Substack is SO MUCH FUN!

There are so many possibilities - and we have barely scratched the surface.

Scratching the surface is, after all, what Harrowings is all about….

Today has been productive, I’m just sitting down to have a little visit with all of you who might read what I write after bringing home a salad for my wife from Daily Provisions. I was there because I had just stopped in after visiting with my new urologist to whom I was referred by a DO at One Medical Group here in DC. I figure it was about time to get a baseline and annual visits scheduled. I need to stay alive, I believe, because my presence on the planet is critical to everything that is happening and will happen in the future. The longer I’m here, the greater the impact, even though it may not seem that way to an outside observer.

If the observer were to be very attentive, however, they’d see how everything I do is impacting on everything else.

…and guess what?

Everything that you are doing is just as impactful. Actions matter. Little else does.

What are these actions of which I speak?

Speaking, writing, communicating generally are actions which impact the sensory apparati of our fellow beings. When we move or touch (gasp), we also make impacts that have ripple effects into the future. If it is, as I sometimes suspect, all a matter of cause and effect, then it could well be that the Determinists are correct; i.e., that which happens must happen and that which does not, couldn’t possibly. Why should I be able to imagine then?

I don’t know. I just know how things seem to me. I’ve just had Philip Glass spring to mind. He is rapidly approaching his 89th birthday. I was writing earlier today, obliquely, about a relationship in which I entered in the spring of 1997. It was over by the fall. During the course of it, we took in Les Enfants Terribles, an opera in which Glass and two other keyboardists performed as two singers and four dancers performed on the stage behind the keyboards. I was struck by how the staging of this opera seemed to me to be a great metaphor for consciousness itself. At any given time, I might be able to imagine two or more options of what I might be doing. One of those things might be to watch the film based on the novel. Its use of Vivaldi reminds me of one of my first acquisitions as part of my Columbia House subscription: “The Four Seasons”:

My writings here on Substack range around like this through the various artifacts that we human beings have created. When I look at this particular performance and realize the myriad events that had to come together so that the individuals on stage could perform this piece for everyone sitting in the audience, well, isn’t it obvious how miraculous this (and any) event actually is?

I don’t know. I just know how things seem to me.

And in that “not knowing” is all the mystery of being in time. Here I go straight into the idea of being born in time - at that point in which we emerge into the stream of history, we are apparently suddenly conscious and begin collecting impressions of “who, what, when, and where” we are. We learn the “how” but the answer to the question “Why?” ends up going unanswered or getting a simple “Because…” in reply.

This is the way it seems from this perspective, but what is yours?

You see, that’s where the fun of Substack really starts. We talk to one another. We talk right out in front of everyone. I’ve gotten some interactions today from a few of you like Everyday Junglist, Holly, Mary Kay Wall, Harriet Corvine, and, of course, Dr. Gabriella Kőrösi. I’ve attempted to raise a few other voices to the fore such as Taly who I read in the wee hours this morning and who, without in the least meaning to, I suspect, inspired me to write about a romance in which I was involved back in 1997.

So many experience are there to have and to have been had when I look back on the past. “When I look back on the past, it’s a wonder I’m not yet extinct.” - Dinosaur by King Crimson from the Thrak period of the double trio. I loved that album, a product of 1995.
Do you remember 1995? I’d just gotten email the year before and would craft my first page on the World Wide Web the next year. It was in the gap between. I was learning that it was possible to reach out and touch another’s mind at distance, but I had yet to hang out my shingle in cyberspace. Here it is in all its glory.

The Home Page of H.B.G. III

It was an experiment and, in my defense, I was left unsupervised. Handcoded using UNIX Pine’s Pico text editor, I’d open up home.html in my directory and type out my raw HTML tags. I’d then use Netscape to look at the results and make tweaks. At the time, I was between my second and third years of graduate student support, spending it in Pittsburgh, taking a course in general linguistics, reading Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct and learning so much. I had picked up an anthology called “The Limits of Language” which kept me entertained that summer. I was in thrall with the way that words worked in those days. As recently mentioned, I’d picked up the book Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia before getting to graduate school and now, hitting the ground at just the right time, I was there as the whole Internet phenomenon was picking up speed.

Isn’t it remarkable that all this happened a full thirty years ago? What was happening in the world just 30 years earlier?

1966

I was three years old on February 4 of that year. I was just learning that the world was a challenging place and the demands that were to be placed upon me were exceptional. I don’t know how conscious I was of these matters at 3. However, things were afoot that summer of 1966. It may have been the year that we got central air conditioning at 108 Dogwood Drive in the Birchwood Gardens neighborhood where we’d settled at the beginning of June just three years earlier when I was but four months old.

It was on this particular day in that year that the second XB-70 Valkyrie prototype was destroyed in a collision with an F-104. This photograph take before the collision:

Remarkable that this happened sixty years ago and that we had used our technology to generate such weapons at that time. The pilot of the F-104 was Joseph A. Walker. One cannot help but wonder if the collision had not occurred, what his contributions might have been. All things that happen in this world have ripple effects and they are becoming ever more impactful, in my estimation, as the rate of change in our world appears to accelerate.

Now I have moved on and am thinking about immortality and from six years before this accident, the following lecture was delivered by Aldous Huxley at the Foerster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul. The most recent lecture in this series was given by Mark Johnston of Princeton University:

Obviously, we find ourselves immired in an embarassment of riches with this tool upon which I found myself stumbling 30 years ago, being able to tap into Huxley and then to Johnston.

As I amplify this voices, I realize this is all a part of my practice of becoming ever-more “other centered” and fighting against the egoistic self-centeredness that characterizes our species over the past few generations. We are evolving. We can become ever more collaborative and cooperative with one another versus being competitive. We are no longer in an age of scarcity except for that which is manufactured by poor policy decisions. We are in an age of exceptional abundance.

All of this brings me back to my appointment today which was to establish a relationship with a urologist to guard against contracting prostate cancer. It may seem to be the ultimate self-centered focus to worry about one’s own health, but I believe that my life is not my own. Others are dependent upon me being here. It reminds me of one of John Perry Barlow’s 12th principle of adult behavior:

“Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Do not endanger it frivolously. And never endanger the life of another.”

All of the 25 are worthy of recounting and are preserved on Mickey Hart’s site. How lucky we are to be traveling around the sun with characters like Mickey who is still with us to this day. Among so many other things, he became personal friends with Walter Cronkite. Cronkite, of course, very much informed my childhood as my father tuned into him every weeknight after dinner and we watched current history unfold.

I think I’ll wrap up this essay here. It went in directions I didn’t expect but that is the way of “Harrowings” - we are scratching the surface. As always, I’d love to hear your perspectives as readers of Harrowings and I encourage you all to amplify the signal through cyberspace in all the ways that are possible. It is FUN here and more FUN to be loud as we can be.

Onward!

Click a button. Any button…