[Disclaimer: Between drafting this and publishing it I talked to someone who knows someone who is actually specialized in Quantum Finance. I have no idea what Quantum Finance involves, but if it is even remotely similar to Quantum Economics as discussed here that is a quantum leap of coincidence.]
I certainly do not plan to make this conform to what I believe I think I understand of the tenets of Quantum Physics. The main thing I have gotten out of the reading I have done in Quantum Physics, given that most of my sources are either preschool level popularizing or I-don’t-get-it-either New Age potpourri, is that a quantum event lolls around the house in its underwear, watching soap opera and swilling beer, until an Observer peer in the window, at which point, quick like a bunny, the quantum event jumps up [spilling the popcorn] and throws on either its Particle overalls or its Wave kimono [both are embroidered with the yin-yang design] and tries to look like it is working.
If I were tying Quantum Economics to that half-baked understanding, I suppose I would have to be saying that the Observer needs to keep an eye on his accounts, lest his money decide it is just as probable for it to be in someone else’s Swiss bank account.
But no. I just wanted a cute entitlement for a discussion of the balance of Quantity versus Quality in my domestic economy.
I am nowhere near having had the Depression experience, but at certain points in my childhood means were straitened. The time when there was no disposable income, and the family lived for most of a month on peanut butter and white bread. I actually do not remember that, but I heard about it from a source I deem reliable. My mother was an economiser by nature as well as necessity, and we ate meals I would not voluntarily feed a dog well past the time when it was strictly necessary. Do not get me wrong – we ate some pretty good stuff too, and there was generally enough for leftovers. She was not extreme. For an extreme case, you would have to go to our neighbours. They were, apparently, not broke – for one thing, they ran a motorboat on the lake. But at a typical meal everyone at table got one slice of meatloaf and one scoop of mashed potatoes.
I trust you will not count me a glutton if I say that I like to leave the dinner table feeling slightly stretched. I trust you will not count me some snooty gourmet if I say that I would rather have something a mite more imaginative than meatloaf and potatoes. And before this goes too far I will announce to all who see or hear read these presents that Lulu can assemble a very moist and meaty and tasty meatloaf and does some creative things with potatoes, but that neither the neighbour lady nor my mother when past the meatloaf and spuds basics.
It’s a matter of taste, as a matter of fact – and de gustibus [but colors are irrelevant here] non disputandum]: one man’s meat is another’s poison. And my set point for Quantity versus Quality will likely differ from yours. I am what I am, and I like what I like, and I want what I want when I want it. I have known people [I suspect the neighbour lady was one of them] who will come home from the store with whatever is cheapest because it is cheapest.
They may well prefer it. For all I know, when the Goodyears were invited out and served exotic dishes and rare vintages, they would drive home shaking their heads about how strange and nasty everything tasted – “Not like your meatloaf, Alice.” But I have a suspicion that every bite of meatloaf was served with the secret sauce of “this was really cheap.”
Then there are the others. Even when nobody is looking, some people will serve larks’ tongues, dumplings in lard, imported caviar, forty year old single malt whiskey, and wild strawberries flown in this morning from Switzerland. I am willing to believe that it is worth it to them, that some would go hungry all week to eat REALLY GOOD FOOD for their Saturday night dinner.
I am myself not an extremist of either kind. In some areas I scrimp. I will by the cheapest cheddar I can find that tastes halfway decent. I will bypass the fruit stand rather than pay $3.00 a pound for grapes. A lot of the time, I am looking for Quantity more than Quality, counting bang for the buck.
But then – I will NOT eat margarine, however high the price of butter climbs. If they are in season, I will buy forelle pears and not worry about the price. I will bring home Jarlsberg cheese and the best wine I can get for what is in my wallet. And I will eat as much of the meatloaf as I feel like and doctor the potatoes.
Of course, different people, different set points. I do not think anyone is completely into the cheapest food available regardless of what it is or what the occasion may be. And I think even the most potlatch-minded bon vivant gourmet has – if the observer peers in his Quantum window – his little economies [the 1899 vintage is half the price of the 1883 and really tastes just as good].
But in life in general – not just food – on balance I would rather have a filling affordable meal with some extra special extravagant treats.
Disclaimer: The Title line is not mine, I got it off the cashier’s booth at a self-service discount gas station. I do not run any kind of petrol outlet; I’m Sharif, and I’m a 5. Hi, Sharif.
I am also, both in my professional and my private capacities, by nature and by nurture, a taxonomist. No, I am not going to audit you – I just want to classify you. Inevitably, I put things together and then divide them up into categories and subcategories. Then I group taxonomies and categorize them. Categorization is just what I do. That is one of the reasons the Enneagram resonates with me – it gives me one more classification to play with.
