The etymology of turmoil is uncertain, but some words might explain what we go through when we are personally “in turmoil.” The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that turmoil derives from tremouille, French for “mill hopper.” That makes some sense as a possible root of our word because mill hoppers hold “mixes” for stirring. Tremouille possibly comes from the Latin trimodia, which like a mill hopper is a container for holding “three modii,” or three dry measures of something (e.g., grains). Again, the idea is “mixing.”
 
When you find your life in turmoil, is it not a “mix”? In your complex life the coarse and the fine, the good and the bad, and the intelligible and the senseless seem intermixed. The turmoil of life is a mix of feelings and knowledge. You can handle one bad event, but no singular event occurs in a vacuum. You have in turmoil a multiplicity of feelings and events with some good and some bad.
 
Turmoil gives you a chance to understand how discerning you are. As you work your way through the messy mix, you find that you have the ability to sort, to distinguish. You aren’t a simple hopper; you aren’t a mixture of just three dry measures.
 
The hopper of turmoil might mix the good and bad, but it is in this mixing that you can recognize that there is some good. The nature of dry mixes is that, unlike solutions, they can be mechanically separated into their individual components. True, the “unmixing” takes time, but as one “unmixes,” he or she gets to withdraw the good, even if bit by bit. It’s a reminder that life is never “all that bad,” just as it is never “all that good.”
 
Life’s a mix. It’s a natural turmoil. While you live, you are always in the hopper.

Streams that run parallel to larger, more prominent channels are called yazoo streams. Typically, they occur on the floodplains of sediments once laid down by the larger stream. If Mother Nature could talk, she might say to the larger stream, “Now what am I going to do with all this flat land you made in your meanderings and floodings?” Then Mother Nature would emplace a smaller stream to occupy the landscape. She abhors a vacuum, doesn’t she?
 
Two streams can’t occupy the same channel. Together they would just make a bigger river. Yazoos are separate streams that use the landscape the larger stream created. They imitate on a smaller scale and rely on what the main river formed.
 
“No, I don’t want to hear it. Tell someone else if you look around to see that in your personal landscape you have modeled the flow of your life on someone else’s.”
 
Big rivers make the landscapes that yazoos cross.

In 1914 German authorities sent Belgian historian Henri Pirenne to Holzminden, basically a concentration camp for enemy soldiers and for people like him, passive dissidents. At the time, internment camps were not as brutal and lethal as those the Germans created for the Holocaust of World War II. No, there were some slightly better standards of decency during World War I. Nevertheless, people in such camps did suffer, first because they were separated from family and homeland and second because they were crowded into insufficient shelters and had inadequate food for healthy living.
 
Pirenne and other incarcerated professors set up schools and gave lectures in the camp’s society of Europeans from the countries affected by the war. However, as you might guess, such lectures drew the attention of the German officers who limited what was said and who eventually had the Belgian transferred elsewhere.
 
He had his intercessors because of his international reputation as a scholar. Princeton U. asked for his release, and so did President Wilson (a Princeton alumnus and the university’s president for four years), King Alfonso XIII, and the Pope. Eventually, the Germans sent him to the small German town called Kreuzburg on the Werra, where he was largely free to roam as long as he reported daily to Herr Burgomeister. There Pirenne  lived in a house, eventually met a number of prominent people, and had conversations with the regional superintendent of the Lutheran Church. And all the while he read and did research on a topic dear to his heart: The history of Europe.
 
From the very outset of his imprisonment, Pirenne lived by a driving motivation: It’s better to kill time than to be killed by time. In other words, the guy strove incessantly to be the best he could be. In Holzminden, for example, he engaged Russian prisoners to learn their language and to discuss their country’s history. That was his nature. As he writes in is Souvenirs de Captivité, “I decided immediately that I could never hold out against the monotony of my detention unless I forced myself to undertake some definite occupation….”
 
So, Henri went on to research and write during his incarceration, went on to learn Russian, and went on to write his A History of Europe. What did you do today? What will you do tomorrow? Yes, I know, inconveniences keep interrupting you, And just when you think you have the time to do something important, you find yourself in an inconvenient place.

PROLOGUE: Once we have our sight fixed, we don’t easily turn away. Believing is akin to staring. Maybe more intense, definitely more enduring. The eyes tire, but the emotional centers of the brain endure like long distance runners whose vision is fixed well ahead of each step. Seeing down the road of a race keeps one from veering and enables a runner to avoid or jump over obstacles and potholes. With eyes fixed on the predetermined finish, the runner is a moving version of a stare. With eyes fixed, those that hold political beliefs rarely run off course.
 
