Convergences

1.

A former student's former student posted this article on her Facebook wall, and when I saw it, I read it, seduced by the notion of ignorance fueling science.  I have always, even as early as my student years, wondered why science was taught as if it were a done-deal.  It isn't.  It can't be.  I was alive when Watson and Crick produced the double helix, when the first man landed on the Moon, when computers moved from multistory buildings to desktops. Surely no one believes that "the scientific method" resulted in any of these innovations.  And now Stuart Firestein has written what I always suspected:

"It's an old adage, it's anonymous and says, it's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room especially when there's no cat, which seems to me to be the perfect description of how we do science. I know most people think that we, you know, the way we do science is we fit together pieces in a puzzle. But it is a puzzle of sorts, but of course, with real puzzles, the kind you buy, the manufacturer has guaranteed there's a solution, you know. The puzzle we have we don't really know that the manufacturer, should there be one, has guaranteed any kind of a solution. So we really bumble around in the dark. We bump into things. We try and figure out what's what and then somebody eventually flips a light on and we see what was in there and say, oh, my goodness, that's what it looked like. And then it's right on to the next black room, you know, to look for the next black cat that may or may not be there. And science is dotted with black rooms in which there were no black cats."

2.

I have been composing a workshop on effective writing, something I have thought about and sought to practice and support through teaching for many years.  Ironically, I never believed myself an effective writing until I completed my Ph.D. and one member of the dissertation committee extended his hand and said, "You are a good writer, Dr. Hood."  His saying it made me recognize the truth: I am a good writer.  But I am also a writer who doesn't and has never fit the standard teacher's mold: write a thesis statement; create an outline; prove something or argue something; write deductively (think "the scientific method"); draft; correct; submit.  I did not think myself an effective writer because I could not follow this proscriptive process. 

You see, I write inductively: like the scientist described by Firestein I am a data-gatherer, collecting thoughts, images, memories, facts, intuitions, writing my way toward -- not away from -- an idea.

3.

Another former student posted a friend's link to this New York Times article on cultivating idleness.  In it, writer Tim Kreider states:

"Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. . . . More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

"Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. 'Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,' wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ 'Eureka' in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking."

I value idleness each day: I walk and wander in the same way I write -- without knowing what I will find but trusting that it will be interesting.  I can't help thinking that Mr. Kreider and Mr. Firestein might have a lot to say each other.

4.

Today, because I am a dragonfly data-gatherer, I saw what I have read about.  Two years ago, before my committed life of idleness, I didn't even know what I didn't know about Odonates.  Today, my data-gathering tells me there is much more to learn.

Common Green Darners, the female ovipositing



5.

I have learned a lot from my former students.