A Man Who Lived Two Years at the Bottom of a Well

Among the countries of the globe, Uruguay ranks 135th in population (3.3 million). Connecticut (3.5 million) is bigger, but Uruguay has 12 times more territory. You might call it an empty land with but 18 people per square mile—over against Connecticut’s 739.

The president of Uruguay is 78-year old José Mujica  (1935-). As a young man he joined the Tupamaros, a communist liberation movement that sprang up in Uruguay in the 1960s. He spent his youth fighting a civil war, in and out of prisons. In 1973, at age 38, he went into a military prison and spent 14 years in confinement; in the course of that imprisonment he spent more than two years in solitary confinement at the bottom of a well. He was 50 when he was at last released in 1985 after the return of constitutional democracy and a general amnesty. Then began his career in politics.

I know of this because Mujica lives very modestly on a farm where he and his wife, Lucia Topolansky, raise chrysanthemums for sale to the public. He gives most of his salary away and refuses to live in the Presidential Palace in Montevideo which awaits him with 42 servants on the payroll. And Mujica is also an advocate of legalizing marijuana. Such a profile qualifies him for sainthood under the dispensations of modernity, hence the press coverage. But never mind the cultural ethos that leads to publicity.

What left an impression on me, reading a story in the New York Times, was the almost infinite variety of lives lived on this globe—that and those two years spent at the bottom of a well. That, surely, will do something to a person. The mind, will, and the soul will change all in proportion to the innate character of the person who undergoes the ordeal.

My image, showing Mujica at 74, is from El Diario (link).

Ochlocracy and Other Gems

I got here because, the other day, Brigitte used Pöbel, a German word that refers to the uncultured masses (to put it mildly). We often use German words in our conversation when they have a sharper, more appropriate meaning than the English equivalent. Then, as is her wont, she wondered where that word might be rooted. We both assumed that its roots are the same as that of people, thus by way of French, peuple, where its first meaning is “people, nation” but les gens du peuple has that German flavor, meaning “the lower classes” or “the crowd.” We were right. But the French comes from the Latin populus, which, it turns out, comes from the Etruscan.

In seeking the German etymology of Pöbel, I encountered a, for me, brand new gem, ochlocracy. You might say that it is the rule of the Pöbel. Sure enough okhlos in Greek means “mob, populace,” and the Greek itself carries the sense of a mass in motion. This sense is captured in the derogatory Latin phrase mobile vulgus, literally “moving mass” or “moving people,” usually rendered as “the fickle crowd.”  Now, amusingly, for me—who’d always assumed that “mob” was a stalwart Old English word—it turns out that mobile vulgus is the root of “mob,” only the first three letters of the Latin phrase having been retained—and the whole meaning. And when we capitalize it as in The Mob, or talk about mob-rule, we are talking about ochlocracy.

Is it in our future? Well, it’s making inroads; it is moving. One indicator of our current situation is that we use the phrase pop culture with positive connotations (unless we are a ways past fifty). The family lineage of pop is very similar to peuple in French and okhlos in Greek. But the whole phrase is still in transition. It is something we cultivate even if, it seems, it is aiming at -kratia instead, the Greek modifier to signify “rule.” And sometimes, turning on the TV, even news shows, popocracy already seems to be comfortably in the saddle.

Cultural Indicators Revisited

The indicator I have in mind today is the pocketbook—more generally the pocketbook distributed, thus where you could casually find it, more specifically yet pocketbooks holding the culture’s treasured literature.

There was a time when I would visit drug stores to buy books. Drug stores in those days had names like Rexall, Katz, Thrift, and SupeRx. They devoted quite a bit of space to books, arranged on rotating racks, and what you could find in these places was quite astonishing. Novels, of course. Science fiction? Yes. But also literary novels, books of philosophy, history. And all modestly priced, just sitting on racks, humbly, much like boxed spaghetti at the grocers. Up to the 1960s and mid-1970s, I routinely bought very valuable paperbacks at such stores and at airports. And the situation was much the same in Europe; in Germany RoRoRo ruled, but there were lots of others. We were refugees in Germany and immigrants to the United States. We had at best modest means. But not only the publishing world but even retailers like drug stores brought us cultural riches at affordable prices.

