10. Consider: The Eye of Sauron could penetrate a mortal soul, but lacked depth perception.

Tugela Falls

9. A contradiction obviously, though Scribe’s world-continent was populated by cultural isolates, both in space & time, meticulously researched. Importantly, as an aside, Josef’s own dream port, namely that of our highest dream-master, is an indigo ocean world of archipelagos. Not Egypt.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.

11. I can see, however, that investing in color vision ultimately might improve 3-d efficiency, as a few bright color-spots, say, might make image alignment easier.

8. Pounds of Flesh (Gathering)

            Consider for a moment a human corpse (not me), lying supine in a hospital bed one second after flat-lining. What is the difference between the before & after death? Physically there’s no measurable difference at all. What’s changed—life—means everything, but nowhere can it be located or defined. Once departed, it can’t be put back. 
            My piano playing is likewise a Frankensteinian collection of body parts, gathered & glued together by a mad musical genius (in his mind), who’s more often a sad boy in practice. All I need, I pray, is a lightning strike to spark the “pieces” to life.[3] What’s the difference between “hitting keys” and “playing” piano? Everything. Consider, for instance, that a spark, in this story, is that vital moment when outside energy initiates a pattern or effect that continues on its own. The “life” of a piece of music, however, must embody far more than its genesis; it must infuse each cell or constituent element throughout the entirety, every distinct note shaped & wrapped in its context, even every rest a living, aching absence—“silence” in my pneumonia semantics.

            This is where in Lesson 13 I'm supposed to make the connection between the silence I experience when I slip into musical beauty and the silence of stereoscopy. Which means, dear Danielle, after fifty years of honest investigation, I’ve arrived at the gate: Now I have to “explain” music. 
            I can’t, says the boy. No one can.
            The old fool agrees. It’s like the Tao or the Good. Music can’t be told, and God knows many have tried. He compares my forthcoming effort to my writing in Lesson 12 about sex. What could I possibly add to the human discussion?
            “Silence!” I hear myself scold the cricket, who snickers as I hit the snooze button on my smoke alarm.

            So of course much of my insecurity on this topic stems from my long-acknowledged lack of reading & fuzzy philosophy, which I value highly but have always found hard. Such marks the tip of an iceberg that calved long ago, for lurking among yet another of my dubious apocrypha—more insidious than Auschwitz & again tracing back to flying boyhood—I found my excuse to justify my academic laziness: In this early hope & lie, it was my life’s highest challenge to figure out all the Big Questions myself. I saw everyone should come to their own beliefs, create their own responsible religion; but I would actually get it right. Thus, I was open to many ideas from many other sources, the great masters especially, but not their details. It was my job, indeed my joy & destiny, to work out the puzzle personally, without someone else’s answer key. Because I could.
            Obviously this is an incredibly arrogant self-opinion, but, recall, up until age 11 I was a happy flyer who exuded charm & self-confidence, largely because I succeeded at everything I tried; and truly most of my attitude (believe it or not) came not from my sizable ego, but rather my sense of pure gamesmanship. I’ve always projected my life’s role in overview, from Albion’s peak, as playing/living the fullest life possible over an extended duration, 80-100 busy years: I would give 100% until the final whistle, learning everything I could squeeze & sequence in time, maximizing all the ultimate lessons, because that’s how the game is played. Recognize also that from the earliest age I knew—far better than my wonderful parents—precisely which issues in life mattered most (love & parenting absolutely), for I’ve always known eternity is real. Music proved that.
            Here then, as an aside, I can briefly address the intellectual problem I’ve had all along with “official” philosophy: I’m deeply curious what the greatest thinkers have thought about these Big Questions; but when I start to read them—Plato, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein—I find myself unreceptive to suggestion, regularly saying No, that’s not how it is. I know. I live in eternity all the time, and you’ve just got it wrong. I often find reading further then to be uncurious & labyrinthine. Right now, for instance, I’m losing interest in Paradiso (which I’ll finish soon), for Dante, I feel, is overcome by his beauty-construction, as he, like me, repeatedly loses vision, speech, & consciousness thanks to bigger, brighter beauties & better beatitudes; and heaven just gets medieval slapstick. (Beatrice’s a complete bitch.) I can love Dante’s language—and, as an albion, tip my hat to the world’s greatest singular metaphysical vision—but, well, he’s just wrong. The afterlife doesn’t revolve around justice, and no Jesus can save you.
            I mention all this backstory in order to frame what I might uniquely offer humanity, my universe of music & voices. That is, “What is music?” is certainly not the most important question facing us, but, for me, it’s by far the greatest mystery I know—and yet, ho hum, the world has nothing to say about it. The Double-Slit experiments, for instance, especially the modern versions, completely explode all science & logic; our own Big Bang somehow is picking up speed; long ago life on Earth once started—once & once only. These are easy mysteries compared to music. In fact, I’ve never heard any explanation for music anywhere, not in science or religion or philosophy or psychology, not even at the ouija board. And I ask in real objection: How can any serious thinker fail to highlight our own massive collective human failure even to define music? Isn’t this the height of intellectual laziness? (Musicians themselves just sigh…)

            Given: Music plays constantly in my head, both heard & unheard, beautiful polyphonic music that goes on & on & on morphing like a river. Most of my life I ignore it like a radio in the next room; but I find myself breathing, humming, walking, whistling along unconsciously even when I’m not listening. The music “stops” in me when my attention is sharply focused elsewhere, although the music may, in fact, continue on its own independently in the right-hemisphere without “me” following.
            Music is not noise, which may be defined as randomness; and, to be clear, I hear music in my head, like it or not, never random noise, exactly one track or song at a time. Music is the opposite of noise, for it is intelligent. It does not suffice to say merely that music, unlike randomness, represents “a pattern” of sounds (which means repeated sounds, for the patterns are restricted to the narrow range of human hearing). The vast majority of sound-patterns in this universe are not musical, whether a pulsar radio signal or my (roughly doubled) resting pulse on a hospital monitor. Thus, most strangely, a musical pattern, like all “information,” can neither be too regular, nor too irregular to discern. 

            To illustrate this profound notion—that music slips between the cracks of expectation—I offer a curious thought or two from my current reading of Dante: Whereas Inferno & Purgatorio are literally constructed around differing categories of human vice & defect, Paradiso is arranged to follow the concentric spheres of its moody planets, including the medieval sun & moon. Everywhere Dante gazes shine lights & wheels & saints doing cartwheels, which turn a heavenly human glockenspiel and describe literally “the music of the spheres,” for indeed sacred (Latin) music is made visible everywhere in Paradiso, hosannas in the highest—while in contrast, we might recall, Inferno has no music at all (rather than “bad” music, which is fun to contemplate). 
            Let me confess my complacency over Dante’s classical metaphor—discovered by Pythagorus, expounded by Boethius—which, in an ideal Neoplatonist light, links the predictability of planetary motions with the same math that governs geometry & harmonics. Ho hum, of course I agree; and I applaud Dante’s appeal to the divine intellect (in contrast to QAnon Christianity). But, well, math & music are abstract, while planetary orbits are more rhythmically punctual than a metronome, which, we must insist, is decidedly not music. 
            But wait: It finally dawned on me that Dante is speaking an extinct language. The sun & moon were “planets” (duh), because medieval planets pre-Copernicus didn’t orbit the sun. They traced predictable linear patterns in the night sky—if you’d trained for years to follow the mystical astronomy; but they’re not elliptical nor comprehensible to any layman, particularly due to their visible retrograde motions, as seen from our own orbiting Earth perspective. Thus a wistful astrologer might, in a moment of insight, construe such back-&-forth wanderings over months as a kind of dance step, even a conscious wink from the heavens when ascribed to a god or a titan. In other words, “the music of the spheres” can be made to make sense, but only from a POV of partial ignorance projected, storytelling.
            Does this mean that music arises from, let’s call it, the fractal edge of ignorance? In such a light I cannot help but visualize the Mandelbrot set. (And note for the record, while I am not normally visual, factually not even God can see the Mandelbrot set.)
            To counter this thought, however, consider that from a divine POV perhaps, like that of a daimon—which represents the opposite of “ignorance”—we might indeed find the planets musical, if, outside of time, we could condense the full lifespan of the moon, say, into its handful of major movements over ten billion years: its birth in colossal collision, its subsequent taming of Earth tides & framing of our life cycles, all the while drifting away, never planning to stay, dragging down the very duration of a day, until someday slipping its earthbound knots entirely. Is that a symphony? Or, on the quantum scale, if, like dancing pinhead angels, we could discern the virtual vicissitudes of a cesium atomic clock or perceive uranium become thorium become radium become lead, would that quantum foam ring or sing or scream? Music lies in the ear of the wormholder.
            Here’s a bigger issue raised by Dante: What does a pre-Copernican, pre-baroque Dante even mean by “music”? Go back to the source: When Plato trisected the Good into Beauty, Justice, and Harmony, exactly what aspect or facet of perfection did he intend by “harmony,” other than those root mathematical proportions—the octave, the perfect fifth, & fourth—ascribed to the Pythagoreans? Such simple ratios, of course, are not the same as “harmony” itself; they can only confirm and symbolize for Plato something profound & essential, otherwise indescribable, that humans perceive acoustically—namely, the experience of music, which we all feel we know. But indeed, we must next ask, what simple tunes did the lyres & flutes of The Symposium play? When was Orpheus or who Apollo? For let me be quite clear on this: That’s not music. Music didn’t even start until the late Renaissance, not in any form that could satisfy my inner world. Again I am spaghettified when I consider how central music is to my identity and, therefore, how utterly different I am from the vast majority of our 100+ billion sapiens forefathers, people with identical brains, who never ever heard music. God I love Bach.
            Thus, music is unnecessary & unnatural, endemic to Earth 2.0 only, nowhere in the Garden of Eden nor in any cave. What does Darwin say? Singing around a campfire might well have proved advantageous in the Stone Age, in terms of protection & natural selection, but music—as I define it here, as indeed all modern & future humans imagine music—serves no known biological function. Beethoven’s Ninth is not a souped-up mating call. 

