What if your favorite team loses? What if your favorite team loses a star player to injury? What if your favorite team…
 
Walled cities once made sense. Ancient and medieval urbanites built walls to ward off invaders. Eventually, those living inside the walls shared a common bond often manifested in an identifiable culture. Within the city stood the temple, cathedral, or palace, usually higher than the other buildings and visible from just about everywhere from both inside and outside the walls. Today, the walls of medieval and ancient cities are quaint archaeological and aesthetic points of interest. They have become historical attractions, as have the central temples, cathedrals, or palaces that were once the focus of allegiance and attention.
 
In the rather amorphous suburban society of today, walls would interrupt the pace of life. In suburban society there are very few places that are “central” or that formidable walls can protect. No, things are more open today. When tricks like the Trojan horse and weapons like cannon can bring down walls, such structures lose their fundamental protective function.
 
Okay, call this an oversimplification (as if simple things can become more simple): The decentralization of society has had its effect on both groups and individuals, including you. What is the source of “belonging” in the modern suburban world? Without boundaries and a central symbolic structure like temple, cathedral, or palace, groups and individuals have substituted virtual walls and alternative structures like a mall or a stadium.
 
The suburbanite can go to a bar during game day, share a pitcher of beer with people, and find a sense of belonging in the common support of a team. The stadium they see on TV or in which they sit is the new walled city; the team is the virtual cathedral. Unlike most ancient and medieval walled cities, the modern version is one into which, like that of the ancient Trojans, the enemy gets free and easy entrance.
The modern “walled city” is both city and central edifice. People flock inside dressed in ritual garb, some with ritual paint on their faces and bodies. Almost everyone is dressed in a common color. During the season fans anticipate every game; talk shows are busy with pregame and postgame commentary; and a substantial part of the local economy profits from the sale of merchandise and beer. But then…
 
What would you expect if the people open the gates to give the enemy access to the inner city and the very altar of the cathedral? Yes, sometimes the walls do nothing more than confine a loss to the inside of stadium walls and TV screens. Now what? The whole structure gets a blow to its characteristic identity. Groups feel beaten; individuals are disheartened even though they never picked up a sword to participate in the actual defense of the walled city’s integrity.
 
Here’s where I insult many of us, including me, a fan of the local football team: Do we really need an enclosing wall or symbolic structure to find identity? When the team fails, it has nothing to do with our own potential for success and identity (unless we sell team jerseys or beer to diminishing game crowds).
 
We don’t need walls and central symbols to find personal identity. In fact, we really don’t need any group structure, whether real or virtual, to shape our lives. We can build our personal cities open to all that lies beyond traditional walls as long as we have the personal means to defend the integrity of who we are. There will always be enemies who seek to tear down our personal walls either by brute force from the outside or by clandestine Trojan horses holding enemies given access to the inside.
 
There’s no wall stronger than one built by self-knowledge, integrity, and belief in the centrality of one’s own worth. Go ahead. It’s all right for you to find a temporary identity in a group bound by either real or virtual walls, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself unprotected by others when an enemy attacks. The City of Self affords the best protection.

It’s a given: Nobody can be on an unending “high.” Many, however, strive for the constant high through the gamut of human activities, such as meditating, using drugs, exercising, competing, spending, boating, farming, working, playing, and, to put it delicately, romancing. The topography of human life is only intermittently, however, an elevated plain. Some process is always at work irregularly eroding to create “lows.” Some process as common as needing to go to the bathroom, to go to supper, or to go to change the thermostat can erode a meditation. Name the activity intended to maintain a high, and you can just as easily name an interruption, possibly innocuous as in the case of going to supper to possibly life threatening as in the case of encountering a storm while at sea. Want to prolong the high caused by drugs? Roll a joint that reaches to Pluto. Want exercise to prolong your high? Never pull a muscle.
 
Of course, we still strive for the highs, and, when we understand the topography of life, we also know that our lows are not interminable. Ideal highs are interrupted by real lows, and vice versa. We have a number experiences and psychologies to explain why, why they don’t last, why we recognize highs and lows by contrast. Highs and lows: This topography of life has long been the subject of the human mind. Friedrich von Schiller, who penned the famous “Ode to Joy” that Beethoven used in his Ninth Symphony, wrote that highs and lows result from an antagonism of the “two impulsions”:
 
"From the antagonism of the two impulsions, and from the association of two opposite principles, we have seen beauty result, of which the highest ideal must therefore be sought in the most perfect union and equilibrium possible of the reality and of the form. But this equilibrium remains always an idea that reality can never completely reach. In reality, there will always remain a preponderance of one of these elements over the other, and the highest point to which experience can reach will consist in an oscillation between two principles, when sometimes reality and at others form will have the advantage. Ideal beauty is therefore eternally one and indivisible, because there can only be one single equilibrium; on the contrary, experimental beauty will be eternally double, because in the oscillation the equilibrium may be destroyed in two ways—this side and that" (Letter XVI, Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man found at Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6798/6798-h/6798-h.htm#link2H_4_0020) .
 
