the Marimbist

Some random pictures of Me and my one-year-old Niece, Xin  I’ll be traveling today and will be writing from Japan for the next week.

This was not a successful perch. It lasted about 5 seconds before...

Laughing at her misery. Misery that I caused by putting her on my shoulder.

Xin (left) and Z. No baby seats in Singapore!

I'm CRUSHing your head!

...And she gets even by simultaneously smacking me in the forehead and trying to rip my nose off.

Bonus Link:  MIDISAURUS!  This is the work of some friends of mine–hopefully I’ll be working with them again soon. 

(It’s 4.30 am.  I’ve slept eight hours already and I can’t sleep any more.  Isn’t jetlag fun?…)

This is an essay that I’ve been planning to write for some time (and I’ve got a long list of ideas that fit into that category).  A fascinating—and surprisingly fiery—conversation with my very intelligent little Sister yesterday gave me a framework for this essay and I’m hoping that the ideas will coalesce below around the basic tenor of our conversation.  Unfortunately (for Li Hong), she gets to lose this argument because it’s MY blog and I’m the one writing it down.  :)  Hopefully, she’ll leave a comment if she feels that I’ve misrepresented her views—then as long as she doesn’t make TOO much sense, I’ll approve her comments.  (That last clause was sarcastic, I’ll approve any and all comments that aren’t spam.)  This week in Singapore/Malaysia has been a prolific one for me in the writing department.  I hope my experience in China will be as inspiring…

The basic conversation started something like this:

Li Hong:  Do you believe in “Cause and Effect?”   (Note:  I didn’t initially hear the capitalization.)

Z:  Absolutely.  If I were to punch you in the face, and you were to cry, then my punch is the cause and your crying is the effect.  How could I not believe in this?  (Note:  She is a tiny little “slip” of a woman and it was fun to tease her with a violent image.  I’m not sure why, but I truly enjoy finding these little thoughts of things that would never happen in the real world.  There’s another essay here if I can figure out the cause of this…effect.  )

Li Hong:   Then why did someone like Mozart exist?  There had to be a reason that that particular person got chosen to be a genius at music.  Why did my Sister get cancer?  Why did a Singaporean woman die in the attacks in Mumbai last year?  There HAS to be a reason for these things to happen to these people and the Buddhists believe that the reason comes from Cause and Effect.  That Singaporean woman was the first person from my country to die in a terrorist attack.  Why her?!

To avoid too much dialogue, I’m going to shift to prose to enumerate two concepts:  Both of which Little Sister (and seemingly Buddhist tradition) is calling “Cause and Effect.”  It also seemed that this term is connected (in a wider and very interesting way) to the concept of Karma.

I’ll start with a brief (and unfortunately, fictional) story:    My friend Tim Daly won the lottery yesterday.  How exciting is that!  A million people played the lottery and HE was the one that won!  What are the odds?  (1,000,000:1.)  At first glance—and certainly my gut reaction agrees—this is MIRACULOUS!  Tim just won a billion dollars and I KNOW HIM!!!  There must be some reason that he won and all those other people didn’t.

Well, let’s look at the story from a slightly different angle.  Let’s be aliens from another world (maybe Singapore).  We don’t know Tim Daly, it’s two days ago and because we’re Singaporean, we are capable of visualizing the entire pool of lottery players as a group in a (very large) field.  Tim Daly is one of those people, but we’ve never met him (or any of the others) and we’re just looking at a million people waiting to see the lottery numbers.  We Singaporeans have been asked to tumble the ping pong balls in order to determine the winning lottery numbers—and… out pop the numbers.  One of those people in the field wins the prize and his name happens to be Tim Daly.  It’s kind of a strange name.  Here’s the important part:  Because we don’t know him, there’s nothing miraculous about the fact that he was chosen.  We KNEW that we were going to choose some single person from the group and then one person was chosen—this is absolute cause and effect.  Moreover, no matter which of the one million people had been chosen, there would have been friends and family for whom the experience would been thrilling and seemingly magical/miraculous.  This is also cause and effect.  There is no magic involved with one person being selected.  If, however, you were to tell me BEFORE the balls were tumbled that Tim Daly was going to be the winner—THEN you’d have some magic.  I would truly be impressed, but I’ve not seen anything like that happen in my 42 years.

