Category Archives: Philosophy

The Go No-Go Decision

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imagesSomebody decided to turn the world into ones and zeroes, and thus began the digital revolution.   Such a simple idea.   It’s either this or that.   Maybe the world really is black and white.   Maybe that whole idea that I have lived by all these years, that life is really analog, that understanding others and oneself is all about appreciating the subtlest shades of gray, the overlap between good and evil, the mysteries residing in the spaces between the lines, the sweet paralysis of ambiguity—maybe I had it all wrong.

Maybe the analog life is the illusion after all.   It really is now or never, and the hackneyed question “if not now, when?” really has currency.  Life would be so much simpler, wouldn’t it, if a person was all good or all evil, or if you are either in love or out of it, and if there really were only two sides to every story.   After all, it is probably indisputable that a person can’t be in two places at the same time, unless of course you’re struggling with one of Zeno’s paradoxes, in which case you might dispute the notions of place and time altogether.

Pilots call it the “go-no go decision.”  You either takeoff or you stay home.   It’s that simple.   As the paean to binariness that Rosie taught me goes: whether you like the weather you got, you gotta have weather, whether or not.  And if the weather is good enough, the airplane is working correctly, and you are physically and mentally capable, you go.   You crank up that engine and open the throttle and start rolling.   Or else, you go home, open a bag of potato chips, and watch TV or read a book. It’s that simple.   Ones and zeroes.

Now, I have nothing against ones and zeroes themselves; in fact, the invention of the zero, probably by ancient Olmecs in Mexico, is a milestone in mathematical history.   Even the ancient Greeks, who came later, struggled with the concept, wondering how nothing can actually be something, a question which many self-doubting adolescents ask themselves daily.

The notion of one, and its philosophical sibling oneness, is perhaps the biggest concept of all.   I would go so far as to say that the number one is like my friend Stephanie’s cheesecake– which is so delicious that it’s probably too sinful to eat, in that the number one is so profound that it’s probably too sinful to even talk about. It is, in Judaism, arguably the definition of God itself, in that every Jewish house has a little scroll wrapped up in a decorative case and affixed to the door that starts with the words—printed in larger type than the rest of the biblical excerpt: “Hear oh Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One.”   “Is” is the verbal representation of the mathematical “equals” sign, which is to say that, based on the principle of commutation, the Lord, God and the number One are all the same.

But while I have no problem with ones and zeroes, I also really like a lot of other numbers.   Thirteen, for example, has always been lucky for me.   Three is particularly romantic, and frankly quite mystical, being associated with the holy trinity and managing to represent both three gods and one simultaneously, while a lot of people believe that the third time you do something is “the charm.”

The magic of the digital revolution, I suppose, is the particular kind of alchemy that arises by stringing a bunch of ones and zeroes together into a byte, which as all you computer geeks know is eight bits.   A bit is a portmanteau for “binary digit,” which is generally coded as a one or a zero.   When you string together eight ones or zeroes, you can create all the letters of the alphabet, and a whole lot more.   But in order to do that, you are still bit-dependent, and so you still, ultimately, exist in a reductionistic, binary world.   No computer geeks worth their weight in kilobytes will tell you that the number eight is magical, because they know that it all really boils down to stringing together a series of binary digits.   Binary is where it’s at.

So the fact that you can perceive color or shades of gray on a computer screen is really an illusion based on making ones and zeroes dance to a programmer’s tune. Perhaps the purple salvia, brown rocks, light green and yellow leaves on the koelreuteria tree outside my window are all an illusion too, constructed out of bits of ones and zeroes, a carbon atom here or not, a bit of silicon or an empty space. Maybe the yearning to see my kids, the anticipation of an adventure, or the thrill of my airplane lifting off the earth is nothing more than a series of ones and zeroes, an electron jumping from one neuron to another or not.

