Thanks for the Metaphors

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Memory is a strange thing. It is universal and yet unique. Universally, memories are little pieces of spacetime that when knitted together, create the picture of our life gone by. Yet, we experience them uniquely, and since, as my sister recently pointed out to me, we cannot see inside each other’s heads, the only memory we can experience is our own. In this attempt to come to grips with this unique yet universal phenomenon, I find myself falling back on my old buddy, metaphor.

I mention my sister because we have been discussing memory. My initial inclination is to say that her’s is much better than mine, and by most traditional measures it is. However, for the moment let me quibble just a bit and merely assert that it is different from mine.

You see, her son and his wife “gave” her StoryWorth. The quotes are there because StoryWorth is an Internet-based gift that presents the recipient with topics about their life, topics that are generated by the givers. The recipient then creates a response; a story, essay, photos, copies of documents, etc. For example, “Who was your favorite childhood friend? “What was the “best” place you ever lived?” Stuff like that. Then, when the “subscription” is complete, the collected responses, which were shared with a small circle of friends and family online, are then compiled into a real, analog, "hold-in-your-hand” book. Margaret brought a copy along when we had dinner recently. I have only now had a chance to sit down and really spend some time with it. Oh. My. Or as digispeak would have it, OMG!

I had read the individual “chapters” online, but the physical book was a radically different experience. Margaret’s responses were staggeringly thorough and insightful, gracefully sketching a decades-long mural of a life that evolved in parallel to my own.  Sometimes achingly similar, other times totally alien. But always detailed to an extent that far surpassed my ability to recall. “How did she do that?” I wondered. And with the zeal of the almost fully retired, I set out to find out. Being still a media-guy, I turned to texting. I include the follow exchange with Margaret’s permission:

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ME: Hi. I have been looking at the StoryWorth books, and a question comes to mind. Where did all the content come from? Obviously you have some journals and stuff, but there seems to be an incredible amount of “memory” going on. I’m playing with a Wall about memory and was curious about yours. We have both read mysteries in which characters with photographic memories play a role. Mine doesn’t even approach those heights, quite the contrary on occasion! How about you?

MARGARET: Well. That’s a great question. Bill (Her husband - RLS) and I have talked about our vastly different abilities in remembering things, trying to tease out the differences. I keep saying “Don’t you just have a picture of x in your mind?”  And he says “No, only you have that.” Do I have a photographic memory? I don’t know. The only memory I know is mine, lol. It’s very visual and detailed and apparently quite different from his. I have trouble putting myself in his head, trying to imagine what his memories look like if they don’t look like mine.

Yes, I apparently have an excellent memory. I’m constantly saying “just a minute, let me picture that” and then I can find the sought after object, or remember the event or conversation, etc.Did I have source materials for a lot of the book? Absolutely. And I also found that just looking at some of the photos triggered a cascade of other very vivid memories. Some of them seemed as real as only yesterday. I guess if there are degrees or levels of photographic memory, then I’m definitely on the spectrum (haha) and I guess pretty far to the positive side. It would be fun to sit and talk about our memories sometime. If that doesn’t answer your question, shoot me more probing questions and I’ll answer them. But email would be easier on my finger.

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“Wow,” I wondered. “Why does she get to be on the eidetic memory spectrum, while I have trouble recalling the names of my college suite mates?” But then my battered self-confidence resurged and I thought, not necessarily better memory, perhaps just different. And that was when I began to think about the various metaphors for memory that might begin to explain the different “memory styles” manifested by my sib and I.

First, I had to wrestle with the notion of what is a “memory” other than an incredibly over-used meme in popular musical theater? It is, I decided, a slice of spacetime, unique to our existence, which led, naturally, I thought, to the flip book metaphor for memory. In a recent post I admitted to the fact that there were times - probably in 4th or 5th grade - when my attention was not actually riveted upon what was being discussed in class. One way I passed the time was to create little cartoons on the corners of the pages of my text books. You know, you draw little frame-by-frame stick figures on the corner of the pages, and then when you flip the pages you can make the little figure run off the page.

In David Baldacci’s books featuring Amos Decker, an FBI agent with an eidetic or photographic memory, he describes Decker’s memory this way, a sort of flip book on steroids, but his analogy is more 21st century - Decker replays things he has experienced like “playing back a DVD, frame-by-frame.” You get the idea. Everything you have ever experienced in your life is stuck up there somewhere between you ears. Folks who are, to use my sister’s phrase, “on the photographic memory spectrum,” apparently can access those experiences, and intentionally examine each frame, or clusters of frames and hence “remember” what happened in great detail.

