Where am I? Where are you?

"I've been driving around for hours...and I'm lost." This late on a rainy evening and in a quavery voice. One way streets, construction sites, sudden missed turns, unexpected curbs, left turn or was it right?, ambiguous signs, no clear landmarks in the dark and the narrow canyon-like city streets: all of these in her words, and especially in the weariness of her voice. "Where are you?" is the question we asked over and over, but there was no clear answer. The streets were empty of passersby, the buildings shut up, the street names high overhead and ill-illuminated when peered at from the stop line.

Of course, we were called to help, find her and get her home, but we, indoors, reaching into the phone with our ears to 'see' where she was, and she, speaking to us while looking around for clues, signs, anything that might help, found ourselves in a strange encounter. She, surrounded by very real but unfamiliar buildings seen through street lamp lit rain, simply wanted to know how to get home. We, warm and dry, were trying to imagine what she was seeing--very murky and indistinct cinematic impressions coming to mind--while very intense and distinct to us was the desperation in the voice and the pressing responsibility to do something right away. 

The responsibility was taken up be others. The contact was finally made in a deserted corner of  Boston's financial district: each turning around and there the other was. Luch got home--it was quite some distance--and she and her rescuers slept late the next morning. But our portion of the 'adventure' hangs in my mind as a special space or rather two spaces linked by an on again off again phone: we enquiring of her, she of her surroundings for location; she seeking of us, we in frustrated perplexity about solutions. Round and round.

 Never again, we commanded; never again, she swore: words from the post-crisis. Perhaps we thought these promises would somehow feel like, even be, the solution. But there were no shortcuts or exits out of the encounter-as so often there are not.

Question Quest

Two men of the twelfth century and their works, Adelard and his Quaestiones Naturales saying "Look" and Abelard and his  Sic et Non saying "Think," stand are at the start of the Western (non-Arabic) question quest to understand the world and how we understand it. An extraordinary example of how far this quest has come is the recently announced Bicep2's observations which lend credence to Alan Guth's hypothesized 'cosmic inflation.' The discovery, if confirmed, offers a window into the beginning of time itself, the very dawn of the universe. What an amazing expansion of scope and scale from those early Scholastics, and yet an unbroken thread connects them. 

Some have concluded that now, after centuries of hard and brave effort, the single right path to  knowledge is clear: evidence-based theory.  "What the [atheist] does...really have now...is a monopoly of legitimate forms of knowledge about the world:...the advantages of having an actual explanation of things and processes...," wrote Adam Gopnick in The New Yorker (2014).

It's said that that this recent development makes the possibility of multiple universes more likely, meaning that everything must happen sometime in one universe or another. Our particular universe may just be one random instance of all that could possibly happen---more confirmation for certain 'hard facts' we're going to have to accept: "nature in itself is morally and aesthetically neutral, neither benevolent nor cruel, neither beautiful nor ugly," as put into words by Catherine Wilson (1995).

Indeed often it seems so, but this seems to me rather a more metaphysical conclusion than a scientific. Many things have been scientifically established; others are not. The body of 'legitimate' knowledge will grow as it will. The God-in-love framework doesn't make any assertions about that. Rather, it recognized the fact that, living, we have to take the risk of trusting what isn't settled yet. The God-in-love framework is offered as a working model to be tested in the living out of it.

There are a number of still very open 'why' questions that this framework addresses: 

1.Why any universe(s) at all? 
(the desire of God-in-love toward a Beloved other, perhaps one per planet, perhaps one per universe, perhaps only one ever.) 

2. Why is this universe so interesting? 
(the activity of God-in-love managing the 'explore/exploit temperature' of universe to foster complexity)

3.Why do ideas, math for instance, or poetry, exist? 

(the creation and exploration of possibility space by God-in-love)

4. Why are hospitality, friendship and exploration good things?

(the attitude of God-in-love toward the Beloved) 

5. Why is the future is open and positive?
(love affairs such as between God-in-love and the beloved Other are ever open and evolving)

Questions like these are less physical than metaphysical, so their answers can't be used to explain, for instance, why any accident happened where and when it did. Nor can they be expected to generate testable predictions (like the polarization of the cosmic microwave background). They can, however, without denigrating the methods or findings of science, tell us why it is important that we are alive and, one day, will have lived.

