make us wiser, happier and more fulfilled.  There will also be heads of garlic.  Let us remember which is worth arguing about.
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Fireflies of Memory

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As we wind our way north to visit family and friends in the "upper Midwest" we have taken to stopping for a couple of days to rest and recharge at a B&B called the Beaumont Inn in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. I was walking around the grounds at dusk when I was visited by some old childhood friends:

Fireflies of Memory

They are fireflies of memory,

Whose tiny votive candles
Bless the rolling lawns 

Of this stately old home.

As evening darkens the skies

Of western Kentucky

They rise from the clover 

In startling numbers.

I remember, I believe,

Similar displays from childhood.

In Ohio, Michigan, and South Dakota,

They would call us into dusk.

Armed with Mason jars,

Lids punctured in futile compassion,

We created short-lived nightlights,

That bathed our bedrooms in wonder.

I do not truly know if those

Childhood excursions

Featured fireflies equal to

Last night's stunning profusion.

But I choose to remember that they did. 

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Fore! Three, Two, One, - Deep Cleansing Breath.

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A friend recently posted on Facebook that his doctor had suggested that he resume playing golf in order to help lower his blood pressure. At first blush this seems a lot like suggesting that an alcoholic add a couple martinis to the evening routine to help combat insomnia.  I mean, really, play golf to lower your blood pressure?  It has been my experience that even really good golfers don’t play golf to lower their blood pressure. Good golfers play golf to lower their score, and they tend to be quite competitive about it.  Let us say you agree to play in a charity golf event. One of those things where you pay an entry fee to play a round of "friendly golf," win some goofy prizes, eat barbecue and drink a cold one or two.  Unless you bring friends along, you are often placed in a foursome with three other charitable souls.  However, god forbid you should get placed in a group with “real golfers;” those folks behind the phrase “shoot a round of golf.”  With these players, you do need to check their golf bags for long guns as well as long irons. The words “Oh, heck. Try that one again,” have never crossed their lips.  The day will be long and your blood pressure will be screaming in your ears.

So, I ask again, resume playing golf to lower your blood pressure?  But then I remember that one of the prominent items on my bucket list is to walk the Augusta National Golf Club course in the Spring. Notice I did not say to play the Augusta National Golf Club course in the Spring. There is a world of difference between walking and playing Augusta, the site of The Master’s.  Serious golfers, both professional and amateur, can spend entire lifetimes pining away to play Augusta, only to die unfulfilled.  I am secure in the knowledge that walking Augusta, like over-wintering in Yellowstone, and singing with Nora Jones, will not come to be, so I don’t let the absence of the possibilities bother me. Mine is a Zen approach to Augusta, and Zen and golf are unlikely bedfellows - but should not be.   

My wanting to walk Augusta has nothing to do with a desire to slam a 300-yard drive down a fabled fairway and chip in from a half mile away for a world-shaking Albatross. [I even had to look up Albatross - three under par for the hole. A “Condor" is four under par on a hole. A hole-in-one on a par five is all I can come up with.] No, I want to walk Augusta because it is beautiful, literally-take-your-breath-away beautiful. There are beautiful gardens in manor houses and palaces all around the world. Augusta is quite comfortable in their company.  It is not hard to understand how a physician could suggest that a patient walk a golf course to lower blood pressure.  The exercise can’t hurt, and even lesser courses than Augusta are designed, in part, for pleasing vistas.  But play golf to lower your blood pressure?

Yes, perhaps, but only if you bring Zen onto the course, into the playing and not just the walking.  When my father passed 90 - years of age, not a golf score - he forgot that golf was, after all, just a game and not terribly important in the grand scheme of things. Until then he and I often played Zen golf. Zen golf meant forgiving errant shots - "Oh, take that one again" - and forgetting exactly what we had on that last hole - "Five? No, I think you had a four.”  It also meant seeing beyond the game, beyond the fairway to the garden around us:  “What do you think that squirrel is up to?” “What are those purple flowers? Your Mother would have known.”

A famous bit from the song Ya Got Trouble from the musical The Music Man goes like this as Prof. Harold Hill decries the creeping influence of horse racing and  -

“ .  .  .  horse-race gamblin'.

Not a wholesome trottin' race, no!

But a race where they set down right on the horse!

Like to see some stuck-up jockey'boy

Sittin' on Dan Patch? Make your blood boil?

Well, I should say!"

