David Barton says to read a book… 01

Captivity and identity: Ishmael comments

 http://books.google.com/books?id=83p-OMrNalYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Some years ago I bought my son a dog, a big black chow, whose name I want to share right now because that is what you put at the end of the sentence where you introduce something. Nonetheless, when I purchased the dog I intentionally decided not to name her so that my son could have the pleasure of naming her himself. However, I got the dog about two weeks before he, Toby was to arrive in Montana. It is remarkably difficult not to assign a name to any animal. Of course we’re probably worse at that than many because our family names our cars names our bikes, names for lots of things. We are a very anthropomorphic family. Although not the point of this particular paper, I will tell you that he named the pup, Pip.
I just started the book, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. So far it deals extensively with the concepts of identity and captivity. Identity is an important idea. We are a species that names things. At many levels we can’t not name things because our ability to conceive and think is tied so closely to our language. Language of course is naming. Naming is identifying.

We have identities as individuals: I am Kevin. We have identity as families: We are the Kvalvik’s. We have identity as a culture: we are Americans. We have lots of tribalism beneath that level though. And the concept of tribe is the concept of identity. But tribes can be loosely identified, like say redheads. Or tribes can be tightly identified like, say, Mormons. And we can shift between tribes, wherein we may love Porsches through our 20s, and migrate to some other affection and club in our 30s and 40s. All this to say that identity is a very complicated, shifting concept.

Another concept that might seem unrelated is called American exceptionalism. This is a fascinating turn of phrase that references a self assigned national privilege. That while we recognize many countries have many strengths and weaknesses. America doesn’t fall into the same grading system as everyone else. While it’s “all good and well for other countries to abide by certain rules, we are America, doggone it and we are not going to be shown how to do things by other countries.”

Yet if our identity is tied wholly to being American, or Baptist, or as an educator, or a man (as opposed to woman), or Republican, or what have you; rather than adding to one’s identity it seems that it actually lessens it. It forces one to be drawn with a broader brush. The more labels that one can assign to themselves. Or to which they may be assigned, the less specific and truly idiosyncratic an individual will tend to be, well maybe not “be” but seem to be. Is it possible that as we age we don’t seem more cartoonish or two-dimensional, but rather we become more cartoonish or two-dimensional?

Our identity as Americans, if tied to a series of clichés, does not seem to make us better Americans but rather makes us a parodies of Americans.

Ishmael teaching humans about captivity.

Identity as described in Quinn’s book, Ishmael, is defined with a passing reference to Nazi Germany. The point he makes, which is made often, is that while the Jews were certainly captives, the general populace was captive. One could not choose to NOT be a good Nazi. To not be a good Nazi or to fight them was to be deceased in amny cases. This is not a license for people to do nothing. But it is important to consider that your actions define your identity and your identity defines the type of captivity you choose, or is chosen for you. You get the idea. So I take from the book so far the illustration that one’s identity rather than describing their likely actions, describes instead their likely obligations. Obligations as captives. In our culture we are obligated to work, obey laws, pay taxes, dress before we go out the door and an almost limitless collection of reasonable to the wholly arbitrary conventions of our time and place within the culture in which we exist.

 

We are captives. Our freedoms are select, our obligations are as well. We can no more deny our time and place than we can decide to go to work without our pants on, or decide that we want to start putting our trash out in the front lawn.. One might feel that they have these choices, but will be subscribed to the places where our culture assigns those with no sense of cultural obligation: No sense of identity as assigned.

More as I proceed through the text…

kevin kvalvik

 

Worse for Wear

This morning I pulled on one of my favorite pair of jeans. As I pulled them on I noted the tear above the knee had increased to the width of the front panel. The trendiness of thread-bareness is lost on me. I just like a profoundly comfortable pair of jeans. I also chose to wear a pair of light blue boxers so that some other, less modest rips might go unnoticed. But as I carefully fed foot one and foot two through the netting of these soft friends I admitted to myself that they were unlikely to endure another trip through my wash. Clock ticking.

