Furnishing

Yesterday L and I bought furniture at Restore, the Habitat for Humanity store in Dedham, items to be delivered this coming Saturday.

In a fit of piqued frustration, last weekend we had put all our living room furniture out on the street (for which we got a ticket). Although bright and warm in color, the chairs and loveseat were impossible to sit in or on for any length of time: saggy, slippery, swallowy. Oh yes, and the rug went too. So the space was bare, echo-y, virtually uninhabitable. Left too long this 'living room' would accumulate piles of stuff and become a lumber room (once again) but, no fear, grandchildren, daughter and son-in-law are coming next weekend for a week and something must be in place, something.

What is interesting, reflecting on it, was the way we came to a unanimity of satisfaction on the sofa-loveseat set and wingback chair purchase we finally made. In the big warehouse, there were chairs and sofas available in many different styles, fabrics, conditions of wear, structural underpinnings, none of them or any small combination of them out of our price range. Also, we were wide open regarding which particular elements or look we wanted in the living room, ready to just have chairs, for instance, or a chair and loveseat as before. Coordination of styles and colors was a consideration but not compelling. The one essential was sittability. We didn’t want to feel ourselves sliding off or into whatever we were sitting on. In particular, we wanted at least one good reading chair. Oh, and we needed at least one piece of furniture big and sturdy enough for our son-in-law.

So how did it happen, I wonder now, that after roaming up and down aisles of sofas, squeezing by coffee tables, testing by plunking down, bouncing, wriggling and relaxing, after criticizing and appreciating, and imaginative assembling different items in the showcase area into ensembles for our actual (small) space, after sharing the individual favorites we’d like to spend more time on, and those others (the saggy, the unyielding, the plain awkward) we absolutely refused to allow, after all this, we came to the selection that lay as lightly on both of our minds as the set and chair we settled on did. There were lots of possible combinations and individual items, and we are two very different individuals (don't we know it), but somehow in this process we came as a couple to know what exactly we wanted.

This is interesting: the dynamics of collaborative choice. L and I have a lot of practice working with each other; we’d been discussing generally the matter of furniture for some time; and we are neither of us fussy. The process was like turning dials on a combination lock until the tumblers fall into place and the door swings easily open.

Somehow in the space of our conversation as we moved around that warehouse space, we held up what was different combinations of what was possible against what was acceptable and found a configuration of options that comfortably inhabited both spheres; that, as it were, sat on as easily on us as we, we hope, will on it.

Gentle rain

Sunday brunch at Ryles with my colleague, who happens to live right around the corner. The jazz trio, guitar, bass and flute, were taking old favorite tunes and stretching, folding, chopping them into perky sonorities.  Sipping our bloody mary's and mimosas, we admired the playing and chatted about our school, our histories, our plans. Both of our wives have birthdays this month, so the passage of time was on our mind.

Then, the trio leader announced a request to be sung by an audience member: Could Roy come up?  Then from one of the tables, a tall old fellow stood and started to walk forward depending on a cane. "For his ninetieth birthday, Roy plans to sing that Diana Krall classic Gentle Rain", announced the flute player, and he did, with aplomb, his voice steady though with some faltering with the high notes. It was a Leonard Cohen-ish performance.

We congratulated him as he went back to his party. He must have practicing singing all along to be so confident and to sing so well.

We both are lost and alone in the world
Walk with me in the gentle rain
Don't be afraid, I've a hand for your hand
And I will be your love for a while.

I feel your tears as they fall on my cheek
They are warm like the gentle rain
Come, little one, you have me in the world
And our love will be sweet, very sweet.

Our love will be sweet, very sad
Very sweet like gentle rain, 
Like the gentle rain, like the gentle rain.

To make such poignancy public on your ninetieth, and so straightforwardly, seems a kind of courage, for which I admire you, old man.

Haiku

Beyond the fence
Frozen worksite
On a black mound
Who's that howling?

Mathematical adventure

Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure by Cedric Villani

Step by step story of the development of a theorem in mathematical physics which won the highest award in mathematics, the Fields Medal, for the author six years ago in 2010.

A picture in the process of the world-wide mathematical community, its work and ways, as well as of the author and his career, and his professional associates and mentors.

Finally, least clear, the world of mathematics itself, the complex structure of mathematical objects, and the demanding criteria for their acceptance as valid.

As a window into a world distant from mine, the book was fascinating. All the professional competitiveness and institutional territoriality unmentioned, at least undwelt-upon, the image of a global network of thinkers busily thinking strikes wonder and longing in me. A global conversation of exploration already and incessantly in progress: wow!

