Is the Natural State of the Soul Quiet or Chaos?

Meditation on words spoken by NFL player Damar Hamlin about recovering from his cardiac arrest on national television

Doing my process in front of the world

Here’s something Damar Hamlin said just the day before yesterday. If you don’t know who Hamlin is don’t look him up, just ride along with me & I’ll tell you who he is just a few paragraphs down the road. I won’t make you wait until the kicker at the end, I promise.

"I wish I could do this process under a rock. . . just to myself, and pop out whenever I felt like I was super, super duper, you know, ready to be a Pro Bowler. But I think it's power in being out here every day and doing my process in front of the world, and I always wanted to stand for something bigger than myself. It was my goal my whole life."

A couple of things struck me about that statement. On the surface level it has echoes of advice that book marketing gurus and (self-help gurus in general, like Mr. Success) give about how to approach projects like this newsletter/substack, Sundman figures it out! “Be real,” they say. “Don’t be a perfectionist. Take chances, be willing to fail in front of everybody.” In other words, do your process in front of the world.

The idea being that it’s more fun for you, reader, to watch me try to figure stuff out as we go along than it would be for me to just give you a solution to stuff I’ve figured out, on the idea that it’s more fun to watch somebody solve, or try to solve, a Rubik’s Cube than it is to just look at a solved cube.

Hamlin says that although he would have preferred to figure it out, or, shall we say, ‘do his process” in private, he finds that ‘it’s power’ in figuring it out in front of the world. Power. That’s an interesting choice of word, I think.

Another thing that struck me about Hamlin’s statement is his use of the word ‘process’. Remember that movie Arrival (which was based on Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”)? Alien beings arrive here, on our melting planet, in a weird asymmetrical spaceship that hovers just over the surface of Earth. A linguist, “Louise Banks,” (played by Amy Adams) is brought in to see if she can find a way to communicate with the arrivals. Which she does, after a fashion. The notion of ‘process’ becomes important to her understanding.

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Pile driver by the harbor

I live in a modest house with Betty, who I took to be my wife as she took me to be her husband, under a tree in my parents’ back yard in West Hartford, Connecticut, in September, 1980.

As Sandy Denny asked before drunkenly falling down a flight of stairs one too many times, Who knows where the time goes?

Here are some photos of our back porch on Martha’s Vineyard. Every summer Betty makes it into a sort of garden — a process that I wrote about in my 3-part essay “Scared firefighter up in the bucket, (part one, part two, part three)". I talked about a bunch of other stuff in that essay, including AI and Douglas Hofstadter and Jefferson Airplane’s song “Crown of Creation”.

I write this note while sitting at my desk under the skylight in my attic office. Our house is about one mile from Vineyard Haven harbor. When the skylight is cracked open I can hear the whistle from each ferry as it leaves the slip, headed for America.

This summer there has been quite a bit of construction in and near the harbor. Big machines pound giant steel piles into the ground. The sound of the pile drivers comes to me through the skylight, like the the tock, tock, tock of a giant metronome. No ‘tick,’ only ‘tock’. It makes me think of the song “Pound,” by that sublime post-punk rock group from Boston, Human Sexual Response.

Because I'm made of flesh
You can wear my armor down
Because I'm made of flesh
You can wear me, wear me down
You just pound, pound, pound, pound

Point to ponder

Here’s a tweet I saw the other day. It has gotten 60,000 ‘likes’. This is pretty much what we’re talking about today (as usual here on Sundman figures it out!).

Damar Hamlin and ‘God’s Timing ’

Damar Hamlin, quoted above, is a professional football player, currently playing for the Buffalo Bills of the NFL. He plays the position of ‘safety,’ which reads somewhat ironically in light of this (from Wikipedia):

During a Monday Night Football game on January 2, 2023, Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest after making a tackle. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and automated external defibrillation (AED) were quickly administered before he was rushed to a local hospital in critical condition. After showing signs of improvement Hamlin was transferred to a Buffalo hospital, and nine days after the incident he was discharged[.]

Two days ago Hamlin reported to the Bills’ training camp to resume his football playing career. As you can imagine, there was enormous interest in his return on the part of local fans and the worldwide sports media. After all, so many people had seen him die on live television, and here he was, a Lazarus, donning shoulder pads and a helmet.