I remember hearing from the old codgers of my youth, as though it were an insult, “Why I have ties older than you.” Now I recognize it as a grim confession. That if our socks, and sweaters and ties have pre-dated some smart Alec kid, then they are earmarks. Little indicators that we were around in 1985 or 1992. “That tie was from a student when I taught at that school back then…” My closet is full of these indicators, these “Ebenezers.” Each peice of clothing has aged some faster and some slower. Jeans age like rockstars, or dogs at about seven times our speed. Ties meanwhile age slower, like you can inherit your granddad’s ties. Shoes are sort of funny, they vary according to use, same as us. I have running shoes that are pretty well spent in less than a year, while I have dress shoes that have held up several years, and I have had ski boots since college.

I carry all of these little totems around with me and their aging reminds me of mine. Each item I outlive reminds me of how time fleets. And that is what it does, exactly. Fleet comes from the Middle English word “fleten,” (as in fleet of ships) or, Old English, flēotan to float. So when you hear the cliché that “time is fleeting,” well I suppose that is so. As boats float down streams , certainly we float along with time. Here we are unaware that time is passing and we note that these jeans have been rendered almost invisible by the ravages of time. As I consider my aging parents and my lost friends they too were “rendered” by time.

So I will wear these pale blue emblems to time carefully today and will hold off on putting them in the wash another week or two. I hope that as I start to fade and forget and slowly unravel I get few more trips out of the drawer before i am casually run through another cycle and begin to show that I am truly “worse for wear.”

 

Forgetfulness

Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read,

never even heard of,

 

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

 

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

 

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

 

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

 

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

 

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

GK Chesterton takes me down a peg

Some priggish little clerk will say, “I have reason to congratulate myself that I am a civilized person, and not so bloodthirsty as the mad mullah.” Somebody ought to say to him, “a really good man would be less bloodthirsty than the mullah. But you are less bloodthirsty, not because you are more of a good man, but because you are a great deal less of a man. You are not bloodthirsty, not because you would spare your enemy, but because you would run away from him.”

Or again, some Puritan with a sullen type of piety would say, “I have reason to congratulate myself that I do not worship graven images like the old heathen Greeks.” And again somebody ought to say to him, “the best religion may not worship graven images, because it may seem beyond them. But if you do not worship graven images, it is only because you are mentally and morally quite incapable of graving them. True religion, perhaps, is above idolatry. But you are below idolatry. You are not holy enough yet to worship a lump of stone.”

GK Chesterton I read this last weekend and was taken by the ability we have to pat ourselves on the back for what we have not done, and I wonder what that says about us when what we have not done, our acts of omission, are our greatest feats. And I ask of I have done anything of merit? If instead of doing things that are significant I prefer describe the reasons that they remain undone.

It seems that we can outline our failures as deeds not done, and then by comparing these un-done tasks with steps poorly taken we can relax into the knowledge that doing nothing is better than doing evil. But really approaching something significant is our calling and absent this I suspect we are failures all. As for me, I am better than the mad mullah, and have never worshipped like the godless Greeks.

kevin

Emergence and divergence

I am a giant fan of WNYC’s podcast, Radio Lab by Abumrad and Krulwich.

This week they did a piece called Emergence that centers around order from disorder when there is an intelligence involved. Sort of the un-law of thermodynamics, which Wikipedia’s randomly collected information from limitless unknown sources describes as the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium. Entropy is essentially decay.

OK I get that. If you knock over a book shelf the books don’t tend toward order, but disheveled stacks. There seems to be much in biology that goes the other way though. This Emergence thing discusses how ants, which seems to be dumb “like” posts, do some pretty hip things with all of the picnic finding, and farm building and twig dragging. The idea is that they are stupid individually on a scale that makes posts look pretty bright. But as a collective, they, like bees and other tiny gadgets, are oddly clever, if not terribly efficient.