If we pay attention we know what makes our “blood boil,” and hence we know what lowers our blood pressure.  Anger, frustration, fear - these negative emotions all make our blood boil, raise our blood pressure.  Happiness, forgiveness, love, calm - we can feel our heart slow, our breathing ease, our boiling blood cooling down.  In the final analysis then, lowering our blood pressure is not tied exclusively to what we do. How we do it also plays an important role.  And it goes far beyond golf - it is about how we live life.  Maybe the idiot who cut you off on the freeway isn’t really an idiot. Maybe they just got word that a loved one had been taken to the hospital. So instead of raising our blood pressure with ancient Italian hand gestures, we should lower it with a murmured “God speed and good luck!”  I tend to think that most of the slights we imagine in life are just that - imagined. Letting them slide off your back is a really great way to lower your blood pressure.

So it would seem, after all is said and done, that you actually can play golf to lower your blood pressure; but only if you wrap it in forgiving and forgetting and treat yourself to an occasional meander off the fairway out into the garden.

“No, no. That’s OK, I meant to hit it over here. A mulligan? Sure. Thanks! I’ll be back in a minute. There’s a little frog over here .  .  . "

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Use All the Words You Need

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It is, I suppose sufficiently ironic to warrant a millennial's eyeroll, that coloring, an activity I pursue specifically to avoid technology-driven undertakings, has thrown me into the maelstrom of Web 2.0, social media and maybe even Web 2.0534, the "Thingy Internet.” As I explore with my publisher the various ways of marketing Color Me Chilled Out online, I am rediscovering parts of the digital world that I had forgotten. It is certainly a world creating its own norms, and that is as it has always been with the media.  

When any communication system reaches a position of cultural dominance, it both shapes and reflects the culture of which it is a part. Newspapers boomed in conjunction with public education.  A literate audience advantaged all print based communication.  The emergence of radio, television and film brought audio and video to center stage. And now we have the Internet - or the Web - all those enchanting, distracting sights and sounds on our computers, tablets and smartphones - and yes, when appropriate, you may remind me that I refused to use the word “phablet."

My current concern is that a loosely-defined cadre of “experts" is defining a set of digital compositional assumptions with which I take exception.  I actually taught a course on writing for the Internet a few years ago - 2010? 2011? - using Christopher Johnson’s Microstyle  and a couple other then-cutting-edge textbooks. Anyhow, also having taught the first HTML course at my university back in 1994, it struck me that it was time to see how the process of putting words and images on screens had shifted in the last decade or so. Sadly, the emerging norms appear to lean in the direction of “quick and dirty,” although that “meme” has been massaged into “immediate and impactful.” 

I am not so much an old fogey that I would suggest that we will find excellence only by looking over our shoulder.  And one positive insight we can take away from new media assertions is the notion of the 360 degree perspective. When we do that we come to realize that there are models for excellence lurking at every point of the compass. Sure, texting invents “words" that may or may not be around next year, or even next week. But Shakespeare is credited with creating new words when they suited his fancy - when they aided the message. The fascists of the 1930s and 40s also moulded the then currently available media to craft a xenophobic milieu that seemed to convince the local populace to tolerate their later atrocities more passively. Current politicians are using the same strategies with modern media to Trumpet an equally hateful agenda. So yes, everything old is new again. Hence, we need to take a 360 degree perspective when looking at both the old and the new in order to design our own “best practices” for digital communication.  And that certainly applies to blogging.

Katy Munger, an old friend of mine - and the current NC Piedmont Laureate - recently wrote an insightful series of posts regarding the place of novelists and other writers in an Internet world. [see http://bit.ly/1Q5drvM]. Among her excellent suggestions is that we keep in mind our intended audience. It should not surprise us that the intended audience demographic at which much of the content currently available on the Internet is aimed is the18-to-30-year-olds for whom “Sit there quietly and read your book,” is a punishment.  My oldest friend, for whom the phrase “brother from another mother” is most appropriate, once told me that his idea of heaven was a room filled with an inexhaustible supply of novels. He is out there with you on “SchragWall,” and serves as an excellent definition of my intended audience; thoughtful, educated, humorous - an audience that loves to read.

It is an audience that gets stopped in its tracks by an artfully constructed phrase, sentence, paragraph, poem or novel.  Try making a list of the "Oh, my! That is just excellent!" moments you have encountered in the world of literature.  Among others on my list I find:

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, the "love is not love" one.

Billy Collins' wonderful poem on Forgetfulness.

Elizabeth Bennet's delightful rebuke of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice.

The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear - in Frank Herbert's Dune.

Well, I could go on, as no doubt you can as well.  The point is that none of these owe much to the ideas of "short sentences," "simple words," 146 characters, and emojis.  My assertion is not that the Internet prohibits meaningful literary moments. Most haikus fit comfortably within the restraints of a tweet. Rather, my concern leans increasingly to software constraints that mandate a particular advocacy of "short form composition."  If you are reading this post in the original blog, there is a text block somewhere on the page titled "About Me" where I was encouraged to "tell your readers all about yourself." I had written what I felt was a nice bio for another of my websites “Agent of Calm," and thought I would use it in the About Me block on SchragWall. Not so fast, buckeroo! What they really meant was tell your readers everything about yourself that fits in 1200 characters - letters, punctuation and spaces!  