Let me be clear, my memory works nothing like that. My memory works more like driving west down the largely undeveloped Route 66 back in the sixties with “roadside rests,” featuring single picnic tables usually next to a motel with a two word name like The Pines or Easy Rest. You accessed each unit directly from the parking lot. One door. One window. Sometimes with an air conditioner. Often there was a postage stamp sized swimming pool and a breezeway with a Coke machine. And there was this time just before sunset with the sun directly in your eyes, when driving became painful and you would find yourself pulling into the parking lot outside an Edward Hopper or Norman Rockwell painting. My memory works something like that.

OK, While that metaphor makes perfect sense to me, I realize I need to unpack it a bit. The "driving west just before sunset” part comes from the retina resurfacing experience that accompanies driving west at that maddening time of day when the sun is sitting on the horizon, below the spot where the sun visor can block it.  The blacktop starts to shimmer and you are reduced to driving along one-handed while using your other hand to block the sun.  But then occasionally when you do manage cancel the glare, all the stuff that was lost around the edges of your compromised vision creeps back in again, but somehow muted in pastels. Eventually those images gradually return to hi def when the sun drops below the horizon and ceases its frontal attack. Exhausted, you turn off the highway, pulling over a cracked concrete parking lot to a Hopper/Rockwell world. You get out, rub your eyes, arch your back, stretch your legs and look around.  

It is that fade from harsh glare through more gentle hues and, eventually, to recalled clarity that best describes the full range of my memory.

You see there are bits and pieces, faces and places, that so dominate in my memory that many other aspects get pushed into a kind of mental hibernation. You will notice that I subtly avoid the f-word, which in this case is get  “forgotten” and the various derivations of the root “f-word.” I make this distinction because in many instances I don’t really “forget” the supporting cast of my life - the strange camp counselor who taught us knife throwing, Mickey Fitzgerald, the earliest “girlfriend” can remember from first grade, the giant teddy bears that Mom made for Margaret and I one Christmas, but in an iconic Mom-like snafu, stuffed them with some itchy industrial foam, the Great Rock Show featuring two or three different types of quartz and granite scrounged from local construction sites - those smaller moments are all still there. As are many of the faces of the 20 or 30 thousand students I have taught in my 40 years in various college classrooms. 

The point is that, for me, those supporting cast members of my memories get washed out by the leads; those other bits and pieces, faces and places that burn so brightly that I still see them when I close my eyes at night, that populate the music I listen to ceaselessly. It is not that I value the supporting cast members any less - I just do not “see” them all that clearly. One of the first things any young stage actor is taught is how to “find your light.” This is different from hitting your spot in a performance designed to be filmed. In those cinematic instances, you hit your spot on the set and it is up to the director to get the camera to you. In live theater a spotlight illuminating a particular point on a stage will hit actors of different heights in different places. You want to, no, you need to, find your light. Only then do you feel that magical bloom on your face, the warmth that assures you that, yes, the audience loves you - or hates you, if that is your objective. 

The “leads" in my memories are those bright lights on my unique stage, bright, dominant, unceasingly precious.  But often it is their intense glow that allows me to peak around in the shadows for the supporting cast resting there in Hooper’s poignant cafes or Rockwell’s impossibly resonant scenes of everyday life. And there they are, not as magnetic as the leads, but then without them the stage would be bare.

So, no, I certainly do not have a hi-def photographic memory. But with occasional nudging it can turn out a pleasing pastel.

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To Emily Dickinson

You kept your poems  

Secreted in a drawer. 

Of a desk, or a dresser. 

I forget which I was taught. 

It was a very long time ago. 

The classroom was warm, 

I was drowsy, the window alluring. 

But I do remember being told, 

“She kept her poems in a drawer.” 

I do not think I dreamed it. 

But I never understood  

Why you would keep 

Your poems secreted  

In a drawer, desk or dresser. 

Until perhaps now. 

They were, I imagine, 

Poems to yourself. 

Desperate or simply brave 

Efforts to capture  

Those ephemeral callings 

From deep within  

Or unimaginably distant 

And anchor them  

With pen upon a page. 

Born in beauty 

Upon a second glance 

You gave in to  

Fear or reluctance. 

Perhaps they were 

Not good enough. 

And so you hid them, 

In a drawer of some type. 

Today we put them 

In a cloud. 

