Loving what's next

In 1974, I made a trip to the local drug store to buy a couple of items.  The store was a mom and pop drug store.  There weren't any signs in the aisles to let me know where to get the items, so it took me a couple of minutes to find them.  I paid by check, so I had to write out by hand the six items required.  The cashier punched actual push buttons with numbers on them on the register.  When the cashier had finished punching in the prices of all the items, (s)he would punch the total button and a bell would ring for the cash drawer to be pushed forward from the bottom of the register ("ringing up the item" was the phrase used).  The total due showed on metal tabs in a window at the top of the register.  Time inside the store was about 10 minutes.

This morning I made a trip to the local drug store to pick up a couple of items.  It was a national chain store, so when I entered, I knew to look over each aisle where the signs were located telling me what the aisle contained.  I spotted the aisle with the items I needed quickly and proceeded to check-out.  The cashier hit a red square touch field on the register monitor, scanned the bar code with a laser gun, touched the square on the monitor labeled total, and was finished with her part.  I swiped my debit card, entered my PIN, tore off my automatically printed receipt, and left for home.  Time inside the store was about 4 minutes.

My goodness what  a different world I live in 38 years after my 1974 trip to the drug store.  Going back in time or living in a previous era absolutely has no appeal.  I look forward to the advancements of the next 38 years.  I may not even have to go to the drug store at all then.  I will probably order with a device much like the smart phone.  My bank account will be automatically debited, and a delivery robot will ring my doorbell with the item within a few minutes of purchase.  Life should be so good! 

And when teleportation of items materializing in front of me is possible... Oh my...  shopping might just take on a whole other dimension.

Underlying meanings

Recently, I was with a couple of young men and a young woman from El Salvador, a middle-aged, privileged man from Ecuador, a young mother from Mexico, and a hard working middle-aged man from another region in Mexico, an up-and-coming electrical engineer from Columbia, and a young man from Costa Rica.  We were together in the United States where everyone is currently living.

The group had several occasions to talk about both the U.S. where they're now living and the country of their birth.  Most didn't want to move back, but they all brought a perspective that let me know that the U.S. didn't measure up in some way or another to the various countries represented.  Most were from very large cities, the equivalent of New York, L.A., and Chicago.

Interestingly, the group thought that the best way to understand the people of the U.S. was to learn their language.  Then, they might understand the attitudes they had encountered while here.  That is not the only way to learn about a culture of another country, but it is one of the most thorough ways to learn why people act the way they do.

One of the great hypotheses of language learning is that the way a language is structured determines one's outlook on life and how life should work.  At least one linguist (Pinker) has sought to disprove the hypothesis.  But, after listening to the group mentioned above speak of the questions they have about the English language, the hypothesis appears to have some merit.

One example is from the group's difficulty with supplying nouns or pronouns to go with the verbs they used.  In Spanish, the ending of the verb contains the pronoun (as do all Romance languages).  So, they were not in the habit of having to supply the referent for the action.  Semantically, then, action and people are fused in Spanish, whereas action and people are fragmented in English.  The cultural connection is that the people of the group see their families as close knit and families of the U.S. as loose knit.  When asked why, they answered that it seemed the people of the family worked all the time and didn't see each other much.  Activities in the U.S. catered to the individual rather than to the family as a unit.  The sentence structure highlighting this fragmentation is the necessity to use nouns or pronouns separately from the verb.   

Well, that's certainly one viewpoint, and maybe it is accurate.  The argument for the hypothesis has more support for it than this one example, but this example is representative.  Attitudes certainly show through a person's phrasing of an utterance.  The whole field of semantics is about revealing underlying meanings.  Analyzing what people say is fun and revealing.  And, although the semantics producing people's utterances can be a hard deer to hunt, when the deer is killed, the venison is delicious.

Hurricane season

It's hurricane season again.  I remember when they would hit without too much warning and radar was primitive.  Scientists then figured out what caused them and they could track those tropical depressions a little better.  Then they noticed the patterns of waves of storms coming across the Atlantic from the shores of northern Africa.

