Tinker, Tailor—and Notes Taker

We watched the last disk of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with Alec Guinness working in splendid company. The book was published in 1974, made into the miniseries in 1979; the Cold War was still lingering on, in other words, and the Tenth Crusade had not yet begun. The experience of that series, which I followed up with starting to read an old copy of Smiley’s People (1979), left its mark on my sleeping self. The works of Le Carré serve as reminders of how society operated at certain levels in the twentieth century, best rendered as dark, dark. It occurred to me this morning, shaking off the shadows as the sun labored to shine, that in the very far away future, by contrast, the twentieth will be remembered as a fabulous and magical time owing to the Twins: Technology and Oil.

Another note occurred as we were watching the segment where the “mole” offers an explanation for his treason to Queen and Country to George Smiley. In the 1970s, quite obviously, the great paralysis that had gripped the world with the Capitalist-Commie polarization, lasting from 1945 right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, had temporarily preserved a widespread perception that civilization was still something real—rather than, let us say, a lifestyle choice; and that it mattered which side you were on though both were monstrous. That civilization was in major crisis, and right on the brink of a precipice, was clearly present in Le Carré’s mind. But it still mattered enough to write about. Interesting how, since then, everything has…how should I put it? Well, how everything since has come so visibly unraveled.

Lilac Bush Acclimated

Our lilac bush arrived as a little thing on Mother’s Day in 2010. It was then in bloom. Indeed I have a picture of it blooming taken, before it was planted, because a butterfly had landed on it to get some nourishment in the early season. Plants are sometimes seriously traumatized after their passage through the Commercial System to their intended home in the Real World. This happened to our lilac bush. It failed to provide flowers in 2011 and again in 2012, but this year, finally—having grown nearly triple in size—it finally feels at home and this Spring returned to its natural cycle.

A Living Laptop?

Since our retirement, roughly—we ignored them altogether during the many decades of our active lives—we’ve gone through relatively brief periods of engagement with crossword puzzles. It all began one time during a late fall vacation near Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes resort. We rented a house there on Glen Lake and used to solve the easy puzzles that came with the local paper which we worked on the lake shore itself with breakfast—and the later, laid out on the sand of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Yes. Michigan has a West Coast too. This madness soon escalated. My Mother’s eightieth birthday was approaching. I decided to make a crossword puzzle for her—and the extended family—of the size and complexity typical of the New York Times Sunday version. In no time at all I was in deep trouble—but Brigitte then joined the effort and we spent much of that vacation—and also some time after coming home again—creating the puzzle. Thus began our “cooperative” approach to this game. The puzzle was a great success—and taught us what it takes to make these wondrous art-for-art’s-sake artefacts.

We entered another period like that a few days ago, having decided to enjoy early spring evenings doing something other than watching movies. Now, of course, in this relentlessly pragmatic era, the pure enjoyment of solving puzzles must be, absolutely must be, justified by such motivations as keeping Alzheimer’s at bay—although, sure enough, some ultra-stupid techno-guru urges the elderly to play computer games instead. Not so for us. We enjoy crosswords—as we enjoy our own Olympic style MyWord (on  sheets of our own creation—with eleven letter words being entirely acceptable along with the shorter ones). We also still play crosswords cooperatively, working on separate sheets of the same game and helping each other.  No ego games here. The pleasure comes when we’ve done the thing with never more help than using an ordinary dictionary.

As in the past so in the present. We are again rediscovering the cunning ways of crossword puzzle makers. Most puzzles are quite easy—if the clues are straight-forward. To make a puzzle difficult, make the clues as deceptively vague as possible. Last night one clue resisted us to the very end. It was “Old laptop instruments.” Such a clue—once it has been penetrated—teaches deeper lessons, namely that most of us, most of the time, have a rigidly limited framework of associations when seeing a word. Laptop, for us, meant a little computer, and we never got past that—until, at last, with the help of other words the answer itself was simply there, on the paper. The cunning crossword maker, in this case one Randolph Ross, had used the word “LYRES” and clued it with the deceptive “laptop” clue. At once I made notes in my still existing Crossword Notebook. Use the clue “A living laptop?” (that question mark is a dead giveaway, of course). And for the answer put in the four-letter “BABY.”

