True or Beautiful or Both

Just a passing thought on a late Friday afternoon. Is Keats correct when he reads from his Greek urn telling us that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty?"

I think I buy it--he seems to say that truth is what is beautiful to us and, as such, that it is subjective.

I know from experience some ideas are beautiful but untrue.

Long before I was married--the second time--I said 'I love you' to a woman I had dated all too briefly. I meant it when I said it but it was said, shall we say, in a moment of passion and became untrue very quickly. And just like Meatloaf prayed 'for the end of time' after I similar slip so did I.

A Big Apple

A beautiful apple. An example of nature’s perfection—smooth to the touch, round to the eye, firm in the hand. The sight of it evokes memory of apples past: biting into it, the skin snapping, the cold appley meat breaking away—sweet and sour and, in a way, wonderfully obscene. The immediate unspoken sense is that this apple is somehow for me.

The fact that the apple and I have come to be here, now—to eat and be eaten—gives me a sense of order in the universe. I suppose the apple would disagree.

For me, millions of years of events, great and small, have led to this transcendental moment (and delicious snack!); for the apple, death. And this moment is a collaboration of my choice (to dine) and a universe—like this apple—whose deep nature is to offer me the opportunity to do so.

Thanks, apple; some day it'll be my turn.

Creation

The New York Times reports this morning of demonstrations in France infiltrated of by a group of young, violent criminals, the casseurs—the smashers. The demonstrations protest a new law allowing younger employees to be fired for any reason within the first two years. (Given what’s happened in America to the implicit contract between employers and the employed over the last 20 years or so this phenomenon seems a bit autre but that’s another topic.)

I’ve seen ‘smashers’ in like situations my whole life—riots across the United States against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King’s assassination, and on and on. I’ve attended demonstrations against the war in Iraq and experienced the tension among participants, from granola pacifists to Palestinian revolutionaries to skinhead fascists to contemptuous Wall Street types.

Living in New York City I’ve wondered about the Draft Riots during our Civil War. Raised as a Yankee with a view of North as noble how can one understand three days of complete anarchy replete with arbitrary destruction, beatings, killings and public lynching? What lessons can be drawn from these happenings? What are the causes and how can we fix it? Or is it too much a part of humanity and the way of the world to be fixed?

The Small Writ Large

By my nature I cannot help but see these things as examples of things larger—and smaller. 180 million died in wars and various manmade calamities in the 20th century alone. Why? Violence within families continues to shock us as it comes to life through the newspapers and from those we know and love. Why?

The 20th century brought us the modern age—when rationalism would bring peace to the nations, when science and technology would allow us to rebuild the world in a way that wouldn’t keep burning down. But it kept burning down and it still is. There hasn’t been an end to history but we’ve certainly built weapons capable of bringing it on. Why? It doesn’t make sense. Despite President Eisenhower’s warnings regarding the ‘Industrial-Military Complex’ we’ve seen an unprecedented growth of the military over the last 25 years. Despite all the talk regarding the new threats we face we’re building multibillion-dollar weapons designed to respond to old threats we no longer face. (Perhaps we’re just getting geared up for the Chinese? After all they should be capable of challenging us in just a generation or two.) What is it about humans that we seem to be hardwired to kill each other? Is it that the lizard part of our brains still rules us to the extent that, if not Now, it’s gonna be Apocalypse Soon?

Part of me has always been an End Timer, a sort of New Age Left Behinder. I’ve had a sense of The End around the corner my whole life. I’m amazed to find myself alive, and almost fifty, living on the other side of the year 2000. I hadn’t really counted on the way life just “keeps on keepin’ on”—at least for me … so far. My mom’s passed on, my brother, all my grandparents, Aunt Betty, and on and on.

Still, life just keeps pushing up all around me. Just yesterday, my sister-in-law Sallie Sydnor Payne Carson (husband Brett) gave birth to a perfect, 22-inch, 9-pound, 14-ounce girl—Brantley Ann Carson. Here she is with her cousin Grace. My friends Don and Katie are due with their first child in the summer. Amazing!

Rationalism does not hold the answers. Our lives, and love, and hatred, violence and death are all--at core--mysteries. In a post-modern age, religion struggles to make sense of the world. Christianity tells of creation; struggles between God and mankind; convents made, broken and made again; God’s perfection and humankind’s imperfection reconciled through Christ’s grizzly death and resurrection. Father, Son and Holy Ghost—Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier. The Hindus offer Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—Creator, Preserver and Destroyer. These traditions hold glorious/bitter mysteries in their hearts and can, at their best, help followers to fully understand and embrace life.

God both creates and destroys. And, it seems, mankind must as well. Perhaps that is what they meant--in part--when the Ancients said that we are made in God's image.