It is, as it happens, an intriguingly unusual classification. The Enneagram presents us with nine major categories, which fall rather neatly into three groups of three: the emotion-referenced 2, 3, and 4, the thought-based 5 [that's me], 6, and 7, and the action-focused 8, 9, and 1. Now that is unusual right there. A lot of classifications make binary cuts, which are easier on the mind. The personality classification of the MBTI [which we will need to compare and contrast some time] has sixteen slots, which is 2×2x2×2 – four binary cuts. Long experience with taxonomy tells me that people generally make three-way distinctions only when the data force them to.
To be fair, it can happen when the system was set up that way. Suppose you run a store – I’ll make you sell computers. Your shop has room for three display aisles. Two would waste space, four would be too narrow and stress the clientele. Aisle 1 holds desktop machines. Aisle 2 is where you put the laptops. What is in Aisle 3? You have a slot in the classification, you are going to fill it with something. I’m thinking you have monitors, palmtops and software displayed in that third aisle.
Now obviously monitors, palmtops and software do not naturally fit together as a coherent category. You see here an example of what Sharif calls a “wastebasket category”. Desktop computers – a coherent category. Laptop computers – a coherent category. And everything else in Aisle 3, the wastebasket category. I was just looking at the classification of supernovae [never you mind why, I have an inquisitive mind and I am heavily into classification and that is all you need to know]. There’s apparently Type Ia, Ib, Ic, then Type IIP, IIL, IIn [I did not really grasp how IIn fits in], IIb [which combines traits of types II and Ib] – and then there is pec – short for “peculiar”, which translates to “I don’t know where it goes, see if you can find room for it in Aisle 3.”
Wastebasket categories are very common in taxonomy – there is almost always something that does not fit. Whether or not your taxonomy includes a wastebasket category depends on are you a lumper or a splitter. Taxonomists are classified – see, we categorize ourselves – into lumpers, who tend to see a small number of big categories, and splitters, who tend to have a lot more categories with fewer items in each.
How many categories do you have in your sock drawer? Twenty pair jumbled together [they are socks, so they do not go into the handkerchief drawer]? Or a row of sweat socks, a half row of argyles, two rows of ribbed socks and a row of thin socks with small designs on them? With socks, I am a lumper – socks is socks. Generally, though, I am a moderate splitter.
I used to do an experiment in one of my courses. I hand the students a set of data – come back Monday with a taxonomy. Like clockwork, at least one student comes back saying they all look the same. Serious lumper. At least one is a radical splitter, with twenty items in eighteen categories. Most of them cut it into four to six categories – it I am very lucky, one perceptive student has a grouping that comes close to matching mine. I would tell them – right and wrong do not come into it. You know the line, God made the integers, all else is the work of man? In taxonomy, only the socks are real – the sort is an artifact of the taxonomist. My experiment is just a psychological test, examining how you think, how you perceive your universe.
The lumpers have wastebasket categories – one taxonomy may include several dumps marked “other”. The splitters just add more categories with only one item.
The Enneagram is unusual because of its trinary cuts. It is more unusual because there is no wastebasket. Each of the Enneagram’s nine points has a positive set of descriptors, nothing is there marked “everything else”.
And that is very strange and wondrous. Imagine a hardware industry where steel-titanium-bronze and slot-Phillips-hex defined ALL the screws in existence. So far, it appears that any normal adult [I have no data on brain damage and so forth, and children seem to start out less clearly differentiated] human will fit naturally and comfortably into one of the nine categories, and that given adequate data most classifiers will agree on the assignment, regardless of lumper or splitter tendencies.
The classification seems to match something actually in humanity, seems not to be a taxonomist’s construct. And God don’t build in no wastebasket category.
You know it is so. The market is for self-help books – not self-awareness books. The people who write them are normally drawn from the Big Brother coalition. Whether they write from the standpoint of the ruling Simpsonite party, or from the edgier position of the Sampsonites, they earnestly believe you ought to be, need to be, must be, shall be, and likely want to be assimilated; resistance is futile. You can and should be taught, inspired, conditioned, helped to be just as they think they are. Why don’t you buy and outfit and be a cowboy too?
For the Big Brother coalition, from the approach of Gurdjieff to his most scientifically grounded successors today, the traits that locate your personality in this type or that are delusions, phobias, foibles, fixations, defects. The goal is to raise you above personality to – well, to what? I confess I am unassimilated and I am not quite sure what I would be without a personality.
No, you are wrong – the person I just know you are thinking of, that relative or coworker who seems to have the personality of warm milk, that person does have a personality, it is just that it is like one of those chemicals not everybody can taste. You know I’m right – that other one thinks you are just as insipid. In reality, neither you nor I nor anyone else has ever met a human with no personality.
I want to open discussion of the Enneagram by making my position very clear: personality is not a defect.
Yes, I know. Certain people seem pretty defective to me too. But the personality is not a problem.
