What Counts is the Set of Your Sails, 
Not the Gales

Among art's most important purposes, it should exult, it should inspire, and should aim for the exalted and the beautiful.  Among the poets taken most seriously by the Twentieth century's literati, there was less of this exultation than in the century before them--a sad and disheartening fact.

Here is Ella Wheeler Wilcox, an ebullient cheerleader from that earlier century, who offers some guidance for unfolding your life, a voice that confidently sang out long before the debilitating fog of postmodern nihilism rolled in from the sea of bad philosophy.

                      Winds of Fate

                      Ella Wheeler Wilcox

One ship drives east and another drives west
With the selfsame winds that blow.
Tis the set of the sails
and not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.

Like the winds of the seas are the ways of fate,
As we voyage along through the life:
Tis the set of a soul
That decides its goal,
And not the calm or the strife.

E   P   N

2018.1021

"Dawn Patrol," a silly little poem with commentary

"Dawn Patrol"

Eric Paul Nolte

A little poem below, a tiny burst of sweet silliness I wrote, along with some commentary on why I came to write it.

Terri is campaigning, slowly but slyly, to get a dog. I resist because dogs are so much work. But I do love dogs anyway! I especially remember how much I loved Star, starting when the girls were little. Star was a big old black standard poodle. Well, actually he was more gray than black, and he was half a size smaller than a standard poodle, but what a winning smile and eager mien! We all adored him.

Now, I just stumbled across a lovely article in The Science Dog, by Linda P. Case, called "I Yawn for Your Love," which describes studies done on the nature of canine yawning. She opens her article by describing how her dog, a Brittany named Vinny, begins every day by yawning hugely in her face.

On her Facebook page, Cynthia Gillis posted Ms. Case's article and there challenged our mutual friend, John Joseph Enright, to write some verse, which John subsequently did with his usual, inimitable wit.

A line or two came to my mind, so I too tried my hand at writing a little, um, doggerel (as it were) on the subject, and amused myself for a few minutes with this silliness.

Here it is:

                             Dawn Patrol

Rising just above the distant mountain ridge,

The sun's slender crescent swells at dawn

While Vinny, Linda's Brittany, creeps and peeks

Above his sleeping master's sheets. Then with a gaping yawn

Of dog breath wafting up her nose--oh, how she freaks! 

And then he crawls across her legs as if upon a bridge

And pulls abeam her face to softly nuzzle Linda's cheeks! 

                                          E P N

2018.1017

Guidance for Reinventing Oneself

Guidance for Reinventing Oneself

Eric Paul Nolte

A young friend, Felix Mueller, just posted on Facebook an engaging little meditation on how he and his wife, Kate, made their way to America from Germany not long ago. He feels that he is now facing some difficult choices in life. 

I too am facing some tough choices, but where Felix is a young man, I am down at the other end of the road.

I am feeling compelled to reinvent myself in the wake of my retirement, which was mandated by an Act of Congress. 

I wrote Felix:

Your path has been very impressive so far! I have been delighted to follow the story of your and Kate's unfolding.

I greatly identify with the matters you are now wrestling with.

However, I think it may miss the point to say, as you do, that this kind of struggle may just be a part of being young. It's not youth, per se, of course, because it greatly depends on the individual!

There are people young and old who remain deaf to the very idea that they have much of a choice in steering their lives on any personal course across the sea of life.

Others of any age can know that life is essentially a matter of making choices.

I believe that most of us acquire our values and, more broadly, our sense of life by an uncritical process of breathing-in whatever ideas happened to be in the air when we dropped off the branches of the tree into which life delivered us.

Nothing so passive for you or others like us who made our way to Ayn Rand's challenging ideas!

Now I find myself at the other end of life, teetering on the brink of Old Geezerhood, with my career as an airline pilot ended by an Act of Congress--that bossy, meddlesome gang that always thinks it knows better than we how to run our lives-- that got me frog-marched out to pasture just because I turned 65 years old.

In short, I am having to reinvent myself in the same way that so many feel compelled to do right after college.

For me, I never had to struggle to find things I loved. Rather, my problem has always been how to limit my pursuits to a path that is practicable.

