[MD] Waving goodbye to particles

[MarshaV]

On Aug 5, 2010, at 4:56 PM, John Carl wrote:

> 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.


Yes it is, Sweet Prince, yes it is!!!!    


 
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