Red March

The  tale of my long love-affair with quince has been told earlier (here). Our new quince bush went through a species of hell after we removed its strangling straight-jacket-of-a-black-plastic-tub and gave it a new home. Removing that tub we also noted how its roots had been savagely butchered to fit the tub. I kept shaking my head and throwing up my hands. Then in the matter of a week or so its leaves began to curl up in advance of dying. The bush seemed to have given up. But then, surprisingly, new leaves appeared. Now Quincy has settled in and has grown its first reddish flowers—delighting us immensely. The first red in our garden this year. The second bit of red emerged indoors. One of our venerable geraniums produced a bloom quite early, and as the weather warmed it got to go outdoors. A recent cold-spell caused us to bring it in again, but soon we’ll cross the threshold a second time. Farewell to March of 2012. It’s been an interesting month.

That first post on quince, incidentally, has become a readers’ favorite. One never knows in advance. There are endless layers in reality, not least vast underground communities of people who love plants and peaceably live their lives beneath skies filled with mayhem and conflict.

Sorting the Ranks

Reading Anthony Trollope’s novels collectively known as the Barchester Chronicles again—and also reading Joanna Trollope’s memorable novel, The Choir, also set in a cathedral—I am surrounded by clerics and church officials of different ranks. In Anthony’s The Warden there is an amusing exchange which justifies this post. The Dean of Barchester Cathedral has died, and the plot now turns on who will be named to replace him. And there, as the discussion swirls, someone asks: “What is it that the Dean does?” What indeed. Well, if the characters themselves don’t know—but do know, to the pence, what that “preferment” means in income—what is the poor reader to think?

(Parenthetically, nineteenth century English fiction has but one theme—although it is fed by two tributaries. One is what income a woman has (so that she is worth courting at all); the other is the “living” that a cleric can hope to earn (so that he can finally marry).)

I’ve spent a little time trying to inform myself about the ranks within the Church of England, and here is the list: archbishop, bishop, archdeacon, dean, canon, vicar, curate, verger, and sexton. This might be loosely matched to another list: province, diocese, archdeaconry, cathedral, parish, buildings and furnishings, and graveyards—and this because archbishops preside over provinces made up of multiple dioceses headed by bishops; each diocese is divided into archdeaconries; within each of these there might be cathedrals, headed by deans. Archdeaconries also hold parishes. The parish priest is the vicar; his assistant or assistants are curates. Vergers are lay people who manage the physical plant of churches and guide ceremonial events. Sextons, finally, are yet lower-level lay functionaries but have been associated principally with managing graveyards.

Now things need a little further sorting. The parish priest of a cathedral is the dean; and for this reason he is also a vicar; the vicar is always the senior cleric in a jurisdiction. Yes, fine. But what, then, do we do with the bishop? Well, in the Church of England the cathedral’s high priest is the dean, to underline it, and the bishop is viewed as a visitor or a resident. Just knowing this makes Trollope’s plots easier to understand. It’s sort of when the Secretary of the Navy happens to be on board of an aircraft carrier. He ranks the captain but the captain runs the ship. So now, finally, we know what a dean does.

Canon is a generic for any priest, but if he is the canon of a cathedral, that title is an honorific bestowed after long service in a vicarage and entitles its bearer to preach once yearly in a cathedral. In some jurisdictions, such honorees are also known as prebendaries; that word derives from a prebend, meaning an income (related to stipend)—once more emphasizing the important of those “livings.” In Trollope’s England many parishes were actually run by curates, thus junior priests, aka the minor canons; one wonders if that’s still going on. A good living accrues to the vicar, a paltry income to the curate; the curate’s income is rarely sufficient to marry on (or was so in Trollope’s time), especially if children began arriving. The rank of archdeacon, still alive and well in the Church of England, has faded from view in Catholicism; there, however, the same functionality is carried out by auxiliary bishops. To give the lower ranks their due, I show here a photo of Vergers at Work. I have it from The Church of England Guild of Vergers (link). They are shown here at their ceremonial work, thus leading a procession, in robes of their own. Notice that one of them is a lady. Progress, you might say; progress is marching on.

