Hale Daily – First Issue

May 5, 2012

Alone

It’s Saturday night and I’m home alone drafting an article to an audience that won’t exist until the future. The plastic clicking under my tapping fingers speaks lonefully over the white noise of a fan and buzzing fridge across the room. There are children’s voices outside though it is quite late, perhaps they’re watching the super moon. Perhaps they’re werewolves preparing to dine on tall, dark and dorky white-guy.

Empty

I just moved into my new apartment, a small, first-floor studio in the back of a complex in a “bad part of town”. Apparently “bad” means “Mexican” in Texas. But just in case my Texish isn’t as good as I think, my door is double-bolted and the blinds are drawn. The air conditioning kicks in from time to time and the fan cuts light for epileptic delight. Besides this cheap card table and the blankets on the floor where I sleep, the apartment is virtually empty.

Lonely

This loneliness is not unfamiliar and not all bad. I’m hardly alone with all the voices in my head. In ceaseless company, they settle or mimic the world around me. In solitude, they develop their own personalities and jockey for reign of my mind. To my current and future employers: it’s not as bad as it sounds. To the rest of you: it’s far worse.

Space

All kidding aside, this alone time is a wonderful space to find myself, or selves, and teach the best of me to sing in chorus. Without time alone, our voices are stifled or follow the crowd until we don’t even recognize our own internal mirrors. These mirror neurons allow us to build, to varying degrees of accuracy and complexity, replicas of things and especially the people in our world. These give us the ability to interact with an imaginary version of a friend, see the world through the eyes of another, and empathize with others among other things. Ultimately, alone time with mirror neurons gives us the opportunity to settle peacefully into our natural selves, listen to our many voices and teach them to sing in harmony or find points of dissonance to overcome, and consider the world and our place from many perspectives from the safety of our own heads.

First

This was to be the first ever Hale Daily, a series I’d hoped to begin publishing today, but the Time Warner cable guy came this morning and said that the cable in the walls is damaged or cut. I could venture over to the office center and use the free wireless, but I’m quite comfortable where I am – see also: too lazy. I had just curled up with a new book, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid when I’d read the following line and got so excited I jumped out of bed to share with you.

…GEB delves, and not just superficially, into so many motley topics – fugues and canons, logic and truth, geometry, recursion, syntactic structures, the nature of meaning, Zen Buddhism, paradoxes, brain and mind, reductionism and holism, ant colonies, concepts and mental representations, translation, computers and their languages, DNA, proteins, the genetic code, artificial intelligence, creativity, consciousness and free will…

Needless to say, I’m excited. You should be too. I’m sure I’ll be sharing plenty of this book with you in the very near future. Stay tuned and as always, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Geoff

Hale Daily | Lost Article | Frustration and Negativity | Flip It And Reverse It