Meta-post

After more than a year of maintaining this blog, I've come to a sad realization: I don't post here often enough. Seven posts in an entire year--no matter how significant I might consider those posts individually--is not many. The issue isn't a lack of material--I have plenty of ideas to write about and opinions to (try to) articulate--but carrying the ideas from the back of my brain to the tips of my fingers increasingly requires far too much effort. Today's post, for example, took days of writing and re-writing, and after all that it still doesn't say quite what I want it to.

I'm not sure exactly why I struggle so much lately, but--along with today's Jungian theme (this post really is meta)--I blame my internal editor, an ever-fattening curmudgeon who blocks the path between my intuitive ideas and the conscious crafting of words. My rational, quasi-perfectionistic mind judges and discards my prose before I get the chance to chew on it.

Therefore, I'm going to conduct an experiment. For the next seven days, I will write one post per day. Probably the posts will be shorter, less polished, and related to shallower topics, but I'll have an opportunity to work on getting ideas on paper quickly. Hopefully it will kick off a trend in more frequent posting, because let's be honest: people want to hear what is inside my brain.

So, I have a request for my meager readership. I believe that I have enough topics to fill seven consecutive days of lightweight blogging, but I'd rather not come up short and have to write a completely superficial post just to make a self-imposed deadline. Thus, I invite you to submit a topic or two about which you would like to see me spout off a few paragraphs. I won't put hard guidelines on the topics, but make them something worth thinking and arguing about. Political topics are acceptable only if there is a meaningful non-partisan component; I'm not interested in becoming anyone's ideologue. Philosophical and/or theological topics earn bonus points.

Thanks in advance for your participation.

Archetypical

[Editor's note/excuse/statement of victory: I haven't used this blog for personal storytelling--if you want to know what's going on day-to-day, try Facebook--but recently I've been distracted by training for, running, and recovering from the Houston Marathon. I thought about writing about it here, but I decided to spare you the treacly life-is-like-my-sport routine and point you to the official photos instead. I'll leave up the 'marathonous' widget for a few more days to give you all one more chance to admire me.

End note. On with the post.]

A few months ago, W. W. Norton published the so-called "Red Book" by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Jung worked closely with Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century, but disagreements eventually led Jung to establish his own school of psychology. Shortly after his break with Freud, Jung began to suffer from major psychoses--voices, hallucinations, and the like--causing Jung to worry that he was going insane. Rather than shunning his episodes or trying to 'cure' them, however, he embraced and even tried to induce them. He viewed his hallucinations as valuable opportunities to become acquainted with his unconscious self, which was necessary to maintain (or recover) his mental health. For sixteen years he kept a detailed record of his hallucinations, transcribing notes and images into a red leather book. After his death, his family kept the book hidden until finally agreeing in 2007 to publish it.

(I promise I'm going somewhere with this. Please hang on.)

Colored by these experiences, Jung developed an unusual theory of psychology. He saw modern man as a victim of too much rational, logical thinking--too much 'consciousness'--which prevented him from realizing his true self. By tapping into the unconscious, letting it rule over the rational mind, a person's true self was realized. In contrast to Freud's 'rational' psychoanalysis, Jung saw psychology as a 'spiritual' (it's not clear--to me, at least--whether or not Jung meant this in a religious sense, or if it was merely figurative) endeavor, and his theories are characterized by a focus on the mystical and metaphysical. So, while Jung made several contributions to modern psychology, his theories are often marginalized as pseudoscientific.

However, the very qualities that render Jungian psychology unscientific simultaneously render it fascinating. The most notable of Jung's theories, for example, is the collective unconscious, the idea that all of humanity shares a common psychic structure that governs our primordial thoughts. To Jung, the commonality of our myths, folklore, and archetypes is due to a deeply-intrenched, genetically heritable psychological framework. In other words, the orphan hero and the wise old sage resonate with us not because George Lucas is a genius (because let's be honest, he isn't! [Cue angry comments.]), but because these characters have been stamped over millennia into our deepest, most immutable subconsciousness.

(Here's where I get to my point!)

Jung may be discredited among psychologists, his ideas useful only as fodder for works of science fiction genius, but I don't care; I'm more interested in the practical aspects of his ideas. While Jung argued that the unconscious mind should rule over the conscious, most of our success comes by doing the opposite. Whenever we overcome a fear, change our habits, or learn a skill, we make a conscious, deliberate effort to alter our unconscious, instinctive selves. This is particularly true for educational efforts: our we consciously struggle with complex ideas until we successfully embed them into our natural intuition.