From the perspective of triumph the author presents the process by which a mathematical analysis of a phenomena in plasma physics running to nearly 200 pages of equations is constructed, beginning with  “Yan is fascinated by this problem--and he’s not alone. Could Clement and I tackle it?  Sure, we could try...Neither Clement nor I have ever worked on this equation. But equations belong to everybody. We’re going to roll up our sleeves and give it our best shot.”

The familiarization with background, the framing of the problem, the conception of the shape of an acceptable outcome, the plan of attack, the crafting of adequate elements and the careful fitting of them together into a flow of mathematical interaction, the warnings of areas that will need work  as well as the recognition of what fails to work and has to be remedied pronto, the work-arounds, the fatigue, the darkness, the flashes of insight, the elation, the lure of light at the end of the tunnel, the shaping into final form, the painstaking proofreading again and again, the corrections and improvements: I know something about these steps of discovery.

As different projects have successively obsessed me over the years, I’ve been through similar cycles more than once. The process of making a new thing, a kind of progressive discovery of what has to work and what in fact does, is exhilarating and exhausting, a very special form of living that I never want to do without. I’ve been blessed by more these kinds of experiences than most, I think, and for this I am grateful to the cast of the world that makes discoveries available and to the itch that drives us to take advantage of the fact. How I wish this experience for all.

It’s not an easy thing to give an account to the general public of the genesis of such an object as a mathematical theorem. I had to skip much of  the mathematical notation. But that you, Cedric Villani, are an interesting person, lover, for instance, of manga and Catherine Ribeiro, in an interesting profession comes across, as does the adventure of your story.

You in yours, I in my ventures, let us enjoy the seeking and the finding.

Why I am a Convex teacher

Leafing through some old papers recently, I realized that I've been engaged in a single project for almost 20 years, nearly a third of my life.

I remember the moment I took it on. A friend and I had started a company to sell hands-on science teaching services and we were giving a workshop in the classroom of a livewire teacher in a middle school in Jamaica Plain, Boston. All around the room were tanks of pond water full of life; we were impressed. But she asked a hard question: how do I get my students to ask questions?

I could tell she did a better than average job at that, her whole set-up and the kids we met spoke to that, but her question nagged at me, and indeed expanded to apply people generally: why aren't we, all of us, looking for and having personal discoveries more than we do? And how could we get better at it? And what woud it mean if we were?

Just back from visiting my grandchildren, one three years old, the other three months, I'm awed by the drive to learn and to master active in each of them. It's a sign of their livingness and a vehicle for the prospering of their personalities going forward.  I want that same hopefulness regarding the rewarding richness of the world and our ability to find ways to engage with it, I want that expectancy for myself, for everyone of my generation, for everyone.

So now, as I've wrapped up the most recent phase of my (obsessive) project, and look forward to retirement in a few years, I was the question: what next for me?
The answer is to take everything I've discovered over the years (decades) and begin the work of sharing it. As a person who enjoys solitary thought, I'm going to be challenged to take the initiative in offering what I've learned (while still learning more.)

Below, there's a short  Q&A script that I put together as an 'elevator pitch.' It makes reference at the end to things yet to come--cards, videos, calendars--but it helps me make real to myself what I'm going to be up to next.

I confess I'm daunted, but I'm also determined. Wish me well.

_________


What do you do?

I was a teacher of science, now a teacher of ESL, and in transition to being a teacher of Convex.

Convex?

Conversation of Exploration. It’s a practice informed by a set of principles that I believe can change the world for the better because it provides something essential to the flourishing of individuals and communities.

It’s also a project, to take Convex worldwide: Convex sessions with people of all ages and backgrounds happening all the time everywhere.

What is Convex exactly?

You can think of it as similar, in terms of discipline, to working out or to meditation, but complementary to those activities in terms of its other and outward-orientation.

Who started this? 

Conversation and exploration are common and natural of course, but I combined the two in a special format to help my students improve their functional faculty for seeking and making discoveries, that is, their explorer-mind.

And how big is Convex?

Right now Convex is in its outreach phase, but the vision is to make Convex a worldwide movement.

What is a Convex session?

A Convex session is some number of people spending some definite time together ‘looking, thinking and linking’ regarding some particular thing prepared ahead of time for sharing. To borrow the words of Kay Ryan about her ideal poems, a Convex session is ‘free, large, and playful.’

What kind of particular thing?

A single or specific object, occurrence, process, person or place, a commission, proposition, or encounter: any of these, considered in themselves or an expression or representation thereof, can be the chosen focus of a Convex session.

‘Looking, thinking, linking’: do these mean something different in Convex than they normally mean?