This is where the Internet turns the old adage "form follows function" on its head. The function is to tell your readers all about you, so the form should enable whatever amount of text, images and music are necessary to complete the function. That was one of the original wonders of the Internet. Back in 2002, when I was the editor of the Journal of The American Communication Association, we were giddy - “No page limits, bring on the images, trot out the music!”  Not, apparently, on your Blogger “About Me” block. I had originally fulfilled the function of “About Me” on the Agent of Calm website in around 3300 “characters.” But here on Blogger the form dictates that the function fit into a form that holds only 1200 letters, spaces and punctuation.  This new "formalism" is evident everywhere throughout the Internet, nudging us all to "short form” constructions. Hvn 4bid! :-(

Mind you, I am not arguing that we should make the academic notion of “Why use 2 words when 15 work just as well?” the norm on the Internet. I am simply asking that we retain places on the Internet where “long form” composition is seen as the future of serious literature and not simply as an interesting relic from days gone by.  Ebooks certainly have a role to play here, but so does blogging. And while in today’s parlance I claim the title of “long-form Blogger,” it would have been great fun, in the 1700s and 1800s, to be an essayist. To be sitting on a overstuffed chair before a fire on a winter's day, chewing on the end of a quill pen, gazing over a frosted pond or garden, and looking down my nose at those infernal mechanical writing machines.

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The Alien's Dilemma: Part Two

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So we last left Zoron circling our solar system attempting to ascertain earth's potential to eventually abandon bloodshed as its dominant form of conflict resolution.  Such an evaluation could span centuries, and during that time Zoron might have encountered the broadcast signals of old radio and TV shows that would only now be making their way to the scout craft.  Among them might be early cartoons such as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. Elmer's lisp might not make it past today's PC censors, but my generation delighted when Bugs out-foxed Elmer, leaving the frustrated hunter fuming "Dwat, that wasscally wabbit!" 

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Zoron might have, in the scout's early attempts to understand our spoken language, mistaken "wabbit" for "yabbit" - and Zoron had heard yabbit over and over throughout our sordid history. Zoron had come to realize that "yabbit" often was included in the rhetoric that preceded violent conflicts in earth culture.  It could be heard in predictive patterns - almost a call and response, from playgrounds to battlegrounds: "We are peace loving people who believe in friendship and freedom. Yabbit, they started it!" At which time the two sides clobber each other with baloney sandwiches, small arms fire, or nuclear devices, depending on their resources and lack of self-control. 

I hope you will pardon my use of what must be one of the worst extended puns in the short history of blogging, but shifting Elmer and Bugs' wabbit to yabbit and then to the painful moral equivocation of “ Yeah But" allows me to sneak up on what might be the only solution to the Alien's Dilemma that gives us any hope of avoiding a lonely life of galactic isolation - and far more likely - self-destruction. 

Anyone who has studied history know that advocates of peaceful co-existence have arisen more than once here on our fortuitously positioned third planet out from the sun. But with stunning regularity they and their movements - political, religious or philosophical - are eventually confronted with violent opposition. Sometimes the MLKs and Ghandis of the world prevail at least to the extent of creating significant, but never total, change. But much more often the glimmer of peaceful coexistence crumbles before one horrific "Yeah But" or another. 

Consider Einstein. A cultural, largely unobservant, Jew, Einstein was the darling of the radical pacifist movement of the 1930s and early 1940s. He was an early personification of the 1960s slogan, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" And then Hitler, Stalin and The Empire of Japan unleashed upon the world a level of barbarous brutality previously unknown in history.  Einstein's pacifism crumbled before the onslaught.  We responded with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, crushed by weapons based, in part, on Einstein’s brilliance. “Yeah But they started it!" And “Yeah But it would have been worse if we had invaded the mainland!" 

The problem with "Yeah But,” is that it is occasionally nigh onto irrefutable. Hitler, Stalin and Imperialist Japan, did have to be stopped, and they did start it. But somehow those global affirmations allows "Yeah But” to gain traction in other, far less certain, arenas. The mainstream West, across belief systems, sees ISIS as evil entity who “started it” and so we launch our drones. The affects of the drones allows the radical leaders of ISIS to holler “Yeah But they started it!" and they ratchet up their level of mayhem. And so it trickles all the way down to “Yeah But” he cut me off on the freeway, and “Yeah But” she meant to spill her chocolate pudding on my sandwich. 

