(Full version coming soon)

Nurse:

• Wet Nurse: τιθήνη
  
  • Plato’s famous “receptacle and nurse of all becoming,” which he offers as a definition of Space or Matter in Timaeus («ὑποδοχὴ» καὶ ἔτι «ἡ τιθήνη»)
    
  • Plotinus comments on this passage and clarifies it somewhat in his Ennead: “For if it is receptacle and nurse, becoming is other than it, but that which is altered is in becoming, so matter would be existent before becoming, and before alteration; and the words “receptacle” and also “nurse” imply its maintenance in the state in which it is free from affections; and so does “that in which each thing appears on its entrance, and again goes out from it”3 and the statements that it is “space” and “seat.”4 And the statement which has been criticised as speaking of a “place of the forms”5 does not mean an affection of the substrate, but is trying to find another way [of participation].”
    
• One who waits on the sick: θεραπευτής
  
  • It can also be “one who attends on anything,” but is more commonly a “worshipper.”
    
  • There was a group of philosophers (an Alexandrian sect)  who went by this name, the “Therapeutae”
    
  • In Plato’s Republic, the word is synonymous with (translated as) “doctor,” “one who care for the sick.”
    
  • And in Galen, “one who treats the disease”
    
  • In Plutarch’s Moralia, in a section titled “That a Philosopher Ought to Converse Especially with Men in Power,” we find the adjective--θεραπευτικός—used to describe “an attendant”: “No, on the contrary, the man who is ambitious for himself and afraid of every whisper is just the one who avoids and fears being called a persistent and servile attendant on those in power. For what does a man say who is an attendant upon philosophy and stands in need of it?”
    
  • And then the verb--θεραπεύω—leads to many compelling sources:
    
    • Pseudo-Lucian, writing of the figure of the Cynic: “But I dance no attendance at the doors of the so-called fortunate, but consider their golden crowns and their purple robes mere pride, and I laugh at the fellows who wear them.”
      
    • Epictetus, considering the question “How ought we to bare ourselves toward tyrants,” plays with the verb throughout an entire paragraph. The translator explains: “The whole passage turns on the various meanings of θεραπεύω, which include serve, attend to, give medical care to, pay attention to, pay court to, flatter, etc.”
      
  • Thus the connection between the nurse and the philosopher: one attends to the sick of body, the other to the sick of soul
    

Nursing:

• When we get to the activity--Nursing—we encounter (variants of) both of the keywords above: τιθήνη and θεραπευτής. But we also encounter another word, one that is quite familiar to me but somewhat surprising to find in this search: παιδαγωγία. In that form, there aren’t too many entries in the Loeb library. It’s more common variant, however, παιδαγωγός, one who undertakes παιδαγωγία, shows up much more:
  
  • There is an entire character in Sophocles’ Electra named “Old Slave”
    
  • Pedagagos appears again in Euripides’ Medea, but there it is translated as “Tutor”
    
  • Also “tutor” in Menander’s Aspis
    
  • The translator of Plato’s Lysis explains, “The παιδαγωγός was a trusted slave who was appointed to attend on a boy out of school hours and to have a general control over his conduct and industry.”
    
  • Plutarch, pursuing the matter of how we ought to study poetry, shines some light on this role of “tutor” as explained above: “Now in all cases it is useful also to seek after the cause of each thing that is said. Cato, for example, used, even as a child, to do whatever the attendant in charge of him ordered, yet he also demanded to know the ground and reason for the order. And so the poets are not to be obeyed as though they were our keepers or law-givers, unless their subject matter be reasonable.”
    

Attending:

• So what is interesting thus far?
  
  • Connection between the nurse who cares for the sick, the therapist, and the philosopher who cares for the sick of soul
    
    
  • The nurse and the philosopher meet another figure, that of the pedagogue, who serves a similar function, namely to guide
    
  • But the figure of the pedagogue is not one we would necessarily want to emulate today:
    
    • Cite secondary sources (below): Close members of the family, but... 
      
  • This question leads to an important matter for all teachers: Do you care for your students like the nurse and philosopher, or do you watch over them like the slave who guides well-to-do children to school? 
    
  • What would it mean to “attend” to our students like the nurse and philosophical therapist?
    
• That question leads to a confrontation with the word “attend”
  
  • When we look that word up in the Ancient Greek dictionary, we find a number of synonyms. One—Attend on (as a servant on a child)—is pedagogue. Another—to attend medically—is the variant of therapy that we’ve talked a bit about. 
    
  • But also this: ἐφέπω…
    
    • A look at the definitions paints an aggressive picture:
      
      • Molest, or follow a woman
        
      • Ply, or practice a pursuit
        
      • obey, attend to
        
    • Does this not set up a confrontation with the dialectic of power that teachers face in the classroom? [...]
      
• The compelling question to which I arrive is this: in what ways ought we, teachers, attend to/on our students? 
  
