Presentation

“Giving things as they are, how shall one individual live?”  -- Annie Dillard, Introduction, For the Time Being.

If it weren’t for this class, had some stranger stopped me on the street and asked me that question, I would have had the same intimidated, confused, and stuttering response that I’m sure most people would have. However, I have had this class, and will forever have an answer for that stranger. I’m going to tell him the process of living a life is a lot like the process of reading a book.

In a class full of circles, the ring that served as our nucleus has been without a doubt the Circle of Interpreting Literature. It has four connected and repetitive stages:

1.       Unread – the reader is ignorant of the book’s contents.

2.       Literal – The words have been read. The reader’s brain is now aware of sequence of words, spaces, and punctuations in the series presented by the author of the book. As soon as this stage begins, so begins the movement towards the next stage.

3.       Metaphorical – the relationship between the words as a larger whole is established. The reader’s brain interprets a story/information from the particular sequence of words as presented in the book. This stage is extensive; it ranges from simply grasping that a message is being communicated through the sequence of words, to any deriving of personal attachments/imagery/memories from the mental processes that occur when a person is reading.

4.       Cosmological – in light of the experience of reading the book, the reader wonders where the story has come from, pursues an answer, and in some sense, settles on one. In micro, the reader wonder what the ending to the Magus is all about. The reader researches an answer through various means, be they reviews and interviews, or reading other books and making connections, or simply personal insight. Then the reader comes to their conclusion, regardless of how firm they are in its resolve. In macro, the reader wonders where all of John Fowles’ ideas came from, what cultural influences lead to them and came from them, etc. More answers come from more investigation. This is the stage where “meaning” is found.

5.       Anagogical – the Cosmological is applied to the Literal. The simple words now contain all ideas and questions created by undergoing the cycle. Then the book is re-read, and this time the stages are re-experienced with all of the insight from the first trip around in tow, all the way around for as many times as the person wants to read the book.

It is worth noting that a person doesn’t complete this cycle simply by reading a book. A significant amount of reading and re-reading must be done to really make it all the way around even once. Of course, only the reader can say if he or she has understood a text anagogically, as not even the author is necessarily privy to the full depth of meanings his or her text may contain. 

I believe that Annie Dillard has an answer for her question, and that it came from applying this thought process to her daily life. I also believe that in answering this question, a deep understanding of how the past possesses the future is required. 

I have a strange sequence of connected “coincidences” that I have experienced largely because of this class that I feel illustrate this concept particularly well. They will be recounted as best as I can throughout this presentation.

Coincidence 1.

There is a video of me in preschool singing Christmas songs. My preschool was in a lady named Anne’s basement, and had 6 kids in it from around the rather large surrounding area. Standing next to me and singing right along is a young boy named Connor Murnion.

To demonstrate the idea of applying the Cycle of Interpreting Literature to a Person’s regular life, I have to start with a box. Upon opening the box, the Person begins the Cycle of Interpreting Life.

1.       Ignored (unread) - The Person does not know what is in the box, and with the contents unobserved, to the person’s brain the box could contain anything. Therefore, nothing can be sure about what is inside, much like an unread book.

2.       Acknowledged (literal)– The box is opened, and a glass of water is revealed to the Person. As soon as the Person’s mind recognizes what it is seeing, or that it is seeing anything at all, that means it has begun interpreting the object, meaning the Person is already in the next stage.

3.       Perceived (metaphorical) – There is not direct contact between the conscious mind of the Person and the glass of water he or she is perceiving regardless of what length he or she goes to perceive it, be that drinking it, splashing it, or breaking the glass. The senses through which the Person perceives the world are the first line of interpreting a reality far more vast and nuanced than any combination of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell can create. Throughout the animal kingdom exist examples of this fact: sharks detect electromagnetism, bats have sonar, etc. Therefore, what the conscious mind of the Person is experiencing at any given moment of consciousness is a representation of what reality actually is, presented in a way that allows a Person to navigate it. So really, all that the mind of the Person experiences was a metaphor from the get go. 

