Good Morning Justin...

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 16 March

A thousand words or more

Good Morning Justin…

The Bradford Pear are in full bloom everywhere.  The tree seems to be in just about every other yard around here so, yes, they are blooming everywhere.  I just noticed it this morning when I took a long walk to Steve’s Garage over on Dale Earnhardt Boulevard.  The funny thing is I took the same walk yesterday (twice!) and I hadn't noticed a single tree in bloom.  Sure, maybe I was preoccupied.  But I had my binoculars with me so it’s not like I wasn’t looking around.  Anyway, the point is these trees bloom all at the same time.  Come March 15^th and they all burst full with popcorn blooms.

That’s something I should put on Facebook.  That’s where we all go to share these days, isn’t it?  What is the point of Facebook if it isn’t to share information?  I think that’s about all we do there.  Exchanging information is so a part of who we are that we take it for granted that this is something we would want to do.  Twitter is more of the same, isn’t it?  The forum is a bit different but it’s where you go to find out about what someone did or thought.  Newt Gingrich, a politician, tweeted what kind of sandwich he and his daughter had for lunch one day.  I suppose if you’re sort of a celebrity this is the kind of thing some people who follow you are curious to know.  For some reason I felt it important you know I saw Bradford Pear blooming. 

Can we step outside of ourselves far enough to find amazement in our own human behavior… even if it seems trivial?  Talking among ourselves about what we saw, what we thought, what we felt – are all not trivial matters.  What greater foundation to our success as a species is there than our instinctive desire to communicate with one another?  It starts with our face.  What a window into our thoughts it can be.  It takes effort and some talent to present to the world a poker face when we are charged with emotion.  It’s the money card to what makes for a great actor.  You’ve been revealed as perpetrator of some great unforgivable sin.  Words escape you.  The director wants a close up of your face that will say it all. 

It’s not just the face that has impact in communicating our feelings.  Once again the director feels words are cheap.  You’re being left by the one you love for another.  You’ve made a life together.  Now you are stunned, crushed, as the dearest person to you walks out of your life forever.  You stand mute following with your eyes as your lover drives away.  She looks back in the rear view mirror to see the figure of devastation.  The body language says it all. 

Of course, words are our great accomplishment.  We’ve created a language not simply of nouns and verbs to express our questions and commands.  We have subtle minds and we often require precision in how we speak.  Grammar gives our language a structure to minimize the possibility that we be misunderstood.  Voicing our thoughts with words requires the ear.  But our eyes are so much better suited to receiving information.  Now we make curious squiggles to represent words for the eye to digest.  We are rich in the ability to share information.  We tell stories and they give our recounting of facts great emotional weight.  We explain our thinking one to another.  Sometimes our need for precision is so great that we rely only on numbers to convey our reasoning behind abstract conceptions.  There are times when what we have to convey requires the purity of paint or dynamics of music to convey a finely tuned emotional sense – something that exists only when carefully balanced.  A shift of feeling either way and our expression topples into something crudely hammered, as though with nails that too easily bend to each blow. 

Picture in your mind a morning sun hidden by falling snow.  This is what human words do.

Love,

           Dad

Good Morning Jacob...

Letter to My Son

Sunday, 6 January

I suppose amnesia is the most effective way to start over with a clean slate.  Cutting off all human links with the past and losing yourself in a foreign country would be another attempt at starting over but you would drag your memory with you.  Both of these efforts to escape your past seem impractical for those of us that settle for a simple New Year’s resolution.

I wonder what dreams people have that suffer from amnesia.  Do they reveal something of the history that has been lost to our conscious mind?  Last night I dreamt I woke to find both my family and the front door gone.  Were I an amnesiac what is it that I could take away with that?

Good Morning Jacob…

Happy New Year!  This is my first opportunity to use the number 2013.  Notice they contain the first four numbers, starting with zero – the number for nothing.  One might think it odd to account for nothing but, as it turns out, nothing counts.  Apparently it was the Arabs that determined the need for a ‘no amount’ number.  The Romans couldn't see the use of a number that represented nothing.  Imagine how difficult it would be to do math with Roman numerals?  Whoever it was that first saw the use for a number meaning zero amount deserves a Nobel Prize.  It would be no small task explaining to people the need for representing nothing to count as well as the usefulness of placing a zero to the right of every number evenly divisible by ten, then adding an additional zero indicating ten times the initial denomination of ten. 

Zero seems such a small creation.  It’s importance may seem obvious to us now but for people of ancient times it just sounded nonsensical, counter intuitive.  If there is nothing to count, why would I want to count it?  Of course, it’s become more than just zero.  It is a convenient way of representing a number’s size.  The Roman’s had to use different letters to represent units of ten:  X = 10; L = 50; C = 100; D = 500; M = 1,000.  You can quickly see how clumsy the system is when you compare the Arabic 1910 with the Roman:  MDCCCCX.  The year 1918 becomes MDCCCCXVIII.  The Roman numeric tools discouraged the development of advanced math such as algebra (an Arabic word, by the way, as is zero itself) and calculus.  Roman numerals today are limited mostly to decorative representations of dates.  They are in a race towards oblivion with Latin.  At least Latin gives us a relational understanding of the contemporary languages it spawned, including Italian, Spanish and French.  Historians and anthropologists can study the relationships between people by finding similarities in their diverse languages. 

English is an interesting blend of cultural influences.  A group of people dominant in a particular field often lent their words to other languages.  Many of our scientific terms are based on Greek words, reflecting the initial thoughts of Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle.  Latin phrases are pervasive in the vocabulary of law.  Words relating to music, such as piano, reflect Italy’s one time dominance in Western music.  The success of Napoleonic France militarily has contributed words like lieutenant and sergeant, among others.  The pervasive reach of American culture has contributed its share of words to the world’s vocabulary.  Ideas are shaped in the human mind through the tools of language.  In this regard, words have been seen by some societies as subversive, a form of cultural imperialism.  The French government has long discouraged the use of American terms, much as English teachers regard slang expressions as terms that coarsen our culture.  

Ideas, and their products, are infectious.  Governments that try to suppress popular movements in philosophy, politics and the arts will find they fight a losing battle.  At most they buy themselves only time.  The people of this world are becoming too interconnected for governments to successfully isolate their population from outside influences.  The unprecedented explosive success of Facebook and other social media dramatically demonstrates the desire for people everywhere to connect and exchange information relevant to them in real time.  A dynamic society requires computers capable of sharing with one another.  Today’s computers are the size of a phone that slips into one’s pocket.  The potential of our growing global conversation for human advancement is incredibly exciting.  It is also subversive to repressive governments wishing to keep their society isolated from the rest of humanity.  It’s like insisting on the use of Roman Numerals while everyone else is calculating clickity-clack with the use of the Arabic zero through nine.  A thumb in the dike won’t long hold back the flood of progress.

Love,

          Dad