Synchronous Antitheticals

In addition to this more-or-less “public” blog, I maintain a completely private (I think/hope) “diary” blog. I do not put anything truly embarrassing even there, but it is more personal than my writings here are. I do this so that I can go back and re-read my previous entries and remind myself of where I was and track what I was doing and what I was feeling in the past, and just to document my passage through life as a future memory-aid.

My big fear in doing this is that someday, as technology evolves and people’s habits change, all this stuff that I am writing will just vanish before I am done with it since the platform and storage device where it sits is not under my personal control. Obviously, this is a chronic issue with anything that is “In the Cloud” (as sexy and “modern” as that concept may sound), and it is not a vacuous concern. This has already happened to me before with a web site called “Eons”. I had a year or more of personal writing out there and then one day it was just gone without warning and it never came back. It seems that the sponsors of the site ran out of money and the hosting facility turned off their servers. I do wish that they had at least asked for donations first because I really would have paid money to have had that data even for a week or two so that I could have offloaded it and stored it somewhere safe – like printed on paper and stuck in a box in my attic (along with my G-grandfather’s letters from the Civil War). I have no interest in trying to be “immortal” through any of my words – I am not that egotistical – but I do want to be able to review these musings as long as I am alive and maybe even leave them as a personal legacy to be unearthed within my “effects” for other’s amusement and enlightenment after I die (although that is of decidedly minor interest since I won’t be there to enjoy the fun). It is clear however that “Cloud Storage” is not the same thing as “Forever” despite the hype, because nothing of human design can exist without someone somewhere making money from it (not judgin’; just sayin’).

Anyway, this morning I was glancing through a few entries in my personal diary/blog from 12 and 24-months ago and I noticed, as I have commented on before, how curious the passage and perception of time can be. When I read these old blog entries, all at the same moment time seems to be going both very quickly and very slowly. As is my intent, I remember what the scene was when I typed those words and I can recall what was going on around me and what my emotions were and it seems like it was just yesterday; and then I blink and in a slightly different context the same moment and scene seems like it was ages ago. It is like when your hand is cold and you put it under your armpit or in your crotch to warm it up – you can feel both warm and cold at the same time and in the same place. There should be a word to describe such a phenomenon – the simultaneous coexistence of complete opposites – and maybe there is such a word, but I can’t think of it. The best 2-word phrase that I can coin for it though is “Synchronous Antithetical” and I find that the older I get, the more it is that time and in fact my entire life becomes one of these synchronous antithetical paradoxes.

A Pride of Lions – A Cackle of Hyenas

Although I generally hate them, we went to a “social event” last night. My wife knows that I hate parties of any sort so she doesn’t insist very often, but because it is not frequent, when she does want me to go with her I always do, and with as little sulking as I can manage. In this case it didn’t turn out as badly as it could have, and it was even mildly amusing.

The excuse here was that some people who my wife knows, and with whom she has lectured and played gigs in the past, wanted to have a planning session for another public program that they were putting together. This upcoming event is to be a set of presentations, performances and “exhibits” designed for the local “Writer’s Community”. Of the six people at this little working dinner-party, four were self-professed “Writers”, my wife was to be the designated musician for the event, and I was there as the token tag-along spouse.

The thing that most amused me during this gathering was the range of conceit and self-absorption that these wordsmith “Artists” clearly felt for themselves. I notice that this attitude is rampant in the WordPress Writer’s Community, but it tickled me to see this in each one of the self-anointed “Writers” of this little group. I have no idea what any of them do for a living (though I gather that it is not writing), but they all clung to the defining mantle of “Writer” as something that might rescue them from the gutter of obscure mediocrity. For example; the male host, when prompted to tell us about a particular event during his recent travels in Europe, ran off to get a manuscript that he had prepared to read it to us since, as he actually had the temerity to say out loud, no live improvisation could approach the quality of his carefully crafted creation. The short-story that he recited was certainly “OK”, but it was also nothing that I would call “impressive”. Nonetheless, it did clearly manage to  thoroughly gratify its own author.

Although I am usually very reticent in these social situations, I became involved in a discussion with the attendant poet of the group after she declared that she would put none of her work online in a place like WordPress for fear of copyright infringement. I asked if she were afraid of losing money, but she said “no” there was no money involved, it was rather a matter of being protective of her “children” (her word) and wishing to have complete personal control over their distribution and use. I told her that in my own creative outlet – photography – I freely gave away my work for anyone to use in any way that they like and that I did not understand the possessiveness that she was expressing. I like my own artistic creations, but I don’t create them to astonish the world with my greatness, I create them for my own personal satisfaction and to express myself. Should someone else be impressed enough with my “art” to want to use my work for their own ends I am gratified, not incensed. I deliberately use a very loose legal copyright to facilitate such use and this actually happens quite a bit. My online photography is picked up and used by all manner of web-sites and electronic publications, sometimes with attribution (as is legally proper) and sometimes not, but it is always a thrill for me that someone else likes my artistic output enough to want to “reproduce” it in their own environment and permit my images to represent them. I guess that I am just not arrogant enough to be a true “Artist” – but every time I come across one of them it reinforces my belief that the term is just too soiled to wear comfortably.

Luck and Quantum Mechanics

“Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I have been thinking recently about how lucky I have been in my life. Then on a whim (and for something to write about here) I looked at the Wikipedia entry on the word and searched for some quotes about it. According to the Wikipedia article there is “prescriptive luck” which is good/bad stuff imposed on people and caused by outside entities such as spirits, gods, numerology, superstitious ritual, celestial mechanics or other inhuman influences and including things such as the Grace-of or Wrath-of-God for dyed-in-the-wool Christians. Then there is what they call “descriptive luck”, which is really just that – a casual description after-the-fact of something that was unexpected or improbable.

Although I often “…thank the gods, or whoever else is out there” for my good luck, I really don’t mean it very seriously. I find it too depressing to think of myself as nothing but a puppet-on-a-string dancing to an unheard tune being played by an external force, even if you want to call it “God”. This is anathema to the concept of Free-Will. I could be wrong about this, of course – but I sincerely hope not.

On the other hand, as I was perusing quotations about luck I noticed that there are many of them that deny the concept of “luck” altogether. According to these people there is simply no such thing. All success and anything good in life is due to nothing but personal diligence and hard-work. To me, this attitude seems arrogant and full of hubris. These people seem to be claiming that there is nothing at all of any value or significance beyond themselves.

I think of luck as being somewhere in-between these more common positions. To me luck is not the willful effect of an outside entity, nor can it simply be something that is exclusively my own doing. To me luck has much more to do with quantum mechanics. It seems to me that “Luck” will ultimately turn out to be a case of all of us being real-life Schrodinger’s Cats. We exist in a Quantum Entanglement with an incalculably immense universe and at any moment any number of good-things or bad-things could happen; and perhaps they all really  do happen simultaneously. What we end up perceiving as our reality and “Luck” is the result of the observations, perspectives, personal will and otherwise “looking in the box” of Schrodinger’s experiment. Luck is the practical manifestation of real-world Chaos Theory. Hard work (usually) produces good results in our lives, but that deterministic relationship does not make the final outcome predictable and – to put it prosaically – Shit Happens. There is a reason for it all, but we can’t necessarily understand or see that reason clearly all the time because it is all so unimaginably complex.

In any event, my Quantum Entanglements have always been quite favorable (and the gods have smiled and Jesus has blessed) and my cat is purring and quite content in his little box – thank you for asking – and I need no more than this.