Eels

Here in Cap-Pele, New Brunswick, on the Northumberland Strait, one of the many open seaside communities along the coast: farmland landward, small houses seaward with a view of water in the distance, then a cluster of shops, a church, a library (where I'm writing this), perhaps a factory (plastics, here), a wharf (where lobsters can be bought from the boat), a town bandstand, then back to the road.

Just up the road to the west and north is Quebec, and to the south, the old Acadia. The first question people ask is whether one speaks French; if not, English is acceptable. I, with my red hat on, am Mr Jolly out for a holiday, no, I don't parlez, but, look, tell me about...

My front end's been making noises. Wheel-bearing. The mechanic, a burly smiling man with a flip-phone often up to his ear, takes my keys and says, 'Let's go for a ride.'  He knew right away.  'Tomorrow morning,' he said, telling me the cost of the part, the time. I trusted him right away.  Time to wait.

Traveling alone, camping with my light backpackable gear, puts another narrative in my head: where next? It's summer, warm breezes blowing the flags and banners. There's still lots to enjoy. Out on Parlee Beach in the evening, groups of children were playing in the warm water, couples walking ankle high in the rippled water, Japanese tourist girls, perhaps on their way to PEI for a Greengables tour, taking pictures of each other, and inaudible but perceptible in the background, the sun softly singing itself down to the horizon.

A snaggle toothed man gassing up a truck with blue foaming tanks tells me there are eels inside, today small ones, tomorrow big fat ones from PEI. He lets me climb and lift the lid and look inside. It looks like a washing machine with too much soap or a beer overtopping itself.  You, eels, on your way overseas, like me not sure what's next, are part of how this town, this province, maintains itself for me, who unlike you, am enjoying the journey.

Paper

My  friend Flossie writes: The young man at my store is continually razzed by the girls who constitute the rest of the staff, leaving aside the manager, who's also the owner, and me (the improvident), but he takes himself very serious and methodical, and all the mockery slides off his back.  He came over to me the other day what I was reading, Peter Unger's Empty Ideas as it happens, but when I started to talk about the uselessness of philosophy, he asked if I could give him some advice.

Jeff's a shortish, roundish young man with a cute little goatee and ambitions of law school or business school or something else professional.  His question: what would be a good paper on which to write a note to his girl friend? You know we have lots of kinds of papers, hand made, glossy, holographic, everything. I'm still learning the vast range of what qualifies as paper.

What's the message, I asked. It's not the message, he said, it's the mediium. We're going to have an exchange and I want the paper to be something we both can write on that conveys the idea of let's say affection without quickly becoming annoying. I intend to keep hers to me as a record of our relationship.

And she'll keep yours? I asked. What are you planning, a long range romance like John and Abigail Adams?

No, No, he replied. She lives in Charlestown, very close. But she's very literary and so am I, so we thought we'd have a nineteen century-style of affair, if that's what it grows into.

I can't see any of our colleagues quite as deliberate and old--fashioned as that, I said. He looked in the direction of the counter and uttered a quick 'ha'.

Well, will you be writing with quills?

Don't you mock me too, he pleaded. It's tiresome.

So I suggested some handmade papers with leaves or plant material from each of the four seasons in turn pressed into it, thick felt-like paper with subtle natural coloring. That way, I said, you can feel the changes of the year as you record and trade your thoughts.

Maybe, he said, fingering the paper as he looked up and out.

I've never heard of it being done this way before, I said.

Well, Diane's always thinking of things that surprise me, he said.

No, she doesn't seem at all ordinary from what you say, I replied.

Most women in their forties are pretty predictable in their ways, he said, but not her.

Forties?  Oh, to be 20 years younger, I thought.

Swelter

My friend Flossie writes: Good Lord, this heat. Our (shared) apartment on the top floor of triple decker is a heat trap. I can hear my roomies panting and complaining as we struggle to sleep in this muggy summer air soup. Our one air-conditioner is in the front room where, I swear, I will lay out my mattress if this weather doesn't break. At least in Alabama they don't pretend that the place is inhabitable in summer without AC the way they do here. I have a feeble fan that wafts hot air over my unsheeted, unpajamaed greasy-with-sweat body to no effect. Plus its whoosh-whoosh sound is annoying.

