The Wisdom of the East: Here in the USA and also in Europe, it’s been rather fashionable over the past 10 to 20 years for “enlightened spiritual seekers” like myself to explore the ways of the East. I’m thinking here about Zen, Taoism, Nikkei Buddhism and Soka Gakkai, maybe a few other movements. The question is, if we think those easterners are so wise about the soul, do we agree with their wisdom about the body? And yes, I’m alluding here to sex. Just how does the far East feel about sex? Does their (alleged) cosmic wisdom translate into a body appreciation and a sexual openness that will appeal to sex-fixated westerners?

I saw a little article on the NPR web site about a worldwide study of people over 40 years old, comparing attitudes about sex between various nations(in the comparative sense, NOT the literal sense — for those of you with dirty minds!). The bottom line is that the USA seems to give high regard to sex, whereas Japan and China like it the least. And by quite a wide margin! There were three main questions in the survey. The first question was about the physical pleasure derived from sex. In the USA, 73% of men and 65% of women gave positive responses. In China, the comparative numbers were 25% and 24%; and worse yet was Japan, coming in at 18% and 10%, respectively.

So OK, the far East doesn’t get much of a shiver out of it. But maybe they still find it emotionally satisfying. But no, alas. Regarding the emotional pleasure of sexuality, 77% of men in the USA gave it a thumbs up, and 68% of women did the same. In China, the male and female numbers were 36% and 33%. Once again, Japan was even less impressed: only 24% of men and 16% of women had positive attitudes about the emotional side of sex.

The third question regarded the overall important to life of sex. And the pattern is quite predictable, although somewhat lower in the USA than you might think. In the US, 37% of men and 28% of women said that sex was either extremely important or very important. In China, the numbers were 29% and 18%. And of course, those sexually cynical Japanese had to go even lower, 28% and 12%. As a footnote, Israelis seems to have the most positive attitudes toward sex; their male / female numbers are 64% and 53%, respectively. Brazilian men hit 75%, but their women are comparative prudes at 46%.

This survey focused on people 40 and above, and those folk are not the ones knocking out the babies, for the most part. To get a sense of whether younger Japanese and Chinese enjoy their sex, I took a look at comparative birth rates per 1000. In the USA, the rate is 14.14%. Japan clearly comes in lower, at 9.37%. China isn’t far behind the USA, at 13.25%. However, the Chinese birth rate probably reflects the whole country better than the survey does. I would suspect that a sex satisfaction survey in China focused disproportionately on the cities and wealthier regions, not on the farms way out in the hinterlands. In those regions, they still need to knock out kids as farm hands and to compensate for shorter life spans. To get a better sense of what goes on in urbanized China, we can look to the stats for Hong Kong and Macau: 7.3% and 8.5%, respectively.

So yea, it does appear that when far Easterners live in a socio-economic environment similar to what Americans are used to, sex isn’t quite the big deal that it is in “the States”. And I can’t help but wonder if that might be a good thing. I myself get tired of all the childish sexual innuendoes in American entertainment, all the sexual enticements in commercial advertisements, and the strong assumption here that if a man and woman are left alone, they’re gonna do it. Perhaps the prudish social assumptions of the 1950’s were unrealistic. But the pendulum shot too far the other way during the American cultural revolution of the late 60’s, fueled by a demographic bulge of horny teens and 20-somethings (i.e., the Baby Boom). Since then, America has gotten older, but the culture and entertainment makers seem to think that we’re still in the summer of love (or the boy’s locker room). What a yucky thought: graying baby-boom people stuck in a cotton candy paradise, thinking that they’re still sexy, thinking that sex is (still) what life is all about.

Perhaps it’s time to throw some far-Eastern cold water on to that notion. Perhaps Zen and the Tao are part of an overall presumption that sees sexuality for what it really is: a very mixed blessing, something that can be very good in certain settings, and yet can very bad in others; something that can deliver you to the gates of heaven, but also to the shackles of boredom; something that can heal, but which all too often hurts; something that can be truth, but is more often a delusion. As with all things, wisdom is the key to breaking the paradox. But here in America, wisdom is at a low ebb right now.

I was updating the consciousness section of my website over the weekend, and I got to thinking about how we actually experience death most every day. Death in the sense of no consciousness, not in the sense of no living body. But hey, if you had a living body and no consciousness, then what good would it do you? The point is, every night when we sleep, we’re completely gone for a few hours (the other slumbering hours are spent dreaming, which is a form of consciousness). And if we need to go under anesthesia for a medical procedure, same deal. For a few hours, we just aren’t.

