Consumer side ethics.

I try not to participate in activities that I find reprehensible or that don't please me.  But sometimes, either from stupidity or advertising or coercion, I do the wrong thing.

I am, you see, a consumer side ethicist. I thought that the cars with 'Boycott Exxon' after the Valdez oil spill were absurd.  Ships have wrecked for years.  If one wants to avoid ship wrecks leaving oil spills, one shouldn't buy oil.  It could have just as easily been a Shell spill.

There was a day in late 1966 that I still remember vividly, when the young woman who was to be my wife and a very naive version of myself were standing on the corner of Michigan and Van Buren in Chicago and a new Caddillac Eldorado nearly ran us over.  I said at the time that I thought cars were a very poor method of daily transporation, and that I never wanted to own one.  I was about to make the worst moral decision of my life, and marry the poor girl.  It was a decision based on ignorance and advertising:  I would ask her to marry me, and when she said yes, to do the deed.  I was a gay man who didn't begin to understand what that meant, and everyone among whom I had grown up had advertised that marriage was a Very Good Thing.  Shortly after that, we were about to make a long journey and wanted to take all our loot--marriage does come with good loot--and my mother offered to buy us a car.  It seemed like something I might use occasionally, not as daily transportation, and it would make hauling all that stuff 3,500 miles easy.  So, I became a married car owner. I would remain married for more than 20 years and buy more cars than I can remember.  Indeed, I would try to find a sort of satisfaction in automobile ownership that I did not find in marriage.  (See Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride.)

Please consider this introduction a kind of confession, a revelation that I am often not very successful in avoiding situations that I find reprehensible or displeasing.  Indeed, after finally getting out of marriage, I would continue to buy cars from time to time for another fifteen years or so, although I was much better about not using them for my daily transportation.  I made a lot of trips to the east, west, and south coasts.

On September 11, 2001, however, I thought that oil had probably been a major contribution to the events surrounding the collapse of the World Trade Center, and I got rid of my car.  More research quickly convinced me that oil was mostly a side show to that event, but I found that not having a car was something I enjoyed, so I haven't had one since.  But I would not condemn anyone else who drives.  Ethics is a really strange human creation, ranging from genital mutilation to forbidding theft and demanding bombings. My position is simple: if you think something is wrong, don't do it.  If you think it's a good thing,  do it.  But don't impose your choices on others by force.  Circumcise yourself, but don't make it a legal requirement.

Soon after September 11, I found the reaction of the United States more reprehensible that the attack on the towers, so I decided to try to limit my support of the activities of the US government.  I simply limited my income to just below the minimal taxable amount.  Interestingly enough, despite what the advertisements might claim, I continued to have a very enjoyable life.  (And, I had a lot more leisure time.)

There was a time when I thought that Apple were an evil corporation, and despite their alluring advertising, I did not buy their products.  More research convinced me that they were not so bad as I had assumed, and I now have an iPhone.  But when I think some corporation or person really is evil, I try not to contribute to their success.  For instance, I think the local food co-op with its claims about being local and organic is just selling bullshit, and I almost never buy anything there.  But even then I am not pure.  They sell some short bread cookies that I buy about once a month.  And I don't hate the people who do buy there.

I am quick to recognize that I have the luxury to make these sorts of decisions because I live in a rich modern society which allows a lot of individual freedom.  I might complain about the coercion exercised by the United States government, but in the history of governments, it's pretty kind and gentle.  Still, it has the power to coerce, and there are many who would have that power as their own. 

It is the quagmire of the current US presidential campaign season that brings these thoughts to my mind and makes me think there might be some value in sharing them.  I find that nearly everyone 'participating in the debate', either as candidates or as voters, is happy to blame someone else for one's own actions,  and to punish the system that allows us choices for our own poor decisions.

As Plato reminded us long ago, Democracies can easily become the worst sort of tyrannies.  Ford can target me with advertisements to buy a new Mustang, but they don't send a mercenary to my door to force me to make a purchase.  Apple can spend millions telling me that my  life would be much richer with a new iMac, but they can't keep me from choosing Samsung or even, god forbid, digital isolation. But the government has the power to coerce. 

The genius of the American system was that the the framers of the Constitution recognized the dangers and tried to put in place restraints to that power, to protect the rights of minorities.  Now those would would use the American system only recognize minorities as voting blocs who are expected to be indebted to the candidate who promises them the biggest benefits at the expense of someone else.  Minority thoughts are to be banned from public discourse. 