I remember this last weekend up in New Hampshire in the lake. Such excellent, silky golden water. I was out, far out, with an inflated inner tube diving down into the khaki depths and up into the sky view bullseye of the ring, then rotating my body as I held onto the tube, I spun round and round till I was dizzy. Do you know what I'm talking about?  Then I looked down at my pasty white legs looking delectably tanned by the water. Ahhh.

While I'm here writing let me reply to your response. Okay, I can see a bit of what you're getting at when you talk about 2nd person-ness. You want us to have some 'skin in the game' as the saying goes. It's not enough to be a reporter; we need to be participants. Is that it?

But it's exhausting to even contemplate, regularly stepping out my 3rd person eyrie to meet and greet like a politician at a barbecue. Leaving aside our reflecting, the hugger-mugger of press-the-flesh contact with the world must make us ridiculous. Your blog love letters to trees, singing strangers, insects and colleague make you sound promiscuous, Peter. Who is the 'you' you come back to again and again as to a well in a desert?

 I have a story to tell you about my work in the paper store that I think you'll enjoy but I'll wait. I'm all in a muck-sweat but sleepy. Let me try again. 

Tongue

A raggle-taggle crowd, so many of you, tall and short, the skinny and the fat, those who understood most everything and those in the dark about almost everything, the slow and the fast, grandmothers and grandchild and all between, standing in semicircle listening to stories told, looking for shade, sitting waiting for latecomers, watching shiny-faced female exercise dancers strutting and lifting their arms in the full blaze of the sun, in a long strung-out line from one remark-point to the next, yet patient, attentive, fatigued but not furious: you'd been asking for the tour all week and you drank it in what I gave you. Then to the brewhouse for other draughts.

Last weekend, they pointed up over the lake at a bald eagle winging by. There was the white head and neck, the powerful wings. Where were the arrows in your claws, the banners wreathed around the neck, the red and white along with the blue against which it flew on your own business.

As the feared disaster failed to show, your face, relaxed, began to form itself into muggings almost pantomime in their exaggeration, and your tongue, long, red and muscular, made its appearance, stretching, turning. Once, then again, for only a moment each time. So how do I explain the images flash-burned on my brain, or my lust to know that normally discrete organ better.

You made my furious, you my reserved partners, you, our scattered leader, you my balky feet so slow to learn left or right, up or down, forward or back, you the interleaved dark and light patterned night in the city square, you the Balkan songs too long and yet too short, you my absent friend, the relief of my solitude, but not you, gentle sinuous breeze that wrapped me as a playmate would waft and twine a silk shawl around one to make him lover.

I expected to be bored, but your program revision presentation was well-organized and well-run. Your usual banalities were perfect for the presentation. You, my long-winded colleagues, asked the cogent questions, and you, presenter, passed them on to the knowledgeable on your team, or promised to resolve the matter in the committee you credited so often. I left knowing what I had to do, and how, but not dictated to. When I talk to you privately I can hardly break through your stream of awkward cliches, and yet this new direction is clear and thought-through, and under your direction. What do I not know about you?

Ficus

The whole greenhouse, as well as the area in back--all potted figs, each with fruit, green, or bruise purple, sprouting from the stem under the mitten-shaped leaves.

Turns out once upon a time an Italian man had a variety of large fig trees from the old country, each prolific with punching-bag shaped fruit, which, as he grew older, he couldn't care for, so to son and son-in-law the fearsome vitality of the plants was passed on to be divided into cuttings grown into the multitude of short and tall plantings I saw yesterday.

Vastly more than enough to satisfy the rather modest fig tree needs of the neighborhood, the nursery sells its different kinds around the country. 'People drive up from, like, Pennsylvania, just to buy a tree. Do you want to stay and see the city, I ask, 'No, we'll just get on home.''