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The Artist's Prerogative

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Just a quick one, stimulated perhaps by a NY Times story on Banksy and his famous self-shedding painting of the girl and the heart-shaped ballon, now titled Love is in the Bin. Banksy had set the painting to “self-destruct” as soon as it was sold at Sotheby’s London in 2018, but the shredder jammed, and the half-destroyed painting was subsequently sold for more than the original undamaged work. Profit assured, no foul? It made me wonder about ownership and art. Does either authorship or ownership entitle one to destroy or alter an artwork that could be argued to be of such cultural value that it “belongs to the world?”  Mind you, I’m not arguing that Love is in the Bin is such a work, or that Banksy is a world class artist. World class marketer, maybe. But that’s not really the point. The question is what prerogatives attach to the creation or possession of an artwork? 

Salvator Mundi is perhaps a better example. This depiction of Christ attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci was sold for 450 million dollars in 2017 and disappeared. A couple of years later it was reported as being housed on the yacht of an Islamic Saudi prince. Strange context for an iconic image of Christ. Yet, nobody seems terribly put out about this - I mean he did, we assume, pay for it, and art often transcends theological fealty. Had the prince, however, opted to destroy the painting - something copyright law would allow - I assume the public reaction would have been quite different. I mean when the Taliban blew up two of the world’s tallest standing Buddhas in 2001, no one - or at least no one not in sympathy with the Taliban - said, “Well, spoils of war. They “owned” them they could do what they wanted.” So, the complexities of copyright law notwithstanding, there appear to be lines you aren’t supposed to cross. You can destroy your own work, or a work you own - the Banksy model. You can purchase an artistically unique work and keep it hidden away for your own pleasure - the Saudi prince model. But you aren’t supposed to blow up works of great cultural significance - the Taliban model.  I realize that copyright law addresses these issues, but like everything when you let the lawyers in, it is not always cut and dried. Each case seems to get adjudicated differently, and deep pockets are often an insurmountable advantage.

So, as I sit here creating a - probably tertiary - digital version of photograph of myself (photographer forgotten - chime in if s/he is you) that I manipulated in Photoshop and then spent an absurd of number of hours hand-painting and am now digitizing, I wonder how does the power of digital technology intersects with the notion of authorship and the prerogative of the artist? With the issue of provenance? Of original and copy? How do we parse provenance in the 21st century? I really don’t know who took the original black and white photo. I have had it for years - 40 or even 50. Does ownership still reside with the original photographer?  [I am now thinking a guy named Alan Williams. The photo was taken, I now faintly recall by his family’s home in the Les Cheneaux Islands off the coast of Michigan’s Upper peninsula sometime in the early 1970s, ’72, ’73?]  But current copyright law certainly asserts that the derivative versions are mine. I’ll stick some copies in here.

Original B&W

Hand-painted

When we were in Venice a year or so ago I remember being fascinated watching restorers at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco working on two large paintings by Tintoretto. Also, I continue to drop in online every now and then to watch the live coverage of the restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Both experiences reveal consummate professionals with otherworldly skills. I couldn’t help but wonder “How much of a painting can be ‘restored’ before authorship transfers from the original artist to the restorer?” Especially in the case of “old masters” where the “master” may have actually painted only a small percentage of the canvas, the rest filled in by apprentices - "a priori restorers?" - from his/her studio?  

And now imagine ultra-high resolution 3D scanners and printers capable of building The Night Watch, or Michelangelo’s David for that matter, brush stroke by 3D brush stroke, chisel stroke by chisel stroke to the point where chemical analysis of the materials used in the “copy" becomes the only way to tell copy from original.  Who is the artist?  Who owns the rights to the copy? And is the copy a copy? Ordinarily one can sell a copy as long as you are clear that it is a copy. But what happens when the copy is, by most normal measures, identical to the original? We went through this when music went digital back in 1999, the Napster days. Initially the industry went nuts - this was really, the labels thought, “the day the music died.” But eventually we all became acclimated to the new reality, and artists discovered that they didn’t really need the big labels, and the music was resurrected with far more variety and flexibility.  Will the plastic arts and traditional drawing, painting, photography show the same resilience?

The potential confusion wrought by evolving technology isn’t the only problem. Reconstruction work on the Bamiyan Buddhas has been stymied by bureaucratic UNESCO regulations that require the use of “original material.” Well, the original material was reduced to dust by the Taliban, and the bureaucrats haven’t been able to work their way around that snafu, so the giant niches stand empty, save the shattered ruins. More recently, reconstruction work on the 850-year-old iconic French cathedral, Notre Dame, which the French Senate has declared should be restored to its “last known visual state" is similarly stalled by a debate between architects, cathedral officials, and UNESCO, again, officials - who apparently have a dog in this fight because the cathedral is part of the World Heritage site known as “Paris, Banks of the Seine.”

