The references to remarks, actions, and ideas of famous people are real. The story itself is completely fabricated.

out there

I was talking to a friend as we were driving down a gravel road somewhere in rural Idaho. According to our map, the road should have connected with a state highway that would take us to Yellowstone National Park. At a certain point, we determined that we were not where we had hoped to be, and that we were about to cross the border in to Utah. Wherever we were, we speculated, it was certainly "out there." We went on to discuss the ramifications of the phrase, and the different contexts in which it had already been used and applied.

We ended up driving a long time before we figured out where we were, other than in the middle of nowhere, which is one of the many kinds of "out there." We took interstate 15 south through Salt Lake City, totally skipping Yellowstone, and ended up spending the night in Mexican Hat, Utah, right at the border with Arizona. One of the things that we talked about involved using the words "out there" the way jazz musicians did in the 50's and 60's. A soloist who had just played a particularly soaring kind of solo, or an improvisation that pushed the envelope of the musical form was said to have gotten "out there." Rock musicians used the same term in the 70's, and although it was occasionally meant in the same context, it really was about something else.

In the late 60's, Miles Davis had a guitar player in his band named John McLaughlin, who was renowned by his peers for his ability to get way "out there," or to play "far out." In reality, McLaughlin was a kind of musical spiritualist who internalized his playing and did what a lot of musicians call "getting inside of the note." There was something meditative about what he did, and Miles said his playing was so far out, that he had come back from another direction, and was now "far in." In fact, on of the pieces on the recording "Tribute to Jack Johnson," was called "Far In." One of many cyclical patterns in both nature, and in automobile tires, which by this time, had stopped turning.

One of the implied meanings of "out there" pertains to thinking. Many times, it is meant as a compliment for clever people who are able to push the envelope of thought in a constructive way that although unorthodox, turns out to be very useful and beneficial. History is littered forward thinking people who were though to have gone around the bend. Nehls Bohr, who was a spokesman for the point of view that although the universe exists around us in a plethora of mathematical precision, that the math for the likelihood of future events is utterly chaotic, and unpredictable. This would be an example of someone who was out there, but whose thinking was ultimately beneficial to the rest of us.

Another of the implied meanings involves the thinking and behavior of those who seem to be tuned to alternate frequencies, for those whose thinking is both unorthodox, and ultimately, not particularly beneficial or useful to much of any one. "That guy," a person might say, "is totally out there." Meaning that in effect, the person is nuts.

Colloquially, it is often said of people who are rambling on while under the influence of marijuana, that they should be ignored as, "like, he's just totally out there." Have I mentioned artists yet? Was that really even necessary? That you are here? This was an implicit point of the current muddled dialog. I persist.

And in terms of attempting to understand meaning, what direction is "out" anyway? The implication of pronoun positioning, is the "out" is the inverse, or opposite of "in." If you are in the house, you can go out. That being the case, what exactly is it that we are in, from whose perspective traveling elsewhere means to go out? Out from being in where, exactly, I wonder? When I was a kid, we said that astronauts and space men were traveling way out there, with the implied "in" being inside the atmosphere, or within the gravitational control of the earth. Out there in this context, would mean outer space. Which may bring us back to the John Mclaughlin thing, but on a more quantum physics sort of way, so never mind.

Which brings us back to thoughts regarding point of view -- That the point of view of someone who is "out there" is neither the oracle of some kind of genius, nor the tragedy of some form of supreme foolishness, but rather, a point of view outside the envelope itself. Such a point of view might be the point of view of a god, or a space traveler, or some kind of sentient awareness existing separate from what we perceive from our point of view in the three dimensions of our universe that we can see.

Then again, you've got your artists.