In closing, I leave you with a bit of wisdom grounded in the belief that if it's in a Broadway musical it must be true:

“The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation!”
--La Vie Boheme, Rent, Jonathan Larson

Tesla

I've been reading a lot about the brilliant but largely forgotten inventer Nikola Tesla, the father of modern electricity. I'm struggling to write about his life but don't know how to tell his story as there are so many--polymath genius, bon vivant of the gilded age, eccentric recluse dying alone and in debt in the New Yorker Hotel in 1942.

In this picture from the end of the 19th century, he controls his equipment in the shadows lighting the bulb held by his friend Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain.

Nikola Tesla was born 150 years ago, a Serb in Smiljan, Croatia. His father was a priest, his mother an extraordinary and loving woman of intelligence and wit.

And so, on a dark winter's night ...

The top of his head was so cold it hurt. He pulled at the down comforter and shivered. He was standing inside Niagara Falls. His body was whipped back and forth by the screaming water, and despite the overwhelming force, he was at peace. Though the sky was still slate black outside he had to get up.

With his eyes still closed he sat up and made an oath. ‘Someday, somehow I will master the Falls.’ He repeated it softly and rocked slightly, enduring the cold.

Niagra was half a world away--and, of course, it simply made no sense--but since he first saw the picture of the Falls, the idea of it burned inside him though he was only 10 years old.

Suddenly something touched his arm and he was so startled he lost his balance and, trailing the bedding behind him, fell to the floor in a dull, down-cushioned thump. His mother, usually silent, laughed out loud.

“You look like a drunken bride,” she said.

Ah, New York City!

Road to SUV:

Drop Dead!

On Waves

Here's a fabulous picture from Coyote Buttes North, Arizona. Isn't it glorious!

I chose this image because it is a paradox: a solid that evokes a liquid. Clearly it was formed over many years of erosion caused by some body of water--a river or a lake or an ocean. But the essence of the water's flow--its grace--is captured in solid rock. (I love the Southwest!)

Is it obvious why waves in different forms seem to comprise so much of nature? And I'm not just talking about waves in the physical world. Consider the rise and fall of market prices, the waxing and waning of populations of fish and animals, and, most mysteriously of all, quantum probability waves in matter.

This quantum manifestation of waves is the sort of paradox that this picture illustrates--the ephemeral behaviour of a liquid manifest in a stolid solid. Isn't it strange? Counterintuitive to the nth degree.

Wave forms pervade the universe. From the monumental pulse of the cataclysmic creation of the universe to the waves on the Jersey shore; from the 11-year period--peak to trough--it takes the sun to reverse its magnetic field to the harmonics of my friend Don's cello; from the music of the spheres that Pythagoras could hear in the perfection of the heavens to my dog Sophie--a pup, an alpha female, an old dog, and someday, a memory. ('Another hundred Cockers just got off of the train and they're looking at us. And another hundred ...')

Is it completely ridiculous to consider these mysteries and ask 'Why?'

Beauty and Truth

“He was always looking for beauty in his work.”

--Of Albert Einstein from Science Friday, Ira Flatow

I Haven't Read It But...

This from the Cynthia Crossen, Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2006.

"The word "happy" is derived from an Old Norse word, happ, meaning chance or luck; the word "hapless," from the same root, means unfortunate. Until the past two centuries, happiness was considered a gift of God or the gods; people could pursue it, but they couldn't control it, and they certainly couldn't will it. That notion also changed in the 20th century, as attaining happiness became a question of mind over matter. In 1952, Norman Vincent Peale's bestselling book, "The Power of Positive Thinking," declared, "You can think your way to success and happiness.""

This is a statue of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, which I pass everyday on my way to work. It's in front of the Marble Collegiate Church at 29th and 5th Avenue in New York City where Dr. Peale was a minister for years and years.

Frankly it kind of gives me the heebie jeebies.

For one reason he looks very much like my grandfather--who was sort of a Quaker minister--with whom I was not close. For another I've always thought of his famous, bestselling work The Power of Positive Thinking as a crock. And finally his worldview--or what I imagine it to be--is at odds with mine. Now mind you I haven't actually read the book. But somehow, long ago, I developed this attitude about Dr. Peale and his theory--a theory for which I have an a priori contempt. Why? I suppose my entrenched persona as the cynical observer with one foot towards the door might have something to do with it.

I'll read the book someday and report back.

Logic's Shore

...I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

-- Isaac Newton, Brewster's Memoirs of Newton. Vol. ii. Chap. xxvii.

I am reading James Gleick's biography of Isaac Newton and am just a little way in so far. Being reminded of the above quote was worth the cost of the book but there's also another bit of a bonus--if you buy now ... and I did. From the book (page 8):

"His name betokens a system of the world. ... He sought order and believed in order but never averted his eyes from the chaos. He of all people was no Newtonian."