Under God

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. [Francis Bellamy’s original Pledge, adopted in 1892]

The Supreme Court’s current focus on the Affordable Care Act led to a discovery today. The issue in that act is a mandate requiring every person not already insured to buy health insurance. But does the government have the right, under the Interstate Commerce Act, to compel anyone to buy something? My dark musings on  this subject led me to mutter, “One nation, under Market, infinitely divided, with competition among all…”

So then, later, I looked up the history of the Pledge and discovered, with some surprise, that I was already a resident here when, in 1954, the two words in my title were added. 1954. Yes, indeed. By then the Pledge had undergone four changes. The first came in 1892 when the word to was added: “…to my flag and to the republic…” Note that flag and republic have lost their capital. In 1923, came another change: “…to the flag of the United States…” In 1924 (oops, we left something out) came the addition: “…of America…” In 1954, finally, that under God.

Pledge recital circa 1941

Amusingly, Francis Bellamy was a Baptist minister. Amusingly, the pledge was recited with a salute—and, ironically, with the arm extended forward, palm down. Later the palm was turned the other way (can’t be doing a “Heil” in the Land of the Free). Finally came the current salute of hand-over-heart, instituted by the U.S. Congress. This came as an amendment of the Flag Code, first passed June 22, 1942 and amended (oops, left something out) on December 22.

Endless contradictions. The U.S. Congress can “compel” hand gestures. Under a Constitution which prohibits establishment of religion, thus gives firm standing (with others) to atheism, we must say “under God” when Pledging Allegiance. But, some argue, Congress cannot compel anyone to buy health insurance. It might be time to revise the Pledge along the lines that I was muttering aloud.

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Picture from Wikipedia commons (link).

Where Do We Live?

The question strikes me as more complicated than it seems. There is, of course, the geographical fix on where our bodies are. But our bodies move about—and in this day and age of cars and planes, a precise answer would have to be calculated using statistics. Suppose we defined the location by the one where we spend at least two thirds of our time over the period of a year. With GPS technology and a little computer properly programmed, this sort of thing could be calculated. Using 66 percent, that would yield 15.84 hours in the same spot, that “spot”defined as one half of an acre. For those who do not work at home and those not yet retired, that target might be difficult to hit. And if we applied a cut off of 75 percent (18 of 24 hours), most people would have difficulty saying that they “live at home.” But now that I’ve managed to get you thinking about your body’s movements in space and in time, let me shift the subject slightly.

I propose that where we actually live is not where our bodies are; that “place” is another and more difficult-to-pinpoint “space”; it is where our attention is focused.  Granted that our attention is actually focused on the narrowly physical some of the time, that slice of time seems rather narrow, in part because we do so many physical things below the radar of attention. Do we as we have our morning shower think about soap, skin, water, and such? A little. But our minds are already in funny space contemplating the day ahead. We divide attention between that first cup of coffee and the headlines. The drive to work may be entirely occupied—there was a time like that for me—composing poems in my head and straining to remember, by frequently repeating, particularly pleasing lines. Or is the time devoted to NPR’s Morning Edition—and our mind all over the nation, all over the globe, embroiled in Supreme Court decisions and what Putin might be up to?

We live most of our time in funny space, the mental dimensions of Meaning. That particular geography is vast; it has its own continents, in fact; in the course of a working day we may visit a number of them—and may be “at home” in some much more than others. And even if our contemplation happens to be about some activity by definition physical, say sports, do we think of muscles, leather, grass or artificial turf? A little. Most of that time, too, will be in the realm of Meaning, contemplating endlessly abstract concepts like the Red Sox or Ohio State, coaches, players, league presidents, and such.

Thinking of these realms of meaning, Factual, the company, founded by Gil Elbaz, comes to mind; it is an outfit with trillions of data items growing by nanobits per nanosecond. Yet even Factual would fail in the effort to calculate with any precision in which Geography of Meaning each of us spends most of his or her time—even if some telepathic radar could feed our thoughts and feelings to that company in what is known as real time.

