LDSoterica

Auld Lang Syne

2009-12-31T20:59:00.005-05:00

Here in the Eastern Time Zone, it's three hours before midnight, and I'm counting the minutes until the end of 2009 and this entire decade (yes, I know; technically the decade doesn't end until next New Year's Day, but why fight the almost unanimous delusion?). The last ten years have been simply calamitous both on a personal and on a global level, and I for one am eager to bid this span of years adieu. As a sort of New Year's Eve catharsis, then, I am going to rehearse the reasons, both personal and general, that I am glad to see the end of the "Noughties" and 2009. Then I'm going to turn my face forward and move into the next ten years of my life and dwell on the past no longer.

First, why the US and the world would like to forget the first ten years of the young millenium:
9-11, Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the great earthquakes in Pakistan, Gujarat (India), and Bam (Iran), the Burmese cyclone, the Tonga/Samoa tsunami, countless earthquakes and other seismic events in Indonesia, the Iraq War, the Afghan War, mega-terrorist attacks in Bali, Madrid, London, Beslan, and Mumbai, the anthrax attacks, swine flu hysteria, the Patriot Act, the end of the dot-com bubble, the end of the housing bubble, the financial panic of fall 2008, the Great Recession, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bush and Obama bailouts of mega-corporations, double-digit unemployment, the Virginia Tech massacre, the Amish schoolgirl massacre, so-called "health care reform," Lady Gaga, Paris Hilton, and the inexplicable popularity of torture movies like Saw.

Second, why I would like to rewind to January 2000 and have another go at things: All of the above, plus a failed marriage that died a long, slow death, a lawsuit and calumnies from an individual (and fellow church member) I had once counted as a friend, a career that wasn't, years of unending penury, the death of my one remaining (and favorite) grandparent (my "Pop-pop"), my father's spinal tumors, the unexpected death of my favorite student last spring, and my struggle, over the last couple of trying years, to perceive a clear sense of purpose in my life.

All these things (and many others besides) I hereby leave in the past.

There have been positives, however. I finished my PhD in 2004, and my blessed daughter arrived the following year. I spent part of 2000 and 2001 in Sri Lanka, and had a magical time. Ditto for last summer's three-week India junket. I also did a 5 week summer road trip to Alaska back in 2007 with my brother, and have been to Mexico and Honduras besides.

The other evening, I switched on NPR on the way back from Altoona, and Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony was playing. It reminded me of a time, before this decade was ever born, when I was a rank sentimentalist and an incurable romantic. Events of recent years and months have, alas, all but extinguished those traits, but, come New Year's Eve, I hum a few bars of Auld Lang Syne, and both sentiments come rushing back. As the hours roll inexorably toward midnight, I can summon a parade of faces of friends and loved ones past who are gone, remember the bright hopes and optimism of my gaudy youth, and wonder anew at the capacity of this vale of tears to temper our rash designs and desires, to quench youthful enthusiasm, and to burst the illusions of the naive. So it often seems.

Yet I look forward now, not backward. In the coming year I see my little daughter continuing to grow and mature, the pain of her parents' divorce ever diminishing. I see continued progress in the one project (aside from my daughter) that seems destined to give me some kind of legacy, my slow but steady progress toward decipherment of the Indus Valley script. I look forward to a May trip to Costa Rica with my best friend, whom I have not seen in several years. I see continued inprovement in my aikido and jujitsu and in my physical conditioning. I see the possibility of beginning to actually save money once again, once the voracious taxman has had his claim. I see a life consecrated to academic pursuits, since another romantic relationship does not appear to be in the cards. I see making time to get back in the woods now and again. I see progress in spirituality, personal organization, and productivity.

I hope that, in 365 days, I will be able to reread this post and see that it has been fulfilled every whit. Happy New Year 2010!

Per Speculum in Aenigmate

2009-12-25T17:15:00.005-05:00

Another year is winding to a close, provoking the usual musings on The Meaning of It All. This year has been the most difficult of my entire life (although there were bright spots). From my current vantage point atop the 2009 holiday season, it is hard to discern a purposeful trajectory in my life. I have had an academically very successful year, yet my prospects for promotion seem distant as ever. I have worked hard to extricate myself from debt incurred by the divorce, all the while paying my tithing faithfully, yet my circumstances are straitened as ever. I have begun casting about to find a potential "celestial mate," as we LDS are wont to call spouses with an eternal perspective on marriage and family life, enmired as I am in Darkest Appalachia, far from any concentration of eligible LDS women, in a town where prowess with fists and hunting rifles is much more esteemed than the esoteric academic skills I possess.

With this in mind, I commented at fast and testimony meeting this month that my testimony (an LDS term for a heartfelt witness or spiritual knowledge of the truth of the restored Gospel) depends as much on what I do not know as on what I do know. For the uninitiated, we LDS hold special meetings on the first Sunday of almost every month, in which we stand and bear testimony, generally of things we "know" to be true, like the veracity of Joseph Smith's visions of God, Jesus Christ, and angels, and of the book of scripture that gives our religion its nickname -- the Book of Mormon. We typically assert that we "know" God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, and that the living president of our church -- Thomas S. Monson as I write these words -- is his prophet.

But how can we "know" any of these things? If, as Paul asserted, we see "through a glass darkly," is it not the height of impudence to claim knowledge of things that are perforce the domain of belief and faith?

Knowledge, of course, was one of the inducements of Lucifer in the Garden of Eden; we might suppose that a presumption of knowledge of things spiritual is contrary to God's requirement that we walk by faith.

There is no bright-line distinction between knowledge and belief, at least as we experience them in mortality. Faith is defined as the "subtance (or assurance) of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." But sight alone is not a requisite for knowledge; many things (of a secular nature) we profess to know, without having seen them, or even an image of them.

Knowledge itself is of a mediate, and not immediate character, as C. S. Peirce demonstrated long ago. That is to say, all cognition is mediate, or apprehended through signs, which are always prior cognitions. As Peirce pointed out in his "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man," there is no evidence that such things as pure intuitions (that is, cognitions not determined by previous cognitions or signs) exist at all, and every reason to suppose, at least as far as this mortal coil is concerned, that they do not. We do not seem to be intuitively self aware, for instance; little children are capable of cognition long before they ever frame a hypothesis of self (and they do become self-aware because of the need to posit a self in which inhere reactions to sensory stimuli originating with the Other). It is likewise wrong to suppose that we have any (intuitive) power of introspection; Our knowledge of the external world, says Peirce, "is derived from the observation of external facts." Finally, we cannot think without signs. All of these axioms and several others besides, are proved in Peirce's so-called "Cognition Series" of three essays, which I recommend to anyone interested in the nature of thought and consciousness.

All of which is to say that we live in a universe, both internal and external, of signs. We perceive nothing except through the mediation of signs. This, I suppose (though this is of course my own opinion), is as true of modes of cognition associated with what we Latter-Day Saints call "personal revelation" as it is with all other perception -- except that the semiosis of revelation is much more vivid than, say, mere contemplation. In fact, for Latter-Day Saints, revelation may be said to be the goal of all cognition, a sort of crowning sign -- reinforced, perhaps, by the light of true inspiration -- to which any enlightened series of cognitions ultimately tends.

For every thought is a symbol (actually, a composite symbol, the makeup of which is beyond the scope of this posting to go into), and the nature of all symbols is to grow, to evolve. Hence one thought/cognition/mental symbol gives rise to another (or, we may say, is predicated on another) ad infinitum. The goal is "pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul, without hypocrisy and without guile" -- knowledge of godliness which is ultimately available only through the Holy Priesthood (LDS readers -- recall that the higher priesthood holds the keys both of the mysteries of God and of the knowledge of God).

The knowledge of godliness, which is not possible without what we now call the Melchizedek Priesthood, but was formerly styled the "Holy Priesthood after the order of the Son of God," is the ultimate desideratum. We receive such sacred knowledge in direct proportion to righteous conduct, for it is only thus that our bodies can become filled with light and comprehend all things, as Section 88 of the Doctrine and Covenants explains so perfectly.

This is why we say we "know" that such and such is true; it is, whether we care to think about it or not, a testimony to the operation of priesthood power upon our understanding. And all knowledge is ultimately semiotic in character.

But what of those things we do not know? In my case, I struggle to understand the terrible trials I have been called upon to endure in recent years. I cannot perceive with any clarity the Lord's plan for me, though I have been reading my patriarchal blessing (a sort of personal LDS revelatory lodestar) daily for months. I grope in the darkness, but instead of finding a door handle, encounter only bare and unyielding walls of stone, or so it seems.

The times that try men's souls are times not of knowledge but of faith, where action in the absence of understanding is required. And they are necessary because not only right knowledge, but also right conduct, are necessary for eternal progression. The pangs I haved endured have often reduced me to tears, but in my extremity, as happened just the other day, I still must confess to myself that the Gospel I embraced thirty years ago is the true and right path. And I know this as much for the fact that, despite a train of disapointments and disillusionments and severe trials with no perceptible purpose, I still cling to the iron rod and enjoy "the peace that surpasseth all understanding," as for the additive reinforcements to my testimony that I have been vouchsafed.

All this said, I still wish for greater clarity, that the symbols that are working themselves out in my own particular mortal path would become a little clearer!

Gracias a la Vida

2009-10-05T23:12:00.003-04:00

I note with sadness the passing, on October 4th, of someone most of my countrymen have never heard of, but who, during her 74 years, was extremely influential south of the border, especially in her native Argentina: singer and political gadfly Mercedes Sosa. When I lived in Argentina at the end of the '70s -- a year that was to prove the most pivotal of my entire life, for it was there, in a remote town in the pampas, that I became acquainted with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and with the message of the restored fulness of the Gospel -- both Mercedes Sosa and the military dictatorship that then held sway in the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires were at the peak of their influence and popularity. Jorge Videla, leader of the Argentine junta at the time, and Sosa were mortal foes, with the latter courageously defying the dictator in her songs and public appearances. She was once arrested and hauled offstage during a concert in BA, and finally had to flee the country, returning only when the junta collapsed in the aftermath of the Falklands War. Sosa was, of course, a leftist; almost all musicians and artists who immerse themselves in politics are. But she was sincere in opposing the many injustices perpetrated against the world's poor, especially in her beloved homeland.

Argentina's was a dictatorship with a smile; its public face was the myriad courteous, submachinegun-toting gendarmes manning roadblocks and checkpoints along the Ruta 2 to the capital, and the pleasant, self-serving patriotic infomercials on TV that I remember well, because I learned lots of Spanish from watching them. But behind the scenes, as the world now knows, and Sosa was aware even back then, the government was quietly liquidating undesirables -- left-leaning journalists, lawyers, and their ilk -- by immuring them in secret interrogation centers, torturing them, and finally drugging them and throwing them out of airplanes over the South Atlantic. That Sosa managed to avoid such a fate is testament to good luck and perhaps to her mass appeal; that she was willing to risk it at all is evidence of her considerable courage.

Moreover, Sosa was no svelte, willowy pop diva; she was short and stout even in her younger years, and became morbidly obese past fifty. Yet despite her lack of sex appeal, she was an international singing sensation, and her best song (actually written and first performed by the Chilean singer/songwriter Violeta Parra), "Gracias a la Vida" ("A Thank-you to Life") is a paean of optimism and gratitude that ought to be far better-known and appreciated than it is. Following is a partial translation:

Gracias a la Vida, que me ha dado tanto;
me dio dos luceros que cuando los abro,
perfecto distingo lo negro del blanco,
y en el alto cielo su fondo estrellado
y en las multitudes el hombre que yo amo.

A thank-you to Life, which has given me so much,
it gave me two shining stars, by which, when I open them,
I can distinguish perfectly between black and white,
And in the high heaven, its starry depth,
And amid the crowds, the man I love.

Gracias a la Vida que me ha dado tanto
me ha dado la marcha de mis pies cansados
con ellos anduve ciudades y charcos,
playas y desiertos, montañas y llanos
y la casa tuya, tu calle y tu patio.

A thank-you to Life which has given me so much
It's given me the stride of my tired feet;
With them I walked through cities and puddles,
Beaches and deserts, mountains and plains,
And in your house, your street, and your patio.