We can think of the activity of God-in-love as operating in four ongoing modes which manifest sequentially. The first mode, starting before the beginning, involves creating and formatting raw possibility space in the conceptual realm. The second involves fostering complexity in the physical realm by adjusting the explore/exploit temperature. This is probability space, versus possibility, because the material world is never self-contradictory. 

The third phase is one in which God-in-love operates in the 2nd person mode to and through those beings, we among them, open 2nd  consciousness.  The fourth phase, the world to come, will have its own mode including all the above and something more. Perhaps this fourth phase is manifesting gradually or will do so suddenly. Each of these modes of activity has its own potentiality, energy and power; and we can open and be open to all.

(Formatting possibilities: the floppy disk analogy. Low level formatting prepares the basic medium, in this case, the disk surface.Partitioning makes the device visible to the operating system.High level formatting generates a file system in preparation for the storage of files  So, what if a cosmic field consisting of all imaginable, though perhaps not yet imagined ideas, was progressively possibility-formatted, that is, prepared for the retention of realized possibilities, the actual content of those possibilities to be discovered over the course of time. By realization, I mean articulation, as in the form of mathematical equations or poetic insights, as well as physical construction.)

Of course, Adelard and Abelard lived in a twelfth century in certain ways truly benighted and we, in a twenty first century, are, about many things, truly enlightened. One thing we have in common is the fact that human beings and what they create and learn are always standing at the beginning of a journey that is sure to surprise, sure to challenge. The question quest continues.

Crowd vs Class

About 40 human resources people mostly women taking the long way to dinner--a walk down Commonwealth Ave with commentary by me on the statues--John Glover, William Lloyd Garrison, the figures in the Women's Memorial, Phylis Wheatley, Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone. The revolution, abolition, women's suffrage, a nod to the Marathon and  then "let's eat." An hour approximately, the night had fall and the wind was chilly when we turned onto Stuart St. 


I experienced the group as a long string of clumps of people who then were around me listening, then as a room of tables of conversation (our table of 7 hit themes of generational characteristics, national cuisines, revolution), then, the next day, as reception with remarks of appreciation for what we'd done. I would have liked to looked at their faces more and listen to their stories, as they had looked at mine and listened to my teacherly trumpet. But the moment was over. We were then in pro forma space and soon, me back to class, they to meetings, lunch and home. 

My classes at Bunker Hill, in abeyance alas this spring, are sixteen weeks, two sessions a week, and two hours and a half hours a session. It's my job to provide the new, interesting and progressively more advanced material we'll work on but the students make it fun. Their shyness and boldness, their stories--often intimate and touching, their person situations gradually revealed, their discovery of each other, their days of weariness and days of exuberance all make each session feel as rich as a tapestry, or better, as the brushwork of a Monet--on the small scale a amazingly complex scumble of distinct colors and on the large, an atmospheric evocation of a special place at a particular time. 

I discover more of myself in that context particularly my clownish and lyrical side. Our end to term parties as are often hilarious celebrations of who we, the class, are and a farewell to who we were.

There's a time for crowds and a time for classes. They're energizing and exhausting and they come to an end. I find myself always wanting more and having had enough. Is that way for all encounters? As I with these Others, so God-in-love in encounter with us? 

Carrier wave

The change in Bama's recitation was remarkable: from floundering among a rubble of words on the page to striding ahead steadily as from one stepping stone to another. Finding the rhythm of the language, the way its sounds are arranged, she was able to speak in a way that sounded almost natural.

I had asked her to sing a song she knew. There was embarrassment and a sheaf of paper covering face, but eventually, starting off quietly, she sweetly sang a few lines from a ballad. She almost stopped, but the rest of the stanza needed to be sung, so she continued to the end. More embarrassment as she finished. "That's beautiful", I said sincerely, "and see how a rhythm like the one you just sang can be the carrier wave for sentence after sentence in this transcript," and I sang the text like a song.


