318. Rediscovering Spacetime

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Spacetime

Earlier today I was waiting for a bus when the detritus of the adjacent eucalyptus trees reminded me of our first house in the San Fernando Valley. So both a very specific place (Calhoun Ave in Van Nuys) and a very specific time (1964-1965). Starting there, I soon realized that, because of the way my family moved around when I was a child, all my memories are similarly isolated in both space and time... so spacetime. 

I can't think of Denver without thinking of 1960, the year we lived there. I can't think of 1969 without thinking of Arizona -- specifically Scottsdale and Prescott. Aside from a cluster of Beverly Hills memories from thirty years ago, all my SoCal memories are from the Valley between '64 and '67. If I think of Boulder, it is 1960-1964.

This is even more true when I've traveled. Paris is locked to the year 1981 and the days around May 10th -- when Mitterrand was first elected. My memories of Montreal connect me to the summer of 1971. But these connections are more limited in the spacial dimension -- I have temporal memories of those years from other places. 

Conventions

The expansion of our convention center was completed just recently and I’ve been noticing many more convention goers around the neighborhood. Until today. So I did a quick search to see if that convention had ended. Unfortunately, I can only find the conventions still to come, but the Specialty Food Association convention starts in two days, so I’m pretty sure I’m right. But guess what convention follows Specialty Food? The Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium. I wonder if there’s a correlation between the two?

Luxembourg

One of the two new, regular waitresses at The Pork Store is from Luxembourg which gives me a reason to think of that tiny state whenever I’m there for breakfast. This morning I almost asked her if they were taught the history of the House of Luxembourg in school. She was too busy, and then I came up with a headcanon that I like better than any plausible reality. (Given all the words my spelling checker doesn’t know, I was surprised just now to be encouraged to replace “head canon” with “headcanon.” I guess this is the sort of thing a computer program would know.)

In the primary and secondary schools of my imaginary Luxembourg, not only is the history of their House taught, but the school malcontents wear jackets featuring the insignia of the houses of Habsbourg or Hohenzollern. The effete arts crowd wears the Bourbon Lily. 

Voices

Once again (I’m going to have to check to make sure I haven’t already posted something like this). I’m thinking about the voices people hear. Sara Maitland’s teasing book on silence brought up “voice hearing” but had little to reveal about what the voices said. Surely someone is researching what these voices are saying to the people who hear them. And why were Maitland’s voices whispering, to the extent that she needed to find profound silence to properly hear them, when the run of the mill schizo I see on the street is having to shout to be heard over his voices?

Thanks to my recent adventures in neurology, I know that there can be multiple “agents” in our heads. Conflicting lobes. Multiple personalities. And then there’s my favorite, the agent that guides our perception. The one that determines what we perceive and takes a bit of time to do it. How do the voices relate to these agents? I would love to think they came from the later one, but that’s asking a lot. Plus, since the agent I have in mind tends to be primarily concerned with propagating our genes, how would you explain the self-destructive quality of the voices heard by the schizophrenics who make it into the news. If you got on the wrong side of that agent you would really be in a fix. No wonder people think in terms of demonic possession.

Good Luck. Bad luck. Who knows?

I thought of a new, personal, way to tell this story. Thirty years ago I was living in a basement apartment in Noe Valley. It was cheap and in a great neighborhood, but had a bit too much character. But the rent was so low I couldn’t leave. Then, for a petty reason, I decided to move into the house next door when my neighbors moved and put their house up for sale. The market was not good at the time so I anticipated being there for many months. But the house sold quite quickly and after only a couple months in the house I had to find a new place to live.

At that moment I was very busy with work which meant I didn’t have time for apartment hunting, but I did have more money than usual. So I quickly moved into the 29th floor of a building that was always advertising vacancies. I stayed there for three years, gaining a good perspective on high-rise living, and then found a cheaper but smaller place on Nob Hill. There were pros and cons to the place, but mostly I loved the challenge of fitting into such a small space. After four years there I got sick. The only time since I was a child with the measles that I have been basically bedridden. Still don’t know what was wrong with me. But at this same time the owners of the unit suddenly decided they needed to sell it. I could buy it or I could go out and find a new place to live. During this whole process I only looked at other apartments in one other building, two blocks away, and the owner’s agent drove me there because these were the only units he could find that were roughly comparable. (When I commented on the superiority of the units in that building he tried to convince me that we were now in a bad neighborhood. That was the last conversation I had with him.) So I bought my unit. And by the end of the Aughts I owned it outright. And this is why I can afford to live in SF.