The title of this piece comes from a book of the same name by steven johnson http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/ (this link may help him keep his #1 “steven” google rating) who also wrote the rather forgettable text, that everything bad is good for you, which was a tome devoted to convincing his wife and himself that he wasn’t killing time by killing time. Anyway, the idea is that groups of folks can be right on average. And if you get 750 folks to guess the weight of an OX the average will be strikingly close to right. There is some weird math underlying the universe as we know it and facts emerge from chaos… bad summary of the piece but I am in a hurry here.

So are we as an ant colony smarter as a collective than we are as individuals? I know that minsky wrote about this a great deal in his book society of mind, although one can argue that marvin is now crazy, his point was sort of the other end of the spectrum. Instead of saying that we are smarter as a group, he denies the concept of self as a semantic convenience. We aren’t a “self,” but just a collection of 300 or so brain centers, and that these are divied up in some infinitely regressive fashion into the bit of electrons and atom bits of which they are derived. We are not individuals at all, but mini-collectives. In the radio piece one guy comments how if you take out some neurons that are not thinking about your coffee cup, but as an assembly they are. Wherein does “coffee cup” reside.

Acourse this is also a John Donne thing with each of us a part of the continent as bells are toling for the collective, not the individual. I take both sets of data and see some continuity as I zoom way in and way out that we are fractal like, ion that the patterns are the same zoomed infinitely in to Horton-Hears-a-Who size out to the all-of humanity scale. I have some friends who have spoken to me so much about their big idears that I am certain (insofar as certainty exists and that I do as well) that my brain think they are one of my brain centers. The fact is that the thinking I do id informed by my memories, but I don’t parse what I thought up from what I was told, so the lines of distinction blur pretty fully. My brain thinks that several other folks I have met exist in my brain alone. They are my brain centers I suppose. Individuality is a myth in this line of thought. Well OK, I get that too.

But if our concept of self is a convenience, then why do I care so much when I miss breakfast? Moreover some groups can seem to agree on how much an ox weighs on average, but the brilliant group of folks who sit in our Congress building on average think that oxen are blue with six legs. Group think is only good for certain types of tasks it seems. Ants do quite well without leaders. Like bees they have queens, but these chicks don’t shout many directives. The just act queenly.

 

OK more on this obtuse reflection later…

 

 

The Petabyte Age Going to Hell in Handbaskets: A Conversation

A discussion where I’m in over my head.

It started with this article in Wired Magazine. Where the author describes what a world of computative thinking looks like if there is data approaching infinity…

Does the axiom that correlation does not equal causation still hold?

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory/

Then my friend (who will not be cited here since he would not want me to post this anyway) said this about that

Kevin

That is interesting. The best case of something like this I’ve heard of is in Cystic Fibrosis research where they just try every gene sequence to see which ones help. Massive numbers of trial and error. No theory, no idea which will help. Just keep trying — one of these has to fit…

So if we allow anyone to write quizzes for students and watch the results across a large user group to determine which questions do the best job of discerning A-students from B-students and B from C, etc. then who needs instructional design? Maybe we can ask undergrads to make flash reviews of key topics, then track exposure to those reviews and test results to find the best reviews. Of course, that seems to put an awful lot on the articulation of the question. Who’s test? I can know which question is most often answered correct by A students but incorrect by B students for one particular class, but the concept of “A student” just isn’t reliable enough to generalize, is it? 

If we have no model but have all of something (such as all the text on the web) do we have anything useful? Life size maps and time machines that go forward at regular speed and what not. I mean, I already have a tool that allows me to access the entire web in my browser. If we have a fact such as “the word ‘handbasket’ almost always comes after the phrase ‘to hell in a’” do we know anything? Can we infer that handbaskets are consistently defined as a means of conveyance to hell? Maybe this is really about finding statistical correlations on massive scales. So instead of guessing that handbaskets go with hell, we can actually know that they do. Which is useful, but descriptive. It’s like not having to guess at how far away the moon is but instead being able to measure it within a fraction of an inch. That’s far more precise and very helpful in planning trips there, but in the end it’s description of what is and not comprehension, knowing or meaning.

