Budapest

Budapest formed on the eastern bank of the Danube around the slopes of what is now called Gellért hill, the highest point in the region. The hill takes its name from St. Gerard, Hungary’s first bishop, martyred by being thrown off the cliffs there. From Gellért it is easy to look across the river, which here flows North to South, in order to scan the East—whence came wave upon wave of nomadic peoples who, for the locals, were always a threat. Here rose one fortification after the other, not least the Castle of Buda, and as that name implies, this settlement was called Buda after the Magyars, who were one of those dangerous invaders, renamed the place after one of their leaders. In later times, as population grew, it eventually spilled across the water. The city across the way was Pest. And, again in due time (1872), the two settlements united to form Budapest, the capital of Hungary.

The city was originally built by the Celts. Yes. If you’re a Central European, you’re a bit of an Irishman, and not just on St. Patrick’s day. The Celts called the settlement Ak-Ink (abundant water). After the Roman expansion eastward eventually incorporated the region (Pannonia) into the Empire, the Romans transformed that name into Aquincum. The Magyars came in the ninth century of our era. Throughout its history, Budapest was, in a quite genuine sense, a border between West and East, the Danube itself a natural line on the map of successive cultures. But in the center of Budapest, which is the river, there is an island which, as it were, makes the center of the center. It is called St. Margaret’s Island. And it was on that island, poised between two worlds, betwixt the East and the West, Catholicism and Protestantism, the traditional and the modern, in the border zone, as it were, that my mother gave birth to her first child seventy-three years ago today. My father, a Catholic and a professional soldier, was stationed in Budapest at the time; the Army maintained a military hospital on St. Margaret’s Island which my mother, a Protestant, was therefore privileged to use. This explains the circumstances of my birth. Or was there something else afoot?—such as, for instance, that this island, in pagan times, had been known as The Island of the Rabbits? It’s true. And I just learned this important fact today, delighted—delighted because I’m a great fan of the rabbits and, on my walks, always count them and consider myself very lucky if I see thirteen or more…

Yes. Budapest is another cradle of Ghulf genes. The coat of arms that kicks things off today is that of Budapest, of course, incorporating in its image the crown of Hungary with its characteristic leaning cross, two castles, Buda’s and Pest’s, separated by the Danube’s azure. As one discovers in delving into heraldry and ancient artifacts, universes of controversy open. The cross was most likely tilted in an accident, but one finds dozens of conflicting stories. The lions, I assume, were presciently chosen because the heralds of the nineteenth century knew that I’d be born under the sign of Leo. Alternatively, the winged lion was part of the original seal of Buda; Pest’s own coat-of-arms bore a griffin, not a lion. In combining the two, the high council responsible for this matter, later, after long and heated debates, eventually replaced the griffin with another, if wing-less, lion for better balance.

The photographs show St. Margaret’s Island. In the first the island is the green mass touched by the bridge in the foreground (St. Margaret’s Bridge). The island’s lovely water tower—at its foot is a grand outdoor theater—is the only visible structure. The second bridge, in the distance, is Árpád Bridge, named after the Magyar chieftain who founded Hungary. The view is from Pest, thus from the East looking North. Behind us on the eastern shore is the Parliament. Across the way and roughly equidistant is Buda Castle. The second photo shows one of the fountains in one of the parks of this large island. The hospital where I was born has long since been transformed into a health resort.

Ai, Ai, Ai!

The coincident appearance of two accounts recently reminded me again that Artificial Intelligence is supposedly advancing even as Ordinary Intelligence is visibly in decline. Indeed the two may be aspects of each other. The first was a New York Times piece titled “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man,” June 26. This was on the front page yet! The other was “Droning On,” by William S. Lind, in The American Conservative.

The first story reports without commentary on a conference held by computer scientists, members of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, at Asilomar in California. Nice place, Asilomar: beachside conference center nestled in lovely pine woods, walks on the beach, a great surf, fresh, modern facilities, all wood (except for pristine plumbing) a genuinely Danish atmosphere. And here people sat about thinking about the end of the human era, an intelligence explosion, and machines that can empathize with you one moment and kill you the next. These brainy people, to quote the story, “generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet.” At the same time, however, they wondered: “What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being?”

In the second story, politically incorrect William Lind dares to question the current and insane military doctrine that victory belongs to the technologist. He excoriates the military for using drone aircraft as killing machines. His article is well worth reading. Lind, wisely, puts the focus on the people behind the gadgets rather than marveling at machines. But the two stories converge. In the first scientists wring their hands; they let themselves imagine that machines have actual volition; in the second military people are depicted believing that weapons systems win military conflicts rather than people.

