Time, Space and Causality

When I think about time, I like to think about stars and about live sports on TV. Stars because when I look at the night sky, I love

the realization that all those star appear to me to be existing at the same moment, yet the individual lights that I see all at once, actually were emitted individually anywhere from a few years ago to thousands of years ago. In fact many of the stars that I am looking at right now, might not even exist anymore. That star over there might have gone supernova three thousand years ago, but I will never know it because its light will still be in our sky for many many lifetimes past mine. Yet, strangely, I seem certain that all those stars are actually there. 

I like live sports on TV because it’s all delayed by a second or two or even maybe by a few minutes. It takes time for the camera to send the image to my screen. So that touchdown that I just high-fived 

my son about, actually might have happened two minutes before I knew it. The fans in the stadium have already been cheering way before I even set down my bowl of chips. Of course this is true of all perception. We never actually perceive what is currently happening, we perceive what has just happened. There is no “live.” We are always a bit behind. And so I think about this old philosopher named Immanuel Kant. Here’s what Wikipedia reports about this German dude. 

Immanuel Kant (1724 –1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology during and at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy. 

Ok … and although the article goes on to offer some good stuff, it fails to mention that he’s one of my favorite philosophers. Further, it 

doesn’t really focus on the one thing that I really like about this guy. Now I’m not a professional philosopher, so here’s a somewhat basic understanding of one of the things he was doing. See, he wanted to deal with how we 

know for sure that what we think is real is actually real. I like this. And strangely, I often think about this. I mean just go to a now old website and listen to the mosquito ring tones 

http://www.freemosquitoringtones.org/ 

and you’ll see, or hear, that sounds exist that some of us cannot hear. If I cannot hear it, does it exist? This suggests that there very well could be substances I cannot see, matter I cannot feel, and odors I cannot smell. Well, Kant agreed. He too wanted to deal with this. And now that we have computers, his idea make a lot of sense in an analogy. Just as computers can only function within their operating systems, we, according to Kant, can only function through our human operating system. And for Kant, this system is constructed in such a way that we experience things outside of us in time, space, and causality. Kant then says the troubling part: we have no way to know if time, space and causality actually exist. We are stuck living in a world that we can absolutely only interact with in this way. We cannot get outside ourselves and perceive things as they might actually be. I mean, maybe time, space and causality actually are inherent in the things we perceive; however, these things could just as easily only seem to exist in time, space and causality because that’s how we function. We perceive the world as growing older. Everything we perceive seems to be moving from a moment of inception toward a moment of final decay. 

Yet, why does everything have to begin and end? Perhaps all things are always happening, but we are unable to see it as it really is. The same is true of space. We see things taking up space and existing as individual items, yet, this is not necessarily true. Maybe everything is one big blob, but our senses break this big blob into trees and houses and people. Finally, we make connections that lead us to believe that if I throw a ball, I caused the ball to move. Yet, again, if space and time are not really demonstrable, then I really cannot cause anything. I can only seem to cause things. Ok, getting pretty deep here, so let’s pull back and ask why this is important. Perhaps it is not, but perhaps it is a constant reminder that all this reality that seems so certain to us, might not really exist at all. I like to think about that stuff, and so I think about it, if I can.

Watching The River Flow

Recently, my days have been filled with summertime activities: playing euchre with aunts and uncles visiting from out-of-town;

riding The Beast and The Diamondback at King’s Island; playing a round of golf with my father, my visiting brother and my teenaged nephew; sitting in the top row at the Great American Ballpark with my kids on a ninety degree afternoon watching the Cleveland Indians beat the Cincinnati Reds; hosting a little league ice-cream social after my son’s team lost the league championship; going to cook-outs and parties with friends and family. When time permits, I tend to respond to the nagging responsibilities of homeownership: vacuuming the family room, mowing the lawn, washing the cars, polishing the woodwork, the list goes on and on. Oh, and when I am not heading the duties of homeownership, or involved in summertime activities, I hear the call of consumption: trips to the grocery, the shoe store, the gas station, the mall. Is it any wonder that when a few extra minutes pop up, I find myself  

involved in easy entertainment: women’s world cup soccer, Expedition Impossible, Summer Wipe Out, Major League Baseball. In the few remaining down times, it is tempting to nap, snack, and just chill. And so life goes on. And so another summer goes by. And then it’s fall. Another college football season, a new bunch of leaves to rake, a Turkey. 