I loved airplanes, music, writing, philosophy, history, literature, science, economics--all things that were artistically and soulfully expressive, or that offered explanatory power for why people do the weird and wonderful things they do!

I remain fascinated by physics and especially by those philosophical aspects of the field that made such a confusing account of things.1

So, my advice, for what it's worth, as I formulate it for myself:

I want to create for myself a life of joy, meaning, purpose.

I need to identify and unfold the gifts I am lucky enough to have.

Which gifts? Most of us have more gifts than a single life can allow us to develop very fully. So which ones should I pursue?

I should strive to identify something that lies at the intersection of:

1. Something I love, something I feel I can learn to do unusually well (if not uniquely well) in the world;

2. A pursuit that stands perhaps the best chance of letting me feel that I have shown up in the world in a way that can make a difference like only I can make.

3. At the end of the day, I need to feel that I have loved doing what I do and that I have nurtured a circle of loving friends and family.

All these are the very stuff of life.

A final point: think about how Alex Epstein as a philosopher is taking the wonderful project he created, the Center for Industrial Progress, into what may become a fount of goodness, sanity, and truly world-shaking gravity! Alex has created for himself and his like-minded associates a place of meaning, purpose, and joy that attracts customers to pay him enough money for him to thrive and flourish!

Felix, I will follow your and Kate's continued unfolding with interest!

Viel Glück!

E P N

________________________________________________________

1. There were epistemological rabbit holes that snagged Einstein [like the analytic-synthetic dichotomy], and then there was the Kantian skepticism that seduced Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, et al, who brought their already committed and contradictory assumptions about the essential Unreality of Reality to bear on their formulation of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the nature of light--i.e. that light is not just a puzzling matter that needs to be further investigated because it displays characteristics of both particles and waves, but rather to say that light is a "wavicle." Right, it’s a wavicle. Now we know! Hallelujah! No need to look into this matter any further! Which is like saying that now we understand something because, "God said it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it. QED."

2018.1013

word count, c. 810

Altrusexual, Finally, a Pithy Word for LGBTQIP2SAA, etc.

Altrusexual

Finally, a Pithy Word for LGBTQIP2SAA, etc.

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I have an answer to the problem of finding a pithy term to describe the community of people who do not identify themselves as heterosexual:

Altrusexual.  

Okay, the word does not easily leap off the tongue. But how much better is it than this daily-changing and impossibly awkward flood of abbreviations: LGBTQIP2SAA!

Altersexual would be a more euphonious choice than my altrusexual, but, as with so many other ideas, the term has either been preempted by earlier users or shunted into vortexes of confusion by the problem of equivocation, namely, the troubling fact that the same word has come to mean more than one thing, and sometimes many more things than the one thing you want to pin down with a good name.

Do you doubt me?  

Think of “liberal,” deriving from the Latin liber, meaning liberty, freedom, but now perversely meaning not one who advocates individual rights and capitalism but instead government control of every blooming little thing.  Think of competing and contradictory definitions of the Good, of true, false, faith, knowledge, profit, morality, induction, art, fact, opinion, equality, objectivity, and freedom.  Need I go on?  It’s a dogfight out there! 

I’ll explain below why the word “altersexual” will not work for what I mean. 

Why should I care about an issue like this which, in the opinion of much of the world, affects but a relatively small community of “sexual minorities,” as the academics might describe them?

For one thing, I have close family, deeply loved, there among this community.

For another thing, the absolute size of this community does not begin to capture the gravity of this issue, starting with humanity’s widely varying experience of sexuality, and of the explosive feelings that this matter arouses across the spectra of politics, religion, morality, and psychology.   

So, as for my choice of “altrusexual” as a pithy term for the non-heterosexual, let me discuss how different cases may be made for and against this word:

Against the word, for starters, is the troubling fact that it’s my word, a neologism, which is a category of language that has long been attacked by our most thoughtful users of language because these unprecedented words can muddy the waters and are so often pretentious, self-aggrandizing, or worse.  Nevertheless, I believe this instance may be one of those rare cases where a new word is justified.