At this point I feel thoroughly unmoored, as if I’ve missed the point and once again bounced off of a quantitative claim further into my qualitative bubble, so I’ll stop. 

But thanks for passing it along.

then I said this, which I wrote but don’t follow too well …

yeah, I track that parsing “what happens” is significantly different from “what it means.” The audio clip about education’s end by Anthony Kronman, which is not exactly stellar to my mind, touches on this difference in how we acquire and gauge things by domain. and this petabyte take on discovering patterns in a random but knowable universe, strikes me as inverse to a more stochastic (fabulous word I just learned the other day) way of looking at things, which is to say we take the patterns that we recognize (as a Douglas Aadams exercise in silliness) and look for the unlikely, or improbable, as in all the air in the room collects I one corner: while not impossible it is highly improbable, right? It is running so many hypothetical tests and pairings that at some point you will get monkeys typing Hamlet.

so if that were not adequately unclear, it seems that it is one thing to take the gwazillion random tests of, say any pairing and combination of genes within some whopping DNA strand and with the use of some tricky algorithm place every piece of a puzzle in every possible combination and at the end of the day (or nanosecond) you get the exact sensible combination. Confusion into a spiffy Jigsaw of Whistler’s Mother. This is taking the arbitrary and guessing at rules until you get lucky on a 10 to the 25^th scale. Rather than thinking through which piece of which puzzle matches Mrs. Whistler’s left eye inside, puzzle piece inny with Mrs. Whistler’s left eye outside, puzzle piece outy you just move all the pieces in a very speedy fashion into all possible positions and get order from disorder. Second law of thermo dynamics be darned.

But in the petabyte article I gather he is referencing all data (and that’s a lot of jigsaw pieces) being juxtaposed in all ways and all the combination of all the things (or numbers), and this will supplant the scientific model of observing, hypothesis stating, and theorizing, and instead it will give one a numeric concept of what is. This is the opposite of stochastic right. it is saying that the monkeys finished Shakespeare because they technically could.

All that to say that while the correlation of handbaskets to damnation can be counted, it cannot really be understood, unless we kid ourselves with the idea of understanding and it really is quantitative and there you go. The counting is all that understanding is and everything else is just the Humanities.

So I hope that this response was as cryptic as yours. I do like the words.

Any ideas?

thoughts on the passage of time

An interesting thing that I note much of the time in life is the slipperiness of reality. By this I mean that way we register change. Most of us noted this early on as we physically grew. My mom owned this cool cabinet stereo she had bought with me when I was five or so. As we moved I spent several years away from this household appliance. The next time I saw the thing I was not looking at it as a big box that went up to my neck, I saw this smaller cabinet that was about waist high. I was shocked how small this thing had become. 

Likewise, my friendships have often diminished as time has passed. When I was in kindergarten and first grade my cousin Allen was my best friend. I can recall the hours that we spent under his parents deck where they had this filtered sunshine coming down onto a large sand box of sorts. We would spend hours together reveling in each other’s invention and conversation. I don’t expect that climbing under Allen’s deck would be as nice now, but I did lose Allen’s companionship as I moved and it never came back. I could—and have—called him out-of-the-blue but we would exchange a few reminiscences and familial updates and say that we should stay in touch, but we won’t. 

And we all have these relationships whose presence we miss unconsciously. They accrue in life and the absences that we note in our internal role call become less apparent, but we never take names completely off the books. These names are written into our minds as not only the categories of others, but they settle in and become part of our personality. Allen’s sense of humor is still mine. Scott Monroe’s smile has become mine, Margaret’s warm personality is the personality I most like to model, and so on. These folks are still resident in the culture of my mind. While this is so I am irritated that when I call their names few reply.

