Jonathan Marcus's Blog

We are endowed with these marvelous brains that excel at everything from oboe-making to calculus to needle point to wind surfing, plus we invented the wheel and slang and meat loaf and pencils and free advice. And with these marvelous brains, we have objectively ascertained that because of these brains we are the crown of creation, the pinnacle of evolution, and the most special snowflakes in the history of weather.

And as wonderful as this Thinking function may be, it would also benefit from some critical thought.

For example, consider that thinking is like breathing: we breathe automatically all day, all night, whether we’re sleeping or running or arguing or eating or laughing inappropriately or playing poker. Breathing is one of the autonomic functions, along with the heartbeat and digestion (among others) that are always ON. This is a pretty handy arrangement, so we don’t have to think about how to metabolize corn dogs, candy corn, corn chips, and corn while counting out loud to maintain a regular heartbeat. It all just happens, so we are free to indulge in this lofty Thinking function.

But shouldn’t Thinking be added to the list of autonomic functions? Think about it. As soon as you blink awake from slumber, you’re thinking, and you keep at it all day long every day until you die.

Whew! That’s a big goddamn heap of thinking! And we’re so busy doing it — Thinking — that we don’t stop to ask what the hell is it for?

We can start by dividing Thinking into two unequal piles: [1.] Useful and Fun Thinking; and [2.] Circular, Annoying, Myopic, Useless Thinking.

Let’s applaud Useful and Fun Thinking. We hereby thank Thinking for over a thousand really handy products, such as trains, dimmer switches, foreign languages, storm windows, the US Constitution, demolition derbies, éclairs, wool socks, and scissors. And scotch tape. And molasses. And cartoons. Plus some really great other non-product stuff like poetry, music, grammar, slapstick, soap operas, maps, weather forecasting, air traffic control, mail, and placebos.

We can all agree that even though Useful and Fun Thinking constitutes the small pile, it has nevertheless wrought an impressive array of really cool stuff plus non-stuff. And if everyone always constantly thought up fun and useful stuff all the time, we wouldn’t even be asking the question.

But we are asking “What is Thinking for?” because Useful and Fun Thinking is what most people rarely get to, and the vast amount of thinking falls into the other vastly larger pile: Circular, Annoying, Useless, Myopic Thinking.

So how is it that we as a species are blessed with this marvelous, miraculous function that is rarely marvelous or miraculous and mostly sputters along, misfiring, making rude noises, and leaving people grumpy and spent at the end of the day just so they can fall asleep and get up and think the same useless circular crap all over again tomorrow until they die.

If we walked as well as we Think, we’d spend our days bashing into concrete barriers, getting decapitated by freight trains, and generally using our heads as battering rams.

So, what’s going on? Let’s look at this wacky profligate slinging of brain power as an ego issue. And don’t worry — this is not an anti-ego screed! Let’s be clear here: we all need an ego. The ego is an essential interface with the world. You have to have one. Ego, that is. You have to have an ego to get yourself cleaned up, dressed, recognized, employed and to barrel onward through the day. The ego is your slice of the prism of universal light, and — ideally — through this slice the world brings light to you, and you bring light to the world.

Well, again, this light-enriching-the-light is the ideal dynamic. As with any model, the ideal is only approached. The ideal is a goal to which we (most of us, anyway) aspire.

However, the arrangement quickly becomes weird, because it is precisely the essential legitimacy of this sense of self, this individuation, that imbues this sense of self — this ego — with justification, power, and importance.

Let’s go over this one more time with some attendant considerations:

· We need an ego in order to interface with life and function well.

· The ego, or sense of self, is inherently valuable in that it confers perspective, a platform from which to engage and learn.

· The medium through which the ego functions is Thinking. Without Thinking, you have no ego; no separate sense of self.

· Our individual prismatic platform is necessarily eccentric. Herein lies its value as well as its shortcomings.

· As important as this ego-thing is, it is also an amorphous blob that will consume as much thought-space as it is allowed.

· This ego-thing is a work in progress, and it is not the whole of what we are; it exists only in the realm of Thinking; and it can be creatively, constructively interrupted by stopping all thought!

Stopping all thought?

This brings us back to the autonomic functions, a group of functions which includes Thinking.

Breathing, unlike digestion and heart beat and others, is one autonomic function over which we can exercise immediate, conscious control. We can hold our breath to annoy our parents or go swimming. We can alter the depth and rate of breathing when meditating or concentrating.

And Thinking is the other autonomic function over which we can exercise some control.

Thinking is a lot more fun and lot more productive when unbound from ego. And this little nugget hunkers down at the core of the human conundrum:

· You need an ego.

· The ego is a platform from which you may engage in the world.

· The medium through which the ego engages is Thinking.

· Your best, most fun, freshest, and most energized Thinking blossoms when the ego is not involved.

Therefore, stop Thinking in order to Think Well and More Funly.

One way to stop Thinking is to play tennis. Playing tennis should be one of the Next Ten Commandments. Because tennis is faster than thought, so if you’re thinking your way through the game, you’re going to hate yourself, which is the opposite of playing tennis. And playing tennis is an actual thing you can do to stop Thinking. It is also a metaphor for a virtually infinite array of way cool human activities that are faster than thought, so to do any of them you bypass the cumbersome, droning, circular ego Thinking — without which, weirdly, none of this would be possible.

That’s why the gods want us to play tennis (after all, this is the last in the series, Think Tank Tennis), paddle white water, explain the cosmos, cure cancer, and run like the wind. And simply, periodically throughout the day, stop all thought. It’s like a breath of fresh air.

Use your ego platform. It’s your diving board, not your hut. Jump already.

Jonathan Marcus’ memoir, Everything is Happening at Once, is now available on Amazon .

Click here for free download of Everything is Happening at Once, Chapters 1 & 2 .

And subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Flossophy Friday.

Intelligence tests are stupid because they determine only one sliver of the intelligence sphere, and the bit these tests measure are the very easiest sliver to measure. So when you’re in awe of someone with, say, an IQ of 181 or whatever, it’s fine to appreciate, “Dude can determine how many times a 5 x 7 x 11 x 2.03 trapezoid can fit into a 21 x 41 x 3 triangle,” and Dude delivers the answer in less time than it takes to crack an egg.

Dude has performed quite a feat while you cracked an egg. Yes, and let’s put the achievement in some perspective (especially since you haven’t solved the problem, and you already ate the omelet). These tests measure static relationships: a problem that sits still, is well-defined, with crisp edges. Which is all great, it’s good to measure stuff about the square root of a round peg and how many pies fill a pie shop at sea level, and we agree that the ability to manipulate abstractions is pretty miraculous. Yet these “intelligence tests” ignore all the other rich and fascinating and dynamic forms of intelligence with which humans are blessed when they’re not too annoyed.

A quarterback has about two seconds to assess [1.] whether or not throw the football; [2.] if not, how to get rid of it; [3.] if so, which of three or four guys to throw it to while each zigzags at more than twenty miles an hour while another guy from another team is really bothering your guy; [4.] and conduct these assessments while giant mean people are trying to hurt you; [5.] and then, as the two seconds or so rapidly wind to a conclusion, you evade a mean person and hurl a spiral right into the palms of a sprinting teammate who is himself being hounded by two more giant mean people who want to hurt him.

What the quarterback has just done demands complex forms of intelligence operating in unity. The skill sets are extremely difficult to even list, let alone measure, in a “Football Quarterback Intelligence Test,” and that’s why no such test exists. Sure, you can quantify foot speed and arm strength, but you can’t quantify the ability to make quick, cogent decisions while your feet are dancing to complete the pass — a difficult athletic feat even when isolated from the infinite variables in frantic game action and it might be snowing or raining — when mean people are trying to hurt you.