Not long ago, I would have thought that “homosexual,” “asexual,” “queer,” and maybe “anti-sexual” would have been perfectly good terms to describe those who are not heterosexual.  But the community of non-heterosexuals seems to have risen up and rejected all of these words.  So their opinion on what they want or do not want to be called should be acknowledged.

For another thing, again, their community has not embraced a description of themselves as homosexual, queer, and so forth.  Surely their opinion ought to be respected for how they themselves might like to be called.

Now, because I am surely not alone in my confusion over this constantly changing string of characters, let us unpack what we are talking about when we say, “LGBTQIP2SAA.”

I, for one, have failed to keep straight (sorry...) this ever-shifting alphabet soup, like a stream of letters poured into a pot from a kettle of random letters plucked from the Roman, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets.  Today, the heat is turned up to the boiling point, and because this community rightly feels itself to be persecuted, when we fail to address them respectfully, it can provoke the howls of wounded and angry voices from a thorny briar patch. 

So what are we talking about here?

As I say, let’s unpack this stream of letters.

Before I start, let’s be clear that I am not making fun of this altrusexual community.  The matters involved here make a riveting contemporary conundrum.  Moreover, and emotionally most to the point, as I said, I have family and friends I love with all my soul who live there, and they absolutely know me to hold the deep belief that love is love is love—and that the more love there is in the world, the better.

Alright, back to the matter at hand:

So far, everybody knows the letters LGBTQ—Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer

Now, “I” means “inter-sex,” for people with two sets of genitals, or who have certain chromosomal anomalies.

“P” is for pansexual, meaning sexual activity with people of any sexual orientation or gender.

“2SA,” means “two spirit,” to describe those who recognize the male and female spirits inside everyone, but more specifically to name a tradition among some “First Nations” that believe that some minority of people have both male and female spirits inside them.  I am guessing that this may be congruent with more modern conceptions, like those of Jung and others, which is to say that all men and women, by their nature as human beings, have both male and female elements of their psychology.

“A” for asexual.

“A,” again, for Allies, meaning those who, although not a part of this community, feel a deep support for them.

If you feel any confusion or hostility to this ever-shifting landscape of language to describe this community, let me remind you of how other groups have undergone changes that are similarly difficult to keep track of:

Think of how Negro became Colored, Black, and African-American.

Think of how Indian became Native American, Amerindian, and, lately, First Nations.

Think of how Handicapped became Disabled.

Hmm.  This brings to mind how “Disabled” never made it all the way to “Differently Abled,” which drowned in the waters somewhere between the River Euphrates and the River Euphonious. 

I am also reminded of how I remember seeing on my boyhood street a “Home for Incurables.”  What must the patients in such a home for the incurables have thought of their prospects in life?  I can't know.  Did this moniker encourage them to feel hopeless?  And is not a feeling of hopelessness a self-fulfilling prophecy?  I do know that how you think is damn near everything in life.  If you think you are incurable, then you surely are.     

You may already have heard the term “altersexual,” so what’s wrong with this idea?  

I did think that this would be a better term for this community of the non-heterosexual, but my google search revealed that the word has been preempted, like so many good words that have been rendered unusable by prior convention.  I found a use of “altersexual” by some mean-spirited wag who derides as hapless the poor soul who says, “I don’t know if I want to be with a guy, a girl, both, or neither.”  Not to mention the matter of, “I don’t know if I want to be a guy, a girl, or both, or neither.” 

I also saw the usage of “altersexual” in a way that might suggest that the idea is wrapped up with a leftist conception of social justice, and it is not my intention to confine my idea of “altrusexuality” to the left side of the political spectrum.  As a libertarian-minded person, I find it ironic that such a big proportion of the non-heterosexual seem to be advocates of leftist politics and therefore proponents of statist control of everything.  Government regulation of everything seems fine only to those whose gang now has the levers of power.  Just wait until the next gang that hates you grabs those levers!

Now, I just said above that the opinion of this community should trump anybody else’s opinion on what to call themselves, but here I must say that I must respect my own measured opinion, which agrees with the altrusexual community that “altersexual” is not a good term, but disagrees with it that their best interests are served by the party of plunder and thought control. 

