The Piano Tuner’s Daughter

*

So.

Uncertainty.

*

I try hard to avoid it. I prefer stability and a predictable routine and I derive a great deal of happiness from the small measure of those things I have managed to craft into my life.

But that is not how growth happens. Not how life happens.

All the shit I fear is how life asserts itself. Left to my own devices, I would strangle the mad green growth, snip off the buds for fear of the thorns.

Luckily, I don’t have that much control over things.

*

I get the flowers and the thorns alike.

As you do.

*

I was thinking the other day about emergence, this quality of seemingly intelligent activity, of higher level order, that emerges spontaneously sometimes from amassing huge quantities of lower level, mindless, automatic processes or individual pieces; how you can see amazing complexity in the behavior of an ant colony in food seeking, nest building, farming, warring, defending against attack, etc, even though no single individual ant has the foggiest fucking idea of what is going on.  He’s just doing his own thing, following his very limited script, just like everyone else. No one has a master plan for the colony, but the colony itself coalesces out of the collective mindless actions of those little stupid ants. And how this same quality of emergence is how evolutionary processes proceed, how the stars and planets formed, how we came to become conscious beings, how our brains work; in short, it seems to be the engine of the world.

It is not a top-down hierarchy, but a bottom-up organic process.

At first when I contemplated this concept it made me realize that there was no room for God in the system, no room for a “creator”- not on a bible-study God level or a more sophisticated new-agey “spiritual being” level: the world and all the wonders in it, ourselves included, just kind of rose up in increasing levels of complexity out of a massive, timeless morass of chaos and nothingness, bootstrapping from one level of complexity to the next, like waves forming in a blender….something like that.

The main point being, there isn’t a conductor. There’s not a single entity with a blueprint for the Universe, directing and correcting, watching over, protecting, judging, etc.

It’s just the grinding of the big calliope.

There isn’t even a gap-toothed, methed-out carny running the thing.

We’re on our own.

*

But then I thought a little more about it. I thought about how humans arose naturally out of the muck and mire after a few million years of rolling the genetic and environmental dice, and how, out of these entirely mindless and natural processes, our own consciousness arose as well. We may not be very good at it, but we can think and feel and act and reflect on all that we do, why we do it, etc.

We have consciousness. And it does not reside in any single neuron in our brains. It is not located in a part of us, but it exists as a byproduct of all of those hundreds of millions of neurons firing together.

Which got me thinking further.

If I suppose that I am conscious, and I am just a single entity, made up of billions upon billions of atoms, cells, various physical systems, etc, then wouldn’t it be possible for the same kind of consciousness to arise out of almost any sufficiently complex system?

Maybe a beach will never become conscious, even though it’s got billions and billions of sand grains. Maybe the vast majority of systems will never attain it because their rules are not sufficient to generate some emergent property.

But some systems must.

*

So, maybe the universe, the ultimate system of systems, has attained consciousness.

Or maybe it is going to somewhere down the line.

Maybe we are the seed of it.

*

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Maybe not.

Maybe it’s the other way around.

***

Namaste.

***

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Souls IX

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Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita. 

*

I am reading Sam Sheridan’s “The Fighter’s Mind, Inside the Mental Game” and Kathryn Schulz’ “Being Wrong, Adventures in the Margin of Error.” Next up is “The Ego Tunnel” by Thomas Metzinger.

I like to read, I really do.

*

Yesterday I got to do one of my favorite things, which is to stand in the middle of a crime scene and try to see what happened by looking carefully at the aftermath. Blood and dirt, broken glass, shell casings, scuff marks, a matted chunk of hair, part of a fingernail.

We got it all figured out.

*

Today is quiet and overcast and still. We went for a walk along the cliffs, under gray skies, the sea leaden and glowing molten in places where the cloud cover thinned, the dry grass browned and rattle-headed, everything hushed and dormant feeling. Came back and cleaned the house, got the wood floors gleaming and polished, the house neat as a pin and quiet, too. The dryer is rumbling, but that’s about it.

Pizza dough is rising on the stove now, getting ready for grilled sausage and fig pizza with goat cheese, arugula, and pomegranate molasses.

You have to eat good while you’re still kicking, man. This is the last chance you got, there’s no pizza in nirvana.

*

Maybe on the outskirts you could get some, though.

*

So far my favorite observation that Schulz makes in her book on being wrong is that there is no feeling of being wrong. 