And an IQ test for music? Well, music schools do test sight reading, which is an amazing skill: to be able to play a score as complicated as Beethoven simply and purely by manifesting into sound bunches of weird annotations on a sheet of paper. Sight reading music is almost as measurable as comparing the area of a trapezoid to the area of a triangle. Yet sight reading music does not figure into intelligence tests. And to complicate this IQ morass even more, many of the world’s greatest musicians can’t read music at all.

Music. You are talking about highly intelligent, complicated, multi-layered, emotionally transcendent manipulations of the air waves. And not one note of all this power and truth registers on any intelligence test.

Look at the skills demanded of a sailor. A sailor reads the wind the way a musician reads the score, and translates the wind into well-trimmed sails and a responsive rudder, while navigating a rolling seascape clear to Polaris.

Carpenters render two dimensional small scale blueprints into full scale three dimensional spaces. Layers of skill and physicality intersect rhythmically and sequentially to make this happen: you integrate spatial abstractions plus brute strength and a delicate touch with intimate knowledge of, for example, the distinct way a nail grabs Douglas fir as opposed to the way a nail grabs southern yellow pine.

We can all be cynical about the very term “political intelligence,” in part because of the tendency of power to corrupt. Nevertheless, many elected officials do aspire to public service, and to do so demands melding moral ideals, language and social skills, and well-conceived practical solutions while navigating the shoals of absurdity and venality.

The list goes on and on. Let’s pause to celebrate. Yay, Yay, and Yay for all the myriad forms of human intelligence! Yay for the baton twirlers! Yay for cellists! Yay for dressage! Yay for sommeliers! Yay for quilters! Yay for comedians! For a species that can be so dumb, we sure are smart! Yay for all the skill sets we haven’t named and Yay for the many, many more invisible skills that never been named.

Yay for everything beyond the scope of what’s measured in a puny, static, dry, heartless, boxed-in IQ test, which includes pretty much everything, and it’s pretty much miraculous.

Add to this the fact the IQ scores do not predict success in living a human life, partly because how in the hell do you define success except that you know when you got it, and it comes and goes, and partly because the many elements that make life rewarding are far too complicated to measure, and partly just because.

So, in conclusion: It’s not so much that IQ tests are stupid as it is that our faith in these tests is stupid.

Only that’s not the conclusion. So calm down. We’re just now approaching the point.

Broad awareness of the fact that IQ measures only a tiny sliver of the miraculous sphere of human intelligence is exemplified in the emergence of Emotional Intelligence in the cultural conversation. It’s become so familiar in many circles that it’s known as “EQ,” as opposed to “IQ”.

Everyone here at our lab (it’s in the basement) (the comedy department is upstairs) (just thought you might want to know) says this EQ thing is really great. We’re all for it, and we want it to have a nice life. Yes, yes, and yes to the importance of Emotional Intelligence!

However, the pitfall with this EQ bandwagon onto which a lot of way cool way smart people have hopped is the tendency to assume that EQ is it. Since we figured out EQ might be more important than IQ, the intelligence question has been resolved, right?

Wrong.

Emotional Intelligence, critical as it is for living a full, fun, expansive, loving, human life, is still only one sliver of the intelligence sphere. It’s a critical sliver, to be sure, along with the boxed-in sliver measured by those clever tests; but still, these are slivers, and no single sliver is sufficient.

Consider this proof from the lab: you can have a high IQ and deftly assay trapezoids and triangles until the next Einstein is born, and still be a blathering, indebted, neurotic, angry, myopic mess. And you can have high EQ, keenly attuned to the feelings of others, and still be a blathering, indebted, neurotic, angry, myopic mess.

So if high IQ and high EQ are not sufficient to live a full, rich, fun, expansive life, what in the hell does it take to get there?

Consider Global Intelligence.

Global Intelligence?

Global Intelligence blossoms from a full-spectrum ecology of intelligences, plus more: call it the umbrella sense; a sense of place in the bigness; citizenship in the universe.

Wait, let’s slow down here.

Let’s think of it in terms of microcosms and the macrocosm.

Microcosms. Go small, way small, and burrow into all the details from which rewarding outcomes are assembled. Aside from the welcome exception of good fortune, rewarding outcomes accrue from artfully and thoughtfully executed efforts in optimal sequences. With technical excellence. Pursuit of mastery is a great teacher. Whatever the arena, be it storytelling or brewing or diesel mechanics, the details matter and the details are a portal to grandeur.

And vital engagement with elemental grandeur can loft us to the macrocosm, the bigness . . . this delicious, abiding sense of the ethos and the drift and the flows of possibility.

Global Intelligence is the dimension where the vitality and the criticality of the details merge and collaborate with a well-earned sense of the whole.

The mind is a lens and the field of vision is everything.

Global Intelligence is the sphere — and the richer your fluency in multiple slivers, the richer and wiser your life will be. The way harmony and dissonance and timbre merge in an orchestra.

All the intelligences are ripe for inclusion. Everything. Deeds of loving kindness, curiosity, knowledge of the world, the art of conversation, gymnastics, animal husbandry, sense of direction, a sense of awe and gratitude, needle point, baking, stone masonry, stock trading. They are all good and noble, and each can potentially enrich your spheriority.

Global Intelligence is the love child of the fruitful marriage of opposites: irreverence and respect; freedom and responsibility; play and work; ascetic and sybaritic; the atomic and the cosmic.

Consider “Global Intelligence” as fluid, boots-on-the-ground, worldly enlightenment: Global Intelligence is not a destination. You never get there. It is an aspiration. It is an arc. You’re the quarterback on an infinite playing field, and the more you stretch and the more you embrace, the better your game.

But there is no score in this game, and victory comes in the form of happy outcomes, understanding and wonder. And Global Intelligence begs new questions, such as, What is thought for? What’s the highest and best use of Thinking? In an ideal world, what we supposed to do with it?

Jonathan Marcus’ memoir, Everything is Happening at Once, is now available on Amazon .

Click here for free download of Everything is Happening at Once, Chapters 1 & 2 .

And subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Flossophy Friday.

Thinking. It’s a messy process, this Thinking thing. It’s easy to get lost in the word forest. There are no trails, and it’s teeming with new impressions, untested theories, agendas from who-knows-where, all mixed in with detritus and ghosts, all writhing for connection.

We are forensic surgeons here, tinkering inside thought chains.  Where are the tendons already?  We need tendons to tether these limbs of thought to the spine of the ethos, or else they’ll flop into the void and disappear.  So we have to tie up these loose ends, these fresh and tentacled fragments.  We can do this.  Can’t we?  Yes, and we do it better when the methodology includes — fun.

Fun pops up in funny ways.  Fun can be driving through the ancient damp southern mountains with a leaf stuck to your windshield.

Rained last night and they say the rain stopped but the rain seems to linger in mid air, filling every highland pocket, everything misted, the old mountain road shines in the wet, and the leaf is still on the windshield.

How is the leaf still on the windshield?  Forty-seven miles an hour.  Hardly speeding by space age standards, but how can a wet paper-thin leaf go catatonic and adhere to slick glass in a steady stiff forty-seven mile an hour waft, mountains or no mountains?