Avaunt, Alzheimer’s! Avaunt!

Some Cardinals are Hatched

One such lives in a little nest built deep inside our by now tree-sized forsythia shrub. Brigitte discovered it the other evening and then, as we alertly watched in the still mildly glowing darkness, we saw its mother coming home and just made out her form bent down, feeding her off-spring. Both mother and chick have brilliantly red beaks. The sex of the chick is still undetermined. I tried my best today with ladder and such, but the nest’s too deep to permit a photograph, hence I bring an image of a “juvenile” from the Internet IBC Bird Collection (link). Having just recently dispatched Castor and Pollux, the butterflies, we are delighted to welcome Cardinals, no less, to Rancho Mariposa. The birds are, formally, Cardinalis cadinalis. Now there is a bioname that’s easy to remember. The song of these birds is stunningly sweet, especially in the gathering dark, very close to us just above our heads, as we sit on these very stained white plastic chairs and the sun is about to set.

Augeas’ Immortal Cattle

Yet another story in the papers of toweringly complex corruption in our financial sector brought to mind the stables of Augeas—and, not coincidentally, the absence, no matter how searchingly one looks, of any figure as potently large as Hercules. But our discussion lead me to look up the story of Hercules’ sixth labor. It had made a vivid impression on me reading it as a child—so much so that the mental images I had then formed were back, pristine. But back in those days an important, and in a way amusing, feature of the story did not register in my young mind—or was, perhaps omitted from the account I read. As the Wikipedia article puts it, “the livestock were divinely healthy (immortal) and therefore produced an enormous quantity of dung.” The emphasis is mine. That had us laughing. All things have a bright and a dark side, you might say. It is good to be immortal in this material dimension—but the consequence appears to be the ability to produce fantastic, towering, gigantic, and presumably ill-smelling mountains of dung. But, as a more humble writer of the modern age has put it, “A river runs through it.”

You Can’t Stop That Clock

Catching up on printed media all at once after a lag of several days—an almost electric shock accompanies the experience—made me think that we really do have far too many people in the world. The collective consequence of that is there in print. This got me wondering about the current population of the globe. I went to worldometers, one of the population clocks, and took a look.

I measured first how many people accrue to world population in a minute. The number was 144. That number is births net of deaths. In my statistical minute, I noted 249 births and 105 deaths, producing my net population growth. Now that translates to 8,640 net new people every hour, 207,360 every day, and 75.7 million every year. And that clock, when you watch it, is absolutely relentless.

worldometers labels itself “real time world statistics.” Concerning “statistics,” there are two views. One derives from their right use. When used with caution and handled carefully, as if they were dangerous explosives, we get a lens on the vast collective. The other view characterizes the abuse of statistics with a famous phrase: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Which of the two applies to worldometers? Well, censuses of population always appear at a lag of time and, because it takes several months to conduct any census, they’re not even accurate snapshots. But such population clocks more or less accurately reflect change that can be tracked, census to census. So here we’re dealing with a truth—indeed, watching that clock rushing madly along, a dangerous truth.

At the same time, lies and damned lies are there as well. I read today an article which suggests that as homeownership rises, so does joblessness. Some feeble-minded economists have collected data on both and—assuming an entirely untraceable cause and effect relationship—proclaim that homeownership may be a baddy.

In the time I put these words on the screen about 42,000 people have been added to the world’s population. Educating all of these new people is truly a growing burden. It does not surprise me that, as population increases, the average skill of economists is tumbling like the seeds are falling out there today—covering my driveway in a nice mixture of yellows and whites.

Rudyard?

A medical day for us had me sitting in the doctor’s waiting room—just observing. The procedure is that you sign in. That involves handing over, every time, one’s driver’s license and insurance card. These are Xeroxed, every time, and filed away. Then, having signed the sign-in sheet, one settles facing a translucent but still opaque glass door where the nurse will appear. When the nurse approaches from the other side, her shadow provides a welcome heads-up. The door then opens and one sees one of five or six different nurses, differently attired but each in uniform, and each is holding a clipboard. This is a large practice. Finally the nurse looks out over the waiting figures and says: “Annemarie?” “Lisa?” “Frederick?” — or something along those lines. After the nurse came and called “Brigitte?” I was left alone. The odd thought then occurred to me. You explain how such thoughts rise. It occurred to me that if Mr. Kipling had been an American and would have needed to visit our Dr. Larose, he would have signed in, would have been carded, and after a reasonable wait, the nurse appearing, as shadow, then as image, would have looked out over those waiting and would have called out: “Rudyard?”