So, these are the issues that come to mind as I switch from my keyboard back to my Wacom graphics tablet. Fortunately, no one has offered me millions of dollars for either the originals or copies of my works, so I need not thrash about attempting to resolve these issues that seem to reside far, far away from the actual process of making art. However, should the odd Saudi Prince contact you with a significant offer, do send him my way. My people will talk to his people.

The Beauty Cure

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“I love it when I discover data that confirms my biases.” Departmental faculty meetings were rarely a hotbed of genuine levity, but I got a fairly good laugh with that one in a meeting a couple of years ago. You see, academicians are wired the other way round. Briefly, you are supposed to settle on a question, design a study that allows you to examine the question from an objective perspective, do the study, examine the data and only then draw the conclusions warranted by the data. Bias has no place in scholarship. All questions are open to unbiased examination. True, that becomes more difficult these days when the deep government pockets, upon which major universities often feast are insisting that researchers commit to a certain range of conclusions before conducting their studies. That calls for increasingly creative grantsmanship. But while climate change may be off limits for the time being, last time I looked government-funded studies can still proceed from the assumption of a round earth and an expanding universe.

However, truth be told, my own research often started from “You know, I bet that .  .  .  and so on and so forth.” So while I tried to design inquiries from a “null hypothesis” objective, deep in my heart-of-hearts, I was leaning towards my bias. Hence, the unintentional jest mentioned above.

And now damned if it didn’t happen again. I was reading the New Scientist, January 25, 2020 article A Radical Idea Suggests that Mental Health Issues Have a Single Cause. If the general area is of interest to you, I suggest you track it down on the Internet, since I will, as usual, condense for brevity. (I’ll try to paste a link to the article in here, but if that doesn’t work, send me a message, and I’ll send you the link.) The article begins thus; “The discovery of a link between anxiety, depression, OCD and more is set to revolutionize how we think about these conditions - and offer new treatments.” The article eventually includes PTSD, bi-polar disorder and anorexia among the relevant conditions. It then goes on to explore this possible link among the various mental health conditions through a variety medical, psychiatric, genetic, psychological and sociological avenues eventually arriving at what, for lack of a more precise term, I will call IITBBO - Inheritable Inclination to Being Bummed Out - which we could further shorten to ITBO. 

Don’t let the tiny acronym fool you. ITBO can wreck your life. Even if you have never strayed over the line into some official diagnosis you have either known someone who has, or have flirted with the line with “blue days,” or “that outfit makes me look fat,” or “I had that dream again.” Those stinging little bummers from the down side of life. When the little bummers swell up and start to fill too many of your waking and sleeping moments, they can suck the joy out of life.

The article does discuss a number of possible treatments, but since the implicated conditions are traditionally seen as “separate,” the work seems a little thin here on the amelioration side, especially since the title clearly primes us for “new treatments.”

To which I respond, “Well, duh? Have you never heard of Distilled Harmony?” To which I’m sure the authors of the article would universally respond, “No. What’s that? And what does it have to do with ITBO?” (They wouldn’t really use the ITBO acronym, but you know what I mean.)

“Well, now that you ask . . . .” I reply.

As long-time readers here on The Wall know, Distilled Harmony is a way of thinking about, and behaving in, the world. Over the last decade and change, its tenets have become my mantra, my rosary if you will; Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, Oppose Harm. As I read the article that laid out the pervasive grey depressive cloud that encompasses ITBO, it became increasingly obvious to me that, particularly in light of a seeming lack of other options, Distilled Harmony seems tailor-made to combat ITBO.  

Ordinarily I present the tenets of Distilled Harmony in the order given above with the mandate to Foster Harmony leading the pack. But when confronting ITBO the second tenet, Enable Beauty, pulls up alongside. It is important to note that when I consider Distilled Harmony, I often conflate Enable and Create.  Enable Beauty can be Create Beauty, switch hitters of equal power. And the simple truth is that it is very difficult to give in to the morbid music of ITBO, if you are actively engaged in making something beautiful.

As Saul Leiter, photographer and artist, wrote in his book, In No Great Hurry, “I may be old-fashioned, but I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty—a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don’t think one should have to apologize for it.” Obviously this puts Leiter on the other side of the creative table from the iconic Heironymus Bosch work Garden of Earthly Delights, or Picasso’s Guernica. Those are ITBO classics and, like much currently popular dystopian “art,” seem more inclined to wallow in the despair that permeates ITBO, than to free us from its clutches. I’m on Leiter’s side.