Finding that underlying structure of sound, the patterns of racing and dawdling, can be key for making encounters with texts meaningful. It's a process of converting texts to scripts. Suddenly a block of words becomes a voice speaking and the reader becomes partner in conversation.

Is it like this in all encounters: finding the voice of the other, responding with our own, sometimes just repeating what we've heard?

Bama relaxed visibly as each word presented itself as somewhere--on the slope or at the crest--on the surface of a sonic surge moving through the text--up, forward and down--like a form of breathing, like her own breath. 

  

Wild Wind

The nine-alarm fire yesterday on Beacon Street: terrible loss of life, health, home. It started in the basement and chimneyed upward at great rate. The deputy fire chief remarked he'd never in 30 years seen a fire grow so fast. The reason was the wind, almost hurricane force, which whipped the city all day. A broken window and the wind barged through like beserk besiegers through a gap in a city wall. Flames became explosions. 


This wind was an equinoctial wind but specially cold, intense, variable, a new kind of wind, perhaps, for us to learn about and build relationship with, a wind more like a tiger than some domesticated beast, a wind with more surprises in store. 

Yesterday's wind may be just one item in the repertoire of a new and rapidly evolving climate regimen along with, who knows, unprecedented floods, extended droughts, huge storms, extreme cold, or heat, and who knows what else.  

If the Beacon Street fire was the face of the wild wind, the wind itself may be the expression of the new climate jurisdiction we've found ourselves willy-nilly subject to. Our negotiations with the air are set to become more complex and fraught.

What we are making with our multiple impalpable contributions has made itself manifest; and we are being forced to respectfully acknowledge its power, though it may be by now beyond pity.

The Smell of Cold

The wiry older guy came into the locker room, pulling off cap and gloves, exuding that indescribable smell of outdoor cold. "A bit fresh out there," I remarked, getting ready to shower. "Yes," he said, " but better than using treadmills," which I took as a just but unkind jab at such as I, who'd been pumping the stairmaster and watching the Today show. 

"Where do you go?, " I queried after a quickie shower (being almost late) and he told me his route through the town and along the river, seven miles in all, and that day, I'm sure, mostly in the teeth of a hard, biting wind. I've run much of it myself, though not in the last few weeks (with the exception of last Friday), and especially beside the river the wind can, almost lift you like a kite. It seems to perforate you and yet, at the same time, obstruct like a wall. Instead of running, what you're doing feels more like stationary windmilling.  And cold?  Body heat is sucked away as fast as it's made; the core may be warm but the skin is chill.

Still in all, it's only a few minutes of discomfort; meanwhile, the river is beside you, the bridge is up ahead, there's something to be noticed, something to be thought about along the way. Fair trade. 

I told him about my route that includes Bunker Hill, trying to hint that I too am a runner if not this winter. We chatted about start times and I thought, "Seven miles... He's serious, not overdressed... It might be fun to have a running partner like this sometimes..." Maybe there are many such people around; I just haven't met them. 

Good running, fella. See you around.

Incomprehensible blizzard

Reading Byzantium by Yeats, not the well-known, stately Sailing to Byzantium, but a later incomprehensible blizzard of disconnected images, in a gloss by Helen Vendler. My first reactions: disorientation and irritation. References to cathedral domes, mummies, birds, dolphins, gong-tormented sea. What to make of it? Repetitious phrases: fury and mire, mire and blood, complexities of fury... Words without resonance for me but repeated obsessively. What is this:"An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve"? A sleeve? And "smithies breaking the flood"? Huh? Nothing but stubbornness compels me to finish reading the long column of non-melodic, off-rhymed verse.

Vendler's approach is to divide the poem into parts, note this pattern, count and tabulate, trace the flow, the appearances and disappearances. My first reading was disaster. The second less exasperating. She argues Yeats is making an argument of images, rather than of propositions, a poetic exploration of the question of life and after-life. Her position: a great poet writes poems worthy of time spent in explication.

