Meandering - A Verbal Art

My image of meandering is that of a stream or really large river like the Grand River than meanders through South Eastern Ontario, or the Mississippi River that meanders down the middle of most of United States. Meanderings are winding statements that cover a lot of ground without moving in a straight line in the 'downhill' direction. They carry the weight of thought or the flow of a river and require a large space because they present such a large flow. "Stop meandering, and get to the point," we might say to someone who seems to be communicating aimlessly, although they may be heading in the only direction they can. People often meander because it is the route to an explanation sufficiently broad to carry the full weight of their conclusion. Without meandering, we might run away from a conclusion thinking it was trivial. Meandering is thus very important, but we are apt to disallow it because we want a short cut answer.

In Europe, the authorities straighten out many meandering rivers because of many reasons, but in the end the river ran to fast and the volumes of water became destructive when there was not sufficient space and time. Enormous flooding occurred.

We think governments should move quickly on certain policy changes, go directly to the solution. What we forget is that meandering to the solution may ensure the solution is attained without damaging the complete system. For example, the American wanted everyone to own their home, so the money supply was enlarged and interest rates lowered. This was done so rapidly that house price inflation resulted and a house price bubble occurred. Prices fell and people walked away from their homes. No deposit meant no commitment. Had the policy been more meandering and people asked to make deposits and to lock into commitments, the credit crisis would not have occurred and we might be looking at the re-election of a Republican president. If the democrats move to quickly they might just lose the election because people see such rapid ill thought out policy activity as the cause of their grief.

Eruditing Philosophical - A Verbal Art

Research and study result in erudition, a state of being well versed in one's chosen fields. Once one has mastered an area of work, it becomes possible to philosophize based on what one knows.

We often hear of waxing philosophical. Most people can wax philosophical, and it is probably healthy behaviour. Not everyone can erudite philosophical, and it is probably likely to empty the room. The reason is that many people are afraid of the eruditeness. As one becomes more erudite, the population of equals deminishes, but the paradox is that the pool of hopefuls enlarges. Eventually, the erudite individual becomes lost in an enlarge field of erudite being crowding in on each other.

Weevilling - A Verbal Art

Patrick O'brien in his book, Master and Commander, now a film, once asked, "What is the worst of three evils?" I take the liberty of referring to the verbal art of finding evil in everything as weevilling. I do it sometimes myself. The weevil is a tiny creature that loves sea biscuits and enjoyed the life at sea during much of the period when huge-tall masted sailing boats were the norm.

What is really evil is ignorance. The most common failure of modern society is unfortunately ignorance. It's not that we don't have enough information nor knowledge, its that we have now to process the information in meaningful ways to derive conclusions.

One of the mysteries of the modern age is how Hitler was able to write his book Mein Kampf with all its hate as a resident of the German state in jail. The moral of this story is not to put people in jail so that their hate ferments. As the TV series OZ so apply demonstrates, more jails and jail time are not the solution to the growth of violent crime. A real solution has yet to be found, but it is not jail time. In jails, criminals continue to commit crimes, take drugs, and do all the things they do out on the streets.

How does one fight real evil?

Fighting evil is what mythology is all about. Weevilling is when we create the mythology that we know how to deal with evil, we weevil. In some societies the knowledge gap about how to deal with evil is so great that they go bankrupt with mythological ideas of a solution that continues to fail. The building of jails is just such a weevilling. Hitlers are created in jails, not outside of them. Our struggle against terrorism is a story about weevilling. We put those thought to be terrorists with terrorists and create new terrorists. We weevil about the solution, the mythology that jailing people actually works. In the end we will have more than 10 percent of the population in jails! No jails are not the solution to evil, jails are just weevilling, a mythology designed to make us feel good. A mythology that backfires in our faces as serious crime continues to grow and jails are the schools of criminals teaching crime.

Mythologizing - A Verbal Art

The challenge of our reality is that it is 99 percent mythology. Some people may be shocked by this, but I can assure you that it is true. What is real has no physical basis. Deepak Chopra the author and philosophy refers frequently to the quantum world that makes up our bodies, which changes almost every atom in a contiuous inflow outflow process.

We are only partially aware that our breath is what gives us some of the the particles that once made up Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Bhuddha, Hitler. We are them and at the same time, we are not them. Our mythologies are the way we come to define our independence while at the same time understand our dependence. Both science and religion, faith and evidence are mythological at their core. Lord Raglan writes in The Hero, A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama: "there are no valid grounds for believing in the historicity of tradition," and he goes on to show how the heroes of our traditions, particularly our religious traditions are mythological. Our heros are not real. Our heros are mythological. All of what we call history is mythology. Where does this leave us?

