Science continually refines what is meant by evidence. The epistemology is forever getting tuned up.
Other specialties -- theology, law, English ... -- also have their epistemology. How frequently are their epistemologies retuned?
In a word, does a court system, or a classroom for literature, have an epistemology anywhere nearly in tune as a science lab?
I bring this up to point out that kleptocracies maintain themselves by picking and choosing among established epistemologies, knowing that the specialists appealed to for that part of the argument will find the references reasonable: and at no point will the judge allow a team of scientists to come in and make mincemeat of the whole.
It’s exactly like the magician inviting the audience to inspect the prop, but only that part of the prop that isn’t rigged; or is rigged precisely to meet their approval.
This is how we cheat: by one hand not knowing what the other is doing. And if the scientists want to keep receiving their grants, they’ll know when to speak and when to keep mum.
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Fake Science
That stem cell guy is S Korea has quit his post at the university. Everybody has egg on their face. Publishers mortaged the farm to get books about him on the shelves; and now it's all bust.
Committees have been reviewing his work to see if there's anything salvageable.
But of course pk laughs and shrugs. What did you expect? His work was in an area of big money, big fame. All such papers should be reviewed: but by whom? The government? The university? What integrity do they have?
Science is real. But it can't be administered. It comes when anyone is intellectually honest for a moment. It comes like falling in love: and goes, just as fast. We can try to attract it: take a shower, dress up ... train our minds. But it comes, or it doesn't. Like a visit from God.
Don't count too many reported visitations as true; but know: there can be some. It's just impossible to be sure when, where, or to whom.
Committees have been reviewing his work to see if there's anything salvageable.
But of course pk laughs and shrugs. What did you expect? His work was in an area of big money, big fame. All such papers should be reviewed: but by whom? The government? The university? What integrity do they have?
Science is real. But it can't be administered. It comes when anyone is intellectually honest for a moment. It comes like falling in love: and goes, just as fast. We can try to attract it: take a shower, dress up ... train our minds. But it comes, or it doesn't. Like a visit from God.
Don't count too many reported visitations as true; but know: there can be some. It's just impossible to be sure when, where, or to whom.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Time / Justice
Justice is impossible while time endures (and that’s infinitely): because agreement among intellects at stageA, stageB, stage z9omega at time0, time1, timen, is meaningless. Therefore democratic justice is impossible. Autocratic justice is also impossible within infinite time because whatever the intellectual stage of the tyrant, whatever the time, the evidence is not all in.
Human culture works by the majority, feeling itself to be the majority, feeling secure in ignoring input from extremes. Lock up, crucify, assassinate the genius, the saint. Call him a madman. Call the prison a sanitarium. Fill it with real madmen, so the ruse will convince all but the genius, the saint.
That’s how we persecute. It’s OK to kill Germans, Japs in 1945, but not in 1946. It’s moral to enslave in 1860, but not in 1870. In 1776 tarrifs were OK, but don’t tax my whiskey. In 15,000 BC there were no tariffs and no one would dream of taxing your beer.
The majority can always delude itself to think it’s being reasonable by being unaware of better meanings for reasonable. The court can throw improvements out of court. But even if every judge had an IQ of 180, it might just be that they needed IQs of 250. And if every single judge went to Harvard, he still hasn’t mastered Moses Harmon. Or Ivan Illich.
Trusting the Enlightenment was almost as grievous a mistake as trusting the Church had been.
But, pk: then what’s the solution?
There is none.
See? (Of course you don’t.) That’s the fundamental secular blasphemy: to fail to swallow the modern lie that we can fix anything and everything to our liking.
Human culture works by the majority, feeling itself to be the majority, feeling secure in ignoring input from extremes. Lock up, crucify, assassinate the genius, the saint. Call him a madman. Call the prison a sanitarium. Fill it with real madmen, so the ruse will convince all but the genius, the saint.
That’s how we persecute. It’s OK to kill Germans, Japs in 1945, but not in 1946. It’s moral to enslave in 1860, but not in 1870. In 1776 tarrifs were OK, but don’t tax my whiskey. In 15,000 BC there were no tariffs and no one would dream of taxing your beer.
The majority can always delude itself to think it’s being reasonable by being unaware of better meanings for reasonable. The court can throw improvements out of court. But even if every judge had an IQ of 180, it might just be that they needed IQs of 250. And if every single judge went to Harvard, he still hasn’t mastered Moses Harmon. Or Ivan Illich.
Trusting the Enlightenment was almost as grievous a mistake as trusting the Church had been.
But, pk: then what’s the solution?
There is none.
See? (Of course you don’t.) That’s the fundamental secular blasphemy: to fail to swallow the modern lie that we can fix anything and everything to our liking.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Purpose
The purpose of the schools, right on up to the universities, is to produce bureaucrats. And the purpose of bureaucrats is not to understand a single word said to them that doesn’t fit their state-authored form. The form asks Are you white or black? You say, Uh, sort of pink; and the bureaucrat enters White into the Library of Congress.
But of course bureaucrats are people. And the purpose of people is not to understand a goddam word said to them: said to them by anything sentient: intelligent, honest.
At least we have churches to make a ritual of this very pattern. We always know that our forebears paid Caesar, worshipped ghosts, and kangarooed Jesus: simultaneously not knowing that we’re cookies from the same cutter.
Every museum will kill for a Van Gogh: without a clue that here and there under their knife is another Van Gogh. We burn new manuscripts to keep old bullshit warm.
Meanwhile, god lives, the truth lives, art lives. There are new prophets, new Van Goghs: spilling their guts, despairing, then spilling some more.
If humans were only willing to become human, that is to stop paying Caesar, worshipping ghosts, and monkeying the law, humans might live too.
But of course bureaucrats are people. And the purpose of people is not to understand a goddam word said to them: said to them by anything sentient: intelligent, honest.
At least we have churches to make a ritual of this very pattern. We always know that our forebears paid Caesar, worshipped ghosts, and kangarooed Jesus: simultaneously not knowing that we’re cookies from the same cutter.
Every museum will kill for a Van Gogh: without a clue that here and there under their knife is another Van Gogh. We burn new manuscripts to keep old bullshit warm.
Meanwhile, god lives, the truth lives, art lives. There are new prophets, new Van Goghs: spilling their guts, despairing, then spilling some more.
If humans were only willing to become human, that is to stop paying Caesar, worshipping ghosts, and monkeying the law, humans might live too.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
White Men Can’t Jump
The Welsh sing. The Irish fight, and drink. The English have a stiff upper lip. Apaches’ll scalp y’a. We all recognize certain cultural generalizations that go beyond men wearing pants and women wearing dresses. Even with cultural prejudices alerted for and at least a bit discounted, some generalizations remain. The Scots are frugal. Boy, those darkies sure can sing and dance.
Before I identify and delve into my meat for this post, I throw in a pair of personal recollections. In grad school the professor apologized for some poet’s use of the stingy Scot saw. I said, "The Scots don’t see that as an insult; they’re proud of it." And: one old college friend visited another old college friend in Italy where the latter had moved with his Italian Commie film maker wife. The former was accompanied by a black grad school associate. The Commie wife went into convulsions about how Americans treated blacks. "Sure," said the "black": "but how about how the Italians treat the Sicilians?" The Commie wife had another fit. In essence: Americans called the blacks lazy, no good thieves to oppress them, following enslavement with prejudice; whereas the Sicilians really were lazy, no good thieves.
Even after prejudices are a bit discounted, some kernel of truth seems to remain with any number of cultural generalizations. Men are brave; women are pussies. Whites can’t sing, dance, or jump (proof that they are superior and should own all and rule all). Which raises the question which becomes a bit less imponderable with time: nature? or nurture?
There’s no serious question that nature determines lots of variables: skin color, eye color ... Some people can roll their tongue, some can’t digest milk, the women of some tribes have a huge caboose. Pygmies are short. We find it harder to acknowledge cultural differences: and that’s what I want to expatiate on a bit.
