Slip me some honey, honey

A couple of you who pass this way may know that I belong to a few "expert" communities, where we blather on at each other in a rather amusing "bees exchanging honey" behavior that's harmless and useless...

In one of those hives, there's recently been a bit of dust-up about whether the forum should be "moderated" -- with posts reviewed and edited and maybe rejected by the moderator. As one might guess, I'm on the side of the "let it all hang out" faction, while some others prefer what they see as the more professional and orderly exchange that moderation ensures.

I made my point about this topic in the form of a mini Twilight Zone-style story... and since I'm lazy, and feel like posting something here, and I kind of liked it, I will let you all (ha!) enjoy it too:

***

Start with a typical scene -- black and white, of course -- with kids playing inside a big 50s-comfy suburban-neighborhood house, watched over by a matronly grandma -- looking suspiciously like our moderator. They'd be real kids, with that 50s kids look -- messy hair, freckled faces -- but unnaturally dressed in kid-sized adult work clothes. They'd be playing with their toys on the carpet of the big living room, rather lackadaisically and unenthusiastically...

One or two of them are arguing with grandma, repeating what is obviously a persistent refrain, an oft-repeated dialogue... "We really want to play outside, grandma. All the kids get to play outside... we'll be extra careful. We'll remember everything you told us... " We see her slowly relenting, slowly bowing to the pressure.

She smiles. "Alright kids, I'll let you try it just this once.. but remem... " But she's cut off in mid-sentence, as they all excitedly jump up, suddenly energized, shouting to each other, leaving all the old toys scattered, grabbing a couple of bats and gloves, balls, etc. and crowding through the door, screen slamming against the outer wall. She sighs, and gets a worried look, but then a wan smile... Maybe it's good for them, after all.

In the next scene (after the commercial, perhaps) we see old grandma, standing in the open doorway, a very worried look on her face, yelling out into the street: "I told you kids! Someone was bound to get hurt! The *outside* is full of dangers... Why did I ever let you all talk me into this at all! You come back inside right now, and I'll patch up your elbows and soothe your bruises, and we'll have some nice supervised play here safe indoors. All your toys are still here, kids! Come on back! Grandma will take care of you and make it all better"

The camera pans slowly around to face the street -- a quiet, wide street, with some oak trees and nicely trimmed lawns, and a couple of cars parked along the street -- where a bunch of grownups are lazily tossing a football, huddled in little groups here and there talking, maybe flipping a frisbee around, or playing with a dog. One of them is rubbing a scratch on his elbow. They all look around at each other, as if to say "what do we do now?" It's clear that the grandma still sees them as roughhousing little kids, while they have all grown up and become professionals with families of their own... but they haven't the heart to tell her. They slowly, dejectedly shuffle back toward the house...

Or do they?

Said the night wind to the little lamb

Occasionally, I wonder: whatever happened to Sherlynn? I won’t tell the whole story here (it wouldn’t reflect well on me, but that’s not why I won’t tell it). But Sherlynn was the only person I know of that ever really understood the way I talk.

A couple of blog entries ago, in describing my reaction to hearing Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car for the first time, I said that I was surprised to be so affected, because “it wasn’t about my life”. Sherlynn would have understood immediately that although I meant just that, I also meant at the same time that of course it was about my life. That was, after all, the whole point of the long preamble about my life as it arrived at that point, right? Even though I didn’t plan it that way – I simply found it necessary to provide the stage directions, as I tried my darndest to get to the scene. All along, I was actually trying to write the sentences about how I felt at that moment, but I found that describing my state of mind required establishing certain perspectives... thus demonstrating, res ipsa loquitur, in exactly what ways it was about my life.

Let me say it another way. The key to the way I talk is that the whole point of my saying that “it wasn’t about my life” was precisely to also express the opposite, in counterpoint. And at the same time, I had in mind the orthogonal meaning: that my life was the life of the people around me, not in the sense that their lives made up the world I lived in, but in the sense that I reflexively inhabit the minds of the people I observe and interact with.

We are all the same, and we are all unique. We all think this way, but some more than others. I pretty much always think and express myself in this kind of multiple, overlapping, self-referential, self-contradictory way, without intending or trying to. It is rare for me, when I've had my coffee anyway, to say something (or hear something) without being aware of the truth of its opposite, and of the perspectives that shape that view, and the alternate views implied by those perspectives. This is probably a useful way of thinking for a mathematician, or a writer, which are the callings I am most drawn to. It is less helpful for a Big-4 Partner wannabe, which explains a few things.