The mere fact that such nutty notions can gain traction is literally proof that ordinary intelligence—or, rather, its serious education—has been too long neglected. We are evidently sinking into barbarism in the midst of a vast technological expansion. Reluctantly, over the years, I’ve come to accept that math and engineering can be taught to and applied at very high levels by people who’ve managed, ultimately, to stay very stupid. So also can administration, accounting, and even law. There are hierarchies of knowledge, and the technical is nowhere near the top.

Circumstances so arranged things that I came to master the computer thing—and at a fundamental enough level so that I genuinely understand it. I was over forty when I started. Dante’s launch into the Inferno is not a bad analogy:

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
Ay me! [Inferno, Canto I]

Ai, Ai, indeed. But, like Dante, I too had a skillful inner guide, and so it all worked out. In those days I remember the wonder and amusement with which I plowed my way through Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach thinking, along the way, that we may have lost God but we’ve certainly discovered magic. We would form the body of an artificial man out of silicon—well, it is a kind of refined sort of dust—and then it would come alive. Or so Hofstadter hoped and believed. But breathing the breath of life into this artificial beast is proving a bit difficult it seems. Huff, puff, huff, puff. It’s not working yet, but faith, surely, conquers all.

One New, One Old

Written this morning.

Haiku in Three Drips

The rain stopped falling
At half past five, but a fast
Relentless drop kept

Me awake, its beat
Against the gutter’s steel, ping,
Ping, ping, ping, ping was

A Chinese water
Torture insisting on its
Own sharp Summer sound.

▬▬▬▬♦▬▬▬▬

Written on July 13, 1999 for Brigitte.

A Triplet of Haikus 4U

Before it really
Dawns, the birds noise somewhere near.
An owl hoots. Summer.

In the silence I
Hear the clock thump like a heart
On the sunroom shelf.

Above these faint sounds,
Unseen but not unaware,
God watches you sleep.

▬▬▬▬♦▬▬▬▬

Note for John: Alas, they are a family heritage. They sprout spontaneously where poets reside.

Why We Have Fingerprints

Of one thing only I am sure of:
Of dermal doctors none’s the greater,
Of skin none abler a repairer,
Than Nora Maya Kachaturoff!

Every visit to my dermatologist is fascinating enough so that it must be followed by another posting about skin. This morning I learned yet one more interesting fact. Science has discovered, and relatively recently, what function fingerprints perform in the great ecology of life. Our fingerprints have not been created (despite the claims of criminology) to help us apprehend the thief. No. Fingerprints serve a higher purpose: they help us feel the world with greater discrimination.

I was looking, again, at a wall chart quite similar to the one shown on the left. On the one that I was looking at, the odd little organelle near the center, colored green, did not have a label. Thus, after my consultation with Dr. Kachaturoff approached its end, I asked her what that formation might be all about. “Ah,” she said, “the Pacinian corpuscle.” It is a bulbous nerve ending but deep enough inside the skin so that I wondered: How could it be effective so deep down? The doctor explained. The corpuscle responds to vibrations. Then she explained, becoming quite lively (but she is always animated) at encountering a patient who took an interest in such matters arcane, that recent, modern research has uncovered a linkage between the Pacinian bulb and fingerprints. Evidently when something slides across those tiny ridges, vibrations are set up sufficient so that the deep-lying corpuscle can identify them and send a translation of this phenomenon on its way to Washington, as it were—the vastly distant brain.

Even a cursory examination of any aspect of the skin (and other ranges of the vast empire we call the body) reveals how many people labored for centuries to understand it. The discoverer of this tiny bulb was Filippo Pacini (1812-1883), an Italian anatomist, better known, perhaps, for isolating the cholera bacillus in 1854—well before Robert Koch, who came thirty years later and got all the credit. While we are entertained in the media by the antics of celebrities, other people, working in deep obscurity, keep discovering the secrets we think we already know. In the twenty-first century we are still completing insights that began in the nineteenth—or much earlier.
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Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia.

A Flux of Matter

Within the last week I’ve come across two articles each of which makes the point that the human body carries, inside and out, ten times as many bacteria as it has cells. We have somewhere between 60 to a 100 trillion cells. The numbers below begin to be as great as those in the astronomical above. The source I’ve managed to locate is a New York Times blog entry by Olivia Judson entitled “Microbes ‘R’ Us.” I can’t locate the second one—nor yet reports of the unveiling of some new scientific paper—hence I assume that Judson was probably the source of the second fragment I saw somewhere else.

Judson’s blog differs from earlier stories of this sort in one respect alone—namely its estimate of a total upper boundary of the number of bacteria in or around the body. Not that anyone has ever really counted the critters, but the human mind loves factoids, and soon everyone will know about the quadrillion bacteria we carry without so much as bending under the weight. The mere fact that we carry bacteria by the billions, trillions has been known for quite some time, of course. Our digestive functions vitally depend on bacterial cultures. The bacteria feed on our food, transform it, and we digest the “treated” product much more easily. Such bacteria are called commensals, a word coined from Latin rooting literally meaning “with-eaters.” When antibiotics destroy too many of these helpful parasites, we are in trouble until they are reintroduced and multiply.

