Highway Signage

With only days of summer left, it’s time to wrap up our vacation. During our brief but glorious excursion we made notes of things we should look up. The last item on that list reads “Highway Signs.” We’re still a young country, but our signage has become confusing. (But has it ever been otherwise? Doubt it.) Thus, for instance, we knew the Interstates (of course). We’d guessed that the white diamond with an M on top must be a Michigan State highway. County roads were marked as such. But what about all those shield-shaped signs?

The hierarchy of signage is shown by the arrangement of the display above. The shields turn out to have been national, thus U.S. highways; not the mighty four-lane Interstates, to be sure, but their humbler predecessors. Today I discovered that the signage for U.S. highways that’d we’d seen was the older version. The official form, recommended by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is a white shield over a black background, with lettering in black. But FHWA’s authority does not compel the states to change all signage; hence many of the old signs are still up. And even older version may be glimpsed here and there. Had we seen those, we wouldn’t have been puzzled. Those actually identified the state where the highway ran—but underneath, clearly spelled out, was the U.S. designation, thus US Highway 23 in Michigan.

While looking up these matters on the web, I discovered something interesting. Signage, evolving over time, has lost information. Not uniformly, not everywhere, but information has been sacrificed for uniformity and to save money. That’s already visible in the previous graphic. The oldest sign for a U.S. highway is much more informative than the new. What follows are two graphics showing signage for four states. None follows FHWA’s recommendation that all states should adopt the Michigan style State Highway sign, thus the diamond with a letter or combinations of letters identifying the state—in abbreviation, of course. Fast. Quick. Nanosecond. In this sampling Kansas uses the sunflower symbol, but its old sign is more informative. The Texas signage hasn’t changed much. Minnesota’s has improved. Its 1948 sign tells you nothing at all; the current one carries both the state’s name and outline. Missouri has retained its outline, but its 1948 sign still has the name.

Finally, some changes at the very top (the Interstate) and the bottom (county signs):

In earlier times, Interstate signs carried the name of the state through which the Interstate was passing now. That sometimes useful information has been sacrificed to cost control. The two county signs, both for Michigan, have retained their information. The change has been to make Michigan counties look just a little sexier—in the current signage, anyway.

To see all current state highway signs look here, to see the 1948 signage, here.

We can cross this item off our list…and turn to the task of making room for our plants in the basement in anticipation of the first frost advancing toward us from the future. Our furnace came on as I was struggling with images this morning.

Hellenistic Science Rules

The best books come to me as gifts from my children. Michelle gave me The Forgotten Revolution, by Lucio Russo, for my birthday. It is subtitled “How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn.” The original in Italian appeared in 1996, the English version, Springer imprint, in 2004. Russo is an Italian historian of science, a physicist, and a professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

This is a splendid and decidedly original work. Its thesis is that what we call modern science originated in full during the Hellenistic era and was essentially lost before that era ended thanks to the collision of Greek with Roman culture. The Romans had no interest in science; their focus was exclusively on power and administration. Science was reborn, and largely through the rediscovery of lost documents (many recovered only as Arabic translations from the Greek) beginning in the sixteenth century. One of his (for me) more fascinating observations is that our tendency to speak of the Graeco-Roman civilization as if it was a coherent whole is a coarse and ignorant blending of what were really opposites, an advanced civilization overcome and essentially buried under by a more primitive force.

Hellenism is typically dated from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the death of Cleopatra (30 BC), thus the onset of the decadent Roman imperial age. Russo thinks that the scientific era that began with Hellenism actually faded earlier, destroyed by Roman expansionism. He dates it to Rome’s conquest of Greece in the Battle of Corinth (146 BC —the same year that also saw Carthage destroyed). That date also roughly coincided with the Egyptian Ptolemy VIII’s rule (a monarch under Roman influence) who began the intense persecution of the Greek community in Alexandria (145-144 BC), a major center of Greek science.

Anybody interested in the history of science will find this book eye-opening. One of its valuable features is that it corrects a deeply rooted current view. It is that the ancients had discovered bits and pieces of science—but it required our genius to do the thing right. Russo’s view is that the Greeks had already done it—right, in other words. We are just now catching up with them. And in some ways some of our greatest (Newton) had still not caught the spirit of the thing and some of our more recent heroes (e.g. Niels Bohr) were again sliding away from the core insights of the Hellenists.

This Too Shall Pass

I happened across an evidently well-known Virgil quote yesterday on Laudator. It must be well known because I found it easy to get a translation of the phrase into English, not present where I saw it. On Laudator I always feel decidedly like a fellahin, and justly so. Here is the quote:

Dabit Deus his quoque finem.

God will also bring this to an end—which just happens to match one of our most basic sayings within Ghulfdom, and we are not alone.

The more we know the more humble we ought to be—because as knowledge expands so does awareness of the vast universes we’ve not even approached. Having read Dante a while back I couldn’t help but become very aware of Virgil, Dante’s guide right to the gates of heaven. In that connection I looked up the poet, read bits. Of course I’d also read or used other snippets from him (see this, for instance). With the Roman culture I am exactly in the same position as those who used bricks and stones from once splendid Roman architectural works to build their hovels. I meant to read the Aeneid, one of these days, the celebration of Rome’s foundation, but to speak of an urge here is incorrect. Whether in writing that work Virgil was celebrating the Augustan age or poetically critiquing it, that scholars are still debating. In any case his focus was the founding of what I view as a secular domain, which interests me not at all. And I don’t even have a child’s Latin any more, hence I can’t appreciate Virgil’s works in the original.

Nevertheless, like a child, having found that quote, I ran upstairs to read it to Brigitte with a manner, although camouflaged in a 75-year-old body, of a little boy: “Look, Ma! Look what I found!”

Truth or Consequences

A subject futurists almost never mention is that some features of the future are indeed predictable with certainty. Two are famous: death and taxes. There is a tiny minority who think that death itself may be an endangered species if we but put our trust in Science—something sure to please those people who sniff insulin to stave off Alzheimer’s disease. Tea party enthusiasts, a little more numerous than the would-be life-extenders, also hope that taxes will someday also be forgotten—but they will surely die before that glorious day dawns. Unmentioned is human nature which, as sure as I am sitting here, will deliver at least as much trouble in the so well predicted future—beyond Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, beyond Daniel Bell’s Post Industrial Society, beyond Francis Fukuyama’s Last Man.