Still, water has a great deal of profound observable properties. Bruce Lee based his whole lifestyle around it, as he described when he said:

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

Understanding the observable properties of water and applying it to one’s own life is the purpose of this exercise, and I have no problem admitting that it was Bruce Lee’s quote that first got me interested in water as something more than just the thing I’d drink when I was out of milk and juice. Still, much of what Bruce Lee talked about was a person’s kung fu and how they should not be a master of Karate or Tai Kwan Do, but of Spencer fu  or the Flying Valerie. As a result, I’ve taken it upon myself to try and understand water in my own way, and it is the conglomeration of my interpretations that will guide the way through the rest of the Person’s experience with water.

I love science, and I think that within its technical language a lot of deep personal insight can be found, so that’s what I’ll use to start. Water molecules are composed of two hydrogen

atoms and one oxygen atom. The molecule is polarized, negative on one end where both atoms of hydrogen are, and positive on the other. However, more specifically, it is dipolar, meaning that each side is relatively positive and relatively negative, which is a crucial factor in making water molecules attracted to each other and to other polar molecules, which goes a long way towards making water the universal solvent that it is. Water is the only molecule that can form four hydrogen bonds, which is what separates it from the rest of molecules that form hydrogen bonds, giving rise to water’s open structure and three-dimensional bonding network.  The hydrogen bonds it shares with other water molecules are weaker than the covalent bonds within the molecule itself, but they are what give water the ability to occur commonly and naturally in nature in three forms, liquid, solid, and vapor. Those forms lead to the Water Cycle, the way water moves between oceans, atmosphere and land.

1.       Precipitation (literal) - rain or snow or something in between falls from clouds down to the land and sea.

2.       Permeation (metaphorical) – the water circulates through the environment it lands in. This isn’t usually part of the cycle, but it’s how water interacts with life, which is why I’m including it.

3.       Evaporation (cosmological) – The water becomes vaporous and ascends back towards the clouds.

4.       Condensation (anagogical)  – the water condenses into clouds and repeats the cycle.

I can’t help but think this cycle fits in with both the established Circle of Interpreting Literature and with the Circle of Interpreting Life that I’m trying to develop.

Coincidence 2.

My sophomore year of high school was the first time I rejected the Catholicism I’d been raised with as truth. Instead of going to atheism though, I decided to make up my own personal religion. It consisted of a series of rings inside of rings, mirroring the valence shells of the electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom. This lifetime was just the space between two rings, with the transition from the experiences in this life to whatever it is that comes after not consisting of some moral judgment, but as a gate that one can only pass through if the y have explored all the highs and lows possible between, because the most basal experiences of the next level exceed the emotional complexities of the most deep and powerful experiences available in this one, and there for require all those preceding experiences in order to be comprehended. This, to me, allowed for all religious paths to exist simultaneously, and if anything it demanded that they be combined. One night, I tried as best as my stoned little self could to explain it to Connor Murnion, a friend with whom I’d spent middle school re-meeting and winning various video competitions for kids. I doubt he remembers, but he was the only person I ever told about it, for by that time the year later I was more Catholic than I ever had been before.

To transition from interpreting a glass of water passed the Metaphorical/Perceptional level on to the next requires the same process as transitioning from science into art, or as I like to call it since reading The Magus, transitioning from the water into the wave. It is the process of taking all the knowledge one has gained from perceiving the object and finding out how it relates to oneself. To put it in Conchis’s terms, the water is the substance of reality; it is the name of the molecule itself and contains all of its behaviors. The wave on the other hand, is the human way of interpreting the substance being seen; the wave would be a wave regardless of whether or not humans called it that because waves form because of the basic properties of the substance that is water. Waves are inseparable from the whole body of water, just as each individual molecule of water in the body of water is directly and indirectly connected to all the others, which is why waves happen in the first place. It is human to separate them and say here  is this Wave on the water, this moment where a specific group of water molecules rose high above the rest before crashing right back down to join them, that those molecules are briefly different from regular water, despite being exactly that, and in fact, a direct result of being just regular water. When Conchis ask Nicholas if he was the water or the wave, I don’t think he meant that a person is resolutely one or the other; rather, I think he was asking him to be aware that both the are the same thing, transitioning back and forth within itself.

