Don’t Gift Me That

Reification marches on. More on that word may be found on this blog (link), but in that note I failed to mention one meaning of the word. It also means to drain the life out of something, thus to make it seem like a corpse. Today the Wall Street Journal features an article on its Personal page titled “The Science Behind Gifting.” It uses two words that both do this—and then it concentrates on that mo-mo-modern linguistic delight, regifting. The science consists of asking people questions in surveys, which, like “gifting,” comes about as close to rendering Nothingness tangible, audible, and tactile as I am able to imagine. Below that article WSJ gifts me with news of mad-cow disease, to the right with news about heart attacks (actually how to avoid them by dieting). I’d rather catch the one or be felled by the other than learn to manage my gifting. Bah! Humbug!

Youth—Age

The Hydrangea in its glory and (at least temporary) old age. Same being. All that’s changed is time. Picture Picture. I showed the glory last June 25. Now a couple of close-ups:

One of the observations I have made for many years now is that the old are not even seen—which causes me to have to exert special efforts even to comb my hair before I go shopping—and I might get past the sunroom door like that were it not for Brigitte’s eagle eyes; they still see me, alas. But our noble hydrangea even draws the eye in its wintry garb. It drew my eyes this morning as the rain began to dribble sullenly on our back yard.

The Comprehensive View

One of the more interesting ideas in Carl G. Jung’s work is the suggestion that consciousness is a very bright but also a very small sort of light. It is a tiny but very energetic island afloat on a vast ocean of Unconsciousness. And that phenomenon, the Unconscious, comes in a personal and a collective form. Moreover, it holds a deeper wisdom. Or that, at least, was how Jung saw it. He was, as I’ve remarked elsewhere here, a transitional figure between an ending and a dawning age, the Enlightenment and the New Age. Let’s call the second the New Dark Age to signal that, unlike the Enlightenment, it will takes its inspiration from within, not from the world without.

Living in that transition, Jung seemed to have trouble deciding what could and what could not be conscious. Getting down to the practical, the Personal Unconscious just has to be our memories, thus a kind of record. But while records, like books, may contain the products of consciousness, they are not in themselves conscious. And similarly with that Collective Unconscious. The only practical way to imagine that vaster complex is to say that, in some as yet undiscovered way, we participate or have access to the deposit of the memories of all who’ve ever lived. In Jung, however, these formations not only contain a kind of wisdom; they are also active, as if they were persons, the Collective older than the Personal. And in dreams the Unconscious presents information to the little consciousness in symbolical formations, as if awarely guiding us. Not surprisingly, he sometimes treats the Unconscious as if it were God.

To someone like me, born into the early days of the New Dark Age, consciousness is the property of souls, of agents. And rather than talking of it as if it were a kind of mysteriously arising Phenomenon that streams through us, to use William James’ phrasing, it is a power. So how does the Unconscious fit that scheme? It fits nicely if we think of the powerful, bright light not as consciousness but as attention. What we know in the day-to-day and general sense is what we mind. But we experience a good deal more than we mind. Nevertheless, what we ignore is also cumulated in our memory.

This suggests the great importance of cultivating a comprehensive view of reality, be it of the mundane or of the exalted. “Comprehensive” has become a key word in my mind of late because our ordinary state of being, what with media bombardment almost unavoidable, is so dangerously one-sided. We shouldn’t have to wait for dreams to remind us of aspects of reality we should be minding. I develop a here-and-now example of that in a post on LaMarotte today (link)—which, as I was writing it, reminded me of the bigger picture sketched out here.

Kálmán: A Literary Ancestor

Among our ancestors, the earliest known to have published books was my greatuncle Kálmán Darnay (1864-1945). It so happens that he is also the latest to have one of his books (re)published, and I show it above. That book was originally written in 1929, but it was reissued again in 2010. The title is The Good Old Justices Socializing: Historical Jokes Depicting the Times. Brother Baldy received this book as a gift when visiting the Museum of Sümeg (Sümeg being an old family seat) this past summer. That title took me an enormous effort to translate. Of that more below. Remaining with Kálmán, he was an historian and novelist.