I can truthfully say that I am never depressed, or even mildly bummed out, when I am drawing, or coloring, painting, sculpting, taking beautiful photos, writing a poem or a song, or sharing thoughts with you here on The Wall. ITBO may be snarking around in the dark outside, looking for a chink in the armor of beauty, but it will hunt in vain. Beauty, especially when snuggled within the arms of Distilled Harmony, has no weak spots. 

So if you would blunt ITBO, create beauty. Paint, draw, sing, sculpt, write, whistle and dance - and do it all as if no one was watching. Because, and this is vital, when we create beauty, we are the final authority as to what is beautiful. The products of our hands and hearts need not reside in the great museums and galleries of the world. Our songs need not be on the lips of millions. Our poems and paintings need not attract “followers” without number. There is but one critical objective to the art we create in the pursuit of beauty, it must make us smile. Just us.

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To Binge or Not to Binge

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Binge viewing seems all the rage these days.  Apparently the idea is to spend hours ingesting junk food while mainlining Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones. Mind you, I have nothing against junk food but I lost whatever taste I ever had for non-stop video viewing in the autumn of 1971. Two events and one technological reality converged that fall to sour me on marathon video viewing. The first event was that I had to select a topic for my Master’s thesis in Communication Arts and Sciences at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The second event was that I decided to measure the amount and type of content that aired on the four available TV stations in the area - ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS. The relevant technical reality was that the home video recorder was still just a very expensive gleam in the eyes of the video engineers at Sony and Philips. The result was me, perched bleary-eyed before my TV, stopwatch in one hand, pen poised over a legal pad in the other as I monitored each station from sign-on to sign-off [another ancient concept]; on four successive days.

So, no, I don’t do binge viewing.  But least I get dizzy and fall off my high horse, I do need to confess to the bingeing that I do indulge in.  Back in the olden days - like 1971 - to go on a “binge" was to lose a few days by over-indulging in alcohol or other mind-muddling substances. My own particular binge preference was, and remains, to lose a few days by over-indulging in serialized print fiction. I have written elsewhere here on the Wall about this addiction that I share with my sister and my older daughter. I blame my mother. It was either 1954 or 1956, as those were the two summers that we spent in LA area while my father did an “exchange teaching” summer school stint. My mother would cart we three kiddies off to the library where we would hoard the maximum of books allowed and head out into what I now realize was the then relatively unpolluted Southern California sunshine. We would loll about on the lawn that surrounded the library, lost in the pages of our personal never, neverland. My first serialized addiction from those early summers was the Mother West Wind stories by Thornton Burgess.  My sister and I never looked back. Our big brother, Jim - now sadly gone - was several years older and I’m not sure if he was ever bitten by the serialized fiction bug, but I do remember dipping into his stash of Albert Payson Terhune canine books, Lad, the Story of Dog, etc.

Still, I digress. I am not sure when or where I first encountered Louis L’Amour.  But it must have been a few decades ago when I first read the 18 books that constitute the Sackett family saga. The series follows a fictional family from Elizabethan England through immigration to “Raleigh’s Land” and eventually, across the continent and over a couple centuries, to the American West.  I have kept my eye out for the books ever since. However, there must be some restrictions on the series, or L’Amour’s works in general, as they are conspicuous by their absence in the ebook world.  So, I finally bit the bullet, and bought the series in paperback from Amazon.  They arrived four days ago, so I have finished the first four. I know, I know, it’s a sickness. "My name is Robert and I’m a bookaholic.”

But a strange thing has happened. It has been a long time since I have spent so much time with a physical book in my hands.  I read almost exclusively on my iPad or my phone. It is just so convenient. I can carry hundreds of books around with me. Pull them out when the line at the grocery store is too long. Whenever or wherever, and ta da, there’s my book.  But not really, or at least not completely. A book is a conversation - author to reader. Rarely back again, but still a conversation. 

I am beginning to think that digital texts can mute part of that conversation. As I read the Sackett books I can literally feel the flow of the conversation. The pages in my right hand decrease as those in my left swell. As they do so my heart rate increases, a strange mixture of joy and sorrow. Joy that resolution grows closer and closer. Sadness that the conversation is coming to end. A beloved friend will soon rise from the table and leave me alone. The comfort of a series is that they will return. A glance at the Amazon box reveals 14 more books. Pristine, spine smooth, unbroken. Calm returns.

And that was when it struck me that another obsessive binge had to lie on the other side of the conversation. The obsession of the artist. The mandate of the muse. I have heard an apocryphal tale about L’Amour. I don’t know if it is true. I choose to believe it is. It goes like this: 

L’Amour rarely lingered over breakfast. He would slurp down his coffee and rush off to his study to write. One morning his daughter asked him why his was in such a hurry to get to his writing. L’Amour’s reply: “I can’t wait to see what happens!”