Our independence is our most purvasive mythology. We think that we are independent, but we are what we are, and that is very different from what we think we are. Our thought is partially a result of chemistry, but it is not chemistry without form, and it is not random chemistry. So what is it? We explain it by use of a mythology. Later on we will need to revise that mythology because we will find out that it is not correct, does not perform in the way we need it to, does not have a true ring about it. Our chemistry means that we can have little constancy of thought as long as the world we think we inhabit is only the now. We rely on the past to anchor the now in some meaningful way, and we need the past to project the future as we fiddle around in the present. Our mythology is that we have a now that we can fiddle around with. We observe things happening, but we think that we are interacting with things, events, and spaces rather than observing what is happening between things in spaces. Our reality is that we observe. Our mythology is that we act.

Wiseacreing - A Verbal Art

The world of the internet is mindboggling. Wiseacreing is what we do when we make use of stuff that we really don't understand, nor have any strong basis of understanding. The past is one of these regions of uncertainty, as is the future. When we discuss these regions we enter the world of wiseacreing because we have to speculate.

One of my passions is travelling through time by means of recorded history. Think what it will mean in the future to have so much recorded history of what is going on in our time. The time when we are alive is when it is all happening, but we can share the worlds of those that preceded us, if we take the time to read and research history. Obviously, much of it is unpleasant, downright horrible, but we can filter out the 'messy bits' to learn more about how to live in the now.

Part of our history is what happened to members of the Bloomsbury Group, the forerunners of the publishing company that brought us Rowling's Harry Potter. Members of the Bloomsbury group of the 1920's travelled to Fontainbleu Castle in France where they studied under a man called G. It was G who used the term wiseacreing with reference to much of what he heard coming from so-called experts or thinkers. Do you know who G was?

Often I do not link the reader to the best of links. Some load slowly. Others present downright disgusting material. And, still others seem off the mark. I apologize. One of my main aims is to bring the reader to realize that there are many points of view. It is not just that we benefit from reading things that we can disagree with, but we are shocked by what we read. This shocking of our sensibilities is a Gurdieffian method that helps us wake up out of our complacency. Without shocks we fall asleep and never really feel awake to the now.

Mugwumping - A Verbal Art

When I first heard this expression, I laughed. I was sitting in my office in Wimbledon as an employee of Ronald Brech Inc a company of economic advisers. My boss was Ronald Brech, a former editor of the Economist during the time of the Great Second War when they rationed paper, used it on me during a serious corporate discussion. He said, "Arthur! Don't be such a mugwump. I want to know what you really think. Explain yourself." I was highly amused. "What on earth does mugwumping mean," I wondered. I knew what a mug was, or thought I did. My thoughts were about the look on one's face, a look of someone silly, mistaken, or full of himself. I thought, "Well! I can't really argue with that. He has a point." But, I was wrong.

Ronald Brech was a wonderful professional economist to work for. I had got my job arriving three hours late for my appointment wearing a trilby. Marjory, his secretary, burst out laughing, the minute I poked my head in the door. It was quite off putting, but I survived a three hour interview and meal at a local pub. Ronald's brother, Edward, is and was an eminent business management consultant and Ronald himself, an economist, had a history of business problem solving behind him. Ronald worked with Patrick Rivett an expert in Operations Research. Together, Ronald, Edward and Patrick were a formidable team of experts in their fields. Ronald was considered the best in the business of providing economic and business advice to companies in the real world. He kept up his contacts in the economist and publishing world and had regular jaunts to the Reform Club in London, an exclusive men's club, where men talked about important issues if you remember Filias Fogg and Around the World in Eighty Days.

Ronald had a list of exclusive clients in a range of vastly different industrial sectors. His world and speciality was the real economy, the workplace of ordinary people, where the real work was being done to pay for Britain's imbalance of payments. It was not the comfortable world of banking that I would join years later with armchair advice and peekaboo analysis.

Ronald's world was an in depth world and he understood it better than any other person alive. An he still does! I was so lucky to join this world working for him, despite my wugmump attitude. We referred to the client companies by code and used their code names in discussions, never their real names. It gave the work a sense of mystery and importance, which of course, it was. I just never really understood how important it was being with a true master of forecasting and analysis. Me, a very wet young 22 with a green masters degree at the baby age of 21. Supposedly, I was a sophisticated statistician, or econometrician, to be more exact. Reality was that I was raw and full of chaotic unpolished ideas. My world was a world of numbers, facts, and mathematical statistics. I would attend evening classes at Birkbeck College and study under the biometrician Cox, who regarded economic statistics with contempt. It was excellent training. Ronald, himself was the Chairman of the Institute of Statisticians, in London, England. He nurtured me through the maze of economic and statistical analysis techniques that even today are state-of-the-art. I could work as an economic consultant, but I am aware of mugwumping, of fence sitting. What Ronald taught me was that it is important to take a view, to get off the fence, to let others have something to measure against even if you know you are wrong or dealing with uncertainty.