I have often been dissatisfied by these seemingly endless days of activity, and thus am reluctant to allow myself to fully commit to them. For a long time I thought I maintained this aloof status because I wanted to be associated with the brooding intellectual type, but now I realize it is because 

I am afraid. I’m afraid of that rushing river that is inviting me to jump in and of allowing the current to carry me, before I know it, to the end of the road. Like Ulysses and his men, I too am tempted by the lotus eaters. I see that I could easily float. 

But, when I do jump into the raging river of life and allow myself to simply flow through a continuous string of activities and duties, I somehow think that I am not living deliberately. I am too passive. 

Although I very well might, I do not want to, as Thoreau says, come to the end of my life and discover that I had not lived. What a haunting thought indeed. I want to live a life in which I am invested in what is expansive. And yes, sometimes that means seeking out experiences, and yes, few lives are free of duty and responsibility, but I can try, I can fight, I can focus on finding moments to devote to expansion. For me, those times manifest through reading, writing, and challenging discussions.

To put this another way, it seems to me that most activity is designed to entertain us while we sit and watch it. I tend, however, to want to be the designer of my entertainment. I want to create and search for meaning. I grow tired and lethargic and bored sitting in the audience day after day. I am bothered by activities that do not encourage reflection, yet, our economy is sort of designed in a way that such activities are promoted and maybe even essential to capitalism. If we all stopped buying stuff, and stopped attending concerts and sports games and theme parks, what industry would support us? But, I do not wish to be

anti-materialistic in this blog. Henry David Thoreau wrote that message far better than I ever could. No, today’s blog is about what centers my life; it’s about pulling myself out of that river that I sometime dive into, it’s about drying off in the sun and, as Dylan sings, it’s about sometimes, just sitting here on this bank of sand and watching the river flow.

Mother and The Lama: Part IV of IV

There is a man I see occasionally at the market. Bath-bubble tumors cover his face, scalp, and neck, disappearing into his shirt. He always smiles, yet I have never heard him speak. Mary is squeamish when she sees him. I only wish to touch each marble that adorns him, but I fear he will not understand, so I remain within myself. Approaching the lonely creates loneliness. It reminds us of our inevitable limits. I can do nothing for this man. We live in different cells, separated by translucent concrete too thick ever to chisel through. Mary knows a clerk at the store. The man is named James, and he lives alone in an assisted-care center. Mary sent him flowers and fruit one year at Christmas. The card read: Thinking of you this Holiday Season. She did not sign it. I was in opposition to the gift. James most likely did not need flowers, and I know few people who believe fruit is a gift.

There is a Christian poem on the cork-board beside the refrigerator. It conveys an experience of a beach walker who finds solace from the idea of Jesus pacing beside him, who merges the two worlds and

finds companionship. He is a Buddha. I am not capable of this merger. I can not see the invisible so clearly. Jason thumb-tacked the poem to the board right before he left. He told Mary to read it when she felt lonely. She thinks of Jason when she reads it and smiles. 

Jason believed that the old American steel workers had it made. They worked twelve hours, went home, ate, kicked the other guy out of bed, climbed in and slept until the cycle started over. Nothing to do with satisfaction, with fulfillment. It is these concepts which destroy us, which produce loneliness. Jason was profound, but the long-shift was no carefree life. Despair arises from no time to despair. Mary’s two uncles worked in the mills. One, blind drunk on whiskey, fell down twenty-four concrete stairs––a pebble over the falls; the other cracked his head on a low beam and pushed a broom on the night shift until he dropped off, like an apple in a windstorm, before he ripened. The ignorant are not blessed. No one is blessed. Mary disagrees.