I am, after all, either going to stop writing this now and check my email, or continue.   I am going to pour another cup of coffee before it gets too cold in the press, or not. I am going to face the chill of this Monday morning and get my ass off this chair, or I am going to sit here longer and try to craft something that you will enjoy reading, or I am going to get off my ass and unpack the backpack full of hopefully income-producing paperwork and have at it or not.   It’s go or no-go, now or never, this or that, yes or no.   The rest is an illusion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Route Not Taken

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I submitted an article for a column I write in Plane & Pilot magazine called “The Route Not Taken.”   I’m fond of the piece, probably because I just submitted it and haven’t had the requisite amount of time and distance to re-read it and hate it, and to question what I was thinking and what makes me think I have the chops to be writing articles in magazines anyway.

The idea of the piece is essentially that pilots are often reluctant to divert from their original destinations because certain elements of their personality that may be strengths also work against them.   Their dogged goal-directedness, for example, may contribute to a diminished psychological flexibility—perhaps the main ingredient required to make the important decision whether or not to divert from their original destinations or route.   Diversions, by the way, are an essential part of keeping pilots and their passengers safe from potentially hazardous weather, bumping into other airplanes, or being escorted by an F-16 or two and forced to land at a military base to be greeted by uniformed machine-gun toting patriotic Americans taught not to smile even when pointing a gun at an unarmed, gray-bearded and balding man exiting a wimpy airplane, perhaps alone or perhaps with a miniature poodle left in the cockpit because he couldn’t carry him out of the airplane at the same time that his hands were reaching for the sky.

In writing the article, I couldn’t help but think about a few diversions in my own life, although I decided not to mention them because of space limitations and because they weren’t specific to aviation.

It was the summer between the second and third year of college, and I saw an ad for a researcher position at Learning Magazine in Palo Alto.   The researcher was the one who read articles and wrote summaries for the staff writers, and it was a step above the mailroom on the path to becoming a writer.   I interviewed well, but didn’t get the job. When I told my housemate, who knew how badly I wanted the job and also happened to be a fearless, only child, he asked my permission to call the editor himself and find out why I didn’t get hired.   I reluctantly gave in, and sure enough Jason was able to coax the editor to reveal “off the record” that although I was the most qualified and possibly most talented of the three finalists, I was the wrong gender.   The magazine staff was almost entirely male, and they were being pressured from management to even things out.   Jason was angry, but being rather feminist even in those days, I wasn’t, and even felt somewhat satisfied that I had lost the job for a good cause.

But I have often thought that, had I been able to score a paycheck for writing, which was my first love, I would never have gone on to become a psychologist.   It is not that I entirely regret having spent most of my life in a career that has allowed me the privilege of contributing to the relief of suffering one human at a time; my career has been a blessing on multiple levels. Yet I do sometimes regret that my practical fear of not earning enough money to support myself and a potential family —a fear to some extent that was nurtured by my parents’ dogged determination to shrug off their own poverty—prevented me from following my deeper passion.

I also know had I gotten that job at Learning Magazine I have no idea how my life would have turned out.   The entire game would have been altered. Every subsequent moment would have been different, never to intersect with the life I actually ended up having. The expenditure of any significant amount of energy on regrets over paths not taken is one of the least productive ways of engaging the past, unless of course we use it as motivation to act in a more courageous way in the moment.

There are, of course, many reasons pilots end up making decisions to forge ahead when doing so may not be the safest thing to do, and each pilot in each circumstance will be motivated differently.   While the article in Plane & Pilot began as an article about diversions, it turned into an article about psychological flexibility– a key factor that correlates highly with overall measures of mental health.   There is considerable evidence that enhancing one’s own ability to be less rigid is a skill that can be learned. It requires the motivation and determination to do so, but people who already find themselves too rigid to adjust their plans and thinking to the demands of the moment often don’t lack the determination to see things through. It just requires the decision to channel that determination into being more flexible, or, as Yogi Berra was alleged to have said: When you come to a fork in the road, take it!

