Breaking Free From Fairy Tales

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There used to be a TV show called Fractured Fairy Tales. It was part of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, which aired between 1959 and 1964. Fractured Fairy Tales featured “re-tellings” of classic fairy tales that confronted some of the questionable assertions contained in those timeless narratives. We are only now beginning to fully realize the impact of those classic tales which condemned generations of men to combat in the forest outside the castle, while shackling women to the drudgery within. But the task is not yet complete. Consider this possible ending to a seemingly sanitized tale:

“So, the self-identified prince and the princess drew their nano-quantum powered light sabers and removed all the dead wood from the environmentally managed forest, and used it to build a wind and solar powered castle in which they lived happily ever after.”

Better, but still needs our attention. You see, the last phrase will never come to be because living happily ever after is an emotional impossibility. Wait, wait, least you think I am a misanthropic frog with no hope of a kiss from well-meaning princess, I am open to this slight editing of the sentence: 

Princess, prince, light sabers, forest, wind power, yadda, yadda, OK here we go, here is the edit: “in which they lived contentedly ever after.” Contentedly ever after, there is a concept we can work with.

The problem with “happily ever after” is at least two-fold. First, in “happily ever after world” or HEAW, how would you even know you were happy? Happy is a comparative emotional state that we can only recognize when we compare it to “unhappy” or, heaven forbid, “sad.” Second, once we realize that there are other emotional categories, HEAW, requires that one lives constantly at the top end of the scale. Whoa, that seems exhausting, like living life in some sort of perpetual “river dance” frantically beating our feet across the floor to traditional Irish music with a huge Gaelic grin on our faces. Furthermore, HEAW seems existentially questionable, like the assertion from Lake Woebegone, that “all the children are above average.” Is it really possible, without brain surgery or powerful drugs, to be continually, unceasingly happy? Somehow I don’t think so.

Now, living contentedly ever after is a horse of a different color. Maybe even a Pinto, yeah, I like Pintos. Gorgeous creatures. OK, living contentedly ever after is a Pinto. First of all, and most importantly, contentment isn’t really an emotion, it is a state of mind, an attitude that we control. A wise friend once pointed out to me that we really have little control over the slings and arrows that life tosses our way, but we do control our reaction to those insults. Combine that notion with Niebuhr’s serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” and we are well on the way to contentment. 

As we live any kind of normal life, we are going to encounter events and individuals who make us sad, even angry. If we eschew mandated happiness and instead take Niebuhr’s advice we can walk away from those inevitable encounters, perhaps not happy, but serene - and I am content with that. You should be too, especially during those moments when you realize , “Hey, This isn’t really ‘Happily Ever After.’"

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The World Behind My Eyelids

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They spool out like reels 

From a summer film festival.

Comedies, romances, mysteries

Thrillers, adventures, docudramas,

And the occasional campy horror flick.

They startle me awake.

I catch my breath.

Pulse settles back

To what passes for normal,

And the sights and sounds recede.

When, in nap, or night, or meditation 

They flicker once again to life,

These Hi-Def vistas behind my eyelids,

I know that they are not “real.”

But then again what is?

When starring in these private movies,

I laugh, I cry, I bleed,

I rejoice, I despair 

Occasionally with people

That I recognize -

Other times with apparent strangers

Who seem nonetheless 

Somehow intimate.

What is the searing difference,

I ask, between these worlds?

One is dominated by trivial realities.

Should I drive that far? 

Should I cut my hair?

Was the meeting today? 

Do I really care?

The other swaps mundane for sublime.

Can I fly that high? 

Swim that far? 

Scale that mountain?

Touch that star?

Both worlds are constructed

In the mystery of my mind.

A shifting set of stimuli,

The neurons do engage,

To swirl mind and body

From ecstasy to rage,

From lethargy to energy,

From love through ennui 

The nerve ends do determine 

Each clear reality.

So which one is the real reel?

Do I awake from each

Convinced the world 

Around me marks the center of my life.

While other “me-s” awaken,

In another place and time

Convinced that they’re 

The “real deal” 

And the world just dreamed

Is mine? 

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You're Not The Boss of Me -- Anymore

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“You’re not the boss of me!” It was certainly not a declaration I heard in my childhood. And just as certainly it was not a phrase or concept that we taught our children. Yet both seem to be relatively common in today’s world. It can be encountered when you come across a child - oh, say somewhere north of 4 but not yet ten - engaged in a questionable activity like playing “dodge ‘em” on the freeway, or setting fire to the neighbor’s cat.

“Hey!” you say, “Cut that out!”

The little darling, or mini-mafioso, places his or her hands on hips, glares at you and declares, “You’re not the boss of me!” Or the slightly more expanded version, “You’re not my parent, so I don’t have to do what you say!” Realizing that in the current permissive society you could wind up behind bars for swatting the brat on the butt, you refrain from doing so since the mini-mafioso might well be being encouraged by parents of the maxi-mafioso variety whose understanding of “Stand your Ground” might extend to “Kill the cat that pees on the begonias.” Besides, you know you are supposed to get down on brat level, look same in the eyes, and say something like: 

“Use your big words and your indoor voice and tell me why you want to kill the nice kitty.” 

I’m not really sure when or how this enabling of childhood incivility began. I assume it was initially a well-intentioned response to the archaic notion of “spare the rod and spoil the child.” But as is often the case, well-intentioned policies can have unintended results. One such result of the “You’re not the boss of me” meme is the implication that the “boss” is entitled to tell us what to do; the “my way or the highway”- the MYOTH - style of organization or management.  

So it is not unreasonable to follow this “MWOTH” notion into a strategy in adolescence and adult life where one seeks to become the BOSS, the one who gets to tell everyone else what to do.  “Success" comes to mean acquiring power. It is a mindset in direct opposition to the first and dominant tenet of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony.

We see the negative effects of MYOTH all around us. On one level it doesn’t really matter if you are CEO of a major corporation, the president of a university, President of the PTSA, or President of the USA - power corrupts, and as the 1st Baron Acton put it “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Hence it is disheartening to realize that the path to success in contemporary culture can also be the path to corruption. There is, no doubt, a world of possible discussion there: Is it possible to rise to power in an organization or a nation and remain free of corruption? Is the current MeToo! movement a confrontation of power or an accumulation of power by new group equally at risk of corruption? Interesting issues, but not where I want to go right now.

