Standing on The Corner With Omar & Satchmo

We are a puzzle, we humans. We find ourselves in the midst of life and don't know how we got here. Our parents tell us we were born. Our teachers say DNA or God or accident. None of them know and both upbringing and education are a form of propaganda which bends our minds to perpetuate the most acceptable myths. By mid life we have settled many of our questions into answers in order to concentrate on pay checks and careers and families. Still, in quiet moments we sense the old, gnawing uncertainties. We think we have settled the questions of where we came from, who we are, why we are here, and what we want, but there they are, still waiting for real answers, not doctrine, so we put them back in their place and go on with our lives until one day we die.

At our funeral, people will say he was a good man, or she was a good woman, all with the obligatory eulogy, as if words could explain the mystery of our existence, our birth and death. For myself, I would prefer a CD player and a tune by Louis Armstrong. After his trumpet licks, he would sing "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If whiskey don't get you, then women must." Not that the words would describe the tone of my life, but that they are sacrilegious and give the raspberry to your standard eulogy. Shocking, they would be, and I would have people scratching their heads, wondering, Was he really like that?

I come from a long line of ancestors, and will some day be one myself. As they say, I will be history. History, though, true history, is the incalculable sum of single faces shining for an instant, then gone. True history is not told by events or by nations, or by names of kings and presidents and dictators. If you want to know true history, visit the Grand Canyon. True history is Kaibab Plateau, Toroweap. It is the Colorado River cutting through geologic layers, coursing into California, all of it under the moon, which once long ago broke free of Earth, but not totally, left to orbit, and then creatures left African savannahs and became known as homo sapiens. That is history and it is also ancestry. All humanity has filed like one frightened, migratory tribe, crossing in a thin dark line across continents, through mountain passes and down valleys, kneeling to drink, then turning faces to the moon. In some distant epoch Earth itself will become a huge, faint moon, and hence a question. The question is akin to a tree falling in a forest without a person there. Will that, too, be a history, a kind of ancestry, when humanity no longer survives to know it?

That old Persian drunkard Omar Khayyam saw in grapes a temporary solution to the problems of existence, although the same problems drove his poetry . "Into this Universe,and Why, not knowing/ Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:/ And out it, as Wind along the Waste,/ I know not Whither, willy-nilly, blowing." (Rubaiyat, XXIX) That is the irony. Even though his words posed more questions than answers, they provided him consolation, for he had created something. "And that inverted Bowl they call the sky,/ Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die,/ Lift not your hands to It for help--for It/ As impotently moves as your or I." (LXXII) Even in his despair we find beauty.

Stand on any city street corner and you will see life's essence. Honking horns, flickering chrome, gurgling exhaust, scurrying pedestrians, fluttering pigeons, changing lights, skittering thoughts. Look again and everything is gone. All of it is solid only in our preconceptions; yet we call it real. It is Heraclitus' river that you can't step into twice. It is what we have instead of certainty. But it is beautiful, even the exhaust fumes. Beauty surrounds us and we can escape it only by closing our eyes. We are puzzles to ourselves, as is the universe to us, but in the midst of life we have more than enough to sustain us.

Take it Satch. Lead us out of here with South Rampart Street Parade.

Grand Canyon

In the years before its fame, the Canyon surprised the unsuspecting. They had no warning of it until they got near. There is a story of a cowboy early in the last century, riding in unfamiliar country on the Kaibab plateau. Loping along, he came to the Canyon's edge, then reined-in his horse, stopping suddenly, backing the mare away from the rim. He approached once again, cautiously, and just sat in the saddle, looking at what lay below. The sun appeared from behind a cloud and lit the immense canyons and distances in shades of color he had never seen. Finally, he patted his horse's mane and whispered to her, "Something happened here."

Below your feet lies an abyss. First the earth falls away from you by several thousand feet to reveal the Tonto Plateau. Beyond that there is another sheer drop to somewhere you can't see. You imagine that there has to be a bottom.

Looking down on the Canyon for the first time is not unlike hearing of a loved one's passing. It's hard to register, to take in. There it is in front of you but where are your bearings with it? You can't relate it to anything you've known.

It is two hundred seventy seven miles long. It could swallow fleet upon fleet of trucks or battleships into its depths. It existed long before apes began walking upright on African plains and savannahs. With such immensity, you would think it had always been there, but the Canyon and its river were slow realities. The soil of the rims came from somewhere else by wind and water. The earth was covered by shallow coastal waters with active volcanoes. For millions of years sediments and lava accumulated thousands of feet thick. About 1.7 billion years ago tremendous deep, internal forces caused the layers to buckle. The earth rose up to meet a coursing stream, imperceptibly and relentlessly and the Canyon slowly was born. Mountains five or six miles high arose and were worn down long before any human saw them.

Vishnu, the Hindu god of creation had played his terrible force. Igneous rock was transformed from heat and pressure and out of ordinary soil. Geologists call it Vishnu schist.

Wind and water then began to carry off the mountains grain by grain over long centuries and millennia. The Colorado runs swift and fierce, tumbling through the gorges and indifferent to the unhappy animal who falls into it, swirling the creature along and plunging him through rapids to his death. The strata on the cliffsides eroded and revealed millions of years of life, trilobites, reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals, all layered over as the earth of centuries covered them inch by inch, clod by clod, until very near the top human beings come upon the geologic scene, dressed in a little brief authority.

