Austin's Super TOE

[austintorn@aol.com]

Explaining Time’s Direction, Sleep’s Purpose, and Consciousness

Possibility, a brute force type of ‘Mind’ with all that’s possible superimposed, is the forge of creation and the echoes are our universe at some stage having great potential to be, to continue onward.

But what kind of observation collapses the wave function to form the real from the possible? It can only be consciousness, for consciousness is all the reality we can know. The wave collapse is a one-way street and so then must be time’s arrow. There is no going back[wards]. Observation creates the instantation of matter that persists.

The colors, the words written here—they are consciousness in operation. It is in the trees and the houses—it is the feel of those things. The odours, the mountains beyond—they are all consciousness. Our only portal is consciousness.

Bell’s theorem shows that nothing “out there” has an entirely independent existence. We can never see “out there”; we only ever see the inside of our brain! It only seems literally out there since the brain projects it as being out there. Colors, form, textures, odours, light and everything exist only in the brain as such.

The brain is amazing and can sort a 100 million bits of informatation in an instant. Consciousness must play an active role in the functioning of the brain, for both evolved together. They are intertwined in a process.

Consciousness, perhaps fundamental since it is so unlike all else, must still yet tie into the regular physical and vice-versa. How is consciousness mediated in order to interact with the physical world? It must be at the synaptic cleft that what we call ‘mind’ qualitively meets the brain proper. Here is where the neuron fires or not; here is where a neuron meets other neurons. This must be where data turns into thought. Whatever triggers these switches produces thought in consciousness.

But how does consciousness operate? The nonlocal properties of quantum mechanics must play a role, for any of the real physical forces such as elecromagnetic, weak, and stong would be too disruptive and/or not have enough reach.

We have seen in this thread

http://www.toequest.com/forum/consci...explained.html

that consciousness is of a quantum biological nature; so, then, it is tied to the quantum mechanical process. The electrons reach everywhere, tunneling and hopping about, then take the most useful path, perhaps globablizing the results of the synapses by selecting a thought or an action from the superimposed scenarios of the action’s consequences. This is the will selecting a course.

The long-range electron tuneling that connects synaptic firings throughout the brain into a self-subsaining pattern is consciousness.

This contact, then, between synapses and electrons, reaching across the whole space of the brain, turns on the light of consciousness.

Consciousness occurs above a certain synaptic firing rate and sleep ensues below the limit. Sleep is to allow the ground state to be refreshed. Consciousness has to pause for restoration when it gets worn out. This was so important that evolution retained sleep, a time of grave danger to any species.

Melanin (what is it doing inside the head?) absorbs many of the electrons, but not all of them. Sleep accounts for the rest, allowing molecules to relax their excited states.

Quantum states and ‘mind’ are one and the same thing.

Is it that the Quantum Realm had a ‘thought’ that created a Cosmos?

[austintorn@aol.com]

Feelings and the Body are Inextricably Unified
(And Why Then Life After Death is a Contradiction)

Art can often make discoveries that precede the scientific findings of the same. each can initiate the other. Walt Whitman’s poetry in the ‘Leaves of Grass’, for example, demonstrated the source of spirit, emotion, and feelings as deriving from the body.

It’s not that we have a body, as he might say, but that we are a body. His fusion of body and spirit was revolutionary at the time, but has been borne out, for much of the mind depends on the flesh, such as emotions being generated by the body.

He wrung “beauty out of sweat” in his poems, seeing everything as continuous with everything else, the first poet who wrote poems in which the flesh was not a stranger. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio noted, “The mind is embodied… not just embrained.”

While feelings may seem ephemeral, they are actually rooted in the movements of our muscles and the movements of our insides. They cannot be separated from the body. The human being is irreducible, being the whole of its bodily form.

The nerves of the body are far flung and are connected to the brain via the spinal cord; in reverse, the actionizations of the mind, those imaginings of action without moving, go all the way out to the nerve spindles everywhere.

Emerson, he great poet, had wished against religion, which saw spirit up in the sky, in favor of seeing spirit among “the common, low, and familiar”. This wish, almost literally brought Walt Whitman flowering forth many years later in the magnificence of his immediacy in the singing of himself and nature as embodied by the body. Naturally, experiencing can only be within one’s self.