Sherlynn understood (and shared) this with no explanation – in fact, like me, with a smiling disinclination to ever put it into words. I can’t remember exactly how we discovered this. She used to sit and read at the long tables in the big dining room at Ridge Project, and since everyone in the house wandered through there and hung out there a few times a day, we eventually were reading at the same table. We were both shy in a certain way – she was just plain shy :-) and I was reserved – unwilling to express my true feelings. There is always a little thrill in getting a shy person to open up, is there not? Somehow, in the course of some initial banter – related, I think, to Narcissus and Goldmund – we mutually realized that we both preferred to use words in the same reflective, oblique fashion, almost like probes into a system governed by Uncertainty Principles, like shields protecting our auras of over-sensitivity.

We began to play a game, without ever planning to. Someone else would come to our table – it became, for awhile, our table – and strike up a conversation. And as the three of us talked, Sherlynn and I were hearing and responding privately – but in the open – to the invisibly interweaved threads in each other’s responses, of which any other participant was unaware. There was no cleverness or double entendre going on; it was simply that we were tuned very sensitively, almost painfully so, to the multiple, subtle meanings of each others’ thoughts. Sometimes this would go on for hours. We would do this when we were alone too (how could we not?), but in that case it was a more dangerous, more tender enterprise. It was a very intimate kind of relationship; one that was not meant for a long season. One of the many things that go by the wayside as life goes on. I do not regret the passing of this very special connection, but I do wonder what might have become of the individuals involved.

Tracing the threads

This morning, I come to find out that Alex’s brain works exactly the same way mine does with respect to right and left. If someone says “go right”, we have to consciously think for a second: “which way is that? OK, I write with my right hand, and that’s this one [shakes hand in air], so this way is right…” But if we’re driving, and someone says “turn right”, we know which way that is instantly, because we know it’s “the shorter turn”. Vice versa with left, of course.

But she doesn’t do the same thing that I do with tying my shoes – making two rabbit-ear loops with the laces, and wrapping one under the other to tie the knot. Most people, including Alex, do whatever loopy thing they do to make it come out the same way… I have a kind of combination of mental block and superstition which makes me hold on to my primitive technique, as if I am holding out against some kind of betrayal, however trivial.

I am constantly checking this kind of thing – trying to see who my daughter is, and what subtly connects us, and in what ways she has become her own unique person. And observing myself and the threads of my personality and my style, and the underlying ways of being from which these personal elements emerge.

I often feel my brain working “as a Radetsky” – there are imperceptible little signs and patterns which are distinctly and recognizably Radetsky, and even more specifically, like the way my father thinks, although growing up I can really remember almost no interaction with him, and certainly no “influence”. I have even come to believe that there must be some genetic mechanism for these enormously specific traits to be transmitted, perhaps emerging from some underlying qualities in a kind of fractal surprise. I would expect, for example, to find that my odd way of conducting music with rhythmic waves of my hands and strumming of my fingers came down to me from some ancient Radetsky – it just seems to me to go along with those qualities of thought that I discern somehow flowing through my mental make-up.

For example, I have a quick temper, going from happy smiling to scowling and raising my voice in an instant, and then back just as quickly… Oddly, I do not perceive this shift as much of a mood change at all – it feels to me like I am simply letting my feelings through, without anger or bitterness. But I remember very distinctly finding this to be a selfish and emotionally disconnected and disconcerting quality in my own father, and I am aware that my daughter sees it the same way in me. My father and I also share a deep mathematical intuition, and a kind of false sensuality… a genuine love of the physical and carnal, undermined and made false by the dominance of our ascetic and mystical side.

Last time I spent much time with my father, several years ago, I was overwhelmed by a sense of how alike we thought, at our core, as if we were clones raised in different times and places, with a different “covering” that made many of the superficial and specific elements of our thinking different, but which could not undo our fundamental sameness. I felt as if I was tracing the same contours of thought with him, inside his mind, in ways that our words could never capture, but only reflect. I felt as if I looked into his old eyes, and saw my own mind looking back out at me, from the vantage of his age and experiences, looking at myself as my son.

At the same time, I feel the softer and sweeter strains of my mother’s family coursing through my soul as well. The quality I share with my mother is hard to name… it’s the quality that loves the Alice in Wonderland stories, responding to their vulnerability and hunger for innocence, their laughing curiosity and childlike impertinence. It’s the insistence on pointing out that “the emperor has no clothes”; the incredibly stubborn insistence on remaining true to oneself; the inability to be happy except when being honest with oneself. It's the "loneliness of the long distance runner". It’s the Orwellian view of politics, not as an exercise in mastery of deep theory, which is the Radetsky strain, but as an attempt at goodness while admitting one’s fundamental weakness. These twin influences even shape my face – one minute, the man in the mirror is my father's skinny, pale, fearful, too-smart brother; the next, he has the bright eyes, wavy hair, and boniness of my mother.

