SERIOUS GRAVITY (A SANITY PRIMER)

The flux of the mind continues - YES ... the feverish traffic of the brain, myself included ... we grant you this fact, Montaigne, so hold your horses - but also those deep obsessions - sources of continuity for me at least...  You have issues with Montaigne? The French guy?  Famous Skeptic, Stoic, Epicurean, nominal Catholic (very nominal and slack)... Inventor of the modern essay... All-around-"chill guy" -- Yes, yes, yes and more yes... He annoys you? Oh - he's so very relaxed all the time - isn't he? It's a pose you think? Well - how could it not be in part - writing during the wars of religion, living through the plague,  giving advice to kings, those episodes with kidney stones - and falling off his horse that one time - nearly died...  And? Oh - I don't know... the essays meander on for pages at a time...All those digressions - I have no idea what he's getting at half the time... So what is it? Well - he's the first hippie (philosopher) for star...

Standing on the steps of Stroud Hall,  the epicenter of the philosophy, philology, theology and anthropology departments @ the University of M_____ - the dapper professor in the bow tie and the pointed loafers, with a large tuft of miscreant white hairs wafting across his forehead - greeted us with a look of supreme confidence. His specialty - > that strain of deep thought referred to as natural theology - a conjoining of skeptical traditions (in philosophy) with mystical traditions (in theology) with the stated aim of reaching some absolute common ground between believer and non-believer; this man, so justly famous (among a select group of scholars numbering no more than 17) for his 897 page treatise on the Absolute Mystery -  a large umbrella concept meant to embrace the SET containing all possible speculations whether upon God or gods or higher intelligence/s, or cosmic underpinnings or  "Laws of Nature" or Mind/Matter dichotomies, overarching randomness, chance a...

  In one of my more  manic phases, I ran up to Dr. Heinrich... And I was perhaps out of breath, disheveled, impatient - such is my M.O... panting with excitement: Such files, Dr. Heinrich...One hears stories about your archive and these case studies. I myself was an ARCHIVIST once - as far as memory allows me to recollect. Such amazing specimens all - as you like to say. And what - if I may ask - comprises the organizational underpinnings of all this information? Ah - yes - says Dr. Heinrich - it is a classification of types we are building here - a gradual accumulation of files as you see - of lives and possible lives that a person may live -with special emphasis on lives that go "rightly" (for lack of a better word) and lives that go "wrongly" (same limitation of language). Success and failure - your dichotomy? Surely - this and more... But surely Dr. Heinrich you allow for other/additional principles of differentiation??? Oh - surely - yes - We are not stopping a...

 I t can be a wonderful thing to be a patient, because there at the hospital, the facility as we call it, @  people are there taking care of you; they tell you from time to time that things are "getting better," that a "cure" of sorts is in sight; there are other patients there to compare notes with. Such places can be inviting, or should i say, well-structured, living spaces with white walls, long corridors, vending machines, aquatic prints, fountains and garden paths; the food here is reliable if never delicious, the beds are high-enough off the ground, the ceiling lights adjustable. Coffee is available and with some effort kindred souls can be found here to converse with. That is encouraged in fact. And they promise people like ME field trips - to help jar the memory banks. Although I am quite old (as far as one can tell) I am suffering not from dementia, but from bouts of amnesia - i.e. having trouble holding all the episodes of my life together like a pack of c...

"How do things go wrong? How do calamities arise? ...And disasters... accidents...  common everyday mishaps...plans going off course... increasing of our human misery... there's a real level of stress - uncertainty - even terror involved...It is the terror of not knowing you see, what will happen next...b/c at any moment anything is possible... The pace of life nowadays - even in a backwater "bubble" such as this - traffic racing... kids riding faster on their bikes...The rush of deadlines... leading us on toward unexpected reversals of fortune...and like that - bam - a crash, an earthquake, an inferno... So what am I getting at you ask? Well - it's simple...We need a plan - a corollary to our intelligence quotient... something to carry with us, "something" to help us get by...There must be something to fall back upon...a sense of what is possible or impossible or most likely to happen or what we must do to avoid this consequence...So with our typical p...