The geological formations can be classified. The periods are Pre-Cambrian, Devonian-Cambrian, Paleozoic with Mississippian and Pennsylvanian, and the Permian. The strata are Dark Gray, Vishnu schist, Tapeats Sandstone, Grand Canyon super group, Bright Angel Shale, Muav Limestone, Temple Butte Limestone, Redwall Limestone, Supai Formation, Hermit Shale, Coconino Sandstone, Toroweap Limestone, Kaibab Limestone. The count of periods and sub-periods is six. The count of strata is thirteen.

Having identified these categories and counted them, I have said nothing. Should I say 800 million years of advancing and regressing oceans, of marshes and mountains, I still have said nothing. If I stand on the rim and look in silence a glimmer of understanding comes to me.

In 1540 the Spaniard Cardenas was the first European to cast eyes on the Canyon. He was a member of Coronado's expedition and had been dispatched to scout the region. For his queen he was seeking gold in the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola. He was in no mood to enjoy the scenery or to look up in awe at the Canyon walls. He did not find gold nor get to the Canyon bottom. After five or six days trying to find his way down he turned back in defeat. He had been led on in the hope that there would be a place, an end, where his difficulties would be over.

In 1857 Lieutenant Joseph C. Ives conducted an extensive reconnaissance of its western end for the US Government. The Arizona Territory was desolate and uninhabited and his report was confident--Ours has been the first and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed. He would never know that a little over a hundred years later a thousand visitors a day would see the Canyon.

In 1869 the next white man came from five hundred miles away in Green River, Wyoming, up the boulder-strewn rapids in twenty foot wooden boats. He was Major John Wesley Powell, a rugged man with one arm lost in the Civil War, a man with a proper Methodist name bestowed by his minister father. Before he started his journey the best maps showed blank space where he explored. Had they been charted in Medieval times they would have carried the warning, Here Be Dragons.

For months back East, rumor was that the Powell party had been lost. The Major and his mountain men knew nothing of this rumor and felt adventurous rather than lost and so pressed forward. Some of the rapids were so turbulent and treacherous that they planned to portage their boats whenever safety indicated. A few of the men would never have gone on had they known that ahead canyon walls were so sheer at water edge that there was no choice but to shoot the rapids.

In his journal Powell wrote The walls now are more than a mile in height . . . A thousand feet of this is up through granite crags, then steep slopes and perpendicular cliffs rise, one above another, to the summit. Earlier he had written that the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above . . . We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel we know not; what walls rise above the river, we know not.

When I first looked upon the Grand Canyon I held a camera to my eye and couldn't get the shot I wanted. The lens just couldn't encompass all that was there, couldn't bring it any nearer.

Eventually it occurred to me that the only way to get close to the Canyon was to establish a relationship with it, and that took time. After a lifetime, I would be a little closer to it, but not much.

We are such things as dreams are made upon, and our little lives are rounded with a sleep, said Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The words returned to me in the Canyon. Wherever I looked I saw the dreaming centuries. The hikers seemed sleepwalkers marvelling at the brightness of the dreamscape. We were all passing through, light moving on shadow, mind upon silence, comforted by the noise that the wind and the river offered back to us to assure ourselves that we were real. Real in the solid, abiding sense. Deep down, on the other side of the Colorado, I came upon rocks with words scratched in them, B. Andrews was here, 6/9/1963. I looked at the muddy, fast current, and thought about the hike back to the rim, unaware that one day I would write this blog article that would not last as long as the man's scratchings.

Beautiful Sardines

---

The Study in Aesthetics

The very small children in patched clothing,
Being smitten with an unusual wisdom,
Stopped in their play as she passed them
And cried up from their cobbles:
Guarda! Ahi, guarda! ch’e b’ea!

But three years after this
I heard the young Dante, whose last name I do not know—
For there are, in Sirmione, twenty-eight young Dantes and thirty-four Catulli;
And there had been a great catch of sardines,
And his elders
Were packing them in the great wooden boxes
For the market in Brescia, and he
Leapt about, snatching at the bright fish
And getting in both of their ways;
And in vain they commanded him to sta fermo!
And when they would not let him arrange
The fish in the boxes
He stroked those which were already arranged,
Murmuring for his own satisfaction
This identical phrase:
Ch’e b’ea.

And at this I was mildly abashed.

By Ezra Pound

---

I sit on the front porch, taking in the sky, feeling the breeze on my cheek, watching birds flit from tree to tree. A cloud drifts overhead, and its shape is radiant of the morning sun. An ant crawls over my shoe, then down its other side, continuing toward a crack in the concrete. I know if I don't move my shoe another ant will soon follow the spore, up over my shoe, down the other side, into the crack. At the moment, I don't care. With the sun in its ascendancy, the ant on my shoe, I am beyond even the Cistine Chapel in the Vatican. Adam's finger reaches across the dome for God's miraculous touch. It is all there, in that sky, the breeze, the birds, the ants, the sun. I am Michelangelo and this is the moment of Creation. I am both Adam's finger and God's touch. This is beauty, and it is all.

Somewhere in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell said that people don't search for meaning. Instead, they seek to live in such breadth and depth that life itself becomes the meaning. In Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig says that quality transforms, and that whatever we think we seek, we are really after quality. Both Campbell and Pirsig have in mind a beauty that can't be named, and it is this beauty that yields truth, a truth worth living for. It is an experience, not words, images, or numbers.

