A New Door Frame

I’m working on this pair of paintings for my apartment, on geometrical and occult themes. They’ll hang in my living room for the moment,on either side of the door into my study/office/library. Here they are: on the right, “White Pillar”, topped by the yin-yang, and proceeding through the foursquare diamond of Chesed to the two seven-pointed stars of Netzach. This painting is half-white, half unpainted “natural canvas”, illustrating polarity even within the extremes of polarity.

On the left, just started tonight, is the new painting, “Black Pillar.” at the bottom is the Rondel of Hod or Mercury, containing an octagon, and two eight-pointed stars. Above it, just barely sketched out, is the Rondel of Geburah or Mars, and above that, even more barely sketched out, is the Rondel of Saturn or Binah. I’m calling them rondels here because they’re not joined by the lines that make up the Tree of Life (although that being the case, I’m not sure why I included their Hebrew names).

I “finished” (no painting is ever really finished, just abandoned or sold) “White Pillar” last night, particularly the sign of Netzach/Venus — and I’ve been absolutely assaulted by green growing things ever since. We’re in killer pollen season, and while I’m never affected by pollen count (or rather, I’ve never been so before), I’m really challenged the last couple of days. Part of me felt like working on “Black Pillar” would help balance things out, and take my mind off the fact that I’m a snot-rocket right now(not a pretty image, I know).

Esoteric readers likely know that there’s a middle pillar between left and right, one which dwells upon the themes of 1, 6, 9, and 10. I’ve been debating if I’ll paint that painting, and I’m strongly leaning against doing so. First, the middle pillar represents the balance between forces, and I want to be reminded of that balance as I walk between the two paintings on my way to work. But more, the middle pillar represents the forces we cultivate within ourselves: unity of purpose, creative power, imagination, and deliberateness in acting in the world. Those powers aren’t really present unless we are. And so the paintings are intended to remind the painter and the visitor alike to cultivate those powers, and enter into the mental states where we are capable of bringing those things to pass.

Two more rondels to paint, some black paint, and some gloss finish in places. To work.

Civil War: research and records

I’ve been on the phone a few times in the last few days, talking to Librarians.

Librarians are your friends.

Especially on projects like this civil war project. We have thirty Union soldiers, along with small pockets of data: some diary entries, military records, census bureau data sometimes, and so on.

And so far, we’ve uncovered an actual diary in a Connecticut library of a man’s civil war experiences; a collection of letters and prison records from Andersonville Prison in Georgia (and one of the librarians at the special collections at the University of Georgia went above and beyond the call of duty yesterday to provide us with those letters — wow!).

The stories are fascinating and wonderful and horrific and beautiful.

Civil War Projects: Bloody Lane and Burnside’s Bridge

So, one of my students doing this Civil War project just discovered that his soldier fought at the Roulette Farm at Antietam. He advanced from Roulette Farm across the fields to “Bloody Lane“, where he was probably injured with a bullet wound to the neck.

The guy’s buddies carried him off the battlefield, before being ordered to dump his body in a pile of mortally wounded men, and return to the battlefield. This soldier then realized he was in a stack of the dying, and picked himself up, and walked eight miles to the hospital, occasionally passing out from blood loss along the way.

He made it to the hospital, and lingered eight days under the uncertain care of surgeons, alternately writing to his wife that he was near death and feeling better, before actually dying. The letter from his best friend to his wife survives, and gives us a sense of the funeral arrangements — as it was September and relatively warm, the friend arranged for a funeral with money sent from home, and this soldier is buried in Clarksburg, MD somewhere, rather than at Antietam National Cemetery.

Another kid, working at the next computer as it happened, learned that his person had fought at Antietam… But he was quite disappointed to learn that it wasn’t on Bloody Lane. He wasn’t in the right Connecticut regiment. Alas.

Then we checked out the Antietam Union order of battle article on Wikipedia. And it turns out this guy fought at Burnside’s Bridge, before being detached to go the long way around to Shapsey’s Ford. Then he was part of the contingent that tried to advance to cut off Lee in Sharpsburg, but was driven back.

Fascinating stories emerging!

