A False Dichotomy

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Halloween is looming. Orange and black is the new black. Strange creatures populate every commercial cranny. And people who are old enough to know better are asking themselves, “What will I be for Halloween?” I assume that come the 31st, the Undead will figure prominently in a variety of displays.  They are very hot media properties despite their questionable existence in the real world.

The history of Halloween gets spun differently depending on who is doing the spinning. A few minutes on the Internet can take you from Halloween as a time to place flowers on the graves of your ancestors to honor their memory, to Halloween as the time when the denizens of the underworld can clamber up into the “real world” and walk among us - often with evil intent. "Be afraid! Be very afraid!”  It is this latter view that favors the frolicking Undead. And, unfortunately, it is the one that intrudes upon my thoughts these days.

You see, public displays of fear have been troubling my university over the last week or so.  It started with a couple of overtly racist GroupMe posts between NC State students being captured with screen shots.  The captured posts went viral, necessitating a response by the Chancellor, resulting in a great deal of public angst throughout both town and gown.  As you know, if you have been attending to this blog over the last decade or so, racism stands in direct opposition to the four tenets of Distilled Harmony [www.distilledharmony.com], so there is no question that I find the content of the posts abhorrent.  However, having spent about 41 years teaching college, I am equally committed to the idea that college campuses are exactly the places where competing ideas must collide.  Popular speech, happy speech, conformist speech needs no protection.  It is unpopular speech, revisionist speech, minority speech, and yes, stupid speech, that needs protection. It is only in an environment that protects such speech that all ideas can be contested.

Other colleagues will argue that the posts are "hate speech" and hence give up their right to protected status.  I will leave that to the lawyers.  I will however suggest that what we often label hate speech isn’t really hate speech. It is fear speech. Let me explain.

The first tenet of Distilled Harmony is to Foster Harmony.  That demands that - in order to live a harmonic life - we must examine the existential tension between areas of harmony and areas of discord and subsequently champion harmony. E.g., kindness is harmonic, cruelty is discordant. Hence if we seek to live a harmonic life, to Foster Harmony in our existence, we need to privilege kindness over cruelty.  Hate speech would seem to privilege hate over love. But to cast love and hate as polar opposites misses, I think, the true areas of opposition.  The more accurate poles of opposition are love and fear.  Think about it for a moment.  If you have a “pocket of hate” hidden in your psyche somewhere, peek in there for a moment.

Do you really “hate” those people, or do you fear what your world will look like if “those people” and “their language,” “their religion,” “their culture,” whatever, come to dominate your day-to-day life?  Or do you fear them because “they” and “their language,” “their religion,” “their culture” whatever, already seem to dominate your day-to-day life? Regardless of which end of the telescope you look through, it is a tube of fear; and Internet trolling, bullying, hate speech and hate crimes are the behavioral manifestations of that deeper entity: fear.  

So how do we Foster Harmony in this particular arena? By addressing fear, which is the root cause of hate. And fear is itself usually the result of ignorance. Entities who peer at each other across a fence of fear are also separated by a gulf of ignorance.  As neither has ever truly lived life inside the other’s skin, each is largely clueless regarding the reality of the life lived by the other.  It is this confluence of ignorance and fear that drives hate.

There are policies, programs and courses that my institution has implemented to confront this nefarious confluence. There are those among my colleagues who say “Too little! Too late!”  To whom I respond, “So, go, do. If you do not wish to follow, then lead.”  Personally, I have come to the conclusion that while programs, policies and courses are worthy undertakings to confront the ignorance that drives fear, the route to finally defeat fear and hate is a personal path.  And, for me, that path is marked by the four road signs of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm.

So what am I going to be for Halloween? I dunno. Clowns are apparently out - victims of their "creepy" kin. Maybe we’ll just snuggle down in the basement and watch George C. Scott’s version of A Christmas Carol.  I thought I saw a wreath at the grocery store yesterday .  .  .   

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Entanglement

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Einstein, famously and disdainfully, declared quantum entanglement to be "spooky action at a distance,” and refused to accept the idea throughout his life. It is easy to understand his discomfort. Basically “entanglement" asserts that two entangled particles will demonstrate instantaneous reactions when only one of the pair is stimulated. Not a huge conceptual problem if the particles happen to live close to one another. But entanglement further asserts that distance is irrelevant, that entangled particles can be light years apart and will still demonstrate these instantaneous and simultaneous reactions when either one of the particles is stimulated.

