The Butterfly Effect - How It All Began

ButterflyTangle - art journal piece:
acrylic, zentangle, fabric and vintage book scraps

Penelope Lively opens her novel How It All Began with a quote from James Gleick regarding the Butterfly Effect, how the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one place can impact the weather somewhere half way around the world. It was Edward Lorenz of MIT, who in 1961, while trying to come up with a way to model weather patterns using computers, discovered that it would be almost impossible to generate longterm forecasts because we are unable to measure precisely enough the factors that we input into the model.

But how does weather modeling come into Lively's story? It doesn't. What does is the opening event - the mugging of an elderly woman named Charlotte. That event creates a cascade through the small group of Lively's characters who don't even know that they are connected to one another. You know it's like meeting someone who it turns out knows so-and-so and before you know it they are your neighbor's third cousin twice removed.

Charlotte is a former Literature teacher and in retirement a literacy volunteer. The mugging has resulted not only in the loss of her purse, but an injury: a broken hip. While convalescing, she finds it hard to focus on the one thing that has always sustained her - reading. "Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even (p. 34)." How frustrating it must have been to her during this time not to have the solace that comes from reading. When my father was in the hospital and we were waiting a diagnosis, I knew that he was truly ill because after a lifetime of watching him reading, he didn't. He wasn't tempted by the daily paper, magazines or a book. When the diagnosis did come, Stage IV lung cancer, it was a swift five weeks to his passing.  I would not see him read again.

Like Charlotte, I read to learn about other cultures, what it is like to be a different age, have more or less money, how to overcome a broken heart, to be a brilliant scientist, an intrepid explorer, and the list goes on and on. "She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without (p. 35)." How beautifully put, of course I am who I am because of what I've experienced but also what I have read. The thoughts of others, whether I've encountered them in person or through a book, and like the beating of a butterfly's wings, have had some effect on me. In return we may never know how our lives and words may effect someone else somewhere half way around the world from us.

Other's opinions about why reading is so good for you!

Art Journal - collage with buttons

My dear librarian friend is always looking for ways to get people reading; she has installed a Little Free Library (LFL) in her front yard. I stopped by this morning for my first visit. If you are not familiar with this idea, it is an opportunity for people to create a free book exchange program - take one, leave one - so I grabbed a title and will bring one the next time I drive by. What a wonderful way to discover a new author - Martin Page and his first novel how i became stupid. I will report back to you about this work after I've had a chance to read it, but be honest how could I resist such a title?

The other goodie in the LFL, was a url to a thoughtful TedTalk video by Lisa Bu, "How books can open your mind." I particularly liked her thoughts on how books can be a "magic portal" to connect us with people, the past, the present, and the future. They are also conduits for helping us to discover our passions. She presents the concept of comparative reading and several ways in which to choose companion pieces to do so. Lisa challenge accepted.

A word about today's art journal piece. When I was a kid I had a lovely yellow bike with a wire basket on the front, which I would ride to the library when the weather was good. It was a wonderful freedom and empowering to be able to head off and supply myself with reading material whenever I wanted. I didn't have to wait for an adult to take me to the library. How awesome was that. I hope you too have wonderful memories of childhood reading adventures, which live on into your present life.

Where have I seen this before? - #1

Sometimes we all need a little refresher in how to do something that we do constantly and take for granted in this case - reading. Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor was sitting on our bookshelf from the time I purchased it for my daughter to use in her first AP Literature course as a junior in high school (now a senior in college?!!), just tempting me to pick it up and peruse its chapters. Several chapters were devoted to the sources from which authors draw inspiration for characters, themes, symbols, plot devices, and more. Of course I knew that authors do that all the time, but it made me pause to think about the current stories that I was drawn into.

I've written before about the joys of audiobooks as the ultimate in hands free reading. Talk about multitasking: reading while driving, reading while walking, reading while doing housework, and reading while knitting. What could be better? So I found a title among the many on the library's website, downloaded it and proceeded to "read." Katherine Hall Page's amateur sleuth, Faith Fairchild, a resident of a fictional Massachusetts town, which based on all the setting clues is located not to far from where I live, was on vacation in Italy with her husband. (The Body in the Piazza) Arriving in Rome they meet a charming British travel writer who shortly gets murdered in front of their very eyes. After giving the police their statements the Fairchilds figure that the authorities will take over and solve the case so they move on to their next stop a cooking class held at the Tuscan villa of their old friends. There they meet their fellow culinary students and all is not as it seems.

Now where have I seen this before? Ah-ha! Ngaio Marsh one of the Grand Dames of British Crime writing has used this one before. In When in Rome, she plants her multilingual, sophisticated inspector from the CID, Roderick Alleyn amend a group of tourists. He is hot on the trail of a drug dealer who ends up the murdered corpse. Not all of the members of the tourist group are who they seem to be. Oh there is the innocent traveler mixed in with the drug users and victims of the murdered man's blackmailing schemes, but who among them is the killer?

She used the device again in A Clutch of Constables, this time planting Troy Alleyn the inspector's wife in the role of amateur sleuth and innocent traveler among a group of tourists who are not who they claim to be. This time it is Troy who gathers clues and impressions of her fellow travelers trying to figure out who might be the killer. Luckily, her husband comes to assist in identifying the killer before an innocent traveller is falsely accused of murder.

Agatha Christie also placed her famous detectives on holiday among people with murder in their hearts. I can think of Miss Marple resting up on an warm tropical island after a bout with illness in A Caribbean Mystery and Hercule Poirot vacationing in Egypt cruising along in Death on the Nile. The more I sit and think about it, I find that  I could name many other titles where a group of tourists are under the suspicions of the police or super sleuth for having committed murder. It is certainly a favorite plot device of authors and of this reader.

