CLUTTER, c'est moi

Life seems stuffed between two great holidays ... entre les fêtes ... the interlude between semesters has been since childhood signified and celebrated by Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year, the annual family feast table was cleared, we got to reviewing Christmas stuff to scatter around, mount on the tree ... faded photos of children as infants, crusty old souvenirs, some glistening artsy ornaments, and the family decorates the tree.

And this calls my attention to stuff I've taken for granted: I look around as though in a stranger's house (a touch of jamais vu) ... at stuff on bookshelves, corners, the garage ... these artifacts depend on me! Only I see the connections ... the coherence I see  breathes life into them. Soon enough we --the stuff and I-- will be redistributed according to some apparent law of nature throughout the universe, only a little different than perhaps 50 years ago. Again I think, maybe I can make sense of things this year. If they were in just the right order, I would be in just the right order, and then the universe, and I can rest, untroubled by this impending disintegration.

THIS clutter is my extended phenotype, less a wunderkammern than one of those crabs (Macrocoeloma trispinosum nodipes) that covers itself with living camouflage from its environment: the serendipitously encountered sponge, or coral, or anemone. Each piece of clutter is a little house some vulnerable part of me lives in. To this point I might be a pathological collector, good at rationalizing my place in the spectrum of dysfunction ... not quite fatally retentive or so encrusted that I'm paralyzed ... but a little like that miniscule creature that creates and then becomes part of its own geology ... like corals and foraminifera –the stuff of white cliffs or the Parthenon or Michelangelo’s Pietà -- or Ernst Haeckel’s radiolaria (icon for this post).


OK, so maybe they're simply the bricks of a little house that shelters me, at least for a while … or (speaking of dwelling in dreams) each is one of the thousand points of light that collectively constitute an imagined memory … or a dream … and losing any one could unravel the whole ... like a subtle memory loss … loss of self! Is that why I’m so enchanted by some arcane words … “redintegration” --the pulling together of vast collections of memory precipitated by a single key recollection, or “pareidolia” -- a tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in the midst of random or ambiguous stimuli.

OK, I’ll clean up the damn garage, but in my heart am I really making room for new stuff? Is giving stuff away disloyal? Maybe I'm giving the best old stuff more room to breath. Am I thinking about this too much? Is my confidence in my intuitive impulses waning?

But wait! There’s more! (a favorite line from 3AM TV commercials)

“Disorganization” is a formal term for clutter in some circles (seems oxymoronic but I appreciate the power of alternative perspectives here) and there is actually a National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization, according to a New York Times article last Nov 3 [link] .

Even better!
Their research director, Catherine Roster, related the relevant fact that “professional organizers frequently urge clients to photograph objects they have trouble letting go of, as an assist to “dispossession.” Aha! We can exchange the image and the object ! I’ve been leaning towards a new camera … this seals the deal.

(I do appreciate the resonance between picking and choosing words for a problematical post and reorganizing the garage)

The Gateless Gate

For a few years now I've had the pleasure of following Joel Weishaus' growing digital journal, THE GATELESS GATE, glorifying the complementarity of word and image as he creates a context and the conditions for emergence. Another installment of poetry, science, image, and spirit just arrived (pp 41-50; illustration from p50) ... has this journal grown in grace and poise as it walks the line between chaos and insight ? or is it resonating with previously unknown circuits within me. (the best journals, said Wordsworth, create the taste by which they will be relished). Braque once said that art disturbs while science reassures ... so Joel gives us the (deceptive?) safety of science enabling a greater adventure than we might have otherwise undertaken.

Not Just Beautiful, but Real

Wednesday, January 27, 2010. In the procession of subsequent approximations that give us confidence, New Scientist, a favorite resource for the cutting edge, reported that “E8,” the beautiful symmetry discovered in the late 1800s is more than a pretty theoretical abstraction – it actually represents something in the real world.

As they put it, when a crystal made of cobalt and niobium was chilled to almost absolute zero its atoms arrayed themselves in in long, parallel chains. “Because of a quantum property called spin, electrons attached to the atom chains act like tiny bar magnets, each of which can only point up or down.” Then, a powerful magnetic field was ‘applied perpendicular to the direction of these electron "magnets". Patterns appeared spontaneously in the electron spins in the chains – in a simplified example with three electrons, the spins could read up-up-down or down-up-down, among other possibilities. Each distinct pattern has a different energy associated with it. The ratio of these different energy levels showed that the electron spins were ordering themselves according to mathematical relationships in E8 symmetry.”

The E8 symmetry also shows up in string theory, a beautiful idea awaiting experimental validation,... but the more real-world traits string theory has in common other domains does not hurt its prestige...