"It feels amazing," Hamlin said, via ESPN. "It's a roller coaster of emotions. I was kind of all over the place, just kind of being back for the first time. But God don't make no mistakes. I'm on God's timing. As much as the NFL is on schedule and camp starts this day, this is all God's timing."

Now of course that statement can be read as a meaningless platitude, an empty commonplace. But I cite his comments here for other reasons, which we’ll address down the road a piece.

What Douglas Hofstadter said to Deb Roy about solving Rubik’s Cubes

In the aforementioned Scared Firefighter up in the Bucket series, I talked about the time in 2005 that I went to dinner with the cognitive/computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter and the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the computer/cognitive scientist Deb Roy. (Wikipedia: Roy conducts research on language, games, and social dynamics at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology.”)

The below paragraph is slightly condensed from a contemporaneous post on my blog Wetmachine about that event:

I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping, but I did pick up some bits of their conversation — about Rubik’s cubes, and about various obnoxious Nobel laureates each of them had met — and other idle talk. Then we all left en bloc for the parking garage. Roy was talking with Hofstadter. He mentioned that the first time he had seen a Rubik’s cube he had solved it in half an hour.

“No! Really?” Hofstadter said.

“Yes,” Roy said.

“You should get a Nobel Prize,” Hofstadter said.

I think one inference that can be made from this exchange is that if I succeed in solving the Rubik’s cube of my life here on Sundman figures it out!, according to the unassailable logic of Douglas Hofstadter, I should be awarded a Nobel Prize.

But I would be happy if you would just share this post.

“God’s Timing” vs “God’s Time”

As I mentioned in a recent essay here, I’ve been working my way through Frank Kermode’s book The Sense of an Ending. I just read about fifty pages about how the hellenization of Christianity around the time of St. Augustine of Hippo forced philosophers at the time to try to reconcile {the classical/Greek notions of fate and cyclical time} with {the traditional Christian notion of rectilinear time, starting with God creating the world as described in the book of Genesis and ending as foretold in the Book of Revelation}.

Back when I worked at Sun Microsystems, my friend Bruce used to hand out pencils that he had had made that bore the message “If I can’t be very intelligent I don’t want to be intelligent at all.” Kermode’s book makes me feel like that. I digress.

According to Kermode, in order to reconcile these two conceptions of time, philosophers and theologians came up 3 flavors of time — God’s Time, human time, and time as experienced by angels. The attributes of each of these don’t matter for our purposes here, what matters is that they’re incommensurate. You can’t express one in terms of another one.

So I take Damar Hamlin to be saying, pace Kermode, that the NFL’s schedule and the Buffalo Bills’ practice schedule are set according to human time, but the matter of Hamlin’s own personal ending is scheduled by God according to a reckoning beyond human understanding. This implies that God experiences time differently than we do, as was argued by post-Augustinian, pre-Copernican theologians.

And when Hamlin says that he found “power” in “doing his process in front of the world [because] he had wanted for his whole life to stand for something bigger than [him]self,” I think what he’s talking about is the opportunity that his cardiac arrest afforded him to testify about his religious faith to a worldwide audience.

I’m not religious and I’m not a fan of empty religious platitudes from anybody, and that includes pious athletes. I just think that Kermode says some interesting things about how all this cosmological/theological stuff bears upon how we think about our own lives, and upon the nature of fiction.

I also think that in light of his on-field near-death experience, Damar Hamlin deserves a break in the empty religious platitude department.

Tock, tock, tock

Because I'm in one piece
You can hold me in one place
Because I'm in one piece
You can hold me, hold me down
You just pound, pound, pound, pound

Samuraipunk experiment

Through the courtesy of

Made in DNA

, I recently guest-posted on his substack which he describes as “Samuraipunk, cyberpunk, mecha, weird and general scifi. Bi-monthly. Content reviews, creative (person) interviews, crowdfunding projects, original fiction, culture, pop culture, and more. Nothing high-brow.”

