Descent of an Angel

An angel descended to see if in truth a
A much-fabled region others had mentioned could
Really be found—where great orbs perpetually burned
And— gathered in clusters by magical pulls—they
Slowly, majestically, whirled and thus formed diamonds
And sparks that lit up domains of permanent dark.

In its descent the angel with pleasure noted
A fading of heavenly light as it now left
The infinite mansions behind and, so it seemed,
Approached a vast zone where darkness and light,
Stirred into twilight that seemed like a froth on the
Surface of oceans of impenetrable night.

“First the darkness,” thought the angel, “then the diamonds
Shall appear.” Into the darkness the angel now
Felt its magnificence gradually drawn until
The last faint light of home blinked out and true darkness
Came. But it was empty, empty, a vast neant.
No trace of sentience, of life, of thought. A void.

“Where are the sparks, where is the light—where have I erred?”
The angel thought. “My heavenly vision. Am I
Now blind?” The angel saw nothing, but God sees all.
The angel’s great wings swept right through whole clouds, whole swarms
Of galaxies, trillions of stars; its subtle
Substance could not perceive this coarser region’s touch.

Nor could it see or even guess that its great wings
Touched, interpenetrated the bodies of trillion
Lesser creatures on countless tiny balls, creatures
As blind, indeed, in their own way, as the great angel
was. Gazing up into their skies they also failed
To see a gorgeous angel in its flight distraught.

—————
To this, by way of commentary, two quotes from Swedenborg:

Since angels have no notion of time, they have a different idea of eternity from that which men of the earth have… There were angels who were admitted more nearly into my thoughts, and even into natural ones in which were many things from time and space; but because they then understood nothing, they suddenly withdrew; and after they had withdrawn, I heard them talking and saying that they had been in darkness. [Heaven and Hell, Emanuel Swedenborg, ¶ 167-168]

The superiority of [the angels’] outer senses to those of the world is as that of sunshine to cloud darkness in the world, and as that of noonday light to evening shade; for the light of heaven, because it is Divine truth, enables the sight of angels to perceive and distinguish things the most minute. Their outer sight also corresponds to their inner sight, or to the understanding; for with angels the one sight flows into the other, so that they act as one; hence they have so great power of vision... But the rest of the senses with the angels are not so exquisite as the senses of seeing and of hearing, since seeing and hearing serve their intelligence and wisdom, but not the other senses, which if they were equally exquisite would take away the light and joy of their wisdom, and would bring in the enjoyment of pleasures of the various appetites and of the body, which obscure and weaken the understanding so far as they prevail—as is the case with men in the world, who are gross and stupid as to spiritual truths so far as they indulge the sense of taste and yield to the allurements of the sense of touch. [Heaven and Hell, Emanuel Swedenborg, ¶ 462]

—————
And yet another note: An earlier version of this general idea may be found here. Michelle, whose sense of thematics is very keen, will point out that I sometimes put posts in the wrong places—and that this one belongs on Borderzone. It is here because I like to keep the poems all on one site.

Only Hearing Those Who Sing Our Song

With the sharp polarization tangible in public discourse, we see this subject surface in various contexts. John Magee of our circle addressed the subject the other day (“Wisdom overheard in the YMCA locker room”) here. The issue in a nutshell: People avoid written or broadcast messages critical of their own views. This subject rapidly turns complex—and here is why: Two important elements of information, always fused, rush at us from the media and need to be teased apart—but time is precious.

A message will typically contain facts (“dark clouds are overtaking the sky”) and interpretation (“a thunderstorm is in the making”). The journalistic ideal is that facts should be presented objectively, thus without slant or interpretation. Opinion should be separated from the factual presentation and clearly labeled as such: editorializing. The difficulties arise right here. Why? Because a genuinely factual presentation is extraordinarily costly. Reality is almost infinitely complex, and therefore selection of what to report—and by selection, therefore, to emphasize—is always involved: what aspects of an event to highlight—which of many different camera-shots to include—how long to dwell, say, on the suffering of victims and how long on the energetic or haphazard actions of those charged with the rescue. And those who do the selection may do so, consciously or unconsciously, in light of their own values. Is “objectivity” really achievable? Here I’m reminded of the Supreme Court justice who, speaking of pornography, said that we know it when we see it. But that’s a way of saying that objectivity, paradoxically, is subjective.

We still keep hearing McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message.” The problem goes back a ways. The victors write the history. We have at least two histories of America. One is written by the European invaders, another by the conquered and marginalized native tribes. The history of America written by a buffalo would be the story of a holocaust. An update of this slogan might be, “the framing is the message” or “the framer is the message.” He who holds a certain set of values will select the facts to suit his purposes. Therefore the facts themselves will be in question.

This, of course, suggests that one must read all sorts of stories—left, right, erudite, popular, high, low, foreign, and domestic—even to gather sufficient number of facts for personal synthesis. This is John’s point, in a way. Every side will impose its selection, and it is therefore necessary to read others’ takes. I emphasize, again, that this approach is needed even understand what happened. Never mind the interpretation.

Is this a modern phenomenon? An aspect of decadence? I would say No. It has always been this way. The big difference between the 1950s, for example, and the 2010s is that in the earlier period the fragmentation of society had not as yet advanced very far and therefore the slant in most publications and broadcasts was the same. But it was still a slant. Already aware of cultural biases by having been an immigrant, I felt braced by learning in my late teens that other cultures also had interesting and novel takes on reality. There is a view of history as seen from China, too—in which the West still appears as an uncouth barbarism—however well armed. It is a view that, as a Chinaman, I no doubt would have found persuasive.

Brigitte and I enjoy sessions of reading out loud to each other from various publications. These realities came into focus as she read an eye-opening article by Philip Jenkins from The American Conservative yesterday (April 2010 issue). It is titled “Third World War” and deals with the clash of Islam and Christianity in Africa. The article is very well worth reading—and is not what might spontaneously spring to mind. It is enlightening and surprising in large part because every kind of western slant on Africa’s development resolutely filters out a whole dimension of cultural evolution on that continent as irrelevant—if even noticed—by the infrequent flyer to Nigeria or Somalia. The article is available online here.

So much simply on getting all of the facts. Now I come to interpretation. The more experience we have—emphasis on experience—the less likely we are to ask others to interpret what we see. As a child, learning how to fish, I listened with great eagerness to elders on how to read the water, bobber, shore, the tension of the line, the bend of the rod. At my age others’ opinions fall into the category of reading for amusement. I treat opinion as another species of fact to absorb and store away. But the many who only read stuff that confirms their existing biases—why, folks like that are way, way below the salt, as far as I’m concerned. Too bad they also have the vote. But, as we often hear it said, there is no justice in this vale of tears…

Keep Looking Up

Valentine’s day is now well, well behind us, but in this household it was a late bloomer. In a reversal of 50 years’ tradition, Brigitte decided to give me a Valentine’s Day present for a change, and she decided to give me the stars. The package took a long time arriving, so we celebrated late.

But let me unwrap this. Decades ago now, in the late 1970s, Jack Horkeimer appeared on Public Television in brief vignettes about the stars—and how to make the most of them by looking up with naked eyes. The program then was called Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler, but Horkheimer changed the name to Star Gazer thanks to the inadvertent influence of the Internet. Children looking for his videos using a search engine got the wrong kinds of sites when they typed in the phrase “star hustler.” Rolling my eyes. In any case, Brigitte got me Horkheimer’s most recent disk, Space Oddities, which is a collage, with linking commentaries, of his recent and some older brief video “articles”—and it is a delight. The place to go to is here. And here you will find a YouTube broadcast of one of the shortest kinds of items Horkheimer produces for PBS, a one-minute snippet.

Jack Foley Horkheimer is the Executive Director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium at the Miami Science Museum and has been at his job for more than 35 years. Each of his episodes ends with the phrase “Keep looking up”—very good advice at any time, not least in this day and age.