I thought long about whether to say 'the genius of the American system was' rather than 'has been'.  I hope I have made the wrong choice, and that there might be a return to a society supporting individual responsibility for one's own choices.  I certainly have made some very poor choices over the years, and I could easily try to blame 'the system'.  But the truth is that when i have made poor choices, it was because I did not make the effort to think through what I was really doing and who would benefit.  It's easy to yield to stupidity, popular to yield to advertising, and sometimes it seems necessary to yield to coercion.  But I'm a perhaps foolishly optimistic old man who thinks that resistance is not futile. So, if you want a new Cadillac, go for it.  Just don't try to make me buy one, too.

The [Dis]United Statees Are not like Sweden; They're like the Holy Roman Empire

States.  Despite the efforts of and outcries of dozens and hundreds of folk who want 'national unity', with methods ranging from Mr. Lincoln's cannons and cannon fodder to Ms. Klobucher's magic woman sauce, the United States are not very united,  They are very diverse.  (I find it odd that it is often people who claim to be celebrating 'diversity' are most offended by that diversity.)

I watched as much of the 'Democratic Debates' as I could stomach last night.  (I am happy that there will probably not be any 'Republican Debates' this year, except perhaps as a Twitterstorm.)  Once again, folk were comparing the United States to other countries.  Denmark came up last night.  Denmark has a population about as great as South Carolina, and an area a bit larger than Delaware.  Eighty-six per-cent of the population is ethnic Danish.  Seventy-four per-cent are Evangelical Lutherans.  It makes more sense to compare Racine, Wisconsin, to Denmark than to compare the whole conglomerate of fifty states with who-knows-how-many ethnic and religious and  however-else we identify ourselves this week, to Denmark.

Often political candidates will compare, for instance, education in the United States to some particularly small and rich and unified European state, in an effort to impose their ideas for education reform on the country.  But of course there is no single level of educational system in the United States.  If one compares, say, California or Massachusetts to those European countries, things are pretty similar.  No aspiring politician whom I have heard has boasted about how much better the education in the United States is compared to India, another country with great diversity across regions. 

I am too lazy to go too far into my analogy of the United States and the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted much longer in its own faltering and evolving way than the United States has, and which most of us only know from Voltaire's quip about that Reich at the end of its life:  it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire.  But if we consider that Empire as having existed from 800 with the coronation of Charlemagne until 1806 and the abdication of Francis after being defeated by Napoleon (an irony in itself), there was never a time when it was truly what it claimed to be.  By the time the last pagans in the Baltic states were 'converted' in the Northern Crusades, Lutheranism was creeping in.  One might argue that at least some of the emperors spoke Romance languages, but Francis was Franz and spoke German.  (One concept of the empire understood  it as the secular arm of the Papacy, and the Pope was usually in Rome.)  And empire?  Well, that term was mostly window dressing, chosen in envy of the real Roman Empire.  The Holy Roman Emperor was even less secure in his position than the emperors of Rome, and the Empire was composed of a conglomerate of 'states' and 'principalities' and 'powers' that ranged from towns and colleges to real princedoms and duchy's.  What united them?  Mostly elaborate webs of mutual defense and delusions of grandeur. All under the banner of a double-headed eagle.

If the American eagle were to more accurately depict the United States, it would be hydra-headed.  What is holiness in the United States?  One need only listen to the candidates describe each other as unholy to conclude that there is nothing holy here. (His brother-in-law claims that Mr. Buttigieg would lead the country into 'unholy directions', which I guess are different from, say, the sacred directions of the Hopi, who consider themselves the only holy people in the country.) At one time the 'Rights of Englishmen' more or less constituted a consensual backdrop to political discourse in the United States that might be compared to Roman Law in the discourse of the HRE, but Louisiana has the Napoleonic Code, much of the Southwest has property laws based on Spanish colonialism, and there are growing segments of the population who have no background in anything European at all.  (Except, perhaps, a yearning to be free. Yes, Virginia, Islam is a thing.) And international empire?  Well, empires usually receive tribute, not dole out foreign aid.  Certainly the United States is an immense world power with a lot of clout, but if it's an empire, it's one of the kindest and gentlest yet. 