Bodies may be likened to standing swirls or vortices of matter, analogous to constant swirls created in flowing water by structures on the river bed that cause turbulence below and on the surface. Matter constantly flows in and out of me—my breath for one. I’m constantly losing matter whenever I so much as touch something; I gain it back as I breathe, eat, drink. My cells have a finite life and are replaced. In each of my cells tiny power-plants, the mitochondria, have their own DNA and cycles of life; they are true symbionts. If I had instruments fine enough to see and measure at the elemental level, my body would extend a vast distance from its core, what I call the body, because I radiate heat, and matter escapes from me and floats away into the air. Not least I host—and benefit from—vast colonies of independent living things. To the extent that my health depends on them, are they really separate from me? Or part of the body? Where, if anywhere, do we draw the line? What, if anything, do I mean by me. This swirl, this standing wave of turbulence?

These are the kinds of thoughts young people think—and those who’ve failed to grow up or haven’t simply accepted the current explanations and therefore are still curious. Heraclitus (535-475 BC) has provided one of the answers—the one that captures all of the above: “Everything flows, nothing stands still.” But that’s the sound of one hand clapping. And for balance I need another hand.

Excuses

A steely decision that brooks no rescission
To post on Ghulf Genes no matter the means
That I must deploy—deep, thoughtful, or coy—
A steady supply, one for each day of the month of July,
That is the aim I hope will hereby justify a game
Or two, here and there, a puzzle there and here a rhyme.

Another Geo Puzzle

A puzzle in time also saves time—at a time when time is in short supply. This one is rather fun especially in our circle of reference publishing; we deal with States of the Union all the time. The puzzle is available here. Comment with your score and I’ll (reluctantly) confess mine. This one comes from my dear brother, Baldy. His scores are, as you might guess, if you know him, high!

Lodz: One of our Cradles

Lodz is Poland’s second largest city with some 890,000 inhabitants today. It began as a small farming community and later developed into a center of the textile industry. The place first appears in written records in 1332. The Poles write the name as Łódz and pronounce it as Voudcs, the “ou” as in could, the “cs” as in church. During the Nazi days the Germans renamed the city Litzmannstadt—a rather radical revision when you consider that in Polish Lodz means “boat.” A boat with an oar is the city’s symbol. The image on the left shows an old version of it dating to 1577. The text, in Latin, says Seal of the Town of Lodz. The shape of the object reminds one of Viking raiders; the modern city’s coat of arms, shown next, retains that shape—a yellow boat on a red field. One imagines the first settlers arriving by boat, rowing up the Jasien river, coming from the west. The river eventually supplies its waters to the Oder. One old boat must have been left dry on land up on some rise, and the landing came to be called “boat.”

Spinning and weaving became an early industry in Lodz and textile working appears to have caused a village to rise to the status of a city. One of the earliest buildings was a weaving mill along the Jasien river in 1387. Lodz may have had a history similar to the city of Szczecin—a gradual colonization by enterprising Germans; but in Lodz this process was not quite so advanced. Brigitte’s forebears were relatively recent immigrants, following a tradition introduced well before their time, and at the time of Brigitte’s arrival in 1932, they were still in that industry, even if her own parents no longer were. Not only that. Both of Brigitte’s parents came from textile families. Her mother’s people had founded a textile spinning operation in Lodz in the middle of the nineteenth century. The successor of that mill was still in operation in Brigitte’s day, although the enterprise was by then also engaged in manufacturing weaving equipment. Brigitte’s mother, however, was a dentist. Her father’s family were operating textile weaving enterprises; but her father was an economist and business consultant.

History, Journalism

We take a breath ten to twenty times a minute; a newborn breathes (so I’m assured) forty-four times a minute, a running athlete every second. A history that might record our every breath, explicitly, I mean, would probably be as boring as the sequel that the eager publisher hurries to the market: My Life: One Eye Blink At a Time.

I made the mistake a couple of months ago of picking up a history of Rome. The dreary results of that decision are found here and there marring my blogs. The latest consequence of that error has been reopening Gibbon’s Decline and Fall at a point where a sheet of paper was sticking out. The paper was a map from the Internet showing parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia as the Romans (and Gibbon) called them. Illyricum is the Balkans, Pannonia is my Hungary, The Mediterranean is Mare Internum, etc. Reading Roman History is a kind of Madness: One Emperor at a Time.

