The Phone Call

One of the consequences of having suffered the death of a loved one (my husband of 34 years died three months ago) is the people around you get a little nervous. They are afraid of reminding you of your loss (as if there’s any chance you’ll forget), or of exposing you to something that will make your broken heart bleed anew.

This happened to me this weekend, when I was at a friend’s house. For some time she has wanted to share some of this years’ Oscar-nominated short films with me, and this night we settled in to watch her favorite, ‘The Phone Call.’ It quickly became apparent that the film is about a man who is in despair over his wife’s death, and my friend hit the pause button, horrified, and apologized for her thoughtlessness. I replied that not only do I not want people to censor themselves around me, I also have to get past any reluctance to see or read about people encountering death, because that is one of the great themes of art and literature.

In fact, I have found that art provides one of the best solaces for grief (being outdoors is another). And I am not alone in this. I’ve read a few ‘grief memoirs’ recently and every person has said that poetry helped them cope.

If you haven’t seen ‘The Phone Call,’ I’m going to give some spoilers so you might want to stop reading now until you’ve seen this beautiful film. Here's the trailer:

A Tribute to Arthur Hancock

Do not weep for me,

This is not my true country, I have lived banish’d from my true country, I now go back there,

I return to the celestial sphere where everyone goes in his turn.

—Walt Whitman, Salut au Monde!

My husband, my lover, my friend, Arthur Hancock, died in February of 2015. He would ask that we not weep for him; he lived a life filled with love, creativity, and adventure and believed that in death he just moved on to his next adventure in the celestial sphere.

I knew Arthur for almost 35 years, which was half of his life. We were soul mates. That can be a cliché for couples that live together a long time, but in our case it went far beyond the cliché.

Arthur was an extraordinary person. He thought for himself and lived by his own rules. He was fiercely independent. He was brilliant.

Arthur had a great heart, honest and open. Open to all creatures, from all walks of life. Open to all ideas. Open to art, music, laughter, and love. Being open allowed Arthur to be easily moved by a song, or a poem, or a person’s story. As a result, he could see deeper into people’s hearts than most people.

Arthur was passionate about many things, chief among them love, truth, and music.

He was a natural-born musician; music was in his heart and soul. He played guitar and sang, and his greatest love was folk music. Arthur knew hundreds of songs; he had a song list with about 400 “requestable songs” on it, and when he played a club he’d pass the lists around. You could call out a song and he’d just launch into it. If you asked him to play a song he didn’t know he could always fake a verse or two.

He was also an amazing entertainer. He lived to be on stage in front of an audience. He loved songs from many genres—folk, old standards, blues, jazz, rock-and-roll, country—so it was easy to find a song for everyone.

But Arthur's interest in music was not just because it pleased him to play. It also stemmed from the fact that he loved to please others. Arthur loved playing for kids, and had all sorts of silly songs and silly voices to make them even more special. When he was on stage performing, he would work tirelessly, pouring out sweat, never taking a break, if he felt he was making his audience happy.

Arthur was an incredible songwriter. He wrote over 90 songs, and John Denver recorded one, entitled 'Relatively Speaking.' His songs are mostly about his passions: truth and universal love. He also wrote songs about relationships, but many of these expand out to universal love. I feel you could build a spiritual practice around Arthur's songs; his songs are both uplifting and inspiring; they are mind-expanding and heart-opening. You can hear all of his songs on his YouTube channels, Songs in the Key of Consciousness and We Are All Innocent by Reason of Insanity (the musical).

Arthur could spontaneously create a song to fit any situation and mood. In the first half of our relationship we had a cat, Fluffles, who lived for sixteen years. We had eight or ten songs about her we loved to sing. Arthur and his daughter Clea had many they’d written together.

Arthur had a great sense of humor. He loved to laugh. He loved silly movies like Airplane (our first date), Where’s Poppa, and Polyester, and TV shows like MST3K, Black Adder, and Fawlty Towers. He loved being silly. Even as an adult, even in his 60s, he would be silly and playful.

Whenever he and his daughter were together in a store they’d always misbehave in the funniest ways.

Arthur brought this silliness to Blackberry Bear, a character he played in a TV show we produced. Five-year-old kids loved Blackberry, and at the same time he threw in subtle jokes to keep the adults amused. (Watch a PSA Blackberry Bear did for the local hospital, or the Visitor Information Program, which Blackberry hosted.)

