Bubbles and stuff

We live in a polarised society.  Within the big bubble of the whole community, people live in social bubbles with invisible boundaries.  These bubbles intersect, and everyone lives in a lot of social bubbles.

New Whig exists in the interstices between the bubbles. Society is like a great foam, full of Social Bubbles.  We are all surrounded by Energy-Fields.  Energy is little understood by Science and even less by most people.  Just as objects of Mass in close contact and moving in unison are equivalent to a single Mass, so people who are socially joined combine their personal Energy Fields.  All Energy is subject to the irrational Wave/Particle Duality, and while we usually think of our Energy being located in a particular spot, namely within our physical bodies, our interactions with other people and with our Social Groups, our Social Bubbles, can only be explained in terms of Energy Fields that exist like bubbles round groups of people.

Foam is the most common structure in the universe.  Indeed, on a large scale, the Universe is a foam, just like the top of frothy, soapy water or where waves break on a sloping beach.  When Astronomers map the zillions of Galaxies that have become visible with orbiting telescopes and whose distance can be quite accurately estimated, we find that it is not an even, grainy distribution, but maps onto huge bubbles, many hundreds of times larger than any galaxy, and while these bubbles appear to be utterly empty, the galaxies we do see are all located in the interstices between the galaxies.  The structure of human cells is very similar: figure and ground.

Where a few bubbles meet there is a multi-filamented nucleus-like blob, and it is within these interstices that galaxy clusters form.  Galaxies can also form along the filaments that exist between three bubbles, some of which are like long tubes, and reach eventually to another blob where another galaxy cluster will form.  How large this foam might be is impossible to say, as our perception is limited to the range in which light can travel before the size of the foam reaches a scale where the foam-expansion exceeds the speed of light.  For indeed, the celestial foam is expanding.  It is like shining a spotlight on a small area of soap foam, counting the zillions of bubbles and then wondering how far the foam extends beyond the light.  We might well imagine that the foam is vastly extensive on a scale that we cannot imaging, and that it, itself is but a speck on the footstool of something yet vastly greater still.   So, Foam is universal.

Within Societies, people (and social creatures including ants and bees) are like the particles in the wave/particle duality, and we all see ourselves that way, but in the real world, there are Energy Fields that interact.  Social Bubbles are made up of groups of linked individuals.  Families are the paradigm. Australia is currently updating its Social Definition of a Family, with some adherents to the Ancient Traditions trying to enclose everyone within their social bubble, while fearing they will either be excluded from what used to be an almost universal social bubble or they will be forced to include within ‘their’ social bubble some elements that are presently outside the impervious barrier.

[Editor’s Note: I came up with this heuristic, mental model of Society decades ago, but it sat on my virtual shelf of un-written books.  It is far too complex to describe in full here, and I suppose my use of some terms has put everyone off. Naum Tered]

The difference between Social Bubbles and soap foam is that the people are within the bubbles.  However, if mathematically we replace all the people, who might be like the non-dimensional, dot ‘centres of gravity’ with the fields they represent, then we have something like the big, open bubbles that make up the universe just like the unseen bubbles in bread and cake. 

Because we all belong to many different bubbles, it is hard to imagine them if they are all transparent, but assigning colour to the bubbles means it is possible to imagine them intersecting with each other.  A two-dimensional version is often used to illustrate Sets and for other organisational reasons and sometimes called Venn Diagrams.  If we want to be really clever we can imagine these bubbles existing in four dimensions where it is possible for otherwise impossible connections to exist, though in some perceptions, seven dimensions is more meaningful.

Politics is like a big balance, where the Social Bubbles on each side weigh up against each other.  Boundaries between the bubbles are not smooth but fractal, and individuals from each side move into the domains of each other, perhaps due to their participation in some other Social Bubble all together, so that they form tendrils that spiral about each other on the boundary. 

He was a terrible Father.