A couple of years ago I caught a PBS doc in which a woman with advanced degrees in percussion travelled about seeking folk groups around the world to sit in with, the show off. And by God, sitting in the dirt in India she played the tabla respectably right along with the locals who were in their own idiom! And though she looked a bit like a dog standing on its hind legs, she looked vastly less out of place than would have been possible oh so short an historical time ago.
Back in the 1950s, maybe 1960, in East Harlem I remember seeing eight year old Puerto Rican kids handing out of the fire escapes and pounding out astonishingly complex rhythms on the bongos. I remember a musicologist visiting Africa back a similar time ago and finding five and six year olds who showed perfect mastery of time combinations the pro himself wouldn’t dare try. He was the beginner; the kids were the experts. And before I go another step further I want to tie in a recollection already mentioned at (K.: link temp. down): my jazz musician friends in college had all been given music lessons since childhood. Their playing an instrument no doubt helped their also excellent school records in getting them into Columbia. But when they started playing professionally, instead of studying harder to get into law school, those same parents went berserk. Music was supposed to be a gentlemanly hobby; not a passion: and certainly not a respectable way to make a living. My own love of jazz got me blackballed among my own "friends." When I first danced, and the other dancers stopped, formed a circle around me, whooping and yelling, it was cute. Paul moves like Sammy Davis Junior. A couple of years later, when I added hip grinding, well before we’d ever heard of Elvis Presley, the looks of disapproval etched into permanence. (Our servants do all that for us.)
I heard no parents, no neighbors, yanking the young bongo players off of the fire escape to get to their rooms and study Latin.
The girl can’t throw the ball because any efforts she made as a girl got smacked back into a pose for the cotillion.
Gregory Bateson studied Iatmul women nursing their babies. He photo-documented how they tease the babes with the nipple, pulling it away if the infants seemed too eager. Stop trying, and I’ll feed you.
We carefully study what’s fed to children in the schools. We start school around six. Sorry: it’s way too late. What you can and can’t try is fed to you from your first cry. And what you’re fed varies not only according to whether you’re male or female, first born or second born, English or Italian, but also whether your father is a lawyer or a farmer.
Anna Magnani made audiences weep merely reciting the alphabet. She used her whole woman’s body to do it. Oh! Gracious! She gestured with her hands!
If the society suddenly wanted to produce bongo or tabla players, over time, it could do it. But the players couldn’t come from the crop that had already been smacked silly if they showed any rhythmic propensities.
PS There. That’s my composition for the moment. But as happens so often, I didn’t weave in the examples that had propelled me to the post in the first place. Too late to weave them now; I’ll just string a couple.
I’ve seen good explanations, very good, of why so many Jews in Europe became usurers. It wasn’t at all all their idea. Now Jews with a choice become doctors: since the med schools started letting a couple of Jews in. (Once more people realize how deadly the medicine game is, to doctors too, but mostly to patients, respectable cultures on the make will stop pushing their kids so hard in that direction.) But how many of us remember how many great athletes the Jews produced a hundred years ago? Jewish boxers? Unthinkable.
Where were the great English gentlemen among great baseball players a few generations ago? Where did all these Pollocks come from? Blink, and "all" the great players are "black." Blink again and they’re "all" from Central America. Do Dominican’s have better baseball genes than the Irish?
Look at the rosters of the medical schools, the law schools ... the Wall Street brokerage houses. Any group that stands out will not also be found dominating the boxing ring: or the dance bands.
We finally let Mick Jagger made a lot of money for imitating Muddy Waters decades after Muddy was past his prime. (That was after decades of smacking little Mick Jaggers who liked the nigger music.) But had Mick had a chance at becoming CEO of Disney, he could have made more: a lot more.
Don’t restrict your demographics to the playing field; look in the real money holes.
Before I identify and delve into my meat for this post, I throw in a pair of personal recollections. In grad school the professor apologized for some poet’s use of the stingy Scot saw. I said, "The Scots don’t see that as an insult; they’re proud of it." And: one old college friend visited another old college friend in Italy where the latter had moved with his Italian Commie film maker wife. The former was accompanied by a black grad school associate. The Commie wife went into convulsions about how Americans treated blacks. "Sure," said the "black": "but how about how the Italians treat the Sicilians?" The Commie wife had another fit. In essence: Americans called the blacks lazy, no good thieves to oppress them, following enslavement with prejudice; whereas the Sicilians really were lazy, no good thieves.
Even after prejudices are a bit discounted, some kernel of truth seems to remain with any number of cultural generalizations. Men are brave; women are pussies. Whites can’t sing, dance, or jump (proof that they are superior and should own all and rule all). Which raises the question which becomes a bit less imponderable with time: nature? or nurture?
There’s no serious question that nature determines lots of variables: skin color, eye color ... Some people can roll their tongue, some can’t digest milk, the women of some tribes have a huge caboose. Pygmies are short. We find it harder to acknowledge cultural differences: and that’s what I want to expatiate on a bit.
A couple of years ago I caught a PBS doc in which a woman with advanced degrees in percussion travelled about seeking folk groups around the world to sit in with, the show off. And by God, sitting in the dirt in India she played the tabla respectably right along with the locals who were in their own idiom! And though she looked a bit like a dog standing on its hind legs, she looked vastly less out of place than would have been possible oh so short an historical time ago.
Back in the 1950s, maybe 1960, in East Harlem I remember seeing eight year old Puerto Rican kids handing out of the fire escapes and pounding out astonishingly complex rhythms on the bongos. I remember a musicologist visiting Africa back a similar time ago and finding five and six year olds who showed perfect mastery of time combinations the pro himself wouldn’t dare try. He was the beginner; the kids were the experts. And before I go another step further I want to tie in a recollection already mentioned at (K.: link temp. down): my jazz musician friends in college had all been given music lessons since childhood. Their playing an instrument no doubt helped their also excellent school records in getting them into Columbia. But when they started playing professionally, instead of studying harder to get into law school, those same parents went berserk. Music was supposed to be a gentlemanly hobby; not a passion: and certainly not a respectable way to make a living. My own love of jazz got me blackballed among my own "friends." When I first danced, and the other dancers stopped, formed a circle around me, whooping and yelling, it was cute. Paul moves like Sammy Davis Junior. A couple of years later, when I added hip grinding, well before we’d ever heard of Elvis Presley, the looks of disapproval etched into permanence. (Our servants do all that for us.)
I heard no parents, no neighbors, yanking the young bongo players off of the fire escape to get to their rooms and study Latin.
The girl can’t throw the ball because any efforts she made as a girl got smacked back into a pose for the cotillion.
Gregory Bateson studied Iatmul women nursing their babies. He photo-documented how they tease the babes with the nipple, pulling it away if the infants seemed too eager. Stop trying, and I’ll feed you.
We carefully study what’s fed to children in the schools. We start school around six. Sorry: it’s way too late. What you can and can’t try is fed to you from your first cry. And what you’re fed varies not only according to whether you’re male or female, first born or second born, English or Italian, but also whether your father is a lawyer or a farmer.
Anna Magnani made audiences weep merely reciting the alphabet. She used her whole woman’s body to do it. Oh! Gracious! She gestured with her hands!
If the society suddenly wanted to produce bongo or tabla players, over time, it could do it. But the players couldn’t come from the crop that had already been smacked silly if they showed any rhythmic propensities.
PS There. That’s my composition for the moment. But as happens so often, I didn’t weave in the examples that had propelled me to the post in the first place. Too late to weave them now; I’ll just string a couple.
I’ve seen good explanations, very good, of why so many Jews in Europe became usurers. It wasn’t at all all their idea. Now Jews with a choice become doctors: since the med schools started letting a couple of Jews in. (Once more people realize how deadly the medicine game is, to doctors too, but mostly to patients, respectable cultures on the make will stop pushing their kids so hard in that direction.) But how many of us remember how many great athletes the Jews produced a hundred years ago? Jewish boxers? Unthinkable.
Where were the great English gentlemen among great baseball players a few generations ago? Where did all these Pollocks come from? Blink, and "all" the great players are "black." Blink again and they’re "all" from Central America. Do Dominican’s have better baseball genes than the Irish?