Much as breaths and eye blinks punctuate our lives, so reading history punctuates mine. The intervals are greater, but the reactions, each time, invariably, are the same. Eventually I’m overcome by exasperation. I have the feeling that formal histories miss something essential. That impulse, several big breaths ago, sent me looking for the fine structure of history, in that era. The field is sparse, at least the kind of literature you can buy in a bookstore. I have a single slender volume on everyday life in Rome. Wouldn’t you know it! It begins with the first problem most of us have when we wake up. It seems that to find a comfy place in which to urinate was not that easy in the good-old-days—unless, that is, a leather tannery was right next door. Those places liked collecting urine as a processing chemical and made “facilities” available to the public. Oh, my. The scatological isn’t neglected later either; I learned that doing Number Two was also a more or less public event. But enough of this giggly stuff.

The resolution of history—I mean that now in an optical sense—illustrates our limitations. At the very fine resolution we get a replay of ordinary experience that we normally ignore. At the highest resolutions that one finds in cyclic historians there seem to be no people there at all; the actors are civilizations. In the middle ground are notable figures, and the more notable they are, the more one longs for a peaceful game of tic-tac-toe.

Journalism, the so-called first draft of history, lives up to the name. It’s rhythm is daily, more recently almost hourly, but the focus is on Important People, and the importance of these people is in part derived from the vicious things they do. My experience—or reactions to them, actually—appear determined to wean me of these interests, but like all of the rest of the humanity I’m morbidly fascinated. It’s very hard to break the habit of enjoying the outrage at all the horrors, which is actually no joy at all. But it takes genuine effort to turn away. And the sophisticated forms of it, such as vast, beautifully written, scholarly histories are no more elevated, in result, than journalism, or seeing gladiators slaying one another, or watching the modern versions of them mowing down jerking, spasming bodies on TV.

Terrain

Why did the Balkans cause the Romans, the Byzantines, the Austrians, and our current times such political headaches? Why is Afghanistan known as the graveyard of empires? The answer is, Terrain. I once read in a penetrating book about the Balkans—I wish I could remember its title—that if you ironed out its terrain, it would be almost the size of all of Europe. That notion might be applied to Afghanistan as well. In such terrains even the overwhelming power of a U.S. military falters. These regions breed independent people able to outlast the most persistent.

This post will also serve to introduce those who've never had the pleasure to use Google Maps, using the "Terrain" feature, to the insights such views can offer. Herewith terrain maps of Sarajevo and Kabul...


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

Afghanistan in Context

Fifty years ago, as a young man in the U.S. Army in Europe, I first learned about Kashmir. My education has always taken novel forms. It proceeded by bumps, exposures, and absorptions. Ten years before that time, for instance, I’d learned about Korea when listening to some inspirational readings—about the labors of brave missionaries—at Konvikt Sankt Bernhard, a Catholic boarding school in Germany. Every day, at the noon meal, someone read out loud for about fifteen minutes until our principal said “Satis”; thus I also learned what Romans said when they meant to say “Enough.” Five years before that time, I learned about the Sufis when my mother threw up her hands and cried: “Stop it! Stop dancing like a wild Dervish.” Anyway, I learned about Kashmir because the deputy commander of our unit, a lieutenant colonel, was taking classes offered by the University of Maryland; so was I. He had to write a paper and asked me to help him shape its English; he provided the content. Editing the stiff text, I learned about Kashmir. Fifty years ago.

The memory surfaced today as I noted in the New York Times that Pakistan objects to U.S. actions in Afghanistan, against the Taliban, which causes Pakistan problems of insurgency inside the country, forcing it to pull back troops from its borders with India, not least borders with parts of Kashmir. The Pakistanis, evidently, are much more concerned about India than worried about terrorism by virtual cousins, you might say, which the Taliban certainly are.

Pakistan itself is just 62 years old, dating from the partition of India into two Muslim enclaves (Pakistan and East Bengal) and India proper. That took place in 1947, followed by chaotic upheavals and the kinds of half-forced and half-voluntary migrations we’ve come to call ethnic cleansing—as Hindus moved south and east and Muslims went north and west. No sooner separated, Pakistan and India fell out over Kashmir, a mostly Muslim princedom that Pakistan began to infiltrate when its ruler did not opt to join the Dominion of Pakistan. Kashmir’s northern areas are ruled by Pakistan, its southern reaches by India, and high tension has stiffened the air above this region ever since 1947, wars between Pakistan and India erupting in 1965 and again in 1999. As for East Bengal, a part of Pakistan after the partition and renamed East Pakistan, it eventually broke away and became Bangladesh. In that conflict, as well as in all of the others that surrounded the partition, many thousands of people perished.

This entire region, including large areas of Afghanistan bordering Pakistan, have an honorably violent history in which two cultures (Muslim and Hindu) have been clashing ever since Muslim invasions from the North began in 1206. Islamic sultanates eventually conquered all of the Indian subcontinent in the Mughal period (early sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century).