Innocent Nature

Nature red in tooth and claw? Oh, come come. That’s pure projection. The gardening season is now upon us—draws us outward irresistibly—and hence we encounter a small patch of nature immediately beyond the sunroom door. The same thought always occurs as I then set to work clearing off winter’s layers: Nature’s innocent and so’s the cosmos. The world itself has never fallen. It has always been and still remains absolutely obedient. Then, unless I have to do something drastic, like move a hosta bush a few feet over—which invariably escalates to digging dirt and axe-cutting through buried roots—my mind goes on elaborating…

Hermes had it right when saying, As above, so below. This innocent but demanding realm we know may be a faint mirroring of heavenly vistas. Swedenborg spoke about correspondences between this world and those above. Yes, I need a new cutting shear, my tooth and claw all clogged with wood debris. It makes a kind of temporary order in the untutored jumble of nature in which the only red I see is the color of my quince-bush flowers.

Seasonal Notes

Unusual early warmth last year, an unusual cold spell in 2013, has caused us to spend at least a month marveling at Nature’s variability.  Last year everything began to bloom late in March already; this year the same process began late in April. Spring 2013, however, also brings multiple new phenomena to our late-blooming backyard garden. One of them, already touched upon in the last posting, is that two Black Swallowtail butterflies spent a full seven months and two weeks as chrysalides and then, early this month, both emerged. We were, of course, unsure what gender they were, individually or severally. Brigitte had named them Castor and Pollux. When Castor emerged we took her to be a lady, but learning (certainly at our age), is sometimes missy. It turns out that Black Swallowtails with yellow markings are male; those with white markings female. We had to look up this distinction again. Castor and Pollux, it turned out had been rightly named. Both were males; Pollux arrived on May 5. I show him resting on the same forsythia bush as his earlier and much more energetic brother. Pollux spent hours on that bush before himself taking off—and flying in a contrary direction, the first of many ever to do so; he flew South.

Our quince bush produced voluminous red flowers this spring. They appear at the bottom of the bush rather than at the tip of the branches. We are still investigating what manner of adaptation that represents. And our lilac bush, which is now observing its third spring, finally shows very energetic signs of actually producing flowers—and in volume. Those I will show some other time.

A Little Jubilation

May first, a truly warm day—and we saw our second Black Swallowtail butterfly early in the afternoon! And with some jubilation. Let me explain. The first we saw came to our pussy willow tree on wing a while ago—and flew away again after a brief snack on the yellow sweetness of a seed. But this one, one Brigitte had named Castora in the dim past, came outdoors, in a glass jar, carried by a jubilant Brigitte crying, “Look, look!” Yes! Castora had been with us as a chrysalis  since September 14 of last year. With her sister, Polluxia, she spent the winter in hibernation in a glass jar in our dark garage (link). Now, after two weeks and seven months of confinement in a tiny shell, the May sunshine had finally convinced her that it was time to take wing. Which, presently, she did. And we bring a picture of her on our forsythia, itself finally in full bloom. The picture isn’t very sharp, but then my hands were a little shaking from the momentous nature of this occasion—our first ever guiding a butterfly through the darkness of winter.

In the image of the chrysalidae, Castora is on the left. Her sister, who took this from two days later and preferred clinging to a stalk, is still, as this is written on the morning of May 2, “undecided.” But now we hope that she too will soon take off, as Castora did. And yes, as always, flying straight north and high, very high, topping our neighbors still leafless but budding tree…

Mottos

God is there, don't despair!

Sleep is the most formidable creditor. It will get its payment no matter what is going down!