I started this post with an observation of children. I would like to close it with an exploration of their grandparents, or of people at least old enough to be grandparents. Here is the paradox: seniors, as we now call old people - and among whom, at a few days shy of 71, I strangely find myself - have a nuanced view of “bosses” and MYOTH. We have either been bosses or have had a lifetime of watching other bosses do it wrong. Completing the paradox, at least for those of us who are retired - or again like myself, just a few months shy of that state - we no longer have anyone to boss. “My Way” no longer commands a view of “The Highway.” So we try to boss each other.

Eavesdrop on a table of seniors, or listen to the conversations around you if you are “of a certain age.” It is a silver-haired debating society. Each of them - or each of us - is busy advocating a specific approach to the issue at hand, whether it be the President of the USA, or the President of the Condo Board, the best diet to control diabetes, or the best way to combat roaches seeking indoor shelter in the winter months - each speaker has “truth.” It is not that any of the various “truths" presented are necessarily data free or “wrong.” But they are truths constructed from the memoirs I defined in the previous post.  “Truths distilled and constructed from experience remembered,” truths that “when I was boss” could simply be stated to “those of whom we were boss” and were then accepted. But now we boss no one and are bossed by no one. So the “debate” is usually “won” by the person who can talk uninterruptedly and at a vocal level that simply overwhelms the competition. It is a form of interaction that is often depressing and rarely reaches a productive conclusion.

It is also a form of interaction that is, as mentioned earlier in this post, in direct conflict with the first tenet of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony. It is relatively easy to rail against the “ignorant other.” It is more difficult to try to understand how the “other" came to possess a version of the truth that, to you, is obvious lunacy. More difficult still is the ability to see past this particular area of disagreement to Harmony.

One option is to focus on the notion of the musical chord - since that is the fundamental element upon which Foster Harmony rests. I find it helpful to consider an orchestra or a choir. As an audience member, regardless of our own expertise, we usually know when something sounds “right” and when it doesn’t. A soft violin passage is interrupted by a clash of brass. The discordancy may be intentional, but it is nonetheless discordant. And, of course, there is the ultimately discordant moment when an instrument or voice pops in fortissimo, but just a couple of beats too soon. A meeting of the silver-haired debating society, or any conversation that turns competitive for that matter, can be seen as a musical composition. To defuse the various discordant attempts to become “boss”of the interaction we need to make a conscious effort to bring harmonious notes to the conversation. Rather than jumping in to “correct" another voice, or to demonstrate how we had an even better example of the issue under consideration, we should try, “That’s fascinating. What happened then?” or “That’s right! I had a similar experience, but not quite that powerful.” We don’t need to always play the solo. Often the chord becomes richer, the path to Harmony smoother, when instead we become a contributing voice in the chorus.

 Additionally, I sometimes find it helpful to look to the second tenet: Enable Beauty. This, like surrendering the solo to become a voice in the chorus, also requires that we try to get over ourselves, and swallow that stinging retort we just know will bring them to their knees and say, instead, something like: "Has anyone seen the new movie, book, exhibit, etc., at the wherever? I hear it is fascinating.” OK, it is a blatant attempt to change the subject and steer the conversational ship into the welcoming harbor of the aesthetics that underlie Harmony.  Your table mates may well recognize it as such. But there is usually a positive reason that you all have gathered together at this place and time, and you may all be willing - even desirous - to leave acrimony behind.

In the name of full disclosure I must admit that I often find it difficult to follow the advice in this post. But I have an excuse. I have been a college professor for almost 50 years. It was my job to sing the solo part. These days it has become more fashionable to be “the guide at the side,” rather than “the sage on the stage.” That makes for a neat lyric, but I have problems with it - largely because I have spent the last decade or so teaching new undergraduates, often in their first college class. They are utterly unprepared to share the solo line. Many of them cannot even read music. So I have grown used to the necessity of singing solo to that particular audience. But as I come to spend more time with my peers, who are often completely, and rightly, unaware of, and unimpressed by, my academic credentials, I too, need to get over myself, and work on becoming more adept at becoming a contributing choral voice in eight-part Harmony.

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The 3Ms of Meaning

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I am often fascinated by the paths we take to our perception of “truth.” For example, I had my hair cut the other day by a young woman whose accent implied that she was from “somewhere else.” I inquired - perhaps politically incorrectly - where she was from. “Ukraine.” she replied. 

Naturally, I asked what she thought of the current brouhaha. “Ah,” she said, “Is all fault of Ukrainian president.” And then launched into a lengthy analogy about what one should do if you saw someone climbing up a ladder into your neighbor’s daughter’s bedroom several times each week. I had no idea what she was talking about, but she had scissors in her hand at the time, and was waving them around my head. So I remained mum. Her insights, it sadly became evident, did not translate to much facility in cutting hair. But I was intrigued with the fervor with which her analogy reflected, to her at least, an obvious path to the “truth” of a complex situation. The more I thought about it, the more I came to consider that, despite the varying way-stations along the route, our path to truth seems to traverse a common countryside. I now think of that path as the 3Ms of meaning. Let me share. 

The first M is “moment.” Meaning has to start somewhere, and I think for us big-brained apes that somewhere is an experiential moment. Something happens to us that is of such import that we stash it away somewhere up in those billions of cells between our ears. Think of it as a still photo. And, like many of the still photos in the dusty photo albums in our closets, or in the “photos” file on our phone, tablet or computer, that may well be the end of it. But occasionally something - a conversation, a movie, a similar instance, jogs the grey matter, and out pops that photo, and that leads us to the second M: Memory. 

Memory is unique. My wife can remember, it seems to me, every meal she has ever eaten, who was present, what they had to eat, how it was prepared and if each person liked their meal. For me, I assume that I usually have somewhere between 2 and 5 meals a day - and have done so most of my life. However, if pressed, yes, I can remember the bistecca alla fiorentina we had in Florence, in the Spring of 2000 something - “Ah, yes, I remember it well.” On the other hand I really do remember the tune and most of the lyrics to every top-40s hits from 1957, when my big brother was a teenager. So, memory is unique and certainly not infallible. In our photographic analogy, memory is like those little videos everyone now shoots on their phones. Little fragments of the past, moments digitally strung together, but still not “the whole thing.” We construct the whole thing. And the “whole thing” that we create is not so much an accurate reconstruction of the reality we lived as it is the “truth” we cobble together from moment and memory. It is the third M: Memoir. 