And underneath those qualities, like old black and white photos hidden in a drawer, I feel the bitter and disappointed Renaissance-man intelligence and the stubborn integrity of my grandfather, and the long-suffering, loving gentleness and musicality of my grandmother, simultaneously unimpressed and pleased by my intelligence. If I could choose anyone in the world to go back in time and spend time with, it would probably be my grandmother… I would go back to her childhood, and see her in her poverty and unhappiness, see her parents and brothers and sisters I never knew, see the laughter and hope in her young eyes, and dance and flirt with her. I would sit next to her at the soda counter where she met my grandfather, and try to charm her, competing for her attention with my hard-eyed grandfather, laughing at the twinkle in her eyes, holding her soft hands, before fading away to let her fate flow on.

Once, when I was at Berkeley, I had what people would call a mystical experience, although really it was just a very slightly heightened version of the way I think and feel all the time. I was at the crest of Ridge Road, next to the Graduate Student Union, with the Dominican School on my right, looking out across the bay toward the city and the coming sunset. And I had a sudden, deep sensation that I was in a gathering of like-minded souls from across all time and space. A place where time and space lost their usual meaning, where one could go simply by recognizing its existence. I knew as surely as I knew my own existence that others had recognized this state of being as well, and across time touched one another, and validated some eternal connection between us, and some deeper substrate of reality. I knew that I could be there anytime, that I belonged there, and that the reality of this place would comfort and sustain me forever.

This is, of course, simply the way I am. It is a kind of sensitivity to what is outside my own skin that defines how I see the universe, and my values. I do not choose it or believe it or advocate it any more than my dog chooses her perspectives; it’s just me.

Dreams at the corner of Broadway and 7th

I remember very clearly the first song that ever made me cry.

I must have been about 27 years old, living and working in Oakland, having just recently “finished” at UC Berkeley.

Actually, I never did graduate from Berkeley… I had started with a year’s college credit from high school AP classes, and an unalloyed, exuberant confidence in my own ability to be the absolute best at whatever intellectual pursuit I essayed. I took whatever classes I was interested in – more math than anything else, but a lot of other classes that went along with my journey of self-discovery: philosophy, religion, literature, and so on. They seemed so interesting on the syllabus, but I lost interest in many of them pretty quickly, or found myself struggling to fight the currents of the intellectual game that I wasn’t there to play, so I would pay only minimal attention or none at all. I ended up failing about 13 or 14 classes – mostly by simply failing to attend – a few of which I later made up, but mostly not.

I was also putting myself through school, so I’d take off time to work here and there, and save a little money – precious little, since I was much more interested in buying clothes and doing fun things than in smartly managing my self-guided path to success. So it took a lot of time off from school just to save for a quarter or two back on. And I took off other times just to play – to read Chinese poetry, or to play blackjack for a living.

So even after 7 or 8 years of sporadic study, I had barely enough credits to graduate with my BA in Math, and I still hadn’t met my minimum foreign language requirement, along with some other useless requirement which I’ve forgotten. But I needed money again, and I was able to talk my way into a job I was completely unqualified for, as an HR Systems Analyst (of all useless things) at World Savings, at their shiny silver 20-story headquarters building in downtown Oakland – so I “finished” going to school for the last time, and just decided that I would go on with my career from there.

I was living with my girlfriend, now my wife, in a little apartment just a couple of blocks from World Savings, on Alice Street. It was very much downtown Oakland – a few blocks from Oakland Chinatown (which is beautifully evoked in Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park, by Nellie Wong), a few blocks from the adult movie theaters and peep-show bookstores that used to line that part of Broadway, around a couple of corners from dingier and darker streets where drugs were sold day and night, where lonely prostitutes wandered between work and home, where poor kids laughed and ran in the garbage-strewn streets. Our building was a refuge of straight lines, clean floors, and potted plants, hoping to become a nicer place, where poor, educated young white and black and Indian and Asian couples pretended they were not poor. Nice little cafes and restaurants sprung up like weeds along the nearby streets, and the city planners of Oakland did their best to bring big businesses like Kaiser and Union Pacific into the few gleaming office towers, while the drug-dealing and emptiness and poverty and racial anger swarmed like a fast-encroaching jungle all around.