Gracias a la Vida que me ha dado tanto
me dio el corazón que agita su marco
cuando miro el fruto del cerebro humano,
cuando miro el bueno tan lejos del malo,
cuando miro el fondo de tus ojos claros.

A thank-you to Life which has given me so much;
It gave me a heart which quickens its beat
When I see the fruits of the human mind,
When I see the good so far from the evil,
When I look in the depths of your clear eyes.

And so forth. Verse of this sort doesn't translate well, but the sentiment is clear enough. Also, it's a fair reflection of what I'm feeling these days, in spite of the challenges I face every day. I have debts, but they are few, and shrinking constantly. I have sorrows, but they are diminishing. I have fears -- of the future as well as the present -- but they are being put to rest. I too, in the long run, am thankful to and for life, and (which the song, secular as it is, does not mention) to the God of life as well. But then, again, perhaps that was what Senora Sosa intended by la Vida, with a capital V. Either way, now seems as good a time as any to be thankful. Mercedes Sosa, RIP.

Music at World's End

2009-08-14T13:13:00.002-04:00

In the classical age, southern India and Ceylon were the end of the world, the eastern edge of of the great web of seaborne trade that linked East and West. It was here in Madras, according to tradition, that Thomas the doubting Apostle repaired for his last mission, and here also that he was martyred. Scarcely a mile from where I sit is Santhome Beach ("San Thome"), named in his honor.

This being my last night in India, I participated in a jam with a bunch of people from the Institute as well as my colleague B., who is an outstanding guitarist. I am a banjo and guitar player of very ordinary abilities whose fingers always seem to seize up when I play in front of others. R., a brilliant young physicist from West Bengal, brought his sarod, a wire-strung lute-like instrument. Others brought guitars, a harmonica, and even a harmonium. R. played several haunting ragas, and I accompanied him somewhat haltingly. Another young man played several Bengali folk songs on his ragged harmonium, and several other Bengalis joined in on the vocals. In a typically Indian touch, a large rat scurried up the wall at one point and kept peeking out at us through a hole in the ceiling. Every time he showed his head, I would glare at him, and he would retire in haste!

It was a lovely evening, where East met West on neutral musical ground. I doubt whether ever in all of human history such a peculiar ensemble of instruments has ever played together. Yet banjo and sarod, guitar and harmonium, managed to make a fair go of it. At this time tomorrow, I shall be on my way home, but I am grateful for such a sendoff.

Jambudvipa

2009-08-14T00:28:00.004-04:00

This blog has lain dormant for several months because I've been unable to muster any creative drive. Nor has there been much worthy of comment, it has seemed to me. This past spring was a convergence of catastrophes great and small that reached an absolute nadir in the month of March, an dreary expanse of weeks that saw my divorce finalized, one of the worst bouts of the flu I've ever experienced, the coming to grips with an unexpectedly heavy burden of taxes (thanks to an unusually successful amount of free-lance writing last year), and a little daughter thoroughly unsettled by unhappy events she cannot comprehend.

But now, things are looking up, as Fred Astaire used to put it, although life is not exactly full of four leaf clovers, at least not yet. Shortly after my monthlong Time of Troubles expired, I received an unexpected invitation to go to India (return, in point of fact, since I spent some time here in the last decade) to deliver a series of lectures on a topic I've been researching since my days as an MA candidate at BYU, the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley civilization. What was to be a summer of leisurely recuperation both emotional and spiritual turned into a whirlwind of preparation for the trip itself, a three week interlude that may well prove to be a turning point in my life.

I use the present tense because I am still in India (in Madras, now more correctly but less-familiarly known as Chennai, its Tamil name), readying for the long trip home tomorrow. In just three weeks, I have given six or seven lectures (I've lost count), met a boatload of new friends, established a welter of new research contacts, traveled to Bombay and Pune, and even appeared on national TV along with two of my colleagues. I've also tussled with a rat in my bathroom, witnessed part of my apartment wall collapse from the inside, enjoyed various harrowing rides in the tiny motorized three-wheelers that are India's preferred means of urban transport, and savored countless heavenly Indian meals. Despite its many hazards and frustrations ("Indian moments," I call them), I love India.

And India has been kind to me. My Tamil, fragmentary from long neglect, came flooding back, and with it my knowledge of Indian customs. Don't speak in the loud, brash voice so typical of Westerners that Indians discreetly ridicule. Keep facial expressions neutral, or nearly so. Don't say "thank you" except for exceptional and unlooked-for benevolent acts. Don't waste too much time bargaining with stoned rickshaw drivers. Remember that Indians shake their heads, rather than nod, to indicate agreement. Accept setbacks like power outages with equanimity. And so forth.

My academic work has been received here with great enthusiasm, exceeding my wildest expectations. Fifteen years ago, I suggested in my Master's Thesis that certain of the Indus Valley signs were indicative of weights and measures, a conclusion that seems rather obvious in hindsight, but which several generations of epigraphers -- hampered, perhaps, by a desire to read something less mundane in the inscriptions -- had overlooked. Several authorities in the field in the U.S. reacted derisively to my thesis, however, and that was that, or so I thought. The downside of American academic publishing is that the gatekeepers -- the peer reviewers -- have the final say. I assumed that my homely MA thesis would languish in obscurity.

But such has proven not to be the case, and this summer's trip has been vindicatory. A longtime colleague of mine who did his PhD at Harvard a few years back wound up with a research fellowship at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Madras, and managed to persuade the folks here to bring me for a visit. The Institute, be it noted, is primarily a facility for theoretical physicists and mathematicians, a sort of Indian Cal Tech. However, several of their people have been working on computer models of the Indus writing system; hence the allegiance between hard science and linguistic epigraphy. My colleague from Harvard, moreover, has no linguistic expertise, and has always valued the linguistic judgments I'm able to bring to bear on the problem.

The atmosphere at the Institute is heady and invigorating, to say the least. Here are assembled many of the best minds in India, the elite of physics and mathematics in a nation that has produced some of the most extraordinary mathematicians (Ramanujan) and physicists (Bose and Chandrasekhar) of the last century. By Western standards, it looks nothing like what an institute for heady theoretical sciences should be. Instead of carefully manicured, septic grounds with all the trappings of high-tech insularity, the campus is disheveled as most things in India tend to be -- mold stains on every building exterior, bamboo scaffolding clinging to various half-constructed elevator shafts and ells, and riotous tropical vegetation forever threatening to encroach on cracked walkways and a neglected tennis court. Geckos, mynahs, and jungle crows are everywhere, along with a species of large reddish millipede that comes out after it rains.

Yet here are men (and women) who discuss quantum gravity and Riemann manifolds over coffee as casually as the rest of us bandy politics or sports preferences. Several of them have become my friends. One of them, a young Bengali physicist with a mind as nimble as any I've ever encountered, plays the sarod, a beautiful lute-like instrument with wire strings. He and I plan to get together tonight -- my last in India, at least for now -- to jam (I brought my banjo along).

In Bombay, my Harvard colleague and I met with more of the same -- Indian scientists with a yen to aid in the decipherment of the language of India's primordial urban civilization. One of them, I assume, was responsible for contacting the Bombay TV station Times Now that put us on the Indian equivalent of the CBS Evening News shortly after we returned to Madras.

Then there was the lovely Deccan city of Pune, mercifully elevated above the sweltering desperation of Bombay on the high interior plateau east of the Western Ghats. That side junket was the nearest thing on this visit that I got to the great Indian outdoors, which on previous trips I've explored on various treks and birding excursions. In Pune we met with a gentlemanly Indian archaeologist who has been excavating a smallish Indus Valley (or "Harappan") site up Haryana way. I got to actually hold in my hands for the first time several of the tiny inscribed seals whose writing caught my fancy so many years ago. I also got to visit the famous Sanskrit Dictionary project at Deccan College where, since 1949, a team of lexicographers have been painstakingly creating the greatest dictionary every assembled, of any language. To give some idea of the scale of the project, consider that what was originally envisioned to be a thirty-volume work has mushroomed into an enterprise that will consume several Hindu kalpas to complete. Eight volumes have so far been published, and the compilers are not even halfway through the very first Sanskrit letter, a! Even the anonymous authors of the sprawling Vedas and Puranas would stand admiringly by.

For India, known to three of its great originary religions as Jambudvipa, the Island of Rose-Apples, is a place in love with complexity and disorder like no other. Visitors from the well-ordered West or the fanatically regimented Far East typically stand aghast at the frenetic confusion and impossible diversity of Indian society. John Kenneth Galbraith, President Kennedy's ambassador to India, famously characterized the Indian social model as "functional chaos" and, his considerable deficiencies as an economist notwithstanding, he was spot on. Indians seem to have little taste for regimentation or order along Western (or Eastern) lines. Traffic is an every-man-for-himself free-for-all in which only the cows wandering the streets are deferred to. Garbage is tossed on festering piles in every ditch and canal -- not because Indians are incapable of cleaning it up, but because they see no reason to. Pharmaceuticals available only by prescription in the West are sold over the counter at rock-bottom prices. People dress modestly, but do not scruple to relieve themselves in public, even along the busiest city streets. Hindu festivals, famous for their color, are also the most disorderly public events this side of a British soccer riot. City buses lurch along leaning at drunken angles from the excess of humanity clinging precariously to open doors. And so on.

India is a linguist's, anthropologist's or sociologist's dream, with literally thousands of languages spoken, hundreds of thousands of gods worshipped, and numberless castes, subcastes, and sodalities all vying for attention and prestige in every city and village from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.

How India came to be this way is anybody's guess, given the absence of reliable historiography beyond a few centuries ago. My best hypothesis is that it is a consequence of India's unique physical geography. India is not an island but is attached to Asia where the Middle East and Far East come together, allowing an influx of diverse cultures and languages across the centuries. The northeast of the country -- Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and other remote states -- are eastward in orientation, speaking languages proper to southeast Asia (except for Assamese) and whose people physically resemble the Burmese and Chinese. From the north the Tibetans encroach, spilling over the Himalayas in areas like Buddhist Ladakh. From the West have come the Arabs and the Mughals as well as (presumably) at a much greater time depth, the Indo-Aryans, who brought Sanskrit and the religion of the Vedas.

At the same time that India's contiguity to the great cultures of Asia has encouraged cultural diversity, natural barriers -- desert and mountain -- have also protected it against regular invasion. The occasional foreign occupier -- Mughal or British -- has left his stamp only briefly as against long centuries free from the brutal conquests and slaughter so typical of the rest of Asia and Europe. Even Alexander the Great foundered in the deserts of the Sindh, and the hordes of Genghis Khan preferred the easy pickings of the open steppes and accessible Middle Eastern fleshpots.

Thus India, in stark contrast to other Eurasian regions, has never been very steeped in militarism and the political regimentation that inevitably accompanies it. India has nukes now, to be sure, but their military is a far cry from the well-honed vehicles for combat and conquest typical of Western nations. We in the West take our fixation for regimentation, with its police and security forces, its military-industrial complex, its emphasis on the rule of law and the ascendancy of orderliness, for granted. But these cultural traits did not come about in a vacuum. They are, as Runciman once observed, the fruits of millenia of conflict, from Roman imperialism, through the Germanic invasions, down to the present day.

India, by contrast, has seen nothing like the upheavals that extinguished Rome, the Crusades, or the colonial conflicts that birthed the world-encircling empires of the French and British. At Plassey, the Indian response was perplexity. They failed to grasp the relevance of such a tiny engagement with upstart outsiders, and soon returned to their looms and rice paddies. The British, however, turned the episode into a platform for further expansion.

Even in the modern age, India has been blessed to be on the sidelines (relatively) of world-convulsing conflicts like the Second World War. The Japanese never made it past Burma, and the German war machine foundered on the Russian steppes.

As a consequence, as we warlike Westerners have busied ourselves discovering more and more ways to align our societies with martial values, India has continued much as it ever has been. The simmering conflict with Pakistan and even last year's terror attacks in Bombay have failed to provoke "a new reality." That, at least, is this observer's impression.