John Keats said that truth is beauty, beauty, truth. Paul Dirac would have agreed with him, although he had his equations in mind. "It is more important," he said, "to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit the experiment." He meant that "if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one's equations, and if one has a really sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress." When asked how he recognized beauty in his math, Dirac replied that he felt it. It couldn't be explained. Nobody can explain it. He added that it's like Beethoven. If somebody doesn't appreciate the beauty of, say, the Ninth Symphony, then nothing can be done for him. Dirac stated that Einstein had this same point of view.

With beautiful sardines is where it all stops, of course. You can't get any further than that. Oh, don't get me wrong. The aesthetic sense can take you into theories, equations, poems, symphonies, canvases, and fine thoughts, but you are moving away from it. Once you are in that moment, you have all the truth you will ever have. Yes, a Buddha can expand its opening, but that's it. Everything else is an attempt to explain it. Quantum theory spins itself out of an exquisite aesthetics, as does good poetry, but they are lain over that which we ultimately cannot describe, which is what Persig finally says with his qualia.

It is the mystery that mind tries to explain, but which will always remain as a dimension of the universe unavailable to our understanding. One of the Upanishads, says "When you see a sunset or a mountain and you pause to exclaim, 'Ah,' then you are participating in divinity."

And at these moments we are at least mildly abashed.

Home______An Infinity of Mirrors: From A Book In Progress

Suppose that time is an infinity of mirrors, in front and in the rear, receding forever into the distance. As you look behind they take you deeper into them and backward. You are carried past your day of birth, past your parents, past your grandparents to the beginning of something.

Suppose a world in which all possible consequences play themselves out. Chance and deviation are infinite. We live on and on as we exhaust one variant life after another without ever running out of them.

In such a universe this book would be written both the same and differently by me. And it would never be written at all. If I write all life scenarios the early versions fill the New York City public libraries, and soon a stack of books stretches out into the universe.

Suppose that one scenario would be lived thus: Chapter one, Rolly stays in Ohio to inherit his uncle's farm. Chapter two, his wife dies in childbirth, leaving him with one girl and two boys, all young. Chapter three, he meets a girl half his age in Springfield, and they get married. Etc.

In a world where all potentials are realized, one is that Will would never return to California from Ohio because his parents never left Xenia.

Suppose a day with Valentine on a barge when river pirates at Die Maus, an island in the Rhein near Ruedesheim, stop the boat to demand toll money from him and his fellow passengers. Suppose that he is left without enough money to get to Amsterdam and hence America and he turns back to Switzerland.

Suppose then that Will was not born because Valentine never made it to the New World. If he was not born he never met his wife nor did they have their daughter. This is a supposition I can't get rid of no matter how I think about time. It remains as potential when I consider it.

In Zen there is a puzzle, What was your face before your parents were born? An omniscient being could crack it without having to meditate, but then, God doesn't need koans.

In another version of the cosmos, time never created earth. The fiery gasses that spun off from the sun and chilled into seas did not do so after all. Or they did and life never occurred. They orbited too far from the sun or too close and temperatures could not support organisms.

Earth both existed and it never existed. Human beings lived and never did. Of course I am not here writing this and here I am. You the reader never read it and here you are.

In a world where all is potential there is paradox. When we see our face before our parents were born it disappears. As a push out of one moment into the next, time stops. It becomes effortless, a flow, or nonexistent.

In this version of time, death becomes unimportant because we will one day live and we will never live. It follows, then, that we will die and we will never die. We will live out countless lives and we will live out none of them.

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Death and The Sense of Self

Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris. (Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.) John Donne Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." (John Donne, Meditation XVII, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624)

Three hundred years lie between Donne's No man is an island and Einstein's remark that a human being is part of a whole (discussed below), and each involves a contemplation of death as a type of illusion.

Early in his life, Albert Einstein became aware of the illusions begotten by common sense. As a boy, he imagined himself riding a light beam and speculated on how things would appear as he approached the speed of light. Understanding the new shapes they would assume, he concluded that the universe is a strange place indeed, providing little to verify common explanations of it. He grew up to demonstrate this strangeness to the entire world. which proclaimed him a genius for theories it could not understand. Einstein set aside common sense to usher in a perspective that, to the cab driver and the politician, offered nothing but nuclear bombs. To poets, he brought forth Yeats' question, What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? To Einstein himself, nothing comforted in the world he had opened for physicists such as Neils Bohr, who told him that all was random, mere chance. No, Einstein replied to Bohr, God does not play dice with the universe. This, he could not accept even to his death bed.

He eventually allowed Bohr's Complementarity Principle as the most rational explanation for quantum events, which is to say the wave-particle duality, persisting to this day as the central puzzle of quantum physics. (Richard Feynman said that if you aren't troubled by it, you don't understand it.) He also came to accept that he wasn't who he thought he was. Nobody is. We are all something other than what we think we are. We are, so to say, not our selves.

Wave-particle duality indicated the failure of a classically materialist explanation of the universe. Later, with experiments such as John Bell's and Alain Aspect's,* the nature of things appeared as non-local, a remarkably weird feature of the universe, but which photons fired 40 meters apart consistently suggested. Matter itself seemed not specific to a point, but instead participated in a different kind of space, one inhabited by a consciousness belonging to nobody in particular and everything in general. * (See them in Non-Local Reality, 10 November 2003.)