 

 

 

 

The Flight of the Enchilada

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enchiladaI don’t eat Mexican food too often, but when I do, I usually go for the chile relleno. There’s something wonderful about the balance between the spiciness of the chile and the softening effect of the cheese.   And even though most Mexican restaurants serve generous portions of everything, if the relleno came with only half a chile, I would likely be annoyed.   Like an enchilada, there is something unsettling about half a chile, half a dictionary, half a blog post, half an airplane, or half a flight to anywhere.

One can leave most things half-completed, but flying is something that essentially requires the whole enchilada. You can’t really stop flying mid-air between San Francisco and Houston, although you could always land and call it quits, and spend the night in a roach-infested motel in Gallup, New Mexico.   But in order to be a whole enchilada, or a whole anything, you are going to need more than the sum of its parts.

In order to get off the ground, you need just the right ingredients mixed in just the right proportions. Lift alone won’t get you anywhere, thrust won’t necessarily get you in the air, and drag—needed to keep you from going out of control, is actually designed to get you nowhere, which is why drag is a drag.   You need the whole enchilada, ingredients mixed just right, to achieve the alchemy of controlled flight.

I had a professor in college, whose name for reasons I would prefer not to mention, I don’t recall. (I give in– he slept with my ex-girlfriend, and even though she was an ex, it still bothered me.) He was fond of saying, half-jokingly I hope, that when he died he wanted the definition of “gestalt” written on his tombstone.   It was a silly thing to say, but as a mnemonic device it worked well because I remember the phrase now, more than 40 years later.   A gestalt, Dr. Whatshisname said, was the “ongoing, contingent, sociobiological organization of attention and action.”

We experience life in chunks—in organizations of attention and action, and each chunk is not only ongoing, but it is also contingent on what comes before and after it. The “before” part is obvious, but the “after” part was something illuminated by behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner, who insisted that what we do is often determined by what immediately follows it.

Contingency is important, because it is how things are connected, how we are all interdependent, and why if a tree falls in the forest we may not hear it but it will still scatter the ants beneath it.

As long as you keep cutting the enchilada in half, and realize that you still have an enchilada, then each half becomes a whole unto itself, especially if you keep eating it. You’ve just created smaller enchiladas. That is why in order for something to really be whole, it needs to be something greater than the sum of its parts. If, on the other hand, you were able to break down the enchilada the way I remember breaking down water in chemistry class into hydrogen and oxygen, interesting things begin to happen.

Enchiladas require tortillas, which require flour or masa, and water. To make the cheese you will probably need some milk, rennet, and maybe a starter culture. You might even add some salt to be adventurous.   Then there’s the chile pepper, and maybe a little guacamole.   None of those things on their own look or taste anything like an enchilada. But, mixed together in the right proportions and under the right Mexican sun, something greater than the mere sum of its parts begins to emerge.

It is, of course, alchemy when we mix ingredients to create something transformative.   It is alchemy when we mix lime with sand and water to create concrete, which by some magic of physics or chemistry becomes the building I am writing this in, and alchemy when you add rice to salmon roe and quail eggs to create the transcendent mixture of earth, sea and sky we call sushi.   It is alchemy when we fall in love, and even greater alchemy when we remain in love. It is alchemy when we fly an airplane. It is alchemy that is the foundation and the very substance of the feeling of awe, which so many have equated with a sense of holiness, numen, or spirituality.

Flying, as is true with everything we do, is a gestalt—a contingent organization of attention and action.   To be up high, beyond the realm even of happy little bluebirds, is an alchemical miracle.   As is true for love, good food, and those things that we value most, it is the transformation of disparate elements under the right conditions—a series of intentional acts that taken together exceed the mere sum of its parts.   It is, dare I say, the whole enchilada.

 

 

 

 

 

All This Blighter Can Do

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belly dancerI have nothing to say.   Not this morning as I sit here waiting for my coffee beans to extrude their bitterness into the water in which they are bathing.   Not any morning.   I am the embodiment of Billy Preston’s dictum in reverse: nothing plus nothing is nothing.   Nada.