For all its cognitive dissonance, this time in India has been a healing balm for me in more ways than one. In a rash moment, I uploaded a picture and some biographical info to an LDS social website (okay, let's be more frank: a matchmaking website), and quickly made several online friends. My opinion of the fairer sex has taken quite a beating over the last few years, and I am happy to discover that there are obviously many lovely and intelligent LDS women out there after all. I deliberately made my profile as academic-sounding and severe as I could, figuring that no one would be interested in such an obvious misfit, an underpaid academic with deplorable real-world skills (I was once called "trash brain" by a vapid young thing out in Provo, who said she'd never met anyone encumbered with so much useless, impractical knowledge). I figured wrong, as it turns out.

However, having missed the entire online social networking revolution thanks to a terminally-ill marriage and complete disinterest in Facebook, I feel a bit like a fish out of water -- rather like a newcomer on the mean streets of India, in point of fact -- in this new medium of anonymous texting, flirting, and jactatory self-profiling. Emailing I'm used to, but text-messaging with a faceless, voiceless counterpart somewhere on the globe seems at once powerful and fraught with hazards. The souls on the other end are understandably cautious: Are you really divorced? Are you a member of the church? Probing questions like these are meant to draw out interlopers who insinuate themselves even onto LDS websites.

I for my part am determined to be measured and responsible, and not to repeat the deplorable mistakes of youth: Don't lead anyone on. Don't be too personal, too soon. Be completely honest. Don't dwell on yourself (that's what blogs are for!). Without face to face interaction or even voice communication, I fear that a medium like instant messenging is a recipe for misunderstanding, unless kept under very strict restraints.

So what is the unifying thread of this tedious blog entry? I suppose it would be the metaphor of Jambudvipa, which doubled in Hindu cosmology as the literal Subcontinent and as the realm where mortal beings lived, a place at once beautiful and chaotic, perilous but rewarding.

The Web as a social medium, it seems to me, is a sort of virtual Jambudvipa, a place where all souls potentially converge and struggle to work through mortal inadequacies. So much for a contrived metaphor.

As for the living, breathing Jambudvipa outside these walls, I need to go get a hearty Indian lunch and then see to my packing.

The Widening Gyre (and other musings)

2009-03-20T23:06:00.004-04:00

"The Second Coming," arguably W. B. Yeats' most celebrated piece of work, has lately become something of an LDS pulpit cliche, thanks in large measure to the late Elder Maxwell. He it was that first recited the lines, "things fall apart, the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" in General Conference. I'm not sure that Yeats intended the poem, composed in the political and financial chaos following World War I, to be interpreted so literally as we LDS have done. Nevertheless, as with everything C.S. Lewis ever wrote, Pope's observations on vice in his Essay on Man, and some fragments of Wordsworth that hint of his then-heretical suspicions of a pre-mortal life, we Latter-Day Saints have taken Yeats' words to our collective bosom -- canonization by popular acclaim, as it were.

At this very moment, Yeats' words ring true for me, both at an impersonal and a personal level. The unsteady foundations of our financial system -- a house built on the most fickle of sands since our unwise abandonment of the gold standard several generations ago -- are in danger of utter collapse. More accurately put, they are in danger of imminent collapse; the fact that they will collapse ultimately is not a hazard but a certainty. Foolish were our leaders of the mid-twentieth century, who listened to the siren song of that economic Pied Piper Keynes, and cast off the restraints of gold and silver in favor of dollars that could be manufactured out of thin air (or even worse, out of debt) at the whim of politicians and their kept central bankers. Not suprisingly, these men, who have pleaded for decades on behalf of the superiority of a "flexible" monetary system, have taken advantage of it to print money in support of burgeoning debts and crippling deficits. All that worked well enough in the short run, at least for those positioned to take advantage of the fantastic and unnatural runups in asset values that printing money always creates. Now, it seems, the long-delayed crackup seen by the prescient few is upon us; the emperor's nakedness is visible to all except his courtiers, and utter dissolution is a real possibility.

These are not matters to be taken lightly. The deliberate debasement of money by venal rulers has undermined civilization from the time of Diocletian to present-day Zimbabwe. It destroyed the currency and all savings in post-WWI Germany and Austria. Germany, like America, was saddled with unpayable debts and resorted to the printing press in a last-ditch effort to stave off national bankruptcy.

And the solution our enlightened leadership has set forth? More debts, more deficits, and vastly more government. Foolish people, who have allowed yourselves to be seduced by the enemies of liberty! The free market (i.e., freedom) does not work, we are now being told incessantly. We must therefore purchase the chains of security with our own (and our granchildren's) money.

On a personal level, the falcon has veered away from the falconer, but I'm expecting him to return someday. My divorce was final two weeks ago, and I am left with lawyer fees and heavy taxes on the horizon. I've always striven to live frugally and avoid debt but now, for the next few months at least, debt will be my attendant. At least in the summer my gas bill will be almost nil. I unfortunately inhabit the very middle of the middle class, income -wise, and so take it on the chin more than any other tax-paying group. Earn ten or fifteen thousand less, and taxes become nugatory. Earn fifteen or twenty thousand more, and tithes and offerings become deductible. But at my income level, the thousands I paid last year in tithes and offerings are not deductible; they are subsumed by the standard deduction.

As you can imagine, such musings have sometimes tempted me to something close to despair over the past few weeks, but there is nothing to do but go forward. Elaine needs me now more than ever, and I must not fail her. So I put my trust that, at some future time, the Lord will again magnify me somehow; but for now, mine is the lot of metaphorical sackcloth and ashes.

Last week I made my monthly temple visit. It's a different experience without my ex-wife, who never manifested much enthusiasm for the temple. On the rare occasions when she accompanied me, she often seemed disoriented. But we did share some things in the celestial room, and she wept often. Now, I am alone with my thoughts and, perhaps, the most diffuse of spiritual promptings, in the celestial room. Sometimes too I weep, in church and at home, but not for joy.

To end on a purely positive note: today was the first calendar day of spring. This does not mean much in the tropical or even subtropical climes, where winter is barely remarked, or in the far north, where snow melts are still many weeks off. But here in this blessed, temperate latitude, the late days of March often confer a jewel of a spring day, when the unexpected can and does happen. Today, a wintry relapse, was not such a day, but Wednesday was. I took Elaine up to Pocky and Nanna's mountaintop farm to enjoy the 70 degree sunny weather on Wednesday afternoon, and signs of spring were everywhere. Along the road below the house the first few yellow coltsfoots -- the first wildflower to bloom in northern Appalachia -- were out, and flies and bees zipped about, obviously elated to have survived the winter cold. By the ruined stone well I found a prenuptial tangle of garter snakes, which Elaine enjoyed spooking, and in the tiny pothole-pond in the lower field a few wood frogs were croaking. Turkey vultures, which do not overwinter in these parts, were bouncing on the updrafts above the ridgeline, and the first phoebe was hawking flies off the white barn wall.

Interesting, I thought, how my own moods have so closely mimicked the turn of the seasons lately. On such a day as this, it was impossible to be overburdened by life's many cares and sorrows. May there come a springtime into every heart.

A Perfect Day

2009-02-11T23:58:00.002-05:00

There was a delightful song that was popular once upon a time -- a hymn, if I remember aright -- called "A Perfect Day." Eons ago, a young Sterling Holloway (he who later became the iconic voice for Disney's Winnie the Pooh) sang it for Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Remember the Night. That movie was typical of its age (1940) -- optimistic and innocent, in spite of the fact that the Great Depression was still in force and a world war was raging. The song, and others like it, captured the spirit of an era that has passed into vague cultural memory, an era that was fundamentally optimistic, even idealistic, about human potential. It was a time when people could sing about perfect days with a straight face because, by and large, they still believed in them.

In my experience, a truly perfect day is a rare event. The last one I can recall was years ago on the Texas Gulf Coast, when I spent a glorious day wandering lonely beaches observing fabulous birds, and ended with a sumptuous seafood dinner in a wharfside restaurant in Galveston. It was one of those rare occasions when the cares of the world sloughed away like a shed skin, and for a few glorious, solitary hours, life was completely good.

The years since then have been less kind, but today was the nearest thing to a perfect day that I've seen in a long, long time. Today is my daughter's fourth birthday, and it coincided with a rarely beautiful late winter day masquerading as spring. The sun came out and the temperature soared to sixty degrees. Honeybees and small beetles were flying around for the first time in months, and the birds were active.

There were a few glitches, to be sure. After finishing my classes, I headed for the car, only to discover that my car key had disappeared. It wasn't in the car, in my office, in my classrooms, in the locker room where I had changed before swimming my laps, or anywhere in my personal effects. Nor was I sure I could find a replacement. I had just finished talking to my father, who had dug up a spare key and was preparing to drive the 18 miles to campus to give it to me, when -- mirabile dictu! -- someone suggested I check a lost and found that I didn't know existed. Just minutes before, someone had found my key lying on the ground and turned it in.

I rushed home, wrapped my daughter' presents, and drove the harrowing, still-icy lane up to my parents' farm, where Elaine was playing happily with her grandparents. The sun was shining fiercely and the surrounding woods rang with exuberant woodpeckers drumming and the distant caroling of a Carolina wren who managed to survive last month's cold snap. I had little difficulty persuading Elaine to come outside to play, and she was soon wading through rivulets in her Hello Kitty rubber boots, getting herself gloriously wet and muddy. I showed her how to make a cattail seed head explode, and she showed me how to jump off a bank of melting snow plowed up along the edge of the barnyard. Not until the sun sank below the ridgeline did we go back indoors.

There followed dinner, cake, and presents, leaving Elaine exhausted with joy and sensory overload. At length we rounded up all of Elaine's new possessions, loaded them and a very sleepy but still wound-up little girl into the car, said goodbye to "Pocky and Nanna," and drove home. Elaine was sleeping soundly when we got there, and barely stirred when I carried her upstairs and put her to bed.

The house is strewn with three days' worth of playthings, but I decided to procrastinate cleaning until tomorrow, when I have no classes to teach. I pulled out my banjo for the first time in several days and practiced for an hour and a half.

Yet it was not quite a perfect day. Sometime around 11 PM, Elaine woke up crying from some bad dream and complaining of aches (she's getting over a cold of some kind). I suspect that she was a bit upset that her mother, who is out in the Midwest for her mother's wedding this coming weekend, failed to telephone as she had promised. She did call later that evening, and sheepishly admitted she'd forgotten to call. She'll call tomorrow, she assured me.

In any event, Elaine required considerable consolation. I unfurled her new Dora the Explorer sleeping bag and draped it over her, which seemed to mollify her. Finally, she fell asleep again, and my house is at peace for a brief, precious interval. Tomorrow, the cares of the world will loom large once again -- Will my wife return next week, as she promised, so that our divorce can be finalized the following week? Will the economy continue its death spiral, beset as it is by so many wrong-headed attempts by our government to "fix" problems that the government created in the first place? Will I have time to pay the bills, clean the house, and take care of other necesaries while giving Elaine the attention she needs?

But for now, I can luxuriate in the lingering warmth of a near-perfect day. Someday, perhaps, I will see its like again.

Finis Saeculi

2009-01-06T21:57:00.001-05:00

This past week marked the ninth time we've celebrated New
Year in a new century and millenium (no, for the last time, the new century did NOT begin on January 1, 2000, and the sentiments of millions to the contrary aren't going to change the laws of mathematics or centuries of calendrics; but no matter). We still haven't figured out a snappy name for this lost decade of ours (the "Naughts"? The "Oughts"? The "Os"? Ouch!), and most of the Western world is still enmired in '80s nostalgia, for reasons that aren't altogether clear. Still, the events of the last few years have inspired a sort of permanent fin de siecle malaise that refuses to go away. The Y2K apocalypse failed to materialize, but we've been in more or less permanent economic crisis mode since the stock bubble -- the first stock bubble -- burst in spring of 2000. We've been at war with a lot of people since 9-11. And of course, we've had epochal natural disasters galore, all of which might lead us to suppose that the end, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer once put it, is "pretty seriously nigh."