The futurists intend to prepare us for the future, but their emphasis is on big things rather than basic, vast societal transformations the individual influences about like ants shape continents. What they emphasize is foresight and adaptation rather than the practice of morality. But such practice, as it happens, is the most practical approach to the future’s uncertainties. Therefore, at least alongside warnings and cautions about foreseeable changes, futurists should urge the effective teaching of morality as Job 1.

(Here parenthetically I would remind the bristling reader that the word ethics would work as well. We associate morality with sex here in the West, and sexual morality reeks of political incorrectness. Ethics sounds less threatening. Both words, alas, derive from the overlaid Greek or Latin root meaning custom.)

This thought arose from yesterday’s contemplation (on LaMarotte) of the European debt crisis—which was created by minimally amoral piling up masses of governmental deficits—and today’s reading of a column by David Brooks in the NYT. Brooks wrote about a study showing that young people today have the absolutely vaguest concept of what morality is all about—beyond thinking of it as an individual sort of thing. Brook’s title is “If It Feels Right…”.

The study of morality has been squeezed completely out of education because, wouldn’t you know “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” (First Amendment), which we’ve come to interpret to mean that the R-word may not even be whispered in schools. But we associate morality as rooted in religion (rather than, as etymology asserts, in custom).

Now the thought that floated into my mind was that a deep sort of study of morality, begun in the earliest grades of school and continued with more force and refinement right up to college graduation is a necessary preparation for understanding much more subtle cases, such as that excessive borrowing, borrowing that you know, in the gut, will be near impossible to repay, is immoral, not just a life-style choice. It might feel good, to be sure, but it is wrong. And immorality has consequences—not least in the here and now.

Many people have come to doubt this last point. They point at amoral lords of the universe enjoying gargantuan bonuses. They suggest that the rich and powerful never suffer the consequences of their depredations. And here, of course, the dilemma of our situation comes to the fore. A holistic concept of morality is anchored in religion, thus that its violation will have consequences, if not here then elsewhere. Or are you indifferent to starting your next incarnation as a sewer rat? We respect all religions on this blog.

Pech Valley Revisited

Journalism still thrives here and there. It does so in The Christian Science Monitor. In its most recent issue (September 5, 2011, Volume 103, Issue 41), I read a story yesterday titled “Soldiers’ tale of an epic battle” by Anna Mulrine. One has to go beyond the mainstream media to get genuine reporting. Over the years I’ve found stories that give real insight in such magazines as the CSM, Harper’s, Atlantic, and even more obscure places. The story I point to here is on the web (link), but in fairness to the CSM, why not buy a copy? One has to penetrate beneath the canned, sanitized, propaganda to get a visceral (read human) understanding of how things really are.

This story visits the same Pech River Valley in Afghanistan I’ve pointed to before in two earlier posts (one, two), each time to make the point that we’re massively engaged in what is a pointless pursuit, a vast over-reaction. What it means in human terms is here rendered in old-fashioned journalistic style by Mulrine.

The story also highlights the valor of our fighting forces as they engage in actions that make as little sense to them as they do to us. I’ve served my time as a professional soldier myself, albeit in peaceful times. I understand and honor that world. But the merits of that profession do not transfer automatically to those who send troops into pointless battles.

The Body of Culture

I was born in Budapest and have lived in many places, but by the chance of war and the clock’s rotation the Bavarian town of Tirschenreuth became my home town. I lived there during crucially formative years (8 to 13); there is more on Tirschenreuth here on this blog. I show the photo featured on Wikipedia (link); everybody always uses the same view and for a good reason. It combines in one image the two places where in ancient times the collective life of humanity took place: the market and the church. I also show the city’s crest; at its founding it came under the sway of the Abbey of Waldsassen, and the abbot ruled. Tirschenreuth is a county seat and has a population just under 10,000. However tempting to continue—such are my feeling for this place—my subject today is the body, thus the institutional expression, of collective life. I begin with Tirschenreuth because there, in the period 1944-1949, I actually experienced what life in medieval times might have been like. The “body of culture” there was the church; it organized collective life and structured time.

I got to thinking yesterday about the three layers of personal and collective life: the physical, cultural, and the transcending. It occurred to me that the middle level in this triad has drastically changed since my childhood. At my birth in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, the market had its usual role—indeed in virtually every settlement of meaningful size there was a large market, either permanent or organized once or twice a week. The cultural level was decisively secular; in Hungary, which was roughly evenly divided between Catholic and Protestant regions, culture expressed itself in such institutions as theater, orchestra, opera and the intellectual life. Parents introduced their children to these realms with conscious effort. We were taken to concerts and the theater much as we were taken to church—and the experience was much the same one. The two lower layers were still unified, as it were. The topmost had already parted into at least three separate domains. The country wasn’t unified at the level of faith. Some were Catholics, some Protestant, and a minority (to which my maternal grandfather and Mother belonged) decidedly humanist. He was a Mason (in Europe that meant atheist). My Mother’s religion was High Art, a kind of amalgam of music and of literature.

The point that I would emphasize here is that culture still meant one thing, and something one acquired, couldn’t simply buy. The concept of pop culture hadn’t formed yet. My reflections yesterday yielded the notion that this middle layer has become transformed so that culture as we used to think of it has become a life-style choice, not a collective experience; it has been replaced by politics and pop culture—movies, TV, “music,” and increasingly social networking. Indeed the distinction between politics and pop culture has also begun to blur. Communications media have changed politics and merged it with entertainment; leaders have become pop stars. A single “body” has emerged in consequence and now represents culture—it organizes collective life and structures time: the media. That amalgamation of institutions is altogether dominated by commercial motives. It is itself being transformed from what used to be a print into a visual medium, signaled to us by the drastic decline in newspapers, inwardly (read content) as well as outwardly.

