I may have been drooling

Staring at a blank page… that most common of sensations… Reminds me of when I was at Berkeley – where there were blank pages in abundance.

Back then, I was a brilliant young man (in my own mind at least) with worlds to conquer and arrogance to burn. No goal seemed too lofty. I was not there in pursuit of a career, or worried about doing the smart things, or indeed following any program whatsoever except the dictates of my heart. I took whatever classes I was interested in, and studied when and if I cared to, and felt perfectly at ease blowing off my coursework to learn Go, or read Chinese and Elizabethan poetry, or play bridge night after night, or make a Quixotic attempt to solve Sprouts, or go work for a few months in Alaska, or play blackjack for a living. I failed quite a few classes, having abandoned them mid-semester without bothering to drop them.

But I was convinced that this sort of unconcern for boring rules and appearances would make no difference. And actually, amusingly, it has made no difference!… what DID make the difference was my lack of responsibility or maturity in the first place. I had a long and difficult road ahead to learn that the world was not waiting open-armed for my brilliance, and that I was a quite ordinary soul who had to stand or fall on my own, with talents and failings like everyone else.

Anyway, I did major in Math, and I loved it. There are two kinds of people in the world (among all the other such bifurcations) – those who understand what math is, and those who do not. To the initiates (and the difference seems to me to an innate one – I have never seen someone go from not getting it to getting it, and I have never seen one who gets it that required any effort to evangelize), math is a joy; the glorious, infinite, and beautiful language of the universe; a way of expressing and appreciating the world, more analogous to music than anything else. Navigating a mathematical problem is natural and intuitive for such souls – no manual is required to explain the core tenets; only mentorship on specific approaches and techniques – like any other art.

And “doing math” involved a lot of sitting in front of blank sheets of paper, usually while at a local café. One would sit with a friend or two at a regular spot, sometimes wandering over to talk with other friends, or to kibbitz the chess-players, or to take a brief walk up the street for a hot dog or to play clunky, primitive video games (Galaga, Spider, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders... and what was the one with the bouncing ball of destruction, and the loud robot voice saying "Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!"?) at the arcade machines in the back of the local bar. Breaks at frequent and random intervals to do something completely different are key to "doing math". But mostly, one would sit, dreamy eyed, with an open notebook, on which pages were scribbled a few meaningless squiggly shapes, or perhaps a cartoon or two, or a swirling, complex geometric doodle.

What was being done? Essentially, it was exploration. The conscious and unconscious minds were engaged in a dance, an inter-weaved dialogue, in an unspoken language, visualizing and modeling and probing and testing and exploring. Bases were being established, experiments engaged, theories proposed and investigated. It burned calories at an incredible rate, keeping me skinny and bright-eyed. And it was a joy unparalleled, that I will never lose or forget – a meditation that is instantly recognizable to anyone with a similar experience, and meaningless to those who have not been fortunate enough to hear their muse.

At some point, the paper would be filled.