            Music does have “organic” building blocks, however, literal physical structures of sound. That is, unlike Platonic forms pure tones exist in reality—though rare in nature—sounds such as those produced from a metal tuning fork. These are sound waves free of noise, isolated from the world’s chaos of interfering sounds; and as such, presumably they become useful auditory landmarks for creatures evolving ears, notes of reference common to us & our animal cousins—the way our later minds in math find integers a lot easier to wield than irrational numbers. Consider that mating calls in the wild foremost must pierce through the acoustic chaos of a dripping rainforest or howling arctic wind (which have very different soundscapes); thus nature employs tones & timbres so purely calibrated that the distant listener can locate & lock in on the sound with their attention, a beacon in the din, eventually reinforced by an evolved dopamine reward.
            Except once our attentions home in & anchor on the pure tones we’ve isolated, we then discover, buzzing in the faint background, all their overtones—the circles of octaves, fifths, & fourths—which physically divide the sound wave into (near-) integral ratios. A C string on a lyre, for instance, when halved, produces another C one octave higher; and what really happens physically when a C string is plucked is we hear both the fundamental C, which is lowest, as well as many higher Cs, some more audible than others, along with many Gs and Ds (namely, the relative dominants & subdominants, which represent ratios on the string of roughly 3:2). Collectively these extra overtones combine in our acoustic perception to give us timbre, as instruments made of different materials will strongly affect the overtones in a multitude of ways, only a few of which produce consonance & harmony. Constructing, and then tuning, a musical instrument thus requires focus on both the fundamentals & the overtones. The splayed brass opening of a trumpet or trombone, for example, is not designed for louder volume, but to correct for dissonant overtones.
            To be clear, while a laboratory can confirm physically the harmonics I gloss over—including, for instance, why two Cs several octaves apart sound “the same” to us—physics can’t tell us why a perfect fifth sounds beautiful. Yes, the human ear is a coiled, vibrating tube, like a trumpet, responsive to the same said physics—meaning, sympathetic & receptive to sound vibrations as an echo. But why does pitch subjectively seem such a tidy spiral to us, repeating circles of the same ratios?[4] What’s key is that these repeated tones & notes do not adhere to absolute frequencies, but rather represent relations & proportions among themselves, and are therefore quite arbitrary: You can stake your music scale to any tone in the human range and name that tone your “middle C”; but once you do, the octaves, fifths, and fourths fall mathematically in line. People like my wife with perfect pitch tend to think of songs as locked into a particular key—as once they were—but thanks to modern equal-tempered tunings, any song can shift up or down the scale and still preserve its internal integrity. 
            None of this explains music….

            Foremost, obviously, music is an emotional experience: Though abstract & nonverbal, sound patterns somehow become chemical/hormonal. For me personally, no other routine life experience compares, as I barely notice my feelings normally. I never cry, for instance, from sadness or as a means to release pain (alas, for I’m well aware crying can heal). I do tear up, however, pretty much every time I hear Bach’s Air on the G String or the second movement adagio of his Violin Concerto No. 2. Mind you, I don’t choose to cry; it’s not an end I seek; the tears are epiphenomenal & ephemeral. No words convey my crying, especially as its source & essence combine good elements only that usually have nothing to do with sadness—personal joy, plugged-in wormhole beauty, an overwhelming, reeling awe of Bach’s genius. I cry in the presence of God.
            Which is my challenge, which is my Dis. And I realize only now, in this very moment of writing how silly of me, to aspire to the whole Earth 2.0 music library without first finding, then holding on to silence….


            “Silence!” shouts the cricket, foot on the brake & smirking smugly—namely, Checkmate, he winks.
            And he wins. It’s like he’s played a fucking race-card or laid a stink bomb in my choir. I can’t kill him; he’s my canary-in-my-cranium, whom I carry as baggage through my right-brain Swiss cheese labyrinth, and whose idle chirping keeps me anchored to my language line. As long as he keeps talking, the line can be extended deeper; I will follow. A silent canary, of course, is the signal to flee, to fly.
            Thus the cricket’s call for “silence” is both cute & effective, for I cannot help but  salute what seems both righteous & clever. Thusly am I diverted, by my own flag-waving loyalties (to my idol-ideal Good) & by my (comparative/competitive) pride.  
            And thus, thank you, dear Fucker, “I” grudgingly acknowledge, angry & focused: That I can be lured away so easily—from this dream, from my challenge –  poof – with merely a word, proves I am still unready… Dis takes practice. Arbeit macht frei.

            Thus doth the weary zen disciple thank the old mountain monk, who marches slowly with the slapstick paddle, applying discipline to all who fall asleep. No punishment, a smack on the back of the neck stimulates blood & mind, employing pain to wake up. Sleep itself is turned away, though, somewhat paradoxically, the silence remains.
​

§ 11/02/24

2. Consider this profound fact from our Darwinian paradigm: Written language has made physical changes to our human brains, cross-wiring visual information—in an unnaturally tiny display of details requiring intense focus—with auditory ideas & forms: Brains changed not via mutation nor natural environmental pressure, but solely because of an abstract idea, writing. Those today who read & write best thrive, while illiterate humans, the last vestige of “classic” Homo sapiens, will soon go extinct.

5. 1996 Session 41 “A True Piece of Our History,” (albionspeak, Lesson 6.4) I note for perspective, however, Achilles lived centuries after Josef, countless millennia after The Fall.

4.  (Thanks to Dave, my brilliant piano tuner, I got the scoop on the difficult history of tuning musical instruments:) Pythagoras deserves the early credit for ascribing to the universe rational proportions, but wound up missing his mark on nearly everything: The orbits of the planets & their moons are always irrational ratios (until a satellite locks in to a state of “tidal gravity,” where two bodies permanently show the same face). The exact rational proportions of a perfect fifth, if used for tunings, results in a scale that can’t quite return to its octave, growing worse every octave after—namely, the circle of fifths misses. Similarly, apocryphally, the Pythagorean cult, after more than two centuries of prominence, disbanded forever once one of its own members proved mathematically that √2 is not rational (for which he apparently had to flee & died in a storm at sea). Thus, modern equal-tempered tunings represent a giant, delicate human compromise, after the time of Bach, probably not to be undone.

(place x, figure y)

7. I must be quoting somebody here, Heidegger?, but I just typed Albion’s words in the flow and am pleased with his Hochdeutsch. “Sein" = “being” (noun), “sein” = “to be” (infinitive)

3. “Pieces” refers both to body parts & musical pieces, but also in this lesson to its German translation “Stücke,” which is how the Nazis officially documented their death camp prisoners.

The Amphitheater

8. A’s daimon & our own Guide ◊ are “brethren” from the Sphere, a giant karass, each assigned to our neighboring circles in the Jewel Net. In 2005 we sat down to a session that included both daimon guides & three living humans (A, E, & U); then the next night marked only our session without Guide ◊, moderated instead by A’s daimon alone. 

​[end of June 2024]            

​

​Danielle,

            Thanks for asking. How are you, by the way?
            I’m sorry I haven’t written. I haven’t written anything beyond grocery lists and retirement applications: Social Security, Medicare, and my teacher’s pension (which I didn’t take early). I turn 65 on July 30th. For the record, I’ll note that living in the state capital has been a boon, since I’ve had to hang out at each respective government office. Apparently retiring teachers east of the Cascades rent buses & get group hotel rates to come here, overfilling the waiting rooms that I personally had to myself (though I was twice directed to “take a number” before I could be helped). Here’s my quick insider’s tip: Never get on a bus full of teachers.
            So this is my first official update to my Companion since recovering fully from pneumonia, but it’s also my first effort to narrate this to myself. To set the proper nonverbal tone here, let me remind you of my Circle’s favorite running joke:

                        Man:      Doctor, doctor! My brother thinks he’s a chicken.
                     Doctor:  By Jove, that’s most curious. Bring him here at once,

                                       and I’ll dispel these delusions forthwith.
                     Man:      I would, but we need the eggs.


1.  Back to Earth

            Since I last left you hanging, I’m sad to say my heightened/voiceless state is gone, evaporated not long after writing you; so that my whole amazing episode—which completely overshadowed my six-figure hospital adventure—lasted 8-10 weeks total (all of it w/o marijuana). The key, however, is: I’m not back; I’m not the man I used to be, because the discontinuity is absolute. I don’t remember the man I was, so I can’t even attempt a return.
            In most ways—and I’m compiling a mental list—I don’t want to go back. Probably the most important thing I learned from my state is how much shit I self-generate. My constant internal voices are, of course, nearly all me, every articulate thought & sound in the narrative I call myself. But this is not my soul; it’s just the babble bubble “I” dwell in, where the self may be no more than a self-aware byproduct of acoustic spillage. I have an incredible memory of my own life, beautifully arranged chronologically, geographically, topically, etc.—all a function of language I narrate to myself, my prison. My soul is so much more.
            So alas, again I bathe & move in language & music & stories I can’t escape. But now things are different: I see clearly how such noise is all projection that saps my attention—“lures” in our k-vocab, if this were a dream (it is): Lures, we are taught, must be avoided, waved away to move forward. I believed I needed my million metaphors & stories to navigate the busy world. Now I know deeply I’m better off without them. When I was sick—which dragged on for at least three months of some disability/disorientation—I stopped generating my noise; meaning, I stopped explaining the world to myself and just lived it. And when I dropped all these filters & imposed cognitive scaffolds, I found mere being a breath of pure oxygen. 