Having jotted down some notes, I went on to thin our Japanese Knotweed. My notes contained no reference to Tirschenreuth. But this morning, waking with some dread of what is to come today in the media, awareness of my home town was suddenly quite large and an addendum to my reflections present. It was that in Tirschenreuth, when we arrived there as refugees in 1944, an earlier order yet had still prevailed. This somewhat backward pocket of Catholicism in Bavaria still retained an order that Hungary had already left behind. Here everything still remained strongly rooted in the old time religion. I’ve always been very grateful for having had the experience. It helps me face the rising flood with equanimity.

Hungarian Wikipedia

I noticed today a banner appearing above Wikipedia pages with the following message:

Thank you to all who helped write 200,000 articles on Hungarian Wikipedia

Click here to help us change the world

I clicked. A page in Hungarian appeared. It gives thanks to all who made possible the creation of the Hungarian version of Wikipedia. The producers feature a few statistics. Evidently the volunteers who made this resource possible compiled more than 10 million drafts over an eight-year period—out of which 200,000 fully-qualified Wikipedia articles were fashioned by more than 179,000 registered Wikipedia editors—helped by countless other commentators, helpers, and readers. There will be a celebration of the appearance of the last of these articles on October 1 in the city of Győr.

Well done indeed! Hungary has just a shade more than 10 million inhabitants. According to the English-language Wikipedia, 16 million speakers of the Hungarian language exist across the globe. The Hungarian Wikipedia has its own article on this subject and is more exact. It puts Hungarian-speakers at 10.64 million in Hungary and at 16.71 million world-wide (1980). Nice to have more detail. But having a national version of this free on-line dictionary also brings additional benefits. The image I am showing, from the Hungarian site (here), is a page from the first book ever published entirely in the Hungarian language (in 1533). Its spelling is as strange and antiquated as that of any document that is as old. Hungary must have been as proud of that book, late although it was appearing, as they are proud today to have their own Wikipedia!

To be part of a very tiny group on this globe gives a person odd perspectives, odd moments of pride. People living in Hungary itself represent 0.15 percent of the global population, all Hungarian-speakers 0.25 percent. A hundred-thousand of those 16.71 million individuals (thus 0.6% of that number) live in the United States. I am one of them.

This Horse is Not an Equus

In these maddened times when elephants fight donkeys, a little excursion into the wonders of nature might be appropriate. A gift we purchased led to a discussion about the seahorse—which is actually a fish. Humanity’s long, long association with the horse—domestication is said to have begun before 3500 BC—no doubt led to the instant identification of the seahorse, when first encountered, with its huge land-based look-alike—up to a point, that is. The official name of this creature is Hippocampus. That word, from the Greek, comes from hippos, horse, and kampos, sea monster, a word that etymologists, using their favorite word, perhaps, say might be linked to kampe, caterpillar, a creature that loomed larger than life for us this summer. Hippocampus is the genus; there are some 50 species beneath that. The higher-up Family name is Syngnathidae, collectively the pipefish—which gives some indication of how these creatures move: pipefish are elongated worm- or snake-like swimmers.

To the left is a photograph of a Hippocampus hystrix, called the spiny seahorse (source). I assume, therefore that hystrix means spiny. As you see, the artist who fashioned the gift we purchased was imitating nature fairly closely. If you would like to see seahorses galloping around in the water, this absolutely delightful YouTube film will show them to you in action (link).

Being a Renaissance woman (her field was physiological psychology in school), no sooner had I produced the name of the seahorse genus Brigitte reminded me that each of us carries a little seahorse embedded deeply in our brain. That’s the hippocampus, of course. It is located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain (therefore in its middle). The temporal lobe is behind and lower than the massive frontal lobe.

The function of this structure is the consolidation of short-term and long term memory. Damage to the hippocampus occurs early in Alzheimer’s disease. The hippocampus is also active in spatial navigation. Navigation? Why of course. That is a sea-faring skill. Why this part is called the hippocampus becomes evident when we place the two hippocampi side by side—as Wikipedia helpfully does in a picture on the subject (link).

All horses aren’t equine, not all elephants are wise, and not every donkey is stupid. But one certainly hopes that each donkey shall remain at least as stubborn as donkeys are supposed to be.

Primary Debates as Mating Ritual

The female courted is the party’s hard core constituency, that is to say the female “in heat.” The candidates engage in ritual combat, its real aim trans-rational, biological. Doesn’t matter diddly what they say. It’s the aura, stupid, the “charisma.” (When I came to this country most people in politics didn’t even know that word, now it is as well known as “environment,” another newcomer. And that, I suppose, is “progress.”) Funny how rapidly Michelle “Straw Vote Winner” Bachman faded from the scene as soon as two viable male contenders finally surfaced, Mitt and Rick. My Job-Creation is bigger than yours. The media aswarm around them are the eunuchs or other kinds of neuters, famed throughout history for loving to groom those who have real potency; they also fancy themselves, secretly, to be the real dispensers of power.

Peaceable Kingdom

Summer is fading, just 17 days left to go. In ours this year we had an experience of the Peaceable Kingdom, as it were—concerned with butterflies, moonrises, flowers, and raising our herbs and tomatoes. Yesterday—the colors shining through the green—we disassembled our wire/plastic cages to harvest the ripe tomatoes—hence this sudden abundance.

Slipp’ry Frames of Reference

My walks sometimes produce odd questions. Something made me wonder the other day: Does God have a sense of humor? My instant, reflexive answer was, “Yes, yes, yes! Of course.” But this reaction was not just piety. If God is All and we have a sense of humor—well, some of the time, certainly—God who has everything in absolute abundance, must also sometimes enjoy a joke. It please me to think so, anyway. And countless instances of meaningful coincidences in my life have had that character—something you cannot help but laugh at—and yet the joke is serious. This subject, I think, hasn’t much standing in our official theologies. Earnest, earnest all the way.

My own Eureka moment concerning humor came in the 1960s when I read a then new book by Arthur Koestler titled The Act of Creation. Koestler’s subject was human creation, but—well, you get my point. It was a Eureka moment because Koestler’s explanation made wonderful sense. He proposed that all experiences of creation, humor, and invention—also the odd experience of art—come from the simultaneous linking of two otherwise seemingly incompatible frames of reference. The act of creation, invention, laughter come from the sudden (Eureka!) realization that the two frames are linked.

