The Power of Secrets

Love needs secrets. 

We need to know that the person sitting next to us, sharing that glass of wine, also shares our humanness and vulnerability. That they've shared our dreams and our failures. That they wish what we wish. We need to hear these longings and desires and vision.

But sharing these views, learning these things about each other - is so incredibly difficult.  It's like learning Chinese - hard to understand, to express, to communicate. 

Maybe this is because we continually try to brand our lives on social media - curating ourselves on Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram. 

But we need more than that. We need secrets. A man needs a woman's secrets like he needs her tenderness. 

But, that's rarely what we get. And rarely what we give in kind. We're imperfect, afraid, sensitive, cautious and suspicious. We carry histories of hurt like stacks of broken hearts, teeteringly arranged on our backs like a Dr. Seuss drawing.   

Fortresses built of these fears and suspicions make for impenetrable hearts. A man won't waste a winter trying to tear down these battlements. 

No. 

He wants to meet the princess in the forest and hear her breathlessly whisper how she can sneak him into the tower. 

He wants to hear secrets.  They are an irresistible gesture of kindness, tenderness and shared longing.

In 1997, Arthur Aron, from the SUNY Stonybrook, published “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,” (http://bit.ly/1F60DLK), a study on how two strangers might develop interpersonal affections (love) through a process of discovery and sharing.

In other words, he developed a verbal Petri dish that can grow love. It's the foundation for the iPhone app "36 questions on the way to love." The app of learning secrets. Of sharing.

It is evidence that this longing for learning truths and secrets and feelings - dreams and vulnerabilities - is just the right kind of environment for something really good to happen.

The secrets are a kind of metaphysical power, like the 1.21 gigawatts that Dr. Brown’s Back to the Future Delorean needed to travel in time and space.

If we take Aron's questions - and our soul's desire to learn secrets - we are connecting cables from the lightning rod on the clock tower directly to our souls. Waiting for lightning to strike.

And we’ll either get electrocuted or the car will fly.

I say plug the cables in and whisper your secrets in my ear.

John Lennon, Mozart and Creation

John Lennon would awaken from sleep with fully formed songs composed in his dreams. Mozart, while walking down a street, would spontaneously hear a completely new musical tune in his head.

In 1962, Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner published, “On Knowing – Essays for the Left Hand.” It was a treatise on how "knowing" is shaped and how knowing in turn helps create language, science, literature, and art.

Wolfe, Hemingway, Tschaikowsky and many others have mused on the creative process. They told us what it felt like to be inspired. About the productive, creative state.

Lennon was almost embarrassed with the completeness and the ease of finishing his dream-created songs - telling friends that he didn't want to put down them down just because they came so easily. One of these is “#9 Dream.”

Mozart told us the same; that the music just entered his mind: “…thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish. Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it… Once I have my theme, another melody comes, linking itself to the first one, in accordance with the needs of the composition as a whole: the counterpoint, the part of each instrument, and all these melodic fragments at last produce the entire work.”

Importantly, these two geniuses needed more than just the intuitive raw material. They needed intellectual technique - highly developed musical, technical, mathematical, and production skills. Could it be that certain brains, certain souls, have a greater power to dissolve the barriers between the left and right brains?

In her Brain Pickings blog (http://bit.ly/1BN7XgU) Maria Popova describes Bruner’s “On Knowing” work as: “…lamenting how the artificial divide between intuition and intelligence limits us…”

There is much more to Bruner’s treatise. He identified different kinds of creativity: predictive, sudden and visionary. He also believed that the left and right worked together in two steps – a creative, inspirational step and a step where technique is applied to finish the process.

This process, where left and right come together, is exactly what Mozart described about his creative techniques. Without it, there would be no Don Giovanni - and no Imagine.

And no iPhone. It’s also what Steve Jobs reveals in his autobiography – it’s the left/right genius that made Apple into Apple.

Thus, when the inspirational, dreamy left and the pragmatic, perfectionist right work in perfect symmetry, creation happens.

We get Mozart symphonies, Beatles songs and iPhones.

