this post made sense to me several days ago.. not so sure about it anymore..

you ever feel like there’s a little squeaky voice in your head? i do.. does that make me weird?

despite a rather enticing opportunity once, i never really pursued it. and i think that starts off this thought process below.. namely, about the kind of person running this show. mostly because that decision had two paths. one: a little crazy, incredibly challenging, an amazing compliment, and way outside my comfort zone. the other: ..err.. i guess it was financial in the end. (none of that is to say i regret my decision.. despite my mind’s wanderings and the occassional “yeah.. but what if..”s, i wouldn’t trade what i’ve come away with from my decision for most anything)

so, to put this in some terms that i enjoy, i’m going to consider all this slightly mathematically..

i feel sometimes as though there are two people in here, in this “soul carrying around a corpse” (epictetus). there is the one who loves euclidean geometry.. that is, straight lines, predictable behaviors, logical conclusions, axiomatic frameworks.. congruency, parallels, and postulates. this person loves stability, control, consistency. slopes are known and can be forecast well ahead of time. there are no contradictions, no exceptions, no surprises.. given a sharp pencil and a quality compass, this person could declare themselves god. and sometimes they even believe that..

but then, on the other side, is the one who lives on the edge of math and philosophy early in the 20th century. this child walks the sharp line with the europeans, the wild-eyed germans, the calm pipe-smoking dutch, the always revolutionary french. this boy lives with chaos and uncertainty and lives in the wide-open spaces between the atoms and the possibilities. keep tightening a loop in space and you’ll eventually come to a point. is the cat in schrodinger’s box alive or dead? ..or both? ..what would you see on a train moving the speed of light? ..why can i know the position of an object but not the velocity.. or the velocity and not the position? that these questions don’t have answers (yet) thrills the child of chaos. talk about wave and particle theory and, though he couldn’t really understand the details, he’d still rocket through the roof in a burst of quantum exuberance. yes, partly because this kid is a complete and utter nerd.. but more so because this edgy heart realizes what all this means – that there is no measure to.. well, anything.

there are two pieces here, two competing voices..
the one, a narcissus or an emil, a father: planned, ordered, concise, practical, level.
the other, a goldmund or a demain, a son: unpredictable, unpredictable, infinite, unpredictable, impassioned.

most of the time, i let the father in me win. most decisions by me are considered, weighed with a near scientific zest for accuracy (and the inevitable uncertainty), given time to grow (and fester), and finally, when the more certain path for success or safety is found (or the most conservative one is settled for), i’ll cautiously start putting the parts in motion.

..but every once in a while the son screams, jumps wildly off the little horse, and tears through the woods on the path taken by none, the one untread, unestablished, unconsidered.. and he stops in an opening to make a snow angel just to be a little extra ridiculous. every once in a while, when the father wants to discuss kant and the critique of pure reason, the son slaps his hands on his ears and yells a lung-full of “i kant take it anymore“, looks up to see the effects of such an awful play on words, and falls to the floor bent over double, clutching his stomach with painful belly laughs racking his body.

this boy asks questions, sometimes loudly, while i’m clicking away all day: “what are you doing this for? who cares about this? what if you left.. not in a few weeks but right now? why haven’t you seen the world? do you think you’ll have more time later in life? do you not understand the fierce urgency of ‘now‘? are you happy with your situation? no, i mean it, really? what if you really were a book? do you think i’d read about you? come on.. get a move on living! if you don’t give me a voice, a real voice, i’ll eventually fade away.. and what will you be then?”

there’s trouble with this boy, though.. or, at least, that’s what the father tells me. the father tells me that living off the cuff is romantic.. but ill-advised. he tells me, realism bleeding from his chest, that living in the moment is, by definition, short-lived. the long-term effects are another story all-together and consistently ignored by the child who refused to believe that space and time are definite structures. a child’s heart, mind, and knowledge, he tells me, like the boys stature; small and awkward. and, the father tells me, not all energy is good, for this child has often been the force behind the destructive energy that sometimes overwhelms the traveling pair.

so what about the geometry? well, geometry has greek roots: geo = earth, metria = measure. and since you could make a few transferences – earth = world our perception – you can say that geometry is the measure of what we perceive. i don’t know if it works but i think the idea behind it: i think it’s always good to put our perspective(s) into perspective. personally, i’m starting to see that my perspective(s) have been somewhat more limited than i originally considered.. they haven’t explored this other world, the world of (infinite) possibility enough.. the world of chance and risk. and it’s not that i don’t know how i feel about that, i do: i don’t like it one bit.. but there’s that father in me – “you don’t want that world. think about and plan for the future. make the safe choice and you won’t get burned.”

i’m not going to go out there tomorrow and turn everything on its head.. but i’m going to at least let the boy have his words.

and i know i’ve been odd..

so what’s holding you back? no, i’m not talking about kentucky’s seatbelt campaign.. i’m asking, as directly as possible, what’s holding you back? back from being/doing/thinking/saying/having/feeling exactly what you want..?

lately, if you haven’t noticed, i’ve been odd. there are, of course, plenty of excuses as to why.. but really only one reason: i’ve let myself get there, let myself need to be back on the living room couch to huddle under my blue afghan, trying to recite some mantra in hopes that it will mystically make things right in my soul.

now, i recognize that i can be overly romantic and/or dramatic at times but i do, sometimes, need to sink into my irrational fits of despair. maybe it’s a way of getting my dose of perspective.. i don’t know.. but i’ve got my phone call from buddy. and it’s time to get off the bed, go outside, and get to work.

from salinger’s franny and zooey

Franny shrieked, “Will you shut up, please?”

In just a second, in just a second. You keep talking about ego. My God, it would take Christ himself to decide what’s ego and what isn’t. This is God’s universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what’s ego and what isn’t. What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away? No, of course you don’t! But you’d like your friend Professor Tupper’s ego taken away from him. That’s different. And maybe it is. Maybe it is. But don’t go screaming about egos in general. In my opinion, if you really want to know, half the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren’t using their true egos. Take your Professor Tupper. From what you say about him, anyway, I’d lay almost any odds that this thing he’s using, the thing you think is his ego, isn’t his ego at all but some other, much dirtier, much less basic faculty. My God, you’ve been around schools long enough to know the score. Scratch an incompetent schoolteacher–or, for that matter, college professor–and half the time you find a displaced first-class automobile mechanic or a goddam stonemason. Take LeSage, for instance– my friend, my employer, my Rose of Madison Avenue. You think it was his ego that got him into television? Like hell it was I He has no ego any more–if ever he had one. He’s split it up into hobbies. He has at least three hobbies that I know of–and they all have to do with a big, ten-thousand-dollar workroom in his basement, full of power tools and vises and God knows what else. Nobody who’s really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies.” Zooey suddenly broke off. He was still lying with his eyes closed and his fingers laced, quite tightly, across his chest, his shirt-front. But he now ground his face into a deliberately pained expression–a form, apparently, of self-criticism. “Hobbies,” he said. “How did I get off onto hobbies?” He lay still for a moment.

Franny’s sobs, no more than partly muffled by a satin pillow, made the only sound in the room. Bloomberg was now sitting under the piano, on an island of sunshine, rather picturesquely washing his face.

so are you using your real ego? do you even know what it is?

–sorry, yet another big thought condemned to incompleteness 😉