Light Reading or Reflections on our Existence

On a clear day I look at the sky and say it’s blue. When you look at that same sky you will most likely agree. But how do I know that the color you call blue looks like what I call blue?

Hold on.  No need to go searching for your bag of weed!  Most of us have pondered this.  And yes, I know this conversation is often THC induced.  But potheads aren’t the only ones curious about perception.  So don’t bogart this subject, my friend.  You are going to have to share these pensive contemplations with scientists.

One day my buddy and I were headed out to a show at a local club.  I was driving.  We were on one of the busiest multi-lane streets in the entire southeast.  I was hyper-focused on the cars weaving in and out of lanes, the brake lights flashing, and the tractor-trailer that was one inch from my rear bumper! My friend was riding shotgun.  Out of nowhere he shouts, “Good God!!!”

I stomp on the brake, checking the mirror to make sure we are not about to be squashed by the tailgater!  No. He was alert and now sticking his middle finger up at me. This all happened in an instant and I said with alarm, “What???”.  My good buddy says with a grin, “Oh. I was just thinking about life, man”.

This particular friend was prone to frequent episodes of obsession with the concept of reality.  One time he discussed this so fervently at a party we had that one guest told me later that it had changed his life forever.  I too loved engaging in this type of discussion, but had always just considered them light and fun musings about subjects we had no real insight into or any means to gain insight to.

Now I know that there are real scientists who are seriously investigating reality and its interaction with our limited perception.

After college I worked on an assembly line while I pursued a post-bac education.  It turned out that the assembly line was staffed by otherwise unemployable graduate-degreed geniuses. The discussions we had, while handling sticky rolls of knitted fiberglass and folding felt padding, intellectually exceeded any experience I had at the local University.  On some days the conversations were deeply personal.  One co-worker who had a Master’s degree in English had witnessed and experienced extreme trauma while serving as a medic in the Vietnam War.  I had mentioned to him that I had a fear of death.  He said that he had a theory that everything we see is an illusion.  The more he spoke I realized that his theory was really more of a religious conviction intertwined with his unique take on Christianity.  For whatever reason, these ideas comforted me. Religion and science were no longer in opposition when you looked at it from his perspective.  They were actually integral to each other.

And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure."

You may have heard news bytes that talk about black holes, multiple universes, and debate about the nature of the cosmos.  Is the Universe expanding?  Can a black hole really be consuming information? I’m no scientist. These questions boggle my brain.  I have picked up enough bits and pieces to understand that there is conflict between quantum physics and classical physics.

Listening to NPR I have heard stories about pulses of light that exit a chamber before it finishes entering the chamber. What??  I’ve heard a theory that we are actually living in a two-dimensional space even though our perceived experience is three dimensional?  Double what????

However, through the magic of FaceBook, I came across an article that has my WHATs going off the scale of WTFs!!  This article brings us full circle back to the question of whether the blue I see is the same as your blue. The scientist being interviewed takes it many steps further though. Is my experience of a headache the same as your experience of a headache? Or do we just have a common word to describe the same variables that underlie the experience we both call a headache? He states an emphatic yes to the latter.

Yet he goes further and actually explains the nature of reality in a way that most of us only have a very recent metaphor available to understand it. You can go to the link for a more detailed description, but here is my take on it.  Imagine looking at your desktop.  You have file icons on your desktop. If you click on that file you will see its content. Correct? No.

The file icon is merely an image that we associate with specific content.  When we click on it we see words and numbers that we have painstakingly typed and organized. But what we see is far from the reality of what is really going on in the computer. We could not possibly grasp the totality of what is going on behind the symbols on the display in a meaningful way without creating these symbolic images. So, according to the scientist and backed up by some crazy math that I will never comprehend, our total experience in this world is a mental representation of what is actually going on.  Evolution does not favor those who can perceive reality, but those who can perceive symbols which enable us to react appropriately for survival.

The reality underlying our perceptions of the world are too complex for us to understand in a meaningful way without the mental images we created!

This makes sense to me from both a scientific standpoint as well as a religious one.  Granted, my religious experience is biased toward a Christian and Jewish perspective. I studied Religion in college and came within one course from having a second minor in it. My education and experience inform my opinion. 

Mythology is central to most religions. Myths are powerful stories that guide us in understanding the Devine. Loaded with symbolism and metaphors, myths are like computer code that create tangible images that help us imagine the infinite. Whenever one of the disciples would ask Jesus a very direct question about the nature of G-d or heaven, he would typically answer with a parable. Often the followers seemed frustrated by this. But Jesus understood that he could never explain the true nature of these concepts without the use of imagery.

As I have aged, I have grown. I have learned to find solace in the mystery that is our existence.

And I am more convinced than ever that even the most intelligent humans on earth have not even scratched the surface of the scratch itself to unraveling the nature of reality.

