Ken's Blog

In marked contrast to yesterday, I now find myself – still in Agra – listening to a group of scientists having a debate about String Theory. In some ways this is the opposite of the Taj Mahal. Where that is tangible and real and human scale, String Theory is a product of pure thought alone. Even the physicists who study it don’t have any confidence that it really does describe how to unify our theories of the universe.

But it is beautiful, and intricate, and lovely to explore. Perhaps this is the goal of all of our human architectures, whether made of marble or of mathematics.

Today something more upbeat.

I had known about the Taj Mahal all my life of course – we all have. I thought countless pictures would prepare me. But they did not.

Only when you are actually in its presence do you realize the genius of its architect. The Taj itself is not only beautiful, with perfect symmetry and balance of form, but also vast, imposing, far beyond human scale.

When you walk through the outer gates and catch your first glimpse and approach, you understand all this. What you are not prepared for is what you will find inside. The intimacy of it.

The whole enterprise is constructed as a cleverly proportioned set of nested spaces, so that when you reach the tomb itself, where the king and his bride lie side by side, you are in a very intimate space indeed, a small room just for two – like a lover’s nest for eternity.

I have never seen anything else quite like it. This juxtaposition of the vast and imposing with the small and intimate. The nearest thing I can think of is Wright’s “Falling Water” – but even that doesn’t quite achieve what the Taj does.

It makes me want to learn more about the architect, this genius who was commissioned by a king in mourning, and responded by creating such a wonder for all of humankind.

I just – in these last hours – received the very sad news that someone has passed away, someone who has been enormously influential on my life, a great mentor and a true friend.

When you are young, you instinctively look for mentors. And one day, if you are fortunate, you encounter someone who has chosen to travel a noble and perhaps difficult path through life, who one day smiles at you and says “Come join me in my walk – you and I might enjoy travelling together for a while.” Of course you know that the journey is more than a simple walk. For when you stumble – and you will stumble – your mentor’s guiding hand reaches out to steady you, while gently teaching you how to steady yourself.

Part of my heart refuses to believe that he is really gone. Yet in an important way he is not really gone – he will never be gone. His light even now continues to shine upon me, and within me. And if I am brave enough and strong enough to honor his example, that light will continue to shine upon some of those who come after me. It will shine every time I reach out to a young traveller in friendship and fellowship, every time I show my faith in the potential of another, and every time I offer an encouraging smile and a steady helping hand.

Have arrived in Agra, and am still trying to decode the jumbled impressions of a first-time visit. Things are different here from southern India, very different. I am reminded that the concept of India as a single country is a relatively recent historical occurance – one created by the British during their colonial expansion. There are layers to unpeel in trying to understand what I am seeing. Behind the veneer of “western” surfaces is something else, but it is a very different something from what lies behind those surfaces in Mumbai or Kalkuta or Bangalore.

I’m still thinking it over, and tomorrow I may have a more clear impression. Perhaps a visit to the Taj Mahal will help… 🙂

Flying from New York to Delhi is a surreal experience. The flight I took is 14 hours – direct – but of course there is the 10.5 hour time shift. So landing was just around a full day later from departure, by the sun.

The flight to the other side of the world puts your mind into a strange fugue state. I am writing this on a lovely Sunday morning in New Delhi, and yet it is still the evening before back in New York City. I know objectively that this post is following my sequential one-per-day habit of posting, but on some deep instinctive level, everything tells me that Saturday – yesterday here now – is something that didn’t really happen. Rather than being a full day in my life, it felt like a strange interstitial experience, somewhere in that place where we keep memories that hover in our recollection between reality and dream.

The sun is so bright here, and of course the people in the bustling city outside my hotel window are so insistently – and enjoyably – loud and pleasant. People are shouting directions in all mixes of Hindi and English, cars are honking, strange clanking noises emerge from the never-ending construction with such intensity, that it is hard to deny the reality of this time shift. I enter a bright, and somewhat strange world, ready to be – as James O’Brien might have put it – on the far side of the world.