Now the official name of my church has the words "Latter-Day" in it, signifying that we Latter-Day Saints see this historical epoch as the last before the Second Coming, that at some time in the indeterminate but not far-distant future, the Lord is going to come down and clean house. This sentiment is far from peculiar to my faith; folks have been reading the end of days into every major catastrophe in recorded history, and probably in just as many of which our historians are ignorant. How, for example, must the doomed Tambora civilization have reacted when their island exploded beneath them in the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, an event that obliterated perhaps 100,000 Tamborans, as well as their unique culture and language, in a pyroclastic cloud less than two centuries ago? What was it like for those who witnessed the unexampled calamity of the Black Death, which wiped out somewhere between a third and a half of all Europeans? And what of those whose unhappy lot was to endure history's most desolating wars firsthand -- the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, the Islamic wars of conquest, the Mongol invasions, the Thirty Years War, and of course, the horrific conflicts and pogroms of the century just passed? It is a fair guess to speculate that all of those eras had their doomsayers and dances macabres, and with some fair justification.

In point of fact, the world has come to an end many times, as we know from historical, archaeological, and geological records (with the first I include sacred writ). We are all apt to regard the times and circumstances of our lives as uniquely privileged -- the Way Things Are, and presumably, always will be. From time to time, of course, The Way Things Are changes abruptly, catastrophically. It happened in the days of Noah and in the days of the nameless Pharaoh who tried to refuse Moses' demands -- "Knowest thou not that Egypt is destroyed?" Pharaoh's counselors inquired, yet that stubborn potentate from an era that had abruptly passed away refused to bow to the inevitable. Instead he went after the Israelites with the only strength that remained to him -- military -- and we know the rest.

The same transpired with the Nephites and the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon -- each civilization, all its other resources exhausted, taking final refuge in military conflict, the only strength left to them. So also with Rome -- the Western Empire, at least, which continued to fight and despoil her enemies long after her other resources -- her wealth, her religion, her cultural vitality, even her population -- were spent. The days of Stilicho and Aetius have little to display other than gargantuan battles like Chalons -- which Jordanes correctly (for his era)characterized as signaling the world's end.

The world came to an end again in spring of 1453, when the Byzantine Empire (or Eastern Roman Empire, if Bury's authority is deferred to) died with a whimper at the hands of the appalling child-conquerer Mehmet. Unsympathetic historians are apt to view the fall of Constantinople as something akin to euthanasia, since by the time of the Ottoman supremacy, the once-proud Byzantine state had contracted to a rump consisting of Constantinople itself and a few outlying city-states like Trebizond and Mistra. But to the Constantinopolitans, the vessels of civilization throughout the Dark Ages of Christendom, the fall of their city into the hands of the infidel was a token of the end of days. As Mehmet's cannon blasted through their walls that had stood for more than a millenium, none of them could imagine the world as it was to become. Few of them, including their valiant last emperor, would live to see the new age anyway.

If there is one certain verdict offered up by history and archaeology, it is that nothing built by the hands of man endures forever. Even empires -- the mightiest of all the works of the hands of men -- seem to have their life cycles, as Spengler and many others have observed. Each of them at its apogee was a sort of novus ordo saeculorum -- a new order of the ages, or as some might style it, a "new world order" -- that encapsulates the way things must always be. But all of them perish, and the same will surely come to pass for our civilization, sooner or later.

A question that needs answering is: Why? Why, for all his considerable ingenuity, has man never been able to create a permanent civilization? After all, many of his lesser contrivances -- fire, the wheel, writing, animal husbandry, and the like -- seem to have become permanent fixtures. We see no rise and fall of language, for example, although languages can and do become extinct. Languages evolve over time but lose none of their vitality. Yet civilizations -- at least, the defining features of high civilization -- do wax and wane over great but measurable intervals. Art and engineering flourish and then fail, trade rises and falls, economies prosper and then decline, and eventually, even military science and power dwindle to naught.

From my reading of history, a number of factors are always involved in the decline of great civilizations and states. They include economic and financial decline, social decay, empire building followed by eventual military defeat, internal political intrigue, and Caesarism. All of these factors were present in the decline and fall of the great powers of the last two millenia -- Rome, Byzantium, Venice and the Italian city states (chiefly Genoa, Pisa, Florence, and Amalfi), the Baghdad Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, and the Russian Empire/Soviet Union. Each of these has followed a trajectory in which all of the abovementioned factors have more or less coincided during the period of decline.

To cite an example less familiar than Rome: the city-states of the Italian peninsula, especially Venice, were the torch-bearers of Western Civilization during the Middle Ages. From them issued many of the great advances in art, science, and technology that laid the foundation for a later age. The enterprising Venetians, for example, mastered the technology of ship-building and invented modern accounting, allowing them to become the military and financial superpower of the Mediterranean Basin. It was these islands of civilization in the decrepit Middle Ages that provided the soil where the Renaissance germinated. Yet it was these same cities that were constantly rent by factional intrigue, Ghibelline on Guelph, quarreling over the seemingly trivial matter of Holy Roman imperial versus papal supremacy, respectively. So too were their once-mighty finances corrupted by the inflationary practices of the great Italian banking families, creating periodic financial panics that sapped morale and capital alike. The Venetians and the Genovese spent much of their strength warring against one another, in the Mediterranean, in the Bosporus, in the Black Sea. Each regarded the entire world as its exclusive commercial franchise and exhausted its resources building armadas to fight the other and lobbying the rest of the world for diplomatic alliances. Internally, Venice jettisoned her enlightened republican form of government for a fearsomely efficient police-state apparatus and network of international espionage. When the Age of Exploration opened up the wider world for colonization, the Italian states were no longer able to hold their own, and had to yield to newer, younger powers with the resources to extend commerce and colonization to Asia and the Americas. The coup de grace was the Napoleonic conquest of Italy, the first and last time in her twelve hundred year independent history that Venice was occupied by a foreign military force.

But all of these factors are mere efficient causes. The final cause of civilizational collapse even Spengler was unable to fathom -- he was content to note that all civilizations follow such a trajectory, and rather prosaically likened it to the life cycle of a living organism. Yet Spengler discovered the reason for historical cyclicity without fully appreciating it, in my opinion. His great insight -- that history in its teleological sense consists of the rise and decline of cultures, not states, and that each great culture is at heart characterized by a prime symbol that informs its arts, sciences, laws, even languages -- contains the grand key for understanding why it is that manmade civilizations cannot endure.

By Spenglerian taxonomy, the "West" is a cultural and not a geopolitical term, on a par with other great cultures such as the Classical or Appolonian culture (Greco-Roman), the Middle Eastern or Magian Culture (embracing Persian, Byzantine, and Islamic culture), the Indian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, and the Mayan. Each of these, Spengler argued, coalesced around a prime or ultimate symbol (also termed a "world-symbol"), born of a distinctive religious and cosmological worldview, which set boundary conditions on the path of development that the culture would follow. In the case of the Classical or Apollonian world, that world symbol was the fixed point in space, which the polyhistor Spengler showed quite convincingly to be manifest in Greco-Roman art, architecture, engineering, even historiography. For Western or "Faustian" culture, the prime symbol is infinite space. It is manifest in the whole panoply of cultural conceits that are distinctively Western: the assumption of infinite progress, the modern mathematics of infinities, limits, series and infinitessimals, the upward reach of Western buildings, from cathedrals to skyscrapers, and the privileging of music as an art form over more bounded forms of representation like painting and sculpture.

In my mind, Spengler's case for prime or world symbols is overwhelming; to his taxonomy (he identified four such, the other two being the "world cavern" for the Magian culture and the "infinite way" for the Egyptian), I add my own modest contribution: the "cosmic wheel," sign of infinite recursion and the prime symbol of the Indian or Brahmanic culture, for reasons I may address in a future post, but not this one. I am, in a word, persuaded that Spengler's insight is both critical and correct.

But how does such a model give rise to a theory of cultural cyclicity? From the nature of signs themselves. Recall from our earlier discussion of symbols a la Charles Sanders Peirce that these are signs indeed, endowed with a vitality and a fulness that other, more degenerate sign types, like icons and indexes, do not possess. Recall also that symbols are not mere convenient abstractions; to the realist, they are real, just as love, law, and other concepts are real. Being real they have the power to cause real events. And being of the nature of signs, that is, mental representations, they obey what Peirce called the Law of Mind. In other words, they do what thoughts do, progressing, changing, and, most especially, becoming more general as they lose intensity. All signs, in other words, evolve and ultimately morph into new signs. They tend to spread, but as they spread, their focus and power diminishes. This is the way it is with a "train of thought," which is nothing more (or less) than semiosis, the continual production and modification of symbols, each one predicated on the previous one by some mode of association.

If one accepts this portrayal of things as they really are in the realm of thought (which is, after all, the realm of the Infinite -- "My thoughts are not your thoughts," God has said), then it is easy to see that the prime symbols that underlie culture must have a similar tendency to spread and then to lose vitality. In the end, they give way to new symbols, and a new culture is born.

Now a vital point to be gleaned from Spengler is that these prime symbols arise in the first place from religion, that culture comes about in the final analysis as a consequence of man's reaction to the numinous and the spiritual. The word "culture," coming as it does from cultus, "religion," captures this notion very neatly. In the high flower of civilization, every culture is inspired by religious impulses first and foremost. When decay sets in -- when its prime symbol begins to degrade -- then secular is substituted for religious as a wellspring of civilization. In the classical world, the Stoics and Epicureans betokened this decay, and in India, the replacement of Brahmanic Hindusim with the so-called "philosophy religions" embodied a similar process.

While I think Spengler oversimplifies his argument a bit here, since the sacred and the secular so often coexist for lengthy periods, the former occasionally reasserting itself over the latter, his basic insight is sound. Who can argue that the West's greatest music, greatest painting, and greatest sculpture has already been produced, and most of it during the long age of faith from the high middle ages to the end of the nineteenth century? Even literature, something of a laggard, will probably never produce another Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dickens, Trollope, or Tolstoy. In the realm of mathematics and physics (especially the latter), an awareness is beginning to sink in that we will never see another Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Euler, Gauss, or Pauli, that their latter-day inheritors are mostly glorified technicians reduced to tinkering with so-called "standard models" or dabbling in grandiose theories, like superstrings, that will likely never be empirically verifiable. For all its superficial brilliance, ours is an age of technicians, bureaucrats, and copycats.

And it is not by accident that we live in a time of secularism ascendant. Little wonder that many of our most eminent scientists -- Steven Weinberg and Richard Dawkins come to mind -- are avowed atheists. The universe for them is a device, and machines -- the ill-fated LHC, for instance -- are the only means adequate to evaluate it.

All of which brings us back to our New Year's question: How nigh is the end? Well, things are bad, but they've been worse. Our burgeoning global recession still isn't a patch on the Great Depression, and our wars and rumors of wars pale beside the world wars of the last century. Natural disasters? Things haven't been this bad, since, oh, the seventies. Anyone remember the great Bangladesh cyclone or the huge earthquakes in China and Iran back then? My guess is that the seventies were at least as bad a decade as this one. And we haven't seen anything like the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919 since, well, 1919. So by any such metric, things could be a lot worse, and have been, even in living memory.

The most troubling indicator, in my mind, is the reflexive militarism that, for several generations, seems to have replaced wise foreign policy for the United States. Like Rome, Venice, and Athens in their declension (not to mention the Nephites and the Jaredites), we seem determined to continue doing the one thing that we can still do better than anyone else -- impose our will militarily. And this condition is not lost on a number of our self-styled prognosticators, though they may fail to grasp the full historical implications; the rest of the world, Zakaria informs us, is rising to equal and perhaps surpass us in every realm but one, the military -- where (he and his epigones in the DC think-tanks assure us) America will maintain full-spectrum dominance for the foreseeable future. Valens and his legions at Hadrianople doubtless believed the same.

In the longer term, there can be no doubt as to the road we are on. The scriptures, more straightforward than Spengler, teach that civilizations fall when men forget God. And this is precisely what has happened to Western man, as his world-symbol, and the spiritual perspective behind it, have been lost. Those of us with so-called "stained-glass minds" live our lives as fish out of water in a world unsympathetic to the faith that once moved our civilization. In a coming day, we must suppose, the symbols of eternity will be restored among a believing remnant. Culture will be renewed and history, as it has always done in ages past, will resume its upward march.

These are my views on the cyclicity of history -- and on why, indeed, such a thing as history exists at all. I think I'll watch an episode of Buffy for some added perspective. Good night.

