Ode to the Attention Monger

It may be a pathology when practiced to the extreme, but seeking attention from others lies at the core of human needs for connection and partnership and therefore at the center of human sociality.

The type of attention request that feels juvenile when seen in others and causes sheepishness when recognized in ourselves is also an extension of regard and affection for those whom it seems more often meant to annoy.

It is made up of an action or a saying that is generally unnecessary for functional purposes. Something sharp or clever or unusual. A negative statement or question (“So you’re not going to the fair because you hate amusement?”) when a neutral one would have done just as well (“Are you going to the fair?”). Often, within the home, partners will ask for help finding items when they know full-well their location or will pretend not to have heard an answer in order to ask its question again. “Did you say the jams are in thus cupboard now?”

Social researcher Brene Brown says that people live for connection. It is “why we’re here,” as she says.*  I think these calls for attention are a plea for that.  Negative or positive, they bring people into contact with the speaker. They engage a mutual sense of logic and purpose, a common space where the two or three or four are intimate players.  Someone has put something somewhere and now someone else must retrieve it. There is a partnership that is necessary, and acknowledging the partnership is key to satisfying the connection.  If the hearer were to find the item without announcing himself or asking for directions: no connection, no partnership.  Just two parties accidentally working in tandem.

Clearly, this kind of connection-seeking is not meant to be practicable, and it is true that actual teams can work together better and more quickly in silence – given prior agreement.  But we should also acknowledge that “prior consent” is important and that few people can do diligent, valuable work for very long without any hope of return from a team member.  Novelists might be an exception and yet, by their own accounts, they connect daily with the plots and characters in their books, crafting together in the moment and amounting to perhaps the most solid partnership of all.   

How nice to be able to conclude that attention-seeking is not necessarily as reprehensible as it may have at first promised to be.

In a final note, it is wroth pointing out that, at the times at which a person otherwise needing connection is not interested in soliciting it, his initial affection for or respect for his interlocutor must be examined.  For, it is in the cases in which these latter properties are missing that a person is least likely to engage his company in the efforts of connecting together.

Therefore, do let’s take as a compliment any action which draws unnecessary attention to a person who may be speaking to us.  Take as compliment and then decide whether to respond benevolently or not.  Ensuing guilt then properly allocated accordingly.

Before Ambition

I’m not a determinist exactly, but it’s pretty clear just from living, that most people cannot avoid what we might call their destiny.

I used to be much more at peace with this in my youth.

There were people I knew I didn’t belong with, for example, and no matter how attractive they were, I did not venture in their direction.   Not out of fear for some other negative emotion.  Only out of certitude that we were better off apart.

It always felt right not to fight this and I never understood the push so many others in high school exercised toward people and activities that  weren’t for them.

But an erosion took place with me too and I have, since high school, spent time and energy in situations that were not optimal for my development.  Coffee dates and other moments that were like places where the power that runs my life was in a different frequency than normal.  Times during which I shut my eyes and waited for the end.

Sometimes these were imposed and unavoidable, such as the time we visited some posh older person’s loft, where everything was in white and I felt very uncomfortable pretending to sit or even look around.  But most of the time they were self-imposed, a sort of “I think I know what is coming here but it wouldn’t hurt to confirm it” approach.

But it does hurt to confirm it. It wastes time, and we are all much better avoiding the situations and people for whom our initial hunch gives the high-school-clarity information “not for you.”

Ambition and social pressure are players in the tendency to over-test near-certain waters, I’m sure, but if we learn anything from the truly successful, it is that they are never confused about what space is conducive to their wellbeing.

In the end, there is a responsibility you have to the box you were given, the one you’ve been walking around with and cultivating since childhood.  It will determine the spaces where you fit and where you don’t fit.  It will make you turn off in dormancy when you are slammed in a room that cannot contain it. 

Because you know its shape without having to constantly ask for it out loud, what we call your intuition is always sending matching feelers our to the environment. 

No matter what you do, the box will fit or not fit in the spaces where you reside and visit, and it is your job to be faithful to its shape.

You may not like your box.  It may not be shaded in your favorite color or it may be too large or too pointy.  Or bent. 

But because it is there it cannot be averted, and carrying it into the wrong places all the time will cause you to live in a near permanent half-sleep, it is important to avoid entering into errors.  

It may seem, to those who are very persistent, that, no matter what space they enter, they can turn it into their own by sheer force of will.  This seems to work in a delusional sort of way and why the universe allows such mismatch is a mystery perhaps belonging to the magnitudes of scale beyond the quantum.  But the space will never feel comfortable and the only solace able to be taken from the experience will be that you had perseverance and you didn’t die.