With that last point comes a dilemma. As my education progresses, my capacity for precise, disciplined, hyperconscious thought improves tremendously. But I feel my creative, impulsive, illogical brain grinding slowly away--not rusting shut with disuse, but being crushed by the weight of ever-present rationality. I love graduate school, don't get me wrong, but as I sharpen my talent for proofmaking and paper writing--in other words, as I expand my rational self--I crowd out vital elements of my mind. I've argued elsewhere that science is not a mechanical process, but one that demands passion and creativity, in which the most valuable ideas spring from the irrational and are then honed under the care of the rational. So I am left with an important question. How do I expand the capacity of my rational mind without squashing the sparks of creativity? How do I go forward in training without neutering the very neuroticism that nurtures the innovation necessary for successful research?

Since it's Christmas...

Christmas is less than two weeks away, and I have nothing to post about it. Neither news article nor dinosaur comic has inspired me to write, and none of my own Christmas-related thoughts is insightful enough to share. But I love Christmastime too much to let it pass without a mention. As I said last year, I'm convinced that--despite the garish, over-hawked kitsch flowing freely over the festivities--Christmas brings out the best in people. So, lest the season go unheeded, let me share two small items:

1. Christmas music might be my favorite part of the season, and I've spent the last week or so fine-tuning the ultimate Pandora Christmas station. The very worst Christmas music is ostentatious and diva-driven; the very best is still, solemn, and beautiful. In an effort to sift out the chaff, I've seeded the station with a choice blend of 'classical' and contemporary music. I dare you to judge my choices. This year's newfound gem is the warm, hearthy choral work of Vaughan Williams. Although an agnostic, he was devoted to spreading Christmas cheer, writing a fantasia on Christmas carols alongside a ballet score for Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". Listen and enjoy, I entreat you.

2. My wife and I can't stomach the idea of Christmas at 75 degrees. So, instead of staying in Texas, we've arranged to be here on Christmas eve. A prediction: best Christmas ever.

I don't want to forget

Over the past several months, I've been reading Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" novels. Or, at least, I've been trying to read them. I enjoy reading, and I usually get through new books quickly, but Tolkien has been slow going--sufficiently so that I've had to take a few breaks to read something more digestible. I could postulate reasons for why that's my fault rather than Tolkien's (and I bet a Tolkien fan or two will leave comments to that effect), but hundreds of pages of irregular pacing, half-hearted character development, and improbable dialogue have led me to a more direct conclusion: whatever his other talents, Tolkien just isn't a great writer.

Having said that, however, I have every intention of finishing the series, for a perhaps surprising reason: I've been profoundly affected by the books. Pervading the series is an overwhelming sense of reverence for the past: the men of Gondor look into the distant past to recall their former glory, history and heros are remembered through songs and poems passed generation to generation, and the preeminence of Rivendell is best understood by recognizing that the elves--having unbounded lifespan--are guardians of history all but lost to the rest of Middle Earth. With Tolkien's emphasis on the ancient and almost-forgotten, reading about Middle Earth evokes images of a medieval monastery on an overcast day--old, dark, and almost depressing, but also inspiring and beautiful.

I've become easily impacted by these sorts of emotions (and, correspondingly, increasingly interested in traveling to places where ancientness is on display). I can't completely articulate why this is the case, but allow me to conjecture a partial explanation: my memory now is not the memory I remember. I no longer remember the details of what I read and hear, and the once-precise recollections of my life are beginning to blur. As with Tolkien's writing, I can come up with purely circumstantial reasons--a grown-up, multi-tasked life precludes my giving full attention to anything, ruining any hopes of ambient memorization; and years of scientific training have reinforced a preference for understanding over regurgitation--but the truth is that my memory is losing its former sharpness, and it can only dull with age.

Trivialize it if you like--dismiss it as the idle navel-gazing of someone whose quarter-life crisis is in full swing or the lightweight drivel of someone who's trying too hard at philosophical depth--but this matters to me. It's legitimately tragic, precisely because there is nothing I can do to prevent it. For example, if I want to relive my childhood, I putatively can fire up the NES emulator and play Super Mario Brothers to my ten-year-old heart's content (actually I do this all the time). But it doesn't really work. Sure, every so often I catch a reminiscent whiff of the plastic cases that held our NES cartridges or a glimpse of what the Mushroom Kingdom looked like that first Christmas morning, but mostly I'm just overwriting old memories. Instead of associating Mario Brothers with my childhood home, now I'm just as likely to associate it with one of several college apartments. Similarly, I can re-read books that defined my life as a teenager (I do this a lot, too), but again I'm more likely to reinforce associations with the present than I am to conjure images of the past. The brain supports only a limited number of neural connections, and any gateway to the past becomes increasingly ineffective the more I use it.