Working Vacation

2008-12-30T00:05:00.000-05:00

Christmas is past, and the new year looms large. 2009 will be the year I become single again at 45, possibly for the rest of my life, though a part of me hopes not. This passing year is the least memorable of my life in so many ways, but I remain grateful for such blessings as I have: a lovely daughter, supportive parents, many friends, my hobbies, my faith.

The past week, ostensibly a holiday, was crammed with less-than-restful activities that precluded blogging, hiking, banjo playing, reading, and just about everything else I consider recreational. It was instead a time of formidable ice storms that hampered travel, of playing with Elaine, of making hectic preparations for the last Christmas I will enjoy as a married man for an indefinite interval. My family and I tried our best to be supportive of my wife; she spent both Christmas Eve and Christmas with us, and seemed content. More than once I reflected during those two days on the surreality of the situation: By all accounts, I should be simmering with conflicted emotions about this woman, who not many months past gave me the "let's just be friends" routine after seventeen years of marriage. Yet the waters of my heart, muddied by such emotions not long ago, have cleared miraculously, something I attribute to the Almighty. A process that friends of mine have assured me will take years -- the anger, the resentment, the guilt, the self-doubt, the crushing grief -- all of this and much more were my lot for the space of a few anguished weeks. But now my wife and I have become, truly, "just friends," and I have trouble already remembering how I once felt about her. That, in my view, is the operation of the Atonement in a mighty way, helping me to make the best of a bad situation.

In any event, the week of Christmas was horribly unproductive. My exercising routine suffered and I fell behind in my free-lance writing assignments. Why is it that our culture is so obsessed with productivity? No one will ever accuse me of being a workaholic, but I often feel the phantom need to be productive goading me like a hot needle.

No time for play now, Elaine. I have work to do. Go amuse yourself, and Daddy will come up and play a little later. Elaine is getting a little too used to that refrain, my conscience warns me. Lately, when she's immersed in make believe, I sometimes overhear disquieting snippets from her role playing, like "Sorry, I can't play right now," and "I'll play with you later, sweetie." Out of the mouths of babes.

I was told once, though I've been unable to verify it firsthand, that Brigham Young opined that four hours a day would suffice to do the "sweat of thy brow" work prescribed at the time of the fall, if we lived in a more equitable world. The rest of our time, presumably, would be spent with our families, in edifying recreation, and doing God's work. Whether this is true or not, I take grave exception with a culture that worships work for its own sake. I read of people working literally all the time, but for what purpose they cannot fathom. To save money? No, their debts and spending habits preclude that. To purchase time for leisure? Not really; many people refuse to take extended vacations, because they see something vaguely decadent in, say, a month-long backpacking trip.

In point of fact, work has become something of a false God, insofar as it distracts from life's other priorities. How many members of my own religion have I known who use the job as an excuse to miss church services, to stay away from the house and family, and to refuse church callings when extended!

The problem is that work is equated with remunerative productivity; nothing else qualifies. This blog, for example, is not deemed work, although some of the entries took considerable time and reflection. Neither is developing a musical talent, or learning a language for the fun of it, or reading an excellent book. And the reason these things are categorized as baneful leisure activities is that they do not earn money.

Not that there's anything wrong with earning money. I've never been wealthy, but I've never been a slacker, either. But money or any other material aim as an end in itself is no justification for work; only a goal is. It is not enough to work; we must strive to accomplish things. With money, that means budgeting and saving, not just spending reflexively. With so-called leisure activities, it means doing, as much as possible, things that will be productive and righteous and enlarge our souls. By such a definition, blogging and recreational writing are indeed forms of work; so is playing with a daughter, or decorating a Christmas tree, or learning a new song on the banjo. And from my experience, even work proper -- the things we do to bring home the bacon as we should -- ought to be something commensurate with our God-given talents and abilities. A good friend of mine is an accountant, a job he finds maddening at times, but withal fulfilling, because accounting is something R., with his careful, disciplined mind and temperament, was born to do. I once told him that I could be an accountant, but I'd be a lousy one. It has never made any sense to me to try to do something for which one is not suited, if only to earn more money.

Anyway, the Christmas week has passed and I'm reverting to productive form. I churned out one article and one piece of editing, both of which were paid assignments, and am working on others, in no small measure to ensure that the checks, above and beyond my contract salary as an academic, keep rolling in. I'm saving money, you see, both for a general nest egg and for a Huber banjo, the most beautiful, sweetest-sounding five-stringed instrument ever built, one that will be a dream to play when I finally come up with the several grand required to buy it. My new banjo is to be the capstone on my midlife crisis, a needless indulgence that will be a lot cheaper than the Harleys, Corvettes, and RVs that other men of my age bracket confer on themselves when life goes sour.

I'm rambling now, which is what happens when you blog past midnight. What I'm trying to say is: Most worthwhile things in life are work of one sort or another -- but aimless toil, which seems to be the lot of so many Americans caught in the "rat race," is pointless idolatry that distracts from things of eternal import.
Buenas noches.

Rarae Aves

2008-12-22T21:14:00.000-05:00

The world is in deep freeze right now. Supercooled snow on the sidewalks creaks underfoot, and fingers of cold start prying their way through cracks in windowsills and door jambs the moment the furnace stops blowing. It was slightly below zero last night, remarkable weather for this early in the winter.

Last Saturday was the annual Christmas Bird Count, my own personal Saturnalia that not even the Ward Christmas Party, inevitably scheduled on the same day, could induce me to forego. For the uninitiated, Christmas Bird Counts are carried out across the United States and Canada (and in a few other countries as well), some time during the Christmas season and wherever enterprising birdwatchers have created a "count circle," a 15-mile diameter area where, for 24 frantic hours, amateur and professional (mostly the former) birders comb woods, fields, mountains, watercourses, and any other habitats for birds. Both numbers and species are tallied and, although the CBC isn't a competitive sport, there's often an element of competition between different count circles. There are four different counts in our immediate area, and the one I and my parents always participate in is usually second banana (except for last year, when we got the highest species total of any of the local counts -- a glorious first).

Counting birds is not particularly glamorous in my neck of the woods. Since we're far from any ocean or other large body of water, the likelihood of turning up anything really exotic is practically nil. But over the many years that I've been counting in this part of the world, I've had occasional moments that are the stuff of lifelong memories. There was the time I saw the first ever golden eagle for our count, a late migrant that sailed overhead one crisp sunny December morning more than two decades ago. There was the last time I saw an evening grosbeak on the CBC, that obstreperous yellow and black north woods finch, once a common winter visitor in these parts and now nearly extirpated from the north woods. The locals used to call them "mustard birds" but they are, apparently, going the way of the passenger pigeon, and no one knows why. It is many, many years since I last heard their ringing calls, here or anywhere else.

This year we awoke to a fresh glaze of ice from a storm the previous day. Nothing was falling from the overcast sky, and the trees and bushes looked like finely-spun glass. My brother Mark, up from Mississippi to help with the count, play Scrabble with yours truly, and pass the holidays, was out before dawn. Just as I was sitting down to a hasty breakfast of eggs and cereal, my trak phone jingled. It was Mark, who had just walked into the middle of a flock of around twenty roosting turkeys. Two species of owls were calling, he added, the subtext unmistable: Get off your posterior and hit the trails, big brother!

All things considered, it was a very good day. My first nice bird was a yellow-bellied sapsucker (a type of smallish woodpecker) that I called up only five minutes after setting out. Not long thereafter, I managed to summon a wintering hermit thrush from a dense grape thicket in one of the more inaccessible niches of my parents' mountaintop property. Later in the morning I located a male purple finch, which turned out to be the only one found that day.

In spite of the ice, the woods were busy and full of evidence of activity. I found a set of fresh fisher tracks along one puddle-pocked trail (aptly named "Ten Springs Trail"), and also found prints of raccoon and opossum. The woods pullulated with roving flocks of pine siskins, hundreds and hundreds of them, small brownish relatives of the goldfinch that hail from the northern coniferous forests. This year is shaping up to be a good year for so-called "invasions" of northern finches like redpolls and crossbills, and the abundant pine siskins may be harbingers of things to come when the winter deepens.

Down by the Little Juniata River, I scoured a river bottom woods of river willow and sycamore, and hit the jackpot: a great blue heron, a reclusive belted kingfisher, a ruby-crowned kinglet (also the only one seen this year) amid a large flock of more common golden-crowned kinglets, and a cheeky winter wren that popped from his place of concealment to scold from a broken snag.

Mark and I teamed up for the afternoon, and drove to a nice marsh near another section of the river. Here were sparrows in abundance and a small flock of bluebirds. Here also we saw a single kestrel (a tiny falcon) buzz-bombing a much larger Cooper's hawk that had breached its territory.

Together we tallied 46 species for the day, a new high for us in this locale.

After dark we drove to the "compilation dinner," where the other birders who'd been out all day were gathered to report their finds. This is usually the best part of the count, as birders affect friendly rivalry to find out who saw the "best" birds of the day. This year, the best bird was probably a short-eared owl, along with a golden eagle. My purple finch and ruby-crowned kinglet were our party's two unique contributions. All in all, our count tallied 69 species, a new high.

I have never understood why bird watching is not more popular among the LDS people. It is a completely innocuous yet challenging activity, and, probably more than any other outdoor activity, is conducive to appreciation of nature. I did the Christmas Bird Count in Provo a time or two, with wonderful results; my assigned area included a slice of the Wasatch Mountains as well as the marshes around the old Novell headquarters south of town, and the cross-section of birdlife was spectacular. Many of the other birders, including the compiler, were obviously fellow LDS, but I've noticed over the years that the activity is viewed with vague suspicion in some church circles. It smacks of such heresies as environmentalism, unlike more wholesome forms of outdoor recreation like ATV riding and hunting.

Yet it is possible to harbor a love of the outdoors and of the natural world without succumbing either to the extremes of modern environmentalist politics nor to the impulse to ravage and degrade God's creation. I have hunted and ridden ATVs in the desert, and enjoyed both activities, but I mostly enjoy the outdoors without attempting to modify it. I've nothing against progress, only against dogmatism in any form.

In any case, I've been a bird watcher since the age of five or so. Some of my best memories are from far-flung birding expeditions -- finding the rare bearded lammergeier in the French Pyrenees at the impressionable age of fourteen, going eyeball to eyeball with giant (and very tame) Magellanic woodpeckers in the cold rainforest of the southern Chilean Andes, spotting my first great pied hornbill in the leech-infested jungles of southern India, seeing my first king vulture over Pico Bonito in Honduras, counting puffins, murres, and other seabirds off Seward, Alaska, and revelling in rare birds like reddish egrets and magnificent frigatebirds blown ashore after a storm on Galveston Island. I've forgotten the names of most of the roommates, friends, missionary companions, co-parishioners, classmates, and fellow employees I've known over the years, but I remember most of the good birds and where and when I saw them.

Birdwatching allows one to enjoy almost any corner of the world, no matter how dismal it may seem. India's teeming, poverty- and disease-ridden cities, for example, are birders' paradises: one need only lift one's eyes from the depressing human squalor to almost any banyan tree to enjoy a wondrous banquet of urban birdlife, from the ruby-eyed koel to tiny glittering sunbirds. Birds may been seen almost anywhere on the face of the earth except deep underwater, their powers of flight providing a subliminal fillip to our own spirits which, once upon a time, may have enjoyed such freedom of movement.

Once, a very long time ago (at least, it seems so), I went to Argentina as a junior in high school on a one year Rotary exchange program. A large part of my motivation was to see new birds, although I was careful not to tell that to the panel of interviewers screening the applicants. No sooner had I arrived in my new digs in a small town in the middle of the boundless pampas than I began combing the surrounding countryside for birds. At about the same time, I met the LDS missionaries living in the town (Maipu was its name) and before long, was taking them on guided birding tours of the surrouding countryside, where I introduced those two bemused young men to the Chimango Caracara, the Monk Parakeet, the Southern Screamer, the Fork-tailed Flycatcher, and other exotica. They in exchange introduced me to a new religion and the rest is history.

Fire

2008-12-17T22:13:00.001-05:00

I spent a few hours with an uncle of mine this evening, while my wife watched over Elaine. My uncle G. went through a fairly messy divorce almost thirty years ago, and was eager to dispense advice. We had dinner at a swank steakhouse and discussed the ramifications of starting over after such an event. Uncle G. had two young children when the unhappy event transpired; there was infidelity and other such unlovely conduct, but in the end, he and his ex have become, if not close friends, at least comfortable acqaintances. Her husband -- the man she should have married in the first place, according to all concerned -- does contracting work at his house now, and the two families are very chummy. All, or almost all, is forgiven, after so many years.