What thoughts occupied your mind the last time you did the dishes? Did each spoon get the attention it deserved? Or were your thoughts at rest in contemplating Order—or reminding you that the garbage still needs taking out?

Literary Genes

This tale begins with my library. I love it, of course (because I’ve yet to meet a library I didn’t), but ours here is a poor relative living in a rich neighborhood—suggesting that great wealth and literary aspirations rarely coincide except in members of  the  third or fourth generation following the one that minted gold. Best sellers crowd the fiction shelves here; here and there between them one finds an old book, one of the classics—and sometimes not. In one of the branches I frequently visit while Brigitte does swimnastics, I went looking for Trollope. I found eight volumes by one Joanna Trollope but none by Anthony. Then the other day I was scanning the shelves again; I had no name in mind; I was, however, using my trusted technique: I ignore the slick-bound colorful volumes and look for something pale and old. Here’s one! I pulled it out. The title was The Old Country by Sholom Aleichem. Sholom Aleichem? Who might that be? More puzzlement followed. Julius and Frances Butwin translated this book from the Yiddish, and Frances wrote a foreword. In it she begins thus:

Years ago when Sholom Aleichem came to New York, Mark Twin was among the first to visit him. “I wanted to meet you,” he said, “because I understand that I am the American Sholom Aleichem.” History does not record the answer of the man who is called variously “the Jewish Mark Twain,” “the Jewish Dickens,” “the modern Heine.”

In the wake of these experiences I looked up these individuals—Joanna Trollope and Sholom Aleichem. And that in turn made me think that at least some part of literature might be in the genes.

Joanna Trollope (1943-) turns out to be a very popular British novelist with some twenty-eight novels to her credit, nineteen written under her own name and nine as Caroline Harvey. She is an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, an order of chivalry; she writes OBE behind her name; the award is testimony to her literary rank and reach. Several of her works have been turned into movies and one, The Choir, into a BBC miniseries. One of the Caroline Harvey historical novels is titled Parson Harding’s Daughter. Why goodness gracious. Wasn’t Harding the lead character in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden? Well, gentle reader, it turns out that Joanna and Anthony Trollope are relatives. She is a fifth-generation niece of the famed nineteenth century postal inspector. Joanna wrote her first novel at 14; it isn’t published, was all about herself, she says, and says she keeps it locked up lest her children see it. Fine and good—but also a clear indicator of the born writer. It’s in the genes. And my annoyance at that library shelf, missing Anthony, seeing the slick volumes of someone called Joanna, must now be revised. Next time I go, I’ll check one of them out. Stick with the genes.

Oh, before I forget. Trollop’s mother, Frances (nee Milton) Trollop (1779-1863), was also a writer, predominantly a novelist, with thirty-four novels and seven nonfiction books to her credit; the first of these latter was also her first book, Domestic Manners of Americans, a book said to be acerbic and witty (like mother like son). She’d moved to America and made a name for herself here (Cincinnati)—although in old age she moved to Italy and lies buried in Florence. Milton is a common enough name—but one kind of wonders…

Sholom Aleichem is of course a pseudonym, the Yiddish rendition of shalom aleikhem. Peace be upon you. The man behind it was Solomon Rabinovich (1859-1916), an extraordinarily prolific and popular author. He began writing in Russian and Hebrew then wrote the rest of his works in Yiddish, some forty volumes! Had I not been distracted when young, I would have learned something about Tevye the Milkman, and Tevye and his Daughters, stories that, by various bounces of fate became The Fiddler on the Roof. But my theme is literary genes. Solomon’s daughter Lyalya Kaufman became a Yiddish writer; his son became a painter and teacher of the arts. Lyalya’s daughter, Bel Kaufman, wrote Up the Down Staircase, which I did read and much enjoyed in my younger years. The genes march on. Sometimes they skip a generation or two or three or five. Sometimes they don’t wait.