But we come back from these mini-deaths when our body awakens and the neuron structures critical to consciousness start firing again. Every night when we go to sleep, we trust that our memory structures will properly restore us intact, with the same personality and the same personal history and the same personal qualities, by the time that morning light shines (or even before, during our dreaming phases). Pretty amazing when you think about it. We give in to a death-like state, with the hope that a physical structure (i.e., that comprising our bodies and brains) is ready and waiting to re-activate our conscious lives in a few hours.

This also makes me think about the Star Trek Transporter scenario. What if, while you were in “dead sleep”, your body was destroyed, but replaced by an exact copy, all charged up and ready to go, but in a completely different place? Or even worse – what if your original body was intact, but there was also a copy? Would you split into two? Two human beings with exactly the same memories and experiences up to a certain point in time (i.e., the date of the copy)?

Right now, this is not a problem. There is no practical way of gaining all the information needed from your existing body, then using it as a blueprint to build a “new you”. Information has a cost, and the cost right now is way too high; it’s beyond what our science can do. But that doesn’t mean that it’s completely impossible, that it will never be possible.

If anyone could intelligently imagine an afterlife granted by a divine, omnipresent power, this would need to be the scenario or principle by which it would take place. That power would need be able to gather all of the information necessary to build an exact copy of the processes and states in your brain at the time of death (or even before, as the actual brain may have experienced severe decay before death, as with Alzheimer’s Disease). “The power” would then need to use that information to establish a working copy of your brain processes in some energy and information exchange medium. Voila, you would be – resurrected.

OK, it’s a long shot. But given that it’s Easter Sunday, well . . . . . I’ll leave it at that for now.

I was listening to a CD lecture about the Old Testament the other day, and the topic was the food and purity laws, in Leviticus and other books. Ugh, booh, thumbs down. That’s how most modern folk feel about ancient purity codes. But to be charitable, we say that perhaps they had a good reason at the time. E.g., don’t eat pigs because they cause trichinosis when not cooked right, or shellfish gets infected by poisonous bacteria very quickly.

But the lecturer made a good counterpoint, by referring to an article written by anthropologist Mary Douglas. Dr. Douglas points out that these ancient codes and rituals cannot be explained as having some practical purpose at the time (even if they incidentally did). No, what was really going on was an ancient culture’s way of dealing with an unpredictable world, dealing with the fact that we don’t fully understand the world. Nothing gets people more upset than strangeness (recall that great song by Jim Morrison and the Doors: “people are strange, when you’re a stranger, faces look ugly when you’re alone”). One way that ancient people dealt with strangeness was to come up with strict laws with strict rules and categories. This is right, anything else is wrong. If it’s not expected, it’s not good, if it doesn’t fit into the way we understand the world, stay away from it. Pigs have cloven hoofs but don’t chew cud, so they’re strange. Shellfish are water creatures without fins. Strange stuff. So don’t mess with it.

[This also explains the Biblical injunctions against homosexuality. It wasn’t what the majority would do, sexually. We now know that about 1 in 25 people have the urge for their own gender. Four percent is definitely a minority. Since ancient people couldn’t understand it, they called it strange and banned it. As though it were in fact bannable.]

In modern times, we have science and know a lot more about stuff. We have much more detailed ways of classifying and understanding things. So we don’t need to adopt such “overspecifications” against things such as shellfish, which might in fact be OK for us (given modern refrigeration). Hopefully, homosexuality is coming out of the social fear zone, and into the “we understand it, nothing to fear” region. But, Dr. Douglas pointed out that we modern folk here in the USA and Western Europe still have some hang-ups about things being in the right place. One example she cited was dirt. Suburban people go out of their way to keep dirt and insects out of their houses. They say this is unhealthy. But actually, most dirt and most insects won’t hurt you (but yes, roaches can spread disease; they remain unwelcome).

So, I was sweeping my kitchen floor this morning, and I pondered the fact that the linoleum is old and is permanently dirty. Most people (including my brother) don’t like this. But hey, so long as there aren’t any mice or black widow spiders around, it’s fine by me. Some dirt, some dust, some leaves, some beetles or grey spiders – what’s the problem?