I do not know why we remain enslaved to such an intellectually and morally bankrupt worldview. We may caught in Darwinian shackles, carnivores destined to react violently to any perceived threat.  Maybe there is a “Yeah But” gene that CRISPR can excise. I do not know. Perhaps Zoron, and the other intelligent members of the Galactic Empire are descended from beings who resolved their “Yeah Buts” through shunning.  A bully, whether on the playground or in their pinnacles of power, was shunned by all, and for Zoron’s people this was fatal.  Their bullies simply shriveled into dust and drifted away on an uncaring breeze. Of course, if this is the case we are in trouble. We would simply be an unacceptable risk for such a non-violent culture, and Zoron would soon throttle up, up and away. 

For those of us left here, it is not really a case of “nowhere to run to.”  Much of what we have accomplished as a species we have accomplished in spite of our occasional descents into mindless violence.  Like the slowly maturing children of exasperated parents, we really do know that “Yeah But” leads eventually to death and destruction. We know that we need to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to its siren song; we need to shun those who jump up and down, pointing at the “different other" next door hollering “Yeah But! Yeah But!”  We need to greet each day and meet each “Yeah But,” with the tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm.  A cultural norm, after all, is only the sum of our personal perspectives. We can live each day in such a way as to add make harmony the norm, to shun “Yeah But,” to give Zoron, and Earth a glimmer of hope. 

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The Alien's Dilemma

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The mid-May edition of New Scientist features articles on "information."  Something called "Maxwell's Demon" plays a large role in one article. It seems that James Clerk Maxwell, the 1880s darling of the posh physics set, constructed a mind experiment to demonstrate how information could move from an intellectual, mental construct to a physical reality. 

Maxwell asked us to imagine a two-chambered box, divided by a wall with a frictionless gate. In each chamber an equal number of molecules were bouncing around at random.  However, Maxwell's Demon knew when a molecule was approaching the gate. Armed with only that information, the Demon could open the gate and allow a molecule to pass between the chambers, creating an uneven number of molecules in the two chambers. That, according to the second law of thermodynamics, would cause a temperature change in the box. This proves, according to Maxwell and his Demon, that "information" could do "work" and hence had very real physical characteristics.  I'll get back to you to clarify that concept in six or seven years. 

But it did get me thinking about the idea of thought experiments and how they might be useful in "rethinking" some of the important issues in our life.  So the idea of Maxwell's Demon combined, no doubt, with the episode on crop circles that I had recently watched on the History Channel to come up with this thought experiment I call The Alien's Dilemma. Imagine if you will that . . . . 

Zoron is a scout for the for the Galactic Empire.  It is Zoron's task to evaluate planets with life that has evolved to a certain level of intelligence and decide whether or not they can be admitted to the Empire.  This is a big deal because member planets receive Galactic knowledge, freedom from sickness, immortality, intergalactic cruises, all those for which intelligent life pines. 

Zoron begins the assessment of the third planet from the star in a minor star-system. The locals call it earth.  The wrinkle in this thought experiment is the fact that Zoron can only sense affiliation and action.  Zoron knows when the entities on Earth feel they are affiliated with other entities - so Zoron call discern among all our social and cultural clusters - from huge groups like racial identity and nationality, down through things like religious and political affiliation, all the way to cliques on a middle school playground.  And Zoron can assess the actions that unfold between and among those groups. But that is all that Zoron can understand. Zoron cannot understand the explanations that the various affiliated groups offer for their actions. It is a binary assessment: affiliation and action. 

What is revealed to Zoron is that we, most commonly, resolve conflicts between and among affiliated groups violently. Zoron looks up previous assessments of the planet called earth in the galactic records and discovers that there appears to be no record of any time on Planet Earth that was free from violent conflict between various affiliated groups. Earth appears to be a planet constantly at war. 

As you might guess this is sufficient data to put the blue ball of earth in the rear view mirror, set the GPS to Alpha Centauri, and set all thrusters on full escape mode. Nobody in their right mind would advocate bringing an entire planet of blood-stained cretins into the galactic empire. And that would be the easy choice, were it not for the Alien's Dilemma. 

You see, every scout has the option of visiting a sentient planet if the scout believes the planet is worth saving. If they so choose, the scout may land on the planet and champion the inhabitants by converting them to the harmonic precepts of the Galactic Empire. Zoron knows this option exists, and it has the scout on the horns of a .  .  .  well, you know what. You see, if the scout fails to establish the appropriate criteria for entry into the Galactic Empire on the planet - the punishment is harsh. The scout must remain there. For Zoron the frustrating thing about this little planet is that shows flashes of higher order thinking. There seem to have been isolated instances when affiliated groups have attempted to resolve conflicts without violence. Even the most dominant affiliated groups show occasional evidence of the harmonic precepts of the Galactic Empire, often just before bending all the resources of their affiliation to assuring the bloody demise of another affiliated group. 

For the time being, I am going to leave Zoron there, poised on the horns of the Alien's Dilemma. My next post will deal with how we, through our own behavior, might increase the odds that the Alien’s Dilemma might be resolved in our favor. 