Why was Mozart (specifically) chosen to be the greatest melodic genius of Western Musical history?  It’s the same as Tim Daly.  There is a “Bell curve” of intelligence.  The vast majority of people fall near the middle if you graph them by their intelligence.  Average intelligence is in the middle of the graph, geniuses are to one side and mental retardation is to the other side.  As you move to the extreme sides of the graph, the number of people reduces until you have VERY few extreme geniuses and roughly EQUALLY few extremely handicapped people.  Mozart was one of the people far out on the genius side—and his Father was a well-known musician driven to make his son into a prodigy.  There’s nothing magical/miraculous here either.   There have been millions of musicians throughout history and a few of them were geniuses.  If Mozart’s name had been Braun, then we would be asking, “What made Braun such a genius?”  Here’s a sentence that’s never been written before:  Mozart equals Tim Daly.

Why did my wife (Le Hong’s Sister) get cancer?  This may be a different type of question—by which I mean that there may actually be a direct cause and effect.  We don’t know why people get cancer much of the time.  Le Khin might have been exposed to something at some time in her life that seemed innocuous at the time—it might still seem innocuous because we don’t yet know that it’s a carcinogen.   On the other hand, people’s tendency to get the type of brain tumor that she got may have its own statistical Bell Curve.  If that’s the case, then SOMEONE was going to be far out on the bad side and we just happen to have loved that one unlucky woman.  Poor her.  Poor us—either way.

The Singaporean woman in Mumbai?  The terrorists were going to kill people that day.  They prepared carefully and the police didn’t get lucky enough to stop them before the mayhem.  Then the direct effect was that people died.  One of them happened to be from Singapore—which has about 4 million people and is nestled between the most populous Muslim country in the world (Indonesia) and another Conservative (though not generally extremist) Muslim country (Malaysia) and indeed a large portion of Singapore is Muslim.  The amazing thing here isn’t the fact that someone from Singapore suffered from an attack by a Muslim extremist group, but that SHE WAS THE FIRST Singaporean to suffer death from such an attack.  I want to be clear here.  I don’t believe that Muslims are dangerous—there are only a few who are and there are Christian, Atheist, Etc. extremists who are dangerous also, but the Muslim countries of the world have had more than their share of extremist violence in recent years (more than the U.S.!) and it’s truly remarkable that Singapore has remained exempt from those problems.  I hope this good “fortune” continues, but I’ll be surprised if it does…

In conclusion, there are two concepts that are being called “Cause and Effect.”  One is simple cause and effect:  One thing happens and it results in another thing happening.  The other concept is a different thing:  call it luck, maybe.  Luck is a magical-seeming perception that occurs when you are close to a statistical result.  And there are millions (BILLIONS) of statistical results happening every day—you’re bound to be standing next to some of them…

Luck is an emotional mirage—a fluke of the evolutionary wiring of our brains.

Bonus Link:  Very interesting discussion of a common spelling error.

Here’s something more interesting than yesterday:  When looking through some of Le Khin’s things, I found a few books with interesting things stuck inside.  She had a “thing” about putting things inside of other things and was fascinated with small boxes with “swanky” stuff that fit inside according to some rubric that was unintelligible to anyone but her.  I have very strongly desired to find some hidden note that she might have left for me–and, in a way, I’ve found this (that is a longer essay that I’ve got planned for another day).  Today I found the following:

1. I was VERY excited when I found a teenage diary explaining her day-to-day activities.  The first day she went shopping (big surprise)   and played the piano.  She also noted a couple of things that her Father had purchased that day.  The second day:  nothing.  ONLY THE FIRST DAY WAS COMPLETED!  Damn it.
2. A Baton Rouge boutique coupon that had been mailed to our address.  It expired on a date shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer.  She was planning to use this one, but never got the chance
3. Two hand-made “Hugs.”  These were yarn crafts made for her by my Grandmother and I was touched to see that she kept them.
4. A hand-made cloth bookmark that reads, “Cherish Each Day.”  Good advice.  Thanks, Le Khin.
5. In the photo also are a couple of pictures that she framed…

Bonus Link  (Some pictures and text about her from my myspace page…)

I have eaten lots of food in the past two days!

Ba-Kut-Teh (Spelling?) From Right to Left: Mother, Father, and Z. Thanks to Sixth Uncle for the photo.

This first picture is (left to right) me, Father, and Mother enjoying a delicious pork soup called Ba-Kut-te.  I tried to thank one of the servers that I thought was Malay, but who turned out to be Indonesian.  “Tarimah Kaseh,” said I.  Father quickly stopped me and said, “You cannot say this.

