ALTHOUGH YOU MAY BE OTHERWISE tempted, the following conversational gambits make for dodgy texts and/or tweets:
“We need to talk.”
“You’re fired.”
“Excuse me, sir or madam. Is your name…?”
“It’s over.”
“You don’t need to come in for the next few months.”
“Don’t share this with anyone, but…”
“Please — have a seat.”
“We need to talk.”
THE MYSTERY is what I decided in 2010 to use instead of the word “God,” since it then encapsulated everything-I-knew-I-didn’t-know-about-G?d (including why I spell it with a question mark). It’s just too big, you know? And mysterious. And incomprehensible. And opaque to understanding. And paradoxical. And … and … and … well, you get the idea. (Or should that be “Idea?”)
AFTER I BOUGHT MY OWN telescope (an Orion StarMax 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain with equatorial mount), I would take it out in the early evenings on the sidewalk in front of our building with a sign leaning against the tripod that read, “FREE MOON TRIPS!” If anyone happened by (as they often did,) I would ask them, “Would you like to see the Moon?” Almost everyone did, and I took great pleasure in their gasps of awe as they saw up-close lunar craters for perhaps the first time.
Something of the same spirit infuses the nascent #popscope movement.
1. WHILE I DON’T BEGRUDGE THE siblings Wachowski their success, and I don’t really believe they stole my idea, as the first populizer of something called “The Matrix” I feel I must firmly and finally speak my piece.
2. Make a circle with a dot in the center. The dot represents you. Within the circle is the sum of your knowledge. Outside the circle is the vasty unknown. The circle itself? I call that The Matrix.
3. This simple reality-diagram was created by me c. 1990, long before the first installment of the popular film series, as part of the work I did for Obscure Research Labs.
THERE I WAS, TYING AN intricate bit of decorative knotwork in the Golden Hinde II‘s hold, and feeling more than a little proud of myself. I was then just a beginner at that sort of thing, and the glow of self-regard was warming my busy hands.
Comes the captain, a grizzled veteran of a hundred-and-one voyages in a hundred-and-one vessels, to peer over my shoulder. I paused, waiting for him to tell me how grand was my creation.
“That’s what it’s supposed to look like,” he said gruffly, and walked on.
To say I was crestfallen would be an understatement.
Tell me what you know of Torah,” asked the greybeard rabbi.
“I only know a little,” responded the young student.
The rabbi smiled. “That’s all anyone knows of Torah.”
IT’S THE NOVELTY. IT”S TRYING to see new places through the eyes of their long-time residents. It’s the road-trip soundtrack, whether CDs, tapes or new-to-me radio stations. If flying, it’s seeing the landscape from a different perspective; it’s the tiny bottles; it’s the in-flight magazines and audio offerings (and it was eating the twice-wrapped kosher meal, at least when airlines still offered meals). It’s watching urban areas dissolve into countryside the further away you get from the city. It’s finding new places to eat, and eating like the locals. It’s testing the limits of my comfort zone. It’s the packing. (It’s also the unpacking.)
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