In my own family the best-known literary figure is my great-uncle Károly Darnay (though only known in Hungary); he wrote histories, memoires, and romances. My aunt Olga was an accomplished writer. And some of those genes even reached Ghulfdom. We are, of course, but servants of our genes—to echo a modernist. When the genes want you to take the pen in hand, can you refuse?

Who is this Man?

jiH 'oH Worf, puq vo' Mogh

If you have perfected your linguistic abilities, a simple reading of the picture caption will tell you—well, not who this man is but at least the role for which he is justly famous. That role, played first in Star Trek: The Next Generation and in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, is that of Worf, and my caption, obtained with some painful searching, says “I am Worf, son of Mogh” in transliterated Klingon. The man I am depicting now is the actor who played Worf, Michael Dorn, a highly accomplished actor not only in science fiction but in other more conventional television series as well—not that you’d recognize him unless you carefully read actor’s names and make the right connections.

One of his unusual accomplishments has been starring in a series of video games, largely also SF, most notably as the Duke of the House Atreides in Emperor: Battle for Dune. Other games include Mission Critical, and Mass Effect 2. I for one (I’ve only ever watched others play video games) was unaware that you could even do this.

The Klingons as a whole, and their wonderfully exaggerated culture, are one of the best creations of the Star Trek franchise. And Dorn is the very archetype of what it is to be a Klingon. Great bravery and endurance must have been his to labor under that massive makeup all those years while turning in such an authentic impersonation. Behind the mask a real person. I wish him luck in his career and mean every word when I say: ghlj qet jahmeyjaj (“May your enemies run with fear!”)

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Picture credits: Wikipedia (link).

Password to the Workplace

An amusing new brouhaha might soon have us cheering and jeering, all depending on our views of privacy. If you go to Google News and click on the Technology tab today, you’ll see a story on the latest threat—covered, at last look, by some 777 sources. The story? Some employers, evidently, demand surrender of a prospective employee’s Facebook password before finalizing hires. The media are careful to report that it’s all anecdotal—but a story of such moment must be reported, they say. They know what is important. Drama, tension. I note this here because it resonates so nicely with the last post. We live in a reality where virtual events draw eyeballs. Under that same tab on Google is a report that the crew members of the International Space Station had to vacate the ISS to avoid the looming problem of a potential collision with some debris from a dead Russian satellite; 275 stories on this subject. The crew fled to the Soyuz spacecraft anchored there for emergencies. Luckily the debris passed the ISS at a distance of nine miles. The crew is safe—as is my Facebook password. I don’t intend to take a job anytime soon.

Ludi Famis

We are lucky to have discovered and then developed, in sequence, electric power, cameras, film, television, computers, and finally digital recording of sounds and images. For this reason our circus games are altogether virtual. We are enabled to let our decaying imagination soar, if that’s the word, and produce exciting spectacles in which hundreds, thousands virtually die in various horrible ways—but no one actually does, not in the circus, anyway; the arrow thumps into the bared chest with a sound you wouldn’t actually hear; the shaft trembles nicely from the force that supposedly sent it to kill; blood spatters effectively in all directions—but it’s all pure illusion. Death, of course, may still cause the young to succumb to mishaps, like taking a bath, because “a history of drug abuse” lurks in the immediate past. But such deaths also enable us to have soulful retrospectives into the life of the celebrity. Unlike the backward Romans, who had to use real people to enact their combats in the ludi circenses, not least actually dying, our enactors are capable of flying and of physical achievements impossible in what was once admired as “real life”—meaning violence, vulgarity, drunkenness, bar fights, and broken noses.

Market v. Community

The second anniversary of the health care act, which is today, started me some days ago looking at data. Today I dug out the global rankings of health care outcomes produced a while back (1997) by the World Health Organization. It’s rather a complicated index built around the achievement of five health goals. One among them is that the national system’s costs should be fairly distributed, thus the degree to which everyone  contributes should be as equal as possible. I had to dig a little to discover how WHO visualizes fairness. Here is the process WHO suggests.