Click to enlarge

The first ever present that Brigitte gave me, for Christmas 1959, was a pocketbook holding selections of Jakob Boehme’s writings. I still have it and show its image. It’s 7 x 4.5 inches in size, published by Goldmanns Yellow Pocketbooks, a RoRoRo competitor. That was still the world of manual typewriters. In that same year Xerox introduced its first copier to the world. Computers in those days were still at the maturing ENIAC stage. That little book fully retains its utility today; indeed it’s featured here because it happened to be laying next to me on the computer desk having been consulted about a week ago. Meanwhile electronic goods purchased much, much later, not least music records, diskettes, and recording devices have lost all of their utility (although they still clutter up the archaeological digs of this house).

Pocketbooks like the one I’m showing have essentially disappeared, replaced by trade paperbacks of larger size and much higher prices. Is the content still available? Yes. Indeed more so. There are books, e-books, Google books readable online, and much else. But not at the drug store. Chance encounters with classics while finding something to read on the plane? Gone. I still continue to check—a kind of animal reflex. What CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens have to offer is, in the context of the 1950s, 1960s too pathetic even to mention. In the 1950s drug stores still served readers at every cultural/intellectual level; now they serve only the lowest layer. And, indeed, most of the time, visiting Barnes and Noble for instance (Borders having crossed the border into Bookseller’s Paradise), B&N almost never has the book I’ve come to buy. But they can get it for me online. Thanks. I can do that too, and cheaper.

I’d emphasize, here, the structural differences. Looking at the situation around 1959, a substantial market for upscale literature at modest pricing existed. Many providers competed. Many channels delivered the goods down to every neighborhood. Today a vastly expanded content is available but based on what is, ultimately, a centralized (and hence vulnerable) electronic medium, itself requiring expensive tooling to use, tooling that rapidly obsoletes itself. The readers seem to have vanished. And as the age of fossil fuels reaches its end—which should be visible in another fifty-three years from now, this system may not survive it. But in those years, my little book, echoing the voice of a sixteenth century mystic, may still be around somewhere, still readable by someone who knows German. And along with it my many dictionaries.

Yes. And I would also emphasize the economics here. Cultural wealth was once accessible easily to those with modest means. Modest means, yes, but equipped with a sound education which made them look at books at the drug store. And opened vistas no longer visible to those thumbing tiny screens.

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The text on the shown book translated: On Divine Revelation/Jakob Böhme/The Silesian Mystic/Introduction and Selection by Charles Waldemar/Goldmanns Yellow Pocketbooks. The book was also published in 1959.

World Day of Peace

Pope Benedict XVI’s annual message, World Day of Peace 2013 (link), the forty-sixth such papal message, got echoed a great deal in the mainstream media for putting “unregulated financial capitalism” into perspective. It contained, in addition, other valuations of modern life certain to cause the heathen to rage. Benedict XVI delivered the message yesterday and also quoted brief parts of it in his homily (link) during mass at St. Peter’s Basilica on New Years Day, the official World Day of Peace. There is a secular version of it too, called International Day of Peace, the creation of the United Nations, celebrated first in 1981 and always on September 21st.

Pope Paul VI ( r. 1963-1978) began this Catholic tradition but, not being a close follower of church events, I became aware of it for the first time ever late last night, when Brigitte handed me a printout—and I saw the controversy that Benedict’s message was causing in the media a mere handful of hours later. Ironic, in one sense—not in another. While peace is the aim, the process of getting there is both turbulent and seemingly everlasting.

Missing Anchor

Today is an official holiday but lacking a traditional anchor. It doesn’t mark a great event or the turn of a season fixed by our planet’s motion around the sun. An essentially arbitrary calendar simply rolls over. In the context of this blog the change is more interesting, in a mild sort of sense, than usually, what with our fascination with “thirteen” (link). But, as holidays tend to do, today reminds me of our need for absolute markers in the continuous flux of time. Such days are meant for collective reflection on the transcending meaning of our existence. This New Years Day, however, is more of a reminder of another sort. It brings to mind just how far, as a collective, we’ve drifted into flux. Just as the day began, the Senate voted to avert an arbitrarily created disaster. Later today the House will vote to avert the same again. The Senate has celebrated its secular version of the Midnight Mass, the House will gather to observe a holy secular None.

Well, never mind. One of the demands of such times is a sage withdrawal from the reigning collective. Invisibly beneath its roar a new culture is being fashioned. And for those still in the work force, a day off is nice.