  • At the surface level of analysis, I think we all agree that we must avoid the violent role of overseer or stalker who, in the name of obeying existing ideologies, follows a student through a course of study like a stalker would follow a woman. 
    
  • Likewise, it seems obvious that an ethical pedagogue will steer clear of the Ancient role of “tutor” that sought to correct the conduct of the pupil through force or verbal harassment or anything of the sort
    
  • The only classical dimension of pedagogy that seems relevant is the thread that ties “teaching” to “attendance,” namely the kind of attendance that a nurse contributed to the sick. But here, the trap would be to liken students to the ill who are always necessarily coming to the classroom in need of repair or an antidote of some kind. The power dynamic there is unbalanced: teachers have the remedy of which students must partake. 
    
  • But my recent long stay in the hospital reveals a particular quality of nurses that point beyond this unhealthy power dynamic.
    
    • Nurses actually touch patients, whereas doctors seem more often to consult numbers and data gathered by nurses of the patients
      
    • Nurses resemble a medical generalist, one who knows a bit about each of the areas of medicine. By contrast, doctors specialize. The general knowledge of nurses feels much more comprehensive and starts to feel like the philosopher’s knowledge of “general” or “universal” truths (putting aside, for now, the challenge of those terms). 
      
    • It is easier to converse with a nurse than with a doctor, meaning that the close contact between patient and nurse (or patient’s parents and nurses) leads to conversations that reveal the connection between the medical world and the world beyond the hospital. This “dialogic” quality to the relationship is often lacking in the doctor-parent relationship
      
  • All of this is to say that “attending on” our students in the spirit of a nurse might lead to an intimate mode of teaching that is hands-on, that seeks to tie academic speciality to concerns of general knowledge, and that relies upon casual conversation as a genuine relationship-building tool.
    
  • More broadly, there is a “care” that nurses bring to their work that philosophers and teachers would do well to emulate. (Foucault and Hadot, of course, talked about this in great detail, at least in regard to philosophy.)
    

Secondary sources

Yannicopoulos, A. V. (1985). The pedagogue in antiquity. British Journal of Educational Studies, 33(2), 173–179. doi:10.1080/00071005.1985.9973708

• “While  the teacher's  function was to equip the  boy with useful knowledge and  skills, the tutor was to enforce decent  conduct. He also stayed continuously by the  side of his charge either inside or outside the school. According to Quintilian, Philostratus and Libanius, pedagogues,  holding their sticks in their hands ready for action, used to sit between the pupils in order to prevent them teasing  each other” (176).
  
• “What   is taught   to the child   by his teacher is supplemented by the pedagogue',  states Libanius, '...he coaxes the child, shouts at  him, produces the rod, shakes the lash, constructs the lessons  to be stored in his mind'” (176).
  

Christian Laes, “Pedagogues in Greek Inscriptions in Hellenistic and Roman Antiquity,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 171 (2009): 113-122.

• Other terms such as τροφός (feeder, rearer) and θρέψας (nourisher) may refer to pedagogues, but the terms are quite broad (114).
  
• “It was already common in ancient Greece for a child to be entrusted to a pedagogue. His  task encompassed an intellectual aspect (tutoring of the young child and language instruction) and a moral aspect (accompanying and protecting the child as it walked to school, further socialisation through, among other things, training in politeness). The moral and  the intellectual facet were, for that matter, not strictly separated. These educators could be either slaves either free persons [...]” (114).
  
• “Paidagogoi were usually discerned from paidonomoi, who were officials or supervisors in charge of education [...]. Other terms as paideutai or epistatai also refer to officials supervisors of children or instructors and teachers” (114).
  
  

I have a frictious relationship with repetition. On the one hand, I don’t believe that anything ever repeats, not really, at least not in the strict sense of a “repetition of the same.” For example: I I I I I I I I. This is not the repetition of the same I. Each I is different. Each occupies a distinct space and has resulted from a distinct pressing of my computer’s keyboard. In casual conversation, one could easily suggest that I have repeated I. But when I really think about it, I don’t see a single I repeated. I see I and I and I and I, always new.
On the other hand, my body seems to feel the return of habitual action, specifically habitual actions that trouble me. The air seems to thicken each morning at 7am when my three-year-old bolts out of bed to start a new day. My body drags itself to an upright position so as to follow and hesitates because of a deep uneasiness about doing this again, of trying to get energy again, of repeating the struggle of parenting. I could possibly describe this as a “continuation” of parenting, instead of a “repetition,” except that there is something very Groundhog’s Day about it. Same with the non-linear path of potty training: poop, again! In this scenario, it doesn’t feel like new poop. It feels like I’m re-living the totality of the “training” process. At the other end of the continuum, where this repetition feels most invasive, I encounter trauma, which is the epitome of this bodily sensation of repetition: I, in the present moment, feel again a series of affronting and unwanted bodily reactions that I have experienced before. This is related to the idea of nomos that I wrote about last time, the habit of experience that instantiates itself through (ostensibly) repeated action.

