Six Years Old!?!

Oh, the insanity!!

So, I just happened by a headline that said that Alanis Morissette was willing to breastfeed her son until he was six, and I have to admit I am a little shaken by the thought of it. The reason is that I have a six year old nephew and I am quite certain that if I saw him standing next to my sister inlaw and sucking on her breast I would have to smack my brother around a bit until he got some sense into his head. Fortunately, I know my sister inlaw wouldn’t do such a thing, but you might be wondering why I would smack my brother around and not her if she did. Well, for two reasons; the first is that I would never hit a woman, and the second is that it is a fathers duty to his children to make sure mom doesn’t overdo it. It is a checks and balances sort of thing.

We know with hard scientific stuff, that women are hard wired to be protective and nurturing to their children, but what if it goes too far? What if the mother is an overbearing crackpot? It is not always her fault, she cannot be expected to make all the right choices all of the time. Especially if there is that hard wiring working against them sometimes. A man has two roles in a family; husband and father. The husband part is to be there for his wife, but the father part is to be there for his children… even when it means backing his wife down a notch. It should be fair and democratic. A father has a right to an equal say in how his children are raised. There should be discussions and arguments. “What the hell are people going to think at the T-Ball game, when junior comes off the field after making a catch and goes to suck on his mothers breast?” I am fairly certain that there is no man out there who could honestly say that they would be alright with that. I am sure that there are plenty of men out there who are pretending to be all modern and “in tune” with their feminine sides, who will “say” it doesn’t bother them. But that is only because they are not “in tune” with their masculine side, and that is the side that their children need to step up to the plate when their mother takes a ride on the crazy train.

And to be fair, fathers are not always a pillar of sanity who can go about without question or scrutiny. Mothers needs to be there for there children too when their father wants to strap them to some motorized something or other and send them for a joy ride down the street. All I am saying is that raising children is a team sport that is not always the parents against the children, sometimes the competition is mother against father… and that is a good thing.

In the end, my message for Mrs. Morissette is this (and this is a message for this whole mixed up culture of ours; from child care to education)… being a good parent is not about YOU. And if anyone knows the brother of her husband, please tell him he needs to smack him around a bit.

Intelligence vs. Smarts

In my old trusty-dusty dictionary intelligence and smart are defined as follows;

Intelligence: 1a, The ability to learn or understand or deal to deal with new or trying situations; also the skilled use of reason; the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests).  b, Christian Science; the basic eternal quality of divine Mind.  c, mental acuteness; shrewdness.

Smart: 4a, mentally alert; bright. b, knowledgeable. c, shrewd.

I have to say that I don’t fully agree with these definitions, and I would argue that confusion about these things is causing some pretty serious problems.

I am going to try and make this as simple as possible; a smart person is good at learning material and reproducing what they have learned; an intelligent person is good at adapting to new environments. It is very rare for a person to be both smart and intelligent. In our culture people who are found to be smart are encouraged to not be intelligent, and people who are intelligent are shunned from the mainstream. Smart people get straight A’s in school and are conditioned to not question what they are told as true; Intelligent people learn everywhere they go – in and out of the classroom – so they end up not getting as good of grades because they are not as focused in the classroom (not to mention that they are usually in trouble because they learn the teachers too well). Smart people are very logical; intelligent people are very intuitive.

The reason this confusion is a problem can be seen in our politics and economy. The people in charge are very smart, but they are not at all intelligent. They are trying to get by with only what they have learned in the classroom… trying to make the world fit into their textbooks (I use the word textbook loosely, referring to any book they might be trying to make the world fit). Thus, we see the same problems surfacing over and over again. Wall Street will not get fixed until they get an intelligent person in there to shake things up a bit. Unfortunately, our current system will never allow an intelligent person within a hundred miles of the authority system.

**This is a rare double post that also appears on another blog of mine called The Management Party.**

Here I Go Again…

It gets so unbelievably exhausting…

In the New York Times today, Gary Gutting asks “Can Physics and Philosophy Get Along?” I think all this tedious empty rhetorical crap is starting to make my eyes bleed. Forgive me, but I must be blunt… to paraphrase the late, great Frank Zappa – “philosophy is not dead, it just smells funny.”