Here I provide a listing of his works with a translation or comment on the title:

Sümeg és vidékének őskora. 1899.	Sümeg and environs in ancient times.
Magyarország őskora. 1900.	Hungary’s ancient times.
Somogy vármegye őskora. 1913.	The ancient times of the Somogy castle region.
Gisimár. Kaposvár. 1913.	A history of ancient man in Somló region.
Tagisir. 1921.	A novel of ancient times.
Testőrszerelmek. 1926.	Guardsman’s Love Affairs (novel).
Elkésett csók. 1932.	The Belated Kiss (novel).
A bujdosó gyöngysor. 1928.	The Pearl Necklace in Hiding (novel).
Kaszinózó táblabírák. 1929.	The Good Old Justices Socializing.

The novels were popular and most are still available in print if in the “old book” category. Of the histories Kálmán’s last book is obviously valued. It is filled with very funny stories harking back into history. The title struck me as very odd. The first word translates as “casino-ing,” kaszinó meaning casino. That word in Hungarian also has the connotation of socializing, “clubbing” and so on; it is less narrowly attached to gambling than that word is for us.

It was the second word, táblabírák, which led into odd spaces and times. You won’t find it in ordinary dictionaries, but it has a suggestion of “board of judges.” Kálmán’s use of the word in the title, and elsewhere, however, strongly suggests that it was very familiar to his readers even if never used in any judicial setting. Trying to find something, anything about that word then landed me on a website. It holds the preface to a much more famous book by a much more famous writer, Mór Jókai (1825-1904). The book’s title is A régi jó táblabírák, rendered into English by others as The Good Old Justices.

That book was published in 1856. To understand things, one needs context. The Hungarian Revolution in the nineteenth century took place in 1848. It’s aim was to separate Hungary from the Austrian Empire. It failed. It failed, furthermore, exactly as the later, call it second, Hungarian Revolution failed in 1956. In both cases, Russia put down the rebellion. In 1849 Russia restored the re-conquered Magyars to Austria. In 1956, it restored the Communist hegemony. So, to return to our story, Jókai Mór (to put the sequence into the Hungarian mode, last name first) wrote in the dreary aftermath of a failed revolution. And, in his preface, he makes a point of explaining that word of his, táblabírák, used in his title. He does so by listing a number of situations all ending in a question. The first of these (link for those with Hungarian):

     If a public emergency arises, if acts of God strike the country, if the rivers overflow, if it was a terrible year, if hail, fire, terrifying plagues visit the people, whose heart calls on the people to make sacrifices in response? To whom does the public, lashed by fear, turn for solace?

     To the good old justices.

Four more such pairings follow. At the end Jókai sums it up. He defines “the good old justice” as the person who had charge of the commons, of the local administration, the engineer, the regulator, the legalizer, the judge, the lawyer, doctor, poet, scholar, the book printer, and the book buyer. Jókai, thus, creates a term to mean the culture’s genuine leadership—not at all restricted to the judicial branches but including them. His aim was to return to a kind of earlier time of stability, peace, and justice—and to an order in which the “good old justices” were heard and minded.

Thus our ancestor, Kálmán, echoes a much more famous work, with a definite cultural message—but he was in a more relaxed, expansive, and humorous mood. It was 1929. Little did he know that the times were about to give birth—to the Great Depression. It would come and visit, in due time, great terrors upon the people, also, of little Hungary. And good old justices would, once more, be very much in demand.
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Added later: The illustration shown was painted by a contemporary of Kálmán, Károly Mühlbeck (1869-1943), on commission, and also illustrated the first edition of this book. Mühlbeck was a well-known Hungarian artist, illustrator, and in his latter days a political cartoonist.

Heaven, Arse, and Thread

Let’s round out November with a German saying, Himmel, Arsch, und Zwirn. All depending on how it’s said, it can be a curse (as in “Hell and damnation!”), a reaction to bad news (as in “God Almighty!”), or merely an exclamation of surprise (as in “Oh my God!”). It’s certainly colorful. It also strikes me as a little too long to issue spontaneously. It requires just a nanosecond’s worth of pause before it tumbles out. Not surprisingly, therefore, it has variants that make it even longer by substituting a longer word for Zwirn or thread. The most popular, at least among the scholars who attempt to explain this saying, is Wolkenbruch, cloudburst. And those who make this claim also think the phrase comes from farming dialects. Another is Heaven, Arse, and Chimneysweep! (Himmel, Arsch, und Schornsteinfeger), which hints at an originator with poetic gifts.