How was the steam engine invented? One conjecture might be this. A man is watching a pot boil on a kitchen stove. The lid clatters as steam escapes. His mind just then is filled with a problem: how to lift water from a well or from a flooded mine. Two frames of reference. Suddenly their linkage occurs to his mind. Why not contain that energy, lifting that lid, and make it do some work.

Here in the form of a delightful photo is the operation of this process as a joke:

The photo is by Friedrich Böhringer, titled “Headless,” and is from the Wikipeia Commons (link).

Some frames are slippery, others are not—at least for humans. But in God’s mind they all intersect. Infinite laughter!

Transit to Chrome

Discovered this morning that Google’s blogger no longer supports Microsoft Internet Explorer 7—an unpleasant surprise. I installed the newer Version 9 with some trepidation. Having done so on Brigitte’s machine some months ago, I knew that it would slow things down. The process these days, in MS land, seems to be to pile new code on top of old to counter new security threats—rather than the much more costly process of redoing things from the bottom up—which has always been our policy at Editorial Code and Data, Inc. Sure enough. Having done it once before, the transit was just a shade faster—but the results mind-numbingly slower.

A good while back I gave Google’s own Chrome browser a try. It worked well a while back, but that was an early trial version. I went back to Microsoft. Today, in frustration, I fetched Chrome for a second time. I had it up and working in a matter literally of minutes. True, it took another half an hour before I’d replicated the Favorites pull-down menu, which in Chrome-land is called a Bookmark (but turns out to be a bookmark folder—and you can line these up in multiples, if you wish). In the MS-world it’s part of a Menu. Chrome also had a facility to import my favorites from Microsoft, so the process was simple enough. And the overall results were stunning. Chrome works faster than my old Version 7. Promptly went upstairs and replaced Brigitte’s version with Chrome too. Well, actually, “replaced” is the wrong word. Her and my MS v. 9 are also still available. But when one of them makes you wonder if something is wrong, while the other fades into the background because it works so well, guess which one we shall make our default browser?

None of this changes anything you might see here, but my experience might mean something to others who daily struggle to put stuff up on the web.

Grosse Pointe Bamboo

Since retirement we have returned to nature, in a way. In extent it amounts to nothing at all, just a narrow little backyard, but you would be surprised what happens here after the morning traffic drains the Grosse Pointes of people. A silence of sorts descends. Being out in it we discover it swarming with bees, ants, squirrels, birds, and butterflies. And we can venture out into the wider neighborhood which is, if not officially then at least territorially, still part of The City of Trees, a one-time nickname for Detroit. Our yard and garden are semi-wild—not least the cultivated parts. Here, for instance the area occupied by just two tomato plants.

A relative newcomer to our postage-stamp-sized piece of nature is a cluster of Japanese Knotweed, Fallopia japonica. How long ago? Don’t know. Three, four years ago? This plant is very bamboo like but is only a distant relative. But ordinary people are not all that discerning, hence it is also known as American Bamboo and Mexican Bamboo. It is viewed as invasive—and we can testify to its energetic spread. But we keep our knotweed in its own limited domain. Here some pictures of our Fallopia; it is currently in bloom:

It looks like a bush, but it is a family of free-standing stalks.

The bamboo-like character of the stems is visible here. Some of the stalks are left over from last year.

The leafage, now in bloom.

And closer up.

Articulation of the stalks into leafage higher up.

Finally a view toward the sky, showing that they spread their shade.

Superbubble?

While the cigar smoke is still in the air, another idle observation. I haven’t seen this one anywhere else. It is that, quite possibly, the Consumption Culture on which our economy appears so much to hang may itself be a bubble. Call it a superbubble. In the 2008-2009 period we lost 8.7 million jobs. In 2010-2011 we have thus far recovered 1.8 million, leaving a deficit of 6.9 million. We haven’t needed those jobs. Maybe that means that we—don’t. It might mean that our economy needs fewer jobs if demand (which is consumption) shrinks. What if we’ve been living inside a vast and artificially hyped bubble of consumption? It’s a bubble if we don’t need it but still buy it. What if the mortgage crisis woke people up and the bubble isn’t there any more? That would still leave not only those 6.9 million still unemployed but also deprive new entrants to the labor force employment that they seek. Social stability demands appropriate levels of employment. If private demand isn’t there any more—because the consumption bubble has been punctured—we need public demand. And we need it precisely at a time when the political mood is to disassemble the public sector. I’d better stub out that cigar.

Cigar Smoke...

An idle thought occurred the last time I lit a seductively aromatic cigar—noted, the aroma, because I like to run cigars under my nose before I light them, and the mysterious nature of these leaves comes in through the nostrils. Thoughts are peripatetic creatures. The sequence went something like this: Well, they haven’t gotten around to banning these yet, the beady-eyes. Prohibition. Odd strain, that, in the American culture. Balanced by beady-eyed permissiveness. Abortion yes; second hand smoke, horrors, NO! Is this tax-cutting frenzy another instance of it? Another irrational kind of prohibitionism? Innocent hubris? Mixed with the vagaries of democracy? Minimally four millennia of human drinking and carousing, but we shall forbid alcohol! So there. Salvation by law. At least the same tradition of taxation, but now we shall do without it—and prosper? But, yes. It is. It is a kind of prohibitionism. The romantic things it always produces. The Speak-Easy. We owe you much, beady eyes. What’s next? The mandatory social tithe? Those lesser cultures without the law should hire our PR people and rename things to make them right. Market-driven government? In the form of the legalized bribe?

Septem-ber-ber-ber-ber

Having been born in Hungary, the last four month of the year were always people for me—with October playing spoiler. The reason for this is that ember in Hungarian is the word for human, not something left over and still glowing in the fireplace. This worked fine for Sept-ember, Nov-ember, and Dec-ember—but October made me doubt my childish logic. Yes. I was that sort of child.