Fame By Scholarly Acclamation

At some point in my younger years—it must have been when (still in the Army) I became interested in Gothic cathedrals—I discovered with mild surprise that the word “Gothic” had once been used, and not all that long ago, as a word of deprecation and dismissal. That meaning is still preserved in my Webster’s, where meaning 1 c: (2) is uncouth, barbarous. This was my first encounter with a process that seems always active in culture, namely the elevation of something new to a status worthy of high praise—and the demotion of the once famed and valued to the nether regions of the barbarous. This process tends to be in the hands of scholars—thus not those who are predominantly creators or doers, although their subjects always are in the those categories. An interesting example of this process is Camille Paglia’s labor to promote pop culture to the higher dimensions of cultural achievement. Now, mind you, Brigitte and I like Camille Paglia even when we don’t agree with her. I’m using her as an example. Other examples will occur to the culturally literate. These efforts also collide and compete—small groups, for instance, labor to reinstate Wagner in Olympus while others battle to keep him locked up in the nasty compound where the rise of Nazism managed to confine him.

I was reminded of this by a story in the New York Times this morning which begins:

By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Caravaggio, who somehow found time to paint when he wasn’t brawling, scandalizing pooh-bahs, chasing women (and men), murdering a tennis opponent with a dagger to the groin, fleeing police assassins or getting his face mutilated by one of his many enemies, has bumped him from his perch. [Michael Kimmelman, “Caravaggio in Ascendance: A Bad Boy Artist’s Time to Shine,” front page]

The last him and his, of course, refer to Michelangelo. The metric referred to is the work of the scholar,Philip Sohm, who has undertaken to do statistical studies of scholarly papers about both artists. Counting papers, a nice scholarly activity, produces the conclusion that more of them deal with Caravaggio. The question then arises: “So what?”

To be quite frank about it, I haven’t got a horse in this race. In the quite wondrous series by Lord Kenneth Clark, Civilisation—it came out in 1969 and we saw it on Public TV—I had had a fairly comprehensive view of the Renaissance and, watching that and other segments once again about a year ago, I came to the conclusion that I was no longer (if ever I had been) a great fan of that period’s art—with some exceptions like Fra Lippo Lippi. No. This is not that kind of rant.

Rather, it strikes me as interesting how the climate of opinion shifts with cultural change. I’d encountered a similar article five, six, seven years ago already, the first time I’d noted that Caravaggio even existed. Then, as today, the reason for the focus was not his art so much but something that seems to appeal to modern pundits and scholars. He was the bad boy. How very, very exciting indeed!

Welcome Back

The temperature now hovering near 60° F…and eyeing the disorder in our backyard from the bedroom window, I glimpsed the first rabbit of 2010 in the backyard of our neighbor. Remembering my boyhood skills learned pretending to be a Redskin, I made a very slow and noiseless approach, shielded by trees, to take this commemorative picture of a member of the family of Leporidae. Note, please, the snow still on the ground.

In Rome...

The dog rejoiced quite visibly,
She writhed, she almost shed her skin,
When mistress finally came back,
The trunk stuffed full of grocery sack.

I wonder, I do, honestly,
If in the wild dogs and their kin
Behave like that and celebrate
The homing of a canine mate
With similar exuberance?

Do dogs change materially
When they live, our inferior twin,
In our homes? Or is it that in
Rome they do as Romans do and
In the wild, another ambiance,
They live a dog’s life quite happily,
Thank you?

Traditions Preserve…the Good and the Bad

Tradition, tradition! Tradition!
     [The Fiddler on the Roof]

A pleasing story in the New York Times this morning (“Wartime Pope Has a Huge Fan: A Jewish Knight”) reminded me that tradition is a two-edged sword. It preserves both the good and the bad. The story concerns the activities of a Gary L. Krupp, a New Yorker, who once received a distinction from Pope John Paul II for fundraising activities on behalf of an Italian hospital. He was named—

A Knight Commander of the
Pontifical Equestrian
Order of St. Gregory
The Great

—the mere citation of which justifies the effort required to write this post, hence my elevation of the title to the status of verse.

In later years Krupp, a medical equipment dealer but now retired, engaged in research regarding the long-standing assertion by Jewish groups that Pope Pius XII failed during World War II to exert himself energetically to save Jews from the holocaust. Krupp’s conclusion was that Pius is innocent of the charges levied against him. The Times quotes him as saying: “Listen to me: Pius XII was the greatest hero of World War II. He saved more Jews than Roosevelt, Churchill and all the rest of them combined. We should not let him be an issues between Catholics and Jews.”

I applaud this sort of effort to lean a single shoulder against a “tradition” that, I don’t for a minute doubt, will linger on and on in time for centuries to come. It is difficult to live in human community. One is invariably lonely. My roots rise from very conservative soil, a royalist past, and I’m very comfortable in reading books like Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind in which the concept of tradition takes on a multi-dimensional aspect and even a word like prejudice undergoes an interesting transformation. But while the company may be congenial, I must preserve a certain reserve. Traditions preserve, and if the balance of the past has been positive, its preservation is laudable. But tradition also carries forward all manner of other detritus that ought to be examined, sifted, and, occasionally left behind as information rather than serving as a carrier of resentments that pass from individual to individual for generations unexamined.

William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art

William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, originally uploaded by fotocitizen

Thinking of The Thinker yesterday reminded me of my youth in Kansas City. A full-size reproduction of Auguste Rodin’s statue stood, or should I say sat, at the back entrance of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art. The original may be found in the Musée Rodin in Paris.

The Gallery (as we used to call it) was within walking distance of our house (for Europeans, anyway); we visited frequently enough so that the place became almost an extension of our ordinary environment. My mother, the Beatrice of my life, lead the way in this venture as she did in all things cultural. The Gallery has greatly expanded since. Its long name is actually even longer. It is the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum of Fine Arts. This name is now officially rendered as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The museum was opened in 1933. In 1993, long after we’d left Kansas City, a rather stunning but very modernistic new wing, the Bloch Building, was added to the western side of it—creating one of those weird hybrids of modernity. In the manner of the day, which still worships Progress even as tides of barbarism are rising slowly on all sides, most photographs of the Nelson-Atkins show the modernistic façade.

Long names are the consequence of our desire to be remembered—which is aided by great wealth. William Rockhill Nelson was the founder of the Kansas City Star; Mary McAfee Atkins was a wealthy widow. In these situations I’m always anxious not to sound—or even to be thought to sound critical. I don’t mind long names and don’t mind remembering those who gave their wealth so that the more humbly endowed can benefit. For each such donor there are countless others who give nothing to the collective at all.

The Gallery is on the edge of a district known as the Plaza, an extensive, ornate, and rather up-scale sort of shopping and office region. Midwest Research Institute (MRI, another of my alma maters) and the Gallery are to the East; St. Luke’s Hospital, where Michelle, was born is to the North; and the Kansas suburbs, where we lived for some years, lie to the west beyond State Line road not too far away. The second photo, taken from the front steps of MRI looking north) shows the Volker Fountain, a wondrous and amusing piece of art of which I’ve written before on Ghulf Genes (here) and which I like well enough to show its picture yet again.

The Volker Fountain? Well, behind it was William Volker, a man who made a fortune making picture frames. He gave away his fortune anonymously; indeed, he was known for a long time as Mr. Anonymous—because nobody knew the name of the donor. One of his donations was a large mansion and land around which, a little to the south and east of this fountain, the University of Kansas City took shape—another Kansas City institution with great merit, not least a splendid theater. Eventually anonymity also fades. And hence this fine fountain received Volker’s name…

Last Chance

Way back I obtained a discount card from Barnes & Noble. Its structure is simple. I pay a relatively modest amount for the discount card each year. Thereafter I enjoy a regular discount on all items I buy at the store. I save money because my purchasing volume is high enough to earn back the price of the card every year—plus some. The plot now thickens. A while after I got used to the B&N card, Borders offered a free discount card and, of course, I got one. Free is good. But these two book chains have quite different approaches. Borders’ card is retroactive. After you’ve made some purchases, you get discounts coupons for future purchases. But these are often limited to certain items and certain periods.