Arthur was even silly while we conducted business. For years we had a video business; we sold the nature videos we had filmed and produced at tourist shops around western North Carolina. When we visited our retailers Arthur would tell stories and jokes to the clerks or owners, always lightening up the transaction, or he’d go off and play with the store cat, all of whom he knew by name (while often not knowing the names of the people).

A friend called Arthur a “gentle giant.” He was a big man physically, but he also had an outsize personality. People always remembered Arthur. When we’d met someone casually sometime in the past, they would rarely remember me, but as soon as they saw Arthur they’d say, “Oh yes, now I know who you are!”

And he was gentle, kind, and tenderhearted. Arthur was very loving and fair. I don’t remember us ever having a conversation about sharing household duties. It seems as if this was just a given in our relationship from the first, that we would share equally. And it was a very natural division, I don’t remember ever negotiating about who would do what. Arthur cleaned bathrooms, vacuumed, dusted, washed windows, and did the dishes.

Arthur loved animals and was very tender with them. One of my favorite photographs of him is in Tahiti, posed in front of a line of stray cats feasting on the canned tuna Arthur had brought them.

Arthur had an amazing mind. He was very intelligent, but had been born into a working-class Southern family and had no chance to go to college. So Arthur educated himself by reading literature and poetry. His memory was astonishing (as you might imagine given the fact that he knew hundreds of songs) and he could think of a passage from a book or film for every occasion.

Arthur loved literature and some of his favorite authors were William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Vladimir Nabokov, and Evelyn Waugh. He was 18 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the night of the assassination he stood under a streetlight and read Walt Whitman’s poem about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” 

He also loved astronomy. Arthur was at Cape Canaveral when the Apollo 11 crew took off for the moon in 1969, and we saw a few shuttle launches, including one on the base where we were so close we could feel the sound of the lift-off in our bodies. Arthur loved looking at Hubble telescope images, and was so conversant with the large numbers involved in cosmology that he could sing Monty Python’s “Universe Song,” filled with statistics about the size of the universe, completely from memory.

In his late 20s Arthur decided to see the Himalayas, and spent six months in Nepal. He had some amazing adventures there, including a two-week hike that took him within a few miles of Mt. Everest.

While there he contracted Guillan-Barre Syndrome and was paralyzed from the neck down for a year. He regained the ability to walk and play the guitar, but had physical limitations from that point on. Yet he never complained, and many casual acquaintances never knew there was anything wrong with him. Despite his disability, Arthur managed to accomplish much in his life.

Arthur took numerous risks and lived on the outside of our culture, never wanting to compromise just to make a living; he questioned himself and life carefully and deeply. As a result he had a very unusual perspective on life. And he wasn’t afraid to be outrageous. 

Arthur spoke his mind; he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. I really admired that about him.

Arthur had some extremely profound spiritual experiences on LSD when he was a young man, and these informed his life and his work.

One of the lessons he learned from his acid trips was a profound love of nature. This found expression in our nature videos. Arthur could find as much beauty in a ditch as in an awesome vista. On his first LSD trip he saw that a patch of dirt was the jewelry case of God, and that perception never left him.

Another legacy of his LSD trips was an unshakeable faith in a reality beyond the physical. He had such deeply profound experiences that he never doubted that there is a God, an absolute Truth, underlying life. The reality of this Truth, which is Love, informed his songs and his philosophy.

Our first book, The Game of God, is the fruit of his LSD visions. Arthur spent five years seriously and soberly developing the philosophy that forms the basis of that work and our next book, We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity. He developed a philosophy that was comprehensive: it covered theology, the mechanics of the physical universe, and psychology. The heart and essence of Arthur’s philosophy is love. To quote Whitman again, “No other theme but love.”

Arthur and I produced a TV show in 2010 for our local public access channel where we discussed our ideas. You can watch them here at our 'A Question of Meaning' YouTube channel (we did 45 shows in all).

Arthur also wrote a memoir, Exposing Myself: A Life of Sex and Truth, in which he describes the adventures of his life and the development of his philosophy.

Arthur felt that most people hide their sex life when they write their memoirs; he felt that someone needed to be honest about this aspect of life and that he was the right man for the job. He dreamed of a day when people wouldn’t have to be ashamed about sex, and was an advocate for freeing our culture from our Puritan past.

One day not long after Arthur and I met in San Francisco we were walking through a park at sundown. The sky was banded with clouds, and the clear patches were turning a brilliant but soft green between the dark red and purple clouds. Arthur pointed and said, “That turquoise—there—that’s my idea of the color of paradise.” That color spoke of paradise to me also, and for all of our years together we would look for the color of paradise in the sunset.