THE WHAT IS: Twenty-five centuries ago Parmenides wrote a philosophical work in verse that has survived only in fragmentary form. In the fragments, the Goddess of the Night addresses Parmenides: “As yet a single tale of a way/ remains, that it is; and along this path markers are there/ very many, that What Is is ungenerated and deathless,/ whole and uniform, and still and perfect” (fr. 8.1–4). Doesn’t seem to make much sense, but then we are listening to a goddess who walks in darkness.
 
Actually, maybe the Goddess of Night makes some sense in light (couldn’t resist the word) of research on “belief-change resistance” by Jonas T. Kaplan, Sarah I. Gimbel, and Sam Harris.* As you know from experience, people don’t change their minds easily. Once they acquire a belief, they tend to hold onto it as “deathless,/ whole and uniform, and still and perfect,” to use the words of the goddess.
 
The researchers point out that “cognitive and emotional flexibility” are cornerstones of cooperation. As they discovered in their study, however, after hearing rational counterevidence that disproves political beliefs, people have a tendency to resist change and can actually increase their inflexibility. In the short version: When one’s beliefs are under attack—even rational attack—emotional centers, particularly the amygdalae, activate. It’s the fight or flight response in a walnut shell (yes, amygdalae are described as “walnut-size and shape”).
 
So, using fMRI to look at the brains of 40 “liberal-minded” individuals (the “mindedness” of the group appears to be irrelevant—could just as easily have been “conservative-minded”), Kaplan and company posed questions, gave statements, and presented counterevidence to beliefs and watched what happened in those brains. As they write, “Generally, political statements showed the smallest degree of belief change…” and “As predicted, participants were especially resistant to arguments against their political beliefs.”
 
Here’s where the Goddess of Night comes in. If you remember, Parmenides, one of the earliest philosophers, was concerned with the unchanging vs. the changing. His work even seems to foreshadow The Matrix. What is real? Some unchanging What Is? Or the stuff of everyday experience open to interpretation through the senses? Is the daily stuff an illusion?
 
We don’t treat it that way, especially in regard to the daily “political stuff.” The amygdalae hold onto beliefs, rarely giving them up or even altering them slightly. It’s as though what we believe is the unshakeable, the ungenerated, whole and uniform Being. Yet, we came by these beliefs in a world of change.
 
CONTRADICTION: We will run through our lives with our eyes on a finish line that is one of our own making. We want everyone to run the same race and to stare at the same goal in the same way. It doesn’t matter whether or not someone sees another goal, proves that is it is a better goal than the one we chase. When it comes to political belief, the emotional centers reject reason.
 
The irony is that we “run” through life, but we hold What Is to be permanent and unchanging; To be still. Can we have it both ways? Is What Is whole and unified? Is it a conglomeration of fleeting entities? Apparently, after more than two thousand years of philosophy and now neuroscience, we still don’t have answers to simple questions. You can say, “The arrow is in flight. The runner is in step,” but as the Calculus shows us, at any moment both are “frozen” in an infinitesimally small spot, analogous to frames in a movie. (The screen shot shows no motion; yet, it is a necessary component of our sense of motion) So, too, we can say our political beliefs are frozen and the race is an illusion—after all, we don’t admit a second path to a finish line. As we run our life’s races, we do so under contradictory beliefs: 1) that we are moving through a world of constant change and 2) that we are bound to the unchangeable that is a “true” reality. And then, to add to our confusion about What Is—whether permanent or transitory—our emotional centers rarely yield to change in our political thinking while at the same time those same centers are befuddled or frustrated by a similar resistance to change in other brains.
 
If all this seems contradictory, could you send your complaints to the Goddess of the Night or to Parmenides? They seemed to have started this argument.  
 
 
*Kaplan, J. T. et al. Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence. Sci. Rep. 6, 39589; doi: 10.1038/srep39589 (2016).

“How are we going to build a wall so high?” the medieval stonemason might have asked. “It will collapse without support.”
 
“Trust me, I know what I am doing. I’m calling the supports ‘flying buttresses.’ I guarantee they’ll hold the tallest wall you can build. I want this cathedral to soar,” the architect might have said.
 
I’m guessing that some stonemason actually asked that question about eight centuries years ago when cathedral builders decided to reach for the heavens. You can see the best examples of flying buttresses in European cathedrals like Notre Dame. In cheaper form on more modern buildings, engaged buttresses do the supporting work. The engaged buttresses are simply narrow perpendicular walls on walls, rectangular or semi-cylindrical columns running up the sides of smaller buildings. Your house or apartment building probably has versions called pilasters.
 