Measure first the total amount of each household’s contributions to healthcare—in whatever form. Next, calculate the household’s income net of the portion spent on subsistence—thus presumably food, clothing, shelter, and perhaps necessary work-related transportation. Now take the money contributed to healthcare and divide it by the net income figure. You’ll get a percentage. WHO’s idea of fairness is that all households should have the same percent.

Before I comment, one or two bits more. The total contribution above includes out-of-pocket expenditures, insurance premiums and co-pays, and that portion of taxes, paid by the household, directly earmarked for health care or later allocated to health care by government. WHO’s idea of fairness also stipulates provisions in the system that protect households from catastrophic expenses.

An equal contribution using percent of income naturally translates into actual total household contributions which will be zero for those who barely earn their subsistence, small for  relatively low earners, and high, indeed very high, for the rich. If one household’s residual income after necessities is $10,000, another’s $100,000, and the percent of health care contribution is uniformly 15 percent, one pays $1,500 the other $15,000. The pool, however, is distributed back to the contributors based on need.

The agency obviously sees health care as a communal system—not as a market. WHO is trying to find an equitable way to pay for it. From every household according to its ability to pay, to every household according to its needs. This, of course is the community model. Every sort of entitlement is best handled this way.

In this country two models are always at war. One is based on nature, the other on nurture. Health care providers like to speak of demand, of consumption—because they must compete to provide services and are thus forced to masquerade as merchants. Those who love the market join them in seeing health care as just another commodity. They think that the market will soon sort it if we just put the scalpel in its hidden hand. Those who are left out—and the market always leaves somebody out—are grudgingly given a dole. It is for this reason that some people abhor all programs that counter the hit-and-miss outcomes of markets. They have the means and want to keep them. They echo one of my daughters’ famous words when, still a little girl and urged to share her toys she announced: “I want to share by myself.” And therefore we have the equivalent of a feeling that all entitlements are theft—even when we paid throughout our working lives to collect ours in old age.

Stella's Keys

Original art appears rarely on this blog, and when it does it tends to be the work of granddaughter Stella. Here is her take on our recent trip to the Florida Keys, a little piece she prepared for Anna and Lexi, the two girls who live next to Monique's house here in Metro Detroit—good friends of Stella’s from summer vacations. Stella has captured all of the highlights in her own very original way. The usual advice: click through to magnify, Esc to return.

Schreber’s Garden

That time has come when I engage in gardening chores, an activity as close to bliss as I’ve come to experience, but that’s the inward feeling. Outwardly it demands actual physical labor, lots of bending, lots of moaning, sweat, dirt, haul, scrape, on and on. But there is nothing like it. The thought arose: One genuine justification for owning your own house—even if small—if it has a bit of land behind it. Next thought was: Europeans living in apartment. The next was Schrebergarten! They too escaped, the Europeans—to the allotment. In Germany such gardens, some distance, sometimes quite a distance, from the house, quite small in size, usually a little shed for tools, are called that. And while I stood up again, groaning, I wondered where the name came from—and then, of course, I immediately surmised. Some German visionary, probably nineteenth century, helping the benighted of the age of industrialization, open your windows, expand your chest, breathe deeply, that sort of thing. At my age such guesses tend to be on target. Yes. There was a Schreber, Moritz Schreber (1808-1861), Leipzig, physician, university professor. He was a great advocate of physical exercise, his chief focus the (negative) consequences of urbanization during the Industrial Revolution. He is viewed as the originator of allotment gardening, at least in Germany. In England they trace it back to darker roots, the Inclosure Acts (beginning 1845), which robbed people of their commons. The first garden that Schreber inspired was in Leipzig and served as a place where children could exercise—and later garden—in pleasant surroundings. Their parents soon took to this recreation too. Schreber’s name came to be associated with this kind of gardening only after his death—thus gardening on land set aside by municipalities and rented at low rates. In this country the activity is called community gardening, and the first of these were the “victory gardens” set up during the two world wars to help grow food. To garden lifts the soul while getting the hands dirty. The name is secondary. But for us the word Schrebergarten has sunny overtones.  