Water makes up 55% to 78% of the Person’s body, so to track to the origins of water would go a long way towards not only understanding how it relates to the Person, as well as how he or she relates to water. Remembering that the glass the water is held in is made of sand. The rest of the elements required to make the Person’s body can be found in the dirt, soils, and sands of the Earth,  so in that one glass of water all of the Person can be fairly well represented, with only the air between not being apparent and clear because the air, of course, is transparent and clear.

So where did water and dirt and air come from?

According to the Big Bang Theory (all of this is highly theoretical and could very well be completely wrong), all the matter and energy that exists in the universe was once in a state of singularity. In this state, every single atom that makes up me, my computer, you reading this, your chair, and Jupiter was once completely unified and indistinguishable from each other as a result. Then, at some unknown point, that singularity ruptured and the universe formed as a result.

The universe is frequently described as a chaotic system, which means it was highly sensitive to its initial conditions. The tiniest variations in the events at the beginning of such a system yield massive changes to where the system ends up. This is called the Butterfly Effect, because of a paper written by Edward Lorenz that speculated how the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in Brazil could set off a chain of events that cause a tornado in Texas. Indeed, the very first events that happen in a chaotic system are directly causal to determining where the system ends, which is considered to be entropy based off thermodynamics. That being said, it would be impossible to predict what long term differences would occur in a system after changing the initial conditions simply by knowing what the changes are. This is because of another condition of chaos called topographical mixing, which means that every element in the system must interact with every other element. There is no way of predicting how these interactions will play out, especially because of the third element of chaos, which is high periodic density. That means that this mixing of elements has to happen frequently, only further obscuring the view of what the final entropic still will look like, despite being the source of it.

The initial state of the post-Bang universe, and I’m drastically over simplifying this, was essentially this:  all of the once energy was expanding rapidly outward while simultaneously being governed by gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. In hindsight it is clear that at some point energy became matter, first in the form of hydrogen. At this point if a Person had Einstein’s E=mc² equation, he or she may have, at this point, predicted that gravity would pull those hydrogen atoms together. But it would have been impossible to predict that hydrogen atoms would ball up into massive stars spread throughout the universe that capable fuse hydrogen atoms together and beginning the process of forming all the rest of the elements, not to mention galaxies and solar systems. So even though hydrogen makes up the majority of the matter in the universe, one could not have guessed that it would recombine and mix in the ways that it has, and at the same time, because of topographical mixing, everyone would have had to guess that it would all have to mix together in some form. So how does such complex order rise from chaos?

A chaotic system will, with unlimited time, recombine itself in all possible ways before reaching entropy. Out the gate, the vast majority of the elements will not combine at all, with the motion since the Big Bang being to expand outward. Still, over time, it will become increasingly likely that the elements of the system will combine in various degrees of order, with more complexity developing as time passes and there are more and more one-in-a-million chances that land on one. The more time passes, the more opportunities there will be for complex structures to interact with each other and recombine into larger and even more complex structures, until so much time has passed that the most complex combinations of elements can combine together, resulting in entropy, or uniform disorder, which in the face of chaos, is a uniform mixing of the separate elements together, ergo, uniform complexity. Essentially, the longer a chaotic system exists, the more complex its organization of elements will be.

Humans on Earth live approximately 13.4 billion years after the Big Bang. The impossibility of this fact in the face of the initial conditions of the universe is matched in incomprehensibility only by the fact that it is so simultaneously inevitable. First, hydrogen had to be converted to Helium in stars by undergoing nuclear fusion. Next, that Helium had to get bashed around by all kinds of universal factors in order to get it to the oxygen required to make water. That took billions of years to happen, and for each new atom of Helium that formed from Hydrogen came a massive flap of the universal butterfly’s wings, forever altering how the future of the universe would play out. Tiny and specific differences in the behaviors of these first atoms would have yielded a present quite a bit different from our own, although to what degree is impossible to guess. Every step of the way from the formation of atoms to the formation of water to the formation of life was essential to forging the present day, each combination and separation of atoms was necessary and directly responsible for the current arrangement of energy and matter in the universe.