The earliest Roman calendar had only ten months. Of these—you guessed it—the last four were our friends above. Count them septem, octo, novem, decem. That -ber ending that tails them in English and other languages derived from the Latin suffix equivalent to our -th, as in seventh. It was originally -bris. When the Romans wanted to be more formal, they said Septembris mensis, literally seventh month. Not too many bothered, therefore it became Septembris. The plural of that word for month is menses—also used in English for a recurring event. Online Etymology Dictionary cites etymologist T.G. Tucker saying that the first five months had been named after events in the agricultural cycle. The implication is that the Romans lost interest in the weather once the harvest was all in. Whatever. Just call the rest by number.

So that’s the answer to my recurring question, recurring since childhood but never answered before. I still think that the powers-that-be in Hungary should have renamed October Octoember a long, long time ago. But then this boy, having arrived in America, would have wondered why the English took the human out of October? Was it to signal the cold?

Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius (no Tarquins in sight yet in 700 BC) added January and February and stuck them in at the beginning. Suddenly there were twelve months! But renaming the old numbered ones so that they’d begin with Novembris and end in Duodecimbris—that was beyond the king’s powers. You can never trust the public sector to do the job right…

Our Last Butterfly Takes Off

The late one, the fifth Black Swallowtail we’ve managed to raise this summer, broke from her pupa today—and took off. The time was exactly noon. The glass jar, read “the hospital,” is the same one that travelled with us to Traverse City. The video lasts for one-and-a-half minutes and will not win any prizes, but here it is, for the record.

Cultural Atmospheres

Ages have an atmosphere formed by consensus. On Babylon 5, the SF saga, areas are set aside for aliens so that, in a jocular aside, Commander Sinclair (Michael O’Hare) tells a visitor to watch it: “Stay out of the methane toilets.” Breathing the public air is dangerous for unbelievers, as it were—for heretics to the common faith. But a corollary of this situation is that genuine participation in collective life is actually denied us—unless we share in the consensus. Oh, it’s possible—if difficult to speak through gas masks. One gets used to it. So much so that temporarily visiting another time, as in, say, reading European documents and letters produced eight hundred years ago, one is startled to find oneself in an era where quite another atmosphere prevailed. On Babylon 5 cultures whose members live in “special quarters” do not take much part in the action—although members of the station’s management sometimes visit them, donning masks to do so, when something is going haywire, as always seems to happen.

Sibyl

The Sibyl came into my view again the other day when I was looking into the Tarquins (here). The prophetess known as the Cumaen Sibyl supposedly approached Tarquinius Superbus (that’s Tarquin the Proud) and offered to sell him nine Sibylline Books of prophecy. He didn’t want to pay the outrageous price that she demanded. She then burned three of the books—and renewed her offer. Once more The Proud hesitated. The Sibyl burned three more. At last Tarquin yielded—and bought the remaining three at the original price. It is such tales—and never mind their factual underpinnings—that draw temperaments like mine to the study of our cultural past.

I think the Sibyl first came into my view, curiously enough, while studying English Lit, specifically T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot used a quote from Petronius as the epigraph for that poem, rendered in Latin, but my good fortune had been to study English in an environment where teachers could render Latin—or Greek, for that matter—into English. The epigram contains two Greek pieces too. Here it is:

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.

Now the Sibyl at Cumae I’ve seen with my eyes
She pended, she hung there in an ampule of glass.
And when boys who’d there gathered addressed her and asked:
“Sybil, what do you want?” She said “I want to die.”
     Petronius, Satyricon vii

What a weird picture. It left an impression. All early Sibyls as it happens were priestesses of Apollo, and Apollo truly loved the beautiful Sibyl of Cumae so much he offered her near immortality (another recent subject here). She could live as many years as there were particles in a presumably full handful of dust. But the Sibyl forgot to ask Apollo also to preserve her youth. Thus as the seemingly limitless years passed, she grew older, and smaller, and thinner—becoming a tiny shriveled old woman who could pend herself into an ampule, a longish sort of glass. The image stayed with me. The Waste Land (nice introduction to my times, by the way) did not. But cheerful Eliot did leave one quote firmly planted in my memories, if from another poem, also appropriate to this age:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.

All set for Modernity.

This post, however, while triggered by the associations I’ve just cited, is here to prepare for a future one, scheduled for September 17. That one will be, I promise, much more uplifting. In support of it I thought I’d put some notes here on Sibyls.

The name’s origin is unknown but dated by the Encyclopedia Britannica to the religious period (800-600 BC) predating the Greek classical era. Female prophets arose in that time. An early one must have been called Sibylla, and others took or were assigned the same name. The best-known ancient prophetess was Sibylla of Marpessos, a little place near Troy in what is now Western Turkey. She lived in a period overlapping the sixth and fifth centuries BC, thus at the dawn of the classical age. The EB quotes Heraclitus (535-475 BC) saying of her: “with her maddened mouth … she reaches a thousand years with her voice by the power of the god.”

In the times that followed, Sibyls arose everywhere—and each region claimed its own. The Romans had the Sibyl at Cumae, a place in southern Italy near Naples. Did this tradition die out in the centuries that followed. In a way, yes. After the classical came the Hellenistic (323 to 30 BC), after that the Imperial, and after that the Christian age. Prophecy thins as we advance—but is reborn again in the new religious age that took firm root after Constantine.... To be continued, God willing, in September.

Invocation

When pundits don’t rely on ordinary argument, their stock in trade, and reach out to Science for their authority, my reflexive expectation, before I know anything more, is that the subject will be a clash of values, the focus on evolution or global warming, and that the sciences involved will be of the softer kind—not those that reach their certainties by experimental demonstration. Precisely such appeals to Authority, but coming from the other side, turned me into an atheist in youth just by reflex—until I had had time to do my own homework.