An Escape from Insanity and it ain't Up on the Roof

My Cellar

My cellar is the Amygdala
Of my house
Primordial dust of ancient warmth
Settle and rise
Settle and rise
Emotional soot lingering
Beneath the visible structure
A hollowed space in the earth
Designed to house the fire
Of survival
A cave dug in salute
To our evolutionary predecessors
An Escape from surface life

by LeGette

The Beginning of the End or Mr. Jones, Me, and John Lennon

Note:  Anything in the body of post in Red is a link to something that provides insight.

By my sophomore year in high school I had learned to downplay my fanaticism about anything Beatles related.  Four years earlier we had moved from our home in a small southern city to a lake in a rural part of the county.  I had been immersed in this culture and had started to assimilate. I still stood out.  I didn’t hunt or fish.  I preferred European sports cars to hot rods.

Beep,beep. Beep beep. Yeah!

 I started listening to AC/DC, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden.  I had a group of friends that spanned the spectrum of small towners, farmers, and other lake folk.  There were things I could not share with them.  I was going on about Crosby, Stills, and Nash one time and it followed me for years.  I might has well said I liked Bing Crosby!! 

Just Like Dylan’s Mr.Jones

So The Beatles had taken a backseat as far as anyone knew.  But I was so proud of the progress I had made in my attempt to collect every album.  I had Meet the Beatles, Something New, HELP, The Second Album, and The White Album.  I had recorded The Beatles A to Z weekend from start to finish from a local radio show.  I listened and listened.  I read all the liner notes.  I sang the lyrics to every song.  I could hear all the harmonies in my head.

When I hold you in my arms. (oh yeah)

And feel my finger onyour trigger. (oh yeah!)

So one December morning in 1980 I got on the school bus.  I was the first stop.  My friend Maxwell was a few stops later.  He got on the bus wearing jeans ripped so badly that they hardly hung on below his knee.  His hair was getting long in the back and he was talking of getting a perm.

Come Together. Right Now. Over me.

He was smiling as usual.  There was nothing different about this day for him.  Sometimes he liked to say crap that might make me mad, but it was all in fun.  When he blurted out that John Lennon was dead, I was pissed.  I thought he was making a sick joke.  He went on, “I’m not shitting you. He was shot. In front of his apartment!”.

I’m sinking.  I’m sinking right through the floor of that bus.

I need a fix ‘cause I’m going down.

This. Can’t. be. True.

Other people are getting on the bus.  They are all talking about it. It’s true. It’s also true that none of them knew jack about John Lennon.  I was alone. I was feeling nauseated.  Could they see that I had gone pale? And silent? 

Long, Tall Sally got on at her stop.  She was smart and nice.  She knew more than most did about my Beatles thing.  She looked at me and said, “It’s so sad, isn’t it?” She didn’t miss much. I shrugged. Or nodded. I could not open my mouth or I might vomit.  John Lennon was dead. Murdered by a nutcase fan. With a gun. I could not wrap my mind around this.

Happiness is a warm gun. Bang, bang. Shoot,shoot.

Long, Tall Sally called me that night.  She said that some kids from the college town were going to the school that night.  They were going to paint a tribute to John Lennon on the spirit rock. Yeah.  John would have loved that.  A memorial on a rock that usually says something like “Go Rebels!”  Sally said that I was not being nice, that they were all really sad too.  OK.  Maybe I needed to give them a break.

Everybody’s talking about bagism, shagism, dragism, madism, ragism, tagism

This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m.

All we are saying isgive peace a chance.

The next day as I walked from the bus to my first class I passed the rock. It’s white. It says Imagine. It says RIP John Lenon. One N. It has a giant Mercedes symbol painted on it.

Yes I’m lonely, wanna die

I understand how Mr. Jones felt.

The EOG or Are We Human or Dancer

This morning my daughter whimpered in the backseat as she absentmindedly fondled my iphone. She was our DJ as usual on the ride to school.  At age eleven, she had learned to rapidly scroll through Youtube, toggle between Spotify, and keep a steady stream of Pop music playing via Bluetooth over the sound system as we made the twenty-minute commute.  The two of us were already exhausted.  The insane, frenzied buildup to End of Grade Testing had taken a toll. Do we test too much?

My youngest daughter is smart, lively, and has a strong spirit. At six months of age in an orphanage in China she was labeled as “Failing to Thrive”. Thus began the long road of labels and near labels; the road of circumstances that try to break her spirit.  She came into our lives a scrawny, one toothed seventeen-month old.  Deep bruises marked her thighs from whatever restraints she had suffered at the hands of institutionalization. But she was a livewire!  She grabbed at things and put things in her mouth like she wanted to take it all in, hold on fast, and ingest the whole world! Ha!  Failing to thrive?

The world is not fair. She has to learn this lesson over and over. It’s not fair.

The world is not fair.

So this morning we make our way to the third elementary school my little scholar has attended on her way to fourth grade. We haven’t moved.  It’s a constant search for the right situation for our beautiful daughter. The song she has chosen to play as she tries to calm herself down from the EOG induced, morning, panic attack is by The Killers. She has been obsessed with this song for the last week or so.  She has played it from her laptop as she eats breakfast, through the headphones in the afternoon, and over our stereo on the weekend. This is the first time on the way to school. Usually it’s Taylor Swift or Taylor Swift, but this morning the haunting lyrics of Human by The Killers are soothing her.