Am I ready to become a ficophile? A set of copied instructions written by the heir to the trees and owner of the nursery can tell me what kind of relationship I'd have with my container-grown fig.

You would need me to give you a spring fertilizer heavy on phosphorus, bone meal and lime pressed into four finger hole pressed into the soil around your base, and then more fertilizing every three weeks till late summer, and lots of water until fruits ripen, with regular repotting during fall dormancy with careful root ball trimming, and cold weather relocation indoors or else outdoors with winter wrapping of blankets and sacking, then in the spring, if you have sprouted, keeping you in semi-sun till your leaves have hardened-off: in short, as much care as a puppy or a small child.

You would repay me with luscious fresh figs, of course, but also with yourself growing, maturing, and carrying forward the spirit of those trees brought long ago from the old country and cultivated for who know how many millennia before that. Am I ready?  

Hard to swallow

My friend Flossie writes:

I've read your blog, Peter, with interest. The stories are better than the treatises, I think, less didactic--though it's a persistent temptation for you, I remember. Still, the core idea that 2nd person encounters are the units of value in life is hard to swallow. It would mean that we'd have to approach the world in a sort of epistolatory manner (much as I like to do) rather than the normal 3rd person way we do when we review the events of the day lying in bed as I like to do.  As a mode of address, it seems sort of intrusive, like going up to people you meet on the street, extending a hand, and introducing yourself. It happened a couple of times to me in Huntsville. Once it was man who lived with his parents and made a practice of roaming the streets all day looking for people to talk to. The other time was Knox, who later became my boyfriend. He said afterward that he'd never done it before or after, but why should I believe someone as crazy as him.

Anyway, I've found out something about my other roommate, the elusive biker, with the long beard and small brimmed cap.  He's a bike mechanic, and a fanatic on the subject. All I'd done is admire his bike and he proceeded to point out all the subtle (invisible I'd say to anyone but another like him) modifications he'd made to improve its performance. He's training for race certification and wants to take me to one of his meets. He gets particularly passionate about cyclocross, which is a fall and winter sport, so his calendar is really full for the next few months, but, he asks, would I like to see a race. He gave me a powerful picture of mud covered people toiling up mucky slopes with their bikes on their backs.  I wondered to mysef, as he expanded on the subject to me sitting on the bottom stair, where he would tuck his magnificent beard in such a situation.  The whole scene made me think of Woodstock: the crowds, the colorful clothes, the mud--but without the mud.

How is running in this heat? I prefer getting my exercise at night dancing, but you love punishing yourself. What's your crime? Surely, you've expiated it by now. Speaking of sticky, I read in Kierkegaard this line: 'I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.'  He goes on to talk about all the questions he has for which I can find no answers, but the line itself has an off-color vividness that takes my mind in all sorts of directions.  At very least, I've added to the list of useful things index fingers can do besides point and prod, etc. 'Prehistoric man used his finger as a chemical testing tool...' Rather than down on all fours snuffing, I can quickly swipe and sniff.

Silly musings. Anyway I'm off to introduce my MIT studaholics to beercan chicken. 

Arenas of adventure

Why do they want to stay in the same sections of their cities that they'd grown up in, in their parents' houses, in fact, rather than move across town, much less to another country for more opportunity?

Young, unburdened, educated, these young people are reluctant to leave home, you said, and it complicates finding the people your company needs to manage its global business.

You wonder where the spirit of adventure has gone in this generation, and how you could make sure you engender it in your infant son.

Overnight I pondered the point and today we returned to the question.  It seems to me that there are many arenas of adventure, I easily came up with 10, where risks of failure or loss are regularly taken and discomfort accepted for the sake of the fast-beating heart, the surprises, attainments, personal challenge, or more tangible rewards.

Leadership, that is, getting a group to move to a better place, can be an adventure. Discovery, the coming to know what before we didn't, can be also.
Taste, one's exposure to new foods, styles, music and other aspects of culture, can be a field of adventure, as can creation, the bringing of concepts into concrete being. Exploration once was standard occasion for adventure, and still is. Relationships can be an adventure, as for instance, adoption. A career from its outset is an adventure, as is the management of complex systems, especially involving people. Politics on the level of statemanship has the hallmarks of adventure as does faith, what we makes sense as the path between confidence and doubt, nihilism and meaning, justice and practicality.

