Resonance

When I woke this morning, I knew that Don was already at work in the Bay Area. He had a 6:00 am call, had driven up last night and would have been looking for breakfast at some ridiculous hour. There was no way I could help. But he is never happier than when he is on set, behind a camera, and sometimes puts up with a lot to get there.

The deep harmonic between Don Starnes and myself got started over thirty years ago. We discovered it by working together, talking, and getting to know each other. I couldn’t believe it. Everything he said made sense to me. And by this time, I knew a lot of people!

Objectively, no one would have put us together. He came out of California’s San Joaquin valley, couldn’t wait to get to the Bay Area, and was already working as a cinematographer while going to San Francisco State. He had had lots of jobs in film, and then at a little tech startup help desk called Computer Hand Holding. I was there because a friend had suggested my thin background in personal computers might help. I came from Minnesota, had studied literature, and, in San Francisco, did administrative work in architectural firms. We were almost of different generations, he a very young baby boomer, while I was among the first.

When we went out for coffee, the first thing we talked about was our mutual love for Terence Malik’s film Days of Heaven, which had come out a good thirteen years before. For Don, the artistry of this film has still not been surpassed. I find it hard to name a favorite film, but this one is certainly among them. We also found we had both worked for newspapers, he as a journalist and I as a typesetter.

Thus began what I think of as a resonance between us which doesn’t quit. This is a word which is generally associated with the auditory senses, but in physics, it can also refer to the “synchronous vibration of neighboring objects.” We are finely tuned and when we waken in each other deep, full and reverberating feelings, we want to keep them going.

I think we need this sort of multi-sensory language to discuss our relations to each other. We sometimes describe the air as being thick with meaning or possibility. Thickness is a matter of dimension, but also sometimes a matter of density, as of fog. We also use it to describe a complex art work, or a tangled and potent relationship, in which people are “thick as thieves.”

As people, we are not Flat Stanley, able to be described by the five senses alone. Our presence holds our deep history, our characteristic tendencies, and our unique ways of expressing ourselves in the space we inhabit. These are modified by the degree of emotional openness we have at the time we meet each other, our feelings of safety and our sense of each other’s social standing. Our inner lives are more a measure of compatibility than anything visible.

As my friendship with Don grew there were many manifestations of the deep resonance between us. We each had an essentially Daoist sense of the world, trusting nature more than society. I loved his thick, emotional voice, which embodied his whole self. As the sweetness between us grew, I felt the bonds so strongly I needed to cut them with my tai chi sword when I had to leave him. More than once I looked in the mirror and saw, not myself, but Don Starnes.

This reflection of each other is also seen in the Hindu metaphor of Indra’s Net. In this ancient concept, each of us occupies a node on the infinite net of life, a multi-faceted jewel reflecting all the other multi-faceted points of light. Thus we see and feel our interconnection and our interdependence. 

The concept of the constantly shifting net points to change and transience in life, but since, in this case, no one really dies, the dead continue to occupy their jewel-like nodes, their influence rippling through the living. Whether seeing them in our mind’s eye, or reflected in their descendants, the vibration, the harmonic is infinite, echoing through time.

We will of course feel more resonance with certain “neighboring objects” than others. This results in couples, which leads to families. Which leads to the reproduction of human life on earth. And when we think of the infinite nature of our selves, we must surely desire to vibrate at the highest level of which we are capable, reflecting goodness and beauty back into the world.

Relationships are not crass exchanges of money and goods. They are deep-level melds. Evolution often selects for diversity. It is capricious. “Hey, I wonder what would happen if we put these two together?” The dance is infinite. Humanity comes from a long line of experiments. And we are still experimenting.

We no longer live in feudal, warring nations in which marriages carried political and social weight (though you would be forgiven for seeing Trump’s America this way!). We can make love and affinity the basis of our relations. And, as the planet probably doesn’t need more people, we can make interesting decisions about whether or not to have children. Our priorities should be with the young humans who are now on earth, not with  extra-terrestrial fantasies.

Don finds work up and down the state of California. I cannot help but worry about my road warrior, but I trust in his ability to care for himself, endlessly demonstrated in his adventurous life. I will be at home, keeping the lights on for his late-night arrival.