Even as my daughter’s sweet little dog leaps up to join me in this favorite chair of mine, cuddling against my right arm and trembling, perhaps realizing that my wife is preparing to take a week-long writing retreat and leave the two of us to fend for ourselves—even as I sit here now fueled by darkly roasted coffee beans steeped long enough in the French press to enable most humans to leap tall buildings in a single bound, I can offer you, dear, sweet, patient and charitable reader of mine, nothing.

I can hear Julie Andrews singing in my ear: “Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through– First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do?”

‘Fraid so, Julie. You see, in the mid-seventies, as a graduate student in Murray, Kentucky, we had a visiting professor come to teach a course or two.   Michael Kaye was a graduate student himself from some other university, an “ABD” as we called them (having completed “all but his dissertation”), and he was simply brilliant, or at least that’s what my 23-year-old, barely crinkled brain thought.   He lived with his short, stocky, effervescent girlfriend, who once popped into the living room in full belly dance attire to entertain my then-girlfriend and I in their living room, the image of which I still have trouble wresting from my mind.

I admired Michael, in spite of his choice in girlfriends, and asked to read the most recent draft of his dissertation.   It was, as I recall, an extraordinary tome, literary and conjectural, and I told him that I liked it so much that he should publish it as a book. He didn’t hesitate to tell me that he had “nothing new to say” so wouldn’t even consider publishing it.   Was this humility, I wondered, or was he simply making a fair point?

Many years, perhaps decades later, I was teaching family therapy at Harbor-UCLA Medical School to psychiatry residents and a sprinkling of psychology fellows. One of the psychology fellows—Martine Van Milders, devoid of any trace of obsequiousness, commented after one of the classes that she enjoyed the way I presented family therapy, and that I should write a book.   Channeling Michael Kaye, and quite honestly, I simply expressed gratitude for the compliment, and added “But I have nothing new to say.”

Clearly more perspicacious than I at a similar point in our careers, she didn’t hesitate to set me straight: “No one has anything new to say.   It isn’t whether you say something new that matters, but how you explain what everyone else has to say.   That is always new.”

Comeuppance sings and hums like a perfectly tuned airplane engine, and learning from our students is especially sweet, in that “child is father to the man” way. Martine’s encouragement was a turning point for me, providing the rationale I needed to write my second book (the first one being a schlock collection of “activities” written with the jejune and dubious motivation of getting a book published before I turned 30).   So I wrote a book with nothing new to say, although I said it differently than others, contributing a single snowflake to the vast storm of family therapy literature.

These days, as I sit in fear of the dying of the light, I can’t help but find myself wondering why on earth any of us—what we do or who we are, matter in the brief moments between the before and after.   In the vastness that is the universe of space and the infinite of all that came before and all that will come after, I can’t help but wonder—perhaps in the renewed adolescence that seems inextricably woven with senescence, what meaning to attribute to this minute speck that is each of our lives.    Sometimes, I imagine, we are merely God’s expendable playthings, little marbles forever lost under the couch.

Perhaps, some of us will be remembered for a brief period after our corporeal deaths. Perhaps, a few of us will be quoted generations down the road.   But none of us, I imagine, will have had anything new to say.   Perhaps the only task that is embraceable is to simply say it all differently, to live a life that is uniquely ours.   We have little choice in that, I suppose, other than the choice of how fully to embrace that task. We can certainly choose to not bother to read or write because it has all been done and said before.   Or, we can embrace it, and write about nothing in our own unique and hopefully gratifying way, or hell, who knows, maybe even break out into a belly dance, chunky middles and all.

Flying Too High

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imgresIn the Greek myth, King Minos gets pretty annoyed with Daedalus, and exiles him and his son Icarus to a remote area of Crete.   Crafty craftsman that he is, Daedalus creates wings made from wax and feathers in hopes of escaping.   Knowing his son well, as good fathers do, Daedalus warns Icarus to fly neither too high nor too low, because the sun’s heat would melt the wax and the sea’s mist would drench the feathers.   The father and son together practice flying, and when Daedalus is satisfied that the two of them have mastered it, he sets a date for the escape.   When the date arrives, Icarus ignores his father’s injunctions and flies boldly toward the sun.   Lacking the strength of youth to fly after him, Daedalus can only watch as his son eventually plummets to his death.