Explication of an argument in imagery over the course of a set of lines and stanzas. This is not the work I usually do or expect to do reading a poem, but perhaps my aspirations for the encounter are too modest, perhaps I lack faith in poems or poets, perhaps I'm lazy.

I still don't like the poem much, though I understand it better, many thanks to the commentator. The images still seem disjoint; none rings in my mind like a bell. I've a better sense of what to do with such a poem, though: take out my pen, or better highlighters, and mark.

Address Unknown

What, I wonder, is the story is behind the young man I saw yesterday on the train holding a single plastic coat hanger? 

What about the blind busker singing Motown songs in an adenoidal baritone, but tapping his cane to a beat different from the song. 


But my real point here is the recent announcement of the discovery of gravity waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background, truly a great feat for science and mankind. Brilliant ideas, strong arguments and careful observations over the course of years have given us an almost inconceivable access deep into the past to the very beginning of time.  Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, whose blog  preposterousuniverse.com has the motto In truth, only atoms and the void, hails this as a triumph of human intelligence and hard work...and I think he is right: these results are downright mind-boggling. 

He writes "Science is a dialogue between the free play of ideas-theorizing-and the harsh constraints of empiricism, " and, in his interview on PBS New Hour, that curiosity as motivation and the making and testing of predictions as the discipline, is at the core of what makes science science. 

What I wonder, however, is whether curiosity disciplined by empirically tested hypotheses is the only justifiable way to address the universe. Are we addressed at all? Carroll quotes Carl Sagan on man as the universe's way of knowing itself. Is this two way or one way? 

It seems to me that a fundamental and persistent behavior of all human beings is to address and be addressed. I'm an adult; I know that wanting something to be so doesn't make it so. Exploration addresses the universe. What about hospitality which addresses the visitor, and friendship the friend? If these are legitimate ways to address each other and all things on earth, might they not also be legitimate with regard to the universe?  

I'm going to keep asking the question. God-in-love is what I've come to so far.  I do know that knowing is not the only end of man; there's also doing. Hurrah for generosity, constancy and courage in science and everything. 

The Plan

Crocuses grow when the ground is sodden;
Perhaps it's so they don't get trodden.

Can imagine the meaning, not the sound

"If I see the word, I can imagine the meaning of it but I can't imagine the sound."  Huy and I were talking about Chinese characters versus our words written in letters of the alphabet. Strange though our spelling is, we read our words as sounds first, semantic units second. Indeed, Chinese can be rendered in sound-representational ways, but only children and foreigners use this way, Huy told me. Why not use this existing alphabetic system and obviate the need for learning thousands of complicated characters? Huy was adamant: no, never, unthinkable. 

But I'm left trying to understand Huy's mental experience. Say I see a character, an image, perhaps a stylized or complexified picture of something, immediately a meaning, or a cluster of meanings, or a menu of possible meanings come to mind, but no spoken word. My tongue is not cued to do anything. A symbol could have multiple pronunciations as for instance our homonyms may have multiple meanings. Is that right--I mean about the Chinese characters? If so, does this mean that the character is independent of actual speech, floats above it like a reference grid of concepts at which certain spoken words can point but which others words could point at equally well. 

My language teaching these days is leaning more and more toward considering text as script, and that as musical. I see this as a promising approach for improving all kinds of fluency. The actual letter-stream is demoted to a bridge between speech (of writer) and speech (of reciter), with the latter seeking to enter the mind of the former through listening to the speech captured in the written word. A book in my hand is an avatar of the author. There's some voice behind any text. 

But not a Chinese text, I guess. Characters present themselves, sequences become combinations, arguments take shape, references proliferate, and all diagrammatically rather than discursively. I'm sure I'm way off...but I was struck by what Huy said. There are possible implications here to be explored. Is the language of mathematics more like Chinese or alphabetized languages?  What about engineering?  What about advertising?  What about movies?  Mmmm, much to think on. 