I have a frictious relationship with repetition. Does it exist as a natural phenomenon of life, or am I the one who fabricates it? To answer this question, I have, for years, explored the topic of repetition in theatre and performance studies. Each time one performs (any habitual activity) or each time an actor steps onstage to enact a part in a pre-designed performance, what precisely is happening? Do we repeat our actions, or is each time a totally new experience? The most intriguing treatment of these questions, however, appears not in theatre and performance scholarship but in philosophy and psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Jacques Lacan’s re-workings of Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on repeated (neurotic and desirous) behavior are texts I return to, repeatedly (?).

>>READ MORE<<

Notes for forthcoming entry on repetition:

Repeat and Repetition

• Ἐπαναπολέω (repeat yet again)
  
• Ἐπαναπόλησις (repetition)
  
• Ἐπαναπορεύομαι (return)
  
• Ἀναλαμβάνω (take up again, resume, in narrative or argument; recollect in mind/memory) … spatializing memory...to walk through?
  
  • In Plato’s Phaedo: “I am reviewing this position a number of times on purpose so we don’t miss anything [...]”
    
  • In Lucian’s Saturnalia: [Cronos] “I take over the sovereignty again to remind mankind what life was like under me [...]”
    
• Ἐπαναλαμβάνω (take up again, resume, repeat; revise, correct, undertake)
  
  • As ἐπαναλαμβάνων, in Plato’s Phaedrus: [Socrates] “I know very well that when listening to Lysias he did not hear once only, but often urged him to repeat; and he gladly obeyed.”
    
  • Επανδιπλαζε, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: [Prometheus, speaking to the Chorus about Io] “If any of this is obscure and hard to understand, please ask again and you will learn it more clearly. I have ample leisure—more than I want.”
    
• Ἀναπολέω (poetic: turn up the ground again, therefore repeat)
  
  • Ἀναπόλησις (repetition). In Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “An unphilosophical but none the less an effective help to the contemning of death is to tell over the names of those who have clung long and tenaciously to life. How are they better off than those who were cut off before their time?”
    
  • Ἀναπολητέον (one must recall to mind)
    
• Ραψωδών (recite)(Rhapsodize)
  
  • Ῥαψῳδέω (recite)
    
    • Ῥαψῳδία (repetition of epic poetry)
      
    • Ῥαψῳδός (reciter of poetry)
      
      • Famous conversation in Plato’s Ion about the Rhapsodist’s art.  
        
      • Oedipus refers to the Sphynx as a “versifying hound”
        
• Ὑμνέω (to sing of; commemorate; tell of over and over again) (Hymn)
  
  • Ὑμνήσεις, in Sophocles’ Electra: “If you do not leave off these lamentations, they plan to send you to where you shall no longer see the light of the sun, but while still alive in a dungeon, outside this country, you shall bewail your troubles.”
    
• Θρυλέω (babble, repeat over and over; related to “common talk”)
  
• Διήγησις (narration, narrative)...is the idea that to narrate is necessarily to repeat something?
  
  

I recently purchased a subscription to the Loeb Classics Online Library. To encourage my use of this amazing resource, I am starting a blog series called "Classical Bellyflop." The name comes from the feeling of leaping or diving into the classical texts curated in that library. Since my knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin is pretty basic, however, any dive would scarcely resemble something pretty; not even a cannonball or a jack-knife would serve as an adequate comparison. No, when I dive into Ancient Greece I most certainly bellyflop. The text-water slaps me with as much force as my dive carries with it. The discoveries I make in the text are usually eye-opening and sometimes startling, similar to the surprisingly painful sensation of breaking the water’s surface. In these blog entries, I am confidently admitting my ugly bellyflop into these classical texts. Combined with definitions sourced through the Liddell and Scott online dictionary, these forays into the Loeb Classical Library will chronicle my flops and present them as lessons.

Why lessons? Why share these bellyflops? I am convinced that words are used too carelessly today. The rich histories packed into each and every word of the English language are hardly ever examined. As a teacher and a writer, I feel called to publicize some of these histories and the lessons that I myself learn every time I unpack the language that I use. Additionally, despite the foreignness of the Ancient Greek alphabet, the English language relies on Ancient Greek words to a great extent. Knowing a bit about this reliance helps us to become more astute readers and critical thinkers. This, at least, is my hope.

The first word I am exploring is νόμος (nomos).
 
You have likely encountered this word many times, though it is usually nested within a larger word, such as “astronomy,” “autonomy,” and “antinomial.” The most common definition of “nomos” is “that which is in habitual practice, use or possession,” “use, custom,” and, more generally, “law.” Thus, “astronomy” is the law or habit of the stars. “Autonomy” means to govern the self (auto = self). “Antinomial” is formed by fusing “against” (anti) and “nomos” (law) and means “the rejection of law.”
 