Well, the ancient closed-mindedness missed a lot of things. The old purity laws didn’t allow the mixing of fabrics, like wool and linen. Today, just about everything we wear is a mix of fabrics. It’s a “best of both worlds” thing to us. But still, I will admit, there are still times and places where categories may be good, and category confusion may be bad. Cops do need to be tough and hard when dealing with bad guys. It’s good for our progeny that women assume nurturing roles with children (although men admittedly also need to help out in that regard). It’s good to teach the 95% of kids who are heterosexual that homosexuality is not evil, but not good to imply that they’re free to experiment with it. Doctors do need to be authoritative (much as I hate that some times), and teachers do need to take the attitude that they know more than their students. Categories still play a role in the functioning of society.

Footnote: I once tried to teach an economic class as a one-day substitute for my boss, who was an adjunct college professor. I totally bombed out. I thought I knew the materials, but when the kids started asking questions, I completely lost my balance and was reduced to a blithering idiot. My boss must have gotten complaints from the kids, as he never had me do that again; and just as well, I figured.

The main sin of the ancient Biblical Jews was closed-mindedness. Leviticus assumes that the community leaders know how the world should be broken down, and thus have enough authority to condemn various things (including all homosexuals; women didn’t do so well either, if they went “outside the box” in their behavior). Perhaps today we go too far the other way at times. As various thinkers have said, it’s all in finding the right balance; i.e., Aristotle’s Golden Mean.

It’s springtime once again, and it seems like a good time to think about sex. Of course, you young folk out there might say “don’t think about it, just do it!” Yes, however . . . . you’ll be old some day, and you may then come to realize just how much of a delusion sex can be, once you can finally free your mind from the grip of your hormones. As Sophocles said, when age takes the passions away from you, “it is like escaping from the bondage of a raging madman.” But let me be fair about it; if sex leads to true love – and that does occasionally happen – well, then perhaps the charade is worth it. But just as it’s the sun’s rays being reflected, and not the moon itself that lights up the night, the promise of sex is ultimately love. The reality of sex without love is just as barren as the lunar craters.

Anyway, we children of the 1960s turned sex into both a playground and an imagined biological necessity, thanks to the technology and social currents of the times – e.g., birth control, abortion rights and the substitution of psychology for religion. We converted sex into a birthright and a marketing tool. Whooppeeee.

Until perhaps the mid-70s, some old-tyme religion people still lectured that sex was something to be careful with, something that can bring forth the worst of life’s moments as well as the best. But before long, the “free love” ethos had won the day. Not even the most fire-breathing of religious preachers would dare warn their congregations any more about the pitfalls of indiscriminate sexuality. You wouldn’t have a congregation for very long if you did.

The ancient Greeks saw past the thrill (which, as Lord Chesterfield famously noted, is fleeting), in their better moments anyway. They celebrated sex as the source of our species’ renewal, and yet feared it as a source of destruction and death. For example, Sophocles’ fellow tragedian Euripides told a story of Medea and Jason (of Argonauts fame). Medea fell in love with Jason and helped him through his various adventures and battles. Her clairvoyance and herbal potions got him out of some tight situations. And yet, wouldn’t ya know it, Jason decided that trusty old Medea just wasn’t too exciting anymore, and took up with some bimbo (i.e., King Creon’s daughter; ah yes, power and wealth are definitely aphrodisiacs). Well, Medea was still holding the torch for Jason and got into a fit about it. How to avenge such betrayal? She decided to kill their sons. That’ll fix Jason.

The free love people might have responded as follows: “oh come on, that was just an old Greek tale; once we get over our hangups, sex is just as harmless as a teddy bear”. Yea, well – we’re living in a “post-hungup” world, and yet the dark side of sexuality keeps on coming thru (aside from the monkey-wrench that nature threw at “free love”, i.e. AIDS). There’s still way too much rape and domestic violence, mostly perpetrated by men. But even women sometimes show forth their Medea-like qualities. Recently, a jilted woman threatened to kill her rival – which wouldn’t have made the news, but for the setting in which it took place. That setting was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — the bastion of science, rationality and military discipline. Yes, I’m talking about Lisa Nowak, the Space Shuttle veteran who drove 900 miles with a diaper, a knife, a BB gun and some pepper spray, to take on her rival (Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman). When you see the astronauts on TV, floating around up in the heavens, all middle-American and laughing at clean jokes and talking their techie lingo with cool precision, you say wow, this is truly the victory of rationality. These folk are absolutely in control. NASA has obviously picked the coolest of the coolest. Roger that.

