A Changing Frame-Of-Reference

I was going to call this post The Fallacy Of Choice after waiting in line to order my Grande Pike at Starbucks. Seems we've made ordering a cup of coffee quite complicated in an apparent attempt to make the mundane more interesting to fit in with our incredibly busy lives, "I'm working don't you know." But we've all bought into the scheme. Only, it's still just a cup of coffee. Enough said—for now. I decided to address a more appropriate subject in that it's been almost a year since my last update.

The Pandemic. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said already but with bookstores and movie theatres closed I had an unprecedented amount of time for writing, reading, thinking and observing that was accompanied by the thrill of discovery; also decided to move across the country (but that’s a story for another time). I’ve decided to use this forum to talk about what happened and is happening. If you like it, cool. If not—c’est dommage.

I am still represented by Max Alexandre Tremblay who is now with Westwood Creative Artists based in Toronto, an agent and agency to be reckoned with.

 

    My writing space is why I’m here and this is what I’ve been at work on:

·     I finished the third book of The Ethan Jones Trilogy, which began with The Actor, titled The Reality of Delusion. I hope it finds a home in the not too distant future. The Musician, published in 2018, is the second book. Leave it to say, there is much more to Ethan’s story.

·     Something of a follow-up to my short story collection The Drive In, with almost twice as many stories, the work is titled If You Could Read My Mind. What would you do if you were imprisoned for life for a crime you didn’t commit?

·     Next is a 10-episode script for the second season of a space-oriented Netflix series I'm hoping will get picked up. It's about what’s really likely to happen in our efforts to colonize Mars.

·     A poetry collection. I’ve been writing poetry and lyrics for most of my life. Why I never thought to put them together, I don’t know, but many of them are together in this compilation. There is no particular theme to the work other than thoughts I’ve had and written as poems. A personal retrospective of different styles and subjects titled Penetralia: A Secret Place.

·     Finally, I’m at work on a new novel in the science fiction genre that's been fascinating to write. There's our plans and then what happens which are almost never the same—Intentional Serendipity. The first draft is complete and I’m in the first rewrite.

My reading space takes me places I never knew I’d go and here are the books in no particular order since our last meeting.

·     Catch-22 by Joseph Keller

·     Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill

·     The Martian by Andy Weir

·     Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

·     On The Road by Jack Kerouac

·     The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson

·     Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America by Annie Jacobsen

·     The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

·     A Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

·     The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

·     Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

·     Animal Farm by George Orwell

·     The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner

·     The Bible

And now about that title, frame-of-reference thing …

Much of what I observe and think about seems to gravitate, in an unplanned way, to what I read (and write) about and vice versa. I rarely know where my interests will lie when the time comes to choose a new book to read. This was the case a couple of years ago when my son introduced me to The Joe Rogan Experience. I rolled my eyes, “The host of Fear Factor?” I said. “Give him a chance Dad,” my son replied. I did and was immediately intrigued by some of Rogan's guests. One of the first I listened to was Graham Hancock on his book Fingerprints of the Gods.

Hancock’s book was never on my list of books to read but after hearing the podcast, I knew it would be my next. Fingerprints of the Gods reignited interests I’d held since a child on discovering the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci and Abraham Lincoln. The book helped changed my way of thinking and gave substance to what had already started to occur to me.

There was many things I took from the book but I’ll talk to three here: pyramids, precession and Younger Dryas. Like most, I knew about the Great Pyramid of Giza but I don’t ever remember learning or even hearing about precession or Younger Dryas.

The Egyptian pyramids are famous and estimated to have been built as tombs some 4,500 years ago for Egypt’s pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure except, as Hancock points out, there was no representation of these individuals inside the tombs when modern explorers discovered them. One would think they’d be full of articles to honour and identify the pharaoh in the after life. The assumption made by experts was the tombs were robbed of their artifacts long before the explorers’ discovered them. Was my supposedly factual education based on assumption? The pyramids were supposedly built by hundreds of slaves hauling monoliths of limestone that weigh up to 200 tons—an unimaginable weight to move even by today’s standards—up dirt ramps. I started to think about the idea of using hundreds of people with ropes and primitive tools to move these leviathan stones. Ever tried to organize ten people to move something heavy like a slate pool table? The concept certainly raises questions in my mind. And why is there no mention of the pyramids in the Bible? The giant Nephilim people are included. The pyramids were certainly around based on the time estimate of when the pyramids were built. And pyramids were not only built in Egypt but in Mexico, Peru and Mesopotamia. Those parts of the world weren’t even supposed to be known to exist let alone have technology able to construct such enormous edifices. On closer scrutiny, Pi appears to have been known by the ancient designers of the Great Pyramid as dividing the perimeter by its height results in a close approximation (too close for coincidence) to 2 x Pi. Archimedes of Syracuse was supposed to have discovered 3.14 in 250 BC over 2,000 years after the Great Pyramid was supposedly built. Hmmm. Mathematically, the Great Pyramid could be a representation of the spherical earth. Coincidence is a little too hard to believe. But why suppress the information.