A Missing Voice lost, a Lost Voice - Malcolm X

10 million Zenith televisions, their black and white screens flickering and fuzzy, circular dials spun to channel 13, showed 1959 America something real and chilling and disturbing.

Eight years before those same televisions played the carnage in Vietnam - and four years before the weekend-long broadcast of sadness in Dallas - they showed Americans Mike Wallace’s CBS special, “The Hate that Hate Produced.”

It shockingly introduced white America to the Nation of Islam (NOI) – specifically, to Malcolm X and his NOI brothers. White Americans cringed at the hatred they saw directed at them and the Brothers' deep contempt for American social values.

In it's wake, there was understandable outrage. CBS was accused of inciting racial unrest. It was unprecedented, self-directed American-made hate – playing out on an American stage.

The multi-part special included Louis Farrakhan’s angered indictments of whites: “I charge the white man …with being the greatest murderer on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest peace-breaker on earth.... the greatest robber on earth…the greatest deceiver on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest trouble-maker on earth.”

Amazingly, this was the same Louis Farrakhan that would later confess to his own complicit role in Malcolm’s demise.

This was 1959, and as yet the deep stirrings of the civil rights movement had not yet begun in America’s collective conscience. Thus America’s shock at these images. These words.

Mike Wallace collaborated with Louis Lomax, a black reporter.  Lomax told Wallace about Black Muslims for the first time earlier that year. “Mike, they hate white people.”

Wallace was initially skeptical when Lomax told him the specifics – that the movement had already recruited over two hundred thousand black Americans whom were vehemently opposed to integration and "had nothing but contempt for the civil rights movement." Then he witnessed it himself. And filmed it with Lomax.

In his autobiography, Wallace describes the work, “The Hate that Hate Produced,” as one of the most explosive pieces he had ever been involved in.  And considering Wallace’s body of work, that statement is astonishing.

The watershed nature of this 1959 expose is that many Americans had no idea that black people had such incendiary feelings towards whites. It was a kind of open, threatened hatred. It was organized - and it was probably really scary for 1959 Americans. Explosive.

Malcolm’s message, despite its angry rhetorical content, was one that America needed to hear. It was a bitter medicine America needed on racial justice and civil rights.  But Malcolm’s Nation of Islam was considered extreme in the extreme – his militant radicals had plunged into even more dangerous waters in that era - they were considered fringe communists. They had met with Castro in Harlem in 1960 for the United Nations Opening Session.

His group was considered so extreme, in fact, that the media was galvanized against publicizing their messages on social justice. The racial genie was out of the bottle. The voices had been heard - the messages - the hate - could not be unheard.  The media instead looked for a balancing voice - and found it in the newsreels of fire-hoses and dogs and marches in Alabama and Mississippi.

And so it was, in part, that Martin Luther King’s message became the national dialogue. His voice, equally stirring yet infinitely more palatable - is remembered as the medicine that worked.  And it Martin that is remembered by history. He is the man who stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and proclaimed his dream.

And after MLK stood on those steps, Malcolm X journeyed to Mecca and returned transformed, renouncing many of his radical positions and his association with the Nation of Islam.  For that, three of his radical former brothers killed him in 1964.

There is no doubt among friends and historians that Macolm X was misunderstood. Maybe by me, too.

But I believe that he cannot be morally judged by his words against social injustice. Perhaps they were words of hate – but no less so than the rhetoric of our own civil revolution.  Or of the war that ended 15 years before Malcolm began speaking for the NOI.

Malcolm’s voice was heard, even if the message was painful for our mothers and fathers, in their suburban homes, to hear. It was so painful, so extreme, that news network cameras turned to the less threatening, less violent, King – and his message. Malcolm and the NOI were marginalized. King’s voice was another to be heard. Then both were silenced.

Today, we don’t hear voices like King’s or Malcolm’s. Where are the angry African Americans to speak outrage at unemployment, underemployment, irrational imprisonment, collapsing families, and violence in their communities? Where are the ones that can speak and be heard?