Primavera

First spring, for us, is always forsythia and pussy willow—although I see here the faint early blooming of some trees. The background still obligingly retains the season that has just been left behind. Forsythia belongs to the olive family, which surprised me, but a branch that produces a dry capsule holding several little seeds. The pussy willow is, well, a willow—although that word evokes long, hanging branches and, for me, an immigrant, a famous verse:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered thee, O Zion.
We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. [Psalm 137:1-2]

Coptic Christianity

The death of Shenouda II, Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church, got us wondering again about the origins of this branch of Christianity. I found some old notes of mine dating back to writing the second volume of the Ghulf Genes trilogy (which starts in Ethiopia) where I found the word monophysitism heavily underlined. That brought a vague memory of an arcane theological point, already forgotten again. The world’s too vast, history too deep. Here some notes on this subject. Christianity, like all great things, evolves. Coptic Christianity, it turns out, was the second of many great schisms within this tradition. I found a very useful graphic for it on Wikipedia (link):

The first two of these schisms, producing the Assyrian Church and the Coptic, are rooted in what is called the Nestorian heresy. Nestorius held that Christ was two persons in one, one human, one divine, while the Church asserted, at the Council of Ephesus (431) that Christ had two natures, human and divine, but only one person in which these two natures were present at once and simultaneously. The split-off of Coptic Christians came twenty years later, after the Council of Chalcedon (451) over a variant of the Nestorian heresy, monophysitism. It held that Christ was a single person with a single nature, both divine.

The third great division, which produced the Eastern Orthodox branch, was initiated by ideas of Photius (820-893), the patriarch of Constantinople. His assertion was that the Holy Spirit arose from the Father. The Church asserted, at the Fourth Council of Constantinople (869-870), that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (Filioque, in the Latin of the Nicene Creed, thus this word became the name of the controversy). Photius also disapproved of Leo III’s crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor and openly criticized clerical celibacy. The Fourth Council set the stage for what is known as the Great Schism, the third. It took place in 1054 when the then leader of the Church in Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, shut down Latin churches in Constantinople; he was excommunicated by Leo IV, and the split became history.

The graphic, of course, also shows later separations and, in some cases, reunions of elements of split-off streams with the main stream, Catholicism.

Some will read this and smile, feeling superior. But, alas, in the realm where we are all sojourning, things get very messy—but, as Rumi, the poet, says, “the caravan keeps marching on.”

Déjà Vu

CNN presented a show yesterday titled GPS Road Map for Saving Health Care. The GPS there stands for “Global Public Square.” It was a well-done comparison of heath care programs around the globe, including the United Kingdom, Taiwan, and Switzerland. But I kept having a powerful sense of déjà vu—if not the genuine kind. I really remembered seeing something quite like this. As one segment ended I went to tell Brigitte what the next country on the list would be. Sure enough. I had been right. And after the show ended I said to her: “I’ve seen something very much like this, very much. The same absolute content, same sequence—even some of the people interviewed are the same.”

It turns out I was right; I did the digging this morning. Back on April 15, 2008 PBS’ Frontline presented a program called Sick Around the World. That program had segments on health care as delivered in the United States, UK, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland.  President Obama signed our health care bill on March 23, 2010, thus two years later. CNN’s program, presented by Fareed Zakaria, was quite excellent, Zakaria’s summation correct and eloquent. Such shows, however, have zero influence on actual political behavior. The reason for that is another interesting subject.

More or Less Taboo

Aging. Therefore a story by novelist Louis Begley in today’s NYT Sunday Review caught my eye: “Age and Its Awful Discontents.” The inserted subhead says: “Is there anything good about getting old? No. Its gifts are bitter.”

This is modernity’s uncensored judgment; it rarely sees print. The ads instead show us busy, active seniors just getting ready, thanks to NevDyX-Plus (but do, by all means, ask your doctor), to go sky-diving with fetchingly silvery friends. Physical deterioration is certainly a challenge-plus. Mates, friends die, hence loneliness knocks on the door. The subject is taboo because in the official view, thus in the naked public square, a whole dimension of human life is missing—its meaning and ultimate direction.