I am stunned when I consider the sheer number of pages in the Sackett saga, especially when the dust jacket informs me that this is just a small portion of  L’Amour's output. I glance over at the Harry Potter books on my bookshelf, same feeling of awe. Some masochistic inclination makes me do an internet search for “books by David Baldacci.” Ouch.  The Great Bridge by David McCullough is sitting on the coffee table across the room. I am not going to look him up. I sit back and take a sip of now cold coffee, yech. My first, and foolish, thought is “How fast can they type? How do you - in the course of lifetime - put that many words down on paper?” And that, of course, completely overlooks the essential variable: these are really good words, often beautiful and inspiring words. Words that make us smile, laugh, think and cry. Words that weave narratives that keep those of us on our of the conversation enchanted. 

I realize that counting the words or pages in great writing is like pricing art by the square inch. Go to an art show and find the booth that has, in your opinion, the absolute best paintings or photographs in the show. Eavesdrop on the shoppers. I guarantee you will hear some version of this conversation:

“Do you really like it?”

“Yes, I do. But that seems like a lot of money for such a small painting.”

The public's inclination to count pages and measure paintings are a couple of reasons that I tell my students that very few artists choose to be artists, their art chooses them, and rarely lets go. The incredible volume of work provided by the authors I have mentioned is without doubt staggering - but that is, at best, a coarse measurement.  We do not go to see Michelangelo’s David because it weighs 12,478 lbs. We go because those 6 tons of marble enable beauty in a way that helps us to better see the beauty of the world.  

We do not binge on the works of L’Amour, Rowling, Baldacci and McCullough because they have spewed out millions of words. We binge on their words because their obsession to create has made our world more fun, interesting, livelier, more beautiful.

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More Than One Way to Skin a Cat

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Back in 1854, when humorist Seba Smith coined that phrase in  "Way Down East; or, Portraitures of Yankee Life” he probably did not have to worry about irate Internet messages from PETA members, because there was neither PETA nor the Internet. But lurking in this earthy, politically incorrect, aphorism is a valuable message for the 21st century.  

The 20th century, including as it did an unprecedented number of armed conflicts - including World War I, which acquired unintentionally ironic moniker "the war to end all wars” - demonstrated what happens when individuals, nations, faiths and philosophies follow the antithesis of the inclusive cat skinning style controversy. That being that there is only one way to skin a cat: my way. And if you try to skin a cat some other way, I, sadly, will have to kill you. 

Theodore Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, tried to warn us against this short-sighted view of the world in his lovely The Butter Battle Book, in which the Yooks and the Zooks swiftly approach mutual self-destruction in a war that hinges on a disagreement over the right way to butter one’s bread. Perhaps the book’s publication date, 1984, is coincidental, perhaps not. 

Still, it might be worth our while to follow this path of prescient chronology a little further. We have just rung in 2020. For many of us 20/20 is synonymous with perfect vision, the ability to see clearly. Perhaps it is not too much to ask, that as fellow passengers on what appears to be an increasingly rickety spaceship Earth, we realize that there are probably many different, perhaps even some painless, non-lethal, PETA approved ways to skin a cat. 

Obviously, my concern is not with cat skinning. Rather, I am hoping that in 2020 we can back away from the arrogant “my way or the highway” mentality that so ravaged the world during the last century and seems to have only grown more virulent in the opening couple of decades of the 21st. So, in that compassionate ecumenical spirit, let me wish you a happy, harmonious, and peaceful 2020.

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My Personal Thesaurus

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Initially I saw it as a color wheel for words. No doubt versions of it exist both online and on paper. Standard stuff, I imagine, in creative writing courses. Specific guides for writers and poets. A quick glance at Google reveals reams of candidates divided by age, discipline, audience and intent. But there is this problem. When you look at a classic color wheel for example, they all look the same: red across from green, yellow across from purple, blue across from orange. The whole Roy G Biv dominated world that tells us what colors “should” maintain “proper” relationships with other colors. Now go look at a sunset. Hmm. Seems nobody told the sunset about the color wheel. Every color on the wheel, and seemingly many that aren’t quite there, are slap bang up against each other and somehow it just comes out awesome.

I suspect that we would find the same phenomenon at work in the world of writing. The truly creepy world of AI that mimics literary greats or discerns an author from a few pithy snippets notwithstanding, I cling to the belief that the miracle of words on a page mystically link author and reader; that subtext, the heartbeat felt between the lines equals, and sometimes exceeds, exchanges born in the here and now.