Uncle G. and I are alike in many ways, and, religious differences aside, embarked upon marriage from similar points of departure. He and I were both naifs as to the ways of the world, so to speak; neither of us had ever, shall we say, been intimate with a woman prior to our respective marriages, and neither had dated much.

I was therefore interested at the contrast in some of the lessons we've drawn from our respective marital debacles. For me, the old adage "Marry in haste, repent at leisure" has new significance; but I have absolutely no intention of changing the moral standards of my upbringing and my religion, regardless of what lies ahead. Uncle G., by contrast, concluded that some measure of sexual experience, in conjunction with a years-long courtship, was the best safeguard against a second failed marriage, and, in the years that followed, conducted himself accordingly.

Which is not to say I blame him; unlike me, he is not under strict religious covenants to keep what we LDS term the "law of chastity," and the cultural climate in our country has, since the 1970s, suffocatingly favored so-called "sexual freedom." My young students, the third generation since the original "sexual revolution," now advocate "hooking up" which, I'm told, is a sexual encounter of the most casual and anonymous character imaginable. By twenty-first century standards, even what used to be called "living in sin" is becoming a quaint anachronism for the degree of commitment it used to entail.

People like myself, on the other hand, who adhere rigidly to the values of several generations past, are today to be found only in a few enclaves of conservative religion (although even the members of my church do not always live up to the lofty moral standards we profess). My parents, never religious in any sectarian sense of the word, also believed in and practiced premarital chastity and postmarital fidelity, just because it "seemed like the right way to behave." Theirs is an extinct breed, I fear.

So it was with some chagrin and a poker face that I listened to my good uncle hold forth on the absolute necessity of getting tested for AIDS and the entire suite of formidably-named venereal diseases now in circulation. There is no such thing as a virgin anymore, he explained, and you'll have to protect yourself and your partners. He admitted he was conflicted on the merits of living together before marriage; he had one such relationship, which lasted a year and a half, and eventually broke up, whereas he did not cohabitate with the woman who became his second (and current) wife. He is now by all accounts a healthy, well-adjusted, happily-married, successful man in his early sixties.

And yet... And yet... I thanked him for the advice, which was so clearly heartfelt, but I already knew in my heart what I would do. For me there can be no turning away from the principles of conduct I have always lived by. I could not help thinking as I drove homewards that, in spite of the alluring rationales for the "new morality" (as they called it when it was still fairly new, at least on Main Street USA) and the new so-called sexual freedoms conferred by birth control, abortion on demand, modern medicine, and an utter revolution in attitudes about marriage and sexuality, we as a nation are not as well off as our ancestors who upheld and practiced a set of values requiring more restraint. We have a saying in our religion (courtesy of the Book of Mormon, from a sermon delivered by a prophet of God to a wayward son who had a problem with the ladies): Wickedness never was happiness. That, it seems to me, is the only possible answer to all the champions of sexual permissiveness. It is difficult to understand, particularly when in the throes of temptation that mortality sometimes sends our way. But it is the truth.

Sexuality has rightly been likened to a fire, and not the sort that refines. Freed from moral restraints, it consumes men and women like a savage flame, leaving ruined lives, families, and societies in its wake. That, at least, is what I've observed. As my experiences richly attest, relationships like marriage are fragile enough without introducing the consuming flame of sexual misconduct of whatever variety. And now a sexual conflagration is literally burning the country to the ground.

This metaphor gained force as I crested the hill and saw my hometown spread out before me. There, a few blocks from the highway and very close to my house, a three-storey building was aflame. Fearing for my daughter's safety, I rushed back to the house, but the massive fire was in fact a block and a half away, an old hotel succumbing to some misbegotten spark. I took Elaine and my soon-to-be ex-wife down the street to watch from a reasonably safe distance as the fire worked its destructive and inevitable course. Seven fire companies were represented, and my daughter watched in awe as thick streams from several water cannons and numerous hoses tried in vain to quench the huge flames erupting from the upper storey windows and the roof. Window panes exploded and a cauldron of smoke billowed heavenward as the firemen struggled to save the ground floor and the adjacent buildings. Elaine was frightened at first, then fascinated, then indifferent, her attention distracted by the numerous dogs wandering around that needed a petting.

We watched the immolation of one of our town's most venerable old buildings for more than a half hour before Elaine's eye-rubbing suggested that bedtime was in order. As we made our way homeward, the hoses and water cannons continued to thunder away, and the night sky was lit up by flames forty or fifty feet high gushing from the roof of the doomed structure. There is nothing good about fire untrammeled, I decided. It is a purely destructive force.

So it is with the fire that lurks in the hearts and minds of men: only when it is kept pent up and under strict control can it ever do any good. If allowed to escape its proper bounds, it will burn the edifice of the soul to the ground. This is my belief, and not even a failed marriage is going to alter it.

Symbols

2008-12-16T23:02:00.000-05:00

To resume my discussion from an earlier post on what I deem the most fundamental keys of understanding ever uncovered by secular scholarship -- I mean the taxonomy of phenomena propounded by Charles Sanders Peirce -- we ought to consider in more depth a few of the implications of what Peirce was fonding of calling "the Triad" (nothing to do with Chinese mafiosi, incidentally!). The triad of eternal, all-embracing categories, which Peirce termed Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, is everywhere manifest. Comprehending the categories, as I also mentioned earlier, is no ordinary task, because the method of reasoning required to "get at" the Peircian architectonic is quite different from the Cartesian nominalism in which we have all been steeped. They are only learnt by a proliferation of examples, and in fact there will never be an "Aha!" moment when the student knows with apodictic certainty what the Categories mean in their totality.

Yet we should strive to understand them nonetheless. Peirce tried many names for his Categories, but settled on prosaic-sounding ordinals because, in their most general sense, that is what they are. Firstness is anything in the class corresponding to the first phenomenon that we perceive or experience. In one of his first writings on the subject ("On a New List of Categories," 1867), Peirce called it "Quality," because that term comes closest, th0ugh still without being perfectly exact, to embodying what Firstness is. All qualities are Firsts, be they visual, tactile, olfactory, aural, or psychological. We experience everything -- whether a mental picture or concept, or a tangible experience -- first in terms of its qualities as they present themselves to our senses. If personalities could be classified according to the dominant Category they embody, then artists, musicians, and entertainers are preponderantly Firsts. The present time is also a First.

Secondness, which Peirce variously characterized as reaction and resistance, is the second thing to impinge upon our senses. It embodies things material inasmuch as they derive their substance from reaction and resistance to other things. The very act of discerning a First will involve a Second -- a notion obtruding upon our thoughts, a physical object resisting our senses, and the like. Secondness is the domain of the material, the existential, the tangible, the reactive, and the inert. The businessman, the accountant, the banker, the manual laborer, the manager -- these are all Seconds in the world of work and personality. The past time -- absolute, unyielding -- is a cardinal Secondness.

Thirdness is the third and final category that presents itself, and is also the most important. It is the Category involved in mediation (that is, of uniting Firstness and Secondness through the operation of some law or habit of mind). It is the most abstract and consequently the most neglected of the three. To acknowledge Thirdness is, as Peirce repeatedly showed, to acknowledge God, for Thirdness among other things involves final (as opposed to efficient) causation, and God is the ultimate final cause. Logicians, mathematicians, scientists, and jurisprudents tend to be (though are not always) Thirds. The future is a Third.

Now a word on another pair of terms which Peirce (and many other philosophers) deem to be of great importance: nominalism and realism. Philosophers don't always agree on the scope of these two terms, but for Peirce, the distinction between nominalists and realists was pivotal. The nominalist believes only in the reality of things existential -- that is, he confines his mode of inquiry and his worldview -- to the realm of Firstness and Secondness. He denies the reality of abstractions like law and motive. He denies the validity of Thirdness, in other words, and sees the world as opposites in conflict. His reasoning is always either-or.

The realist incorporates Thirdness into his reasoning. He believes in the reality of abstracts -- laws, principles, purposes, and the like.

In the Middle Ages, when the schoolmen were laying the first foundations of the science of logic (distilled mostly from Aristotle), they coalesced into two great camps, the realists, led by one John Duns Scotus, and the nominalists, led by William of Occam (he of "Occam's Razor," a beguiling fallacy if there ever was one). Duns Scotus, who was nicknamed "Doctor subtilis," was quite possibly -- along with Roger Bacon -- the most subtle mind of his age. His works -- even that small portion that have been translated into English from Church Latin -- are noteworthy for their quodlibetical nuances, which Peirce imbibed when few other scholars were interested in things Medieval (medieval history and studies was long a neglected subject in the American academy until Haskins came along).

It was, however, the Occamites who managed to get the upper hand in Medieval universities and purge the ranks of Scotus' epigones. So vivid was the obloquy directed at the realists that Scotus' surname Duns (probably representing the village in Scotland where he came from) became synonymous with with willful ignorance -- the "dunce cap" is a legacy of that debate.

As to the most important application of the Categories, Peirce was one of the two founders (the linguist Saussure was the other) of the modern discipline of semiotics, the study of signs. A sign is anything that represents something (an object or ground) to some mind, producing a mental representation called an interpretant. In Peirce's most famous taxonomy, he resolved signs into three basic types -- icons, indexes, and symbols (in point of fact, there are other ways of classifying signs in Peirce's system; this particular trio evaluates signs in terms of the manner in which they have signifying force).

Each of these three sign types represents its object in terms of one of the three categories. Icons are Firstnesses; their power of representation is bound up in some quality of the thing represented. Thus icons are usually likenesses of some type, such as pictures or onomatopoeic words (words that "sound" like what they represent). Broadly speaking, icons act as signs by virtue of similarity to the thing represented.

Indexes are signs that derive their force from directing the mind's attention to the thing represented, by some kind of physical or mental deixis ("pointing out"). A pointed finger is a good example of an index; so are demonstrative adjectives and pronouns ("this," "those," etc.). Terms that have meaning by virtue of a part referring to a whole (so-called synechdoche), like "all hands on deck" (where "hand" refers to the entire person) are also indexical. Where icons derive their force from similarity, indexes derive theirs from contiguity.

But these two sign classes are in fact what Peirce termed degenerate. Symbols are signs in the fullest sense because they operate in their entirety the way all signs operate in part, namely, by deriving their power to signify solely from some associative habit of mind. For example, the "plus sign" is a pure symbol, as are the overwhelming majority of words in all languages. With all such symbols we find that the relationship between the sign and its object is purely arbitrary; there is nothing inherently more correct about denominating the canine animal "dog," "chien" (French), "perro" (Spanish), "Hund," (German), "sobaka," (Russian), or "nay" (Tamil), for example; all are essentially arbitrary configurations of sound the utterance of which, for their respective speaking communities, will ineluctably summon up the interpretant of a dog. Mental habit is a form of Thirdness, and so the symbol is Thirdness embodied in the sign.

But these divisions are not absolute, as the realist mode of thought has to acknowledge. All words in fact are symbols, and all partake in one degree or another of iconicity and indexicality as well. Consider, for the fact, that in all languages, words denoting the simplest and most commonly-uttered concepts are typically the shortest and phonologically least complex. Pronouns, common verbs like "be" and "go," determiners, and common nouns for the most familiar objects (like "man," "boy," "dog," etc.) are some examples of this. On the other hand, word-symbols denoting more complex things tend to be longer and more phonologically challenging. This is highly iconic, and is found in all languages.

Likewise, even the most obviously indexical word-signs, onomatopoeia, have an element of arbitrary symbolism; or else why does a rooster say "cock-a-doodle-do" in English but "kikiriki" in Spanish? The sound of a blow in English is "Pow!" or "Wham!"; in Spanish it is "Paf!" And so forth.