My term, altrusexual, is derived, of course, from alter, and altru, Latin terms for “other,” plus the Vulgar Latin alterui, the oblique case that modifies “other” with part of -cui, -ui, which means “to whom,” and adds an adjectival “L.”

We could speak of “altrusexuality,” using the same grammatical form as for “homosexuality.”  Perhaps we could also use the term “altrusexism,” which unfortunately echoes “sexism,” a bad belief, but it is not bad to bring this formulation into the realm of belief itself, onto the turf of philosophy, in other words—because it is therefore a term which, being a belief, is subject to examination and therefore to acceptance or rejection as a matter of logic.  By logic, I mean a controversial idea, but, in my opinion, an idea that is true nonetheless, namely that we acknowledge the law of non-contradiction (which says that nothing can be entirely black and entirely white at the same time and the same respect) and apply this concept with thoughtful examination to the evidence of experience.  This formulation may be another name for the idea of objectivity, which is also controversial.  The idea of objectivity is controversial because it is rejected by cultural relativists, and yet is upheld by many who falsely conflate it with their various flavors of religious absolutism and revealed wisdom.  How bizarre!  How common!  How invisible to most!  How senseless!  To my knowledge, only Ayn Rand’s full theory of concepts can bring sanity to these conundrums. 

Now, consider the coincidence that my terms altrusexuality or altrusexism might make one guess that they are derived from “altruism,” which takes the Latin for “other” and mates it with “-ism.”  This term was coined by Auguste Comte, who strove to create a secular morality that would pull the fangs out of the cruel and mass-murderous head of religion and to address all the other predatory behavior in the world as well.  

Objectivists will plotz at the suggestion that any good can come from anything that Comte wrote, but surely it is a good motive to want to create an ethics that could drain the world of murderous, screwball, supernatural ideas and predation.  

So, what to call the LGBTQIP2SAA community?

Altrusexual.

In the end, let us celebrate the fact that love is love is love is love, and the more of it, the better!

E   P   N

2017.1128
revised 2017.1130
and again, 2017.1229

1,700 words

Playing the Piano with Speed and Ease

Playing the Piano with Speed and Ease

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I've been thinking about the pianist's problems recently--so much more engaging and serene than pondering the world's gyrating vortex of insanity!  Nevertheless, on more than one occasion, these problems of the pianist have reduced me to clinched-up knots of frustration.

Here are some thoughts on this matter that accompanied a piece I published last year at sheetmusicplus.com.  These remarks appear as a preface to the score:

This piece is a free adaptation and a complete reworking of a study by Felix Le Couppey (1811-1887), Étude number 12, from his L'Agilité, Opus 20-- 25 Progressive Studies for Mechanism and Light Touch.

In its original form, this study was a charming little piece of musical fluff. But getting it up to speed reduced me to tears! It also gave me an epiphany of immense power that transformed my technique. Suddenly I could play faster than I had ever thought possible, and I could do so with a thrilling ease! 

This epiphany emerged from the spluttering frustration I felt over my inability to play these sixteenth notes at Le Couppey's metronome marking of 144. It dawned on me that I couldn’t play fast enough because I was tripping over my own fingers when I used the overly articulated technique of moving the fingers by the “lift, throw, relax” method. This superfluous motion creates an impenetrable barrier, a speed wall, as does playing legato scales by passing the thumb under the palm, when shifting hand position up and down the keyboard. So I found another way—which I’ve since learned was known to every pianist who ever achieved prodigious speed. Here’s how to bring this piece up to speed with ease:

Be sure to practice this piece with each hand alone. For each group of sixteenth notes, gently place the four fingers down simultaneously, to get the feel. Think of your arm, from elbow to fingertips, as something like a kitchen utensil, such as a spatula. Moving your right arm as a unit, place your finger tips down into the key bed, depressing all four notes at once, as a block chord. Make sure that all the fingers remain stiff (not rigid with tension, but just stiff enough to resist collapsing upwards.) Slowly lift and then play each group by placing all the fingers down with a rotation of your forearm, calm and relaxed, with the fingers rolling through the notes at the speed of a brief snare drum roll: Rrrrip! To rip through this group of notes like this takes no more effort than to place those four fingers down, calmly, all at once! Then, with a quick shift up or down the keyboard to get into position for the next group, that’s the whole trick for playing such passages with astonishing speed and ease! It takes time and effort to get the knack here, but the result can be transformative and thrilling! 