We are now bogged down on the northern fringes of this region under the strange illusion that controlling Afghanistan—a mostly stony, rocky, mountainous, dirt-poor, and barbaric region of the world, that no empire has ever effectively managed to control—will secure us from terrorism. In this process we’re ignoring the vast sweep of history. We’re projecting our own values and assumptions on this region and naively believe that democratic forms will not only take root there but magically transform a region in habits and history altogether alien to ours.

And fifty years from now? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some earnest colonel in 2059 will still be using his spare time to improve himself by learning something about Kashmir. Or Bangladesh. Or the geography of the Khyber Pass.
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Maps are from the CIA World Factbook, an old friend, you might say.

Humanity Steps on the Moon

Certain events deserve nothing less or more than a simple bow of the head. Such was the landing on the moon that took place forty years ago today. I was underway, traveling by car, far from home, somewhere in Indiana, driving in darkness and listening to the radio. At last, and just in time, I saw lights and an easy exit. I drove off and made it to the light—a filling station. The owner had set up a TV set in the garage, the two bays empty, the lifts lowered on their oily columns. And there, a handful of us—locals and travelers—stood in the semi-darkness and watched as Neil Armstrong descended and made contact with the dust of the moon. Humanity was watching. I waited in line at the pay-phone until, my turn, I called home to share the moment with my family back in the state with the red earth, Virginia, where we lived in what, in our small circle, brings that whole time back: the Wallingford house.

The American People

My title refers to the common phrase we hear, constantly, in political discourse. Now I will present a sample of two such people, American People, the only people seen walking on Kercheval Avenue in Grosse Pointe (it’s a sizeable boulevard), at precisely seven minutes to 5 p.m. today. One was myself, wearing jeans, a striped shirt, and a rugby cap (Detroit Rugby Football Club, Est. 1968), and carrying a white plastic CVS bag holding two medications, picked up on foot (about an hours' walk) to get exercise and (incidentally) to save a tiny bit of gasoline. Concerning me, you know a little something from reading this blog. The other representative of the American People was a gentleman of roughly my age. He wore a tan suit, a white shirt, and a dark bow tie. He walked from the shade of an elm into the sunshine, and that bow tie was like a coat-of-arms, you couldn’t miss it. He was carrying a slender folder. Judging by the place, the time, I guessed that he was a retired businessman or banker who still visits an office, a place of refuge, a place where the transition may be marked in dignity, most likely in the Punch & Judy Building, across from our Library—a building that specializes in offering just such suites, modest in size but nicely appointed, to serve such purposes. I went my way, he in his, and as I walked home I pondered the meaning of this picture—the limitless uniqueness of each and every person, not least the American People neither of these two old men could see—because they were driving up and down Kercheval, as usual, but the sunlight reflecting brightly from the windshield hid their faces from view.

A Quote in Time Saves Time

Das eigentlich wahrhaf Gute, was wir tun, geschieht größtenteils clam, vi et
precario. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The genuinely good that we do happens largely clam, vi et precario, thus in secret, by effort and prayer—although, strictly speaking, the Latin means secretly, by force and by request. Prayer in Latin is precatio. I feel the temptation to wax eloquent on that difference between an R and a T, but time presses today.

Flipsides of Alienation

Many years ago now, Brigitte once bought a pack of cigarettes an enterprising outfit had produced. The cigarettes looked real, felt real, had a tobacco odor. She gave me one without revealing the background. I lit the thing up, took one puff, held it at arm’s length. I said: “There’s something wrong with this cigarette. It, uh, it lacks a theme.” I had a Churchill quote in mind. Churchill supposedly sent back a pudding once, saying to the waiter: “Tell the chef, this pudding has no theme.” My cigarette was made of some kind of grass carefully doctored in all of the irrelevant ways. But it had no nicotine.

There is the story of the young man who went to work for a pair of brothers, master dyers. They made a highly prized color purple. After two years of learning, our man left one day and organized his own shop in a distant town. He used the same ingredients as the Purple Brothers. He had timing, temperatures, vessel-sizes, sequences—everything right. But at the end he got a sick-green dye nobody wanted. He labored months but kept on failing. He went on to another trade. But years later he ran into one of the Purple Brothers. They went and had a beer. Our man confessed. “What did I do wrong?” The Purple fellow laughed. He said: “Remember how we used to send you out to fetch fresh rolls every morning? Well, while you were gone we added it—the secret ingredient.”

When a person is said to be alienated, the assumption is that all is well with the society. Something is wrong with the alienated person. But the flip side of this is that the lack may well be in society, not in the person. What happens when the salt of the earth hath lost its savor?