I can’t say I hated my job – I enjoyed some of the challenge, and I learned a lot, and I enjoyed some aspects of “work life”. I liked dressing up for work; I liked being smart and proving I could become good at a job I had no preparation for. But I was lonely. I did not find my co-workers to be potential friends, the way many of my classmates at Berkeley had been with no effort. We shared fewer values and goals, and I wasn’t psychologically prepared for the sad and meaningless struggle of entry level office culture; I was still a brilliant intellectual in my own mind; an important person, not a hamster in a cage. I had to force myself to play the game. I was intimidated by those who seemed to thrive in this milieu, and I doubted myself.

I would usually go off somewhere for lunch, just driving around, exploring aimlessly, eventually stopping somewhere for a bite. A little out of the way café here or there, where I could eat and think and read the paper in private, away from the maddening bustle and meaningless drudgery of the office, with all it’s little daily emergencies and it’s crazy culture of objectives that no one in their right mind could take personally seriously – and which everyone seemed to. Someplace I could flirt with a waitress, or doodle cartoons on my napkins – brilliant little compositions which I would laugh and throw away after an hour, as I sighed and smiled and got ready to go back to face the afternoon.

One day, I was driving on my slow way back, listening to the radio, and Fast Car, by Tracy Chapman came on. I think it had just been released. I had never heard it, or her, before.

You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so we can fly away
We gotta make a decision
We leave tonight or live and die this way

It was so completely unlike any other popular music I was used to hearing. It wasn’t jingly jouncy crap. It made my fingertips tingle, like a kind of electricity that was flowing right through my body. It was like listening in silence, in the dark, to the deepest sorrows of a close friend, baring their soul. Tears were streaming down my face, involuntarily. I had to pull over, on 6th or 7th, a block away from Broadway, and just sit and listen, in amazement.

I was really surprised to be affected this way. It wasn’t about me… it wasn’t about my life. But it was about the life of the people I lived with, that walked the streets of Oakland. I recognized them. I could FEEL that life coming out of my radio; I felt as if I were INSIDE that young black woman’s skin, as if I were riding in the car with her as she held out that hope, as she did what she could to dream, while living in her true world.

You got a fast car
And we go cruising to entertain ourselves
You still ain't got a job
And I work in a market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better
You'll find work and I'll get promoted
We'll move out of the shelter
Buy a big house and live in the suburbs

It was such an uncompromising song. One listened, knowing that things would not get better for her; drawn into her hopeless clinging to the prospect of a promotion, of his job, of the big house, but knowing that it was an empty dream; knowing that she would never escape in her fast car, that the bills and the crying baby and the tiredness would go on, that there would be shouting fights on the steps of the dirty, run-down apartment building, the man would leave, that nothing would change.

And it was completely unpretentious, completely unprotected. It was not *about* something else, it wasn’t pretty or pleasant or lovely. It was exposed. Yet it wasn’t raw, or exploitive, or bold. It was simply the true feelings of a young, poor, still hopeful black woman, who held on to some dream of a good life, a life. It was stripped of all pretension, as if she had written it, and then gone back over it and mercilessly struck out every false note, every word that was not straight from the heart. Over and over again, stripping the words bare, excising every hint of self-protection, so that at the end we were listening in to her deepest private feelings, with music seemingly welling up straight from the unconscious, that spoke the language of the soul.

I remember we were driving driving in your car
The speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I had a feeling that I belonged
And I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

It makes my eyes water just hearing it again, in my mind. I sometimes tell my wife that in my next life, I’ll come back as a black woman, and maybe there’s some secret unknowable affinity there. Probably not.

I loved Tracy Chapman from that moment on. Really loved her; I would help her the way I would help my brothers or sisters if she needed it. That’s the power that art has to remake us. She hasn’t changed; her later music has remained uncompromising and brilliant and true. Some of her songs, like “All That You Have Is Your Soul”, or “Subcity”, or “The Promise” are among my favorite things in the world, and perfectly express (and shape) my own feelings, and make me sigh and smile and cry. But nothing, to me, has the power of “Fast Car” or “Talkin’ About a Revolution” – those first punches; those first words, that to me told a truth that I wanted to hear.

Looking around curiously as I descend into the pit

I must admit to having some difficulty with the blog form. Partly because I'm so damn busy that I don't have time to translate my thoughts from their lovely and insightful "shower form" to coherent paragraphs. But that wouldn't stop me if I didn't have a second problem -- that I am only interested in saying something worth saying. I've had plenty of people tell me my blog was boring, and that if I wanted readers, I needed to get with the blog form... breezy observations, interesting links, a little ironic commentary, a few pictures or videos. Well, I don't want readers. This blog is me talking aloud, reflecting, partly to myself, and partly to what many people would call God... to that which knows, to the fullness of what is, of which I am a part.