            So the noise is back, though much diminished. The key is I know not to pay it heed. When I walk my dog in the forest (5 mi/day), I don’t indulge my thoughts now, especially my empty stories. Instead I try my very best to live the visual experience—not merely moving my body through space, but through beautiful space, beauty everywhere. Dis is immersion. To a painter like yourself, this effort might appear ridiculous, but this really is very hard for me to maintain. It seems outrageous, but I have to ask myself repeatedly, “What should I look for/at as I walk? Where? What scale or POV?” Surely I should view more than just the foot path before me. But should I search the canopy, the fern fronds near, or the mossy maples & their swirling burls? With a little effort I sometimes turn on my stereoscopy, perfect for the forest layers & depths. And I know well the irony of my privileged state, the opulence of my conceit: I come to Planet Earth for a perfect moment of visual being; yet I have no idea what to look at as an active seer—and almost immediately I fall back into my sightless Charybdis monologue, spinning yarns & webs & security blankets I don’t need. I concoct all my shit—which, to be clear, is not nouns, but rather processes—trying to sift sanity from chaos; but my efforts are counterproductive, self-verifying, self-replicating; fundamentally they drain my finite time & energy.

The key: From this long-enduring pneumonia lesson I know with certainty that I can return to that “noise-free” state. I lost it, but having learned its true nature (i.e., I am my noise), I know it is within my power & grasp & responsibility to be free. I lived there long enough to see it’s no mystery. What I project I can affect.

2.  Reconquista

            So if I am to divine Albion’s purpose to this post-pneumonia station, I’ve needed to set language aside and immerse myself in whatever Dis has in store for me. I’m not dreaming, but I have three study areas where I’m quite committed and have stepped up: “normal” forest seeing as described above (= being a visual being), piano, and Dante. (Spanish comes after Dante.)
            Thus yes, I’m playing a lot more piano; and finally (post pneumonia) I can play all of Bach’s Italian Concerto, but there’s a big catch: I play only Bach’s Italian Concerto, almost nothing else, which, I know well, is crazy. Recall, I am a pedagogue; I know teaching deeply, and no teacher could ever endorse such a singular curriculum. This is Albion’s choice, not mine; I follow not understanding my soul’s higher purpose or process. It’s taken me over seven years to learn this one fucking twenty-minute, three-movement piece, following more than twenty years of lessons; but I have reached a legitimate milestone. Here’s why: 
            First, a quick k. allusion: If you haven’t read Borges’s brilliant satire "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," I highly recommend it—it’s about five pages—here’s the gist: The story is presented as a critical essay (a modest proposal) of the magnum opus of a certain deceased author Pierre Menard. Not only does Menard pen the same exact book Don Quixote that Cervantes wrote word for word circa 1600, Borges methodically demonstrates how Menard’s accomplishment is actually far superior to the original, precisely because Menard had to write it from a 16th Century mindset, immersing himself for years in dialect & culture & a post-Reconquista zeitgeist 300 years extinct! 
            Apparently Albion is amused by such audacious single-minded projects; recall, my one diptych Riomaggiore took me twelve hard years to paint. I learned a lot from it—and I was rewarded with a beautiful spacetime artifact to prove my success—but strangely, even after a couple thousand hours of devoted practice, I am no painter. Truly I insist, I still don’t know shit about painting; I never wished to paint. I know that those years of work were/are deeply important to me, but I have no idea what I learned. D. the painter lies outside my self’s language bubble; thus “I” have no access to “his” process, remarkably few eidetic memories of actual painting. Without the finished product literally to hang on my prominent wall, I’d quickly forget I’d even dabbled in painting. 
            The Italian Concerto, though equally single-minded as a project, actually represents the process polar opposite of my painting Riomaggiore. Both attempt art on a ridiculous scale: one acoustic, where I live most of my existence, the other visual, which I barely know. Riomaggiore, I painted from scotch-taped photographs, which is not very creative, although I warped & wrapped the perspective around the viewer, and thus had to create from scratch the affected gaps on the canvas. 
            The Italian Concerto is even less creative; it’s Bach’s creation, and for many years I often viewed piano as my muscle-building discipline. But there’s actually far more creativity than I initially assumed; and here I feel chagrined, for I should have grasped the infinities before ever starting piano, simply from my own mental music. As I write elsewhere, hearing “unheard music” (Keats) is proof for me that eternity exists. But most of my internal noise is music I know well, Bach especially. What’s interesting here is that I don’t just hear Glenn Gould’s rendition of the Italian Concerto, for example, nor Andras Schiff’s. I hear many “unheard” Italian concerti. Often I find myself on my long walks hearing jazz versions timed to my footsteps—spontaneously & unintentionally, mind you, as a background soundtrack I’d rather not hear—but when I tune in, I affect what I project. I hear saxophones & drums, bagpipes & electric violins, anything I want and far more.
            So with painting I start from nothing, but with piano I begin in infinity. Both I find exceedingly hard. The point being, we don’t come to Earth to be passive voyeurs & observers. Souls engage & participate.
            Another huge difference between painting & piano is that I really want to learn piano well. I want to play fluidly enough to create, improvise, and jam with others. I want to express my own voice through music. It may sound selfish, but truly few things are more sacred to the Good than our becoming ourselves. I choose to be musical, and I’m blessed with ample space & time to learn—which I intentionally set aside for this very purpose, decades ago. It would be crime not to learn.

3.  Bach

            I began taking lessons when Rhiannon first started piano in elementary school and continued long after she’d moved on to other instruments & literature. Paying for weekly piano lessons, as well as having a personal bond with Rhonda, my forgiving teacher, forced me to stick with piano for two decades, when I knew well I absolutely had no time to study music seriously (parenting, teaching, travel, Nine Men). My plan all along, then, was to “get the basics down,” so that once I retired I could devote my full intent to piano. 
            And this plan, you might be surprised to hear, goes all the way back to age 12, when my parents gave me my life’s biggest (conscious) Choice of either an elite private boarding school or public high school with a band; I played flute. For the rest of my life, then, I’ve looked back at this bifurcation as the key moment when I “abandoned” one deep calling, to follow instead a privileged & necessary path. My dad reminded me many times thereafter that I could, if I chose, learn an instrument or a language later in life (as my dad clearly modeled, learning 4-8 languages during his thirties). I had all the foundations, he said, down to the synaptic plane. I already knew this.
            Later, as a young adult, I recognized fully the folly of my boyhood mythology. Surely my Choice, in fact, was a false choice, largely rhetorical & ritual, since my parents themselves clearly preferred private school for me, and I only nominally could have chosen otherwise. I realized my parents were giving me “one last chance” then to pursue music, since I clearly loved it and showed ability. Thus, if I had loved flute more, I could have raised my voice; they would have respected my wishes. But I respected my parents’ wishes more than my own; my dad knew better. So there never was a real choice.
            Even so, some elder Prussian pedagogue within me was always pissed over this Choice, starting by age 12. (This is where things get weirder…) Today I identify this meme or profile as “Bach,” with whom amazingly I do have a true connection; but in no way do I believe my caricature to be the real Bach. This is one face of Albion whom I have to trust, though he seems more of a task-master sadist than my patient overseer & conscience with whom I regularly speak. And I fear an old pattern: My dad, who taught thousands of students foreign languages, said I was one of the two best students he ever saw; but, he’d always chuckle, to have me learn he often had to make me angry. He’d assign me Spanish or German homework, both written & oral exercises; and I’d flounder & babble until he hit me—not a beating, just a smack upside the head for not doing my job—and suddenly perfect conjugations & declensions flowed effortlessly. In my own career, especially soccer coaching, I also found a few kids, who likewise needed to get angry to engage & play well. 
            (To be clear, I carry no scars & never felt any hostility toward my dad, who, incidentally, didn’t tutor my younger brother the same way. When my dad hit Bruce, he just shut up. Thus, my pragmatic father soon gave up, and Bruce never learned a second language. I almost never hit my own daughters, never spontaneously. Spankings in my household were rare & ritual performances, executions.)
            I’ve lodged my complaints with Bach: 17th Century piano discipline doesn’t normally work so well in suburban America (unless you’re Chinese), and I am not a child. Bach is unmoved. I may know more about teaching theory, but “he” absolutely knows more about music, especially music training. That is, I would surely dismiss “Bach” as an O.I. hallucination (organic intelligence); nevertheless, for good reason I accept him as my master. 
            Borges once opined (in writing), and Scribe often confirmed, that insomnia feels like “someone” (else) is intentionally “doing it to you” (maliciously keeping you awake). This is how I view Bach. Why would I accept such a meme? My ability to hear everything in my mind only makes me far more skeptical of what pops up. Nevertheless, Bach proves to me every time I sit down to play that he’s in charge. Often I feel like I’m learning to drive, and Bach, my driving instructor, is sitting next to me on the piano bench with his own master brake & steering wheel. Often he just seems cruel, cutting me off for no apparent reason. But I’ve learned otherwise.
            The most common insertion of Bach comes when my mind drifts from the sheet music: BOOM! Bach hits the brake. Lost in my score, frustrated I can’t maintain my fucking track, I generally then thank Bach for keeping me in line, for slapping me with a natural consequence—meaning, Bach did nothing. But the dynamics between us are far more subtle, and rarely verbal. It’s just as true, for example, that when I play beautifully for a lengthy stretch, as I now can, my mind rarely stays focused on the music. It’s like driving an open highway and thinking about anything—that is, anything except self-thoughts about playing piano. Self-awareness specifically fucks me up. My teachers call such a break an “eclipse of lunar attention,” where one’s ego-shadow blocks the light of the moon (= aliah). Which is exactly like flying—in a dream, in a movie—where everything is wonderful & wondrous until you realize you can’t (or shouldn’t be able to) fly. Oops!
            But there’s more, far more: Bach sometimes will pick what seems like a random point in the music and steer me wrong, off a cliff, for no apparent reason. I’ll replay the phrase three or four times, where each attempt actually gets worse, culminating in my hitting wrong notes even in the first measure. Angry now with my Prussian-Nazi caricature—who is “doing it to me”—I’ll stop & sigh & reset, knowing: Somewhere in that specific section Bach wants me to discover something new. Generally this amounts to finding faulty fingering, but sometimes I see I’ve been playing a phrase incorrectly, perhaps a trill or mordent. Sometimes I’m supposed to check out a progression of chords to discover how they echo a motif somewhere else. I’ve played the Italian Concerto thousands of times, and I keep discovering new elements, most of these because Bach rubs my face in them. Unfortunately what my dad observed remains true of my character: When I get mad, I focus.

