Incommunicado

 Marcus Alden Meredith

July 7, 2025

Incommunicado

Research and Reading

“Where the Hell have you been?” is a question I get asked a lot lately. Since becoming self-employed, I find that there are times when the juice for writing just isn’t in the head and I find myself in need of lots and lots and lots of reading. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, I do (I don’t think I’d take up the mantle of a writer if I didn’t), but sometimes you just need to take some deep dives into the subjects that interest you so that you can come back refreshed and full of vigor. “ So what have you been reading?” Oh Hell! Where do I start…

Ok, here goes…

First, I finally found a psychologist who has been able to come up with as complete a description of who I am as far as personality type that I have ever read about. The Joy of Not Belonging by Rami Kazinski was one of those books you don’t read but vacuum down in a couple of days. The basic premise of the text is that there is a third personality type, not introvert, not extrovert, that needs to be examined and studied seriously; the Otrovert (meaning one who sees in an other or different manner).  First, how do you know what one is and if you are one? Well, Kazinski was smart enough to design a test which he includes in the back of the book. It’s 40 questions you rank as 1 - Very strongly disagree up to 7 - Very strongly agree. the questions vary but in the end you add up the numbers and if you score above a certain amount, you are an Otrovert. There’s a lot that goes into being an otrovert (remember this is a whole book on the subject) but basically the quiet, studious kid who everyone thought was pretty cool but who you never really saw at social gatherings even though he/she is really good with people one on one (you like him!) but never was a party animal and always seemed to like being alone a lot more than other people… well, there’s your otrovert. That really creative person you know who is never part of the party scene or seemed to always give an Irish exit when they were at a party, well chances are pretty good there this otrovert type of person. The book itself was a quick read and quite readable and if you, like I am, seemed always to want to be an outsider but one that everyone was okay with, yeah you should read this book.

Next, I got deeply onto learning chess. Yeah, yeah… I’ve played it before and know more than most but never really took the time to train myself to play the game. Then, by chance, I spied a chess lesson on the language app Duolingo. I’ve been on Duo for close to 5 years now, learning French, Italian, and Latin but the chess part really intrigued me. So, I gave it a shot… Wow. The daily practice upped my game in a few months tremendously! At one point the app will force you to play games against it in a 20 minute-timed fashion. I’m currently up to and ELO of 1212 (that’s a statistical ranking of your ability based on how many games you played as well as your win-loss record against the computer) which puts me up to the intermediate level. I was wise enough to start out the lessons at the raw beginner level but after the 800 level, I started to slow way down, make more mistakes, and learn to recognize patterns a lot better than the raw beginner I was. It’s been so much fun that now keep a chess board out in the living room, have been reading some chess openings books, and have been perusing the chess channels on YouTube to gain more familiarity. Being the OCD type of person I can be (I think most people trained in the sciences can be this way) I’ve really enjoyed starting to see the patterns in chess and going back to watch The Queen’s Gambit I actually started to see them in the series… really cool! I can now confidently state when I see a Queen’s Gambit, King’s Gambit, Ruy Lopez, Scandinavian, or a Sicilian Defense not to mention a Queen’s Gambit Declined or an Alpin Variation! Yeah, I’m becoming a chess nerd, so sue me. *Smile*

But my real Achilles heal is my love of history. When I was a boy in middle school my father’s father got me hooked on the history bug and I’ve been infected ever since. And DAMN AMAZON BOOKS…. their suggestions algorithm is so good that I can hardly contain myself sometimes. They got their first hit in on me this year with the suggestion of The Golden Road by William Dalrymple. It’s about the history of trade with the Indian Subcontinent and it’s influence on wide ranging cultures from ancient Rome to Tang dynasty China to Japan and the Khmer Empire! To think that one of the largest stashes of Roman coins found by archeologists was in the southwest of India; it just blew my mind. Then the influence of Indian civilization on astronomy, mathematics, religion, etc. One of the books mentioned was by Violet Moller and called The Map of Knowledge but out of order I picked up another book of hers titled Inside The Stargazer’s Palace. It’s about the rise of talented craftsmen and scientists in Northern Europe in the late Renaissance 1500’s mostly with people like John Dee and Gerardus Mercator of map fame. It’s my read right now before I hit the other book, but what’s most fascinating to me is how little of this is taught in our schools… just a freaking shame that I had to wait until my 60’s and retirement to learn what I should have been taught in high school. 

The aforementioned book gave me the impetus to see if some of those old instruments like astrolabes and sextants and lunar volvelles were still something that people made and I could use. [ You’re wondering what the hell these instruments are… I highly recommend that you Google them and look at pictures and descriptions] I first acquired a mariner’s sextant and have successfully learned how to “shoot” the Sun and Moon and get their elevations in degrees (or at least as best I can, I can’t see a horizon with all the houses around). Then using a volvelle to use The Big Dipper to tell time, or one to tell the phases of the Moon, length of the day was a blast. But the piece de resistance has been learning to use a fairly modern version of an astrolabe to get sunrise, sunset, the equation of time for sundials, and the rising and setting times for stars and planets! It’s amazing how innovative and inventive our ancestors were… I continue to be truly astonished.

At the same time, my violin lessons started getting interesting and I began to progress enough to start to learn some small concerto’s by various composers like Seitz and Vivaldi. I’m not yet over all the bad teaching I got from my previous instructor but I am making progress and the violin is fun again. I’m also trying to keep up with my piano practice even though that is generally a lot easier for me (I started learning when I was 8, so go figure). But practice never really ends for a musician to remain proficient and I have a set of pieces I want to have memorized for performance purposes… so, practice, practice, practice. In addition, I never really thought I could be a visual artist except that at this stage in my life I have far more patience than previous incarnations of “me” has ever enjoyed. So, on this note, I started investigating drawing and art videos on YouTube… man! THAT was a rabbit hole I have yet to reach the bottom of! I’ve spent money I reserved for books to get some basic supplies for drawing and even purchased a Camera Lucida for making my drawings better (thanks to the history I’ve been reading, I discovered that these types of instruments were in common use by the Masters of the arts like Vermeer and Rembrandt… so, no guilt there, just copying the Masters). It’s been amazing to realize that I possess skills that I had no knowledge of, especially since in my family my mother was the artist. The explorations and practices have been illuminating and enlightening… I can’t wait to do more.

Such is the life of a raging autodidact who works for himself and has free reign to explore all aspects and corners of the Universe he sees fit. Nature abhors a vacuum and that trite phrase has never been more on the spot than now for me. What once was or could have been endless hours of mind-numbing slavery to The Screen(s) has been taken up by a renewed and reinvigorated zeal for learning… but learning what I want to learn. And this has lead me to have a strong and serious re-evaluation of what I think is the plus/minus of our educational system. But THAT… that will have to wait until the next essay. À bientot!