And so it will be, until I return back to New York, when I will most likely have the equally magical and uncanny experience of receiving back that lost half day in my life, this loan of time that I have made – simply by moving across the planet – finally repaid.

I recently picked up my guitar again after a long time away. This has happened to me before – it’s a long-standing pattern for me. Usually I’ll pick up the guitar in response to some emotional crisis in my life. I’ll start playing intensely, go for lessons again, really work at it. Then the crisis will subside, or I just won’t seem to need to go to that place anymore, and eventually – it might take two years or five years – the guitar will recede from my life. Until the next time.

But this time the pattern is different. Nothing is wrong – I’m just drawn to the guitar, and I find myself playing at odd moments of the day or night, enjoying the sound of it, the feel of my fingers over the fretboard.

But one thing remains the same. As always, my way back in is the “First Prelude” by Heitor Villa Lobos. It was the first “classical” piece I ever learned, and it’s the one piece I never forget. My fingers just seem to find it automatically whenever I pick up a classical guitar, no matter how many years I’ve been away.

There is no other pleasure on earth quite like playing a piece that has seeped into your soul on some deep level, the one you can simply escape into, the one that has gotten you over your crises in times past. You know you can just show up at its door like an old friend in the middle of the night, and you know it will let you in, will put on a pot of tea, and stay up talking with you until you’re ok again. For me, the “First Prelude” is that friend.

Señor Villa Lobos, wherever your spirit may be in the universe, thank you.

Evolution is not an absolute – survival is always relative to an ecosystem. Which means that almost any idea you come up with can fail when dropped into an incompatible ecosystem – even if the same idea has been a wild success in a different ecosystem.

The idea I described yesterday for finding the best young minds and nurturing them along to success – an idea that is being used successfully in India right now – might simply not work in the U.S. There are so many differences between the two cultures.

For example, I noticed the last time I was in India (I’m actually flying over there again tomorrow, which is probably why I’m thinking about this) that people over there have a much more intense and idealistic view of democracy than we do here in the U.S. It’s not that there isn’t corruption – there is lots of corruption. It’s more that even local elections in India are approached with an air of fierce pride. From what I saw when I was there, they take the right to vote very seriously. I think many people in India would be astounded by the fact that so many people in the U.S. have the right to vote yet don’t bother going to the polls.

That’s just one example, among many, of a difference in the way the two cultures think about things. I wouldn’t be surprised at all, given those many differences, to find that the idea I described yesterday simply wouldn’t work over here.

Darwin pointed out that every genotype requires a viable phenotype. In plain english, that just means that every generation along an evolutionary path needs to survive – not just most generations. A mutation that kills off its population at some point is a dead end, no matter how wonderful would be its final outcome three generations later.

And in the case of creating and maintaining an incentive program to find and support the top one percent of kids, there may simply be no viable phenotype – no path for growth without a fatal weakness – along the many steps that would be required for such a program to take root and flourish.

I’m not saying that this is true. But I am saying that if you did want to create such a program here, it would be a good idea to think about ways of providing it with an immune system of some sort, some way – at each stage of its development – to defend itself from its enemies.

A colleague of mine, a university professor here in the U.S. who is originally from India, told me recently about a program he is involved with back in his native state in India. Throughout the state, which has a population of about 50 million, in every town and village the top one percent of kids are identified by academic achievement. These kids become eligible for a program in which the state government pays for their college education.

One thing you might note right away about this plan is that there will be a huge disparity between the top one percent in a major town and the top one percent in a poor rural village. In the latter, even the best and the brightest may be practically illiterate. If you were simply to put all the kids in the same classroom, the ones from the richer areas would vastly outperform their counterparts from the impoverished countryside.

And so the plan contains the following provisions: If you fail your first year of college under the plan, you get to take it over, and the government will continue to pay. If it takes you seven years to finish college under the plan, the government will still pay. Also, after you graduate, the government will reimburse itself by automatically deducting a certain percentage from whatever job you take, for a certain number of years. But here’s the kicker: If you don’t get a job after you graduate – for whatever reason – there is no penalty. None whatsoever. The government simply swallows the loss.