True story: One day I went 15 miles per hour over the speed limit, and the cop gave me a ticket. I decided to fight city hall and challenge the citation in traffic court. So, I went, having received a 9:00 a.m. time for my appearance before the traffic court judge to argue my case. I went about a half hour early to make sure I would be prompt only to find that everyone scheduled for that day had a 9:00 a.m. court time. It was a “first come” summons, and I seemed to be one of only a few out of about 100 people who did not know the system. So, I signed in, and entered, to my surprise, a very large room with many people already seated and awaiting the judge. The judge entered at 9:00 a.m., sat at his bench, and began hearing what people had to say.
 
“Guilty,” said the judge as he used his gavel to punctuate each person’s status. The process went on uninterruptedly for about 45 minutes, and then something different happened. Pushing back from the elevated bench, the judge engaged in a conversation with the next defendant, heard the story and the plea of innocence, and said, “Not guilty.” The next defendant faced the “guilty” verdict as did those who followed for about another 45 minutes. Once again, the judge pulled back, listened, and proclaimed, “Not guilty” with a bang of the gavel.
 
I sensed a pattern, somewhat irregular, nevertheless, a pattern. The judge was stern for about 45 minutes, and then he needed some comic relief. I was watching a play with a structure that would please the Bard. Shakespeare knew to incorporate such relief in his tragedies.
 
His maintaining a constant stern demeanor was taking a toll on the judge, especially since not all the traffic violations were serious matters. As one woman said, “I could not get into the right lane because other cars were blocking me.” The judge responded, “Well, I see you were just the victim of circumstance. Not guilty.” Bang!
 
Where would I be in the timescale of traffic court? What was my role as an actor? There were still many people in the room whose cases had not been heard. Where was I on the sign-in list? My circumstances did not look promising. I had no way of knowing my fate.
 
About another 45 minutes passed, and then, JOY. As my name was called, I saw the judge push back from his bench. I told my story. “Not Guilty.” Bang! Joy!
 
Bound by reality’s fluctuations and topography, we ascend and descend, not in any regular pattern, but rather in an unpredictable and varying landscape of experience. Would equilibrium be pleasant? Would the uninterrupted plain be a place of constant joy? We will never know, but we can find joy in the undulations of our personal landscape.

Cartographers always employ a scale when they draw maps, and the scale is a ratio. No one draws a 1:1 scale, of course, because such a scale would result in a map the same size as the place being mapped. So, on a map we might see that one inch equals 63,360 inches on Earth’s surface (i.e., a linear inch on the map equals one linear mile). Scales vary according to the area covered. In a contractor’s blueprint, an inch might represent 36 linear inches of a house. On a world map, one inch might represent seven million inches of Earth’s surface.
 
You know the old adage that until it takes flight a fly on the face of the Mona Lisa cannot see the image of the woman in the painting (Silly adage, isn’t it? Have you ever looked through one of those novelty-store combination fly-eye lenses? A fly would think that Da Vinci was on an LSD trip when he painted all those faces) Anyway, back to the point: Mapping something close up is called large-scale mapping. The contractor’s blueprint is a large-scale map. The map of Earth is a small-scale map. The difference in the scale, the ratio of linear map distance to linear surface distance, is the difference between mapping lots on details in a small area and mapping few details in a large area.  
 
The scale of a printed map never varies once the map is published. In contrast, the scale of a mental map changes because of changing perspectives and attitudes. Perspectives can change because of a person’s changing status. The office seems different to a person internally promoted from a position as subordinate to a position as authority. The classroom seems different to a recent college graduate as she takes over a teaching position. The school seems different when she becomes principal. All the schools seem different when she becomes superintendent. The difference is reflected in the mental map that has a changing scale: Acquiring greater authority or responsibility changes scale from large to small.
 
How has changing scale played out in your life? Try remembering when you experienced a change in scale brought about by 1) acquisition of knowledge, 2) maturation, or 3) experience. Look back on the “paintings” on which you once sat and think about the change in perspective taking flight gave you on your obligations, responsibilities, relationships, and self-development. Now think about how limited your own perspective might be in light of both your unknown and likely future. How might your scale change in your mental maps?