In both cases, the stores try to get you to be a frequent buyer. Someone at B&N imagines that I sit about at home thinking like Rodin’s The Thinker, worrying: “Have I purchased enough books from Barnes & Noble to have recovered the fifteen, twenty-five dollars (forget the amount) I spent on my discount card? Let me stop thinking and consult my discount diary NOW.” Then, seeing that I still have three, two, or one dollar unredeemed, I rush out to acquire the latest best seller. The folks at Borders imagine that I find e-mailed coupons irresistible. These arrive after I’ve been to the store to buy something. Borders thinks that urgent e-mails with deadlines can move me. The upshot here is that I buy my books at B&N by preference although the B&N store is farther away. B&N’s program is more rational.

Today I get an e-mail from Borders titled: Last Chance: Up to 40% Off at PETCO Up to 70% Off at The Home Depot. Now here is a wonder. What does buying books have to do with PETCO? You know the place, don’t you? PETCO is—Where the pets go. And Home Depot, while certainly a close acquaintance, only sells how-to-do-your-plumbing kind of titles. Well. This particular e-mail promotion offers me nine, count them, nine different coupons—and all because I’m the proud holder of a Borders Reward Card. Almost all have expiration dates, some tomorrow, some the day after tomorrow. I can buy shoes from Nordstrom, hotel rooms from Pricelines, skincare products from Philosophy (Philosophy??). Of the remaining four—The Container Store, Sephora, Staples, and Gilt Groupe I only recognize Staples. I honestly haven’t a clue what the others have on offer—although the Gilt Groupe actually names two items. One of the is Marc by Marc; the other is Zac Posen. Even after I resume my The Thinker pose, I cannot for the life of me remember if I’ve run out of Zac Posen or not.

Last Chance? I think I’ll miss it. The gates of the heaven of the Kingdom of Commerce are closing on me. And the choice is all mine, too.

Let’s Ban the Word

Those of us living in metropolitan Detroit now sigh as we read about Governor Patterson’s problems in New York and Representative Charles Rangle’s temporary yielding of the hammer over House Ways and Means in Washington, DC. Here we have been embroiled in a mayoral corruption scandal for more than a year. It led to the ouster of Detroit’s mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick last year; most recently we’ve learned of a belated FBI investigation of his reign about to boil up in earnest. In seeking distraction from steamy and/or monetary corruption charges, we are then treated (we were yesterday) to proof positive that the man appointed to lead the Detroit School Board cannot actually write a grammatical sentence. To describe the Detroit school system as “failing” is to use a euphemism.

I tend to see these things through a cultural lens. Corruption has everything to do with morality and morality with custom. In sorting through these matters in the past, I’ve looked at the distinction between morality and legality on LaMarotte (here) and have pondered the fact that corruption in one domain may be custom in another (here). This morning, glancing at the New York Times over coffee—and setting aside a sudden impulse to join the Coffee Party on Facebook at once—it occurred to me that the loud cries of Corruption! are not, perhaps, relevant to modern, secular culture at all.

Such cries suggest that morality has actual standing in our secular culture. Is not the public promotion of morality the nose of the camel under the tent flap? Isn’t it religion trying to get itself established again? That, my friends, should be treated as a problem, an assault on the modern values of staunch value-free realism. All right. Morality, arguably, has its place, may be tolerated. It belongs to the lower, the less important, the voluntary, the life-style, the private sphere. As such, we know, there are as many different moralities as there are cultures, and we’re resolutely multicultural. If it isn’t illegal, it should simply be labeled behavior.

Let me illustrate. It is perfectly legal to finesse in bridge. If you do it, and it works, you win. If you guessed wrong, you lose a trick. Is it illegal to send a message to the battered mistress of a governor’s aide that she should keep her yap shut? Isn’t speech free? Is it illegal to make assignations to fornicate outside of marriage? Or is the illegality merely confined to using City-owned texting devices when doing so? Get it right, Media. If a presidential candidate sleeps around, isn’t that his private business? Or perhaps his wife’s? If being homophobic is a no-no, shouldn’t being adultryphobic be condemned as well?

I urge all sectors—media, punditry, politicians—to be consistent. Use the word Illegality! Avoid the word corruption. It implies too many things that reek of the Old Time Religion. To be sure, even that nasty word, corruption, is inconsistently applied. Why hasn’t it been applied to the Too Big To Fails when they engage in underhanded, deceptive practices however legal? Why do we call that creativity or financial innovation?

Ban the word, I say. It’s just behavior, stupid. Behavior. Got it? And when it’s illegal, why then, by all means, let the wheels of justice slowly grind away. But let’s not get judgmental. To be judgmental is to act immorally in the context of modernity.

As Above, So Below

With sixteen days to go before Spring is officially with us, namely at 5:32 pm on March 20, 2010, the weather now is showing a certain restless anticipation. Huge puddles form on sidewalks—and trees seem to grow out of the concrete.... Oh, yes. I do anticipate yet another big snow-storm either before or after the Vernal Equinox, but walks now are much, much more interesting.

The Post Deserves Support

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. [Herodotus (484 - 425 BC)]

The Postal Service is deeply rooted in our history. It was established in 1775, thus before there was a United States of America, and the first Postmaster General was Benjamin Franklin. The quoted motto—most people believe that it is the USPS’ own—was actually written by the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, in praise of an even older postal service, a kind of pony express operated by the Persians; and Herodotus was celebrating the stalwart behavior of those forerunners of our men and women in blue. The motto appears carved into the stone of the General Post Office in New York City located at 8th and 33rd Street. And it applies to our own. Indeed it applies, all around the world, to mail carriers everywhere, one of the least noticed but ubiquitous living symbols of genuine civilization. For some statistics on our own postal service I refer the reader to today’s post on LaMarotte (here) where, as here, I advocate support of this venerable service lest the acids of modernity begin to eat away at it and we shall be obliged, in some future time, to reinvent it.

Postmaster General John E. Potter, in company of other postal execs, appeared yesterday before a group of postal clients, congressional aides, and union representatives. He urged several changes—including reduction in the number of post offices, elimination of Saturday delivery, and changes in the Service’s contributions to retirement benefits. The reason? The USPS projects losses of $238 billion over the next ten years.

The changes projected are neither dramatic nor threatening. Congress, for once, is unwilling to act. The unions are opposed, of course. So are the big postal customers. Nonetheless, we must become alert. I’ve become gun-shy. I don’t want another pillar of civilization thinned down, reshaped, or even painted a new color. Hands off the Postal Service! Subsidize it, dammit! Raise taxes, if you must. No way, José. Let’s not tolerate the nose of the camel under the tent flap. First you cut this, then you cut that. Pretty soon its privatized. Once we had a decently operating airline system and a coherent system of telephone communications. If it hadn’t been for Enron, we’d be bombarded daily with calls urging us to shift electrical, gas, and water suppliers. I say No! Fie on you, Progress. Fie on you, deregulation!

Let’s Hear it for Leporidae

This being the first ever March the First with a post on Ghulf Genes, I wish to honor one of the families of the Mammalian class, of the phylum Vertebrata, superphylum Chordata, of the kingdom of Animalia. This is the family that shelters both rabbits and hares. Hares are bigger and belong to the genus Lepus; rabbits are smaller and their genera are also many (eight), of which the genus Sylvilagus is closest to me in daily experience, the classification of the Cottontail. From Spring (around the corner) until late Fall one or more members of this genus appears/appear somewhere on my property—else, to keep things balanced—let me just say that we both nest on the same minuscule area of the surface of the earth. March Hare and Mad Hatter thus inhabit the same space. As it should be.

My fascination with and love of the Leporidae is no secret to careful readers of this blog. The subject occurs here, here, and here. In the last of those posts I even claim to have been born on the Island of the Rabbits in Hungary. Biology, literature, and even sculpture celebrate these creatures. Herewith I show the March Hare from Alice in Wonderland, the first edition cover of Richard Adams’ Watership Down (courtesy of Wikipedia here), and proudly present a photograph of my own, taken last fall, of The Lord of the Rabbits of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the biggest representative of this genre in my own neck of the woods.

Thus let us march into March.

