Michael O. Flanagan – 50th Reunion Essay

Michael O. Flanagan

507 Tulane Place NE

Albuquerque, NM 87106-1344

flanagan44@msn.com

505-415-6278

Spouse(s): Dianna Byrnes (1969 – 1980); Valerie Jill Young (1989 – present)

Education: University of New Mexico School of Medicine: M.D. 1983

National Service: Navigator: US Air Force 1971 – 76

Career: Neurobiology/Biochemistry graduate student: (UNM) 1979 – 80; Psychiatry Resident: (UNM) 1983 – 85; Neurology Research Fellow (U. Otago) 1988 – 90; Medical Practitioner, Albuquerque, NM 1991 – 2006; Student of the Universe (still active)

Avocations: understanding people and the world and trying to find out the truth; music

College: Branford

54 Years in 500 Kaleidoscopic Words

First day: No hooded scholars with candles in turrets, bragging upperclassmen in cutoffs in the linen line, The Commons, Wright Hall, Yale Station, roommates, we’re all foreigners to each other. Tom, slow down, I can hardly understand you. Carlos can’t understand the Chinese math teacher.

Education: 45% academic; 55% super-experiential. Music: Yale Precision Marching Band; starting the YSO; Collegium Musicum; Bulent Arel (harmony instructor): “A life experience is worth 10,000 pictures.” Chemistry: you can’t do Schrödinger’s equation on a test without practicing (beg two points from the TA); Anthropology: Bugger writing footnotes with a typewriter (quick karma: “WF” from “Leopard Popsicle”): switch to Philosophy (more up my alley anyway): Margaret Mead’s gift of my highest grade; Wm. Sloane Coffin’s pastoral support; drifting in and out of the postprandial darkness to the magnificence of Scully’s lectures. G. F. W. Hegel in the expert hands of J. N. Findlay; Husserl from the mouth of David Carr; etiquette instruction from Mme. Vetö; francophilia and Rollo May with J. P. Trinkhaus; Prof. Schrader as a master and instructor.

I regret having spent so much precious effort trying to succeed at academics. Names and faces waft through the veils of time: once one begins to remember, the stream widens and deepens in a marvelous flow of image and sound.

Mozart Requiem on tour with Glorious Apollo and Connecticut College (Libera me, Domine); 1968 Concert Band tour; Elihu Yale’s grave; Heineken standchen; my first trip to Frankfurt (to be repeated several times in the Air Force); Innsbruck; Zürich; Basel; Nancy; Lichtenstein; Spa; Amsterdam. Graduation to “Crown Imperial” (another Anglophile connection).

My friends come to New Mexico for a wedding (mine; too earnest to submit to a stag party)—the beginning of the end of friendships formed at Yale. (The marriage lasted eleven and a half years.) A year at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley (as much Telegraph Avenue as St. Paul and the apostles). Premed, nondegree at UNM; drafted; joined USAF—navigator; storm chaser in Guam; C-5s at Dover… med school: seven years at UNM (time off to bury my father and delve into biochemistry (don’t ignore your weaknesses) and neurobiology). Start psychiatry residency; drop out; go to Otago, New Zealand, for neurology research—Glaxo phase III Imitrex. Back to Albuquerque (married again—29 years so far); ADHD clinic 11 yrs.

Yale—its significance to me? Words, ideas, concepts, patterns, prototypes and stereotypes. Sharing space with movers, shakers: stirred as much by heroes from the past: Russell’s skepticism, St. Exupéry’s optimism, Teilhard de Chardin’s foresight, Kierkegaard’s neuroticism—counterbalances to counterculture, inoculations against plodding post-modernism. Since being charged with leading the inattentive back to the nonexistent “normal” fold, I have been grateful for what little I was able to take away from alma mater in the way of scholarly prowess. It continues to be my work to compare and contrast traditional understanding with experiential knowledge of reality’s mysterious catacombs. I spend my days exploring integral nonduality, consciousness, and social expressions of truth relative to essence.