Support comes in different forms. There are those who, like engaged buttresses and pilasters, get right next to the person in need, becoming fully engaged and intrusive. The support runs from bottom to top, from initial to latest layer of life. Then there are those who, like flying buttresses, stand off a bit, let the person support himself or herself except where a precise shoring up seems necessary. The support goes there and only there.
 
Flying buttresses are graceful, airy, and precise in where they give support. There’s no unnecessary engagement with the wall. Walls can be self-supporting to a certain height. Flying buttresses meet walls after they stand on established footing that is their strength from below.  
 
We live in a world of intrusive engagement, one that doesn’t allow the building of inherent strength. There’s nothing wrong with offering precise help where it is needed, but constant engagement robs individualism from the one in need of support.
 
A wall that begins on a solid footer can support itself to an impressive height. There, far above the ground, it might need some light and airy support.
 
 

Human folly: Think videos that people post. Why? Why, really? Who has the desire to make a fool of himself or herself? What’s to gain?
 
Sometime shortly before or after the beginning of the thirteenth century in Europe, royalty began to admit court jesters into gatherings of aristocrats. Either people with disabilities, some associated with brain dysfunction and some with physical problems, or people who were early versions of comedians began to “entertain” at court.
 
Today, we are all “royalty.” Turn on your computer or TV to see as many jesters as you have the energy to watch. And unlike the thirteenth century jesters whose geographic isolation of one court from another minimized competition, today’s internet jesters are out to “out-jest” competitors. We’ve taken foolishness to a new level. You can sit in a coffee shop and watch a jestor online. We’ve turned every place into a potential monarch’s court, and in doing so, we’ve turned ourselves into bored royalty seeking entertainment in the folly of others. Never a dull moment, is there?
 
Of course, you might, as a reader of this website, argue that you would never yourself purposefully become someone else’s fool.* And I hope that’s true. But are you tempted at times to see human folly, to experience vicariously fails and falls?
 
Comedy is great, and laughing is therapeutic. We’re better when we have a sense of humor in a world filled with tragedy. And we avoid the pitfalls of vanity when we can “laugh” at ourselves. But there’s a loss of dignity in jestors whose acts are self-demeaning, sadomasochistic, or dangerous to others.
 
Since at least the early 1200s the western culture has supported and encouraged jestors. The formal incorporation of jestors into courts ignores an informal history of royal entertainment that probably goes back not just hundreds, but thousands of years before those medieval courts and clowns. Jestors might even be as old as culture itself. That the tradition continues on the Web should be no surprise. Like the royalty of nearly a millennium ago, our society encourages—and sometimes even rewards—such folly.
 
The rise of folly arguably coincided with the rise of our species. That we incorporated it in our cyberplaces was probably inevitable. The early inventions that led to motion pictures were indicators of our penchant for foolish display. When William Kennedy Dickson (1860-1935) worked for Edison, he helped to develop the kinetograph, an early “motion-picture” camera. In 1891 he starred in a three-second movie in which he moved his hat from one hand to the other. After leaving Edison’s employ, he founded the American Mutoscope Company. What films did he make? Were they of great consequence? Were they profound? No, he made peep shows of young women undressing or posing in the nude for “artists.” Folly?
 
So, now, as we enter the Age of AI, will robot versions replace our human jestors? They already have. They play music, do our bidding in limited ways, and even serve as companions for today’s “royalty.” We can’t get enough of jesting, especially when it involves the diminution of others, even “fake” others.
 
You could argue that the court jestors of our age do nothing to diminish human dignity, that they simply perform harmless entertainment, and that their rising machine counterparts will do more of the same. Maybe you are correct, and the next time you see someone playing court jestor, you might blame me for putting a question about it into your head. Sorry for possibly spoiling your future entertainment.
 
But you are, in fact, king or queen of your own court. You get to choose the nature of that society, even the virtual part of it.
 
 
*This is obviously a vanity. Maybe you consider this website to be the epitome of folly.

Not the main character in the American Transcendentalist Movement, Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was among its most controversial exponents. In his “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” he upset many of his Unitarian contemporaries in New England. His ideas were an avenue to becoming, as Emerson called him, the Transcendentalists’ Savonarola. Parker was a bright guy, having passed his courses at Harvard without attending classes (couldn’t afford them) and having learned on his own enough of 22 languages to read in all of them. His ideas made Parker an outcast. Do they hold a personal ethical lesson for us more than a century and a half after his death?
 