Memoir is one of the building blocks of our truth.  It is our life remembered, and, to certain extent reconstructed. Unless you are among that small population of folks blessed, or cursed, with a photographic or eidetic memory, we forget far more than we remember. And that is probably a good thing. We grow, we change, we evolve.  It is most likely not healthy to constantly remember a previous version of ourself that is at odds with the person we are now, or hope to be in the future. 

This notion of a “truth” and an “identity” largely based on these evolving and flexible memoirs has always fascinated me.  Most interesting is the implication that we are different, or at least differing, people at 6, 16, 60, 86, 106, etc., as our evolving memoirs construct evolving versions of truth and reality. Long time readers of these posts may sense a potential conflict here with the notion of “chord theory,” the variation of string theory upon which Distilled Harmony is based. Very, very basically, chord theory asserts that at the final, irreducible, physical level, we are uniquely constructed of tiny vibrating strings. Vibrating strings produce musical notes, hence, we are made of music. Furthermore, that unique music, that “chord” is the purest definition of the “self.” The potential conflict could arise with the evolving memoir’s impact on the self, and hence potentially upon the chord which is a physical construction. I resolve that possible conflict by remembering that memoir is a constructed reality. We use both moment and memory to construct memoir. It is the chord that guides that construction, which provides a fundamental consistency to the differing realities - differing selves - that we construct from 6 to 106.  

That assertion puts to rest a lingering concern I have always had regarding our evolving identity and mortality.  I am less comfortable with some of my past identities than the current version. Yet, neither am I content to define the current version as the final form. Both situations raise the uncomfortable question of “the interrupted self.” What happens to these evolving memoirs and their codependent versions of the self when we die? I find comfort in the following points:

The chord is constant and utterly unique to you. Like our DNA, which is itself built on the strings that express the chord, the chord may be subject to some evolutionary shifts, but those would be minor and consistent with the dominant tonality of the chord. So every expression of the chord in our lives, no matter how immature, retains the legitimate core of the chord, so death, “the interrupted self” is not the end of the story, particularly when you consider:

This life is only the most current expression of your chord. Distilled Harmony always cycles around to the notion that one lifetime is insufficient to the task of becoming a fully evolved entity. So, obviously, we must experience more than one lifetime. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Which segues neatly into another reoccurring Distilled Harmony meme (a word I swore to resist - but sometimes it just works): That which we call enlightenment, or nirvana, or inner peace, or ultimate oneness, or whatever, is that state of existence when we become aware of our previous existences and the truths, selves, identities, lessons, accumulated in those lives.

And, if we want to get really strange, in a “many worlds” view of existence it seems likely that we only die in one world at a time, hence our “self” and “identity” continue to evolve in those other worlds. And perhaps true enlightenment occurs when we come to realize that the many worlds are not really divergent, but are rather “covergent” paths leading .  .  .  well, somewhere. 

So, in any case, the 3Ms of meaning provide me with a seemingly never-ending supply of interesting “what ifs” to consider when sleep eludes me in the tiny hours of morning. Occasionally, I think I stumble upon meanings. Occasionally, I remember to write them down.

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Schrag Wall: Uncle Ben in a "Big Car"

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OK, this is a "full disclosure" post from my "Legacy" series of drawings.  The original photo remains unchanged.  Here it is:

I had always believed that this was a picture of my mother in one of her father's taxis - he ran a cab company. I posted the image with that description. Not too long after, my sister Margaret - the family archivist - contacted me to say she wasn't sure of the image or its provenance. So she began to search through her archives.

Eventually in one of Mom's journals she found the original image with this caption:

"Bennie in a really BIG CAR.

1917"

So the picture is obviously of her brother Benjamin, who died young, before she married and naturally before I or any of my siblings were born. The provenance of the car remains a mystery. One of the family taxis remains logical, but year, make and model all remain mysteries. Obviously, some type of touring car manufactured in 1917 or earlier. A friend pointed out that the valve on top of the radiator might be a diesel escape valve. The multiple intake valves on the side of the hood might also might point in that direction. But still a mystery.

I will admit that none of those issues concerned me during the 4 million hours - OK, maybe only 2 million - I spent creating the Legacy image below. Finished mere minutes ago :-)!

The image is 9.5 x 15 inches. The color is the result of several types of markers on heavy water color paper.

Enjoy!

The Human Singularity in Many Worlds - Or The Body Entangled

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It is like seeing a landscape through a fog. You can make out shapes and perhaps movement, but nothing is quite clear. Then a breeze sweeps away the mist, and you now see things in a different light. Isolated insights weave together in a pattern that may still be fragmented, but is somehow better, more complete than what you had before. I had one such moment when Google recently announced, but then recanted, a claim that it had achieved “quantum supremacy.” At first I thought it meant that Google had released a new Jason Bourne film - anything would better than the last one. But after reading a number of articles on quantum supremacy, I realized that that was not the case.  However, it also became clear that it would take a long time for me to understand the marriage of quantum mechanics and computer science that such supremacy would represent. However, since the claim quickly dissolved into a kind of Internet “Oops,” I wasn’t overly concerned. I’ll worry about it a bit more once we see a “We really mean it this time!” post.

What did happen, though, was that a number of previous, semi-connected “quantum-esque” musings came together in ways, that while probably still incomplete, seemed a tad clearer than before. Let me try to share them and hopefully retain at least a bit of that clarity. Let’s start with the “many worlds theory.” In this version of quantum mechanics there is no such thing as the path not taken. When we make an important decision - when path A is chosen, paths B, C, D, etc., - the other decisions we could have made - are also simultaneously taken, but those decisions play out in different worlds, in different - or at least somewhat hidden - universes. OK, hold on to that for a moment and let’s jump to the “human singularity.”

In the Big Bang theory of the universe, before the big bang itself, all matter, space-time, the whole enchilada, was compressed into an infinitely tiny small point - a physical singularity. Then quantum fluctuations within the singularity caused the Big Bang throwing all the contents of the singularity out into an inflation that, in an incredibly minuscule blink of time, resulted in the humongous universe in which we exist and can observe.

