Tapestries, Holograms, and Birthday Balloons

...a second take on Going Back to Kindergarten

Photo Cliff Scholz. Copper tooling by my Grandma.

As a person who has been in the writing business in one way or another for about 40 years, I feel the need to clarify something for those who have not been so engaged: There is no beginning to the story. And there is no end.  Such designations may not be arbitrary, but in choosing a starting point for a piece of writing one has to recognize there is a degree of artifice involved. It’s an artistic choice, in other words. Other choices could have been made.

On the back side of any tapestry you’ll often find a tangle of colorful hanging threads. We don’t usually hang our tapestries with that side facing out. We know it’s there, though. It’s just that we choose to display the side with the more immediately intelligible picture or pattern. That’s the side we’re accustomed to seeing. The side that makes sense to us.

Same with writing. When in my last essay, for example, I decided to summarize my daily circle practice beginning with the drawing of a circle on a piece of paper, I left out… well, pretty much everything. For the sake of simplicity, I left out why I already had a collection of paintbrushes and watercolor paper on hand to start with. Having these things frankly made the project easier from a practical standpoint. I also didn’t mention that I’d grown up in a home where family members’ paintings and other artistic creations hung on our walls. This experience no doubt made picking up a brush and mucking around with it for fun more conceivable to me in the first place. I didn’t mention that my artwork had hung in juried shows at the university, which no doubt helped validate and encourage me in this area at a time when I frankly needed a bit of external validation. Nor did I share that as a person who has experienced various problems with my eyesight for much of my life, learning to see has been an ongoing challenge, which no doubt also informed my interest in visual arts.

All of these are threads hanging off the back of the tapestry of the essay I wrote and published on December 4, listed here in case you want to go back and read it. And there are other threads. As a writer I can say for sure they got woven in, but they probably weren’t immediately accessible on the side facing most of my readers.

Is it possible to feel in a piece of writing where the threads in another person’s writing come from, how pieces of the author’s life weave in? To some extent yes, I believe so, even when we are experiencing only the “front” side of the tapestry. Some years back while watching the movie, The Incredible Jessica James, out of the blue it occurred to me: The writer of the screenplay has a thing for the actor playing the lead role. Well, I wasn’t able to verify the part about the screenwriter “having a thing for” the actor, but it didn’t take much of an internet search to find confirmation that yes, the role was created and the screenplay written just for that specific actor. And she is pretty fabulous. This is just one particularly amusing case in point.

I made a career of sorts out of divining from written words the presence, the reality, the full multidimensionality of the writers in their words. It usually helps. So many times my writers look at a suggestion I have and say, “Exactly! That’s just what I was trying to say!” I recall once while reviewing an essay I inserted a suggestion for adding the word ‘moot’ used in its verb sense. As in, “The administrative action was mooted by subsequent events.” It’s an unusual usage, but I went with my gut and made the suggested change just to see how it landed with the client. Several paragraphs later, I was more than a little surprised to come across the word ‘moot’ used in the verb sense in a different place in the client’s original draft. The client was the only writer I encountered in 19 years editing for that organization who ever did so. Thing is, it’s not that the word was implied by the writing, it’s that the writer was implied by the writing. The word then derived from the writer. Of course when I got there in my reading I had to go back and change my edit, and I found the whole experience pretty funny.

Bottom line is, the universe is holographic. Therefore, as “part” of the universe, words are holographic, too. One property of holograms is that each part contains information about the whole. In a sense, it’s impossible to cut a hologram into pieces. Yes, the degree of optical resolution of certain aspects of the hologram will be compromised by cutting it, but the whole is still there in each of the pieces. Hence the word ‘hologram’. If you find this confusing, I’ll link a short video here for a demonstration.

One of the logical consequences of living in a holistic universe is that in principle this means that there are no secrets. [Note: I deleted a few sentences from right here in the text, but their etheric presence might still be accessible to more sensitive readers. See if you can pick up on the deleted content. You’re welcome to post any impressions you get in the Comments section if you feel like it.] Okay, back to the essay: If all parts of the universe contain information about the whole, then in theory anything is knowable through anything else. Hence: no secrets. For example, a pebble that you might randomly pick up from the roadside implies the existence of both Julius Caesar and the name of a particular dog currently barking in a backyard in Salt Lake City. Named Ralf, by the way. With an ‘f’. Quite possibly also, that pebble may imply the solution to tomorrow’s Wordle. And every other thing. That information is there, in the pebble. It’s just at a pretty low level of resolution. Okay, it is most likely present at a VERY low level of resolution. But there are people with the flexibility of focus needed to access such things. Even if it means that they must become the stone. Always up for an adventure!

Likewise with writing. We tend to be better trained and more experienced in reading literature than stones, but the point is, being nested within greater wholes and wholes yet greater still, a piece of writing can imply all kinds of things. As we start weaving our words together, first and most obviously these words contain recoverable, intelligible information about the wholes from which they most immediately drew their origins. In plain language, our words imply our existence. That’s so obvious it probably seems trite, but strangely, it also means that all the various particulars of any writer or speaker will inevitably start showing up in their writing or speech. All our many experiences are there. Plus there’s a voice. A presence. A feeling tone. A whole. Further, that whole not only implies the author’s existence, it implies writing that the author has left unwritten, but which is possible.

All of this is bread and butter to me. This is where I live: right here on the cusp of what might be said and what can be said and what will yet be said and how to bring to laser coherence if possible the clarity of the holographic potential of the work so that it might have a chance of saying something to others. It’s my freaking job, for heaven’s sakes. But what’s really funny about all this is that the day before I wrote and published my last essay about painting circles, I’d spent the afternoon at my friends’ house with their just-turned-4-year-old son who stood next to me on the couch and hit me repeatedly on the head with birthday balloons, laughing.

Yes, the experience left an impression on me. That kind of in-my-face giggling silliness is exactly what it took to start breaking down my staid, 61-year-old self a bit. My inner tapestry came unraveled enough to start weaving a different picture…in fact, as described in my previous post here, literally a different picture emerged the very next day. Which I then wrote about. All of this was a vivid demonstration of the essential role of playfulness in being alive and creative, in changing habits, in growing, in just being human. The boy was living it, showing it, radiating it through and through. Oh, and guess what? He’d just gotten a set of watercolors for his birthday! And I got to see some of his paintings!

So that’s one thread hanging off the back of the tapestry from my Dec 4 posting that I felt was  worth sharing.

But wait, there’s more!

On the day I wrote “Going Back to Kindergarten,” Mary came home from teaching and I shared  the essay with her. It turned out that her fifth-graders had literally gone back to kindergarten that day, connecting with their kindergartener reading buddies. So at the exact same time I was writing about the possibility of going back to kindergarten to rejuvenate ourselves and renew our perspectives, Mary had been observing the positive effects of doing so with real people in real time.

You can call that a coincidence if you like. Personally, my sense is that this tapestry we’re weaving together is a lot deeper in its weave than many people commonly suppose.

As I write this, is the universe weaving itself through me? And as you read this, what threads are connecting in you?