Whitman saw everyone in his sensual democracy while growing up in Brooklyn, NY. Later, while helping amputees recover during the Civil War, he all the more noted that our matter was entangled with our spirit when the patients reported their missing limbs as being like sensory ghosts and that to lose any part seemed to lessen the sense of one’s own existence.

The first page of ‘Leaves of Grass’ explains Whitman’s sense that mind and matter are impossibly intertwined, even yet now thought by some to be totally opposite substances:

Of physiology from top to toe I sing
not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worth for the
Muse, I say the form complete is worthier far.

William James was the first scientist to realize that Whitman’s poetry was literally true, even often reciting his verse: the body was the source of feelings. The flesh was not just a part of what we felt, it was what we felt.

Whitman always referenced the ensemble, not the parts. It was once thought that the body was the slave to the master of the brain; nay; it is that either is master and slave to the other, for they are unified.

An emotion begins as a perception of bodily change, such as a quickened heart, shallow breathing, and so forth, such as for fear. What emotion would be left without these happenings? This is not, as it seems, a reduction of feeling to a physical state, but the quite opposite point of a constant interaction of the body and brain. That is what makes the living of life.

Modern neuroscience has now found Whitman’s idea to be true—that feelings begin in the flesh—finding the exact nerves and brain regions that make it true. Bodily changes are detected by the cortex, stemming from a fearsome sight, let’s say, the sight having produced them in the first place, but the cortex connects them to the scary sensation and forms a mental image of the feeling—an emulsion of thought and flesh, body and spirit—altogether passing though the vessel of our whole body as the ‘feeling’.

Some patients with brain injuries still have full sensory awareness, but cannot translate these sensations into emotions. A mind that is divorced from the flesh becomes numb.

Even imagining a fast heartbeat can induce an emotion. It is also a discovery of Damasio that feelings generated by the body are an essential element of rational thought. The emotionless patients could not make reasonable decisions.

Oftentimes, unconscious feelings generated by the body even precede conscious decisions. We are the poem that emerges from the unity of body and brain, a fragile unity that exists only while we are alive. Live it, love it, and never forget it. Celebrate life in all its glory, for death is its end.

If it is not enough that upon death the brain decomposes us away, then it is more than enough that the body, too, buries all that we were.

Life is of the living. The supposed after death ‘life’ is neither alive nor living nor anything but a contradiction. Being is inseparate from body and brain.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Freedom
Or
“The Final Laws of the World”

Laplace thought that a ‘demon’, knowing all, could predict all turns of events. So, one could simply compute the data and foretell the future, this becoming known as “social physics”, that which could ever uncover the order behind the motions of humans.

The novelist, George Elliot, who was really Mary Anne Evans, railed against these fixed notions of Laplace, suggesting that while some general directions might be predetermined, there was still a freedom to be within this larger constraint, and, as such, a meaningful part of the will was free to make a life—because the mind was “not cut in marble”. Her novels reflected this theme.

She wanted to be ‘a scientific poet; her loving partner wished to be ‘a poet in science’. They, a perfect match, found a love that “defies all calculations”.

In one of her novels, some sullen gamblers awaited their luck or not by the turn of the wheel or what was the lay of the cards. But then there was, too, a lively vivacious lady there whose outlook was full of creative promise.

Some thought that Darwin’s revelations made for nothing more than a meaningless life built on the edifice of randomness. Well, evolution by natural selection did do this, really, but Mary Ann read this as the very road to freedom, for it removed the fixedness of destiny from science and even from the all-knowing demon, not to mention God. Random variations made life’s narrative unknowable.

Then came the chaos of entropy. This disorder was real, and it was even increasing. Pure entropy couldn’t be solved, for not even the demon could know everything. It also came out that physical laws were really only approximations.

Later, of course, after Mary Anne’s time, came the discovery of the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics, this being a fundamental trait of nature.

Then neurogenesis was found, the formation of new neurons during one’s life to be used as they may, increasing the already malleable properties of the brain that could reform its marbles.