OK, trudging on to yet another quantum condition - entanglement. This is the one that Einstein initially resisted but later accepted and defined as “spooky action at a distance.” Wikipedia defines it thus: 

“Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.”

To simplify, particles that are “entangled” react to any stimulus identically and instantaneously regardless of their degree of separation - inches, miles, light years, makes no difference. Do something to one of a pair or group of entangled particles and the other entangled elements react identically and instantaneously regardless of their degree of separation. Thus, entangled particles seem to toss information back and forth playing fast and loose with the speed of light and other cosmic niceties. No wonder Einstein found it “spooky.”

I haven’t run across any sources that assert that the contents of the original physical singularity which inflated into the universe we know were entangled, but they certainly shared “intense spatial proximity” in the original singularity. So I wouldn’t be surprised at all to read that someone had discovered evidence that the entire universe is entangled. If that pops up, remember you heard it here first! Or drop me a note and let me know where you read about it years ago.

Anyhow, I don’t want to focus on the possible entanglement of the physical universe. Well, not directly anyhow. I am more interested in the possibilities of what I think of as the human singularity.  Let me jump back almost 20 years to the original publication of The God Chord. Stealing from string theory, I asserted in that work that we were literally made of music. That our own unique Chord was the result of the vibration of the strings that formed the smallest unique divisions of each replicated particle in our bodies.  Now, these couple of decades later, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to posit that all these tiny harmonic particles in our body are “generated, interact, or share spatial proximity” in such a way as to be entangled. After all, the particles were generated together, constantly interact, and share the spatial proximity of our body. Seems a strong argument for “the body entangled.” There are obviously tempting possible paths here for medicine, genetics, science and physics here. But that is not the path that intrigues me. I am more interested in the metaphysical spin implied by these entanglements.

Let us assume that we are composed of entangled particles. Let us further suppose that the many worlds theory - or the multiverses theory - is right. So that when we make specific life choices that lead us down path A, entangled versions of our selves simultaneously head off down paths B, C, D, etc.  I am willing to admit that that is strange. But not nearly as strange as this: if we are entangled with those other versions of ourselves shouldn’t we - at some level - be experiencing elements of the lives of those alternative choices? Down paths B, C, D, etc.?

What happens when we choose a major, a career, a partner? In a many worlds reality we simultaneously chose a different major, a different career, a different partner. When we marry “many worlds” with “entanglement” we simultaneously make all those different choices and entangled versions of our self are living those different lives in different worlds in different universes. 

My most intense curiosity at the moment focuses on possible evidence of being able to sense - via entanglement -  what is going on in my “other lives in other worlds.” Those entangled harmonic worlds I created by not choosing them.  Do I experience them through dreams, sleeping or waking? Visions? Trances? Prayer? Creative impulses and works? Meditation? What are those intensely “real seeming” experiences that feature precious people in alien situations, or hyper-realistic dreams of familiar situations inhabited by strangers? 

I said that I consider these musings to live more in the realm of metaphysics than traditional or classical physics. But that may well be a spurious distinction. If one world yields up its secrets to the probing of physics, might that choice in itself give rise to other entangled worlds governed by “spookier” paths to understanding? An alternate type of physics? metaphysics? philosophies? Why not? After all, Halloween is just around the corner!

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Me and Mikey Angelo

In my last post I introduced you to my notion of The Three Ps: Poetry, Prose and Painting. They are not new companions. I have been dabbling with them for as long as I can remember. Well, that is a bad yardstick. It puts me in mind of situations when I am required to correct a young student’s effort at say, punctuation or footnote format and they respond “But I’ve done it that way all my life!” I usually refrain from inquiring “And just how long is that?” So, in this instance it would be more accurate to say that I have been fiddling around with poetry, prose and painting for far longer than I can remember, and I will trust in your good manners not to inquire “And just how long is that?” Which would force me to ask you to repeat the question.

I do remember having a poem published in the school yearbook when I was in 5th grade in The American International School in Vienna, Austria. So about 1960. I remember the final lines went something like, 

“Did the wolf eat the moon? 

That chapter’s not written.

Can’t say, it’s too soon!”

I have no idea what great conflict preceded that dire conclusion, and unless my sister Margaret - the family archivist - saved that particular yearbook, that is one of those literary inquiries destined to go unanswered. The same is true, no doubt of my early efforts in prose which I’m sure were created in response to such timeless impulses as “Write a paragraph about what you did on your summer vacation.” or “Write a description of your favorite pet.” No doubt that since those assignments were given after the invention of both the magnet and refrigerators, that was the publication route for those early epistles. Around the same time as the perhaps sadly lost “Wolf and the Moon” poem I must have expressed a interest in drawing, because my parents hired a young woman to give me drawing lessons. Well, that’s not exactly true. More accurately they hired a young woman to paint a portrait of my sister. Perhaps as a Christmas present? I seem to recall a branch of a Christmas tree in the background. My drawing lessons may have been an afterthought. The portrait, I assume, resides in Muse Schrag out in North Barrington, Illinois. Alas, no records exist of my own artistic work from that era.

So the intent of this post is to bring you up to date on my current efforts in the Three Ps. We can leave poetry and prose alone since The Wall contains examples enough for a very large book. One I am actually attempting to compile, a task I am discovering is somewhat Herculean in nature. But then Dad lived to be 100, perhaps there is time enough.

So, right now I am focusing on a series of images tentatively called Legacy. They are the result of a multi-step process. The first step in the process is a photograph. With the exception of the one taken of my mother when she was maybe five years old, they are all mine. The second step is to pull the photo into Photoshop where I add a layer to the image and trace the portion of the image that will contain the colored portion of the final image. Third, I “erase” the major spaces that will be colored. Fourth, I put a white layer behind the other layers and print out the image. Fifth, I draw designs in the “empty spaces, and sixth, I color the designs.

I have had folks ask me “How long does that take?” My glib response is “Don’t ask.” But a little more seriously is it quite time consuming - one of those 3 P tasks requiring hours of uninterrupted time I mentioned in the previous post. But there is also a trick. You never consider the whole task at once. Consider Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. If you google “how many square feet are there in the Sistine chapel ceiling?” You will get a number of responses - well, you will get a number of websites, but only 2 responses: 5,000 sq. ft. or 12,000 sq. ft. I have no idea why only those two answers pop up. I assume there are a couple of seemingly credible sources out there that all the others are cribbing from. No matter. Either number is an intimidating number of square feet to paint, even with a roller!

