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Could It Have Been Her Perfume?

March 20, 2009

Most don’t realize it, but there is more involved with a rich experience of a perfume than simple inhalation. If you rush it or force it, all is lost. In fact, it is best not to inhale at all. To maximize the olfactory uptake, especially of a really fine subtle sent, you let it flow through your nostrils of its own accord. Allow it to linger. Then maybe draw in more very gently and slowly. While keeping an eye on she off whom it floated.

The very old part of your brain that manages the sense of smell will conjure something up for you to combine with the view. Unfortunately the process often ends up feeling like inhaling screen or something out of Bosch. Get what you pay for, tart.

But sometimes when my wife walks past I’m left in a special sort of ethereal reverie. An unexpected existential elevation – transitory to be sure, but all the more effective for the fact. Oh yaaa. Wow! That’s who she is…

One’s sense of smell can be incredibly generative. The briefest waft can catalyze memories by the torrent. I remember once when my kids were very young I picked up a crayon and smelled it. A hallucination ensued of me in my youth with coloring books and my brothers at our kitchen table. Proust began his novel In Search Of Lost Time with the protagonist sniffing a small French cake called a Madeline which act brought forth such cerebration that seven volumes were required to get to the denouement.

Remember in Silence of the Lambs when Lecter first meets Clarice and says: “You use Evyan cream and sometimes you wear L’Air du Temps, but not today…”? It was a crucial part of the flic for a variety of reasons. We already knew that he was a beast, but then in that dungeon we learn that he was cultured and preternaturally discerning.

The choice of that particular scent was prescient. The name translates as “the air of the time” or zeitgeist in other words. The film went on to win five Academy Awards and could thus be said to have been at the leading edge of consciousness back then in the early nineties.

What in Lord’s name does that say about us? That millions around the world would pay good money (and still do) to watch a horrible cannibalistic psychopath? Does it numb or sensitize? It’s interesting to juxtapose Dr. Lecter and Hanna Schmitz (cf March 6 below). Few would find Lecter banal. Should that be reassuring in some way?

In the end, after his gruesome escape when he called Clarice from calm repose, how was it that his feelings toward her would have him say: “I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it”?

Could it have been her perfume?

Posted in Fashion, Film, Literature, Perfume | Leave a Comment »

Can’t Read It Out Of A Book

March 6, 2009

reader1

In the New Yorker Anthony Lane called the film version of The Reader “dramatic roughage”. Rex Read, in an advert pull quote, used the phrase “one of the most uplifting films of the year”. Wikipedia holds that the main theme has to do with how Germans have struggled to come to terms with the holocaust and what it did to postwar intergenerational tension.

That’s not what I got out of it. At all. Or rather, I guess I buy the above, but was nearly overwhelmed by something else.

For me it was a deeply troubling personification of Hannah Arendt’s observation that the perpetrators of the holocaust were in no way special. She called it the “banality of evil”. In fact, by either deliberate allusion or fortuitous coincidence, the main protagonist’s name is Hanna(h). Hanna Schmitz. Late in the book one even learns that Frau Schmitz became familiar with Arendt’s reportage of the Eichmann trial which led to the coining of that chilling phrase.

Frau Schmitz was a simple person who could not read and was ashamed of that fact. The shame led her to quit good jobs twice so as to avoid promotions and discovery. The first led her to take work as a guard for the SS at a concentration camp. The second to recall the first and leave her then current circumstance and the life of a young lover.

From the moment we meet her (which in story sequence is 1958) Schmitz appears to be a joyless working woman. Her apartment is quite spare and she works as a conductress on a streetcar. The highly publicized eroticism of her chance encounter and subsequent affair with fifteen year old Michael Berg is diversionary. Years later the mature man, our narrator, looks back and realizes that she’d had a “seductiveness that had nothing to do with breasts and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of her body”.

The story takes its name from her perusal of literature by a variety of means for first, other attempts at escape, but later for insight. She becomes absorbed, as do we…

Several years after her disappearance, Michael learned that her (literary and then physical) departures were not from the workaday world but instead from the memory of her complicity in the deaths of 300 innocents in the camps. There could though be no real escape. “…escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere”.