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Diamond and Gold

Diamonds and gold,

Diamonds and gold, 

Neither will keep you 

Warm when you're cold. 

Still they sparkle and shine 

When pried from the mine 

And something about them 

We find passing fine. 

So we keep on digging 

No matter the toll 

We keep right on digging 

For diamonds and gold. 

It is a silly little ditty that crept into my head, waking me at 3 AM the other morning.  But rather than disparaging avarice, it reminded me that value clings to that which is scarce. Increasingly, for me, the commodity in question is verbiage. When I first wandered up to the front of a college classroom, some 44 years ago, to face a sea of student faces, loquaciousness was an important arrow in my quiver. Never was the old saw "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit" more apropos. Give me any topic remotely related to my field and I could ride a veritable tsunami of sentences that, as often as not, would - some 50 minutes later - come to rest on a beach that passed for insight. Later I honed the skill to such a degree that anything less than a three-hour seminar seemed an unworthy challenge. 

Perhaps the ebbing of that tide of prose led to the late-blooming third of the four primary tenets of Distilled Harmony: Distill Complexity. Though my students would no doubt argue the point, I have largely abandoned bullshit, seeking instead to provide genuine insight supported by clear, contemporary, supporting evidence. Trying to hit that small, swift target on the fly has profoundly increased my respect for skeet shooting. 

The problem, you see, is that the classroom demands spontaneous composition. Unless you wish to be reduced to the stereotype of the ivy-covered professor droning on over yellowed notes before a classroom stuffed with dozing students, you need to create lectures that weave the verities of the past together with the evolving evidence of today - extemporaneously. Pull!  Blam! Damn! Missed! 

Perhaps it is the increasing illusiveness of the spontaneous bon mote that leads me to now prefer words upon a page. They don’t slip around as much there as they do in front of a hundred students, when the perfect example is lodged there on the edge of your brain but eludes your tongue.  On paper they behave more like brush strokes on canvas; changing the lighting there, softening an edge there, painting out the ugly parts altogether.  

  

The more I think about it, what I’m talking about - well, writing about - is part of a set of natural cycles of caring and competence.  As we move though our lives we encounter existential niches that capture our hearts and our minds and we invest in that niche to hone the competencies demanded by it.  Across the middle decades of my life, as a camp counselor, an acting major, and then as an instructor in small college classes [15 to 25 students], storytelling was such an important niche.  Whether telling a tall tale around a campfire, depicting Miller’s Willy Lohman, or unfolding the early history of the Pony Express - watching the gleam in the audience’s eye was the key to knowing when and how you would punch the important line.  And it shifted with every audience.  In today’s modern and “online classrooms” clinging to that caring for the individual camper, audience member or student is an exercise in frustration. In today's efficiently humongous lecture halls there are too many students in the classroom [60 to 360] to actually see them as individuals, or in the online classroom, there are no students there at all - just a camera pretending to be alive. 

It is more bland than distasteful.  After all, working in front of a camera isn’t that much different than working from a stage where you can hide in the light and imagine the audience loves you.  It’s OK - but just not much more than that. 

Words on a page however are something else entirely.  The allure is at least twofold, maybe threefold or morefold. One attraction lies there in “morefold” that my software is desperately trying to correct for me. [Psst! Robert, that’s not a word. It should be “more fold.”] But if you accept that correction the software will then try to correct your grammar. The fight can be tedious, but I have come to see it as a personal bond with Shakespeare.  The Bard is often credited with adding about 1700 new words to the English language. No doubt the upper crust looked down from their boxes and sneered, “Bedazzled!? Z’wounds, its not even a word!” But it became one - because it was just so right for the moment.  I doubt that “morefold” will gain the traction of "bedazzled,” but whenever I take arms against a sea of software, I feel a sense of, probably unwarranted, kinship with Billy, as we try to bend the language to our purpose. 

Secondfold, is the idea that the words leave here and make their merry way across the Internet, at least into your mailbox, to Senior Correspondent and perhaps even further afield.  It is not too difficult to imagine you reading them - as some of you write back and tell me that you do. Students, not so much, if tests are any indication of attention.  But still on occasion, sometimes after several years, a student will slide into my email box and say “Thank you. Your lectures were interesting and valuable.”  And, like golf, that one good shot keeps you coming back. 

Thirdfold, is just the pleasure of giving these thoughts and words and sentences a home.  They, I assume, wake me for a reason.  They are notes that are important, somehow, to the chord that is me; to the sentient articulation that is my unique presence in existence. I should give them the attention, the caring, they deserve.  And, of course, it would be silly to get up to write without seeing what was left in the refrigerator. 