I found a great many attempts trying to explain the phrase in various sophisticated ways on German websites. The typical approach is to take each word in turn and then to list every conceivable meaning and connotation that it carries and then weaving something from selected meanings (e.g., heaven is the highest, arse the lowest, thread the finest). Some have discovered that in criminal contexts Zwirn means money (hereabouts we use “bread”); others have it that in old German usage Zwirn carried the meaning of “semen”— and the activity that makes it flow. And so on. Yet others opt, perhaps intuitively, for a single meaning hidden in all three: strength. The strength here is meant to refer to the strength of the emotion that rises and causes that exclamation to be made. That explanation fits both heaven and thread—Zwirn being a particularly strong, twisted filament. The Germans use the word Draht, which has the same rooting as thread, to mean wire, as in metallic. The explanation is difficult to apply to arse—except to say that it must be strong to have us sitting on it all the time. But the intention of this explanation is persuasive to an extent. Big emotion—and a wild grab for big, contrasty words.

Regarding arse, I stumbled on the reason why we use ass instead across the Atlantic. The R got eroded—as it has in cuss for curse, bust for burst, and hoss for horse. Online Etymology Dictionary (endless source of delights) also informs me that the German for our perch, the fish, is Barsch. In Old English we used to call it bærs. Now we call it bass. Oh, the complexity!

*    *    *

After reading this much to Brigitte, she seemed to remember another version. She screwed up her face and said: “Himmel, Kreuz, und…” She could remember no more. But I had another clue—and went to work. It struck me that the combination of “heaven” and “cross” might prove  productive.

Right. It was. I discovered that an older form of this saying—but, to be sure, also associated with disasters—was Himmel, Kreuz, und Wolkenbruch (Heaven, Cross, and Cloudburst) or Himmel, Kreuz, und Donnerbaum (Heaven, Cross, and Thunder Tree). Digging even deeper, I discovered an even older version: Himmel, Kreuz, und Sakrament!†

At this point I knew I had arrived. It happens that in Bavaria Sakrament! was the most common curse word; indeed it seemed to be the only word ever used by our choleric landlord. All the cursing in Bavaria was exclusively blasphemous. The longer version in this case was Herrgott, Kruzifix, und Sakrament (Lord God, Crucifix, and Sacrament). Now I knew the pattern from which the “secular” versions have descended. One Austrian site suggests that in very early Christianity, when something dreadful happened, people thought that the End Times had arrived, that the heavens would now open, the clouds would burst, and Judgement would descend—for which no one was quite ready yet.

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†Robert Laude, Hinterpommersches Wörterbhuch: des Persantengebiets, p. 164 (link).

Neither Nature nor the Cosmos

We were driving home close to dusk the other day from swimming exercise. We’ve lately found an efficient but much more peaceful route by residential streets to the alternate—beating our way down Mack Avenue with endless lights and double lanes. Trees against a pinkish, dimming sky, leafless or nearly so now. Endless trees. Lovely. The recurring thought came. There is nothing fallen about the world. The Fall belongs to mankind, strictly speaking, not to Nature or the Cosmos. It is a human tendency always to project our state onto whatever canvas happens to be handy. It’s not us—it’s the world that has fallen. Curiously, or perhaps not, we also project positives outward. Inspiration comes from somewhere invisibly within, but we project in onto the Muses. And then, since they are out there, we find an outward residence for them—on Mount Helikon in Pieria, in Thessaly.

The Ship of Philosophers

On September 28, 1922, Communist Russia, at Lenin’s behest, sent at least 160 philosophers and intellectuals from Petrograd to Stettin, in Germany, aboard the Oberbürgermeister Haken. Another ship was also involved, the Preussen. Lenin’s active agent in this venture was Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, vividly familiar to all who have watched Reilly, Ace of Spies. On board the Oberbürgermeister Haken was Nicolai Berdyaev, the philosopher. Berdyaev had also spent some time in Lubyanka prison. Dzerzhinsky interviewed him there but found Berdyaev firmly centered in his philosophy and not apparently political. Berdyaev’s fate was therefore kinder than Reilly’s. The philosopher lived in Berlin for a while, eventually in Paris; he died there in 1948.