During her trial we watch as she, lone among her group of defendants, subconsciously struggles to understand why she did not unlock the doors of a burning church in which women and girls were penned. She had been instructed to keep order and that was what she had done. It had been her job. “What would you have done?” she asks the judge who did not respond. For himself or us.

One can only say what one thinks one would have done in a hypothetical situation. It is easy to be heroic from several points of remove. Look only to Cambodia and Rwanda and Srebrenitca for subsequent episodes of horror in which multitudes of common people chose not to break rank.

Just before her scheduled release from prison, Schmitz tells Michael that “no one understood me…and when no one understands you then no one can call you to account… Not even the court…But the dead can. They understand. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them or not. Before the trial I could still chase them away when they wanted to come.”

By that time she had taught herself to read and as indicated above had read the likes of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Arendt. She learned that the dead were many more than 300 and decided that if they understood she would join them to finally thus enable her own understanding. She hanged herself.

Only the film could be called uplifting and then only in the narrowest of senses. At the end of the movie (not the book) Michael begins to attempt to remove some of the distance between his daughter and himself by taking her to Hanna Schmitz’ grave and initiating a cathartic dialogue.

So, for his daughter there could perhaps be some measure of understanding. But not for us. It has happened again. And again. And again.

Posted in Film, Literature | Leave a Comment »

I Am Not Myself

February 27, 2009

That’s Swedish singer Karin Dreijer Andersson in When I Grow Up from her Fever Ray project. The video was directed by Martin De Thurah. DJ Dirt McGirk introduced me to the piece calling it stunning and mesmerizing. I agree.

From an initial brief placidity, the music quickly lets you know that something’s awry in suburbia. Rounding a corner we see a disheveled waif atop a diving board facing away. With contorted steps backward, she gathers strength and begins to writhe and sing as if possessed. The water initially trembles with potential, but soon roils to her incantations. She turns and communes with the water beast which displays its spiritual tumescence.

At the peak of the tumult we briefly see a man through glass darkly – a minder, intermediary, sacerdote there to make sure things don’t get out of hand. He’s like dark energy, the 70% of the universe about which we know nothing and looms large for the fact.

Spent, our shaman folds her wings and the water calms. Even though she did all of the work, it was good for us too and we’re newly invigorated.

Clearly this is not just a “silly little love song” or anything else we’ve previously seen or heard. (Well, at least not this 56 yr old technophobe.) And more than any other video I’ve seen neither meaning nor valence can be teased out of the lyrics alone. Here’s the first verse:

When I grow up, I want to be a forester

Run through the moss on high heels

That’s what I’ll do, throwing out boomerang

Waiting for it to come back to me.

It’s oracular. Like, say, the I Ching. Jung wrote in the introduction to the Wilhelm translation that “The heavy-handed pedagogic approach that attempts to fit irrational phenomena into a preconceived rational pattern is anathema to me.” Let it sift for a while, let the other side of your brain kick in. What does it mean to me?

Indeed, Andersson says that “half of what the songs are about is the subconscious… A lot of it is like daydreaming, dreaming when you’re awake, but tired. I try to write when I’m in that state.”

The piece brought immediately to mind African maskers – dancers wearing those beautiful/grotesque wooden masks seen in museums. They are fascinating and often spectacular objects in and of themselves, but purposeful and part of a larger whole in their use. Wearing one, a dancer says “I am not myself” meaning he/she has become the evocation of a spirit.

Perhaps enabling a rite of passage in this case. Try something out. Throw something out there. Wait for feedback…

Masks in museums are shorn of much decoration attendant to them when in use such as raffia, textiles, animal hides, feathers, leaves etc. Their makers say that “their work actually came from the spirits who revealed themselves in a dream or vision…”*

mask-2

Joseph Campbell wrote in his incredible Hero With a Thousand Faces that: “It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation”. I know Jung would agree, but probably also would an African dancer and Andersson herself.

