[MD] Waving goodbye to particles

[John Carl]

Every year, it's our family tradition to go to Santa Cruz and take  a little
vacation.  Going to the Boardwalk and riding the roller coaster on the cheap
night.  Hitting all of Lu's favorite Santa Cruz thrift stores.  Parking at
the top of a 4-story parking garage, overlooking Pacific Garden Mall and
while my brood explores the streets below, dad has a beer and a smoke and
listens to the radio, observing life from above it all.


So it's been about a year since I went to Santa Cruz last, and waved at the
moon from the top of the roller coaster and thought of Marsha.  And then
came back home and wrote about it.


This year there was no moon, and what i enjoyed the most was playing in the
ocean with Josh, my son.  Splashing and diving  in waves of patterned
experience, again I thought of Marsha, and I wondered if there was any
functional difference between "patterns" and "waves".


as deep as you want to go, you find waves -  A phenomena that has/is a peak,
then a trough, a peak, then a trough.  The frequency and amplitude define
our perceptual reality everywhere.  Music is waves, light is waves.


Yeah, yeah, it's all waves, baby.


The philosophy of a surfer.


The economy is sure wavey!  One reason my dad and mom fled this beautiful
Santa Cruz coast when I was a kid, was a decline in construction, the
ever-present leading indicator of what's going on in the National economy.
 Growing up with a contractor dad meant never falling in love with any one
place - always   fleeing the bust, seeking the boom.


Finding that sweet spot on the economic wave.


For a kid, it's a bummer.  I tried to avoid that pattern with my kids and
have been successful, at least in that.  I avoided the  Racing up and down
the beach, looking for where the waves are always more exciting at some
other spot.  Just stay put and learn the patterns.


Hmmm... a clue.  Waves come in patterns, does it follow that  patterns come
in waves?


I watched my son deal with the consequences of wrong timing in the waves,
learning as I had done at his age,  that you really don't wanna be on the
bad side of a good strong wave.  I had showed him how to body surf, but he's
not a good enough swimmer yet, and even Sarah the bold blonde middle child
couldn't quite get that super oomph you need in the launch phase, fighting
against the backwards pull of the water so you have forward momentum when
the wave catches up to you and pushes you more strongly forward.  She
glanced too much over her shoulder.  You gotta look ahead, when you're
surfing.  You study the waves coming in, as far out as you can see them and
stop looking at them when they come upon you.  It's a swivel snap of the
head, when you stop looking back, and start looking forward, too late and
the wave just passes you by.



 Josh got smacked by a good one by not paying attention>  I stood back and
watched.  I saw it coming, and saw that he was too much in the moment.  He
was standing and laughing with his sisters and his cousin, and it was right
behind him and just starting to crest.  I got up from my spot where I'd
retired from teaching mode, where I could hear the the roller coaster
behind, while watching the waves out in front and observe  my young surfers
attempts to emulate my lessons, occasionally interrupted  in my sightline by
some  bikini-clad occlusion.  (Which I didn't mind at all, btw.)


When Josh got tumbled and rolled on up the beach, I was looming over him,
telling him, "I sure saw that one coming" a bit gentler than my dad's
chuckled aspersions when I was his age "what did you do that for dummy?",
but basically in the same spirit - and helped him up, retching and spitting.



After that, he decided to go back to his mom.  Play with particles instead
of waves.   Making sand castles out of specks and ideas.


It's interesting, that we have these two "things" with which to describe our
reality - we have waves, and we have particles. When you try and describe
either, you end up with the other.  And we have the beach to experience them
both simultaneously and observe which is better.  Life's a beach.


Then you die.



Here's what I'd say to WaveDave, before the door hits his butt on the way
out, that intellectual formulation is only half the story.  That's what ZAMM
was really about - the final recovery of the better half of himself, by an
overly intellectual guy.  The union of art and science has always been our
biggest need in the world today.  We've crafted ourselves an  intellectual
solution to life's problems, but that's not enough. It's never enough.  Even
primitive man, after figuring out how to dominate the other animals with
spears and arrows and collaborative intelligence, needed an artistic
expression of the process and made paintings on the walls.




The MoQ is not some panacea that will save our culture from
self-annihilation.   But if you want the music, you gotta have the singers.
 And the MoQ has been an excellent forum for the gathering of experiences of
Quality - of thinkers who are striving for good, and questioning our overly
intellectualized, compartmentalized academy and sciences.  The fact that
there are so many evidences of similar lines of thought that resonate
strongly with Pirsig and ZAMM, ought to be enough.


Having it all make perfect sense, is just an added bonus.  Yesterday, or the
day before, I played on the beach with my son. I swam in the waves.  A
romantic experience, I suppose.  But there were ideas in my head, that made
the realization of the experience more. ...


More what?  More deep?  More pleasurable?  More enticing?  More memorable?


Yes.  All those, and more. More more'ish.  We have to always return to the
real world, to nature, to the bedrock of value, and we have to define and
conceptualize and describe, in an endless multitude of waves and particles.



The waves make the particles, the particles hold back and define the end of
the waves.


An endlessly entertaining dance.