Alienation may be the right, the healthy, the creative response to a situation. But for most people this is a painful process. We tend to blame ourselves; we think that we are maladapted. A Sufi story comes to mind. This concerns a man who learns that, as of a certain date, by evil magic, all of the water naturally flowing would be poisoned and the poison would make everybody mad. The man labors hard and hides several large vessel of good water deep in a cave. When the day comes, the people really do—they go crazy. All sorts of madness spreads. But our fellow retains his sanity. He secretly fetches his still-good water late at night and carefully sips it all day. But he soon feels, well, alienated, separated, estranged, alone. For weeks he holds out but, in the end, he can’t stand it any more. On that day he goes to the flowing fountain in the town, drinks of the poisoned water, and goes crazy like the rest.

As you can you tell, I’ve been listening (if only in nauseated dribbles) to Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings—and to the health care debate. I'm also a regular reader (more honestly a skimmer) of the New York Times. What’s wrong with me? I keep drinking deep of the poisoned water, but it doesn’t seem to work on me.

Added Later: Strange how things happen. On the evening of the day on which I wrote the above, I visited for the first time a link on Siris to a blog called Nova Scotia Scott where I found, in the side-bar, the following quote:

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us’.” — St Antony of Egypt

The Measured Pace of Progress

The idea of progress is showing signs of over-ripeness—little brown spots on the pristine green of the pear. I think the idea came into flower with the French Revolution, and one of its rational hopes was that measurement would start obeying sensible rules, everything decimal, s’il vous plait—milli-, centi-, and meter; kilometer; milli-, centi-, and liter; deciliter, hectoliter; milli-, centi-, and gram, kilogram, metric ton. It didn’t quite happen; and what with the pear over-ripe, metrication isn’t in our future either.

I was reminded of that today. I was helping proof our second oldest product, Market Share Reporter, the upcoming volumes (he shakes his head in disbelief) will be the seventeenth edition. This book covers the world of things on sale across the world, tangible or otherwise, and in the things that you can touch all kinds of measurements surface.

I note that long, metric, and the standard U.S. ton are still all alive and well although they are 2240, 2205, and 2000 pounds respectively. The hundredweight still also comes in two varieties, although the Imperial cwt, 112 pounds, is fading—used these days only for weighing bells intended to be rung. The c of cwt stands for the Latin centum. I note that it takes 20 Imperial cwt to make a long ton. Long tons are still used for aviation fuel. The long is sometimes referred to as gross ton. To complicate matters, a deadweight ton (dwt) is the carrying capacity of ships, and it comes in tonnes (1000 kg) or in long tons (1016 kg). Tonne is the synonym for metric ton, and when you proof you’ve got to be aware of that, strike through the word and say metric ton instead for the U.S. readership. Looking these things up I discovered that there is also an “old” hundredweight (108 pounds), but that will only be of interest to medievalists.

The Brits did not like the French Revolution, something we know from history. Today it seems that they like the French better than the Germans. They use the French spelling for litre; the Germans say liter. So do we. At ECDI we want things spelled one way or the other, not both ways at once.

Coal is sometimes reported by “millions of tons of oil equivalent,” sometimes as metric tons, sometimes as tons. All good analysts have on their desk—I can see mine from here—little handbooks that let us render anything into anything else. Gas in cubic meters? When I want cubic feet. No problem. Oil is usually reported in barrels, but the gallon comes in two versions. A U.S. barrel is 42 U.S. gallons but 34.972 Imperial gallons; sadly, whichever gallons you use, you only get 19.74 gallons of gasoline out of a barrel of oil. But not all barrels are born equal. Barrels used for food or chemicals hold 55 U.S. gallons.

Diamonds? Millions of carats. Cotton? Bales. How much do these weigh? 480 pounds. Bushels? Pecks? When do I wake up? I’m dreaming of the future, and it holds lots of jīns, lǐs, and dàns. Those are Chinese measurements equivalent, respectively, to about a pound, about 550 yards, and 23 gallons. The dominant economy tends to impose some at least of its measurements on its trading partners sooner or later.

Sometimes one also runs into something like this. “The world market is worth Rs 3,000 crore.” Come again? This turns out to mean 30 billion rupees (Rs). Crore stands for 10 million and modifies the number shown. I guess the Indians like small numbers. The rupee being worth 2 cents, that market (for beer in India) was worth $615 million in 2008.

But enough. Progress is slow. And it may be recessive.

Rays of Sunlight - Two

While in a praising mood, I thought I’d make a second entry to celebrate things large and small in modern culture. Herewith one big thing and one small.