Technical Note

To round out a busy month filled with all manner of anniversaries, it might be appropriate to end with a note about a new technical feature that has suddenly appeared on the Blogger platform, host of Ghulf Genes. It is a “Pages” facility permitting the user to create static pages accessible either from a listing in the left or the right column (depending on template) or from tabs at the top of the blog. This feature has been available on other platforms and has obvious benefits. This morning, almost by accident—I was messing with my test blog—I discovered the new feature. How long has it been available? I don’t know and don’t want to take the time to discover, but you can see it implemented beneath the header and to the left of the screen. Welcome, “Pages.” This platform needed the new dimension. In time I’ll make use of it.

Tracks in the Snow

Out on a walk as snow comes down
in dense diagonals ahead,
the distant air quite white yet still
translucent so that trees retain
their winter blacks, houses their red
brick shades and bushes their dark greens…

The sidewalk’s covered and pristine.
I am the first to press my print
into this virgin, crystalline
seal of an aging Winter as
it drenches flakes but has the air
of half believing that it’s Spring…

Indeed it’s weirdly quiet here,
I’m all alone, no cars, no sound,
the snow’s absorbed all noise and din,
it seems I own this landscape by
myself, the last to walk the path,
the past alone around me now,
no sign, no hint of future time…

Then like a miniature tide
I glimpse a single track approach:
I’m starting a new block. Steps in
the snow, their gender indistinct,
not large, not small—but purposive!
At every driveway in they go.
To every porch they quickly mount.

Aha! I think, as patterns now
appear, as time resumes its tick,
as future reasserts itself,
as I’m no longer quite alone.
Those tracks— surely they must belong
to someone working for La Poste
who carries news once valued most.

Hidden Rainbow

The frown of words must sometimes be relieved by a bit of illumination. Looking at some pictures—while also reorganizing the mass of images that have begun to crowd my black machine—I came across a photograph taken by son-in-law John Magee in California. I use that picture as the illustration on LaMarotte, my sometimes edgy commentary on all things secular. The picture on LaMarotte has a somber sort of feel. But the original from which I cropped it, had to crop it in effect, was taken for another reason—visible in the photograph above. There it is, the hidden rainbow—always present in life no matter what happens, whether visible or not.

Catastrophism

Two events quite recently reminded me of Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979), a Russian-born American scholar. One was a post on Siris (here) about the prehistoric temple site in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, presumed to be at least 11,000 years old but possibly begun 13,000 years ago. The other was seeing Nova’s program, Megabeasts’ Sudden Death, on Public Television last night. The story makes a very good case, based on examination of glaciers, that the woolly mammoth and other large creatures of North America may have been killed off by a devastating comet strike about 12,900 years ago.

I got interested in Velikovsky—as in other heterodox figures of my own time—in a home-made education that I sometimes liken to the progress of an ass dragging a plow from cactus to cactus; donkeys are said to be able to digest such prickly goods; or this may merely be a fitting myth to characterize the likes of me. This happened in the 1960s. I bought and read in succession some of Velikovsky’s books: Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, and Earth in Upheaval, all published in the 1950s. Velikovsky’s thesis in a nutshell? Many geological, climatic, and historical accounts are best explained by astronomical events of a catastrophic nature. A good deal of discussion in the late 1950s and early ‘60s focused (believe it or not) on the likelihood of global cooling. This got me thinking about, and researching, the cause of the ice ages. I stumbled on Velikovsky in that context and stayed to study his strange theories.

Catastrophism and gradualism are as perennial and persistent in human thought as Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to reality. Two figures whose lives bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the Frenchman George Cuvier (1769-1832) and the Englishman Charles Lyell (1797-1875). Cuvier attempted to explain anomalous phenomena in geology and fossil remains by catastrophic causes; Lyell was a gradualist and influenced Darwin. Someone—perhaps it was Velikovsky—suggested that the English embraced gradualism in horror of the French Revolution. And the Anglo-Saxon world dominance that marked the last century explains why we are all gradualists now. All except the donkeys, of course. The truth of the matter might have been expressed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was once handed two speeches on the same subject, one pro and one con. He handed them to another speech writer and suggested that he sort of blend the two into a third. Catastrophism is not incompatible with gradualism. To combine them we might adopt a phrase of Stephen Jay Gould’s and speak of “punctuated equilibrium.”

In its program on the mammoths, Nova duly bowed in the direction of gradualism by producing professors who expressed deep reservations of extinction by cometary bombs descending from the sky. The tone adopted was all too familiar: superior and dismissive, ex cathedra, as it were. This attitude has always struck me as odd and unscientific—and a signal that ideology is present. Even in a modern landscape scoured clean of any hint of God, scientism spontaneously rears back from anything that might even remotely be read as an act of God.

To this I might add a couple of footnotes. I once conceived of a short story the chief merit of which was its punning title: Dis-Aster. Yes. You guessed it. Someone started a huge comet on its way to Earth to make some point or other—embarrass NASA? To let NASA shine in averting the horror and thus gain additional funding? In any case, just two sheets of notes survive. Thus the first footnote ends and the next begins. Its thrust is to suggest that the imagination soars just pondering whole series of ancient civilizations that might once have flourished before current memories even began…of which Göbekli Tepe might be a token remnant. It delights me to see things open up in all dimensions, up, down, and in both vectors of time.

The three books referenced on Amazon:
Worlds in Collision
Ages in Chaos
Earth in Upheaval

Attention Seekers, Value Seekers

I’d like to round out my reactions to the New Age/Paganist convention we attended this past weekend, ConVocation. Convocation is sponsored by The Magical Education Council in Michigan; the 2010 event was the organization’s sixteenth. According to the MEC’s mission statement, “This organization is established for the following purpose: to create community by promoting the sharing of knowledge, experience, and fellowship among people who follow mystical and esoteric traditions.”

As I’ve noted in earlier posts, we’ve recently also attended a science fiction convention called ConFusion just a couple of miles from ConVocation in Detroit’s convention alley, you might say, along I-75 in the metro’s northern suburbs. Structurally the two conventions were very similar, but the interesting contrast for me was a seemingly different internal structure. While attending the last three sci-fi conventions over a period of about six years, it became ever more clear to me that the audiences were shrinking and that at least half of those attending were present (as we were present at the last ConFusion) with the agenda of self-promotion. We were there to sell my novels. This became very obvious in those sessions where I was a panelist and could therefore, from the front table, see the nametags of the audience. Many—and in some panels most—of those attending had panelist ribbons under their nametags. We were addressing insiders who would later address us… Among these some of those simply attending (no ribbon visible) revealed themselves in commentary and questions posed to be would-be artists, writers, or musicians. We were among Attention Seekers. The audience—those seeking values, had greatly diminished.

I must not generalize, of course, but experience is experience. Working our booth in the Vendor room, the same pattern emerged even more sharply. ConFusion is an entertainment venue, but far too few of those who stopped to chat were present for entertainment. They were all selling or promoting something.

Now for the contrast. I mentioned in the last post that ConVocation had a much larger audience; insiders in that audience, however, were the exception. Most of those attending—and eyeballing them they matched ConFusion’s audience in demographic and income characteristics—were present because they sought something of value. A snapshot. I arrived quite early on Friday morning not wishing to miss the single session on publishing. As I entered the lobby and went down the halls to find registration, I saw six different women each sitting on a chair, alone. Each was absorbed in the reading of a book.

This got me thinking in the days that followed. Attention seeking, value seeking. Lots of food for thought there as we look out into the world—especially the cybernetic world of information overload. But the sorting of these thoughts is still in progress.

Interesting Contrasts

We are attending ConVocation, a New Age/Paganist convention just a hop and a skip from the location where we attended ConFusion, the science fiction convention.  We is Dwarf Planet Press. We did not manage to get a vendor spot ahead of time. Had we done so, our tidy, elegant, industrial style booth, used by Editorial Code and Data for a decade at reference publishing conventions (at which we thought we looked  daring) would have looked at ConVocation like a Puritan at a cocktail party. Jewelry, textiles, and magical implements dominated the vendor space, although we glimpsed a book or two for sale at nearly every booth. The contrast between the sci-fi and the pagan event was startling. The differences?