And finally, there is morefold.  No doubt I will find just the right words to describe that entity after a small sandwich, or perhaps a doughnut. 

The Arrow of Time, or Sorry Marty and The Insidious MRC

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As a young stage-struck theater major, I thought that the first law of thermodynamics was that you always moved to the center of the brightest spotlight. I have since learned that it is the first of the three absolute laws of the universe that declares that the amount of energy and matter in the universe is constant. Neither can be created or destroyed. But they can transform; H2O can be ice, water or a gas, but the molecules that make up those three states must remain constant. I have also learned, I think, that information, as a phase of energy, is similarly immune to destruction. 

Perusing that last assertion will make your brain hurt if you are not fairly well versed in theoretical physics. Even Physics for Dummies - and, yes, there is such a publication - fails the Distilled Harmony mandate to Distill Complexity.  But as I said, I think that information slips in there with mass and energy in the first law of thermodynamics as “things in the universe that cannot be destroyed.”  Maybe it can - but only at the edges of certain types of black holes, and if you are Stephen Hawking, because most of the other physics biggies seem to disagree.

As I lie here in bed at 3 AM staring at the LED of the speaker playing a thunderstorm, this strikes me as important.  It would seem that entities, particles, people, puppies, what have you, in the course of existence, move from a state of less information to a state of more information. To reverse that process, for time to run backwards, energy would have to be lost, which contradicts said "first law of thermodynamics." Hence the arrow of time runs one way. From the past into the future. Which, it appears, puts the kibosh on the idea of time travel, at least on a round trip to the future, a realization that, seemingly will always prevent Marty McFly from going Back to the Future.

Whew. Now that we have taken care of that, let us move on to a more complicated issue: the stairwell memory repressing condensate hypothesis. The phenomenon is common enough. I am sitting at my desk in the downstairs office and I sudden realize I need something from the floor above. I get up and begin to climb the stairs. Upon reaching the landing I realize I have no idea why I am going upstairs.  The phenomenon can also be observed in reverse - unlike the one way arrow of time. I can be upstairs and realize that I need something on the main floor. Once again, upon reaching the landing, all knowledge of my objective vanishes.  The secret lies in the fact that if I continue, clueless, to the floor that was my original objective, either up or down, after a moment or two I can recall why I needed to be there. Hence:

The Stairwell Memory Repressing Condensate Hypothesis

There is something - let us call it MRC for Memory Repressing Condensate - that gathers in the stairwell landings that interferes with the normal neurological process we call "memory."  When we move through the MRC it ceases to affect us and memory returns. I would posit two solutions - ceiling fans or a nap. 

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Downsizing the Upgrades

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I run a values clarification exercise in my classes that asks the students to give serious consideration to their core beliefs; what those beliefs are, and where they came from. The idea for these technology classes is that when we encounter a new app for our phone, or a new piece of technology like virtual reality goggles, we need to decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing. We need to ask questions. Should the government be able to access your email? Should your phone always report where you are? Can people say anything they want about you on the Internet?  The idea I try to stress is that they need to run everything they encounter through the filter of their values; people, careers, technology, their own behavior.  Everything needs to be evaluated in terms of that core set of values.

I nudge them toward the idea of constructing a nice tight set of hierarchical core values that can serve as a “first pass” set of criteria as they move through their lives. Foster Harmony is the first tenet of my “hierarchical core” - Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, Oppose Harm. So Foster Harmony becomes my first filter for new elements I encounter in my life. With people it is pretty simple. People who are discordant, rude, racist bullies simply drop out of the “worth my time or consideration” category. It doesn’t matter if they are neighbors, colleagues, or presidential candidates. Which of course brings us to the topic of this essay which is, no, not politics, it is software development. And the tenet under consideration is the third one: Distill Complexity.

The problem with upgrades, you see, is like the Hogwarts Staircases.  In the Harry Potter movies, more than in the novels, the staircases at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry seem to be in constant movement. The older students navigate them with nary a second thought, while new students seem in danger of imminent death by nasty knocking newells. It is a delightful cinematic device. Everything is in a perpetual state of change, you never know quite where you are or where you will end up. Delicious. But when the notion of constant chaos becomes the default for your computer, laptop or phone, the novelty quickly wears thin. 

“Upgrade” is a word whose meaning and impact has shifted significantly over the past few decades.  Think of that old movie from the early 1990s, “Sleepless in Seattle”: “Bing. You’ve got mail!” There was time when getting email was kind of exciting - someone you knew was reaching out to you across that Internet thingy to communicate with you. Now, when I awake to fewer than 50 new emails it may be an easy day.  And that, of course, is the crux of the matter.  Computers, the Internet, smartphones, etc., everything that makes up our digital world was originally designed to make us more efficient, more creative, better, happier. “Bing. Not so much."