There’s lot’s at stake. Close to the end she sings:

On the seventh day I rest

for a minute or two

then back on my feet and cry for you

Perhaps she needs our help. Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek wrote in his The Saviors of God “Gather your strength and listen: the whole heart of man is a single outcry. Lean against your breast to hear it; someone is struggling and shouting within you.”

At the very least, as the author of a tome on African Masks** says of them, cultural myths, and Fever Ray also “represent part of a larger cultural ethos”.

That old zeitgeist again. Where, exactly, are we? To enjoy one’s stay here it is important to be comfortable living in that question.

*African Masks from the Barbier-Mueller Collection

**Andersson is the mother of two young kids and all I know is that if I had seen my mom (or my kid’s mom) acting like that I’d think that she’d had too many of what the Stones called “mother’s little helpers”.

*** I once heard Kazantsakis’ widow speak. She said that he’d held that humankind’s biggest problems were the comforts of life and syphilis. The former, at least, seems to be taking care of itself these days…

Posted in Art, Literature, Music | 2 Comments »

From Iowa with Love

January 31, 2009

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The world looks different from a train. When you’re driving you have to concentrate on what’s ahead. Keep your wits about you. It’s fatiguing. You think in terms of starting point and destination. Fuel and fast food.

On a train you don’t look ahead unless you’re the engineer. You look out to the side upon the world as it is. No pavement, no bright lights. Just now it’s dusk, January, and we’re crossing the Mississippi. It’s frozen and covered with snow. There are several bald eagles low over the small bit of open water still looking for something to eat. I don’t envy them.

Now we are pulling through a small village and I’m reminded of Breughel’s winter scenes. In those pictures you watch people interact and think about what their lives might have been like. On a train, and in a museum, you can employ your mind to consider background, context, follow your thoughts wherever they might lead. It looks cold out there. I wonder if the people in that farmhouse are warm. Do they have to go out and feed their livestock again tonight?

Train travel is also a kinesthetic experience. Obviously one can rise and move about with much more ease than from the backseat or ‘the middle seat’. On a train you become part of the swaying and the rhythms. At modest speeds it feels like a saunter on horseback. Perhaps that’s why they’re called chemins de fer – paths of iron – in France.

Certainly, road trips can be really great for extended conversation. I’ve many, many very fond memories of being sealed in a vehicle with our whole family for hours on end. I’m sure my wife and kids would all agree those rides procured their own special sort of joy. Back in the days before cell phones…

But kids are scattered to all four corners of the earth (well three) and I’m sitting across from their mother enjoying her company. She’s sketching me which always sort of feels like, uhm, a homeopathic massage. Makes me feel like daydreaming…

“Everything conspired to make him sleep – the hasty metal gallop of the wheels, the hypnotic swoop of the silver telegraph wires, the occasional melancholy, reassuring moan of the steam whistle clearing their way, the drowsy metallic chatter of the couplings at each end of the corridor, the lullaby creak of the woodwork in the little room…”

“He looked down at the beautiful sleeping profile. How innocent she looked, this girl from the Russian Secret Service – the lashes fringing the soft swell of the cheek, the lips parted and unaware, the long strand of hair that had strayed untidily across her forehead and that he wanted to brush back neatly to join the rest, the steady slow throb of the pulse in the offered neck…”*

obama-plate-0101

Next morning we wake to the soft pink glow of first light upon the mountains. All is quiet but for the clickity clack clickity clack.

Range after range of mountains

Year after year after year.

I am still in love**

As we climb and draw near, lenticular clouds have formed and hover just above the ridge. How do they hang there like that?

Tunnel.

* From From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming

** Poem by Gary Snyder

Posted in Family, Literature, Travel | 1 Comment »

Expecto Patronum*

January 23, 2009

The headline of a recent Daily Mail from London tells us that: “Richard Dawkins warns Harry Potter could have ‘negative effects’ on children”. Dawkins is a recently retired professor from Oxford, scientist, and author of best seller The Selfish Gene. The book first came out in 1976 and has sold over a million copies in twenty-five different languages.