The Little Real Life

People live three lives these days: daily, media, and inner. One of these is unavoidable, another is neglected at our peril, and the third, frankly, is becoming quite absurd. Both daily and inner life are “real life,” this in contrast with what “real life” is supposed to be about if we watch today’s entertainments. Daily life in our now retired state still holds its daily chores. Sometimes they are unusual and produce their own muted little triumphs. Sure enough the string-pull light above this station, which turns on the fluorescent lamps above, once more went on the blink. There are seven such in this basement; six have been in place since, well, since 1989 when we bought this place. But the one above me has been replaced, this morning, for the fourth time. Hard, black wires, their copper teeth bared, must be attached to two screws set into a porcelain device. And then the device, with suitable openings, must be threaded, in a manner of speaking, around two longer screws until they “catch.” After that the screws are tightened and the job is done—in relative darkness because the basement lights are turned off at the fuse box. And—it worked! The muted triumph. Real life. That life also involved my visit to Ace hardware. We began in sunshine—using which I cleared off last year’s vast clump of dead Michigan bamboo stalks (read Japanese knotweed, link). Drops marked my windshield on going, rain fell hard as I returned, having swiped my card and signed my name on a little calculator-sized screen with a kind of stick anchored to this device by another black wire. As if those signatures mattered. The Little Real Life has its own profound mysteries too. Returning Brigitte told me that an upstairs walk-in closet has another overhead that fails to dispense its light. Another item for my to do list in the Little Real Life; they are sometimes challenging, as that closet, I fear, shall be. But so long as the problems are little, no problem; when they are bigger, the pains tend to be financial. But nothing compared with what flows over the media every day, every day. And turning them off only helps a little—because the chaos is in the air. Which then, of course, reminds us of the Inner Life. It holds out hope.

Archibald Craven’s Problem

We watched a charming children’s story rendered into a seven-part series last night: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Significantly—in light of what is to follow here—the tale was first published as a serial in 1910. A significant if minor character of the novel is Archibald Craven, the lord of the manor; he is very rich but humpbacked. After watching the story we got to talking about it—not least Archibald Craven. Both Brigitte and I recall seeing, here and there, now and then, a hunchback in our childhood. In the wake of World War II, for instance, I knew one very well. My father employed him on occasional jobs—one of which was chopping our firewood. But looking back over the last fifty-sixty years, we can’t recall a single instance. Brigitte got to wondering about the cause of that condition—and why it had disappeared…

There are, of course, many thousands of anciently incurable conditions that modern times have made to disappear. To elucidate one on a blog like mine may be justified by the role that humpbacks have played in literature.

So (as the young begin their expositions nowadays) the human spine’s natural shape, seen from the side, is a flattened S—where the upper part is called the anterior, the lower the posterior. When the upper angle is unusually curved relative to the posterior, the back takes on a hump-like form. This curving can occur in teenage years due to uneven bone growth in the spine itself caused by the interruption of blood supply to the bone, known as Scheuermann’s disease, also known as Scheuermann’s kyphosis, using the Greek for “hump.” The disease is self-limiting; it affects its victim for a limited time only, but because the deformation is to the spine, the consequences remain in place. The condition has disappeared thanks to advancements in surgical know-how, medical technology, and metallurgy. Scheuerman’s is treated by major—and very invasive—surgery in youth. It involves spinal fusion and the installation of hardware—rods and anchoring (so-called pedicle) screws. The rods are made of titanium. What many unfortunate individuals had simply to live through today we solve with know-how and technology.

Some great challenges lie ahead of us as we enter the post-oil dark ages. One of them is how to preserve the advanced arts the Age of Oil has bequeathed us—not least the transmission of knowledge, skill, and technology the arts will continue to require. By all means let us deprive our future literature of certain categories of heroes.

Endless Debate

I’ve had occasion to point to a categorization of problems offered by E.F. Schumacher earlier (link). Schumacher suggests that humanity’s problems are either convergent or divergent. The first of these are physical in nature, dealing with the non-living sphere.  In attacking these physical problems, sooner or later efforts “converge” on a decent solution. The second, divergent problems, center on the living, including human phenomena. Values are always involved in these. And precisely for that reason, humanity never embraces a single solution. There is perpetual discovered. And that is because humans are—and this is my label, not Schumacher’s—unfinished.

