Once a Mouse…

8 Minute Read

I saw the rain-dirty valley
You saw Brigadoon
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon

Mike Scott, The Whole of the Moon

In 1963, when I was still learning to read, my Aunt Jennie (Campbell) gave me for Christmas Marcia Brown’s 1962 Caldecott recipient Once a Mouse… Because that same Christmas, Jennie gave my siblings way cooler 1940s picture book classics by Robert McCloskey–Make Way for Ducklings and One Morning in Maine–and a just published, really weird-cool adventure called Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, I didn’t acknowledge, let alone appreciate my relatively dreary and quite non-cool gift, nor the sweetheart aunt who thought I might like it. Compared to McCloskey’s broad, bright New England vistas, Brown’s book was smallish and dark. To my six-year-old understanding, its oblique, never-before-seen-and-therefore-unworthy woodcut style illustration couldn’t touch for wondrous Sendak’s otherworldly carnival of animals. It seemed to me that even adults weren’t keen on helping me read my new and difficult-to-digest picture book. It would be decades after her death before I got an inkling that my Great Aunt Jennie, once appointed by her state’s Board of Education to set the curriculum from which millions of schoolchildren would learn to read, might have known a thing or two about children’s books, and that I ought to give her Christmas gift to me that year a second reading.

The year was 1999 and during a business process re-engineering engagement I had been thinking about big and little. Re-reading David Bohm on how the universe behaves much the same way as the sub-atomic realm despite our too quickly accepting that quantum theory applied only to the world of the very tiny, I thought of Brown’s protagonist, not a mouse, but a pensive hermit. After picking up a softbound copy (my Christmas first edition didn’t last until the New Year, an entire page ripped out in a tug-of-war that must have been over whose book was ugliest) and turning each [now] beautifully illustrated page, how ashamed I was for not realizing during what Aunt Jennie had attempted to teach me that Christmas. Her gift lay not in the smallish format, nor the too-novel-to-cherish, edge-to-edge woodcut pages, but in the now vivid tale’s profound but nuanced message, that whether big or little, the rules of the world never varied.

Before Einstein came along it was widely accepted that the large objects of Newtonian physics–think bowling balls, asteroids, planets–were not subject to the observable and seemingly random motions of subatomic particles. Instead, moderately large objects in motion remained in motion while the relatively smallest bits of matter seemed, if you could looked closely enough, to do whatever they pleased. Making a name for himself by extending the mysteries of quantum physics beyond the atomic, Einstein’s protégé David Bohm became at the end of his life, like Brown’s elderly hermit, fascinated with how the principles inherent in the big and the little were more similar than different. To Bohm, the separation of the cosmic from the quantum was not only wrongheaded, it robbed us of a fuller understanding of what we wanderers in the middle distance were capable of. To Bohm, just as the atom can reveal its mysterious inner workings to the shrewd observer, so, too, can the universe she observes.

Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.

David Bohm

The story of Once a Mouse… came to Brown from a thousand-year-old volume of Sanskrit fables called the Hitopadesa. Written by Narayana to teach young Indian princes statecraft the fables relied on the wisdom–or folly–of common animals to make their morals-of-the-story more memorable. In Brown’s retelling, while pondering the big and little of the world around him, a hermit spies a tiny mouse harassed to the brink of extinction by a large and mean-looking cat. In his mercy, the hermit turns the mouse into an even larger cat who in turn menaces its former menace. And when a meaner-looking dog wanders by, to empower the mouse-turned-cat to face off against it the hermit escalates more life-preserving transformations. Ending in the form of a ferocious tiger, the hermit’s charge, once a mouse, becomes virtually unassailable. But as invulnerability gives way to complacence, complacency to arrogance, arrogance ingratitude, the once generous hermit repents of his empathy and in the tale’s insightful conclusion … well, you’ll want to read it for yourself. And as you do, consider whether the mouse that becomes the cat, that becomes the dog, that becomes the tiger, is the real creature. Is it any of them? All of them? You decide.

***

In Elayne Finlinson’s eighth-grade English class, I wrote a short story called Don’t Make Me Bristle. It was about what happens when you put your toothbrush in the bathroom drawer at night. Did you know that in the unobservable obscurity of hidden toiletries the filaments of a toothbrush live and move and have their being? To most of us, a bathroom drawer is a bathroom drawer (except that at my house when you smuggled into the bathroom a carton of ice cream, the drawer adjacent and parallel to the door doubled as a deadbolt for when your fingers were too small to work the lock). In the infinity of all things, like a mouse capable of becoming anything a hermit saw fit to inflict upon it, a bathroom drawer was a wonderland.

Bohm called the secret life of everything its Implicate Order. The OED defines implicate, in Bohm’s context not a verb but an adjective, as “Intertwined, twisted together; also, wrapped up with, entangled or involved in.” But for Bohm the implicate order was not just an inner self hidden from those who permitted periodic glimpses of its unfolded, explicate reflection. The implicate–here used as a noun–was also an organismic whole unto itself. According to that same dictionary, a black box is “a device that performs intricate functions but whose internal mechanism may not readily be inspected or understood.” Inside a magician’s black box—her hat—is darkness too opaque to pierce when looking for a rabbit. But with a topsy-turvy flourish, she also places that same hat functionally upon her head. Despite everything that might be enfolded within it, a hat is still a hat. Likewise, the something-filled ‘vacuum’ of space, magically conjurable by the curious, is still ‘just space’. Even when we deconstruct it down to its last quark, rolled-up space has volume, a handle, meaning, truth, and a unique place in the implicate order of things.

***

What we become naturally but invisibly good at will perform for us on demand but never tell us, nor move us to question, how that happens.