But why should any of this be of concern to we of the LDS faith? Because a grand consequence of realism and of the semiotic that flows therefrom is that the universe is meaningful, that all things have signification to some mind (or Mind). Where the nominalist sees mere inert, lifeless reaction, the realist perceives purpose and meaning. He sees no contradiction between the laws of physics and of mind because, as Thirdnesses, they are both really the same thing. The realist also sees that mind and matter are the same, that the latter is merely a deadened, habit-bound version of the former; and all of this, which squares perfectly with latter-day revelation, is to be gleaned from the magisterial musings of Peirce.

Herein lies the repudiation of the materialist, the existentialist, the atheist, the socialist -- nominalists all --that the universe, including human society, is not a mere congeries of reactive substances, susceptible to rigid Cartesian determinism and manipulation. It is in fact a grand Symbol and composite of symbols, dynamic, meaningful, purposeful, evolutionary, and perfused with mind or intelligence. It is the embodiment of the three Categories, behaving as all symbols do, working out its own meaning and destiny, progressing (like a train of thought-symbols) to ever higher states of perfection and consistency.

This is, as best I can represent it at this late hour and with limited materials on hand, a distillate of the Peircian categories and a few of their consequences. Perhaps most pleasing to the realist is that there is no conflict between reason and religion; Peirce's nifty little paper, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" is worthwhile in this connection. So is "The Law of Mind," concerning which I may have more to say in a future entry.

It's snowing and sleeting by turns outside, and I must arise early to convey my beloved to preschool. Good night.

Cold

2008-12-13T23:28:00.000-05:00

My little one is gone again for a few days, and, as always when she's with her mother, the house seems -- and is -- very empty without her. Also, it's very cold.

This is deliberate. I have always preferred cold weather, and left to my own devices, prefer to keep the furnace turned down or completely off. Right now the temperature is in the low fifties and falling; it will be in the upper forties in my bedroom when I wake up tomorrow.

What is it about the cold and the winter that has always held an almost magical attraction, at least for me? In our family albums, there are photos of me as a small boy in Maine, playing in several feet of snow when the temperature was below minus 30. Two summers ago, in a road trip to Alaska and the Yukon with my brother, I got to swim in the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay, and loved it. The day was cold (about 40 degrees) and very windy, and the pebbly beach was roiled by chalk-colored waves. I plunged into the 34 degree water and swam around for a few minutes, earning a meaningless "polar bear certificate" into the bargain. In the wilds of Alaska and the Canadian far north, I got used to bathing in haste in frigid, glacier-fed streams and sleeping in a tent in near or below-freezing temperatures.

For me, the winter cold is emblematic of the northlands, which I love more than any other region of the globe; and the north means freedom. Long ago, certain of the wayward Israelites fled to unspecified "north countries" in hopes of keeping the statutes of God, which they had never been too successful at doing in the gentler, softer Levantine region.

It was Montesquieu, in that portion of Spirit of the Laws that practically no one bothers to read nowadays, who speculated that soft climates make for soft men. He pointed out that the freest peoples generally live in cold or mountainous areas; whereas the tropical and temperate climes have mostly nurtured autocracy. To the jaundiced modern eye, that might seem like an absurd generalization, but no one who has spent time in the comparatively epicene cultures of the Asian tropics (as I have -- India and Sri Lanka in particular) could altogether disagree.

The people whose laws and culture became Western Civilization (the Germanic tribes, whose descendants people all of the nations of northwest Europe, and whose blood, thanks to the southward irruption of the Lombards and the later Medieval movements of the Normans into Italy and the Balkans, is even heavily mingled with that of the peoples of the northern Mediterranean) were from unspecified northern regions of Asia. They settled in the vast "Hercynian Forest) of northern Europe and eventually became (if the authority of Turner, the Anglo-Saxons' first great historian, is to be accepted) a sort of refuge for expatriate Romans wishing to escape the bondage of living in that decrepit empire. It was they who truly discovered popular government of the sort we know today -- the Icelandic Althing, the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, and quite probably the distinctives of English common law -- trial by jury and the system of writs -- were innovations of the Germanic people at some stage, though the precise origin of such institutions is a matter of dispute.

Even today, most (though not all) of the world's freest countries are northerly -- the United States and Canada, Finland, Switzerland, Holland, Norway, and Denmark come to mind (yes, I know some of the aforementioned are socialistic, but they aren't a patch on the more despotic varieties of socialism preferred in Africa, Asia, and Latin America). Russia is of course the great exception, but there too, things appear to be changing.

As for the freest place on earth, that would have to be Alaska, almost a country in its own right. Those of us who have been there can understand why the "last frontier" attracts a certain breed of men: vast stretches of extremely hostile, unforgiving wilderness, long, cold, dark winters, and a lot of people who prefer, shall we say, to do their own thing. Alaska holds little attraction for those who abhor risk, who expect society to take care of them, and who do not like physical discomfort -- that is to say, most of the human race.

Which brings me back to the cold. As will become apparent as this blog progresses, I love liberty -- some say too much. Liberty requires first and foremost a denial of self -- what the Founding Fathers meant when they spoke of "virtue." Liberty has no place among the effete, the soft, the lazy, self-serving, or the pleasure-loving. It is an active impulse that disdains needless luxuries. It is best appreciated under some degree of self-denial; hence it is that so very few of the wealthy -- those who benefit the most from the bounties of liberty -- actually prefer freedom to the gentle bondage of luxury and privilege. Most of the men who fought the Revolutionary War -- who fought it, I mean, as opposed to watching from the sidelines and hedging their bets (and their business dealings) -- were poor men from "the sticks," men of little means but who knew how to shoot. The sacrifice of Dr. Warren at Bunker Hill stands out for its singularity: a man of privilege and status who insisted on fighting and dying on the front lines, despite being appointed a general.

Likewise is freedom popular here in the hills of western Pennsylvania, where few households are unarmed and government, especially the one down DC way, is viewed with narrow suspicion.

The other day, in the bitter cold and sleet, I went up the mountain to pay my parents a visit. No fewer than seven cars were parked at the bottom of their road, all belonging to hunters who were out in their tree stands waiting for a deer to happen by. This in weather that would send city folks scurrying chipmunk-like from the toasty warmth of offices and delis to the protective coccoons of their cars.

Our people prefer the snow and the cold, not to mention the solitude of the forests. I prefer them too, which is why I'll never live in a large city. I enjoy being alone, and I enjoy the outdoors for its own sake. But more even that that, I enjoy being a free man.

A Grand Key -- The Peircian Categories

2008-12-10T21:43:00.000-05:00

My little beauty is fast asleep, leaving me alone with my thoughts for an hour or two. And for the past several days, while other commitments have prevented me from making any entries to this blog, it occurred to me that this blog needs to begin living up to its name (which, I admit, is a term I invented years ago, and which sprang readily to mind when I was groping for a title in the wee hours last week when I started this enterprise on something of a whim). Occasional effusions of self-pity such as the first two entries have featured may be therapeutic, but they are hardly in keeping with what I think I want to achieve.

And what I want to achieve, in the midst of a life-altering crisis (Is there any other kind?) is a sort of melding of the spiritual and the intellectual, such as I have been mulling on for many years, the bare beginnings of an LDS-informed architectonic, perhaps. For it seems to me that in our church we are either apt to regard intellectualism with narrow suspicion, cordoning it off from respectable Gospel-oriented discourse, or to embrace it in all of its secularist extremes, relegating the revealed Gospel to a lowlier status and sneering at that portion of Latter-Day Saint-dom that fails to live up to self-serving intellectual ideals. In this latter category I have always placed those obstreperous and energetic Church dissidents, whose sole purpose seems to be to disrupt the orderliness of the Lord's house. Little wonder that many faithful Saints, upon seeing the mischief such souls stir up on their way out the doors of Zion, push away intellectualism as a needless distraction.

In truth, the Lord encourages the Saints (and every leader of the Church from Joseph Smith on has done the same, both by exhortation and by personal example) to seek education and truth wherever it can be found. There is something inherently romantic and ennobling about the process of education -- which, by the way, is primarily to be had as a result of personal effort, under the guidance of the Spirit, rather than by inculcation under the rod of some trained and too-often nescient professional educator.

Thus the overarching concern of this blog will be to systematize some of my own thoughts, the fruits of roughly three decades of both formal and self-education, and to share with whatever readers should stumble on this site some suggestions on where the "best books" are to be found and what is in them.

Where to begin? Though not a philosopher as such, I take as my point of departure an idea that, while little known, will yet (in my humble opinion) come to be recognized as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single concept ever brought to light by human intellect.

Most people, if asked, Who is the greatest genius that ever lived? would likely give the name of some eminent physicist or mathematician --Einstein or Gauss, Planck or Newton, perhaps. In our technocratic age, it is the great abstractionists of the physical sciences -- the theoretical physicists and the mathematicians who provide their theoretical tools -- who seem to get the highest acclaim. The most important ideas of our age? Undoubtedly (say the worshipful masses) Einstein's theory of relativity (E=MC2 being the easier version, special relativity, but the much less memorable equations of general relativity are far more significant), or perhaps the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or the laws of thermodynamics.

But in the opinion of this humble pilgrim, the achievements of all of these men are dwarfed by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, the greatest genius most people have never heard of. Peirce lived mostly in the 19th century, and never held a university professorship, his thinking being so far ahead of his time that even the Harvard savants could not abide him, except in small doses. He grew up in Cambridge, however; his father, Benjamin Peirce, was Harvard's (and America's) first bona fide theoretical physicist, and many of the extraordinarily talented people who lived in the Cambridge area in the first half of the 19th Century -- Emerson, for example -- were acquaintances of the Peirces. Charles read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason at the age of twelve, and knew that he wanted to be a philosopher first and foremost. In point of fact, he was many things throughout the course of his scholarly life: a mathematician, psychologist, linguist, historian, economist, astronomer, and geodesics expert among them. But it was in the field of philosophy that Peirce made his greatest contributions, although little of his work was published in his lifetime. In particular, Peirce was interested in the efforts of Kant to produce a taxonomy of phenomena, a fundamental classificatory system of everything that is or exists.

We are all familiar with the process of classification -- all of the descriptive sciences use it, and languages do as well, subconsciously creating classificatory categories for nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech (Latin verb conjugations and noun declensions being but one example). The question that Kant was willing to ask was: Is there a most fundamental classification for all things, both tangible and intangible, in which a self-consistent worldview can be grounded? Kant believed that there was, and came up with a fairly elaborate taxonomy (I forget how many basic categories he posited, but it was a significant number).

Peirce, beginning at a fairly tender age, set about to correct Kant's line of reasoning, and soon hit upon what he came to regard as his greatest insight, that there are in fact but three grand Categories into which all phenomena can be classified. He named them (prosaically but logically enough) Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, and devoted most of the rest of his copious scholarly output to tracing conclusions from this idea in various disciplines, like linguistics and graph theory, with which he was familiar.

The most accessible exposition of Peirce's Categories is to be found in a paper intended as an outline for a book he never wrote, A Guess at the Riddle. Firstness, Peirce explains, is that which first impresses itself on our senses --a mere feeling or quality of feeling. It encompasses things like odors, qualities of appearance, states of emotion, and the like. Firstnesses are such as they are without regard to anything else. Secondness is that which is such as it is with reference to something else. It encompasses the tangible, the reactive, the factual. Secondness embodies opposition, resistance, and effort, among many other things (or, perhaps better put, these things are all examples of Secondness). Thirdness is the domain of those things which stand in relationship between First and Second, that are such as they are by virtue of relating a thing or percept with something else. Thirdness is the domain of law, of motive, of meaning, of purpose, and of final causation. It comprehends both the laws of physics and of the human mind.

Now at first blush, these Categories may seem arbitrary or even pointless. But they are the grand key to understanding the makeup of the universe and the organization of all truth. They cannot be grasped in the same way that one might, for example, master a mathematical algorithm or memorize a verb paradigm. They must be learnt line upon line and not by rote, and be allowed to impress themselves gradually upon the soul until they come to perfuse our entire way of thinking. When I was first introduced to the Categories by John Robertson, my mentor at BYU, I was less than impressed. But over time (years, actually) and many readings and re-readings of Peirce's seminal papers, the Categories oozed through my intellectual pores,so to speak, until I appreciated with almost revelatory force their importance. To begin to comprehend the Categories is to see everything in an entirely new light, and to being to take one's first tentative steps away from the stifling nominalism (about which more in a future post) that is the unquestioned mode of thought of our age.