Have you noticed how so many things are two sided? Look in the refrigerator. Smell that cheese – a bit too ripe, isn’t it? We need to throw it out. WAIT – that chunk of brie slumping across the plate cost $20 a pound. Be careful not to jostle that vial labeled “nitroglycerin”. Surely we need to get rid of something so dangerous. WAIT – that’s Grandma’s heart medicine. Clear that junk out of the attic and put it out by the curb. WAIT – isn’t that just like the thing I saw in the Antiques Road Show? I seem to remember pointing out that without death and decay we can’t have life or fine wine. Water is necessary for life. WAIT – pull me out, I’m drowning.
Enough experience convinces us – it is not the thing that is good or bad in itself, it is the WHERE and the WHEN and the HOW and the WHY that determines the WHICHness of the WHAT. Case in point. Do you know about the mutiny on the Bounty? I strongly recommend taking a close look at one of the accounts or the masterful Nordhoff and Hall Bounty trilogy. Bligh [a far from healthy 8, if you are already Ennealiterate], was, not to put too fine a point on it, an insufferable and unstable tyrant with paranoid tendencies. His personality made mutiny almost inevitable – the only strange thing is that the crew did not kill him.
But they did not kill him, which is why he is a perfect illustration of my point. They put him and the part of the crew that did not mutiny [many of whom hated Bligh just as much as those who did] into a boat and left them in the middle of the Pacific, with hardly any supplies. Bligh sailed that overloaded boat from somewhere in the area of Tahiti all the way to the Dutch East Indies, regardless of navigational hazards and unfriendly natives. He did it by using the powers of the 8. His personality brought that boat and its crew back to civilization, against all odds.
On the Bounty, Bligh’s personality was in the wrong place. On the boat ride home, his was exactly the right personality. And this is why I believe and insist that your personality, your Enneatype, is a combination of talents, which you can use for wrong purposes, but which can also work miracles.
So okay. I’m Sharif, and I’m a 5. Hi, Sharif. And I enjoy and employ the Five Powers of 5.
CONCENTRATION: I focus down, like a hound single-mindedly following the scent. Set me on a problem and I will let nothing distract my attention. I am absentminded. Lulu knows I totally missed what she just said to me. I walked right past him on the street. I never noticed she was crying.
DISPASSION: I look at things without emotional involvement. I judge according to the facts, not according to my feelings. My reasons and my advice are free from prejudice. I may love you, I may hate your guts – if you are in my class, your grade is neither more nor less than what you have earned. I am so uninvolved. I treat Abdurrahman no better than I would a total stranger. My family can not believe they are at all special to me.
SKEPTICISM: I constantly double check my data, examine and refine all my beliefs and theories. I am aware that there are good arguments on both sides of most questions. What I tell you today is not what I said yesterday. When you tell me something I go off and check it out, as if you’re a liar or an idiot. I never take a definite position. I have no faith.
INTEGRATION: I operate more by leaps of intuition than by 1 + 1 reasoning. I can look at the problem and come up with an outside the box answer, see relationships between grammar and basket weaving [Disclaimer: that last one is not actually one of mine; it is an insight from - included as a tribute to - a friend who has now moved on]. I never really explain where I get this stuff. A lot of the time I just don’t seem to make any sense. I was supposed to be talking about music and spent the whole time talking about botany – what does the honey locust have to do with Andean folk music, anyway?
STEALTH: I keep my own counsel. I find things out indirectly. I am calm, quiet, unobtrusive. I never pry. I am a sneak, a snoop, a stalker. Lulu can feel I am too uncommunicative, don’t let her know what I’m doing. He feels if I were interested in what he was saying I would ask questions. She is bothered that she has no idea what I feel.
These 5 Powers – and Bligh’s 8 Powers, Abdurrahman’s 1 Powers, Laila’s 3 Powers, Lulu’s 4 Powers, the First Noelle’s 7 Powers – are Talents – if we use them in the right places. If we use them wrongly – well, a serial killer can use a scalpel or a screwdriver, an extension cord or a guitar string, a car or an anchor.
But – I hope you will agree with me. A personality is not a defect. The goal is not to lose the personality with its Powers – it is to learn to use it consistently for good.
In the exile of Cooper – more than Babylonian, there being for practical purposes no waters to sit beside weeping – there were some glimmers of hope in the grass. One of these was the rain lilies. Zephyranthes sp., to be precise. There would be a patch of parched, bare ground. Then one day, a shower of rain. Immediately – well, probably next day – the ground would be covered with clumps of thin grassy leaves, speckled with stalks bearing perfect white or pink stars. I dug down, collected some bulbs, and still had them growing in my windowsill in Foggy Bottom. Lovely things; they rarely bloomed in captivity, but ah, when they did!
There is a Tide in the affairs of men, wrote our friend Bill, that we all know all too well. The rain lily is invisible until the rain falls. The cones of the jack pine [Pinus banksiana to you] will not open to release their seeds until there is a forest fire. Then, and only then, the young pines begin their journey, with clear land and soil enriched by the ashes. The young bird cannot learn the characteristic song of its species until it reaches a specific stage of development – after which it has a window of opportunity. If it does not learn its song inside that period, it never learns it right.