Is there anything good about getting old? Yes, actually. We know a great deal more and, with age, the knowledge is more certain. The trip is almost over, and at its end a longed-for destination. This last leg, of course, is best shared. But even all alone a certain delight sometimes makes itself felt. Reunion with the dearly departed comes closer with every visit to the ER room.

The Industry/Bureaucracy of Butterflies

Our trip to Florida featured a delightful afternoon at what we called the Butterfly Museum, but the formal name of the place is The Key West Butterfly & Nature Conservancy (link). I’m showing an exterior view of the place—which hides the glass-domed conservatory where up to 60 butterfly varieties live peacefully with 20 exotic bird species, some wondrous orchids and bewilderingly many tropical trees and plants, and, in a little rock-ringed lakelet fed by running, bubbling streams some rather showy goldfish. Orchids are present, not least a variety called the Butterfly Orchid, because coevolution marks the growing and the flying creatures, among the latter, of course, also moths. The place is enchanting—but if you are a photographer also maddening. Nature has endowed these creatures with marvelous gifts of motion. They don’t hold still.

As we ambled along, I approached an attendant. “Tell me,” I said, making a gesture in the air. “How do you raise so many kinds?” “We buy them,” he said. This was the start of a brief but enlightening exchange. I learned of butterfly farms, many in Florida, that breed many varieties and supply them to conservatories and also sell a more limited variety to the public at large. Do you wish to release a quite visible swarm of them at your wedding? No problem. Or perhaps you wish to include an “activity” for your grade-school biology class? The industry is waiting. It is ready to supply you with eggs, caterpillars, chrysalides, or the living butterflies themselves—and ancillary products are on sale as well, not least dozens of varieties of butterfly plants, translucent containers in which your butterflies can gambol (some taller than a man), and other objects that, together, are sold as “kits.”

Later I learned that transporting butterflies (at any stage of life) across state lines is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Butterfly raisers must get certifications for every variety. Why? Well, some are viewed as plant pests, and the long arm of commercial interest is aided by USDA regulation. The stray thought occurs (but then vanishes again as rapidly as a butterfly eludes the hand-held Kodak) that butterflies may be much more stringently regulated than financial instruments that swarm outward from Wall Street.

As for us, we intend to stay beneath the radar that flies threateningly but invisibly in the skies above us. If a Monarch or a Swallowtail, a Painted Lady or a Red Admiral should fall in love with our dill and lay an egg, we’ll nurture it in coming months and only inflict on you, the anxious public, a photo or two of what comes forth…

The Duke in the Dock

If we trace that phrase back to its origins, we could render it “the leader in the cage,” and this because “duke” comes from the Latin ducere, to lead, whereas “dock,” in the sense of a place where the accused person stands comes from the Flemish dok, meaning a pen or cage. But if I changed the phrase to “the duke at the dock,” this time meaning something that separates water from the earth, the meaning could be rendered “the guide by the guide,” once more going back to Latin, because to lead is also to guide, and because “dock” in the watery sense derives from aqueduct, thus some structure that guides the water, also from ducere. But if the duke in the dock was fined a certain sum, we could render that as “the duke was docked.” Now that last meaning of “dock” in this case comes from yet another meaning of the word, namely to chop off an animal’s tail—and specifically the fleshy, muscular part.

                     

Now while I have these words under interrogation, I might as well note that both Hitler and Mussolini were dukes. Hitler was called Der Führer, which means leader or guide in German, and Mussolini was, of course, Il Duce. And no. The Doctor didn’t get his name from chopping off damaged muscular appendages. That title derives from docere, “to show, to teach” and by implication to make something right by correcting. That was a step up from being a plain old leech, a name that had its origins in what doctors did in medieval times—namely to bleed people. Me duce lingua dulcis…

Temper, Temper

Temper, temper inveterate

Defender of obscure mysteries.

Okay. Buddhism is not a subject

Suitable for TV coverage—

Least of all if commentators

Are professors of religion

And a shrink. It’s only PBS.