As I’ll show in what follows, this usual definition is accompanied by a now rare meaning linked to the production of music in Ancient Greece. Since music, mathematics, and philosophy were so intimately related for the Greeks, this forgotten definition of nomos helps us peer into the connection between order, the frequency of sound, and the workings of both human society and the wider universe.
 
I discovered this new-old definition of νόμος while writing a book with my friend and collaborator, Matthew Goulish, which maps the contours of the astonishing poetry, drama, and philosophy of Jay Wright. While reading Wright’s most recent book of poetry, The Prime Anniversary (2019), I encountered this verse:
 
That periodic bouncing between mirror points
might define the note’s order in the scale. Custom
could determine all that the spent soul might fathom,
make of it a blue galaxy that disappoints.
Consider a slow dance about an axis, dust
in an elliptical field. Now Emily must
go mad with her math, and take these errors in trust.
 
You’ll have to wait for the book to hear our fullest interpretation of stanzas like this one. For now, let me draw your attention to the second line where Wright ends the first sentence and begins another: “[…] the note’s order in the scale. Custom”.
 
It seems that Wright is aware of the familiar and less-than-common definitions of νόμος. He has united two sentences that each summon one of these definitions. “Custom” hearkens to the traditional meaning, and the discussion of a note’s order in a scale calls to mind the following: “melody [...] a type of early melody created by Terpander for the lyre as an accompaniment to Epic texts.” The Prime Anniversary is dedicated to exploring ancient philosophical ideas in verse, as did the pre-Socratic philosophers. This fact helped me tune into the subtle reference that one could easily miss while trying to figure out what precisely Wright is talking about here.
 
To give a brief peek into the complex working of this passage, I’ll widen my scope to the entirety of the first sentence: “That periodic bouncing between mirror points / might define the note’s order in the scale.” A “mirror scale,” or “mirror mode,” which comes to mind because of Wright’s word choice, is a musical phenomenon that reveals the type of “distance” between notes that so interested Ancient Greek philosophers. Arthur Fox helps us understand what’s going on in one of his blog entries:
 
Try reversing or “mirroring” the order of intervals in any given scale. Reversing the order of intervals in a palindromic scale will produce the same scale. Otherwise, we will end up with a new ‘mirror scale‘ that is on the opposite side of the brightness/darkness spectrum.
 
So, for example, intervals between the scale degrees of the Major (Ionian) scale are as follows:
T – T – ST – T – T – T – ST. If we mirror these degrees, we get the Phrygian mode.

For the Ancient Greeks, geometrical relations such as those revealed through the realization of mirror scales hinted at an underlying structural code to the cosmos. Philosophers such as Pythagoras, and even more staid ones like Plato, sought to understand whether the discernment of those underlying codes in nature could translate into a harmonious political situation among humans. If so, then the law of the land (nomos) might be developed from a deep understanding of musical harmony and the placement of notes in a scale (nomos). In fact, despite his protestations against music and its ability to mislead the soul, Plato seems to hint at the benefit of such realizations in his dialogues Laws and Statesman.
 
Wright, too, senses resonance between the mathematics of harmonious musical relations and the order of the universe, which is why this stanza moves on to discuss the phenomenon of the Blue Galaxy and elliptical orbits. Unlike Plato, however, whose philosophical systems seem to conserve a top-down governmental structure in human society, Wright’s poetry brings some dissonant dissidence. His fusion of sources challenges us to unite cultures and ideas that most people keep separated into categories like “Western,” “African,” “Musicology,” and “Philosophy.” By dismissing the historically developed separation of various modes of thought and cultural production, Wright allows us to think up new combinations. Or, rather, he helps us revisit old unities that provided glimpses of the active Oneness to the universe.  

If you think about the geometry of music long enough, you’ll start to understand why so many musicians find spiritual power in their art. A prime example is John Coltrane whose famous diagram of the circle of fifths hints at his dual role as mathematician.
 
When we listen to Coltrane and dwell on images like this, we find another example of the two-fold definition of nomos, much like in Jay Wright’s poem. At stake in Coltrane’s music is the possibility of re-ordering the habits of society through coming up with heretofore-unheard-of orders of notes, as if thinking up new musical formations will bring about a social revolution. Nomos evokes nomos. Play the old standards, things stay the same. Blow off the roof and change blows through.
 
At this point, it seems important to point out that, in a relatively limited number of steps, I have maneuvered from a dictionary of Ancient Greek words to a theory of political revolution embedded within a jazz musician’s sound. The Loeb Classical Library sent me back to A Love Supreme. What’s important here is not that I’ve discovered some new connection between seemingly disparate human artefacts. Rather, I’ve discovered something that was already embedded in the word “law” or “custom,” a type of knowledge that was released through poetic verse. Is there, perhaps, a methodology here that we can put to repeated use? Begin with poetry. Peer deep into the structure and words of the poetic verse. Unpack the history of the terms and listen to what that history has to say. Through listening, rediscover truths that have been forgotten or intentionally pushed aside, and then put those truths into action in order to bring about change.