The leaf is your friend.  You are glad the leaf is here, with you, as  “here”  curves fast-forward across well-tumbled earth.  The leaf, with you all the way, every turn, every incline and every down-shiftable descent, yup, it’s you and your leaf buddy.  Traveling together.  The leaf makes the trip more fun.  The leaf makes you wonder how it can still be plastered to the windshield while the wonder spills into the hills and hollers of the southern mountains and the truth is that you have no more idea how the mountains came to be  (even if you can toss off terms like orogenic process and igneous intrusion)  than why the leaf is on the windshield.

How can it still be there, stuck to the windshield like that?  You flash on a  “Slippery When Wet”  road sign and immediately imagine a  “Caution Wet Floor!”  sign in a mid-rise office lobby in suburbia and you ask the leaf out loud — breaching the tacit vow of silence between fellow pilgrims — “I thought wet made everything slippery.”  And the leaf replies, as if it were totally normal for a leaf to converse in a forty-seven mile an hour airstream,  “If you want to clean your kitchen counter, you better use a wet sponge instead of a dry sponge.  Get it wet.  More stuff sticks to it.”

Which is exactly why it’s fun to cruise the southern mountains with a leaf.  On the windshield.  You get the mountains in their full four dimensional massive mysticism.  And you get the leaf.  Hugging the slick glass.  And you get to wonder,  “Which is it?  Are things slippery when wet?  Or are things sticky when wet?”

Fun with leaf.

Fun?

Fun, a simple three-letter word, with a simple etymology.  It didn’t appear until late in our English language — showed up in the 1700s, when  “to fun somebody”  meant to take advantage or cheat, in the sense of gamesmanship.  Later, it came to mean fun in the sense of light-hearted pastimes and dumb stuff like paying five hundred dollars for the family to chat with a person dressed as a famous mouse while waiting in line for a goofy ride.  But I digress.

Ahem.

Admittedly, the Fun Question is debatable.  Which is more fun:  take everyone to Disney World, or cruise the southern mountains with a leaf stuck to a wet windshield?  Reasonable people may certainly espouse nuanced opinions on this vexing question.

Language evolves;  perhaps we’re skating ahead of the dictionary with some emergent connotations of the word.  Consider that  “fun”  is a kind of quiet contract:  You agree to pay attention and/or money in exchange for some new sensation, thought, or experience.

Well, it’s actually more than that.  Fun also implies a release from the ongoing burden of being you.  Fun is a zone where you can enjoy being alive while the general pain-in-the-assedness of being alive is temporarily suspended.  You shift your inner gears into neutral, in a manner of speaking, and coast with some added frisson of magic liberty while being doused in impressions you don’t have to work for.

Surrendering to the flow of images on a movie screen.  Or letting a roller coaster throw you down up and sideways.  Or paddling white water or floating above the mesas in a hot air balloon.  Or a heightened sense of wonder as a leaf accompanies you on a mountain junket.  You name it:  anything with the right mix of time and attention and curiosity and pliability can bounce you straight into fun.

The fun thing about fun is that it comes from anywhere.  You can pay for it but you don’t have to.  A lot of free fun is more fun because you don’t have stand in line or decide if you got your money’s worth and you can quit whenever it gets to be no fun anymore.

And you don’t have to worry about the body.  The body knows how to have fun.  The body likes being alive.  It’s really good at this life thing.  And it’s easily entertained.  It likes to walk around and move through space and hurl other objects through space, objects like spears and spitballs and boomerangs and water balloons.  The body likes to dance and see other bodies dance.  The body likes to eat and feast and run and yell.

The body and Thinking appear to have little in common.  Yet upon closer scrutiny, with the help of a good translator, we find some similarities.  The body likes a good feast, and Thinking loves a good feast, too.  And here’s where the translator comes in, because Thinking feasts in a very different way.  While the body feasts and finds fun in the familiar, Thinking comes more alive in the new — new impressions, new information, new prisms of insight.  The mind is refreshed when it cavorts where it’s never been before.  The good news is, the body has plenty of room for its repetitions, and the mind has infinite space for invention.

The leaf is still on the windshield.  And the question lingers: is moisture slippery or sticky?

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We generally devote our astounding global brain power to just getting our little selves through the little day, so any discussion of how we happen to live this life wailing with possibility and what we should do about it becomes, well, dicey, because the discussion requires that we step back from our brains in order to explore their possibilities.  Which is not a reason to avoid the discussion.  Au contraire!  It’s all the more reason, really, to exercise peripheral vision and wide-angle thinking, savor the view, and respond to it all in a new way.

Let’s plunge ahead by breaking it down into  [1.]  All the facets of the brain, and  [2.]  The information to which we have access and how may we best avail ourselves of it.

[1.]  Facets of the brain.  Don’t panic!  This is not a neurological or physiological text.  This is a boots-on-the-ground, trooper-to-trooper, survey of available portals.  You’re probably familiar with some of these, but it doesn’t hurt anything to enjoy a quick bird’s eye scan of our plug-ins.

Start with smell.  It’s ancient and fundamental, instant and irrefutable.  And build from there.  Taste.  Touch.  Hearing.  Sight.  (They say the human eye can perceive one photon!)  Speech.  Locomotion.  Balance.  Athleticism.  Sex.  Instinct.  Intuition.  Love.  And all the miraculous autonomic functions that take care of operations when we’re out to lunch.  Plus we have an opposable thumb!

And, oh yeah, Thinking.  Thinking!  Thinking is last on the list, as indeed it came last in our development, and we’re still trying to wedge it into the program.  All the other parts operate splendidly without a lot of second-guessing.  But Thinking, well, sheesh, it can give you a headache, and again, we’re still figuring it out: the how, when and what of Thinking.

What to think about is a question that we ought to ask more often.  After all, we do have a choice.  Don’t we? Broadly speaking, the content of Thinking can be divided into Thinking about me, and Thinking about other stuff.

A corollary question:  should I think the same thoughts about me and other stuff over and over again?  Or should I think new stuff?  Any nascent, snuffled curiosity about thinking new stuff whooshes us to the shores of the information age, which is  [2.]  in our discussion.

[2.]  Information.  As denizens of this information age, we do need to process abstract information in order to live well.  It’s an intimidating challenge, and we’re breathlessly trying to catch up.  And failing.

Not so many centuries ago, in the Middle Ages, the sum of human knowledge was well defined. You could actually comprehend its limits.  All the books in the world fit into one room probably smaller than your local DMV.  The body of knowledge was growing, but at a barely discernible pace: it took over a millennium for the quantity of information to double.

Now, five or six centuries later, the scope and depth of human knowledge is beyond comprehension, and nobody even knows for sure how fast information is doubling.  Some argue that the sum of human knowledge doubles every year.  Some say it’s happening much faster.

However anyone measures it, we are awash in information, and we can’t imagine keeping pace with the waves of it all.  It can drive you crazy, just maintaining basic literacy and currency in multiple fields of inquiry.  Movies, politics, indie song writers, physics, art, insomnia, and tennis.  History, theater, atheism, astronomy, fiction, law, football, economics, poetry, synchronized swimming, and geography.

You couldn’t cope with new production in the relatively minor discipline of sociology, even if it were your full time job.  And what about banking, psychology, chemistry, metallurgy, the stock market, the Balkans, micro-dosing, and 3-D printing?  And, oh yeah, baseball, Islam, agriculture, the Iberian peninsula, mining, solar energy, Judaism, basketball, robotics, coffee bean futures, pharmaceuticals, Christianity, sabermetrics, and wind power  . . ?

Apologies to all those areas of expertise that haven’t been mentioned, not limited to glass blowing, Hinduism, fire tornado theory, quilting, serotonin vs. dopamine, ballistics, hermeneutics, the Etruscans, oncology, comedy, Timbuktu, corn syrup solids, and ballet.