I have no doubt that when Mikey came to work and clambered up the scaffolding he did NOT say to himself “Well, I better get cracking. Got to crank out a couple hundred square feet of mural before the Pope sticks his big nose in here.” Tho’ Mikey and I are not quite as close as I imply - all those centuries and stuff - I am pretty sure he began each day with a particularly artistic objective in mind. It would have been more like, “I’m going to get those damn hands right today if it kills me!” That “focus on one thing at a time” concept is no doubt the only thing the Legacy images have in common with Mikey’s ceiling. You color one particular section - a wheel, a spoke, some one thing - at a time and over the course of an indeterminate time - Ta Da! It’s finished! Well, almost, just a couple more dots .  .  .

But writing about the process is probably not the best way to go. Let me show a couple examples.

This is a photograph that I took of some old farm equipment that my Dad and his brothers used as youngsters growing up on the family farm. My cousin Dean has rescued much of that machinery, and, last I knew he still has them on his farm in South Dakota.

I hadn’t planned on saving the interim steps so this stage of the image has been both Photoshopped and hand-drawn and painted with portions erased so they can be colored, and some of the white spaces colored in.

And this is the final version. It is 8.5 x 11 inches.

This series of images gives you a bit more complete view of the process. The original image has a couple mysteries attached to it. I have always believed it to be my mother “driving” one of the Taxi’s from her father’s cab company. My sister - who was not sure of the photo’s provenance - thought it might be Mom’s brother Benn. But the image seems to be clearly a young girl of 4 or 5 years of age. The vehicle itself appears to be a Ford from the early 30s. Anyhow this is the seminal image for this study.

This is the image with the darker lines drawn in - in Photoshop - and the blank spaces whited out in preparation for drawing.

And this is the current state of the drawing.  It is 9.5x15 inches.  From here I think I will either move to the rear tire and fender or the space below the windshield. Mikey and I will talk it over and let you know!

Poetry, Prose and Painting

These days education seems to be all about STEM: science, technology, engineering and math. Kids tap and swipe on a variety of dancing screens, stumbling, it seems, past the world they live in and the people they live with, focused on other places and faces. Back in the day it was the “3 Rs - reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic.” Slates, then blackboards and ruled yellow tablets with yellow #2 pencils and pink erasers captured penmanship, vocabulary tests, multiplication tables and decimal equivalents.   

The tools designed to enable and manifest human intellect and creativity are constantly evolving. Indeed, come January, I will teach my last class at NC State. It will focus on that very notion of how - from the crude symbols scratched millennia ago at the ever more receding dawn of “humanity” to this week’s new phone, app or “smart appliance” - we strive for new ways to enhance human interaction. It is a tad ironic that the course, dealing with the nuances of human communication, will be conducted entirely online, across a variety of screens. But I digress - no surprise there. 

The point is that now, after 40 some years in the classroom - and on computer screens - I am drawn to a new model for my personal “manifestation of human intellect and creativity.” I call it The 3 Ps.” Poetry, Prose and Painting. 

We tell our children, and were no doubt told by our parents that “You can be whatever you want to be. Follow your dreams!” However, as we go through the formal education process it soon becomes clear that instead of that being an ever-broadening road exploring more and more options in existence, we are actually funneled through a series of choices that require us to focus ever more tightly on a particular area of interest, a particular vocation; on making our reputation and enhancing our income via a tightly focused specialization. In the academy that specialization spiral increasingly reflects a Pygmalion-like inclination to facilitate the hatching of a new generation of academics remarkably similar to ourselves. Oops, another digression. 

The point is that this web of specialization inclines us to trust our hobbies or avocations to provide a more Renaissance experience among the wonders that surround us. The 3 Ps reverse that track, encouraging us to shake off the rust and see, savor and create in that all encompassing “everything is possible” world that we were promised as children but that somehow slipped away. 

This inclination of the senior cohort to “re-experience life” has not gone unnoticed by the leisure industry. Cruises, lecture series, hiking vacations for the “mature set” abound, and no doubt provide excellent profits for those purveyors of silver from the silver-haired. I don’t know why I find the idea a touch creepy - but I do. Maybe I just don’t like being part of a “targeted demographic.” Instead I find myself increasingly drawn to the avocations for which I stole time while locked in the demands of the specialization spiral. Don’t get me wrong, the life of a tenured university professor is a wonderful life. I know of none other that offers more freedom to think, create, and reflect. It is sort of like being one of the Medici, but without the money or the power, and with an obligation to publish within the shifting confines of your discipline. So I see my “almost here” retirement as a liberating opportunity to truly think, reflect and create; hence the 3 Ps. 

I do, however, need to point out that the 3 Ps, are not easy task masters. Pick any of the three, and you quickly discover that each requires significant effort and long stretches - hours, not fractions thereof - of uninterrupted concentration and reflection. Finding that kind of time - even in a retired world - is incredibly difficult. That is particularly true because it often appears to others that the “3 P involved individual” is doing nothing at all, or at the least isn’t doing anything that cannot be interrupted or put off. So you can see why those AARP and Smithsonian cruises, tightly scheduled to fill the days, are the antithesis of a 3 P lifestyle: 

“Ready for the breakfast buffet? 

“No.” 

“How about a tour of the cathedral?” 

“No.” 

“Yoga?” 

“No.” 

“Lecture on the structure of black holes?” 

“No.” 

“Water aerobics?” 

“No.” 

“Antique shopping spree? 

“No." 

“Would you like me to leave?” 

“Yes.” 

“Close the door?” 

“Please.” 

So this, bit by bit, day by day, is becoming my life: the 3 Ps.  A blank screen, a clean sheet of paper, a rainbow of paints or markers, music lilting in the background magically creates a mysterious, ideally timeless, world of creative potential; words and rhymes, images and lines. Everything lies beneath my fingers, and once again, like the first day of school, anything is possible. 