Suddenly some fundamental beliefs about the nature of the universe get trashed like the leftovers at a demolition derby. Primary among the wrecks is the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light. Yet, if two particles separated by light years can react simultaneously and instantaneously to a stimulus applied to only one particle, some type of information passed between the particles at a speed that makes the old speed of light seem positively pedestrian.

I suppose that should surprise us, but then again we need to remember that some 94% of the universe remains invisible to us. Hence, our ideas of “normal” come from often fuzzy observations of the 5 or 6% of “reality” that we can see. So the idea that such linked, instantaneous, communication might be commonplace in the wider “dark” universe becomes plausible and intriguing, to say the least. Among the related questions that occur to me are:

Is there a particle that is the enactor of entanglement? A “tangletron?" Or a field consisting of some kind of tangling bosons that enables instantaneous communication throughout the universe? And if it is there, why is it there and what manner of communication does it enable? And then the one that most fascinates me: Do we already participate in entangled experiences without realizing the mechanism? 

Consider this:

It is not uncommon for partners in the first bloom of a romantic relationship to assert that they were lovers in a former life, that they are soulmates, etc., etc.  While such declarations may well crash and burn in the long run, there is no denying the power of the initial attraction, nor the mysterious power that sustains some relationships for a lifetime.  Listen to any love song, read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 - the “love is not love” one. We are seemingly in love with love. Underlying Distilled Harmony [www.distilledharmony.com] is the idea that harmony is the natural state of existence, that there is a universal harmony, "The God Chord,” -  that I discussed in my book by the same name.  There is a universal chord, a transcendent state to which we can all aspire and eventually obtain. Perhaps romantic love is among the most common human manifestations of an entangled interaction with the God Chord. Being able to somehow sense the location or presence of the other, being able to predict the behavior of the other, finishing each other’s sentences. Might these not be evidence of entangled interactions?

And, to return briefly to the recent posts on expressionist memory, it seems to me quite feasible that the palette of expressionist memories is drawn from various entangled interactions - from those strong notes in our own chord that are entangled with the notes of universal harmony.  Which also addresses the expressionist memory notion of discarding the negative components of memories while retaining and nurturing the harmonic portions of the same experiences.  We retain harmony, we discard discord.

I am further inclined to consider that this “spooky action at a distance” touches all experience, not only human interactions. Art, music, nature, science, philosophy, physical activity - all these fields have language that points to these indescribable moments of perceived harmony: In the zone. In the groove. Feeling it. And, yes, transcendent.  We arrive somewhere we have never been before and feel “at home.” We listen to a piece of music and lose touch with our immediate surroundings, returning only when the music stops and we find ourselves deposited back in a more mundane “reality.” Standing before a painting we are transported to the world within the frame.

There are certainly more prosaic explanations for these phenomena. More pragmatic explanations drawn from our direct experiences in that small portion of the universe we can most easily observe. I would suggest, however, allowing ourselves to consider that entangled experience may be the universal norm beyond our little bubble of light, and that that norm - entanglement - moves easily, if invisibly, around and through us, weaving wonderful ties to the rest of existence.

We need to leave ourselves open to these entanglements - with individuals, with art, with science, with music and with nature; for it is through these entanglements that we blend the notes of our own chord with the notes of The God Chord.

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Kites of Darkness

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A coronet of consciousness 

Circles the two o'clock hour. 

Born aloft by kites of darkness  

Drifting on a tether between  

Sunset and first dawn. 

Impervious to the hours past 

Since slumber's onset 

Or morning's impending obligations. 

Driven perhaps by blinking numerals 

It nudges my eyelids open 

And requires an auditory sweep 

Of the immediate environs. 

Born more of curiosity than concern, 

It resolves the darker pools of shadow  

And blinking points of light 

Into the expected dips and edges 

Of what should surround me. 

And sleep becomes an option. 

Unless the wail of a train 

Or the drumming of rain 

Demands further attention. 

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A Short[er] Footnote on Expressionist Memory

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I know, I know - “Surely he has beaten this idea to death!”  But not quite.

