I.J. Ikavalko:  

Well -- I don't expect anyone to read this, it’s too long -- but… it should pass unredacted. Even under a "reading stone" -- that's a piece of beryl, used to examine text. in the Middle Ages and earlier -- even mentioned in the Old Testament... Anyway, a friend who's a book-maven talked me into visiting this book fair, whence -- in spite of best intentions -- I returned with more books incl. a copy of Valerie Plame's volume from, like 2007, with long redactions. A bit of chronology ... Some of my FHS classmates knew I'm from Finland. When I was 11 or 12, the late 1950s, my elders put me on a plane and I traveled from Helsinki to Miami FL (via Oslo, Reykjavik, New York). Douglas DC-4? 6? I forget. No adults with me. You could ask, “who does that?” – sends a kid by himself in the 1950s on a transatlantic multi-stage flight? Short answer? – there is no short answer. Making it more of an adventure, I spoke no English. A sign was pinned to my shirt, saying “If you find this kid, call the Embassy at -- .” I knew little about “the U.S.” until I made that flight. My uncle Olli was an electrical engineer who had been a sailor and had spent time in the U.S. and shared some colorful vignettes. My grandmother (Lempi Ikavalko – there’s a Wikipedia entry) was editor of a Finnish-language newspaper in Lake Worth, FL. I spent the summer. Palm trees, beaches, America. Jukeboxes. The following year, back in Finland, I became – some might say predictably -- something of a disciplinary problem. I had been at a school for talented children, from which I was now politely expelled, so the family gave in. We emigrated. *** Junior high in Duluth MN, where I fell in love (and still haven’t gotten over it, go ahead and laugh). She was pretty. I was happy. It was perfect. Then Fitchburg. Academically – average. Through it all, I remained outside social groups. Instead, without realizing it, I migrated – discovering French authors; and Zen (didn’t understand it then and don’t claim to, now). I got a guitar and listened to Bob Dylan – who, to the dismay of some, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. None of the cultural topics occupying my attention were on the school curriculum. I learned on my own about the Renaissance, Giorgione, the Baroque era. Descartes. Pascal. Leibnitz, one of the two inventors of the binary system -- Isaac Newton being the other). And Egyptian geometry. Phi... the Golden Section. Jacob Boehme – the Protestant mystic who saw God while gazing at a pewter dish... Random memory -- I painted some crazy thing on the ceiling of my bedroom, to go with the red lights of the room – a picture of the ceiling was published in the city newspaper. *** In sophomore year, I joined the FHS swim team, eventually becoming one of the captains, along with John Marion and John Sultan. The latter, now Emma Marie, was religious -- with a real inner strength you could sense. I subjected John to ridiculous arguments which I now regret, about logic. But I think with affection back to my teammates and swim practice in the YMCA on Wallace. The Doff Fitchburg had a Finnish paper, the Raivaaja, where they let me do some work. But -- and I had forgotten about this, really -- I also got a factory job. I was hired as a “doff”— to run a yarn spooler (or winder), a long monster of a machine with whirring spindles on both sides. When it starts with a sudden tug, some of the spindles cause the yarn to break. The doff runs and fixes broken threads while the bobbins keep spinning. A factory floor scene right out of Charles Dickens. The plant manager, whom I remember well, sweated and smoked as he looked me over during the interview, skeptical -- but he hired me. Eight-hour shifts while in my freshman year at FHS. It’s true. Got off at 10 PM or 10:30. No wonder my studies were "curtailed." Talk about learning. Why did I get a factory job? At a car lot not far from where I lived (Marshall St.) I had seen this red Jaguar sedan. It had leather seats and a lacquered steering wheel. -- The look, ambiance, and fragrance of the interior, were amazing. Then -- or so I reasoned in my ruthless teenage logic -- I could drive back to Duluth to see the girl. No plan past that... Well it was an idiotic plan. I didn't get back to Minnesota in that red Jaguar, though no one can say I didn't even try. And the girl? -- she didn't know anything about this drama. We corresponded, but I said nothing about my mad plans... You know, always, always deliver on expectations, and somehow I knew not to set up any... Eventually, senior year at FHS, I tried to get into a couple of colleges that were out of my reach. But I didn’t understand how things worked or listen to people who did know. After graduation, I moved to New York. Obvious. *** But you know – behind the little wheels we see, are bigger ones. I found work in proofreading, editing, writing. At a car magazine; then a publisher of military jet aircraft manuals; and, incredibly, at the NCCC (National Council of the Churches of Christ) who published some 30 Christian journals. I told them during the interview I was an atheist -- they hired me anyway. I learned about theology, ways of thinking about God and “interrogating the human state” as a theologian might say. Along the way, new vocabulary (exegetics! hermeneutics!). I was made editor of the in-house journal. They took a bunch of us to see a play by Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) and it made an impression on yours truly. From New York, I moved to Detroit. Wayne State University. I had a 4.0 GPA, wrote some papers, met a few professors. Dr. Bernard Levine, a genius (and I don't use that word casually), Yeats scholar -- he and his wife became dear lifelong friends. He just passed away in Dec. 2021. I also plunged into "logical space" -- as the academic Ludwig Wittgenstein might call the grid underlying language and mathematical notation. Today, that logical infrastructure is being revised, because binary units don’t "natively" support quantum "both 0 and 1" states. Wittgenstein was part of the true beginnings of AI – what later became Artificial Intelligence & 'machine-readable" statements. The fabric of intelligent space. But I was impatient -- feeling that my teachers took neither metaphysics nor science seriously, and ignored “outrageous problems” inherent in formal logic etc etc. Of course, I was being an idiot. But… I was interested in perception in relation to physics – “the whole stack” as someone might say today. Another random memory point: during this period, I had drafted a short work about consciousness and what (as I later learned) physicist Erwin Schrödinger designated “the superposition.” – Today, that theory is more than ever an important part of physics. But I had no formal grounding (which did not stop me, later, from being the “science guy” at a nanoscience investment fund). My work from my college days was not published, and the MS was lost. *** Meanwhile, I met someone remarkable (but here I have to protect her privacy). Moved with her back to New England, took a job as a recruiter of computer engineers in Hartford. Somehow, I received some recognition. It was dawn of the “microcomputer.” The IBM PC ... business was being migrated. Stanford and MIT loomed large ... A software startup made me a partner. Originally funded by a large insurance company, the firm had drifted to the verge of bankruptcy. The original founder was a technical wizard without even a high school diploma. It didn't matter. His talent was obvious. Eventually I was made equity partner. Our cash-poor venture was pitched to financial powerhouses emerging in Silicon Valley. We had $300 left in our bank account and maybe a dozen employees, when I flew to Palm Springs (CA), to an elite venture capital conference. I elbowed my way in (no invitation), meeting people I'd only read about in The Wall Street Journal. Among them were the progenitors of "microcomputer" investm...Expand for more