As soon as you are aware that you’re wrong about something, you no longer believe what you were wrong about. You can only be aware of having been wrong. Before you figure it out, being wrong feels exactly like being right.

Huh.

That explains some things, don’t it.

*

Your task, should you accept it:

Be happy.
Be good to yourself.
Be good to other people.
Eat good food.
Go for a walk.
Breathe deeply.
Give thanks.

*

Namaste.

***

Souls VIII

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How we long for what cannot be.

*

Perhaps that is what makes us human.

A part of it, at any rate.

*

Mad gardening this weekend. Moving plants around like we were rearranging furniture. Bought lots of new stuff, which we haven’t done for ages and ages. But the bug has bitten us and hard.

We’ve been gardening these beds for almost fifteen years. Learning, slowly by slowly, what works and what doesn’t, learning how not to fight the hopeless fights and how to make what wants to happen happen in a way we’d like.

You can’t swim upstream if you are a gardener.

The earth will have its way with you.

The best you can hope for is to shade things. Nudge them. Encourage, discourage, hint and tilt and bargain.

*

If you had spent the last three days with my woman the way that I have done, you would sell your soul and the earth and everyone in it for another five minutes with her, I swear to God.

You would burn down cities.

*

I love my fragile life. I love the way we spin like children in those carnival tea cups, screaming and dizzy and begging for it to stop and begging for it to never end. I love the fierceness of the blue sky and the gurgle of water and the hard little packages of birds as they oar through the void of the air and the muscular glide of the fishes in the sea and the silent maneuverings of earthworms and moles and voles in the darkness of the loam.

Did you know that you have ten times as many bacteria cells in your body as human ones? Did you know that you are a cloud of beings, a universe, only a tiny fraction of which you’d recognize as yourself if you met them?

You are a multitude, a menagerie, a god-damn riddle wrapped in an enigma, a work of art.

Go on with your bad self.

***

Namaste, you forest of wild creatures.

***

The Quiet of Dissolution with Schoolgirl

*

A day of gardening. Birds and wind chimes and dappled sunlight and weeding and cutting back and planting and the glory of the world in my eyes and nose and mouth and lungs and under my feet and under my fingernails and burning some of the evil out of my burdened soul.

Thank God for it.

*

Now for some food and drink and laying in the lair with the woman.

*

I urge you to find similar deportment.

*

Namaste.

***

(this piece is lifted from Sonja Braas, The Quiet of Dissolution)

Souls VII

*

Playing hookie today.

Maybe I will cook a mess of good food and clean the house and take the woman to the Bay Theater to watch Inception and go to Castaways and the nursery and Thai Bounty for take out curry in a place shaped like a boat.

Maybe I will lay about in the hammock and drink.

Maybe I will do both.

*

I am a lazy man. As much as I like to work hard, I like not working even better. I like playing hooky. I like slipping out of the straightjacket of my self-imposed responsibilities.

I like goofing off.

*

So there.

*

May you be happy.
May you be calm.
May you be at peace.

***

Souls VI

*

Last night we watched “Terribly Happy”, a Danish film directed by Henrik Genz. This young cop gets sent to a sleepy hamlet on the edge of a swampy bog after having done “something terrible.” His penance is to be the town marshal until things blow over. But the village is home to a crew of misfits, tight-knit and unfriendly to strangers. Everyone has an ulterior motive and enough secrets to keep them drinking like fish and sleeping with one eye open.

Think of Fargo with a sublimated sense of humor.

Dead good.

*

The interesting thing for me, one of them, was this question of moral compromise that the protagonist had to deal with. He’s THE LAW in the little village, and at every step he is faced with how to proceed: does he go “by the book” or does he do the kinder thing, the more human thing? Does he go along with the villagers in how they prefer to handle things, or impose his own will on a situation he is a stranger to?

Its the kind of thing I struggled with as a rookie cop, and still struggle with now. Although struggle might be the wrong word. I am faced with it all the time. And unless you are the kind of cop who got into it because you used to get beat up by the football team in high school, and shoved into a locker at lunch time, and never got the girl, and now you can go around writing speeding tickets to the ex-prom queen, then you want to do the human thing. Sometimes. You don’t want to be a fucking prick day in and day out. It wears on you. I mean, you want to be a prick to the asshats and scumbags. At least I do. But every once in a while someone gets caught in the machine and you’ve got the power to give them a do-over. It’s tempting. And sometimes its the right thing to do, or it sure looks like it.