My essay there is called Accidental Samurai: How I became, despite my best intentions, a cyber-biopunk novelist. It includes some discussion on the genesis of my various books, a topic already covered here, and also a bit on the nature of hacking and its relation to some literary sub-genres:

Hackers look at complex systems as challenges; they are things to be broken into and manipulated for personal gain, or for political reasons, or to fix things that are broken, or for bragging rights, or, perhaps mainly, for fun; which is to say, to learn and to manipulate — as any healthy 10 month old child delights in manipulating a simple toy — and thereby learning so much about the toy, their bodies, their world, and the pure joy of control.

So if ‘cyberpunk’ is the genre that looks at digital systems from a hacker's point of view, then ‘biopunk’ looks at biological systems from a hacker's point of view.

Most non-biohacker/biopunk people make a distinction between, for example, living, carbon-based biological systems on one hand and silicon-based digital systems on the other. Biopunks don't make that distinction. A system is just a system, and the only question is, how do you hack it?

Now if the system is, for example, you — your brain, your mind, your essence, your soul — you may like it just fine the way it is, and you may not want somebody else (where "somebody" might be “the government” or some squicky corporation) to hack it. So then the challenge becomes, How do I define who I am? How do I maintain the integrity of my system?

This ‘Accidental Samurai’ essay has so far received 14 ‘likes’ and 6 comments and 5 ‘restacks’, which is more than I get on my Sundman figures it out! essays, despite significantly more people typically reading them. Please leave a comment explaining why you do not leave comments here.

Stones Sway in Fanaye

If you’ve been with me for a while you’ve heard about the little Senegalese village called Fanaye Dieri where I resided for nearly two years in the 1970’s. You’re probably also getting sick of seeing this photo, but it’s the only one I have from that and it gives some context to what follows

Still sitting at that desk. Still thinking.

.Before I left for Africa I spent 4 days in Washington DC getting introduced to Peace Corps and getting a ton of shots to immunize me against this and that and the other horrible disease. While in DC I bought a little cassette tape recorder and three albums of music on tape. I chose one album I knew well, and two that I had never heard before— new music from artists I liked.

The album that I knew well was Sticky Fingers, by the Rolling Stones. It contains the ballad “Sway”:

Did you ever wake up to find
A day that broke up your mind
Destroyed your notion of circular time

It's just that demon life has got you in its sway
It's just that demon life has got you in its sway

So many hours I spent in that lonely little hut! I remember listening to Sticky Fingers until my cassette player’s batteries died — and the nearest place to buy batteries was ten miles — a few hours — away, in the village of Thile Boubacar — but it wasn’t worth trying to go buy some, because when you go there you might find that that one little store in Thile Boubacar had no batteries on its shelves.

In Arrival (“Story of your life”), the linguist Louise Banks learns the aliens’ language, and in so doing finds that her experience of time and causality has been wrecked. Past, present and future become one. She comes to see that beings (like those aliens, like humans) are processes akin to subatomic interactions that can be represented in Feynman diagrams, processes which can move backwards or forwards in time.

As I was saying, Mick Jagger asks if we have ever woken up to find ourselves in a day that broke our conception of circular time. But in our case, unlike the one Mick Jagger was singing about, we’re not talking about destroying our notion of circular time: we had no such notion to begin with. And more to the point, what we’re talking about here on Sundman figures it out! are notions of time that go way beyond the simple cyclic vs rectilinear dichotomy.

Zach Bryan, in his song “The Greatest Day of My Life” offers the proposition “Years are just moments in a great big pile.” I don’t find any merit in that assertion, at least insofar as it my help us figure out anything about our own personal Rubik’s cubes of who we are and how we got here and where we’re going.

I find the notion of one crowded hour much more helpful, and I like Augie March’s music much more than I do Zach Bryan’s. There will be no further mention of Zach Bryan on this substack, ever.

That ‘one crowded hour’ notion, you may not be surprised to learn, seems to correspond to notions in Kermode’s Sense of an Ending.

Having kicked this essay off with Damar Hamlin’s remark about the power that comes from “doing his process in front of the world,” and “standing for something “bigger than [him]self;” and having compared my writing these Sundman figures it out! essays to Hamlin’s return to football; I suppose I should address the question of whether if, in writing these essays for you, I, too, like Hamlin, am finding some kind of “power” in “standing for something bigger than myself”.

This topic is going to require a little more space to go into. Maybe some other time.

After I’ve told you about the other two albums that I purchased in Washington DC.