The ship of philosophers produced for Brigitte the association of The Ship of Fools. To set that in perspective, that name first attached to a satirical book of the same title by one Sebastian Brant published in 1494 and illustrated by Albrecht Dürer. The more famous painting of it is by Hieronymus Bosch from the same period (shown). The book parodies the vices and abuses of its times. An interesting association between “church” and “ship” and “fools” had long been present in earlier mediaeval times, what with navis meaning ship as well as the nave of a church, and corruption present in the Church. Hence…

Another passenger on that ship of the philosophers was Pitirim Sorokin, the sociologist-historian, a great teacher of mine, albeit only through his writings. And, come to think of it, on our own endless migration from the homeland caused by World War II, one of our stops along the way was also Stettin, now Szczecin in Poland.

My illustration comes from Wikipedia (link) by a round-about-way from Russia. The inscription beneath it says: “The ship with the long name ‘Lord Mayor Haken’ was one of those small passenger ships that, by way of many lines, linked the harbors of the Baltic one with the others. They were smaller than today’s Helgoland ships but were quite stately.” Another source on this subject may be found here.

Ashes! Ashes!

Culture is vast, complex, layered, and ultimately impossible to sum up in categories—much as is the starry sky on a clear night in the country. Science derives from the precise, the particular, but the laws it builds are vanishingly thin. This comes to mind in certain contexts, most recently, in my case, thinking about vox populi.

Things run together. Ashes were on my mind as well, well mixed with dust, this month. That led to a memory linked to some work I’d done years ago now for one of our titles. In that context I ran across a children’s rhyme sometimes linked to the Great Plague and a later companion that links to the 1918 Influenza Epidemic. Let’s look at the first of these:

Ring-a-round a rosie,

A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!

We all fall down.

That’s the American version. A British version has A-tishoo! A-tishoo! for those ashes, suggesting sneezing. Other slightly different versions exist as well, thanks to the scholars. And let’s transit to them now. Before World War II none of our learned associated this verse with the Great Plague, afterwards the notion arose. To quote the couple Peter and Iona Opie, who first noted this explanation in 1951 (quoted in Wikipedia, link):

The invariable sneezing and falling down in modern English versions have given would-be origin finders the opportunity to say that the rhyme dates back to the Great Plague. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, and posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom, and “all fall down” was exactly what happened.

This version of events is challenged by other scholar saying that the symptoms do not match very well. Indeed the colors associated with the plague were black and blue; among the symptoms swollen glands dominate and one finds no mention of sneezing. Gangrene on fingers and toes, on lips and on the nose—yes. Seizures—yes. By contrast, among the top four symptoms of influenza are coughing and runny, stuffy nose. Fever is tops and sore throat third. Too bad that those Ashes! Ashes!—or the double-sneeze—predate the year 1918 when influenza came.

Now an early German version of this rhyme, or simply a sound-alike, is this one, with my translation:

Ringelringelreihen,	Ring-a-ring in rows
Wir sind der Kinder dreien,	Of children three with bows
Sitzen unter’m Hollerbusch	We sit under an elder bush
Und machen alle Huschhuschhusch!	And make together hush-hush-hush.

I cite this by way of showing that the form of such a ditty keeps persisting, but its content is subject to change. That is the way the vox populi works. It is poetic, free, and entirely untrammeled by careful observation of endless details—but it captures the most important. That is why culture gets it right in myths and science in detail. More power to both.

Now the real verse the 1918 Influenza left us is a little gem illustrating how the culture can take an alien word, like influenza, and make it something memorably part of the current language. And the details are right as well. One of the ways by which the influenza virus is transmitted is by means of airborne aerosols. A hard sneeze can send those babies flying. And they maybe even enter by the window:

I had a little bird

Its name was Enza.

I opened the window

And in flew Enza.

Auris Populi

To whom do pundits address their often frenzied pleas? And what are these, these oft repeated outcries? Having held forth on a subject once, why do they repeat the message, in variant forms, over and over and over again? An answer occurred to me today. The pundits are addressing the Ear of the People hoping that, if understood, Vox Populi will repeat them with the force of Deus. And, of course, there is that striking similarity between the preacher of old and the pundit of new. But does prayer work?

So Where Do You Live?