Now when it's hurricane season, data are fed into software that calculates how many hurricanes will form in a season, predict the destinations of the strongest ones, and track each one on its journey from Africa to the shores of Latin America and the Gulf of Mexico with a pretty good degree of accuracy.  No big deal.

I also used to wander my way through a blurry life.  The prediction patterns are much clearer now.  It's old hat.  I know that the hurricane season of life will start in about 6 weeks and last for about 3 months.  My list of names for them is already prepared.  There should be fewer than last year, but the intensity of the ones that do form might be greater.  I'm watching the monitor for that this season for sure.

Figures of life

A Cliff Dwelling

There sandy seems the golden sky
And golden seems the sandy plain.
No habitation meets the eye
Unless in the horizon rim,
Some halfway up the limestone wall,
That spot of black is not a stain
Or shadow, but a cavern hole,
Where someone used to climb and crawl
To rest from his besetting fears.
I see the callus on his soul
The disappearing last of him
And of his race starvation slim,
Oh years ago - ten thousand years.

Robert Frost

Someone today used the phrase poetic license in reference to wanting to take some liberties with modernizing a well-known ancient story.  That got me to thinking about what all is meant by poetic license in a literary analysis.  The Frost poem Cliff Dwelling illustrates beautifully what is meant.

Usual sentence order is out of kilter.  The first two lines are good examples.  "There, the golden sky seems sandy and the sandy plain seems golden," become stacked stanzas so the reversal of terms is much easier to see as it is written:

There sandy seems the golden sky

And golden seems the sandy plain.

The reversal of terms is both on a single line and across two lines, so it is unmistakable and it serves as a visual where earth meets horizon.  It also is said twice to signify the two times a day when earth and horizon meet - morning and night.  Sandy and golden are synonymous terms since they refer to the same basic color so that even though earth and sky are different in nature, their sameness of color makes them seem as one.  There is a play on words then if the sameness of color blends earth and sky.  They become seamless, which is a thought triggered by the double use of the word "seem" which appears in the two lines one above the other.

In the fourth line from the end, "I see the callus on his soul," the poet is seeing something that no one else sees.  One cannot see into another's soul.  That means the poet has power that others don't and can make remarks full of insight.  For example, callus is a physical hardening of the skin, but callus has been turned into a metaphor for the meaning of hardening.  A hardened soul brings to mind how stoic a person's face may look when considering he is part of a vanishing race.  So the metaphor is then turned into metonymy, that is, something representing another thing it is related to or a part of, the soul representing the person housing the soul.  Frost also achieves contrasting ideas with this metonymy.  He uses soul for flesh and blood.  Flesh and blood are usually separate and distinguishable parts of a human.  But, by metonymy they are the same.  Soul is also ghost-like, something invisible, so the next line referring to a race's extinction, "disappearing last of him," allows the reader to see the invisible past in the cliff dwelling, helping her or him to understand a whole lot more than the physical cliff before her or his eyes.

Much more could be said about the poem, but the 4 lines used are an illustration of how much more a poem contains than normal prose.  So, poetic license doesn't mean merely to take liberties with the grammar, it means to hide images in figures, use words that create images and have multiple meanings at the same time, and rhyme in order to make the ideas memorable.  Poetry is rich because it is so compact, succinct because grammar has another dimension to its semantics, beautiful because its contours are presented in melody, rhyme, and syllabic control.  Poetic license and poetic punch are synonymous phrases.  

So, when my life rhythms come out as prose, I retreat into the inner sanctum of my mind and draw from the rich store of scenes that semantically, figuratively, and melodically have enriched my existence and meaning here on the Earth.  For a period of time, I get lost in the poetic license of life as it should be.

Cut the gyrations

Gyrations is a lovely word.  Its meaning can be applied to a number of situations.  Game playing is among them.  By game playing, I mean that people don't really say and do what is in their best interests or the best interests of those entrusted to them.  Instead, image is everything.  So, people present pictures of themselves or their children that don't match any sort of reality (or only partially match).  They go through such gyrations to throw people off the real track or to enhance the unauthentic picture.