Scientists, get your heads out of your collective ass. Facts, scientifically proven facts, are nothing more than tools hanging on the wall of our garage workshop; they only have value when we choose to use them. And even then, the value is measured in how we use them, and for what reason we use them. Which, in turn, is determined by our perceptions… which lies in the domain of philosophy.

Philosophers, stop being such arrogant diluted shitheads. By themselves, your words have no value. 2+2=4 is not a truth, it is a representation of a truth. All your run-on sentences and boring debates as to what the meaning of the word “nothing” is, does not mean anything. Thoughts and ideas only have value when they can be used to give context to our perception of our experiences.

Philosophy is not about who can come up with the best explanation for something irrelevant, philosophy is about giving context to our experiences so that we can use the things we know, those facts, all those tools we have out in the garage, efficiently and effectively.

The problem is, from my perspective, two fold; both sides have a problem. On the one hand we have scientists who are very good at what they do, and thinking that gives them the right to start bossing other people around. What makes a scientist good is their diligence and their focus and discipline and their ability to do the same thing over and over again until they are certain what they have is a fact. Those same characteristics make for a crappy philosopher and theoretician. A good philosopher knows how to day dream… they are professional goof-balls. A good philosopher knows how to let go of the rope and go a little crazy, and then grab the rope again and bring back what they found. Put a philosopher in a laboratory and nothing would get done. On the other hand, those who would call themselves philosophers have begun to believe that their ideas have value by themselves. I am sorry, but they do not. It is an unfortunate result of this copyright world of status and profits. “I have to have an idea that I can copyright”, and if a person does achieve this the idea gains value. But that value does not necessarily mean it has value in the context of philosophy and understanding… just in the politics of our societies fight for dominance.

Ultimately, the problem we face is that everyone seems to think that they know something… and the only reason they think this is because they are fighting for position, not because they actually know anything.

I have said it before and I will most likely say many time more… we are living in the times of Socrates, where the smartest among us know that we don’t know anything at all.

Further Explanations Needed

So, I have things bouncing around in my head that I feel  might make my thinking more clear in My Theory of Homosexuality (and, Divorce: an Addendum to My Theory of Homosexuality, and  My Theory of Autism, and so on). I have tried to point out my perspective that homosexuality is a mistake of perspective; emotionally sensitive people measuring their experiences based on the perspective of a world that does not acknowledge the ability of people to feel each others emotions. However, I don’t feel that I have explained the mechanism behind this all that well. So here, I am going to craft a theory as to how people become so emotionally sensitive to begin with – in other words, empathic – and how it becomes confused over time. Please remember that this is all just the crazy writing of a crazy bald man who believes that no fact or theory is more important than any persons freedom or happiness.

Statistically, homosexuals and the autistic are mostly 3rd or greater in birthing order… and, statistically, homosexuality and autism have increased dramatically over the past sixty years. So, the two questions are; what is the difference between the second and third child? and what has changed over the past sixty years to exacerbate this difference? To me, the answer is very simple… emotional energy.

We know our brains develop in direct relation to the information that it is receiving. A child born without eyes will have a slightly different wiring of the brain than a child born with eyes. It doesn’t take much. Even an adult who loses their vision will experience a change in brain function. So, the difference between the second and third child is the amount of emotional energy floating around the house at the time of their birth causing their brain to develop slightly differently. The more energy there is, the greater the difference in brain wiring and functionality there will be. To make a general scale; the total absence of emotional energy creates sociopaths, extremely intense energy creates the severely autistic, and there are a million shades of gray in between. Homosexuals, I would argue, are generally somewhere in the middle.

The logic is very simple… over the past sixty years, more and more people are receiving higher education, and more and more people (whether or not they themselves are getting the education, the culture as a whole has changed from the increase of educated people.) are planning on having only two children. The third child will naturally receive more emotional energy during development, even to parents who do want more than two children, but the accidental third child (whether the parent admits it or not) is a lightning rod… especially with a mother who plans on starting a career once her youngest child is of a certain age. And then there are all the other factors that cause stress in the average home; debt, job insecurity, and so forth, all having increased drastically as well over the past few decades. From my experience, the people I know and have met, this holds true, but can also be explained with first and second children who are homosexual or autistic. I know a homosexual first child that was born in very emotionally tense times for his parents, while his younger siblings were born in a much more casual and comfortable environment and are heterosexual.