It is a very interesting look at evolution holding that the theory is best explained or understood from the point of view of a gene. They function alone or in combination with others with the sole purpose of ensuring their own replication. This usually, but not always, works to the benefit of the particular organism in which a gene exits.

An example of a case in which it does not is that of a male praying mantis in search of a mate. You probably know that the female usually eats the male after they’ve done the dirty. Too bad for him fer sure, but his genes made it to the pool whatever his consort might have had for lunch.

So why in the world would he worry about Harry Potter? As I’ve said (way) above, there are fundamentalists of all sorts of stripes. Indeed, Dawkins has been accused of attempting to establish a religion built around evolution. Being a prominent and very public atheist, he makes a very odd bedfellow for those mustering the clerical assault on Hogwarts.

Book bannings and burnings are nothing new of course. In fact those ashen pages make quite an august group. Leaves of Grass, Huckleberry Finn, Ulysses, and Civil Disobedience (!) just to name a few in English. Why not Cinderella, Snow White, and the Wizard of Oz? Hey, what about the witches in Macbeth? “Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble…” Hmmm. I’m gonna guess that those who get worked up about Harry Potter haven’t made it to Shakespeare.

Kids learn valuable lessons from fairy tales and other fiction. And are OK at reality testing. In his National Book Award winning (1977) The Uses of Enchantment psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote: “a child needs to understand what is going on within his conscious self so that he can also cope with that which goes on in his unconscious… It is here that fairy tales have unequaled value, because they offer new dimensions to the child’s imagination which would be impossible for him to discover as truly on his own.”

The problem with fundamentalist adults, it has long seemed to me, is that the words that leave their lips express desperate attempts to convince themselves that the doubts lurking deep in their unconscious are unfounded. And as Bettelheim continues: “When the unconscious material is repressed and its content denied entrance into awareness, then eventually the person’s conscious mind will be partially overwhelmed by derivatives of these unconscious elements, or else he is forced to keep such rigid, compulsive control over them that his personality may become severely crippled.”

They get stuck and never take up such important tomes as the one my thoughtful (and well yes perceptive) brother gave me for Christmas: The Encyclopedia Of Immaturity. There are approximately 240 entries. I’m already to page 18 which helps me brush up on “How to Make Noises Under Your Arm”. I’m trying to get each lesson down before turning the page, but I couldn’t help noticing that “The Case Against Chores”, “Here are Your Lifetime Goals”, “Be a Stapler Artiste”, “Do the Bubblegum Nose Bubble”, and “The Cas Aginst Gud Spelg” lie ahead.

My wife said it was the perfect gift for me. Also that my brother is better looking than am I as well as much handier. She hasn’t laughed at my new facility with the brachial noisemaker. Jeesh. I’ll get even once I master “How to Be A Rubber Band Ninja Warrior” and “How to Make an Air Puff Annoyer”.

*Expecto Patronum is a spell first used in the Harry Potter book Prisoner of Azkaban. According to Wikipedia it “Conjures an incarnation of the caster’s innermost positive feelings such as joy and hope…”

Posted in consciousness/psychology, Literature | Leave a Comment »

Grace Under Pressure

January 16, 2009

Once heard Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live being interviewed. Questioned about what made for the best guest hosts he responded “athletes” without missing a beat. He said that people like Michael Jordan were used to being in front of a demanding audience and performing under pressure.

He didn’t mention the tremendous work ethic that great athletes must also have. Or the ability to take mistakes in stride or worse – how to deal with “the agony of defeat”.

Youngest daughter played D1 soccer for four seasons. Team made it to the Big 10 championships her last season. Lost by one point to the eventual #1. They worked out from 7:00 AM to 10:00 AM and several hours late in the PM six days a week. And that was the off season. Seniors all graduated with honors.