Recently, I was around someone who has known me since college.  The person decided to make some statements for image's sake that didn't fully represent what I stand for.  In the past, I would have merely stood by and let this person say things, but time was up.  I reacted by saying that the person's statement was inaccurate and gave a fuller accounting of what I represent.  The people witnessing the reaction became immediately uncomfortable when a spade was called a spade because they too have let this other person's rants go unchecked.  So, they acknowledged their discomfort level about the interchange and switched the subject.

It is the better part of wisdom to pick battles carefully, but sometimes one has to dismantle the gyrations going on and speak undiluted words about a matter so that a false image does not result.  And it's refreshing to me to be liberated from or to thwart the propaganda people use to further themselves or to denigrate me.  So totally liberating.  And the other person knew to speak truth when continuing to comment about others.  You might call that a win/win.

Journey of 1000 miles

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres
Gaul is all divided into three parts

 Julius Caesar penned his famous first line in Gallic Wars almost 2200 years ago.  I encountered them 41 years ago.  Latin was the first language I learned, so these words are burned into my memory.  I learned a great deal about a second language for the next two years.  I learned how different words were, sentence structures were, concepts for time were, culture was, and that some words and sentence structures could easily have two or three ways to be expressed in English.  I remember spending much time in poring over translations.

The Chinese have a proverb: A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.  Yes, these two years of Latin were my first steps.  I didn't know it then, but the journey's destination was to study several ancient languages and a modern language and to study all the principles in the science of all languages.  Who would've guessed!  But, the journey to that destination was the product of many, many, many steps after the first ones.

I don't know how many steps I have taken, probably about 950 miles worth.  I know I am not through taking steps and accumulating miles either.  But, there is a notable difference between the early steps of the first 500 miles and the later steps of the last 450 miles.  The first half of the journey contained tremendous amounts and bursts of work.  The second half contained mechanical ease from repetition, conclusions about limitations of expressions, and manipulation of facts in constructing theories.  Applying information from other fields to the science helped in seeing a larger and ever-growing picture.  Now operating within the discipline is not work, it is enjoyable and familiar.  Like family, I have grown up and grown older around this science.  Now it's time to smile.

I wish all of life would be like this particular journey.  But, life doesn't work that way.  It's not a series of unilateral decisions, but made up of bilateral or multi-lateral decisons.  Relationships developed have many contributing factors as to how strong they become.  Jobs have many people and circumstances to interact with.  My own birth family stretches its horizons beyond the family I knew and grew up in.  Beliefs are tested against reality and change their shape or break altogether.  Acceptance of values into one's own philosophical view is based on proven track records rather than their ideal or theoretical worth.  All in all, life is messy..  The destination of life is not well defined and evidently has so many different paths leading to its success, that even the proverbs of a society have to change if it lasts long enough.

The saving grace is that there is a degree of familiarity, ease, and enjoyment in the second half of life like there is in the formal training and experience that a person chooses... Golden years to be sure.

About halfway

Today someone asked me to keep a lookout for reading material and/or texts for 9th graders.  It was hard to slow my head from nodding "No."  It's an old subject, but here goes the 200th verse of the same song.

In the year 2000 a friend and I began a book that we never finished.  The chapters were to detail the demise and lack of need for the ability to read and write.  I know that people have decried the sorry state of affairs for both abilities, but I wanted to herald the disappearance of reading and writing.  Since that time on this blog I have tried to warn people of a struggle that would break out in society that would go way beyond poor scores in reading and writing on standardized tests for public school students.  The struggle would last 10 years and end with the unmistakable next stage in transmission of information, including storytelling.

My favorite analogy is to the striking of the meteorite in the Yucatan that killed the dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs were kings of the world and the top of the food chain for millions of years.  But they were unaware up until the time of the strike that not one single dinosaur would make it out alive after the series of devastations set off by the meteorite's crashing into the Earth.  The event is marked by iridium between layers of the Earth's crust called the KT boundary.

 The death of reading and writing will be marked with a 10 year tug-of-war between those who advocate the need for reading and writing forever and those who are bringing in a much more efficient and a quantum leap faster mode of relaying information.  The war would begin in 2007 and end after 2017.  The need to read and write would disappear after 2017, and when people recognized the new path being forged, they would hasten the dying forms for transmission of knowledge and entertainment that has lasted for so many centuries as the paramount mode for perpetuation.