Civil War and Primary Sources and Google Maps

Last year, the historian-parent of one of my students assembled thirty portfolios of documents on thirty Civil War soldiers from Connecticut — photocopies of letters and diaries and newspaper articles, links to Google ebooks, links to PDFs and websites, addresses and phone numbers for archives and historical societies in Connecticut which had the original papers, and so on.  Quite the undertaking, and I’m incredibly grateful to her for the work she did.

Now this project is in its second year.  The kids this year have the materials assembled by this historian-parent, and they have the materials assembled by last year’s seventh graders.  And they’re already making discoveries quite different from the kids who worked through this material last year.

Working with one kid yesterday, and with the help of Google Maps, we located where one such Connecticut soldier was when he wrote his last letter to his wife before marching out toward an unknown destination.  By tracing the information in his letter, we were able to identify the location of his campsite (within about a mile) the previous night.  Using Wikipedia, we were able to find his commanding general, and using various historical atlases we were able to trace the route of his march.

The march that brought him to Antietam battlefield.

Based on the assigned positions of his commanding officers, we were able to get a rough idea of where he was standing during the morning of the battle, and where he was firing from.  We were able to guess from his letter after the battle, roughly where he was wounded.

And we were able to ascertain where his friends carried him, to lay him down among a pile of other wounded men.  Where, after being ignored for a day or two, he picked himself up from, and walked eight miles toward the nearest hospital.

Which we were able to roughly locate, using Google Maps and the man’s own letters, and the letters of his friends.

And where he died.

Officially not one of the wounded of Antietam, but nonetheless killed by it. A man who marched twenty-odd miles to be wounded in the neck by a passing bullet, and then marched another ten miles, many of them alone and leaking copious amounts of blood, to die in a hospital bed from lack of medical care and sepsis.

And from this I had a vision of what American education could be.  Not an endless round of tests and preparation for tests, but a chance for the discovery and the digitization of the historical lives of thousands or millions of people — pioneers and homesteaders and explorers and scientists and immigrants and all sorts of writers and painters and workers from all sorts of walks of life, where they were and what they were doing while great and terrible events unfolded around them.  And it’s extraordinary that I could go to Maryland and Virginia, and walk the roads that this man walked, or see those roads in satellite photographs, and actually live out the short, extraordinary military life of one man in the Civil War — Enlisted August 7, 1862, Died September 25, 1862 — and see where and how he lived and fought and died — in the space of an hour’s class.

Do we not live in extraordinary times?

Tai Chi Y2D56: Breathe

It really does come down to breathing, in the end.  Don’t hold the breath, don’t force the breath, don’t belabor the breath, don’t not-breathe.  Keep breathing.

Today’s practice was uneventful.  I mean, that’s sort of what they’re supposed to be.  Uneventful.  I made a mistake relatively near the beginning.  I stepped out with the right foot instead of the left, and started to do Push instead of Throat Strike.  I was able to recover the mis-position, and find the correct movement in the moment, and do that instead.  Yes, I still make mistakes in practice, and yes, there are steps that I do that I don’t do as well as I’d like.  But it’s sort of not the point of the work to acknowledge how well or poorly you do the work on any given day.  My worst day last week was better than anything in my first month of tai chi a year ago.  And the internal changes are continuing, long after the physical work of the tai chi daily has become easy.

So it goes.

Simplicity demands underlying complexity

I’ll be writing about some of the things I saw in DC at some point soon. But I wanted to touch on one of the things that I did on the trip down and the trip back. Specifically, I was playing with an iPad app called Geo Designer. Basically, this is a little geometry program that allows one to build computer graphics like this one of typical ruler-and-compass constructions, such as these circles nested in an angle, tangent to the angle’s sides. Pretty cool.

But the thing that gets to me is the underlying complexity. I mean, sure. Go ahead. Draw an angle and then nest some circles inside it. That’s pretty cool. But to do it “right”, mathematically and geometrically, requires a whole lot of attention to detail, and precise geometry. And there’s no royal road to any of this, to borrow a phrasing from Euclid. There’s no way to fake this with a few rules of thumb: want a few circles nested along the bisector of an angle? Sure: learn some geometry.

Now here I am, twenty years after I loved basic geometry and wanted more, and then it devolved into algebra because, really, aren’t ruler and compass just so old-fashioned and out of touch? but it turns out that they’re not irrelevant. All this stuff is relevant to the world that kids live in today. That we all live in, today. Because simplicity is a byproduct of complexity, not the other way around. And yet we’ve done a great disservice to children by simplifying things for them, rather than complexifying them.