The significance of this emotional sensitivity is that the usual heterosexual mating routine is for two people who experience a physical attraction to maintain (usually unconsciously) that physical attraction until they develop an emotional connection. With homosexuals being emotionally sensitive they are doing things backwards. They make emotional connections easily and are, over a lifetime of conditioning by a society that is emotionally stunted and sexually repressed, building physical relationships based on their emotional connections… and everyone, hetero and homosexuals, naturally have deeper emotional connections to members of the same sex… It’s a function of language and communication. All languages are based on shared experiences, and emotional energy as a form of communication is more potent between individuals who have shared experiences. This is why scientists have only been able to measure such a thing in twins and close family members. First, there is a difference between the emotional experiences in genders, then there is a difference between the emotional experiences of people who are emotionally sensitive and people who are not. Thus, the confusion. The physical difference is the ability to feel the emotional energy, the behavioral difference is how we use that ability.

Anyway, that is my perspective. I hope it makes sense, and I hope that the reader understands that I am not saying I am right, and I certainly don’t believe that any opinion, or belief, or theory, or anything else for that mater, is more important than a persons freedom and happiness… I am just emptying my nagging brain and throwing it out there.

The Single Solution Problem

The Single Solution Problem is when a broad advance occurs, an adaptation that is effective enough to spread into all environments, however, over time, as each environment evolves in it’s own direction, that single adaptation is pressured to respond to those changes, but individual’s resist that natural pressure because they believe there should be a single solution that crosses all environments, just like the initial adaptation had, and not an unique solution that is a solution in their environment alone.

The most obvious example of this is oil and automobiles. In the past century the automobile has spread around the world with perfect effectiveness, mostly because of the ready availability of oil and gasoline. Now, however, oil and gasoline availability is dwindling and most people are looking for the one next solution to the problem. Will it be hydrogen? Batteries? Or some other source of energy.  The truth is very simple… most likely there will not be another source of energy that is as effective and ubiquitous as oil has been, and that the solution to this problem will take many different forms depending on the unique pressures of many different individuals in many different environments.

For example, battery powered electric cars will be a sound solution for commuters who live within a certain distance from their work and in an area with a good electrical infrastructure. Inversely, farmers will most likely have to stick with some sort of internal combustion engine… maybe even having someone invent a home brew kit so they can make their own bio-diesel. Rich people will stubbornly keep estate cars and sports cars as a sign of class and stature; being rich enough to still burn gasoline. All the different variations of what could be done are actually too numerous to write down here, but if we watch the television and listen to the “experts”, all that we here them say is they are trying to find the solution to the problem and that we simply need to be patient and wait for them to find it.

Another example of this (and the reason why it going through my head now) is what we see in the global corporations and the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. After World War II the corporation was an effective enough adaption that it has spread all over the world. However, now all the unique environments are evolving in their own way and the corporations are fighting to maintain status quo while governments and experts are trying to find A Single Solution to the problem. There is no single solution to the problem of global corporations. Each individual, each unique environment will have it’s own best solution, and if people are going to stand around and wait for some government or panel of experts to develop a Single Solution that could be applied to the entire world, then the corporations that are fighting for their own survival by trying to maintain the status quo will win.

There is no single solution. Europe’s best solution to our banking problems are going to be different than the United States, China, Russia, and so forth. Even within the individual nations there will be a variety of solutions, depending on the unique traits of the local ecosystems. This, I would argue, was why the founding fathers made the layers of State an Federal Government… so that there was a little wiggle room for individual States to find the right solution for them without needing to break from the union.

We have seen some amazing adaptations recently that have been so effective that they have swept the world up in a frenzy of growth and advancement. The only problem is that these adaptations have not changed the fact that there are still many different environments on this planet – all continuously changing, all continuously evolving in their own unique directions – and in the end, by peace or by war, those individual environments will come to their own unique solutions to their problems.

