Techku

ProetryPlace Blog 40 The Techku: Art, Science or Both?

(or Neither)

    I have written and published scientific theses and technical reports. I have written and published fiction, nonfiction and a variety of poetic forms. Each kind of writing has its own style, its own linguistic requirements or conventions, even its own formal or esoteric vocabulary. Each genre has had its own distinct place in my writing—its own different and distinct means and purpose of communication.

    I often write and read haiku and about haiku. It is an ancient Japanese poetic form that was greedily adopted and adapted by English writers more than a century ago. I and many other poets often tamper with the classical 17-syllable constraint or the three-line format in favor of even shorter statements. Traditional references or allusions to nature are often omitted in modern English haiku in order to apply it to a broader range of subject matter.

    The best haiku, however, preserve certain essential characteristics: brevity, imagery, appeal to or reference to the various senses, immediacy of the moment and the unexpected turn in the final line to some adjacent image or thought.

    My haiku comprise a range from serious or somber to humorous or featuring human foibles. Here are two recent examples:

we laughed and we joked

almost ‘til the day he died

glad I did not know

A stealthy odor

rises, permeates the pews.

Who farted in church?

    In spite of my willingness to adapt various forms of writing to accomplish some specific objective or convey some particular thought or emotion, I have never gone so far as to mix such widely divergent forms as poetry and scientific essay. Now comes the news, reported on the internet and newspapers across the country, that a scientist has used haiku, the briefest of poetic forms, to distill and communicate the meaning of a lengthy and involved report on environmental research.

    Greg Johnson is a veteran scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and contributor to the 2000+ page report, “Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis.” A few days ago, Greg published on the web a series of 19 illustrated haiku to distill and accentuate the meaning of that report. Here are three.

Big, fast carbon surge.

Ice melts, oceans heat and rise.

Air warms by decades.

Glaciers and ice sheets

melt worldwide, speed increasing.

Sea ice, snow retreat.

Fast, strong action will

Reduce future warming, but . . .

rising seas certain.

And this final comment, including Johnson’s drawing:

    As much as I admire Johnson’s imagination and innovation in creating these interesting statements of technology results and interpretation, even I cannot consider them to be haiku. They are certainly succinct and deal with nature, but they lack some of the essential qualities of haiku that I mentioned above. Maybe we can dub them “Techku” and let it go at that.

    I also enjoyed seeing Johnson’s pencil and watercolor sketches like the one illustrated above. These little drawings do haiku one better by communicating without words at all. Do yourself a favor and Google Greg Johnson or the Climate Change report to see all of his words and artistic works.

    One final encomium must go to my sister who alerted me to Johnson’s work with this headline haiku:

Seattle author

distills global warming tome

into hot haiku  

Richard Allen Anderson, 26 January 2014, http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

One Day, Perhaps

ProetryPlace Blog 39

One Day, Perhaps

    Okay gang, listen up. We had our fun last year. Now it is 2014 and time to get serious, return to the routine, pay the piper, or more precisely, the MasterCard, Visa and Discover statements the USPS has been delivering day by day. It was fun shopping for loved ones, finding those special, surprise gifts. Well, at least Dolly enjoyed it, but she leaves the mop up operation—paying the bills— to me. Still, it is as hard to swallow the price of our holiday-induced magnanimousness as it is those few remaining crusty Christmas cookies.

    And who could resist those family holiday meals—nosh on tempting snacks of cheeses and sausages, chips and dips, sliced fruits and salads, munchies and mimosas for hours, almost unnoticed amidst the fun and conversation before sitting down to the baked ham or turkey and trimmings and at least one slice of the three or four desert choices? But who can suppress the groan of dismay when the scale reveals the extent of our penalty for casual gluttony?

    The first chill of winter, the first snow flakes, the serenity of waking to a hushed white landscape—occasions that we greeted like old friends—are beginning to feel like house guests who have overstayed their welcome by several weeks. We have taken down the tree, packed away the decorations and bright lights, heard at last the final strains of chestnuts roasting and merry gentlemen. Now what?