Look at the rosters of the medical schools, the law schools ... the Wall Street brokerage houses. Any group that stands out will not also be found dominating the boxing ring: or the dance bands.
We finally let Mick Jagger made a lot of money for imitating Muddy Waters decades after Muddy was past his prime. (That was after decades of smacking little Mick Jaggers who liked the nigger music.) But had Mick had a chance at becoming CEO of Disney, he could have made more: a lot more.
Don’t restrict your demographics to the playing field; look in the real money holes.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
PostModern Professional Sincerity
You know how these days TV shows advertise themselves by lining up their stars, not like the Kremlin used to do it, all of them in a row, and not like the Nazi’s did it at Nuremberg, the army down here and the fuehrer up there, but sort of like dominoes in a side profile: the news anchor up front, the woman right behind him, slightly diminished by perspective, the ethnic contribution right behind her: lined up and all superior to you. Well just now a show’s ad came on. Some blond was running, fear on her face, some male was running behind her: and with perfect choreography, the blond segued into a dominant domino pose and the male slide into place behind behind her. I am reminded only a little of Mount Rushmore and a lot of Hollywood Ben-Hur-type graphics.
And I said to myself, Oh, gracious, they’re giving the game away. They’re giving the game away sort of like Meg Ryan did, having coffee with Rob Reiner, and, cueing herself, goes into a Richter scale orgasm; then, just as abruptly, ceases and smiles sweetly. (Reiner, the film’s director, gave not dad, but this time mom a follow-up bit to do. Mom says to the diner’s waitress, "I’ll have what she’s having.")
Hollywood should be careful. Audiences cherish their primitive confidence that illusions prepared specifically for them are somehow real, not staged. When Tony Richardson had Albert Finney’s Tom Jones turn suddenly and speak directly to the camera (and therefore, directly to the audience) it was a riot. Making a whole film where Kevin Bacon delivers every other line as an aside to the audience shows that the whole culture is cracking at the seams.
Not many people are likely to spend more time thinking about semiotics and semantic map/territory distinctions than I do, but I too have my own cherished naivete. I like the actor to stay in the damn role until the scene is over. I don’t want them to show their acting chops just to show their acting chops. To me, musicians were showing their feelings, raw and naked, not just displaying a lifetime of acquired technique. My jaw dropped decades ago on TV when Dick Cavett was interviewing an opera star and she illustrated her musical point with perfect exercises, seemingly replete with passion, on and off, switching singing with speaking and speaking with singing. I don’t doubt that she could turn the feeling on or off as well. Apropos, I remember an interview with an actress talking about Alec Guiness. She reported that he had been deep in conversation with her off camera: he heard his cue, abruptly left her, went and did his scene, came back and picked the conversation right back up. "I’m not all Method or anything," she said, "But really ..." (I’m also reminded in that context of the story that Bobby Fischer, talking to a reporter, paused mid-sentence, had dinner, then another dinner, played solitaire chess for four hours, then resumed his sentence.)
If the whore, or your wife, or your girlfriend, is pretending to have an orgasm, let her maintain the pretense. (Though we’re all actors, males don’t have to pretend; not in THAT area.) Five years later, in the middle of a fight, your wife can claim that she was faking it (claiming thereby to be a whore), and of course, all of us being liars on one or another occasion, you’ll have no opinion but your own whether she was lying then or whether she’s lying now.
Am I the only primitive left? Is everyone else really thoroughly PostModern?
Winding down for the moment: a drummer told the story of the big moment in his life when he got to audition for Bird: Charlie Parker. He played his heart out. Bird said something like No, no, you got to mix it up. His saxophone still strapped around his neck, Bird sat at the drums. His one foot kicked a steady beat against the bass drum. His other foot kicked a charleston beat on the high hat. With his left hand he did triplets, and with his right, Latin: or some such mix.
The great pros can do anything. When Bird wanted to give young trumpeter, Miles Davis, a shot, then-trumpet-star-supreme Dizzy Gillespie said, "That’s OK, I’ll play piano." Later, when all-time supreme trumpet artist Miles Davis wanted the keyboard just so, he played it himself. But then the great pros must have had passion to start with. Mozart must have had passion a life time before puberty.
And I said to myself, Oh, gracious, they’re giving the game away. They’re giving the game away sort of like Meg Ryan did, having coffee with Rob Reiner, and, cueing herself, goes into a Richter scale orgasm; then, just as abruptly, ceases and smiles sweetly. (Reiner, the film’s director, gave not dad, but this time mom a follow-up bit to do. Mom says to the diner’s waitress, "I’ll have what she’s having.")
Hollywood should be careful. Audiences cherish their primitive confidence that illusions prepared specifically for them are somehow real, not staged. When Tony Richardson had Albert Finney’s Tom Jones turn suddenly and speak directly to the camera (and therefore, directly to the audience) it was a riot. Making a whole film where Kevin Bacon delivers every other line as an aside to the audience shows that the whole culture is cracking at the seams.
Not many people are likely to spend more time thinking about semiotics and semantic map/territory distinctions than I do, but I too have my own cherished naivete. I like the actor to stay in the damn role until the scene is over. I don’t want them to show their acting chops just to show their acting chops. To me, musicians were showing their feelings, raw and naked, not just displaying a lifetime of acquired technique. My jaw dropped decades ago on TV when Dick Cavett was interviewing an opera star and she illustrated her musical point with perfect exercises, seemingly replete with passion, on and off, switching singing with speaking and speaking with singing. I don’t doubt that she could turn the feeling on or off as well. Apropos, I remember an interview with an actress talking about Alec Guiness. She reported that he had been deep in conversation with her off camera: he heard his cue, abruptly left her, went and did his scene, came back and picked the conversation right back up. "I’m not all Method or anything," she said, "But really ..." (I’m also reminded in that context of the story that Bobby Fischer, talking to a reporter, paused mid-sentence, had dinner, then another dinner, played solitaire chess for four hours, then resumed his sentence.)
If the whore, or your wife, or your girlfriend, is pretending to have an orgasm, let her maintain the pretense. (Though we’re all actors, males don’t have to pretend; not in THAT area.) Five years later, in the middle of a fight, your wife can claim that she was faking it (claiming thereby to be a whore), and of course, all of us being liars on one or another occasion, you’ll have no opinion but your own whether she was lying then or whether she’s lying now.
Am I the only primitive left? Is everyone else really thoroughly PostModern?
Winding down for the moment: a drummer told the story of the big moment in his life when he got to audition for Bird: Charlie Parker. He played his heart out. Bird said something like No, no, you got to mix it up. His saxophone still strapped around his neck, Bird sat at the drums. His one foot kicked a steady beat against the bass drum. His other foot kicked a charleston beat on the high hat. With his left hand he did triplets, and with his right, Latin: or some such mix.
The great pros can do anything. When Bird wanted to give young trumpeter, Miles Davis, a shot, then-trumpet-star-supreme Dizzy Gillespie said, "That’s OK, I’ll play piano." Later, when all-time supreme trumpet artist Miles Davis wanted the keyboard just so, he played it himself. But then the great pros must have had passion to start with. Mozart must have had passion a life time before puberty.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Push ’Em to the Wall
"Stone tools found embedded at the base of cliffs in southeastern England show that early humans lived in northern Europe 700,000 years ago -- much earlier than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday." Says Reuters. Push those dates back. Push ’em back, push ’em back, way back.
At the same time every time you turn around some swimmer, some runner, has again broken the world record. How boring is the World Series, the golf tournament, if some record isn’t announced as broken every other second: all part of our self-hypnosis that no one has ever been better than us.
In the 1950s, when I ran the mile, a time of four minutes was believed to be an unbreakable barrier. Once it fell, the new record got peeled and re-peeled in short order. Will it ever be found that humans lived in Europe 900,000 years ago? A million years ago? Before the birth of the earth? Before the Big Bang?
Will the mile ever be run in three and a half minutes? Will the times for the Australian crawl ever get to minus figures: you come out of the pool before you dive in?
