POV

Reading the Times I see a group mind, or is this every person's mind thinking all kinds of apparently minimally related thoughts?  Today's front page:  (A) Broadway shows need a bankable star to open ( e.g., Pacino, Scarlett); (B)  the State's top judge says excessive bail is being used as a tool to force poor defendants to plead guilty (lock 'em up til they say uncle.)  (C) Business page notes that Deveauboise is eliminating trusts and estates--too few billable hours in helping billionaires reach out from the grave.  Big corporations are the cash cow for big law.  And the obituaries (D) note the passing of Strom Thurmond's love child, who signed his letters to her "Strom Thurmond."  I suppose this is better than Ike's dismissal of his lovely driver as she suffered terminal cancer.  Is tragedy really only personal?  Is God alone caring for the falling sparrow? 

From whose perspective do we view our lives and the life of the world?  I remember fondly a doodle: a black circle with two white triangles opposite each other on the circumference.  Titled: the world as seen by a little man living in a beer can.  Is interior decorating that beer can the chief end of man?

Well, no, by God!  I re-read a reminscence of a weekend encounter with Dirac written by an astronomer whose family entertained the great man and his wife near the Hawaiian observatory in the early seventies.  The host wrote that watching Dirac read two children's books with his nine year old daughter confounded his later learning that Dirac was seen as austere and distant by the world of physicists.  He also wrote that Dirac tried to draw him  out on The Large Number hypothesis saying that though he, too, was once plagued by doubts it was astrological, he still thought the remarkable ratio was hard to accept as a coincidence.  None of us easily accepts living in a beer can.  Dirac, too, wanted to see cosmic significance in what he saw from the can.  And I, in his ability to perceive.

Nagel

Tom Nagel has published another philosophical work challening the dominant pragmatic realism that has imperialized science and social life.  Basically I think he's saying since we can't explain consciousness and since we're apparently bound by its perspectives, we need a new one.  It's obvious we can't explain life, where we and the universe came from, time and most anything we're really interested in.  Total explanation precludes interest, which is to say mystery, the thrill of the hunt, the search, the journey.   And what system can explain this?  A recursive one.  Godel's incompleteness theorem, Dirac's unitary hypothesis, fractals all suggest to me an approach to Logos.  The All looking into our mind's eye peering into its.  Our God is a living, loving God.  And this cosmos is an illusion built for our delectation and edification.  This moment is our only reality, and it, too, is a portal to God knows what and everything else.  You can't grasp it.  Be Aware, Be Aware....of wild eyes and floating hair.  O that Dionysian rag.  But I digress.

This journey is so beyond our ability to grasp it that there comes a tendency to idolize ourselves and our systems and shibboleths.  Pain, or the fear of pain, seems to become the Other that diminishes us.  Take arms against a vale of tears and....who wants to become a millionaire??!!   Who doesn't?  It's hard to remember we've all won the lottery by being conceived.  In short, the journey to our next destination is a tough one for most of us.  Hence, our idol worship.  For some reason, Peter Horton screwing around on Michelle Pfeiffer comes to mind.  And Queen Bees Perelman and Gagosian going at it.  May the best man's lawyers win.  And barring that, the best men's media-military-industrial-financial (ser)vices complex.  And their running dogs.

Somehow this leads me to the question of why great art about current events is so rare.  Probably because the recursive function is so difficult to apply to the moment at hand.  Perfection in the life OR the work, Pater wrote.  Gurus are the exception.  I sometimes remember that great Canadian tenor, whose name escapes me, who said something like, "When I perform I am trying to embrace the audience and bring it up into the performance with me so they can see and feel the glory and wonder."  This is very closely related to the joy we take in watching our grandchildren discover. 

And that's an example of my idea of recursion.  In watching our grandchildren we are re-activating our own childhood wonder.  And this re-activation is selfless, ego-free.  Our childhood wonder is the great universal.  We've all got a ticket to ride...given the average expectable environment.  My ability to escape the demands of discursive logic reminds me of the child's book of the little locomotive that kept jumping the tracks to smell the daisies rather than staying straight and true and becoming the great Flying Limited.  When I was a child, I thought as a child....But now, as a man, I'm completely off the tracks, my ability to follow Imagination flourishing in the absence of Adderal.

Yet, somehow, when I encounter someone suffering, I become wonderfully focused.  I suppose this is why I can never become an author.  I can't stand imagining suffering readers, and I've never liked imaginary playmates.  So, there's no escaping it.  This writing is a masturbatory equivalent.  I think I'm going blind.