Arthur loved me intensely. I loved Arthur intensely. We were both incredibly blessed to love the one who loved us.

Arthur and I were together 24/7/365. We worked together and wrote books together. We made music together. We made love together.

I will miss this extraordinary man for the rest of my life.

Let Pi Remind us of the Mystery of Life

There’s a lot of celebration for this year’s Pi Day, since today’s date expressed in numbers, 3.14.15, is the first five digits in the (apparently) infinite sequence of pi.

We usually think of science and mathematics as hard sciences that are all about dispelling the mysteries of life. Yet mathematics can be seen as enshrining the mystery of life in a way that perhaps can speak to our modern, materialistic world better than religious or spiritual language.

Pi in particular is a great reminder that human knowledge is still just scratching the surface of the truth of what is. Computers have allowed mathematicians to compute the value of pi to trillions of digits, and there is still no discernible pattern—it is infinitely singular (that is, it goes on forever but can only be expressed by itself, it can’t be condensed). At the same time, pi is derived from an extremely simple formula: the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.

As mathematics professor Manil Suri wrote in today’s New York Times, (“On Pi Day Celebrate Math’s Enigmas”):

But pi’s infinite randomness can also be seen more as richness. What amazes, then, is the possibility that such profusion can come from a rule so simple: circumference divided by diameter. This is characteristic of mathematics, whereby elementary formulas can give rise to surprisingly varied phenomena. For instance, the humble quadratic can be used to model everything from the growth of bacterial populations to the manifestation of chaos. Pi makes us wonder if our universe’s complexity emerges from similarly simple mathematical building blocks…Pi reveals how limited human knowledge is, how there exist teeming realms we might never explore.

This simplicity is what I find so amazing about fractals: these are incredibly complex forms mimicking objects in the real world like an ocean’s shoreline, a river’s delta, or a tree’s branches, but the equations that produce the fractal designs are extremely simple. Learn more about fractals here. The website describes fractals in this way:

A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.

How much more mystical can you get?

There are many other examples of life’s mysteries being beautifully expressed in mathematics. The Fibonacci sequence describes the growth of plants (for example sunflower blossoms), nautilus shells, and dragonfly wings. Click here to watch a beautiful animation of how the Fibonacci sequence unfolds in living things.

If you’d like to learn more about how mathematics and the mystery of life are intertwined, I recommend Sacred Geometry: Deciphering the Code, by Stephen Skinner. This interesting and beautifully designed book shows how nature is filled with geometrical forms: plant growth following the Fibonacci sequence and the golden mean, crystals’ seven basic shapes, and the spirals found in shells, horns, hurricanes, and galaxies.

The book also shows the incredible genius of the ancient Greeks in figuring so much of geometry out, and utilizing it in understanding the world and the stars. Mr. Skinner then shows how the people of these ancient cultures used geometry to design their sacred spaces—temples, pyramids, and the megalithic monuments like Stonehenge.

So celebrate Pi Day—eat a piece of pie contemplating the awesomeness of the relation between circumference and diameter of your pie’s original circle—and embrace the mystery of the universe!

Life is a Mix of Good and Bad

Last year my 12-year-old niece and I started a “reading club”—it’s an exclusive club, just the two of us. It’s been a lot of fun, and it’s given me an interesting insight into her life and the things she thinks about. It’s also given me a chance to read some wonderful young-adult novels that I would never have known about otherwise.

Last summer three of the books we read were A Wrinkle in Time (which I had read when I was a teen-ager), Where the Mountain meets the Moon, and Tuck Everlasting, and an interesting theme emerged from these three very different books: an understanding of Taoist principles, in particular the yin-yang aspect of life.

What I realized was that I have a tendency to dream about and work for a life where there are no problems; a utopian vision of sunshine and happiness everlasting. And I don’t think I’m alone with this tendency. We dream about our relationships—our fairy-tales end with the couple riding off into the sunset, living “happily ever after.” Our politicians prey on this thinking, promising us that they will deliver the policies that will solve all of our problems. Many of us work hard all our lives, building a retirement fund that we imagine will finance living the life of our dreams, free of stress and hassle.

But these dreams always set us up for disappointment, because they are based on the flawed belief that there can be a situation with just one side of the yin-yang polarity—that we can have good without bad, happy without sad, love without grief, joy without heartbreak.

