Silence

As I spend time in popular coffee houses, I notice that silent people seem to have more fun.

The last time I ran this test, I saw a woman of ambiguous middle age, with curly brown hair and no makeup, who sipped with quick deliberation from her iced tea while working on a little white computer.  

I imagined that she was involved with something administrative but fun.  Like arranging children’s book layouts or considering microeconomics.

Then she entered a conversation. She agreed with her interlocutor.  "Yes, I don't understand how..."

She could have been on topic with her work, but the very act of verbalizing anything, seemed to crumple the charm of the quieter time.  The depressing implication was that casual observation  of "silent waters run deep" is unreliable.

As with so much in human perception, assumptions come from the observer or even from the act of observing itself and not from properties of the subject, the "silent" one.

Henry James said that a reader's imagination is better suited to filling in the details of a story than are a writer's words.*  Imagination, in being broad, can be more accurate than language.  Imagination works with possibilities,  vague notions which, while unclear, are full of scope and complete in feeling.

Like matter in the form of wave rather than particle, a reader's experience is everywhere at once.  In this way, it misses nothing and, as James will say, delivers much better effect:  stronger fear, finer sight, deeper meaning. When imagination collides with language, it forces the condensation of a point. It spits out a word or a sentence, an outlined meaning.  It eschews vagueness, collapses into clarity and diminishes emotion.

This property of language to diminish experience is why fiction, the art built of language, works by showing rather than telling.   A storyshows a lively party rather than saying there had been one. Fiction wants the reader to dicide whether the party was lively by experiencing it. Fiction is not its plot summary.

Like an infant's brain, over-rich in synaptic pathways, a reader's imagination incorporates possibilities   without chosing a single path.  The protagonist may have looked away.  Or may have wished to have looked away. Or may have thought about it. Without choosing, a reader incorporates all possibilities into the story. 

Like the trajectory of a moving swing, whose character is defined by the motion rather than by any single position, imagination relies on sweaping through thought to get the full picture.

Words, as helpful as they are, collapse that sweaping path. They ask the wave-particle of imagination to fall into its single, tiny circumferance.   Sure, we see it more clearly that way, but we now removed all exogenous possibilities. Wave collapse is when waves die and particles are born. As far as we know particles are what we call collapsed possibility. In other words, non-possibilities, no longer stretched in all directions, now a single, limp spot. Dead.

If something has to give in this scenario, I would have it be the words.

* in “The Art of Fiction”

Valence Procrastination

In his 2012 book The Art of Procrastination, John Perry suggests that there is a lot of value in what we do when we are putting off important projects.  In between getting to the project and now, a lot of the work that really  matters gets done.

More rigidly, this amounts to something like:  in order to get important things done, we invent a project to contain the space around them. 

If you had an indefinite amount of time to putter around your computer and your coffee, there would be no structure to it, and, like empty space without a house, it would feel too vast and open to nestle down in.  So you put a parameter around your time.  You say, “by the end of the day, I must have accomplished half of A.” Now you have a boundary, a temporal home. 

You can function inside a home. You know how to do that.  Your space is between Now and “the end of the day,” and so you start to fill it. You check email, write that thank-you note, finally look up the address of the friend you had to buy a gift for after she moved away and now need to send it.   You get busy on a whole slew of to-dos.  John Perry is right.  They are all important.  Sometimes more important.  Often, they are the food you need to do a fine job on the Project that’s waiting at time X.

Most often, however, Project X is just an excuse.  It may be large and important and it may even be something you need to do, but it exists most directly as a temporal parameter within which your other tasks feel comfortable being filled.
This is called my theory of Valence Procrastination.  “Valence” for the outermost shell of an electron orbiting cloud.

Electrons fill the space around their atoms for the most part from innermost space to outermost, from close to the nucleus to farther out.  In the slightly larger atoms, however, electrons begin to “leave room,” as they fill the shells. They will fill the outermost sphere of an energy level first and then fill in below. 

In chemistry, this is taught an optimization of stability.  In order to fill the bucket proper, you first need to define the bucket.

Perhaps something similar happens with human perception of time. In being most fndamentally a measure of change, time – space-time – is most certainly not linear. In treating it as linear, we follow lines that curve under our feet, like the paths of light rays that travel “straight” until their embedded space track bends with them.

Maybe spacetime, in being one single property and holding all non-entropic impurities like atoms and people, has only a few rules:  same for valence shells and to-do lists, and we people have just been too busy or barbarous or hungry to notice.

Bicycle Math

In a recent episode of MinutePhysics, Max, the
storyteller-producer, asks, Is the universe entirely mathematical?  He thinks Yes.

