My father would have been 98 this year. I wrote this poem about him several years before he died, and it still expresses much of who he was to me then. Later, even after his death, I added some more dimensions to my knowledge of him. He was above all a gentleman of intelligence, thoughtfulness, and impeccable refinement. But it was what I saw or sensed inside of him that has always provided my truest bond with my father.

The old man’s hands are clean.
His nails, highly polished, shine
like shells upon the beach.
His wrinkled skin is smooth and pale,
his once-bright eyes now seldom smile.
People hurt him long ago,
and now he waits alone to die.
He is my father.
And I cry.
Alone

As we begin to finally get serious about our exploration of alternative energy generation technologies, we run heading, over and over again, with classic good-news/bad-news scenarios. Solar power is the absolute cleanest source of electricity, but it’s also expensive and takes up a lot of space. Wave energy is free, but accessing it is extremely costly. Ethanol is a good compromise, except that most of the savings are eroded away with collateral costs. The list goes on. That is why no alternative source of energy generation has broken out on top and become the next big thing. Well, there is a new player on the field, and while it is not without its downsides, it has so much to be said for it on the plus side. It’s very unlikelihood makes it intriguing. The source or this energy is <drum roll please>: E-Coli bacteria.

Yep. You heard me right. To be more precise, genetically engineered E-Coli. Lonnie Ingram, a professor of microbiology with University of Florida’s “Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences” has genetically engineered a strain of E-Coli that produces fuel ethanol from non-edible sugar sources at an estimated cost of $1.30 gallon.

Just in case you missed it, one of the most significant implications of that statement is “non-edible.” In other words, it is of no use to either humans of animals as a source of nourishment. It’s just a waste product that must be disposed of. Until now. But wait, it gets better.

There are certain types of grasses and other vegetation that can grow quite well on land that is not suitable for growing any kind of edible plants. This land, from the agricultural standpoint, is utterly useless. Yet the E-Coli thrive on these plants. So what we have is the ability to feed bacteria on plants that don’t take a single acre of land away from the production of edible food, and have the capacity to produce enormous quantities of fuel that can immediately replace the fossil fuels we have become so dependent on.

Now, ethanol is not a silver bullet, even if it fell right out of the sky into your gas tank. It dumps at best only about one third less carbon into the atmosphere as what most of us are burning now. On the other hand, a third is a third. And it will take some of the pressure off while we bring something even better into full production.

The developers of this technology are confident that, with a little more creative bio-engineering, they can create new strains of bacteria that can poop diesel, gasoline, or even jet fuel. Diesel has already been proven.

And then there is always the possible risk intrinsic to putting a new man-made species of organism into the world. We have no particular reason to think there is any danger, but no one can honestly say that they know with absolute certainty. We do, however, know that if we don’t do something to slow down, and eventually stop, global warming, the rest will all be academic soon enough. Maybe this isn’t as big a gamble as it might at first appear.

Both the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Energy are taking it very seriously, and with good reason. For more on this technology, look here: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/05/genetically_eng.php.

I read this quotation from Abraham Lincoln on Twitter just now: ”Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.” It reminded me of a situation I was once in, and for the first time I can recall, I did just what Abe would have advised me to do. It was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. I thought someone else might benefit from my experience, so I decided to blog it.

This episode happened in just after Christmas of 1984. I was in the habit at that time of going to a particular restaurant in the neighborhood for breakfast on the weekends. After I ate, I was enjoying a cup of coffee before leaving, and I found myself in a conversation with an older couple at the next table. We talked for a while, and I liked them a lot. We said good-bye, and they left just before I did.

After I paid my bill and went out to get in my car, I noticed that they were still sitting in their car. He was having trouble getting it started. It was quite cold, and I was pretty sure I knew what he was doing wrong. So I went over and asked if I could help. There was still enough charge left in the battery to give me a couple of tries at starting it.

I had learned about this type of car (a big Detroit V8), and I was pretty sure what it needed was just to put the gas pedal all the way down and leave it there till the engine started. Not exactly rocket science. But most people would pump the gas, or take their foot off the gas pedal or something, and that just made things impossible.

So, I got in, put the pedal to the metal, and turned the key. It turned over a few times, and then began to chug its way to life. Soon it was purring like a kitten. I told him I’d follow him home just in case, and he thanked me.

They only live a few blocks away, and when we got there, he motioned me that he wanted to talk. I waited while he walked over and asked me if I liked music. I said that yes, I did. He invited me in to hear something very special. I couldn’t resist.