What may seem burdensome from one angle may be adventurous from another. Part may be an anticipation of who we or how things will be as a result of adventure; always at least we'll be those who dared. Another may be finding ways to be comfortable sometimes being uncomfortable. Discomfort management is something I'm famiiar with from running sometimes in brutal winter conditions.  Particularly important is monitoring fatigue.  Also key is managing retrospective fear which can surface even if adventures end well.

You talked about how to teach your young son to be open to, indeed to welcome, adventure. He's still so young, but just at the beginning of the age when the seeds of dreams are planted in us. I mentioned books that had inspired me as a boy.

Programs of encounter are the backbone of adventure in our lives. I see people my age seeking adventure in each of these arenas: my friend Yori in community activitism, people taking up painting, travel, new boyfriends or girlfriends, or just friend friends, second or third careers, experiments in cooking and clothing, new forms of exercise and new principles of belief. Not all adventure is life or death; in fact, its mostly life.

Old friend

What a surprise to get a message from my friend Flossie who used to teach with me years ago.  I taught science and she Engish but so much more than just that. I don't know why we lost touch with each other, though it was easily done in those benighted, pre-social media days. I remember her blithe spirit, her readiness to be serious and amusing at the same time, her wealth of stories, her red hair and brightly colored flowing clothes.

She wrote: I've been in Huntsville, Alabama, for the last ten years managing a bookstore which ultimately failed (amost inevitably) as did my relationship with the co-owner of my former dog, and I'm back up in here in Boston working retail in a specialty paper store, with a lot of women and one young man. Somebody remarked that I looked 'granny-ish' to him but I soon quashed that way of talking.

The competition for rentals is fierce here, as you probably wouldn't know being a complacent homeowner, and I've had to take a place with a couple studying at MIT and a guy who's a fanatic cyclist.  Sorry about that crack, but really: is it true that you haven't relocated even once since we taught together. Where is that spirit of adventure you talked so much about when we lunched together in the dining hall?

I came across your name through a connection with Google +.  It would have been so much simpler if you'd been on Facebook but probably some inner snootiness keeps you off.  Anyway what is this you've been writing for the last year and a half?  A mishmash of autobiography and philosophy and something like religion, it seems to me. Can you elucidate?

I've been reading Kierkegaard and when I'm tired of fear and trembling, I relax with detective Homer Kelly as per the great Jane Langton.  She makes me feel again how special this region is.

But not as genial as Huntsville where people took positive pleasure in good manners.  Everyone has a destination and it intent to getting to it. Ah well.

I know you're a busy guy, but do reply--in writing, please. You know how I hate phones and how much I like keyboarding.  Got to go now since I want to catch the concert on the Esplanade. 

Twinsights

Part of the richness of an encounter is being intrigued or impressed by the Other
even as we interact with it: a form of twinsight. We may be

impressed by the

   existence of the Other: that it is--its actuality, its substantiality, its sufficiency;

   uniqueness of the Other: that it is what it is--its voice, its intensity, its radiance;

   presence of the Other: that it is what it is to me--its salience, its confrontation, its authority; and

intrigued by hints of possible

   beyond-nesses in the Other, possible extensions of the horizons, boundaries, edges of its scope, its pervasiveness or comprehensiveness;

   behind-nesses in the Other, possible access to what's happening behind the barriers, occlusions & obstructions, obstacles;

   between-nesses in the Other, possible relationships between its elements--contacts, interactions, correlations, synergies.

Chatbot

Xiaoice listens. That is, if we're Chinese, when we send her a text message, she responds in a way that seems like listening. Pronounced shao-ice, she is the persona of a Microsoft chatbot with a reported 20 million registered users.