In the early days of AI, I was asked by Universal Studios in Los Angeles to develop a predictive system that could suggest which film directors, actors, and marketing strategies they should combine to produce, time and again, a guaranteed Hollywood blockbuster. (Really? Yes, really.) The same industry that knows implicitly that the transition between acts one and two of a screenplay occurs on or about the 27-minute mark of any feature film hired me to discover what they must have known by then with certainty. But what we ought to delight in when asking an AI to make certain choices for us is that after years of real-life, heuristic experience, there is inside our own black boxes a seeming infinity of deeply compiled, mysteriously enfolded, information/knowledge/wisdom that we already ‘know’ but somehow cannot conjure on demand. The non-Hollywood blockbusters we attempt to produce we also know, somewhere deep, how to direct, act, and take to market.

When we first learn to drive, for example, everything is before us–the strange gadgets we hold in our hands to steer and change gears, the hundred-hundred rules of the road, oncoming cars headed straight at us when we engage a left turn into their path. But the more we drive, bit by bit all those detailed sensory inputs compress themselves into a corner of our brain we never again conscientiously invoke. Without realizing that what was constantly before us now lurks in a black box silently within us–mine feels like it’s somewhere behind my left ear–like tradition, culture, or last night’s no longer recallable dream, we suddenly drive without the aid of explicate thinking. What we become naturally but invisibly good at will perform for us when we need it but never tell us, nor move us to question, how that happens.

To Bohm, just as the electrons previously thought to encircle the nucleus of an atom are now said only to tend to exist, and only in the nanosecond we look at them, the universe and everything in it reveal themselves to us on what we mistakenly believe to be our own terms. Like the atom, whose behavior when the bathroom drawer is closed can never be fully known to us, our implicate selves are a black box that can neither be seen nor fiddled with inside their implicate, inaccessible whole. Only as we approach and operate on their explicate brokenness–the bits we can see and almost touch–can we hope first to understand both the temporal inner workings of our implicate identity–our past, present, and future–and digging deeper, to tease into the light additional dimensions into which we dare to deconstruct ourselves.

One popular epistemology, or way of dividing to conquer our inner selves, is to break apart Being into buckets we euphemistically refer to as our bodies, our minds, and our hearts. This is not to say that the physical, intellectual, and emotional aspects of our identity are all there is to us, or that those three dimensions are any more differentiated from each other than the artificial (and some scientists and philosophers would even argue arbitrary) separation of Time into the past, present, and future. (Temporal and elemental wholeness and their too easily fragmented bits will be recurring themes in this blog.) For now, viewing the magician’s hat as both wardrobe and implement of concealment begs the question: when we change, which bits of us do the changing? Is it our bodies? Our minds? Our presents? Our futures? (Spoiler alert. I currently lean into the idea that to change anything, we must first change everything. Big help, n’est-ce pas?)

Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. 

David Bohm

The first several posts of this blog have been a warm-up of the idea that like a mouse who becomes a cat (and then a dog, and so on), we are all of us comprised of multiple parts. To begin the warm-up I chose as parts the popular delineations of Time. Communication Theory is about my early inability to declare the past. Failure Is Not an Option mourns my struggle to diagnose the present. The Proper Aim of Art relays what I took as a personal invitation from a well-known futurist to foretell my future. And in at At-One-[Mo]Ment I attempt to cobble all three temporal explicatives–the past, the present, and the future–into their implicate state of wholeness. (There are more ways to divide time than into that which lies beyond us in either of just two directions. See, for example, Alan Lightman’s creative masterpiece Einstein’s Dreams. But anxious to get past what amounts to an infinity of creation, I have stuck for now to popular metaphysics.)

But in this assay, while the interventions of Brown’s hermit traversed time’s arrow, the intended target of his deconstruction was the mouse’s soul. Like a magician’s hat, a bathroom drawer, or the vastness of space, we are each of us possessed of non-temporal parts that, like Einstein’s actual dreams, might divide and subdivide forever. And I’m not just talking about bone, wit, and will.

The next eight assays turn away from Hippocrates’ dimensions of Time toward Aristotle’s elements of Being. Moving up and down on Hayakawa’s ladder of abstraction—think big to little and back again—and Narayan’s self-deconstruction—think tiger, cat, and mouse, both separately and at the same time—in the next several assays I begin to fiddle across my unfolded black box before it re-enfolds itself. That sounds a lot of mambo jambo but here are in order the bits I will take on next.

Time’s Gravity and ->Body<->Mind<->Heart-> will first lay down the rules of elemental engagement by stripping Time from Being, connecting Being to Change, and introducing the spin cycle of Aristotle’s Big Five: Bone, Wit, Gut, Spark, and Mystery. Next, Rock, Paper, Sisyphus will explore what happens when I attempt to change my own earth, i.e., my body. (Not pretty, but hopefully instructive.) Mark’s Bookshelf plums the airy mental models we might consider rigid, but which turn out to be infinitely malleable. Alcestis Beats the Devil delves deep into watery and emotion-driven decision-making. Performing on Broadway is my attempt to explain what happens when we fire up and act–literally–the part we wish to play in the world. Dark Matters toys with the hidden universe as it toys back with us in mysterious ways. Putting Humpty Dumpty–all five elements across all three temporal zones–back together, Sometimes We Change wraps up the 12th introductory section of this blog.

By then I will have hypothesized that to change anything, like Brown’s hermit, I must repent of everything. After all, Brown titled her book ‘Once a mouse…’, an anapodoton. Like the missing conclusion of ‘When in Rome…’, Brown’s hermit is reminding us that in all ways, and at all times, each of us is ‘…always a mouse’.