Outside the Box

A feature in the NYT today (“Imagining the Downside of Immortality,” by Stephen Cave) again reminded me: the cosmic models people hold entirely determine how far their thoughts can reach. The hypothesis the author examines? Suppose we conquered death somehow? Would it be a good or a bad thing? He thinks that physical problems (like overpopulation) could be overcome, but that the end result would be a psychological disaster. All human progress, aspiration, effort, and achievement (in his view) is motivated by the fear of death. That fear drives all of our behavior, consciously or unconsciously. He views all religious concepts of immortality as projections—efforts to cope with our fear. And he underlines that all of us, religious or not, seek immortality. The only difference is the modality of that search. It produces civilization, hope. False hope, to be sure. Cave’s underlying hard conviction, of course, appears to be the sophisticated orthodoxy of materialism. To be sure, if all that is worthwhile is just illusion pursued in dread of death, a rather pathetic picture of life is unveiled. But at least it’s grimly realistic. My questioning all of this Cave would no doubt assign to my own naïve dread of disappearance.

Amusing to read such articles in a world where breaking all the rules makes you a visionary and thinking outside the box is highly touted.

The Visionary

The inspiration for this post (to use the wrong word) was Steve Jobs’ resignation from Apple. As oil-rich necessarily accompanies any mention of a sheikdom, so Steve Jobs necessarily invokes the visionary tag. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not attacking Jobs or belittling his accomplishments. It pains me that his health problems have forced this move. The subject is pop-culture and language.

The root of that word, of course, is vision, and Wikipedia’s take on things is that the vision can involve the supernatural. Wiki’s first-mentioned visionary is Hildegard of Bingen—followed then by Mohammed, St. Bernadette, and Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism). In the modern understanding of the word, a vision of the transcendental has been replaced by a vision of the future, a future so compelling that it leads to a transcending of the rules. Thus an op-ed today in the NYT states that Jobs “violated every rule of management.” Hildegard of Bingen did a little bit of that as well—the rules in the twelfth century being that a woman must keep herself out of sight. Interestingly, I note, when Wikipedia turns its attention to technology, the person at Apple it cites as the visionary is Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, the man who actually designed the first personal computer. It was Wozniak who had the vision—and strove mightily to give it birth. Steve Jobs’ contribution to that revolution lay in negotiating low prices for components and mounting the very successful sales and marketing campaign.

The practical visionary is also well-advised to live in wealthy times. The word’s etymology (from Online Etymology Dictionary) dates to the 1650s, meaning then the ability to see visions. By 1702, however, the word had begun to carry the meaning “one who indulges in impractical fantasies.” I date the Age of Oil (read fossil fuels) to 1748—when coal mining began in the United States. It would take a while before “impractical” visions regarding the material dimension could lead to visionary status.

Another interesting take on this is the use of the word over time, provided by Google’s Ngram viewer. Here is a link to that. The word peaked early in the 1820s, declined thereafter to about the late 1940s (wars and such?), began a little climb late in the 1960s, and then began rising again to prominence in 1980 as computers created the new visionary environment. But should we celebrate the inventor of pop-computing or the pitchman who brought us to the booth?

Added later: Well, all right. Prejudices are showing here, and I might as well come clean. Here are two older posts on the old LaMarotte on this subject, best read in the following order: one, two.

The Lens of Attention

Attention is a magnifier—and a kind of resource. That on which we focus becomes large and hence important. The neglected largely disappears. We’re biologically programmed to notice change and, to conserve resources, to ignore that which just stays the same. But let me single out one word above: important. If attention bestows importance, those who wish to be, important, strive to get attention—and they do so ultimately by hyping threats or pleasures.

This after some days away, almost devoid of media, drawn by company, the new, the strange, the beautiful. Libya, Syria, elections? The moon-rise over Grand Traverse Bay—and a night-sky filled with stars, so rarely visible in detro-metro-land: they had our attention.

When Monique worked in cement and therefore barges struggling up the Mississippi were important, conditions on the river all the way down to distant New Orleans figured very large in our lives. Now working on the publishing plantation, news that McGraw-Hill is about to dump its core business, textbooks, is on a par with tornadoes in the south or floods in Missouri. Attention is the lens. It goes where we live. It magnifies into giants what countless others do not even see.

Libya, Syria, elections? Are you really all that crucially important for us, here, essentially powerless to do anything concrete? They seem to be because to have the power, people need the attention of the masses—and the media, its social dispenser, beats its endless drums to catch our vague attention—by threats or fake triumphs (We’ve won in Libya)—ultimately to sell eyeballs to advertisers who hope and pray that we will buy.

Sweep, Sweep

Sweep, sweep. Sweep, sweep. Now sweep the yard
In steady rhythm, carefully,
Not too easy, not too hard.
The Summer has begun to fall.
Not that our Spring had failed to shed
Its seed on bed and lawn and all.
Sky’s overcast, the wind is cool.
Some wrinkled leaves, branchlets galore
Are underfoot and more dead things,
Obsolete; decay begins its rule.
Sweep, sweep. Sweep, sweep. Now sweep the drive.
Grey caulk around the house is worn.
I note: The plastic dust-bin’s lid is torn.
My broom sweeps sand and thus disturbs a hive
Of very, very tiny ants.

A Day of Butterflies

Four of our five Black Swallowtail butterflies have hatched, migrated outside, eventually into the air, and away... One came last night, three hatched rapidly this morning. Above pictures of them still indoors. The last image is that of an empty husk with but a faintly perceptible slit through which these winged creatures first force themselves into the daylight. One of them, sure enough injured a wing—and gave us some worries for a while.

The migration continued outdoors. The one on the concrete was the first out, last night, and spent his night under a stool in a great down-pour. This morning it was time to dry up. Once dry, they all proceeded to take little trial flights--first to the top of flowers, then to the fenced tomatoe yard, finally into the heights. The last photo shows our last Swallowtail, indeed the one with the injured wing, way up high on a leaf. He rested there for some hours and eventually also flew away.

So does this mean that our butterflies days are over for the year—aside from the last, the fifth, still in chrysalis and a couple more weeks to go? By no means. Around 10 in the morning came a NEW KIND. It stayed for several hours feasting on the blue flowers of our basil plants. Heavy research soon yielded its name. It was a Junonea coenia, better known as a Buckeye—and in the politically insensitive word of nomenclature, sometimes rendered as the Common Buckeye. Not common for us, let me tell you! So long did that Buckeye linger here, we wonder if another campaign may be in the offing. We already know that Buckeye’s caterpillars are very, very black. We shall be inspecting the basil plants daily soon, on the lookout. Herewith some views of this first-time visitor:

We’ve had to use small pictures here to show a good many, hence detail is not immediately visible. But clicking on the images will enlarge them very nicely.