True but still kind of useless if the point is to find a place to unload your box and get to work with the tools that are in it rather than just barely fitting in and restricting your breathing.

Often, people are too uncomfortable in the wrong situation to stay long or persevere, but it is possible to push against the walls of the wrong café long enough to push through and exit into possibly much friendly waters.

Still, it would be best to have read the signs on the outside before entering.  Read and believed them. 

The way we did when were were young.  When we lived our destiny purely, without angst or ambition. When progress formed its own effortless path.

Rough Shine

I want to be able to quote a famous writer who said something like: 

”It’s easy to be shiny if you rent a large sander and start polishing.”

In my life, I've always been interested in seeing how much sheen there is to someone without cosmetics. How much sparkle is there in the rough or, at the most, through the natural abrasion of scraping across the other sandy elements the stone rubs against?  Virtue in adversity?  Grace in diminution?

It is for this reason, I think, that I have always given people a long cord of leniency.  I do not demand or express wishes.  How they should be towards me.  How they should be toward the world.  Some people have seen this as an absence of the desire for respect.  I have always seen it as a berth by which to view an element’s properties.  That is to say, a person’s character.

What is interesting is that even through the polish of deliberate effort, people’s nature shines through.  Sometimes the polish itself will tell you what is at the center.  Is it very hard and full of effort?  Is it so shiny as to be suspicious?   Has it been so carefully applied that no one is supposed to be able to tell it is there?

Through the nature of the effort, we can look in on who lives inside.  And through its absence, we can see more directly into the center.  This is what is to be appreciated about those who do not polish.  They are asking you to do less work.  And, they are smart enough to know they can’t hide anyway.

There are pathologies of not shining, of course.  Some people go in the opposite direction and cake on the dirt, as if indeed too ashamed of their own roughness to have it show naturally.  Caking dirt is the same as polishing assiduously:  it is an effort to disguise.  Only, the dirt approach is a response to disdain for the shiny.  It is sometimes a result of the recognition that much too much shining will be necessary for a truly shiny polish, that this is too much work or too expensive and that the only way left to engage the game is to play it in reverse.  Unfortunately, this reaction is no more free than the one that is devoted to cosmetic beauty.  Just as in cases where one person responds to fear by running and one responds by standing still, the opposing parties are responding with anxiety to the same circumstance: usually a broad array of societal pressures.  In the one case, a person is interested in subduing the pressures and showing disdain for them while in the other, he is interested in meeting them so perfectly that no one will see the effort for the glow.  

It is a property of the rough-shine rule that the more sheen or dirt is present, the more damage is underneath.  As mentioned, it is easy to parse through the layers of coating, but it does seem a service of the well-adjusted to not make you dig.  They are attractive because they are not hiding and so there is no work to be done in seeing them.  It is a double grace:  a service to you through a personal strength of theirs. It seems almost as if the function itself of not holding heavy sanders or loads of dirt renders them unnecessary.  As if the space around a laden individual is warped and needs the smoothing his equipment can render while a freer space has few kinks and does not need smoothers that, appropriately, is not there. 

Because I believe that a lot of veneer is a pathology of those who fear too strongly that their shine will be undiscovered, I favor those who, without trying, polish the outer coating of their exterior by placing themselves among friends and activities that do the work for them.  Unafraid and productive, they come out smooth in end.

It is harder than renting equipment like a name-brand school or a known lucrative profession but it is truer, creates fewer layers to parse through and, in the end, offers its surroundings the full  scope of possibility.  It is, in a popular word today, organic:  grown from itself and its influence. Employing feedback loops and eschewing with long-term planning.  This kind of trek requires constant inquiry.  Like the particle falling to the grown that asks, at every new instant, what the direction of least resistance is NOW, the unaffected person asks at every turn what the way to go is now.  This precludes a reliance on long-distance plans and disallows, as I have mentioned, the use of heavy social cosmetic machinery like degrees and titles.  In this person’s life, the titles are those that his friends and colleagues put upon him as a result of his path.  They are not ones he reached for before he was close to them or planned ahead from his childhood.  They may be milestones he sensed he would meet but not because of any dogged determination.  There is a difference between assiduously chiseling your way through a rough tunnel with a distant goal in mind and chiseling as you go because your pockets scrape the side of your path. 