It may not matter in any long-term sense whether or not I can remember my childhood Mario exploits or the feeling of reading Dune for the first time, but as I notice my memory fading, I feel like bits of me are slipping away--both without my permission and in spite of my best efforts. Like a small town trying to preserve its way of life against the press of modernity, I feel the need to protect my past from being swallowed up in the present. And as the gloomy, comfortable fog of agnosticism finally sets in, I'm forced to confront a stark reality: as those memories are forgotten, parts of who I am are lost forever. Not merely misplaced or damaged, but irretrievably lost and irreparably destroyed. And there's nothing I can do--nothing that will work, at least. Entropy knocks down all our sandcastles, even the ones we build of ourselves, and none of our noisy efforts at self-preservation can change the outcome.

I say that's a tragedy. If you still don't think it's sad, well, maybe we can't be friends anymore.

Theme and variations

I recently promised some friends that I'd post the final project from the composition class I took last semester. I figured that my blog-following audience [as well as you lurkers; I know who (most of) you are. If you're going to read, you might as well leave a comment once in a while. Or, if the subject matter doesn't suit you, you can at least send a surrogate.] might be interested to see it, too.

But this... isn't that project. I'm actually quite proud of my work on the final project (a cello concerto), but I left a few things half-finished in order to meet the course deadlines. So, while I finish up the score for the cello concerto, allow me to offer this as a cop-out: my first composition project for the course, a theme and variations for piano.

The requirements were straightforward: one theme plus five "variations" on that theme, lasting in total approximately three minutes, containing at least one key change and one time signature change. I wrote each of the variations in a very different style, and since I believe that context always enhances the listening experience, let me drag you through a little bit of play-by-play analysis:

- Theme: It's... well, it's the theme, presented very simply in unremarkable four-part harmony. It's a little boring, even, but that's sort of the point, to take an ordinary theme on a wild ride through the variations. Plus, it's only thirty seconds; you can make it.

- Variation I: The first variation is a slow, brooding treatment of the theme. I like its atmosphere, but still the presentation is rather uncomplicated.

- Variation II: I lack the contrapuntal mettle to write a full-fledged fugue, but this variation is at least fugue-like. I love Bach's ability to weave passion and intensity into a tightly constructed musical mass; here is my effort at emulation.

- Variation III: Here I'm deliberately imitating the major-scale sappiness of Rachmaninoff. Although this variation was a good exercise in part-writing, it's a little too melodramatic for my tastes.

- Variation IV: I'm most proud of these last two variations, mostly because they exhibit qualities my of own compositional voice: asymmetrical time signatures, lots of dissonance, unapologetic parallel motion, and an emphasis on harmony over melody. And while the fast tempo forces this variation to be over too soon, it's far and away the best 20 seconds of the piece.

- Variation V: The final variation is an attempt to merge Sigur Ros-style ambience with an Eric Whiticare-style approach to harmony. (There's also a Sufjan Stevens reference; five points to the first person to correctly identify it!) I'm pretty happy with the result and its atmospheric minimalism. I won't pretend that there's some grand artistic meaning to my little school project, but I think this variation gives a fitting end to the piece: after folding, spindling, and torturing the theme, we pare it down to its essential elements and lay it to rest.

Below are links to the piece itself (.mp3) and the score (.pdf). Be forewarned: even though there have been great advances recently in electronic music, the mp3 file still came out of Finale's synthesizer. As far as synthesizers go, it's quite good, but don't expect it to sound like the real thing. And since I don't play the piano, a live recording isn't likely to be forthcoming anytime soon. Also: you may need to turn up the volume or use headphones. Finale is a little sissy about volume.

I know it isn't much, but it's something I created from scratch, and something I'm a little bit proud of. Please enjoy (please?):

Score (Finale)

(Sometime tomorrow I will upload the hand-written score, which will immediately make the whole thing at least 17% more bona fide. I'll also try to get Google player embedded into the post. I couldn't get it working, and I believe that blog jukeboxes are moderately evil, so we're stuck with this for now.)

Statuesque

If you follow the links embedded in my posts (and seriously, you really should; I spend considerable time hunting them down, and furthermore they are awesome), you know that I'm a fan of Bertrand Russell. Although he probably would have mostly thought of himself as a mathematician, he's better remembered now for his skeptical philosophy and quotable one-liners. Over the past several years, a few of his quotes have helped formalize my thoughts in a few areas I already felt strongly about: the value of questioning one's assumptions, the wisdom in acknowledging uncertainty, and the nobility of the scientific endeavor. He's also occasionally forced me to realize that sometimes I sympathize with the skeptic more readily than with the believer.

But as much as I like him, every so often he gets it terribly, terribly wrong. Consider the following:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty--a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

Sounds innocuous enough, maybe even something I'd support, given my overexuberance for mathematics. But no. As you might imagine, I take no issue with the idea that mathematics possesses truth and beauty--mathematics is all about the truth and beauty (although, if you want to be picky, we have to be careful about what we mean by mathematical truth. But I don't want to be picky.). Instead, my problem is with the "cold and austere" part. Maybe I misunderstand Mr. Russell, but I think he's missed the mark.