It turned out that he had retired young for health reasons, and kept himself busy by helping young inventors and innovators develop their ideas and found people with money to help them make their dreams come true. One of his recent protegees had invented something that we would now call a sub-woofer. I’d never heard of any such thing, then. And it was indeed very special. I’d never heard bass sounds that realistic.

He then played an audio recording for me of an interview with a couple. The man had been severely crippled by two strokes, and had be receiving physical therapy from a practitioner who had developed a new device. It read the electrical impulses that nerves emit when you think about moving a muscle, but that were blocked from reaching the intended muscle. His device used wires to carry (and amplify) these electrical signals past the blockage, and connect them to the intended muscle. In this way, the man was again able to think about moving his leg, and the leg actually moved in response.

The point of this part of my story is just this. When the man was asked how this device affected his life, he broke down and cried. His wife had to answer for him. She said that he had thought his life was over, but now he could see where he had a chance of recuperating. This experimental gizmo changed everything.

As I listened to this recording, I was reminded of a similar situation that had happened to me some years before. I had written a computer program that was able to collect text from the screen of an ordinary computer and send it to a voice synthesizer so that it could be spoken aloud. This allowed a totally blind person to operate the computer without being able to see the screen. Before my program, the best way for a blind person to read computer output was by using a pin to find the holes in an IBM punch card. Obviously, this was a major improvement.

Soon after I got the first prototype working, I received a call from the Executive Director of a non-profit foundation in San Francisco. He had heard about what I had done, and was very interested in talking about it. He himself was an engineer with two advanced degrees, and he was also blind. I sent him a copy of my program the next day.

A week or two later he called me back and we talked for a long time about my program. Clearly there were lots of things that could be improved, and we both were full of ideas of what could be done. After quite a while, I was going on about some of the shortcomings of the existing program, when he stopped me. He said, “You’re right. The program leaves much to be desired. But let’s keep this in perspective. I’ve had this computer for six months, and all I’ve been able to do with it was hold down paper. Now I can actually use it. So no matter how much better the software could be, it is already a black and white difference to me.”

That stopped me dead in my tracks. I had been so caught up in the technology that I had totally lost track of the human aspect. My little program–all 500 bytes of it–had turned on the lights in the computer room. Period. By the time our conversation was over, we had reached agreement on a substantial grant that they would give me so that I could take things to the next level. In less than a month, it was done. The next month the only computer the program would run on was discontinued, and the whole thing became academic. For a while.

Now here I was in 1984 listening to the recording of another man’s life being changed by a new technology, and I got to thinking that maybe it was time for me to resurrect my talking computer. Within 24 hours I picked up a copy of a computer magazine and saw an ad for a new type of voice synthesizer that had all the features that the one I had started with lacked. And it was cost only a quarter as much.

I called my new friend and asked him if he’d be interested in helping me put this new project into the real world. He said he sure would, and we got together to talk about it. He said that he knew someone who represented some Oklahoma oil money who might be interested in financing the venture.

The following week he and I met with the money man, and the three of us talked about how we could put the whole thing together. It seemed to me then that these two old war horses were having the time of their lives talking about how we could form one corporation for R & D, and another one to do the manufacturing, and yet another for marketing and distribution, and one would license this to that one and on and one and on. When the meeting was over, I didn’t feel any closer to anything useful than I did walking in. But at least we scheduled another meeting in a few days.

The second meeting just continued where the first one had left off. And when all was said and done, nothing had really changed. I guess I had expected us to reach some kind of decision, though I hadn’t really thought it out that far yet. But after the second meeting, I did.

What jumped out at me immediately was that no one was talking about whether we were going to do anything or what it was going to be, but only about how we could do it. That seemed totally backward to me. By that time I had made my decision: I was going to do it regardless of what anyone else did.

So I got to thinking, maybe I didn’t need them or their money or anything else. Maybe I could just do it myself. But I would need to find a way to take the time off to do the work. And that’s when the inspiration hit. I’d go back to the well once again.

My original work was paid for by the state blind commission on behalf of one of their clients. He wanted to attend college and study computer programming, but he couldn’t because he couldn’t use the computer. So they paid me to allow him to do that. Why not go back to them and suggest that they help me take it to the next level, with the newer technology.

I made an appointment with the Directory of the agency, and made my pitch. I asked him to buy two copies of my new program (which I hadn’t written yet) and that I would have six weeks to deliver them (twice as long as it had taken me before). His first comment was that if he did that, he would have a problem, because no one in his agency knew anything about computers. His solution was to buy not only the software, but 100 hours of my time, over the next year, to help them make the technology work for them and their clientele. All of which would be prepaid.

