100 and counting

Big Frank has been recently made aware that this post is his 100th blogging message. So that number seemed to invite a quantitative comment. What Big Frank was thinking was that this number carried some significance and that called for something special. Then the thought came to him that this was just another number carrying no more signification than 49 or 82, or 24. Well, theoretically it’s just another number, but in fact it’s not just any old number. We invest some numbers with more significance than others: the 5s, the quarter markers (25, 50, 75), and the centuries (100, 200, 300), and the all of those numbers multiplied by 10, 100, 1000, etc. Those are the anniversaries that we mark in our birthdays: personal, institutional, national, etc. Those are happy numbers. We also have happy numbers that correspond to our desired weight, bank account balance, interest rate, wait times, waist line, cholesterol, blood pressure, restaurant bill, miles per gallon, temperature, etc. etc. And these last categories also have disappointing numbers that we count away from. However, the numbers that Big Frank thinks most obsesses are those connected with duration. In only 2, 5, 25 minutes, days, years I will acquire, be rid of, arrive at, figure out, pay off, or in some way satisfy some as desire. This counting takes place at regular intervals and is actually numbered off. The calculation is made, recalculated, counted out (often sotto voce), but like the calendars in old black and white films, in your mind the numerical milestones are counted forward in anticipation and counted backwards from the culmination of desire. It is not enough to have a desire – it needs to be placed within a quantitative sequence that one can then go in, from time to time, and walk around in taking steps – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; 4,000/5,000/6,000; January, February, March; Winter, Spring, Summer; 21nd, 23rd, 24th; 5:00 pm, 5:15 pm, 5:30 pm; 9th floor, 8th floor, 7th floor; Exit 87A, Exit 87B, Exit 91; and on and on. The clock never stop ticking; the centimeters; the degrees; the calendar pages turn; and the count no matter where you are, where you’ve been, or where you’re going – it never arrives at the end of the alphabet, nor the end of the calendar, nor the season that stops; no culminating point – none.

The Bad Muse & blogging

Big Frank is including a poem by Lawrence Raab from his book "What We Don't Know About Each Other". This poem was sent to Big Frank by his blogging buddy, Magne. It is is posted here because it seems appropriate to a lot of what Big Frank posts. As his brother, Big Fella, says: "Why don't you just send an e-mail to yourself?" Well, it's not the same for a lot of reasons. As Lawrence Raab puts it in his poem: ". . . yours/is the same old life a thousand people/ have had the good sense to keep to themselves". Well, Big Frank doesn't keep it to himself. He is selective: not everything gets deposited here (Big Frank will spare you the catalogue of what he doesn't post). Still, he is vulnerable to accusations of being under the influence of "The Bad Muse". But, while waiting for "The Good Muse" the posting will go on.

And with that . . . here is Raab's poem.

THE BAD MUSE

by Lawrence Raab

Calm down. No one's listening. Of course
you have the right to make mistakes.
Say anything you want, any dumb thing that
occurs to you. On the other hand,
it really does look bad, doesn't it?

And if anyone were foolish enough to print it
scorn and ridicule would be heaped upon you,
upon your family as well.
Think about them, if not yourself.
Someone in New Hampshire or California

is writing the important poem about history
at this very moment. Most of it
is done already. And this person
has had a life of great interest,
full of struggle and incident, whereas yours

is the same old life a thousand people
have had the good sense to keep to themselves.
Who wants to hear about what it was like
to turn forty, or the strange thing
your dog did last week? So relax.

Think of how good it will feel
to climb into bed and turn off the light.
And tomorrow is Sunday. You can read the papers,
go for a walk, cook outside. Friends will drop by.
Why not invite them all to stay for dinner?

And when the conversation gets really lively
and they're nodding in agreement
with everything you say, maybe someone
will ask you to tell that story—you know,
the one about the dog and the squirrel.

Your Dream Show

We write, direct, and act in our own productions. Well, this is a little trite when we think of it as a metaphor for life. You know the old saw - life's a stage where we all strut and fret etc. etc. However, when we look at this as reality it carries a little more weight, and this is nowhere more true than in your dreams. Here is where you are in complete control. The catch is, of course, that afterwards, or before, you can't analyze and second guess what you decided to do. Talk about being in the NOW, it seems to be nowhere more true than in your dreams.

In your waking life most often any kind of action that you take is preceded by plans with lots of alternatives, and then ultimately some kind of decision that often is delayed, changed, or even abandoned. And then, even when you do act upon it, there is your reaction to it. You might be proud of what you did, regret it, or even put a spin on it (consciously or not) so that it becomes more of what you would have liked it to be, or maybe even what you didn't want it to be (no sense in being rationale about this process - for it usually is not). Memory is its own story-teller, as often as not as far off the mark as perception - if there is such a thing as "the mark". However, in the dream there is no need to spin, no need to regret, no need be proud. It is almost as though the ego has been removed from the picture. Maybe the ego had some kind of input into the writing, directing and acting; if so a whole different part of you (let's call it the producer) made the calls and put the show (the dream) together. Who this producer is (that's a topic for another time), is beyond our understanding, and so we acknowledge that it was "only a dream", and we played our part(s), and mostly take pleasure in whether or not we even remembered what it was that we did.