To tell the truth, not just respond to your reflexive questioning,

I ought to answer with a litany of which the city

Is the first thing on the list, my address next. Or should I start with

Continent and state? And if you wish to reach my voice alone

Herewith the digits of my telephone. But, to be sure, I could

Destroy the small talk that you wish to start to fill the time until

This plane takes off in this—is it really fog?—I could still add a

Few things more, among them, here, this suit I wear and, layered beneath

Its complicated surfaces are underwear and socks under the

Leather of my shoes. And given that these coverings get wrinkled

Up in use, get sweaty, smelly, and so on, multiple copies

Of these habitations reside in drawers, hang in closets, wait

On the floor in polished rows. Where do I live? I live in these, but

There is more—or rather a corrective. My body lives in these,

And I, whoever that “I” really is, lives in the body that

In turn lives in my clothes that live inside the house, at that address

And on this continent. And I, within this most mysterious self—

To reach the end, naught left behind—I, dear sir, live in my mind.

Kirk on Benda

Prompted by a query from Brigitte, I chanced across an interesting two-pager: one famous scholar commenting on another. The first is Russel Kirk (The Conservative Mind), the other is Julian Benda (The Treason of the Clerks). Both are now dead. Russel passed in 1994, Benda in 1956. The two-pager is available here. In that brief piece, which appeared in the Summer 1957 issue of Modern Age, Kirk thought that Benda was “still in the land of the living” when he had, in fact, died the previous summer. In those days, news travelled slowly. In this house we are rather fond of both authors and cited works. There are probably others, hence…

The Professional Soldier

One of the characteristics of the professional soldier—as my late friend and comrade-in-arms Al Coger used to say—is respect for the professionals on the other side. Both are simply doing a job that, alas, has become necessary enough to make war a calling. Hate is not an aspect of it—nor is war something elevated. It isn’t about ideology, much less about adherence to a cosmic faith. It’s organized violence to be managed as efficiently as possible, and as Sun Tzu, who belonged to this profession, wisely asserted in his The Art of War, the most efficient handling of war is to win it without an actual battle.

Elections, to be sure, are somewhat more efficient ways of resolving conflict than war. Unity frays over time, and at right regular intervals it needs to be restored by the force, in the case of politics, of superior numbers. Ballots are more efficient than bullets. And once the matter is decided, civility should rapidly return. It should return if both sides recognize the underlying issue. That issue is that conflict may be unavoidable but isn’t some kind of good in and of itself. Unity is. And conflict must be ended as soon as ever possible—not when the other side has been absolutely annihilated. Compromise, therefore is part of it.

The presence of a sense of unity, even in the midst of the conflict, is what matters. And when it’s absent, real trouble looms. War between nations must be hallowed by an understanding on both side that each is part of humanity—and humanity is the higher good. Within a nation the unity of its people as one community must be the fundamental assumption that renders elections legitimate. Demonization of the other side has been a feature of elections at their emotional heights throughout our own—and in other countries’—history. But after the election is decided, normalcy returns again. Indeed it has been a feature for the winner to embrace those who opposed him and for the looser to pledge his support.

Quite visible cracks have appeared after this year’s election. They may just be a residue of the pain of loss on the right. The right, of course, will triumph again, just give it time, but one of the signs of a loss of effective unity is that every loss today is Doom Forever, and every victory the Triumphal Arrival of the Everlasting Future. One radio host, for instance, Dennis Prager, has elevated political stances into religions. He sees three such competing for humanity’s allegiance: Leftism, Islamism, and Americanism (link). That’s the sort of thing I mean. It reminds me of Toynbee; he saw “end times” characterized internally by the rise of Futurism (read leftism), Archaism (read Americanism), and externally by the eventually successful pressure of an External Proletariat (read Islamism). The secessionist talk, largely only symbolic although it is, also indicates that even great and successful unions of people become, eventually, too big to hold together.

To whom does the future really belong? Toynbee suggested that those in charge of really shaping the future are the people who are looking up, transcending all these battles, and finding  solutions in the spiritual realm—where no “divisions,” in Stalin’s sense, are even discernible. They are too few in number to be clearly seen yet. They’re not agitating in the public square; that square is down there, not up. They’re not thirsting for power, either; they only long to do a good job—like any decent professional soldier. I’m waving to you, Al. You never thought you’d end up in heaven—or that such a place even existed—but there you are now.

The Iniquity of the Children

If time resembles waves that lap the shores,

If time therefore now forward moves, now back,

If causes may betimes appear reversed,

As Richard Feynman in his physics said,

Then now iniquities of children may

Be said to visit, lash, and torture back,

In time, their fathers to the third, fourth

Generation in a turnabout that

Is fair play if seen from eternity.