Needless to say, I jumped on it. We still had to pitch it to the board of commissioners, but that turned out to be even easier. As one man said, “I don’t see that we have any choice in the matter.” The vote was unanimous. Six weeks later I delivered the programs on time. Six months (and several more copies of the program) later I had provided my 100 hours and started billing for additional time.

Meanwhile, I called my mentor to tell him that I had made other arrangements. He was delighted. It wasn’t like he needed the money. He really did just want to help people and have something interesting to do himself.

So when I saw Honest Abe’s words today, I thought, “You were right then, Abe, and you still are. First decide that you are going to do it, then figure out how.” If you get those reversed, it is highly unlikely you will ever get anywhere at all.

P.S.

Oh yes, it is also worth mentioning that the business I started in that way lasted almost a decade, went through 7 generations of software, and changed the lives of thousands of blind people all over the planet, many of them students. Among my users were: a microbiologist and computer scientist who played a key role in the Human Genome Project, an international economist who worked for both the Department of State and Peentagon, and many of the finest examples of humanity it has ever been my honor to know.

Many readers of my novel When Gulls Fly Low have remarked that they found it to be a wonderful lesson in forgiveness. One even said it was the best book on forgiving she’d ever read.

At first this mystified me, because I’d never thought of it as anything like that. But I figured that so many people couldn’t be wrong. So I looked a little closer, and I could see what they meant. Then one reader, Judi S., wrote and published a review of the book that highlighted that aspect. Below is an excerpt from her review in which she quotes a passage from the Gulls that is very representative of the way it deals with forgiveness. Notice, the word is never even mentioned.

Here, Henry is talking to his mother-in-law, Josie. They have been adversaries until now, but she has now removed herself as an obstacle in his life. She is surprised that he does not take the opportunity to gloat at having “dethroned the old battle-ax.” Henry says:

“I am only trying to be who I most want to be. That is, in fact, how I try live my life. Yes, I could have held a grudge against you. But what purpose would that have served? How could I possibly have benefited from that? It would have created an unbridgeable gap between me and the mother of the woman I love; it would have brought the problems of having to make war with you down upon my new family; it would have brought no joy to anyone on this Earth. How could I make such a choice knowing all of that?”

Josie replied, “Perhaps that is the key, Henry. You did know all of that. I suppose it is only when we do not see the rest of the picture, when we become obsessed with those powerful emotions, that we fail to recognize the folly of our choices in time to prevent it.”

So when I think of forgiveness, I think of Henry and of these three paragraphs, and I know all I need to know.

What follows is an excerpt I recently found in my personal journal. I wrote it Friday, November 25th, 2005, the day after Thanksgiving. It offers the reader a chance to peek inside my mind as I consider some new ideas that I found extremely compelling at the time, and far more so ever since, right up to this moment. In fact, a few months later, I began writing a book, Time, Myth & Magic, that is still a work in progress. Notice also that part way through this piece, I start talking to the reader, even though this was written in and for a personal journal. By that time, I had realized that some day someone else would be reading it, and there was no point pretending otherwise. I guess today is that day.

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So I have been thinking more and more about the stories I tell myself that are best expressed in this way. Although I am learning about the true nature of stories in general, I feel no closer to unraveling my own. I feel the need to find the truth of my stories so that I can at least understand, if not change them. It is becoming almost an obsession, but a benevolent one. It feels more like a survival skill that I am far from mastering. Here are some of the things I have learned so far.

First, I am increasingly certain that I am right about it all being stories, “it” meaning our experience of being alive as ourselves. Once one realizes that our entire experience occurs in the spacious present moment, the intrinsic role of our stories becomes obvious and inescapable. There is no other explanation. The past and future, the elsewhere in space, and our entire interpretation of the present are just collections of stories, personal myths if you like, that we tell ourselves to give context and meaning to everything we experience. This is true even of our sense of self in every detail.

The next thing I questioned was the source of these stories, their nature, and the fantastic tenacity they seem to possess. Then, of course, there is the question of the rules by which old ones can be modified or retired, and new ones added to the mix. This has proven to be a most interesting pursuit.