Einstein had thought about consciousness when faced with Bohr's Complementarity and, after deliberating on it, he again concluded with an idea that the cab driver and politician would take as bizarre.

If the universe cannot be described by material points in space, by discreteness, said Einstein, then, as a collection of matter, the separate human self is an illusion:

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest--a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and foundation for inner security."

By this remark Einstein stepped out of classically scientific considerations into the spiritual life which, in a sense, had formed his basic temperament. It had helped spur Einstein as a boy when he imagined himself traveling on a beam of light, for his universe was one with a grand design that allowed human understanding or mystery wherever mind probed. Nor was he far from poetry in his regard for beauty. "Death is the mother of beauty," said poet Wallace Stevens. In its contemplation we see our limits as individuals, as he did.

Death is the final liberator, and from its freedom none do escape. It is the mother of compassion, and as Wallace Stevens said in another context, "Hence, from it all things must follow." The liberation itself lies in Einstein's words if we can but fathom their profound implication. There's nobody at home. Nobody is telling the story. The story tells itself, with the story teller woven into the plot.

People find this unacceptable. Death, they say, is the obverse of life, and spurs us into creative energy. We want to leave something behind, to make a mark, something that lasts, so to establish ego beyond the grave. We would not die without having lived, our lives understood as a self making coherence of the world.

Einstein may not have fully grasped his own meanings, but at bottom his implications are that ego cannot die because it was never born. As he puts the situation, ego is an optical illusion of consciousness. People would gladly accept non-death if they could but understand it, deeply, fully, after they have died unto their egos. What died was fiction.

This is not so much theory, and is available to science, a different kind, one that silently examines consciousness. Its practitioners have been many, and one was Sri Ramana Maharshi, who wrote to Mercedes De Acosta in response to her book, Here Lies The Heart. Without ego, the world is. Of the egoless state, he said, "The Gnani (the Enlightened) continually enjoys uninterrupted, transcendental experience, keeping his inner attention always on the Source, in spite of the apparent existence of the ego, which the ignorant imagine to be real. This apparent ego is harmless; it is like the skeleton of a burnt rope--though it has form, it is of no use to tie anything with." (See Mercedes de Acosta and Ramana Maharshi, 24 January 2004 at the Occasionals site.)

Ramana Maharshi also said, " Your glory lies where you cease to exist." This is not a uniquely Hindu vantage, and can be found in Christianity. St Gregory said, " No one gets so much of God as the man who is completely dead." A Medieval German, Meister Eckhart advised, " The Kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead" and William Blake told us that " We are in a world of generation and death, and this world we must cast off." Each of them had arrived at the same understanding although their paths were different.

"We are such things as dreams are made on," said Shakespeare's Prospero, "and our little lives are rounded with a sleep." Of that sleep, John Donne's contemporary, Sir Thomas Browne, remarked, " Our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes." * He urges us to make much of time.

Zen Buddhism teaches that form is emptiness, emptiness, form, and all participates in the continual change that is life and death. Ego vanishes and reappears, as do thoughts and lives. Shadows lengthen inside Buddhist zendos when disciples chant the Evening Gatha:

Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken.
Awaken!
Take heed . . . Do not squander your life.

Their voices trail off with the last syllable, carrying it into the silence, from which new sounds will emerge. A baby cries, spanked into life in the delivery room while in another part of the hospital an old woman's eyes shut for the last time. Albert Einstein, John Donne, all of them appeared and vanished, just as you will leave this page and these words will fall from your mind, our brief contact over.

* Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, 1658

Home______Deconstruction As Fashionable Nonsense

As a child, I could hear fog horns on San Francisco Bay during the night. Beeee-oohhhh, they would groan in deep bass, then repeat themselves, beeee-oohhhh, until the sky cleared some time next morning. Fog was my friend, then. It made me feel warm and cozy in bed and hopeful of light drizzle on the walk to school next day. Even today I enjoy misty weather and dark pavement glistening with moisture under street lights. But, of fog, there are two kinds of atmospherics, and I have come to like the other type less as I grow older. It has to do with intellectual fog.

Recently I opened a book titled Entropy: A New World View, by Jeremy Rifikin, and read this as an application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "Every day we awake to a world that appears more confused and disordered than the one we left the night before. Nothing seems to work anymore. Our lives are bound up in constant repair. We are forever mending and patching. Our leaders are forever lamenting and apologizing. Every time we think we've found a way ouf of a crisis, something backfires. The powers that be continue to address the problems at hand with solutions that create even greater problems than the ones they were meant to solve."

Now, that sounds quite powerful, that prose--it has a roll, and a tone, but it means nothing. If Rifkin said to the reader that he is taking license with the scientific concept, entropy, then I would string along with him. But he is quite serious in applying the Second Law where it does not belong. He says this about that: "The entropy law destroys the notion of history as progress. The entropy law destroys the notion that science and technology create a more ordered world."

Sorry, Mr Rifkin, but it does no such thing. In fact, your statement is intellectual nonsense. Entropy is a complex, and difficult concept of physics that cannot be elevated to some over-arching philosophical principle. By no stretch of the imagination can it support a theory explaining what is wrong with modern society. It offers no universal filter by which to understand history.