But the dark side of sexual passion has finally gotten past the gates of NASA. Bottom line: I think that kids still need to be lectured by adults about that dark side, even though doing so instantly crashes the standing of any such adult in the eyes of today’s youth. It would take guts to speak up, because kids seem to be running the world these days. Their likes and dislikes certainly drive our consumer-oriented economy. And I’ll be the first to admit – I’m not gonna stop the next gaggle of 15 year olds I see walking down my street on a warm spring evening to enlighten them with tales of argonauts and astronauts. No one can do it alone. But parents and teachers and clergypeople who aren’t Christian or Islamic nutcases should really try to explain the two-sidedness of sexuality to young folk. Perhaps a few of them might benefit, even if the majority would just get a laugh out of it.

I was swapping thoughts the other day with my correspondent from Illinois (Dr. Mary S.) regarding paranormal psychic powers like clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition. (Let’s not even get into spoon bending and out-of-body experiences right now, OK?). Do they really exist? Well, attempts to scientifically document such abilities have generally failed. Research psychologist Susan Blackmore, who spent a lot of time studying the paranormal, concludes that there probably are no paranormal phenomena.

As a guy with much regard for the scientific approach, I give a lot of credence to Dr. Blackmore. She allegedly started her career with a positive mindset towards ESP and its like, and hoped that she might actually settle the question in a positive fashion. But she eventually concluded that it just wasn’t meant to be.

I myself think that ESP and mindreading and clairvoyance are mostly a matter of people seeking attention or trying to hustle a few bucks. I remember Jeane Dixon, who was popular when I was still a kid; the local paper ran a weekly column with her cryptic predictions. She got lucky about JFK’s assassination, but after that she forecast that Jesus Christ was coming back in the 1980s, somewhere in India or the Middle East. Well, still no sign of that big reunion tour taking place. So, for the most part I don’t take claims of paranormal abilities too seriously.

However . . . . I’m not 100% sure that there’s absolutely nothing to it. As Mary and I concluded, it is possible that some as yet undocumented phenomenon of nature could occur very randomly and sporadically, and thus be impossible to capture by scientific method. We pondered the Flatland scenario (recall Edward Abbot’s classic book) of a 2-dimensional world with living beings having different geometric shapes (circles, squares, triangles, hexagons, etc.). Suppose their flat world occasionally encountered our 3-D world? Well, stuff would appear to them, then disappear, then magically reappear somewhere else. They wouldn’t have the means to document and understand what was happening; it couldn’t be reliably reproduced or observed by them. Thus, the more scientific Flatlanders would conclude that these disappearing and reappearing things weren’t real; they were just someone’s hallucinations.

So what if psychic phenomenon (or some of them, anyway) are actually like that – caused by some unreliable, rare, randomly occurring interaction between our known world, and some physical laws we haven’t yet come to grips with? This is a far-fetched thought. But actually, you can’t completely dismiss it. The reason that I give it any regard is that I‘ve had 3 or 4 “funny feelings” myself over the course of my life. I knew something was going to happen and it turned out to be right. These weren’t very profound predictions on my part. Just simple stuff, like “my cousin and his parents are coming over to visit us right now”. These mostly happened when I was younger. Can’t say I’ve had such a feeling in the last 5 or 6 years.

Well, skeptics would ask me, how often did you have such a feeling and it turned out to be wrong? Yea, good point. I honestly don’t remember having a “funny feeling in the mind” and then being wrong about it. But I probably wouldn’t remember it, unless it were vindicated. We tend to remember the successes, not the failures.

Mary suggested that perhaps a new idea from physics about the universe being “holographic” in nature would support ESP, given that it more-or-less ties everything in the universe together. OK, here’s what I’ve heard about that, mostly from a Scientific American article. Basically, the hologram idea / hypothesis arose from the study of black holes, including Stephen Hawking’s work. It turns out that the entropy (i.e., state of organization versus decay and randomness) of black holes depends more closely on the surface area of the black hole, versus its volume as originally expected. Entropy is tied at the hip to the more formal, scientific definitions of “information”. Information is the opposite of entropy – organization can carry information, while disorganization cannot. E.g., a metal key is organized in such a way that it can open a lock. A pile of rust cannot do that. The key carries information, the disorganized rust does not. When the key rusts, its entropy increases, and its information decreases. Eventually it can no longer open the lock, as its information is gone.