§ 7/25/24





​

Lesson 13: Silence

6. I must complete this thought, our single    most profound lesson: 
    Q: [If all of the above are myths,] What in

         our conscious experience is not a myth?
    A: EX1STENCE [NO] MYTH
         I AM HERE     YOU ARE ALSO    

          [if & only if]

12. Tugela Falls had frozen to a trickle that became spray well before hitting any bottom; it didn’t matter. This was the famous Chain Ladder trek, one of the world’s great hikes start-to-finish, which avoids the rolling hills on the return trip by descending vertical chain ladders unroped over sheer cliffs.

​albionspeak 2:  the gates of dis

​​4.  Delay

Here’s the main story I tell myself: 

            I knew in junior high that I loved music & played well. To my credit I further understood that, indeed, as a natural I was in jeopardy of never “learning” music fully. That is, I knew of genius-flyers like Paul McCartney who advanced so quickly he never learned to read, and I found as a flutist that I barely read my own scores. I memorized my simple parts so quickly, without trying, that tracking the black dots on the page with my eyes seemed pointless, needlessly difficult. 
            I did take piano lessons, btw, for a couple of years before heading to Spain, a year’s interruption which effectively ended those lessons. I had a horrible teacher, someone, I feel, who might have raped me if my lessons had been anywhere other than at my dad’s living room piano. Mr. K. creeped me out, sitting next to him on the same black bench I still sit on today. My brother felt exactly the same—yet somehow my parents never noticed. (Years later I’d run into Mr. K. at Rich’s, my local barbershop. He came not for the haircuts, Rich told me with a wink, but for the porn.)
            Needless to say, when I restarted my lessons as an adult, I commenced musically from scratch; but unlike a true beginner I understood the nature & monumental scale of my challenge. Piano is not flute. Flutes play one note at a time; a piano can stand in for an entire orchestra. More important to me, if you want to master music theory (which I find hard), then piano is indispensable. Guitar in its many forms is surely my favorite instrument, but my goal all along—more even than to play music—has been to understand deeply, mystically what music is.
            So I made a deal with Bach—I repeat, not J.S. Bach, nor did I call “him” Bach (or Albion) at the time—but the persona persisted through the decades & remembers:  I would postpone Bach’s tutelage & my potential flying music-life indefinitely, but consciously, overtly, I promised both him & myself that I would return, like MacArthur to my music beachhead, someday—after high school, after college at the least. Could I then maybe learn piano while slaving through a future 30-year career? Again, my dad immersed himself in many languages while also living fully as a parent/teacher/traveler, an inspiring achievement. He also played piano. But my dad never had Nine Men (and I had to work much harder in my teaching career than my father). Piano would wait to retirement, no choice.
            This I told Rhonda upfront, for more than twenty years, that I was seeking the basics only, and I would start piano seriously once I had time. I wasn’t striving then, even to play as well as her middle & high school students, who were practicing two hours each day and cared. I could not; rarely could I practice more than a few hours a week. Rhonda understood, and so we carried on my curious curriculum of Bach only at my own carpet-crawling pace. I do love other music, of course; but there’s no shortage of practice exercises in Bach, the irrepressible pedagogue; Bach has all you need. For surely if you can learn The Well-Tempered Clavier, you can also play Beethoven, Debussy, or Tony Banks. Over the years, then, I practiced many preludes & two-part inventions, varying the keys & tempos, also the great gigue from French Suite No. 5; then I tackled the Italian Concerto. 
            I don’t remember why Rhonda considered the Italian Concerto a reasonable challenge; it’s hardly easy. (Glenn Gould’s rendering of the third movement presto is simply insane.) I just followed her guidance, and, sometime around June 2016, began plodding my way through the first movement allegro, where this one movement alone took me (incredibly, pathetically) at least three years to “learn”—and meaning only, to get the fingering down—not really playing it. I knew, of course, with any piece I had to beware: that I’d quickly possess all the blind kinesthetic memories—my fingers being tactilely trainable—thus I could, if I wanted, put my sheet music aside and “play” somehow more directly & naturally than when I read & processed & synaptically converted all the musical dots. I could play like a parrot—and I’d probably sound musical a lot quicker.
            But I’d end up with but a single playable concerto. The point of the Italian curriculum all along was, of course, to immerse myself & absorb fully one exemplar par excellence, but only as the springboard to all others, to learn from its multi-textured harmonic structures every conceivable nuance & intonation, “a world in a grain of sand,” all the permutations Bach toyed with like an alphabet—precisely as Pierre Menard (in the Borges fiction) had to assume all of 16th century Spain to rewrite el Quixote. In theory at least, if I could—not just “play”—but master the Italian Concerto, I should be free to play anything.

§ 8/13/24

5.  Arbeit Macht Frei

Here’s another story:

            I’m in Auschwitz, fresh off the cattle-car, thus not very fresh. I see a divergence in the parade of walking dead ahead, the throng I’m among, unwashed frightened face-masks, and I confirm from my very core: I will survive. So by the time I reach the fork in that flow, I’ve figured out my only escape. “Yes, I can work!” I shout out from the crowd. “I know math & chemistry & road construction, and I play piano & harpsichord, too” (nearly all lies). 
            “Harpsichord?” queries the effete commandant, a dark statue above the gallows dais with his nose in the air, poised for divine justice or intervention. I have sized him up accurately: a musical snob robot, probably rejected as an artist & lover, who’s found queer joy in Nazi sadism, spearpoint of eugenic selection. Clearly I can & must manipulate this soulless projection, and I can see, deep within his personal Charybdis Kampf, he seeks to justify his self-confessed love-of-evil by balancing it with “civil service," promoting German values, culture, civilization. Thus he believes devoutly, every working death camp needs its Jewish German orchestra. (Am I Jewish??)
            My piano sucks, I’m well aware; and there’s only one piece I know well enough to play for an audition. Der Kommandant will surely demand that I prove what I claim, first by testing my knowledge of the baroque period, then, a day or two later, by having me play live. At that time, I’ll have to engage him again, steer my Nazi-caricature carefully, step by step, to my secret one-chance-in-the-world at survival, the Italian Concerto, though, in fact, I have already won a victory: I’ve made it past the first selection.     
            And when the test-time arrives like a Last Judgment, I know how difficult my task will prove to pull off: first, to annoy my commandant by praising the French composers, then to “confess” (more lying) my personal preference for the Italian masters, Vivaldi especially. Which should direct my programmable Nazi robot back to his preferred German canon origins—Händel & Telemann, too—but Bach in particular, who was a public fan of Vivaldi’s work. From there, it’s a relatively small step to get my Nazi-Arschloch to command me on-the-point-of-death to play the Italian Concerto.
            All my eggs in one basket, I am ready…

            “But I need the eggs!” 
            The boy in me cries out still, with no regard for what or who laid them. And the boy is right, for here’s the rub: You can’t make a piano omelette without first cracking eggs. (And yes, these are golden eggs.)
            So I made a deal with Bach, der Kommandant: The boy & I would return to music someday, und der Meister, for his part, again would deign to teach me, once I could prove I was committed (time) & serious (intent)—which, we all agreed, seem fair provisions. How serious then? Well, clearly I needed to show more intent than my slow-drip investment over the previous twenty years, and, judging from at least one running joke, Bach himself is always life-or-death serious; no doubt he expects the same from me. I must be all in. My music meme, it seems, is a jealous god, where “jealous” in the Biblical sense demands a singular focus (not blind idolatry), and which stands in sharp contrast to many-mindedness (desert wanderings, golden calves).
            Still, when retirement came to me a year early (because I could), I decided to put off piano again anyway, sharply aware of Bach’s icy disappointment. Writing albionspeak—namely, documenting all of “ouija” for the world, for posterity—absolutely had to come first, and it would take me years. I still wanted/intended/hoped for a music return, though in earnest I began wondering if I would ever find the time… As it turned out, 2016 Trump’s election upset followed mere months after I retired—a confirming sign of horrors to come—so now in overview I believe that I did likely follow my best path, piano aside. Nevertheless, I cannot today expect my jilted Nazi lover to thank me or empathize; no slack or mercy will be granted me for delaying 50 years. And thus, someday, when my solo audition finally does arrive, I’d better be good…

            BOOM! COVID hit, smack in the middle of the andante—long after I’d elevated this slower, middle-child movement to its exalted status (namely, once it manifested as my guide-song to Lesson 8). All further piano lessons were abruptly canceled. I haven’t seen Rhonda since (and miss our chats).
            Then, after finishing my Volume 1, I delayed further, this time for “noble” crickety excuses: No, I reasoned, I cannot plan to change the world as a musician—that ship has long sailed—rather I should devote my waning final energies to what I can affect most, how I best can serve the world. But, as a factual retort, after years & years of writing, no one benefits from my efforts but me (and maybe not enough). This I know. Meanwhile the whole time, Albion, my wise & pleasant overseer—who above all else is sworn to protect my free will—pushes piano with every dialogue. In eternity we have always played piano, he insists. We are piano.
​

Drakensberg Amphitheater                                                                    ​

1. Indeed as I type on my MacBook Pro, I note my keyboard, an infamous lemon in the industry,  has nearly collapsed. Some keys will type up to five of the same letter; some won’t type at all unless depressed completely; and strangely which letters do what varies over weeks. Many people with this keyboard got compensation from Apple years ago, including replacement keyboards. I just keep typing, unconsciously correcting what the spellcheck does not, no big deal. Typing hidden passwords, however, has become a serious hassle. (Btw, I mastered typing by age 13.)

