Keenan’s quest, O’Carolan’s companionship

Brain Keenan, a teacher from Belfast working at the American University in Beirut, was abducted by Muslim terrorists in 1986 and released in 1990. As a hostage, Keenan later reported, he felt he was being stripped “of every sense and fibre of body and mind and spirit that [makes one] who we are” (quoted by Richard Hutch in SOUNDINGS, 2001). During the isolation of his incarceration, Keenan imagined he was visited by several people, most particularly Turlough O’Carolan, the legendary, 17th century father of Irish music. He later wrote that “If [O’carolan] hadn’t been in the cell, I might still be locked up. It’s somebody to talk to, it’s somebody to focus your mind on, it’s something to keep yourself sane or insane …” (p122). These seemingly pathological experiences helped Keenan sustain his identity. BUT isn't pathology supposed to compromise or erode one’s competence, not sustain it? While we play with words, Keenan sought to survive, to maintain creative control while enduring brutal incarceration. This spontaneous experiment with the boundaries of reality might resonate with those who undertake a spiritual quest.

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...

Multitasking = Attention Deficit ? Learning Therapy

Okay, so I'm sad today ... I always get sad when I can't do something as well as I expect ... I let go and mindmap to relax ... free associate and come what will ... I stay with it until I learn something ... anything(?) new. I know I'm overextended, I let it happen ... things become disconnected ... brain cells die of loneliness ... so make some new connections, renew even as I disintegrate, evaporate ... I'm crazy for connections:

“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” -- Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

So stop, center, focus ... I can't center everything, and yet "Centering [is] that act which precedes all others on the potter's wheel. The bringing of the clay into a spinning, unwobbling pivot, which will then be free to take innumerable shapes as potter and clay press against each other. The firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts." --Mary Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person.

Okay, so learn something ... make connections: "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers by base minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you." --Terence H. White, The Once and Future King

Art & Organism: POETRY AT WAR

I find the social / political significance of art is as compelling as any more intimate or even uniquely personal significance. Such power is often neglected in thinking about how the experience of art affects our ability to meet our (real or perceived) needs. The mind bending powers of propaganda art and music are better known than poetry ... but then there's Kipling ... and Muhammad Abdille Hassan, known now as then to the Somalis as Sayyid, or "Master" and to the British as "The Mad Mullah."

Every educated Somali, Jeffrey Bartholet writes, knows what happened at Dul Madoba in 1913: “ Some have memorized verses of a classic Somali poem written by the mullah [that prevailed over the British there]. The gruesome ode is addressed to Richard Corfield, a British political officer who commanded troops on this dusty edge of the empire. The mullah instructs Corfield, who was slain in battle, on what he should tell God's helpers on his way to hell. "Say: 'In fury they fell upon us.'/Report how savagely their swords tore you."

“Many Somalis would come to think [the mullah] mad in another sense—that he was touched by God.... “It's impossible to gauge the impact the poem had on the thinking of Somali fighters [then and now]. … In an age before television, the Internet, and streaming video, the mullah used poetry as a propaganda tool, both to gain sympathy and to terrify his foes.

Today poetry is also written and recited by bin Laden and just about every other Qaeda leader with a following. The poems proliferate on jihadi Web sites.” (from his essay, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (Newsweek, Oct 12, 2009; http://www.newsweek.com/id/216509/)

Sunday, October 25, 2009 5PM On the deck overlooking the back yard, only a little chilly. Neighbors have turned off their leaf blowers and I can imagine their pride of power and a bright green lawn. crickets and birds, a distant dog’s bark , The sun is behind the top of the trees in the yard now but the green and gold and amber leaves have become incandescent. Reading Wm F. Schulz’s little essay[1] in UU World from last winter. He was head of Amnesty International and exposed to the vicarious experience of unrelenting evil for over a decade. But he spoke also of the grace often on the other side. I began to think of assembling a little sermon on “fear.”
I have a daughter who may or may not have daughters who may or may not have daughters themselves …I have students who may or may not have students, and so on…
Some days, I feel like I have come to the crest of time. An event horizon. Poised at the angle of repose soon to join a cascade over the edge when the flicker of an eyelash a mile away triggers the tipping point.
[1] http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/121286.shtml

Driving home...

After a long Fall break weekend in Asheville (we saw Tosca, the annual Bonsai exhibition), WE impulsively chose to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway home to Knoxville ... We saw the clouds above but went anyway ... an adventure. But then we were IN the clouds, we were part of them. The Parkway is narrow and we felt very safe. As we drove through the clouds the world revealed itself to our senses slowly, sensuously ... the gorgeous colors of death preceding rebirth emerged from the mist, resonating with other myths I live by. The little mysteries of "what next" echoed the great mystery ... Blue Ridge mist / boughs of trees / … born before my eyes.

On the day that I die ...

BEATLES. When I think of the Beatles or hear some of their old tunes I expect part of my pleasure is a kindly, cozy bias ... a trusty, safe connection as though we've survived some trauma together. Cozy but not fresh. Then Paul McCartney does something new like these lyrics from “The End of the End” –

On the day that I die
I’d like jokes to be told
And stories of old
To be rolled out like carpets
That children have played on
And laid on while listening
To stories of old.