The very first aviation aphorism I learned was that “there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but no old bold pilots.”   While some may point to the exuberance of youth and lack of fear inherent in the young as the primary moral to the Icarus myth, to me it is a story about the danger of boldness, or what those old Greeks called hubris.

Pilots crash and die for many reasons, and although there is no official category for hubris, it is often easy to detect.    At my local airport, a pilot died a couple of years ago while flying low along a riverbed.   Besides being illegal, it is also stupid, for reasons bold pilots have ignored since they took to the sky.  The pilot who died while flying along the riverbed managed not to see the electrical wires that spanned the riverbed, and he and his new girlfriend got tangled up in them just before reaching their ultimate destination.  I don’t mean to be tongue in cheek about a disaster that killed two people, but it is hard to be sympathetic knowing the pilot also killed his new girlfriend and caused such grief in their families.   All, it seems to me, as a result of a case of hubris.

Before doing a radio interview once I was coached to not be self-effacing.   The coach didn’t know me from Adam, but apparently he knew enough about radio to know that people who listen to radio aren’t particularly drawn to those who put themselves down.   Humility is one thing, but taken too far it sucks the sex appeal right out of you.

On the other hand, given the popularity of such characters as Donald Trump, hubris can have its own cachet, at least for half the populace.   From a romantic perspective, I believe I understand this.   Self-confidence and self-assuredness spawn feelings of safety, and that is the foundation of any relationship.   You don’t want your partner to quiver in his or her boots when protecting you from the blue meanies who have come to ruin your day.  But just as humility can slip into a lack of self-confidence, too much self-confidence can easily turn into hubris.   While a lack of self-confidence can cause you to melt under pressure, hubris can cause you to fight when fleeing would be the wiser (and safer) option.   It can cause you to believe that somehow you can outsmart nature and find a way to make it through that nasty thunderstorm, or believe that the instrument that is giving you that strange reading is just a faulty gauge and not the first in the long line of problems that will eventually kill you.

The Greeks knew this thousands of years ago, when they conceived the story of Icarus rising.   For pilots, altitude is our friend because it gives us more time to recover from problems and prevents us from bumping into things near the ground.  Hubris, however, has a way of evaporating our friendships, and leads to the kind of mistakes that can kill us.

 

 

Maintaining Intention

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Unknown-2My yoga instructor, Charles DeFay, is a kind, well-intentioned man, who is undoubtedly sincere in his beliefs, despite delivering his instructions a bit like a drill sergeant on Ritalin.   He repeats the same phrases along with the asanas (the positions) in each session; sometimes the phrases serve as punctuation, but just like the asanas, they are always the same.

This drives me crazy, because I despise conformity, and repetition of phrases, unless it is great poetry or literature, makes me want to tune out.  The phrases are recited as though they were scientific facts;  some are simply incorrect, while others, such as energizing “protons, neutrons and thought-trons” are just plain well-intended gobbledygook.   But every once in a while a phrase pops up worthy of some real debate.  “Intention is stronger than will” is one that has perplexed me now for quite a while.

Now, I am a big fan of intention, or intentionality, as the existential philosophers like to call it, but I am also a big fan of will, and in a fight between these two superheroes I’m just not sure who would win.   While it is easy to fall into a pit of semantic mumbo jumbo, let me give you an example where I do think intention just might have an edge.

There is a common saying in aviation that if you believe you are going to crash, your job as the pilot is to fly through the crash—not into the crash, but through the crash.   I love that idea, because it rests on an assumption, a set of beliefs, that one can survive anything, that the situation is never hopeless, that one must never give up.

If you intend on surviving a crash, while there are certainly no guarantees, you will give yourself every opportunity to make decisions even as you go through the storm.   On the other hand, if you simply willed yourself to survive, I suspect you would be more likely to stop making decisions, and in those particular moments, the Force may be busy with someone else, Luke.