6.  What’s Up

            Now consider my Italian curriculum in light of my curious universe, my inner strengths & weaknesses, these exaggerated quirks: My biggest problem with music, in fact, is my biggest problem period: I live 95% of my existence in a non-spatial, verbal-musical, abstract pinprick POV. I’m the captain in my submarine, navigating the lightless depths via 360° sonar, A.I. computer software, & secret satellite connections—w/ missions from superiors or radio silence—but rarely does the periscope go up, especially under ice.
            For more clarity, let me add another strange fact about my life: Already I’ve spent many pages illustrating, to my own astonishment, how I don’t see anything; and I contrast this void with my constant noise. What I haven’t mentioned is that I don’t often “hear” the physical world either. When my dog & I walk our daily forest trails, my ears arrive turned on & active; I hear it all—and then, almost instantly my attention turns away from physical sounds: First I cancel the nearby chain saws & leaf blowers, the trucks & distant freeway hum; then the jet ski on the water & goddam airplane overhead, all intrusions; but then, just as quickly, I erase the wind from the treetops, the cooing doves & dueling squirrels, woodpeckers knocking, even the rumbling raven no sooner than I’ve pegged him. They all become “kite strings”; meaning, each is a thread (fiber) I hold in absence and can, if necessary, return in an instant to the tangible artifact (having geospatially located its sound wave source). Otherwise/meanwhile, I’m off on a tangent, running through another fucking story, old or new, often much like this one now, anything to fill the gaping silence. 
            The fact is & has long long been regarding music,I’ve always been a passive, third-person listener. My dad was only half right: I grew from infancy all the neurons necessary for unwinding musical beauty; but never did I sit in the driver’s seat—i.e., take responsibility to make music myself. Any flying synapses I possessed before Spain no longer reached my fingertips at puberty years later and were snipped; thus, I became a witness only, not a player; and being so regularly awed & humbled by music, I no longer could presume for myself any potential, for, indeed, I was no longer physically “hooked up.”

            Now consider the alternative—isn’t it terrifying?—to imagine a nascent, infinite soul in eternity, seeking identity and coming “all the way” in time to incarnate in this insane 21st Century, which—along with Trump, Putin, & climate change—includes positively wonderful music—and then, despite having every opportunity to learn & become a musician, to spend a lifetime instead as a couch potato, dependent on mass media to entertain you & spoon-feed you wet dreams. You can sleep away eighty years in a clean bed in a warm home—not a cave—and not a care in the world, cozy & safe & smug.

                    “Happiness is an ill.” – Josef

                    “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle

            than for a rich man to enter Heaven.” – Jesus

            When my oxygen levels dropped precipitously, my noises stopped; and I was amazed that I could actually function—as a human soul in the physical world—without any storytelling; in fact, I was clearly better. The scales had fallen from my ears, except there was no blazing Jesus standing over me, no prophetic insights to write down. There was nothing but my hospital room, which fascinated me, as did almost every facet of that grain of sand.
            Upon returning home, my oxygen still low, I slowly resumed my forest walks and found no troubles breathing, though I paced myself cautiously and carried my oximeter. The woods appeared transfigured. Initially I was tickled to find myself wandering in “natural” stereoscopy, namely without making any effort. Every visual detail, every sound, every fungal or floral odor seemed magnified & dignified, lucid. Trails I’ve traversed literally thousands of times struck me as wonderfully otherworldly—like Peter Jackson’s Lothlórien; and I thanked the universe with all my heart that I didn’t then have to revive/retell/relive all of Tolkien’s Two Towers. I could observe the cinematic connection without attending to it, without getting sucked in. Dis is immersion, yes; but to immerse fully, you have to disregard every thought that steals you elsewhere; you can’t be bothered.
            But after four or five forest forays, my executive director & 1st-person narrator—me—stepped in for “good” reason: Someone has to remember & record this exceptional mental experience—for others to hear that this unclouded state of mind is real; it’s better, and it’s achievable. For I’ve never valued a revelation that couldn’t be shared, a “hero’s journey” with no return. So I consciously “permitted” my conscientious radio correspondent (me) to sort out & verbally broadcast the sensory highlights & notable differences from my pre-pneumonia life—stereoscopy, for example—and to document these data the best way he/I can/could to remember, and thus not as eidetic 3-d images, which I simply can’t hold, but condensed into words like “stereoscopy,” “bronchoscopy,” “ground glass opacities,” “oxygen,” “92,” and “silence,” where each of these words then, like objects set in motion, continued in their semantic trajectories, so that “stereoscopy,” which in January referred narrowly to visual parallactic reconstructions, by late March symbolized & embodied all of "noise-free seeing,” lucidity.
            Then I got mad, angry with myself, terribly frustrated & saddened by how much of my life energy was wrapped up & wasted in my stories. How could I be so needy & stupid? Why did I wallow in such masturbatory melodrama? In the past, to be clear, I have always worked hard to eliminate my worst stories—generally ones where, amply aggrieved, I react with “necessary” violence—precisely what most vigilante movies distill for testosterone-laced psyches. But most of my stories, in fact, seek a moral self-justification; they want to be good stories, for, indeed, most of my life’s best insights have been revealed to me via endless, iterative storytelling, where, as an O.I. churning out the probabilities, my relentless pursuit of noise sometimes bears fruit, a few lucky jewels amid the chaos worthy of the chase. In my democratic head every fucking thought gets its soapbox. I also saw with clarity that I could fall back into my many-minded vortex of voices, and it would be hard to get out.

                        “We will go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because

            it is hard.” – J.F.K.

            So with caution, yes, I invited back my deadpan C-SPAN broadcaster (the chirping cricket above) ostensibly to document my forest walks for others; but I saw clearly, reluctantly, that I needed this running-record for myself as well. This is because in the absence of any “official minutes”—namely, in the pure presence of the nonverbal forest only—“I” largely missed the whole goddam experience, since “I” wasn’t personally there/engaged/talking. For indeed, at the end of a spectacular forest week of “moving in stereo” I hardly remembered anything at all. 

§ 8/28/24



7.  Both Sides Now

            Recall, I often fear my personal identity-construction (me) resides entirely within my language bubble. For convenience let’s now posit, as I do while playing piano, that “I,” the self, lives physically in my left-brain hemisphere, while Bach in counterpoint dwells somewhere in my musical right-half, surely a near neighbor of Albion, painter of Riomaggiore. Indeed, in this story let my right hemisphere stand for my “black box” of “dark matter,” the place where I expel & behold at arm’s length my nonverbal identities, anyone whom my language & reasoning mind can’t fathom. How did I play soccer so effortlessly? Who makes my legs dance? 
            On the other hand, if I accept this dichotomy—where the human brain partitions itself across the bottleneck corpus callosum—then I must also ask who “my” nearest neighbors are, here in this lingual left-hemisphere: The math-guy for sure, we can say, and the master of “games” as well (which have yet to be defined in albionspeak); for I have proved far too many times that I can play/solve Minesweeper, Free Cell, and (fast 5x5) Kenken puzzles far faster than “I” can think. Often I catch myself “knowing” an elegant play before I know how I know it. Then I have to prove my intuition correct, methodically, deductively, which often leads me to new algorithms & short-cuts—and is a fun way to learn. Except who, in my home-brain domain, is teaching me?
            Bottom-line, I’m not even the dictator of my own babble bubble; I can’t claim my own language: If my “self” is relegated to a patch of language circuits in the left-brain—where “I” function largely as the day-shift CEO—then where, I ask, among my lingual gray-matter does Albion lie, whose chosen English is simply better than mine? As I note elsewhere, I write best when “I” merely write down what “he” dictates, or, more often, “we” work together to discover words that need only seem recalled in their flow, like a song that must be sung to be remembered. Many times I’ve copied down whole paragraphs that feel like plagiarism, like I’m quoting somebody verbatim—in fact myself—except it’s the first time in time I’ve seen the words. The point is, Albion knows everything I know plus so much more that I must access from him to learn. If & when & where we make the link, the rest is fluid dynamics…


            Thus I confess, at age 65 I’m tired of forever feeling like both a child & an old fool. Consider that in every dialogue of self & soul, the self always seems inferior, incomplete, immature, whining, stuck at Point A—a impression which, I remind myself regularly, does not represent my true progress. The purpose of any such dialogue, of course, is for the self to seek what he/I doesn’t understand, while my soul Albion speaks from Point B, a (place, figure) of knowledge. The gap between us may seem large or small, but when the self finally does cross the abyss from A to B, Point B simply is renamed the new Point A, as it becomes my self’s new starting point of ignorance. I’m tired of chasing rainbows & feeling dumb. I see no end to it. It’s not fun. 
            For here’s a fundamental fact that I don’t like about myself: Piano isn’t fun, and so far, a quarter-century in, sitting benched for thousands of amassed hours has not been worth my martyrdom. I still can’t play. I need eggs.
            “What’s up with that?” the boy asks Albion accusingly, namely in my angriest moments at the keyboard. Isn’t learning supposed to be fun? (i.e., like Auschwitz?)
            That’s not part of the deal, Albion states flatly—which is a surprise actually, because normally Albion ignores my chirping cricket altogether. Thus, I see, he’s directing me overtly: Read the fine print.