Mother phoned me before loneliness fully enveloped me, back when enduring seemed possible, even likely. She said she needed to talk about Jason. She said she had never called a parent before, that most of her contacts were from the parentless, from the phone booths of emptiness, from the void, but that Jason was eccentric for an old man, extraordinary for an adult, unbelievable as a child. I listened to the voice in my ear, still unclear of its origin. Beth was dead. The dead have no need for phones.

They have no one to call. Yet Mother continued. Jason is a philosopher, a theologian, a metaphysician. Jason understands. He knows your struggles. He knows Mary’s struggles. He understands loneliness like a wave understands the sea. He knows that some fruit is never harvested. He knows that glaciers creep slower than the watched clock. He knows that despair is woven into Nature’s blanket. He knows why I sit here beside my phone. These intuitions his father ignores, he says. He says his father will not let go, will not drop his dukes, will not allow things to be. Jason is right, Mother told me. She said she knew it before he told her. She said she knew she would one day make such a call. She said she knew the call would be futile, in vain, but necessary, like the warm spell in January, bound to do more harm than good, yet completely right. Mary does not connect to you, she said. Mary needs a soul-mate, a kindred-spirit, she said. Mary will never live through the fighting, she said. Still I wondered who this voice belonged to, yet I could not ask, she knew me, and I knew that somewhere deep within my being, I knew her, that I once lived in her belly, in her mind, in her soul. She said Mary was fortunate to have Jason. She said I did not know Jason. She said time interferes, that she could have loved Jason, that Jason was her yang, that people are often born too many years apart to meet their missing links, that loneliness was this. Then Mother was gone. 

For every gorge in the visible world, there is a mountain in the invisible world. When humans descend into canyons, they climb the mountains of the Buddha land. This is why Mount Everest is so lonely, this is why the summit is the base, why apexes are heavy. I now know this also. It was not apparent to me until many years after Mary left. Leaving me sparring in an empty ring, a flower with no petals, a mirror which does not reflect. I had to stop fighting then. I had to understand the inevitable. I had to surrender.

Grief glues us together, but the sea water soon dissolves all binding, leaving loneliness. Jason called me when Sonny died. Mary and I reunited then, but it did not last. She was higher then, but still George lived on, and our levels differed too much. We pretended for a time that we understood. We played charades in

the dark. We lit candles in every room to celebrate the sunshine. We ran naked around Walden Pond at night, and made love beside the rock pile. How silly we were. People as high as we should have known better. Yet we choose to climb down for a time, to re-create Beth and Drummer and Sonny and Lottie, to be their children once more, to forget all we understood, to pretend love was real, lasting, eternal, to forget Jason, to forget careers, lifestyles, philosophies. One can only forget for a short time. The memory is impossible to erase, and no matter how many dams are constructed, eventually the levees break, and the frolic is washed under twenty miles of loneliness. 

A grown-child’s room is a museum of an age never to return. It is evolution. It is the billions of stars in the sky, all seeming to shine at once, yet a reminder of the confusion of time, the deception of

it all. In Jason's room is a baseball card collection. A music poster is thumb-tacked to the wall. A blue spread covers his mattress. In his desk drawer are remnants of papers and pencil stubs, but in the back of the bottom drawer, crinkled and dried, fragile, is a hand-written note in faded ink: 

Mother is always home. 

705-476-2210 

Sometimes at night, I call Mother. She does not answer anymore. The phone just rings and rings. I hang up after fifteen rings and try again every thirty minutes until I am too tired to remember. Just the number, the dialing, the potential is enough sometimes. Drummer never knew that. I know that now.

George still lives. He will live on and on, he is the lama, he will never die.