In Second Grade, I (Will) remember having an afternoon class with a teacher I had never seen before. Even though it was 30 years ago, the experience of that day sticks with me. I can think of three reasons for this. First, the teacher guided us through a hands-on exercise intended to engage our senses. We passed spices and various liquids (like vanilla extract) around a circle and tried to guess what they were by smelling, tasting, and touching them. I volunteered to taste what turned out to be garlic powder, and the teacher was impressed that I could name what it was. I was less impressed with the taste in my mouth, but quite interested in the exercise. The engagement of all of my senses left an indelible mark on my memory.
Second, this was the first male teacher I had ever seen. Not only had all my previous teachers been women (in school, swim lessons, gymnastics, and other venues), but I had never even seen a male teacher in our school. Men could be teachers! Clearly, this realization stuck with me and informed, to some degree, my path in life.

Third, I remember vividly a meditation that ended the class. Our teacher asked us to close our eyes and visualize various things. The final thing was “nothing.” “Now think of nothing,” he said. “Try as hard as you can. Can you do it?” I opened my eyes and looked directly at him from my place in the back of the room. I said quietly, “It’s not possible. You can’t think of nothing.” But as I looked around the class, all the other students seemed immersed in the task. They nodded their heads in assent of his question: they were all picturing nothing. When I looked back to the teacher, he met my gaze and smiled. Can you think about nothing? I’ve thought about that question since that day in 1988.
This post is about nothing.  

While not strictly equal with death, “nothingness” provides a commensurate challenge. Nothing and death are equally gigantic in scale. How do we think of it? Why would we think of it? To think of one’s death is to prepare for and to become more intimate with one’s own finitude. There are multiple benefits to thinking of death often, not least of which is the overcoming of fear and the ability to sense new threads connecting me with my loved ones who have died. Similarly, to think of nothingness is to press the mind to its limit and expand our cognitive maps of the universe. If welcoming thoughts of death into our daily consciousness can demystify the great equalizer that so many people work feverishly to avoid, then coming to grips with nothing can throw the wild variety of our being into relief and perhaps help us to engage with the Great Mystery.

This kind of activity might seem abstract and unnecessary. My hope, however, is that I can reveal some of the mind-expanding potential bound up with the task of thinking nothing, and, furthermore, to demonstrate how thinking nothingness is helpful for imagining new forms of connection with dead friends and family. I emphasize the word “task” because, like so many words, it carries a fascinating history that, once unpacked, makes the word available for new uses. After tarrying with “nothing,” I’ll move on to “task” so as to end this reflection with some specific suggestions about how the task of (thinking) nothing deepens our relations with our dead friends and loved ones.

I’ve thought about nothing a lot, and I can easily summarize my findings. Nothing cannot be. There can be no nothing. Nothing, were it to have qualities (which it can’t), would need to be free from anything that has ever been. Thus, even if the universe was extinguished this very moment, it still would once have been, and therefore the remaining absence would flummox nothingness. You can’t have an absence because an absence is something, so even an absent universe is not quite nothing. Amusingly, the only way to get close to nothingness is to say that it doesn’t exist. There is no nothing. But even here, the laugh echoes back upon us since attributing any kind of is­-ness to nothing ends up undoing nothing (by giving it something, a weird kind of is-ness). Nothing, it seems to me, is a relative construct, something we rely upon to distinguish between the presence and absence of things. When it comes to the grand Nothing, however, we are bound always to find something posing as nothing. 

French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia wrestles with this problem in his carefully crafted book Form et objet. He concludes:

“Therefore, there is no nothing except from one of these three angles: a nothing which is in fact something; a nothing which is in fact the opposite of something [which for him means something’s form]; or a nothing which is in fact an absence of something (an emptiness or an exile). Each way leads to something, with none of them leading to a nothing” (Garcia, Form and Object 49).

His point, which is also my point, a point that deserves repeating, is that nothing is something, and, therefore, it has the potential to generate ideas, affections, activities, and events. We can make something with nothing.
​
(To read about nothing’s counterpart—Everything—click through to the parallel post, “What about Everything?”)

I have had the opportunity to make something out of that which first appeared to be nothing. When Joanne and I left the hospital after Finlay’s inexplicable death during childbirth, we were overwhelmingly aware of the wrongness that was unfolding. You simply don’t leave the maternity wing with nothing. You leave with a child, as was demonstrated by all the other happy parents around us. Or not. We had, or so it seemed, discovered a loophole in the order of things. We left with nothing and commenced our life as parents whose child was dead.

Except we didn’t leave with nothing. Though it would take me several months to understand, and years to put into words, I eventually realized that we left the hospital that day with something. It wasn’t the thing we wanted. In fact, it was something we absolutely didn’t want. But it was something nonetheless. We left with an unbreakable connection between the land of the living and the land of the dead. We had forged a connection with all that lay beyond the realm of the visible and knowable.

