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.

I recently came upon this video that I made a few years ago for former students of mine who were putting together a devised theatre piece. I was asked to make "something about ritual," and so that's precisely what I did. 

​In order to live and thrive while grieving for the deaths of my son, father, stepfather, and friends, I have to reckon with death: How do these people’s deaths affect my ability to navigate through the social world? How do their deaths change my relation to life, generally? Is death really an end, or is it more like a threshold that opens onto a new beginning? By asking these philosophical questions, I feel that I am arranging the deaths of my family members into an order, one that acts like a trail capable of leading me in a specific direction. Here, the histories of the word “reckon” come into view: “to explain, relate, recount, arrange in order” as well as “to settle accounts.” Dead reckoning is a helpful term to know when facing life’s ultimate limit.
The term, however, is more common in the world of nautical navigation. Historically, sailors would determine their current position by calculating their previous position (such as port of embarkation) and their ships’ speed over a specific duration. With the knowledge of their current location, sailors could then adjust their heading and navigate around known obstacles. The process of finding one’s location at sea was called dead reckoning.

As a philosopher, I’m drawn to the function of the “present position” in this nautical wayfinding practice. Sailors and grievers alike need to understand their present place in order to know where they’re going. But knowledge of “where one is” comes about only after making some analytical/mathematical calculations. We can’t know where we are unless we know where we’ve been and where we want to go. On the sea, past and future position is a matter of course; on the open seas of grief, by distinction, past and future locations aren’t so easy to ascertain, and thus knowledge of “where one is” in the world requires more intuitive calculations. Applied to the more philosophical kind of wayfinding, dead reckoning becomes a useful but extraordinarily difficult process for healing.
In this task of healing, we come upon a specific dimension of the word “dead”: “of water, ‘still, standing,’ from Proto-Germanic *daudaz.” Grief drops us in the still waters of the deep ocean of the soul. Without wind or current, these waters keep us in place and force us to comprehend the depth and expanse of the waters in which we are floating. I think of this dead water as the doldrums, a word that surfaces in Book IV of Homer’s Odyssey and refers to windless ocean travel, the worst kind of situation for a sailor trying to make his way home. The only way to summon the wind is to make an offering to the right spirit (Proteus) and/or god (Poseidon). Without faith in such spirits, people are left to float until chance intervenes. Even with faith and certainty in the spirit world, helping hands from beyond arrive on their own schedule, and waiting for help can be just as painful as the original traumatic experience that left us stranded in the first place.
But in that still water where no wind blows, an opportunity also presents itself. It is there that we have cause to think and talk to ourselves. The gnawing boredom we feel during the incessant waiting amid grief actually sparks the imagination and forces a necessary encounter with the self. Nietzsche referred to this “boredom” as “that disagreeable ‘lull’ of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.” It is a disposition common among artists who actually need this boredom brought on by still waters in order to ruminate, connive, and create. Most importantly, the doldrums bring about a stillness of soul that helps us individually to reckon with ourselves, as if to say, “Ok. Fine. What is this all about then? What am I doing here? What is here?”

Dear Senator Tillis,
​
The 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King to Senator Strom Thurmond that Elizabeth Warren was censured for reading contains words you need to hear. In that letter, King, a woman of incredible strength and tenacity, explained in clear terms why Jeff Sessions should not be elevated to the Federal District Court of the Southern District of Alabama. The issue, she said, was voter's rights. It was clear to King back then that Jeff Sessions had participated in blocking access to the polls for black people. In other words, Sessions was accused of undermining the democratic process first and foremost. Questions of his racism linger in the accusation, but the primary matter is that of democracy. King comments on both facets of the problem when she writes, "The irony of Mr. Sessions' nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods."

As a Senator in North Carolina, King's words should trouble you for a very specific reason: they are as pertinent today for your own state as they were in 1986 for Alabama. The Federal Court of Appeals very recently struck down North Carolina's Voter ID law saying its provisions deliberately “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” in an effort to depress black turnout at the polls" (NY Times: http://ow.ly/f7dN308O9ZH). Based in part on those findings, the Electoral Integrity Project pronounced that North Carolina is no longer considered a democracy according to verified statistical analysis (http://ow.ly/n6TY308OatU). It is clear that the fears expressed by King in 1986 are once again palpable, this time because Jeff Sessions is poised to assume an even more powerful position in the US Government. King's accusations, therefore, can and should be summoned during Sessions' nomination proceedings, and, moreover, you as a Senator of this particular state need to take King's words to heart. That is, by supporting Mitch McConnell in censuring King via her contemporary spokeswoman Elizabeth Warren, and by voting to confirm Jeff Sessions, you are perpetuating North Carolina's questionable past and making possible a deeply upsetting future in which a man of questionable integrity drives the US legal system. 

I have written to you quite recently about the confirmation of DeVos for Secretary of Education. You did not listen to my appeal as you cast your vote in favor of her nomination. This time, however, I urge you to listen to my voice and those who share my concerns about Jeff Sessions. If you vote to make him US Attorney General, you are demonstrating to me and to likeminded individuals that you don't value the words of one of our country's most powerful black, female activists, that you don't take seriously the recent condemnation of North Carolina's voter laws, and that you don't care about the legitimate concerns about Sessions's racist behavior. 

If you vote for Jeff Sessions, I will write to you again and request an explanation. In the meantime, if my words aren't enough to at least motivate a long meditation on the problem at hand, then please read King's letter in full. You can find it here: http://ow.ly/LGmR308Odaq. I recommend you read it aloud.

Sincerely, 
Will Daddario, PhD
Asheville, NC 28803