By the way, interesting fact:  Wikipedia contains almost six million articles in the English language version alone, and articles are accumulating at the rate of about two hundred per day.  This is a beautiful problem.

Yet it is still a problem, and it’s a thousand problems, and the crushing onslaught of human knowledge might have doubled since yesterday morning.  Nobody knows.  And by the time anyone figures out how fast it’s doubling, it probably will have more than quintupled a bunch of times.

And also by the way, let’s agree that lots of people, for various reasons, don’t care about this problem.  (They’re being driven crazy by other stuff, such as the insidious IFOS — Incuriosity Faux Omniscience Syndrome — so don’t worry, they’re not getting off easy.)  And if you were an IFOS dupe, you would have already lost interest and quit reading.

Since you do care, as it’s the next paragraph and you’re still here, we have to ask:  exactly what is the problem?  Excellent question.  Thank you.

The problem is that we want to understand the whirl of the world, and we can’t exactly “information our way” (if “information” were a verb) to understanding, because the waves of new knowledge rotate like crazed moons around our puny (albeit amazing) tennis ball brains — and these brains are not even fully available because we have to think ad nauseam about “me.”

And simply gathering information, even if we could do it 24/7, does not satisfy the abiding, surpassing urge to understand: information provides the building blocks but another kind of vision/integration confers the architecture of understanding.

As the rate of information increases, it’s particularly easy to get stupid-crazy and neglect to consider that thinking is slow.  Thinking takes time.  Thinking requires care and curiosity and, yes, it also requires those raw building blocks of new information called facts.  But again — thinking is slow, and moreover thinking is the art of connecting facts.

It’s not a game of tennis.

People and cultures often treat thinking as if it were tennis, with responses to new facts and new ideas slammed around at body-speed with return-forehand-finality.  While simultaneity and instantaneity elevate your tennis, the tennis model does not enhance the game of thought:  just because you wallop a return thought doesn’t mean it enriches your understanding of anything.

In fact, thinking benefits by resisting the instant reactions that serve so well in tennis.  Because thinking takes time, and benefits from connecting far-flung facts and experiences and fresh perception.

Paying attention to new facts and countervailing ideas from the gathering mass of information, and then connecting these new facts and ideas in new ways across seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge and experience is a lot more fun and alive and startling than thinking about “me” all the time.

Let’s pluck a couple of examples from the infinite tsunami of new information, and see where any of them may lead.

Example:  The placebo effect: a growing number of studies indicate that patients’ belief in the power of a remedy is often as effective as the actual medical remedies themselves.  The belief is so strong that patients have achieved complete recovery from knee injuries when they see the incision made by a surgeon — even though no surgical remedy was performed.  The belief in the remedy was the only intervention!

Knowledge of the placebo effect is useful and captivating.  (Profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies find the placebo effect supremely annoying.)  Considered further, the placebo effect casts new light and new perspective on mind/body dualism, and suggests that the mind and the body are not separate functions as we usually construe them — because if mere belief in a cure can cure a medical problem, then obviously the mind and the body can work as one.

The placebo effect seems to work because of the power of our belief in medicine.  The power of belief in a pill or an incision is so strong that chronic maladies can be cured not by chemistry or surgery but simply and purely by the belief itself.  We believe that an external intervention works.  Can the power of this belief in the external be internalized?  So that we may cure ourselves more often?  And how in the world can we learn to do that?  Now, that’s something worth thinking about.

Example:  The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, documents the homicide rate world wide over the centuries.  Against all expectation, author Steven Pinker documents that in the Twentieth Century, even with two horrific world wars and the millions of deaths caused by Stalin and Mao and others, the homicide rate was the lowest in history.

For anyone paying attention to news and the human condition, it’s practically blasphemy to say that life is getting better.  And of course the question is complicated, and problems abound everywhere you look.  Yet if the goal is to understand what’s really happening, then it is critical to integrate big picture facts, including these: people are slaughtering people a lot less than they used to.  And the rate of abject poverty in the world is declining.  And other signs of progress abound but it might be too upsetting to list them all at once  . . .

Example:  Atlanta, Georgia, is west of the entire continent of South America.  Look at a globe.  It’s perfectly obvious.  Okay, fine, you say — but why does this matter?  It matters because you thought North America was right above South America.  And you were wrong.  And it’s plainly obvious:  North America is almost entirely to the west of South America.  In the interest of understanding what in the heck is going on around here, we have to be wary of the brain’s reflex to stack facts and make a pattern where none exists.

Example:  Cross Species Pollination.  Research biologist Carl Woese showed that species do not evolve only according to Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, but also by exchanging genetic information directly from species to species at the cellular level.

Such cross-species exchanges upend the suppositions that have undergirded biology for more than a century.

And such exchanges serve as a model for the cross-pollination of facts, broad information, and personal experience.

The fount of information is not going to stop.  It’s going to accelerate.  Let’s enjoy it.  Let’s pay attention to the big parts and the little parts and let the infinite combinations form and lead us beyond, way beyond the circular preoccupations with “me.”

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Except you don’t “decide” or “plan” anything.  Decisions and planning are functions of the mind, and the body processes all this information more or less immediately as soon as the ball is whacked on the other side of the court and zooms at you across the net.  And it all happens at once.

Past, present, and future collapse into the trajectory of the ball, and you fold right into it all, all at once.  Your wrist adjusts for forehand or backhand while you move towards the ball / while you wind up for a shot / while planting your foot / while swinging the racket / while making contact and directing the ball back across the court and—pow!—the ball flies across the court and you’re setting up for the next return in a lot less time than it takes to read this paragraph.

Imagine if you did have to think tennis instead of play tennis.  Each shot would require spreadsheets and committee meetings.  Maybe on a whiteboard you’d graph the dynamics.  And a Power Point, too, with photos and charts and Venn diagrams.  A list of pros and cons, spin studies, trajectory assessments, and policy on preferred wrist orientation expressed in degree of deviation from the vertical.

Who knows, if tennis were played on a chess board, but featured a rapidly rotating round projectile instead of little statues, even with access to databases for everything, you’d probably need an hour or two of quiet time instead of two seconds of action to execute a return.

Thinking takes more time than you think it does.

This is something we need to think about.

Hmmm.  Thinking is the new kid in the nervous system, and is still very much a work in progress.  Thinking wants to play with the big dogs in the nervous system—the body and the emotions—the working dogs who have been in the game for a million generations.

But Thinking, like a lot of new kids who are not fully developed, tends to be insecure, nervous, bossy, and quite defensive.  The new kid, who’s still learning the game of living, likes to pretend it’s in charge, and barks orders at the big dogs.  The big dogs just yawn and laugh, lick their asses, smack their lips, and run the enterprise while pretty much ignoring the yappy lap dog of the mind.

The yappy lap dog of the mind, aka  “Thinking,”  often attempts to imitate the body, because Thinking is secretly in awe of the body.  Jeez, what new kid wouldn’t be?  The body metabolizes air and wheat and berries and chickens and cabbage and moves through space with ease and plays tennis faster than anyone can think about what just happened.

And while Thinking tries to bully the big dogs, Thinking is jealous of their ease and fit in the world, and wants to be like them.  Thinking sees the body racing around the tennis court, full speed ahead, fully drenched in the enduring fluid moments, and the miracle of it all is beyond the sphere of thought.