She’s now in Aspen working at an exclusive club. Waitress/sommelier. Her first time in Colorado was during the summer before she was born. I remember being concerned for her prenatal wellbeing when we all hiked above the upper lift at Aspen Highlands. +12,000 ft. I worried that the thin air might somehow attenuate her potential to, well, smile.

Needn’t have worried. On her Facebook wall her brother’s post read: “Why is it that in every picture you look like you are having more fun than everyone else in the room?” In Sydney, Australia she and a friend won the grand prize at a karaoke contest singing “Born in the USA” along with the Boss. Who else could get away with something like that? In June of 2008? Her name comes from a Hebrew word meaning “source of joy” so maybe that’s it.

Lorne Michaels’ thoughts came to mind when we heard that senior staff at the club were favorably impressed with her performance. Maneuvering trays and bottles through a room crowded with demanding folks has to be easier than doing the same with a ball through a bunch of Amazons intent upon inflicting bodily harm.

These months have been a great opportunity for her to sift through her thoughts of the year she spent working at a fine winery in New Zealand. She’s just now begun evaluating graduate programs in viticulture and oenology. I was quite taken by her response to my question of what drew her interest thereto.

She said “Dad, you can’t cheat or lie. You can only do the best you can do with the soil and the grapes. The fact that a crucial ingredient, the weather, is completely beyond the vintner’s control only makes the work more interesting”.

Her first comment evoked a vision of the current scoundrels of Wall Street. I thought about how all of the ugly headlines must reverberate across the cerebrations of those with career choices not yet hardwired in.

Then it dawned on me that she was talking about farming and how, in any of its permutations, agriculture is the archetype for an honest living. For exactly the reasons she mentioned.

A few years ago some urbanite asked Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham why she lived in Iowa:

“Iowans respect work. When one comes to live and work here, from whatever corner of the globe, one realizes after a while that one is working amidst people who work hard, who work with their hands, who stand between land and sky, corn prices and weather, with determination and faith and courage and an uncluttered understanding of the value of work. When you sit down to work in their midst – you have a deep sense of their being at work in your midst. Whether it’s the farmland that surrounds us, or the small businesses struggling around us, writers in Iowa are encircled – and instructed – by all kinds of other real work being done… One can feel the rightness of a well-planted thing, the incredible hard work it takes to make it come to fruition, the miracles and the sweat and the patience and the technique – both literal and imaginary – are in fact poems or stories that carry in their marrow the values and the beliefs of that community…”

Yup, can take the girl out of Iowa, but can’t take Iowa out of the girl.

abby-stomping-grapes-1

The grapes of my body can only become wine

After the winemaker tramples me.

I surrender my spirit like grapes to his trampling

So my inmost heart can blaze and dance with joy.

although the grapes go on weeping blood and sobbing

“I cannot bear any more anguish, and more cruelty”

The trampler stuffs cotton in his ears: “I am not working in ignorance

You can deny me if you want, you have every excuse,

But it is I who am the Master of this Work.

And when through my Passion you reach Perfection

You will never be done praising my name.”

Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi 1207-1273

Posted in Business, Family, Farming, Literature | 1 Comment »

Think Responsibly

December 26, 2008

Balzac wrote: “Behind every great fortune lies a forgotten crime.” Combine that thought with Buffet’s “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked” and you a great take of the current financial landscape.

And while not quite completely systemic (thanks Mr. Buffet!) corruption and bad practice are, of course, rife. The headlines have never before been filled with such a torrent of tales of Ponzi schemes, corruption, bribery, self delusion, and disingenuity. Well maybe not never. Paul Krugman and others have compared this state of affairs with the collapse of the gilded age.

The financial arrangements at the bottom of the housing bubble, while maybe not criminal, were disastrously hair brained. Daughter traveled for a bit with several bankers from the UK who joked about financing their multi-continent peregrinations by means of liberal applications of their index fingers on the mortgage approval yes button. Nothing easier to spend or risk than someone else’s money.

Yet another case of “The Best and The Brightest” syndrome. Just like intellectual war planning and the development of weapons of mass destruction undertaken by highly educated elites to which I’ve referred several times. Another permutation of the Enlightenment conundrum.