To step sideways for a moment, I am currently composing what will be my last syllabus for a communication course at NC State University, where I have taught since 1981. The course is an online course, and in the syllabus I break several rules that have slipped into being for the online environment. Primary among them is the notion that videos should be brief and should not substitute for lectures. Not only are my online videos long - often over an hour - but they blatantly are the lectures. Even more egregious, they are sometimes lectures pulled from previous semesters - a few from years ago. Which brings us back to the motivation for My Personal Thesaurus.

Doing a live lecture to a large class is clearly live theater. Being an undergraduate theater major myself that never bothered me, except for the fact that you carried all those “live theater” anxieties with you when you went off stage. “Damn. I have done that bit on the influence of the Western on early film better.” “Did I make the distinction between Edison and Tesla clear enough?” One of the real benefits of online teaching is that I can, and shamelessly do, go back and pull what I hope were the days I hit a lecture just right, and paste that lecture into the current syllabus. And yes, I do warn the students that they will be seeing a number of “golden oldies,” during the course and that guy with varying haircuts etc., is really just different versions of me.

Back to the Personal Thesaurus; I have been doing what passed, for me, as creative writing for more than 60 years. The earliest publication, as I have mentioned here on the Wall before, was a poem in the school newspaper when I was in either 5th or 6th grade in The American International School in Vienna, Austria circa 1960 or '61. Thing is, I hope I have gotten better since then. But nowadays often when I finish a piece, prose or poetry, and think about sharing it with you here on the Wall I am often beset by those “live theater” anxieties: "I think I said that better before!" "What was that word?"

Ah, yes. "What was that word?” And hence my personal thesaurus. It is not as if I want to go back and steal a “better line” from a previous post - but a better word? Sure! Why not? So, I start this personal thesaurus. The current organizational structure is random. And that is a good thing. Something more structured may evolve, but I think I will resist it. After all I’m not really after a color wheel here - rather, more a sunset.

Harmony

Whippoorwill 

Dappled

Serenity 

Moonlight

Tranquility 

Enlightenment 

Intimacy 

Transcendence 

Gentility

Gentle

Silky

Silken

Enfolded

Thunder

Transfixed

Starlight

Shaded

Soft

Animation

Animated

Drowsy

Dozing

Dream

Dreaming

Dreamy

Smooth
Suspended 

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Weaving a Narrative in Our Personal Spacetime

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Back in the late 1980s communication scholar Walter Fisher gracefully wove together his own and other’s observations into the assertion that “we are the people of the story.” It is a theory that has stood the test of time well in the swirling, competitive arena of communication scholarship where the newest, shiniest perspective tends to garner the “buzz.” For those of you who want to explore the “narrative paradigm” in more detail, look up either Fisher or his intellectual forerunner Kenneth Burke in Google or Google Scholar. Fascinating reading but admittedly sprouting in some pretty tall cotton. After all, they did need to get published.  But in this post, while admitting that some of my rambling can be traced to the works of those to illuminaries, I am going to try to stick close to the third tenet of Distilled Harmony: Distill Complexity.

So here we go.  As we move from infancy to aged, we live one intricate story. Many times it seems that it is a story whose evolving plots and interweaving characters could put Game of Thrones to shame.  But, no, it is really just us.  Occasionally, from some high point or major crossroads in that story, we glance back over our shoulder and see the countless tributaries of our narrative Mississippi twisting and turning through the forests, wheatfields and bayous of our lives until, lo' and behold, there it is, running between our feet. We weave the fabric of that story from our beliefs and behaviors. Our choices. We often explain those choices to ourselves and others through a variety of symbolic narratives - these days often through the Internet, Facebook, emojis, etc., that whole constantly shifting panorama of the digital delta. The dominant foregrounded narrative is what we consider our “real” life.

However that “most obvious” narrative - the Mississippi between our feet - isn’t the “whole story.” Elsewhere here on the Wall I have toyed with the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics. That view of reality asserts that every time we chose a path down the Mississippi, other versions of ourselves floated off up the Ohio, the Arkansas, or somehow even found their way over to the Nile and the Danube. 

Today I am particularly focused on the choices we make when we create narratives that  are admittedly fictional. The often playful narratives that spring from our imaginations - fanciful depictions of other “unlived” stories in our narrative. The would-have-beens, might-have-beens, could-of-beens, should-have-beens, of our narrative river. These imagined narratives are our art. We imagine a whole universe of stories that might have unfolded from the roads not taken. In these artistic imaginings we become the puppet master, deciding the script, motivation, and actions of all the players. We can even create the players themselves, from “whole cloth” as it were.