I will display a timeline in class of the universe from the Big Bang until the present day. During this point there will be a discussion about what had to happen to get from one end to the other, and I’d like the class to contribute to this section. Still there are key points (labled in years since the Big Bang)

3 minutes – Hydrogen forms.

30 million years – stars form.

200 million years – the Milky Way galaxy forms

9 billion years – our solar system forms

10 billion years – the first life appears on Earth.

11 billion years – atmospheric oxygen appears as a result of the chemical processes of early life.

13.5 billion years – the first humans evolve.

13.7 billion years – this project is presented.

Coincidence 3

I’m walking to class with a girl named Brooke, who has Spanish with me right before Tracings. On the way, it is revealed that Brooke’s room in her house shares a wall with my older sister Audrey’s room in her house. A week later, after Brady’s blog on circles, Brooke posts a blog on how she has developed a system of understanding life based around the circular electron paths in atoms. A few weeks later, Calder posts a blog on seeing in a piece of paper the clouds from which the rain fell to water the tree from which the paper was made. A week later, Connor Murnion begins attenting our class.

After going through the timeline, it becomes much clearer how the Person is related to the glass of water.          At this point, the Circle of Interpreting Life transitions from Perception to Reaction.

4.       Reaction (cosmological) – Now that the Person has been impressed by the massive scope of his or her own existence and the existence of the cup of water, he or she will begin to infer personal meaning from the relationship the Person has with the cup of water. The Person has examined the water from a scientific standpoint and a metaphorical one as well, meaning he or she has seen it as both the water and the wave.

There is one element to human existence that requires people to interpret it from both standpoints at once: music. Music is both mathematically explainable and logical, and mystical and emotional. To make music requires unifying contradicting concepts; rhythm comes not from the beat, but from the silence between the beats as well; harmony takes separate elements (notes) and brings them together to make a chord that is more complex and capable than any of the individual elements. Even those individual notes only gain power when played in the presence of other notes, meaning the song is the result of what notes come together, but how they are played in sequence.  On top of that, to play music requires both halves of the musician’s brain to be unified so that the musician can play both logically and creatively at the same time. Obiviously most human functioning requires the whole brain, but music requires such a particular level of synergy to both create and understand that it seems to stand alone from all other human activities. Besides, I can’t think of anything in the world that contradicts the initial conditions of the universe more than human music; for it to exist requires all the other impossible combinations I’ve touched upon: water, life,  and consciousness.

Consciousness would take far too much time to examine in depth, so instead I’d like to point out a few of its attributes at the present moment: consciousness has led humans to understand the history of the universe, and yet the conscious minds of humans are more perplexed by what consciousness is than they are about the origins of the universe. Indeed, consciousness does not know what consciousness is, and is immensely curious about it. On top of that, human consciousness is only a fraction on the whole human mental existence. The subconscious constantly feeds the conscious and is fully aware of its functions, yet the conscious is completely baffled by the subconscious. In short, consciousness confusing, and therefore I’m not going to talk too much about it.

Still, consciousness is a requirement for music. The case seems to be overwhelmingly that music results from the conscious mind finding meaning in the chaos that surrounds it, and that that meaning inspires the Person to create music. I can only explain this process by demonstration. Luckily, I have written a song that was entirely inspired by me applying this Circle to water, and the meaning I have found as a result. The lyrics will be attached.

Coincidence 4

The first week of class, Professor Sexson explained why it is so important to pay attention. His reasoning was complex and thorough, although it all hinged on what at first glance was a simple idea ( and I quote): “Something is going on here!”

 I shivered in class, hearing the words of a song I wrote repeated to me for the same reason I wrote them. Any more confirmation that Something is in fact going on here in the universe of human experience is no longer necessary.

5.       Perspective is Asserted (anagogical) – After meaning is found, the Person must return to seeing the glass of water as to him or her it once was: simply a glass full of water. The fact is, I wrote a song about a cup of water. That’s a pretty damn funny thing to do, and if you asked a Person if he or she wanted to hear a deeply emotional song about water, I can only imagine that they would laugh outright before responding, “no thanks.” In that sense, this assertion of perspective can seem cruel, but it is absolutely crucial to maintaining a worldview that allows for the cycle to continue. Without it, all meaning that was found is lost, because that meaning only came from altering the perspective with which the Person viewed the water.