This all brings to mind the last book of the letters of George Santayana that just came out. His most famous words: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” are not his only of interest. “Where parties and governments are bad, as they are in most ages and countries, it makes practically no difference to a community, apart from its local ravages, whether its own army or its enemy’s is victorious in war.” Will Durant wrote that “Santayana thinks that no people has ever won a war”

Santayana was a materialist – he thought the universe was mechanistic with humans well understood and explained by behaviorists. But it was a “buoyant” materialism in the words of Durant. The life of the mind was important to him. It is “man’s imitation of divinity”.

“My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests”. “…feeling attracted to the Church, feeling its historic and moral authority, and yet seeing that its doctrine is not true – in its “humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.”*

I’d be interested in hearing his thoughts now that we know that behaviorists didn’t get it right, that Thoreau’s Walden was richer and made much more sense than BF Skinner’s. How quantum physics and dark matter would inform his thinking.

I’d enjoyed renewing this old acquaintance over the course of the last few days until I came across this: “Some races are obviously superior to others…” Jeesh. He died in 1952 so I’d also like to ask him what he’d thought of the ‘master race’. He later wrote that: “Wisdom comes by disillusionment” so perhaps that’d be his answer.

I will conclude with a passage from The Once And Future King by T.H. White with which I often relate: “Long ago I had my Merlyn to help. He tried to teach me to think. He knew he would have to leave in the end. So he forced me to think for myself. Don’t ever let anybody teach you to think, Lance. It is the curse of the world.”

Yup, the ultimate mixed blessing.

*From a review of the book by Robert Richardson in the 12/20 – 21 WSJ

Posted in Business, Literature | Leave a Comment »

From The Heart

November 14, 2008

The clip is the opening spectacular from the Bollywood flic Dil Se. It neatly launches the story about an All-India radio reporter who becomes so infatuated with a mysterious and beautiful woman that he doesn’t realize that she’s a terrorist until it is too late. Way too late.

The film is dark, foreboding, and does not attempt to convey optimism about the potential for peaceful coexistence between and among India’s many ethnic and religious groups. The interwoven bits of romance lighten up the political part of the narrative in the same way that the fantasy of Tralfamadore does the story of the WWII firebombing of Dresden in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.

Dil Se was controversial when it came out in 1998 because it had only been a few years since a female suicide bomber had taken the life of Rajiv Ghandi. It failed at the box office in India. Since then it has been shown at many international film festivals and has drawn praise and a following.

I’m sure you’ll agree that the video is incredible on many levels. The music alone is wonderful and has become wildly popular around the world. It was employed by Spike Lee – to provocative effect – on the soundtrack of his Inside Man.

The music combined with the position of its performance – atop a train moving through rugged topography – makes what could be a dream sequence for a lyrical thrill seeker as well a poetic look at love.

He whose head is in the shadow of love

will have heaven beneath his feet.

Whose head is in the shadow of love..

Walk in the shadow.

Walk in heaven, walk in the shadow.

Culturally, it brings several things to mind. First, it would not seem odd or staged or maybe not even dangerous to Indians or people in much of the third world that passengers would be allowed to ride on the top of a train. Makes one aware of the existence of a spectrum of personal responsibility with abdication on one (our) end and self reliance on the other.

Secondly, it interesting to know that while Richard Gere was threatened with jail for kissing an Indian actress on the lips on stage at an AIDs awareness rally, it is apparently not there found unacceptably erotic that the dancer at the beginning of this movie initially lends her chest to the surrounding landscape and then sets her hips to swaying like, well, uh, if I went into the kitchen at home and my wife was moving thus I’d know what was on the menu. And my silverware would be ready.

Posted in Film, Literature, Music | Leave a Comment »

True

October 31, 2008

Hemingway wrote: “… a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weedfringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.”

What a way to go through life. If something is beautiful one should simply allow it to be so. There is beauty all around if you’re open to it – especially if out in nature’s throes. Your choice.