This is pork, and the Malays do not eat it.”  Oops.  It didn’t occur to me that it would be culturally insensitive to thank someone for SERVING food that they cannot eat for religious reasons, but it makes sense.  Luckily the guy didn’t even hear me–or he was ignoring me out of politeness.  (There’s a phrase you don’t see every day.)

Soon Kwong and Z (Z's the one on your left.) Thanks to Chee Keen for this photo.

This second picture is from a movie last night.  I met up with my former colleagues from a software company for dinner (at Swensen’s–not exactly traditional Asian food.)  Afterward, three of us went downtown to watch the new Shrek movie, then out for some sweet bean curd (cold OR hot!) and home a bit after midnight.  This morning it was up early  for Dim sum, a tour around Singapore’s Chinatown, and a return to Malaysia where we visited all afternoon, then went out to my favorite restaurant (That’s the third photo.)

Z and Beggar's (or paper-wrapped) Chicken! Note the best chili sauce in the world...

These blog entries are meant to be either interesting or informative (for family members that want to follow me on my trip).  I try to combine the two when possible, but today is clearly a failure in the former and a boring version of the latter.  I can hear your thoughts:  “You mean Z both woke up today AND ate.  Moreover, he ate TWICE in one day, he ate?  That guy really knows how to make the most of his time!”

It’s been three and a half years since Le Khin died.  I visited her “resting” place today.

I knew that was going to be part of this visit to Singapore and I had been thinking about it on the plane:  “Those are just ashes,”  I thought.  Nothing important at all to me.  I’m much more interested in the results of her creativity—things that give me a stronger connection to who she was and to who she is in my mind.  That is what “remains” means to me.

While we were parking in the monastery, I looked around at the grounds and thought, “This is a beautiful place:  running water; lots of bright colors.  Peaceful.  Le Khin would have approved.”  It occurred to me at the time that this thought foreshadowed a more difficult visit than the one I had imagined on the plane.

We took the elevator to the fifth floor and I could have walked directly to her place even though the myriad hallways and thousands of small doors looked exactly alike.  I had only been to this particular small door once and that was more than three years ago, but I think that I could have found it blindfolded.  While I knew precisely where it was in space, I had no recollection of what it looked like.  I didn’t remember the portrait (of her in her graduation robe and hood from her Brother’s graduation ceremony) that had become her permanent new face.  I didn’t even remember that her name (in Chinese characters only) had a fourth character that I didn’t know.  Her Father told me that it means “female” and that all the thousands of women’s little doors had the same character as as an ending to their name.  Go figure.

I truly like the placement of her small door.  It’s at the end of an aisle and on the bottom row—which allowed me to sit on the floor in front of it.  Where I proceeded to cry uncontrollably.  Mother shuffled her feet uncomfortably and Father gently touched my shoulder before they both sensitively stepped away to let me grieve alone.  (Edit:  I cried last night when I wrote this and I have tears in my eyes now just from editing it.)

I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to speak to her.  But she wasn’t there.  I wanted to cry out—to share my sadness.  But that doesn’t help anyone.  I was craving for someone to see and understand the depths of my pain.  But what’s the point?  Her parents certainly understand my feelings, and it doesn’t help them or me…  This is one of the problems with being an Atheist:  logic castrates consolation.  So I did what I have done the many times that I’ve had this experience over the last 13 years:  I faced the pain again and allowed to cry the part of my brain that needed to cry.  (The body quickly and easily follows that part of my brain.)  The oddest thing about this experience is that the rest of my brain, very patiently (The calmness is eerie as a contrast to outward appearances.) waits for its opportunity to regain control of the body.  Once the crying was done, I went to find Father and Mother who were moving among the endless stacks of little doors, looking at the pictures and being told by those fourth characters which of the photos were of females.  I think they were pretending that they were looking for someone in particular–I love them very much.

We then went to Third Uncle’s country club for a lunch and I was surprised that several of Mother’s Siblings came to join us—apparently because I was in town.  It was very nice to see them all, but I was not much in a mood for levity and I hope I managed not to offend them with my personal darkness.  I’m not sure if they knew how sad I was, or even if they knew that we had come from the monastery, but they were (as always) kind to me and didn’t act as if anything was out of the ordinary.

Bonus Link  (This might be helpful, if you don’t recognize Prometheus’ name.)