I think this is Emersonian with a capital Emer. No secondary experience is adequate to such a man. Should it be for us?

Sophie

This is my dog, which, as you see, I've enhanced.

A Little Bible Isn't Gonna Kill Ya

The Bible is a library of books each telling us something in a different way. There is history, law, poetry, allegory, prophetic vision and a bit of everything else under the sun—and, of course, beyond the sun (and that which is underneath as well!)

The Bible was written by more than 40 authors over some 1,600 years—from roughly 1,500 BCE to 90 ACE. Life in this era was steeped in myth but hardly lacking in philosophic, scientific and technological discovery.

Inventions created during this time include: tumbler locks, arches, crossbow, lighthouse, battery (250 BCE in Baghdad), blown glass, forceps, and, perhaps most mercenarily, a coin-operated holy water dispensing machine.

Philosophers and scientists were no less productive; the Greeks alone tell the tale:

• Pythagoras’s highly abstract mathematics
• Socrates and Plato’s teachings regarding:
• Virtue, knowledge and happiness
• The relationship among the soul, the state and the cosmos
• Law, mathematics and nature
• Heraclitus and metaphysics
• Anaxagoras’s discovery of the true cause of the eclipse
• Archimedes the sand counter and, with his ingenious inventions, defender of Syracuse (in Greece, that is)
  

So, if so much changed during the time the Bible was written wouldn't it be surprising if the Bible didn't change from beginning to end?

Many folks believe God inspired biblical authors to transcend their parochial influences and deliver truths for all ages. But have you read Leviticus lately? I mean do we really want to kill people for cheating on their spouses? Literally?

Isn't it self evident that the Bible's writings (and, for later ages, the choice of those writings) were influenced by their times? The Bible was written and assembled by a dynamic process akin to a dialogue across the ages. As such, during the 1,600 years it took to write, it's not surprising that the subjects of the Old Testament spent more time killing people than those from the New Testament did loving them.

So given the acceleration of discovery over the last 1,900 years or so--particularly in the last few hundred years--how do we continue the dialogue?

I'm hopeful that we'll all figure that out.

A Magical Wood

There's a story that goes with this ruin of a mill along side Dingman Creek in Pennsylvania--how it came to be, what happened to its owner and his business. But what difference does that story make to what emerges from this picture? There are literal truths and transcendent truths--subjective, experiential, and creative.

The literal truth is that an Englishman came to what was then the frontier to find his fortune. He built a mill and imported sheep with which to make woolen garments. It was the biggest enterprise for miles around and might have been a big success ... if it wasn't for the wolves.

Emerson saw America as a land unmarked by such stories. One could commune with God's work directly, he believed, to experience the transcendental in nature.

In Praise of Weather

In the last week or so winter has reared its head and descended on us again. Given that today is the first day of spring how could this be?

I love to talk about weather, especially when it's doing something interesting, and, most particularly of all, when it snows. In all the extremes of tempurature found in the universe it is glorious that snow falls beautifully--and, then, goes away. Enough to make balls of it, forts of it, men of it and ski on it before it melts into spring. All this and it gives us something we can talk about with anyone. 'Glad we're having weather, again,' as an old high school friend used to say.

Of course this past hurricane season shows that the weather can overwhelm us, take our lives and scatter us like bugs. It takes the wicked and the wise, and the young and the old with equanimity. In which case we are as weak as children before an angry parent.

In Tim Burton's lovely modern-day fable Edward Scissorhands, Edward, who is too dangerous to live in the world, must live alone in his castle on the hill. And with his razor-sharp hands he makes his sculptures of ice and, in the fury of his work, causes it to snow. It's a lovely story but not so lovely as the snow that falls, every flake beautiful and unique.

When it snows it seems to me that we are part of something greater than our selves, something good, true and eternal, but, most of all, beautiful.

The Future of God

“The Future of God, however, lies in spiritual evolution, and the next step of growth is for people to start to awaken one by one, just as Jesus, Gautama [Buddha], and Muhammad did.”

--Deepak Chopra, March 17, 2006

It is apt given the increasingly diverse population of this country that I find myself--a waspy guy--in the minority.

I believe in evolution.

There I've said it and I'm glad. It seems that the majority of Americans believe God created us just as we are. Does this mean that I'm an atheist? No. But my understanding of God and how God goes about his business seem to be at odds with the majority.

Here's the problem: if God stands outside the laws of his creation--creating the universe in six days and then interceding in mankind's affairs now and then--why is he so stingy with his help?

In the 20th century pehaps 180 million died as a result of wars, massacres and miscellaneous tragedies.

The underlying question is one for the ages and I won't pretend to settle it here once and for all. I know that God created us with free will and that sometimes we make poor choices and, as a result, bad things happen. Further I understand that we humans almost always fall short of what God hopes for us so it's sort of our fault. But come on, 180 million! Some of those people must not have earned untimely deaths through sin. This is why I cannot believe in a God that acts as a capricious superhero coming to the rescue now and again when it suits him. Such a god is either partially impotent or a villain. So I'm an atheist? No.