Is your read the same as my read?

Recently my students asked to spend some time learning about neuroscience so we spent a couple of days looking at brain structure, how the sense of sight works, reaction time, and habits and learning. One of the videos that I showed them is from Vsauce, in it we are challenged by the thought question: do you see red the same way that I do? 

Now this whole concept of qualia struck me when I read the introduction to Wendy Lesser's book Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books. First of all, she is absolutely correct when she says that reading can be an addiction. I can't imagine a day going by without reading. In fact I learned the hard way what it would be like not to be able to read when you want to. Last spring when hospitalized with a tick-borne illness I felt too miserable and tired to read. I couldn't find the energy to focus, and that frustrated me. I wanted to read. I was desperate to read as there was absolutely nothing worth watching on television. Thankfully I had my iPhone with my cache of audio-books to listen to. I knew I was better when I could sit and focus again upon the written word. 

Second, she pointed out that for every reader of a book there is a unique experience. Each of us brings a unique perspective to the books that we read. Here's where that concept of qualia comes in. How can you and I share fully our experience of reading the same book? There will always be something missing in our ability to explain how we feel, or what we got out of the book. Same book but totally different. It's thought experiments such as this that blows my mind. So I have to ask you, is your red the same as mine? Is your read the same as mine? Think about it. 

If on a winter's morning the traveler arrives....

Note the sticky tabs of learning

Okay I realize that it is not yet winter, the solstice is not until Friday, but it feels and looks like winter outside today. I sat cuddled under a blanket with my morning cup of coffee and finished Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler just a few minutes ago. It has been one of those intensely rich readings, nourishing and challenging to the brain. He closed the book with a discussion amongst some readers at a library as to the meaning of reading. Each declared their own personal philosophy of why they read and yet as a reader each one made perfect sense to me. We read for all different reasons, yet all our reading is interconnected. It is a matter of our brain chemistry. As discussed, the new reading that we do is connected to what we have previously read. Just like the synapses in our brain are connected, so too are the memories of the things we have read. Haven't you experienced that yourself? As you read you are reminded of something, what was it? Was it in a book? Or a movie or TV show (remember they all started as a written word hatched in the brain of a writer)? Maybe even an event in your life since writers take and fashion the world into their creations. It has been a book that has made me think. I have had to think about my own reading while I've been reading.

The beauty of marking a book while reading is to go back and see what you marked. Don't you know that when I looked at the very first sticky tab, there was the start of the final discussion that the book ended with. Fancy that! A circle was started and completed. Would I have had that insight, had I not been tempted to mark that early passage because it struck me as such a profound thought? I could have finished the book with the memory of the ending most prominent as it was the last stimulus in my mind. Again brain chemistry is to blame. Pathways must be built and strengthened for strong permanent memories to take hold.

One other thing that attracted me about this piece of work was his allusions to matter and the chemistry of the world. Twice he relates the "matter" of a book: words, sentences, grammatical structure to the elemental particles of matter: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Or at least that's what I interpreted from those passages. Writing and reading are real and have substance just like that which makes up the universe. Underlying these two things, writing and reading, is the energy of the universe waiting to be explored and released, a universal truth that runs through us all since each of us is made up of the same matter. We are all just star dust which was generated when the universe expanded with a big bang, and there was light.  

If on a winter's night ....

I chose Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler thinking it would fit into my theme of winter or Christmas stories, little did I know it wouldn't be any such thing but something even more. Calvino died in 1984 when I was just graduating high school and going off to college. I would not have chosen this book to read at that time in my life. Do you think books find us when we are ready to read them? Something like the old adage that the teacher will come along when the student is ready.

I read the first page while standing among the stacks at the library and thought it sounded fun. The whole first chapter deals with you the reader. The conditions for reading must be just right before you can proceed. Are you the right temperature, if not get a blanket or open the window. Is the light level right, the noise levels (tell the family to pipe down), do you have something to drink at hand, are you sitting in the right chair? Finally when all is right with you and your world you can begin.

Now this book doesn't belong to me, it belongs to the library so I can not highlight it, or write in the margins. This is where I must praise the inventors of the post-it-note, they have expanded their product line to include these tiny pop up strips that come out of a highlighter which I can't use on this book, but I can stick a harmless tag on a page where I have found something I want to jot down later. This book is starting to have a collection of these little tags sticking out all over it.

This morning I came across this quote written by a character who is an author suffering from writer's block, "writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process," (p. 169). This thought piggy backed on a previous post about books being the oxygen to a reader. Here it is the act of writing that provides the breath of the reader. I am going to digress once again into my passion with biology. Only some organisms breathe, and that act is called respiration. Yet all living things must make energy in order to carry out their life functions and this is cellular respiration. To make this energy they must convert the food that they make (photosynthesis or chemosynthesis) or consume (herbivore, omnivore, or carnivore) into energy in the form of ATP. This process can take place in the presence of oxygen (aerobic respiration) or in its absence (anaerobic respiration).

Okay bear with me, biology lesson over. All of this made me think, is writing more like the act of photosynthesis where the inspirational light (for plants it's the sun) is stored in the words of the book (like a sugar molecule) which when read (cellular respiration) releases its energy once again within the mind of the reader? The law of conservation of matter/energy states that matter/energy is neither created nor destroyed in a chemical reaction it simply changes its form. So, are reading and writing the two sides of the equation? The creative energy of the writer becomes the energy of the reader. As a reader I know that what I read stimulates me to think in new ways. To apply lessons to my life. To share what I have read with others. As a writer isn't that what I hope to do for others as well. The energy of my thoughts seek to be shared with others. "If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, 'I read, therefore it writes." (p. 176)

Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, translated by William Weaver, Harcourt, Inc. 1981