 I feel that I am alone in this, but I guess that is the point. I feel like I have picked up too large a double handful of those little silver round cake sprinkles and in trying to hold them all I have managed to drop every one. Some folks I have lost as I moved, and others have just been part of the attrition cycle that happens in each partitioned section of our lives: my pals in high school were for high school. Many friendships were for a certain city, or certain activity, or for when I was single, or when I was married. My friends in different work places have not transferred out of the work place. They are all stuck in the faculty lounges of my memory and calling them is no better than calling my cousin. Like college electives, for some reason these friendships don’t transfer.

 However I have a group, an inner circle of those whom I cherish. Probably a dozen or so folks whose opinion and insight and company I hold as the high watermark of pleasurable company, valued friends, necessary confidant. Yet even these are lost from me as I slide forward through slippery time. I had one friend, Shirley, who was approaching 90 that I lost. She was OK with it, but I was not, am not. (And when I point out what I got from others, I have no qualities as fine as Shirley’s at all.) Others wandered away from my campfire because we had been too close and had to become something else, and became nothing at all.

 It goes on. Writing like this usually stumbles around and ends on the happy note that they are all still with you, as you have bits of them, but not me. I love dozens of dear friends well and fully, and feel a bit gypped by their loss. I suppose it is unhealthy to want to keep so many and to stay in touch and so on, but I do. I resent the slipperiness of reality. It’s like we are all paratroopers leaping from a plane at night descending with others but only bumping into them briefly and then flying off in other directions.  Our descent so outstrips our floating toward and away from one another so much that our interactions are the background and the plummeting is the foreground. I sort of resent the velocity of descent. I want to focus on my friends and enjoy them and love them.

 I want to reject my own metaphor of parachutists accelerating toward terra firma largely alone, and claim rail travel instead. I want to be hurtling forward and invite my comrades to the bar car to enjoy the journey instead. Now how to do that? I don’t know yet.

Commitment: Our actions our intentions.

Relationship Growth: Technical and Actual.

Adults have typical relational actions that are rather prescribed by culture. These are the usual steps of taking someone home to meet their mother, creating friends as a couple, spending domestic time together, bringing him/her to obligatory office functions.

Somewhere in there is the development of a love life and mutual compatibility building or negotiating or discovery… Then the individuals are bumping the idea off of their trusted friends and family to see what the reviews are like. I suppose it happens on occasion that those who bring home Ted Kaszcinsky or Lassie are deterred from the “big mistake” by listening to the family or friends.

For second marriage candidates we have steps like getting to know the respective kiddos and enduring the potentially withering critique (which knows no bounds of acceptable allusion and civil double entendre) that may oft be offered by scornful children on behalf of the third-party parent, or in deference to Leave-it-to-Beaver-based resentments…

Then there is the ring that is not an “outward sign of an inner spiritual commitment.” Engagement rings are outward signs to a girl’s friends and family that the bum is not going to lead her on forever. Its size and tastefulness are both part of a vocabulary of jewelers and brides that I feel I am unfit to try and fathom much less explain in this little note.

Then there is all the wedding planning that is, to my understanding, rarely done by the man even if he is a marriage counselor of a professional caterer. The planning of weddings, like surgery, should only be done by professionals. Women are surgeons, and men are patients it seems.

A metaphor

But at the heart of all of this is a kernel of possibility. A seed of hope. The tiniest ivy start that will be blown under the trestle and will progress from thread to twine to rope as it grows. It will wrap weedy branch and bough tightly about the trestle and also will burrow itself into cracks of the adjacent home. Causing the trestle and the home to be woven together tightly by this third party. This ivy that magically climbs wall and trestle and binds them over years into single objects: as both are so enmeshed in this spread branch that neither can be seen at all, but ivy only.

It is this weed-like growth that creates its own beginning and path up the wall turning two things in to another, a single collection of green life holding fast the two in an impassioned grip allowing the wall and the trestle little room to exist less its planted covering.