He concedes that people fall in love and call sheep ‘cute’ and experience other properties that aren’t mathematical, but, at the end of the day, a sheep’s electrons don’t care if it is cute or if they are cute.

True, but you know who cares?  Other sheep.  Yes, they are electrical too, but, unlike the directives of an electron, they are called on by biology to survive. They are called on by the chemical rulebook of the initial replicators whose activities included protection and reproduction to sustain their existence as long as possible and as well as possible. 

In this survival directive lies the crux of why, despite being strictly physical, life does not feel that way.  If we didn’t need to live on, we wouldn't need to eat or to see food as good (tasty).  We wouldn't need to make friends (protection) or avoid enemies (danger).  If living on was not a sought-after outcome, none of the subjective characteristics with which animals imbue their surroundings would exist. There would not “love,” “cute,” “mean,” or “tasty.”

If you don’t care what happens to you, you are mathematical.  If you care what happens to you, you are mathematical with a feedback loop.  The questions the loop tests for are:
1.)  Are you in homeostasis? (Are you living?)
2.)  If you are, in which direction is the rate of change of the condition?  Is homeostasis destabilizing or increasing? 

Any event that would decrease homeostasis is perceived by creatures sensitive to the state as negative, and any event that would stabilize decline or increase robustness is perceived as positive: food, water, shelter, friendship, mates.

The world is full of “cute” and “ugly” for mathematical forms with the sustainability directive because having a cause like survival requires gauging surroundings.  An electron which cares whether it is free or bound would need to decide whether an object is positive or negative for it based on the needs of its directive result. . 

Biology, in asking for longevity from its structures, must ask for value judgments.  Heavy, complicated, endless value judgments.  And there we have the world of people.  The world of “Too late!”  “Hurray!" and "Ouch."

Outside of biology, math works everywhere - no problem. Inside biology, math is on a bicycle, headed in a direction.  It’s still Math but it has to not fall off and so it pays special attention to the road.

Deferred Growth

In a March 10th opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, history professor Gary Cross laments the expansion of perennial adolescence, of “the sweet spot of youth,” wherein personal freedom mixes with peer-group support to create comfort too good to leave. 

He refers to historical trends in marriage, working life and childrearing to explain the popularity of what I will call middle adulthood.  Economic pressures and the need to differentiate from previous generations drive the video-game culture and drive up the age at which adults commit to relationships, bear children or establish a career.

While Gary Cross suggests that we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water in condemning prolonged adolescence, he does warn that self-enclosed focus on  youth causes us to ignore the connection to the generations of the past, losing “intergenerationality,” which “creates a more shallow culture for all of us.”

There is a superficiality to our culture.  However, it isn’t clear that in the 50s, when people married “on time,” and settled early, young adults were any more in tune with the plight of their parents or with aging than they are today.  They were just otherwise engaged than middle adults are today.  They worked manufacturing or sales jobs, within the government or military or in business.  They differentiated their own youth from the past times of their parents by buying appliances, pre-cooked food and plastic containers. 

It is a human predisposition to be unable to connect with people otherwise situated than yourself.  Especially in time.  For a working 60 year old, imagining that he or she will one day be retired and 80 is slightly unsettling and difficult to connect to.  So it is for all of us all across the age spectrum.

So, while I support the article’s observations as valid, I’m not sure that the deleterious effects of today’s youthification are unique to the subcultures present today.

I think the matter is more homogenous than that. 

I think that what people seek is all the same.  Children and adults want comfort, security, engagement and contact with others.  For kids, school provides work, engagement and encouragement.  Home provides security and care.  For adults, jobs provide both:  something to do and an income with which to secure one’s needs.

When it used to be that workers found employment and stuck with it for the majority of their working life, this position as their parent.  The company and its rules were the adult’s new home the way his parents’ house had been his first. 

As the years past the golden age of this kind of employment waned, and as people found out that companies had much less loyalty toward workers than parents had toward children, the abandon with which adults committed to a job in the manner they had committed to their parents’ home as children also broke apart. 

The loss of the American employment fidelity was the permanent break up of the American adult home.  

Once employees realized that the corporations they were subliminally treating as parents did not have the commitment to their health and wellbeing that they had also subliminally expected, a sort of random scattering began.  Workers from every level of professionalism scattering like seeds in the wind, looking for the better current, the warmer climate, the richer soil.  Looking, essentially, for the corporation they thought existed.  Sometimes, they build their own secure environment.  Freelancing works by putting a person within a community of professionals who support and employ each other.  Agents, clients, writers, consultants, editors, contractors.