Crossing the Chain Bridge

If two out of three years makes a tradition, it is tradition on this blog to mark the passage from one year to the next with images of gates. Passage from 12 to 13, however, calls for something a little more massive, hence I bring today a landmark of my birthplace, Budapest, known as the Chain Bridge or, formally, Széchenyí Lánchíd. The bridge spans the Danube and connects high-lying Buda with low-lying Pest. The daylight view is from Buda. Parliament is on the Pest side to the north (left). The spires visible are those of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. I was born just up-river of here, on Margaret Island, between the two parts of the city (also to the left but invisible).

The perspective here is distorted by the current viewpoint (often is, come to think of it). The bridge is much wider than it looks, and the cathedral lies beyond a river-side park and then four long city-blocks inland. Another view, by night, corrects for that. Here is the same bridge ceremonially lit:

This image is taken from the Pest side, and the domed structure across the river is part of the Buda Castle.

For eastern parts of Europe, the technology always came from the West. The leadership that caused the building of this bridge came from a very famous politician and nobleman, István Széchenyí—who also founded the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The bridge was built by a Scot, Adam Clark, after a design by the Englishman William Tierney Clark (no relation). The first square the Chain Bridge touches on the Buda side is called Adam Clark Square.

So let us cross the bridge tonight and enter a new time. Will it be from the flat, industrialized Pest to the medieval  sharply rising, old-fashioned Buda—or the other way around? Time will tell. Time sometimes reverses its course.
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Picture credit: Hungarian Wikipedia (link).

Tracing Dubstep

The last Sunday of the year comes just one day ahead of The End, ideal for those who wish to review the year just past—culture-wise. We’re living in such “happening” times that missing like three days of the year before writing their retrospectives, the authors are sure to miss a brand new trend likely to “re-define” pop for years. So here is hoping that nothing much happens tomorrow, as in “virality.”

Herewith a quote from the New York Times that provides the context:

For pop 2012 was a year of rewired consensus. A year in which Taylor Swift finally accepted her pop-star birthright, waved casually at country and then bravely entered dubstep. A year in which the critic-consensus R&B star was Frank Ocean, who spent most of the year spilling out feelings and then averting his eyes. A year in which Carly Rae Jepsen suffocated the mainstream and then evaporated. A year in which Psy, a B-list Korean pop star, unleashed a video (and song) that became the first to surpass one billion views on YouTube, redefining virality in pop along the way.

     Jon Pareles, Ben Ratliff, and Jon Caramanica, “Mad Science and Pop Hits,” New York Times, today.

Now in that, for me, totally obscure paragraph, one word was even more opaque than the others: dubstep. Having accepted her birthright, Ms. Swift entered that word. Now was that a place? In today’s culture, where lower-casing everything is de rigeur if you are young, as writing vatican or queeny liz, it might be a place, another country (after all she was leaving “country”), a state of some kind of grace, or even, possibly, a new word for her nineteenth year. I thought I’d better look it up.

Lo and behold, dubstep is dance music. It is only 12 years old, born in South London, and has an illustrious heritage. It’s sibling is grime, music that came from East London. East meets South. Dubstep is described (by the Allmusic website) as “tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals.” Alas. Pop music described in words is as weird as classical music rendered into writing. Dubstep’s precursor is 2-step garage, itself the child of UK garage (mid-1990s). Now UK garage is a sub-genre of deep house, deep house a sub-genre of house, and house finally gets us back to the United States. It was born in Chicago (early 1980s). House is ultimately traceable to disco.

One more elucidation before my confession. That “garage” in 2-step and in UK comes from a New York City discotheque by the name of Paradise Garage, once located at 84 King Street.

Now for my confession. In all of the above I have been cribbing from Wikipedia without, frankly, understanding a word I was reading—but like Katie the Beagle (whom we’re dog-sitting at present) just sniffling the snow with fantastic eagerness to make a kind of fuzzy pattern. In human terms, this is like editing a Russian manuscript using a Chinese Grammar of Russian accessible by way of an English-Chinese and a Chinese-Russian dictionary.

The Two Races

Having mentioned Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychotherapist, yesterday I’ll follow it up with a quote from him:

In Wirklichkeit gibt es aber nur zwei Menschenrassen, nämlich die “Rasse” der anständigen Menschen und die “Rasse” der unanständigen Menschen. Und die “Rassentrennung” verläuft quer durch alle Nationen und innerhalb jeder einzelnen Nation quer durch alle Parteien.

In reality there are only two human races, namely the “race” of the decent people and the “race” of the indecent people. And “racial segregation” runs crosswise through all nations and within each nation crosswise through all parties.

Viktor Frankl, in a speech given on March 10, 1988, in Vienna, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi Annexation of Austria.