 In a recent podcast episode, I interviewed David Harradine and Sam Butler, the artistic directors of the English art group Fevered Sleep (Episode 6 of “To Grieve”). At the end of the interview, I asked David and Sam what it meant “to grieve.” David’s answer was precisely aligned with my thoughts on nothing (which is really something). He said (I’m paraphrasing): To grieve means to build relationships with people who are no longer here. It may seem quite difficult, since the living party is going to put in 100% of the work, but the relationship with your deceased loved one continues. Grieving is the activity of nurturing this new, non-traditional, painful/praise-worthy/depressing/joyous connection with the dead.

My connection with Finlay is forged through my daily grief for his absence. What appeared at first as his nothingness when we left the hospital without him, his sheer lack of existing upon the “sterile promontory” (as Hamlet says) of my daily terrain, turned out to be his invitation to me to think beyond the limits of the ordinary. His nothing is really quite something.

But the burden of it. The tax Finlay’s absence withdraws from me. To ignore the difficulty of this relationship with the dead is to gloss over a major aspect of the grief-nothingness equation. And this brings me to the task of nothingness.

The history of the word reveals a connection with the Modern French word tâche, which means “duty, tax,” and this leads back into the Latin vernacular where we find tasca, “a duty, assessment.” By the late 16th century, the word (in English and French) acquires the general meaning of “any piece of work that has to be done.”  

This brief etymological foray provides me with a few insights. I might think of the effort required to establish an intimate bond with my dead son as a kind of tax that comes hand in hand with the wider work of conscious expansion. Among the death, dying, and grief community here in Asheville (and I suspect elsewhere in the United States), the work of reckoning with death is considered a privilege held by those for whom grief has bestowed a more nuanced understanding of death and dying. To die, I aver, is to change into a state of which we know quite little. We do know, however, that it is not an end. Death cannot lead to nothing, since, as I’ve already mentioned, there is no nothing. If death becomes, in this way of thinking, a portal to some unknown territory, then the living may find ways to communicate across the portal. To do so may mean risking one’s appearance of sanity or one’s lazy harmony with the status quo, but this risk is simply another word for the tax, or task, of making something of what first appears to be the nothing of the dead.

More profound is the general meaning assigned to “task” of “any piece of work that has to be done.” In this formulation, the task of nothingness, of forging meaningful and tangible relationships with the dead, joins the ranks of our daily chores. Wake up, brush my teeth, bond with my dead son, throw my two-year-old son’s Phalen’s cloth diapers in the laundry, make coffee, imagine Finlay’s favorite breakfast food, make breakfast, etc., etc., etc. As complex as this discussion of “nothingness” and grief may seem, the result of all this philosophical labor is merely another handful of moments in the day. One of the biggest challenges faced by grief workers is to spread the wisdom that grief and death and dying ought to be as banal as buying coffee, shopping for groceries, and getting gas. Grief, and the task of nothingness, is and should be a common occurrence into which we invest as much energy as is stored in our love for those who have died. We come back to this work whenever we can, each day, and then we do the laundry.
​
Can you think about nothing? Of course. And if you experience a profound loss—either of a person or a version of reality that you hold dear—then you’ll likely experience the visceral feeling of a gigantic hole right in the center of your universe. But this hole is not nothing. It may in fact turn out to be the Whole. Whatever it is, it is certainly something, and I think it is worth the effort to consider what we might make with this peculiar entity.

If you clicked here from my post “The Task of Nothing,” then it might make sense to jump right in: What’s the deal with Nothing’s counterpart, Everything? We’ll get there soon, I promise.

First, however, if you arrived here without first encountering my post on Nothing, then what you need to know is that I’ve thought about Nothing since I was seven years old. By the time I was 18, I had stumbled onto the realization that, in casual conversation and philosophical texts alike, Nothing tends to travel alongside Everything. I was so taken with the Zen Buddhist contemplation of Mu (Japanese for “not have; without,” written as 無) and its travelling partner Yu (“to exist; to have,” written as 有) that I got the symbols tattooed on my lower back (i.e., my center, but a place that I can’t see; an invisible everything). Traveling with Everything and Nothing has convinced me that the latter is in fact quite something.

But in this post, my consideration is Everything. Specifically, it seems reasonable to suggest that if Nothing is in fact something, then something must be amiss with Everything. How are we to think of Everything? Is it one thing? Do all things retain their collective multiplicity when collected into this one Everything? If not, then was there ever a multiplicity of things to begin with, or is the appearance of multiplicity actually an illusion behind which throbs the One (whatever that might be)?

I think it makes sense to provide two opposing viewpoints in order to glimpse the continuum of possible answers to these questions. One viewpoint comes from popular culture and the other from advanced mathematics. Any apparent disparity between pop culture and complex math fades away alongside the promise of Everything, which, after all, should accommodate the comparison of each thing residing in the great One (again, whatever that may be).