Everyone has faith. No? Yes. Everyone, really. What about an atheist? An atheist has faith in place. In fact, we all do. Otherwise, we couldn’t run through our daily lives without anxiety at every turn.
 
Think about it. You are sitting right now. Your faith? The chair will continue to support you as will the floor. “Faith in a material object isn’t faith,” you respond, “it’s assumption.” But all assumption implies faith. You have faith that the designer of the chair could imagine a product that a builder could fashion without flaw, at least without a flaw that would jeopardize your safety. What about the faith you have in the stability of the third floor, the tenth, the sixty-second? And, don’t let me get started, the elevator! The elevator, it’s a box suspended by a cable high above a shaft. The plane, the train, an automobile, the elevator, the cantilevered overlook: these are all places that require some faith. Every conscious minute is enveloped by faith. “This place is safe,” so you enter, you stay, you even return.
 
Even when potential danger threatens, you seek shelter in both place and faith in place. Take an earthquake zone, such as southern California. Last big one, as of this writing, Northridge, when a blind fault shifted. Did everyone abandon Northridge? Nope. People still live there. People from outside Northridge even travel to work within its boundaries, the same boundaries that enclosed a zone of terrible shaking.
 
Will another earthquake shake Northridge. Yes. When? Those in the community have faith that it will not occur soon; but if it does occur, it will not affect them personally. That goes for believers and nonbelievers alike.
 
What about people who go on adventures, you know, the risk-takers, the extreme enthusiasts who rock climb, kayak over ten-foot rapids, or ski off precipices? Faith.
 
In the face of potential danger, they have faith that they are the lucky ones, that the goddess Fortuna looks on them with favor, that God will protect them, that forces of Nature cannot harm them, only hurt others.
 
And so the reasoning goes with those who stay in abusive relationships. “But this place is usually safe; I have faith that it will be so. That dangerous stuff happens only to others. The abuse was only a temporary shaking of the place.” Really? Think actual earthquake zones. The ground will shake again regardless of residents’ faith. Individuals will be hurt or killed, regardless of their faith. You can stay in Northridge and maybe, by chance, you will never feel the release of seismic energy. Maybe the ground won’t shake again until you are long gone, when it will affect others.
 
Here’s a message: We are all “others” in the eyes of others. There’s no guarantee of safety just because one has faith in place, faith that where you are poses no imminent risk to your health or life. You can stay in a danger zone. That’s a choice. Your faith in the goddess Fortuna, or in God, or in place might coincide with your safety. But if the earthquake zone is deep and under great pressure, you will eventually feel the shaking. Sometimes assuring safety means having faith in another place.

          Entangled maps within the mind
​          Make true location hard to find.
 
Give any two people in a relationship time, and their common experiences will become both more and less common. Sounds contradictory, but consider your own relationship with someone.
 
You met. The two of you mapped that meeting. “Where did you two meet?” your friend asks at a party. Then you tell the tale, or your partner tells the tale. The many specific details, buried in a map of the meeting, are not the focus. The tale is more like a set of directions to a neighborhood, rather than to a particular site in all its details. “It was October, and we met at Smith’s Bar right after the game against the Golden Wannabees,” your partner says. You nod in agreement. Yes, the time stamp is on the tale, and so is Smith’s Bar. But, for the listener, the description lacks the smell of beer, the loud noise and the shouting of the introduction as you told your name, the barstool color and shape, the lighting, and everything else that made the environment of your meeting. It also lacks the perspective. Were you sitting side by side? Standing and facing each other? Within a couple of feet? Pressed together by a crowd of mutual friends? Did you shake hands? What expression did you see? Whew! There was a lot of detail in that meeting, wasn’t there?
 
Over the years, the map of the meeting became both enriched and impoverished. The two of you enhanced the map by intervening experiences as your minds merged into more commonality. The two of you also lost some of the details to overriding images. The map-making event also differed for the two of you. You faced the door; your partner faced the interior of Smith’s Bar. Your perspective was different as you looked toward either a taller or a shorter person. So many details from different perspectives captured under two slightly different moods and emotional responses under the effects of different stimuli and in varying degrees of confidence, or wonder, or trepidation, all going into a map of the moment in a very particular place.
 
Then entanglement ensued. Like a quantum particle the two of you carried the map first through separate journeys and then through common ones. What does the map look like now? It traces a complexity of experience beyond a single meeting. The two of you might never find your way to that location, but that location has overprinted every other location in your lives. The maps are entangled. You are entangled.

The atrocities of war and crime have followed humans through time. Evil is seemingly ubiquitous. It has followed our colonization of the planet.
 