That “annexation” is commonly known as Der Anschluß. It took place officially on March 12, 1938. While the Nazis get “all the credit,” this movement predated the Nazis and really began immediately after the Holy Roman Empire disappeared in 1806. Thereafter advocates of a Small Germany and a Great Germany competed, the latter hoping to revive the HRE—which itself had been an attempt to revive the SPQR, the Roman Empire….

Where Statistics are Conspicuous by Absence

It might be very interesting, as a way of assessing cultural trends, if we could get good statistics for a handful of countries—or even just for the United States—on the number of practitioners of psychotherapy by major schools and, of course, over time: say 1900, 1950, and 2000. No such thing. I’ve tried. I’ve arrived here because two such schools came to mind in the last couple of months. One is hypnotherapy, pioneered by the American Milton H. Erikson (1901-1980) and the other logotherapy, the work of the Austrian Viktor Frankl (1905-1997). For me they stand way, way above the rest, but there is a strange commonality between them that I thought I would explore—and report on, most likely on Borderzone—in 2013.

Michelle is now taking a course, sponsored by her hospital, on hypnotherapy. It tickled me pink when I discovered that the course is centered on Milton Erikson’s methods. And as for logotherapy, I’ve known about it since my young adulthood, back when I was marching through the schools: Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, Eriksonian (no relation to Milton H. above), Horneyan, and then, finally Frankl’s. Frankl’s logotherapy is centered on meaning, and having arrived there, I had arrived—at a genuine theory. I didn’t bother much with the explosive growth of all kinds of therapies thereafter except to read a couple of books by B.F. Skinner the behaviorist.

Here I would note that while we avidly collect statistics on everything to do with money and people (the Economic and Population censuses), culture gets short shrift. I’ve long felt that statistics are a lens into the realm of vast numbers. Concerning psychotherapy, I found two numbers on Wikipedia. One lists the number of schools in 1980 (250) and the number in 1996 (450). The references cited are minimal and essentially impossible to trace. And even finding a coherent listing of such schools, they are quite varied, don’t agree, and list the names of broad categories, not actual schools. Fuzz, fog. Absent  the sharp resolution that statistics offer.

Inhalationism

A famous and successful American optimist, Ronal Reagan, put his finger closer to the problem when he suggested there was little limit to what people could accomplish if government would get out of the way.

    [From Daniel Henninger’s column in today’s Wall Street Journal]

The doctor must have hit Mr. Henninger just below the knee with a little hammer because those words, above, are a kind of reflex. The reflex might be called the American Reflex; it produces contradictory statements by members of government. That famous and successful optimist, after all, was a President of the United States, a Governor of California, a labor union leader, and a secret informer employed by the FBI to pinpoint communist sympathizers. Three of these activities of his could be described as “government”; he certainly didn’t “get out of the way.” People who suffer from the American Reflex hunger and thirst for political power when they are out of office, and when in the office pretend to do away with the jobs that they are holding.

Days ago we were once more throwing up our hands over some other, earlier instance of the American Reflex. “Odd, when you think of it,” I said. “America is the only country where this virulent hatred of any kind of collective activity, especially government, is taken for granted.” “Individualism,” Brigitte said.

Got to thinking about that. Individuality is a defining characteristic of humans. Humans only? No. It’s a feature of all living entities. Are the Japanese, Indians, Germans, Tibetans any less individual that we are? Isn’t it peculiar to single out this universal trait, common to all people all over the world as a distinguishing trait, a marker of American Exceptionalism? We all breathe. Then came the title of this post. Wouldn’t it be amusing if we worshipped breathing, instead of individuality? Then inhalationism would not have the ridiculous sound that it has.

The Rest of the Story

Over most of Europe today is the Second Day of Christmas; in England it’s called Boxing Day (not related to fisticuffs but to boxed gifts). Hereabouts we begin the brief walk to the end of the year. It is the rest of the story of 2012—but not in Paul Harvey’s sense. In that stout radio journalist's broadcasts that phrase always promised a surprise. Christmas crowns, indeed completes, the year. Not surprising, therefore, that the Mayan civil calendar began at the winter solstice, a right apt date for endings and beginnings: the shortest day. Since the solstice we’ve gained a whole minute in daylight here in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. But our calendar does not end for a few more days yet. And a hiatus is welcome, a time for taking a deep breath, for taking stock. Not for us the revels of New Years eve—although we’ll hear it out there as firecrackers will go off. In the world of the hyper, hysteria—over the cliff and the miserable retail sales numbers of this season, said to be, in today’s papers, the worst since 2008. The malls will still be busy. But hereabouts the humdrum begins to rule again. Where did I put the salt last spring? Was it in the garage? In the basement? Wherever I didn’t put it—that’s where I’ll be looking first. And now you know the rest of the story.