We need a soul like Malcolm X to emerge again. Our moral judgments on his message are eclipsed by the effect his words - his voice - had on opening eyes, starting a conversation. We need Malcolm's charismatic and provocative outrage at injustice.

Mike Wallace, who would become a lifelong friend of Malcolm X’s family, remembers him fondly as a deeply charismatic and complex man. The same Mike Wallace that, at 93, had known world leaders, presidents, and history – up close and in detail.

He knew how important Malcolm was to us. He knew Malcolm was a part of America.

And Mike Wallace knew Malcolm was a voice that needed to be heard.

A voice that is missing.

Michelangelo's Lemnsicate

The lemnsicate can represent the zero set of two points, tucked within a complex polynomial equation. It's also what we know as the symbol of infinity.

If you were to ride on the lemnsicate like a twisted NASCAR track, you'd keep going forever and never get to the end. 

A strange symbol for infinity, really. Also known mathematically as Watt's Curve and Devil's Curve, among many descriptions. It's a number - but not a real number. It's a concept - but not a concept. Like consciousness. Like feeling. 

Like the universe. 

In his 1584 book, "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds," the Italian astronomer (and of course, philosopher) Giordano Bruno, postulated an unbound universe where, "Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds."

This is an amazing treatise, considering it was published some thirty years prior to Galileo's stand-off with the Catholic Church on the Aristotelian view that the earth was the center of the universe. And considering we didn't need to wait for Carl Sagan to give us his opinions. We knew it in the 16th century.

But this kind of infinity in the physical universe is metaphorically different from the mathematical lemnsicate. Astronomical radio studies seem to indicate that space - that the universe - is flat. Which means that that infinity stretches to a point of no return. Unlike the lemnsicate. An unimaginable topographical concept - perhaps not best represented by the lazy figure 8.

In mathematical circles, John Wallis first "discovered" it forty years after Galileo's disagreement with the Romans. But mystically, linguistically and religiously, it was there long before Wallis. 

And it has far more interesting origins. From India, it was passed into the Arabic numerical system. Metaphysically and artistically, it spent millennia as a representation of balanced opposites; male and female, night and day, darkness and light. 

These balanced opposites are almost a re-constituted Yin-Yang, an ancient Chinese symbol of complementary opposites. In Daoist metaphysics, the belief is that these dualistic forces are actually moral judgements and therefore they are only perceptual - that they aren't real. They're an indivisible whole. This is also tinctured in Buddhist precepts.

The lemnsicate symbol can also be found in the elaborate Arabic calligraphic renderings of the Name of God; the elegant loops providing a decorative device as well as pointing toward the idea of eternity.

On this track of infinity, there are metaphysical elements of the universe, of God and of morality. Of perfect opposites - male and female, darkness and light, life and death.

Mixing all these symbols and metaphors and real math together, what can we make of infinity? If it's a concept, then can it be rationalized by literature or science or religion?

Michelangelo, like Mozart, da Vinci, and Plato - is an old, knowing soul. And Michelangelo, in a moment of elemental wisdom, gave us his answer. With his brush, he painted God touching us as he created Adam - across the universe and across infinity.

In a perfect template of the lemnsicate.

We are all on this funny, twisted track. And few of us know - or could ever understand - if we are just human beings in born bodies or something more. Could we be creations made within infinity itself - souls that live in metaphysical worlds within the lemnsicate?

Are we on a journey that never begins - and never really ends?

Changing Egyptian Artifacts

Across the globe, people are shocked by the violence committed by ISIS forces against Christians in Egypt just a few days ago. In a graphic, violent video, soldiers beheaded approximately 50 people.

In the United States, we seem to remember and recognize that kind of violence through flickering black and white newsreels of camps in Poland and Germany and in the tides of human sadness that engulfed parts of the 20th century.

In the wake of the ISIS brutality, the world expressed a shared outrage and Egypt angrily responded by bombing suspected ISIS installations in Libya. This growing epidemic of conflict and extremism won’t be easily stopped. It continues to spread across the Middle East and Europe. Across the globe.