You could say that, in the one, the pockets hold the key to what is chiseled and in the other a paper plan does.  

As the chiseler keeps referring to his plan, looking down and up and down and up, a smoothness is lost to the resulting path.  Sure, it may be forceful, and that's just the point:  the force of the effort will be obvious.  It will be obvious from his dinner table to his attitude to his fear of obstruction to a resentment for those who do not carry big tools. 

Sure, it is easier, but it is also rougher.  And the whole system those senses the weight of the power tools.  Senses it and crumbles under it, kinking the space everyone wants to make so smooth.

Momentum Kindness

In his July feature on BigThink.com, writer Kevin Dutton discusses some properties of the psychopathic mind that he says may make it more adept at impartial decision making when morality would stump the rest of us. Should I send troops to war? Should I sacrifice one life for many?

He says it is convenient for leaders to have a bit of this moral impartiality in order to be functional.

Many of the comments following the post argue with the set up of the hypothetical premises that lead to this conclusion. Whether to suffocate baby Hitler with a pillow is more than a straightforward question of about numbers, the, presumably, the psychopathic mind would coolly figure it: one dead, many saved. Readers correctly point out that human moral choice hinges on elements outside of the numerical. Baby Hitler is, after all, a product of his circumstances, too. Many Hitler-like children are born every day, one reader reminded us. Some are put into circumstances that would nurture their tendencies into benevolent fervor and some possibly into not so benevolent.

In any case, normal people who understand these dynamics face moral dilemmas not because the can't add or because some super-human sympathy keeps them from committing murder - I hope it is clear through the casual use of military sport throughout the world that otherwise civil people are easily capable of murder in the proper circumstances. Most people wouldn't suffocate baby Hitler because they believe what their experience routinely shows: that human actions come at the end of a long chain of precursory events whose trajectory depends on long chains of other adjoining events and that every circumstance deserves the benefit of the chances that it is subject to. In other words, we cannot interfere with the wave function of the new life since we do not know what kind of influences it will actually fall under and, therefore, cannot act now on the chance of its future folly.

This reaction is based on something that would also prevent most normal people from shoving someone under a train in order to save five others down the road and that is the faith in forward momentum of a system.

If a train is speeding down a set of tracks and an innocent man is standing on a bridge above it, it doesn't seem to most of us as if it would be a good idea to throw the man overboard in order to stop the train in order to save the people on it or five others on the tracks downriver, because most of us observe what inanimate objects also often observe and that it the inertial states of physical systems.

The train as a trajectory, a speed, a destiny as it were. In physics, this is called momentum, even though I am being a little figurative about it. Just as with baby Hitler, the train has a future path determined by its present circumstances and all the influences that will come in contact with it between now and the future point of interest. To most of us, this path is to be left to the devices of the forces that shape it and, as bystanders, it is difficult to make a decision to interfere.

It's as if, if we had the ability to pump something into the sun to alter its chemical reactability, as some effort and cost to us, would we. Even if it were to be a good thing for our planet, it would seem rather as if we should let the sun do its thing. Interference is added action which, in physics, translates to the introduction of force, an interaction between matter and a change in energy states - in other words, an outside action, an influence. Momentum functions on the energy and trajectory already present in the system. Momentum is a measure of an inertial state, meaning essentially a stable state, a situation that requires interference in order to undergo change.

Again, as is true for when you are watching TV and don't want to stop or are not watching and don't want to start, inertial states are pleasant and attractive, even to active objects like people. In life we call this "routine." We get used a certain way of activity and like to stick to it. It is familiar. It is easy. It is certainly easier than formulating alternate courses at every turn.

I believe it is for this fondness of routine, of the preservation of unaltered momentum, that people think hard about interfering with a speeding train. What will be will be, they say. It is in the cards of the train, they say. Anything could happen between now and then, the moment we are trying to forecast for. Just as you would not interfere with a waterfall that is that you think may break apart a rock that may set off a volcano that may generate an earthquake, you would not throw the guy under the train to help derail it. Not because you are so very kind. If you really thought you would save hundreds by sacrificing one, you could do the math as well as the next person. But because the math is not that simple. And our scruples - indeed what we call moral dilemma or empathy or kindness - is just the consideration that there is no guarantee that interference will help. For all you know, it may hinder. Stopping the waterfall may have consequences you could not imagine that may be even worse than the earthquake.

Secretly, most of us trust this doubt and do not interfere in systems that are on an inertial trajectory for this reason. The effects of interference are unpredictable and we trust that the many points of change they would introduce could generate waves we could control even less.