• Attendance: ConVocation was/is crowded, masses of people.
• Content: More than a hundred lectures, presentations, and classes—all of them full.
• Quality: We attended four sessions yesterday, and three of the four were superb.
• Audience Participation: Much more active and lively. In fairness to ConFusion, the few participants there were as well-informed as at ConVocation.

Our first and challenging session yesterday was a presentation by Llewellyn Worldwide, the leading New Age Publisher. I confesss that I'd never heard of them before. Llewellyn publishes 135 books a year. One of their acquisitions editor and a promotional executive gave a fascinating presentation aimed at new writers, but what we heard and understood from comments on the margins, from anecdotes illustrating good advice, and from the context is how one really goes about promoting books in the modern day. Awesome, brother, awesome. But more later, not least some comments on what the contrast tells me. Must run to attend ConVocation's second day—and this conference is good enough so that we must be there at 9 am sharp!

Reading the Geographic

Keeping Brigitte company at the doctor’s office, I fell to reading what must be a recent copy of the National Geographic. I’ve always been neutral toward this publication and, as in the case of the Readers Digest, I only look at it in circumstances when there is nothing else on offer. The experience thus has a similarity to being thrust into environments I’d just as soon avoid, e.g., airports, truck stops, cocktail parties. But I do learn from the shocks I get at such venues; those are the places where what people call “real life” proceeds. Yesterday I learned of a fundamentalist branch of Mormonism where some men have as many as 80 wives. They get around the law by simply cohabiting with multiple women; and these days who can prosecute anyone for cohabitation? I learned that industrial salmon fisheries in Patagonia are ruining the ocean environments there, some of the last pristine waters on earth. I was reminded of the horse latitudes (Brigitte and I talked about that subject just the other day), thus the New Jersey-sized (or bigger) region in the middle of the ocean where a horrid mass of plastic and textile debris has cumulated. The ocean currents keep it slowly circling. Another article in the Geographic featured poor migratory inhabitants of India. People admire India’s new digital cities and soaring GDP, but India and the rest of the world ignore the slow spreading of alienation, neglect, and beggary. The Geographic tried to console its readers by reprinting some stunning photos taken by the recently fixed 20-year-old Hubble telescope. The photos teach the color of suns: they’re blue and red and orange and seem infinite in number.

Jane Austen, Detective

I must have read the novels of Stephanie Barron not long before I began this blog. Had Ghulf Genes been running at that time, I’m sure I would have noted her name and her delightful novels already. Stephanie Barron is the pseudonym of Francine Matthews, a woman with a fascinating career. She is a scholar (history), a one-time CIA analyst—but above all a very fine novelist. Her Jane Austen books generally follow Jane Austen’s life chronologically; the mysteries take place in the places where Austen lived or vacationed, and its characters include members of her family, people she knew, and, of course, characters invented by Stephanie.

I came across her work in my on-and-off life’s hobby of discovering mystery writers I really like. I approached this series with a great deal of apprehension. I discovered these detective novels while looking deeper into Jane Austen’s life after another period (which also repeats at roughly nine-year intervals) of rereading Austen. “Well,” I thought, “it’s probably a waste, but what the hell. Read one.” I was immediately captured, charmed, indeed surprised—and never regretted setting off on the venture. The list of Stephanie Barron's mysteries, a serious body of work, follows:

1. Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (1996)
2. Jane and the Man of the Cloth (1997)
3. Jane and the Wandering Eye (1998)
4. Jane and the Genius of the Place (1999)
5. Jane and the Stillroom Maid (2000)
6. Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House (2001)
7. Jane and the Ghosts of Netley (2003)
8. Jane and His Lordship's Legacy (2005)
9. Jane and the Barque of Frailty (2006)
10. Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron (2010)

Why now? I’ve become weary of reading so-called serious books, needed a change of atmospherics, and therefore began another search for yet another mystery author. I think I’ve also succeeded, but I'll write about the new author I stumbled across at some other time. The current search reminded me of the last one.

Francine Matthews, under that, her real, name also writes modern thrillers. I’ve looked at these as well but had the same curious response I’d had to reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. That novel is the strangest amalgam of magic and brutality I’ve ever encountered. Two thirds of it takes place in the past and is illuminated by a mysterious spirit. In the last third we are suddenly in modern times, and everything changes with such a gritty brutality that I found it difficult to finish the book. Now, of course, this may have been intended… Years later I chanced across Allende’s The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir. This book has essentially the same content as The House of the Spirits, but, written as a memoir, it is understated and oddly much better structured than the fictional version. A round-about way of saying that the spiritual element is much stronger in Matthews’—as in Allende’s—work when reality is seen at a greater distance and the raw texture of the everyday has been transformed by distance and reflection into meaning.

Another Kind of Climate Change

You have to be old enough, of course—breathing, living in that time—to feel the change viscerally. Not that those times are inaccessible to the younger generation, but there is a difference. I was 14 in 1950 and therefore, obviously, 24 in 1960, 34 in 1970. What loomed huge in the 1950s was Technology as Machine. UNIVAC, the first computer, was born in 1951; it was huge and did almost nothing. This feeling culminated in 1959 when the gigantic machine assaulted heaven and made a giant step, boots on the moon. The transformation of technology has since proceeded toward the ever smaller, so that its latest and almost universally fingered product is held in the hand, and it is now commonplace to thumb-nudge bright little pictures (does it really matter what they show?) left, right, up, and down on a screen no larger than a calculator.

I started consciously noting in the late 1970s that the word “technology” had come more and more to mean the cybernetic. Before that time, invariably, it had meant mechanical, plastic, chemical, and atomic wonders or horrors. There was a time, believe it or not, when Steel, the magazine of the metals industry, had roughly the same aura of prestige as Wired has today. The relentless miniaturization of the new technology has had the curious effect, I would propose, of miniaturizing our scientific imagination too. In the process the genuinely human has been squeezed out. Wandering about, it has gotten lost in a thickening forest of barbarism and of the weird. Hence the interesting changes in science fiction.

The first phase of the cybernetic revolution began with UNIVAC and ended, I would propose, in the early 1970s. The Apple appeared in 1976. The computer developed in the shadow of another dominant technological threat, atomic annihilation. Significant markers of that phase were Herman Kahn thinking the unthinkable. Kahn was an influential military strategist, systems theorist, and founder of the Hudson Institute. His actual title (1962) was Thinking About the Unthinkable—namely about total atomic war—but the phrase was shortened by much use. Two years later came the movie, as it were: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

By the year 1970 two decades of relentless change and endless public dread had reached a tipping point. Two books again marked another transition. It would last another thirty years. That year Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock and Charles A. Reich The Greening of America. One analyzed the all-deforming magic, supposedly, of technology. The other leaped into an imaginary future of ecological nirvana.

This wondrous period, in which we all turned green but nothing actually changed, culminated in two other books, both with oddly ambiguous messages. Francis Fukuyama sensed something. I think he got the details all wrong, but he captured the essence of his time. His book was The End of History. The book appeared in 1992. In 1996 John Horgan wrote The End of Science, Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. Horgan’s book did make some waves, but mostly in the specialized circles interested in science and technology.

The actual future shock, the seal of the old dispensation, came some years after its announcement when on September 11, 2001, airplanes rammed into the two pillars of capitalism and the bastion of military might, the Pentagon. Another, intended to destroy the symbol of democracy, didn’t make it but augured into the ground. Thus we passed through an invisible gate from Modernity into the New Dark Age. (Okay, cut the man some slack. He’s just a science fiction hack.)

Since then? Well, folks, I propose to you yet another wild and wooly fancy that minds like mine will conjure up. It is that we are undergoing a mighty climate change indeed, but it is cultural. But in the manner of humans always, we project it. We project it onto the innocent canvas of nature and think that it’s a physical phenomenon. Lives are short and the processes of history long. Our times will be judged a thousand years from now. By then these words will certainly be lost in the vortex of historical change, but I might just turn out to have been right.