Such misapplication is typical of a highly fashionable form of academic criticism, Deconstruction. Although useful in some instances, it is a theory that adopts scientific concepts as attempts to pry open the workings of society, politics, and literature. Its chief practitioner, Jacques Derrida, is capable of whoppers like his essay, "Differance." Here is an excerpt, and I would like to know what it means--

"Retaining at least the framework, if not the content, of this requirement formulated by Saussure, we will designate as differance the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted 'historically' as a weave of differences. 'Is constituted', 'is produced', 'is created', 'movement', 'historically', etc. necessarily being understood beyond the metaphysical language in which they are retained, along with all their implications. We ought to demonstrate why concepts like production, constitution, and history remain in complicity with what is at issue here. But this would take me too far today--toward the theory of the representation of the 'circle' in which we appear to be enclosed--and I utilize such concepts, like many others, only for their strategic convenience and in order to undertake their deconstruction at the currently most decisive point. In any event, it will be understood, by means of the circle in which we appear to be engaged, that as it is written here, differance is no more static than it is genetic, no more structural than historical. Or is no less so; and to object to this on the basis of the oldest of metaphysical oppositions (for example, by setting some generative point of view against a structural-taxonomical point of view, or vice versa) would be, above all, not to read what here is missing from orthographical ethics. Such oppositions have not the least pertinence to differance, which makes the thinking of it uneasy and uncomfortable."

Sorry to inflict that on you, but you see my point. Science holds that the best explanations lie with elegance and it in turn lies with simplicity of explanation. Professor Derrida's approach is not elegant, only befuddling, and is nothing new in professorial writing.* The fog factor has always been fashionable, except now it has become an entire academic school of theoretical nonsense. Then again, perhaps I'm being too harsh. After all, pretentiousness has often been a successful ploy in academe, and literature PhDs must get that promotion somehow.

* (Paul Dirac said that, for him, the truth of an equation lay in its aesthetic appeal, which is to say its simplicity. Understand that I don't disagree that aesthetics can also be found in complexity, such as poetic language. I just take issue with pretensions, particularly when language is used to disguise its own meanings, and all to support a fashionable theory that will eventually be buried next another vogue, now dead, New Criticism. Such people should instead write novels or poems, if they can.)

* ( Physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to Social Text, a fashionable cultural-studies journal. In it he parodied the journal's typical contents, and filled his piece with absurdities and glaring non-sequiturs. It mocked as old-fashioned and dogmatic the standard conceptions by which scientists investigate and derive evidence, and proclaimed that both social and physical reality are socio-linguistic constructs. He intentionally made his leaps of logic obvious and arrived at the conclusion that "the [Pi] of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone."

The article was accepted and published. Not only that, it appeared in a special issue of Social Text devoted to rebutting the criticisms levelled by several distinguished scientists against postmodernism and social constructivism. Then Sokal told the editors it was all a hoax and full of gibberish. I don't know what they thought, but "shot in the foot" comes to mind.)

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The Seige of Vicksburg and The Velocity of Time

I am cursed and blessed by memory. When two and a half years old, I rode in the back seat as the Ford passed farms and climbed the hill. I got out with my parents and walked into the Old Stewart Place to see my uncle sweeping gravel out of the living room, as the house had been abandoned and used to stable horses. Max, my uncle, had Down's Syndrome in today's parlance. In those times he was mongoloid. He looked at me, smiled, went on sweeping. The house had been owned by an ancestor, Doctor David Stewart, captain in the 28th Iowa Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. He fought at Vicksburg and returned home to take a seat in the Iowa State legislature. Uncle Max passed away years ago. Doctor Stewart died long before I was born. They fell out of time into memory and I now have an ancient reprint of a picture taken in 1863 of Captain Stewart in uniform with epaulettes and brass buttons.

I touch the picture, feel the edges, note the sepia and white, and wonder about a light that captured it like this, froze it into a minor immortality before the years work at the edges, fade the tones, blur the features. There is decay in this thing I hold and I seem to feel it under my fingers, indiscriminate of flesh or paper, a rot impartial to all, except the picture knows nothing about it while I do. Then TS Eliot comes to mind--"I will show you fear in a handful of dust." That is an unsettling thought, so I tell myself that the paradox is merely one of concepts--emotion and matter. Still, concepts are what we have.

I also have Dr. Stewart's medical accounts book. It is a big book, bound in heavy, brown, padded leather, its pages ruled and columned. "March 10th, 1879. Set Abe Gentry's broken arm," one entry says, then explains, "He paid in ten bushels of corn and promised to work the South Forty next spring." Another states simply, ""Will Langtree's son, Jake, knocked on the door in the middle of the night. I dressed and grabbed my bag while Jake hitched Bess to the buggy. Hurried to the Langtree place. Delivered the wife of an eight pound girl. Came home, too tired to arrange accounts." When a boy, I imagined the doctor and his family on Sunday morning, his wife and children climbing into their surry, and the horses trotting to church in the village. Try as I might, though, I cannot summon much today. Instead, I think of the mystery that enfolded them as it does me. The world feels solid, real. We awaken to the sunrise, then we warm to summers, chill into winters, and suddenly we are gone.

Instead, I sometimes think of the sky that hovered over them like a mask, veiling the black infinitude of space, making the day warm and bright, as if it were the way the world was, and make no mistake. As they rode off to church, a Turkish regiment attacked an Assyrian village, a Chinese peasant drowned in the Yangtze, a prostitute in London felt Jack The Ripper's knife. Here is God's plenty as well.