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Napping in the Guest Room

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Napping in the guest room is akin to taking a vacation, like hanging a sign on your door that says “Gone Fishin’.” It is not the nicest room in the house. We have spent more time and resources on just about every other room. But is a perfectly acceptable room. Nice lighting, good view of the McMansions and the golf course across the street. Comfy bed, just a step away from a full bath. It would make for a great B&B. But perhaps more than any other room in the house, it doesn’t say much about us. And maybe that is why I sometimes choose to nap there.

A nap is not simply catching up on sleep. The parents of any infant or toddler can tell you that. Napping is a transformative activity. It is closer kin to meditation than to actual full on nighttime snoozing. Done properly a nap refreshes the soul, allows a smile to come more easily, paints the world in brighter, happier colors, restores our rose-colored glasses that can easily be knocked askew by the hurly-burly of everyday. 

But we ignore the notion of “done properly” at our peril. “Hurry up and take your nap!” is an invitation to disaster - again consult anyone tasked with the care of young children, or, I now realize, the partner of any truly committed napper. Napping cannot be hurried, and even done properly, is easily disrupted.

One of the primary characteristics that my napping shares with my form of meditation is what I call clearing the screen. Despite my ongoing love affair with words, I am a very visual person.  Closing my eyes has little to do “making it dark.” Rather it simply raises the curtain on my inner world. Inevitably that stage is at least partially populated by the issues and individuals lurking on the other side of my eyelids. Hence the need to clear the screen.

I do this with music. Sleep specialists are probably tearing their hair out - but tough, it is my nap. So I play music - most often classical, exclusively instrumental or sung in a language I do not understand. As the music plays I consciously turn the screen behind my eyelids white. I try to hold that for a bit - but then, little by little I begin to paint the scene. Most often they are tranquil naturescapes, forest glades, seashores, mountains, quiet cabins on placid lakes, meadows streaked with golden sunlight, knee-high grasses waving in a gentle breeze, snow falling through a moonlit clearing. You get the idea. And it is when people stroll into my images and begin to speak that, on some level, I know that I am asleep.

These are very real constructions for me, but they are, unfortunately, at least initially, also very fragile. An unexpected flash of light, the complaining warble of a cellphone, an intrusive TV “therapy” confrontation or gun fight, a car door crashing shut down the street, all can untie the shades of my eyelids and send them, and my heart rate, shooting skyward. And I must begin again.

Which brings me back to why I am napping in the guest room. If my nap is disrupted in normal living space - say the couch by my desk, or even the bedroom - the real world creeps in. If that world is fairly under control then restarting the nap ritual can be a minor irritation. However, too often that brief glimpse is enough to trigger the litany of thoughts that plague daily life. The “to do” list from which there is little escape. Groceries to be bought, lightbulbs to change, cleaning to be picked up, emails to answer; the death by a thousand little cuts that are the true bane of life in the 21st century. You can kiss your nap goodbye.

But if you are napping in the guest room, you open your eyes to a rather bland reality. Paintings hung here because they are B-list images. Photos of someone vaguely familiar, at a young age and in a place you don’t really recognize. Nothing at all that screams you should be up doing something. You can close your eyes, encounter the blank screen, listen to the music and begin again. Maybe a path somewhere between a meadow and a forest. Perhaps there is a stream over there, a gentle rain beginning - yes, that’s good.

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Tales of a Memory Hunt

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It is a somewhat strange image. I am on a path, holding my favorite hiking staff, the one I bought at a medieval fair in Wisconsin a few years ago. It is wood, dark walnut stain, spiral top with a leather grip, my name carved below the grip - it stands a bit taller than I. The air is neither warm nor cool - neutral enough to be nonexistent, so I am dressed in jeans and a comfortable long-sleeved shirt, running shoes and my trusty compression socks. There is a water bottle on my belt and I carry a light pack filled, I assume, with things I like to eat. I am in a forest glade, and while sunlight dapples on the area immediately at my feet, the myriad paths that lead away from the clearing are quickly lost in mist. It is not quite fog. The tops of the surrounding trees remain sunlit for the most part, but descend into the mist as I try to peer down each path. 

I know why I am here.  A note was slipped under the door of my consciousness, just as I was trying to slide into my afternoon nap.  It was neither long nor complex - ironically I don’t recall the specifics at the moment. A name, a face, a room, a vista, a flavor, a tune, one of those - or something closely related. So here I am on this path inside my head. You can take comfort from the fact that it is nothing like those pictures of the brain you encounter in books, or magazine articles, or on the Internet. Nothing grey and squishy, and if there are crevasses and convolutions they must be far above me, beyond the tree tops and what I assume is a sun up there. 

Having procrastinated as long as possible, I move on down the path.  This is not as simple as it may sound. The path has a disconcerting habit of bifurcating, and trifurcating, and whatever furcating comes next: No, not here. Maybe over there. It might have looked like this, smelled like that, felt somewhat similar to that other thing. This was the dominant color. No, maybe a shade more blue. A touch of turquoise. Maybe a bit of crimson. Now add just a bit of the smell of a Spring morning, a touch of Fall when you could still burn leaves, and maybe a hint of that first snowfall that started a bit after midnight when you were coming home late - or were supposed to have been in bed hours ago. Hold that. That seems about right. 

But, oh, wait. Through the trees. Over there. Is that a different path? A better one? Is there less mist over there? Doesn’t that seem a bit more like what I am trying to recall? Yes. No. Maybe. So I take my staff and poke around the edge of the path. It seems solid so, using little baby steps, I make my way through the trees and am soon standing on the other path. Now, right or left? Straight ahead or backwards? Sure, but which is ahead and which is backwards?  Maybe, if I return to the nap I can figure it out. OK.  Sleeping now, I think.

Yet, hold on.  What’s that? Over there, at the edge of consciousness. A note! Here, let me see. What does it say? I can’t quite make it out. Maybe if .  .  .   

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A Bench by the Side of the Road

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Just a bench without plaque or notation  

Of events either stirring or grand.

Nor is it a rough-hewn construction  

Inclining a traveler to stand. 

It rests at the point of conjunction  

Of many a well-traveled path, 

But gives no real hint of direction  

Of what future should follow the past. 

So I sit in the twilight of evening 

Watching fireflies welcome the night, 

And suppose that I ought to be leaving 

But somehow it just seems to be right 

To linger awhile while believing  

That one path or another will tempt me 

As the moon fills the sky with her light. 