The life of the mariner used to be – in some places still is – largely waiting for wind and tide to cooperate, followed by intense labor to complete the voyage while conditions remained conducive. And my life – likely yours – has been pretty much like that. Mark time treading water till just the right wave comes along – then swoosh, I’m carried across the sea to Foggy Bottom. Swing in wide arcs at the peak of the Big Top, waiting for my catcher to reach just the right place with just the right momentum – then great Ahhs from below as I launch from the trapeze to be caught in midair by the University at Matthews. Chatting while the tea steeps, then decanting myself out of academia for a much needed break with a cozy cuppa.
Opportunity knocks only once. If you miss one bus, there will be another along in a few minutes. Which are you more inclined to believe? As a good Skeptic, I have to characterize myself as a Realistic Optimist and a Hopeful Pessimist. To fully qualified Optimists and card carrying pessimists I generally seem to be the opposite. As a Realistic Optimist, I believe there is more than one path through the labyrinth and that, though there are many dead ends, you can back track and find a way out. As a Hopeful Pessimist, I believe there is only one quickest and most comfortable route, and that, though you may eventually find a way out, you will likely have to work for it.
But to me, the hopeful realist, it comes down to watching for the patterns, timing the pendulum, being ready to scramble as soon as the fire alarm goes off. The rain lily cannot call the rain anymore than the fireman can save a building before the fire. King Canute did not do so well with controlling the tide, so how is the dhow captain to manage it? I did not – could not – open the door to Foggy Bottom, I had to be ready to jump when it opened to me.
There are those who believe that they can call the rain or the evevator, hold back the clock or the tide, open or close the door. Maybe they can – who am I to say? Gravity is a two-way street, and both my catcher and I are constantly fine-tuning our swings on the trapeze. If a butterfly stamping in Solomon’s garden creates a tsunami on the fifth planet of Tau Ceti, might not a magnetic disturbance on Rigel have induced that lepidopterous stamp? If there are consequences in both directions of time, might not the rain lilies have induced the rain?
I have been led to believe, in some areas of my work, that my being poised to start on a new job can call the right job into existence. For example, when you are at a party and wander randomly into a room, and there is another guest who just turned way from his cards to glance at the door, and you each immediately know that the other is a friend, perhaps even THE friend, is it truly pure chance? Or did he call you in, or did your approach draw his eyes to the door?
Well, we don’t know, and we never will. But it certainly looks as if there is a very high level calling of deep to deep. Which I am inclined to accept as a working hypothesis.
And yet – we are in point of fact talking DEEP. And a lot of that is not accessible to my shallow consciousness. I can be in the same room or the same department with certain people for quite a long time and not be aware of their existence. And yet – if one of the Invisible Ones enters the room I am likely to leave. If they are truly invisible, how do I know to do that? Certain others I am aware of without perceiving them. Think of the blind man who knows someone is in the room with him, though he can’t say who it is, or where he is. With these people, I know there is SOMEONE there, just as I feel inaudible subsonics.
So – I do not, can not, deny that the tides in my affairs can be manipulated. I can and do, however, maintain that I do not have the equipment to perform such manipulation consciously.
And yet – we are told by those who know that observation makes a difference. Forget the quantum issues surrounding the observer – go straight to the person lurking in the bushes watching your every move through the scope of as sniper rifle. It is said, if the sniper focuses too much attention on the target, the target will feel it. On a slightly more quotidian plane, Lulu yesterday remarked how consistently the insect sitting happily on the sunlit window moves to a sheltered crevice the instant her hand closes on the swatter.
I have remarked elsewhere – not here, yet, that treat awaits us – how that prayer for me, a 5 [Hi Sharif!], is mostly an attentive waiting, in contrast to the praise and worship and petition of prayer as practiced by other type. Dare we rule out the possibility that my vigilant scan of the environment for signs that the fleet is approaching is not how I manipulate the fleet?
They also call the Tide who only stand and chant Omo.
We all do it. There is a knock at the door. You open the door to find an unkempt eighteen year old with a baseball cap worn backwards and three silver rings in his nose. He looks at you sideways, watching the street, and says, “Yo, Mr. Mabaker, you won big in the lottery, dude.” Chances are, unless you have multiple piercings yourself, you are not inclined to believe him. Wait till the official letter comes, you say.
But if you find on your doorstep a professional looking twenty five year old wearing an Italian suit and carrying a briefcase, and he hands you his card and says, “Mr. Sharif Mubakkar? I am Andras Kettering, with the Lottery Commission. I have some good news for you. May I come in?” Ah, THEN you will start trying to remember where you put those brochures for the Caribbean cruise.
What if the messenger on your doorstep is a bald guy with a fierce moustache and a heavy accent?