Yesterday Air France delivered two boys to us, Henry and Malcolm, Michelle’s youngest, twins aged ten. They left Paris and arrived here some eight, ten hours later, smiling sweetly, full of life, accompanied by an unsmilingly severe lady in Air France uniform (the perfect French bureaucrat) holding their passports and wheeling their luggage. A curious process of identification then took place. The children waved, we rushed forward (Brigitte, Monique, and I) and proceeded to hug and smack big kisses in European style while the Air France lady observed and, no doubt, at some crucial level, fully knew that we were the people to whom these youngsters could now be safely transferred. Bits of paper? What do they know? Nonetheless, we next proceeded to the examination of bits of paper, not least Monique’s plastic-encased Michigan driver’s license—which the Air France lady dutifully studied, not least the picture, looking up to see if Monique was really the same reality as the photograph indicated. Magical things were going on—a mental process in the Air France lady’s mind which judged the picture to be Monique. Behind that look loomed the vast process of vehicle licensing arrangements by the State of Michigan. Then came signatures, twice, and finally, mutual nods and smiles (the bureaucrat cracked a little) signaled the end of the encounter, and— left, as it were, en famille— we proceeded to the elevators.

Second verse. Back at Monique’s house, not very much later, the boys in swimming trunks now, attempted to do it all at once, thus swimming and fishing at the same time. In this process I got entangled with Henry’s fishing box, left over from last summer. Inside it the top tray had been hopelessly disfigured by the melting of five or six artificial worms made of some kind of second-rate plastic that had liquefied in the fierce heat of last summer. While the boys were off to fish-and-swim simultaneously, I went off (always seeking concentration) to clean up that tray. It was fiercely resistant—until Monique, divining my problem, handed me one of the modern culture’s unsung but great products: Goo-be-Gone. Well, in truth, the product’s real name is Goo Gone, but everybody refers to it as I just did. The Producer is Magic American Corporation—and that’s the kind of magic I do believe in. In no time at all, Goo Gone had dealt with the melted worms and Henry’s tackle-box was as good as new. I suffered conscience pangs for enjoying this cleaning experience rather than using it as a way of interacting with Henry, letting him do it, but for the boys it was now 1:00 a.m. subjective time, for us 7:00 in the evening.

Praises to Air France and all the other airlines, battling the storms of high prices and falling travel patronage. Praises for Goo Gone.

It was a good day. There are lots of them. By way of a corrective to this excess of exuberance, I began looking forward to today’s New York Times, and, indeed, I wasn’t disappointed. Goo be Gone but Gloom be Back.

In Praise of Concentration

Quite early in my youth already I discovered that some people seek stimulus while others seek solitude. An innate endowment must lie beneath this difference. Those who seek solitude are easily stimulated; they’re sensitive—you might say excessively so. By “excess” I must here refer to an imagined standard from which most people don’t deviate far. At the spectrum’s other end are people who actively seek stimulus of every kind. For them solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment whereas for the sensitive that sentence has at least one element of charm.

On the whole I am much more solitary than outgoing. I lean in that direction, and strongly at that, much as in the choice between the Platonist or Aristotelian temperament, I definitely lean in the platonic direction. Yes, solitude. I well recall my delight long ago discovering the famous quote attributed to St. Bernard de Clairvaux: O beata solitudo! Sola beatitudo! Yes, I said. Yes, yes, yes! But what I mean by solitude—as I’m sure every other person so inclined also does—isn’t some kind of passive state of lazing around while chewing stems of grass and contemplating clouds. Solitude is an active, attentive, and sometimes a creative state. But it is inwardly rather than outwardly focused. The stimulus rises, comes from internal springs. And the very demand for solitude arises because it creates the best conditions for attending to this inner process. It requires concentration—which is very difficult to achieve amidst constant distractions.

Concentration, then, in turn—once it has become a well-established skill—counteracts the trance-inducing centripetal force of sensory stimulus from all sides. It calms and centers the self and produces what I call sovereignty. By that I simply mean a feeling of mastery over the world around me—even when my actual mastery is virtually zero. Nonetheless, in a concentrated state, I feel above the flux. When solitude is denied, concentration is still possible. In the world of action, it is a skill the invocation and practice of which has very beneficial consequences; better judgments will be made; actions will be more sharply, effectively directed. But concentration and its practice have more to do with athletics and crafts than with learning abstract concepts. It’s not a cognitive skill but something that depends on will. Those among the sensitives who cannot learn to exercise their will efficiently are condemned to endless suffering. Those at the other end of the spectrum can never get anything done. We ought to teach concentration in multiple settings to every human being—not just to some on football fields.

Cultural Winter

In the early 1980s two scholars suggested that global nuclear war might asphyxiate photosynthesis in a vast cloud of soot and smoke persisting long enough to produce what they called “nuclear winter.” Now here I would suggest that analogous, strange, “unnatural” seasons do sometimes actually set it, caused by human action—and that the latter half of the twentieth century was such a lull, a freezing, a species of “cultural winter” caused by war.