As I was driving to the cafe this morning, I chanced to ask myself, in the course of meandering thoughts, what I would be like if no one was watching -- INCLUDING MYSELF. What will I do when I am freed from accountability, when I am Lord of my private universe? Who am I really? I concluded that although I would do some things which would make me cringe, which would be EXTREMELY :-) embarrassing and revealing, that I was at my core what I appear to be -- a nice person, in love with life, with good will toward all. How nice... :-)

But anyway, I have this writing problem. As we speak, I am in the middle of writing a couple of longer pieces, political or social analysis, which are hard for me to write. It is hard to get started -- the issues are so complex, so wide-ranging, so mixed up, that it's very difficult to find the wedge that lets you say something meaningful, that one can get one's mind around, and from there extrapolate important principles and outline a philosophy... which is what I think I should be doing.

In the meantime, I do want to continue to say Hello, World... so I will succumb to the blog form, and just extract from my morning universe a couple of twigs that you -- my imagined alter ego -- may find amusing, as I have.

1) The New York Times has a nice puff piece this morning on mathematician Terrence Tao. Thank God for the small miracle of some publicity for someone other than a rich celebrity or a politician or a fashionable artist or "personality" (narcissistic and worthless frauds all). And I personally found this little vignette vastly charming:

At age 5, he was enrolled in a public school, and his parents, administrators and teachers set up an individualized program for him. He proceeded through each subject at his own pace, quickly accelerating through several grades in math and science while remaining closer to his age group in other subjects. In English classes, for instance, he became flustered when he had to write essays.

“I never really got the hang of that,” he said. “These very vague, undefined questions. I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.”

Assigned to write a story about what was going on at home, Terry went from room to room and made detailed lists of the contents.

Reminds me a bit of my nephew Edward, who is quite charming in his own right, although much more likely to be the next Keanu Reeves than the Mozart of mathematics. Or perhaps a bit like me, although not literally, only in some corner of my character.

2) I was flabbergasted and angered by this posting at this very useful blog. In particular, the following excerpt is a wonderful little insight into what's going on behind the scenes, in the meatgrinder of the massive government, where our future is being defined. It's not too late -- the future is surprisingly susceptible to leadership -- but I am beginning to wonder where the intelligent opposition is. No one needs idiot opposition; we need opposition that's smarter and better and more capable than the corrupt insiders.

AT&T told an appeals court in a written brief Monday that the case against it for allegedly helping the government spy on its customers should be thrown out, because it cannot defend itself -- even by showing a signed order from the government -- without endangering national security.

A government brief filed simultaneously backed AT&T's claims and said a lower court judge had exceeded his authority by not dismissing the suit outright.

Because plaintiffs' entire action rests upon alleged secret espionage activities, including an alleged secret espionage relationship between AT&T and the Government concerning the alleged activities, this suit must be dismissed now as a matter of law," the government argued in its brief.

Holy frikkin crap. So the claim is that the law says that if the government says it's actions are secret, they do not need to follow the law? AND that the government ITSELF gets to make the call whether this claim is valid? There's no irony here -- I think that IS the claim. I'm not OK with that.

Cute cute cute

Sometimes, you just have to look at the innocent way that our elephantine government goes about it's business, as if all was right with the world, and smile. They're trying, you say to yourself.. Thus my reaction to the slate of bids I see, one after another, in this mornings FedBizOpps email alert:

Federal Upcoming Bid		Administrative Professionals Day		Mar. 31, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Base Club Membership Drive		Jul. 24, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Base wide event- Hot Summer Nights		Jun. 08, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Cinco de Mayo		Apr. 27, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Easter Brunch		Mar. 30, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Edwards AFB Tops in Blue Performace		Apr. 27, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Holiday Tree Lighting		Dec. 03, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Teen Center Haunted House		Oct. 12, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Youth of the Month / Youth of the Year		Dec. 31, 2007

Then at other times, you look at the Walter Reed mess, or Katrina aid (still!), or a million other examples, and shake your head and sigh.. There's an old Sam Cooke song -- "A Change Is Going To Come" -- that seems appropriate. That song is kind of wistful, as if suspecting that the change may not come soon, while hoping that it will, but my feeling now is the opposite -- I think the coming changes will be quite a shock to system of still-complacent and VERY unprepared America.