Yet, it has further cemented the world’s concern over this kind of terrorism - an extreme, fatal violation of human rights. It's stimulated more conversation on militant theocratic terrorists and helped push for a broader recognition that a shared global strategy is needed. That a shared commitment is needed.

That said, Egypt has another human rights problem – violence against women. Its effects ripple throughout Egyptian society - through families and marriages and communities. And while the ISIS brutality is awful and medieval, the violence against women is a far greater threat to each Egyptian family - and each woman - than the looming specter of ISIS.

In a 2013 United Nations Women survey, more than 99 percent of women and girls interviewed in Egypt reported that they experienced some form of sexual harassment. Then, in Amnesty International’s report released last month, more startling documentation emerged about how “women and girls face violence - on a disturbing scale - both at home and in public. The violence includes domestic violence, sexual mob attacks, and torture in state custody. Egyptian laws and entrenched impunity continue to foster a culture of routine sexual and gender-based violence.”

Can you imagine if, here in the United States, it was considered acceptable that our daughters, sisters, and mothers were subject to sexual violence while in public – or in state custody? Would we really accept that the raping or abusing of our girlfriends and wives was an unfortunate social norm?

Of course not.

So where are the media reports of this tragedy in Egypt?

“In a world populated with over 7 billion people, one in three women will be physically, sexually, or otherwise abused during her lifetime: that’s a staggering one billion women and girls who have experienced violence.” http://blog.amnestyusa.org/women/one-billion-women-and-girls-deserve-better/

For more, read the Amnesty International Report on Egypt violence here: http://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/mde_120042015.pdf

The 50 Breakthroughs that the world is waiting for

Looking at the technological advances that fill our lives and occupy our attention, you might think that innovation is everywhere. That our creative, constructive efforts are being focused not only on our ability to text and instagram each other but also on making the world a better place.

If the world's appetite for smartphones can feed Apple an $18B profit in a single quarter, can't humanity's needs for clean water, housing and disease prevention create an equally compelling need for innovation?

The answer, sadly, is - not yet.

The Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, studied the 50 most critical scientific & technological breakthroughs required for sustainable global development (http://bit.ly/1xQijVz)

In the study, they attempted to identify "where game-changing technologies are most required," and to "Foster a thought-provoking conversation about the role of technology in solving the world's most pressing problems, and focus effort on the breakthroughs that really matter."

The world is waiting. It's waiting for desalinated water. For energy where there is cold and darkness. For better ways to treat and control malaria, one of the world's most prolific killers. And more.

We need more conversation on these problems. And we need to get to work.

A partial list is here. Click the above link to view the full report and list.

• A new method for desalination: scalable, low cost, and using renewable energy. 
• Vaccines that can effectively control and eventually help eradicate the major infectious diseases of our time—HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB 
• A new generation of homes with advanced construction material, especially for the urban poor: durable, lightweight, and affordable, with integrated solar-powered lighting, ventilation, and toilets 
• New methods to produce fertilizers to replace current processes, which are extremely capital intensive and have significant environmental footprints 
• A ‘utility-in-a-box’ for making it simpler, cheaper and faster to set up and operate renewable energy mini-grids 
• Short course TB treatment drugs that will lead to significant improvements in treatment adherence, and curb the spread of drug resistance 
• Micro-biocides to provide a method of protection against HIV/AIDS and Human Papillomavirus (HPV) for women who are otherwise vulnerable to infection through sexual contact with their partner 
• Improved, longer-lasting antiretroviral therapy (ART) formulations to control HIV viral replication and increase patient adherence 
• PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) to reduce the risk of HIV infection 
• An integrated, easy to operate, affordable, and solar-powered suite of medical devices specifically for maternal, child and primary care in low resource settings 
• A complete cure drug for Malaria that eliminates all malarial parasites, at every stage of the life cycle, from the human body 
• New long-lasting chemical mosquito repellents delivered in novel ways 
• New long-lasting non-chemical spatial mosquito repellents or attractants for vector control 
• Low cost off-grid refrigerators for preserving vaccines (and other temperature sensitive 
• Thermo-stabilizing mechanisms for preserving vaccines and other temperature sensitive, lifesaving pharmaceuticals so that they do not require refrigeration 
• Nutrient-dense and culturally appropriate foods for infants to complement breast milk during the weaning period 
• A low cost drilling system for shallow (rain-fed) groundwater wells, combined with portable sensors for measuring groundwater depth. Such systems should reduce the cost of drilling wells to under $100 per farmer in Africa 
• Affordable herbicides or other mechanisms to control weeds, ideally ones that are more environmentally friendly than herbicides currently on the market