So, Thinking does what a lot of new kids do while they try to boss the big dogs around.  In all its foundering, adolescent, wannabe mayhem, Thinking tries plain old imitation.  Thinking tries to imitate the body playing tennis.  So here comes any thought tossed its way, and Thinking treats it like a tennis shot, and rushes to return it without thinking about it, because that’s what the body does, and look at how wonderful the body is!

In fairness, yes, there’s a time and situation for quick, physical thinking, and it can be a lot of fun when the mind plays body.  That’s what a lot of humor is.  And the banter and badinage that lubricates camaraderie.

Most quality forms and functions of thought, however, require time for optimal development.  Thinking takes time.  It does not happen at tennis speed.  It happens at the speed of thought, which is non-quantifiable.  It gestates at its own pace.  New thought ripens over time, and it works best when it’s off the clock.

“It?”

What’s “It?” It is connecting facts and perceptions in new ways for the first time;  wiring up stuff that was never wired up before.  It’s the new, slow-cooked connections that light you up like a cosmic firefly.

And unlike tennis, you score big in thinking not when you hit a winner in bounds but when you soar past the boundaries and upend the rules of the game by expanding those very rules and preconceptions.  Thinking is the game of expanding the court.

Thinking is hard to think about.  It’s a lot easier to think about tennis or what’s in the refrigerator or your future as a benign dictator.  But Thinking is worth some attention, and people have thought about Thinking over the years.

So, now for a few thinks on Thinking  . . .

“I think 99 times and find nothing.  I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.” – Albert Einstein

“I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have.  So they stop thinking.  But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.  The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.” – Ken Kesey

“Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself from thinking.” – Aldous Huxley

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading.  Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.  Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do.  It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.” – Christopher Morley

“Few people think more than two or three times a year;  I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably why so few engage in it.” – Henry Ford

“To think is to differ.” – Clarence Darrow

“And remember, you don’t have to believe everything you think.” – Nancy Graham

And last for today:

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge;  it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” – John Locke

John Locke mentioned knowledge around 300 years ago.  We now swim in a sea of knowledge, in our wildly propagating information age.  There’s a lot of it, and more keeps coming.  It’s like playing tennis while the court fills up with tennis balls.  We have to think about this.

Since thinking takes time, we are going to calm down and let this percolate for a bit.  Maybe a game of tennis will help clear the mind.  So stay tuned.  We are approaching Part II, which is thinking your way through the information inundation.  Coming soon to screen near you.  Stay tuned.  We just finished the first set of a slow-motion tennis match.  The game is in process, and the court expands.

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Many of us, though, may weary of the rich lives we have the opportunity to claim, and sometimes envy other life forms.

The wolf, for example.  Member of a sleek, muscular tribe, plenty of fresh air and sunshine  (prairie dog tunnels are for losers),  plus great scenery all day long.

Or, if you like swimming, you could envy porpoises.  Porpoises have a good time on purpose, and they’re always smiling.

And eagles.  Top of the food chain, top of the sky.  Living large.  Talk about fresh air and sunshine.  This is the life!  Spot a rat from a thousand feet, dive down for nice pre-brunch appetizer without crushing your beak, gobble, yum, and while you’re swallowing, whether or not you chewed well, who’s gonna say anything, soar up above the timber line for a refreshing dollop of mountain chill, and then ride thermals until you spy the next snack.  Life is good.

Exciting as it would be to lope around the boreal forest with your posse, or cavort naked in the watery deep, or soar the afternoon away in the Alps, um, I forget . . . why do we still want this aggravating, stiff, gravity-prone, worrisome human life?

For starters, we humans do not want to hold our breath all day or sleep in cold mud or on some wind-tossed sticks in a tree and mainly we do not want to wonder until we die where the next meal is coming from.  We would like to have a well-stocked larder, plus a few weeks off every now and then for levity or gravity or whatever the hell we want, and what we clearly do not want is to hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, every day of the month every month of our lives until we become somebody else’s dinner or just up and buy the farm.

The crazy thing with our brains, well, one of many, is that we can imagine the freedom of the porpoise, wolf, and eagle.  Our brains can do this.  We can long for another life.

This is astounding, that we can conceive of another kind of life and long for it.

Longing.  Desire.  Call it the surpassing urge.  We want to be more than we are.  Maybe every single person does not have this urge, but we have it as a species.  We can imagine, and we can feel other lives.  We yearn for betterment, and the transcendent moments we cherish impel us to reach beyond and beyond.

The emotions.  If little you were a solar system, the emotions would be the sun.  The fire at the core.  The heat, the engine, that propels the vast, complex juggernaut of you to engage in life.

However, it gets sticky, this business of managing a human life:  just because you have an emotion doesn’t mean that said emotion has value.  Yet the emotions are so powerful that each and every one demands all your attention.  But no.  While a powerful emotional core is the engine of a robust life, each separate emotional reaction may or may not have any value at all.  Some are utterly useless, or worse than useless, and get in the way of living well. Such as getting your little feelings hurt.  Such as not getting enough attention.  Such as road rage.  Is it worth killing or dying because of your unfortunate position in a line of cars?  Not if you have more to live for than your position in a line of cars, which, ideally, you do.

Emotions, as rich and wonderful and vital as they are, cannot be relied upon by themselves to provide a rich and rewarding life.  Emotions, left to their own propensities, do not delay gratification.  They want what they want now, meaning RIGHT NOW, and while this urgency can confer blissful results, it can also get you or them killed.

Riding the emotions into life without any training would be like hopping unannounced on a wild stallion.  The ride will be memorable, but it won’t last long and it won’t end well.

So much for “living in the moment.”

The goal here would be to  “live in the moment”  judiciously enough so that you may enjoy many more moments well after the emotional impulse/moment in question has dissolved into its essential nothingness.  Such a long term goal—outliving the emotion of the moment—calls for training, judgment, experience, and tempering—just as stallions are a lot more fun when they get used to bridles, saddles, reins, and crap like that.  You, too, are a lot more fun when all your horsepower is reined in and well-directed.

And by the way, the division of emotions into “positive” and “negative” is a false dichotomy.  Fear, for example, is generally classified as a negative emotion.  But if you don’t conserve a healthy dose of fear when driving a car (while managing road rage), your attention wanders off the road and your ride is likely to end before it is complete.  Anger is even more complicated.  Often, anger is misplaced, and, oy, some people find the riveting energy of anger addicting.  However, a healthy dose of anger can be appropriate when protecting one’s interests.  The full range of emotions, from joy to sorrow to trust and love and yearning all have value when intelligently applied to the situation at hand.

Suffice it to say, though, that your life tends to be a lot more rewarding and fun when conducted so that your engagements produce tons more joy than anger.  (Joy weighs less than anger, so the comparative mathematics get knotty.)

Which brings us to other parts of these amazing brains we’ve been born into.  Yup, you gotta use your brain to navigate here, and simultaneously let your brain get out of the way.

If you’re opting for the optimal life, as most people would say they are, then integration between the emotions and the intellect and the body is required.  Successful integration takes time and practice and desire, and some ability to see in the dark . . . that is, to find the way through your own nervous system.  It gets dark in there.  But the path can be found.

The mind is a terrible thing to manage.  Or, more accurately, the mind is a terrible thing to manage when you’re not managing it, but it can become quite the nice ride through the time/space/life/love amalgamation when the juggernaut of you functions harmoniously.

This is not a How To or How Not To Do It treatise.  It’s an assessment of the management challenge.  And you’re doing great, so don’t worry.  Too much.  Worry a little.  Worry a little every day.  It burns calories.