Here we go: it's become a cliche to characterize mathematics (and mathematicians) in simultanously dismissing and reverential terms. That is, it's terribly complicated and we could never understand it and it's SO amazing that someone could, in fact, understand it. But it's also so complicated and abstruse that it's entirely disconnected from our real life, so it's ultimately unimportant and irrelevant. By extension, we do the same thing to science in general: regard it as an impressively difficult, but impenetrably tedious task better left to someone else who happens to enjoy the pointlessness. (I could go on about how harmful this idea is, how it's perpetuated by our approach to math and science education, and what it says about us as a people, but I need to get back on point.)

"Cold and austere" only serves to reinforce this idea. It suggests that mathematics, science, and even logic in general are remote and lifeless and alien to everyday existence. That logical, mathematical thought is a robotic, passionless exercise that leads to a boring and unimportant answer. Even more, it misses so much of what logical thought actually is. Your friends, your parents, and even Yann Martel all want you to believe that logic happens in a sterile, Spockian vaccum of emotion and imagination. But they are all wrong. Logic is alive and hot with argument, struggle, and discovery. It requires (not merely permits) imagination, passion, and creativity. And its results have the power to fundamentally alter how we perceive our everyday reality. (I mean this: I dare any of you to learn calculus [or maybe learn about the Cantor set] without suffering an irreversible perceptual shift.)

To be fair, probably I've significantly exaggerated Russell's meaning. Indeed, he certainly knew something of the joys of mathematical exertion. But I still argue that his imagery isolates mathematics from reality, treating it as something to be curated and admired rather than experienced. Mathematics--and logic in general--is less like appreciating a classical statue and more like creating a Jackson Pollock: an effort to find truth and beauty out of instinct and intuition; an unpredictable, even violent process that forges order from the chaos of human thought.

The state secedes

Yes, yes, yes. I know. It's been "a while". I'm sure you've all missed me. I have excuses: research qualifiers, paper reviews and revisions, recruitment weekend, composition projects, and a well-connected Finnish engineer have all distracted me from serving up rhetorical goodness for my (four or so) devoted fans.

I started a few posts--one on the tragedy of fading memory as it relates to William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" and one on an unfortunate quote by the otherwise-brilliant Bertrand Russell--but I didn't finish them. Those were shaping up to be complicated posts, and it takes me a lot of effort to organize and articulate my thoughts correctly. So, in keeping with my Gaussian approach to this blog, I've scrapped them--at least for the time being.

But today's topic is perfect for the blogger in a hurry. It's stupid, it makes me angry, and it requires only a minimum of analytical horsepower: Texas secession and the anti-tax tea parties.

On Wednesday, while at a tea party rally in Austin, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that if the Federal government didn't start listening to the American people, secession was a real possibility: "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that."

First, let's get one thing straight. Texas has no special "secession clause" built into its constitution or treaty of annexation. (Even crackpot secessionists admit this.) It's as mythological as the idea that Texas's state flag is uniquely allowed to be flown at the same height as the U. S. flag (in fact, ANY state flag can be flown at the same height. Perhaps Texas is the only state insecure enough to feel the need.) Texas is no more allowed to peaceably secede than any other state, and that question was settled about twenty years after Texas joined the union.

There's a lot to pick on here: the irresponsibility of a standing governor publicly (even if hypothetically) suggesting secession, the obvious hypocrisy of waving an American flag while calling out for secession, and the absurdity of invoking the Boston Tea Party when you have elected officials in Congress. But this article covers those issues, so I'll leave them alone.

Instead, I want to make a different point, which is one of timing. Why are people suddenly so outraged over governmental excess? We've been engaged in "unsustainable" government spending for several years now, and no one complained nearly this loudly. The primary difference is that now there's a good (although perhaps debatable, but still: most credible economists [sorry, Ron Paul, you don't count] agree that SOME sort of stimulus was necessary) reason for it.

So I'm forced to conclude that a "secondary" difference is the real reason for all the protesting: there's a Democrat in the White House instead of a Republican. In other words, this is mostly an exercise in mob-driven partisanship. Hard-core conservatives are hell-bent on complaining about the new administration, so they decide to rekindle their rage over something that didn't get them all that upset a year ago.

It's frustrating for me as a (nominal) conservative, because it's becoming increasingly difficult to take conservative leadership seriously unless you're a party loyalist (which I'm not). This sort of redneck populism has all the intellectual honesty of an NRA pamphlet, and it appeals to roughly the same audience. Unless their goal is to shore up political capital in the former confederacy, encouraging people to "tea bag" Obama isn't exactly a winning strategy.

Of course, if that is their goal, I guess it works out pretty well for them if the secession movement takes hold. It'll simplify the problem of choosing a presidential candidate.

Who knows what might come out of that?