The river flows east and west here, a geographical anomaly with which I’ve never really become comfortable. (I guess it’s probably the reason I always carry a compass.) Rivers flow north to south in this hemisphere, right?

Anyway, at sunrise, over these particular few days of fall, this orientation of the landscape makes for an incredible display on my drive to work in the morning. Traveling west along its northern bank, the sun flames up over the horizon behind me and spectacularly engulfs our downtown some distance ahead as the river bends a bit southward – windows cracklingly ablaze and masonry all coppered up.

Each year, for a moment, I ask myself if it is that time of year, or might there really be a fire? I’m forced to turn off my radio and concentrate. Soon, I realize that it’s my bit of autumnal bliss and relax and sometimes even pull over. As I’ve said above, I’ve always enjoyed pyrotechnics.

Further along, just before my office, a wooded island blocks view of the river (as long as limbs are leafed). During these few days, by now several minutes past dawn, its canopy is burst ablaze, flames blowing about wildly, and spreading ever eastward.

These are events of existential relativity just like rainbows and, uh, the proverbial tree falling in the forest. You’re not there, they are fundamentally not seen or heard. The rainbow only occurs in the brain of one with vision and in the right place at the right time. Similarly, the tree may fall in the forest, but there is no sound if there is no tympanum upon which the sound wave for to fall.

Shame, crime, sin to miss or dismiss or – more – not to enjoy any such sweet “spot of time”.

Tip tops of trees

At dawn – peak autumn color

Like flames in a breeze

Posted in Literature, nature, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Poetry for Physicists

October 24, 2008

I don’t like to revisit the same issue – at least not directly – but, well, in an entry level undergraduate physics course I read a book entitled: Physics for Poets and I’ve thought ever since that there should also be something called Poetry for Physicists.

This came to mind recently while reading reviews of a new production of the opera Doctor Atomic which follows events leading up to the explosion of the first nuclear weapon in 1945. The libretto was assembled from historical documents by Peter Sellars. The end of the opening chorus goes like this:

A weapon has been developed

that is potentially destructive

beyond the wildest nightmares

of the imagination;

a weapon so ideally suited

to sudden attack

that a country’s major cities

might be destroyed overnight

by an ostensibly friendly power.

This weapon has been created

not by the devilish inspiration

of some warped genius

but by the arduous labor

of thousands of normal men and women

working for the safety of their country.

Certainly I am glad Hitler didn’t cook it up before we did and the several hundred thousand Japanese who perished probably did substitute for many thousands of Allied deaths. Somebody was going to figure it out and we’re lucky it was us.

What did take me aback though was that during a recent dress rehearsal the composer, John Adams, met with one of original scientists who told him: “I didn’t know a single person at Los Alamos who wasn’t enthusiastic about using it. Not a single person.”

I’m no military strategist and won’t attempt to suggest what better course of action might have been taken, but will state the obvious: with such terrible power must come responsibility and perspective. I wonder how that responsibility would have been managed if those with even the vaguest notions of what the ramifications of E = MC2 might be were versed in, say, ancient Greek literature.

For example, in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King the title character meets King Laius on the road to Thebes and kills him due to a prideful perception of disrespect. Only later does he find that Laius was his biological father. Or the Odyssey in which that title character lands himself a ten year detour by haughtily mocking the Cyclops who was able to use information contained in the taunt to exact revenge.

It isn’t a lack of knowledge or information that got those fellows into trouble, it was arrogance and a lack of humility. There is actually a name for the concept – hubris – and it is well to keep in mind. (Like every time I open my mouth!)

Perhaps those scientists would have been chastened by knowledge of the myth of Prometheus. He was the Greek god who gave fire to our ancestors and was punished by Zeus for having done so. Chained to a rock, his liver was torn out and eaten by eagles, only to have it grow back and torn out again day after day.

Or how about something more recent:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice. Robert Frost

As the pace of change ever increases discerning vision will only become more critical and as Nathalie Sarraute wrote: “Poetry is what makes the invisible appear”.

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The Subtle Landscape