The love a couple has is this aggressive coupler, this thirsty third party, this thorny joiner. The look of the lovely new trestle and the freshly painted siding are lost in the thick living mass of this violate intercourse of the two being pulled and held by this seed turned master. Their unsuspecting lives are subsumed by an unapologetic love and hunger for one another that is not two appetites, but a single urge, need, hunger that wraps them tightly into the one thick wall of this sturdy home. They are lost in their care and connection to one another. This is the part that is more than buying white dresses and choosing metal tokens. This is the hidden yet fully seen transition of two to one: Wrapped by absurd love in an ever increasing burden of care and need.

 

Symbols and Signs

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/06/09/080609on_audio_gaitskill

So there’s this story by Nabokov called Symbols and Signs. It is an amazing story, although like lots of Russian lit it is dense and seemingly random, but upon consideration it is to my palette rather provocative and deeply meaningful. It is featured in the New Yorker this week on line.

To ruin the story, it is about a character we do not meet, and not like Godot, but like any sad lost character like stolen children through history rather famously considered with pied pipers leading them away by the droves or in and Irish ballads of stolen children, this one is about a son who was born “deranged” who had a condition of some kind of paranoia, Referential Mania. A condition where Nabokov describes this young man as seeing everything around himself as a veiled reference to himself. As no one exists but him, and all actions and artifacts in the world allude to him and convey tangible if not invidious message.

From childhood he carried this delusion of seeing meaning in everything like what’s-his-face does in “Beautiful Mind” with delusions of secret messages hidden in magazines. Yet after describing this as a grievous illness he decorates the beach of his story with the shells of planted information. He describes the ten jellies the parents bring, the look of strangers on the train and the bird fallen and drowned on the ground with the details of importance.

I was moved to see that we all assign meaning. And we all assign meaning as it concerns us. Further not seeing his now suicidal son sets the tension of the narrative to be fully conveyed by this apparent subtext. A set or series of metaphor from which we are left to derive, like the son, meaning from subtle symbols. He became a cipher assigned permanent translation duties to tell himself these terrible whispers from all things around. Gong from man’s assumption of no meaning to the converse assigning meaning to everything. And latent, painful language that he must endure.

It is a story of meaning embedded not seen. As we each draw conclusions that suit or diminish us from the subtle messages time leaves us. Each of us reading the tea leaves at the bottom of our cups, finding message s that impact no one else’s and that no one else can understand.,

Swarms of Thoughts: thinking about thinking

Ways of thinking about things. 01

When I was growing up I thought a lot about skiing. It was an important to me although I had never been on skis. Just as roping and riding may have been important to youngsters raised on a cattle ranch. I was raised in Alaska and always wanted to ski, to be a skier, to buy ski equipment, to hang about by roaring fires in woody ski lodges and tell stories about skiing. I watched and thought about it so much that when I was in eighth grade I took my first lessons I had already invested much time in thinking about skiing. I took to it like a duck takes to water. I believe that I was prepped for doing it by all the pre-thought I had given it.

As for the cliché about ducks and water, I was thinking about instinct and intuition. I think that instinct is a pre-knowledge. Right? Ducks take to water, like ducks for a reason. They are pre-populated with duck thinking. The way a duck thinks is undoubtedly low-res. But also given to little internal reflection , self doubt and so on. Rather, a duck is simply gifted at duckness: at diving under water, at ambling about and nibbling on detritus, at flying south for the winter and so on. While not a perfect analogy it is helpful as the low-res version of what I am alluding to.

Writing is a way of thinking. Well certain types of writing creates or replicates intentional linearity of thought. What does that mean? Hmmm, well it is that I see our brains as swarms of ants crawling all around the busy ant farm. These little guys are all over, doing their various ant tasks. But as they leave the hill, they line up and come out in this line that is the letter-bound, word sequence that we use for communication. If we could read pages at a glance, and I mean see the whole page and consume it like we do a photo of a pastoral landscape image, then we could write in patterns and use hundreds of words as combined expressions. We could see the whole landscape of the ant-works as its whole. That is how we think.