Even DNA is seen to vary from the noise within cells. Plus, genes do not always express themselves equally. Genetics directs, but it does not precisely predict.

While no one wishes for completely random decisions, it is our purposelessness that lets us make a life for ourselves with the meanings that we can choose within our form.

We are the equations without an answer. We solve ourselves. We are free to be, for there are no strings attached. Luck, or not, can be made by us.

(Napoleon, who nearly took over the world, fired Laplace after he had only worked for six weeks.)

Or, who knows, but, just in case, one might not just sit back to await the determined reign of fate.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Memory Explained

The past is never past,
At least while we are alive.
Our memories, though volatile,
Being both ephemeral and re-cognized,
No doubt have some basic persistence.

But how does this past remain,
And what kind of substance
Could there be
That lives outside time?

What makes it so strong
That it can survive
The merciless climate of the brain?

And in what storm’s eye does it reside
In the center of the maelstrom
Of the change and growth of cells?

What be this grain that persists
Among the shifting sands of time?

All this we shall show
And answer soon
In the search for lost time.

Our rememberings try to describe
Reality as it really was experienced,
But, that sheer essence may elude,
Although some general outline remains.

Then, too, we add to it, subtract from it
And reconnect by association to the new.

Lo, the subjective metes out our reality;
While the objective lies furthest removed.

Perhaps, we may have a memory
That returns from a taste of butterscotch
From which Grandma’s home then arises,
And then of connections further becoming.

How do some crumbs, here, and of the past
Waft back as vapours unto our present?

Do the senses of smell and taste,
Yet more fragile and more insubstantial,
Bear a unique burden of memory,
As more enduring and faithful,
Rising up past the ruins of the rest?

Just noting the butterscotch,
Back then,
Without its tasting,
Would not have made the mark.

Everything is connected
Within the mind,
Each germ of recollection
Ballooning into a revelation.

Time mutates some ancient pastimes,
And so they are not wholly recaptured,
And sometimes rather fallible,
Even altered more by the call to mind,
Yet they are there.

A memory begins as a changing
Connection between two neurons.
The strength of the synapse changes
So that the neurons can communicate.
Thus, the taste of memory
Also activates
The neurons downstream
To do with one’s childhood days.

The neurons have been
Inextricably entwined,
Yet, too, reconsolidate upon recall.

How do we remember
Long after we have forgotten?
How do such apparitions reappear,
Some with no suggestion of their origin,
And sink and swell, float and change,
Withering the acids of time’s reflux?

The memory making process need proteins
For the cellular construction of remembrance,
Yet the life of a protein is but 14 days.

And some hippocampal neurons die,
And some are born anew,
Yet some memory seems immutable.

Does the mind constantly reincarnate?

Aye, our memories must be made
Of a material stronger than cells,
And must be quite specific as well.

While each neuron has but a single nucleus,
It has a teeming mass of dendritic branches,
Connecting to other neurons
At dendritic synapses,
Such as the branches of two trees
Touching in a forest.

So, it is at these tiny crossings
That memories are made;
Not in the trunk of the neuronal tree,
But in its sprawling canopy.

What marks a specific branch
As a memory?
What molecule awaits
The taste of butterscotch?

It has to turn on mRNA
To help make the proteins.

It’s name is
Cyptoplasmic polyadenenylaton
Element binding protein,
A tough assignment of a name
For even my memory to recall,
So, how about CPEB, for short.

Since it was in the brain’s memory center,
Scientists looked for it in sea slugs,
Amazingly finding it in the slug’s neurons.

Upon removing it, the sea slugs
Could not remember a darn thing!

But how does it work,
Existing outside of time?

Well, it has a series of repetitions
In its amino acid repetitions:

QQQLQQQQQQBQLQQQQ,

Where Q is glutamine.

Looking for similar odd repetitions,
What looked like a prion was found!
They are pathogens
Of earth’s nastiest diseases.

However, they are everywhere,
And have two distinct states,
As no other proteins do,
One active and one inactive.

Without guidance from above,
They can switch states
And alter proteomic structure
Without changing DNA,

And then transmit their
New, infectious structure
To neighboring cells
With no transfer of genetic material.