‘Til then I will try to stay peaceful, 

While enjoying this lack of a load, 

And keep time with the call of the crickets 

As I rest on this bench by the road. 

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Oppose Harm in the Voting Booth

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This final tenet of Distilled Harmony has a vital place in the voting booth.  Oppose Harm is the last of the four tenets because in some ways it is a tacit admission that the first three were unsuccessful. We need to remember that the primary objective of Distilled Harmony as a belief system is to enable and encourage a kinder and more gentle world. It calls upon us first to foster harmony, then to enable beauty, next clarify our understanding of the world via studying and reducing the needless or deceptive “smoke and mirrors” of political and social agendas. 

Sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes in politics we find ourselves confronted with candidates who simply do not believe in a kinder and more gentle world, or even worse, believe that such a world should be the sole province of those who are members of the candidate’s specific demographic categories: ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, political party, etc.  These are the “my way or the highway” candidates who may pretend to want to “reach across the aisle” to advance a shared view for America but in reality believe that there is only one proper view of America and it is their special property. They are bullies.

In the history of American politics there are plenty of examples of bullies in all political parties. Some parties and religious organizations, mostly no longer with us to any meaningful degree, were actually founded to advance the agenda of one gang of bullies or another, like Charles Coughlin and his radical quasi-Catholic National Shrine of the Little Flowers, a vocal Canadian/American front for Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party [Nazis] which swept into power in Germany in the middle third of the 1900s. Hitler’s Nazis, while not a unique instance, are perhaps the most visible example here in the West of what can happen when a “bully-centered” party is able to capture a country’s significant political and military power.

For those of us who hold Distilled Harmony as an important and viable belief system, the 2020 presidential election is a complex decision, but not for the usual reasons. While ballotpedia [ballotpedia.org] reports that 107 Republicans have filed to run for president, the site admits that there are a lot of pseudonyms and “fake candidates” on that list. And despite former Governor Weld of Massachusetts having thrown his hat into the Republican ring, no one seriously considers any serious challenge to Trump. For those of us who believe in the four tenets of Distilled Harmony, or values closely allied to those tenets, President Trump has removed himself from consideration. He ran unabashedly as a racist bully, and his administration has created a dark “Bully Pulpit” unlike anything Teddy Roosevelt could have imagined. Demanding absolute personal loyalty and pulling “truth” from the most malevolent corners of the Internet, he provides a textbook example for everything Distilled Harmony opposes.

Still, the Democrats are’t making it easy. As I write this, there are 271 Democrats who have filed with the Federal Election Committee as presidential candidates. Among those 271 are 25 or 30 who appear to be serious possibilities. While it is true that all of the serious candidates fall closer to the ideals and tenets of Distilled Harmony than our current President, they are by no means a cluster of Stepford Candidates, clones cut from the same cloth. They all do hope that folks who voted for Trump last time around are suffering from some degree of voter's remorse - “I didn’t think he was actually that much of a racist bully.” But there real differences among these serious democratic candidates, and I appear to be on all their mailing lists. While I do have some early favorites, I am nowhere near a final choice. I have a lot more reading to do - comparing policy statements and proposals and researching past behaviors as they relate to the four tenets of Distilled Harmony. Hopefully my eventual favorite will survive the primaries relatively unscathed and come Election Day I will be able to fill in the little circle next to the name of a genuinely harmonious candidate.  

Well, that is it for my “Voter’s Guide According to Distilled Harmony.” I hope you found it helpful. I will now return my attention to painting and poetry, both of which are more in harmony with sleeping well and lowering my blood pressure. By the way, did you know that almost all of Bob Ross’s paintings live in a small warehouse in Northern Virginia? And no, you can’t buy one. You are supposed to paint your own. :-)

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Distill Complexity in The Voting Booth

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Political campaigns often represent the dark side of this tenet of Distilled Harmony. In the usual context of Distilled Harmony this tenet asks us to examine the seeming complexity of life and distill it to its least complex truth. What do we mean by things like truth, happiness, love, honor? In the context of politics the notion of distilling complexity requires us to examine issues that are often presented - in the bills that actually eventually reach Congress - in quite complex language. We should attempt to distill that linguistic complexity in an effort to discern the potential impact of those bills on policy and law. Political campaigns are something else completely. Campaigns craft “slogans” designed to allow supporters to graft their own perceptions and objectives onto the often amorphous identity of the candidate. Some recent examples:

Bill Clinton: 1992 “For People, For a Change” “It’s Time to Change America”

Bush 2004 “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America.”

Obama 2008: “Yes, We Can.” “Change” “Hope”  

Romney 2012: “Believe in America”

And most recently:

Hillary Clinton: “Fighting for America.”

Trump: “Make America Great Again.”

One would be hard pressed to take exception with any of these slogans, yet they represent candidates who would implement radically different policies in pursuit of very different visions for America. The slogans obviously shift for incumbents urging us to “stay the course” and challengers who want to “throw the bums out!" but the shared intent is to craft a slogan broad enough to morph comfortably with the beliefs and values of a candidate’s core supporters as well as those of the all-important undecided voters. Quite the exercise in saying nothing specific but seeming to say just what your audience hopes you mean.

That makes things more difficult for us, often resulting in "voter’s remorse": I didn’t think that was what s/he meant by “ ________ for America!” In this instance it is our task is flip the distill complexity tenet on its head and paint a little complexity on the simple slogans. We need to define our own priorities and then examine the candidate’s past performance in regard to those issues - what does each candidate advocate for America regarding our priorities? Healthcare? Education? Climate change? Immigration? Social security? Student loans? Where do we stand on these issues and what has each candidate done in the political or business arenas to advance our priorities? Is their "great, safe, changed” America the same as our "great, safe, changed" America? Or have they championed policies and behaviors and political appointees that contradict our view of the best possible America?

Once we come to understand that more complex view of the candidate’s view of America, then we can distill that complexity into a simple decision: open your wallet, attend the rally, mark your ballet. 