Some, like William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, would argue that evil is an underlying character of humans. Others would argue that evil is the product of desire run amok and willful disdain for “Good.” Still others would argue that evil is an aberration, that humans are inherently good.
 
Whatever its source, evil has been with us and is here to stay. Generation after generation, we don’t learn. Maybe we can’t because evil comes in two forms: the instantaneous decision of one or a few acting out of unbridled emotion and the planned actions of the willful self-centeredness that has little or no compunction.
 
Evil doesn’t seem to hit us personally until it is a personal matter, until some act dramatizes it for us. So, few in the United States were aware of the slaughter in Rwanda in the 1990s. That evil occurred in a distant and backward land with little press coverage to personalize it for Americans. The evil in Syria and Iraq in the second decade of this century, however, has found a dramatization that personalizes it. I don’t need to go into the details because news coverage has been relatively thorough. What I do need to say is that evil is a set of fractals.
 
Whether or not evil is an individual and isolated event or a genocidal atrocity, it is the same. Like the pattern on the edges of leaves, the pattern of evil repeats itself. Evil has its own geometry, always repeating the shapes it takes regardless of time or place, and regardless of the radius of its encompassing reach. The murder of a co-ed, the bombing of a marathon, or the slaughter of a group: To paraphrase Dylan Thomas’s famous line about death, I would say, “After the first evil act there is no other.” The magnitude of an evil action against an individual is the total magnitude of evil. As all fractals do, the fractals of evil repeat, but just one of the repetitions is all that is necessary for an individual to suffer.

You can always answer the question: “Where are you?” Even when you are “lost,” you can identify a “where” by its sights, sounds, smells, and textures—all identifying boundaries of an unfamiliar place. Place is a finite entity. It has boundaries: the walls of a room, the property line of a backyard, the forest’s edge, a seashore. Boundaries. All that we know is framed by a known finite, or by an unknown indefinite, surmised, if unknown, boundary, the horizon. Our existence is framed by our being “here” in a place bounded by some horizon. Living entails being and doing in a place: Earth or spaceship, continent or ocean, region or country, neighborhood or wilderness.
 
Do you perceive the moment of nonliving to be in a place? The great hall known as Valhalla? Heaven? Hell? Some undefined Nirvana? Whatever your image is of “not-being-alive-in-a-place,” it is probably one you imagine in the context of the places you know. Is it an image of “endless” stars in the blackness of space? Does it have a defining light? Or, is it, if you are not religious, a void, a black nothingness?
 
There’s geometry to your image of death. Even a black nothingness acquires a “shape” in your imagination. You imagine it “from the inside” since you can’t imagine it “from the outside” without making it finite. If you accept an “infinite continuation” of who you are after death, then the geometry of “not-being-alive-in-a-place” falls into plane or solid geometrical shapes: It extends as an unbroken plane of existence without a boundary into infinity; it takes on some spherical form with a boundary past which you cannot go; or it circles into some reincarnation that reunites some altered form of you with finite place.
 
As a living being, you find your identity in the geometry of place. What you do is also identified by place. “I swim.” Where? “I build houses.” Where? “I handle money.” Where? “I think.” Where? For all these and more activities, you can cite place. Place is so integral, that we have problems with so-called abstractions. We talk about “love,” “spirit,” “soul,” and “thought” as being outside of place and boundaries, but, when asked to “explain,” we put them in the context of boundaries. We see manifestations of love, but not love. We understand the spirit of a team, but we see that spirit only in its manifestation of individuals acting together in a place.
 
As a living being, you know the geometry of your world. You do not know, regardless of your belief or imagination, the geometry of “not-this-place.” Choose the geometry you know over the geometry you do not know.

​Don’t you like a bit of turmoil? No? Oh! Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who wants life with no surprises, a flat roller coaster during the off-season.
 
Hegel’s dialectic has three parts: The thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. You probably make it part of your intellectual life. It goes where you go. You make a point to which there is always a counterpoint. Gotta get some resolution. So, you synthesize. You put together something that is greater than thesis and its antithesis. Ah! The world makes sense. You’ve found the resolution to all that is contradictory.
 
Boring. Without the synthesis, the world is a yin-yang, a plethora of opposites, chaos between different sides of an issue, or a feeling, a behavior, a lifestyle. Synthesis is a smooth world. No bumps. No grumbling. No clashing. No doubts that you might have missed something, that your categories might be overlapping like a platypus: something of bird, mammal, and reptile.
 