Holiday of Obligation

When my thoughts wander back, as on such a day they ought, to the grand old days in the old country where Brigitte and I both come from, and I look for cherished memories of St. Valentine’s day as we used to celebrate it, I discover—nothing at all. And that’s because Valentine’s day is a holiday of obligation—but of the Church of Commerce, not of the Church of Rome. But the Church of Rome, at least in the institutional persona of the Catholic Encyclopedia, informs me (here) that early lists of martyrs cite at least three Valentines. One was a martyred priest, another a martyred bishop; about the third, who died with others somewhere in Africa, we know nothing at all. The deaths of celibate men by violence seem a poor basis for such a celebration. For this reason the editors go on to discover how this holiday actually arose. I quote:

The popular customs associated with Saint Valentine’s Day undoubtedly had their origin in a conventional belief generally received in England and France during the Middle Ages, that on 14 February, i.e. half way through the second month of the year, the birds began to pair. Thus in Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules we read:

     For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day
     Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.

For this reason the day was looked upon as specially consecrated to lovers and as a proper occasion for writing love letters and sending lovers’ tokens. Both the French and English literatures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contain allusions to the practice.

Now Brigitte was born into a German family but in what is now part of Poland, and after World War II continued to live in Germany—and as I was born in Hungary and in my youth also moved to Germany—we did not encounter this custom. But in the United States, where the St. Valentines, fused into a single image, are unavoidable, our celebration has indeed taken the form of exchanges in writing. That practice, the Catholic Encyclopedia notes with a certain wryness of phrasing, “has of late years fallen into desuetude.”

Herald

An upside-down heart to herald the coming of Valentine's Day.

Stone Motto Addendum

I was delighted to get from Brandon of Siris, as comment to the last post, indications where the wondrous motto quoted yesterday originated—and how it was first transformed by Chaucer and one of his “translators” before it appeared on stone, in a shortened and, as it were, updated version in a garden in Georgetown in Washington, DC.

Brandon informs us that the original concept was framed by Boethius in Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius (480-524) was a high-level imperial civil servant and philosopher. He fell victim to political intrigues while serving Theodoric the Great and was imprisoned. While in prison, he consoled himself with philosophy, and hence we are heir to his thought. He was executed within a year of his arrest.

Brandon identifies the spot in Consolation where the verse I quoted undoubtedly originated, Book I, Meter V. To make this account complete, I thought I’d quote the passage from what is known as King Alfred’s Version of the Consolations of Boethius. A Google Books digitized version is available here. The book was a translation prepared for King Alfred by Walter John Sedgefield and internally dated 1900. Herewith the passage:

THOU Creator of heaven and earth, that rulest on the eternal throne, Thou that makest the heavens to turn in swift course, and the stars to obey Thee, and the sun with his shining beams to quench the darkness of black night, (so too the moon with her pale beam maketh the stars to grow dim in the heaven, and at times robbeth the sun of his light, coming between him and us men; and that bright star too that we call the morning star, and which by its other name we call the evening star), Thou that givest short hours to the days of winter, and longer ones to those of summer, Thou that in autumn with the strong north-east wind spoilest the trees of their leaves, and again in spring givest them fresh ones with the soft south-west winds, lo! all creatures do Thy will, and keep the ordinances of Thy commandments, save man only; he setteth Thee at naught.

Stone Mottos

Two days ago at Costco we noted the rollout (as I think it’s called) of Spring: mounds of earth and gardening kits and bags of fertilizers piled on high. This morning in the hush of silence produced by the snowfall of the past two days thought continues in that same direction, and with a nudge from the fountain inscription found on Siris this morning, I was reminded of our favorite stone inscription. We chanced across it once  in the narrow interior garden of some foundation or museum in Georgetown, Washington, DC a hundred summers ago. We’ve never forgotten it—and have never seen the motto used by anyone anywhere since. It marked a circular plate held aloft by a slender stone column amidst dense greenery, half obscured, and said:

OH YE MAKER OF THE WHEEL
THAT GEARETH THE HEAVENS
AND TOURNETH THE STARRES
IN A RAVISHING SWAY.

If anyone can identify the author of these words, I would appreciate getting the word.

Decade-Old Trend? Unbelief!

We plan to visit another local convention—by we I mean those of us involved with Dwarf Planet Press—to see what kind of venue it might represent for my novels. This one is called ConVocation 2010, a New Age sort of venue. Even with ample notice, we could not secure a vendor table at this con; every table had already been assigned two months in advance. In perusing the program, I noted that this gathering has a much richer offering of lectures than ConFusion had had in panels.  Even the names signal a certain difference. In any case, this led me to check  the progress of belief in the United States. A reasonably reliable source for data on beliefs is ARIS, the American Religious Identity Survey. The survey is produced by the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Some of the tabulations are available from Adherents.com’s website here.

Interesting trends emerge for the United States. In the period 1990 to 2001, the largest increase by religious affiliation (adults identifying themselves by belief), has been in those who labeled themselves Deists (up 717% in the period). Second were those who labeled themselves Sikhs (up 338%). In third place in this period were those who identified themselves as holding to New Age beliefs (up 240%). These folks are those most likely to visit ConVocation 2010.

These groups are practically invisible; they are less than 1 percent of U.S. adult population. But the trend is fascinating. Between these two years, Deists increased by 43,000, New Agers by 48,000, and Sikhs by 44,000. By contrast, self-defined Agnostics decreased by 195,000 and those professing Judaism by 306,000. These last two are the only categories that showed a numerical loss of adherents. Christianity showed a loss of share in believers in this period, but of that more below. No data on atheists for 1990 were available; they only show up in 2001. All of these comparisons relate to adults. But let’s take the two largest groups. Those who described themselves as Christians increased by 5 percent and 7.8 million; those who described themselves as Nonreligious or Secular increased by 110 percent and 14.4 million.

Another way to look at these data is to ask who has lost or gained in market share—in total share of adherents. Here the biggest loser was Christianity, down in share by 7.5 percent (88.7 in 1990, 81.2% in 2001), followed by Judaism, down 0.4 percent, and Agnosticism, down 0.2 percent. Among the gainers, the largest was Nonbelievers/Secularists, gaining 6.37 in share (7.7 in 1990, 14.1% in 2001). The Nonbelievers’ share would have been even greater if atheists, not broken out in 1990, were added in as nonbelievers in 2001, an additional 902,000 adults. Taken as a whole, the total net gains in “believers” in this period amounted to 10.1 million, the net gain in nonbelievers to 15.1 million. Believers in 1990 accounted for 91.6 percent of the adult population, in 2001 for 85.0 percent. Believers still dominated, but unbelief was the trend—a decade ago. No new surveys appear to have been conducted since.

Numbers to please or to worry just about any reader of this blog? The big pattern is obvious, but tea leaves at the bottom of this or any other survey cup may be read this way or that.

A Tea Party in Flatland

The chief marker of a secular era is its worldly and temporal character—this in contrast to a religious era in which the spiritual and eternal aspects of reality are emphasized. Let’s ignore the debate about the claims of either era and proceed. In secular times the spiritual and eternal are simply denied all standing but are tolerated as life-style choices. In religious times the world is still recognized as real, but its importance is minimized. If we express the secular in geometrical terms as a flat surface and the religious as a vertical, it turns out that the religious conception of reality is the more complex of the two. It has a third dimension that the secular times lack. So far, so good. In a flat cosmology time itself is a function of matter with its threefold divisions into past, present, and future.

When troubles erupt in secular ages, two ways of coping with the problem tend always to surface—and only two. Only two because a transcending movement into the vertical, as it were, isn’t thought to be possible. Part of the public embraces the future which, still unknown and not yet realized, may be envisioned to hold the sought-after relief. The others, especially those in a better economic shape—who tend to remember better times—envision the solution to lie in a return to an earlier and happier period. Living memories are short; hence the real past is largely forgotten or only selectively recalled. Thus the past’s as good a canvas on which to paint a golden age as is the future.

Futurism and archaism. These labels were framed by Arnold Toynbee, the cyclic historian. In effect, of course, both are futuristic in the sense that any new order much desired will be achieved, if achieved at all, in the future. The labels therefore refer to strategies. Futurists wish to achieve the new order by ridding themselves of current restraints; archaists hope to bring back into the present what they imagine has been lost.