Before we wrap it up and get on with our messy lives, just a couple of things here.

Well, three to be exact.  The emotions.  The mind.  The body.  We want them to work and play well together.

The body is the oldest of the three, so consider that it offers some basic lessons to the two younger, less experienced dimensions.  Take the example of how the body processes a lot of material every day.  It makes the most of the good stuff and tosses what’s useless.  This defecation function might not smell great, but it is a beautiful function in the big picture and we now pause to applaud it!!!  Woo-hoo!!!

Here’s hoping that the mind and emotions learn to defecate every day as well.  Yes, you can do this:  keep the nourishing emotions and let them enrich your time/space/life/love amalgamation.  And throw the rest of the shit out.  Same with the mind.  If a thought has value, let it channel new thought, and throw the rest of the shit out:  just because you think it doesn’t mean it’s worth thinking.

Such fundamental dumping procedures are not the final step in this management process but the beginning.  So that new sightlines, new clarity, new connections become possible . . .

Which brings us back the wolf.  Porpoise.  Eagle.  Lope.  Swim.  Soar.  You can do this.  Just not like they do it.  You can do it in your own way, on your own found path . . .  because the mind is a beautiful, wonderful, uniquely faceted thing to manage.

Here’s the link:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/magazine/evolution-gene-microbiology.html

It recounts how an ornery, indefatigable, iconoclastic, highly original rebel researcher, a guy named Carl Woese, made the case that (to put it simply) Darwin’s Tree of Life was just a fairy tale.  But that’s not the juicy part.  The juice is that Woese blows up Darwin’s contention that each life form is a discrete genealogical entity that changes—evolves—by natural selection over time and circumstance strictly within its own genome.

But that’s not what happens!  It’s way crazier than the nifty, tidy model of incremental change by  “survival of the fittest”  because Woese showed that genetic information is exchanged across species at the cellular level.  Crazy!  So tarantulas or armadillos or platypuses or your Uncle Bunky could suddenly adopt new genetic directives from an unnamed bacterium and nobody would even know what happened.

The article prompted what you could call an impromptu salon, but we didn’t call it a salon, so it was even better than one of those formally organized gatherings of prominent intellectuals in some hifalutin urban living room.  Not that we weren’t accomplished.  We just weren’t famous.  Which is probably a good thing.

The writer among us quoted John Updike:  “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”

The artist listened and grimaced and said  “Wow, that’s an image-and-a-half.  Salvador Dali could have a field day with that image . . . but back to Carl Woese.”

The artist said that the importation of alien genetic information into a biological system sounds a lot like the history of art.  It’s called co-option.  Or appropriation.  Sure, a culture or a school of art develops a visual language.  Like the Persian miniatures.  Or the development of perspective in the Middle Ages.  Examples abound.  But any artistic tradition is sooner or later  “infected,”  so to speak, kinda like genetic information being exchanged at the cellular level, only with imported visual information.  New kernels of how to manipulate paint.  New ways of seeing.  So from an art history perspective, it certainly makes sense that something similar could happen biologically.

Well, not so fast, said the musician.  It’s a little too easy to see biological appropriation in hindsight, after a visionary scientist upends the evolutionary status quo that we’ve all accepted for our entire lives . . . but that said, she said, interrupting herself, the same is certainly true in music.  The entirety of world music is a compendium of appropriation.  “I never thought of it that way before, but it’s true.  There is no purely indigenous music, no more so than a pure life form . . . all life forms are temporary.  Phases of an ongoing process.”

The conversation accelerated itself, pogo-sticking around the room, from artist to writer to business people to scientist to outdoorsmen, with clusters of everyone talking at once syncopated by points scored and points debunked.  We all agreed.  But not as much as we all disagreed.  It was a beautiful thing.

Weirdly, the one quiet person in the room was the scientist.  He didn’t seem all that happy with the pogo-sticking-brainstorming boisterousness that didn’t follow proper linearity from the well-ordered scientific breakthrough that spawned the free-for-all.

Funny.  The headline describing the proceedings, if we were newsworthy people, could have been,  “Precise Science Generates Wild Speculation.”

And then apropos of nothing, the artist claims the floor and states,  “All creativity begins with observation.  Observation, perception, they are the fount of creativity.”

The scientist cracked, and finally said something, and it wasn’t fun.  “You can’t say that!  How can you make such a statement?  Where is the data?”

Data?  To prove an insight on the fount of creativity?

Silence.

The “fount of creativity” theory is not something you would study in a data-centric way.

The scientist again demanded the data.  If you’re going to make a correlation, you have to back it up with data!

The outdoorsman, a nationally ranked competitive fisherman, and a man of few words—probably a desirable attribute for a fisherman—asked the scientist,  “Did you vote?”

The question was not expected.  More silence.  And then,  “Of course I voted,”  grumped the scientist.

Well, then, where was the data?

Voting.  We don’t vote with data.  Science offers one body of information.  Business offers another.  Religion offers another.  And life experience offers another.  But there are no peer reviewed, control group studies that conclude in a clear election choice.  Don’t we all try to get a sense of things and make the best choices we can?  And like voting, most of the way we navigate life is not data-driven.  Choice of life partners, friends, careers, hobbies—we don’t seek out a life path by comparing data sets.  And one of the many reasons is that no data sets exist for most of what we navigate.

And the pogo-sticking ramped up all over again.  The vast majority of decisions we make are not based on reviewing reams of data, or on consulting a holy text, but on a whole array of inputs and hunches and preconceived notions.  And experience.  And curiosity.  And facts based in science.

Someone finally asked,  “So what’s the point here?”

Good question.  Glad you asked.

 We do not need a point here, thank you very much.
 However, we have several.
 The scientist can be the fundamentalist.
 This is ironic.
 But it takes nothing away from science.
 Science remains the greatest engine of information in human history!
 YaaaY science.
 Discussions that include science must also include the immortal line from physicist Richard Feynman: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Eight points are more than enough for a short article.

And beside the point, Feynman also said:  “Physics is like sex … it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”

How did this happen?  How did nothing become something?

Well, every story contains the story of how it unspooled.  Some stories-of-the-story can be so straightforward that they’re hardly stories at all:  “Writer produces 2,000 words a day until the novel is done.”  Well, that’s great if that’s how you roll.

And then we have the zigzag-what-is-this-and-if-it-is-something-how-will-it-ever-emerge path to completion.  Or not.

Everything Is Happening at Once is a product of the latter process.

It emerged as a creature from the ooze without form, intention, or body parts.  It burbled shapeless out of the great—meaning horrible—recession that began in 2008.

I had been building houses.  Suddenly one day buyers disappeared.  One day.  Completely.  I managed to come out relatively unscathed but relatively unemployed.  So I did what all other former homebuilders in Atlanta never do:  I signed up for a writing class at Callanwolde, the grand old Candler Mansion repurposed as the Arts Center.

Not that I needed a writing teacher per se.  Writing was always a natural engagement with the world, like breathing and eating and walking in the woods.  And just like walking in the woods, writing clicked along without expectation.  Writing was its own reward:  a way to refine the world, a way to milk this life for maximum flavor.  Hew life to the page so you might better learn what it is.

As a reader of books, I was able to comprehend that getting published was something writers did, and publication did seem a possible consequence of all this writing, but not especially important and certainly not the object of such a natural activity.  It would be like getting paid to walk in the woods.

I signed up for the class not to  “learn how to write”  or  “take a project to market”  but simply for the weekly deadline.  Something to make me fill pages with words.  The written pages would be the reward.