He was a terrible Father.  To start with, he dropped me on my head doing gymnastics in the bathroom when I was three and a half, possibly just before my Brother was born.  I was knocked unconscious and had retrograde amnesia, had a partially dislocated neck and spent most of the next few years in bed.  However, my dear Father was in denial, and I was always in bed because I was sickly, though without any exercise or fresh air it is little wonder I became asthmatic and susceptible to every cough and cold.  Years later, I found out the reason I never had any visitors was that my Family all believed I was a malingerer and did not want to encourage me.  I asked him about it when I was in my Twenties, because I must have remembered people talking about, and he agreed that it had happened, but added, ‘Fortunately, there was not lasting damage.’

When I was Six I was sent to the Mercy Hospital for a Tonsillectomy that was supposed to cure my susceptibility to illness.  I don’t know how susceptible I was, but I do remember that nearly every year, even when we rented a house down the Peninsular, I would only need to sneeze once and I would be confined to bed and the local Doctor called.  My room had all its vents sealed, the windows were never opened and the Central Heating (one of the first in Melbourne) was always turned up.  While there, I was abused by the Sisters of Mercy, but could not tell anyone and became even more introverted than I had been.  It was sixty years before I blurted it out to a General Practitioner who sent me for Counselling.

He was a man of great personal self-confidence and unassailable initiative.  He expected the same of me and never forgave me for my lack of initiative and a raft of other personal failings.  While other Fathers, particularly Jewish Parents, put pressure on their children to achieve, he kept telling me I could do anything and he wasn’t going to be like other Fathers, as long as I did something Professional.

He did not take me into his business as an adolescent during vacations or whenever, when I could have learnt useful skills, because he did not want me to work ‘in Trade’ or whatever he called it, though I don’t remember him referring to anything.  He was himself largely Class-free, and dealt equally with everyone man-to-man.  I think he saw the world as a meritocracy based on personal achievements, and he had risen to hob-knobbing with Princes from peniless refugee, and expected I could do the same, without his help.

He prevented me from more than a career in Industry, though ironically I was streamed into Commerce at High School, presumably based on my Father’s occupation, not on his aspirations for me.  He also prevented me from turning a childhood hobby of Puppetry into a career in Entertainment.  So it was all stopping me from what he did not like, but never helping me or encouraging me or indicating what he did want for me.

I saw all my cousins under pressure to into Law or Medicine, but I had no such pressure; I could do anything, which to my mind was the same as nothing because ‘nothing’ and ‘anything’ are both ‘not something’. I grew up thinking I was rather stupid anyway, mainly because I was away from school a lot and never seemed to know what they were learning about when I went back after being sick.  I have report cards showing I was away more than I attended some years in Primary School.  Of course it didn’t help when he was always telling me I was stupid.  Whenever I didn’t do something that I hadn’t known he wanted me to do, or started to do something in some way he hadn’t expected, he would say, ‘Don’t be stupid.’  After some Psycho-Drama at Augustine Centre when I was in my Forties, I eventually convinced him to stop saying that, and we eventually became good friends for the last few years of his life.

He had fallen out with his own father who had died a couple of years before I was born.   Although my Grand-Parents lived in the same street in St Kilda, they belonged to Synagogues on different sides of the Highway.  My Maternal Grand-Parents were part of the British Establishment. My Grand-Mother was proudly British, with siblings born throughout the Empire and a birth in London’s East End.  My Grand-Father never lost his Yorkshire accent or his love of Cricket.  Australia was mostly half Anglican and half Irish, Roman Catholic, but unlike other countries we had social harmony because there was no overt display so everyone looked the same in public, and in that environment, Jews could remain equally public and religiously anonymous.  Everyone knew we were Jewish but the only difference from everyone else was that we had different holidays, didn’t eat certain things and went to Synagogue on Saturday instead of Church on Sunday.  I think that was it.  We kept a wishy-washy sort of Kosher, avoiding forbidden meats, but not worrying about the rest.