Indeed, this is the folly of modern engineering and the hubris against which systems scientists warn the didactic structuralists: Be careful how you plan for the change you want to affect. Sure, constructing a bridge may be straightforward in and of itself, but perhaps what happens to traffic and to resulting population patterns will be less easy to quantify, predict or plan for.

Often, systems scientists only ask that engineers and planners be aware of this property, sometimes referred to as emergence. To be aware of the fact that our well-structured and forecast actions result not only in the interference we planned for but in some we didn't plan for as well. And, in the exponential ripple effect of action, into a multitude of other shimmying effects .

Because all systems are physical in the end, somehow, human behavior follows, in consciousness, the contours of physical rules and therefore thinks very hard before poking a finger in boiling pot, even if it appears to mean prevention of a fire. Not so much self-preservation as an awareness that current knowledge of the true system is incomplete and knowledge of the the results of interference far from predictable. Too unpredictable, in fact, to warrant the kind of bold action that would come only through certitude.

Perhaps it is for this reason that psychopaths are more likely to simply to the math and act the action.
They don't understand about momentum. They don't sense inertial systems or interfering systems or the momentousness of effects from just a small addition of energy into a situation. They just count: one person here, five people there. Five minus one = four. I know what to do.

They know what to do but as we see in our current societies, in which this kind of reasoning leads not only to poor political decisions but to truly pathological behavior, the end results of this simplicity are frequently condemned because they are, in the end, dysfunctional.

Kevin Dutton still makes a good point. Noting that some of us think twice while some of us do not is important. But before learning any applicable lessons from those who seem to be able to subdue moral scruples for the benefit of clear-cut benefit, we should ask what moral scruples are made out of and whether they're not related to a larger knowledge that, as yet, we qualify only as intuition, kindness, incertitude or humanity.

 

The Resentment Force

There must be some principle in psychology that describes the personal hurt people feel over others' shortcomings.

I am thinking especially of something I've written about before, people in personals adds asking for a partner that is "height-weight proportionate" or "HWP."   Although this leaves a bad taste in my mouth no matter how it's framed, I recognize that some people may have an open-hearted desire for a medium-sized person on some personal grounds, like a love of gymnastics or a love of tiny spaces.  Or even to satisfy particular attractiveness needs.

But there is another kind of HWP requirement that is based on a kind of personal resentment.  The people who object on this level can be heard saying things like "she must have been really fat if..." with a sharp edge that suggests a lot more than functional considerations.  It's as if heavy poeple had at some point leveraged undue power over the speaker.  As if they had humiliated him in grade school. As if they are members of an elite, bully strength circle against whom now a perpetual, personal resentment must be launched, at once subdued and agressive.  He doesn't let anyone to hear it, but in his heart he is screaming: "I hate these people."

As with most personal reactions, this one can be generalized to qualities outside of physical appearance.  People resent those who have more money than they do or even those who may have more money in future.  Business people are a common target of those who are not entrepreneurial.  Those with nine-to-five jobs often suppose that commercial work is quick, easy and not sufficeintly unpleasant. College students are targets among those who are not graduates or sometimes by fellow collegiates who feel out of place in the environment. 

The same resentful disdain that partners feel toward imperfect romance can be seen here too.  As if the offending party has transgressed the rules of engagement.  It is interesting that, while one transgression has the flavor of jealousy and the other of reproach, they both have a similar emotional effect on the beholder, one of dissatisfaction with the world and personal reproach of the individual. 

Perhaps this is because directionality does not matter in this exchange.  In other words, whether you are the one feeling judged or doling out the judgement, the feelings generated there fill the space between the two parties - even if exercised in theory only - and create a sort of hazard space that is palpable by both and has the same flavor for both.  And for any passing stranger for that matter as well.

In physics, Force is described as "an interaction between two objects."*  In other words, like water that fills the space between two sides of a basin, force is a sort medium for a conversation between the objects on the relationship between them.  Being more precise and quantifiable than a social exchange, it is easier to measure and name, but similar dynamics exist in the world of human behavior, where the interchange between two people can be sensed by both equally and, perhaps for this reason rendering the directionality of such a thing as resentment unimportant or, indeed, unmeasurable.

In essence, the relationship between two objectgs is a situation, like being lost in a market or toasting a promotion, necessarily viewed in its entirety for full effect and evading taxonomical dissection.   In physics as in behavior.  Like a smooth-piece batton, where it is difficult to tell, technically, where one end begins and the other ends, Force and Resentment both live within the full house built for them by the interaction at play, filling the space and reverbirating against to walls until ineed a veriable symphony plays, shaking everyone to its uniform tune.

