Feb. 22, 1852 - Every man will take such views as he can afford to take. Views one would think were the most expensive guests to entertain. -- Henry D. Thoreau

Journal of a Sabbatical

February 22, 1999

just give me one moment in time
and then iterate it

Insight lurks where you least expect it, and is impossible to find where you're looking for it. This applies to personal as well as software concerns. And I'm not talking about the image of Roger Clemens in Yankee pinstripes. Although the idea of trading one old fat pitcher for another has a 1950's feeling/aura around it.

fractal

n. A geometric pattern that is repeated at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes that cannot be represented by classical geometry.

iterate

v. To say or perform again.

moment

n. A brief interval of time.

Somewhere between Mombassa and Monday, "moment" is frozen thanks to Kodak or Polaroid or Fuji or Ilford ... a shape that cannot be represented by classical tenses. Frozen because we can't repeat it and yet we want to say it or perform it again over and over and over. English has tenses you see, so we can never represent our moments as they really are. Chinese has no tenses, as Hayden Carruth points out in one of my favorite poems, addressing the Classical Chinese poets:

Your language has no tenses, which is why your poems can never be translated whole into English;

Your minds are the minds of men who feel and imagine without time.

Who is imprisoned by language? Them or us?

Would they even think of freezing a moment and breaking it down into a geometric pattern repeated at ever smaller intervals? Can we iterate a moment? Would we really want to if we could?

Suddenly I am three years old and Hurricane Carol is raging outside. My Dad and his brother lean into the wind in their yellow foul weather suits as a tree falls across the front walk. I watch through the window, frightened. And that wasn't even a Kodak moment.

Kate came over to pick my brain about the fractal plug-in I was planning to use to get around the scaling problem for my virtual forest project. Trouble is it's been a long time since I was actively working on the project rather than trying to get funding for the project, so my bookmarks were stale and my brain was befuddled trying to remember where I'd seen the visual database that had used the particular fractal program I was interested in. It took forever to download the demo and then I didn't seem to be able to view the images with the version of the FIF viewer I had. We spent about 2 hours on this, and I was exhausted by the time we gave up.

To be truthful, I was exhausted when we started. I've been wicked tired lately. I joked to Nancy the other day that I'd be the first case of acute fatigue syndrome. (The fact that I didn't sleep at all Friday night before the first "let's bomb Serbia deadline doesn't have anything to do with it all, right?) Anyway, I wasn't firing on all cylinders this afternoon and didn't do a good job with getting Kate and her dad set up with the fractal plug-ins. Sigh. I need to look at it again when I've gotten a couple of good nights of sleep.

Every time Kate visits my house she comments on the fact that I haven't changed the family pictures on my dining room wall. She wants to see current pictures new ones from the family gatherings, 'cause as she pointed out, I see my family all the time so I know what they look like, but visitors to my house don't.

The thing is I chose those three pictures because they represent specific moments in time. The pictures themselves have a significance beyond just showing what my family looks like.

One is a picture of Lizzy holding the newborn Andrea and looking like the proud and happy big sister. It was a long time ago, and they both look like young women now. That moment of innocence can't be repeated but I can be reminded of it by the picture.

The second picture is a professional family portrait of my and all five brothers and Kathleen and Bobby's wife Sue. My mother had us pose for it shortly after my father had his heart attack/stroke thing that damaged his brain and kept him hospitalized for the next five years until he died. She wanted to have a current picture to put in his hospital room to help him learn to recognize us again. We had a lot of hope then. You can see it in our faces. We thought we could get him back.

The third picture shows us posing outside the Back Bay Bistro with Mom on Mother's Day sometime in the early 1990's. Kathleen is holding Andrea in her arms. We're all smiling. We'd just finished brunch at the bistro, a benefit for Rosie's Place, and we'd had such a good time that we asked the owner's kid to snap a picture of us with my instant camera. It was a gorgeous spring day and there were more tulips in bloom in the Back Bay than I'd ever seen in my life. Steven was in the hospital with pneumocystis pneumonia. Thomas was so excited that the snow peas were already coming up in the garden that he ran to the hospital to tell Steven. We were all unaccountably full of the simple joy of living.

So maybe I should put captions on the pictures explaining that they represent innocence, hope, and joy unsullied by the shadow of death. But then again, I already know what they represent.