The first viewpoint—which, I admit, I find refreshing but ultimately misleading—comes from the musical group They Might be Giants. On their 2008 children’s album, Here Come the 123s, the band sings the following words on the song “One Everything” (which, funnily enough, is song number 2 on the album. Zero comes first…that’s a different story altogether):

There’s only one everything
Remember these words
There’s only one everything
And if you go out and count up everything
It all adds up to one
There’s only one everything
The last time I checked
There’s only one everything
It kinda makes sense that there would only be
Just one, not ten, not three
If you get all the stuff together
And you have not left something out
Then could there still be anything left over?
I'm pretty sure that means there could not

The claim here—presented as a humorous but also philosophically rich introduction to the number 1—is that Everything = 1. The great 1 of the universe shows itself if we try to imagine all things gathered together. Fascinatingly, then, Everything is not infinite or another word for infinity; it is, rather, a unity. The unity. 
While the band doesn’t delve into particulars, their lyrics do hint at answers to some of the big questions I asked at the beginning of this post. For example: What happens to multiplicity within this unity? They Might Be Giants suggests that the two—multiplicity and unity—co-exist in an unresolved mystery. This mystery is similar to the one that children likely feel when they ask their parents a question and receive the answer, “Because I said so.” Is that really an answer? There must be more to it. Will I ever find out??? 
(In their characteristic, self-reflexive lyrics, the band even acknowledges this: “There’s only one Omniverse. Go clean your room. There’s only one Omniverse.” Here, the lead singer, a father, creates a joke by juxtaposing a deep thought about the Universe/Multiverse/Omniverse and the most mundane and tedious of all parental commands, thereby underlining the co-existence of multiple strata of being within the unity of Being.)

I both agree and disagree with They Might Be Giants. I quite like their tacit insistence that the One everything contains multiplicity (audible in the command to go and remove the many toys from your room’s floor, preferably while thinking about the Oneness of Everything). The wiggle room made available to the listener allows for “One” to mean something different than it usually does. Something mysterious resides in the quantity of the One. But I disagree with the quick take-away message made possible by the pithy title “One Everything.” The disagreement comes from my belief that there are many everythings, which, in turn, comes from years thinking about the work of the mathematician Georg Cantor who developed what we now call Set Theory.

With this turn, I highly recommend the book Everything and More: a compact history of ∞, by David Foster Wallace, which provides a fantastic primer to the work of Cantor. Without delving into the details here, however, I can summarize one of Cantor’s main ideas in this way: There are many infinities, and thus there are many everythings. Now, it is possible to grasp this idea through a simple experiment:

• I will sit here in my apartment and think of everything.
• Next, wherever you are, think of everything.
• Imagine, next, that there are five other people reading this and each of those people is thinking of everything.
• Summary: All in all, then, we have seven everythings.

Cantor’s fame in the history of mathematics came in his ability to demonstrate the possibility of these multiple everythings in mathematical language, thereby satisfying thinkers who see math’s logical language as superlative (i.e., more fundamental to the nature of existence) than our everyday language (which introduces too many question marks, as in (the pronouns) “you,” “I,” and (the verb) “think”—what, after all, do those words mean??).

I am not a mathematician (to say the least), but I still feel the heat of Cantor’s realizations. His work demonstrated a logical explanation to some discoveries that poets had made before him, thereby extending the poetic discoveries to the study of mathematics and the (albeit Sisyphean) ordering of chaos. Think, for example, of William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Note the indefinite articles: “a World;” “a Heaven.” With this construction, we can picture a thousand of us scattered across the beaches of the planet, absorbed with the granules in our palms, each seeing a different world and a different heaven in our hands. How many worlds are there? At least as many as there are grains of sand. How many hours are in the day? Not 24, as we like to say; rather, there are infinite hours. It depends on how we look at it (to evoke a phrase that will also find mathematical justification in the eventual work of the profoundly bored patent clerk, Albert Einstein).

Why does any of this matter for you? If, like me, you have experienced the devastating loss of loved ones and sunk to your knees with a single thought—Everything is ruined. All is lost—then the material, non-metaphorical existence of multiple everythings is, well, Everything. Personally, I experience multiple everythings (i.e., complete, disparate realities) at each moment of every day. In one reality, my two-year-old son Phalen runs around the apartment by himself and plays with blocks, and magnets, and balls, and books, and chalk, et. al. In another reality, my would/should-be-four-and-a-half-year-old son Finlay is here with him, functioning as an older brother to both enhance and obstruct Phalen’s fun. In another reality, Finlay isn’t here bodily but he is here as pure energy and infuses all matter with a buzz. In another reality, Finlay isn’t in this apartment at all because he has work to do elsewhere, and I feel this to be true in my bones. In another reality, I feel “nothing” and read this as a sign of his absence that hangs over my cavernous internal emptiness. All of these realities—and more—coincide in each moment of every day.