Of course, there is no “reality” against which those imaginings are measured, so they become their own reality. And as we give them life in any of a variety of forms they become literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, etc. Accepting that multifaceted notion of our personal narrative requires no great intellectual or creative stretch. Two-sides of a coin, mask of tragedy, mask of comedy, bass clef, treble clef - we do that all the time. Real world, world of the imagination; no big deal unless we start to conflate the two allowing our imagined narratives to infringe upon the harder edges of the real world inhabited by others. Wander too far down those paths and the guys with the butterfly nets show up.

But perhaps we should not be quite so hasty. The many worlds version of quantum mechanics would seem to allow for just such a conflation of the “real” and the “imagined.” According to my, no doubt incomplete, understanding of this aspect of quantum mechanics, our choices in the “real” world do determine the immediate course of our existential Mississippi, but they not simultaneously render the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Nile, etc., fictitious. Those “rivers not taken” continue to flow along carrying alternative versions of ourselves into alternative futures nestled within our personal spacetime.

Hence it occurs to me that our personal "quantum narrative" is a tapestry woven from all the lived, and the imagined narratives that reside in our spacetime, including those narratives that are the ‘unchosen siblings’ of those other lived and imagined narratives.

All of which brings me to this assertion, which may well form the opening of another, even stranger Wall post:

Spacetime can be envisioned as a onion of infinite narrative layers each part of which is contiguous with every other part. And, it would seem to follow that that which we define generally as “enlightenment" is the ability to sense, and/or make sense of, those contiguous points.   

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Prayerful Profanity

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We have always had a complicated relationship with profanity. Consider early cartoons. A character would drop an anvil on his or her foot, and a text bubble appears overhead: “#**!!&#!” The message is clear, the character is swearing, but you, gentle reader, must be protected from the actual words. “Oh, my gosh and golly!” or even “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!”  

This semantic pussyfooting stems from the fact that not all profanity is the same. In fact, I would assert that it is a rather large genre of human expression. Unfortunately, we have all been exposed to what I think of as “casual profanity” f* this and f*in'  that, or that SOB and those SOBs did this or that. Long ago a dear friend suggested that “casual profanity” stemmed either from linguistic laziness when one lacked the intellectual drive to consider a more specific bon mote, or worse, was an indication that one’s vocabulary was itself insufficient to the task of expressing elegant negativity. I have come to agree.  

Additionally, there is “affiliative profanity.” This type of profanity draws upon the same lexicon, but employs it to express affiliation, belonging to an admired group. It is most common among young adolescents and their older brothers and sisters attempting to demonstrate the current version of what was once defined as “cool” or “in” or, to reach back even further, “hip.” It is also quite common among performing artists attempting to market their own version of “cool-in-hip” to a market increasing dominated by the aforementioned youngsters.  And it spirals from performer to audience and back again. Sort of a linguistic carousel. 

But, I would like to propose a third major category of profanity, and this one strays a bit beyond the more common varieties: “prayerful profanity.” Just play along with me for a minute. Say you are approaching a sharp bend in a rural two-lane highway and as you round the bend - whoa! there is a huge truck passing another car and coming straight at you! It swerves back into its own lane seconds before hitting you head on! Or perhaps you are crossing a busy intersection, and your friend grabs your arm, jerking you back just in time to keep you from being pancaked by a city bus. The exhortations that escape you in those situations, moments when you truly believe you just cheated death, may indeed be those drawn from the vocabulary of both casual and affiliative profanity. However they may also include phrases from what I call “prayerful profanity,” or what others might call “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” 

Consider this; in those life-or-death situations we are doing anything but “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” We have never been more intensely prayerful, never more truly hopeful that we are not taking the Lord’s name in vain, but rather are seriously seeking some kind of immediate divine intervention. I’m not really sure where I am going with this, maybe just re-emphasizing the old saw that there are no atheists in foxholes. But maybe it goes a bit further, maybe I am suggesting that those “spontaneous spiritual exhortations” are not really profane, but instead possibly sacred. I read Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and The Profane when a young undergraduate and while my recollections have no doubt faded over the years, I don’t think he would object to my asserting that there is far more than just a seeming oxymoron in the notion of “prayerful profanity.” Perhaps such prayerful profanity is actually a window to spirituality, a moment of insight that can be further explored as an avenue to the sacred. To steal a concept from theoretical physics, maybe prayerful profanity is a kind of “wormhole” between the sacred and the profane. Something we might want to consider after our roadside near death experience - once our heart rate returns to something approaching normal. 

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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!