Silent Night

Brigitte and I wish all visitors and readers of Ghulf Genes a Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noël, ¡Feliz Navidad! Frohe Weihnachten, メリークリスマス, Wesołych Świąt, Glædelig jul, С Рождеством, 圣诞节快乐, and a Boldog Karácsony! We include you, too, Delrine, but cannot find the Sinhalese...

Weissenfels: One of Our Cradles

And der Saale hellem Strande	Along the Saale’s bright-lit banks
Stehen Burgen stolz und kühn,	Stand castles proud and brave,
Ihre Dächer sind zerfallen,	Their roofs have shattered in their falls,
Und der Wind streicht durch die Hallen,	The wind sweeps down their empty halls,
Wolken ziehen d’rüber hin.	The clouds above pass slow and grave.

Weissenfels is a large town (nearly 41,000) in southern Sachsen-Anhalt, a north-eastern state of Germany. It is about 20 miles south-west of Leipzig as the crow flies. It is on the Saale river and, to distinguish it from other  instances of Weissenfels in Germany, it is known as Weissenfels an der Saale. Until Germany’s reunification around 1990, it was in East Germany. Functionally the town has always been and still is an agricultural service center with light industry, but is better known as a cultural center where many famous 18th century musicians gathered or performed for the princes of Sachsen-Weissenfels. The famous poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) lived there. Friedrich Händel’s talents were discovered there. Many of the streets today are named after poets, musicians, and famous scientists. The town looks back to 1185 when some lord built a great castle topping the “white cliff” that gave the city its name. The Saale parts the town into a northern and a southern half. And this place also plays major role in Ghulf history. It was the gathering point for Brigitte’s family as World War II disrupted her family’s life in Lodz, in Poland and scattered its members. And here was born our eldest child, Barbara, close in time to this posting, on December 30, 1949.

The naming symbolism of life is wondrously curious. Barbara, the child of Brigitte’s first marriage, was born a Vogel; in German the word means “bird.” But Babs, as we call her, later married a man named Hohenstein. He is an American, to be sure, but the word in German is “High Stone”—so that she, a high flyer always, now bears a name that echoes the place of her birth. One of those proud castles along the Saale’s banks is shown in the winter shot of the town above. It is known simply as Schloss Weissenfels.

The war had scattered Brigitte’s family. Her father, Heinrich, had been impressed into the military and was at the Russian front, Brigitte herself had been sent off to Germany with her school to escape bombing—and she lost contact with her family in the vast confusion that soon developed. Elivra, Brigitte’s mother, set out for Germany with her youngest, Edda, still a baby. She was the first to arrive in Weissenfels where she had a friend, the mother of a son who would have married Brigitte’s cousin had he not been killed. Much later, Heinrich managed to join Elvira there—and thanks to his efforts and the invaluable help of the Red Cross, a very lofty institution in our hearts—Brigitte was found and also arrived. Last came Heinrich’s own father, Karl, a very old man, and Heinrich’s sister, Hela.

That’s the story, in barest outline. Those in the thinning ranks who still remember “real life,” as it was lived during World War II, will have no problem enriching this tale with sordid and shivery detail. But in the end, love conquers all.
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The wonderful panoramic shot of Weissenfels comes from the town's own website (link). The church shown is St-Marien, the evangelical city church (Stadtkirche). The view is from the Saale to the west.

Of Pens and Nibs and Ribs

The pen’s an object writers must possess!

A means, of course, it doesn’t spell success.

And of the pen itself the most important part,

The thing that gives it spirit, soul, and heart,

Is that metallic tip of it, its nib.

It is, let’s say, the writer’s thirteenth rib—

To make a nod, with tongue in cheek, to God

Who, if the text is right, instead of flawed,

Used Adam’s rib to write the script for Eve.

Or perhaps that rib meant to deceive.

The Hebrew might be read another way:

God might have nudged Adam a bit astray:

“From your own rib is where the woman sprang;

She’s merely yin and You are proudly yang,

(But as for Eve, she was right up My sleeve,

A wonder a mere man cannot conceive.)”