The French Revolution serves as a classical and large-scale example of a real try at futurism. Its henchmen even changed the names of the months on the calendar. The current Tea Party movement serves as a minor example of an archaist reaction to the initiatives of the Obama administration. That administration is wrongly seen as futurist in its intentions. Alas, it’s merely rational—but unfortunately also inept. Its futurist coloration is a very pale shade of pink and derives from the illusion that change can be made almost entirely by magical PR gestures intended to influence public opinion.

Secularism see-saws this way, back and forth. These dreary rounds remind me of Hell’s fourth circle where, on a flat piece of territory, hoarders and squanderers roll gigantic rocks against each other, crash, separate, and do it all again. Here is the scene in Dante’s words in Dorothy Sayers’ translation (Inferno, Canto VII, 22-36):

         As waves against encountering waves advance
             Above Charybdis, clashing with toppling crest,
             So must the folk here dance and counter-dance.

         More than elsewhere, I saw them thronged and pressed
             This side and that, yelling with all their might,
             And shoving each a great weight with his chest.

         They bump together, and where they bump, wheel right
             Round, and return, trundling their loads again,
             Shouting: “Why chuck away?” “Why grab so tight?”

         Then round the dismal ring they pant and strain
             Back on both sides to where they first began
             Still as they go bawling their rude refrain;

         And when they meet, then each re-treads his span,
             Half round the ring to joust in the other list;
             I felt quite shocked, and like a stricken man.

But you don’t have to go to hell to see it. CNN will bring it to you live.
--------------------
For more on “Charybdis,” see the previous post.

Scylla and Charybdis

In Greek mythology Odysseus had to make his way between two dangers. Of these Scylla was a rock on which a gigantic monster threatened his ship, on the other was a giant whirlpool called Charybdis. Thus originated the phrase endlessly used in classical literature, and down to our times: Between Scylla and Charybdis. With first Greek and later Latin no longer obligatory in school—studying in Germany, I was still required to take Latin—the mythological images have much less currency. We’re therefore more likely to say: Between the rock and the hard place. An eighteenth century political cartoon, courtesy of Wikipedia here, gives an image of the myth: Britannia between Scylla and Charybdis.

I find myself obliged to quote part of that phrase in the next post, hence I thought I would discover (so easy with the Internet) where moderns think that Scylla is and whether Charybdis is still whirling. The collective wisdom is that the location of Odysseus’ trauma took place in the Strait of Messina, the narrow seaway that separates Sicily from mainland Italy. On the western shore of Italy there, in Calabria, sits a rock and settlement called Scilla.

In the strait itself the Tyrrhenian and the Ionian Seas are mixing their waters, and whirlpools are observed there due to this mixing, but the dangers are not particularly pronounced. The Strait at its narrowest points is nearly two miles wide. The photograph of the Strait, taken from the south, thus Sicily to the left, Italy to the right, doesn’t look particularly dangerous. Not surprisingly, therefore, others have located this dangerous pair elsewhere—or have taken narrower passages in this general region to be the place. But why would Odysseus have deliberately taken narrow little channels when, to right or left, the wider sea gave him much opportunity to avoid both rock-bound monsters and horrid vortices? The photo credit for the Strait of Messina goes to someone called Ivan at this Internet location.


View Larger Map

I conclude by presenting a Google terrain map of the Strait of Messina. Scilla itself is not quite visible (my bad, as they say) but may be drawn into visibily using the “hand.”

Deepest Commiserations

We extend our deepest commiserations to Mary Campbell-Droze. Her years-long dedication to her cause, expressed in words humble, strident, and flaring high into the sublime sky of poetry (and what could be higher than a Beagle Haiku) has been temporarily crushed by events when saints came marching in. Alas, even scorched earth eventually recovers, turns green, and may support young colts under a new-formed sun.

Aspects of Alienation

The word itself, alienation, has a rich flavor, when you think about it. Its Latin root is alius, “the other,” the word itself means “belonging to another” and is therefore linked to property. The third meaning, estrangement, thus an attitude toward the strange or the foreign, seems to have arisen as an extension of the basic concept hidden in that dread word—the other. So here we have a word that simultaneously constellates property relationships (the alienation, thus the transfer to another, of a piece of property); the alien, the stranger; and the alienist, thus the shrink, the person assigned to deal with the insane. Wonderfully rich word, perfect for the sociologist.

Estrangement, based on “stranger,” comes ultimately, by way of Old French (estrange), from the Latin extraneus. That last word is basic. It means “born outside,” thus beyond our borders. Foreign, also from OF, is based on late Latin foranus meaning “on the outside.” There it is again: other, outside, beyond the border. Functionally these are all concepts suggesting a distance in space. What isn’t right around us, that which we don’t see every day—that is the strange, the foreign, the other, the unknown, the alien—the threatening.

Now it strikes me as interesting that the meaning we now attach to alienation has nothing to do with visiting or invading strangers. The modern meaning suggests a kind of internal estrangement. Here we are, living our lives, getting along, more or less agreeing with all that goes on around us. But we now notice that in a kind of stealthy way now this changes and now that. A kind of strangeness has begun to spread. And nodes of strangeness are connecting, linking. They’re forming, it seems (although it’s hard to see it clearly), a veritable network of the “other.” This particular species of strangeness is familiar, however—because it’s all around us and we see it every day. Its alien nature derives from something other than distance. It is a deformation, you might say, of the vertical dimension, the dimension of values.

When a foreign culture invades our own, it is segregated spatially. Those who come cluster together for protection, and the natives avoid them for similar reasons. Brigitte and I saw this process most strikingly years ago once on a trip to Germany. We hadn’t been back for a decade or more. A huge emigration from Turkey, to support the Wirtschaftswunder, so-called, had resulted in the formation of Turkish-only neighborhoods. On one of our trips we suddenly left Germany as we knew it by crossing an intersection and were smack in the center of a middle-eastern world. We recognized it, too, but from television coverage of that particular part of the world. Spatial separation.

But when the world morphs into an alien shape, when familiar institutions—while retaining all their outward forms—internally change into something recognizably alien—when that is our experience, the feeling is, well, alienation of the vertical sort. It is inescapable especially when the numbers begin to shift and we find ourselves in the ever-shrinking minority. With that process accelerating, one experiences a strange isolation from the society-at-large. And the sharper our own sense of values, the more keenly felt. Does this portend that, sooner or later, a vertical alienation also transforms into a spatial kind—with minorities aggregating into separate communities in physical space? Too bad that even in light of today’s extended life-expectancy, I’m not likely to live long enough to see the outcome of a process I feel taking place all around me.

Not Another Anniversary, Surely?

Afraid so. Ghulf Genes turns one year old today. We had a lot of laughs preparing the celebratory cake. It was intended to look quite different, but in one of those series of events that happen even to seasoned bakers, the thing just would not hold still, and the fixes wouldn’t stay fixed...which somewhat reminded me of the object of the celebration.

Bump in the Night

An awesome windstorm rose during the night and filled the sky with an enduring, booming sound. Something woke me at three in the morning—that wind, perhaps, or a bump in the night. A little later I heard a dull clatter. In search of it I discovered our plastic trashcan blown into the street and making orgiastic circles lying on its belly. I set things right and then went back to bed; but this activity had awakened me enough so that for a while I was playing word games in my head; bump in the night; that sort of thing. Eventually the whole verse came back:

         From ghoulies and ghosties
         And long-leggedy beasties
         And things that go bump in the night,
         Good Lord, deliver us!

The verse next reminded me of something I'd read recently, namely that this seemingly amusing chant had once been part of an Anglican litany. Trying to remember where I’d seen that, I drifted back off to sleep. This morning a great high pressure system had replaced the wind and brought searing cold and a bright sun. I got up to discover the origins of this verse if I could.