However even-handed we may try to be, it is true that presentation makes a difference, that the truth from the wrong lips will be received as falsehood and vice versa. I do not like it, of course. When Lynda told me an astonishing thing she had heard from her mother – the same thing I had been trying in vain to tell her for months – it bothered me. Was it less true when I said it? No – but my voice was at the wrong pitch to be heard. Surely this should not be. A truth is a truth, whether we hear it from a professor or a panhandler, whether we read it in the New England Journal of Medicine or the National Enquirer.
But I have to admit – I do it too. I will believe things that would usually have me sneering and jeering in disbelief – if I am told them by a fellow 5. I may still test them – I constantly test even things I know from personal experience. But I am much less likely to hoot incredulously.
This comes up because I want, I need to talk in these mini-lectures about the Enneagram. That should be easy – a robust system of personality classification that is in use in some segments of the psychological community, that has a growing body of sound research behind it and that has any number of very practical real life applications – not easily rejected, you might think.
But the problem is the source. The problem is Gurdjieff. That is George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, it says on his card, with the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. If, having read his card and gazed upon his physiognomy, you are predisposed to believe what he says, fine. We can proceed. But neither his credentials nor his character would incline me toward a less probing Skepticism.
Whatever the source of the Enneagram before Gurdjieff may have been, it is no more accessible to us than the week before the Big Bang. Yes, Gurdjieff tells us some things about where he found the Enneagram and what it was doing there and how he got hold of it. But – well, let me say only that Gurdjieff was no 5, and I do not find anything he says about the Enneagram’s sources all that convincing.
Of course, many people did. Mubakkar’s Law applies: every statement incredible to a 5, and derived from a non-5 source, will accumulate a body of believers drawn from other types that will outnumber the skeptical 5s. Gurdjieff had a large number of followers, some of whom took on the Enneagram and developed it beyond Gurdjieff’s version. Some of these moved in the direction of scientific credibility, and refined the system to where it was when I found it and found it useful. [Disclaimer – I am not an early adopter or any kind of adopter at all. I did not find it. In point of fact, Lulu found it, I looked over her shoulder and was positively impressed, eventually getting in on the act.]
Others, however, stayed outside the boundaries of credibility, kicking the Enneagram soccer ball around the field of New Age paradigms. Some are further out in left field [I know, it is a metaphor from a different game, so sue me] than others. A few are really very close to the practitioners playing in the scientific school yard; if you added a few concepts and subtracted a few pieces of terminology they could pass.
But I am afraid that if I say, “You need to take the Enneagram seriously”, you will take a long look at Gurdjieff, check out some of his more way out successors, and wind up ignoring everything that I and the scientific Enneagram proponents have to say.
That would be a shame. There is a folk tale well known in parts of Africa. God decided that people should not have to die, so he sent a messenger to tell them to live indefinitely. But the hyena, who saw that a dearth of corpses would be bad for business, rushed off and told the human race, “God says you are to die and stay dead.” The people believed the hyena because he arrived first and delivered his message with authority. They did not even listen to the real message. So because of the wrong choice of messenger, we are all doomed to die and feed the hyenas.
Well, so some of you will not listen. I could get some of you to listen if I could speak with the authority of my brother Abdurrahman. I could get some others of you to listen if I could speak as persuasively as my sister Leila. Still others would be convinced if I could speak as forcefully as my colleague Gary Farquhar. But I cannot walk their walk nor talk their talk. I gotta be me.
Well, 5s and 4s will probably listen, and experience shows that some others can hear, though for some the volume is low and there is a lot of static when I talk. And just maybe some of you will consider the source in the scientific community, and not get tripped by Gurdjieff.
So I will do it. I will, as we go, run you through the major thoroughfares and some of the alleys of the Enneagram. Believe it or not.
It is moderately popular, in some of the lighter books on the Enneagram, to assign to each type an animal, felt to be somehow emblematic of the type. A bit crude, but as a mnemonic device fairly effective – enough so that one work assigns two animals per type, one representing the negative traits of the unhealthy individual and one for those who have risen above their type temptations.
If we are going to do this, I want to assign the hermit crab as type beast for my 5s. The hermit crab protects its vulnerable parts with a borrowed shell. I, the 5, protect my softness by putting on The Great Stone Face – an expression that expresses nothing. The hermit crab defends itself against frontal attack by holding in its pincers small sea anemones with stinging tentacles. The 5 develops a persona than can ward off attacks with barbed words.
Finally – but I yam what I yam. Disclaimer: while the brachyuran true crabs generally are seen to walk sideways, anomuran hermit crabs have a different structure with a narrower, more rounded thorax and are handicapped by the shell. They step forward. But it suits my point to use this gait trait, and to bring it in by an unethical use of the “crab” part of the popular name. The crab [note, I do not here say "hermit crab"] walks sideways. The 5 tends to sidestep uncomfortable issues by the use of coded speech and equivocation.