  Q was taking one of his walks with Dr. Heinrich... and Nurse Amanda was there as well - seemingly appearing and disappearing at random intervals. He was trying to his latest theory about the sources of anxiety - and how "anything was possible at any time"...even in a placid backwater college town such as this one... we live with the dread and uncertainty of these infinite possibilities... You really think an earthquake could strike us, a volcano, a tsunami - aren't we safe from that sort of thing?" Nurse Amanda couldn't resist playing devil's advocate..."I don't just refer to the stress caused by one's current location - but the fact that earth as a whole is so vulnerable is still a stress factor....  Dr. Heinrich was overjoyed by the philosophical bent of the conversation. You're rehabilitation is proceeding splendidly ... you are a fine specimen. What an odd thing to say - Dr. H. was known for these little eccentric utterances that made h...

 Q had always said to himself - " You cannot find Enlightenment in a backwater. .." - but what place wasn't that - even within the college town of B_____  in which he had floundered for so many years... It's because in "backwaters" (towns, villages, suburbs - even large metropoles) so to speak everyone's concerns were so eminently distractible, time-bound, self-referential, fleeting, impermanent, driven by habit. In such places, there was no erstwhile mountaintop to climb, no desert to cross, no golden, mystical, oceanic shoreline to trek along - which is not to say that such exotic excursions were guaranteed to have the desired effect either.  Q had no intentions of making a long pilgrimage anywhere such as to Canterbury or a Buddhist  monastery in Nepal.  This town was filled with smart-enough folks no doubt, some even with a hint of spiritual knowledge -  experts resting on their little perches and pinnacles who made Q nervous and a good deal resentfu...

Q's  life fell apart on him at the very zenith of his career, back when he was a professor of Renaissance studies and official archivist of alchemical esoterica; it was in the wake of what became known on campus as the "le scandale de Vive" - a fleeting tragi-comedy which involved a modicum of good intentions,  some garbled miscommunication involving a troubled young soul, a sordid yet false accusation, formal inquiry ending with official demotion and blighted reputation; this needless and easily avoidable cosmic mishap sent Q 's previous good fortune into a tailspin, derailing both his career and his marriage and severing him from his daughter's love forever, the tragic aftermath of it all precipitating his nervous breakdown which gave way to subsequent years of despondency and embitterment, of generally being out of commission - years marked by days at a time of squatting in public lounge areas, staring out of windows, having fits  alternating between anger and ...

So many utopias that never come into being - these ideal scenarios with the power of logic behind them....A society operating on visions of order and harmony, shared wealth, distribution of goods and services, civility, morality, respect for the common good - a  world that simply moves on from outworn,  useless, backward practices, from inequity and injustice... the excising of stupidity and irrationality... One assumes: If such a world can exist in principle, on paper, it will exist, it must exist, it will come to be under the right conditions....when the stars and opportunities align...Logically speaking ....because what is to stop it? Why should fear alone impede the advancement of humankind? ....Looking around however - we see not utopias, but the ruins of various attempts... And with such consciousness, a  contrary notion asserts itself, namely that if such a place could truly exist, we would have already seen a successful form of it... something would have gained a ...

Growing up out west - we had what was known as the "endless summer" feeling - a moment in the summer when - not Time per se - but hectic, anxious, nerve-wracking time would come to a standstill. Change would still happen of course, things would continue moving, interacting, but at a slower, more predictable pace...the rhythms of summer would take over with sunny days giving way to balmy nights...a certain degree of repetition would lend structure to this seeming "pause" in the action...Clouds still move across the sky, waves still crash against the shore, traffic on the roads, people walking, biking, swimming - but all in a self-contained world over which one had some semblance of control..Long days at the beach, lying in the sun or playing tennis at the community college, watching the heat rise on the pavement, shooting baskets on the outdoor courts, sitting poolside at a neighbor's house, sitting on the lawn at dusk, staying outside on summer nights with no wi...