Statisticians have a good model for what stops us from getting too absurd. The left wall is where we come from. Bacteria never ran a mile, so their time is infinite. Since then some creatures have gotten speedy indeed: horses, cheetahs. Men aren’t very fast on their feet, but if we put a lot into it we can run faster and faster ... until we reach a right wall for our species, for our environment. Maybe some prior Homo species could cover a mile in three and a half minutes, but modern humans are probably pretty damn close to the right wall for the species. (Running on the moon won't count.) Someday, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s example, some human may be able to hit the fast ball a tiny bit better than Ted Williams, but no human will ever be able to hit any kind of ball more than a tiny bit better than Ted Williams. Ted Williams was damn close to the right wall.
At the same time every time you turn around some swimmer, some runner, has again broken the world record. How boring is the World Series, the golf tournament, if some record isn’t announced as broken every other second: all part of our self-hypnosis that no one has ever been better than us.
In the 1950s, when I ran the mile, a time of four minutes was believed to be an unbreakable barrier. Once it fell, the new record got peeled and re-peeled in short order. Will it ever be found that humans lived in Europe 900,000 years ago? A million years ago? Before the birth of the earth? Before the Big Bang?
Will the mile ever be run in three and a half minutes? Will the times for the Australian crawl ever get to minus figures: you come out of the pool before you dive in?
Statisticians have a good model for what stops us from getting too absurd. The left wall is where we come from. Bacteria never ran a mile, so their time is infinite. Since then some creatures have gotten speedy indeed: horses, cheetahs. Men aren’t very fast on their feet, but if we put a lot into it we can run faster and faster ... until we reach a right wall for our species, for our environment. Maybe some prior Homo species could cover a mile in three and a half minutes, but modern humans are probably pretty damn close to the right wall for the species. (Running on the moon won't count.) Someday, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s example, some human may be able to hit the fast ball a tiny bit better than Ted Williams, but no human will ever be able to hit any kind of ball more than a tiny bit better than Ted Williams. Ted Williams was damn close to the right wall.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Fight Game
I’m a sucker for sports, including spectator sports. My own activities have always been of the individualist type. I fish. I like to hit tennis balls. I sure wish I could get to a good mountain for some more skiing. I like danger, I like speed, I like surviving danger.
Though I haven’t done any team sports since crew in college, and there I only participated freshman year, I respond to some team efforts much like anybody else with a TV set. I can get in an uproar during a World Series. Michael Jordan kept me hyper for close to a decade, and when he retired, I segued straight to the Spurs, then the Lakers. (It’s amazing how boobland can ride winners, then ride another winner. In boobland it seems like we win almost all the time.)
But I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten as excited over the Yankees or the Bulls as I used to get when Cassius Clay, then Muhammed Ali, boxed. Even on the couch with the sports page or the radio or the tube, I guess I’m really an individualist even for spectator competitions. Hell, I got almost as excited as a kid when Joe Louis fought as I did when an Ali fight was broadcast. Hell, I got almost as excited when I read a boxing magazine biography of Jack Johnson which was lying around the army base at Camp Drum.
It’s not just fighting. I’d go berserk over Jean Claude Killy, over Nadia Comaneci.
And my excitement over boxing puzzles me: it’s so out of synch with my theoretical morality: fighting / bad.
But I initiate this post over another puzzlement: even if fighting rouses our blood lust -- David and Goliath, US against Hitler ... -- how can people possibly respond so to staged fights? to fights where the combatants hold nothing serious against each other? Ali had to invent reasons to not like Joe Frazier.
The newspapers made a big deal about Louis versus Max Schmeling, stacking politics behind sports.
This puzzlement infects my enjoyment of some of the outstanding movies that have been made that center around boxing. Raging Bull! What a great film: in so many ways. I liked Girlfight a lot, the first half of it anyway. Million Dollar Baby was good; though not to my mind quite as good as claimed.
The other night I watched the DVD of Cinderella Man. I put that movie on a plane at least half-way toward Seabiscuit. The sports side was good. The picture of the Great Depression was even better. And the human story was tops.
Still, in Seabiscuit horses were running in circles. I don’t mind. In Cinderella Man Max Baer was trying to take Braddock’s head off. He hit him in the nuts at least twice. It was deliberate. Why wasn’t he severely penalized?
In a real fight of course you hit the guy in the nuts. And in the kidneys. Anywhere you can hurt him. And that’s what old style boxing used to be. And of course, old style, only a fool would hit a guy to the head. The skull is hard; the hand is fragile.
But the Marquis of Queensbury changed all that: for the delectation of the gentlemen bettors. Separate the guy from his brain. Who cares? so long as the betting prospers?
But what did Max Baer have against nice Jim Braddock? What nice James J. had against Max was simple: he wanted to move into a bigger house.
If Hitler killed Poles, Jews, Commies ... it was one thing. He was trying to deny Germans’ humiliations. Country meant something to him. If Goliath tried to kill David, well, the Jews were enemies of the Philistines. And visa versa when David killed Goliath.
When Clay humiliated Big Bad Sonny Liston, that was one thing. Sonny Liston was big and bad. But why should we want Ali to take Frazier’s head off? Or Forman’s?
Aren’t we embarrassed that the fight game is just about vanity? about money?
I think we should stage fights between real enemies. Broke as I am, I might scrape to pay to view Bush against a terrorist: where the terrorist stepped forward to fight Bush, the way David stepped forward to fight Goliath. And the hell with the Marquis of Queensbury. Leave off the gloves. Leave out the rules. Forget about rounds, times out. Never mind height, or weight, or reach, or age. Have at it till one of them can’t continue, or is dead.
Though I haven’t done any team sports since crew in college, and there I only participated freshman year, I respond to some team efforts much like anybody else with a TV set. I can get in an uproar during a World Series. Michael Jordan kept me hyper for close to a decade, and when he retired, I segued straight to the Spurs, then the Lakers. (It’s amazing how boobland can ride winners, then ride another winner. In boobland it seems like we win almost all the time.)
But I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten as excited over the Yankees or the Bulls as I used to get when Cassius Clay, then Muhammed Ali, boxed. Even on the couch with the sports page or the radio or the tube, I guess I’m really an individualist even for spectator competitions. Hell, I got almost as excited as a kid when Joe Louis fought as I did when an Ali fight was broadcast. Hell, I got almost as excited when I read a boxing magazine biography of Jack Johnson which was lying around the army base at Camp Drum.
It’s not just fighting. I’d go berserk over Jean Claude Killy, over Nadia Comaneci.
And my excitement over boxing puzzles me: it’s so out of synch with my theoretical morality: fighting / bad.
But I initiate this post over another puzzlement: even if fighting rouses our blood lust -- David and Goliath, US against Hitler ... -- how can people possibly respond so to staged fights? to fights where the combatants hold nothing serious against each other? Ali had to invent reasons to not like Joe Frazier.
The newspapers made a big deal about Louis versus Max Schmeling, stacking politics behind sports.
This puzzlement infects my enjoyment of some of the outstanding movies that have been made that center around boxing. Raging Bull! What a great film: in so many ways. I liked Girlfight a lot, the first half of it anyway. Million Dollar Baby was good; though not to my mind quite as good as claimed.
The other night I watched the DVD of Cinderella Man. I put that movie on a plane at least half-way toward Seabiscuit. The sports side was good. The picture of the Great Depression was even better. And the human story was tops.
Still, in Seabiscuit horses were running in circles. I don’t mind. In Cinderella Man Max Baer was trying to take Braddock’s head off. He hit him in the nuts at least twice. It was deliberate. Why wasn’t he severely penalized?
In a real fight of course you hit the guy in the nuts. And in the kidneys. Anywhere you can hurt him. And that’s what old style boxing used to be. And of course, old style, only a fool would hit a guy to the head. The skull is hard; the hand is fragile.
But the Marquis of Queensbury changed all that: for the delectation of the gentlemen bettors. Separate the guy from his brain. Who cares? so long as the betting prospers?
But what did Max Baer have against nice Jim Braddock? What nice James J. had against Max was simple: he wanted to move into a bigger house.