Maybe nobody uses these kinds of circles any more. It’s possible. But I know that my own intellectual powers were grown and challenged by the creation of this image, and I wonder how this ancient lesson can be applied again today.

Discovery Loved, Cause Hated

Today, I heard two different children, independently of one another, use the same language to describe something. Hearing them use this descriptive language set my heart aflame in joy.  It was such a pleasure to hear them using this language — for them to capture, in similar phrases, an elegant, basic discovery about the nature of the world.

It was so normal.  It was so ordinary.  It was truly owned information. They knew what they were talking about.

It was the discovery that they were pointing out that drove me to madness.  Here’s the phrases they used.

“Mr. Watt, it looks like that x-axis motor is pulling the build platform too far to the south — along the negative side of the line, on pretty much every build line.”

And,

“Mr. Watt, it looks like the build-platform is pulling too far south into the negatives…  Either the motor or the drive train for the build platform has to be out of alignment or something.”

THESE ARE THIRD GRADERS.

And yet they have a very clear sense of the X, Y, and Z axis lines on the 3D printer.  It’s been messing up their models for the last three classes.  And, after printing a few calibration cubes, and other designs, they’re gradually discovering what I’ve known for some time. The build platform pulls ever so slightly to the south — along the negative end of the x-axis — on every rise in Z. That is to say, every time the extruder head goes up a layer in the build on the 3D printer… a shift occurs southward, toward the back wall of the Design Lab, and the object being printed is ruined after about thirty-five layers. Sometimes less.  Our fifth attempt at building, today, was ruined after a mere three layers of construction.

But Third Graders. Talking about X Y and Z axis and understanding what they mean.  Being able to analyze the movements of a robot and figure out — conceptually, and abstractly, and concretely — just what was going wrong with their designs.  Being able to look at the red,blue green lines on their SketchUp programs, and thus become able to see that objects reside in three dimensions, and that they can be described mathematically.

These are not typical Third Grader discoveries, I don’t think.  They’re barely used to the idea of number lines extending below zero, much less extending below zero, and being roughly drawn in three directions, all at right angles to one another. Set your coffee cup down (or your whiskey bottle, or whatever you happen to be drinking), and take a look at it.  It’s a physical object, right?  You could draw a line through the middle of it, through the exact center of it, top to bottom.  How many layers is it composed of?  On the one hand, it’s an infinite number of layers, mathematically.  A plane of mathematical precision has length and breadth but no depth.

As a 3-D object, though, your coffee cup (we’ll assume it only holds coffee for now), is made up of layers of atoms … and those atoms, however unbelieveably small they are, have mass. They have length, width and breadth.  And the plastic that the 3D printer, Moira, extrudes… well.  That has plenty of depth.  Enough to be visible to the naked eye on each layer.  The change is real to the kids who stand there and watch.  And they can see the X-Axis, the Y-Axis, and the Z-axis.  How many of those plastic pixels wide is your coffee cup?  How many deep?  How thick are the walls? The handle? And Can that handle be supported by its own weight as the printer builds it? Or does it need some sort of prop to hold it up? What is the right-sized prop? Where does it get put?

We’ve tested things that might throw off the printer.  Slamming doors. Running in the lab.  The air conditioner.  The most likely culprit remains the motor inside the 3D printer. Except that, we noticed, the models we’re printing from seem to have a lot of code errors in them.  Next week, we’re going to try to troubleshoot our models digitally, and empty them of some coding errors.  But truth be told, we’ve printed test cubes (think the weighted test cubes from the game, Portal) and they don’t turn out perfect — and we know that code is clean.  So we’re left with the problem that we may have a technical error inside the guts of our machine.  Are they disappointed?  YES.  Yes they are.

But part of me, as much as I hate the cause of their discovery, is thrilled.  These kids are learning to understand mathematics and geometry from a quite-different perspective than their classmates.  They understand that number lines can represent measurements from a central point.  They understand what X, Y and Z axes are, and that number lines can represent measurements from a value of  0 in three dimensions.  They understand that physical objects have measurements where width and depth are not zero, that they have to impart mass to objects.