Now as for nibs, to get back to my subject,

The finest nib’s the worthiest of object,

And the writer lucky who gets as a gift

Two fine-nibbed pens to labor on his shrift.

Raising the Periscope

When first we moved to the Detroit region and were still just contemplating buying a house in Grosse Pointe, an astute, wise lady and high-ranking editorial figure at Gale Research (the reference Publisher) made a face and sort of stuck out her head, a gesture indicating, Are you sure you want to do that? And then she said, “Nice, yes. But there isn’t any shopping around there. You’ll find yourself forever traveling west.” Yes. That turned out to be true.

If Time has memories, Detroit, the city, and its most prestigious flanking suburb—but originally the first place where the French founders of this metropolis first built their dwellings—are regions that Time has forgotten. This isn’t where the action is. Hereabouts we still live in what seem to be the 1950s. Decorum still has its place. The schools perform. The other day we contemplated the projected plans of the City of Grosse Pointe Farms to “beautify” the town with literally more than  a dozen projects. Our Pier Park, with a grand view of Lake Saint Clair—dark blue waters,  bright sunlight, and white sails majestically beating their passage—Pier Park, already lovely and richly equipped, is getting yet other additions. Another consequence of our location here is that the mass and roar of Modernity is virtually unheard.

Yesterday the quest for an unusual object, to be precise a white-trimmed black Speedo one-piece bathing suit, caused us to raise our periscope. The change in image is appropriate in light of the product. I’d polled Sports Authority by telephone and discovered that the product we were seeking was only available in Auburn Hills, 45 miles and in that traffic an hour away. In that experience, both going and arriving, we did discover where the action around here is. It is way to the West and North. Vast masses of people, ocean-sized parking lots, creeping traffic. Reminded us of other trips. One took us from Detroit to Seattle in the 1990s, another from the United States to East Germany in the 1960s. One globe. But, to change the image again, different times. The globe’s face is dappled. Dark place and still—bright places and noisy. And those who live in each of these places think it’s the same all over. But it isn’t.

The End of a Mayan Age

The Mayans believed in “world eons” each lasting, using the Gregorian calendar, 5125 years. The Mayans had three calendars. The civil calendar (the Haab’) had 365 days, the religious 260, and the Long Count Calendar 144,000 days. A “world” or eon was 13 of these long count years, called b’ak’tuns.  The length of each such age, therefore, is 1,872,000 days.

The beginning of the last world—the fourth such in the Long Count Calendar—was on August 11, 3114 BC. Adding 1.872 million days to that brings us to today, December 21, 2012. Now is it just a coincidence—or did the Mayans know that the end of this age would end on the day of the Winter Solstice? I think that they did.

As pointed out in the last post on this series (link), they well knew exactly how long the actual tropical (also called solar) year was (365.2422 days). Their own civil calendar, according to the scholar, Victoria Bricker (“The Origin of the Maya Solar Calendar,” in Current Anthropology,  February 1982) had its beginnings on the winter solstice around 550 BC. The Mayans therefore clearly associated that date with the completion of a period. My guess is that they calculated their long calendar looking both backward and forward—and picked the starting day of this Fourth Age so that it would coincide with today’s solar event at its end.

To bring this counting down to earth, lets trace it. Between 3114 BC and 2012 AD, we have the passage of 5,126 years. But the first year was partial, starting on August 11; so was the last year, ending on December 21, today. Now August 11, 3114 (not a leap year) was day 223; therefore we count only 143 days of that year. This leap year’s December 21 is day number 356. So let’s do the additions using years of 365.2422 days as the multiplier for full years:

	Days
5,124 full years	1,871,501
Days in the first year to be counted	143
Days in the last year to be counted	356
Total Days	1,872,000

The exact time of the Winter Solstice took place in the northern hemisphere at 11:12 Greenwich Mean Time, which was 6:12 am here in Detroit; the scare-mongers prefer 11:11—perhaps because it looks more ominous. If you are reading this, it means that the world, as a physical phenomenon, hasn’t ended. Nor did the Mayans ever suggest that it would. It’s just another fancy calendar running out—so that a new one must be purchased.

So what happens now to folks who have been earning advertising dollars by publicizing Doomsday? Well, there is still hope for them. The Mayan Long Count Calendar is truly long. The next important date comes when instead of 13 b’ak’tuns 20 will have passed. At that point we reach a Piktun. And that day will come October 12, 4772. That would seem to leave a fair amount of time yet to come up with the new websites proclaiming that calamity.