If Hitler killed Poles, Jews, Commies ... it was one thing. He was trying to deny Germans’ humiliations. Country meant something to him. If Goliath tried to kill David, well, the Jews were enemies of the Philistines. And visa versa when David killed Goliath.
When Clay humiliated Big Bad Sonny Liston, that was one thing. Sonny Liston was big and bad. But why should we want Ali to take Frazier’s head off? Or Forman’s?
Aren’t we embarrassed that the fight game is just about vanity? about money?
I think we should stage fights between real enemies. Broke as I am, I might scrape to pay to view Bush against a terrorist: where the terrorist stepped forward to fight Bush, the way David stepped forward to fight Goliath. And the hell with the Marquis of Queensbury. Leave off the gloves. Leave out the rules. Forget about rounds, times out. Never mind height, or weight, or reach, or age. Have at it till one of them can’t continue, or is dead.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
DVD
Aging is so weird. The first time I saw Hamlet the experience took two and a half hours: because that’s how long Laurence Olivier edited his movie for. The first time I read it it took me maybe five hours, Lear probably six hours. That’s because when I’m reading, I look out the window, or in my belly button, as often as I look at the page. I’m not just wool gathering; I find Hamlet out the widow or in my belly button when reading Hamlet and looking out the window. In the theater, in the movie, the lines are timed. When I’m reading I take my time. And the longer I take the more I see.
And of course it took me half a dozen years between seeing the movie and reading the play, and weeks and weeks between the assignment being due and my getting around to it.
With London weather so iffy, daylight so short, the original performances of Hamlet or Lear would have been sped through. The professor has fits at how much the movie production cut in its version: think how much Richard Burbage and the Kings Men might have cut on a blustery afternoon. It’s a play. Theater is a business. It’s not the Easter mass, it’s not the bishop’s sermon. It’s incomprehensible why Shakespeare put so much into it. Because he could? Because it amused him to?
What it is is so richly layered, so redundant -- not in the English teacher’s trivial sense but in the engineer’s profound sense -- that the audience member who understands 90% of the words and the audience member who understands 30% of the words are still seeing much the same drama. You could hear none of the words, watch from a blimp, and still experience some of the story, some of the drama.
The last time I read Lear it took me three days. That was thirty-odd years ago. I don’t dare read it again. If I read it again it might well take me three years.
It took me years and years to read War and Peace some parts I read slower than the characters were living it. When WBAI radio decided to read it out loud, continuously, they scheduled a week. Who knows how many of us read along, staying up all night, every night: thousands of us for sure. It went faster than anticipated and we listened to lots of Russian music during the breaks. Some parts we read repeatedly.
But Olivier’s Hamlet, at the Thalia theater would take one hundred fifty-five minutes: for the matinee, for Saturday night. And that’s one reason I loved movies. Empty your bladder before it starts: because it keeps going. You’ve got to sit and pay attention for however long the company edited it at: an hour and a half, two hours, sometimes longer. Olivier, Bogart, Orson Wells, says the line. Pay attention or you’ve missed it.
Until VCRs, DVDs. Now it can take me all day and all night to watch a one hundred twenty minute movie. The DVD for Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander has been siting next to the Macintosh for weeks now. I’ve watched one scene. It was so great I had to pause it and catch my breath, write emails about it, look up the cast at IMDb.com. Good God: Gunnar Bjöornstrand and Erland Josephson on the same celluloid!
more in a bit
And of course it took me half a dozen years between seeing the movie and reading the play, and weeks and weeks between the assignment being due and my getting around to it.
With London weather so iffy, daylight so short, the original performances of Hamlet or Lear would have been sped through. The professor has fits at how much the movie production cut in its version: think how much Richard Burbage and the Kings Men might have cut on a blustery afternoon. It’s a play. Theater is a business. It’s not the Easter mass, it’s not the bishop’s sermon. It’s incomprehensible why Shakespeare put so much into it. Because he could? Because it amused him to?
What it is is so richly layered, so redundant -- not in the English teacher’s trivial sense but in the engineer’s profound sense -- that the audience member who understands 90% of the words and the audience member who understands 30% of the words are still seeing much the same drama. You could hear none of the words, watch from a blimp, and still experience some of the story, some of the drama.
The last time I read Lear it took me three days. That was thirty-odd years ago. I don’t dare read it again. If I read it again it might well take me three years.
It took me years and years to read War and Peace some parts I read slower than the characters were living it. When WBAI radio decided to read it out loud, continuously, they scheduled a week. Who knows how many of us read along, staying up all night, every night: thousands of us for sure. It went faster than anticipated and we listened to lots of Russian music during the breaks. Some parts we read repeatedly.
But Olivier’s Hamlet, at the Thalia theater would take one hundred fifty-five minutes: for the matinee, for Saturday night. And that’s one reason I loved movies. Empty your bladder before it starts: because it keeps going. You’ve got to sit and pay attention for however long the company edited it at: an hour and a half, two hours, sometimes longer. Olivier, Bogart, Orson Wells, says the line. Pay attention or you’ve missed it.
Until VCRs, DVDs. Now it can take me all day and all night to watch a one hundred twenty minute movie. The DVD for Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander has been siting next to the Macintosh for weeks now. I’ve watched one scene. It was so great I had to pause it and catch my breath, write emails about it, look up the cast at IMDb.com. Good God: Gunnar Bjöornstrand and Erland Josephson on the same celluloid!
more in a bit
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Waste ’im: Bang, bang
Nature is famous for being wasteful: trillions of seeds for mere millions of trees. Everyone knows about the number of sperm in semen, and everyone knows that an awful lot of semen gets jetted into the breeze. But even a woman, who ripens at least one egg a month in her maturity, winds up with far fewer grown children than twelve a year. For all their millions of eggs, oysters do well just to maintain their population: or would if we’d let them.
Nature, whether wasteful or not, has lots of neat ways to have here a beach, there scrub lands, there pine forest, there climax forest -- there mountains, there grasslands, there a reef, there deep ocean.
Humans are wasteful. That’s why rats and ’roaches fare so well among us. Human societies are wasteful. Nature knew how to make deserts without us, but at nothing like the rate at which it makes deserts with us. We lose soil, forests, shoreline ...
If we had a different perspective, who knows, maybe we’d see nothing as wasted; or, everything as wasted.
There’s no way to tell, so we’d have to ask God, if we could trust him, but this is what I’d like to know:
Is a society with an institution to promote or to preserve something any better at promoting or preserving that something than a society without any such institution?
Lightning must have started many a fire before some animal thought to keep some of the fire going in a fireplace. Sitting in front of their cave, the fire having been domesticated for a million years, the kid gets an idea of how to bank the fire for baking and gets cuffed upside the head by the fire keeper.
Universities are fire keepers of a kind: the appointed fire keepers get tenure, while the kids with ideas get cuffed upside the head. No university was sitting there with a chair ready for Faraday and his electricity; but they had lots of chairs for whale oil captains. They "understood" their oil lamps; not electricity.
Some trees grow, some oysters mature, some babies. Some ideas get through, get a place at the fire: some tiny minority of ideas. And maybe that’s exactly as it should be. Once the critturs have figured out a way to grow a backbone, they’re reluctant to figure out ways not to grow a backbone. Indeed, they’d always already known trillions of ways not to grow a backbone.
So: few ideas get through. Universities get paid to promote ideas: and they do. They promote the ideas they already have. Which still leaves me with my question: which society lets more ideas through: the society with a university, or the society without a university?
I know one thing: the society without a university is cheaper.
Women always had babies. That’s what women do. In fact, many a woman can figure out how to have a baby without having a husband first. But now they can’t figure out how to have a baby without a doctor. And the first baby doctors killed an astonishing portion of their babies, and their women!
Maybe love, and family-making, were better off before there was marriage: before there was this society, before there was this church, before there was this God.
Nature, whether wasteful or not, has lots of neat ways to have here a beach, there scrub lands, there pine forest, there climax forest -- there mountains, there grasslands, there a reef, there deep ocean.