Distill Complexity points to that failed promise.  In my life my technology should do those promised tasks, let me write, paint, draw, and contact people more easily and efficiently.  What software developers obviously do not understand is that if you continually develop and release “upgraded" suites of software that may correct existing flaws in the software, that same “upgrade" actually introduces undesirable complexity into my world.  The developers may, like the older students at Hogwarts hopping up and down the shifting stairways, see these upgrades as really excellent and intuitive improvements. 

However while coders see features like automatically sorting my mail into predetermined categories, asking if I want to save a website’s URL to the cloud, popping a text message on my screen while I am composing a document - as improvements, to many of us they are just messing up our digital world. What I did one way in the older version, I now have to do a different way in the “upgrade.”  The coders seem to have lost track of the fact that for me - and I would assert for most of us - software is just a tool, like a hammer, or paint brush or screwdriver. The software is not the element of importance in a task, it is simply a route to that more important objective; the document, the images, the song, that allow us to Enable Beauty - realizing the second tenet.

I would like to suggest a new tenet for coders based on “Distill Complexity”: Invisible Improvements.  The basic idea is that the improvements are “under the hood.” What I do, my “click route” to a task remains the same - the coder’s “better, faster, more stable” parts of the process are invisible to me. I don’t have to relearn how to use the software. And please, please, don’t change what I see on the screen.  While a coder might think it is “better” to have a neon hammer with four interchangeable heads with variable density, I just use it to hammer a picture hanger on the wall. Leave it alone.

Another analogy: Think “Upstairs Downstairs”. Think "Downton Abbey”. The servants were invisible, but absolutely vital. They made things happen, but never, never, did they interrupt the smooth flow of life above stairs. The code, the applications, and the people who create them should live downstairs. The test of their quality is measured by how invisibly they make sure that life above stairs functions smoothly, beautifully.

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The Continuing Promise of the Sunrise

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I have reached that age when conversations with friends often include discussions of "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" and their potential remedies. That is not, by the by, a complaint. The alternative is far less to be desired.

I would however like to assert that our objections to those "natural shocks" are largely the result of measuring our lives by the wrong ruler, or yardstick, or meter stick, or whatever you might wish to call it.  We make the mistake of measuring today in terms of yesterday. A brief example - yoga.  Would I like to regain the flexibility that used to amaze my doctor during my yearly check ups when I was in my 40s? Sure. Am I ready to buy a mat, special shoes and, shudder, spandex in order to coax my 67 year-old body back into that bygone decade? No. Especially when I realize that I, like all of us, was most flexible as a baby. I mean have you watched those little critters? They bend like Gumby, and no amount of sweat and spandex will ever get any of us back to those days.

Which might make the theme of this essay seem a bit strange: I believe I wake up every day better than I was the day before. Absurd? Better at 67 after two stem cell transplants than at 57, 47, 37? In a word: Yes.

It is, of course, all about the ruler. In 21st century America we tend to measure "better" in units defined by our media. Consider the t-shirt "You can never be too rich or too thin." We start getting "informative" emails from our employers telling us that not only are we eligible for "phased retirement," but we might want to consider what our Social Security options might be. Reality TV shows peek into the lives of 20 or 30-somethings as if there were something of importance to learn there. Wrong rulers. Warped rulers. Wrong. Wrong.

Recently I have been cleaning out files that stretch back over my four decades as a university professor. Correspondence before computers. Yearly semi-aggrandizing “reports” on my accomplishments. Oh my. Now, truthfully, when measured by "age and maturity appropriate rulers" I did OK. But given the opportunity to speak to my 27 or 37 or 47 year-old selves, my 67 year-old self would say, "Son, let's grab a beverage and chat. I can make this all a bit easier for you."

Eastern cultures, Native American cultures, aboriginal cultures all seem to have grasped something that we have let slip away in modern America: as we grow older, we often grow wiser. And that is what I mean when I say I wake up every day better than I was the day before. You see, I - and you - wake up every day a bit older and a bit wiser than we were the day before.

A couple of important caveats: When I say wiser, I don't necessarily claim to have a bunch of solid answers to life's confusions. But I do have some, and I have a lot of better questions than I had when I was younger. And, hopefully, I express both the questions and the conclusions with more grace and subtlety than did the youngster I once was.

Also, I have made many more mistakes than I had had time for when I was younger. So little time, so many mistakes.  But there is no better way to learn how to do something right than by doing it wrong a few times.

So that is the continuing promise of each sunrise: we wake each day - perhaps stiffer, maybe nursing the occasional twinge - but still we rise, older and wiser than we were the day before. And that, my friend, is something for which we should be thankful.

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The First of Nevermore

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The first time ever 

Announces itself 

With trumpets and cymbals:

The first time ever I

Came to this place

Breathed this air

Saw your face

Felt your kiss

Trumpets and cymbals.