But, not to err in my own projections, one of these eons one of the catastrophists, surely, will turn out to be right! Not this time. And in the meantime, the Mayans have had their season in the spotlight. And their astronomy serves us as a reminder not ever to discount the cleverness of vanished cultures.

A Swarm of Bases

Looking at Mayan ways of herding numbers, where base-20 numeration (the vigesimal) is dominant, with one exception, I was reminded that ancient cultures, going far back into the BC regions, also liked working with numbers other than the decimal. The Mayans used positional notation for their numbers but, unlike us, who move from right to left as numbers increase, they moved from top to bottom. At each position they showed multiples of 20 except in the third place. There they used an 18-base structure (octodemical). Their numeration came from the construction of calendars. The first position (topmost) included units, the second weeks (20 days), and the third years. If they had been consistently vigesimal, they would have derived a year by multiplying 1 week of 20 days by 20. That would have yielded a 400-day year—a little too long for comfort. Therefore they used 18-base numeration in that position to get a year of 360 days. Thereafter, each successive period was 20 times the earlier. The Mayans also had a symbol for zero; it had the shape of an eye.

During Babylonian times (around 1800-1600 BC), base-60 numeration (sexagesimal) was common—whereas the Egyptians used the decimal system. Use of the sexagesimal seems to have been motivated by the problem of fractions, known to plague all elementary grade children in decimal eras. Sixty is evenly divisible into halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, tenths, twelfths, fifteenths, twentieths, and thirtieths fractions, whereas 10 is divisible cleanly only into halves and fifths.

Now, of course, we also use a sexagesimal system daily—if not hourly—without having our eyes glaze up: the sixty seconds to the minute, 60 minutes to the hour, the 360 degrees of the circle, which is 6 x 60. And as we know instinctively that 15 minutes are a quarter hour, so we also know that 90° are a quarter of a circle. Our longer measurements of time are also derivable from 60—as in hour, and day—but when it comes to a year, Mother Nature shakes off our precision and insists on pesky fractions.

The Babylonians, unlike the Mayans, applied their numbers to geometry and mathematics, not to calendars. They stuck to a lunar calendar which is something of a nightmare to describe.

Modern people all over the world also daily use other bases without ever thinking about them. Two that are hidden—but the nerds know—are base-2 (binary), the core language of computers, and built on top of it the base-16 (hexadecimal), of which a half is the 8-bit byte. Some folks, stuck with very old computers, may also be served by 12-base (duodecimal) numbers.

The duodecimal is under our linear measurements (12 inches to the foot); hexadecimal hides in weights (a dram is 1/16 of an ounce, an ounce 1/16 of a pound), and in volumes (an ounce is 1/16 of a pint, the quart and gallon are multiples of pints). And so on. Note that bases other than 10 all have more clean fraction than the decimal. Sexagesimal wins, with ten such. The 12-, 18-, and 20-base have four, the 16-base has three.

So what is the point of all this? The point is that, before modern calculators, there was motivation (to use a word the nerds are fond of) for using all kinds of bases for ease of calculation—and habit has preserved those practices in ordinary life. And the final point is to praise the decimal point—which has freed us of calculating awkward fractions in the old way in an age that is becoming ever more fractionalized.

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My source here is A History of Mathematics by Carl B. Boyer, revised by Uta C. Merzbach, John Wiley & Sons, on the Babylonians p. 25, on the Mayans p. 213.

Emergence of a New Plea

One might think of it as the NRA Insanity Plea. Almost out of the box, someone suggested that the teachers in that unfortunate Newtown elementary “have blood on their hands.” They didn’t have a gun handy to defeat the attacker—blasting him to kingdom come from behind the desk where the apple sits. Okay. That was just a reflex. But as the second, third day dragged on, the new plea began emerging—with a weak and a strong thrust. The weak thrust is that we must now ban assault weapons—as if a person with a loaded six-shooter couldn’t, with some care, kill five people before terminating himself with prejudice. The strong thrust is that, looking for culprits, we must immediately point fingers at the Mental Health Community for its failure to identify the nuts among us.