Biology’s sacred rules are violated!

In the brain, CREB proteins are
Sturdy enough to resist time,
They being virtually indestructible.

Yet, they have plasticity,
Being free of the genetic substrate,
To change their shapes,
Creating or erasing a memory.

When we think,
The neurotransmitters
Serotonin and dopamine
Are released by neurons,
Which switch the CPEB protein
Into its active state
By changing their very structure.

The activated CPEB marks
A specific dendritic branch
As a memory,
Recruiting the requisite mRNA
Needed to maintain
Long-term remembrance.

And, yet, prions have
An element of randomness
Built into their structure
Due to the inscrutable
Laws of protein folding
And stoichiometry,
Even becoming active
For no reason.

Ah, such contingency
Is just like Proust predicted:
The remembrance of things past
May not be the remembrance
Of things as they were.

Due to unpredictable and unstable prions,
We have some essential randomness,
For memory obeys nothing outside of itself.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Magical Revelations of Vision

Instead of describing how the visual systems V1-V5 transform blobs and shards of energy into a finely integrated and unified image of merged forms, edges, colors, textures, reflections, and more, I shall try to show it outright, as did Cezanne in his incomplete post impressionist art that begged the mind for its completion, but, at least, I will progress each image to its completion from the hints of the lines and blurs in the raw video images direct from “out there”.

Our vision creates the world, but more like interprets waves to put a better face upon them to form our reality, as, too, I tried to do in these composited scenes of reality in which I attempted to create nature as it might be seen on a perfect day at the perfect time. They were done in the still of the night in the quiet darkness when I worked as a night desk clerk in a hotel somewhere on the edge of forever.

At first you may not see in this video, but then you will see:

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/ca...231118yqTD2SE9

I fly a starship across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
And I'll be back again, and again and again and again and again.

(From song in the video.)



Bridge Over a River
(by Cezanne)

[austintorn@aol.com]

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER WE DIE?

We die "little deaths" all the time. Our atoms change, some of our memories go away and some new ones reappear, although I realize that it is the core of memories that defines us as us. It's just that we are hardly the same person now as when we were much younger.

We had "death" before birth, too, and now there is life after birth. Is there life only during life?

If we had amnesia and began learning the world anew, then one might say that one as the previous person was "dead" and that it is our new life that counts, one not even missing the old one.

And, while the "big death" is much more than any of these "little deaths", it is that our atoms go on to reside in a new person eventually. It's not like there is any continuity of memory, but more like that any narrative will do.

As for really knowing all, that is the TOE, meaning that we know that we can't know. This is a relief and so then we can go about our life with the ultimate freedom to be.

(Now and Zen)

Everything that is part of us—our cells, tissues, organs and organ systems—has come about over billions of years because it proved successful in the great survival stakes during our perilous evolutionary descent with modification.
The brain, being no exception, evolved, in part, to allow a creature to learn from what happens in its life, to retain key elements that could influence future actions.

We are geared for self-preservation. We will do anything to avoid facing the possibility that who we are now cannot continue. We ourselves are mainly the cause that we are most interested in. The self is preoccupied with staying alive, which is why we are still around today. It is a prime biological function to be afraid of death, and so the self, as thus contrived, is able to fully play its crucial survival role.
We want to equip our brain with a soul that offers us an escape when the brain dies since the self can hardly ever come to terms with its own extinction.

From a subjective standpoint, we are all born equal and undifferentiated (before that ‘we’ were dead), but as mature selves we make a distinction between the individual and the surroundings. Still, the brain keeps changing throughout life, in a pattern of the shifting flux of its neurons. We gain and lose memories and feelings, essentially creating a new person over and over again. The self is thus not so rock solid as it seems. These moment-to-moment changes differ from death only in degree. In essence, they are identical, although at the opposite ends of the spectrum. So, we are not static things. Other neural networks will come to be in other, future people, albeit with an “amnesia” of what went on before in the brains of the previous others.

Why should we be happy about this? We never can be, because the ‘I’ cannot operate outside of its own boundaries. The only viable alternative is to think of a way in which it is possible to ever continue on.