Rather the empire of the United States is a domestic one, with the federal powers striving always to gain more control, with a steady stream of the sorts of people Plato said should never be given power, seeking to hold power. There are pockets of resistance:  the succession movement and the Confederacy was one; asylum cities are another.  Always the imperial powers fight back, sometimes with punishment, such as stripping the rights of citizenship from Robert E. Lee (Lincoln did pardon him from criminal prosecution, but it was not until the Ford presidency that his citizenship was restored.) or the banishment of Edward Snowden.  For most of the citizens of the empire, it has seemed that bread and circus has been enough.  This go-round, the Republicans seem to be ahead i circuses while the Democrats argue over who will give us the biggest loaf of bread. 

One great success of the American Empire is of course 'to provide for the common defense'.  Fortunately for Mr. Eisenhower when he was leading the allied Forces in Europe, he had the US military-industrial complex pumping out B-29's and B-24's and M4 Shermans.  If there's not a real enemy, most presidents are happy to invent one.

Then there's the delusion of grandeur.  I keep trying to imagine John Adams getting out of Air Force One, or playing golf at the expense of the country. 

Noah's Green New Deal

It has been raining.  Not forty days and forty nights yet, but close enough.  Several of my neighbors have been complaining that the rats are climbing on board their arks.  No rats have made it into my little craft, which I think is pretty snugly closed, but a bit of water has made it in.  When my gopher wood dries out a bit, I need to get me some of that pitch, which i hope will work on the without.  Pitching within tends to keep water hidden in places one doesn't want water.

It strikes me that the story of Noah and the ark is one of the earliest examples of some crisis for which humans in our hubris are hasty to take the blame.  (I wonder if the rats are telling their youngins that the rain is the result of their over indulgences.)  It often tends to be some some person in power who is jealous of anyone else's having power who points out the crisis.  In the time of Noah it was the Lord God himself who made the announcement, although it would be a few more years before he bragged about his jealousy for power. 'And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.  And God said to Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them, and behold, I will destroy them with the earth.'

So Noah set out to obey the radical plan to fix the earth.  It must have felt pretty good to be one of the very few good guys.  He built the ark, supplying it with enough natural, organic food for the duration, took on board all the animals of the earth, although giving a head to start to the clean animals (and feeling pretty special since it would be a while before the lists of clean and unclean animals would be published for general knowledge).  God apparently wanted the number of species, at least on land, to be stable.  It seems that fundamentalists, whether then or now, don't trust evolution to allow for changing conditions.

Anyway, the floods came, the floods went.  The ark landed on a mountain. There was a rainbow.  God  was easily pleased by the smell of burnt offerings and promised that next time he destroyed the earth, he would use something besides water.  Happy ending, right.  Well, no, not really.

Noah's first crop was grapes, and he got drunk and naked.  And he cursed his only son who was honest enough to point out that the emperor was naked. 'Speaking truth to power' is often dangerous.

Then of course things went on pretty much the way they always do, just as they had before the flood.  Now I keep hearing that once again 'the end of all flesh is come'.  This time it is said that we have twenty years, and the earth will end not in water but in heat.

Now, I am not a climate change denier.  Climate change is an observable, measurable phenomenon.

As recently as 20,000 years ago, the bit of rather soggy land I occupy was under ice.  The climate is becoming warmer, although at a varying pace, and it does certainly seem that now it is getting warmer fast.

What I don't accept is that such change is a crisis.  Human beings, as well as many other species, have been around for a good long time, and we are very adaptive.  What the fearful call our corruption of the moment is carbon dioxide.  But carbon dioxide is necessary for life on this planet, and as it increases, so does plant life, which absorbs it and releases oxygen.  The climate is a very complex system which we hardly understand at all.  It has never been stable, no more than there has ever been a stable number of species on the earth.Were that most famous group of species, the dinosaurs, unclean, while we are clean?

Nor do I accept that we must respond with radical measures that will limit the growth of well-being for everyone except the chosen few.  Yes, I know, there are all those scientists who are quite happy to go along with the popular fears.  Fear pays well.  Ninety percent or whatever of scientists are often wrong.  Advances in human knowledge are almost always made by rebellious sorts who say things like 'nevertheless, it does move.' More than ninety percent of the scientists of Galileo's time, after all, were certain, based on their best science, that the sun moved around the earth. Facts are not really determined by popular vote.  I tend to distrust anyone who is willing to make bit statements about a system so complex as the climate of the earth.