    It is January, the time for looking forward and the time for looking back, like Janus the two-faced Roman god of gates and doorways and endings and beginnings for whom the month is named. It is a time to take inventory and restock shelves. It is a time to pause and parse, reflect and project, a time to plan the future. It is a time when colorful garden catalogues are gleefully perused, a time to think ahead to when the snow has melted and Persephone has returned to spread the glory of springtime on the land. Dolly is already making out her Easter shopping list.

    It is tax time too. The 1099s and bank and broker statements have started to arrive. I will not be a volunteer preparer for the AARP TaxAide program this year, but I have purchased TurboTax as my personal tax adviser, and will soon install it on my PC. Meanwhile, I rummage through the statements of what we paid out in medical and drug expenses, what taxes and interest we paid, what contributions to charity we were able to make that can count as deductions, off-sets to our retirement income. TurboTax will ease the calculation of how much to pay the IRS and tell me when to do it, but it won’t abate the pain of this springtime curse, this April anathema. (Another Season Spent, page 61)

    What of the future? I will aspire to some things outside the bounds of our mundane though reasonably comfortable daily existence. What new adventures will Dolly and I be able to attempt in the coming year? Do we have another voyage left in us? The travels we have made were wonderful experiences and yielded lasting memories, but travel has become a bit more difficult now and our hearts are not often far from home. Still the open road calls out.

    I will write. Writing is no longer something I can do or not do. Writing is a part of me, a physical function as essential as eating or drinking or you-know-what. (The you-know-what may be a better analogy for writing.) So much is yet undone—the long-neglected family history, many memoirs, my next volume of poetry, illustration and possible publication of my one and only children’s story. The list grows rather than diminishes.

    I will study. I will read. I will learn. As essential as writing, and not unrelated to it, is poking about various esoteric caverns of human knowledge in search of new enlightenments, new understandings. Will this thirst for knowledge, for intellectual and spiritual growth ever end?

    One day, perhaps.

 

Richard Allen Anderson, 19 January 2014, http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

On Truth and Love

Truth and Love

    The noted Beatle philosopher, John Lennon, once quipped, “The more I see, the less I know for sure.” Quantum scientist, Werner Heisenberg, quantified that idea with his Uncertainty Principle that states, in essence, that the very act of observing disturbs the system being observed, so that its exact properties can never be known.

    What then is truth? For each of us, truth is what we perceive it to be, and no two people perceive it the same. Thus perception is reality for anyone, but is it really truth?

    Goodreads.com lists 454 quotations on perception. Here are a few.

    Jonathan Safran Foer in his novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,: “Songs are as sad as the listener.”

    Edgar Allan Poe: “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” Of course, not many may claim perceptions similar to the extraordinary Poe.

    The German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” I think we can, in the spirit of equality, expand that observation to include women.

    Eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, is considered by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to be “the most important philosopher ever to write in English.” I love his perspective on the subject—“Each mind perceives a different beauty.”

    Is there any wonder that discrepancies arise over the seemingly most simple matters, let alone those of great consequence? Science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, warned, “. . . if subjective worlds are perceived too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication . . .” As a long-married man, I can attest to the truth in that.

    But, surely there is a real, immutable truth, a physical reality that stands outside of human perception—or is there? Albert Einstein said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

    If a single “correct” version of truth exists, how are we ever to recognize it? Author Anais Nin put it this way, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

    But wait; it gets worse. Christof Koch reported on a structured study of the issue in the 8/9/10 (cool date, no?) volume of Scientific American magazine. “Our perception of the world, though relatively stable, is not static . . . our awareness is informed . . . by any number of transient factors—our strength and energy levels, our sense of confidence, our fears and desires. Being human means seeing the world through our own, constantly shifting lens. We are incapable of being fully objective.” (Italics, mine.)