What will it be like to be a part of someone else after we die, with our own particular narrative of life cast aside and forgotten? This is the ‘zen’ of now and then.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Brain Waves

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5VhzrF_J2g

[austintorn@aol.com]

For the SuperWeight Championship of the Universe

God Vs. Science

Round 1

In the Beginning, God played an active role in the Universe after creating it, and upon the Earth, which is supposedly only a few thousand years old.

God won this round, hands down, for even the little science there was at the time thought that man was the special center of creation and that the sun and the stars revolved around the Earth. God and evil spirits caused physical ills and mental ills called ‘sins’. Even fun was sin’s evil cousin. The Bible was constituted out of old Jewish legends. The numerous many many hundreds of gods that had come to reign before were defeated by Jehovah.

However, three centuries ago, the realm of natural law was extended and the Kingdom of the Supernatural began to shrink away, eventually vanishing from all of existence, but we get ahead of ourselves…

God made Adam fully formed, without a navel;
Now, an asterisk on page one of the
Philippine Catholic bible says no,
Don’t take it literally—it’s just not so.


Round 2

God came out still claiming that He guided the Earth safe through its orbit around the the center sun in space, for by now Earth’s orbit was known to be true.

Newton demolished this notion with his laws of motion. God no longer ruled Nature. The world was free to run its course.

Isaac: Revelations

There is a mote in space known as Earth,
A pale blue dot of fluff orbiting a hearth,
Due but to Newton’s laws of motion, there’s
No Godly hand guiding it safe around the sun.

The vanishing had begun. The heavens and the Earth were one. Stars and galaxies went on and on. We became the center of nothing.

God was losing his definition in stone,
As his sworn traits disappeared one by one.
There’s a retreat to higher ground, that is,
Outside of space, time, and all existence.

Round 3

God claimed to appear to us only in spiritual ideas and thoughts within our minds, making Him responsible for the good and bad in human behavior. This metaphor was found to be unnecessary for the source of human character and behavior. Some still clung to the life-line ropes of His intervention, yeta few claimed that He did not involve Himself in daily operations.

God no longer intercedes in causes,
Except in the nebulous cures they claim,
Like improved hearing, or made one safe from harm,
But He never heals amputees, or appears.

For the latest is that he must stay hidden,
Even if the miracles of his son
Were very much out in the open to see—
Better that no one know of him clearly.

So there is faith—blind trust in the unknown.
Believe or be tortured—or has this, too,
The Word of God, become inoperable?
Only the supernatural realm remains.


Round 4

God still wished to intervene in the natural world, saving lives here and there, but striking planes from the sky, sometimes, ever adjusting the smooth operations of natural law, expressing His inscrutable purpose.

Yet, scientific knowledge, cosmology, fundamental physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology and psychology began totally undermine religious views on every front. God was losing His strength to be. Science loomed large and ponderous.

Religious knowledge, which professes absolute truth, fails and fades, while science, which professes fallibility, succeeds and grows stronger.

And then there were the strange myths.

Why is the Old Testament out of use
In many churches, in favor of the new?
Was it divine revelation or not?
Do God’s fits not become a good role model?

Round 5

With God in retreat, it was thought that at least He had instilled a spiritual essence in us called the soul.

What vanity to claim such full self-importance!
To demand so much from the universe…

That you would claim angelic vapor that
Drives a living being, provides character,
Morality, and consciousness, on top of
A burdensome, fragile, and expensive
Organ such as a brain not to be used?

Science collapsed the idea of the elan vital when synthesis of substance began. Life’s chemical were just chemicals!

Yet, it was still said that God made all, albeit strange and full of problems of unintelligent design, for how else could it have been?

Darwin told us how. Natural selection explained the mysteries of evolution and the variety of life. The continuum extended from animals to us. We were no longer special, differing from chimps by not much. The discovery of genetics later collaborated all.

So, because of evolution’s record,
God’s bible was no longer written in
Plain text for the common man, but now is
Open to some guesses and interpretations.