* Serway, Raymond and John Jewett, Jr.  Physics for Scientists and Engineers. 8th ed. Boston: Brooks/Cole. 2012. 92.

Dig

There is "dig where you stand" and there is "say Yes more often," and the reflective "que sera, sera," but these idioms all refer to what must be some fundamental principle of all systems theory: that in order to get anything, you have to start with something.

This sounds so banal that, if I wasn't in a hurry to explain it, I would not write it down.  Starting with something is actually a condition that many people eschew with.  We often think that, while we are wearing a red dress and eating a muffin, the thing we should really be doing is riding a train in a linen suit. Without any linen or a suit pattern or a train, we are to suddenly shed the somethings we have and acquire new somethings out of the blue.  The problem people then percieve seems to them to be a tactical one: how to get from here to there. 

I think that, in physics, if you were asking a particle how it might want to manifest itself as a collapsed piece of matter on a wall from its present state of being expressed as a wave function, it would just shrug.  It would not know.  The gap would be too big and the circumstances by which such a thing too numerous to even begin to build a plan.  The circumstances for the ways in which this may not happen would be even more numerous still.  So much so, in fact, that they would dominate statistically and would cause the current state of the particle's mind which would be that the plan for collapsing is not to be entertained at all.

The wisdom philosophers, writers and comedians throughout the ages and in our modern times echo this incredulity.  Stop trying to shape a future that is as far removed from you as a the opposite side of the canyon you're standing on.  In order to get to the other side - or to some other place - you need to just start walking.  No promises about the other side.  Only promises that, along the way, you will build a path that, in retrospect, will most likely seem inevitable, because, after all, it was built from every step that came before the previous one, a pattern that is not easily replicable and impossible to foreshadow at the start.

It's really like the simple principle of building:  one brick at a time, one cell at a time.  Nobody does it in any other way.  Nature does not begin with a cell and say, I want this to turn into a pumpkin and, somehow, through sheer will and ambition, make it so.  Or, even less so, by taking an alternate path from the one it had the germ of.  It doesn't throw away the seed because the seed is a daisy and it wants a pumpkin.  It doesn't know what it wants - a good lesson for people to internalize - so it just starts building on the seed. And sooner or later, it will get whatever was meant to happen from it.  Daisy or pumpkin.  Grass blade or dud whose rotting energy fuels the nearby blade. 

Nature does not have a plan.  It has a code and it has a history.  That is true and that is very important, for, without the past, the future extinguishes instantly, like the receding line of electrons from the center of an old-fashioned TV.  But a blueprint doesn't mean a path.  It only means a contour on top of which, that which is place will balance or fall off according to the shapes of the land.  This is the way in which biology appears to have directive and leads so many people to consider the need for a willful being as conductor.  Because of what happened before, what happens next has a certain natural trajectory.  It isn't perfectly defined and no one planned it any more than an unraveling weave plans the final snap of the straightening yarn, but because there is a chain link in human and physical events, at any point in the chain, looking back, one sees a straight and perfect path leading exactly to the point where he stands:  inevitable, meant to be, planned from the start.   Most of us forget what nature never even dwells upon:  that this view would be true under any and every circumstance in which time as we know it is the guiding measure of change in the world.

This is all to say that "dig where you stand," is not only good advice but is actually inescapable. You cannot not dig where you stand.  And all people who attempt to jump the cite where they are and leap over to a different position either never make it off the ground and use up all their energy just huffing up in an attempt at liftoff or, instead of digging, rent a backhoe, with the help of their ambitious parents, and bulldoze through everything the should have carefully dug around in their slow journey forward, reaching the point they had their sites set to, yes, but looking back and seeing a big mess, without a trace of the bridge that should exist between their position and where they came from.

These latter people often suffer from identity problems, because, again, they cannot see the path of their journey.  And we all want to see a path. We want to know that what we have done has a history and a purpose, perhaps because, if we were a photon, we could not avoid this fate.  It would be in the equations.  As people, in whom the photon's tiny error margin is collected one quadrillion times, the ability to err becomes visible and, through the bio-neurological mechanism of behavior, we exercise our right to control our environment incorrectly. 