The is no one global solution.

Defining Genius

I just kind of read this article in the NYT, skimmed it really, about these two musicians who both won a MacArthur Foundation award calling them “genius”. The question in the article asked what it was that makes a genius. The answer they gave were typically vague and humble, which is probably what we should hope to expect from someone who has just been called a genius. However, since I most certainly live on the other side of the spectrum, and in no risk of anyone calling me a genius, I shall offer you my definition of what makes a genius.

Every single person is capable of genius in one way or another – be it physical, intellectual, or artistic. There are three elements to it however; the first is finding The Groove, the second is have the discipline pursue it, and the third is having the courage to follow it where ever it may lead us. We all know the experience, for we all have it in the basic physical reactions of love and sex. When we are young it is just a look, a gentle touch of the hand, or a sweet little kiss that sends us through the roof. But as we pursue this, as we get older an more experienced, we need more and more to get the same feeling. Apply this same principle to a artist, musician, athlete, or scholar and we will see exactly the same dynamic in what makes a genius. Consider a jazz musician as a small child as they first hear the sound of a saxophone. At first it is just hearing it being played that sends them to the roof, but after a small while that isn’t enough… they have to play to get the feeling. So, they put the work in to learn the instrument and practice, and the more comfortable and the more skilled they become they discover that they can get that same feeling as when they first heard the instrument as a small child when they let go and allow the themselves to simply play. This ability to enter the groove, however, is not genius by itself. For it to be genius the musician has to remember the things they did during the time they were in the groove and use these pieces to build upon and put them together with other pieces they find while in The Groove. A genius is someone who keeps building… over and over going back into The Groove to grab another piece and then work with it. Eventually, the genius will not be satisfied with just retrieving pieces out of The Groove when they can manage to enter it (which often seems random), they want to learn how to develop a state of constant Groove. The reason for this is because behind all of this pursuit, there is always the titillating sensation of attention that is like a drug to artists… always craving more and more.

This process is true with every genius; intellectual, physical, emotional, artistic, and so on. Some would argue that someone like a physicist doesn’t crave attention, but I think that it only seems that way. Give them a little and once they become comfortable with that little amount, they will crave more. This is why the Muse has always been considered a lover who inspires through passion. And it is why I personally believe that genius and spiritual awareness are exactly the same thing.

The Evolution of Philosophy

In the beginning, (you know you are in trouble when I start with that) there was this thing called Sophistry. Today, we call sophistry ‘politics’. Sophistry is saying any crazy thing in order to get people to go along with you. I could never define it as clearly as you could experience it for yourself. So, take a moment and turn on the TV to one of those twenty-four hour news channels and you will get a taste of Sophistry first hand. (For you information, the greatest modern Sophist is Glen Beck.) The Sophist cares not about logic or reason, but they do like to create elaborate explanations to convince people that they are smart and right. For a long time, a long time ago, there were only sophists fighting it out for control of how things go. Out of this hostile and confusing environment came a man that changed everything.

In a world where people were saying anything they wanted in order to get what they wanted, a man named Socrates developed a way to parse through the Sophists tricks and get to the truth. Today, we call this method he developed ‘The Socratic Method‘. The Socratic Method is asking questions in order to test that accuracy of the claims made. The best modern example of this principle is known as ‘Cross Examination’. Just think how screwed up things had to be for a person who asks questions to be considered an innovator and hero. (As remarkable as the first monkey using a stick to fling his pooh instead of his hand.) Then, a student of Socrates started using this crazy idea of using questions to examine and test ideas in order to build complex structures of logic and reason. Today, we call these structures of logic and reason Philosophies.

For almost two thousand years a battle raged in the arena of human perception. It was the battle between the sophists and the philosophers. And, just like the battle between the cheetah and the antelope out on the Serengeti, the sophists and the philosophers developed amazing and unique skills in their ever evolving ability to weave lies and misdirection, build complex structures of logic that gave people a stronger sense of context to protect themselves from the increased ability to weave more lies and misdirection. Round and round it went; more and more complex, more and more deceitful. The only thing that they had in common was that they both grew further away from the common person.