If climate change continues as it is tending now--and there are some data from NASA which suggest that we are really heading into a much colder period because of a cooling in the activity of the sun--then it will displace a lot of people, and we will need more acceptance of our differences and less fear of change much more than we need more acres of solar panels, which I suspect we will soon recognize to be at least as destructive as internal combustion engines and cow farts.

If the cunning plan of the Lord God Almighty to purify the earth failed  (for the documentation of that failure, read the Old Testament writings that followed the story of Noah), I doubt that the cunning plans of a truant teenager and a cocktail waitress would be more successful.  Such plans almost always punish far too many innocent people. I would suggest that we need more open discussion, without Facebook demonetizing or taking down people who are brave enough to say, 'yet it still moves.' If the shit hits the fan, it will take more than some seed bank in Antarctica, almost certainly inaccessible and filled with seeds suitable for a climate which will no longer exist, but which we have built as a contemporary Noah's arc, to recover.

I am reminded of another boat besides the ark, which has also come to have a place in the literature of western civilization, a small ship indeed:

'And when they had sent away the multitude, they took him even as he was in the ship.  And there were also with him other little ships:  And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full.  And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow, and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish?  And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still.  And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.  And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful?  how is it that ye have no faith?

I would suggest that there is indeed a powerful storm of fear around us these days, a storm to which almost none of us are willing to speak, a storm which few of us are even willing to name.  That is why I was pleased when Patty Murray, the Senator from this little soggy bit of once-glacier-covered land on which I perch, was willing this week to name the substance that pollutes the atmosphere of contemporary American politics as fear.

But I am a foolish old man who still has faith in the ability of humanity to gather our boats together and go out into the unknown,  I do not expect us to perish unless we abandon the search for knowledge and surrender to the gnawing rats of fear.  But that is why when I last had a boat of my own, I named it for St. Brendan.

A footnote, being a quote from Vikram Mansharamani's essay 'Navigating Uncertainty:  Thinking in Futures' in John Schroeter, ed., After Shock (Bainbridge Island, 2020), p. 15:  'Nobel Laureate Ken Arrow eloquently captured the desire for predictions in recalling his work for the US Army Air Force.  Despite concluding that the weather predictions upon which his superiors relied were entirely useless (i.e., statistically random, no better than a guess), he was rebuffed, told that "The Commanding General is well aware the the forecasts are no good; however, he needs them for planning purposes."'

Free will? Drawing 'my' Life

There are a few questions that have kept freshmen college students up into the wee hours of the night around their campfire or their beer or their coffee for millennia:  Is there one or are there many?  Is there an objective reality? Do we have free will or is everything predetermined?

 It's been nearly a millennium  since I was a college freshman, but I still find myself pondering on such things as I am trying to drift off to sleep.  (Cue Puck.)  And just last night a much younger friend asked me whether I thought we had free will.  I evaded answering him by saying that I had been thinking of making a blog post on the question, and here's that blog.

I had been reminded of the question when on the fiftieth anniversary of Albert Camus' death a few weeks ago I had started to reread The Rebel.  I did not devour it as I had when I discovered it just before I entered college.  It's not so much that we mortals become less foolish in our old age, but that, in my case, I become more and more lazy.  Camus is not for the lazy, nor for the faint of heart, nor for those who do not take seriously the uses of suicide.  Besides, I can no longer buy Gauloise cigarettes nor can I afford a Facel Vega to go out in style.  If I were to run my bicycle into a tree,  I would probably just be sore for a few days and have to repair my bicycle.  It would not be breaking news.  Still, such an act would be a major event in my own life, I suppose.

Such thoughts always remind me of one of the dozen or so days I can remember from being in the first grade, when first I found myself a 'freshman' of sorts.  My favourite activity in the first grade was what Miss Wilson called 'coloring'. when she passed out big sheets of newsprint and we got to 'color' whatever we wanted with our little box of Crayola crayons.

Only now do I think I begin to understand why I liked coloring best.  It was one of the few times when we had, to my six-year old's eyes, a sheet of large paper without lines.  Most of the time we had to use BlueHorse notebooks with solid lines for large letters and dotted lines for small letters and spaces between each line of our carefully printed words, which I managed no less sloppily nor with better spelling than I do now.