And unethical or not, here I am keeping my promise to discuss coded speech. Let me give an example. It is late afternoon in Queenstown and I am walking Alix home after Overton’s class. We are idly chatting of this and that. My beady eyes spot an ear piercing that I am certain was not there the last time we walked that way. I have a number of confused and conflicting reactions. I disapprove because I don’t like the idea of piercings. I am unclear on whether I like or dislike the outcome [it can take me months to know where I stand on a new haircut]. I oppose any sort of change. I stand behind Alix’ decision. I have no right to an opinion because, for all anybody knows, I am just a friend. I have a duty to speak out because I think I may be more than a friend whether or not she is.
Tell me, Miss Manners, what does one say in this situation? As it happens, I remember exactly what I did say, what I felt it was my duty to say: “Generally speaking, it is a good idea not to make irreversible decisions without being really certain.”
I think it very probable Alix had no slightest idea what that was about. And of course that was the point. The 5 is often the miser who passes the bill across the counter but cannot quite let go of it.
I want to convey information while concealing information. To comment while apparently not commenting. To say something to one person while making it impossible for anyone else to eavesdrop. To get data out without sounding an alarm from my data leakage monitor.
It can be completely involuntary. I can be convinced I have talked about something at great length – and the hearers think I have said nothing. I can believe I have explained things clearly and simply – and the hearers are baffled. It is most conspicuous when I am under stress. Give me a heavy topic and figuring what I am saying can be like reading Etruscan written in archaic Japanese calligraphy. I am barely comprehensible when I am at ease, off duty and joking around.
I can’t say WHY control of data flow is so big in 5 consciousness, but it is at least as important to us as rectitude is to the 1. I can only say all of this because you are not here, because you may not exist. I am talking to the software and to myself. Part of me thinks someone may read this, and part of me is content that someone with ears to hear might read and understand. But at least I can’t see you.
If I want to say anything important to you, I will take off my glasses. I will look anywhere but at you. I can only talk, you see, if you are invisible. The Third Noelle once told me she switched to contact lenses when she realized she used to hide behind her glasses. Mindboggling. Crazy talk. Like you CAN hide behind glasses? Like hiding is not the whole idea?
Well, here I am. I still shield my quiz paper with my arm and bend low. I still go sideways [not in real life a hermit crab trait] into the kitchen to make myself a snack – silently. I still use my spectacles to do the ostrich thing. And I would still say that it is just as well not to give the ambassador a haircut down at the barbershop.
There. That was an example, if you have ears [even if pierced] to hear.
My very first apartment, in the student ghetto of Queen City known as Eastgrove, had neither. Even the most enthusiastic and imaginative realtor would have had to shake his head and agree. What it had was a concrete and stucco caldera ringed with apartments and staircases, sort of like an Anasazi pueblo folded around a courtyard, with hot and cold running neighbours. At night it was hard to sleep. There were the throbbing native drums from three separate parties up to four blocks away. There were the northern lights – emanating from the entry to the garage, where lithe tanned native women – don’t tell the Beach Boys – loudly discussed the events of an uneventful day while using the washing machines. And there were the hot and cold running neighbours – like the night a group spent hours chasing up and down the stairs and trying to persuade a loudly disconcerted [and possibly lithe and tanned] native woman to come down, go back inside and put some clothes on.
My second domicile, in Foggy Bottom, was a step up. To be more precise, about three flights of steps up, the third being narrow and twisted and really fun when I was carrying up the refrigerator I had desperately needed to buy. It was arguably wooded – at least there was a small and unkempt garden with a dismal shrubby tree in it. My landlady tried to persuade me to take on the care of this park-like 10 by 15 yard. She thought I would be ideal because I had on my windowsill a flowerpot planted with rain lilies that I had [almost certainly illegally, but I did not know that yet] brought into the country.
But there was a water feature, no question. My domain was a garret about a third the size of the room where I sit writing this, up under the eaves. It might originally have been servant quarters, or it might have been an attic. The roof leaked when it rained – which was often – through my sloping ceiling and down the cord of my light fixture and actually into the bulb. I lived in fear of shocks and shattered light bulbs. After a rain I would cautiously turn the light back on and hear the bubble and squeak of the water boiling out of the bulb.
My next place, also in Foggy Bottom, was bigger and dryer. There was another garden, but it was better maintained and nobody tried to rope me into doing it. Here the water feature of interest was the bath room. The landlady invaded my space on a regular basis to clean, claiming I was too sloppy and slobby. In the process, of course, she moved all my personal stuff and left the window open to air. Since the air was frigid and I was paying for heat, I resented this. But I most bitterly protested the hypocrisy of critiquing my housekeeping when the shared bathtub – which the landlady used for washing clothes – had a deposit of ancient and compacted scum about three millimeters thick. It does not sound like much until you try to bathe in it.
With your gracious permission I will skip the next five places and take you straight to my second house and third residence in Matthews, home of the University where my off-ivory tower is located. The only water feature here was the corner of the basement where there was a crack right where the drainpipe came down outside so that there was regular flooding. But it was wooded. The front was, I think, too exposed to the carbon monoxide from the main road outside my door for anything but the hardiest grass to grow. But the back yard was shaded by giant trees so even the hardiest grass had a difficult time of it.