This is where a rule I’ve developed from my own experiences comes into play. It’s called the Fuck Rule, and I found it by analyzing my relationships with people. To strangers and acquaintances, I unilaterally will try to be as open and polite as I can. Yet to my close friends, the people with whom I have developed a great deal of understanding, our interactions frequently open with a raised middle finger or something along those lines. Indeed, only by understanding a person does it become possible for saying “fuck you” to mean “I love you buddy” like it does within my friend group. This apparent disrespect can only be exchanged like this if both parties actually do share immense respect for each other.

In that same token, the bittersweet moment of asserting Perspective on any meaning the Person finds can only happen if the Person does truly believe that he or she has found meaning. To clarify, if the Person saw this presentation and my song, he or she would likely be reminded of it for a short while afterwards whenever the Person encountered water in cups, and though those cups of water wouldn’t come with a song or extensive examination, the sight of water would likely call back any meaning found during the presentation. Perhaps in that moment the Person would experience a tinge of nostalgia for the time of this presentation, but any happy memory will only serve to remind the Person that the time of this presentation is gone forever.

Still, this bittersweet moment would be the very same moment in which the Person will recognize the depth with which the past possesses the present. From then on out, the experience of this presentation can inform the mind of the Person for any future interactions he or she has with glasses of water.

To conclude this presentation on the many interconnected circles and cycles of the human experience, I would like to add one more cycle to the mix. It is the Circle of Life.

1.       Unborn

2.       Birth

3.       Youth and Development

4.       Maturity and Reproduction

5.       Old Age and Death.

Together the Circles look like this.

1.       Literal/Acknowledgement/Precipitation/Birth

2.       Metaphorical/Perception/Permeation/Youth

3.       Cosmological/Reaction/Evaporation/Maturity and Reproduction(Music)

4.       Anagogical/Assertion of Perspective/Condensation/Old Age and Death.

My goal was to provide as system that any person could use answer Annie Dillard’s question: “Giving things as they are, how shall one individual live?” The result of using this system, ideally, is the Person learning to find meaning for themselves in everyday objects and occurrences. I believe that by paying attention and diving deeply into my surroundings I will be engage the chaos of the universe directly, and by putting order and meaning to it, I can be an agent of entropy. I believe that the steps I take will leave footprints on the sands of time whether I like it or not.

There is no one clear answer for Dillard’s question; every person will have a unique answer. Regardless of how a person should live, he or she still lives. The Circle of Interpreting Life is my way of engaging with my life, and it is how I am learning to let myself be totally changed from water, dirt, and air into the blazing fires of entropy envisioned by Teilhard.

Thank you for reading!

Here's the lyrics to the song I played too!

 

Mud by Joe Schadt

Verse 1

Follow, follow, follow, follow me

out to the snow.

They can’t, they can’t, they can’t hear

our voices now,

so we can sing

so loud

and we can just,

lay back down

and make some strange snow angels, now

maybe that’s why I’ve been seeing skulls up in the clouds.

I know time, times are changing somehow.

As these angels melt.

Chorus

I know something is going on here.

I can feel it move, and I can feel it breathe.

Verse 2

I guess, I guess, I guess, it’s just

me and my friends

out here listening, listening,

to these angels sing

that your soul is vaporious

and your soul is dangerous,

because you’re having the time of your life.

That’s some heavy water that’s falling, falling, down.

That’s some heavy water that’s flowing on this ground.

That’s some heavy water, and it’s turning me round.

Chorus

Is there something that we forgot how to see?

Feel the wind blow. Feel the gravity.

Verse 3

I can do, I can do, anything.

I am here to change.

There’s something old, something ancient

deep down in my brain.

And it keeps on telling, telling

me things.

Making, making

me sing,

that Holy Water’s got nothing on this Mud.

I don’t know what I’m feeling, but damn I’m feeling good.

Now if I start flowing, they’ll see me when I’m done.

Outro

I am an ocean, I am one.

I am the storm, I am the sun.

His story is history,

it’s our turn now.