I was talking to a friend one night and she asked me what my point was after a rambling set of disjointed paragraphs (not unlike those that precede this sentence) and I said that I did not have “a” point, but rather I had a cluster of ideas like a swarm of moths. They all form some sort of whole but we are not used to “idea swarms.” We train ourselves to line up the big thoughts in the ant mound and send them out like a choir taking the risers on the stage. They will all line up and line out as they fill the risers from left to right top to bottom. When they are all their they share the point.

This all goes to non-linear expression and to asynchronicity. But I am done scratching at the surface of these ideas for now. I have lost my way with today’s entry I will see if I can regroup by tomorrow.

I am caught with the genesis of thinking that happens with some metaphorical slap on our bare behinds after we are born. OK, I will stop now…

 

 

Pretending to Dance

4th Grade and I am invited to a birthday party for some girl at her dad’s restaurant. As I recall, i did not really know the kid, but was blessed to be the recipient of a group invite to the whole class. Sort of a collateral guest, owing to the noblesse oblige of her folks. I got there; having been to few restaurants and even fewer dances, and was surprised by two things right away: 1.) it was a dance 2.) my classmates were all dancers.

When i say that they were all dancers, i mean to say that they were all dancing. To my fourth-grade eyes they all looked quite practiced. They were not uniformly teamed up with the opposite sex, or in pairs of girls and boys. There was much more of a clump of these kids all moving expertly to the rhythm of the Jackson Five and Osmond’s and that family group that had the TV show and the plaid bus.

I had dressed up for this event. My dad had bought a flower of some sort for me to bring to the kid whose folks owned the place. As i recall i handed it over to the parent/bouncer at as i walked in to great fanfare of condescending appreciation. Which condescension i was not above liking a great deal. I was feeling like James Bond as he walks into a casino: the only smart guy in the room.

I walked out into the middle of the pinball of dancing figures and did an amazing thing: i pretended to know how to dance. I was in a semi-darkened space (although it was midday outside), i was wearing new striped bellbottoms, i had just gotten accolades at the door for the suave purchase of some plastic covered corsage, and i felt like i was walking up to the baccarat table with high-dollar chips in my tuxedo.

I did the twist, and variations of… well, the twist, i then sorta jumped around a great deal like the Peanuts gang, and finally switched over to the kind of finger-snapping cool dance with hands raised. This looked less like West Side Story hipness, and more like the Archie’s singular dance move, but i was (in the voice of Cagney not DiCaprio) “on top of the world.” I walked out on to the floor of dancers and made them all think i was a dancer. It’s like going to a symphony and striding forward and taking the first chair away from the violinist, or maybe even like snatching the baton from the conductor. I pulled it off. At the end of the party, and i am not kidding, i was handed a first-place prize of being the best dancer on the floor.

In retrospect i have drawn some conclusions about the training each of my fellow dancers had received before our fateful dance competition. I also have some unfortunate suspicions about the amount of irony the parent/judges exhibited when deciding about the respective skills vs. unrestrained self-denying calisthenics.

Regardless, for that afternoon i was a dance god. Moving with unerring grace, and interpreting Sugar Sugar with the confidence of a Balanchine. Casting my glances at the vaguely aware young beauties, too taken by my own prowess to give them the attentions that they clearly desired.

Today I was thinking about my career teaching. It was one of pretense. I was ever pretending to be the teacher in the room. Only i knew that i was just one of the students. At this point in this entry i want to qualify what i am saying and say that there are experts and actual practitioners and we are not all really imposters. But I can’t. I keep seeing life as so short that i wonder if we aren’t all just pretending to dance.

I went through the biography of Churchill last week, and i was taken by in the span of several hundred pages he seemed like just the man for just the task, but you still have a sense that he was aware at all times who he really was underneath the Prime Minister role. He was always still the young soldier asking his mom for more money. He was the back-bencher wishing he had more pull. He was ever acting like PM and trying to convince everyone else he could dance.

I end with this. That if all we can do is pretend because it takes more than a hundred years to become the real thing, then this does open the door to all of us. We can each step out on under the colored lights and loosen our clip-on ties, cast restraint to the wind and become the masters of class for an hour or two at a time.