We live by lies, some of them useful. We live by memories, all of them reminders. The best reminders are not the sieze-the-day sort, but those which tell us something there is that no photograph can explain. As I look at this picture I know that light, travelling at 186,000 miles per second, captured the Doctor's eyes as he gazed into the camera lens, expecting that somehow the future would be better than the past. I can use scientific datum to explain the event, but how can I render the person? The War of The Rebellion would one day be over. He could return home. He would marry and father children. He would grow old gracefully. How is it that he reaches me on this distant shore of time, this Twenty First century while he remains in the Nineteenth? He touches me with his hopes, his tribulations, his genes. I am his bridge to the future. I live in a time beyond his ken; he, in one beyond mine.

That mystery serves like TS Eliot's paradox. For me, it is what we have in place of the certitude of data. We are all incessantly hurled out of the past into the future, despite our self-reminders to live for the day. Our Earth spins its equatorial girth 25,000 miles every 24 hours (1670 km/hr). We don't sense it. This planet orbits the sun at 67,000 miles per hour (107,870 km/hr), and yet we feel a different kind of change, that which moves our muscles, ages our skin, dims our hopes. How can we judge magnitudes when death is more calamitous than a major shift in the solar system? We are caught up in our own velocities, which numbers cannot explain.

Perhaps memory itself is orbital, and we always cycle through the same life, committed to time's strange entropy. We await disorder, the uncertain future, and leave patterns in our wake. Perhaps we loop through time and space in an eternal return. That would be fine so long as I experience no déjà vu. Captain Stewart lays down his rifle, returns home, and resumes his medical practice. The Ford stops at the Old Stewart Place, I get out, and see Uncle Max. You read about me holding the picture and it is all new.

Home______The Sky and The Mill Near Wijk

I once lived in the Netherlands. It is a fine country, with pleasant canals, and green fields reaching to polders. I lived in Gouda and commuted to Rotterdam. Each morning I looked in on my sleeping daughter, said goodbye to my wife, and headed out of town, across the draw bridge, and toward the highway. I turned on the radio and listened to news and talk shows as I drove, sipping the coffee I had carried out the door of the house. One morning I heard a Dutch professor interviewed about a growing concern in Europe, American Cultural Imperialism, as it was called. The term struck me, and I listened to the professor develop his argument that Europeans in general and Dutch in particular must be on guard against the cultural hegemony foisted over them by the United States. It was feared as an invasion of sorts--movies, music, television programs, books, even cultural icons. It was not only cultural, but economic, a way of living, an acquisitiveness, a materialism that was taking over society.

After I had lived there for a while and got to know more Dutchmen, I realized that the average person had other concerns which had to do with daily living, not any American cultural or economic imperialism.

This came to me as I improved my command of Dutch. In part, it came because I found it difficult to practice the language. I would walk into a shop and in accented Nederlands asked for something and the response inevitably followed in English. Almost everyone spoke it. School courses of up to five years in English were required.

When I asked a storekeeper why so much emphasis on English, I was told that it was a matter of economics. English was the dominant business language in the world today. I asked, Doesn't this ability to understand English also heighten a fondness for, and acceptance of, foreign things? Doesn't it quicken the absorption of other cultures, goods, and points of view, and especially things American because of the volume of imported U.S. goods?

Yes, but people live in a global economy, he said. English was necessary to grow and survive and prosper.

But what about its influence on what I heard called American imperialism?

Ah, well, said the storekeeper, That was another matter, one best left to the professors to discuss. It was how they earned their own livings--by thinking about society and lamenting what was happening to it.

Yes, a steady American flotilla of goods, ideas, and images, sailed on a commercial tide to Europe and Holland but so, too, were markets opening everywhere else. As one instance, jobs increasingly left American shores for places like China and India. The imperialism, it seemed to me, was not American. It was of history, of time as we know it, of an entire world in competition to move toward growth economies. It was an accidental imperialism, one that nobody intended but which everyone becomes ensnared in. It was called The Twentieth Century. In developed countries, most people steadfastly regard it as an age of relief for the common man and time for his entry into affluence. I had no quarrel with any of that. I just wondered about what we had forgotten or had never known.

I looked at a lovely windmill perched along a canal as it turned slowly in the wind. Its blades caught the rising sun as they passed their zenith. Drivers sped along the canal road, encased in glass and metal, listening to a rock station or morning news. They might glance at the windmill and briefly think that it was pretty and then they braked for the bridge, drawing up for a barge to pass underneath. They glanced at wrist watches to see if they would be late to the office.

After I noticed drivers passing the windmill, hardly glancing at it, I was reminded of what I had read about forest natives in Brazil. I thought of breeze along a jungle river and of the Amahueca Indians of the upper Amazon. They gathered evenings and discussed the day as it had passed. A hunter described the sounds a jaguar made. He talked about the animal's mood. Another tribesman noted the greenness of the foliage and that a certain plant was growing in an area. A band of howler monkeys had moved on to another part of the forest. Some birds settled in the trees over by the river and hadn't moved for days. Somebody mentioned that the wind had shifted several times during the day and carried a strange smell in it whenever it blew from up river. They discussed the personality of plants which gave off strange vibrations that they could feel as they walked by.