To understand the next step in the evolution of philosophy, we have to take a simple step back for a moment. One of the students of Socrates was a man named Plato (not to be confused with Play-dough even though Play-dough is far more fun… and edible). Plato used the dialectic method of Socrates to build a complex structure of understanding of our own existence from the top down. For Plato, everything began with the center of all things, a thing he called ‘The Good’, and everything we know and experience cascades out from that singular point. Alternately, it was a student of Plato’s that used the Socratic Method to build a complex logical understanding of things from the ground up. Aristotle was a man who valued cataloging, classifying, and associating all the things around him. Both of these men had, in their complex structures of understanding, folded in views of good government and the structure of a perfect society. However, Plato’s views started from ‘The Good’ and spread downward, while Aristotle’s began in the world he saw around him and built upward. Truthfully, back then there was very little difference between the two, but by the time we get to Galileo these two different views can be seen as the seeds for the next step in the evolution of philosophy.

That small little difference between Plato and Aristotle, tempered in the furnace of competition between the sophists and the philosophers, gave birth to Science and Theology. Science being the pursuit of facts (using an evolved form of The Socratic Method known as The Scientific Method), building it’s understanding fro the ground upwards, and theology being the branch of philosophy that starts with the idea of a higher consciousness, God, and builds downward. Since the days of Galileo we have witnessed these three things battle in that arena of our world. Three!! You just asked, no? Yes, Three. Because what most people is the battle between science and theology, but th truth is that the sophists never went anywhere. The sophists are still running for public office,.. they own newspapers and TV stations and enjoy controlling the image of the battle between science and theology. However, the truth is, like Isaac and Ishmael, science and theology come from the same parents…. and understanding this opens the door to the next evolutionary step of philosophy.

The next step in the evolution of philosophy is to remember that the most important battle is between non-sense and reason; between philosophers and sophists. It is true that there may be infighting between scientists and theologians about which is a better foundation to build our understanding on, God above us or nature around us, but that infighting must never let us forget that the scientist and the theologian are pursuing the same goal from different directions (like digging a tunnel through a mountain from both sides and meeting in the middle) and the true enemy of logic and reason is the non-sense of the sophist politician; whether that sophist pretends to be a scientist or a theologian. In this confusing world, if a person has a hard time trying to figure out who is who, and what is what, the best thing to do is go back to the beginning and practice the martial art of Socrates, the first warrior of reason, and ask questions that expose the logic of the argument that is being offered as truth.

For The Professional Ladies

This morning I was out for my usual coffee and I spent a good part of the coffee listening to the people sitting next to me. There were three professional people, two sales reps for something medical and one hospital executive type… you know, the usual people who use coffee shops for meeting places. The hospital executive was a gentleman in his early sixties, while the sales people were a man and woman in their mid-thirties(ish). Of the two sales people, the man was the superior in the business, but the woman was far more intelligent and knowledgeable. It was clear that the guy did just enough to get by, but gained his position by working the social angles and politics of the game. She, like other women I have witness in this same situation, gave off a sense of underlying frustration, nothing that showed physically, purely an empathic thing, that gave the impression that she was trying desperately to crack the barrier that prevented her from rising to the level of her capabilities. She wasn’t doing a sales pitch, which would have explained some of the things I noticed… it was clear that she was trying too hard to be a part of the meeting. So, as I sat watching and listening I noted three things that I noticed before about such professional women trying to meet with professional men in such a professional situation (like a guide to meeting with men).

Her first problem was that she wasn’t relaxed and she was obviously trying to prove herself. In a man’s mind, people who are trying to prove themselves are still trying to work things out. It’s the people who are not only capable, but confident and relaxed in their knowledge of there capability that are trusted. This made itself apparent in the fact that she consistently gave more information than was necessary. If we are talking to a subordinate then it is alright to give them tons of information that we might think is important, but if we are talking to equals or superiors it is best to simply answer the question and let them know that their is more information if they want it; let them decide if it is important enough for them to know, “… there are issues pertaining to this that I can fill you in on if your are interested.” There was several times there when the two men drifted off into the ether as the woman went on and on – with amazing knowledge and accuracy – but without need.