Cartoons appeal to every inner

Child. The music is sitar-like

Soothing. The hard won truth the Buddha

Reached seated beneath that Banyan tree

Amounts to saying that we’re all right

Just like we are if only we embrace

Our Gaia Mom and we are nice

To one another while we ignore

All of that kinda bad stuff that

Just happens to come down.

The Buddha, by David Grubin, shown on PBS December 2010. Available on DVD in a library near you.

Mitochondria

My cousin Tibor and I (we’re of the same age) were exchanging, with help from HP Photosmart, very yellowing family-tree information that reaches its frail bony fingers all the way back to 1645 to an ancestor of ours called Peter—indeed bemoaning that the finger doesn’t reach all the way back to 1470, when an even older male forebear, according to a coat of arms, gave rise to the famed Darnay name—only, alas, it was then still just Dorner. Men’s names everywhere, in heavy ink, the progenitating ladies sort of sidelined with less obvious emphasis. But this is a patriarchal time—and has been since somebody way, way back in the pre-BC era, as it were, decided that things really pend from men.

Contrarian that I am, naturally I thought of mitochondria. These are, in a way, my favorite organelles, found in eukaryotic (read “advanced”) cells. They manufacture ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the fuel of chemical energy. The mighty mitochondria, therefore, are the power plants inside our cells. Now nature knows best—and knows what really is important. It’s about energy, stupid, not male descent. And nature also knows that women are, as it were, slightly better designed than men. For this reason the mitochondria in our bodies—and they have their own DNA—all come from the female. To be sure, sperm cells bring mitochondria from the male parent, but in the embryo only the little power-plants from the female egg are reproduced. What happens is a kind of culling. During the formation of the embryo, the mitochondria introduced by sperm are marked by a regulatory protein called ubiquitin (the name deriving from ubiquitous, because they are). The presence of this marker means that the unfortunately tagged mitochondria from the father’s side are recycled into proteins—not used to make ATP. If they lived in a male, they are suspect; the male metabolism probably messed them up by recombination and such like shenanigans. The female rules.

For this reason a really, really long look back into the very dawns of time makes use of tracing mitochondrial DNA backward. A book that reports on  such efforts is Bryan Sykes’ The Seven Daughters of Eve. Sykes is a professor of human genetics. The book, alas, is only mildly fascinating. Humanity as we know it can be traced back to seven females and is also, incidentally, useful for tracing the geographic origins of various population groups.

The most intriguing aspect of mitochondria, for me, is that they are clearly immigrants to the eukaryotic cell—acquired along the line to provide a sophisticated functionality. That is why they have their own DNA. All that’s left now of their once glorious origins is the power plant they’d originally built. Which, in turn, resonates with our family’s history too. We were German immigrants who brought hi-tech to the backward regions of Hungary—iron-working skills that one branch of our family, recorded on those yellowing sheets, still practiced in my grandparents’ generation.

Mother’s Milk

Our sense of the greater world reaches us, as it were, through our mother’s milk—because the world’s so vast. A visceral sense of this rose up in me thanks to the confluence of some personal associations and some dark news events. The personal aspect came when I found an old book on Mallarmé no doubt part of my Mother’s library—and the memory of a memoir of World War I which probably reached me through her as well. My sense of culture was heavily influenced by literature and humanistic values, and all else I saw through my mother’s interpretation of them as influenced by such values. At the same time came news yesterday of African atrocities, first a video of Ugandan horrors, then interviews of George Clooney, the actor, making a brave attempt to draw attention to the suffering of Sudanese living on the new borders between Sudan and South Sudan. The thought came: what sort of culture reaches the children of those regions through their mother’s milk—if they are fortunate enough to survive? Our earliest memories are privileged. Only with great reluctance do we yield to the successive onslaughts of wider and wider experience. What I still powerfully feel as real culture—at least European culture—was barely alive when I imbibed it—but, of course, my dear Mother didn’t know that either. She carried a treasure and passed it on—and she was so young then. Mothers are, aren’t they. The actual reality of the world? Ultimately it is an incoherence. Fortunate those of us who carry a little light forward from childhood. However dim it seems, it continues to guide.