Humans are wasteful. That’s why rats and ’roaches fare so well among us. Human societies are wasteful. Nature knew how to make deserts without us, but at nothing like the rate at which it makes deserts with us. We lose soil, forests, shoreline ...
If we had a different perspective, who knows, maybe we’d see nothing as wasted; or, everything as wasted.
There’s no way to tell, so we’d have to ask God, if we could trust him, but this is what I’d like to know:
Is a society with an institution to promote or to preserve something any better at promoting or preserving that something than a society without any such institution?
Lightning must have started many a fire before some animal thought to keep some of the fire going in a fireplace. Sitting in front of their cave, the fire having been domesticated for a million years, the kid gets an idea of how to bank the fire for baking and gets cuffed upside the head by the fire keeper.
Universities are fire keepers of a kind: the appointed fire keepers get tenure, while the kids with ideas get cuffed upside the head. No university was sitting there with a chair ready for Faraday and his electricity; but they had lots of chairs for whale oil captains. They "understood" their oil lamps; not electricity.
Some trees grow, some oysters mature, some babies. Some ideas get through, get a place at the fire: some tiny minority of ideas. And maybe that’s exactly as it should be. Once the critturs have figured out a way to grow a backbone, they’re reluctant to figure out ways not to grow a backbone. Indeed, they’d always already known trillions of ways not to grow a backbone.
So: few ideas get through. Universities get paid to promote ideas: and they do. They promote the ideas they already have. Which still leaves me with my question: which society lets more ideas through: the society with a university, or the society without a university?
I know one thing: the society without a university is cheaper.
Women always had babies. That’s what women do. In fact, many a woman can figure out how to have a baby without having a husband first. But now they can’t figure out how to have a baby without a doctor. And the first baby doctors killed an astonishing portion of their babies, and their women!
Maybe love, and family-making, were better off before there was marriage: before there was this society, before there was this church, before there was this God.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Social Semiotics
Remember at all times: it’s not for Jesus to hail himself as Christ; first John has to recognize him, then Peter, then Paul, then the rest of us.
God is whatever we’re all pointing at.
It’s not for Beethoven to know he’s great; first the duke has to tell him, then the public, then posterity.
Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh ... have no right to an opinion: until the museum puts up a plaque.
Einstein wasn’t smart, Relativity wasn’t true: until Life Magazine said so.
As my sister’s friend’s much younger brother said: "Leonardo can’t be a genius; because it he were a genius, he’d be famous."
If you see the Buddha, kill him.
Society relies on the golden goose being immortal no matter how many times we kill it. My particular pessimism relies on the public getting cancer irreversibly before it stops smoking.
I suspect that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Conrad ... would agree with me: the smartest of us was an idiot.
And what God is is none of our affair.
God is whatever we’re all pointing at.
It’s not for Beethoven to know he’s great; first the duke has to tell him, then the public, then posterity.
Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh ... have no right to an opinion: until the museum puts up a plaque.
Einstein wasn’t smart, Relativity wasn’t true: until Life Magazine said so.
As my sister’s friend’s much younger brother said: "Leonardo can’t be a genius; because it he were a genius, he’d be famous."
If you see the Buddha, kill him.
Society relies on the golden goose being immortal no matter how many times we kill it. My particular pessimism relies on the public getting cancer irreversibly before it stops smoking.
I suspect that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Conrad ... would agree with me: the smartest of us was an idiot.
And what God is is none of our affair.
Monday, December 05, 2005
Rosy Dawn and the Ecliptic
Dawn’s rosy fingers teased through the trees at the horizon moments ago. A dwelling with a light on inside, in the next lane south, looked ghostly.
Now the sky is merely yellow-orange-pink: and dawn is close.
My computers are set up in the front. My work Mac is on the right, my play Mac to the left. Therefore my working face has a southern exposure, eastward biased. Ah: now the eastern sky is magenta-colored; but overall it’s much lighter.
Moments ago I had to step outside and scan eastward. From inside it had seemed that the sun would appear far more southward than I’d expected. When we say north, south ... we seldom mean precise compass points. There are places where the "northbound" highway may actually be running due east, or west. I know a road on Cape Code that says "south" but runs dead north! Anyway I stepped outside to check. Sure the ecliptic spans south east / south west in the northern hemisphere: conspicuously in the temperate zones, dramatically in the arctic.
Sure enough. My impression from indoors had been an illusion. The sky had seemed rosiest in the south-south east because that’s where the window was, that’s where the trees were thinnest, because that’s where I was looking ...
The Ecliptic
So, I stood outside and looked directly east: again, not a compass point: more or less. Brunns Road runs fairly true north / south. I had it to my back. Therefore I was facing east.
I tried in my mind to erase the tree line, to see the horizon as I would see it were I a half-mile east right now, on the lake, in my boat, no interference between me and the dawn horizon. "Sure," I said to myself. The ecliptic bisects the horizon about There. That’s where I’d be seeing the colors most intensely were I on the lake: the sun about to start showing directly. And I swept my head back and around, over my right shoulder, imagining the night sky. Yes, that’s the Zodiac. More or less along that line right there: lower in the sky now that autumn is so far advanced.
The Zodiac
And suddenly it hit me: like for the first time ever: all those old guys, all those astronomers, those astrologers, those Cro-Magnon cavemen: they all could follow the sun’s path better at night than in the day time!
In day light, unless you’re really socked in, you can see the sun in the sky. With clouds, you can see the sun through any cirrus cloud and through most cumulous clouds. But that’s just a point. You don’t see the path. The path shows on the opposite side of the day. You look up at the night sky: there’s Leo, there’s Virgo, there’s Libra ... That's the sun’s path!
Dynamic, Not Static
Ok, I just stepped outside again. Now I can see the sun directly, just passed clear of the horizon: a bit of sky underneath it as well as above and to its sides. The sun is already looking pathetically smaller than it had appeared a moment ago, glued with the horizon. And yes: the sun is MUCH further south that I was picturing it moments ago, based on my last dawn viewings from the lake. It’s December. The ecliptic intersects the horizon much further south than it had say in October when I was still fishing many a dawn.
September? Forget it: wind to sink the boat, making fishing a punishment. November was almost as bad. But there had been navigable nights in October: fish through the night, enjoy the dawn, then go home and sleep.
Final thought on the subject for now: I remember driving in the Keys, twenty-some years ago, winter. That’s the furthest south I’ve ever seen the night sky: and the darkest, Miami far to the north. Dark sky, great sky. Dark sky bright with natural light.
And man, the ecliptic was so far south I couldn’t believe it. Man, Scorpio, Capricorn: practically in the freaking Straights of Florida!
PS No, wait: gotta add a subsequent memory. Back when I lived in my "beach house" -- my apartment smack on the Atlantic in Long Beach, every room laid along the sand-side, a direct view of the ocean from every room but the second bedroom (which had an indirect view, you had to stand kind of close to the window and look south) -- I’d watch this dawn and that dusk from my terrace. I was almost always awake for the dusk, I was frequently awake for the dawn, and sometimes I was awake for both.
Long Island runs east / west. To the north is the Sound. The south shore has the Atlantic direct. At least it does if you live on the sand bars: Rockaway, Atlantic Beach, Long Beach, Lido Beach, Jones Beach, Fire Island ... Therefore if you live on the south shore, actually on the shore, on the beach side, you have a southern exposure: and therefore you have the entire day-time or night-time path of the ecliptic laid out right before you.
And if you can keep time in your head, as I work at being able to do, you can watch the ecliptic drift through the seasons, right before your eyes.
Back when I started writing this piece, I had to adjust my shoulders to parallel Brunns Road in order to be confident that I was facing east. In my beach house all I had to go was look out from my terrace and I was assured of a southern view. The architect had cooperated with geography to set my shoulders for me. I was looking south no matter what. The dawn began way to my left. The sun set way to my right. In winter I could follow the whole arc, no problem. In summer the sun’s first moments were partially blocked by my neighbor’s terrace. The sun’s last moments were partially blocked by my own kitchen. I had to move to the bedroom, or, lean over the railing, to see the last of it.