I have taught econometrics to some of the best economists in the world. but they were no good until they stopped mugwumping. I would use a technique of Ronald Brech which he referred to as figure less accounting, 'figgaless,' which meant that you had to decide whether some economic variable was going to be more +, less -, or unchanged =. From there you went on to learn how to arrive at an actual percentage change that was credible. I went on to use forecasting techniques learned at Ronald Brech that made future employers many millions.

Yarning - A Verbal Art

Yarning

Telling a sea yarn is an ancient skill and pasttime. We have many of the stories that were told by the many boys and men sailing seas during the four hundred years leading up to the twentieth century. Mariners continue to spin yarns as the while away hours and days.

Spending many months on the waves of vast oceans with many hours confined to vessel with a group of sailors provided an environment in which the imagination grabbed hold. The many hours of sailing would pass into days, the days into weeks, the weeks into months, and occasionally the months into years before a sailor was reunited with his family.

Often, the best yarns were about actual events on board boat. A vessel at sea was a dangerous unpredictable place. In the West end of English Channel storms coming off the Atlantic would regularly blow up suddenly bringing waves over twenty feet.

Inevitably, there would be monster storms with wave over thirty feet, and occasionally during and after the hurricane season, there would be waves within waves within waves within waves within waves, coming from a multitude of directions. In a hurricane there would be a depression, there would be waves coming from one direction for a period and there would be waves coming from another direction for a period all caused by the devastating force of unbelievably strong winds that set currents in motion all across the Atlantic to die down, no one knows where.

The job of the Captain was to use his complete authority in order to have all stations of his command operating smoothly and as a concerted team. In rough weather, the slap of the large waves against the sides of the vessel often tipped it violently forward and back, and from one side to another.

The larger the vessel the greater could be the opposite motion as a wave left a clift edge over which the ship would tumble, not always straight down, but frequently at an angle.

A sailor would develop sea legs that would adjust his balance automatically to the motion of the boat, however, his body could not know the complex patterns of the sea waves slamming the ship up and down, over and about.

My Own Yarn

I once sailed the Atlantic in the proud vessel, the Empress of England. This cruise liner had sailed from Montreal many a time and was used to the waters of the Eastern seaboard. My voyage in 1968 was from the St. Lawrence seaway port of Montreal to the mighty port of Liverpool, England.

It was November 1968, and a hurricane was dying out in the Atlantic. On shore, no-one could guess what was happening hundreds off miles out to sea. The hurricane had not touched land and people breathed a long sigh of relief. A similar event hit the Atlantic in 2000. Another, in 1991. People use the analogy of the monster or perfect storm to describe events in their work.

My experience was that of monster waves as tall as skyscrapers hitting the vessel at half hour intervals. Easily as tall as the vessel itself, the waves made one feel that one was in a rowing boat instead of a huge ship. Our captain wisely allowed the waves to hit the vessel from the side and not head on, as the USS France was doing to its regret. In any event, he probably had no choice because of the difficult of shifting direction of such a large vessel, even with half an hour intervals. Every half hour for about three days, the ship would tip on its side about 30 or more degrees.

On impact of the wave, everyone sitting in chairs on one side of the lounges which were the width of the ship would slide the ships width to the other side. The vessel would then right itself by tipping in the opposite direction, and people would slide backwards to the opposite side. For each wave there were about five such reversals of direction until the ship regained level balance.

I was fortunate that I did not suffer from sea sickness. Nor did I fear the storm because I trusted the Captain and the ship. I was able to run around and help passengers get to their rooms, or pick them up off the floor.

One passenger at night in an outer edge cabin, was tossed out of his bed by a sideward hitting wave that caused the ship to turn on its side. He was thrown onto a cubbard door at the foot of his bed. As the ship turned on its opposite side, he was tossed back into bed. Immediately, the ship adjusted again its balance by tipping in the opposite direction on its side and the passenger was thrown out of his bed onto the cubboard door once again. The ship corrected itself and the passenger was thrown back into bed, but this time the cubboard door flung open and all its contents flew onto the bed with the passenger. As the ship again righted itself, the passenger was thrown back towards the cubboard door, but this time it was open and the passenger ended up inside the cubboard. The door of the cubboard closed behind him and he was knocked unconscious as it slammed his head. The following morning, he was found locked inside the cubboard sleeping soundly.