After I had thought a few weeks about imperialism, economic and cultural, I decided that I would read The Education of Henry Adams to my daughter when she was older. Henry Adams, the author, a grandson and great grandson of U.S. Presidents, narrated a visit to the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris where he was drawn to the huge gallery of machines. There he looked upon forty foot dynamos which became for him a symbol of ultimate energy, inhuman, that man had unleashed. With such machines he had fear for the future of humankind.

In 1884 Hiram Stevens Maxim invented the machine gun in England. He harnessed the steady and progressive burning of the propellant, which released gases that drove the gun mechanism. He held the trigger down and it fired eleven rounds a second.

The Maxim gun changed the course of World War I. It was largely responsible for the men, horses and mules left to rot on the fields of France. The Allied and Central Powers had anticipated quick victories and a war soon over but the machine gun forced soldiers of both sides into trenches and it kept them huddled there. Trained two feet above the mud, it could shoot the knees off anything that moved.

Henry Adams had feared the future and at the Paris Exposition he walked in the galleries which manifested what would become a new view of normalcy. He was not sure if it would become the right view or not, but he beheld it all through a crystal ball of his imagination and didn't feel assured by what he saw.

I could tell my daughter that from one perspective, despite the Maxim gun, another machine, an economic one, gained awesome strength so that today the common man continues to be better off than his peasant forbears, and he considers it his normal lot. I would say it to reassure her of a future yet uncertain.

I would say, Yes, there have been other machines: nuclear bombs and the one fed by Zyklon B. I would not add that it is also true that the economic engine demands more fuel of human spirit but so far, I would say to myself, we are better off if we don't think too much about what sanity might mean.

I would talk to her about the dynamo Adams saw in Paris among those gentlemen with top hats and frock coats as they escorted ladies with bustles and parasols. Modernity can be traced to that thing, not to economic imperialism. The machine had been created by people who didn't know that instead future generations would serve it. I would say that Adams was right to fear it, but it is what we have and now we find it hard to look at the world any other way than through technology and the money it brings.

American cultural imperialism, the Dutch professor complained, is bringing the country down. At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam I found a painting by Jacob van Ruisdael, once attributed to Duurstede. It is titled The Mill Near Wijk and shows a great sky of dark, ominous clouds moving over a windmill, a boat and three tiny women in the right foreground.

As I gazed at the painting I was drawn into it and asked myself if the sky Ruisdael had seen was like what Henry Adams saw in the future, for the one in the picture swelled beyond its borders and did not warn of a storm merely. It hid the sun and threatened the people below with something far beyond their dreams and fears.

It seemed to look out of the past to suggest an age when no one could seriously paint like that again. It implied a time when the natural could no longer be represented because nobody could be sure what nature meant. Entire cultures would think that way. Henry Adams and the Dutch professor were implied by that sky. My wife and daughter were in it. So was I.

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Home______In Memory of Carlie Brucia

Carlie Brucia has been on my thoughts lately. Abducted, then raped and murdered, she died as nobody should, especially not an eleven year old. The video surveillance camera shows her being quietly led off, her hand in the man's, as if adult authority is not to be challenged. This is a powerful, disturbing, scene, and one that reaches into human nature itself.


In my youth I met André Gide one semester. His novel, The Immoralist, introduced me to existential philosophy, which raised the concept, If God is dead, then everything is permitted. As my father would say, it was Tom-Foolery, but I didn't know it then. Wherever I walked, metaphysically speaking, my feet straddled a seismic fault, and I sought solid ground. After while, though, I discovered that I really was after an escape from the world as I found it.

Each minute, each hour, each day, a Carlie is somewhere ripped from the safety of father, mother, and siblings, and plunged into horror. No wonder that she did not struggle at first. The furniture of society conspires to promote the illusion of home. We have traffic lights, policemen, law, order. We have popcorn at movies, TV sit-coms, football games, and family dinners. When little Carlie was led away, she was probably fearful, but obedient to the illusion.

The social fabric is tissue-thin, sustained by the illusion. We laugh at Jay Leno, scorn Saddam Hussein, as we watch their phosphate images on television screens. They are social constructs, thousands of miles away; yet they are closer in mind than our next door neighbors, many of whom we do not know. Let the economy collapse, nuclear holocaust erupt, and see how quickly the constructs disappear.

Brutally, suddenly, Carlie Brucia discovered that the world is not as it seems. A father myself, I feel her parents' anguish when I think of her. Despite years of sordid news events, I still ask Why?

Covering the trial of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann, Hannah Arendt coined a phrase, the banality of evil, and it has become her legacy to our understanding of murders such as Carlie's. Evil is almost always banal. We must remain vigilant and not assume that it always looms as a large warning. WH Auden said it well: "About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters: how well they understood its human position: how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; how, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting for the miraculous birth, there always must be children who did not specially want it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood. . . ." (Musée des Beaux Arts)

At this moment as you read these words, somebody somewhere is raped, murdered, robbed, tortured, or discovers a cancerous tumor.

Like the bumper stickers proclaiming Shit happens, so does evil. We think of it as monstrous, satanic in proportions, its quintessential image the jetliners slamming into the World Trade Center. But it is banal--trite, common-place, everyday. The Al Qaeda terrorists smiled at the lady when they checked out of the hotel. They said thank you to the ticket agent at the airline counter. A neighbor describes Joseph P. Smith, arrested for killing Carlie, as playing with his three daughters, buying them a puppy, building them a goldfish pond.