            Hmm… Let’s review: “I” would someday “return” to music—which is a ridiculous verb since I never played—and Bach would teach me, having proved he fully knows how. However, having been disappointed by me before, Bach needed me to prove I was serious. Thus, I had to learn to read music and play comfortably before he would teach me. After all, any music student who came to learn music from the historical J.S. Bach (among many teachers) would certainly be expected already to play. What does “play” mean?
            I know that for a quarter century I did not play. Rather “I” the verbal self hit the keys that corresponded to visual information, basically one key at a time, even while playing chords. Music is abstract, and I love it abstractly. Playing piano is physical. 
            And of course, as everyone can see, playing should feel easy. Put some music on the stereo, for instance, and dancing for me is literally easier than not dancing. No surprise, then, that what I “did at the keyboard” (not play) simply exhausted me: hitting thousands of half-memorized keys, while trying also to keep time in time; shifting my eyes between points on the music sheets & far-reaching piano keys, then trying to recover my spot on the page before the next sixteenth note; and Bach, the composer, never repeating anything exactly the same way twice, always fucking with the phrasings & fingerings; no rest for the weary. Bach takes no prisoners.
            Now let me add a factual wrinkle to this piano puzzle: Finger-hitting keyboard keys is absolutely no problem for me & my brain: I’m a fantastic typist, to the point that I easily type language unconsciously, directly from a draft without thinking or even reading it, also straight from speech (typing well-outlined minutes while simultaneously bargaining the union contract, for instance), or verbal thoughts directly, as I’ve shown with my 200+ Albion dialogues. I make plenty of errors, but I correct nearly all of them unconsciously in the flow.[1] Indeed before becoming a teacher and before word processing existed, I worked as a corporate finance secretary, meaning I typed zillions of form letters, but I also custom-crafted dozens of oversized financial statements full of columns of numbers, which is a special skill. I mastered my IBM Selectric.


So here’s the contract loophole wormhole I can’t get my mind around: 

            Bach expects me to play before he gifts me any eggs, where “eggs” here represent my own musical abilities banished to my right hemisphere & Bach is the gatekeeper. Thus, I’m attempting to fry up an omelette (for my solo audition), but Bach holds all the eggs. My verb “banished” provides narrative melodrama, a hallmark of verbal memory practice; thusly my “I” explains & documents what “he” can’t directly access. Perhaps, the story continues, Bach denies me access so that “I” the self must step up & play, actively in the first person, and not simply enjoy the music from my normal, passive drooling distance, as music, recall, so flows continually in my mind. 
           For reading music, like reading language, requires an active rewiring of the brain circuitry—where auditory information is rerouted through visual synapses[2]—but tracking music is much more difficult for me personally, as music requires additionally that one follow the flow at a continuous exact rate/tempo. Because I am a fast thinker, I failed to recognize for most of my life how my ADD many-mindedness makes me jump around the words & sentences I read on a page of text. I bounce around so quickly, in fact, that I reassemble the pieces reasonably smoothly, most of the time. Such cricket jumping, however, utterly fails when reading music.
           So there’s that, namely my difficulty tracking a musical score with my eyes, which is neither an ocular problem nor an attention deficiency that can be corrected with drugs. Since I am quite capable of playing the puzzle games I list above at high speeds for hours on end, I know I can track visually. (In fact, I can play these games while also chatting or “watching” TV news.) I know from many activities I can focus visually, mentally, and maintain my attention. For example, I can drive wild roads for days & weeks without ever letting down, even for a second, while also looking intensely at the scenery, listening to music, and talking in the car about anything & everything. When driving alone, I often sing every song, heard or unheard.

            My problem with piano, then, is abstract music itself, a unique wormhole keyhole to my unique identity, where “piano” specifically might well embody my personal Dis. In order to transform from a passive music beholder to an engaged musician, Point A to Point B, somehow I have to “get past,” or “push through,” pure beauty, which I know from ouija is one human “door to eternity." It sounds most strange to say, but beauty puts “me” to sleep, to silence. That’s what it feels like: Melting like a baby, I go bye-bye in the beauty slipstream—somewhere in the right-brain, where “I” can’t follow. The question arises: Do I fuck up because I forget that I’m playing, or when I remember that I’m playing? (Der Kommandant has no comment.)
            Bach warned me clearly at age 12 that a “return” to music—rather than pursuing my pied-piping prepuberty—would prove much harder for me when older. Indeed I weighed his counsel carefully; then I chose otherwise. Was I foolish? I still don’t know, but from the outset, age 12, I’ve consciously seen I would need a long fucking lifespan to accomplish all I intend. I recall well my thinking then: I chose firmly, as I would bet again & always, to have my cake & eat it too. Then let my training be hard, I said—not in ignorance nor in Marie Antionette mockery—but grasping quite well the (gulp) terms of the contract. The piper must be paid with interest. 

§ 9/20/24

9. Uncle Oxygen

​
Another story: 

            I woke this morning, November 6, 2024, to learn Trump had been reelected President of these “United States.” I felt like I’d slipped another timeline, like the Taoist sage Zhuangzi who couldn’t tell if he was dreaming a butterfly or if his nightmare never ended. Did I smile? Did I dance?
            God I love defense, the soccer boy exults, especially against the biggest odds. 
            Are you crazy? My old fart, uncomprehending, grieves aghast again—at America, where suicide wins—though he’s pleasantly bemused by “my” personal reaction to this worst possible news. For indeed, I am so grateful that I’m not reliving November 9, 2016, which so squeezed my heart and shook me to my foundation. This second round of abyssal insanity looks far more serious for the world, and I must be ready. “Ich will arbeiten!”

            So cue the music, Albion chimes in with his wand, for I know the way to kill this hatred: There must be fun.
            Enter Uncle Oxygen (slapstick raised): “One, two, three…”

    
            BEGIN with my axiom that existence must be shared (Lesson 4), but let’s also spell out overtly its corollary, that you must be present in the moment for a sharing to occur—you can’t phone in your life. Remember from ouija Session 10, “outside life is no ob or sub,” so existence is nothing more than the created present moment, which necessarily coordinates a place x & a figure y, with another figure in that same place x. We are not “planets” wandering the cosmos; we are stars who light up only in our moments of collision. Otherwise, darkness. This is the easy part.
            Now what’s hard: These moments are the only moments of existence; there are no others. Existence as place (like the universe) does not “continue” without its figures. A dream doesn’t go on dreaming without dreamers, nor a play or movie without actors. There is no objective reality, no continuity at all. When I go to bed and wake up the next morning, I’m in a different place; I am a different me. The prior evening is assumed & accepted (passive voice) as the given myth—namely, it’s conveyed instantaneously as the relevant past, an aspect of place—but the intervening nighttime hours never get filled in. No one dreamt them. 
            Thus, the universe did not begin with the Big Bang, but rather a few minutes ago when I sat down to resume my writing. Right now meine Arbeit places me at this keyboard, fingering my verbal bubble, plumbing the dark depths of D’s Dis (mine, not Albion’s). Meanwhile, the universe does not continue on its own, beyond my bedroom alcove & beautiful home; the planets don’t circle the sun, for there is, in fact, no single universe, no line in time at all, but rather trillions of tiny moments of human interaction loosely or tightly threaded by stories, with very few of these places actually set outside at night in the company of stars. This is not solipsism, not subjective nihilism, for I don’t deny your existence, Danielle, or that of the multiverse—indeed I affirm the silk threads that tie us. But consider that eternity, the multiverse, is not at all "many universes,” a clear confusion of the term, but more like “many rooms.” This is why Dis seems under ground: It’s full of rooms.

            How long is a moment? In 1996 when our Guide told Scribe & me at the board that Achilles’ mind was a “deep well,”[5] I felt comfortable with this metaphor (compared to so many others); I understood his purpose then was to contrast the ancient mind with that of modern people, to highlight the profound trend in the human template, a shift. Let me now read/presume (without having proved to myself) that a “deep well” experiences “longer” moments, while modern humans (me specifically in that session) are more many-minded, like “busy ants,” so our moments, we might guess, are more fractured in the juggling of competing agendas, thus progressively getting “shorter,” as measured by our attention spans, where electronic media surely exacerbate this trajectory, probably exponentially so. Our Guide does not comprehend why this is happening to humanity—namely, why we race to the abyss; ants have no souls.
            For Clive Wearing of London a moment lasts from 7 to 30 seconds, as measured ad infinitum for nearly forty years. Wearing is the tragic case of the accomplished pianist, organist, tenor, & conductor who in 1985 succumbed to herpesviral encephalitis, and, as a result of damage to his hippocampus, can form no new memories; he literally cannot remember any moment previous to his present. Thus he experiences his whole life as singular, discontiguous grand “awakenings”—of his life, of his wife (no name), & indeed the cosmos itself—roughly every 20 seconds. Wearing’s personal journal well documents these glorious “first awakenings” in his own hand—which represent rather grotesquely the opposite of a suicide note, maybe sadder, for each time he wakes, he quickly becomes distraught when he finds words he can’t remember writing. Forgeries!, he inveighs with the strongest emotions, then crosses out as sacrilege each fake news he finds there, which could never have existed before the universe—pages & pages & pages of stricken forgeries. Poor man.
            Let’s ask the same question another way: What is the maximum duration of a musical rest? (i.e., silencing all the instruments before the end of a composition, then resuming play) In theory this sounds like a Philip Glass experimental piece/stunt: “10,000 Hours of Silence,” which tickles an ideal, but is not physically, humanly possible. I don’t think, in fact, an honest audience today could last even 20 seconds hanging on to a musical absence—not checking their cell phones, tracking their parking spots, or just sitting there patiently counting the time, the tempo, the whatnot—just suspended… There is a human limit to a moment, and, at least in 2024, it is remarkably, unbearably short. I recall Nietzsche: The hardest thing is to think a single thought.
            Now consider how a musical rest is literally nothing, no different by any measure from silence or zero or the vacuum of space. How then does it feel different to count out four whole rests, rather than sixteen quarter rests at the same tempo, or try the same temporal interval, but at a different tempo—literally different divisions of nothing? Or how, for example, in the violin adagio mentioned above, can two prolonged silences convey such feeling, such aching, and perhaps more strangely, convey very different feelings from each other—the first, disquieting, painful; the second, sublime? Clearly any present silence is informed by the music that precedes it.…
            …In time, of course, which is the circus maximus of human experience. Einstein tells us time & space are one, which defies our perception, though his math “works” great anyway to describe gravity, the course & speed of light, and much of what our telescopes reveal. Our Guide, however, (again in landmark Session 10) confirmed that while both time & space indeed are “myths” (along w/ biology, history, geography, etc.), time is a “deeper” myth—meaning not “longer” here, as with Achilles’ well—but more foundational or, speaking practically like a sorcerer, harder to manipulate. To confirm this scientifically, consider that while in space we see & move in all directions, in time we live the present only.[6]