So I was delighted beyond all expectation to find myself in the midst of highly accomplished authors, mostly working on novels.  Their sharp observations, critiques, suggestions, questions, and exuberance for fly-off-the-page language crackled like a campfire at my keyboard.

One of my first submissions was a ten page piece called  “The Other Way,”  about following the Golden Isles Highway diagonally across south Georgia en route to the Florida beaches from Atlanta—instead of the common interstate highway routes.  The class loved the writing.  The main suggestion was to dig deeper into the experience.  These astute readers and aficionados of the written word sensed more.  Dig deeper, they said.  You’ve written a fine travelogue.  Well crafted piece.  But you haven’t put enough  “you”  in the story.  So it’s not yet a story.

Hmm, wow.  They certainly zeroed in on the crux of the void.

And speaking of  “you in the story,”  I had written it in the second person—you.  “You’re turning left onto The Golden Isles Highway.  I-75 disappears in your rear view mirror.  About a mile later, you’re outside Perry.  You’re alone on a flawless band of macadam.”

I had a thing about not using the word  “I.”

One vignette after another.  I kept trying.  But every time  “I”  appeared, the sentence would freeze up, and it wouldn’t flow until  “you”  or  “he”  or  “it”  came to the rescue and took the place of  “I”.  Like an acquired reflex I couldn’t shake, all because of the group I had been in—all the way in—for twenty years.  A group we didn’t talk about.  It was one of the rules.  Don’t talk about it, and don’t talk about yourself, and as much as possible, don’t use the word  “I.”

But finally, after too many I-can’t-say-I classes later, and urging from my cohorts, the hell with it, I broke loose and the reflex shattered.  I spilled onto the pages the truth of an indelible episode that no one had ever spoken about, that day on the lake.  It came alive again through my fingers.  On the keyboard.  In the first person.

In the middle of the twenty years in the group, on that long-ago balmy spring day, we were zipping around the lake in Sam’s speedboat.  It was supposed to be fun.  And it was at first, it was a blast, Sam throwing the boat into tight figure 8s, starboard and port taking turns airborne, then burrowing down and slicing the black lake, everyone thrilling along.  Until the Guy-in-Charge dragged his forefinger across his throat.  Sam cuts the motor.  Boat draws up in the middle of the giant lake.  And those Guy-in-Charge rock hard green eyes bore into the new guy who had just attended a few meetings and the Guy-in-Charge said,  “Jump in the lake.”  The new guy, pudgy and impossibly white, got a lot whiter and said,  “I can’t swim.”

Everyone in the class loves the story.  Gripping, they say, on the edge of my seat, what a departure, we want more, where did you get this?

But the teacher of the writing class, a published author herself, shouts everyone down, demands silence, and launches into a breathless diatribe, bashing this hollow failure that is not a story at all but just an insult to the reader, and who would want to make up such a thing, let alone why would anyone want to read such miserable drivel.

As she ranted, it registers, yes, I have a story here.  She hates it + they love it + I want to chisel the truth out of the wild twenty year full spectrum fandango and plant it on the page = this is the story, and I’m gonna tell it.

That’s how the zygote formed.  The memoir.  From nothing to these few pages in the middle of it all.  That’s how it started, it started in the middle.  The story that wasn’t supposed to be told.  So obvious now:  I have to tell it.  It’s the only way I know to figure out what in the hell all that was all about.  Clarity.  A project.  A mission.  Focus.

Now that I know what I’m doing, the path is clear.  And straightforward.  It’s the memoir of what actually happened in that closed whirl.  I can just tell the story.  I imagined being one of those two thousand word a day guys who just cranks it out in a few months.

But no.  The zigging and zagging has just begun.

I quit the class because the teacher, talented wordsmith or not, was a judgmental maniac.

And before even wondering how to get from the middle of the story to the beginning, I graft myself to a chair on the beach in north Florida, where my grandparents had lived out their days.  I call it primary research.  For the memoir.  This is nonfiction.  We need facts.  But I wasn’t shuffling through archives in the Volusia County Courthouse or perusing faded photographs in an ancient attic.  I sat with a pen and journal while an arthroscopic bloodhound traipsed neural pathways, sniffing out memories that had been sealed since inception.  It was archaeological, and it was physical, I could feel it in there, the hunt, following the scent, and then zeroing in. Surgically one-by-one, with the light of attention, unlocking sealed memory kernels and writing them down.  Gathering the facts.

Serendipitously, as if orchestrated by life itself, another primary research document appears out of nowhere:  Grandpa’s autobiography.  Hand-written, in dense, loopy script.  Hard to read.  Of all the relatives in our loquacious family, he was the one we as kids knew the least—and he is the only one to have shared his life story like this.  He left his family in Poland with no money, alone, at age sixteen, landed in New York, and after sacrificing his youth, became a wealthy fur broker.  And I am the only one who’s read it.

Three of us refugees from the class began our own writing group.  New pages flowed to the regular deadlines, and the memoir that formed on the empty pages was a structurally risky braided together marriage of stories united by their fundamental urges, including my twenty years in the old group, and Grandpa’s struggle to make a new life in the New World.  My partners in the writing group loved it.

Three years later.  I have a finished manuscript.  Now what?  Would the publishers please form a line and bid for the rights . . .

I moved to Richmond, Virginia.

Zigzag.

I joined the very active James River Writers group, and attended a class they sponsored,  “Social Media for Writers.”  Sat next to a published author.  We became friendly.  At the end of the day, I asked her the dreaded question.  “Would you like to read my manuscript?”

She loved it completely, asked me where did I learn to write like that, and she told her agent in New York,  “You have to read this.”

The agent said, “This is beautiful writing, but nobody will ever buy this book the way it’s written. Nobody wants to read about your multiple stories braided together, no matter how cleverly you’ve pulled it off. But if you really want to tell the whole story of what happened in that group, everyone wants to know. Everyone wants to know what’s behind the locked door at the end of the long dark corridor.”  I rewrote it completely.  It’s a different manuscript, and it delves all the way into the nuts and bolts and glories and travesties of what went on behind the locked door.

And in the process, life imitates art.  Cyndy Myer, my girlfriend from 1980, appears on page 217 as I’m writing the new manuscript.  Then, practically the next week, she contacts me for the first time in thirty-five years, and we reconnect in real life.

And now, in October, 2018, Cyndy and I are publishing the book together, and as of last week, it’s available on Amazon.  Zigzag of my dreams!

The zigzag zygote of gestation and labor.  The memoir of twenty years hewn to the pages by the twenty years that followed.

One More Time, Everyone All Together Now:

YaaaY We!

We Did It!

Yesssssssss,

We Did It!

The memoir published by Marcus & Myer

Everything Is Happening at Once

is now available on Amazon!

We have given birth.

First it was nothing.

Then it was a zygote,

barely a fat paragraph,

a few bumpy spilled words on page one.

Now this three hundred and twenty-one page dynamo

will meet its audience.

Turns out that we and words, surprisingly, do share characteristics that shape our destiny:

1.]  Words have a body and a space and a form and a sound, just as we do.  This matters.  And nobody thinks about it.  This matters, too.

2.]  We and words exhibit apparently well-defined edges which are, in fact, not well-defined at all:  words share multiple meanings, and merge with their mothers, modifiers, neighbors, and cohorts;  just as people blend and merge in myriad sane and wacky combinations spanning heredity and circumstance.

3.]  Neither we nor words exist independently of others.

4.]  We and words change over time, and if you’re not changing, you’re not very alive.

5.]   So, yes, the words are alive.  And so are we, aren’t we?

