Category Archives: metaphor

On typing

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I won’t call it keyboarding–I’m too old for that. I learned to type on a small portable Remington while working at a small 100 watt am radio station near Minot, North Dakota. There was really nothing else to do, so I learned to type, even though I had nothing to either write or say. Some might say that is still true today. What I liked about typing was the physicality of punching the keys and watching the letters appear on the paper–an actual piece of blank, white paper–without looking at my fingers or the keys. I developed the same muscle memory that piano players had, but instead of 88 keys, I only had 52, each key was identified with a letter, not a note. I couldn’t play cords, but I could write words in spite of knowing little and saying less. Banging on the keys of a typewriter in order to pound out an essay on post-structuralism is really more satisfying that most existentialists understand. The physical action of punching down the key with one of your fingers give one a very personal connection with the written word. I don’t get that same feeling from contemporary electronic keyboards found on most laptops or connect by wires or bluetooth to a desktop (which are becoming increasingly archaic, just like me). Kids entering college today may have seen a typewriter, but I’m sure they have never used one. Typewriters, along with rotary telephones and cathode ray tube televisions, are relics of the past, inventions that have been dumped on the ash heap of history along with cassette players, eight-track tapes, and 35 mm cameras that still used film to take pictures. A pity.

On going home

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I have been gone for 86 days–almost three months on the road. People often ask, “How can you stay away for so long?” but I always ask, “How come you never get away?” Home is where you make it. It isn’t a building or a city, it’s not a house that you built or an apartment you rent. Your home is where your heart is, to coin a cliche, so, in a sense, I am always home, whether I am at the cabin in northern Minnesota, or the farm, or in Europe. I have long since ceased being a tourist, even when I’m touring a castle, passing through customs, or checking a map. I ride the subway as if I were a local, brandishing my transport pass as if I had lived there twenty years. In sense, I am always going home–to the farm, in the city, at the university, on the plains of central Texas. One should not obsess one way or another about what “home” means. I find that the journey home is so much easier to make when I am going somewhere that looks, smells, and feels like home. I can wait in airport–which is not home, definitely not home–when I know that the plane I am waiting for is going “home.” Home is more about the people and less about the stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I love my stuff, but stuff will never love you and can always be replaced–not so true about the human element. So if you are going home and will see folks, greet them for me, tell them I am fine, and that I will be there soon.

On randomness

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The nature of a random event is both complex and chaotic, but again, predictable in a certain way. When you flip a coin, the result is both random and predictable because you will get either a head or a tail, but never know which one since all events are individual and isolated, independent, and do not foreshadow in any real way what the next result might be. Sometimes we use the word “random” to refer to unpredicted outcomes such as rain shower on a sunny day or an unannounced visit from weird Aunt Hortensia who normally lives in Portland but just happens to be in Minnesota for the weekend for no apparent reason. Nevertheless, neither the rain nor the visit are random, being more a part of predictable chaotic patterns to which we may not be privy. They seem “random” but if we had more information, we would understand how they might be “strange,” but certainly not random. Teenagers love to abuse this word to describe events that seem tangential or extraneous to them, but then again, it’s because they don’t see a bigger picture. The idea of randomness has bothered me every since I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1927) which tells the story of a number of people who are killed when a bridge collapses. “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below,” but is any of it random? The people are relatively unrelated and their stories and lives are all incredibly different, but they all die together when the bridge collapses. The question that the novel proposes, I suppose, is the random nature in life’s events–is there a meaning to it all or is it all random? How was it that those five people were all on the bridge at the same time and that the bridge decided to fail at that moment. At the end of Conan Doyle’s “The Cardboard Box,” Holmes remarks, “What is the meaning of it, Watson?” […] “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.” So sometimes, life looks really, really, random, even when, perhaps, it’s not.

On randomness

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The nature of a random event is both complex and chaotic, but again, predictable in a certain way. When you flip a coin, the result is both random and predictable because you will get either a head or a tail, but never know which one since all events are individual and isolated, independent, and do not foreshadow in any real way what the next result might be. Sometimes we use the word “random” to refer to unpredicted outcomes such as rain shower on a sunny day or an unannounced visit from weird Aunt Hortensia who normally lives in Portland but just happens to be in Minnesota for the weekend for no apparent reason. Nevertheless, neither the rain nor the visit are random, being more a part of predictable chaotic patterns to which we may not be privy. They seem “random” but if we had more information, we would understand how they might be “strange,” but certainly not random. Teenagers love to abuse this word to describe events that seem tangential or extraneous to them, but then again, it’s because they don’t see a bigger picture. The idea of randomness has bothered me every since I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1927) which tells the story of a number of people who are killed when a bridge collapses. “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below,” but is any of it random? The people are relatively unrelated and their stories and lives are all incredibly different, but they all die together when the bridge collapses. The question that the novel proposes, I suppose, is the random nature in life’s events–is there a meaning to it all or is it all random? How was it that those five people were all on the bridge at the same time and that the bridge decided to fail at that moment. At the end of Conan Doyle’s “The Cardboard Box,” Holmes remarks, “What is the meaning of it, Watson?” […] “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.” So sometimes, life looks really, really, random, even when, perhaps, it’s not.