            I refer to my previous Lesson 12 on corporeality, where I tie us biologically to our Paleolithic forebears, more than 100 billion Homo sapiens who had few tools, words, or abstract thoughts, no inkling of city: Earth 1.0. Why would anyone choose that nasty, brutal existence over this overripe world with so much to offer? My answer was the body itself, how we create our self-image physically, truly out of nothing but our minds, and that most of the modern world takes us away from this primary task. We are infant souls taste-testing a widely-shared storyline to see if it’s the one, my chosen identity. But if you haven’t developed a clear (3-d, functional) self-image, your own figure in spacetime, then “after” you die, how do you return anywhere?  * poof  *
            Now some detail: Because existence consists of present moments only, how we choose & sequence & play our moments becomes the essence of our life. To be sure, our souls are not required to live each moment chronologically; we can create & insert “new” moments into our chosen storyline any time; we delete & replace; we forget altogether. But recall, while we may replay, we may never repeat the same moment exactly (no ob), and humans are unable to engage/exist in several moments at once. 
            So discipline: each moment projected in its chosen place & turn, one by one by one, where our first task on Earth is to learn how to “return” in mind & body repeatedly to nearly the same spacetime coordinates, our chosen (place, figure), to build one moment on another, either just before or just after, then add a few more to form a chain, threading a storyline we share with others. The entire chain is fiction, each moment a projection, full of gaping gaps among the winking pearls, particularly where no thread has been fathomed and since every pearl pops; and yet this is all that living is. It is neither real nor unreal. Now, in this context of this moth-eaten multiverse—more holes than stars—consider the abject necessity of your karass.
            We create continuity from iteration, 5-d motion out of 4-d still-shots, meaning from sharings. Life means living the details, and I see in math: If, as psychologists posit, it takes 10,000 hours to internalize a discipline, then, at our modern-moment pace of twenty-second intervals, that’s 1.8 million moments to create & inhabit fully a single chapter of your life. No wonder my brain hurts! Arbeit macht Sein.[7]

            So what does Achilles think about in his deep illiterate well? (Homer portrays him as a brooding adolescent.) Sure, he could wield a sword, but how well could he divide & multiply fractions? If his moments were “longer,” I’m guessing they were “silent” as well, no leakage among the bubbles, no music. 
            In contrast, I consider my own highest self-image, from my all-time dream I Dance (in 1999: see Lesson 12, Canto 3). Immediately upon waking I knew that I’d “been to the mountain top,” that the dream marked a revelation milestone. Except all I did there, in my total lucidity, was dance dance dance to wonderful music and blow impossible colours from my wand. Was I Blake naked? 
            Not until writing this very paragraph did/do I start to grasp the necessary place of Albion’s dream opus: While I love Earth’s natural beauty, I was literally not on Earth, not in reality anywhere. Rather I danced in an artificial structure in hyperspace, a scaffold of holodeck boxes of bare-bones existence, each one 9 x 9 x 9 cubic feet, with (as seen from outside) transparent walls, ceiling, & floor; and I—exultant, ecstatic, yet still fully rational—leapt from cube to cube. From this insight, I feel it’s fair to assert I am no caveman, though I frequent the Village and cherish my home by the sea. Albion makes clear, however, I’m a veteran city traveller, come back in time to tell & sell a tale of unreal estate, even while remaining fully vested & invested in this present tense story.    

            I look around at my fellow Homo sapiens and see most have deeply erred. No, their souls cry in chorus, I don’t wanna be here. Earth 1.9 is a mess! The babies jack off with guns & nukes & human trafficking, while everyone murders the rainforests. How do we make this fun?
            Silence, I soothe my terrified cricket, who also errs. True, most people don’t cherish their lives, but they don’t think about the world, or care what Trump or Putin or climate denialism might do—because they are under-educated, thus unable to care. Without early cognitive training they will never figure out this 2.0 world-box, where the rules & laws themselves are now playable, giving us so many 4-d games the soulless never play. In sympathy, and with no judgment attached, we recall our human bio-brain never evolved for this bombardment of irrelevance. Indeed, until very recently few humans conceived of a “world” ever: Existence meant sharing with your family only, maybe 10 or 20 people, working together to face the challenges of hunger, pain, death, child-rearing, & love, along with regular nighttime dreaming. 
            Central to my own world story is the Fall of humanity, deep in the Stone Age, which I connect to language, cognition, & the progressive fracturing of human attention, and which my teachers insist was a bad choice. I my self never had that choice, just as I am not responsible for my ancestors who owned slaves (a few). But I do live & play in such a place that allows for all that baggage, relevant or otherwise gangrenous, and which therefore involves absolute risk. Indeed, it’s clear I love it here, though I see well the train wreck ahead, a gorge without a bridge, as can anyone who sees in math. I do not believe the end of Earth was foreordained from that first fatal Fall forward; indeed I haven’t determined my own next moment yet. I don’t feel obliged to play at all. 
            Not that game, not MAGA World, for instance, where the whole goal, it would seem, is to flame out as a meteor in Trump’s agent-orange atmosphere, though truly no light can escape such a history. I refuse to project that dream. I am saddened, then, that I must give up the news, Ukrainians, and most life on this world: Shed that skin to breathe fresh oxygen. Nothing lasts forever, since nothing actually lasts more than twenty seconds.
            My grandchildren become my only story now, they & my monastic orders. I knew when I took my vow of discipline (piano, Spanish, literature) that I’d spend much of my future life laboring alone. That was my cricket’s greatest complaint, that these projects, which nearly fill up my foreseeable lifespan, leave little room for “saving the world”—now suddenly a billion bubbles away. Finally resigned, I did agree to a term in the abbey library—regular, repetitive Arbeit to fashion myself a potty-trained hominid, civilized for city folk. I did not expect a vow of silence.
            For clearly there is a City, Point C, just over the horizon. I know it well, for I get all its radio stations. I just don’t know if we—all creatures currently living—can reach it via the projected road we’re traveling. I see a divergence, an uncivil war & script divorce: One devout & powerful faction promotes a “promised” ancient fiction of rapture & apocalypse. If they pray & work hard enough, perhaps they’ll achieve what they wish. I, on the other hand, choose Josef’s thread, which is abstract, which serves the Good, and needs no story to support it. I am here; my friends are everywhere. 

            Let’s return to Clive Wearing, who can himself never “return” anywhere, because every moment he perceives is “first.” Now let’s posit (for experiment only) that the hypothalamus functions as the brain locus where humans “frame our moment,” and that for Wearing, while his moments’ x-coordinate place evolves apace & apiece with the other figures present (like his wife), his y-coordinate figure is stuck; no chain can be formed. If apt, this would illustrate clearly, if not counterintuitively, that one’s physical body is a component of place, not figure, especially when one is sick or injured, while figure is purely abstract, the POV-trapped protagonist choosing & playing amid place’s given rules & box, be it a bare-bones empty holodeck or the caves & canyons of New York.
            Wearing’s condition also indicates that figure, and not place, determines the duration of a moment: Never mind “what a clock measures”—which Einstein half-offered for one definition of time (as staged from his bare-box, “falling elevator” POV). Modern ants can pack a given interval full of mini-moments, if we so choose, returning & returning in rapid-fire sequence; or instead, with discipline (& more like Achilles perhaps), we can draw out a single moment by immersing fully in its flow, cutting out all noise. Most athlete testimonials, I bet, share my own soccer playing POV, that I flew in “slow motion,” while, in polar contrast, writing essays like this—seeking abstract horizons unthinkable to Village people—eats up numberless hours in a mind-numbing instant. Train wrecks, we know, always play out in slow-mo—that is, to the passive witnesses & victims. An engaged & lucid actor, however—say, a modern-day Achilles, possessing both a deep well & (at least) a bachelor’s degree—can play to bend a scene, especially a disaster, to change both time & facts. 