In the vast great orb beyond the cosmic

Pocket where we live, time is no more but

Cause prevails in all directions. All’s an

Ocean limitless with, without an edge.

Ashes

Not to get morbid, by any means, but yesterday’s look at dust tempted me to look more closely at a close relative of that, as in “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The phrases is too well known to need much explanation, but its source is interesting. No, it doesn’t come from the King James version of the Bible, or at least not word-for-word. The phrase appears in the Book of Common Prayer. Ashes and dust, however, are linked in three Old Testament verses (Genesis 18:27, Job 30:19, Job 42:6) and always in the same context. That’s what we—or at least our physical we’s—are.

Much of my adult life I spent in the study of technology. Today’s noodling reminded me once more that no subject is exhaustible. I discovered a technology I’d never heard of before, cremulation. It is the final stage of cremation. After bodies are burned in refractory-brick-lined retorts—using, these days, natural gas and propane; we’re energy-consuming even as corpses!—what remains is bone fragments and ash. If the corpse had a pace-maker installed, it is first removed. It has been found that such a device can produce explosions that damage the furnace: a clash of technologies. The remains are then gathered and ground to a powder in the cremulator. It is just a grinder, of course, but interesting to note that after we’ve long fled this vale of tears, the grind keeps going on.

So what is left? Wikipedia’s article on this subject (link) tells me, citing and article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, that adult women leave on average a residue weighing 4 pounds, men 6 pounds. So much for our average gravitas.

I might use this occasion to note that Catholicism permits cremation but evidently with a great lack of enthusiasm. The grounds for this arise from the Christian view of the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit and belief in the resurrection of the body. The Church lifted the ban on cremation in 1963. Certain restriction apply. The funeral mass must be held with the body present; cremation may then follow. The Church frowns on such practices as scattering the ashes and holds that these must be interred. For more, see this article from the American Catholic (link).

The largest Catholic Church near us is St. Paul on the Lake. On its grounds resides a quite extensive columbarium  (link). That word means dove-cote, and columbaria have small niche-sized but sealed places where ashes are held. That columbarium is a favorite destination for Brigitte and me, the weather permitting. We sit on benches there, silence all around us, surrounded by the ashes of those departed.

Dust

A series on the Dustbowl Days is running on PBS now, and to be sure the afflicted people endured great hardships in the 1930s. But it bears remarking that, in a more stealthy way, dust covers us at all times if we let the outside air in at any time. Left alone, given time, it would eventually cover everything. Today, doing chores in the basement, a toilet paper roll escaped me and ran under the stairs. I retrieved it using a broom handle through its welcoming center cavity—and that alerted me to masses of dust where I sweep rather rarely. Today was such an occasion. Once daily also, in that same basement, I wipe my computer screen. It accumulates a uniformly-spaced population of dust particles.

Dust particles are incredibly small. One source† puts atmospheric dust as small as 0.001 µm; that symbol stands for micrometer, meaning one millionth of a meter, in this case a thousandth of a millionth of a meter. They carry electric charge and hence are very sociable, so that my broom this morning carried a veritable halo of grey fluff while also moving the larger dust particles on the ground, ranging up to a gigantic 10 µm. I also noted, in looking things up, that dust carries a message: All things are connected. Wikipedia assures me that my gathering this morning probably contained a few meteorite particles along with just about anything you can name, organic and inorganic. They’ve come a long ways to decorate, almost invisibly, the darkest shadows beneath the stairs, sharing space there with a gigantic cardboard box that, aging, probably contributes its own tiny bits originating in the forests of our southern states where corrugated boxes take on life.

The image I show is actually a dust particle from the Moon, obtained from NASA indirectly via Journal of Young Investigators (link). The particle is too small for the human eye to see. Here it is enlarged using an electron microscope. And lo and behold. The particle is cratered, like the Moon itself. According to NASA, the craters were made by super-tiny meteorite particles crashing on the Moon and then carving homes for themselves on the dust particle itself. With such attacks constantly bombing us, how can we ever hope to win?

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†Lide, David R. “Characteristics of Particles and Particle Dispersoids.” Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 75th Edition. Florida: CRC Press, 1994.