Reading these books left me with this piece of wisdom: everything is a mix of good and bad. Allow for that, embrace it. Quit your pursuit of that unattainable, nothing-but-happiness rainbow.

When my niece and I discussed A Wrinkle in Time, I mentioned that once again we were hearing the Taoist message. She said, “Mom and I went on a hike this morning and I asked her, ‘Do you like going up or down better?’ and she replied, ‘if you do one you’re going to have to do the other!’”

An Empirical Test for Economic Theories

Is economics a hard science, like physics? Or is it more like sociology and history? Many economists would like us to believe that the first is true, that economics is now firmly rooted in mathematics and empirical evidence.

In Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists have Damaged America and theWorld, author Jeff Madrick asserts that the myth that economics is a science is one of the ideas that have inflicted damage on our country. In particular, he writes that for all the talk about being a science, many economists don’t care much about how their theories work in the real world. In Paul Krugman’s review of the book, he wrote, “Economists presented as reality an idealized vision of free markets, dressed up in fancy math that gave it a false appearance of rigor.”

It seems to me it’s time to do an empirical test of economic theories; an objective analysis of real-world results. For forty years from about 1930-1970, the policies of John Maynard Keynes were followed. Keynesianism included a strong role for government in regulating business and the markets.

In the 1970s a different economic model began to gain popularity, and in the U.S. the main proponent was Milton Friedman, so I’ll call this model Friedmanism. This model claimed that markets work best without government interference, because markets had an inherent tendency to always find perfect states of equilibrium. By 1980, with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, this new economic thinking began to dominate western economic thinking.

We now have forty years of Friedmanism to contrast with the forty years of Keynesianism. How do those two periods compare? Keynesianism produced strong economic growth and a relatively equal society with no major financial crashes. Friedmanism has led to poor economic growth, an increasingly unequal society, and regular and painful financial crashes. Interestingly, somehow these crashes are, in the end, only painful to the middle and lower classes; they are strangely rewarding to the 1%.

The Origins of Symbolic Thought

What distinguishes humanity from animals? Many attributes have been proposed over the years, including language and tool-use, but most have been discarded once it was discovered how widespread their use was in the animal kingdom. One candidate still survives, and that is the capacity for abstract, symbolic thought.

We take symbolic thought for granted. For example the idea that I can write my thoughts in this blog and you can (hopefully) understand them seems unremarkable, but when you take a step back the capability is quite astonishing. In his film “Waking Life,” the director Richard Linklater has a character describe the wonder of symbolic thought: it’s easy to imagine how we came up with a word for “tiger,” and a phrase that means “tiger attacking from behind!” But how did humans come up with a word for “frustration”? That’s an abstract concept, with no obvious analogue in objective reality to point to.

All of human civilization is based on this ability to conceptualize.

What an intriguing period in human history, when we were first capable of symbolic thought! There’s no way of knowing exactly when this happened, but the evidence of art on the walls of caves allows us to give it a minimum date—by the time humans were capable of painting images of animals they were obviously capable of thinking symbolically.

For many years, it was thought that the oldest cave paintings were in southern France, in the Chauvet caves. Werner Herzog produced a documentary about the art, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” and watching it, I was deeply moved by the power of the imagery produced by humans 30,000 years ago.

History Told Through the Three Stooges

I am a great fan of the Three Stooges. Their earliest films were made in the 1930s, and most of the characters they played were working class men struggling to make a living and occasionally interacting with the wealthy in ridiculous ways. In an era when Hollywood answered the Great Depression with glamorous movie stars and movies like “Gold Diggers of 1933” (the opening song is “We’re in the Money”; the film is well-worth watching for the Busby Berkeley dance choreography), the Three Stooges must have provided a hilarious satirical depiction of ordinary life for the average moviegoer.

Not long ago I purchased a DVD set of all their short films from 1934-1942. Watching them in order over a period of a couple of months, it occurred to me that you could teach a class on the Great Depression using the Three Stooges as the foundation. Because they often portray workmen, the Stooges are often in people’s homes, particularly kitchens, and I was struck by the difference in kitchen appliances over the course of these few years. In one of their famous films, “An Ache in Every Stake” (1941) they are ice deliverymen; even in 1941 people still had iceboxes. The ovens start out looking like modified woodstoves. By the last film of 1942, “Sock-a-Bye Baby” they are in a kitchen with an electric refrigerator and fancy gas stove, and the kitchen looks gleamingly modern.

There are also references to the New Deal, including a visit to the Oval Office where the Stooges thank President Roosevelt.