It strikes me that I might have left you with the idea that expressionist memory is a naturally occurring phenomenon.  That is only partially true.  Memory is a naturally occurring phenomenon - expressionist memory requires some work on our part.  In this way it is similar to lucid dreaming. Dreaming seems to be a naturally occurring phenomenon - normally, we dream whether we choose to dream or not. Lucid dreaming builds on that phenomenon. Wikipedia asserts that "A lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. During lucid dreaming, the dreamer may be able to exert some degree of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment.” [http://bit.ly/2bKt37K].  We also exert a degree of control in the construction of expressionist memories. 

Expressionist memories are central to our construction of the beliefs that define reality. Hence they need to be consistent with our beliefs regarding the nature of existence. For me, that means my expressionist memories must be consistent with the four basic tenets of Distilled Harmony [www.distilledharmony.com]: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm.  So my expressionist memories form in part by discarding those portions of hyperthymesiatic recall that are conflict with those tenets of Distilled Harmony. 

Yes, I realize that implies an intentional distortion of “the reality experienced.” But what kind of memory doesn’t do that? Yes, hyperthymesiatic memory that traps one in a freeze frame high definition of what “really” happened. And is also often seen as an abnormal characteristic, if not a condition bordering on a disease.  More normal memories fade over time, leaving the peaks and valleys. In constructing intentional expressionist memories I seek to hold to the peaks, discarding the valleys.

But here is an important distinction - I said discarding the valleys, not repressing them.  John’s [14:2] assertion that we live in a reality with many mansions, is only one of many admissions across belief systems, philosophies and scientific schemes that asserts that we are inclined to compartmentalize our lives. One of the drawings in my coloring book [http://amzn.to/2bQdhFw] started out as a sort of Route 66 old motel, but then got hijacked by a herd of rogue eggplants. OK, strange, but the idea of bits of life poised behind many different doors remains: 

That complexity is just fine - it is what makes us human, interesting, complex.  But if we repress the valleys of recalled experiences, we are merely hiding them away in a room we ignore. They can fester there, eventually rotting the foundations of our reality to such an extent that the whole thing can come crashing down around our ears, landing us in a padded room, or on a very expensive couch in a office with potted plants and soft music.

Discarding is a conscious act of elimination.  It is not so much a “Get away! Get away! Get in that room!” Slam. Now I walk away leaving you locked up in there” scenario, as it is a “Been there, done that. Let me show you the door. Good byeeeeeeeeee!” kind of thing.

To go back to the expressionist painting analogy - which is after all, where I stole the whole idea of expressionist memory - expressionist memories are the palettes from which we paint our lives. We choose the dominant hues of that composition.  I choose calm and pleasing colors.

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Expressive Memory, Transcendence, Dark Matter and All That Jazz

Over on Distilled Harmony [www.distilledharmony.com] I assert that “ever since I was a small child I have been forever ambushed by moments of pure harmony.” I do not mean to imply that I exist in a constant harmonic state - would that it were so!  Rather, those moments of pure harmony have always been transient impressions  - like a moment of extended slow motion. 

When I was younger my reaction was often “Whew! That was weird! Cool, but weird.”  I recall one such harmonic moment when I was was 17 or 18, working at a treatment center for emotionally disturbed children up in Philo, California.  My participation was through an American Friends Service Committee summer program, so every morning we “Friendlies,” as we were known, would have a “few moments of silence.” One morning we hiked up the creek a short ways for our moment of silence.  It was warm but not hot. The sun was bright, dancing off the small rapids that ran around the rocks where we had perched.  And then a soft transition; sight, sound, air on my skin, and mist. Pure harmony, intense and extended.  

At some point the “adult leaders” stood to indicate it was time to start the day, and everyone else moved on back downstream. I don’t know how long I remained behind.  It couldn’t have been too long, because I had no trouble catching up. But when I tried to engage the others in conversation about the magical moment, blank if not suspicious stares were the response.  Well, we were in constant contact with “emotionally disturbed children.” In retrospect I can’t blame my fellow friendlies for being a bit put off by my babbling.

