Note to Me

Before you plan a day involving errands at the Post Office, DMV, and the bank - check to see if it's a HOLIDAY. 

Reduced to Basics

When I visited the Smithsonian Arts and Industry Museum one of the exhibits we walked through was the Human Genome Project.  We all know about DNA, that it is composed of two long strand of sugar connected by paired combinations of four nitrogen bases.  Even more restricting the four bases only combine guanine with cytosine, and adenine with thymine.So in essence all your DNA is made up of GC alternating with TA pairs.And yet, for all the many similarities that DNA preserves across humanity, there are more than 6 billion unique individuals on the earth today.

Fiction writers learn that all stories are variations of the same few plots.  Depending on which teacher you follow there are 3 or 7 or maybe nine.  I have a book that lists 77 masterplots, but it freely admits that many are no more than subsets and expansions of the basic ideas.  Yet out of these few structures come all the stories you've ever heard.

Mortimer Adler undertook to outline the Great Ideas of Civilization some 7 decades back.At the time that he first compiled his list, he included 102 ideas.Since then he has added one.The Great Ideas derive from the Great Books of the Great Conversation which has been conducted across millennia.You don’t have to have read all the Great Books to be familiar with the Great Ideas, they permeate our logic, our language and sense of what is.People who have never picked up John Locke will argue that there is such a thing as Property and that a Property Owner has the right to receive benefit from use of his property even if he himself doesn’t perform the labor that produces the benefit.(In other words, you don’t have to know Locke to be a Capitalist.)

But Locke’s articulation of the idea wasn’t our first introduction to it.All the Great Ideas are found in the writings of ancient Greece.Mark Twain said, “The ancients stole all our ideas from us …”For example, any discussion of Change must begin with the writings of Heraclitus who predates Plato and Aristotle but said that the only constant of the Universe is Change.

My imagination has been caught by the suggestion of my friend that I consider for my next book an introduction to basic philosophical ideas and concepts.Not an Introduction to Philosophy such as you might encounter during your Freshman year at any University, but a brief and simple discussion of Ideas.Why do we ask these questions and what difference do they make to the way we live? Adler attempted to cover 22 of the basic ideas in a PBS series with Bill Moyers (and as an aside, if I could have traded lives with anyone from the past century it would be Bill Moyers, that man has gotten to sit down and participate in deep conversation with everyone I would have wanted to talk with.)When Adler’s series was edited and published in a book, it covered 522 pages not counted appendices.Yikes.

But then again – how many people will pick up a 522 page volume?How many Junior High students would read it?I think that’s my target audience.Junior High aged people who are at the brink of a lifetime in which they will be wrestling with the Great Ideas whether they know it or not.I’m intrigued by the thought of arming them with just enough of an understanding to give them tools for starting their journey.So that’s my Sunday morning thought.

I tried commenting yesterday and it didn’t go so well.Some of the pages wouldn’t load, some of the comments wouldn’t load, and on at least one site a comment that I submitted, disappeared.I’m NOT griping about Xanga, oh, no, I’m not.After 2+ weeks away, I’m grateful to Xanga that it’s here.Plus, knowing the problems that I had commenting yesterday, I’m going to assume that all the many people who are subscribed to my site tried to comment on ME as well, and that if only the stars were aligned properly, I’d have had hundreds of comments in the counter …

Return to Real

One of the things that preoccupied my thinking on this trip was the question what's really real?  I visited monuments, historic sites, cemeteries, battlefields, I held in my hand bullets from the Civil War, and I saw museum pieces that spanned eons.  Which of those things were the most real?  I looked at the faces of the other people who like me were looking at these important notes from our collective past.  Some interested, some bored, and some who seemed to know much more about what they were looking at than I did.  I wondered if the monuments and artifacts were more real to some people than they were to others.

I wondered as I stood in the Lincoln memorial, what those words meant to others in the group.  Lincoln said that the earth at Gettysburg was hallowed by the blood spilt there.  But is the ground really hallowed at all?  To hallow, to be hallowed is to be set aside for a particular purpose.  For what purpose could we say that the ground at Gettysburg is set aside?  Memory?  Whose memory?  I don't remember Gettysburg.  I can study it, I can try to understand what happened there.  But I don't remember. 

I stood before monuments in a cemetery and realized that many of them are so weathered they can no longer be read.  Even the nicest, tallest, most ornate of them are no longer markers of the lives they represent.  They are just pieces of stone.