The temptation, when answering the question of their source, is to look into the “past.” But that is obviously circular, since the past itself is just another story. So the source of our stories must also be in the present, just as the stories themselves are, just as everything else within our experience is and must be. There is a certain rootlessness to this. It is analogous to having both feet firmly planted in thin air. This troubled me for a while, until I realized that it is true: the whole of our physical existence, including but not limited to, physical reality itself, is an arbitrary work of fiction. What is important is that behind and everywhere within it is agreement on that fiction. This is the real meaning of phrases like “the world of agreement.”

So what seems to be true is that there is only one basic story that we share with everyone with whom we interact, though we each have our own variations. Yet even the variations must be faithful to the root story or we are considered at least a hair off center, if not outright insane. This story of ours is a work in progress that, though it is all happening in the spacious present, gives the appearance of going back billions of years. Time can be viewed as a version control system by which we increment the evolution of our shared story. History, then, is an account of that evolution retrospectively.

Thirty years ago I made the observation that nothing is ever destroyed or removed (at least that’s what is in my story). Change occurs by addition only. Yet there is nothing that cannot be changed into anything else whatsoever by addition. If you add enough of the right stuff to it, its original character and identity can be transformed into anything at all. So it is with our stories. We cannot remove anything from them: we can only add to them. This can be done, however, in a way that has the effect of obscuring certain facets to the extent that they seem to disappear altogether.

But we cannot add just  any old thing to our story willy-nilly. There is tremendous resistance to that. Instead we can only add things that connect well to what is already there. It is not so different from Lego blocks: you can add them together in certain ways, but you cannot just jam a peach pit or quartz crystal into them and expect it to fit. There must be a reciprocity between the new addition and some point on the main body.

However, if that were all there was to it, nothing really new could ever change. Fortunately, this is not the case. So how do we maintain this consistency and continuity while allowing for innovation and real change? Good question, and I have a good answer: we must either be very clever or else we need to allow loopholes. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s take the clever approach first. The best example of how this works is the way in which Albert Einstein transformed the reality of Sir Isaac Newton into the one that produce the atomic bomb and quantum mechanics. He did not invalidate Newton’s laws of gravity, motion, and thermodynamics. Instead, Einstein simply put them under a microscope and pointed out that they were only approximations of the way things really work—an excellent approximation, but an approximation nonetheless. As it turns out, Newton’s formulas work extraordinarily well, even today, until you get into mindbogglingly large magnitudes of space, time, mass or energy. In fact, NASA uses them (rather than Einstein’s relativistic ones) in their interplanetary navigation to this day.

To give you a clear picture of how this works, consider the formulas each of these men created to describe the mass of a body in motion. Newton’s is very simple:

M_m= M_o

where M_o is the original mass at rest, and M_m is the same mass in motion.

In other words, there is no difference between the two. Motion does not affect mass. Einstein, however, added some fine tuning. His version goes like this:

M_m= M_o/(1- v²/c²)^½

where v=the velocity of the mass and c= the speed of light.

What is important to understand here is the effect changes in the mass’s velocity have on the objects mass in motion. To see this, one only needs to examine the two extreme examples of velocity: zero and the speed of light. If v=0, then v²/c²=0, 1-0=1, the square root of 1 is 1, and the mass at rest divided by 1 is itself. In other words, exactly what Newton said.

However, when we give velocity a value of the speed of light, we get something entirely different. Now v²/c² is equal to 1, 1-1=0, and M_o/0 is…wait a minute, we are not allowed to divide by zero! So mass cannot be defined at exactly the speed of light! We don’t have the math for it. However, if velocity were 99.99999% the speed of light, then we can see that as v approaches c, the value of M_m approaches infinity.

What all this means is that at velocities that are not particularly close to the speed of light, the mass of an object does not change appreciably from its rest mass. Only as it starts to approach the speed of light does it begin to get more massive, to the point where, as it approaches that barrier, it has nearly infinite mass. This is the basic relationship that has led to the famous conclusion that no mass can be accelerated to, much less beyond, the speed of light. It is considered an absolute barrier to the physical dimension.

So, getting back to our original point—how one can add dramatically new elements to our collective story line if we are clever enough—this is how Einstein added everything to our universe that requires relativity to exist and make any sense at all. He did not have to destroy or remove Newton’s Laws: he had only to modify them by addition, in this case by fine tuning. You could say he added a relativistic fudge factor. Had this extension not been added, then none of our modern technology could even exist: not only the bomb and nuclear power, but computers, exotic materials, and others too numerous to mention. In other words, it was HUGE! It had the effect of increasing the breadth, depth, and scope of physical reality by—pardon the expression—light-years.