Will usually has an object attached to it, but in its rawest form it is like an engine that roars but has no place to go.  Intention is the direction we give our will to go.  That is why, when an autopilot fails, instead of calling it George or Otto, I like to call it Willy Nilly.

To say that intention is stronger than will presumes that they are separate entities.  But if anything, will feeds intention and intention requires that food to survive.  I certainly intended to go to yoga today, but it wasn’t that intention that got me out of bed.  I am certain of that, because I stayed in savasana (corpse pose) while I tried really hard for the intention to get me upright.  Without pure will, and a whole lot of it, I wouldn’t have made it to yoga.

If you are inclined to argue with me, and if you are anything like me, you will be, then you could always argue that it was my intention to go to yoga that drove my will and not the other way around.   Or, even, in its more fundamental form, it was my intention to live a long and healthy life that drives the will to do so.  I am not going to argue with you.   I am only going to say that intention alone gets me nowhere slowly.   It is my will, a fundamental life-force not unlike Freud’s libido, that powers this fragile vehicle in which my intention resides.

At least that is how my thought-trons see it.

 

 

 

Situational Awareness? Bring a Fat Pet

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9255620704_57f5018b6f_oThe term “situational awareness” originally referred to knowing where one was in space at any particular moment and remaining vigilant when it comes to bumping into things such as other airplanes and mountains.   As have so many things in flying and life, it has come to mean much more.

Mnemonics, besides being a really fun word to spell, has helped me pass many an exam, and even occasionally led others to believe that I actually know something; and when it comes to flying an airplane, it may someday save my life.  Reducing complex concepts to simple abbreviations is also fun, which as the Beatles told us is something that money can’t buy.

So, wait for it… here it is:  being “situationally aware” is like having a FAT PET.   Here’s why having a fat pet is so important:

F is for “fuel.”  If your destination is 3 hours away and you only have 2 hours worth of fuel on board, you need to change your plans.   Because wind changes constantly, plans need to change as well.  Being situationally aware means always knowing how much fuel you have and how much you need, and changing plans accordingly.   I will confess that when not flying an airplane I often forget to fuel myself, which may be one reason my head begins to ache and I find it difficult to move a shopping cart down an aisle.  Staying aware of what’s in our own fuel tanks means staying hydrated and even having a meal every once in a while.

“A” is for “angle of attack,” which pilots know refers to the angle of the wing cord to the relative wind, but which translates for all practical purposes to the amount of power one has at any moment in time.  Exceed one’s abilities, and you end up on the “back end of the power curve,” meaning that the airplane will do the opposite of what you tell it to do because it really doesn’t have enough power to follow your commands.   For the rest of us, it means to know what our capabilities and limitations are, and being careful to not exceed them.

“T” is for “traffic,” and it means knowing where the other airplanes are and keeping out of their way.   In its most literal sense, for civilians it means looking both ways before crossing the street, but in metaphorical terms it can also mean knowing who your competition is, and making sure you know what they’re up to.

“P” is for “position,” and this is the closest thing to the classical definition of situational awareness.  It means knowing where you are in 3-dimensional space, especially relative to any terrain that might get in your way.  In the business world, this can be especially important.  See what happens if you neglect to tell your direct supervisor about the conversation you are about to have with her supervisor.

“E” is for “equipment,” and in aviation it means to know what equipment you have on board, how to properly use it, what its limitations are, and what condition it is in.   I am reminded of the cliché that a worker is as good as his or her tools.  This is true not only for the capabilities of the circular saw in your shed, but also for the cerebral cortex in your head.  If we are not certain of what we are doing, consult with others who may know better.

The final “T” is for “terrain.”  We not only need to know where we are in relation to the ground, but we also need to know where the mountains and broadcast towers are going to be.  Learning where our obstacles are likely to show up can help us to understand what we are up against.

Every phase of flight has its own mnemonics, from preparing for a flight, to taxiing and liftoff, to landing and for emergencies.   Pilot or not, it’s a good idea to keep a “fat pet” alongside us for the entire ride.