            Which, in bare-bones abstraction, is all sorcery is, Dis being the place of a sorcerer’s “residency” or journeyman practice. In 2005 when last I saw Scribe & Advisor, they were deeply immersed in Dis. For them “Dis” meant lucid dreaming simply, a structured, shared curriculum—crafted while awake, practiced every night. Both flyers at this time were advancing rapidly, after years of independent diligence: Scribe, a master of monasticism already; Advisor, because he had no other path; he saw too much. Their sharings, I recall, included a kind of telepathic “summoning” (nonverbal, I think, but I was not filled in). I know in 2005 they had not yet attempted any shared dreaming; but—I have little doubt—this rather obvious “learning target” came soon after my departure. Like an A.I. singularity, it seemed all-but inevitable, as they each had established “outposts” (o-dreams) in the Forest, places of their own projected creation to which they regularly recurred with explicit tasks. Both employed nightly use of their daimon guides.[8]
            A quick contrast might prove helpful: A’s outposts were all rooms & pieces of an elaborate medieval construction of his adolescence, when A suddenly found himself flung into the deepest Forest projections, vivid enough to rival so-called “real” life. (As a result, A’s personal life on Earth took a very different course from Scribe’s or mine.) A, who lacked the language & science of our curriculum, endowed his outpost with magic missions, made it a Village castle & bailey with established geography, his great stage for samurai challenges & conjurings, wielding his daimonic Sword. A visited this world nightly and more.
            Scribe, you might recall, came to flight late (age 39). Unlike Advisor, thrown into the deep end, Scribe arrived at Dis’s gates only after completing his Nine Men, which above all represented a conscious/waking curriculum over time. Again, all of Scribe’s Nine Men went exclusively to poetry: 81 indelible poems, most quite long, requiring five focused years of days to write a daily dozen lines per moment. Each poem, in turn, needed to challenge Scribe in a precise novel fashion, small incremental rules-changes, generally of progressing difficulty—in voice or dialogue or narrative tempo—each permeating fully the poem’s place, ultimately comprising his Pangaea of Possible Islands.[9] 
            Importantly, I don’t believe Scribe inserted his own figure into his poems; The Nine Men curriculum (I see now in retrospect) is devoted to place first, less figure, which is the subject of Dis. Indeed, while Scribe lived personally some spectacular waking visions (two visits to Atlantis, for instance), I think these came to him, perhaps as to Blake, as a passive scribal witness, not an immersed POV-player. Rather, Scribe’s own polished figure returned punctually, bodily, ritually to his hand-cut stationary, his hand-sharpened Blackfeet Indian pencils, his magic circle of knotted silk neckties, and to his “zen quiet wishes,” where I don’t think the bare-bones physical room mattered much, perhaps literally.
            Dis, in contrast, is necessarily physical. Make the room 20% larger. Raise the atmospheric temperature 20 degrees. Replace a mountain with a fountain. Fly to the City. (For Scribe “City” meant the rooftops of Florence or the Vatican.) Each of these tasks & many others comprised Scribe’s “way of night” dreamwork, and some tasks took a lot “longer” to master—both more nights & fortnights of focused dream practice, but also more moments sequenced within each dream, steps to connect & execute: 1) become lucid; 2) remember the dreamtask; 3) summon the guide; 4) travel to Outpost x; 5) perform the rehearsed dreamtask, which then usually required further command sequences. —And oh yeah, by the way beware: Travelling the Forest, one soon hooks up with travellers & parasites & fucking lethal predators—none human, none welcome—which marks the Forest as utterly alien & potentially hostile, nothing like the Village nursery lawn & laws (where everyone suffers lice). 

            I am not a lucid dreamer, not yet, though my teachers fully expect it of me in time—which is my burden, my gilded cross, since at 65 I’m not measuring up. Maybe I’ve already failed; maybe I fell off my “proper” path years ago, perhaps in 2005 when I departed ouija. I accept fully this given possibility as a potential fact of my 2024 place (a mental construction unthinkable to a caveman). If true, then I blame my own arrogance, the hubris of a boy Icarus who never tamed his ego, because he proved too timid to return to flight & twice face the sun, merely after singeing a few feathers. I’m still terrified. But what I fear most is not the Forest & its foreigners, not Trump or climate change, which saddens me deeply, nor all the fucking lost sheep of 2024 (poof); rather I’m terrified to overstep my self  & lose my center, run insane inside my ant nest. I fear idolizing my certainty, falling for my own bullshit; and I feel deep shame when I’m wrong. How dare I claim I know anything? I can’t place my new figure.
            And I fear my own irrelevance—not merely that all my time thinking & writing will go unshared in the world, but that my thinking & writing, whether accurate or not, have no application. So what if A can transform himself bodily in a dream? How is my knowing this necessary or beneficial? What excess baggage of this present place mess can be thrown out? 
            The surprise answer I learned thanks to pneumonia: All of it. 

            Breathe deep. Ah, oxygen! 
            Silence begins with breathing in, becoming aware of my presence behind my rising rib cage. If I want to see the forest, then first I must infuse & feel fresh oxygen throughout all my constituent cells, head to toe, with not one cell left suffocating at an extremity. Here, let me send all that CO2 to the canopy. Repeat.…


            Uncle O takes up the baton: 

            Stereoscopy (as a matter of vision strictly) is not why chordates have two eyes. Fish eyes first evolved on either side of the head/body—following the bilateral symmetry of the chordate model—and such placement in no way enables depth perception. The eyes had to slide around the head, so that both eyes could focus forward, (incidentally) giving us a face. Note, of course, the majority of vertebrates retain their depthless faceless vision in favor of 360° flat-screen seeing, because most animals are prey, who swim or run or fly away, not toward. Predators, on the other hand, need to reach out to grasp prey, often in motion. They don’t need eyes looking backward or skyward or to the sides; in fact it would be a waste of precious brain space to include extra eyes, especially because 3-d vision requires far more than simple eyehole placement; stereoscopy is expensive.
            When two spatially-separated POV eyeballs view the same object in space (parallax), the two slightly-different images can be overlayed & coordinated, detail by detail, to construct for the “viewer” a single, 3-d image. While the optics of stereoscopy, like perspective drawing, can be demonstrated following Euclidean geometry, what goes on in the brain is not clear. Consider, stereoscopy is not a normal human way to see; yet it can be “turned on” at will. We know, for instance, that persons who are blind in one eye lack all depth perception. Most of us, on the other hand, who see “just fine” still marvel at a 3-d Imax movie, because somehow it seems “more real” to us than reality.[10] From this and from my own forest experimentation I conclude stereoscopy is actually a continuum of spatial perception, which boils down largely, I think, to data-crunching.
            Who needs stereoscopy? Not modern flat-screen people surely, and least of all our nomad ancestors wandering the savannah, where parallax becomes pointless at great distances. But arboreal primates, we can guess, some time in our more distant past probably benefitted enormously. They didn’t need to evolve new eyes, of course, high up in the canopy, since they already had two, along with much of the basic software for image-processing. But they would have certainly needed expanded brain capacity, simply to overlay & coordinate ever-greater detail in ever-smaller pixels. These same pre-people, living among ubiquitous line-of-sight jungle obstructions, probably mark the point in our evolution where we also added (heightened) color vision to our palette. I say “added,” but “multiplied” is functionally more accurate, and accordingly still more brain capacity was required.[11] Over 50% of the human brain is dedicated to vision, while, in contrast—and acknowledging our deep lack of scientific understanding here—language is believed to take up less than 5%. 
            I’m good at stereoscopy; I’ve practiced a lot, especially as my (unnatural second-growth Doug-fir) forests—which more resemble a holodeck colonnade than a native wood—might, by pure luck, provide the ideal forum for just such visual practice, though, to prove a point, let me “turn on” my stereoscopy right here & now with a single thought—in fact a strangely-hidden executive override function—a mere reflection in my alcove. Note, however, I can’t hold on to stereoscopy; it takes a lot of effort to maintain. If I go long, my brain hurts. Yet such was not the case, as you know, Danielle, when I had pneumonia.
            A quick story to build my case: I recall hiking with Rhiannon in 2013 on a guided trek to “the greatest overlook in Africa,” the Amphitheater of the Drakensberg range, home to (tiny) Tugela Falls, officially the second-highest on the planet.[12] The distant view, unfortunately, got smoked out from agricultural fires, though the immediate cliff faces, 3000+ vertical feet everywhere, were fucking awesome. What’s relevant here, however, came earlier in the morning ascent, rising among the naked rolling roiling Drakensberg hills, falling away like billowing grass-covered balloons the full 3000 ft. Rhiannon & I couldn’t look at them and, in fact, had to curb our gazes sharply to avoid even glimpsing, as they gave us both great vertigo. We were able to gaze straight down the sheer faces of the Amphitheater, but unable to face the gentler bubble geometries. Why?
            I conclude our brains are “smart” technology, smart enough to make independent executive decisions. To process 3-d vision takes incredible data-crunching. Merely to “map” one’s visual field in an instant, both with the left & right eyes simultaneously (thus separate brain-hemispheres), is an incredible achievement, particularly when one considers a human eye can pick up (as a pixel, say) a single candle flame from 10 miles away. Comparing in a second two separate megapixel images, then, even in the simplest fashion, pixel by pixel, is computationally mind-blowing. Now factor motion into those reiterating generative algorithms (as an exponent, not addition), and one can see, out of dire functional necessity, that the “smart” part of our tech concerns knowing what not to include for consumptive calculation, which details to omit, or, perhaps in my case, what not to see entirely. 
            Joseph Campbell recounts the story of a lifelong rainforest dweller suddenly removed from his jungle universe by Europeans to the savannah. Upon first looking over the endless grasslands, this (probably Khoi-san) nomad couldn’t make out or understand his sight: He had no sense of spatial distances, believing faraway giraffes & buffalo to be the size of ants. Thus he had a meltdown, a psychic & cultural break from the POV of his judging handlers; but it seems more likely to me that his brain simply fried. Stereoscopy doesn’t work on the savannah.
            Similarly, I think Rhiannon & I could stare down the face of Tugela Falls without too much dizziness, for the same reason we can look directly at the sky & measureless ocean: Our smart brains realize what’s going on and turn off the 3-d processing. A 2-d picture is more than sufficient on the Serengeti, minus most of the details even, leaving  the brain plenty of room for talking. The colossal rolling hills, however—like none I’d seen before or since—overrode all our visual processing. The eyes saw earth, hard, tangible matter, but no trees offered scale; no jagged edges anywhere could be aligned; the distances could not be coordinated to be calculated to be fathomed. Still the brain kept trying trying anyway, smoked out to the horizon.
            In short, my pneumonia stereoscopy, I deduce, was the physical, visual result of my pneumonia silence. Namely, when my streaming satellite radio and all its stations & stories & music & voices got turned off, suddenly my brain had plenty of freed-up capacity for other processings, such as wholesome & natural forest seeing.…


    […an awkward silence or rest]

            Well uh thank you, Uncle Oxygen, for that (extended, purely hypothetical) neural speculation. “Silence” might indeed explain my “enabled” stereo-vision—as well as my heightened ability during pneumonia to absorb & recall effortlessly large quantities of (often useless) TV information. For these reasons alone, I want to know silence. But your analysis, dear O, while “solving” for the manifestation of a symptom, doesn’t tackle the mystery or root pathology: How did “I” silence my self?
            Uncle O says nothing, but nods knowingly and passes me the baton. Yeah, that’s my job.



§12/12/24