A life of love

On my shelf there's a special book, its pages worn and creased. I bought it long ago, perhaps at in the children's section at Barnes and Noble. It's "Love you Forever" by Robert Munsch.

When my children were growing up, it was a must read before naps and at bedtime.

Even looking at its cover here brings back memories of all of the places we read it and of the shelves and closets where we hunted for it at story time.

The book follows a boy through his life - and his mother's love for him.  Whether he's flushing a watch down the toilet as a toddler or being a terrible teenager, his mother always gives him unconditional love.  Eventually, the boy expresses the same love for her - and tenderly holds her in her old age.

Valentine's Day is this week.  OK, I know this book is about a different kind of love, but love is love. A recent study found that about 15% of women send flowers to themselves at work on that day. No one should have to pretend that they are loved. Everyone should know love, whether it's romantic love - or the love that Robert Munsch writes about.

To me, love is demonstrated in small and personal moments. Many of these are described in simple ways in Munsch's book. These moments are almost always not fully appreciated until they've long passed.  Then we remember them in the sweetness of their context.

I have had many of those moments, which I cherish.

-  A teenager who holds my hand in the car
-  My twelve year old son, smiling at me as I laughed with his friends at his birthday party
-  When my parents bought me a present on my sister's birthday
-  My mother, who always took me for a milk shake after my doctor's appointment
-  My father, arriving unexpectedly at the hospital when my first child was born
-  My children, hugging each other when they come home from college
-  All those text messages that say, "Hey, dad" but I know mean, "I love you, dad"

This book, "Love you Forever" has sold 15,000,000 copies worldwide. And the reason so many people have this book on their shelves is because it tells a universal story of simple, unconditional love; unwavering and unchanging throughout a lifetime, illustrated in small ways, each day.

And it's love. What we should think about on Valentine's Day. Love for each other. Love for our mothers and fathers.

Love for someone who can look into your heart and make you tingle.

That Day You Remembered

We spent his 18th birthday together.

I remembered the day he was born, driving to the hospital, looking out the window at the stark February trees. Wondering about this youngest child. The kind of man he would become. And mostly about what we would become together.

On his birthday, I picked him up at noon. He walked out of the high school office, past the front gates and into the bleaching white Florida sunlight, squinting and smiling. I stood waiting next to the car and smiled back.

"Happy birthday, buddy. You're driving."

"Hi dad, oh .. thanks." With a knowing grin, he stepped over to the driver's side and happily tossed in his backpack. We were headed to St. Pete Beach for the afternoon.

"Have you driven on the highway before?"

"No, not really. A little."

We swung around the on-ramp and pulled into the flow of I-75 traffic, among landscaping trailers and massive motor homes. Pick-ups and motorcycles. The old, restless and tattooed. He was on edge. I was too. Everyone is - on that scary stretch of Florida asphalt.

I told him, alternately, to slow down, change lanes, speed up, move over, watch out. He was doing his best to take instruction and not glare at me.

"This is the worst stretch," I reassured him, "We'll be out of the heavy stuff soon." And we were. Soon, there were fewer trailers with towering stacks of Buicks and Cadillacs teetering over us. His fear was ebbing and his confidence building.

"Hey, Matt, did you know grandpa had a sports car convertible and he taught me how to drive in it?"

He smiled and glanced at me, hands on the wheel. "Seriously?"

I leaned back in my seat, remembering my father. "Yeah, he had this little green Fiat Spider convertible. When we first went out in it, he was wearing his beret and his leather gloves, because it was really too cold to have the top down, but we did anyway. You know what he said? Grandpa pointed at me with those leather gloves and said, 'This car is a sports car, John. Drive it like one. Don't be afraid.'"

