[MD] Waving goodbye to particles

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi John
This time I'll shut up about my view of the MOQ and just say what a 
splendid writer you are, I really enjoyed this piece. At the moment I 
have no map or internet connection to see where Santa Cruz is 
located, but the California coast  is strewn with "santa"s and "san"s.  I 
seem to remember that you recently spoke about Monterey, isn't that 
Salinas and Steinbeck "territory"? Anyway, my own California 
experience is from the sixties when as a young No. Air Force sergeant 
I was ordered to an "on the job" training at a Navy Base near the dry 
China Lake in the Mojave Desert. There I watched testing of the 
ejection system of the Gemini Space Capsule, and also of the Stinger 
hand-held ground-to-air rocket, they used a real, but remotely 
controlled jet fighter as a target. Wow that impressed frugal me, so did 
the mess meals, starting the day with pancakes and maple syrup! I 
was also taken out on a sunday sightseeing to among other things an 
abandoned mining town called Calico. How immense just that state 
and then fifty more! And the American economy, then still at its peak 
sending men into space and eventually to the moon while paying for 
much of the the Cold War effort. It's not to endear myself, but there 
has never been anything like the USA and will never be something like 
it. Too bad the "sustainable development" craze seems to even 
overwhelm this great nation as if there has been any sustainable such 
since the agricultural revolution! I don't know what caused the fall of 
the Roman Empire, but it surely will be this SD that will spell the end of 
the "Abendlandes" (The West) Ok this was just to say how much I like 
your short stories John. This site seems to the be the "cold storage" 
for great but non-recognized writers, painters and - last but not least - 
philosophers  ;-) 

Bodvar





            












On 5 Aug 2010 at 13:56, 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.
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