But I think equally important was that coloring was one of the few activities we could do on our own.  Everything else was in groups.  I had been reading for three years, exploring with my beloved encyclopedia a world far beyond the one On Cherry Street. Group work was boring.  Coloring was one of the few times during the day when I was free.

I still remember vividly my embarrassment the day my grandfather visited and Miss Wilson asked me to recite the alphabet.  I did of course know my ABC's, but I did not want to do such 'baby stuff' in front of my grandfather.  (I learned many years later that the reason my grandfather visited my first grade class, something he never did after I was 'promoted', was that he and Miss Wilson were having an affair. I still thought things happened that were about me.)

The most vivid memory I have of the first grade, however, was the day when we didn't color.  As the time for the fina; bell approached, I timidly lodged  the first of what would become many complaints against the shackles of education.  'But Miss Wilson,' I blurted, as we got out some boring reader or speller when it was only thirty minutes to the bell, probably without even raising my hand, I was so affronted, 'we haven't colored.'  Her response was terrifying:  'We can't color every day, Dale.'

Whether what happened next is a true memory from that day or if I have added it as I have rewritten my life to make me the hero, I don't know.  But in my own private heroic saga, I thought, 'I can.'  And I have in different ways tried to color every day since

It was a minor act of rebellion, but one that has often comforted me. There have been periods of my life when I have made very elaborate journals with colors and pictures and special bindings.

More often of late I do my coloring on one of my series of tablet computers that I love, freeing me from a bag of pens and markers and bits of paper and glue sticks.

Sometimes I have gotten all nostalgic for the old days of smelling the markers and licking the glue off the tips of my fingers and tried paper again for a few days, but I always end up just photographing those attempts and returning to the 21st century.

And very often, I confess, I am lazy as fuck and I just use a journaling app, which lets me add some art work--some bit of coloring--of my own but which I often just accompany with a photo from my smart phone, which has pretty much replaced that old box of Crayolas.

But. And it's a big 'but'.  It is very easy for small, repeated acts that were once rebellious to become a comforting crutch, a numbness (Cue Pink Floyd) which lets me ignore situations which are much more limiting to my freedom.  Or, if I don't ignore them, I ignore that there's only a short time until the bell will ring and there will be no more time for any activities.  The big example of this in my own life was marriage.  It was wrong for me first because I am gay, and being married to a woman, even a beautiful and talented and kind woman, was just wrong in every way.  But I colored.  I made pottery until the numbness had set in.  After I, finally, was divorced, leaving a trail of havoc behind me, because saying one is sorry changes nothing, I immediately entered a marriage-like relationship with a man, a beautiful and talented and kind man.  It was only when he asked me to marry him that I realized that I really preferred solitude.  But I said I would think about it, and I colored, making graphic art and such as the numbness set in.  Finally he realized before I did that my heart preferred a big sheet of news print to a neat notebook with lines and set me loose.  I like to think that there was less damage left behind that time.

Now, as I finally get towards the end of this ramble, I realize that it has done nothing to answer the question of free will versus determinism.  I thought I was making choices, even when I made foolish choices.  But of course the hardcore Calvinists out there will just say that those choices were predetermined, so, duh.  What I have found valuable about my daily coloring--I even have somewhere a Deviant Art account called The Daily Crayola--is that at best it helps me notice the choices I am making.  The much younger friend who asked me about free will also asked me what I would like to change about my life, what I would like to do differently in the at least near future.  I described what must have seemed to him like a very boring routine day, and said that I didn't see it changing much in the future except that I will spend more time at the beach as the days become longer.

I no longer hope to make a big impact on the world, but as I look at things that make big impacts on the world, I find bomb craters to be as prevalent as the iPhone, so perhaps it's better that I was kept in check, especially when I was younger and angrier.  I have come to convince myself that even if I hadn't married, even if I had gone to school in New York rather than Chicago, even if I had kayaked to Alaska rather than to Olympia, or down the Amazon rather than down the White, I would, had I survived, probably have a very similar routine to what I do now.  It is a routine which allows me to explore new thought and discoveries from new people every day, people whose lives make group activities much more exciting than reading On Cherry Street,  people whose ideas are as close as my bookmarks bar, limited only by my own editing.