Over the past decade, I've heard a lot of buzz about the need to create a legacy.  Of course, this is nothing new, people have from the dawn of time hoped to make some mark that would cause them to live in memory.  And there are some people who seem to have inscribed their names on the fabric of time.  From Aristotle, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Marc Antony, to Galileo, Erasmus, Aquinas, Michaelangelo, Hitler, Stalin and Churchhill some people seem to have risen above the stream to achieve a legacy.  They point us toward principles larger than a single human life: power, lust, love, hate, destruction, peace, perseverance, wisdom, piety, discovery and beauty.  But do we really remember them at all?  We don't know how they moved, how they talked, how they laughed, or cried, we don't know whether they were slovenly or neat, we don't konw whether they were the kind of people we'd want as neighbors ... well, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have wanted to live next to Hitler or Stalin, but you get the point.  Even those from recent history are obscured.  They left behind a name.  They left behind a legend.  They themselves, are gone. 

I want the real in my life.  I want my life to be real, to mean something.  And I know that I want it to have meaning to more than just myself.  I want to be real to other people.  I want to know that there are those around me who know me, who love me, and who are real to me as I am real to them.  How long does reality have to last in order to be real?  Are the only REAL things those that are permanent?  Because I've just taken a quick look around at some fairly impressive things that were certainly intended to be permanent, and I see them fading before my eyes.     

I feel that there are some people from history that are more easily "known" than others.  Those who left a great body of words that explain their thoughts and feelings give us more to hold, more to relate to.  But no volume of words is sufficient to encapsulate a life.  If the only thing left of me someday is this journal I've kept on Xanga, a person could get a limited sense of who I was.  But they wouldn't know me. 

Some of you who've dealt with my existential forays before probably know where I'm heading now.  I came home with the conviction that the legacy of my life is not important.  The only thing that's real is to be who I am right now.  Right where I am.  To be as real as I can be with the people who are real to me. 

As I read that last bit, I'm realizing that it could seem as though I'm saying that the people I haven't met in real life aren't real to me.  That's not true.  You are real to me.  You influence me.  You relate to me.  In an odd way, some of the people who are the MOST real to me are those I've spent the least time with in real life. 

I was so tired yesterday.  I unloaded the car, did a few important errands (got my kids' haircut) and then just pretty much collapsed.  Tim walked in the door at 5:40 and I was asleep in bed by 5:45.  I slept over 12 hours.  Twelve hours in which I'm pretty sure a butterfly dreamed she was me ... and it was real. 

I'm BACK!!!!!

I woke up early yesterday and drove through the pre-dawn hour in fog and darkness.  By the time the sun was peeking down on me, I was entering the Mountains of West Virginia.  Such a beautiful state.  Bright sun shines down across the valleys on one side of the mountain and then you go around the curve to deep shadows, heavy fog and mysterious grottos.  The sort of place that I wished I could take time to pull over and explore or perch on a moss covered stone for thinking.  But I had miles and miles to go,  about 600 if I figured it correctly.  I forgot to reset the trip meter, so I'm kind of guessing. 

It was a long day of driving - about 13 hours not counting the time I stopped off in Ohio to visit with lovingmy40s.  We had a lot to talk about, but don't worry, I still have SO much more bottled up inside me from all the things I've seen, experienced and thought about during the past two weeks that there will be blogs galore as I work through it.  If I do it right, you are going to see things that will make you laugh, make you wonder, and make you wish you had friends as super-cool as mine.  I am absolutely the most BLESSED person I know. 

I have been spoiled, indulged, and generally treated like a Queen for two solid weeks.  You wanna see?  This is from my room at Mary's house.  I was greeted with my favorite dark chocolates and my friend even learned how to arrange flowers just to create this beautiful piece for me. 

Oh, Really?

Like most Americans on vacation I've been sitting around comtemplating the deep questions of life. You know, where can we do lunch, how many miles will I drive today, and are there restrooms in sight. But outside those concerns, I must admit I've been distracted by the lighter questions such as "What is really - REAL?"

In the Smithsonian Museum of Art and Industry there is an exhibit of the works of Walter Anderson. he worked in multiple mediums and dealt with themes that range from whimsical to profound. On the wall beside several paintings of birds, I found this quote, "The bird flies and in that fraction of a fraction of a second, man and bird are real ... and he, man exists, and he is almost as wonderful as the think he sees."

Okay, now I've been well and truly indoctrinated to the Cartesian view of reality as the objective and observable fact of the matter. Anderson's more holistic view of reality turns that around and also elevates the human spirit in a breathtakingly simple juxtoposition of a few careful words. Can you tell that I was stunned into brainlash? Follow me for just another second.

De Cartes said, "I think therefore I am." We are all familiar with that quote, but he went a little further in his essay. The full conclusion he drew is, "I can be certain that I exist only when I am thinking about my existence because in that moment, my existence is real even if only in my thoughts." From there we have gone further and further down the path of elevating that which is thought of, considered, and observed into our agreed upon reality, while minimizing the individual experience and feeling to a place where we are almost embarrassed to assert anything that we discover in that place as "true."

Anderson says that the most real we can be is in the moment when our spirit is completely engaged in wonder. And even better? His exhibit is right beside the sign pointing to the restrooms.