But

The first of nevermore,

Like death,

Slides in silently.

Cloaked in secrecy:

Never to be seen again

Vanished without a trace

No further evidence 

The last time I ever

Knowing this

Remove the sting 

Of nevermore

By painting each

Precious day

In the fleeting hues of

The first time ever. 

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The Last Refuge of the Incompetent

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Once you set out to articulate your personal code of life, you soon discover why so many people choose to let someone else do it.  All the world’s great faith communities, governments, political parties, and most social and fraternal organizations have codified their beliefs in a “good book” or a series of laws, regulations, best practices, symbols, handshakes, what have you.  The problem, of course, is that as those codifying documents and rituals proliferate, it becomes relatively easy to find bits and pieces that contradict each other. This allows the various adherents to that particular “good book" to cherry pick which elements of “the truth” they intend to claim.  This tends to lead to bloody schisms as folks following one subset of beliefs decide that they must confront - often violently - those other folks who have foolishly chosen another subset of beliefs to guide them.

 

However, when the document you begin to examine for contradictions is one you yourself have created, you often find yourself deep in heartfelt arguments with, well, yourself.  It would be nice to blame someone else for those discordant inconsistencies. It would be nice, but not terribly productive, and more than a touch schizophrenic 

Distilled Harmony would, at first glance, appear relatively free from ideological contradictions. I mean, after all there are only four tenets: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. Pretty simple right? Only at first glance.  Maybe I put Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm at opposite ends of the mantra so it wouldn’t be so obvious that they are in direct contradiction.  Foster Harmony clearly has its roots in philosophies similar to Isaac Asimov’s assertion that "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. King come to mind as significant, relatively recent adherents to that non-violent creed. But then you open your morning news emails and read about the latest atrocities committed by one group or another in order to enforce their notion of “truth” upon innocent others, and you wonder at what point one needs to move past Fostering Harmony to a remedy based in Opposing Harm.

These days the media, both corporate and social; as well as coffeehouse conversations ring with the strum und drang of contemporary geopolitics marred by much volume and little reflection. The dominant theme is discord, angst, and variations on “my way or the highway!”  The truly ironic element in these parrying pontifications is that they are often voiced by people who, like me, have no power to implement the changes they advocate so strongly. Truthfully now - what role do I have in determining who occupies the White House in DC, or the Governor’s Mansion here in Raleigh? Oh, don’t get me wrong - I vote, I click and contribute my $3.00 or 5 dollars - several times - to the candidates whose positions are most harmonic with mine. I sign online petitions that support issues that seem to express a harmonious interaction among people and the fragile earth upon which we live, and on which depend.  Yet, I am not content to accept the notion that my single digital data point among millions in our internet driven “mentally of the herd” world is “the best I can do.” 

So, while realizing the minimal impact I have upon the globe, at the moment I am content to let “real personal impact” be my guide.  Political scientists and economists have, for decades, discussed “spheres of influence”. These are, to the best of my knowledge, the geopolitical areas whose policies and practices are guided by the most dominant nation  in the region.  The cold war was a tug of war between the US and the USSR to maintain and/or expand their “spheres of influence."

What, realistically, I ask myself, is my sphere of influence? What is the reach of my behavior? How can I maximize Harmony and reduce discord by Opposing Harm? If I restrict my “area of angst” to events and individuals that I can actually influence, the contradiction between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm becomes less intense.  I have no real influence over the “haters” of the world.  To directly thwart ISIS, to move our government out of contentious gridlock, to reaffirm the value of higher education in the nation - these are goals beyond my meager efforts. But I may be able to exert a gentle influence over others - my students, my friends, those of you who encounter these ramblings on one screen or another. In those areas I will still give Foster Harmony precedence, I will still attempt to champion Harmony whenever possible. To Foster Harmony, through individual harmonious acts, is analogous to tossing a pebble into a pond. The harmonious act spreads out across the surface of the pond, replicating ripples that gently, eventually, fill the surface. It is chaos theory, with the wings of the jungle butterfly spawning cooling rains across parched deserts continents away.  This may be the nature of my "sphere of influence”, largely invisible to me, but of possible value to others.

Comforting as this conclusion may be, it does not entirely still my fear of leaving Oppose Harm a place among the four major tenets of Distilled Harmony.  The danger is that the haters of the world have often pried their violent manifesto from some minor passage in their “good book” and elevated it to a mandate for evil.  It would be foolish to deny that evil exists in the world. Stalin and Hitler in the history I studied; ISIS, and other terrorists - both foreign and domestic - in the world that unfolds around me today. These evidences of evil should not go unopposed. But that opposition must not subvert the moral dominance of Harmony, allowing some evil, violent, social contrariness to parade as “the real truth” around which moral discord may rally. 

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