When I allow the multiple everythings to develop in the darkroom of my mind, the words “Everything is Ruined” and “All is lost” lose their illusory power. Only one everything is ruined. In another everything, the ruins left behind in the shape of Finlay’s absence vibrate love into the universe like a beacon transmitting pure electricity. Only one all is lost. In another all, Finlay’s absence transmutes into a strange something that improves and empowers my parenting of his brother. This is not psychosis or derangement or poetic imagining. These alls all collaborate in the multiplicity of my Being.
​
Returning to the starting point of these reflections (as a way of concluding), we notice that we have embarked on quite a journey. Nothing turns out to be a powerful something. Everything turns out to be the starting point of the many alls in which we participate at each moment of the day. Paired side by side, Everything and Nothing author an invitation to see beyond the surface of appearance and to journey into the Great Mystery.

This episode brings us to the Raga Room, nestled in the highly charged environment of Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Will interviews Aditi Sethi, Jojo Silverman, and Greg Lathrop. Once each season, these musicians host a Ceremonial Grief Concert that harnesses the powers of collective grieving and music to hold space for the work of spiritual transformation in the wake of grief.
Listen Here:
https://invitingabundance.net/to-grieve-podcast#Episode8

Linked to my work at Inviting Abundance, Joanne and I have started publishing a podcast series call To Grieve. As of September 2018, we have 5 episodes. You can find the episodes in one of three ways:

1. Check them out on our website. 
2. Download from iTunes
3. Download from Spotify

To whet your appetite, here's the first episode:

I recently had the opportunity to write about the importance of adding art into STEM curricula in higher education. In acronyms, this topic is understood as the move from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math). I'm sharing my thoughts on this blog in order to make my language available to anyone who finds themselves in need of advocating for the arts in education.

The STEM to STEAM movement, championed by the Rhode Island School of Design and many institutions around the country, advocates for the necessary inclusion of Art and Design in curricula dedicated primarily to science, technology, engineering, and math. The resources and case studies compiled by these advocates demonstrate how exposure to the arts leads to more STEM patents, cultivates creativity in the design thinking behind today’s technology, and helps students from underrepresented cultural groups find footholds in the fields of science and engineering. I agree with all these findings and count myself among the STEM to STEAM advocates, but I also see a bigger reason for institutions of higher education to support and grow its arts offerings.

Adding the “A” to STEM does more than expand the minds of students and professionals. Art, and the Humanities more broadly, help to enhance STEM students’ awareness of the ethical complexities they will face in their careers after college. Pointing to the proliferation of algorithmic software applications, biotechnological advances in the treatment of fatal diseases, and technological solutions to the problem of climate change, Richard Lachman of Ryerson University argues that STEM students need arts education and exposure to the fine arts precisely in order to conceptualize the human lives affected by the technology they will help to build. Computer user interfaces, medical interventions, and renewable energy, he argues, aren’t fundamentally problems of technology. They are, rather, ethical problems that require the flexible and creative kind of ingenuity stimulated by artistic thinking. The arts, not the sciences, provide this ethical dimension and thus arts education in primary, secondary, and higher education must be a necessary component of twenty-first century education in the United States.

By teaching individuals about empathy, the nuances of interpersonal communication, and the stories too often forgotten by dominant historical narratives, the arts and arts-based education prepare students to participate in the larger socio-political questions surrounding the big issues of our times. I argue that educational institutions that foreground their offerings in science, technology, engineering, and math education have a responsibility to engage in and with the arts for the simple reason that without it the degrees being offered are entirely incomplete. To provide a college degree that is more than a slip of paper, colleges must create the conditions for on-campus experiences that challenge students to think about the local and global worlds in which they take part. That is, if arts education leads students to engage in the ethical dimension of STEM applications, then universities have an ethical imperative for supporting the arts on their campuses.

I do, however, recognize the challenges in implementing the vision that I am elaborating here.  One reason that colleges and universities have a hard time fully understanding the ethical impact of arts education is that artistic thinking focuses not primarily on results but on process. The qualitative value of art making, furthermore, is extremely hard to measure, and thus the quantitative proof of art’s impact on STEM students is difficult to see in the short term. I believe, nonetheless, that the road to achieving the ethical enrichment sought by STEAM advocates such as Lachman and myself begins with a shift in perspective, one that touts process, play, and experimentation as much as concrete and easily repeatable learning outcomes. Universities will need to hire administrators with backgrounds in the arts and in arts education capable of translating the language of art-making into terms that all faculty and students at the university can understand. Likewise, I think that universities would do well to promote faculty members into administrative positions so as to promote unity among all university employees as the institution as a whole moves forward with large-scale projects such as those in the areas of art outreach and engagement.

​While it might seem that STEAM curricula should first arise at the primary and secondary education levels in order to create a foundation for the type of change advocated by arts activists and educators like myself, I actually believe that colleges and universities should take the lead role. By demonstrating that the arts and the sciences can collaborate together in the transformative education of our nation’s young adults, universities will send the message that similar curricula are needed at the earlier stages of learning.