My Father’s Parents belonged to a traditionally Orthodox, European Synagogue, where my Grand-Father had been a community leader.  Not long before he died, he had been part of a break-away group that later grew into one of Melbourne’s leading Orthodox Communities.  I don’t think he was exceptionally religious, and I reject epithets like ‘ultra-Orthodox’ for people who are just traditionally Observant.  My Father wanted none of it, and being in Business and active in sport, was as secular as he found the rest of the community.  This must have started when they lived in Montreal before coming to Australia.  Anyhow, my Father had fallen out with his Father, but I did not know this as a child.  I occasionally saw my Grand-Mother, who died when I was about eight, but visits to her were often tinged by the presence of refugees from the Holocaust.  Australia had joined the rest of the world in turning its back on the plight of European Jews, which was already quite well known in military and government circles, even if not widely discussed publicly.  Australian Jews were Patriotic, fighting in the Australian Defence Forces, but were noticeably not Zionists.

I had a minimalist Religious upbringing, with a Bar Mitzvah that was form without content.  A few years later, when my Mother died after an agonising illness of ‘Women’s Disease’, I was quite unprepared for the religious expectations that came with a Jewish Funeral, and missed out on everything that might have come at that time.  I was always very introverted, remember, so I could not go out of my way to learn or participate, but needed to be included and wanted, which I was not.  I blame my Father for growing up without any sense of belonging.  He had done it, as a child-refugee, but I had not had his experiences, lying in bed dreaming of adventures at the early age when he had been having them.  For example, lined up in front of a firing squad and being sent away at the last moment because he was but a child.  Did I ever have a similar sense of my own impending demise, while I was lying in bed with Asthma, unable to move or breathe, thinking I was at my end?

One thing in his favour was his attitude to punishment.  I don’t know where I got my attitude to Morality, but I don’t think I ever did anything wrong deserving punishment.  There was one occasion, perhaps a year or so after we moved, so eight or nine when for something that I cannot recall at all, he announced he was going to smack me.  I was terrified as he had never behaved like this before, usually ignoring me.  I recall running into my bedroom and round the back of the bed.  I don’t think any actual hitting occurred as I was by then hysterical and the whole thing was stopped by my Mother.  I have no idea what evil I perpetrated.

Here is an early memory that might make enjoyable telling.

Perhaps randomly, I suffered some traumas in infancy that led to a lot of repressed memories.  Recent counseling has also brought back other childhood memories, and one of them is my astonishment the first time I encountered division.  It was Grade Two, because I remember it was in the classroom where we would be the next year, and that was Grade Three with Mrs Stillman, whose brother Rod Stillman had a rose named after him, as I remember her telling us, and who had eaten some of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Cake. 

I recall a particular moment, because most of my memories are in the form of a snap-shot, like a single frame of a motion picture.  My images are still but not static, perhaps the same way pixels can have a vector quality of motion in a direction.  I do not recall who my teacher was that year, but I still have report cards from Junior School showing I was away sick more days than I attended.  She must have been away, so we were sent to the next room, and shared desks for a short time with those boys.  I was doing subtraction, which I must have only recently learnt.  

Reading was something that I discovered late in my childhood because I was away sick so much, and numbers also revealed their magic to me very slowly.  This particular early memory now stands out from all those empty years and is of seeing the other boy doing something that looked like subtraction but was quite different.  I ask him what it is and he tells me it is division, and I can look forward to learning it next year and then he warned me that it was very difficult.  We never spoke again.

Mathematical Functions have been a continual succession of discoveries ever since.  It was a source of wonder then and has never ceased to be.  I feel sorry for people who don’t see the absolute beauty in Mathematics that requires no eye to behold it, but is inherent beauty for its own sake, like ‘art pour l’Art’.  Tangentially, I think myself lucky now that I started to be interested in computers when they were simple things and it was easy to understand how to make one out of common electronic components and to program it to the limit of its capacity.  In contemporary times, apart from the tiny fraction of the population that writes Apps, most people are in total ignorance of the devices they spend most of their waking hours interacting with.     

My fascination with division (particularly into Primes) was quickly overtaken by the endless consequences of exponentiation, but it is the jump from division to differentiation that truly reveals the Magick.  Perhaps I am also lucky enough to have become expert with a slide-rule, which everyone had, but are never seen lying around in retro movies.  Then there were log-tables, accurate to four significant figures, sufficient for all practical purposes, apart from Rocket Science, while now I can almost instantly calculate a number with more decimal places that the largest known Prime.  What a wonderful world!