A Tarquin Unmasked

The bathroom door was locked so he banged on it, and called, “Time’s up.”
     “Who is it?” said a voice.
     “Oh, I’m sorry,” said George, retreating a step or two from the locked door in his agitation. “I thought it was Sylvia.”
     “It’s only me,” said Edith. “I’ll be as quick as I can, but the bath’s so slippery I can’t get out. Your water is so soft and I used too much soap. I shan’t be long” and a sound of splashing told George that the guest was keeping her word and he went back to his room feeling himself a Tarquin unmasked.
     [Angela Thirkell, Enter Sir Robert, 1955]

Reading that passage last night—in what was a popular novel intended for a predominantly female audience—reminded me how very much popular culture has evidently changed in the last sixty years or so, here as well as in Britain. Angela Thirkell was a very prolific and popular novelist; more on her is on this blog here; I have a great admiration for her and am slowly reading all of her work. Clearly Thirkell not only expected that phrase, “feeling himself a Tarquin unmasked,” to illuminate and to enlarge this seemingly innocent scene—but also to signal feelings inside George, the lead male in this novel, towards Edith, the lead female, not evident on the surface.

My own recall of Tarquins was thin enough to amount to almost nothing. Something to do with Rome—yes, despite that odd spelling. Etruscan kings? And then, with effort, rose a small flag suggesting that a famous rape had led the Romans to abolish monarchy in favor of republican rule. Thus far my vague response to Angela. Naked Edith in a tub? Thoughts in George of sexual congress. That seemed to fit. But as for masks and such, not even the glimmer of a glimmer.

Here in a nutshell the story. Yes. The first Tarquin (Lucius) was a rich Etruscan immigrant to Rome; later he became a popular king. The second, known as Lucius Superbus, was his son, better remembered as Tarquin the Proud; he gained the throne by the assassination of his father’s popular successor, a Roman. Superbus’ son, one Sextus Tarquinius, raped the wife of a Roman nobleman by name of Lucretia. Here is the story of The Rape of Lucretia as told by Livy—the cause, ultimately, of the end of Roman monarchy.

Now in that story Sextus visits Lucretia while her husband is still away at the war. Lucretia receives the king’s son with due hospitality. But late at night Sextus enters her chambers and gives her a choice: She can make love to him or she can die. If she refuses, he proposes to kill her, kill a male slave, and place them in bed together suggesting that she was entertaining the slave while her husband was at war. She chooses to live and suffers his violation. But later, in public, she reveals his deeds before the king himself and then commits suicide with a dagger. Thus, in a way, she “unmasks” the Tarquin. (The painting shown is Titian’s version.)

But this sort of symbolic unmasking, it seemed to me, is a bit too obscure for the general reader. I went to search out a more vivid representation. A painting, perhaps? In no time at all I discovered what must have been Angela Thirkell’s reference—a play called Le Viol de Lucrèce by André Obey. In this play masked narrators, one for the Tarquin, one for Lucrece, voice the inner thoughts of the actual Tarquin and the actual Lucrece during that crucial scene. And at the most dramatic moment in the play, the narrator-Lucrece takes off her mask and addresses the audience to plead for the character. In a book titled Masks in Modern Drama, the author, Susan Valeria Harris Smith comments as follows (p. 75):

The brief unmasking humanizes and personalizes the action, catching the complacent and removed audience off guard. The departure from the stylistic ritual mode allows Obey to use the mask diversely without violating the mythological context he carefully creates in the first three acts.

The play, written in 1931, was very meaningful in France in that, as Smith points out, the Tarquins’ violation of Rome represented to the French the later German violation of France. The play was turned into an opera in 1946—and the play was undoubtedly produced again in connection with that event; indeed, I found a recent performance of it in 2006 in France. Obey himself became head of the Comédie-Française (1945-1947). In Thirkell’s time, therefore (most likely) that mask-scene had some standing in popular recall, and Thirkell’s use of the phrase consequently produced the intended poetic echoes in this humble scene in her novel. In my case it lead straight to the Internet so that I could unmask the Tarquin for myself.

The First Black Swallowtail

As reported before we left, and again this morning, we’ve had the Black Swallowtail pupae with us in Traverse City in a little fishtank. We arrived home late last night, and as already documented, Brigitte released the pupae again and installed them high above some old parsley plants still riding their chosen sticks.

Then, for good measure, Brigitte affixed a huge (from their perspective) plastic butterfly to the window by means of a suction cup. She’d bought the object in Suttons Bay, just north of where we’d stayed. Brigitte thought this “graven image” might “encourage” her charges. Here is Brigitte “archetype”:

Tonight, to our astonishment, the first Black Swallowtail, by coloration a little boy, sliced itself a very narrow opening in its pupa and came out. Brigitte came screaming to get me, and here is a good picture of the new arrival as seen from the side, wings closed, in other words. Meanwhile we’d moved the tray to a more central place in the sunroom. Here he is:

An hour or two later our friend took flight—but only temporarily. At first he crashed against a wall in an unhappy attempt to plunge himself into a lamp. He crawled up the leg of a stool. Brigitte put the stool on the table and took this photo of our friend. Notice that his wings are now half-open.

There the new-born sat for a while, calming down. But the light was still drawing him ever on, ever on. Taking wing again, he landed (happily for the photographer) on the rim of the lampshade and, exhausted from this effort, rested with wings completely opene:

And that was also—probably—the last we shall see of Aristo One of 2011. He took wing again, fell once more, and once more climbed up the leg of the stool. We then decided that we’d set him free—and took the stool out into the night. Good-bye, young one. You’re back in your element again. A happy, happy flight to you in your brief but splendid, fascinating life...

And the two of us came in again, bent over from all of the tensions of the night...

Unpacked

Our butterfly pupae made the trip to Traverse City in their fishtank home (see a few posts back), spent their time in mysterious and continuous meditation, and are now back again—unpacked! Much the same thing happened with Aristo/a last year, although the destination was Canada. We'll keep the doors to the sunroom shut at night and anticipate, one morning soon, to see one or more butterflies trying to get throught the windows into the sunshine.