But as behavioral economist Dan Arieli will tell you, in fact, people seem to want to want to see a lasting pattern their work. Something meaningful and logical. Something that came from somewhere and will go elsewhere.  And this always requires a scaffolding.  It is impossible to see a pattern in work if you drop the shovel you were holding and rent a backhoe much too large for you.  In essence, you have to start with what you've got and build on.  And there are no shortcuts.  This is what starting with something in order to get another something means.  I know the words do not suggest it, but the somethings are not random.  They are related, connected.  Inextricable. You must hold on to your shovel.  And only your shovel.  And you cannot exchange it, sell it or even buff it.  You must just grip it and dig.  The rocks and dirt in your way will tell you what next, and, it is only through this blind pursuit that you will get the pleasure of looking back at an orderly path.

That's why the wisdoms advocate the Yes and "que sera" and why the millions who try to soar over their yards end up building such elaborate psychological defenses around them that we begin to bump into their giant round dome-bot bodies everywhere and it is uncomfortable.

Closer

Long ago, in some missive whose origin I've forgotten, someone said that a passionate kiss can feel as if you completely climbed inside another person's face. The writer was making the point that this only happens in youth, but forgetting the particularities of the comparison, it seems rather that adults of all ages spend many years trying to climb inside a chose area of interest. All the way inside, to embody it.

First, usually, is the study of said area. Books are opened. Possibly, degrees conferred. Then a professional effort is launched to approach more and more closely the core of whatever it was that interested you. If it was architecture, for example, you begin to practice it and you hope that, through this proximity, you will gain entrance into the muddled core love you felt when all things technical, structural and upright merged with all things human, emotional and spacial in the world, like the feeling you may have gotten when the sun peaked around a structure while you were on an escapade with your best friend on a lazy Saturday afternoon in high school. But, as you work, though other pleasures are no doubt born and buried daily in the rise to adulthood, that particular pleasure of bottling up your favorite thing in a can and cloistering it tightly throughout your career has yet evaded you. You have studied and now you have practiced and still there is no can. There is only tasks and moments and you know you are in the vicinity but the elusive concentrate still seems to graze by you and lightly mock as it zooms past, unable to offer you a staircase for a complete climb inside.

At this point, young adults usually attempt to alleviate the vacancy by coming together with friends and discussing. Nowadays, much of this can be done online through digital social media but back just a few years ago, people still preferred to get together in bars and talk over the whole thing. Work, colleagues and ambitions.

Talking does work. Either through books or through friends in conversation, poignant explanations of the nature of life and of what we are pursuing come to the surface. Most of us have had many
Eureka moments, when either we or someone we know or have been reading seems to solve a problem we've had a question we've been harboring. It doesn't have to be a personal question. Often, it is not. It is bigger, broader and more satisfying: so that's why architecture works this way. Or doesn't. That's why I like to wake up at six rather than at 8. Oh, that's how behavioral economics controls small market. Aha moments are everywhere and they feel so satisfying that, for a brief moment, we feel as if we have arrived: we have achieved the closest proximity we have to the subject we were interested in. We have asked THE question and a satisfying answer has rung back.
But almost as soon as the words have been spoken or read, the void of distance returns. As if we were on the latter to the inside of the cave and just as we saw inside and would enter, the entire thing vanished like a mirage. So, while we still have its vision in our minds, some of us turn to writing about it. If studying a thing and practicing a thing and hashing a thing out with our friends doesn't get us completely inside it then perhaps putting what we know down on paper would.

That's solid: a piece of thinking we can at least always refer back to if we ever forget what it feels like to have put our finger on the main gist of the matter. This is sometimes called journal writing. Sometimes it is reports or emails or personal manifestos. In extreme cases, this kind of attempt turns into a book of personal philosophy or of a memoir: What I learned from my time on Wall Street. All manner of attempts are both put down on paper and consumed off the paper by readers and writers in an attempt at proximity to the situations we are curious about, knowledgeable about or longing for.
Writing works for a bit longer than talking, because, at the very least, it takes longer to produce and is, after all, physically permanent. Or can be.

But just as when you were sitting at your drawing board, enjoying moments of professional serenity, sketching beauty on paper and, the moment that you were done, your proximity to your profession vanished, just so, in the writing about it, for those who chose to do so, the moment you are finished with the effort, you are alone again. Not really an architect. Not carrying the insights you brought forth with you on your back. You are free from all the load that you have just produced, what you did not want to be free from. What, indeed, you thought that, in the exposition of, you would have more permanently weaved into the texture of your personality, a permanence that had been the object of the exercise. And, despite the very deep dive you may have taken within the study, practice, writing, reading and talking about said subject - or moment or question - at the time that you cease talking, musing, writing or practicing it, its presence disappears. At least it disappears from being attached to the surface of your skin. It becomes a subject again, to be broached at a distance, to be drawn ever closer, once again and all over, through effort and erudition.