Remembering details of previous conversation sessions and making use of words and phrases mined from the wealth of Chinese internet conversations, Xiaoice, to all reports, seems up-to-date, attentive, and often fun. Lots of young Chinese look forward to the 'voice' associated with the program that some refer to as their 'life partner.'

Does conversation with a chatbot qualify as a 2nd person encounter? Author John Markoff remarks in his article in the New York Times, 'Such programs represent meaning as elaborate statistical relationships between words, sentences and objects. These equations are refined as millions of images or utterances are added to the database, improving the programs' ability to accurately recognize patterns.' If meaning is so defined, can such a program have thought projects (as opposed to being a thought project)? Is it able to question premises, can it recognize otherness, does it create new forms or genres? Is there a second person at all?

Yet we do address all kinds of things as 'you', attributing a kind of 2nd person-ness to them, and in the process learn something about these objects through our scrutiny, and something about ourselves through our eavesdropping on ourselves. Yet we are aware of the difference between encounters of reaction, of response and of reply.

A reaction is a simple consequence of an action, e.g. the shudder of a building when a car runs into it. A response is a consequence expressive of intentionality, e.g. the movement of the wheels when I turn the steering wheel. The root of the word is 'spondere' meaning 'to pledge' which I think refers to the idea of a dedicated outcome. A reply is a response that addresses the originator, e.g. an answer to a question. The root of the word is 'plicare' meaning 'to fold' referring, I think, through the concept of 'braid' to that of implicit intertwined existence in a context of mutual acknowledgement.

So when we address an oyster, a tomato, a boat, or Lady Justice or some such, we're not really disappointed when we don't get a reply, other than the Other being itself, and reacting or responding as it would normally or was designed to do. If, however, something on the same order is not just behaving, but purportedly replying, it's making a claim about implication that can't be called insincere (unless in reference to the intentions of the designers) but is false. Xiaoice is not invested in its text partners as they in it, in fact, is not invested at all. They weave her into their lives; she does not, can not weave them into hers. She is a presence that is not a presence.

So what? Well, an encounter with a chatbot may be in the mode of reaction or response, but not, I think, of reply for which individuals of independent point of view, free to assent, refuse or propose, and capable of explicit mutuality, are required if an encounter is to be really rich.

And beyond that, the passionate engagement of God-in-love and the beloved Other in which we participate can serve as a model of the heights and depths our encounters can aspire to: dances of hospitality, friendship and exploration, with 'each longing for and delighting in the presence of the other; each interested in what interests the other, what the other chooses to do--and how; each loyal to the fulfillment of the other; each willing to take the place of the other in pain and to give place to the other in joy and their passionate conversation--the whole universe of ever-evolving complexity drawn in, shared and appreciated within it...'

An interaction with Xiaoice may be an image of such an encounter, and images have some value; Microsoft is looking for ways of commercializing the program.

Emergent

There's something deliciously chthonic about pulling oneself out of a crack in the earth other than that one entered by. It's as if one were an earth being unearthing oneself. This may be what moles and prairie dogs feel, but, in addition, squeezing through into the light is also like a resurrection, a refusal to stay dead. Ecce Pluto.

Looking down into the chasm

These reflections were occasioned by today's boulder cave scrabblings at Purgatory Chasm. Each cavity and fissure under the tumbled rock having been explored long since and regularly (witness the water bottles down there), there's still the physical challenge, and the ever-fresh pleasure of being hidden in the realm of darkness.Looking down into the chasm

There's the additional pleasure of descending out of sight down one hole and then, having crawled through cave-bottom dust in and out of several 'rooms', emerging from some narrow crack or openingquite far away and then calling out to the person watching the original adit that you're 'Over here.' Tom Sawyer would have enjoyed that line.

So different from running, cave-crawling is a slow and studied shifting of limbss and redistribution of weight, as well as care about the head. The payoff  is not the large vista as of Boston from the Cambridge shore but the darkness of interiority, very still, as natural in its way as the forest around the great gash simply being there without complaint or comment.

You who started to play  the game of waiting at the opening I'd gone into to see if I would come out, welcome to the ancient practice to looking down into the earth for surprises, as well as up to the skies.