My colleague reports that the plan is quite successful. Not only are the top one percent of students thriving in the program, but a number of top students selected from impoverished and relatively illiterate regions are making it through college as well, gradually gaining the skills they need as they go – albeit more slowly than the students from more well-off backgrounds. And the great majority of the students who graduate go on to well paying jobs.

It’s clear what the state is doing here. This program is not being done as some sort of favor for these kids. This is an act of pure self-interest on the part of the state. Find the students with the best natural ability, structure things so that the debilitating effects of even the most enormous economic disparity can be overcome over time, and do it all in such a way that there is no risk to the student – ie: no reason not to enroll in the program.

What you end up with is a sieve to discover your very best natural talents, and to make sure that as many as possible of those talents will be directed toward improving the state’s economy. If you end up with a few bad eggs along the way, that’s an acceptable level of loss, given the return on investment to the state’s economy coming from those students who thrive under the program and become financially successful.

What struck me when I heard about this plan was that (1) it’s brilliant, and that (2) it would never be tolerated in the U.S. Why is that? Because it would make people uncomfortable – the idea that somebody might be getting something for nothing. The idea that you might pay for a student’s education on the basis of pure potential, and then not punish that student in any way if they do not succeed, would be anathema in our society.

And the irony is that the real beneficiary of such a program is not the student, but rather the state – ie: everybody else. A program such as this is an engine for success precisely because it aligns with the state’s own enlightened self-interest. Find potential engines of the economy, nurture them and help them to reach their full potential. Your state will become richer and more competitive within the global marketplace.

Many people seem to have a sort of love/hate relationship with poetry. People will recite even the most obscure song lyrics with an easy familiarity and almost a pride of ownership – as though those words were their own personal anthem, and the song’s authorship by somebody else merely a quirk of fate.

But if you quote from Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or Byron’s “Don Juan”, many people will just grow pale. Rather than an act of cultural inclusion, quoting poetry is often seen as a form of cultural exclusion.

I’m not sure I understand why this is. Is poetry really so fundamentally changed when you add a melody to it? Does verse set to music become magically transform from “high culture” to “low culture” – and only then become valid as a medium of emotional exchange and comfort between ordinary folk?

By common consensus all song writers belong to the people, but few poets can claim that distinction. Perhaps Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings and one or two others. There is a mysterious wall of perception between “song lyric” and “poetry”. And something there is that doesn’t love a wall… Can anybody shed any light here?

Isn’t it astonishing that our minds are capable of exploring an endless variety of hypothetical realities? Just as those alternate realities are not limited by the bounds of physics, neither are they limited by the bounds of any other constraint of plausibility, whether psychological, cultural or ethical.

Every time you pick up a novel, you are entering in a world that was created entirely within the mind of a fellow human being. That world can be vast – filled with nooks and crannies, minute details and cataclysmic events, never seen upon this or any other world.

When I was a teenager I read Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” series. On the level of discovered worlds, I found it far more compelling than Tolkien. Not only was Peake’s fantastical world insanely detailed, but those details differed from our own in telling ways. There were physical differences yes, but – more important – were the psychological differences.

The driving forces within the people of “Gormenghast” bear only a tangential relationship to those within the people we know. They are recognizable by analogy, but only in the way that, say, an American might recognize a dinner of boiled cricket to be food.

Tolkien, in contrast, is far more conventional – and therefore less exciting in my book. His hobbits and elves think very much the way we do. They may look different, but they are essentially us, in thinly veiled guise of chestnut brown and kelly green. Only Tom Bombadil is fundamentally different (unless you count Sauron as a character). Tellingly, Bombadil never made it into the film.

Not that this is a fair comparison. Tolkien was far more concerned with mythology than with psychology. Exploring uncharted regions in mythology can a lot less disturbing than uncharted regions in psychology. Which is probably why Middle Earth is a much more popular place than the Castle Gormenghast.