PPS I’ve got to stick in another memory, though this one has nothing to do with the ecliptic. I’d told David Tamerin that I’d accompany him to Atlantic Highlands to monitor the printing of his lithograph, Her Mind Moves Upon Silence, that I was publishing. David drives from Queens out to Long Beach, picks me up. We cross the Verizanno, head off into the wilds of New Jersey, bend over toward the coast ... David had talked me into letting him use an offset press. He assured me that everyone was doing it. What the hell, once you’re a whore you might as well be a whore.
... Never mind. Day’s end, we have a bite to eat. He shows me a scenic overpass, up by the old light house. There’s room for a car or two near the crest of the highlands. And there’s one of those public telescopes you put a coin into and get of couple of minutes of powerful looking. This machine was more like a telescope than like binoculars: well more than six or seven power. Not twenty, but powerful. I drop a dime (1977ish). I scan the distance. Oh, wow. There’s Coney Island. I can see the paint peeling on the Cyclone, see the cars sliding on the Wonder Wheel, see how sad the closed Parachute Jump looks. I pan right. Hey, I can see Rockaway just as well as I can see Brooklyn! I scan further right. Damn! That’s the Lido Hotel! I’m seeing the Lido closer than I ever saw it in person, closer than Saul Steinberg can ever have seen it, no matter how many times he painted it for The New Yorker.
Wait a minute: if I can see the Lido Hotel, then I ought to be able to see my own neighborhood, maybe my own apartment building. I panned back westward a tad.
Damn! I was looking in my own bedroom window! From a two plus hour drive away! I could see my love birds nuzzling and grooming each other. I could see my cockatiel looking all aone. I could see my waterbed with the sheets rumpled!
Atlantic Highlands was way more than one hundred miles on the odometer (and in New York traffic, that’s like two hundred miles), but had we gone by boat it was only about eighty miles.
Funny thing: after that day I started being able to pick out a hint of Atlantic Highlands from Long Beach. What I’d previously thought was pure sky over pure ocean actually betrayed a tiny hump of continent. And the binoculars confirmed it. It wasn’t just my imagination, my will to see with my naked eye the reverse of what I’d seen with a powerful instrument.
Now the sky is merely yellow-orange-pink: and dawn is close.
My computers are set up in the front. My work Mac is on the right, my play Mac to the left. Therefore my working face has a southern exposure, eastward biased. Ah: now the eastern sky is magenta-colored; but overall it’s much lighter.
Moments ago I had to step outside and scan eastward. From inside it had seemed that the sun would appear far more southward than I’d expected. When we say north, south ... we seldom mean precise compass points. There are places where the "northbound" highway may actually be running due east, or west. I know a road on Cape Code that says "south" but runs dead north! Anyway I stepped outside to check. Sure the ecliptic spans south east / south west in the northern hemisphere: conspicuously in the temperate zones, dramatically in the arctic.
Sure enough. My impression from indoors had been an illusion. The sky had seemed rosiest in the south-south east because that’s where the window was, that’s where the trees were thinnest, because that’s where I was looking ...
The Ecliptic
So, I stood outside and looked directly east: again, not a compass point: more or less. Brunns Road runs fairly true north / south. I had it to my back. Therefore I was facing east.
I tried in my mind to erase the tree line, to see the horizon as I would see it were I a half-mile east right now, on the lake, in my boat, no interference between me and the dawn horizon. "Sure," I said to myself. The ecliptic bisects the horizon about There. That’s where I’d be seeing the colors most intensely were I on the lake: the sun about to start showing directly. And I swept my head back and around, over my right shoulder, imagining the night sky. Yes, that’s the Zodiac. More or less along that line right there: lower in the sky now that autumn is so far advanced.
The Zodiac
And suddenly it hit me: like for the first time ever: all those old guys, all those astronomers, those astrologers, those Cro-Magnon cavemen: they all could follow the sun’s path better at night than in the day time!
In day light, unless you’re really socked in, you can see the sun in the sky. With clouds, you can see the sun through any cirrus cloud and through most cumulous clouds. But that’s just a point. You don’t see the path. The path shows on the opposite side of the day. You look up at the night sky: there’s Leo, there’s Virgo, there’s Libra ... That's the sun’s path!
Dynamic, Not Static
Ok, I just stepped outside again. Now I can see the sun directly, just passed clear of the horizon: a bit of sky underneath it as well as above and to its sides. The sun is already looking pathetically smaller than it had appeared a moment ago, glued with the horizon. And yes: the sun is MUCH further south that I was picturing it moments ago, based on my last dawn viewings from the lake. It’s December. The ecliptic intersects the horizon much further south than it had say in October when I was still fishing many a dawn.
September? Forget it: wind to sink the boat, making fishing a punishment. November was almost as bad. But there had been navigable nights in October: fish through the night, enjoy the dawn, then go home and sleep.
Final thought on the subject for now: I remember driving in the Keys, twenty-some years ago, winter. That’s the furthest south I’ve ever seen the night sky: and the darkest, Miami far to the north. Dark sky, great sky. Dark sky bright with natural light.
And man, the ecliptic was so far south I couldn’t believe it. Man, Scorpio, Capricorn: practically in the freaking Straights of Florida!
PS No, wait: gotta add a subsequent memory. Back when I lived in my "beach house" -- my apartment smack on the Atlantic in Long Beach, every room laid along the sand-side, a direct view of the ocean from every room but the second bedroom (which had an indirect view, you had to stand kind of close to the window and look south) -- I’d watch this dawn and that dusk from my terrace. I was almost always awake for the dusk, I was frequently awake for the dawn, and sometimes I was awake for both.
Long Island runs east / west. To the north is the Sound. The south shore has the Atlantic direct. At least it does if you live on the sand bars: Rockaway, Atlantic Beach, Long Beach, Lido Beach, Jones Beach, Fire Island ... Therefore if you live on the south shore, actually on the shore, on the beach side, you have a southern exposure: and therefore you have the entire day-time or night-time path of the ecliptic laid out right before you.
And if you can keep time in your head, as I work at being able to do, you can watch the ecliptic drift through the seasons, right before your eyes.
Back when I started writing this piece, I had to adjust my shoulders to parallel Brunns Road in order to be confident that I was facing east. In my beach house all I had to go was look out from my terrace and I was assured of a southern view. The architect had cooperated with geography to set my shoulders for me. I was looking south no matter what. The dawn began way to my left. The sun set way to my right. In winter I could follow the whole arc, no problem. In summer the sun’s first moments were partially blocked by my neighbor’s terrace. The sun’s last moments were partially blocked by my own kitchen. I had to move to the bedroom, or, lean over the railing, to see the last of it.
PPS I’ve got to stick in another memory, though this one has nothing to do with the ecliptic. I’d told David Tamerin that I’d accompany him to Atlantic Highlands to monitor the printing of his lithograph, Her Mind Moves Upon Silence, that I was publishing. David drives from Queens out to Long Beach, picks me up. We cross the Verizanno, head off into the wilds of New Jersey, bend over toward the coast ... David had talked me into letting him use an offset press. He assured me that everyone was doing it. What the hell, once you’re a whore you might as well be a whore.
... Never mind. Day’s end, we have a bite to eat. He shows me a scenic overpass, up by the old light house. There’s room for a car or two near the crest of the highlands. And there’s one of those public telescopes you put a coin into and get of couple of minutes of powerful looking. This machine was more like a telescope than like binoculars: well more than six or seven power. Not twenty, but powerful. I drop a dime (1977ish). I scan the distance. Oh, wow. There’s Coney Island. I can see the paint peeling on the Cyclone, see the cars sliding on the Wonder Wheel, see how sad the closed Parachute Jump looks. I pan right. Hey, I can see Rockaway just as well as I can see Brooklyn! I scan further right. Damn! That’s the Lido Hotel! I’m seeing the Lido closer than I ever saw it in person, closer than Saul Steinberg can ever have seen it, no matter how many times he painted it for The New Yorker.
Wait a minute: if I can see the Lido Hotel, then I ought to be able to see my own neighborhood, maybe my own apartment building. I panned back westward a tad.