Endless debates are a marker of divergent issues. Even masses of empirical data fail to solve them. One such is whether “life” or “mind” are emergent or transcendent phenomena. If they are emergent, all is but a consequence of matter/energy complexly arranged by chance. If the latter, we must posit a “higher” dimension from which life and mind derive. The debate is unending because the scientific observations will not produce an answer. They present a pattern which people with different awareness will interpret intuitively, thus from personal experience. And they will therefore have a very firm conviction that they are right. If one’s intuition produces the inwardly felt truth of transcendence, the mechanical will never seem sufficient explanation for the living or the spiritual. If no such resonance is felt by the person—but the facts of life and mind are still there to see—the equally firm view is that these must have evolved.

A recent example of this is a book by Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed—and a review of the book by Collin McGinn (link), in the New York Review of Books, titled “Homunculism” (ht to Siris).

Rare, exceedingly rare, is the case where a man of science after long, long study of what is a divergent problem, at last concludes that something transcendental is going on. I came across a book that makes this point last year, Wilder Penfield’s The Mystery of the Mind (p. 113-114). Penfield was a pioneering neurosurgeon.  And even Penfield ends with a reservation:

And so I come to my final reconsideration: I worked as a scientist trying to prove that the brain accounted for the mind and demonstrating as many brain-mechanisms as possible hoping to show how the brain did so. In presenting this monograph I do not begin with a conclusion and I do not end by making a final and unalterable one. Instead, I reconsider the present-day neurophysiological evidence on the basis of two hypotheses: (a) that man’s being consists of one fundamental element, and (b) that it consists of two. I take the position that the brain-mechanism, which we (my many colleagues and I all around the world), are working out, would, of course have to be employed on the basis of either alternative. In the end I conclude that there is no good evidence, in spite of new methods, such as the employment of stimulating electrodes, the study of conscious patients and the analysis of epileptic attacks, that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does. I conclude that it is easier to rationalize man’s being on the basis of two elements than on the basis of one. But I believe that one should not pretend to draw a final scientific conclusion, in man’s study of man, until the nature of the energy responsible for mind-action is discovered as, in my own opinion, it will be.

The debate will certainly continue on. There is such a thing as the will to believe, but  it arises from a spark of intuition. Until it does, all will be matter, matter, drearily matter.

O Sole Mio

Renaissance Festival, sometime in the 1970s, on the southern outskirts of Minneapolis. There we bought what then was a bright casting made of sandy clay. It came from a vendor who came from New Mexico or Arizona. It had been hanging on some fence for many decades now at the two places where we’d lived ever since. Last fall the hanger affixed to its back gave way. The sun fell but landed softly. I brought it in to see if I could fix it. And now it’s Spring again. The time has come for this old sun, much battered by the winds and waters, to be cleaned up and, if possible to be hung again.

Return to Basics

“No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Almost as if to convey to us just that message from the famous poem, “Desiderata,” yesterday a quite young Black Swallowtail butterfly appeared. It landed on our flowering pussy willow tree and stayed a while to feed on the nectar  it found there. Then, briskly, it flew away again.

The times now are unusually turbulent. The Boston Marathon disaster consumes our media. Even the weak attempt to curb our gun-use failed in the Senate. Almost as if it were a vast collective “meaningful coincidence,” a fertilizer plant blew up in tiny West, Texas and killed ten times as many people (and still counting) as died in the marathon bombing. Once more we hear about the cowardice of our attackers and the heroism of our police and fire-fighters. And quite undeserved and cloying flattery comes from the mouths of our leaders suggesting our own unique exceptionalism—attempting to pump up our morale and trying to show that the center is still holding. But quite another smell rises with the smoke. These very attempts to manage the collective emotion suggest something else. President Obama’s focus on children—and the horror of their death in terrorist attacks—causes us to wonder how many equally innocent children died in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen thanks to the deployment of our own sleek drones.

Relativism, pragmatism, materialism left to storm unchecked eventually produce a state in which madness comes to be the norm—and it seems that only the steadying of egotism and of our self-regard will permit us to “finish the race.”

Contemplating all of this with involuntary shudders made me think: Valuable books repay rereading. So, last night, I picked up once more E.F. Schumacher’s book, A Guide for the Perplexed, to remind myself how things really are—and where the path begins back from the chaos to an ordered life. The more the chaos mounts, the more people will set foot on that path and begin the pilgrimage we sorely need.