So we can add new and radically different plot elements to our shared and private stories in this way, but though it may not take an Einstein to do so this way, it does require a certain creative bend that many of us lack.

Enter the other, and far more common, method of innovation by story extension: the loophole. By loophole I simply mean a catchall explanation, a way of joining a new story element to the original, that allows for some degree of mismatch. One of the most obvious of these is called a miracle. The dictionary defines a miracle thusly:

A marvelous event manifesting a supernatural act of God.

The operative word here is supernatural. In other words, “the rules are suspended.” This creates the loophole. However, we cannot call every little thing we would like to add to our story a miracle, just because it doesn’t fit into the standard template. So this loophole is of limited use, being generally reserved for extraordinary events that are at once extremely compelling (usually in the positive sense) and at the same time without explanation within the context of our existing story.

Other versions of the supernatural loophole are less restrictive. Everything from flying saucers to ESP to channeling to [fill in the blank] are all candidates for this type of loophole. So this is the one that is most often used by the majority of people. Yet even this approach has its limits. If everything becomes an exception, what happens to the rule? How will you be able to share your new version of our story with others who are not as lenient about the freewheeling use of loopholes? If you abuse this tactic, you are likely to take your story additions to your grave with you, leaving no imprint behind that they ever existed (yes, I know, just another story).

So when all is said and done, we are still left with the story-in-progress, and all the personalized versions we all cling to.

There is one more major feature of our stories that we haven’t yet touched on: tenacity. Once a new element is added to the story and becomes accepted, it wants to be forever. If you even think about adding something that contradicts it, you will hear screaming the like of which would be upsetting in Hades. For good or ill, we are in certain major respects bound to our existing stories. Only by adding new elements in an acceptable way can we obscure or reverse outdated or undesirable elements. But there is a good reason for this.

First, if we are to share reality, we must agree on what it is. Otherwise, we are like jazz musicians who get together to jam, but find that they each know the same tune in different keys. What a cacophony that would be. Similarly, if your version of the story said that Hitler won WWII, imagine how that would match up with the official version of other people’s WWII story. So one general version prevails, and though some freedom is allowed in the details, the main thrust must be accepted more or less unanimously.

This, however, brings up an interesting and potentially powerful point: differences between individual stories only become important when we start comparing them. For example, half the people you know may have accepted stories where there was a significantly different end to WWII than the one you accept. But if the subject never comes up between you, neither party would have any way of knowing that these differences exist. So what we are really talking about here is not that our personal versions of the story have to agree in ever minute detail, but that we can only share the portions of our stories that do. As long as we stay away from the “trouble spots,” we can interact.

One more point, just to satisfy the more astute: what about ordinary disagreements between individuals. Surely there is no commonality there? Well, I admit it appears so at first blush. But upon closer examination, you will find that in such cases, each participant actually has accepted the point of view of their counterpart, but they have tried to suppress it (unsuccessfully). So, they don’t think of themselves as believing that variation, and consequently feel obliged to argue against it, while all the time there is someplace within them that actually agrees. This is what brings together people like that. They are trying to work out these particular variations until there is unanimity within their individual story. Argument and dialog is one way to accomplish that. So even though there may seem to be unbridgeable gaps between people’s stories, they are in actuality nothing more than penciled in extensions that have yet to be fully worked out and integrated.

And this whole piece is just one such. If there was nothing in you that was consistent with and open to these views, you would not only not be reading this, but would likely live your entire life without being aware that it (or I) existed. The fact that you are experiencing it means that there is something within you that thinks it is, or may be, true. No exceptions.

Conversely, if you disagree with me, and I find out about it, then I must have my own doubts (or mixed certainties, as I like to call them). If, on the other hand, I don’t find out, then it says volumes about you, but little about me.

So that’s the short course on stories. There is so very much more to it, even now, but this is all I have worked out so far that I’m prepared to stand behind.

In closing let me say that one of the challenges I face in exploring this direction lies in integrating it with my own story. I am trying to use the same kind of approach Einstein did, because it tends to be more rigorous, more stable, and more enduring. The cheap out (miracles) just doesn’t give one much to build on afterward, and I seek only that which will seed great extensions to the story, those that can make an extensive, powerful, and positive change for anyone who chooses to adopt them.

So on the day-after-Thanksgiving, I am above all thankful for the opportunity and ability to explore in these kinds of directions. It is, I believe, what I came here to do above all other things. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

And this is my story today, such as it is. What’s yours?