Her second mistake was in her speaking. Her grammar, diction, and enunciation were perfect, but her delivery was monotone, and without pauses or rhythm… and a little too fast, but I think that was only because she had no rhythm. I noticed that the executive was straining at times to listen to her. She was a stream of valuable information that was being delivered in a way that was difficult to pick up. We use rhythm and voice inflection to package what we are saying in a way that makes it easier for people to understand what we are saying, as well as give a whole bunch of other unspoken information. Simply consider the people in your life that you like talking to, and listening to, and you will notice that they all have certain delivery traits – rhythm and inflection – that takes you in hand and helps you understand what they are saying.

My last little critique comes from when the male sales person went to the rest room and the executive and the woman were left by themselves. The executive sat quietly and the woman tried to fill the time with work talk… bad form. Always have something inconsequential to chat about lined up for just such an occasion. Books, sports, art… anything except politics, religion, and children. It really doesn’t matter what you talk about, because I will let you all in on a little secret; men really don’t care what they talk about or listen to (wait for it) so long as they don’t feel like there are any expectation placed on them. Well, anything within reason… I’m sure most men don’t want to here about quilting. It is the feeling that what a person is saying is attached to some expectation that causes a man to clam up and retreat. Thus, why it is bad to chit chat about work related things. The executive guy sat there looking at the woman with that quiet “no comment” look.

Well, that is it. Everything about this woman screamed that she had the smarts to run the whole show… she simply didn’t understand the basic social skills that are so important in these things. In the end, the old lesson that I learned in college will always be true, “The number one thing a boss or employer is looking for in a potential employee or promotee… is whether or not they would mind having lunch with them every day.” No one will admit to this, but….

The Art of a Honey Bear

In my head there is an image of a big old lumbering brown bear. This bear is working its way through the forest when it gets the scent of honey. It likes honey. So, the bear follows the scent to a stump wherein there is a beehive. Normally, the bear uses its brute strength to rip stumps in two, but this stump is not that old and is wedged between two very large boulders. The big bear tries, but simply cannot tear into the stump to get the honey by any of its usual means. The bear, however, does not give up. Instead, it proceeds to try a million different ways to get into the honey.

The bear does not use its brain; it does not sit back and consider tactics or options. The big brown bear simply and continuously follows its desire to get the honey. Eventually, the bear rips the stump in two in a manner it had never experienced before. After slurping up all the honey a big brown bear could eat, it went to find a place to nap – never fully aware that its brain had recorded the new method for ripping open stumps to be used later.

This is what I call true art. An artist, in the traditional sense, has a desire in them to express themselves clearly. That is the honey. Most can understand art as a form of expression, some know that what is being expressed had no other way of coming out, and few realize that art is merely a byproduct of the pursuit of honey: something that can only be sensed. An artist can spend their whole life trying to rip that stump in two and scratch that itch. Hopefully, at some point, they understand that their life is more art than their paintings (or writings). Because, if and when they do, they will be able to look back over their life and know who they are.

It is not too difficult to see life as art. However, if I looked at any single event in my life and tried to understand that, I could only laugh and call it bad art if anything. It would be like the big brown bear trying to understand how it came about the new method of getting honey without considering the desire for honey or the string of failed attempts that preceded. But, if I should pull back and measure it all – the patterns, repetitive cycles, and the rhythms – I could get a greater understanding of myself. For, I see that in the beginning of my life I struggled to learn who I should be. Then, out of the reaction of adolescence, I used that experience and applied it towards becoming who I wanted to be. At which point, I made the decision to go through the confusion and awkwardness of adolescence all over again to apply what I have learned from being who I wanted to be, to become who I am.

It is tricky because who I am exists independently from all I can understand. If I pursued a life towards what I thought was true, I would be biasing what could be discovered as my truth. That is, if I spent my life trying to mimic Picasso, I would only ever discover, in many different ways, that I am not Picasso: nothing more than a distraction, or an illusion. But, that has always been the danger of idols.

The Return of Verse

A friend of mine made a comment the other day, that the future of written language was going to be some crazy imperceptible jumble because of the pressure that texting has on how people communicate. I disagreed. I am of the opinion that, because of the limits that texting places on peoples ability to communicate, people will slowly return to verse writing…. and they probably won’t even know it.