Where does the hologram analogy to a black hole come from? Well, a hologram is a special 2-dimensional surface that has certain added information, such that when light is reflected from it to an “interacting system”, say a human being with normal eyesight, the added information gives the impression that the image is actually of a 3D object, not of a flat plane. The hologram’s “extra dimension” information is packed into its flat surface area.

Well, for a black hole, the maximum amount of organization it can have (versus a state of random decay; like rust compared against a metal key), is tied to how much surface area it has. However, the information conveyed through this “organization” relates to all 3 dimensions of the black hole. Thus, 2 dimensions tell you about all 3 dimensions. I don’t totally understand it, but the ultimate idea is that information may be a fundamental characteristic of the universe, as much as space, matter, energy and time are.

It’s thus imaginable that information (as the basic stuff of reality) is painted on a 3-dimentional “surface membrane” (I use the word “membrane” to mean any boundary to a multi-dimensional reality; the membrane boundary of a 2D plane is a set of 1D lines; the boundary of a 3D object is a set of 2D planes; thus, a 4D reality has a 3D “membrane”; etc.). As such, 3 dimensions would then give us the experience of our familiar 4-dimensional spacetime. But, even more exciting: the “holograph equivalence” theorists note that the 4-dimensional reality we know of, plus “information”, may in fact be the stage for a 5 dimensional reality. In such a model, the lower-dimensional world has particles and forces and all kinds of perturbations, whereas the higher-dimensional side of reality is symmetric and undisturbed. Could ESP and such be, in certain instances, just another 4-D information disturbance that a 5-dimension “background reality” can cause or be caused by? Just remember, a lot can be done with an extra dimension . . . .

To go out on a limb even further: a thinker named Ed Fredkin has been saying something similar about the centrality of information, though not from the perspective of black holes. Fredkin says that the Universe, at bottom, is a computer; like a computer, the most important thing is information, i.e. the program that makes a computer run. At bottom, the deepest level of reality is information – for both computers, in an operational sense, and for our universe, in an ontological sense, if Fredkin is right.

I could thus imagine (on a good day) a connection between a “holographic reality” and paranormal mind abilities – since the ultimate question of psychic powers is information conveyance (the spoon benders notwithstanding). But this would be very, very speculative; way out there beyond accepted science. Nonetheless, perhaps there are information conveyance mechanisms other than length, depth, width and time – the barriers of those dimensions could possibly be transcended if the
holograph equivalence hypothesis were pushed to the limit. And from Fredkin’s view, perhaps the usual restriction that signals need to cross length, depth, width and time is not as impermeable as we now think, since these dimensions are arguably just illusions. They are illusions controlled by information; as such, the barrier is one that information could possibly overcome. Perhaps the “core reality of information” is written so as to flow according to what appears to be time / space restrictions, but occasionally “hiccups” and jumps over the normal barriers (maybe thru some random quantum fluctuation that occasionally gets magnified into the macroworld?). This arguably might allow a small part of the future to wind up in your mind at an odd time. But it’s like an intermittent short-circuit in your car’s dashboard. It only happens when you least expect it, never in the repair shop.

This all sounds wonderful, but it would all go better with some psychedelic music from the late 1960s. It’s way out there, on an EXTREMELY thin reed of quasi-understanding. For now, I’ll take my working reality to be the Fab Four – time, depth, length, and width. And as to my cousin and Mary – well, I can just e-mail them, don’t need ESP or clairvoyance to keep in touch.

Before I get back to my usual mental machinations, I need to congratulate my long-time correspondent from Illinois, Mary S., on being awarded a doctorate in patristic studies from the St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology. Mary retired a while back from a 36 year teaching career, at both the high school and college level. Mary has dual masters’ degrees, but she decided to finally go for the PhD. After some years of study and a thesis, she’s now a Doctor. She is also a true eternal student. Young graduate students jokingly refer to themselves as “eternal students” (here’s another one ); ‘like wow, I’ve been in school so long it seems like forever . . . . .’ But after you get past 50 and then 60, it’s no longer a joke. Some of us finally realize that learning and preserving the mind is quite a noble thing. These are the REAL eternal students. And Mary is a prime example. Here’s one of her recent articles on gnostic influences in John’s Gospel. WRITE ON, Mary.

(Ok, sorry for the weak pun from the ’70s; hearty congratulations to Mary, nonetheless.)