When December comes and goes, the struggle will be halfway over.  From every sign I see, everything is right on schedule.  Other voices have joined mine in warning others of the impending doom of two of the three Rs.  Two of the important signs can be capsulized by two commercials and two innovations.  The first commercial is for a speech to type device so that people can speak their words and type will appear on a page.  The ability to create information on a page from a voice command will not be limited to type for long.  Creating visual logs from speech is next.  The second is for the Iphone's ability to speak a question and get the answer in a matter of seconds or utter a command and the task will be performed.  Since visual information can be archived also, it is a matter of time before that kind of information will be commanded.  The first innovation is the smart phone, complete with its myriad number of apps that can control lighting and temperature in houses, count the number of calories eaten, recognize information coded in bars and other encryption codes, and "read" notes in a song and tell you its title among a thousand other useful tasks.  The second innovation is the ability to be somewhere virtually, without travel and without loss of dimensionality.   The appearance of two other inventions will sound Taps for reading and writing: holographic virtuality and invisibility (cloaking) in matters of stealth.  Both are right around the corner - probably about 5 years away.

I hope to see the years after 2017.  There will be remnants plenty of the age that has just passed.  But there will be a layer of iridium separating the two epochs.  Readers and writers won't fare well in the new world.  The currency of the educated will be different.  Those who know how to organize electronic data and format what people visualize will conduct the funerals of those whose pens, pencils, and typing keys only make the runes of sentences and paragraphs.  R.I.P.

A color-filled cloud

It was a cloudy day three years ago, and in the western sky a beautiful rainbow occurred.  I had seen one just the day before too.  Those were the best days, and I remember writing a blog about those two rainbows and how they represented my reason for living.

Tonight, I stepped outside to view the sky.  Dark clouds had formed a half-hour to the east.  A beautiful, brilliantly colored arc filled the sky.  So, I stopped for a minute or two to let my mind wonder again about what it represented... the source of my life.  And below that rainbow tonight - my greatest treasure.

Insanely harsh at 112

Parked in the sun for only an hour and a half, the car had a temperature reading of 122 degrees.  This was at 5:00 PM.  The car's gauge did fall after hitting the road and having a little wind blow against it.  But, the temperature only dropped 10 degrees.  So, at 5 it was 112.  A couple of hours later the measurement was 106.  Even at 10:00 at night, the news reported a temperature of 98.

That's the second time this summer it has been 112.  I could feel the heat radiating from the driveway, and it felt every bit as hot as the heat pouring across my face when I open an oven door.  112 is a different level of hot.  Last summer set a record for the most number of days in a year above 100.  But, never did it reach 112.  Last month was the hottest July on record in the United States.  It was also the hottest 7 month period on record (January through July).  The record was last set in 1936 in the throes of the dust bowl and depression era.  Now it's hotter than one of the bleakest, driest, most drought-ridden time periods in recent history in the USA.

Hemingway wrote a short story called Hills Like White Elephants (1927), in which the setting was a place in Spain that was dripping hot.  The heat-driven setting controlled the story, its characters' conversations, and its actions.  It was the backdrop for forbidden topics to be discussed and extreme reactions to surface.

Extreme is the operative word.  At 112 degrees, I was ready to react more harshly to conversations today than normal.  And, I was subjected to some harsh, bleak, and drought-ridden conversations today.  Tomorrow is supposed to be only 104.  I look forward to the cool down in both outside air and topics of conversation.

Failure culture

NASA did it!  And I love them for the story they tell.

Exploration on Mars has been a long, desolate road.  The planet has beckoned to Earth's inhabitants ever since people have been gazing at it through telescopes.  After rocket power was discovered, attempt after attempt by the USSR and the USA failed to either reach Mars or operate properly.  Europe and Japan have also tried reaching Mars.  Finally, several probes from the USA managed to snap pictures of Mars' surface.  Then came the landings.  Most were successful, but landing on Mars and completing the mission successfully has only had a collective 47% success rate for all countries that have tried it.