As I grew older I learned to discuss these harmonic moments in less weird and more mainstream terms - art and the intellect.  But when I nudged past the half-century mark, I began to consider the notion that these moments of harmony, of “rightness” if you will, were not aberrations. Rather they were moments when the “me of the moment” coincided with the “me I am supposed to me.” They were transcendent moments. That, I have decided, is what I mean by moments of pure harmony. It now strikes me that, for a variety of reasons, art is inclined to seek out and attempts to capture, such transcendent moments.

It is a daunting task. Even photography, that can freeze a moment, freezes but that single moment, carving it away from the greater gestalt that contained the moment.  In "Ansel Adams: Photographer."  Adams makes a significant distinction between "scenic moments" and "artistic photography.”  As Adams had been trained as a concert pianist, some of his friends were taken aback by his decision to turn to photography full-time. “Ansel,” they opined, “a photograph cannot express the depth of the human soul.” 

“Perhaps not,” he replied. “But maybe a photographer can."

Adams realized that photography, even contemporary ultra high-speed photography, or the staggering images beamed back from the Hubble Telescope and it’s high tech kin, are not push button portals to a transcendent moment - to pure harmony.  It is different from that.  And, yes, the phrase “more complicated than that” did spring to mind for that last sentence.  But capturing a transcendent moment is not more complicated than the layers upon layers of science and engineering that are necessary to operate the Hubble. But transcendent moments are however quite different.

As I said before, I had always been aware of “ being in a harmonic moment” although I had not yet defined them as such. But it wasn't until sometime around my 50th birthday that I began to explore ways to make them stay a little longer.  I tried to put myself in that “extended slow motion.” Breath lightly and slowly. Don’t focus intensely on anything, but try to remain aware of everything.  Light, slow, open.  And then when it was gone, smile.  It would be nice to be able to remain permanently “in the moment,” and I do not dismiss, out of hand, claims of very extended harmonic states - they just seem to be beyond me at the moment.  So I try to “save the memory.” And this is where the notion of memory begins to dominate.

Often, as we seek our own path to transcendence, to recognize and perhaps give form to a transcendent moment, we turn to memory.  I suppose that this is because transcendent moments neither arrive from, nor float off to, some mysterious, alien realm. Quite the contrary actually. Transcendent moments are those moments when our chord sounds most clearly. The path to more extended transcendence lies in recognizing those moments and discerning their common elements.  It is, however, important to realize that we will discover the transcendent moment not in the memories whose details we grasp most clearly, but rather in those memories that resonate most strongly with our unique chord. The specific "internal movie" may be fleeting, unclear, even confusing as a solitary entity - as in “What happened back there? When we were all sitting on those rocks by the creek?"

The important distinction is between recall and memory. Recall is factual. Extreme recall is out there on the spectrum, as in hyperthymesia. Wikipedia tells us that "hyperthymesia is the condition of possessing an extremely detailed autobiographical memory. Hyperthymestics remember an abnormally vast number of their life experiences.”  Facebook, Twitter and other social media encourage a kind of artificial hyperthymesia as they encourage users to dutifully note the trivia of their lives.  That is not to say that highly significant moments are ignored, but they do run the risk of being overwhelmed by restaurant menus, momentary observations, celebrity spotting and images of a friend’s friend’s friend’s child’s cat.

  

I think we often err in attempting to engage seniors in issues of recall. Far more fruitful, for them and for our understanding of them, might be discussions of memory - particularly, expressionist memory.  Recall seeks a reconstruction of "what happened," and "what happened" often has little to do with what an event or series of events came to mean to an individual. I would assert that a far more important type of memory is what I call “expressionist memory.” 

I use "expressionist memory" to define a cognitive unit, a belief, a meaning-making entity that coalesces over time as a result of related recollections. Portions of those conceptually-related recollections are the palette from which we paint or construct the more powerful, selective "expressionist memory" that becomes the "reality" that supersedes the hyperthymesial recollections.

OK, it is obviously time for an example.  You are walking down the street, and you pass by a couple of kids sitting on either side of a big cardboard box. You look into the box. Puppies! Cute, wiggly, soft, warm, unconditionally loving, cuddly puppies. If your “expressionist memory” of all those positive parts of “puppy-ness,” overwhelms the more pragmatic hyperthymesiatic recalling of soiled carpets and spoiled sleep, midnight walks and veterinary bills; you may find yourself the somewhat surprised new owner of a little "wiggler." 