I believe that the universe--all matter, all energy, time, space and all potential for self awareness--exploded into existence some 13 or so billion years ago. That Big Bang was so phenomenal, so outrageously creative that our minds may never be able to ever fully grasp it. From immutable laws of matter--at core relatively simple--a remarkable number of phenomena arose--stars and planets and life. Of these the most mystifying is the birth of consciousness. Somehow the universe evolved a means of considering itself. And what might the purpose of all this be? Is there a purpose?

I'll answer this question with a story.

The wise man gathered his followers and they discussed the meaning of their lives. For hours they exhausted themselves trying to answer mankind's great questions. Finally the wise man held up a beautiful flower and asked 'What does it mean?'

My faith consists of seeking understanding and, when I reach its limits, embracing the mystery that life reveals with as much of my heart, mind, soul and body as I can tear away from my video games.

To be or not to be?

Is there a more famous question? For 400 years vasty legions of people have been kicking this line around, exploring its many facets. But never mind all that, I want to consider it as a ‘bit’ in a computer and use the idea for a jumping off point for something else.

Computers do what they do by working with electronic codes that, on their most basic level, consist of switches that are either on or off. For Hamlet, 'be' or 'not be,' for a computer, 'one' or 'zero.' This consists of two aspects: the switch itself—a complete electronic circuit (or not)—and the underlying idea of the state of being (or not). The thing and the idea of the thing—physics and metaphysics.

My ambition here is to examine information and meaning—the meaning of life...so back to our hero.

Hamlet has had a run of bad luck. His father was murdered and replaced as king of Denmark by the king’s brother—Hamlet’s uncle Claudius. That’s enough right there to get you hanging around the cemetery. But there’s more: two months after the deed Claudius marries the king’s widow! Wouldn’t that flat out make you annoyed? It certainly did Hamlet.

It all comes to a head when Hamlet asks his famous question and answers it by giving up the easy life of a dilettante prince, revenging his father and, unfortunately, getting killed in the process. So Hamlet accepts his fate, does his duty and gives his abbreviated life meaning. He saw what needed to be done and he did it.

You know, it’s interesting; now I’m more interested in Hamlet than in what I first set out to say. But that makes sense though, doesn’t it? Life is more interesting than the idea of life. Then why have I always been aching to make sense of it?

Here's one thought: real life—not the television show of the same name—is such a mess that its meaning, or lack thereof, usually isn’t clear until it’s over. That’s the beauty of an idea: if it’s a good one--true or beautiful or both--it could be around as long as there are people to think it.

So I’ll leave my theory for another day. (Wait for it.)

Okay just for fun, here it is in a nutshell.

Ideas, and meaning itself, are characteristics of matter. Time and space themselves wouldn’t exist without manifest matter--no matter, no meaning. A deep study, understanding and participation in the material world—thanks Madonna!—will yield a meaningful life.

You may notice the contradiction with my previous comment about the eternal nature of ideas. 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.' Thanks, Whitman, for stealing my idea a hundred plus years before I thought of it.

More anon.

It Might as Well be Spring

Perry and I were in the Poconos a few weeks ago and it was plenty cold. When we first got there we cranked up the heat and stoked up the fire. We turned on the water heater and the water pump, opened the faucet and ... well, nothing!

Our pipes had frozen for the second time this winter. Happily the plumber was able to thaw out the pipes without so much as a how-do-you-do and, eighty dollars poorer, we settled in to enjoy our cabin.

The next day we were up and about--putting a new lock on the crawlspace door, insulating pipes--but also finding time to just lie about and relax.

In such a still moment these deer might of wandered by--as they did on another day in Old Marcel Lakes Estates where our cabin lives. But they didn't. The idea is right though.

Just out of sight, under the snow and beyond the turkey mound, something was there: winter's defeat, a not-too-distant yelp of spring getting ready to make things a little crazy.

Here we go again.

The Power of Cheese

Today MoDo touches on a subject that I'm very interested in: the power of humor. She notes that in 2008 "John McCain will dribble Hillary Clinton's head down the court like a basketball."

Better Candidates?

While acknowledging that Barack Obama is young (44) and green (less than 2 years in the Senate), she praises his smooth and funny performance at the Gridiron dinner. (For example: he advised W. to "spy on the Weather Channel, and find out when big storms are coming.")

She notes that is took Bill Clinton years to get the speech right but W. was a laugh riot from the get-go. So despite Obama's shortcomings, his ability to "fill a room" with intelligence, grace and humor might make him the best candidate in 2008.

Oh, and as far as the age thing--JFK "was 43 when he became president."