The Minimalists

The German Gustav Spörer (1822-1885), who had studied mathematics and astronomy, began as a school teacher but then, at age 36, turned to astronomical observation. His interest centered on the sun and using sunspots to discover where the sun’s equator lies. His work led him to discover, searching ever older records, that a period from 1645 to 1715 the sun had virtually no sunspots. Nobody paid much attention. The younger Edward Maunder (1851-1928), an English astronomer, later made the same observations and was a much better publicist—perhaps because his second wife, Annie Russell, helped him. As a consequence, that period of minimum sunspots came to be known as the Maunder Minimum. Spörer, however, managed to get his own minimum—posthumously. John A. Eddy (1931-2009), discovered a yet earlier period of solar inactivity dating from 1460 to 1550, and, having a kindly temperament, presumably, he named it after Spörer to make up for that pioneer’s lack of recognition.

Having mentioned these names, we’re far from exhausting discoveries of solar minima, thus periods of unusually low sunspot activity. We also have the Oort Minimum, dated to 1010-1050 and associated with the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort (1900-1992), the Wolf Minimum, dated to 1280-1350, associated with Swiss astronomer Rudolf Wolf (1816-1893), and the Dalton Minimum, 1790-1820, named after the English chemist, physicist and meteorologist John Dalton, but I cannot discover who actually made the observations and named this minimum after him. The period from 1300 to 1850, thus encompassing the Spörer-Maunder minima and what might be called the Dalton Dip are known as the Little Ice Age.

I show above a graphic from Wikipedia (link) charting carbon-14 measurements from about 850 AD to 1950. These are thought to be meaningful because sunspot activity interferes with cosmic-rays. Therefore fewer rays reach the earth in periods of strong sunspot activity—and therefore produce less carbon-14. The more quiet the sun, the more radiocarbon is formed. This gives us a way of measuring, indirectly, sunspot activity down here on earth. The graphic above does not single out the Dalton Minimum, but it is there to the right of the 1800 peak.

Now we have ample, indeed abundant, evidence that solar maxima are warm periods while solar minima, if they last a while, produce a cooler climate; hence we look back on a Little Ice Age. Currently, what with a very wide trough in the last solar cycle, the 23th, and a “weak” 24th underway now, some NASA-ites have speculated that we may be seeing another Dalton. Interesting. We’ll have to wait. It might be ironical that just as the population finally gets with Global Warming, the New York Harbor might freeze over as it did in 1780. (See also my post today on LaMarotte.)

The Greatest

When I contemplate the vast amount of information now in digital form—or projects that capture ancient books in digital format, a goal pursued by Google—I wonder what will happen to accumulated knowledge as we leave the fossil age. How that transition, which is less than a century away, will actually play out is really the big question—but only for those with generous time horizons. A baby born today will be 69 when it happens around about 2081 (link). Most of the adult population of that year has some decades to wait before being born. Now the up-beat narrative has us transiting smoothly as “new technology” comes on line betimes, but I rather think that those times will be extraordinarily turbulent. And in such times all sorts of printed matter will be lost—never mind digital stuff.

This thought arose again when I came across a reference to Ptolemy’s Almagest. That book dates to about 150 AD. Ptolemy was a Roman-Egyptian and lived between 90 and 168 AD. His book was a greatly valued source of information on astronomy and mathematics. It informed Byzantine, Islamic, and European scholars for many generations. It had thirteen "books" (naturally, I would say). Among other things, the work captures the teachings of Hipparchus (190-120 BC) on trigonometry. Its original title was Mathēmatikē Syntaxis, in Latin Syntaxis mathematica. Syntax means “orderly arrangement.” In due time the name morphed to The Great Treatise, and it is the Greek word, μεγίστη (megistē), meaning “greatest,” rendered untranslated into Arabic as magest, with the article al added at the front, that gives us the Almagest. (Have always wondered where that word came from.)

If I were a multi-millionaire, I’d start a project. It would produce printed versions of the great surviving books of our own and other cultures, ancient and modern, and cause them to be deposited at thousands of locations across the globe in anticipation of a post-fossil melt-down. Lots for my staff to think about as they get going. The printing surfaces should not be useful for burning, say. They should resist corrosion and be impossible to melt. And that for starters. Then, in some distant time one of these stations might survive and, the books once more recovered, they’d give the learned of that time something useful to do. This idea is free, multi-millionaires. You don’t even have to give me a hat tip.