It comes from many sides at once . . . or does it?

Big Frank has been thinking lately about the phenomenon of being exposed on many fronts at the same time by a particular idea. Does this mean anything? Well, Big Frank does not mean such common assaults as tighten your abs, take advantage of this credit card offer, or send your bank account number to a friendly former government employee in Nigeria in order to receive 10 million dollars. No, these are ideas that assault everyone at the same time everywhere. They have no particular significance to anyone. What about the idea that seems to pop out un-expectantly over and over again, from a variety of sources but seemingly aimed particularly you you?

Big Frank was reading a blog of the other regular attendee of the Spokane Weblogger’s meetup and on his blog there was a link to a philosopher’s page on which was a list of her favorite philosophy books. One of these books was David Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature. So Big Frank, never having read this, went out and bought it. In the opening pages of this book he came upon this: in section 3.5.2: "As to those impressions which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and ‘twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produc’d by the creative power of the mind, or are deriv’d from the author of our being.” Basically Hume was not going to address the physical causes in any detail, but rather examined the immediate object of the mind, which he believed was always something mental or internal.

Then in a recent issue of the New Yorker Big Frank was reading an article by Atul Gawande entitled “The Itch” and came across this idea of the separateness of reception from perception. The commonplace notion that reception = perception is rarely challenged (other than by philosophers), and if so with the kind of derision of Samuel Johnston’s refuting kick “I refute it thus”’ by which he claimed to refute Berkely’s notion that people do not know the external world, they only know their mental ideas of object. The article demonstrates how the mind itself without any external prompt creates perceptions that can linger for years, for example itches, and phantom limbs. Most amazingly, however, the article then shows how through a very clever manipulation of the mind these “misperceptions” can be removed. However, that can only happen through the creation of a counter misperception through a tricky set of mirrors. OK, so now Big Frank has been exposed, within two days, to views questioning the reliability of the reception = perception notions.

Then – here comes number three – an article in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books entitled: “How the Mind Works: Revelations” that reviews primarily two recent books by Jean-Pierre Changeux - The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge, and Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors: From Molecular Biology to Cognition. Once again the idea at the forefront of this review is that external reality is a construction of the brain. He even sites the same experiments mentioned in Gawande’s article: a therapeutic devise invented by the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran – mirror box therapy to rid patients of phantom limb pain.

There are more, but Big Frank has already pushed this blog entry to the limit. What does this all mean. Well, for Big Frank it means that he had better start paying attention to the external reality that he has constructed. The shared perception that we have with others is secure territory (perhaps); however, those uniquely personal constructs – and we have a ton of those – are what are interesting: memories of events, emotional readings of others, judgments, and by extension – dreams (the topic of the next blog), where the mind reigns supreme and the “perceptions” are interpreted as “real” as long as we are “in” the dream. When we are in the dream we grant the mind preeminence and when we awake we like to think that external reality holds sway, but in both cases there is an influence from the other: external reality colors our dreams, and our mind colors external reality. "Color" is a good word to choose because contrary to our visual experience there are no colors in external reality - only electromagnetic waves of differing frequencies. All of this, of course, has profound implications for representation, meaning, and memory.

Fading Into view

Big Frank has been thinking lately about the hidden beauty that surrounds us. This is sleeping beauty; the cloud that struts its stuff high above you in shifting shapes that goes unseen. This is like the perfect symmetry of the solid green leaves that dangle out of sight. This is the corner locked colors of that long-ago purchased picture looked at . . . when? This is the ambition/worry clouded view that overhangs our days. This is . . . the faded bluish-green paint on the weathered wood on that street two blocks from your house. William Carlos William can show you the way.

Pastoral

by William Carlos Williams

When I was younger

it was plain to me

I must make something of myself.

Older now

I walk back streets

admiring the houses

of the very poor:

roof out of line with sides

the yards cluttered

with old chicken wire, ashes,

furniture gone wrong;

the fences and outhouses

built of barrel staves

and parts of boxes, all,

if I am fortunate,

smeared a bluish green

that properly weathered

pleases me best

of all colors.

No one
will believe this

of vast import to the nation.

Chinese Jump

Poem [“At night Chinamen jump”]
by Frank O'Hara

At night Chinamen jump
on Asia with a thump

while in our willful way
we, in secret, play

affectionate games and bruise
our knees like China’s shoes.

The birds push apples through
grass the moon turns blue,

these apples roll beneath
our buttocks like a heath

full of Chinese thrushes
flushed from China’s bushes.

As we love at night
birds sing out of sight,

Chinese rhythms beat
through us in our heat,

the apples and the birds
move us like soft words,

we couple in the grace
of that mysterious race.

As Ron Padget wrote of this poem in his poem “Night Jump”: Frank O’Hara starts on “funny” and then goes on to write of love, mystery and of grace. Big Frank believes that this poem is a beautiful expression of the wonder and mystery and absurdity of life . . . the earthiness and the wonder, the humor and the joy of love and the grace that accompanies that coupling. It is even a little silly and that makes it all the better for its eschewing the solemnity of the coming together in love.