He just is, the same as the universe
Cannot be, leaving us all on our own,
Just as is the case that’s seen by science;
Now we’re a planned random accident!

The truth of what you are: mammal, organic;
Past narcissism and self-adulation,
To the bioelectrochemical organism
Evolved upon a planet near a star,

In the long and winding mindless way of
Slow time, dust, and selection by death that
Sifts the best from the rest: evolution.

Round 6

More devastating blows landed. Einstein's’ theories extended Newton’s laws to the very large universal scales, while quantum mechanics brought us to the reach of the very tiniest of objects. There was no place left. God was nowhere to be seen, having vacated the arena.

OK, so science has found that the universe
Operates just as it would without Him,
That evil spirits don’t lead to bad health,
That brain imbalances can lead to sins.

Devil, Hell, the bible, intercession, etc.,
Are all gone—he is undefinable—
Protected from the knowing—safe, away:
Yet claimable as an unseeable unknowable!

Round 7

Science then goes on to astronomical heights. The first supernova since 1572 appears in some small galaxies nearby, called the Magellanic Clouds. Though its radiation to us began a while back, we see it alight upon us as a ‘now’—these immerse quantities of energy of the star-stuff maelstrom.

An astronomical technician in Chile steps outside for a smoke, and being observant, spots it. A large burst of neutrinos is expected. Astrophysicists call their colleagues deep beneath the Earth’s surface in the United States, Japan, and Europe. They said, “Look in your tanks. You have already made a great discovery.”

They were right. Each of the observatories had detected a few tens of neutrinos at about the same time.

Consider the magnitude of this achievement. They had tested all of of physics! They had predicted the events in a star’s death throes by using theories from nearly every part of physics: special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, nuclear physics, atomic physics and elementary particles. If any of these theories had been in error by much, the prediction of neutrinos would have failed.

The laws of nature known to us on Earth must be the same hundreds of thousands of light years away and also the same back when that star exploded hundred of thousands of years ago. God had been pushed completely out of the ring.

There was no one miracle of life leaping into any living form. Slightly dead chemicals became definitely alive chemicals, this being nothing spectacular. We even have evidence of ancient algae from 3.5 billion years ago. This was when liquid water was available. It still took more than two billion years for more complicated life to appear. There was no Garden of Eden.

God’s become aloof—he just started the Bang
And let the design gradually evolve
Over thirteen billion years into man,
The endless universe a mere backdrop.

He is the intelligent designer that
Is deducible from not understanding design,
But wait, he is of infinite design—
Now I know that something had to make him!

(to be continued)

[austintorn@aol.com]

Round 8

The Knockout

The three-degree blackbody radiation was found, the CMBR. It comes to us from all directions. Nonuniformities in the radiation were found at last, those that formed the galaxies

The QM realm has proved to be a fundamentally fuzzy state, virtual pluses and minuses popping out of it; that is, there is no cause, there are no hidden variables. This is not quite a ‘nothing’. Virtual particles may cancel, but they go back into the QM realm. If ‘nothing’ were exactly zero, then this ‘vacuum’ would not be vague and fuzzy. Thus, an absolute ‘nothing’ cannot exist. Its very definition means that it is not to be, that it, it could not even be there at all. There were quantum jitters; there was only possibility forever.

Often, the QM virtual particles spring into existence and vanish quickly, although they can interact and stay real. If not, they have to vanish so quickly that we cannot directly see them. If we could see them, then the QM realm would not be a vacuum, but, if they were not there the vacuum would be exactly ‘nothing’ and so it would violate the vague and fuzzy rule.

None of these happenings are invisible, like supernatural claims, for the fuzzy ‘nothing’ has effects that we can compute and measure.

So, there is no cause, no purpose! And no predetermination. Does this make us go into a deep dark funk? No, for it is our glory that we are free to be. Our responsibility is our own doing.

God was dead, gone, and counted out, having never been.

Terrorists still go to war in his name;
It’s all going astray—the design fails;
If I knew where the great designer stays,
I’d question his mysterious(insane) ways.



What is left of the vanishing Phantom?
More features have fallen than I’ve listed,
The extraordinary superstition
Remains only as a shadow of a wish.