In a post-modern, deconstructionist, world, the term evil may sound outmoded, but I believe it exists. I must believe so. Otherwise, things make no sense to me. I cannot shrug away the horrible fate of Carlie as tough luck.

Carlie's is the world as I find it and it must be faced.

Albert Camus' The Plague is about fight, not against disease, not against German soldiers, but against indifference to human suffering.

Camus believed that in each of us a spark of goodness smolders, which we can choose to fan into flame, and with this novel he develops his belief. For Camus, actions define the man and the citizens of his novelistic city have defined themselves into meaninglessness.

The people of Oran, Algeria, are alienated from one another. In torrid summers, they stay indoors, shutters closed, each turned in on himself. "The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich." Involved in his own concerns, each is removed from society and the common welfare. Life is ennui, meaningless. The plague changes everything. It offers people a chance to regain meanings.

Like evil, an epidemic belongs not to a person but to communities. Evil for Camus is indeed a plague and something we must fight against. We cannot doubt it exists. As the townspeople gather together they discover new meaning; their lives are shaped by belief in the good of community and hatred of the plague.

Tarrou, an outsider, cannot stand to see human suffering ignored by the masses. To correct this, he gathers sanitary squads, formerly complacent men now eager for difficult daily jobs. Tarrou explains, "All I maintain is that there are on this Earth pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences."

That is my belief and with every news item about Carlie Brucia I am reminded of it.

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Home______Napoleon at 35,0000 feet

In a DC9 at 35,000 feet. Looking down on vast plains of clouds. Layer upon layer of them, nimbus, cumulus. Hurts the eyes, like snowblindedness. The cabin is very light inside. The clouds are real but we fly right through them, like a thought through the mind.

At the National Gallery I saw a larger-than-life portrait of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David. The Emperor stood before me, the weight of his countenance heavy on history. Over there in that cloud I see his torso lying in state. The nose, the high forehead, the eyelids drawn.

David had captured the man, but which is the greater likeness? That cloud or his portrait?

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< The way it never was. An art photo of labor.

Home_____Dad & Freudian Arbeit

Father's hair had receded to the sides with a few strands brushed over the top when one day he retired. For over fifty years he had bent to the daily grind, supporting his family as electrician, a trade he learned on the battleship Connecticut in the first war. He worked until age sixty seven. Each morning he listened to the radio of his Ford as he drove to his job at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in the hills above Berkeley, California. The news was his chief interest. Songs didn't stick to him, a practical man who determined early in life that the labor of his hands and feet, not any penchant for pretty lyrics, would get him through it. One song he did like, though, was Sixteen Tons, a Hit Parade tune and South African ballad popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford. "You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt." To my father the lyrics bespoke the dignity of manhood, of providing for others, of strength in the face of grim daily reality, of holding his head high.

Most of the other songs he heard were Tin Pan Alley fluff about Paper Moons and White Sport Coats and Pink Carnations but this song was about hanging tough, about a world that ground people into grit and muscle and left little time to think about romantic nights and gossamer clouds.

Father stuck it out for mother and his family and grew older, trying hard not to get deeper in debt. He and mom scrimped and saved for their retirement.

Sir Edmund Hillary said he climbed mountains because they are there. My dad worked because it is a thing set like the pattern of moon and stars. You do it because it is what a man does.

He had dreams as a youth. Their residue emerged when he spoke of the "big shots" at the Radiation Lab, the scientists and managers who wore suits and ties and walked around talking, which to my father was their task rather than using their hands to oil an electric motor.

Later, I read Freud's discussion of arbeit, work, as a key means to growth and self-mastery in life. I smiled at this as I thought of dad. Freud had a wholly different perspective than his. In Freud's own life, creative imagination and intellectual development were central and for that reason he believed that successful arbeit provides a sense of competence and allows personal maturation. He saw in work, modern professional work, a main hope for people. I thought of father who was proud of having a job but it seemed to wear him down rather than build him up. As a therapist, Freud observed his patients and thought in terms of individual fulfillment for the Viennese affluent rather than of how few paychecks in society could support such occupation.

Dad stuck with the program for his family. He never saw a shrink, nor did it occur to him that he needed one. A therapist might have given him greater insight into his own motivations and complexities and the parents within, who kept him as a child in chains, but he had responsibilities and that was that. He would have not known what to make of Freudian psychiatry, which began a new age and atmosphere. In this privileged air the individual sought to free himself from parental and social expectations, to cast out skeletons in mental closets, to seek self-realization even if it meant forsaking obligations. Freud's discussion of work was interesting but dad's background gave me an awareness that went unmentioned by the doctor. Austrian fathers dug for coal in unsafe mines and Austrian mothers took in wash to pay for their children's breakfast while gentlemen and ladies lay on the doctor's couch to take the talking cure.

Freud's was a rather limited view of work, a view proscribed by the marked division of labor in industrial society and he sat on the comfortable side of the line. Dad showed me that that a job often had more of the sense that Studs Terkel gave it in Working, a collection of tape-recorded narratives from many people, fry cooks to executives: "This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence--to the spirit as well as to the body. . . . It is above all (or beneath all) about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the great many of us."

That is the common reality of arbeit. Its country has no patriots. Its citizens are worn into compliance and they hope only for the winning lotto number.

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