5.]  And, oh yeah, we and words have evolved together.  Neither of us would be where we are today without the other.

This is quite an arrangement.  And it’s hidden in plain sight, while we’re all so busy in the ebb and flow of words—talking and texting and reading and writing and listening to the tumbling torrent of words delivered electronically and socially—we don’t pause to appreciate the miracle.

Even when we’re not in a discernible verbal exchange, the words keep burbling from the artesian discharge in our own brains.

So let’s pause now and consider again:  we and words evolve together, and neither of us would be where we are without the other.

All together now, or separately for that matter, who cares, let’s non-verbally celebrate.  Words!  Yay!  Words do have a being and an energy and a meaning and a life, and that life, that wholeness, should be respected.

Therefore, simply on the basis of common decency, and perhaps an appreciation for adjunct beings in the universe if you can dig that deep, words should be respected and expressed in their full form.  Not only do you insult Words by reducing, say, a seven letter word to four letters, but you also reduce yourself.  Short form words are for short form brains, people!  You’re better than that.

Abbreviations are for abbreviated people.  Whole words are for whole people.

And the matter is a lot more substantive than whether or not you go to the trouble of using all seven or eleven letters in the whole word.  But let’s look at the matter of length first.

Here are some eleven letter words you probably use either more than you’d like to admit, or less than you should:

Submersible

Galvanizing

Association

Silversmith

Godforsaken

Pyrotechnic

Pls attnd mtng of glvnzg sbmsble slvrsmth assn of gdfrskn slvrsmths (GSAGS) nxt Tues or it’s yr ass.

Let’s do the math here.  Six words of eleven letters each = 66 letters if written in I-respect-whole-words format.

Using the I-am-an-abbreviated-lazy-small-minded-person format, we have used 35 letters and managed to insult six words, the English language, and our readers.

The lazy, shallow, disrespectful way saves 21 letters, but, again, look at the cost!  You have denigrated the language, your species, evolution, dignity, and yourself.

I think you’re better than that.

But we’re not done. It gets worse.

It appears that you’re making up abbreviations like you’re Daniel Webster because it might save a little time.  Well, if you’re so important that you need to save 3.1 seconds of keyboard time to write a sentence, then pls join the Vry Imprtnt Ppl Clb and stop reading now.  Everyone else, please slow down for a minute, savor the miracle of language and consciousness, and contemplate:

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” – Gandhi

Life can be richer when you graciously afford each word its proper slice of the time/space continuum.

And, presumably, you are writing because you expect your words to be read.  So in addition to respecting the language, consciousness, evolution, and life itself, you should also respect the reader.

What we know as “the written word” evolved from pictograms, those little drawings on cave walls, like cartoons, that were standardized, after a fashion, to say something like,  “I killed the dragon and left the beak and entrails down by the funny rock.”  These pictograms were digested, so to speak, in a glance.  Visual signage, which we still use today, cross language barriers; they have become a de facto international language to help you find the toilet, the train, the trail, and when to cross the street.

Why does this matter?  It matters a lot, because we read words as if they were pictograms.  We do not read letter-by-letter.  We read word by word.  We recognize the words as images.  And we zip right along the line and the page until we come across some unrecognizable jumble of cnsnnts x vwls that make us stop reading and wonder WTF is that?  It’s a goddam abbrvn because the goddam author’s brain was too abbreviated to spell the word he so cavalierly dismembered.

Don’t do it, people.  The language and consciousness and life on earth, they’re better than that.  And so are you.  So is your reader.

And one more thing if you’re still tempted to shrivel like a leaky balloon to the pathetic dimensions of your lesser self.

What if spoken words were abbreviated?  How cool would you sound then, Mr. I’m-Too-Big-A-Deal to write out the whole word every time?  You’d sound like a seven year old kid imitating war sounds, which could be fun when you’re playing with seven year olds but hardly the vowel-free delivery you’d employ when, say, negotiating a large baloney purchase or talking your parole officer into bringing you a nice Reuben sandwich.  Most languages have vowels and don’t sound all that good when these melodic lingers are abbreviated to death.

And now that you mention it, thank you, all of the world’s great speeches are delivered very, very slowly;  almost—word—by—every—single—word—, as if the speaker is imbuing each with the full force of its etymology, its context, its meanings, its homonyms, and the cultural blood that nourished it into being.

Spoken language blossoms fully in proper tempo, and written language comes fully alive when its fine full form is well respected.

 

However, just as any realm of inquiry or endeavor hungers for all the energy it can get, so too does science.  And when left exclusively to its own devices, any field suffocates from insularity.

We diminish ourselves, and we diminish science, when we treat it as a separate, exclusive realm.

Conversely, both scientists and non-scientists prosper in life and in vocation when enriched by exchange with other disciplines.

Until relatively recent history, knowledge has been treated as a unified whole.  And this holistic treatment applied not only to what are now the many discrete disciplines in science, from astronomy to zoology, but also the arts, all forms of craft, technology, literature, philosophy, and everything else.  If you were curious about the world, you were a student of everything.  You applied paint and melted tin and baked clay and studied the night sky and questioned the action of wind on sails and you grappled with morality.

In ancient Greece, the philosophers investigated the nature of consciousness as well as the nature of the universe;  they were called  “natural philosophers.”  Nobody conceived of separate areas of inquiry, since any inquiry into anything could provide fresh insight into the whole, because anything is indivisible from everything.  And so it was that sophisticated, existentially cultivated inquiries into the nature of materials and time and life produced great cathedral domes spanning hundreds of feet, and complex astronomy to predict eclipses in the next century.  And this comprehensive curiosity maintained through the Renaissance, and arguably reached its apotheosis in Leonardo da Vinci, the polymath best known for his paintings but also renowned for breakthroughs in technology, theory, cartography, architecture, and more.

Not until the Victorian Age did the walls go up.  Geology separated from chemistry, and chemistry from biology, biology from physics, physics from astronomy, astronomy from cosmology, and all of these “hard sciences” bound off from the “soft sciences” of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, political science and economics;  and all of the sciences definitely quarantined from all of the arts.

But the great revolutionists are not obeisant to knowledge corralled in fiefdoms.  Einstein wanted to comprehend the universe, and was inspired not only by the mystical whole, but also in part by train schedules, which helped generate twenty-four time zones around the world, which meant that time was relative.  And if time was relative between Munich and Paris, what was time on Earth vis-a-vis Andromeda?  And Einstein was also partly inspired by the breakaway artists of Impressionism, who were liberated from the bounds of representation by quick precise photography—so they were free to explore a marriage of truth and experience:  “What am I seeing?”  It’s all relative.  Which helped generate the Theory of Relativity.

So where does this leave all of us non-scientists?  Well, if you’re curious about the world and the whirl and the vast, silent cosmos and the heft of the ethos, you’re smack in the middle of the infinite consciousness game.  If you’re curious, you will pay attention to what is determined scientifically, you will feast on the arts, and you will serve the expanding whole with new questions.

The questions are worth more than the answers.

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”  –  Richard Feynman, physicist.

You have a brain.  It’s ripe for more than getting through the day.  Stake a claim out there in those vast, silent, unknown parts.  Let new facts become the pitons and chocks that triangulate your voyage . . . and, whoa . . . new connections reveal delicious slices of what was never there before.

New facts?  Yes and yes:  the wider the array, the more robust your discoveries: nourishment for the next ascent.  And if some of it doesn’t make sense, so much the better.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.  Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.  It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”  –  Dr. Seuss, curious irreverent holistic scientist par excellence.