Learning our lessons

Human beings must learn so many things in the course of their lives. That is not what separates from the rest of the animals, however. It’s the level of our self-awareness. Among other things, we learn that we are indeed human – gradually understanding more of what that means.

I have already forgotten so many things. What was it like when I first began to learn about pain and fear, for example? Oh these things are not unique to humans among the species of living beings, but we do become aware of them in some unique ways.

I am thinking now of a little girl that I know. She smiles easily. She also put on a face to go with the words when she said that it was sad that the puppy they were taking care of along with their own puppy had to go back to its family.

And then the other night I heard that she was in a top bunk and a ceiling fan struck her and bloodied her nose. That’s all I know really. But I imagine the pain, maybe more than a little fear, the shock of happily playing one moment and then blood. These are the things that we learn about.

And I’m sure that she will be okay, for now, and I - roughly ten times her age - I am okay, for now.

The times tables were easy. Reading and writing. I learned these basics when I was about her age.

Hurt and loss are much harder lessons. I can bear to think about a bloodied nose. Two times two is four. But no calculator I know about can work out to my satisfaction some of the suffering I have experienced or seen in others.

It gets to be a little like working with imaginary numbers. In math, the only way to think of numbers such as the square root of -1, for example, is with your imagination. And even then, the concept isn’t clear. But yet you can work with such numbers. A man named Benoit Mandelbrot has done some amazing things with these imaginary numbers. Now in this age of fast computers, you can readily see how an infinite series called the Mandlebrot Set (a series  that includes these imaginary numbers in an equation with the results then plotted on a graph  and visualized on your computer screen) will produce some of the most intricate and beautiful patterns that you can see.

And I have also seen people work with pain with amazing results. Some answers have been suggested, but I’m afraid this problem still needs more work. Still there is no escape, hurt is one of the elements of life.

I can’t understand why it must be that children so young must begin these lessons so early. But I suppose that with time so short and with even more complicated problems ahead, humans simply must begin learning about life when they are very young.

But not about pain every day or very moment. There should also be time for children and all of us to go out and play and laugh. There are things to learn about pleasure, too. Life is intricate and sometimes beautiful.

***

Two places to start exploring the Mandelbrot set:

Zooming in to infinity with musical accompaniment:

http://youtu.be/gEw8xpb1aRA

More about the math and some explanation - as well as a gallery of images:

http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/Mandelset/MandelDef/MandelDef.html

You don’t need to understand the mathematical language to appreciate this, but effort will be required if you wish to learn how this all works. But if you take this basic formula and plug in a succession of complex numbers which includes the imaginary number – the square root of -1 – and plot the result on a graph, you will get the amazing fractal patterns unfolding on your computer screen. Of course, it’s more complicated than I’m describing, but it starts with this formula:  z_n → z_n+1 = z_n² + c. You should start by looking at the pictures.

What do do nonsense

I have a powerful and peculiar brain compared to a bug’s brain. But it is just like yours – except that mine is unique. And so is yours. Even a bug is not precisely like every other bug in its thinking and actions - such as they are.

Where is the sense in this? you are asking. But it was only my brain talking earlier, and there seemed to have been something sensical at the time.

But here is one puzzle. What is worth doing? How is it not an entirely frivolous use of my time to write this apparent nonsense – and yet somehow it means something to me.

I could grow beans and rice with my time, carrots, bok choy, black-seeded Simpson lettuce. Or like my brother-in-law, I could buy and sell, sort and schlep, trundle stuff from storage lockers to Ebay to flea markets and still barely make enough to provide for his family the way he would like to do.

All the while I don’t get paid at all for writing poetry and other nonsense.

Consider all that unbelievable amount of wasted time before we were born, and then there will be all that unbearably long time after we are gone, and then in between there’s all of this. And yet we burn this brief candle as if everything matters – doing what? And why?

Why not just sit on a bench with a cardboard sign that reads, ‘will eat food for spare change – will sleep in the scrub woods on the edge of town for nothing.’

Some of those brains are damaged and skewed – in ways that are different from yours and mine.

And yet the time will pass no matter what we do.

What is the measure of worthiness when all will be consumed?

I never had the chance to meet the man who made the most exquisite baskets out of pine needles and bits of grasses and stuff that I saw at a friend’s house one evening. Put a match to them and all that time and effort put into those baskets would be ash in an instant. And who needs pine needle baskets, anyway? And anyway, the man, too, is gone.

We are filled from birth with drive and abilities, with desires and energy. And so each of us does what each of us finds to do, the apparent difference between necessity and frivolous so glaring, yet so insignificant.

I admire the tall, brown leather boots my wife bought – the animal cared for and killed for its hide, the skin worked, tanned, shaped and stitched. Then on the outside of each boot someone placed three brass-colored metal buckles, somewhat for function, mostly for style. There’s also an intricately fashioned zipper running down the inside, a long-toothed slide from the top to the arch so that the boot can slide over the heel, the foot coming to rest on a crafted bed. Hands were involved and hands made the machines that were also used.

These boots are no accident, but who really needs boots such as these? The bugs and the beasts of the fields? Consider the lily; they toil not, neither do they spin.

Why not just lay ourselves down and die?

And why do some write on corrugated scraps of cardboard and I – I write my printed and pretty-sounding words. And men and women, and sometimes little children, toil for their survival and for my survival while a contrived and accidental system provides easy opportunities for some and harsh gain – even loss – for others.

Oh Jesus! You left so many questions with only the hints of answers.

You said that God said, ‘You fool, this night your soul shall be required of you, then whose shall these things be, which you have prepared?’

But who or what made us this way in the first place?

And what else are we supposed to do with our time? Without food we will not eat. Without art, we’d rather starve.

What nonsense would you compare to my nonsense? Or flip it. What makes sense for you to do?

African-Human

I'm not saying I could be black, but I could have soul.

I'm not saying I feel black,

I'm saying I can feel my soul reach back to the first human being,

and that man and that woman came out of Africa.

I do feel with my skin, but it goes so much deeper.

It's not the pigment,

it's in your soul where you feel what you feel.

It's not about the rainbow, it's not about light or dark -

it's about feeling who and what you are

within every drop of blood of your being

and then inside and outside of that heart’s breath.

More basic than your atoms and still out beyond the farthest star.

If you don't have soul,

eat and drink and dance with the people who do –

whatever the color of their skin.

They'll show you how to find it.