    I devoted many years of my life to scientific study and research, both in academia and in the more practically or commercially directed practice of industrial R&D. I have discovered new “truths” and contributed that knowledge to the scientific and patent literature. Yet, with Lennon, I always felt that the more I learned, the less I knew. This feeling of ambiguity is not restricted to my understanding of the physical world but extends to more esoteric and metaphysical concepts, as I express in my poem,

No Ordinary Fish (from Another Season Spent).

I caught a fish the other day.

Glancing down I perceived it dimly

through rippled waters

wagging its tail at me.

Odd, I thought—this fish

acknowledges my presence

but does not dart into the depths.

And so I reached down

with my left hand and grasped it

expecting now for sure that it would

squirm away and leave me foolish,

empty handed.

But no, this cold creature did not

twist or fight as all fish do

when I lifted it dripping from the water

and held it in my two hands

beheld it face to face, dumbfounded.

This is no ordinary walleye, I said,

as the fish looked me in the eye

raised one brow quizzically and blew

me a fish kiss. Well I’ll be damned!

So when it spoke I hardly flinched:

My name is Pythia, it said, through bubble lips

but you can call me Scales.

I have the answers you have been searching for.

The answers?

Yes. It flipped its tail impatiently.

So ask away, I haven’t got all day.

But I don’t know where to start.

So what?

You never did.

Then I pondered on the expanding universe,

(or is it universes in the plural)

and how it (or they) came to be.

What would I find beyond the outer edges

of the cosmos, of space and time? And

of the soul—its composition and mortality

the meaning of beauty

the need for evil

how life came to be

collisions of galaxies

the death of the sun

my parent’s graves

my children’s faces

my life

love.

The walleye pursed its lips

but with no other word

it shook its head

and shrugged.

I placed it deep down

into the water

a full arm’s length.

I felt its scales abrade my hand

as it backed off slowly, and

with a sudden silvery burst

I saw it flash away.

No ordinary fish.

    Humorist Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and others) had this take on the question: “There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

    Lest you feel put off or disturbed by the enigmas of a universal truth, let me conclude with another quote from John Lennon:

“All you need is love,

All you need is love,

All you need is love, love

Love is all you need.”

Richard Allen Anderson, ProetryPlace Blog 38 http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

ProetryPlace Blog 37

SNOW

    Some of the country is getting a lot of winter this winter, Midwestern and Northeastern states buried under record snowfalls. Here in Georgia, the best I can report is eight flurries floating in the frigid breeze late last night, squeezed from the saturated air by sub-freezing temperatures.

    It is now more than twenty years since the Storm of the Century blanketed most of the southeastern United States with heavy, wet, late-season snow. For three days in mid-March, 1993, traffic snarled everywhere. Automobiles and truck transports were stranded on snow-bound interstates for days while the overwhelmed clearing crews and equipment struggled to restore even partial traffic flow. Shelves at supermarkets were stripped of bread and milk, even if one somehow managed to get to the store. There was little else to do but sit back by the fire and enjoy it.

    Snow amounting to more than a dusting is somewhat rare in Georgia; ice storms can be even more devastating. Several years back, the heavy coatings of ice brought down tree branches and power lines, leaving us without electric power, telephone or, horror of horrors, cable television for five days.

     It has been several years since I had to get out one of the snow shovels we kept when we moved south from Wisconsin over thirty years ago. But with all the heavy snowfalls now being reported elsewhere this year, I suppose I ought to try to find one in case I need it before spring. We probably need to stick a loaf or two of bread in the freezer too and make sure the generator we own now is working.

    When I think of Wisconsin, the first thing that comes to mind is snow. It’s not that I haven’t experienced the wonders of all the seasons in the state of my birth and upbringing. But the winters, somehow are the most memorable, and those memories are overridden by the essence of snow.

     I can personally attest to the fact that snow can come to Wisconsin anytime from early October through late April, a period of seven months. I have heard it reported that it has snowed every month of the year in that northern state, and though I have no official confirmation, I believe this to be true.