That sounds a lot like the missions I try in life.  Some of my missions have not reached Earth's orbit.  Some have malfunctioned while making the trip.  Some have crash-landed on the surface.  And some have performed like they were supposed to have and have added much quality and knowledge to my life.  But, just knowing that some of the bravest, most expert scientists in the world have collectively not done very well in meeting their objectives makes me feel better about my own failures.

I think of Edison when I think of failures in life.  Time after time after time he tried this chemical and that, this shape and that, this thickness of filament and that, this size of bulb and that, this strength of current and that, this type of material for bulbs and filaments and that.  I have never tried to do something 1000 times, but I think I would probably drop experimentation after the 300th attempt.  But, Edison and space programs have something in common.  They knew that landing and light could happen with the right combination of knowledge and time.  So, they settled in for the long haul... and they will be remembered for all the quality they have added to human existence.  I will not be remembered by history for anything major done for society, but I can add to the quality of human existence within the sphere allotted to me.

Failures have happened for me in life and have occurred more often than not... over half the time (just as for attempts to land on Mars and discovering the light bulb).  But, how sweet it is when everything happens properly, and success is achieved.... sweet and long lasting, memorable and flavorful.

Following the trail of sweart

Sweart was a word from Anglo-Saxon meaning dark.  It was used when two items were being compared.  It also meant black and was used in describing skin color and sky color.  As time passed people began to only pronounce the a in the word, as in the word father.  So, lo and behold, the spelling changed to swart.  Apparently, some of the peasants of the country didn't know much grammar and thought the word was a noun instead of an adjective.  So when they wanted to say the adjective form of the word, they added y.  By the time Edward DeVere was writing plays under the pseudonym William Shakespeare, the word swarty was popular.  Then, the pronunciation became a function of where a person lived around London.  The ever-popular d alternation with t in words like hearty (pronounced hardy) became both a glottal stop (swar? i) in some outlying regions and an eth sound (voiced th, swarthy) in some other outlying regions.  By the time England began colonizing America the eth version of the word fell from the lips of the sailors and pilgrims making their way across the pond.

That is the microscopic version of a word journey from about 500 ACE to 2012 ACE.  It shows that change happens in language over time.  In fact, language change is the rule for words and grammar rather than stasis.  The change principle of language helped me see that life was like that too.  Things change.  A person's environment changes several times over one's lifetime.  A person's tastes in clothing and food change.  One's personal orientation changes from being single to include a partner and children.  One's attitudes toward others and important issues change from staunch to mellow as years pass.  Beliefs change either by addition or by deletion.  And, physically, one's body changes.  Ear lobes and noses elongate, skin loosens and eventually sags, bones compact, and hair thins.

I can't help but reflect on my own journey of change.  I have learned to expect it.  Life comes in phases.  I can tell you about a certain time in my life by referring to where I lived, what job I had, or whether it was pre-children, with children, or post-children.  Many types of phases and milestones mark a person's journey.  Mine is no different.  I have some interesting phases in my life, several beautiful phases, and yes, a few swarthy ones. I might have 3 or 4 phases left, but I look forward to them.  They'll be different from the ones that came before.  I will make the same journey from sweart to swarthy.

When I seek harmony

The scenery was like few other places on Earth.  I still have the pictures.  The mountain top was 14,000 feet high.  It really wasn't the tallest mountain in the world, but it was for me that day.  Peaks surrounded the summit I was on, but I was looking down on all of them.  Clouds hovered, suspended on most of them.  They drifted by me in the thin air.  I saw valleys carved by glaciers, and pools of deep alpine water dotted those valleys.  Others walked around on the summit, but I could hear nothing but silence.  14,000 feet in the clouds of the sky, but total silence draped the mountain sides all the way to their valleys.  Stupendous moments indelibly printed their time-stamps in the recesses of my mind.

On occasions when I need total peace, I retreat to this mountain top.  I breathe in again the cool, soothing air.  The intoxicating landscape takes me from any worry that has crossed my mind.  It revives in me the faith I have that once again life can rest in such breathtaking beauty. 

Then, I can make the descent to the mountainside floor for harmony with the flow of regular life.