The Transcendentalists were part of a general movement away from authoritarian control. Their rise coincided with the literary rise of Romanticism as represented across the Atlantic by poets like Wordsworth. For whatever reasons that serve as a context of both the philosophy and art of the times, there seems to be one that unifies both: An emphasis on Nature very much like that of the Force in Star Wars. Nature was the pervasive divinity. Against the rise of urbanization and industrialization of nineteenth century Western Civilization, movements like Transcendentalism and Romanticism proclaimed the significance of the individual and his direct relationship with such Divinity. That didn’t sit well with the embedded religious thought of nineteenth-century England and America. Even the Unitarians, who themselves were out of the mainstream Christian traditions, became upset by the thoughts of Parker and his like-minded contemporaries.
 
In that “Transient and Permanent” discourse, Parker addresses two elements as the title suggests. Since he recognized a history of different forms of Christianity, he noted that rituals and forms have changed with sects, but the underlying “essence” of the faith remained. As he writes, “It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as religion.” He then goes on to say that such transient forms (specific rituals, for example) “are only the accident of Christianity, not its substance. They are the robe, not the angel, who may take another robe quite as becoming and useful. One sect has many forms; another, none. Yet both may be equally Christian.” You can imagine the turmoil such thinking caused in the nineteenth century.
 
From this let’s glean a point of departure for our own thinking. Going back to Aristotle through Aquinas till now, people have argued over “substance” (or accident) and “essence.” Seems that many of us believe that there is something that underlies what we experience. We want to think that beneath the transient forms there lies something permanent, something of greater consequence, maybe something that, to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, is a “force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
 
Yet, we don’t apply the concept of essence in our daily dealings with one another. It’s the “accident,” the transient that we use when we judge others. We know that members of our species come in many forms, but while we speak of essence, we judge by accident. We ascribe identity to appearance. In short, we see the robes around us, and not the angels they cover.

Math! Some people dread it; others love it. You might be somewhere between dreading and loving, possibly in a grey area that indifferently acknowledges its usefulness. And then there are those parts of math that befuddle the middle schooler: Functions. So, good teachers give analogs. They say something the students might understand. “Functions are like vending machines: Put a certain amount of money in; the machine kicks out a certain product (candy, carbonated drink, pack of gum). It’s an unfailing and predictable process. If the machine lists the price of a candy bar at $1.00, then an inserted dollar releases the bar. Next person, same choice, same process, same result, and so on. Dollar = candy bar.”
 
Are you such a function? Given a repeated stimulus, do you respond in the exact way like the vending machine’s response to the “input” of a dollar? Take an emotion such as anger. Does your machine spit it out under predictable inputs? Do others know the “price” to insert to get such a product? Are you that simple to operate?
 
Vending machines are relatively reliable. That’s why their suppliers can leave them unattended. They know that they consistently function. But on occasion, an item gets stuck or the mechanism fails to do what it is "supposed" to do. Then what?
 
Does a non-functioning vending machine turn the buyer into a function? Say you go to the vending machine in search of a candy bar, put in the specified amount, and expect the predictable result. Upon not getting the product you sought from the machine, do you become angry? Do you hit or kick the machine? “I put my quarters in, but nothing came out. Darn (the epithet is your choice) machine!” Strange! A nonfunctioning function turns you into a function.
 
Are you an emotional vending machine? People put their “coins” into you and expect you to respond. When you are the function, you allow the input to control your output. As in math, you become “single valued.” Given a certain stimulus, you will inevitably give the corresponding emotional response. You respond as the people providing the stimuli expect you to respond. If they want to see you angry, they already know the “coinage” to insert.  
 
Do you expect others to be emotional vending machines? Do you think they are “single valued”? You provide the input and expect a predictable result. When you don’t get it, you kick the machine or express your anger verbally. (You’ve seen this acted out many times on TV or in person)
 
Of course, vending machines usually offer more than one product, each with its own cost. But they are finite. They have limited numbers of items. And in some vending machines only a single product is available. Are you an emotional vending machine? What products do you hold, and how much is each? Are you a perfect function, or do others perceive you as such?

When Comte Mede de Sivrac invented the celerifere at the end of the eighteenth century, he forgot what from the perspective of our advanced technology we would say is of fundamental importance: The celerifere was a bicycle without a steering mechanism. You might wonder how de Sivrac came up with the idea for a wooden bike with no free-turning front wheel and no handlebars. Was his neighborhood in a town with only a single straight road? Was his life running on the straight and narrow path to a single destination?
 