Never fear…

[austintorn@aol.com]

The Solidarity of the Concordance

The blend of the coalition grows upon itself,
Striving for the dynamic-balance—of light
And dark, Yin and Yang, and wrong and right.

Reality’s not found in separate actions,
But in related events blended in twilight.

The concept of Classicism accentuates
Order and clarity of thought, simplicity,
Restraint, balance, dignity, and
A mistrust of emotion and excess;

However, since it relies on imitation and
The acceptance of objective standards,
It may lack spontaneity, and degenerate
Into excessive traditionalism and empty formalism.

Romanticism embraces an exaltation
Of the feelings, an individualism,
With new modes of imagination,
Of freedom of form, spontaneity,
Self-expression, and subjectivity.

It began, at least in art, music, and literature,
As a revolt against 18th century doctrines
Of restraint, forms and rules, decorum,
Stagnation, and blind tradition.

However, romanticism and classicism
Are now taken as more general terms.

Some exemplars of their contrast are:
Passion as opposed to reason,
The whole against the details,
The Yin facing the Yang,
The right vs. the left side of the brain,
“don’t confuse me with emotion”
Or “don’t confuse me with facts”,
The sails confronting the rudder of the soul.

This epitome may become a battlefield,
Or it may grace a smooth sailing ship.

How easy they are not transformed,
These apparently opposing forces
That may wage war upon the other,
But how tremendous they can be
In their bond of confederacy.

Pure reason, ruling all alone,
Is a force confining and stale;
While passion, unattended,
Is a flame that burns
To its own end.

Poetry is an ideal of the unison:
The right side of the brain
Provides the inspiration;
The left side devises the rhyme.

An utter, absolute classicist
Or romanticist is an extremist!
S/he honors one worthy guest
In the house above the other,
And so loses the love and faith of both.

Witness the average classicist at IBM,
One who knows little of the humanities,
One who ever works through lunch,
Never having the time by to hear of life,
Making every decision by the book
But none from the heart.

Or the total romanticist:
One who can’t even hold a job,
even taking drugs, and losing all control.

The writing of this page—this analysis—
Is rather a classicist undertaking.
But I do not live by the unbending way
And therefore my songbird
Is never imprisoned within.

Perhaps, it chooses to be here, classically,
Or perhaps it will, at any time of day,
Burst forth and enjoy a total feeling.

Nor does a long wild night of lovemaking
Mean that you’ve gone bonkers.
Life is full of spikes of valleys and mountains—
It is only when one can’t merge the two
Or at least make jumps between
That one may need some reflection.

How can there be any sort of resolution
Of a dichotomy in which one side
Expresses itself so logically and
The other in emotions and images?

Well, if either your sails or rudder be broken,
You will soon be dead in the water...

Therefore, the discord and rivalry
Of one’s elements must become
Rhythm and all sweet melody!

It’s not the same for everyone,
But the knowledge of
The ‘contrast’ itself is the first step…

Therefore, let your blended soul exalt
Your reason to the height of passion,
That it may sing and fly about,
Letting it direct your passion with reason,
That your passion may live and survive
Through its daily death and resurrection, but
In effect, ever arising from its own ashes.

Now, no one can ever achieve
the ultimate and perfect balance
between classicism and romanticism,
But for the rare times in the ‘zone’,
And indeed, this balancing attempt
Itself smacks of classicism!

And so we all have leanings—
And that’s what I mean when I say
The tilt is toward romanticism.

Emotion, slightly favored, rules,
But every so often I do check in
with logic and analytical reason.

Thereby, I enjoy the world, mainly,
Because, like many of you,
I am much impressed by it wonders…

Without perception’s deeper depiction,
One finds little that excites—
Not noticing much, ever in a hurry,
And seldom having the time…

Two other poor relatives
Of classicism and romanticism
Are substance and surface glory.

The romanticist in me likes the veneer
Of the shiny red car or motorcycle,
But the classicist in me would like
To know that the vehicle operates well,
Even be able to take it much apart,
For that is the very substance.

When I maintain my car or cycle well,
shine it up, and then speed off
Into the country sunshine
With the wind on my face,
then I have the best of both worlds!