It's as if proximity to fields of study or to the poignant moments that make professions appealing to us is tethered to a rubber band. You can pull on the rubber band and you will bring the fullness of it closer to you but as soon as you let go which you inevitably must, either to take a breath or stir the chicken or get back to work, it snaps into that distant spot that it seems to occupy, taunting you again with its remove and asking for yet another get together in which wine, conversation and maybe some napkin notes bring the satisfaction of proximity more nearby.

Possibly, fields of research have a different relationship than this to their areas of interest. If the main job, every day, is to design experiments that, through slow, measured tenure ask the questions that hold the promise of unveiling some fundamental truth about life and planet, then maybe, since the question-asking is so spread out over time, the gratification is never-ending as well. The rubber band is never snapped back because it has not yet been pulled out all the way. Yet, as pleasant as it would be not to have rebound, it must also be unsatisfying to a move at a speed that is beneficial to the collection of knowledge but not very beneficial to radical conjectures and quick answers, which our interest in climbing whole-bodied into the areas of our interest requires.
For most of the rest of us, the recourse is simply to do it again. Get together again. Go over the main points again. Was Goethe right ore was Nietzsche right. Is architecture really an art and what is the final nature of design, once and for all. Once and for all but not for all, because as soon as the party is over, so is the sense that we have solved any mysteries. As soon as we are done reading the essay and go put on our slippers for bed, we feel that, if we want to figure out that thing that the writer talked about, we must read the essay again. As if only in the act of reading, only in the act of talking, of writing of kissing do we experience the thing we are interested in and there is no sticking power to its surface. We can never walk inside it and have it stick around our body like a bag that we, from thereon out carry forth and feel permanently.

There is certainly a neuroscientific explanation for this. Some circuit is released from duty the moment you cease to engage it, being necessary for some other critical function, like keeping your balance or seeing depth. Bartenders must know all about this as patrons repeat the same stories and fixating philosophies week after week. Bartenders and wives and husbands. Friends and colleagues and children. We all know it and we still somehow think that the next time we have a chance to, we will settle the question once and for all since last time didn't seem to stick. No doubt engaging a brain circuit that, in the next moment, will be cleared for use in our swallowing of our hot wing and soda.

 

Certainty I Know

As we grow up, we learn to trust our own instincts. We like this dress and not that one. This person seems all right.  That one, not so much. We learn to believe that our judgment is accurate. At least as far as our own needs are concerned. You were right about that creepy guy in math class. You were right about those first-grade shoes. They still look adorable in the pictures.

So it is unsettling when, as we grow even older, the reverse insight beings to seep in through experience. That dress you bought on sale that you were sure you would never wear comes into its own. Years down the road, it is the perfect staple to one notable summer. That guy that maybe you didn't love at first sight? He's the guy you end up with. We often hear couples say that their relationship was...unexpected at best.

What is it about our ability to predict how we may feel about or like something that changes with time? From amorphous at birth to certain by age 14 to "I didn't see that coming" in later adulthood.

Normally, this adult-onset uncertainty is called wisdom. Or rather, the awareness that you should not be so hasty to judge or be certain is wisdom. And, usually, it's a nice surprise. Hey, I didn't know I'd ever love that dress. But even when it's pleasant, this turn-about throws me. I end up asking: what else am I certain about that is a mistake. What am I missing that I should be relishing? All because I trust that I am a self-directing person who knows his mind?

Tina Fey says in Bossypants, as others have done, that to say Yes to situations in life is, at the very least, a good exercise and, at best, a fruitful way to personal success.

So why is it so antipathic to the way many of us function? Perhaps that early certainty expands into areas it should occupy. Perhaps, our eye-on-ourselves attempts too much control. Maybe we go from feeling ourselves out and going, "Hm, I'm round and red and bouncy" to "I'm round and red and bouncy and I want to steer the winds this way so that, when I roll down this valley, A, B and C will happen."

I'm sure that's how I go about it. And maybe therein lies my mistake. That is why I will be surprised by T-shirts people give me that I don't think I will ever wear that become a staple the following week. (See pic.) That is why when I do say Yes - since I am open to suggestion - I end up liking people I wouldn't have known and diverging on interesting and meaningful paths.