I still color every day.  My palette is augmented far beyond the eight choices in that first box of Crayolas, even if my talent isn't.

What, if anything, has changed over the years, is that in my second (or third of fourth (Cue your gentle poke, gentle reader, at my childishness.)  childhood I am almost always aware that the clock is ticking ever closer to the last bell.

Getting Old, Letting Go

I took all of my Nintendo paraphernalia to GameStop recently and sold the lot. I could almost certainly have gotten more money if I had sold all that cool stuff on line, but I am lazy, I don't want to bother with haggling with people, and I didn't want to be tempted to keep any of it. I became intrigued with The Legend of Zelda several years ago as a sort of exploration in religious history. Zelda has a canon, pseudopigrapha, lore and legend, saints and historians and hagiographers. I found it fascinating to be able to study such an intellectual system that was, being only thirty years old, completely accessible. And, being a hardware junky, I bought several Nintendo consoles and games besides Zelda. Video games are, as not only I am aware, an important part of recent art history.

But, I found myself rather Zelda-ed out. I have been exploring Tamriel lately, the local of the Elderscrolls, rather than Hyrule. I was tempted to keep the Zeldoid devices as a prompt for comparative religious history, but there is so much Zelda material online that it's not really necessary. So, now someone else can enjoy the beautiful hardware that I have so enjoyed. These were things that gave me joy, but which I did not use.

At my age, I can look back over a wide range of collections of beautiful things that I no longer have: telescopes (four); cars (I don't even remember how many); kayaks (16); books (probably around  20,000); pottery (tons--there was a time when often gave sit-down dinners for 30 or more people.) I have friends who are hoarders, who have bits and pieces of as many parts of their past as they can hold onto in closets and shelves and attics and storage units, or scattered around the yard, because those things might be useful again, or because they are connected to important memories. My tendency to buy whole collections of things when I have an interest in a new subject I suppose I copied from my father, who was an avid hobbyist, but with serial hobbies. My ability to let them go must be from my mother, who would haul out almost anything if it wasn't nailed down, and if it was she might call 911 for help prying it loose. Who knows what she did with my telescopes and microscopes that I left at home when I went off to college. (I don't think she had any idea of what I had spent for those wonderful instruments. If she had, I think she would just have thought me foolish, but it probably wouldn't have kept her from clearing them out.)

The GameStop guy asked me, when he told me how little he could offer for my New Nintendo 3DS XL, if I wanted to keep. It was the second one I have bought, I gave the first one away to a kid whom I thought to need it more than I, but then Zelda-nostalgia convinced me to buy another one for at least The Ocarina of Time. I told him no. If I kept it, I would re-buy Majora's Mask, and A Link Between Worlds, and then I would just feel guilty because I didn't play them.  Abstinence is easier than moderation.

What I realize more and more is that I have plenty of stuff, both to enjoy and to do, but I am running out of life. I can buy just about anything I want, except for a Diamond DA 50--and more time. So, letting go of things that I might feel I should use frees me to do things that I enjoy more, that provide more joy now.

There is always a temptation, it seems, to go back. One of my current obsessions is the life and work of Cy Twombly, a painter I found fascinating when I was in high school but who sort of felt off my horizon when I moved to Chicago with the glorious clutter of the artists at the Art Institute.  When Twombly was 66, he began to spend more and more time in his home town of Lexington, Virginia. He did, however, keep exploring new ways to paint.  He seemed to enjoy the comfort of his history in Lexington, but he did not let himself become tied to it.

I am older than Twombly was when he returned to Lexington, and I understand the attraction of the past.  If I had as much money as Twombly, I might go back to the old country and buy a little place so that I could take vacations in the past.  But I don't have enough money, as Twombly did, to keep a place in the past and another couple of places in the present.  However, in the eight years since Twombly died, the internet has expanded fast enough that I can visit, at least visually, the little house I almost bought the last time I revisited the old country.