Damn! I was looking in my own bedroom window! From a two plus hour drive away! I could see my love birds nuzzling and grooming each other. I could see my cockatiel looking all aone. I could see my waterbed with the sheets rumpled!
Atlantic Highlands was way more than one hundred miles on the odometer (and in New York traffic, that’s like two hundred miles), but had we gone by boat it was only about eighty miles.
Funny thing: after that day I started being able to pick out a hint of Atlantic Highlands from Long Beach. What I’d previously thought was pure sky over pure ocean actually betrayed a tiny hump of continent. And the binoculars confirmed it. It wasn’t just my imagination, my will to see with my naked eye the reverse of what I’d seen with a powerful instrument.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Tolerance
Recent societies increasingly teach that tolerance is good.
But it depends. If the Big Enders crack their eggs at the big end and the Little Enders crack their eggs at the little end, what difference does it make? The part of the egg that we’re interested in plops into the bowl or into the pan either way.
If one nanny warms the baby by wrapping it in a blanket, by holding in her arms, by patting and cooing to it, fine. If the other nanny warms the baby up by setting it on fire, should both practices receive equal preference? Should the cooing nanny be fired to make room for the fire setter?
Well, there are no fire-setting nannies. If there ever were, we got rid of them. We also got rid of Jesus, and Reich, and Leary, but who ever said we were a rose garden?
Specifically, the United States was founded with an emphasis on religious tolerance: meaning, the pilgrims crossed the Atlantic in order to dissent. They had already proved the lengths they’d go to to protect their dissents. That did not mean that they wanted to tolerate new dissent; but if they had to, in order to dissent, the Puritans, the Baptists, would tolerate the Quakers, and maybe even the Methodists. If the Founding Fathers had suspected that someday their words might come to apply to atheists, or to anarchists, or the Catholics, or to Jews, they would have had a cow.
Let me try to focus on just one thing for one moment: Catholics. The Church had proved the very bastion of intolerance. If you wanted to practice religious tolerance, obviously you couldn’t tolerate Catholics.
Now a group that the Catholics had conspicuously not tolerated was the Jews. Many a European country had no Jewish problem because they had no Jews. Any Jew who showed up was swiftly introduced to some cousin of the fire-setting nanny.
What knee-jerk thing can we expect a Catholic to say about a Jew? What’s the first thing that will pop out? The Jews murdered Christ.
Translate that: "The Jews murdered God."
Should any God-lover tolerate God’s murderers?
I don’t see how. I don’t see why.
But first shouldn’t the God-lovers prove that the Jews in fact murdered God?
Shouldn’t they first prove that God is a synonym for Christ? and that Christ is a synonym for Jesus?
And where do Catholics get the idea that the Jews murdered Jesus? My reading of the gospels suggests to me that the Roman governors did it, prodded a bit not by the Jews but by the Jewish priests of the Temple of Solomon.
Do Catholics want to burn the Roman governors? The Catholics are the governors of Rome.
Was the poor Jew who showed up in Lisbon, maybe in the Fourteenth Century -- maybe trying to sell some pig’s bone as a relic, maybe offering cheaper, better crucifixes -- a priest in the Temple of Solomon? at the time Jesus came to Jerusalem? I’d like to see that explanation.
But first, even before that, shouldn’t the God-lovers prove that they actually love God? (And I don’t mean by shouting it louder and louder.)
And whether or not they prove that they love God, shouldn’t they prove that the object of their love isn’t merely some imaginary artifact of their own semantics?
I am for tolerating Big Enders and Little Enders. As well, I am for tolerating the nanny who coos. And I am for tolerating any religion that can objectively demonstrate any couple of their basic tenets to be more real than hypnotizing themselves in the mirror.
Get your god to manifest to the un-hypnotized. Then: also get your god to demonstrate that his tenets are more sane than un-sane.
Then: the idea of religious tolerance might have some basis.
PS SW's comment is good and welcome. Take a look.
But it depends. If the Big Enders crack their eggs at the big end and the Little Enders crack their eggs at the little end, what difference does it make? The part of the egg that we’re interested in plops into the bowl or into the pan either way.
If one nanny warms the baby by wrapping it in a blanket, by holding in her arms, by patting and cooing to it, fine. If the other nanny warms the baby up by setting it on fire, should both practices receive equal preference? Should the cooing nanny be fired to make room for the fire setter?
Well, there are no fire-setting nannies. If there ever were, we got rid of them. We also got rid of Jesus, and Reich, and Leary, but who ever said we were a rose garden?
Specifically, the United States was founded with an emphasis on religious tolerance: meaning, the pilgrims crossed the Atlantic in order to dissent. They had already proved the lengths they’d go to to protect their dissents. That did not mean that they wanted to tolerate new dissent; but if they had to, in order to dissent, the Puritans, the Baptists, would tolerate the Quakers, and maybe even the Methodists. If the Founding Fathers had suspected that someday their words might come to apply to atheists, or to anarchists, or the Catholics, or to Jews, they would have had a cow.
Let me try to focus on just one thing for one moment: Catholics. The Church had proved the very bastion of intolerance. If you wanted to practice religious tolerance, obviously you couldn’t tolerate Catholics.
Now a group that the Catholics had conspicuously not tolerated was the Jews. Many a European country had no Jewish problem because they had no Jews. Any Jew who showed up was swiftly introduced to some cousin of the fire-setting nanny.
What knee-jerk thing can we expect a Catholic to say about a Jew? What’s the first thing that will pop out? The Jews murdered Christ.
Translate that: "The Jews murdered God."
Should any God-lover tolerate God’s murderers?
I don’t see how. I don’t see why.
But first shouldn’t the God-lovers prove that the Jews in fact murdered God?
Shouldn’t they first prove that God is a synonym for Christ? and that Christ is a synonym for Jesus?
And where do Catholics get the idea that the Jews murdered Jesus? My reading of the gospels suggests to me that the Roman governors did it, prodded a bit not by the Jews but by the Jewish priests of the Temple of Solomon.
Do Catholics want to burn the Roman governors? The Catholics are the governors of Rome.
Was the poor Jew who showed up in Lisbon, maybe in the Fourteenth Century -- maybe trying to sell some pig’s bone as a relic, maybe offering cheaper, better crucifixes -- a priest in the Temple of Solomon? at the time Jesus came to Jerusalem? I’d like to see that explanation.
But first, even before that, shouldn’t the God-lovers prove that they actually love God? (And I don’t mean by shouting it louder and louder.)
And whether or not they prove that they love God, shouldn’t they prove that the object of their love isn’t merely some imaginary artifact of their own semantics?
I am for tolerating Big Enders and Little Enders. As well, I am for tolerating the nanny who coos. And I am for tolerating any religion that can objectively demonstrate any couple of their basic tenets to be more real than hypnotizing themselves in the mirror.
Get your god to manifest to the un-hypnotized. Then: also get your god to demonstrate that his tenets are more sane than un-sane.
Then: the idea of religious tolerance might have some basis.
PS SW's comment is good and welcome. Take a look.
Proof: Proof Positive
That the world is the way it is is proof that no one has ever understood a word I’ve said.
That the world is the way it is, the human world, I don’t mean the natural world, is proof, proof positive, that no one has ever understood a word I’ve said.
Then again, that the world is the way it is, the human world, is also proof, proof positive, that no one has ever understood a word that Prigogine has ever said. Or Bateson.
Or Thoreau. Or Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare.
And certainly not Illich.
And absolutely not Jesus.
That the world is the way it is just might be proof that 90% of communication is illusory. The phatic part works, but substance seldom transmits.
That the world is the way it is, the human world, I don’t mean the natural world, is proof, proof positive, that no one has ever understood a word I’ve said.
Then again, that the world is the way it is, the human world, is also proof, proof positive, that no one has ever understood a word that Prigogine has ever said. Or Bateson.
Or Thoreau. Or Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare.
And certainly not Illich.
And absolutely not Jesus.
That the world is the way it is just might be proof that 90% of communication is illusory. The phatic part works, but substance seldom transmits.
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