Matt grinned said, "Yeah that sounds like grandpa, I miss him."

"Me too. Every day."

I think that was the first time I heard my father tell me to take chances. To have courage. Have fun. It was his way of telling me I was a man. That in his sports car, he wanted me to be an equal. I was just sixteen. Cool.

Those words made a difference in how I felt about myself. And how I would come to feel about him, really. I began to hear my father's advice differently after that, I think. It would always be worth paying attention.

That afternoon, Matt and I spent time in our favorite places. In Big Jim's Bait and Tackle shop, picking out reels and rods, tackle and lures. Sitting on the beach. Casting lines in the surf. Looking over the harbor at lunch, sharing a bottle of Anchor Steam.

We opened my safe and sorted through old watches, especially the one my father gave me from my train-hopping great great uncle - a wind-up sterling silver Waltham pocket watch from the late 1800's. We looked at guns and coins and collectibles.

Late in the afternoon, I saw Matt stretched across the couch, sleeping. Slanted rays of the setting sun, pink and orange, slipped past the blinds and had washed over him. He looked peaceful and content. His eyes opened and I said, "Go back to sleep, it's your birthday." He nodded.

Later, we packed up and headed home, drinking coffee from a thermos. One the way home, we stopped at our favorite roadside farm stand, where they make perfect Cuban sandwiches and sell home-made key lime pies. We bought a Coke and a pie. Switched places and he drove home. This time, he was more confident.

At one point, I asked him, "Which of your birthdays do you remember the most? For me, when I was in third grade my mother had a party with my friends in the backyard. I remember getting this plastic submarine and a cool GI Joe foot locker."

He thought for a minute and shook his head. "I don't think any really come to mind. But I'll remember this one."

Me too.

On the way home, as he drank his Coke and we listened to Kenny Chesney singing "Key Lime Pie", he glanced at me and asked, "Dad, I'm, going 83, is that OK?"

"Of course. This is a sports car, Matt. Drive it like one."

Things About You, About Love

This week, I've been thinking about love and about time.

About spontaneity. How some of the best moments just - happen.

Timothy Leary, famous for trying to discover a higher level of consciousness, once wrote, "Conscious love is not an emotion; it is serene merging with yourself, with other people, with other forms of energy."

I think Leary, despite his fascination with psychedelics, got it just right.

Which is why these moments are so rare. Because a "serene merging" with someone requires a special state. A higher level of consciousness that most of us - perhaps all of us - have a really hard time achieving. But - in those rare moments - we feel its power.

Powerful, profound. A high, an epiphany, a euphoria. A narcotic transfiguration of who we thought we were - and whom we thought you were. For a moment - for an instant - we change. Time freezes.

Maybe these frozen moments in time are simply achieved elements of our destiny.

Leary also wrote, “If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love."  You see, he knew that conscious love was impossible to create in the vortex of mixed emotions. Dr. Leary's prescription for serenity was the removal of emotion.

For how can this merging of self and others be achieved in an environment of thinking, analyzing, reacting, comparing, hoping and resenting?

It just can't be. It's spontaneous and karmic.

What I'm saying is that this is different from the continuum of a relationship that is wrapped in commitments and history and connections. It's a moment in time.

It's why we desperately seek moments like these. Whether we do it knowingly or not. And I think that these flashes in time are what souls long to experience. It's a drug that offers a brief glimpse of heaven.

I've had a few of those experiences. They are sweet and transcendent. And hopeful. Certainly addictive. And, like everyone, I think of them with longing.

Like that night. In that old house, when we talked almost all night about life and love and the world. You were sitting on your knees on the couch. As we were talking, you spontaneously sat on my lap, laughing and looking into my eyes. You barely knew me. But my love felt, in that moment, deep and conscious.

I wonder, from time to time, if either of us will find it again. But I hope that we both always remember that feeling. It was about you, about love - and about time.

You know what I mean.