Coupling the infidelity of the long-term employer with the random success of scattered professionals, a general feeling arose of limitless possibilities.  Of being able to find the comforts of security of success on one’s own terms.  The self as a corporation.  Education and training come in handy here, but even people with limited erudition can, through effort and ingenuity, generate their own supportive soil.

In this way, the rubric of the new professionalism is no different than the morays of the past:  work hard and focus and you will be rewarded.  But the risks inherent in the new model are greater, and the delayed adulthood so evident today is a way to mitigate this risk.  No home?  No child?  No liability.   A floating seed looking for the perfect soil cannot float if dragging lots of weight.

I understand that Gary Cross is calling into question the nature of this floating period, not its existence.  He is asking why it has lengthened.  He wants to know what people are doing en route.   He thinks that, in the transition from parents’ soil to their own perfect clime’, adults are shutting their eyes to the rich heritage of their past, to the warm of their culture and the context of time. 

Maybe they are, but, once it was clear that companies won’t care for employees the way parents care for children, the stakes of survival were heightened and the possibilities of perfectionism joined the state of uncertainty in a mix that leads to what may be characterized as a primordial soup of professional development:  many different molecules swimming around in a salty sea.  The possibility of a perfect chemical bond luring enticingly nearby while the likelihood of dismal obscurity rivals its glory. 

With so much open chance around, the agents interested in grounding in the middle decrease.  While still a majority in number, working adults who settle into home and marriage early are fewer today than in the past because the essential elements all people need have been de-certified.  Life programs no longer standard in transition between first home and second give youth passing through adulthood more steps to go through than one or two graduations and a walk to the office to see your boss’s boss.

In the search for security, engagement and connection, children drift into a world today that is devoid of companies which promise them what their parents did.  They are asked to look within themselves for the values that will build solidity, that will build a strong career and a secure social life.  And in being asked to look within, we are asking that they build as they go.  From scratch and with all the benefit of our engrossed media consumption.  They have a microscope, it is true.  And a telescope and data.  They have what they need.  But it still takes time.  So let’s watch them and applaud as necessary.    

No wrong

When people uncover the unified theory, it may become clear why errors in trajectory are possible. 

It seems that, when a particle “falls toward” the ground, for instance, it is exploring the possibilities of moving in other directions at every moment and, at every moment, if it does continue to fall, no forces that alter its trajectory are present.  If there are such forces, its trajectory will be altered.

In the animal kingdom, up to the introduction of the social species, it seems this rule of precision in trajectory of behavior continues to apply.  The E coli bacteria that swim through human intestines flap their flagellum in the direction of higher concentrations of sugar and in the direction opposite to toxins. 

Sensing environmental cues and reacting to them is of course central to all life and, if we anthropomorphize the inanimate and think of their reactions too, to non-living physicality as well.

It is tempting to suggest, given this general impression, that errors in trajectory exist in all situations, perhaps grounded in the statistical probabilities that govern the underlying quantum mechanics of everything, but that they become noticeable to anyone who’s watching only when matter is so large that mechanics has to morph into biology, biology in neurology and neurology into behavior.  At that point, the purity of trajectories, though still largely in place, sustains hits of social will and stubbornness that, if excluded from the system, act as disrupters.

It is this double game, then, that social species play with their sociability and their brains: On the once hand, there is path of the particle.  And on the other  hand there is the path of the particle with an attitude.  If you separate attitude from particle, you will have a system in which there is a Should.  The particle should have gone that way, but, because of attitude, it did not.

If you do not separate attitude from particle, you have particle-attitude which now is going in exactly the direction in which it properties suggest it should go.

Because, people can separate attitude from particle, they love to talk about what if and what has-its. If it hadn’t been for such and such, I could have done this and so. So it is often the case that time goes by in people’s lives which, although perfectly fitting their trajectory according to human-physics, somehow does not match their ambition for their trajectory. 

Often people mistake temporal displacement for misguided trajectory, too.  They think that, since they are not yet where they would like to be, their current situation not real or not right or not as real or right as it might be when, in fact, their situation is perfectly right.  It is just not at the temporal development they are entertaining in their mind. 

These people eventually arrive at the point in time they have been envisioning, and we say about them that they thought their way through to their position when, in fact, all they did was wait for it, while traveling in the direction of their forward motion.

It is common in our world to associate the word “wait” with static nothingness.  But if we apply “wait,” we will be forced to associate it with the inertial-reference system, a system in which there is no change of momentum from the point of view of the system from which we are observing it:  no addition or subtraction of mass or energy.  But these inertial systems are not without velocity from every perspective and do not necessarily contain zero energy.  They are therefore not immune to suddenly running into something that causes them to give off or accept energy.  In other words, to lose their inertial state.  