Thanks to Robert Goyer for providing the essential content for situational awareness.

Wright and Wrong

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imgresAll the calculations show it can’t work. There’s only one thing to do: make it work.   –Pierre Georges Latécoère, early French aviation entrepreneur.

When I went to school in Murray, Kentucky, there were plaques around town that honored Nathan Stubblefield, the inventor of the radio.   The inventor of the radio?  I grew up believing that it was Marconi who invented the radio, although later on I learned that the guy who I thought invented the telephone actually held the patent for the radio, good old Alex Bell.

I guess that when it comes to intellectual property and who reaps the benefits of their labor, the game of who gets credit for what is important.   But for those of us who use toasters, it hardly matters who invented them.  What intrigues me, especially as I travel to other parts of the world, is the extent to which nationalistic pride comes into it.

Ask Americans who was the first to take flight, and they will almost certainly say it was one of the Wright Brothers.  Ask that question in France, and they will tell you not only that the French invented aviation altogether, but they will reel off the names of Charles Renard, Henri Giffard and Arthur Krebs—all French of course.  In Italy, they will mention DaVinci, although there is no record of Leo ever actually lifting off.   They will, however, mention Tito Burattini, who successfully lifted a cat into flight in 1648 (but not himself).

In Great Britain, they will tell you that it was Sir George Cayley in 1846, five decades before the Wright Brothers invented the “aeroplane”.  Cayley began drawing pictures of airplanes when he was 10 years old, which was around 1792.

In Germany, they will mention Gustave Weisskopf, who emigrated to the U.S. where he changed his name to Whitehead.  In 1901, a year before the Wright Brothers’ flight, he carried out a controlled, powered flight in a monoplane in Fairfield, Connecticut.   Although a story ran about it in the local newspaper, he obviously didn’t have as good a press agent as the Wrights, so he never made it into the history books.  Or, perhaps, his neglecting to change his first name had something to do with it.

National pride, I suppose, is primarily an extension of the instinct to protect one’s own tribe.   Without tribal identity one vanishes into the whims of those who seek to conquer. Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing most likely depends on the outcome, and the question of who gets hurt in the process.

In reading the history of the development of the atom bomb, for example, it seemed clear that national pride had little to do with getting there first.   Getting there first was imposed by the circumstances, but those who labored to split the atom did so more out of the spirit of the challenge than out of tribal identity.

I have been fortunate enough to know a few inventors, and none of them invented out of national pride.   They did so because they had a creative instinct, a love affair with solving problems cleverly and doing things better.  Money and credit are often secondary motivations.  National pride seems to come into play more by those seeking to find a way to attach themselves and their identities to the cleverness of the inventors they celebrate.   I may not have invented Swiss cheese, but you can rest assured it must have been another Eastern European Jew.  We invent everything.

What is most important is the spirit of invention itself, a spirit that has resulted for the most part in prolonged lives with less suffering.   That is noble, and that is the thing to be nurtured.

Flying Sdrawkcab

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UnknownThe first time I saw it happen, I was taking my boat out of the harbor, and about 50 yards away I saw a seagull flying backwards.  It was one of those quirks of nature, one of those things that shouldn’t be possible but happens anyway.  It was a beautiful sight, his wings outstretched, his nose pointed one direction and his body moving backwards against the landscape of the island behind him and the water below.

Recently, on a particularly windy day, I told my instrument instructor that I always wanted to fly backwards, and as is typical of him he said, “let’s do it.”   We had other plans for that day, and I wasn’t in the mood to change them, so I opted for another time. Apparently, it’s an easy thing to do, especially in a small, low-powered airplane such as a Piper Cub or a Cessna 150.   The wings of a J3 Cub stall at about 33 knots, or about 38 miles an hour, so all you need to do to fly backwards is to point your nose into a 45 mile an hour wind, fly just over stall speed, and you can find yourself flying backwards over the ground.  Find a stiff 60 mile an hour wind or more and you can fly backwards at 20 miles an hour.