Stay with me, I’ll get to where I'm going soon.

Precession, or the earth’s precession, was a difficult concept to grasp but I learned that as the earth rotates, the axis it rotates on wobbles a bit—23.5°. The wobble takes 26,000 years to complete its full revolution all the while orbiting the sun along with all the other planets. There’s much more to this but it’s science that has helped us understand some of what exists and it’s difficult for me to peek into something like precession and not get a sense of a much grander master plan and power that is simply beyond human understanding. Could this entire spectacular machination be accidental? That’s a big pill to swallow, red or blue.

Just a little more and I’ll be there.

I had never heard of Younger Dryas before reading Fingerprints Of The Gods and although I don’t think it’s mentioned in the book but has been in others and comes up in Hancock’s interviews. Take it to say, it’s a warming that took place in the Northern Hemisphere about 12,000 years ago. It’s important, as research has shown that the Sphinx at the site of the pyramids shows erosion markings that far exceed wind and weather and is more representative of flooding and water flow that is believed to have occurred during the Younger Dryas period that puts into question the age of the Sphinx at 4,500 years. Again, makes me wonder.

Why is this important to me? Part of the reason is that what came out of writing The Actor: is anything what it seems? We’re constantly faced with what to believe from our numerous information sources; the truth often seems nearly impossible to get. This is not a new thing but you’d think we’d get better at it.

I began to have conflicted feelings as to what I was supposed to know about and what I wasn’t, that seemed to be decided or regulated by someone else for reasons that I’ll leave to future posts. Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Ballad of East and West and the line “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” has begun to haunt me.

Rudyard Kipling interesting to note crossed my education world of science and engineering and established knowledge. Kipling was requested by H. E. T. Haultain of the University of Toronto to create “Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer” that is part of, and was part of my, engineering graduation in Canada. The purpose is for the graduating engineer to recognize the responsibility of their work to society.

My observation here and the purpose of the examples from Fingerprints Of The Gods is to help understand why I’m beginning to believe a better conception of our existence may be best learned  through the concepts of metaphysics and postmodernism and not just science.

Metaphysics refers to studies of what cannot be reached through objective studies of material existence and postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, and objective, efforts to explain reality (I’ve been helped here with definition by www.pbs.org). Both are beginning to figure more prominently in my thinking that was not always the case. Unfortunately, I saw postmodernism as an apocalyptic view of the world connected to chaos and free living, while metaphysics was centred on mysticism, the occult and pseudoscience. Both seemed to promote mayhem, destruction and the deterioration of society. My views of both were seriously wrong and quite misunderstood. Judgment or pre-judgment is a terrible thing but coming from the scientific and engineering community, much of the perceived non-science view is frowned upon and defended by attacking and discrediting the author followed by weak, if any, defence of the assumed certainties. Yes, there are crazies, but discerning crazy from fact is not necessarily easy but ignoring well thought out reasoning is not the answer, and why real science is so important, hard and, come think of it, its purpose. Daily, I am becoming much more aware of why this is, some of which is in my novel The Musician which I’m coming to believe is much more about postmodernism than was ever my intention.

Having spent much of my life in the science world, which I’m pleased to have, I’m beginning to see and feel a transformation and a change to my frame-of-reference. While, science helps keep planes in the air, explains planetary orbits and allows us to communicate faster, at greater distances, with more information than ever before—science doesn’t explain everything. In fact, I’m beginning to think, explains little of the human experience and close to an infinitesimal amount of the full scope of existence. While we seem to learn more and more, at the same time, we seem to learn massively more about what we don’t know, yet struggle to admit it. “I don’t know” seems to be an unacceptable answer today and a made-up answer preferable to the admission of not knowing. Two quotes come to mind here: Einstein’s “I learn more and more about less and less until I’ll soon know everything about nothing” and Socrate’s “the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Yet  I contend, I still find the pursuit incredibly fascinating.

More about this and other things in my next post but now time for that coffee.

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I’m still doing my best to live up to the moniker Canada's The Globe and Mail gave me—the hardest working novelist you’ve never heard of.

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and find out what many readers have already discovered.

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