As for my adaptation of this study, I believe it offers intermediate advanced players the chance to enjoy a great leap in technique like the one I experienced, and also offers a piece of music that one might not blush to play outside the practice room—perhaps bringing it at least into the living room for a soirée, if not into the concert hall. To make this adaptation, I wrote a grumbly bass line with lungs, and nice fat chords to flesh out most of the skinny little triads that accompany the original study’s fast passages. I added a brooding, chromatic introduction that features as a melody the accompanimental figure of a broken triad that Le Couppey wrote a few times on the second page, in various inversions. I employed this broken chord figure several more times in both hands, and also added a little coda, sprinkled with sparkle. 

Playing time is about one minute 30 seconds.

E   P   N

2017.1028

Making Our Way Home from the World Trade Center

Making Our Way Home from the World Trade Center

by

Eric Paul Nolte

On the early morning of September 11, 16 years ago today, I was at Newark airport, right across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center.  I was picking up my flight papers at the Concourse C-3 weather room, where the pilots did their pre-flight planning.

As usual, I had left my car at the employee parking lot F, on the south side of the airfield.  When I parked there I always looked up fondly at the Trade Towers just across the marshes and the river. 

I had lived in New York twenty years before, driving a taxi cab while a student, and I watched the towers going up a little every day.  My feelings about those buildings were personal. I had a visceral affection for the awe-inspiring majesty of the structure and, as I learned more and more about sound economics, I came to harbor an intellectual appreciation for it as well.  I came to understand how this vibrant center played a central role in the global financial networks that served the creation of so much wealth in the world. I had also learned that a relatively few people actually understand that these financial markets are not merely a bunch of paper pushers exploiting everybody else.  But grasping the nature of financial markets is difficult for many because their work is so abstract and arcane, but nonetheless crucial to directing the flow of scarce resources into those ventures that directly benefit everybody in the free world—and the freer the nation, economically, the greater the benefits. 

Immediately outside the weather room where I stood, in the near distance, the Boeing 737 I was scheduled to fly was there at Gate 80.  In the middle distance was the WTC, and my view of it was as if I were near the front of an auditorium, watching someone on stage.

I took a break and walked over to the Garden State Diner and ordered breakfast. 

As is my wont, I sat at the counter of the diner with my nose buried in a book.  

I vividly remember what I was reading—economist Russell Roberts’ didactic, yet somehow touching novel, The Invisible Heart: an Economic Romance.  The novel is about two academics in love, one of whom is a liberal progressive who believes that government control of things is vital to our well-being in life.  Where the one character sees victims in life, the other sees victors and creative heroes.  This other protagonist is a passionate champion of free markets and believes that government regulation tends to create perversely unintended consequences for almost everything it touches, and that the economic freedom of capitalism dramatically, stupendously supports peaceful, voluntary trade in the world, trade for mutual benefit, and thereby enables people to flourish better than any other system ever to appear in history anywhere in the world.

I kid you not!  This is the truth!  Such a nerd!  Yet I was indeed reading Russ Roberts' book and I remember this fact as vividly as I remember where I was the day President Kennedy was shot. 

Then I heard a woman cry out, “Oh my god, an airplane just flew into the World Trade Center!” I looked up and witnessed the first puff of smoke beginning to billow out of the north tower of the WTC.

I thought to myself that the jagged and bloody hole a big airplane would make on the side of that tower would be an ugly scar that might take months to repair.  More importantly, the tragic loss of all those poor souls who died in this accident would certainly leave behind bereft relatives and friends whose grief might never subside or heal. 

But this awful event was already jangling my nerves, so I settled up for breakfast and went directly back to the weather room for my flight papers.  My departure time was just an hour later and I needed to meet my crew down at the airplane.

As I stood at the window in the flight planning room, the second airplane blasted a mushroom cloud of fire and flesh and steel and glass out of the south tower.

At that moment, all the pilots in the room knew that these were no accidents, these were acts of terror. 