The longer you do the job, though, the more you realize that, although you may not be able to see it right away, there is a reason they are jammed up in this terrible situation, and you ignore it at your peril.

You start becoming a real cop when you realize that if you interfere with the turning of the wheel of karma, you take on that karma yourself.

So you do it sparingly, with deep regret, and with your eyes wide open.

Because, believe me, it always costs you.

*

Of course, I still do it.

I’m a slow learner, I guess.

*

The woman made us chicken paillard with crusty bread and a fig and walnut salad on romaine.

I am a lucky son of a bitch, I’ll tell you what.

*

A wreck of a human being, but damn lucky.

***

Namaste.

***

Goodnight, Harvey Pekar.

Try the pina colada jelly bellys, Harvey, when you get there.

*

Goddamn, they aim to get every one of us.

****

Sannah, 1972

*

Look, the destruction is all around. It continues unabated. The world is an inferno, burning everything to death.

And we all pitch in.

In the Snake Range of eastern Nevada, a student of the University of North Carolina was taking core samples of bristlecones in 1964. He was looking for a way to study ancient warming patterns. He looked around for about five minutes, found an old bristlecone pine, and bored into it. His coring tool broke off inside the tree. Now he was stuck, because it was five minutes into his research for the year, and he was going to have to go home empty handed. He found some forest service guys and explained his predicament to them. 


“No problem.” They said. “We’ll cut down the tree and get your tool out. There’s a million of those trees out here.”


So they cut it down, he got his coring tool, and a sample of the trees rings. 


He counted them, found out he’d just cut down a tree that was over four-thousand, five hundred years old.




He’d just killed the oldest living thing on the planet.


*




He felt just awful about it, but it couldn’t be undone.






*






That’s just how we proceed.






*








Making mistakes that we can’t take back. 








Out of ignorance, when we are at our best. Usually, our motives are less pure.




*




Results are the same, however.






*




We’re all of us shuffling down a chute that might have been designed by Temple Grandin, beautiful and strange, the path narrowing almost imperceptibly, till we are squeezed into a pen and hit between the eyes with the slaughterman’s bolt.




*




It’s nice while it lasts, I think.






****




Namaste.




**

At Gunderson’s Farm, Summer 1939

*

If I can stop doing art and the woman on the verge can stop knitting for five damn minutes we aim to load up Lucy in the pickup and head down to the dog beach and run her ass silly. Then she can sit in the truck and gather herself while we eat elevensies at the Sea Shanty.

That is the plan.

*

Yesterday we picked up our new coffee table. My step-brother is a furniture maker who lives a few miles up the road. He makes stuff out of big slabs of redwood and cedar and I had him make us a coffee table, japanese-influenced trestle legs topped with a slab of cedar, capped on each end with clean milled pieces of cedar. It is a beautiful piece.

But I pulled the trigger on the commision without consulting the woman on the verge, which is a stupid, thoughtless thing to have done. Not typical of me, perhaps, but not unheard of, either.

It takes whatever pleasure I might have got from it and kind of edges it in guilt and remorse.

I suppose we’ll get over it.

It is beautiful.

*

Last night I made this Peruvian-Chinese fried rice with chicken and avocado and cilantro and green onions and a mess of pickled red onions. The woman on the verge picked it out, and it was a stunner. We had my Mom and Step-father over and there is still about ten pounds of the stuff left.

It were good.

*

Maybe something is happening or going to happen.

I feel like I am in limbo…

***

Namaste.

***

Grief Is A Room In Our Home

*

We all find ourselves here.

*

It seems so unfair, doesn’t it? Well, it is, I suppose. Unfair, and unfailing.

*

It seems unendurable.

*

I know, I know.

There, there.

It’s okay.








*






But there is stillness in this room. The world comes to a halt. Outside it continues its spinning and cacophony of noise, smell, taste, color, birth, death, and carnage unabated.

But here there is stillness.

Silence.

An achingly beautiful luminescence that deep grief brings to the plainest of things.

And the door is shut hard behind you.

*

Don’t be in any hurry to leave, for grief is a kind of medicine for the soul.

Though it works like a conflagration in you.

*

May your grief leave diamonds in its wake.

*

Namaste.

***