On packing

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If there is one activity that for me is fraught with ambiguity and melancholy it is packing for long trips. Not that I’m going on a long trip or anything, but many people I know are packing up and moving out because school is out, they are graduating, taking new jobs, and moving on. They are leaving and a big part of leaving is packing. I am happy that they are getting on with their lives, but I am sad that they are leaving once and for all, and when people leave, they never come back. When I pack I invariably forget half a dozen things which are vital to my survival, but I do manage to take forty pounds of stuff that I will never need when I get to my destination. In the meantime, I’ve forgotten my toothbrush, an extra pair of underwear, and my glasses. I would forget shoes but I’ve got to put them on to get out of the door. Living in Waco, I have forgotten to bring a coat or jacket with me and regretted it. Packing is such an imprecise science which prone to fail just when you think you have it right. You forget the little book with all your passwords, the cord to your phone charger, your phone, your keys, your snacks. If there is an art to packing it has to do with traveling light, always including a towel, never expecting that you will remember everything. In other words, when you get to your destination, just imagine that you will have to go buy a few things because that’s just the way packing is. Packing is both the sign for a new destination and leaving behind of a current place, all of which is fraught with multiple complications which are all undergirded by strange feelings of loss. Sure, you can always, “phone home,” but it’s not the same as being there. So even getting out the suitcases makes me just slightly morose and cranky, irked, maybe.

On packing

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If there is one activity that for me is fraught with ambiguity and melancholy it is packing for long trips. Not that I’m going on a long trip or anything, but many people I know are packing up and moving out because school is out, they are graduating, taking new jobs, and moving on. They are leaving and a big part of leaving is packing. I am happy that they are getting on with their lives, but I am sad that they are leaving once and for all, and when people leave, they never come back. When I pack I invariably forget half a dozen things which are vital to my survival, but I do manage to take forty pounds of stuff that I will never need when I get to my destination. In the meantime, I’ve forgotten my toothbrush, an extra pair of underwear, and my glasses. I would forget shoes but I’ve got to put them on to get out of the door. Living in Waco, I have forgotten to bring a coat or jacket with me and regretted it. Packing is such an imprecise science which prone to fail just when you think you have it right. You forget the little book with all your passwords, the cord to your phone charger, your phone, your keys, your snacks. If there is an art to packing it has to do with traveling light, always including a towel, never expecting that you will remember everything. In other words, when you get to your destination, just imagine that you will have to go buy a few things because that’s just the way packing is. Packing is both the sign for a new destination and leaving behind of a current place, all of which is fraught with multiple complications which are all undergirded by strange feelings of loss. Sure, you can always, “phone home,” but it’s not the same as being there. So even getting out the suitcases makes me just slightly morose and cranky, irked, maybe.

On fractals

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Though they are complex to describe, you have seen them many times in snow flakes, branching river deltas, the branches of pine trees, ancient ferns, and the florettes of a cauliflower. Fractals, though difficult to define, seem to be repeating self-similar patterns that repeat until they are infinitesimly small, but always the same. Fractals, if you were to analyse them from a mathematical standpoint, are non-linear functions that form all sorts of beautiful loops, and swirls that go on and on into a vanishing point somewhere off of the graph paper. We see fractals that occur in nature all the time. They are so common that we would miss if they weren’t there, but we ignore them because they are ubiquitous. Fractals are imprinted in our subconscious to the point that a nautilous shell can only have one design–a spiral of ever increasing size. If the fractal weren’t there, it wouldn’t be a nautilous shell, or pine tree branch, frost on a window, branching lightening, or the Mississippi River delta. Ever look at the way medieval architects imprint a fractal design on the front of Gothic cathedrals? Fractals are pleasing to the eye and soothing for the soul. Part of the universes harmony is wrapped up in fractals, including the designs of galaxies. Now, in the Oscar winning song of the year, “Let it Go,” the word fractal is included in the lyrics, and the main character creates an ice palace out of macro-fractal snow flake. Fascinating.

On fractals

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Though they are complex to describe, you have seen them many times in snow flakes, branching river deltas, the branches of pine trees, ancient ferns, and the florettes of a cauliflower. Fractals, though difficult to define, seem to be repeating self-similar patterns that repeat until they are infinitesimly small, but always the same. Fractals, if you were to analyse them from a mathematical standpoint, are non-linear functions that form all sorts of beautiful loops, and swirls that go on and on into a vanishing point somewhere off of the graph paper. We see fractals that occur in nature all the time. They are so common that we would miss if they weren’t there, but we ignore them because they are ubiquitous. Fractals are imprinted in our subconscious to the point that a nautilous shell can only have one design–a spiral of ever increasing size. If the fractal weren’t there, it wouldn’t be a nautilous shell, or pine tree branch, frost on a window, branching lightening, or the Mississippi River delta. Ever look at the way medieval architects imprint a fractal design on the front of Gothic cathedrals? Fractals are pleasing to the eye and soothing for the soul. Part of the universes harmony is wrapped up in fractals, including the designs of galaxies. Now, in the Oscar winning song of the year, “Let it Go,” the word fractal is included in the lyrics, and the main character creates an ice palace out of macro-fractal snow flake. Fascinating.