Everybody there knew that our world was listing gravely towards a loathsome and dangerous ocean. 

I stood with my colleagues, weak and stagnant with horror.

And then the south tower fell in a pall of smoke against that pellucid blue sky like an ugly smear of paint thrown against a beautiful painting by some stinking little punk.

I never imagined that there was the remotest possibility that one of the towers could ever collapse as a result of an airplane’s crashing into it.  

Then the second tower collapsed.  

The authorities closed the airport then and I joined a miles long refugee column of dumbfounded, shattered and woozy humanity, and, pulling my roller bag and flight kit, trudged the three miles back to my car at the far end of employee parking Lot F.  

In the bewildered traffic jam that followed, I began trying to make my way home.

In a sense, like every decent person in the world, I am still trying to make my way home. 

E   P   N

2017.0911

What is a Facebook Friend?

What is a Facebook Friend?

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I recently embarrassed myself when I behaved a bit like a horse’s ass on the Facebook Message site.  What?  Little old mild mannered me?  I, who have often been called a warm and kind man of gentle soul?  Yup.  

How did this happen?  

In the wake of having my friend request denied, I exchanged testy salvos with the wife of a young man I greatly admire. This man is the author of books I have placed on my short list of the best books I own.  I’ve met this man a couple times at talks he gave in New York when he was on book tours, and our meetings were warm and respectful, in contrast to the exchange between his wife and me.

Now, I rarely ask anybody to be a Facebook friend of mine, but I did so in this case because his wife had written something on her husband’s Facebook page that made me like the way she thinks and inspired me to ask her to join my circle of friends.

This little episode brings into sharp focus the question of what a Facebook friend is.  This woman and I clearly had clashing ideas on the matter.

So, just what is a friend, really, and how might this concept align with or differ from the kind of person we befriend on Facebook?

Aristotle is always a good place to start with deep questions.  Aristotle said that friendship is a benevolent and mutual bond between people whose ties are independent of the familial or sexual.  There are three levels of friendship: 1. The useful, as between those engaged in a common project or work.  2. The pleasant, as between companions who hang out together for mutual entertainment.  3.  The good or virtuous bond between people who are drawn together by mutual esteem.  In essence, at its deepest level, this mutual esteem between the like-minded makes one think of the friend as almost another self.  

I would think that a Facebook friend can rightly fall into any of Aristotle’s categories here.  But a Facebook friend can also be someone we have never met; many of mine are.

For me, a Facebook friend is many things.  Yes, I have close personal friends and family here.  I also have old college buddies and colleagues from work and other adventures.  Yet I have also received Facebook friend requests from people I have never met.  

By what criteria should we allow others into our Facebook circle?  

Now, I have the possibly delusional notion that as I continue to nudge my music and writing out into the wider world, my Facebook page and other social media may prove to be an advantage for me, so I have never insisted that I must personally know someone before accepting a friend request.  

For me, when I get a FB friend request, I always go to that person’s FB page to sniff the air and verify a whiff of sanity, and if we also have some FB friends in common, I usually have no fear of accepting the request.

Without having given the matter any thought, I had assumed that my own criteria for FB friendship were universal and really the only reasonable view.

For this person who denied my FB friend request, there is another standard: she said that before allowing others into her circle, she demands that they have met personally, no exceptions.  Hers is a far more restrictive standard than mine.   So be it.  There is nothing wrong with that, but I had never considered the matter.  

In the end, what is a Facebook friend?  As it turns out, to my embarrassed surprise, when I gave the matter some thought I realized that, of course, a Facebook friend is, like every other value in life, whatever you want it to be!  It’s your choice.

Once again, confirmation bias, humanity’s Original Sin, rears its ugly head.  I could see no farther than what I myself believed was the reasonable standard of online friendship.  Mea culpa.  I’m so sorry!  

I foolishly expressed surprise and indignation at having my FB friend request denied, and the gal responded by blocking me from her FB page!  Then I felt both ridiculous and embarrassed.  Here I was denied even the salve of being able to apologize for my apparently boorish expression of indignation and wounded pride.  So, wife of that wonderful author, if you read this—you know who you are—please accept my apology here.

E   P   N

2017.0602

c. 750 words