No, in the sense that individually these are activities people have engaged in from time immemorial, but yes, in the sense that, joined together as a specially designed routine of exercises and challenges that make particulars into portals, they are a powerful program of practice for enhancing our ability to engage with whatever and whomever is around and ahead of us.

Where can I find out more?

Here’s my card with the website where the full Convex program is laid out. There are links to videos where the program is explained and demonstrated. There’s also news about recent and upcoming Convex events.

Convex enhances the wellbeing of everyone; that’s why I champion it and teach it, and why I’d like to teach you. Are you interested?

How to be not boring

A sure-fire way: engage more in conversations that explore implications.

These are conversations that make explicit the networks of implication that make locales or propositions interesting. Incidents, images, ideas, places, and items redolent of latent implications present themselves or hang in our minds; convex brings these logical associations into the light, spreads them out like an map before us, and invites us to enter. 

Bertrand Russell wrote a mathematical treatise The Theory of Implication in 1906 in which he said early on: ‘The essential property we require of implication is this: what is implied by a true proposition is true’. The word ‘true’ here grounds implication in what is reasonable and meaningful.

The process of drawing implications is not just one of inference toward proof but toward the gradual revelation of worlds: wider: This implies a world-wide conspiracy; denser: More and more people were implicated in the plot; prospective: This implies that we have at most an hour to save the planet; retrospective: His actions implied that his public statements were politically motivated; alternative: If it wasn't you, then by implication, it must have been someone else; speculative: If the earth’s gravity were less than it is, trees could be taller than they are; general: What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA; abstract: What if everyone did it; non-implied: Just because he was found standing over the body with smoking gun in his hand doesn’t prove he committed murder.   

Why do we not more often engage in exploration of implications? First of all, there’s the question of language. Some syntactical forms and intonational patterns such as  ‘let’s say’ speculation, clauses of concession, the perfect tenses, modals generally as well as negative space intonations, can open the door to exploration of implications if the willingness is there to move beyond bare, bland, unsuggestive assertions.

Secondly, not everyone is ready to engage in implication mapping as an exercise since it is a special kind of mental exertion. If recognized and practiced as important, such conversation would become less daunting.

Finally, we’re sometimes reluctant to own the implications we discover through such conversation, not trusting the process of logical exploration. Or we may be disturbed by the uncomfortable nature of the implications we discover. 

But what we lose by not is a level of interestingness that can't be replaced by drama of presentation or profusion of detail or flow of narrative. I mean a sense of ampleness of context, of plenitude of pathways, of kinds of coherence to be discovered. There's a kind of fun to be had in exploration of implications that leaves us with a glow long after the conversation is over. Let's do more of it. 

Watchers

At Downtown Crossing, a middle aged woman in a pant-suit got on the train and sat down a seat away from me. The train was full, no empty seats and tall young men and women standing and looking at their phones--when suddenly the woman broke into a wail of anguish. With her phone pressed to her ear, she held her face and leaned over: My son is dead. My son is dead.

Over the next minutes as she tried to get through to the hospital and get details, we who sat and listened learned there had been a car accident, that the boy was 14, that it was really her child who was gone.

She wept, deep, hawking sobs, her body heaving.  She pled to Jesus for some other fact to be the case. She was in an agony of anguish.

I didn't know what to do, didn't know how to respond, and said as much to the woman on the other side of me who said herself she was at a loss. And the black woman across the way, and the young man with the laptop. As it went on, station after station, the faces took on the shape of sorrow, as I felt mine had, and we wiped our eyes. My son is dead, she cried over and over.

She stood at the door, hanging from a pole. One woman put her arm around her unti the next stop. My neighbor got up and offered tissues from a little packet. Another woman who looked as if she knew something said a few words, but nothing went on except the heart-wrenching wailing  until she got out at Stony Brook.

When we got to Forest Hills, we all left the train without looking at each other, each seared by the terrible emotions, the awful event, we'd just been in the presence of.

My wife had had a hard day, angry at herself for, uncharacteristically, getting taken by a asphalt dumping scam, but she had some ideas of what I coud have done. You could have gone with her to the hospital. Yes, I suppose you're right. I didn't think of it. I had a handkerchief not tissues and an arm around the shoulder: would that be right?

Oh, ma'am, I am so sorry for this nightmare news that tore you to pieces before us. We weren't heartless, just shy in the face of so intense a grief. Still justification doesn't matter; what does is the pain in which you are going to live for the next frightful days, pain which could as well be the lot of any of us who love.

May you soon be in the arms of a comforter, ma'am, and may the presence of God-in-love be with you with more potency than shown by any of us on the train who listened, prayed and wiped our eyes. I'm baffled, somewhat ashamed, and so, so sad.