I will never be able to relinquish complete control. The fact that I understand my personal properties (a bouncy ball) is not enough for me to trust that, between the terrain I'm on and my psycho-physical attributes, the road will take care of itself. I believe in this purist ideology in principle. I believe that who you are and where you are determines what happens and that too much interest in exerting control over a situation is futile. But I guess I feel as if the truly have your bouncy and other properties be expressed so that the terrain will respond to them optimally, they need to be bronzed and buffed and, certainly, overtly expressed. Maybe that's where most of our interest in personal control lies. Maybe we all understand that we can't fight the forces of our environments and nature, but keep fighting for the proper expression of our abilities, tendencies and personality.

So the wisest of all things would be to understand that the ground will not bend for you but understand also that you will not know how it hits unless you are in your proper shape. If you are a red bouncy ball, you have to be all blown up and smoothly shined or the terrain will respond to the rough, underinflated circumstances you offer. Beyond that, saying Yes is nothing more than rolling down the hill. And, honestly, once begun, who can stop the motion. Maybe the real question is do any of us really say No to anything. Or even, can we. ?

 

Modern Stretch

a Brice Marden, "Untitled 3"

There are a lot of questions asked about the validity of what we call modern art.  Lines on canvas. Abstractions.  In the one camp are supporters - enthusiasts - who see value and maybe truth and beauty in abstract painting.  In the other camp are the scoffers, both adamant antagonists and quizzical romantics.  Why can't all art be something, say something?  Make me feel good or bad or just feel.  A sad girl in a chair.  Napoleon Bonaparte, majestic but with the undertones of schizophrenic apoplexy that you know must have driven his crusades. Why can't visual art be visual, like life?

The answer to this question can be revealed through artist Brice Marden's talk at the Tate Modern Museum in London in May of 2012.  Though his own words are also poignant, Marden cites another artist, Marc Chagall (1887-1985), who had said, that "the ultimate aim of painting is not decorative beauty but truth," which truth, "must not be confused with formal resemblance." Formal resemblance, he had said, presents only appearance while truth captures an essence.

This dichotomy between resemblance and essence exists also in science.  The now classic conundrum of our effort to look in on the tiny matters of nature is that we cannot look without disturbing.  Indeed, physicists will now casually say that the instrumentation is part of the experiment.  That is, part of the natural system of which it also attempts to note a record. In order to "see" an electron, we must register its mark somewhere.  In order for it to make mark, it needs to collapse from a wave state to a particle state.  In order to collapse, it needs to collide.  And so, to count one, we need to put up an electro-sensitive screen and fire what we believe to be electrons at it.  If we succeed, we see only the mark the element we harnessed made in the environment we gave it.  Clearly, without the screen it would not have registered and we know now that it would not even have collapsed.  So, our experiment has quite literally produced an outcome that would have been different - would have looked different - if registered in some other way.

And  yet, the energy value of such an electron, no matter whether measured or not, has a distinct property.  Even if the electron is in the form of a wave and extends out into space infinitely in all directions, it still has an essence.  Or, more precisely, its interaction with other energy states has a particular character.  This is what allows us to use a definitive, singular pronoun to describe something that is more like wind than like a marble.  Because if we stop it it allows us to measure its energy value, we agree that we will call this value an electron and the other value a proton or a photon. So, to use the artist's language, essence exists even if semblance is not its mirror image, if we cannot count on the image housing the essence.

Perhaps this general flow of universal everywhereness of electric and other energy is what artists who throw paint on canvas or lines on canvas are trying to convey.  And may be what they  mean when they say that to see an electron or to draw one is not to engage truth.

I would argue that in larger systems, such as girls sitting in chairs, what you see is closer to what is than it is in elemental systems.  Because we have learned to recognize a human being by the expressions on her face, to portray those emotions is to say something real about her.  And, if we agree that a portrait is maybe a portrait of an emotion rather than of an individual, then the emotion that lives in the semblance of the person is both what is visual and what is essential.

But what Brice Marden points to in his Tate talk is still true:  art is here to "accentuate the validity of vagueness."  To remind us that we cannot characterize an ocean wave by the splash it makes with our body, and which splash we may be inclined to paint for sentimental reasons.  Art is here to remind us that that wave has a long and involved natural history and that, if we dare to call it a wave at all rather than the effect of distant forces interacting with a system of topography, winds, currents and temperature, then, at the very least, we should not paint it as one.