January 21 was the anniversary of my father-in-law’s passing in 2002. He was not yet my father-in-law at the time. He was my girlfriend’s father. Catherine and I had been dating for almost four years by then. So while I got to know Anthony, I didn’t get to know him as well as I knew my mother-in-law, Frances, who passed in 2020.

I’ve been thinking about Anthony a lot lately. He took a liking to me pretty quickly, which I was thankful for. The father of an only child can be a frightening figure in a young suitor’s life, and I tread very lightly. But he put me at ease for the most part. He had his quirks, his nuances, but he must’ve trusted me because he allowed his most precious creation to go out galavanting with me (even after he told her never to bring home a guy with long hair and an earring. I had those, plus tattoos–the trifecta). He gave off a Joe Pesci vibe, but not violent Goodfellas Pesci… just a nice New Yawka from the neighborhood.

So while I didn’t get to know Anthony as well as I would have liked, he left a lasting impression on me. He loved lighthouses. We need a guiding light right now.There was a particular quotation that he liked. I remember he had a print-out of it posted on a bulletin board or refrigerator door. The quote is attributed to science fiction writer Robert Heinlein: Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

I had always liked that quote. It scratched that righteously sardonic itch that I’ve always had. It felt like a great way of demeaning people with whom I disagreed. I had heard the quote before I met Anthony, so seeing it among his things made me feel an even greater connection with him.

But one thing that always bothered me about the quote was the very thing that attracted me to it: the righteously biting nature. For while I’ve been known to have a razor sharp tongue, most verbal battles-won are pyrrhic victories. They feel good in the moment, but afterwards all that’s left is blood on the tracks. The emptiness you were trying to fill remains a rotting sinus.

I didn’t like that it used the metaphor of a pig for an ideological adversary. It seemed like a bad-faith way of looking at disagreement, a mind-set that I fear underlies most of today’s atmosphere of intransigence. Heinlein was a complicated dude as it was. He wrote some wildly inventive sci-fi with an interesting style, but he was a bit of a proto-libertarian with some strange views on citizenship and rights.

But putting aside the semiotic complications of the pig metaphor, there’s a more sensitive meaning that I’ve always grokked, just slightly below my conscious understanding: the pig is as the pig does. He could have chosen another, less symbolically-loaded animal, but I’m not sure if it would have been as powerful. The pig metaphor makes us stop and take notice. But it carries quite a payload, this Trojan boar.

The pig don’t give a rat’s ass. This is important. The pig will eat whatever it wants, root around in mud… there’s a reason for the idiom “happy as a pig in sh!t.” Who am I to intrude on the pacific pen of our porcine friend?

And pigs are extremely intelligent. You can’t hypnotize them with a chalk line. We can probably learn a thing or two from an animal that can be as happy in a pigsty as it would be in Green Acres.

The moral is, pigs don’t sing. Just like eels don’t climb trees. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, but there’s some things they just ain’t able to try… (my apologies to Oscar Hammerstein II). So why waste time trying to force someone into a mindset of which he or she is incapable of perceiving? It’s like trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results… if only there were an old idiom about that…

Since the explosion of social media, an explosion that happened long after Heinlein and not terribly long after Anthony left us, we have been trying to teach pigs to sing. Sometimes I’m the teacher, sometimes I’m the pig. There’s a deeper analysis in here, but I’m going long and I may as well save that deep dive for another day. I’m seeing connections with Timothy Leary’s circuits of consciousness that I learned about from reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising. If you’re coming at me from the 2nd circuit (Emotional-Territorial) and I’m trying to speak to you on the 4th (Socio-Sexual), we’re not going to connect.

So that’s the critique. We’ve identified the problem (or at least a problem). Now what? That’s where the work lies. How do we communicate in a way that bridges this divide? You have the authoritarians looking at the world in an Emotional-Territorial, us-vs.-them manner. They see the world as transactional and zero-sum. They fear the other and lock on to an alpha dog to protect them from all anxiety. Then you have people coming from the higher circuits like Symbolic-Conceptual, Socio-Sexual, Neurosomatic, and Neuroelectric.

While the first two circuits (Bio-Survival and Emotional-Territorial) ground us in survival and social dynamics, these four propel us further: the Symbolic-Conceptual Circuit allows for abstract thought and language, the Socio-Sexual for navigating morality and culture, the Neurosomatic unlocks heightened sensory experience, and the Neuroelectric opens the doors to intuition and non-linear thought. Beyond these, the final two circuits delve into the esoteric: the Neurogenetic Circuit taps into ancestral memory and the collective unconscious, while the Psycho-Atomic Circuit allows for experiences of cosmic consciousness and unity with the universe. They nest like Russian dolls. The point is evolving past level 2, where much of political discourse lies.Thusly, there is nothing inherently wrong with the 1st and 2nd circuits. They are foundational. But if you’re still swimming in those ponds, you’ve missed the opening to a much larger sea.

I come back to the lighthouse and a certain twinkle in Anthony’s eye. He presented as a simple, down-to-earth, Italian-American Bronxite. He retired from the US Postal Service, he liked jazz music, electronics, watching sports and comedies. But there was an inner wisdom of which I was only beginning to scratch the surface when he so suddenly departed.

But I believe the soul is eternal. I’m really starting to think that the way we experience linear time is an emergent function of our incarnation on this 4-dimensional plane (3 spatial, 1 temporal) and that reality is much more beautifully sublime… if we could only see it. That belief tells me that even though I only knew Anthony for 4 years, his wisdom, his smile, his Being imprinted on me and I can still commune with him the same way I can commune with any soul that existed or will exist in this 4D reality. Because if you split the atom enough times to get down to the quantum foam, we’re all it.

But I digress. Anthony is a spirit guide and just might teach this pig to sing.

We must all find a way to cut through the noise to find the signal. How? Get out of our own heads. Listen to understand–not necessarily agree, just understand. See and hear each other. Realize that we’re not teaching a pig to sing. It only looks like a pig when you forget there’s a human inside. Once you stop teaching that pig to sing and you start seeing the human on the other side, things change. Will it fix everything? Of course not. But how’s the other way going?