COVID-19 has disrupted our lives in so many ways – commerce and trade, personal livelihoods and economic vitality, family and social interactions, health and wellness (obviously), mobility and travel, and education, to name just a few. This global pandemic has also exposed deep social inequities in new ways, convolved with political disarray and often dysfunctional government processes. (See On the Etiology of Heroes for a few thoughts on a way forward that calls on our best to address the challenges before us.)
Meanwhile, cue theme music over a video montage of transformed academia – grassy quadrangles devoid of human activity, sparsely populated classrooms denuded of desks, and research laboratories accessible only by those in personal protective equipment (PPE). As the music fades, the final cut shows me sitting in my home office, dressed in stereotypical Zoom attire – a business shirt and tie, visible on camera, complemented by off-camera sweatpants and slippers.
In this morality play, my character is a balding, myopic, astigmatic university provost navigating the ship of academe through the iceberg filled waters of these uncertain times, seeking to ensure fair and equal access, facilitate student academic success, promote faculty research and scholarship productivity, and safeguard staff wellness. It’s not an easy thing, and I have lain awake many nights, agonizing over decisions and their unexpected consequences.
About that balding thing; it’s neither an appellation nor a sobriquet, simply an attribute. A few years ago, I sent a saliva sample to 23andMe, curious what I might learn from my SNPs and the company’s database of expressed traits. Like Captain Renault, I was shocked, shocked, I say, when the report showed there was some ever so slightly elevated probability that my genetic profile might be consistent with male pattern baldness. LOL, who knew? It’s a cogent warning to consider carefully insights a modern GWAS can sometimes reveal. But I digress, lest I also pontificate on my childhood surprise, when glasses first let me see leaves on trees, rather than just a green blur atop a gray one. Now back to the scene of the balding provost …
In my provost role, I regularly counsel faculty, staff, and students that successfully navigating this pandemic requires constant vigilance, determined collaboration, committed partnerships, and mutual support. A yearlong pandemic is an emotional and logistical marathon, not a sprint, and in the midst of unremitting stress, each of us must allocate some time and space to focus on our individual mental health and engage in activities that bring happiness and serenity. In the spirit of “physician, heal thyself” where have I sought my own balm in Gilead?
So Many Books, So Little Time
In differing times and places, I have, unlike Poe, found books to provide a surcease for sorrow. Books can teleport one into the mind of another’s memories and knowledge (non-fiction) or imagination and fancy (fiction). That a string of stylized symbols can record the thoughts of another, sometimes long dead, whose insights and ideas reach across time and space to illuminate and inspire, is itself an extraordinary thing, one that still fills me with unabashed wonder.
Arguably among humanity’s greatest inventions, these things we call language and writing are perhaps rivaled only by fire, agriculture, and science in their importance. In their embodiment via books and libraries, ideas and knowledge accumulate and set ready for transmission and uptake by successive generations of willing and malleable minds.
It’s no surprise then, that books were one of my first and most joyous childhood discoveries, a precursor to that other abiding love, science. (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind.) With a good book, I could, then and now, sit transfixed for six, twelve, or even eighteen hours, oblivious to my surroundings, transported into worlds unknown and challenged by ideas beyond the reach of my experience and current understanding, each page crackling with enlightenment.
Emboldened, seeking meaning in an oft-confusing world, I sometimes try my own, feeble hand at the mystic art of writing, finding comfort and refuge in the feel of words and their juxtaposition to ruminate and communicate ideas. (Yes, I was a geeky kid who read dictionaries for pleasure, savoring both the etymology and the denotation. No surprise – myopia and astigmatism came early; baldness reared its sunburned head somewhat later.)
In a world of eight second sound bites and enervating ad hominem social media attacks, when Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame seems like the imprimatur of immortality, meditative reflection and long-form written discourse now seem like lost arts. (See Contemplative Reflection and Instantaneous Communication and Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim.)
At its best, writing is a contemplative Zen state where words and phrases spring unbidden from the recesses of your mind, bound by a set of unspoken rules and imagined mores and shaped by a lifetime of intellectual and emotional milieu. Part puppeteer, part curious observer, you are a transcriber of events in real and imagined worlds seen only through the uncertain lens of your mind. It is an exhilarating and sometimes frustrating art, at its best, informed by experience, wisdom, and passions. (See Eudora, You Got the Love?)
Some of my writing samples are archived on this website (www.hpcdan.org), and some others are shared only with select friends. You now hold one such weak musing in your digital hands. Those writers with the greatest gifts can touch our naked souls, but none of us can ever truly master the form. I know I never will, though I continue to try, and perhaps that is, in the end, enough.
Pure Thought Stuff
Of late, I have returned to one of my other teenaged and lasting loves, the art of software. (See A Feeling for the Code.) As in any creative medium, there are hacks, artisans, and artists of the highest gift. Hence, I use the word art with thoughtful intent, for well-written software has an austere and ethereal beauty all its own, and like writing, it can bring joys unknown to all but the most committed and talented acolytes.
In his wonderful book, The Mythical Man Month, my friend and former colleague, Fred Brooks, writes elegantly of the joy of software and why it is so enthralling:
The Programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. ... The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
When fully immersed in the code, you hold in your mind an abstract world of your own creation, defined by the rules of logic, but mutable and capable of evolving in complex and unexpected ways, just as an author’s fully formed characters can take on lives of their own, sometimes surprising even their creator. In these moments, pure thought-stuff becomes incarnate and nested causal chains glisten with beauty like raindrops on a spring flower.
Reconciling the perfect world as imagined and the inevitably flawed creation then becomes an exhilarating and encompassing quest. Why did this happen? How can that be true? Inspired and chagrined by unexpected behaviors and sometimes subtle clues, the creator becomes detective, seeking insights and remediations that return the code to a state of grace. The magic of myth and legend, indeed.
It can take hours to load one’s working memory with such a virtual world of software, and doing so necessarily pushes all other concerns from one’s mind. As Morpheus tells Neo in The Matrix, you must “free your mind” from all other thoughts, perspectives, and assumptions and follow the code. During that oneness, there are no other actors, no other concerns, and one can abide in the bliss of total immersion. It is intellectual joy that unexpectedly changed our world. (See Reluctant Revolutionaries, the Trolley Paradox, and Ender’s Game.)
Such creativity and full cognitive loading brooks no exceptions and tolerates no distractions. It can be broken by such mundane events as an unexpected telephone call, a colleague’s doorway interrogative, or an unwelcomed text message. In that momentary interruption, connections can disappear, insights can fade, and perspectives can be lost. That too is a fall from grace. (See On Cognitive Loading and Intellectual Hierophany.)
In the past few months, I have sought solace in the beauty and logic of such software, incarnated as the end-to-end development of a wireless environmental sensor network. As a potential extension to the SAGE research project of which I am a part, it offers a path to citizen science empowerment and real-time response to environmental change. The terms of art – ESP32, Raspberry Pi, Jetson, JSON, MQTT, InfluxDB, Grafana, LoRaWAN, TensorFlow – matter only to those in the discipline. For me, the beauty and the cognitive load can, for just a few hours of the nights and weekends, free my mind, and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, that too brings me peace.
Coda
Our culture and our future rest on mutual respect, sharing insights, ideas, and knowledge, and the empowerment of human minds and their ingenuity. In the crucible of the pandemic, we must support and draw strength from one another. As I have noted before, these simple things matter most of all. (See The Simple Things Matter, Most of All Now.) Ultimately, that is humanity’s sustainable balm in Gilead.
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