You probably feel a bit more challenged and “alive” when the thesis and antithesis are at odds, when life is a bit more chaotic. Once resolved, where does a former set of contentions leave you? Are you really that kind of person? Really? Are you sure you don’t want just a bit of surprise now and then? Are you sure you don't like being a little unsure? Do you really want every place to be the same color with no hills, no spills—no thrills. We’re not talking jumping from a plane, but we’re not talking about flat lining, either.
 
The thesis: You argue for balance, equilibrium, smoothness, peace, AND harmony as you believe you can achieve them. You think the argument is the best you can do, that your lifestyle and beliefs all fit together nicely. Then you realize the excluded part, that is, the part of the argument that doesn't fit. Something wrong with the categories, something's left out, or something is included that shouldn’t be there. Holy Cow! You realize you’ve become a platypus. The antithesis: You argue with yourself. How could I have missed that? Not necessarily vociferously, but at least a little protest when you disagree with the thesis you yourself proposed and defended when you needed to stand for a principle that seemed so nailed down and definite at the time.
 
New argument. New resolution. Then, your new synthesis gives way to new analysis. Doubt, you realize, might be better than surety. For Hegel, synthesis became the new thesis. Doubting is the lifestyle you desire.
 
You can aim for synthesis if you want, but when you achieve it, you’ll probably ask, “What’s next?” Theses and antitheses drive you. 

From our earliest days we have all been cartographers. In the crib we mapped our hands, our caretaker’s face, our sleeping area. As we became more aware and independent, we mapped our dwelling in an ever-expanding worldview. From our homes we mapped outward to property, neighborhood, district, region, and world. All our mental mental maps bear the marks of associations: Details, thoughts, events, and emotions have all attached themselves to our mental maps. This is where I played. This is where I shopped. This is where I met my friend, or lover, or enemy. This is my route from point A to point B. This is one of my favorite spots. 

In our active brains mental maps change. We revise our maps because of real and false memories, rational thinking, episodic learning, enculturation, study, attitude, affinities, and by the infusion of current or changing circumstances, emotions, concepts, and attitudes. We also alter our mental maps by forgetting details, a process that makes unreliable records of our personal historic geography.

However flawed they are as representations of reality, mental maps still serve as templates for behavior and attitude. We act as we have mapped. In certain settings we are assertive; in others, deferential. In a place we have mentally mapped we are cognizant of a “proper attitude” associated with that place: Wildness on the beach at spring break, reverence at the worship site, trepidation in the “bad neighborhood,” sophistication in the “ritzy neighborhood,” fear near the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster.

​The places we have mentally mapped are those whose details we learned through either direct experience or vicarious experience. I never, for example, visited Chernobyl, but I would not visit the site because I know it was contaminated during the nuclear accident. My mental map of Chernobyl comes with a warning.

​So, how have you mapped your life? What are the attitudes you associate with the places you know either directly or indirectly? How have those attitudes been shaped by time, experience, and forgetfulness? Try this: Choose one of those places you have mentally mapped, and examine how you acquired the attitudes you associate with it. Try this, also: As you map or remap a place, be conscious of how you are acquiring both details and attitude.

Talk about some crazy behavior!

​I’m ahead of myself, so let’s recap: In the late ninth century Pope Formosus crowned Arnulf, a Frankish king, Holy Roman Emperor. That ticked off Ageltrude who wanted the empire for her offspring, Duke Lambert. So, with her son she forced a trial to get even. Problem was, Formosus had died. No problem. They dug him up and had a trial with the cadaver seated in vestments. Certainly, this is one trial when the defendant did not speak for himself. Anyway, the dead pope was found guilty of perjury and covetousness in front of a courtroom of witnesses and guests. Pope Stephen VI, reigning at the time, had allowed the event that ended with Formosus’ body being thrown into the Tiber. The citizens of Rome weren’t happy about the proceedings, so they deposed Stephen, jailed him, and had him strangled. The next pope, Theodore II retrieved the wet corpse and had it reburied. You won’t believe where this is going. Back and forth over the next decade or so, the succeeding popes, elected from factions that had either supported or opposed Formosus, alternatively exonerated or re-condemned him and his papacy. At least one and maybe two popes were killed in the aftermath of the trial. All this because Ageltrude didn’t get what she wanted.
 
To what lengths do people go when they don’t get what they want? Fortunately, you have never gone to such lengths as digging up a cadaver for a trial. You let the dead lie. Right? And when others who have somehow offended you are essentially out of sight, you have kept them out of mind. Too bad the people of the late ninth and early tenth centuries could not have you for their behavioral model. You know when and how to drop things.
 
How does digging up a dead pope or issue serve the present?