Le Grand Traverse

Every year a rugby tournament takes us to Traverse City, MI and then in turn to the Sleeping Bear Dunes. But our bonding with this region began soon after we moved to Michigan in 1989 and our very first excursion to see the state took us to this region. On the left of the embedded map you see the Leelanau Peninsula. It is one arm embracing the Grand Traverse Bay. French explorers first called the distance between the peninsula and the landmass to the east “the long crossing.” The region was originally named after Omeena, a legendary Indian maiden, but Grand Traverse took over later and, of course, gave its name to Traverse City.

[Map Courtesy of BING. Have replaced embedded map because it sometimes fails to work.]

We often hear the words, “Words fail me,” but on this trip “Pictures failed me.” I had two cameras but somehow nothing much came out of them. Hence I bring you here the best of the lot. They show images from the Grand Traverse Lighthouse, located at the tip of Leelanau Peninsula.

Here is a view to the north-north-east.

Here the rock-strewn coast-line.

Last year I showed one picture under the heading “If I had to pick one.” Here is its equivalent for 2011 showing Brigitte, all in white, adjusting her sweater against the cold wind.

And here, finally, a more distant view of that same bench with our party, John and Monique Magee flanking Brigitte, me behind the camera, and the 1858 lighthouse visible in part behind them. The actually lighthouse is to my right but is nothing much to see.

Mind you, this was a great trip full of adventures and delights: a midnight moonrise, a thrilling Old Boy’s rugby game (it ended in a tie), sailing on the Schooner Manitou, excursions, tours, and laughing a lot about a merchant who obsessed about fake C-bills. Not least we crowned our tour by visiting Sleeping Bear Dunes. As luck would have it, the audience of Good Morning America voted the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore the “Most Beautiful Place in America” the very weekend we were there. Oh, yes! We knew that already. Too bad my pictures failed me. The map shows you two islands west of that lakeshore, North and South Manitou. They are the two sleeping bears, little and big.

Okay. You thought I was just faking it—as with that C-bill. Not so! We really were on that boat! And here is a picture to prove it:

Yes, that is John on the left. And if you don’t believe me, you will clearly see the words Detroit Rugby on his sweatshirt!

Dalrymple on the Riots

A few days ago I mentioned Theodore Dalrymple in the context of the London riots and wondered what he would have to say about it on one of his venues, City Journal. Well, here are two answers: August 10 and and August 15.

Packed, Ready to Go

The image you see here is the mobile home of our five future Black Swallowtail butterflies. Yes. This is another post in that series. Last year Aristo was in her pupa stage when necessity compelled us to take a brief Canadian trip. (And yes. Aristo was a she. Brigitte’s found a site where boys and girls of this variety are separately shown, and now we know we should have named last year’s creature Arista.) This year we have five we cannot simply leave to their own fate. Four of them are in the chrysalis stage, one about to enter it. So last night Brigitte prepared a temporary habitation for them during our more or less annual trip to Traverse City, Michigan. It begins today. Three of the creatures are visible. That sign at the bottom was intended for me. As I went to bed last night, Brigitte said she had an idea of how we should house them. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said. Well, the answer was waiting on the stove this morning.

Still Struggling to Learn Newspeak

I learned today that Nigeria is another state that I must begin to dread. The New York Times headlines “Islamist Threat in Nigeria Grows With Qaeda Help” (no less). I also learn that “Bashing E.P.A. Is New Theme in G.O.P. Race.” Ah. A former Shining Knight turns Darth Vader? That one starts getting personal—in that I labored some years at that agency. To be sure, that then (and still) tiny lop-off from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (those days) wasn’t exactly the darling of the Nixon administration either.

Reminds me of lessons I learned quite early in life in books titled Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the first George Orwell’s generic and the other his specific description of his times. I’d read these books in the 1950s, a time when individual authors could still be heard. The noise was still quite low. In 1984 I learned that that there must always be an enemy, that the enemy can change overnight, and we must immediately shift attention, when Big Brother nods, and hate the one we loved the day before. Having made peace with Communism, the shift came to hate Islamism—which new hate is still unfolding nicely. But hating the EPA, the new internal enemy, why that one will be a bit of a wrench for me, a lesson in learning self-loathing. The effort is daunting. I think I’ll start after the brief vacation on which we start today ends again next week.

Pierre de Fermat: Happy 410th

French mathematician Pierre de Fermat was born August 17, 1601. Google dedicates its search logo to the event today, the reason why I know. As in the case of all the great mathematicians, I greatly admire Fermat without grasping anything he tackled—much less why he’d bother. But I’ve looked into his life—as also the lives of several others over the years—because they are in some ways kin. I’ve spent my life pondering great puzzles, but in my case none is solvable whereas, in theirs, many were, if not by ordinary humans.

Fermat is most famed for his Last Theorem. The theorem is that there are no whole number (integer) solutions for this equation:

xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ if n is greater than two

…which is what Google’s logo reproduces. Fermat jotted into the margins of Dophantus’ Arithmetica the following famous phrase. “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.”

The issue goes back to Pythagoras’ theorem, namely: “In a right-angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides,” which makes:

x² + y² = z²

Finding numbers that satisfy this relationship became a preoccupation in mathematics; there are endlessly many, among them 3, 4, and 5. What Fermat claimed was that no such triplets were possible if the power is greater than two.

Fermat wrote his intriguing teaser in 1637. He never published his “marvelous proof.” It took 358 years before Andrew John Wiles, a British mathematician, published a proof in 1995. The story of that proof is told in Fermat’s Enigma, by Simon Singh, Walker and Company, New York, 1997. I got my copy from Brigitte as a birthday gift, my 62nd, in 1998. It’s a truly fascinating but, in the end, a not very satisfactory story. Wiles’ proof takes more than 100 pages to present and makes use of the most modern techniques of numbers theory—which, believe me, are not at all accessible to mere mortals. The margin of Arithmetica was not enough for Fermat, but two or three pages of parchment presumably would have been…