Now, I really don’t know all the answers—
I just like to tug at the hem of the garment
In which life’s mysterious dualities are clothed.

As ever as in all good marriages,
“The oak tree and the cypress
Grow not in each other’s shadow”.

People involved in the arts may
Like to listen to music while they work,
In order to deactivate the left side of the brain
By giving it something innocuous to focus on.

Personally, I often dream up many ideas
While listening to music that moves me deeply,
For then the imaginative power
Of the brain’s right hemisphere
Is free and inspired to soar unbounded.

Yet, I do lean toward romanticism...
Perhaps it is my nature nurtured,
Or perhaps I feel a need to counteract
The overabundance of classicism in the world,
Or perhaps because in romanticism there is grandeur,
While in classicism there is but cold logic
And endless analytical thought.

But even with these leanings,
The good romanticists never forgets
That it is classicism that pays the bills
That authorizes some indulgence.

I have some hope, that,
In any totally classical person,
No matter how stern or dull s/he be,
That one day, somehow, somewhere,
There will come some small measure,
But then ever-luring triumph of jubilation.

Yes, the desire to be orderly and factual
is one part of he human species,
But there are other yearnings in every person,
The desire to be imaginative and unrestrained in
Expressing personal emotions
Warmly and freely flowing,
And to take in art, music, literature,
As well as escalate the way one lives a life
From an illuminating flame fed from the self,
A source of lucid experience that
Can usher wisdom and fervency,
As the means to the rounded truth.

Then luckily, these may be some of its aspects:
Sentiment, celebration of nature, interest in the past,
A new emphasis on feeling and the senses,
Even actually enjoying melancholy and sadness.

Thence comes love of freedom, mysteries,
Even fascinating figures and heroes,
The allegorical, some delight in whimsy,
The improbable and the ‘impossible’,
Of legend, folklore, and mythology,
An awe before the immensity of what is—
The Earth as a friend and
The sky as a warm blanket,
And certainly the uniqueness of all selves.

The curious blend never lets one down,
Ever keeping one centered but ranging.

So, extroversion entertains, at large,
While love’s introversion is great one-on-one.

Intuition and sensing
Can sustain each the other
In a magnificent fusion.

Thinking and feeling combined
Are of an unbeatable synergy,
The being coalesced and intermixed.

Sensing the general direction but
Not exactly knowing one’s next move
Is of a spontaneous higher ‘order’.

There looms the classical planning of
A magnificently grand adventure,
Whether triumphant or of glorious failure
Always of the superb and the sublime.

Merge these ingredients, until smooth,
This loving mix, mingling and combining,
Soon melding into the ‘zone’, well integrated,
Stirred, whisked, and folded in and out, the commingling
That leads to the harmony of amalgamation’s union,
The marriage and the synthesis, the very admixture
Of the concoction of life’s ever-during brew.

The parts all sum to the whole flow, so,
Life must be more like a mosaic done
Than some focused laser tunnel of sun.
Since few lengthy pleasures are lent to us,
We build a stained-glass window of small ones.

Oh, thou soul, dare to live near the edge;
Brave the walk of the line, balancing fun
There between adventure and misfortune—
For the greatest blunder in life is to
Repeatedly fear that you might make one.

Hail! Lord Byron’s Golden Mean extends:
Let us have wine, lovers, song, and laughter—
Water, chastity, prayer the day after.
Such we’ll alternate the rest of our days—
So, on the average, we’ll make Hereafter!

Wholeness arrives by mixing the suspension:
Classicists drone toward dull perfection,
Romanticists drown in feeling’s affection;
Worse, others alternate between extremes—
It’s not this nor that, but a joined direction.

Harmony then rolls along, round and round:
Each holding within it the seed of the other—
Yin reaches climax, then retreats in Yang’s favor,
A cyclic movement of rotational symmetry:
Rounded life is the blend of Yin/Yang together.

The perfect balance may still call upon us:
Edges dissolve when opposites are balanced—
Time and dimensional space are transcended.
Everything joins yet remains as itself,
For what “is not” is as great as what “is”.