    The character of snow and one’s personal response to it depend on many things—one’s age, the month of the year and how the balance of one’s life is affected by it, for example. As a middle-aged adult, my reaction to snow was less delight than disgust. While my wife sat inside and viewed the hushed white scene outdoors, I would be required to don heavy sweaters or jackets in the dark of night or early morning to shovel the stuff from my sidewalk and driveway, often time after arduous time. But for my children, snow meant sledding, snowmen, defending one’s snow-fort with barrages of snowballs and, best of all, no school today.

    The most memorable snow of my lifetime occurred during the closing days of January, 1947 when two feet or more accumulated over a three day period and drifted into piles high enough to tunnel through. I was a young teen living in Milwaukee and in spite of the hard labor of constant shoveling that I, my dad and my older brother did, the snow was a marvel to me. Never before had I experienced such snow, nor have I ever since. Nothing else mattered. The snow dominated everything. No streetcars or motor vehicles ran in the street that pedestrians tried in vain to traverse in hip-deep snow. Businesses and institutions closed. The humdrum routine of life was turned ass over teakettle—a nightmare for some, for me a winter wonderland I shall never forget.

    Here is one of the “snow” poems from my book, Another Season Spent, entitled:

The Ages of Snow

In frigid January

light breezes swirl the snow.

Fluffy, frivolous and airy

in temperatures of five below

it drifts to pile at fences

before the winds of night—

then amazes all our senses

with the new aurora’s light.

In the slow return of morning

it lies quiet on the ground,

its stillness makes no warning

as it muffles every sound.

Bestowing calm and wonderment

it spreads soft beneath our sight;

the landscape flows mellifluent

all over hushed and white.

March brings sticky snowfalls.

They drop heavy and profoundly—

good packing for hard snowballs,

and snowmen stacked rotundly.

Children try to catch snow’s coldness

on open palm and lifted face

they watch the crystal essence

morph into a liquid trace.

Groaning loudly under foot or ski

snow complies to hard compaction

warning town-folk to drive carefully

to be wary of uncertain traction.

Then shoveling is a murderous thing

torturing will and sacroiliac,

relieved but by thoughts that joyous spring

will soon come rushing warmly back.

Richard Allen Anderson

January 2014

http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

Another Season Spent is available at Amazon.com in print or Kindle versions and discount paperback from Barnes and Noble or Vabella Publishing.

An Act of Random Kindness

ProetryPlace Blog 36, New Year’s Day, 2014

An Act of Random Kindness

    The news frequently reports acts of random violence—drive-by shootings, children wounded asleep in their beds, all variations of senseless destruction. I now want to report an act of random kindness.

    Last night, my wife and I met another couple about 7:30 PM at a neighborhood Carrollton restaurant for a quiet New Year’s Eve dinner. Like most of the restaurants in town, many of the tables were already occupied. A family of five or six sat around the table closest to ours—a mother and father, some teens and possibly others. I did not pay close enough attention to report the composition of their group accurately, although shortly after we arrived, the apparent mother of the group and I did exchange a few friendly words.

    Our friends and we ordered drinks and hors d’oeuvres and eventually our dinners. We became engrossed in table talk about ourselves, our families, our neighbors and a few old reminiscences for auld lang syne. The young family next to us finished their meals and waved to us as they left. 

Our leisurely dinner finally finished, we called for the check—Dutch treat, of course.

    “Oh, the family that was next to you paid your check,” our smiling waitress reported.

    “What? Who? Why? We don’t even know them!”

    “Yes, they just said they wanted to pay for your dinners.”

    Probably, I will never again see those people that perpetrated that act of kindness with no expectation or possibility for repayment. Quite possibly I would not recognize any of them if I saw them again somewhere in public. But for today and as long as the warm glow they created persists, our dogs will get an extra treat, I will be sure to tell my wife I love her and compliment her on her looks, and I will smile at strangers and feel a special bond of humanity.

    And just maybe, when the opportunity strikes, I may be able to perform a random act of kindness for some other unsuspecting victims. Thank you, mystery family, thank you.

    To one and all, “Happy New Year.”

Richard Allen Anderson, 1 January 2014

http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com