Long live...

Sitting on the T, my own book in my lap, I used to sneak peeks at what other passengers were reading and write down the titles in the back of my notebook. Across the aisle from me, head down and engrossed, or standing balancing, lurching for the pole whenever turning pages, readers slowly flipped through their paperbacks, their massive hardbounds, their pulps, their graphic novels, their textbooks. I would try to glimpse the spines or the covers to get the names of whatever it was that they were into. Sometimes I had to stare hard if they had reached their stop and were stuffing the volume back into their bags. Did I catch a few words of the title? Could I reconstruct it from what I had? There were school kids working through reading lists, older men with their politics and war books, woman and their Danielle Steeles and Jodi Picoults. Some read classics--which I found most moving. I remember doing once what I had never done--asking a young man what that old dark tattered book he was reading was. Dickens, he told me, from an old collection in his family.

I used to get ten or twenty titles per notebook and I go through notebooks at a rate of one a month. Then it stopped. There weren't so many people reading, then almost none, at least when I rode. Now what I see are phones and blue-flushed faces.  But yesterday, on the 32 bus, as I was reading Phil Klay's Redeployment, I glanced over and saw the young man next to me reading a hardcover book with a title saying something about Thought and Life. Dark clothes, dark skin, fulsome dark hair jutting out of a dark hood, he was reading---Wordsworth! Long live poetry.

Inner Fire

The Mary Dyer statue in front of the State House seemed to loom over me yesterday, massive and blocky. Hands on lap, head becapped and bowed, the message seems to be submissiveness, but is not really.

Last night after I got home from the tour, I read an account of her conflict with the Massachusetts authorities, how they, in authoritarian defensiveness, were exasperated by this Quaker woman who would not shut up, would not stay away, and claimed at both of her executions to be experiencing more spiritual bliss than they in their puckered-up state could ever hope to experience, ever even conceive.

The sculptor, Sylvia Shaw Judson, herself a Quaker, gave Mary Dyer a heroic feel like the larger-than-life mid-century figures we see, on the march, flag in hand, pointing the way forward, yet Dyer is immobile, contained, not suggesting in the grey stone the fire inside. 

These Puritan women, I think here also of Anne Bradstreet, had vivid inner lives that belied their somber dress and sober behavior. Dyer was snarked for holding hands with the two young condemned Quaker men who marched with her to the gallows the first time she went. What petty piety you practice, she sniffed, compared to the holy transports I am experiencing now.

Her husband and son, in roles I recognize, tried to save her, pleaded with her to the end to give up martyrdom for something more feminine, all in vain.

Massachusetts recognizes two of the women it expelled with statues in front of the State House. Ignore it, suppress it as we may, the fire will out. Aggravating and awe-inspiring at the same time. 

Multiple partners

A contra dance: four beat music, a sequence of stars, allemandes, circles, gipsies (intense eye-to-eye), doe-see-does, California swing, balances and swings, new corners but same partner, round and round, up and down the chain, waiting out a set at the top or the bottom of the line, then back into the braid in the other direction. 

Where are my feet? Is the circle round or oblong? Oh right, I should be doing a hay. One time around with the swing, or two? Is she leaning outward or keeping her weight centered? My new corner is a guy in the ladies part. How does this work? I'm getting hot but there's no time to dab the brow. The music, repetitious and insistent, drives us on and on. My partner and I apologize to each other with our eyes as we make mistakes but find our places again and carry on. A hilarity infects us all, a mix of slap-happiness and strict routine. A final chord just as I confront a new corner and prepare to take hands, a bow to corner, a bow to partner, a relieved laugh, then "pick a new partner and get in long lines."  

All evening I'm on the edge of disorientation. The music is regular but each person is different and has to be danced with. My style changes over the night, progressively less prancy. 

Watching the waltzing at the end, I see something I've never noticed before: a two part step structure. He moves two, three steps, then she swings around with two... I don't quite understand but there's more for me to learn. Always more for me to learn.