However, just to show that my understanding of the “Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?” story is robust, I will admit that, while this looks like Good luck, you never know. I am now trapped here since I can’t afford to move anywhere else. Perhaps a much happier fate awaited me elsewhere? Perhaps living here will be my doom? Who knows?

127. Time in dreams

Previous - 126. That problem of evil

Space & time in dreams

I had an interesting dream this morning that might be related to a new Crash Course series I'm watching on Myth. Or at least my writing about the dream is related to that. 

They started, exactly where I would have started, with Creation Stories. They're not finished with the topic -- they've only covered some stories from the Fertile Crescent and the Americas, nothing so far from South Asia or the Far East. These stories tend to start with chaos or water or, in one case mud, and then a god shows up to convert the chaos into Earth. The Greek versions are a bit more metaphysical but in general these myths exist not so much to explain "existence" as the place where they lived. And this includes the Genesis story. Since this sense of "creation" is rather more limited than what I'm interested in, I guess we have to go easy on them for not explaining where the gods came from, or the seas or mud or chaos.

I was impressed that they ended the episode with The Big Bang story. In many ways this secular creation myth is very similar, and not any more satisfying from a metaphysical perspective, than the other stories. How that plasma suddenly came to be is as much of a mystery as what the Jewish god was doing before "Creation."

Anyway, my dream. I was listening to the radio news until the radio shut off less than 10 minutes after the hour (I have a new morning routine I'm still testing, with my radio coming on just in time for the better national news episode, and then shutting off, a bit after an hour, when I should get out of bed. Or that's the plan.) Less than ten minutes after that I woke up needing to pee -- my true morning alarm. So I know that the dream I had took less than 10 minutes in awake time. 

I was walking down the street shopping or window shopping, can't actually remember the details, but then ended up going into a cafe for a meal and sitting at a counter. I was sitting at the corner with a prissy little man to my right facing perpendicular to me. As I was finishing up my meal -- again I don't recall much of the meal itself -- a large man carrying a burger on a plate and a glass of beer sat to my left. As he was sitting down, a waiter came up behind him with another glass of beer and I thought that doesn't look promising, and was glad that I was about to leave. Oddly, the waiter leaned over me to give the beer to the guy on my right. I don't recall paying, but as I was about to leave I decided I should use the bathroom (I did need to pee) and walked to the back of the cafe just in time to see someone enter the only restroom. I stood awkwardly near a couple of busy tables waiting my turn. As I waited, the rear door would occasionally open for a minute and I could see out into the hotel -- the cafe was in a hotel, it seems -- and I had a perfect view up the hotel's grand staircase, which doesn't make much sense if you try to draw a floor-plan. I glimpsed a handsome and well-dressed woman, flanked by two exemplary children, approach and then ascend the stairs. I recall being impressed by her perfect form in quite high heels.

I then got access to the bathroom but don't recall actually using it (possibly a good thing) and then I walked through the cafe again and was about to exit through the front door onto the street when I realized I didn't have my backpack (I almost always carry one) and I couldn't recall if I had it when I came in or not. I walked over to the counter and the entire area had been cleared, but there was a black bag on the floor under the counter. I picked it up, but it clearly wasn't mine. I then noticed that it was only one of about four black bags, some quite large, all sitting where the prissy little man had been. I wondered if he could have walked away without them (they blended in very well) and I wondered if someone had noticed my backpack, so I stood where he had been sitting waiting for a waiter to come by. Instead the prissy little man, irate looking, came walking toward me -- but behind the counter? -- obviously thinking I was messing with his stuff. I ignored this and asked if anyone had noticed my backpack... no one had, so I left. And that's when I woke up.

In our dreams we create space and time. We then build a set for our stage and populate that set with a cast of characters playing elaborate roles. We create small or grand plays and we do it not in "real" time but outside time or possibly in the interstices of time. In any case it happens faster than anyone could describe it.

If we are indeed gods as we sleep, is it any wonder so many people can't help prolonging and augmenting that state with opiates and the like? (At least that's my understanding of what taking opiates is like, and also the reason I've been so determined to avoid them. Not out of strength but from acknowledged weakness.) 