My thesis is that a great cultural process has been underway since the eighteenth century, the peak of the Enlightenment, namely a slide toward barbarism; Oswald Spengler called it the “The Decline of the West.” The twin convulsions of global war were part of this process; the fact that we call them world wars is testimony to the reach of our civilization; their unsurpassed violence, culminating in the twin flowers of atomic fire over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, proof of our mastery over nature. But the very violence of that conflict brought exhaustion and sharpened the emerging polarization between the decaying West and one of its chief heresies, Marxism. As World War II ended, it left the U.S. mesmerized by the threat of the U.S.S.R, and the other way around, while the Yellow Peril (a.k.a. China) was also heading the wrong way. The resulting paralysis brought a kind of madness at the upper layers of our culture—but, fortunately (that famed silver lining), it produced a kind of cultural quiet at the level where ordinary people lived.

The madness included children practicing to die under their desks with little arms folded over their heads. Quite a few people were frightened enough to build atomic shelters in backyards. McCarthyism was another ugly symptom, Joe hounding communists with steely eyes. The concerned and the sophisticated read books like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. At RAND Corporation Herman Kahn was thinking the unthinkable. Early signs of what today is a mad polarization began appearing as some members of the Silent Majority pasted little U.S. flags on cars to say that they loved Nixon. Places all over began to sprout astounding masses of nuclear bombs and missiles, but where they were nobody knew. Top Secret. The domino theory justified two wars, Korea, Vietnam. But all this while Capital was held in check. Government mattered because the reds were out to get us. Madness indeed. George Orwell, writing his novel, 1984, did not realize, I don’t think, that he was writing the script for a Reality Show called the Cold War.

Now for the silver lining—what I call cultural winter—namely the temporary suspension of our rush to decadence. It lasted for a period of roughly 50 years, from the end of World War II to 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. In this period government felt obliged to look out for the people, fearing—consciously or unconsciously—that the public might embrace the communist heresy unless it had a modest level of well-being. Capital, therefore, was held in check. Communism kept us honest, cautious. It was a bi-polar world, and as a consequence life at the working level remained relatively peaceful despite spontaneous signs, twitching, and stirrings of decadence. But it was held in check.

Brigitte and I were lucky to have lived the core of our lives in this hiatus, with reasonable conditions in which to raise a family. In this time America was strangely innocent. The ordinary people remained friendly, polite, and modestly prosperous. The tension and madness above us could be felt but did not infect the folk. Talk radio? No. The top hits dominated the airwaves in the cities; out in the country country music reigned: “Drop-kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.” Bible programs. Polarization? Largely absent. TV shows? Happily mediocre and careful not to offend. Drugs? Yes, but distant. Little houses mushroomed everywhere and you could afford them with FHA loans. Libraries were good, not too crowded. In private you could have high culture, and Public TV did not solicit funds.

In retrospect only, to be sure, I liked the cultural winter. Curiously, when decadence began to move again—the dread of commies fading—the change was signaled by troubles in the Balkans. This whole interlude had begun there, in Sarajevo, kicking off the bloodiest conflict known until that time. Now it ended with the Balkans breaking into pieces, like the frozen surface of a river, vast blocks rubbing and scraping at each other. Cultural winter was over, and from now on the chaos already underway before I was born could resume its march into the future.
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The scholars who coined the phrase “nuclear winter” were John Birks at the Max Plank Institute and Paul Crutzen at the University of Colorado writing in a paper published in Ambio in 1982.

Perspective

Quite a while back I chanced across an automated slide-show titled “Secret Worlds: The Universe Within.” The title is a little lame, but the experience is not. The merit of this project is to enlarge our perspective, an activity fit for that day of the week reserved for contemplation. There are many dimension to reality, but the physical is certainly the one our eyes can’t help but contemplate. This show illustrates in images the Hermetic “As above, so below.” I urge all who see this post to take the tour and click through to see for themselves. The link is here.

For those who didn’t scroll down to the bottom of the page, I note that credit for this innovative view of our fractal universe belongs to Michael W. Davidson and the Florida State University, the joint copyright holders.

The idea for digging up this site—it took me a while to reconstruct the processes of mind that first produced it and to find the two- or three-word strategy I used in my search then—came to me while I was clearing a vast jungle of neglected growths in our back yard. Whenever I do that, and I am in touch with nature, handling branches and weeds and the dried out detritus of the last season still clinging to the soil and forming mats through which the new emerges; and then, always, I’m reminded of the stupendous complexity of everything, living or not—and who’s to say where living yields to dead? Relentless branchings and branchings of branchings of branchings—and looking at the tips of the tiniest things, catching my breath, I realized that I’ve not even begun to see. There’s much, much more, as the ads keep telling us—and so also the world.