Do you know the unassuming but pleasant looking and aromatic herb of the mint family known to some as Creeping Charlie, to others as Creeping Jenny? Occasionally you will find people offering young plants for sale at farmer’s markets. Myself, I cannot imagine paying money for it. Creeping Charlie was almost all that would grow there. It grew in embarrassing profusion, and in trying to control and eliminate it I gave myself a serious allergy.
After that came the first place Lulu and I lived, a shack under the trees by the bank of a gurgling stream that flooded over our floor; our first house to ourselves, where there were no water issues but the back yard involved mowing stringy grass on a wooded lot tilted at about 60 degrees; my mother-in-law’s house where we lived in the basement that flooded when the rains came.
Since then there is only one place, our cozy Chez Sharif in the country side. In the years we have been here we have been instrumental in making the property much more wooded than we found it. We have lost major trees – an ancient willow, a scrappy box elder, and a poplar that was a sapling when we started. But the willow is coming back from the roots, and we have planted. Apples, pears, cherries, plums, willows, spruce, pine – and the squirrels have contributed walnut trees I failed to catch before they were too big to mow.
As for water features, in the first year we managed to exclude rain from most of the upper storey. We have tamed the water pouring into the new basement and almost controlled the water in the old cellar. The old cellar only seems to have a dirt floor – there is concrete under the layers of sediment the leaks have brought in. If Lulu’s patch job on the windows works, we will be fairly dry for a while.
Of course, now that we have more or less tamed this place, we are thinking of moving. But travel is broadening and experience is a good teacher. When the realtor talks about the great location and lauds the wooded lot and the water features, we plan to ask questions.
Brutus is an honorable man. So are they all, all honorable men.
I never liked Mark Anthony either, at least as Shakespeare portrays him. But he has a point, though I suspect he may not be sincere. They are, many of them, honorable men. They will tell you so themselves.
Talking to Ibrahim’s friend Cristo Graf about 1984. The book, not the year. Something about the discussion suggested I need to make things clear, since you may [not for the first time] have misunderstood me to mean the opposite of what I intended. Big Brother, as I talk about Big Brother, is not an individual, although in any one place and time there often arises One who speaks for Big Brother and whom all the avatars recognize as Alpha Wolf. Big Brother’s name is Legion.
Think of bees, or any of the social insects. What is one bee? You can snatch it out of the air. I would be glad if it did not buzz in my ear or land on my arm or, as happened once, on my nose [not being the Buddha, I swatted it - and suffered the consequences], but it is of no more significance than a June bug.
But the hive – that is another thing. Abdurrahman or one of his associates tells me there has been a lot of research into how the Hive Mind works, how swarms of bees and flocks of birds and schools of fish, and other animals too, like voters, behave as a unit, not a gaggle of individuals. How a few simple instincts, melded into a collective, result in a swarm whose actions seem almost intelligent.
One time there was a big confrontation at the University. A select committee was formed to investigate and rule on the issue – I sat on it. We investigated over a span of weeks, and came to a decision, which we passed to the administration. A little later a high-ranking official of the University asked to meet with us. He came in and asked us very politely to reverse our decision. Some committee members agreed immediately. I sat there wondering – we had taken our time, weighed the evidence, and agreed on our ruling. Why would we change it? Then up spoke Jonah, from my own department, an honorable man. “How,” he asked the University’s representative, “could we change a decision carefully made without compromising our principles?” The official laughed. “The art of effective administration lies in knowing when to compromise one’s principles.” We voted. I was the only one opposed to doing as the University asked.
Big Brother is an honorable man. A principled man. A principle, by definition, is a primary basis for one’s actions. A lawsuit had been threatened. The University’s principle – stay out of court at all costs. The committee’s principle – don’t make waves.
While I was a Great Lakes State College there was another confrontation. And another committee. I had the honor to sit on that committee too. The confronters made a number of complaints and demands. One complaint and its accompanying demand had a solid basis in fact. I chimed in agreeing with their point. Sometime after midnight that night I received a call from the chairman of the committee, an honorable man. He bitterly berated me for betraying “my own kind”. “You never,” he said, “agree with what your enemy says, even if it is true.”
Big Brother is an honorable man. A principled man. A principle is a rule of action that supersedes all others. The chairman’s principle – words must mean the opposite of what Big Brother’s enemies say they mean. The committee’s principle, again, was don’t make waves. The confronters got what they wanted, both the justified demands and the ridiculous demands. The chairman resigned.
Abdurrahman has not told me what happens if half the hive is out gathering nectar and half is repelling Sharif, who unwittingly threw a piece of 2×4 at the hive. How is the conflict of Prime Directives resolved? With humans, whose Hive Mind is not highly evolved, or possibly degenerate if we were once a troop of baboons, it can take a while, which is why Big Brother has multiple personalities and sometimes one swarm of avatars attacks another.