Religious Affiliation

Religious affiliation of large masses of people is damnably difficult to establish with what might be called scientific precision. The reason for this is that the most cost effective method is by telephone survey. A really good census would be prohibitively costly. One way to do that would be to select four Sundays a year, one in each season, by randomized methods. Then, with observers stationed at every church in America, actual headcounts would be undertaken. The usual survey method is quite missy, one might say, because those conducting the surveys rely on the self-identification of the respondents. Thus, in addition to some 41 named religious or non-religious categories, the results include choices like “Christian,” not further specified,  “Protestant,” no denomination listed, and also “Nondenominational.” People could also vote for “No Religion” either by subcategory or by that label. The subcategories respondents supplied were Atheist, Agnostic, and Humanist. Here I am showing results obtained by the most respected survey of this kind in the United States, the American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS); it is run by the Graduate School of the University of New York.

I got to thinking about this while reading an article by evangelical pastor John S. Dickerson (“The Decline of Evangelical America”) in the New York Times this morning.  I got to wondering if ARIS had updated its earlier results, which had been for 2001. It turned out that it had. Data for 2008 are now available and were published in the 2012 Statistical Abstract (link, see Table 75). It now turns out that Pastor Dickerson may be wrong—or that he is reflecting a decline in quality rather than quantity. Those who self-describe themselves as Evangelical and/or Born Again more than doubled between 1990 and 2001 and nearly tripled in number between 1990 an d 2008.

Now when we next look at those who just say that they are Christian, they doubled in the 1990-2008 period (108.5% increase). Those who identified themselves as Protestants, however, declined by 70 percent. But those who called themselves Nondenominational increased by a whopping 4,040 percent. What to make of this? Are we dealing here with a drift in self-identification? So that once church-going people have been re-purposing Sunday and hence are kinda forgetting where they belong? Or does that huge Nondenominational increase mean drawing closer to religion?

The most potent increase in numbers is shown by Catholics (up in this period by 11.2 million, 24.33% in 1990-2008) and Baptists (up by 2.2 million, 6.4%). As for the single largest percentage increase, 4,175 percent, that belongs to Wicca. In 1990 there were 8,000 of them, in 2008 342,000. They know the name of their denomination. In this period, all Christian denominations increased their adherents by 14.7 percent (to 173.4 million), other religions by 50.28 percent (to 8.8 million), and the nonreligious by 138.4 percent (34.2 million). I last wrote about this subject in February 2010 (link). Back then I noted a drift toward unbelief. That still seems to be going on.

Brutal Corrective

An alternative title might be Cosmic Corrective—but that might be misunderstood as an Act of God, our most exalted and injurious conceptualization for the random. I’ve dealt with mass killings before both here and on LaMarotte, on LaMarotte again this morning (link), showing counts over the span of a century; they paint a trend.

For a student of the life of cultures and the death of civilizations, events like the Newtown, Connecticut massacre have the character of markers. I’ve written extensively here about collectives; culture is their youth and adulthood, civilization their aging and decline. I noted with interest that media coverage of the event was immediate and extensive—and that the presence of international media was prominent enough to be remarked upon and reported. The problem is now global.

The brutally corrective character of such events is that they remind us of something we’ve come to neglect: our impotence and helplessness—especially over against the collective, in the face of actions that arise from the fracturing of culture. Media coverage today and for quite a long time to come—until it fades only to erupt again when the next mayhem strikes—will be about why and how it could have happened, also, marginally, about “what to do.” Many things immediately come to mind, of course. Will laws be enacted? The safe bet is, No. But the sheer and increasingly densifying recurrence of such events will act as a corrective for many, many people—and as these numbers rise, the culture, sure enough will undergo a change. When chaos spreads and strikes the individual out of the blue like a random lightning bolt, we lose faith in our collective perfection and begin to look for a new orientation—in the vertical direction. Will mass killings eventually diminish? The cultural time-scale is very long—but yes; killings of this kind probably will as a new culture takes hold of us. In the best of cultural times, however, mass killing are still present and still practiced—but only at the most refractory and stupid level of humanity, by the tips of our collectives, by our kings and by our states.  

Concerning that Act of God, above, it is, unfortunately of very long standing. There is that phrase by the German poet Friedrich von Logau (1640):

Gottes Mühlen mahlen langsam, mahlen aber trefflich klein.

Ob aus Langmut Er sich säumet, bringt mit Schärf’ Er alles ein.

Longfellow translated von Logau’s Sinngedichte in part. His rendition:

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;

Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.

Longfellow lived in the nineteenth century. And folk sayings echo this. How many thought, in Newtown and elsewhere yesterday: “There but for the grace of God…” But our brutal corrective suggests that we best leave God out of it. His grace was as much there for those killed, and their relatives, as for those who escaped physical termination—which, ultimately, awaits us all.