The first mentions Google brought asserted that this was an old Scottish ditty. Next I found confirmation that it might have been a litany. Last I came across a book by Don E. Post entitled, yes, Ghosties and Ghoulies and Long-Legged Beasties and Things that Go Bump in the Night. The book is subtitled Christian Basics for the Twenty-First Century. To an eye like mine the title and subtitle taken together—and with the Ph.D. following the author’s name on the cover—did not promise enlightenment. I couldn’t be sure, but this sort of pattern suggests a work intended to “update” and to “modernize” Christianity to make it if not hip at least respectable. I proceeded to look at the front-matter and there found, on page ix, a section called About the Title. It says in whole:

An Early Cornish Litany
         Laity: O Lord, deliver us from Ghosties and Ghoulies and long legged beasties and things that go bump in the night.
         Clergy: O Lord, deliver us.
Lest one think I am trying to be funny, this phrase was reportedly part of a 14th or 15th Century Protestant litany, probably Cornish, although sources within the Anglican Church have not been able to locate the total litany. This may seem humorous now, but it represents a world filled with scary creatures. Unfortunately, that eerie world still exists for too many. This superstitious world view hang-over is a good example of what social scientists call cultural lag.

Very well. The commentary seemed to confirm my interpretation of the book's general pattern. Just yesterday elsewhere, commenting on the phrase “moving on,” I mentioned the cult of progress. In this commentary I saw another instance of it. But having gotten this far, I thought it was time to put the kettle on. And while the kettle made its seething sounds, a kind of miniature windstorm, I was pondering the direction in which our time is really trending. Lines formed in my head more or less spontaneously in my honest effort, I think, rapidly to close that cultural lag and to bring us now up to full speed:

          From profs and from pollsters
          And men with huge holsters
          And drones that drop bombs in the night,
          Good Lord, deliver us!

Statistical Fronts

Ah for the halcyon days [see below] when we could track on maps the progress of our victorious armies advancing on foreign soil to their inevitable victory at last. In these latter days we’ve substituted statistical fronts for lines that mark territorial gains. The earliest signs of the new definition began to appear during the Vietnam war. In that time we started hearing about body counts, and the bad news could also be recorded by counting body bags shipped overseas empty and returned to these shores filled. The perfection of this new front began in earnest in Iraq and continues now in Afghanistan. And all this, of course, is the welcome sign of our growing sophistication in every possible category of the meaningful, not least in armed conflict. With unmanned (or should I, with more sophistication, call it unpresonned) drones we have now achieved some likeness to Zeus who, sending dread bolts from on high can kill with zigzagging laser beams at random. This means that we can be anywhere and nowhere—much as our mythical opponent who is both alive and dead, invisible but sometimes heard, and whose voice we analyze deploying fervent and pious hermeneutics by using ultra-modern sound equipment. In this sort of environment, actual territorial gains, dated concepts like pacification and control, and obsolete notions like victory are inappropriate. Instead we use the probabilistic approaches offered to us by higher math to calculate on computers whether or not we’re succeeding or just approaching success. Failure is also a non-starter, and even if we do approach suboptimal outcomes, we have a more sophisticated language to describe it. This came to mind as my eyes encountered the following headline in the New York Times this morning: TOP U.S. COMMANDER SEES PROGRESS IN AFGHANISTAN. I wondered what General McChrystal could possibly be seeing. Then it dawned on me. Numbers and graphs. Yes. Numbers and graphs.

Halcyon Days?

Phrases like that spring to the half-asleep mind all too easily—but this morning, as I began the post that follows (the one that is, alas, above), something stirred, namely the eerie feeling that I hadn’t the slightest idea what the word halcyon actually meant. Etymonline to the rescue. Wonder of wonders. The word refers to a bird of all things, evidently a mythical bird, but one identified with the kingfisher. The word derives from Greek for hals meaning sea or salt and kyon, conceiving, therefore swelling, thus the swell of a sea wave. The mythological rootings are Halcyone (or Alcyone), daughter of Aeolus, the god of the winds. When her husband, Ceyx, king of Thessaly, drowns in the process of consulting the I Ching (so to say—actually he sails off to consult an oracle), Halcyone throws herself into the sea and becomes a kingfisher (and quite a beauty she is, too) or (in another version of the myth) Morpheus turns both her and the corpse of her husband, washed ashore, into kingfishers. In any case, there is supposed to be a two-week period of calm weather at the winter solstice, the time when the halcyon breeds in the calm seas. And that brief period, my friends, is what came to be known as the halcyon days. A brief duration of calm—not the happy days of the past as I ignorantly assumed. The picture is from Wikipedia here.

Wondering About Rails

We watched The Railway Children last night, a Masterpiece Theatre production that originally aired in November 2000. We got our copy from Netflix. In the introduction to this rather charming story, Russell Baker, the columnist, who was for some time the host of Masterpiece Theater, sketched the history of rail. His account touched upon the so-called robber barons who caused the railroads to span the American continent—and in the process remembered the neglect of safety, the exploitation of labor, and the other wondrous concomitants that seemingly always accompany the tale of industrial development. This made me wonder. Had the development of railways in Continental Europe followed a different course? I say continental Europe because, it seems to me that England not only experienced but led what I think of as the dark kind of industrialization. I always think of satanic mills and Dickens’ London. Europe adopted these ways later. And, it seems, in continental Europe, much more centralized forms of government muted the brutalities of development, not least in the development of rails. The exception was Russia, where industrialization under communism managed to be as soul-less an enterprise as under the sway of capital. Rails absolutely dominated consciousness in Europe in my childhood. But neither then, nor later, did I ever hear either sagas of triumphant successes or tales of brutality as fixed in collective memory. Maybe we were simply sheltered from the truth… In any case, I’m disinclined to trade the boredom of backwardness for the excitements of constant innovation and limitless “enterprise.”

Anniversary

Humbly and with gratitude, we mark the day.

Tongue Twisters

The lazy post this morning on Dwarf Planet Press on the occasion of Groundhog Day suggested to me that the Editors there might have at minimum identified this animal by its Latin name, particularly for those of us from Europe who did not encounter this animal in the normal course of life, even of rural life. The creature is Marmota monax, familiarly the woodchuck, a member of the rodent family. And woodchuck then reminded me of the following, which DPP should also have featured:

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
     if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could
     if a woodchuck could chuck wood!

That in turn reminded me of one of the best-known tongue twisters in Hungarian. Hungarians are such a tiny minority here, and most certainly discriminated against (I experience it daily, even at home from my wife of the more populous German extraction) therefore I present the following without apologies, indeed with attitude:

Az ibafai papnak fapipája van,
Ezért az ibafai papi pipa papi fapipa.

Which witty tongue twister means: The priest from Ibafa has a wooden pipe. Therefore the priestly pipe of Ibafa is a wooden priestly pipe. (Not a mean translator, either, your blogger).

In acknowledgement of the French branch of Ghulfdom, I herewith go on to present the following. French-persons will naturally note that a French tongue twister must transcend the genre by also being full of puns:

Mon père est maire, mon frère est masseur.

Academics would leave that one alone by way of saying: “If you can’t understand that without me, you are ignorant indeed,” but here we follow a more generous policy. “My father is mayor, my brother is a masseur.” But if you ignore the spelling, “mayor” sounds out as “mother” and “masseur” as “my sister,” hence "My father is my mother, my brother my sister."

With a nod to Quito, Ecuador—where, as all the world knows, the Ghulfs shall establish their famed family seat in the 2250s—here one in the Spanish language:

¿Usted no nada nada?
No, no traje traje.

The meaning is “You don’t swim at all?” Answer: “No, I didn't bring a suit.” This exchange exploits the homonymous character of “nothing” and “swim” and “brought” and “suit.” The doubling of words adds a quality, especially in that “No, no” violates the seeming rule.

Finally, here is one in German:

Hottentottenpotentatentantenattentat!

This twister additionally exploits what all linguists know, namely that in German you can make nouns by simply compressing a whole lot of other nouns. The meaning: Assassination of the aunt of a Hottentot potentate.
————
Some of these twisters courtesy of 1st International Collection of Tongue Twisters at http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/index.htm.

Happy Birthday, Brigitte!

… he said very quietly—because the BIG BLOG celebration is actually taking place on Pontoon Pirates, and you can take part in it here. Yes. We’ve conquered distance, and it is possible to be in Detroit but to celebrate in Paris. We’ve also conquered time, so that we celebrated here yesterday but in Royal Oak—appropriately named, that place, to mark another anniversary in the life of the Queen of Ghulfdom.