But Big Brother is an honorable man. A principled man. So are they all, all honorable men. At election time, neither party will field a great candidate, an experienced, qualified candidate, a wise candidate fit to bear the burden. No. That would conflict with a Great Principle – and they are all principled people. Both – no, let me say ALL – great political; parties have as Prime Directive: Thou shalt nominate NO candidate who is not likely to win. And the Great Principle for the voter is like unto it: Thou shalt NOT waste thy vote on a candidate who is unlikely to win.
I am glad that I understand that Big Brother is an honorable – and principled – man. Sometimes my faith is almost shaken, when I observe how often the Prime Directives that dictate the actions of the avatars of Big Brother’s Hive Mind APPEAR to be self serving. Sometimes I could even be persuaded that the Principles change to fit Big Brother’s needs and desires of the moment.
But I know that Big Brother, and each and every one of his avatars swarming over the clover fields, is an honorable man. A principled man. Who would never go against his principles. Of course, I know at least one hive that explicitly on paper values more highly those avatars who are best at “discovering new principles”.
As the gentleman going off to battle told his wife, ” I could not love thee, dear, so much loved I not Honor more.” As she said, “Who is this Honor hussy?”
The title line is, in my mind, indissolubly linked to Joan Rivers. I am bad at names, and I have always felt about that lady very much the way I feel about Ralph Waldo Emerson or Naomi Brenner, so I had to check the web to be sure that the line and the personality and that name go together. It was pure serendipity [which is a distinct subspecies of luck and therefore could be illusion] that the spiders spoke to me in their dusty voices and told me she is [in addition to being the Can we Talk lady] an animal rights supporter and possibly – I logged out around then – a vegetarian.
A good many of Big Brother’s avatars agree with her on these issues. As are many others, including at one time my sister Leila’s daughter Aurelie. I would just like to ask them: If you are sitting in a swamp waiting to photograph the wood duck [magnificent creatures] looking out from their nest in the hollow tree, what do you do about the mosquitoes? I ask in a pure spirit of scientific inquiry – I really want to know how your logic works. Animals have rights – well, I certainly agree, though we might differ on what counts as an animal and what those rights are. Animals must be protected. Animals must not be slaughtered or mutilated or annoyed to serve mankind’s selfishness.
So – mosquitoes are animals. I get there by applying Abdurrahman’s criteria. And mosquitoes have rights, among them the right to life, liberty, and the occasional drop of blood. But if I notice a mosquito about to beat the Red Cross to my blood, and perhaps incidentally give me malaria, filariasis, West Nile disease, or worse [are we POSITIVE mosquitoes cannot transmit AIDS?], I will slap her despite my generation’s rules about not beating up on the allegedly weaker sex.
But will Joan Rivers? Would the Buddha? I am pretty sure that Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus would slap. Saint Francis would probably just preach to the cloud of bloodsucking witnesses. Did Gautama, sitting under the Bo tree, swat? Did he fan them away? Or did he, in attaining enlightenment, let them feast?
Then again, according to the news, some animal rights avatars advocate such things as blowing up facilities where animals are deprived of their rights – zoos, kennels, laboratories. This seems to reflect the same level of logic as Pro-Life activists shooting at abortionists. I would like to ask some militant animal right activist: Where do you stand on carnivores?
You see, the logical problem is that most of the animals we want to protect injure, and in many cases eat, other animals. Those incredible wood ducks looking out of their nest-hole are enlightened adults, and they by choice live on acorns when they can get them. But their babies will munch aquatic animals. Hoss – one of the cats which prowl around my past life – once literally frightened a mouse to death. What about man-eating tigers and sharks? Can we talk?
I realize fully that even for Big Brother, who often advocates unflinching application of Principle [except when Principle says to compromise], life involves balancing apparently conflicting Principles. As we used to say in the Observers [I doubt it was original but do not know any earlier source], :Look before you leap because he who hesitates is lost. The animal rights activist may have a very good and principled reason for interfering with the deer tick on her arm.
But why are our great minds in recombinant DNA not working around the clock to modify mosquito genes so as to free them from the Curse of Dracula and get them off our necks? Why are there not teams of dedicated dog trainers educating coyotes to get them to lay off “rodents and hares [and] also … carrion and most types of animal … matter” and “sometimes … “domestic or game animals“?
As for me, I advocate hobgoblin rights. This much maligned species does much good for mankind and the environment, cleaning houses and straightening out muddled thinking. And yet we stigmatize them, are annoyed at their puckishness, and lump them with the unrelated goblins. My organization urges recognition of their services, regular bowls of milk, compensation equivalent to that demanded by other cleaning staff, replacing their derogatory label with “Hobsprite”, and sensitivity training for all who believe that consistency is small-minded.
Of course, we are working with Hobsprite leaders on programs to reeducate them to respect the right of other creatures, even humans. Us animals got to stick together.
