Fallin’ Rain
I grabbed dinner at the Ute recently and ran into an old climbing friend. We spent over an hour comparing notes on a psychology professor at CC and reflecting on the demerits of the Block Plan, a way of learning in which you devote your time and attention to a single class for three and a half weeks. Focusing on one thing at a time mostly tickled my brain in the right way, but I sometimes wonder if I retained as much compared to peers who studied on more traditional terms.
I also believe the best thinking can arise from drawing insights across disciplines. While not impossible on the Block Plan, it may be less likely to occur when deeply immersed in just one subject. A good example is where nihilism (philsophy) and entropy (physics) meet. I escaped both high school and college without taking a formal physics class—I was relieved and boastful at the time but regretted it as soon as I started climbing on sandstone—so I best remember the concept of entropy from the classic, Annie Hall. Woody Allen’s character is seen in flashback as an adolescent refusing to do his homework because the universe is expanding, aka: exercising a tendency toward maximum chaos and destruction. He is stuck on the futility of his existence given this reality. His mother is right to point out the problem of scale, even if her response—”Brooklyn is not expanding!”—is cosmically incorrect. Entropy is a phenomenon occuring at such a slow pace relative to our lifetimes that it is practically imperceptible, meaning Alvy should suck it up and do his homework.
But when acts of “senseless violence” occur twice in the same day (“We interrupt this broacast of the Evergreen High School shooting to bring you news of a second school shooting at Utah Valley University”), we feel we are confronting this disorder in real time. While we might disagree on the specific call to action this has engendered, we are alike in our desire to sensemake.
Gabriel Kelley and Dylan LeBlanc’s rich and melodic cover of “Fallin’ Rain” (cue the trickle of keys at 2:06 and 2:53) has given me comfort where there is little but a cleansing rain to be had: “And there's no place on this planet / Where peace can be found.” Written by Link Wray of “Rumble” (1958) fame and first released in 1971, the acoustic guitar and trenchant lyrics reverberate into the present moment. The original also prominently features the guiro, a constant percussive element that grounds us, as the song has no chorus. We hear it at the beginning (0:14) of Kelley and LeBlanc’s version as well. I am glad they referenced it, but it is not the star of the show as it was for Wray. That honor belongs to our stringed instruments.
If you are interested in revisiting the concept of entropy, I highly this episode from Veritasium and this article on finding meaning and morality “in the heat death of [our] universe.”