Has every kid gotten it yet?  No. Probably not. Are they on their way?  Yes.  Yes I think they are.  Amazing how an annoying technical mistake can impart such important, and deep, abstract knowledge.

And sooner or later, these kids are going to fix the machine. Watch the learning then!

Tai Chi Y2D48: Sweat

I notice that the food I eat at dinner has a tendency to determine if I sweat at tai chi the morning afterward.  I don’t necessarily know what I ate last night to cause me to run so hot this morning, but I did.  In any case, I think it’s connected with dairy.

Tai Chi Y2D44: advising Lawrence

It’s becoming harder to decide what to write about each morning. There’s nothing that I can point to that’s going particularly well; but nothing that’s going particularly badly, either. I’m in a groove, I guess; but it’s hard to tell if it’s a rut, either. A lot of the basic challenges of doing the form are solved; the principle challenge is getting up and doing it. That is to say, the dweller on the threshold is still my most critical enemy.

Which is to say, procrastination is my biggest enemy. Procrastination comes from the Latin words “for tomorrow”. There’s this temptation to “for-tomorrowize” a good many of the challenges I face. And it would have been fine to lie in bed and get another half-hour or more of sleep. Or write a poem. Or something else.

T.S. Eliot once wrote “ambition comes when we find all things no longer possible.” I haven’t run up against physical limits at all. The mental obstacles are the real challenges — as they pretty much always have been.

I told a kid yesterday at school that most schools have a secret curriculum that consists of three things:

1. organization
2. presentation
3. participation

That is, how well your system works at getting things done; how well your system works at presenting and framing your ideas; and how well you get along with others and making the team work.

But it occurs to me this morning that there are two more:

1. initiation
2. transition

That is, how well you develop new ideas, and how easily you shift from one set of ideas to another set. I think tai chi cultivates these two in me. But it’s hard to tell at the moment.

Follow-Up on Teaching Sonnets

I wrote both of these sonnets using the methods I advocated in this post, namely,

1. Choose the rhyming words first,
2. then count syllables to fit, and
3. wait for the iambic pentameter to emerge on future efforts.

My kids today wanted more practice, so they gave me these words:

Fly
So
Guy
Dough
Real
Cheek
Appeal
Weak
Ran
Bumpy
Can
Lumpy
Fat
Cat.

And here’s the resulting 15-minute sonnet:

I had a dream once where I was a Fly
with six small legs and wings angled just So
and in this dream I landed on a Guy.
he worked in kitchens all covered in Dough
He hit me. I survived. Was this dream Real
I bit him when I landed on his Cheek
I tast of his flesh had such sweet Appeal
but the blow from his hand made me feel Weak
I buzzed around his head and off he Ran
This dream I had was crazy and Bumpy
He tried to catch me in a small tin Can
the old man’s cheek was hairy and Lumpy
I bit him again and then I got Fat
Suddenly I was eaten by a Cat.

And if you read this poem out loud, it will become immediately obvious which lines are definitely NOT in iambic pentameter.  It’s also clear that there’s a story that sort of emerges, but that story is compromised (I think) by the fact that the words were chosen first, before the subject of the poem was chosen.

Here’s the second set of rhyming words I was given:  doors, walls, floors, calls, pencil, two, smencil (a kind of scented pencil, apparently), blue, horses, monk, forces, funk, cheese, please.

And here’s the 15-minute poem that resulted:

I dreamed that I could walk through maple doors,
dark portals piercing through sweating stone walls.
My feet do not echo on pale pine floors.
But off in the distance I hear the calls
of laughing students writing in pencil,
counting syllables out loud, two by tow.
Strawberry scent — someone has a smencil,
and new colors also, yellow and blue.
From through a window, grass-smell and horses;
from up the stairs, the chanting of a monk,
and all these symbols represent forces
of my mind alone. Students in a funk
expect great sonnets; but first write the cheese—
for the form must be learned, ere it can please.

And this is one of the core concepts of the form, really — one must start with the rules of the form, and work backwards to a completed poem a few times, even if the poem doesn’t make ANY SENSE AT ALL , before the capacities of one’s brain readjusts to writing poetry that makes sense.  It takes time.  It did for me, and it did for anyone else that’s ever learned to write a sonnet — the first few are terrible, and then suddenly the brain adjusts.  It says, “Oh, is this what you were trying to do?”  And then it does it.

It’s magic.