Cross-country crosswords

Doing crosswords across the country.  Last night, Dulu and I in Boston and Mery, Mejo and Duru out in Holland, Michigan. They've still got snow but we've lost ours. We're still cold but they've warmed up. Finding a crossword website, printing out the sheets, putting the phone on broadcast, then going to work: one down, 5 across, what is a three letter for 'necessary to tango', can't be 'foil', never would have thought of that, good for you, what's a...?, "hamburgers near the mouth? huh? and so on through three rounds, and all of this at 900 miles distance. I'm amazed. Low cost long distance phone, crossword puzzles on a shared internet and something like a party can happen, full of high hilarity and that wonderful end-of-evening-as-off-to-bed glow.  Next week, same time, why not? 

Of course, to see the others, share goodies, hug them before they go is so much better but this was not nothing. There was real engagement, real surprises exploded, minds leveraged each other, the laughter was spontaneous, the silences were of thinking, answers popped into our heads like bubbles in champagne. It was altogether fun. Distance melted like snow in rain; no, it was gone as soon as we began. A world without separation. My mind is boggling, or maybe just jiggling or flapping after last night's exertion. Oh, Holland guys, oh, we between whom so many miles intervene, let's do it again.

Harbinger?

So I was standing jacket-less outside on the sunny side of my house feeling the sun being friendly when Frada walked up the street, in down coat with furry hood. “Look at the crocuses,” I called, pointing down at tiny courageous yellow flowers on short little stems. “Sign of spring for sure,” she said as I walked out into the street to chat. “I just came outside to get some air and clear my head from working on my blog,” I told her. “What blog? Current affairs?” Then I had to tell her in a few words what I’ve been up to, and that for the last few weeks, I have had nothing to show for my efforts. “I can write about philosophical things all day, but saying something about everyday encounters that doesn’t strike me as banal, much less readers, is awful. “I would think you’d have lots to say.” “I do, until I face the blank page, and then I feel like Tantalus.” She knew immediately what I mean since she’s working on her PhD in classics, Greek in particular. “You mean when you bend down, the water recedes?” :Exactly. It’s just like that.” Some more laughs and then we parted, she to her house across the street, me to my ‘office’ for more torment.

Our street doesn’t have sidewalks but there’s always a lot of foot traffic. People like Frada and her barky dog, boys in twos and threes heading down to McDonald’s, Frada’s dad power-walking, mothers pushing carriages, people with bags of groceries from Baby Nat’s at the bottom of the hill, bikers, speedy cars: there’s always something stumping or swooshing by. Sitting on the porch, I sometimes call out greetings, sometimes wave, but often people are engaged with each other or in their own thoughts. 

How to speak about encounters such as ours this afternoon has been perplexing to me. For the last 3 weeks I’ve tried to create a format for doing so. I want a format that allows me to speak in a voice I like about enjoying the sun, or reading a poem, or watching a movie, or going to a concert, or having an argument, or chatting by phone with someone in the hospital, in short, any kind of conversation whatsoever. It has to be format that honors encounters (pleasant and unpleasant) with real attention but isn’t flat or literal. I’ve experimented with ideas of half-silvered mirrors, with rivers and rains, with banjo picking and harp glissandi, all good, some even useful, but it doesn’t make the page less of a place where I feel more of a fool. Pressing myself now to produce something before another weekend goes by, I find my thoughts, under the thrashing I’ve been giving them, have offered up a clue.

Since I’m an English as a second language teacher, I often deal with that hybrid tense the present perfect, which is neither past nor present but something in between, almost a bridge. It’s a verb tense exquisitely appropriate for conversations. Based as it is on the perception that the present is the product of the past which in turn produces the future, its every assertion is resonant with implication. That’s what I want to say about encounters as such and about my encounters with encounters (reflection): nothing is just what it is, and even Frada and I chatting in the sun represents an encounter that;s more than just a few evanescent words but something vivid, wonderful, thought-provoking (see above) and more. Have I found my format? Maybe. Let’s see. 

Is this anyone's else's problem: finding the right voice?