The house belonged to a woman for whom I worked as a sort of yard- and handyman when I was in high school.  I know how beautiful its rear garden is, with the first French doors and loggia that I ever saw. It was for sale about twenty years ago, and I almost bought it.  But I didn't.  Now I can look at it and be happy that I don't have to keep up the yard.  I can look at it and be happy that I don't have to endure the heat of its summers.  I can look at it and let go of a life that has become as imaginary as Hyrule, as imaginary as the images in Google Street View.  My present life may not be magnificent, but it is enough to keep me surprised each day by all the riches that present themselves.  It is enough to keep me up past my bedtime trying to cram more in each day.  I am at a stage of life and the world is at a stage of history when shell shock is the  pretty much the common condition of us all (Cue Alvin Toffler).  And yet I try to cram more in each day until my heart stops beating. I understand the attraction of the old.  But I also know that the old ain't there any more. Let it go.

The True Meaning of Christmas

(Spoiler:  I would never tell, even if I knew it. I like mysteries.)

A few weeks ago I had lunch with three Buddhists.  (Four if one counts the woman who had been a Buddhist but who now had dementia so that she didn't much participate in the conversation, although I wonder if she didn't best exhibit the true Buddha nature.)  It was an interesting lunch in many ways.  They were each students and practitioners of different Buddhist traditions, so much of their talk was about those differences.  They were all pretty advanced in their practices.   I kinda led them along for a while, showing as much innocence as I can muster before admitting to having been a practicing Christian priest. So for a while we shared stories of how many divergent/converging paths there are in the two religions, and of how many of the daily practices could be similar.

The ultimate question of the lunch was directed at me.  (I had been the one asking most of the questions most of the time.):  Did I still 'believe in' Christianity?  Not being sure what each of them might mean by Christianity, I said I would answer that question in terms of whether I thought that the Symbols of the Nicene Creed were true.  And I said, of course I didn't.  I mean, what does it mean, 'light from light'?  And wouldn't things be things become terribly cluttered with 'the resurrection of the dead'?  And I said that, of course I do.  It is a beautifully consistent and elegant way to express the relationship between the parts of the world, the causes and effects, and only claims to be dogma, that is, the best we can do to express the inexpressible.  Then we traded phone numbers and said we would meet again and have coffee--or tea, in the case of those non-believers who only drink tea.

But of course, we haven't, and I had forgotten about that conversation until I tried to watch a video stream of the Advent Lessons and Carols from Washington National Cathedral.  I did pretty well until the Dean of the Cathedral replaced the traditional bidding prayer for Lessons and Carols, which is about our listening to stories and praying for the world, with asking God to tell us the 'true meaning of Christmas'.  At that point I gave up, because I knew what followed would not be the wonderfully complex, multivalent ambiguities of a collection of stories from many places and times combined with songs from many places and times that reflect on those stories but an attempt to make the meaning of Christmas that we should elect Elizabeth Warren president of the United States.  Now, I could live with someone's suggesting that electing such a person president might be congruent with the meaning of Christmas.  But I can't accept that it is possible to  to reduce Christmas to one meaning, to claim that there is true meaning of Christmas and that we err to expand the feast to include pagan practices like yule logs and trees from old non- or ore-Christians sources or non-, post-Christian urban practices like stealing the baby Jesus from the nativity scene in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, or lighting the front of Saks in New York. 

If we really do believe in 'One God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible,' then we are  stuck with a lot of things that we find difficult to accept as true, such as Santa Claus being at one time in every department store in the developed world and coming down chimneys in houses with steam heat.  But, hey, if you think you understand quantum physics, then you don't understand it.

So, I would suggest that when someone tells you 'the true meaning of Christmas', smile, because that would perhaps 'rejoice [the Christ Child's] heart', and then put that meaning in a bag of gifts to ponder.  Be careful when you smile, though.  Someone might think you are the Buddha on the road and kill you.  But even if that happens, you can still look for the resurrection of the dead.

The Joy of Failure

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or, what's a heaven for?

Last night, a friend and I watched Dolemite is My Name, a movie about making a movie, Dolemite.  Afterwards we stood outside and smoked a cigarette and my friend wondered where the planets that are in alignment with the moon were.  He's kinda woo-woo and into astrology.  I pointed to the ground to the southwest and said they were set.  'How could I know that?' he asked, and took out his phone to check with an app.  I said that the moon is new, and therefore close to the sun, which had set about five hours earlier, and since it's winter it would be towards the south and not just the west.  We talked whether Venus was on this side of the sun or the far side.  (It's the far side, and I used an app for that.)  He wondered how I could know that.  I recounted the tale of my adventures as an amateur astronomer when I was in high school, of the telescopes I built and used, back in the dark ages when there were no apps for anything.  He was impressed and said that I could have been something, a reference to the theme of the movie about achievement being possible for those who really work for achievements.  I said that I had never wanted to be something, but to know something,