Unfortunately, and at the risk of sounding like a snob, most people do not understand poetry and verse anymore. Recently, I saw a television interview where the talk show host was interviewing a man who published a book of poetry and the host read some of the poems on air. It was terrifying and hilarious all at the same time. The terrifying part was that the host did not know how to read poetry – he did not understand that we read a poem by punctuation and not by the line. It is a very common mistake that is maintained by the fact that simple and/or crappy poems will have punctuation only at the end of the line. If there is no punctuation at the end of the line the reader should read right through no differently than if they were reading a novel. The reason for the use of different length in lines and placement of words in poetry is that the poet is trying to influence how the reader reads the poem – not overtly… subtly. If the reader assumes the meter and rhythm of the poem and projects it over what the poet has done, it ends up sounding like a husband and wife arguing over which side of the bathroom sink the tube of toothpaste should be kept. Which brings me to the hilarious part; the look on the poor mans face as the host butchered the poems in his book.

This is the essence of verse as I understand it – it is seeing the rhythm and spacing of words as tools to increase the emotional context of what we are saying so that we can have greater control over what we are expressing. Or, more simply, saying more with less. The best example that I can think of would be to go to the extreme in the form of the haiku. Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry that has created a large amount a debate and subsequent understanding from the effort to translate the form over to English. Initially, people thought that it was a simple syllable thing in three lines; 5,7,5. Over time, people came to realize that the Japanese language is different than English and our concept of syllable didn’t really translate all that well. So, a poet came to the conclusion that it was better to think in terms of rhythmic beats and not syllables. He said in English a haiku should be 2,3,2 rhythmic beats. For example: (a quick crappy haiku from me)

Young adults,
full of future and light,
worrying about money.

This is the part that matters, so pay attention. That little diddy clearly does not follow a 5,7,5 syllable such forth, and to read it straight forward by the line does not give the reader the same perception that reading it by a 2,3,2 rhythm. Consider the last line, “worrying about money.” There is more than one way to read this line and more than one way to perceive its emotional context. It could be read in one beat and it would sound like someone gossiping over coffee – “Oh, she was just worrying about money.” Or, each word could be reading it’s own beat and then it sounds like a father chastising a child – “You need to be worrying about money.” Or. like in a haiku, the rhythm could be broken into two beats and the reader should get a more solemn and somber perception – “it’s sad really, worrying about money.”

That is verse as I understand it. It is far too subtle to use punctuation, but it is very important in delivering a greater understanding to the reader. Haiku is the most structured system that we know of where the reader can assume phrases into the established rhythmic structure. At the other end of the spectrum is “Free Verse”, where poets and writers will manipulate sentence structure and line lengths and grammar and anything else they can think of in order to give the reader the subtle rhythm that makes what they are trying to express more clear. The best example of Free Verse is Jack Kerouac. He is known as the father of Jazz writing (or Langston Hughes and his Blues verse). There are some who will claim that Kerouac writing is prose, but prose is define by being in natural spoken form and that simply isn’t true with Kerouac; go ahead, try to have a conversation in the manner of Kerouac’s writing… I dare you. When reading Kerouac’s works, if the reader allows the verse to guide them, the rhythm and cadence is like Jazz music, like some Jazz musician standing on a stage and playing their heart out through their trumpet. It is a rhythm that cannot be clearly communicated or denoted with punctuation… but, actually, I think it might be in this modern age of ours.

With computers and technology and everyone having a basic knowledge of rhythms and writing and so forth, and with the pressure that texting is placing on people’s ability to communicate, I don’t think it will be too long before people will start sending their messages with a cue to how to reader the rhythm of their text… already, many people know to use “/”(or is it the other one, “\”?) to indicate a line break without actually starting a new line. Also, a person might consider using an underscore to denote a single rhythmic beat:

Please call me as soon as you can.
Please call me_as soon as you can.
Please_call me_as soon_as you can.

Although, I am fairly certain that the young hipsters will be the ones who figure out what works best for them…. without even knowing it.