Next - 128. Well, Everything Is Well

90. Moneytime

Previous - 89. A Holiday Miracle

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Money and time

Yesterday I was reading an excellent article about spacetime -- actually rereading it, as I find some of these concepts hard to grasp, which is why I doubt I will ever understand Quantum Chromodynamics in this lifetime. (HERE's the link. This is about why the dimensions are most commonly expressed as 3 +1, rather than 4. ) But today I was thinking about moneytime, which is really the relationship between money and time.

I enjoy imagining what I would do if I won the lotto for a variety of different amounts -- with smaller amounts I tend to be practical, but with larger amounts you have the option of doing really interesting things. It occurred to me that this was in a way analogous to thinking about what you would do if you knew you only had a year or a month or a week or a day to live. In the latter case, time takes on the value of money and becomes more precious the less there is, while what you would do with it also becomes more practical. 

If I had $100 million I would want to build something interesting. If you had a year you might want to travel. I might even want to travel, though by train and to places I already knew I enjoyed... that's just the way I roll.

On the other hand, if I only had $10,000 I would get a really nice, zero-gravity chair and eat out more often. And if I only had a day to live... well that would be tricky. Being me, I would want to at least make detailed notes about what I wanted done with my assets and stuff -- since there wouldn't be time to actually deal with it all. Your first thought would be to do all the things you most enjoy, for me that would be favorite breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But I know from previous birthday celebrations, that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I would probably just contact friends (though how to do this without freaking them out could be challenging) and have a very pleasant day featuring my favorite place to eat. If my last day was a Monday, when my favorite restaurant is closed, I would at least be able to enjoy that final irony. And then I would fall back on another favorite place. I don't know what I would want to read, if anything. Also, these are all hypotheticals, so I really can't swear by any of my thoughts on these subjects. My reality could be completely different and surprising.

Trump

A random insight: Trump's core supporters are very much like the West Bank Settlers in the Middle-east. This came from reading about his interest in Salvadorian gangs on Long Island.

I once read an interesting piece on early West Bank settlers and almost all of them were Jews who had been driven out of Brooklyn (or was it the Bronx?) by Blacks. That had been a frustrating "war" they couldn't fight with guns, so they were very eager for this new fight that they could fight with guns. The Palestinians were substitutes for African Americans.

The other interesting thing about Trump's aggressive anti-gang talk is that it is exactly the kind of pack leader posturing that I believe is behind (possibly subconsciously) many voter's inability to vote for a woman President. They want Trump to lead their pack against other hostile packs, and gangs are precisely that -- even more than nations are. 

I would actually be relieved if Trump would devote this pent up level of violence against gangs and cults like ISIS. We could even cooperate with Russia (and Iran) in the ISIS battle which would be desirable from the point of view of attempting to avoid nuclear annihilation.

Random and annoying

So I'm sitting in the window at the Pine Street Peet's with my Chromebook open in front of me (because the WiFi is dead slow) and Absalom open in my hand, which I'm reading while waiting for my email to load, when this guy comes up and interrupts me with this convoluted story, involving Meyer Lansky and all these "facts" that I can confirm with the staff, and after I get a bit tired of it and urge him to get to the point while advising him that I can't imagine a situation in which I would give him anything, he reveals that he wants $25. There's some situation where I might be the one who gets millions of dollars from him later, that I couldn't make any sense of. I told him I didn't really want the ten million and that he should share it with someone else. He then told me my computer was controlling my mind and ruining my soul. I was tempted to say, "Not with this crappy WiFi."

He was very disappointed -- both in me, as he had gifted me with a very generous and honorable soul, which I had then belied, and for himself since I think he saw the $25 as already being his, but I was holding it for him and then welshed. It really was an involved and clever scheme. Thirty years ago he would have gotten something from me just for the originality of it. Not now.

He didn't let disappointment slow him down though, he was instantly hitting up a woman sitting near me. I couldn't hear if it was the same spiel, though I'm sure it was, and I got caught up in Absalom and didn't notice how he made out with that fish.


Absalom

Chapter VII: So Charles Bon was Sutpen's son by his first wife in Haiti?! Should I have seen that coming? It does explain why Sutpen went to the trouble of uncovering Bon's situation in New Orleans. So the Octoroon wife was a blind, but did Henry know this?

It is such a teasing but brilliant way to tell a tale.

Next - 91. Rambling