I wrote up a long essay about ESP and psychic phenomenon for today’s posting. I thought it was pretty interesting. But as I was walking from my car this afternoon, I noticed some rabbit tracks in the snow. And I decided that Mother Nature in her simplicity can be just as interesting as my theories about her. So, for now, here’s a pic of the rabbit tracks. The ESP essay is on tap for later this week.

There’s a pretty good article to be read in the latest Atlantic Monthly. It’s about who the winners and losers will be as global warming makes its presence increasingly felt over the next few generations. You’d think that the fossil fuel energy companies (the big oil and coal companies) wouldn’t do so well, since their main product is causing the problem. Besides, by 2040 or so, some analysts think that world oil production will level off and even start going down, no matter what the market demands. But guess what? Global warming will probably open up new coal and oil fields in areas now covered by snow and ice, including Siberia, Greenland, and Antarctica (and will make undersea oil in the Arctic Sea accessible). So, the supply of oil and coal might actually increase, and drive the production cost of these fuels down, for a few decades anyway.

Will the world (and especially the industrialized nations) have the discipline to use this “last hurrah” for fossil fuels wisely (and at greater expense), applying carbon sequestering technologies and maintaining economic supports for alternative energy sources? (Those should include, for better and for worse, improved nuclear power; but only as a part of a bigger mixture including wind, solar, hydro, local generation, improved efficiency, conservation, etc.) Or, as I suspect, will Russia, India, the US, Europe and China throw caution to the wind and go for one last blast of polluting prosperity, before the approaching dark ages really take hold?

Sorry, but I’m a pessimist. I’d like to think that the next generation will learn from my generation’s mistakes. We listened to lovely songs about global brotherhood (remember “We Are The World” from 1985 — you don’t hear that one much anymore, probably as much because of embarrassment as musical mediocrity). But in the end, we allowed the big moneymen to define and shape our world. The problem for the future is that global warming is going to have different affects, based on where you now live and how much you now have. Other than Europe, where things might get very cold very quickly (strangely enough — global warming will have some surprising effects), the farther north you are and the more you now have, the better you will do.

As Greg Easterbrook points out in the Atlantic, some people (or even relatively large populations) are actually going to be better off because of global warming (while most people on this planet today, or their children, are going to be worse off — mostly those who are pretty marginal already). A lot of the people who could do the most to control greenhouse gasses are not going to have much personal incentive to make the needed sacrifices. Just the opposite, actually. You will certainly see plenty of public relations on the part of the big, mostly northern-based world conglomerates about how they are addressing famine, rising sea levels, and increasingly powerful storms lashing the central and southern parts of the planet. But it sounds to me like a formula for more of the same of what we’ve had here in the USA over the past 30 years. More free-market capitalism, more Republicanism, more “too bad if you’re not rich” social policy, more lottery tickets and rags-to-riches stories to keep the disenfranchised hopeful. Things will get worse and worse for them on average, but a handful of struggling families will be given a ticket to the good life. Just enough to keep the masses hoping that they will be next; just enough to keep them from getting crazy or going Bolshevik on us.

Oh, speaking of dark futures, I was watching Jericho last night, and it brought back a memory from the 1980s. The fictional little town of Jericho, isolated out there on the Great Plains after a terrorist nuclear apocalypse, thought that the Calvary was finally coming to its rescue. A band of grifters somehow got some Marine uniforms and an M-1 tank, and were looting towns like Jericho by pretending to be the vanguard of a federal re-building effort. One character, Mimi (an IRS agent on business in Jericho when the bombs went off), was extremely happy to think that her former employer was back in business. She looked forward to getting back to New York City — which, according to the plot of Jericho, was one of the few major cities that somehow escaped the nukes. She swelled with pleasure at the thought that she would soon walk Central Park instead of the cornfields of Kansas.

Central Park in Manhattan – I’ve been there, at least on the south end. And to be honest, I wasn’t impressed. Back in the mid-80s when I was married (when “We Are The World” first came out), I used to go to Manhattan a lot, because my wife felt at home there (even though she never lived there). What do I remember most about Central Park? The rats. They were bold critters, sneaking in and out of shadowy zones to recover whatever food dropped from the humans eating on the benches. Amazing just how close they would get to people. You’d see some young or middle aged parents, well-off and educated kinds of people, enjoying a sunny afternoon with their kids in the park. And the rats would sneak up to within 3 feet or so of they and their kinder. Yet I never saw anyone notice those furry little things with the long tails, or get panicky about having their kids so close to carriers of rabies. I couldn’t figure out whether New Yorkers, even the hip and well-off crowd from 68th Street or whatever, weren’t very observant, or whether they just took rats in stride as a cost of being part of “the big Apple”. Unlike Mimi, I just never caught Manhattan fever. If rats would make her feel more at home, I’m sure she could find them sneaking around the corn silos out in the heartland. Jericho must certainly have that in common with Central Park.