 I have spent much of my early life in the suburbs and after a brief stint in the big city - with its noise, crowding and cramped spaces,  I find myself immersed again in this familiar realm - an environment that seems part of my destiny. I've always thoughts of the suburbs as a place meant for children - where children can feel safe and protected - with non-busy streets and clean sidewalks - room to ride one's bike or go door-to-door selling cookies. To consider how many of our early impressions and sensations were spawned by this largely artificial world...How different such a milieu is from other places on earth, war zones, rain forests, Siberian outposts, tiny mountaintop villages or large sprawling mazes of high rise apartments in vertically-inclined mega metropolises...The suburbs are a place where a definite order and routine can be imposed...where regularity is king... lawns get mowed on time, shrubs are trimmed, garbage bins are placed at the curb and returned to thei...

The divide between faith and doubt in a secular world...There are those persons of faith who feel firmly grounded in their beliefs arising from to some powerful life-altering event, a conversion experience perhaps or a mystical encounter in Nature, a solid upbringing or otherwise from being grounded in a particular tradition, a faith-community - a way of reading scripture...Once your faith has been secured in this manner, it can be hard to grasp how others fail to find faith...Imagine the person who wants to have a religious experience of the kind that William James wrote about, but cannot find anything within his life-history that qualifies as a massively life-altering event. Or consider the student of religion who performs the requisite research hoping to stumble upon an overlooked yet compelling paradigm, who is nevertheless put off by what appear to be obscure or implausible claims, who despite their best effort is simply unable to "think through" these orthodox tenets or...

Prologue - > We are fortunate to live in a time, or so it is said, when we of the future no longer feel the burden of gender to such a degree as in previous ages; nowadays there is no pre-established norm or "role" for us to perform or hold onto like a chain about the neck. There was a time, of course, and not so long ago, when men were de facto expected to be  tough strong, resilient, athletic, assertive... and which to judge by the role models in movies and popular culture which we could add on silent, stoical, protective, while no great shock was registered if there should be a woman or more than one who in some degree was known (also through popular culture, movies, novels, songs, etc. in comparison with her male counterparts) as:  soft, demure,  flirtatious, sociable, wise,  and to which one might add on: practical, prescient, intuitive, gregarious, solicitous, nurturing and perhaps multi-tasking,  socially-aware, loyal, resilient .   With regard t...

We had made our way down busy Palm Avenue towards the crosswalk. after zigzagging the usual route from busy Bandini Avenue to Tower Road to Rosewood Place. Bret was our wild-man companion - a fifth-grader with a take-no-prisoners approach to life. The local crosswalk, that most mundane of enterprises was soon to become the scene of spontaneous absurdist theater when suddenly out of nowhere came the random yelp: Hey...Hey...What do you want with us lady? -  What do I want with you? said the most predictably normal gray-haired woman by whose ever so brief guidance we measured our daily jaunt to school.  Yeah - where are you taking us? -  There's only one way kid - It's this way... -  You're not really a crossing guard are you? came the cheeky interrogative.  The slightly bemused, limping, beleaguered  woman was dwarfed by her bright yellow uniform as she held up her STOP sign - showing Brett. The other smaller kids walked by us single file in the middle of th...

  The year is 1977...We are traveling back in time to that forlorn, goofy, gritty, disenchanting, disorienting, stable, cuddly, much-maligned decade before the most recent wave of progress had swept across the land, decade of garish neon color and tupperware, decade of energy crises and foreign policy debacles, political scandals and failed assassinations, decade of ethnic pride and racial tension, fading hippie idealism and working class re-alignment, decade of divorce and singles-dating scenes, UFO's, bigfoot sightings, Bermuda Triangle, primal scream therapy,  fondue pots, blue jeans, rock concerts and Lawrence Welk show, decade of urban decay, hard hat riots and west-coast hedonism, youth culture, long hair, food fads, omnipresent television, consciousness raising, protest marches....As part of our deep dive and time travel, we are aware, for starters, of the glaring technological backwardness of this former era - a decade lacking in computer laptops, cell phones, copier m...