We take steering for granted. A guy named Baron Karl Drais von Sauerbronn incorporated it into his “bike” in the early nineteenth century. In vanity, he called his version draisienne. Powered by the rider, whose feet were on the ground and not on pedals, the draisienne is still around. Toddlers use plastic versions of it.
 
One could use cladistics to trace the evolution of bikes. Each clade would be a significant change that would differentiate it from its predecessors: A second generation (draisienne) with steering; a third with pedals and chains; a fourth with gears; a fifth with foot brakes; and a sixth with hand brakes; all followed by the sophisticated developments of modern bikes.
 
In a sense, our lives are like the evolution of bikes. We aren’t in much control of direction early on, but we acquire some steering ability, and we add layers of personal technologies that help us get to destinations of our choosing. Some destinations lie not along some singular straight path, but rather up some twisting lane into a cul-de-sac. The destinations we choose vary, and some end up not being worth the journey. Nevertheless, we’re fortunate to be able to turn our life-bike in a different direction, pedal uphill or glide downhill, turn as we wish, explore as we choose, and sometimes simply enjoy the ride with no particular destination in mind.
 
For those who choose to ride a celerifere, only luck prevents disappointment or an unhappy accident. Happiness is less chancy for those who ride nothing less than a second-generation bike. For those who steer, destinations become purposeful goals, and if they choose, even their journeys become destinations.

Maybe you were born to repeat. There are, after all, only so many ways to do things. What’s that? Yes, you are correct. A piano has only 88 keys; yet, there seem to be endless numbers of songs. Of course, we should acknowledge that among all the songs, even those that seem highly original, there lies some predictable set of notes, a subtle repetition of notes found in other songs. Right. Calling into question a single musical phrase doesn’t call into question the whole song’s originality.
 
But you grew up on a planet that likes to recycle. Take the seasons, for example. True, Earth has places that seem to alter very little through a year, but subtle changes in weather are both measurable and noticeable, at least to long-term residents. On Earth, you are a long-term resident, so you should be able to detect subtle changes throughout a year’s worth of seasons just as you detect subtle changes in the notes of different songs. And what about subtle changes, say, between one winter and the next, or one summer and another five years later, big symphonies of sound? “Why,” you remark, “when I was a child, I had to walk through snow up to my waist.” (Of course, you are taller now)
 
So, what’s with the weather? It’s always a topic. Does it cycle beyond the time of an individual life? And what would cause such long-separated parts of such a cycle? Could the weather be influenced by giant gravitational systems far removed from the planet itself? Enter Zhiren Joseph Wang and Xiaopei Lin, the former from the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at NC State and the latter from the Physical Oceanography Laboratory of China’s Ocean University in Qingdao. In 2015 the two published an article on magma motion and sun-moon gravitation that links both to paleoclimatic changes.* They note that paleoclimate data suggest Earth undergoes variations on the order of every 23,000 years, 40,000 years, and 100,000 years, periods associated with Sun-moon-Earth orbits and orientations (Milankovich cycles). Okay, enough of the long-winded stuff.
 
Short form: It seems possible that the Earth-moon-sun gravitational relationship affects magma motion (that’s the mushy hot stuff that emerges to become volcanic lavas) within our planet. Magma’s heat, the authors hypothesize, could be the engine that drives a long-term periodicity in climate. Climate changes, the researchers seem to argue, have external and internal drivers.
 
We don’t have to belabor that point. What we might want to note is that we live on a planet of cycles, and that might be why, in our evolutionary history, we have a tendency to do things over—and over, and over, and over. We can ask ourselves about what influences our personal cycling of emotions, ways of thinking, and preferences. Like our planet, are there two causes of our cycling? Earth is influenced by sun and moon. They impose a cycle (even if one considers the simple cycle of ocean tides). Earth’s weather, a surface process, is partly driven by the movement of something deep within that Wang and Lin tie to sun and moon.  
 
If we want to understand ourselves and if we acknowledge that we do run through cycles of various kinds, shouldn’t we, after identifying our “cycles,” ask which are driven from within and which from without? We might not be able to avoid the sources of our cycling, but we can understand them enough to make subtle changes that only we as individuals can detect just as we know when a song is original or the weather is different. 
 
* https://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2015/536829/  Astronomy and Climate-Earth System: Can Magma Motion under Sun-Moon Gravitation Contribute to Paleoclimatic Variations and Earth’s Heat?in Advances in Astronomy Volume 2015 (2015), Article ID 536829, 10 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/536829