REFLECTIONS ON A BOOK I NEVER READ: A few weeks ago, I finally discovered Douglas Hofstadter. His new book “I Am A Strange Loop” just came out. That sounds like my kind of book! I’m hoping to pick up a copy in the near future. It’s about human consciousness, kind-of; but it’s also about advanced math and computers and the death of Hofstadter’s ex-wife . . . . Hofstadter is hard to put into any one box. He’s one of those expansive thinkers who have developed a cult following of sorts.

Hofstadter came out of nowhere in 1979 with a book called “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”. GEB is about math and physics and consciousness and paradoxes and various quasi-scientific ways of looking at reality. I just picked up a copy of GEB from a used-book web site. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but I plan to put a few chapters of it away before I get to “I Am A Strange Loop”. Reviewers say that GEB is a prerequisite for Strange Loop. On the Amazon web site, one of the customer reviews of GEB says “this is the book that made me weird”. Dang! Must be good. Then why didn’t I hear about GEB back in the 80’s?

At the time it came out, I was finishing up law school. I didn’t get a job with a high-powered law firm, and thus had some time to kill. So, with my increased spare time, I started reading non-legal books, and hanging out with a guy who was kicking around in my brother’s crowd. This guy, Mr. Shortman, was around my age. He also had an undergrad degree in engineering (although he didn’t go to law school). He was a heavy-drinking kind of guy (thus his affiliation with my brother’s friends), but his mind wasn’t totally gone yet either. He still took seriously all the stuff about critical thinking and openness to new ideas, which college profs try to cram you with even in engineering school. Good old Rick still hadn’t lost the habit of reading books.

And at the time, there were a lot of new, off-beat books for guys like Rick and me to read. Robert Pirsig had hit the scene with “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, and then there was Samuel Florman with “Existential Pleasures of Engineering”. Lewis Thomas also presented some “outside the box” reflections in “The Medusa and the Snail” and “Lives of a Cell”. Me and Rick discussed these books over many a glass of beer. Hofstadter’s book would have been right up our alley. But for whatever reason, it never made our list. I can’t figure that out.

On the dedication page of my used copy of GEB, there’s some writing under the author’s tribute to “M. and D.” The writing says “Much love to Dad from Alice, ’82”. Wow — so Alice heard about Hofstadter back then, and obviously so did Dad. It can’t help but make me wonder what happened to Alice and Dad – and who were they? And what ever happened to Rick S? I lost track of him about 10 or 12 years ago. We just both kind of lost interest, I guess. Rick moved to Ohio around ’88. Although for a number of years I made the long drive on Interstate 80 to stay in touch, I guess that I got tired of it, especially since Rick seemed to be losing interest in books and off-beat techno-metaphysical viewpoints. We’d still hit the restaurants and taverns, and wind up late at night in a go-go dancer bar (one of Rick’s key non-technical interests). But without the rambling discussions about weird and potentially brilliant new ways of looking at reality, the girls and the beers just seemed kind of low-life (instead of presenting a charmingly odd setting to discuss recursive feedback systems and quantum decoherence and spacetime topology). The fire in Rick’s mind had gone out. And that was really a shame.

Well, hopefully the fire in Dr. Hofstadter’s mind is still burning. I hope that Alice’s dad is still around, and that he gets to read “Strange Loops”. And I’m glad that I finally caught up with Hofstadter. It makes me sad thinking back to Mr. Shortman, though. Someone told me not long ago that he’s still alive, selling RV’s (it’s probably hard to hold a job in quality control engineering in Ohio now, with all the factories being shut; but I’m not doing anything all that earth-shaking with my life either). I can’t help but wonder if Mr. S somehow came across GEB and Strange Loops, would he perhaps pick them up, and maybe get the sense that these were once his kind of book? And maybe read them? Ah, but life buries most of us under so much rubble. To anyone young who might come across my words here (if anyone at all comes across them), I would admonish you to take seriously that line in Pink Floyd’s “Hey You”. The one that goes: “hey you, don’t let them bury the light; don’t give in without a fight”.