This fairly simplistic example should not detract from the powerful role that expressive memory plays in the important decisions of our lives, and its central place in our construction of reality. Expressive memory is a path to the existential objective of Distilled Harmony, which is to bring your own chord into harmony with the universal chord - the ultimate music of the spheres, if you will. Consider the image of a mystic, seated in repose, eyes closed or focused on something we cannot see. There is no movement.  “Ooomm, ooomm.” It is a common theme in Western storytelling.  We even married it to the traditional American western in the 1972 TV show, Kung Fu. It is from distorted depictions such as this that we create the misconception that transcendence is somehow passive, an empty stillness.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Transcendence is an act of creative transformation. It is a blending of the notes of the self with the song of the universe. Transcendence manifests one's chord.  I must, however, admit to a teensy, weensy little problem: I am not sure how one does that consistently. If I did maybe I wouldn’t be here pecking, two-, three-, sometimes even four-fingered at the keyboard. Or maybe that is part of the process, and I do have some thoughts about the process.

I am pretty convinced that personal transcendence is closely linked to using expressive memory to define our harmonic self, the person we would most like to become. And further, to become that person we need to consciously construct those pieces of expressive memory that define our most harmonic self.

Descriptions may work better than definitions here:

Tranquility and Harmony. I think that the iconic "rocks in the stream" moment provided some hues to the palette from which I construct my expressive memory of harmonic tranquility. For me harmonic tranquility carries a "rightness with nature" component. A cabin in the pines at Tower Hill Camp, close by the shores of Lake Michigan. Summer breezes passing through the screened in porch of my childhood home. The moon painting a path on the Manistee River, as I paddled with a cohort of companions through Michigan forests. A cold midnight surround of stars during a youthful ski trip in the Austrian Alps. 

These moments obviously describe highly personal recollections scattered across many decades. And my internal movies of the events may take extreme liberties with any hyperthymesial documentaries that could have captured the scenes from a more objective perspective. Which is of little or no importance, as expressive memory trumps hyperthymesial recollections every time. Expressive memory does far more than reconstruct the past, it provides a transcendent path into the future.

That path is paved with the cobblestones of expressive memory: Tranquility and Harmony, Love, Honor, Success, Truth, Beauty. And each cobblestone is an intensely personal construction fashioned by the life we have lived, the moments we have experienced. I have been thinking more about the process through which we construct these cobblestones and an intriguing analogy sprang to mind.  The Large Hadron Collider.  No, really. Hang with me for a moment.

As I understand it, the LHC smashes atomic particles into one another at speeds approaching the speed of light.  It is in the aftermath of the collisions, in the residue, that new or deeper meaning is revealed - like the Higgs Boson. A major objective of all this science, personnel, and treasure is to discover the nature of dark matter. 

Dark matter is one of those things so far beyond our ordinary experience that, most often, we choose not to think about it.  But let’s think about it for just a moment. Richard Panek points out in his nifty book The Four Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality that everything we can see of the universe is only 4% of all that is out there beyond our standard methods of observation and perception. So modern science - and particularly the guys and dolls of CERN and the LHC - seeks to ferret out the deeper nature of reality, the form and void of the universe if you will, by examining the tantalizing residue of particle collisions in an attempt to glean what visible matter can tell us about invisible matter.

OK. Let us make “recall” visible matter - the Facebook Timeline/hyperthymesial recalled particles rushing around in the LHC of our minds. Ten-year old truth collides with 35 year-old truth, 18-year old beauty crashes into 50-year old beauty, 40-year old honor smashes into 75-year old honor as they all glance off of various versions of tranquility and harmony. Expressive memory springs to light and life in the collective residue of those collisions. Expressive memory constructs the deeper nature of our reality, fills in the form and void of our personal existence, makes visible and cohesive that reality which previously was invisible and disjointed.

I now have two options. I can try to con a grad student into inserting some footnotes into this incredibly long post and try to find a journal that might consider publishing it, or I can just stop and send it out to you in the hopes that some of you will tough it out from beginning to end and find it interesting, perhaps even enjoyable 😃!

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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.