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Monet by the Highway

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The pioneers had it a lot tougher. Hard wooden seats, Conestoga wagons with no springs, few roads to speak of, and a two, four or maybe six ox power plant. Still, over the last couple of weeks I have come to sense a new feeling of kinship with those folks. I have spent what feels like many hours in the back of a friend’s car looking out the window at the freeways in and around Chicago. It has been an interesting experience. No complaints about the back seat. Worlds removed from a Conestoga wagon, it lives in a high end air-conditioned Mercedes 550 with an excellent sound system. I do occasionally share the seat with a large, rather rambunctious black lab who is far more interested in being in the front seat. But we all have dreams that will never be realized. Quite often the front seat conversation centers on people I have never met and places to which I have never been, so I look out the window.

There is a lot of stuff to see out the window.  There is no doubt this is a huge city - Wikipedia puts the population of the metropolitan area at around 9.7 million, third in the US behind LA and New York. The view constantly changes. Buildings both gleaming and gutted, billboards for every product under the sun - yes, every product! People of any imaginable size, shape, hue and attitude. A menagerie of pets, and occasionally other faces peering back at me out of other windows. Sometimes we wave. 

But I am often more taken by the flora than by the fauna and the architecture. Down in the city proper the flowers are most often enabled. Parks and fanciful concrete planters house the exotic end of the plant palette; crimsons and golds, purples and cobalt climb stalks to make a sculptor proud. But as you wind your way out toward the burbs, the spaces left alone reassert themselves. Hemerocallis - or day lilies, which probably started as a tasteful intentional border or pathway have invaded the ditches from whence they originally sprang, and garnered their most lowbrow name - ditch lilies.  Occasionally leaping across deserts of concrete to the median, everywhere they provide wonderful splashes of color against a background of myriad greens.  

The greens begin as unassuming tufts of grass along the edge of the highway, but soon climb up into foliage my mother could probably have named, in the colloquial, if not the Latin - probably “bachelor’s breeches," or something equally colorful. Bullrushes and stalks of foliage that must be kin to the buffalo grass of the early midwestern prairie, peak up in wild hedges 5 or 6 feet tall, often entwined with the deceptively attractive toxicodendron radicals, aka poison ivy, which thrives in the area. The "water-featured” ponds of the downtown office parks give way to their more rural inspirations often covered with enough lily pads and ivory-tinged blooms to make an impressionist salivate.   

More hardwoods than pines claim the further horizons that can be glimpsed between the now more scattered buildings. They often host wisteria, another weed turned high-brow ornamental. Fields begin to crop up. Corn seems to be doing well, and my guess about the lower plants would be just that - a guess. Too low for soybeans, too high for strawberries. “You can take the kid out of town, but you can't take the .  .  .  .  .  “ You get it.   

Clouds scuttle across a sky that is improbably a Carolina blue. Might have something to do with winds off the plains to the west meeting the winds blowing in from Lake Michigan to the east.  Towering thunderheads on one side, fluffy Bob Ross "happy little clouds" on the other. They are the kinds of views that make me wish I could paint. Instead I just settle back and look out the window. 

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Enable Beauty in the Voting Booth

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Beauty is not a luxury.  At first glance the sentence appears to be an oxymoron. We need only take a quick stroll down memory lane to link the beautiful with the luxurious. Pick a century, pick an empire, pick a robber baron, and you will find a palace or mansion stuffed full of the artifacts deemed the most beautiful of the age. But interestingly we may have the chicken and the egg backwards. It is easy to assume that wealth and power were the dominant motivations of the top 1% of any particular era. And I would not suggest that Genghis Khan, Napoleon, the Medici, Hitler, Qin Shi Huang, and that crowd were shrinking violets; they were all megalomaniacs, whose glories were rooted in blood. But I am fascinated by what they acquired once they had amassed their wealth and power. Without exception they either plundered their known world for the finest art or commissioned new works by the world’s finest artists. A psychiatrist might wonder if all the brutality and mayhem had, at least in part, masked a frustrated obsession with “all things bright and beautiful.” 

But the love of beauty has by no means been restricted to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, or infamous, nor to recent history. Humans have been painting on the walls of caves and carving wooden and stone figures for some 60 thousand years! We seem to have an innate love of - even a visceral need for - the beautiful.  In the context of this specific post, we need to pay particular attention to the work of one iconic President, FDR. 

In 1934, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration realized that art and artists were vital to the fiscal and emotional recovery of the nation. And so the Public Works of Art Project was born, hiring some 4000 artists to create almost 16,000 works of art.  The scope and lasting legacy of the various works remains open to debate. What is not, is the legacy of an administration with the courage to assert that beauty was fundamental to the health of the nation. Interestingly, FDR’s distant cousin and fellow president, Teddy Roosevelt, had taken a similarly courageous stand earlier in the century, setting aside vast tracts of wilderness as national parks and forests, assuring us of a heritage of natural beauty to partner with FDR’s efforts in the arts. 

So what insight do these histories lend to our voting behavior in 2020?  A candidate’s position on environment is often fairly front and center.  Climate change, exploration by private companies into public lands, policies and leadership of the EPA, these are all fairly high profile issues that impact natural beauty, and separating the “pro-beauty” candidate from those who show little concern for, or outright animosity towards, these issues is not terribly difficult. Standard position papers posted on the candidate’s website usually make the candidate’s feelings on these issues clear.   

However, positions on the fine arts, like those championed by Roosevelt’s Public Arts Work Project are often less transparent. The National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities are flagship national “pro-beauty” endeavors, so we can be guided somewhat by candidates’ positions on those agencies and their budgets. However other issues, like a candidate’s position on national educational curricular initiatives the effect of which can trickle all the way down to providing art supplies in public elementary school classrooms are often harder to discern and may require contact with a candidate’s campaign that goes beyond their boilerplate social media blurbs. Take the time and effort to learn what these folks believe about beauty and the arts and why. 

Beauty and humanity have coexisted across the millennia.  It seems that every time the anthropologists and archeologists push our species’ history further back into the "mists before now" we find sculpture among the skeletons, paintings beside the ancient hearths. Enable Beauty is the second tenet of Distilled Harmony simply because it seems obvious that by enabling beauty we enable and ennoble humanity and the world in which we live.

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Foster Harmony - The Most Harmonious Candidate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Both have their place.

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

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

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

Student: And when was that?

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

Student: Thank you.

Me: No problem.

The “hopper days” work somewhat differently: 

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

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

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

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