So it is with the people who “see” their future. Their personal store, their directionality and their environment create a system that determines their trajectory.  Since the part of the system that is the person’s sensory cognition and processing is accepting the data about trajectory and directionality, he or she is often able to predict an accurate future position.  And, often, he is also eager to jump to it without having to pass the intervening distance, causing all sorts of discontent.

Too much discontent can alter the cargo of the system and affect its trajectory.  Whether the results of this alteration are pleasing to the cognition that is watching them is a matter subjective predicament but, in any event, the oscillations between what is contained in the system core and what makes up its affective environment are continuous, microstructurally infinitesimal and – how do I say this nicely – permanent.  Permanent in the mathematical sense of effecting the point of following development.

Since physicists agree at the moment that time is the “dimension” that we only experience in one direction unlike what is allowed in the other dimensions, presently what has happened in the past is set and, because it is set, rigidifies the moments that immediately follow.  That is to say, each moment passed greatly limits the flexibility of the experience of the following moments.  The more closely adjacent said past moment is to the forward moment removed, the greater its rigidifying influence.

However, if we trust in math, we may admis the past, as we know about it, if not flexible is at least a skeletal roadmap of the most likely of trajectories and that mistakes in behavior, as in physics are oxymoronic.  “Mistake” is the word people use for events whose probability their human cognition miscalculated.  Or whose probability their cognition calculated correctly but their super-cognitive interests disliked – possibly because of a resulting survival disadvantage, which is rather removed from physical properties, life being the only physical form we know of that has an interest in sustaining certain physical states over others.  Living states over non-living.

Unless or until we are able to incorporate life’s survival interests in the scheme of physical determinism, if I may use such a maligned word, there will always be meta-levels to experience that are neither calculable nor understandable through the models of physical positioning.  Even through metaphor.  But once we have mastered the algorithms that naturally include and derive interest in the preservation of certain physical states – self interest – then the dynamics this interest causes in the kinks of trajectories will cease to befuddle or upset people. 

Without upset, we would have many more personal courses that follow the curvatures of circumstance and please the observers that nervously occupy them.

Contact

Sometimes this trait is complained about and sometimes it is pursued:  contact with information seems to hold both a sweet spot for speakers and their variants and to be the bane of social intercourse:  the repetitious family member, the boastful neighbor.  And yet this need for people to express what is on their mind or to offer a conclusion of certitude is so strong that they will do it despite possible negative consequences, fully in the face of the knowledge that they have done it before, and prostrate across the world, unapologetic of their social sins, as if it is not they who are thus conversing but a force external.

This force external is also the contact writers make with reality.  It is what brings the world into their pen and out to their readers.  Experience enters their mind and exits same, meanwhile joining the daily disparate threads of information into a whole.  A rich, meaningful muff which, while not crisp in its circumference, has the virtue of presence. 

So when your uncle tells his dog story over Thanksgiving yet again or when your cousin recites tasks she is committing to for her children, they are making order of what is otherwise a mess.  As the author Donna Tartt says*, the writing life is satisfying, because it is filled with little moments that put information in its place.  The life of the fiction writer, as she also says, must be especially satisfying, since it adds a dimension to clarifying experience.  An extra dimension to the satisfaction of nonfiction writers whose joy lives in noticing and pointing out. 

Building a story, in addition to offering contact with sweet spots of clarity, offers the opportunity to sculpt clarity as if from scratch.  To see and notice as you go.  To adjust based on what makes the most watertight fit around the experience you are focusing on. 

Reading this kind of sculpted fiction, which is to say real fiction, is like taking a drug.  You read it again and again.  And every time it is sweet.  You repeat passages from books.  Or repeat your favorite work story, because, every time there is clarity.  Once is not enough.  Or rather, once is enough for its own duration.  The brain does not store the satisfaction of clarity into memory for continuous access.  It does not spread it around experience as a permanent feature.  The clarity must be accessed again in order to be experienced.   Hence our culture’s endless hashing out of the same basic human problems:  how much love is there and who dominates whom.

True to people’s hard, physical nature, it seems that, in order to experience truth from insight, we must simply hear it again.  The result is no less satisfying, but it is occasionally disturbing to listeners.  Especially if the insight is personal and therefore not as much fun for listeners as for the teller. 

This mental characteristic may be the culprit for why we repeat conversations at dinner and why, despite the repetition, company remains poignant.  To love the world through proximity, it seems, means to require constant contact with it.   Or, in the state of our current psychological presets, constant, short bursts of illumination that flash, with healthy self-satisfaction and no regard to originality, often on the very same spot. 

Wasn’t it the director James Cameron who said that, no matter what of kind movie he starts to make, it always ends up being about his mother?

* In February 8, 2014 interview with Charlie Rose