That statement is not completely true.  Like Dante , 'In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.'  For an unfortunately long number of years after high school I tried to be a average American husband/citizen.  Wife.  Kids. Dogs. Cars.  As Zorba would say, 'the whole catastrophe.'  Oddly, perhaps, one of the most satisfying things of that period of my life was a Jeep Wagoneer.  In McLuhan's terms, this was an exceedingly powerful extension of myself, a strong carapace.  But, alas, it was a dominatrix, costing more than I could really afford and being quite unreliable.

But, in my forty-first year, I returned to the path of an aimless wanderer seeking data.  I again made discovering facts and ideas the main occupation of my life rather than seeking 'success."

Of course, I had accumulated a lot of facts and ideas even while I was in servitude to the American dream.  There's data everywhere.  One odd piece of anecdotal data is that when my wife and I broke up, several people expressed their dismay because they thought that we were the happiest couple they knew.  I'm not sure if that meant that we were very good actors or that a lot of other people were miserable in their journeys.

It would take a few more years before I stopped feeling vaguely guilty about not being some thing and comfortable with wanting to understand things.  I supported my habits with a number of quite assorted jobs because that let me know a lot of assorted people whom I would never have met if I had stayed glued to the oculus of a telescope.  (Although now astronomers mostly look at screens much like the one I'm using to look at my 'writing' now.)

I didn't really figure out what I keep trying to do until about six years ago when I had dinner in Fayetteville with a friend from high school whom I had hardly seen since graduation.  He is very successful in his craft, has plenty of work which he enjoys, and has also made several millions of dollars along the way.  He mentioned another of our class mates whom I had found somewhat loathsome, who was now the second richest man in Arkansas.  I felt rather sorry for him.  He still has wretched taste in cigars, and he was only the second richest man.  My dinner friend , who recognized that I had not made any millions but was too polite to mention it even though he insisted on paying the bill, saying he could put it on his expense account, had a question for me.  What did I want my legacy to be.  That has proved to be a very helpful question.  I told him that I didn't particularly want to have a legacy, that in the long view of history most of what we consider are great events and great people are just blips.

But, I have thought about that question a lot, because I realize that I am on a quest that cannot be successful:  I want to understand how things work.  (At the time my friend and I had dinner, I had gone to the University of Arkansas thinking I would learn about quantum physics. Ha. Cue Dick Feynman.) Who knows:  someday human beings may understand how things work, but I certainly don't expect to live that long.  But in the meantime, I am enjoying watching the process.

I am not, however, often impressed by men who leave big legacies.  The cell phone almost certainly have been developed even if Tony Nadell had not nudged Steve Jobs to push Apple in that direction.  The theory of relativity was just waiting for someone like Albert Einstein to connect the dots left by many others whose names and equations are not famous.  And slavery in the United States would almost certainly have ended without Abraham Lincoln allowing the war that killed 620,00 people, a few of whom are buried under the snow on a hill overlooking Fayetteville in the Confederate cemetery.  (There are many more folks buried in the US cemetery, but it isn't nearly so picturesque and doesn't encourage reverie and reflection.)

Now another winter is beginning.  It is certainly far past the middle of the journey of our life.  And by the standards of becoming famous like Dolemite or making astronomical discoveries like Virginia Trimble, someone else who looked into the skies as a kid, I suppose I am a failure.

But, I am insofar as I can figure it out, living my own life.  I don't want to be rich; I have enough money even though perhaps if I were to do my life again I would have realized that I might live a long time and gather up enough gold to live in New York where I could go to the MoMA and the Guggenheim.   But even if I dd, most of my time would be spent the same way it is now in the other corner of the country.  I don't care about being famous. I just want to follow the devices and desires of my own heart, realizing that that will as often as not lead to disappointment and failure as to joy.  But why settle for being the second richest man in Babylon when I can reach for the heavens.

But I do think that I might now wish to have a legacy.  It would be to encourage any kid I meet, whatever age, to live his or her own life and avoid distractions.  Even if that kid is someone I rather loathe and who wants to be the richest man in Babylon.  It's his own life, too.