Mirror, Mirror

The wish that we be significant-to some admirable other-calls up images of magic mirrors and "monkey see, monkey do" to me.   Our copying what we see and becoming what we behold leads me down the garden path to perception, itself indistinguishable to me from life....and all else?   I find it a useful exercise to inhabit the Eastern maxim "There is only one perceiver."   Work at imagining that the force behind your life and consciousness is the Ultimate, which is perceiving through you while the miracle of you is looking into a mirror that is the creation.  You know, the earth, everyone else, the cosmos, etc. etc.  It's the fun house mirror room in ten dimension space time, and God knows how many dimensions of comprehension.  And all six plus billion of us are doing it, aware or not.

Old Hebrew saying: God created the universe for you and you alone, you who are nothing but dust and ashes.

Bill Russel's mom on her death bed:  "No one is any better than you.   And you're no better than anybody else."

Jesus on the most important commandments: "Love God with all your being, and treat others as you would be treated."

Selma Kramer famously wrote of "the child's love affair with the world."  This mode of perception, or being, is a faculty always within each of us, though the daily weight of man's inhumanity to man has a way of burying it.  Seeing what Socrates' mentress was revealing in The Symposium while not becoming pollyannish is a challenge.  A challenge nicely thrown down by Job's Inquisitor asking, "Who is this that darkens my design with ignorance?"   Why that would be you and me.  It certainly has seemed a hell of a lot easier to me personally to investigate that question when I felt (felt mind you) that God or whatever was taking an interest in me.

I think I'll fire up Google earth and see if I can see the Brooklyn Heights home in which I'm writing...from about two thousand feet up.

Bullies

"Identification with the aggessor" is a simple way I like to think about the running of "the world."  Years ago Oprah picked up on a study claiming two thirds of American school children were more worried about bullying than any other school problem.  10% of kids were identified as targets of bullies.  I assume the other 57% were frightened by seeing that nothing was done by school authorities or anyone else to recognize the problem--thereby condoning it.  How similar to society at large where the mass of people lead lives of quiet despair.  In the world of realpolitik Richard Nixon noted that three to four thousand people made all the substantive decisions about allocation of resources--societal goals.   I did the math: one person in 70,000 has a say.  Kind of like the military and top brass.  I also read that with today's armaments 2 armed men can control 100 civilians.  I don't believe in conspiracies so much as in the confluence of interests.  And in the ability of mass communcations to obfuscate who the confluential persons are and to mask the costs of their interests to the mass of men.  Bread and circuses, the hope of winning the lottery, and the desire to join those close to the golden calf are carrots held out to the common man.  Loss of job & life plus constant tension about where the next dollar is coming from are sufficient to dissolve most mass action. These would be The Stick.  Take out a rebellious slave, whip him to death, build a pyramid.  To the survivors a little soup and hope to live another day.  And maybe some day to become a whipper one's self.

Jesus is not a role model who's gained traction

Pauline Kael wrote that normal life depends on our hypocrisies.  Lack of hypocrisy is a classic abnormality.  Remember Dorothy Day Lewis.  ?

Watching the World Go By

I re-experience so clearly my early childhood awe and wonder at the glory of experience and the wonder of being able to experience at all, let alone with all these senses. What must a rock experience, I wondered. And then to be confused by my experience--shocking, painful-of others. And ultimately to realize that my perception of a diminished world was as if I had become that pain giving other. Monkey see, monkey do. Monkey feel, monkey become. We became what we beheld.

And in childhood, I somehow imagined that Oriental wisdom must be profound. Where this thought came from, I haven't a clue. But the beholder of what we beheld must figure in.

Teaching by example is the only way. Learning is another matter.

It seems like old times

Hillel, when asked by one of his disciples, "When will the messiah come, teacher," answered, "He is already here."

"Where?"

Go to the pool of Siloam, where the lepers and the sick wash their bandages. You will see that most take off all their wrappings, wash them, and leave them all to dry in the sun. But one takes but one bandage off at a time, washes the one, dries it and then rewraps, continuing until he is done. So if anyone needs him he has but one bandage to apply and is off in a flash.

Firenze comme era

Returning from Firenze last evening I was astonished to see my home more beautiful than anything there. The yard was lush and redolent from the two weeks of rain. And most intriguingly I dreamt of Florence, its stone streets, while I'd not dreamt of it once while there. The Florence I dreamt was a secret garden though all was stone. A neuropsychologist has written "My Stroke of Luck"--I saw it mentioned while on the plane--that allowed her to enter her "right brain" and discover the world was too much with her. Shades of Dostoevski who said he'd give his whole life to live one day in his aura. All connects; mind is Mind. Giacommetti would save his cat over his Michaelangelo. And Fra Angelico would sooner use Tamara of the Vivoli than Madonna.
It is not the soles of our feet that need washing after our daily encounters. Can we, dare we, use our true resource to flood our world instead of being gorged by it? Smile! You're on cando camera.