Although I have never flown backwards, I have done many other things backwards.   The Pimsleur language wizards somehow figured out that it’s easier to learn difficult foreign words by rehearsing the syllables backwards, which is how I learned how to say thank you in Armenian (shnorhakalutyun).

Reading backwards is tricky at first, but after a while it gets easier, because, just like reading forwards, one begins to notice patterns.  When I first moved to California, the moment I looked at the sign for the street named “Moorpark” I cracked up laughing.   Reading it backwards, I thought that it was a joke, but none of the locals seemed to know it.

In Northern California, where I wrote the first draft of this post, there is a town called Ukiah.  I never looked it up to see if it was intentional that it was named for the 17-syllable poem we all had to write as kids in school.  Maybe someone else who values his or her precious time even less than I do will look it up for me.

A friend was visiting me from New York, and when somehow the conversation came to reading or speaking backwards, he immediately mentioned the Long Island town of Lynbrook, which is not really backwards, just a swapping of the syllables of Brooklyn, but still, I think, clever enough to be mildly entertaining.

There is a natural food store in LA that is called “Erewhon.”  It is actually one letter off, but it is more difficult to read “Erehwon,” and as far as I’m concerned they can be forgiven.

I had always assumed Oprah’s parents were Marx Brothers’ fans, until I read that her birth name was actually Orpah, after a biblical character.  Apparently, people mispronounced it as “Oprah” frequently enough for it to stick.   Oprah calls her production company Harpo Productions, so at least she gets it.

There is also a coffee shop called Amocat in Washington (guess what city it’s in?) and one in Tokyo called Alucard, which as far as I know does not serve doolb.  And my old buddy Francis Albert used to sign his oil paintings as Artanis.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”  So, by illogical extension, perhaps if I get up in the air on a particularly windy day, rent an old Cessna, point my nose directly into the wind, and slow down, I will begin to understand life as I find myself flying backwards.   But I doubt it.

Grushenka Turns Final

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GrushenkaI lost my beloved German shepherd Grushenka a couple of weeks ago, the family having made the decision to end what increasingly seemed like a hopeless string of hospital visits, unwelcomed medications and transfusions.   She was only seven or eight years old, much too brief a lifetime; at least too soon to say goodbye to that extraordinary, powerful spirit of hers.   We were all so blessed with her presence, and now, out of that sadness arises gratitude for all the joy and complexity she brought to those around her.

Certainly, none of us get out of this life alive, and I’m sure most of my readers have had many losses in their lives.     Nearly all pilots have known fellow pilots, as well as friends and family, who have “gone west.”    Death seems to come in waves, and I’m all too rapidly approaching the age my parents reached when their friends and family members seemed to die off one after another.    I talked to my father about how hard it must have been for him, outliving so many of them.  He was a very sensitive and emotional man, but after a while he became inured to it.   I remember when he heard the news about one of his friend’s passing, he just mildly shrugged, said a brief “hmm,” and went about his business.   At some point, I suppose, it all becomes too much.

There is no way to truly understand death, at least not scientifically.   Science can explain certain aspects of it, but science is ill-equipped to handle the big questions, especially those having to do with consciousness, and what happened before and what happens afterward.  All we really have to understand death are narratives and metaphors.

Sometimes I think about life as if it were the rectangular pattern around an airport.   Grushenka was a rescue dog, so I have no idea how she entered the pattern.  She had a rough upwind leg, struggling with two TPLO (knee joint) implants, but she recovered well, and eventually had a smooth downwind leg, carefree with the wind at her back.

Turning base, she somehow developed an autoimmune disorder, and her red blood cells were constantly being attacked.  For a while, there was some hope, with steroids and transfusions, and she was fighting the crosswinds well.  But eventually, turning final, the headwinds were too much for her, and she seemed to be giving up the fight.   Her landing was forced, as a pilot might say, but the euthanasia, surrounded by her doting family on the spot where she stood guard over the house, made it a good one.  Sadly, this was the one she couldn’t walk away from.