We tried to avoid this.  She started having anxiety about the tests a few weeks ago.  She had outbursts at school.  This was new. At this school she had been happy.  She was thriving.  So when she raged and screamed uncontrollably at bedtime about the Test and how she didn’t want to go to school anymore, we wrung our hands and worried that once again circumstances were conspiring to break her spirit.  What could we do?  She has to take the test. Right?

This past weekend she was chilling on the sofa listening to Human amplified through our thirty-year-old Cerwin-Vega speakers.  She called out, “Da-ddy” in her typical shouty style.

“Yes?” I said. She asked, “What do you think about this song?”. Hmmmm…. I did like it, I told her.  “It’s pretty cool sounding…. but I don’t get the lyrics.” I think I said something like they must be over my head as I wandered back to the next room. She had started the song over…” Are we Human or are we dancer?”  I shrugged at the strange grammar and busied myself with nothing of importance.

We called a meeting with the school.  We had informed them that our daughter would not take the test.  That’s right, we were advocating for our child.  Don’t judge.  You haven’t walked in our shoes.  The administration didn’t know how to react.  They sought guidance from the mysterious TESTING coordinator from the Ministry of Squashing my Child’s Spirit!! The Ministry decreed that we had a choice!  Yes!

Hold on… She must take the test or withdraw from the school. The Test must be administered or we can withdraw her from the school.  The school where she thrived.  The school she loved until a few weeks ago.  The school which we had been on the lottery waiting list for two years for. We would lose our spot. The test must be administered. Period.

“Are we Human or are we dancer, my sign is vital, my hands are cold”. 

Yesterday my little audiophile blurted out of the blue, “Puppets!”.  “What?”, I asked. She said, “you know, in that song by The Killers, dancer means like a puppet.” Wow.  I think my daughter is brilliant. These stupid educators must be blind.  They can’t see the genius, the complete brilliance that she had sorted this out?  That she was some sort of Savant who could decipher the code in poems and lyrics that had eluded me? “Da-ddy!”. “Yes?” I ask.  She says, “I googled it.”  Ok.  So it’s a different kind of brilliant.  But brilliant is brilliant.

At the meeting with the various representatives involved in the spirit crushing conspiracy, we were told that they had considered our reply that our daughter had the right to refuse the test. Yes. They agreed that she could refuse the test.  However, they would have to offer her the test and after she had listened to the directions she could say no to the test.  My wife suggested that it might be difficult for a child to refuse a test the teacher is telling them to take.  They grudgingly agreed and suggested that we just instruct her not to open her booklet and that as soon as someone was available they would remove her from the room.  “my sign is vital; my hands are cold”. The strings tug and lift us from the conference chairs and lead us out of the school in silence.

Yesterday our daughter declared,” I might take the test”. We assured her it was Ok to say no. Just don’t open the booklet we explained as we exchanged troubled glances. “Are we Human or are we Dancer?”

Bam!! This morning started with a bang!  Our strong willed girl was kicking a metal file cabinet as hard as she could.  Straight out of bed and into full on, raging, panic attack mode!  This was bad. We had exactly one hour and fifteen minutes to get her through this, into the car, twenty minutes to the school, and into the testing room.  She was screaming now, “I DON’T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL!”  Sobbing, screaming, heart wrenching anxiety. No way was this going to end well.

The bottom line is that we contacted the school, said all the wrong things, and I probably permanently alienated half the staff.  Ok.  I alienated all the the staff. Somehow, our little fighter calmed herself enough to get dressed and we managed to get out the door with barely enough time to make it.

“Are we human, or are we dancer? My sign is vital; my hands are cold.”

My sweet little one huddled against me, sobbing, as we made our way to the car. So here we are. Exhausted.  We are listening to Human by The Killers.  The lyrics are penetrating my brain as the speakers blast the electronic dance beat that seems to be soothing her. “Are we human or are we dancer?”  Are we puppets? Dammit!  I do not want to be a puppet.  I want to turn the car around, tell her that she can stop worrying because Daddy is human and has compassion and is going to take her home. But I keep driving. I don’t change direction.

Am I human or am I dancer?  If I had to answer this question as The Killers keep suggesting that I must, I’d have to say that I am both.  I am both at the same time.  Simultaneously the flesh and vitality of humanity while also cold and wooden like a puppet being lead on strings. This morning the two parts are in a battle. The puppet master has incredible leverage.

So as I drive my daughter to school today and Human keeps repeating it’s pleading chorus, my sign is vital and my hands are cold.

Update: My brilliant daughter has taken to calling Common Core "Complicate it More"! Haha.  Reminds me of when she was at a school in kindergarten that was on Torrence Street. She called it "Torment Street".  LOL