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The image of Ptolemy, from Wikipedia (link), comes from a sixteenth century edition of the Almagest and is one of its frontispiece images. Each age dresses its heroes in the garb of its time.

Hebrew and Mayan Calendars

Something interesting must have happened back in the fourth millennium BC. I gather this because the Hebrew Calendar, which dates from the year of Creation, therefore 3760 BC, is echoed by the Mayan Long Count Calendar which begins on August 11, 3114 BC using the Gregorian and September 6, 3113 BC using the Julian calendar. This date, for the Mayans was also the date of creation.

According to the Judaic tradition, the first 6,000 years after creation correspond to the six (might we say “long”) days; the seventh millennium would be the seventh, the day of rest, and it would inaugurate the Messianic Age, also lasting a thousand years. The first year of that cycle is referred to as Year 6000 of the Hebrew Calendar, which corresponds to 2239-2240 of ours. In that year begins the Messianic Age.

The Mayan Long Count Calendar is based on periods one-day long multiplied four times to get other, intermediate periods. One is multiplied by 20 to get what we might call a long week, that number by 18 to get a year of (360 days). Thereafter 360 is multiplied by 20 again to obtain what might be called a “month of years,” and that figure ( 7,200 days), is once more multiplied by 20 to get one “long year” in that cycle of 144,000 days. That period is called a b’ak’tun, and thirteen of them is the period of a “world.” We are now in the 13th b’ak’tun of the Mayan calendar†. It will end on December 21 of this year, thus signaling the end of a world. Unlike the Judaic tradition, which sees the world absolutely created, and for the first time, 5,772 years ago, the Mayans saw multiple earlier “worlds,” each lasting 13 b’ak’tuns. The fifth Mayan world, therefore, is about to begin late in 2012.

Concerning the interpretation of that day, December 21, I’ll have more to say that day. But here I’d like to point to something else.

Interesting that two cultures as distant one from the other as the Judaic and Mayan, or more precisely the Olmec culture in Mesoamerica (which is credited with the invention of the Long Calendar), should hark back to the fourth millennium BC and see the beginning of the world there. Granted. The Jews put the creation nearly 700 years earlier than the Mayans—so that the two beginnings are off by three-quarters of a millennium. But there may be a reasonable explanation for that. I note that the Mayan calendar also recorded very close observations of the cycles of Venus. That’s odd for an ancient culture unless it was once important to keep track of Venus. Odd bits like that cause me to credit claims, like Velikovsky’s, that great solar system cataclysms may first have made humanity—all over the place—keen observers of what happens in the skies. There is Stonehenge in Europe, too. It’s fashioning is dated to 3000 to 2000 BC. Regarding Velikovsky, here are two posts (link, link) on this blog.

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†Here is the math. 3114 + 2012 = 5126 years. Times 365.25 = 18,772,271.5 days. Dividing that by 144,000 we get 13 b’ak’tuns. The image shown is the Mayan symbol for a b’ak’tun (link). Where the Mayans and the Olmecs lived? Here is a link to that.

Lucky and not so Lucky Elections

Very little time actually passes when we are not again reminded that we live in a fallen world. Things are getting back to normal. The cynical response to this, of course, is merely to shrug, but invariably “normalcy” means that children are being killed needlessly somewhere. We have the teaching to guide us (Matthew 19:14): “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’” The Golan Heights heat up as if there was a volcano there. And Israel is mobilizing to defend itself against that Goliath of Palestine, the dirt-poor Gaza strip. Of course it is election time in Israel, and that might have some causative effect (see, for instance, link). And we may call ourselves lucky that children are not routinely killed every time we go to the polls. But such good fortune does not please if our context is humanity.

Times in Upheaval?

Might it be that as we age time compresses, as it were? What for the young seems ages ago is for the old but yesterday. This observation is prompted by noticing that after each election, if you believe the sage pronunciamentos of the pundits, a New Age has just been proclaimed, and what ruled yesterday is fallen, indeed forever, as Everything’s Changed. But the last time that time reversed was just two years ago. And in two or four more years to follow, a mere eyewink for the septuagenarian, the same will happen once again. Similarly, no science fiction movie these  days ever has its heroine just save a city from a raid by nasty saucers. No. Each time the entire  Cosmos must be saved. Pundits thus seem grander, delivering on a cataclysmic Time of Reversal for all Ages—than merely noting the start of a new, ho-hum, and brief interval.