The Categories are everywhere manifest; they are the reason that the mind is so fond of threes, of which the Godhead is the preeminent example: Father (Thirdness -- final cause), Son (Secondness -- tangible, born in the flesh), and Holy Ghost (Firstness -- quality of feeling par excellence). Peirce saw reality as triadic rather than dyadic, and noted that Thirdness is typically cut out of modern systems of thought. This is tantamount to saying that modern thinkers are fond of excising law, motive, final causation, and the like from theory, and dealing solely in the domain of the First and the Second.

The hour is late and I need to retire, so I'll resume this thread at the next opportunity.

Alone

2008-12-08T00:27:00.000-05:00

A friend from Utah telephoned this evening, and I mentioned my new marital status. He is himself a happily-married fiftysomething with a raft of fine offspring (many of them married), but he was sympathetic to my plight. His brother, he told me, was divorced many years ago and has not re-married -- this in a church and culture where long-term single men are regarded (not altogether whimsically) as "menaces to society" (that's from a statement usually ascribed to Brigham Young, though I've never seen the original source). Scott said his brother wants nothing to do with LDS women and has no expectation of ever marrying again. Regarding another mutual acquaintance, also of Utah, who's been through a divorce, Scott informed me that this good brother (who has since remarried) told him that the day he walked out of the courthouse a divorced man, he felt like doing cartwheels. "Scott," he said, "why do you think men get divorced?" When Scott had no answer, he answered his own question: "Because it's worth it."

I certainly bear my own soon-to-be-ex no ill will; in point of fact, I enjoy our association much more now that we're just friends. I frequently point out to friends and family inclined to pass judgment that we never fought during our marriage, and do not intend to start now. So I doubt very much I will share that man's unbridled jubilation when my divorce is final.

But the other observation is much, much more trenchant. Men, at least men with any shred of decency in their makeup, do not take such a drastic and painful step as divorce unless it is really, really worth it. My sex in general lacks the nuanced subtleties of a woman's understanding of the human heart, but we all know, and can anticipate, in our admittedly one-dimensional way, what the choice of divorce means: months, perhaps years of anguish, guilt, perhaps worse. It means sobbing children who cannot or (if older) will not understand. It means new long-term financial obligations and possibly restrictions on where one can live and work. It means painful, sometimes adversarial discussions with in-laws who used to be family. It can mean years of legal conflict, hard feelings, social ostracism, and all the rest. Even those of my sex (and there are many) who find their way to divorce as a result of indecorous behavior like adultery, pornography, or abuse, whose moral compasses are significantly impaired, understand the consequences of divorce.

But in the end, divorce must be (or be perceived to be) worth the cost. For me, it is. Much of my pain was front-loaded, so to speak, expended over the years when my wife and I were married in little more than name. How many nights I lay awake until the gray hour before dawn, hoping against hope, praying that somehow, the Lord would soften my wife's heart, that she would want to re-commit herself to our marriage and to our eternal covenants! How many lonely hours I spent, when she was away on extended visits to family, wishing that she would call or email of her own account, rather than wait to hear from me before sending some terse reply! How many years did I watch with something akin to envy as other men's wives expressed their love and admiration for their husbands publicly? How many times did I sit alone in the Celestial Room of the DC temple, watching other couples luxuriate in the things of eternity together?

In short, by the time I was finally ready to give up on our marriage of 17 years, most of the bonds that constitute such a relationship had already been severed. The physical act of separation (her moving out, which my brother and I accomplished in one forgettable afternoon with the help of our father's dump truck) and its aftermath was still brutally, exquisitely painful, but short. After only a week or two, I could smile at her again; by Thanksgiving, I was happy to have her share in the festivities at my parents' home, since she had nowhere else to go. This evening, when she came over to pick up Elaine, she admired the Christmas tree that my daughter and I put up yesterday and then helped give our daughter a quick but overdue bath before leaving.

And mirabile dictu, tonight was the first time Elaine left my house without tears. As daughters often do, she has shown a strong preference for being with her father, and has made that preference painfully clear every time she has to go with her Mommy. Now, however, she's coming to accept the new order of things, and knows that she'll see Daddy again in a few days.

While Elaine's grief and incomprehension were at their most acute, however, it was awful. The first time her Mommy bore her away, crying and fighting to stay with Daddy, it was all I could do to keep a "game face" until I got the door closed; then, I broke down and wept like a child, great wracking sobs that I hadn't seen the likes of since long before adolescence. One cries a lot during a divorce, by the way; if one is like yours truly, never in public, but often in private, especially during moments of pure reflection, like while commuting to work.

But all of that is past now. I knew it was coming, but could not, of course, fully appreciate how exquisite it would be, that pain of breaking a bond that was meant to endure forever. It was an experience I never intend to repeat.

But it was worth it. As I told a friend recently, I've been alone now for many years, as I've only recently come to appreciate. But it's easier by far to be lonely alone.

Prolegomenon: While My Pretty One Sleeps

2008-12-05T22:52:00.003-05:00

My beauty, my gorgeous little daughter, is slumbering more or less peacefully down the hall. She is finally sleeping better weeks after her mother left, although the custody changes are still jarring for her. Her mother -- my soon-to-be ex-wife of 17 years -- lives now only a few blocks away, but for my daughter -- Elaine, I shall call her, though it isn't her real name -- it might as well be a continent. Elaine is not yet four, at that age when cognition is newly-awakened, but reason lies still a few seasons in the future. She knows that Mommy no longer lives with Daddy, but does not understand why. At intervals of a few hours, this terrible knowledge obtrudes on whatever peaceful visions she might be enjoying, and sends her stumbling down the hall half awake in search of Daddy (if he's nowhere nearby), or causes her to sit bolt upright in bed, requiring a father's embrace to settle down again. Sometime during this writing, she will probably come looking for me, a tiny girl whose world has been torn apart by things she cannot comprehend.

Until Elaine comes looking, let me introduce myself. I am forty-four, at an age nowadays still considered youthful but (as someone once pointed out) finally old enough to get some respect. I hold a PhD in linguistics from an Ivy League university, have a beautiful three year old daughter, and have more hobbies than a respectable middle-aged male is supposed to have: I enjoy hiking, birdwatching, beetle collecting, weightlifting, and the five-string banjo. I spend entirely too much time reading (a pursuit with no remunerative rewards, and hence held in low esteem in this pragmatic modern age). I also do a fair amount of free-lance writing, which does earn me a tidy extra income beyond my salary as a Spanish teacher at a small northeastern college. I am a faithful, temple-worthy member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mitt Romney Church). And, oh yes, in less than three months, I'll be divorced.

To those who read this without an insider's perspcctive on LDS culture: a divorced LDS male is a pariah of sorts. When divorces occur between people married in an LDS temple (supposedly for all eternity) it is almost universally assumed to be the man's fault -- he must have found someone else, or perhaps he has a problem with pornography, or maybe there's abuse. Women, we are told, in an interesting cultural volte-face from generations past, are wiser, more spiritual, and altogether superior to their husbands. Of this we LDS men we are frequently reminded, by implication and by overt statement, in our priesthood meetings and church conferences. In married couples, goes one popular refrain, husbands are usually the theologians, but wives are the Christians. Scarcely a General Priesthood meeting goes by without discussion of the evils of pornography, infidelity, abuse, and other kindred evils. Men, it is assumed, are the universal perpetrators, while women are the long-suffering saints.

The truth, at least based on my experience, is that both men and women are capable of good and evil, of sound and of shoddy judgment. I am still having trouble figuring out why our own marriage failed, but I know this: It was not because of pornography, infidelity, abuse, apostasy, or any of the other usual suspects. What I do know is that, soon after my wife and I got married, she withdrew into a shell from which she has never emerged. She has never, in all our years of marriage, expressed her love or appreciation for me publicly (in a testimony meeting, for instance). She has always disliked physical contact intensely, and, starting about ten years ago, began conveying the impression that she could not stand to be around me. A few years after that, she stopped going to the temple with me more than once every couple of years. More or less concommitantly, she developed a strong interest in alternative medicine (EFT in particular), and stopped going to the doctor for treatment of her thyroid problem. Three and a half years ago, shortly after the birth of our daughter, she discontinued intimacy altogether. Her pregnancy, during which she refused medical attention except for the ministrations of a midwife, was nightmarish for both of us. She gained a lot of weight, understandably enough, but continued to gain more and more after Elaine was born. Her health declined, but she refused to do anything about it. I tried everything I could think of -- counseling with church authorities and with a Church professional counselor chief among them -- but nothing made any difference. Being encumbered with male ego, I had a difficult time accepting that my wife simply did not want to be married any longer -- after all, I've always tried to keep in shape by exercising with weights, have always been responsible with money, have been as faithful as a black Lab, and we've never had a fight.

But in the end, after many solo trips to the D.C. temple and long months of careful prayer and reflection, I asked her last summer what she wanted. Her answer: a divorce. I am not a good listener, she said, and many other things besides, all of which I'd heard before and done my best (admittedly, a far less than perfect attempt) to rectify. Do you love me? I asked. No, was her reply, except as a fellow child of God.

That was it, then. I was raised to believe that if you are faithful, kind, reponsible, a peacemaker, and a communicator, you will have a successful marriage. Certainly my parents have built a lasting relationship with that formula. My later conversion to the LDS Church added another dimension: Keep your covenants, especially your temple covenants, and the Lord will consecrate your union forever. I've seen time and again how other temple marriages have foundered on that shoal: the husband develops "worthiness" problems, or an affair or some other such crisis rears its ugly head, and temple vows are set on their ear. Yet none of the foregoing apply here. In the end, I can only wonder: Is it I, Lord?

Such things are a novelty in my (non-LDS) family; there has never been a divorce in any of my direct lineages, as far as anyone knows. Divorce is something visited upon uncles and aunts and a few friends, but it hasn't been a family matter, until now. In my wife's family -- all LDS or former LDS -- things are different. Two of her five siblings have already had a total of three divorces between them, and a third sibling once filed for divorce but ultimately forged a shaky reconciliation that lasts to this day. Still another is in a nightmarish relationship with a spouse who has lots of "issues," as we say.

But however it has happened, I find myself on the cusp of middle age looking to start life all over again, where none but those who know me very well are likely to believe that it wasn't somehow entirely my fault.

But enough of that. Elaine slumbers still, so I'll hazard a few more biographical details. I love languages. I've studied as many as the late Brother Nibley, but my area of expertise lies to the east of his. My languages include Sanskrit, Pali, Avestan, Pali, and Sinhala, but I don't qualify as an LDS scholar because I know little Hebrew and will never be employed at "the Y" or contribute to Sunstone Magazine. Also, FARMS will never be interested in my scholarship, which has involved decipherment and translation of obscure South Asian texts that presumably lie outside the realm of LDS scholarly interest. No spite there: I just decided a long time ago that the Church has more than enough Middle Eastern scholars, Mayanists (my own advisor at BYU, where I did my Master's was one), and Classicists. No, I wanted to be a bona fide Orientalist, to lisp the chaste tongues of South Asia and unravel the pagan mysteries of their unspeakably ancient societies. But my publishing record is scanty, and academic demand for Orientalists is scantier, so I earn my bread teaching Spanish and writing articles on history and current events for a reasonably well-known "conservative" biweekly magazine.

For years, my fascination with, well, just about everything, seemed a tremendous liability, but no longer. It's now my lifeline. I exercise compulsively with weights, and also swim laps at least once a week and slog on the treadmill as well, in pursuit of those oh-so-elusive flat abs. I've never completely overcome my adolescent obsession with fitness and muscle definition, I'm afraid.

And as balm for my sorrows, there is always the woods, the rich Eastern woodlands of my birth and youth, where I've returned to live out my days (or so I hope). I know every birdsong, every mammal, every tree, and a goodly portion of the insects and other lesser creatures our woods harbor. I never miss a chance to be out in the woods, observing, enjoying. Just the other day, on the eve of deer season, I went eyeball to eyeball with a strangely confiding six point buck. A few days before that, I showed Elaine a porcupine in a black locust tree. And this afternoon a swamp sparrow mingled with the usual host of juncos and house finches at my parents' bird feeder. Life is never dull nor God far distant for those with a love of nature and the outdoors in their hearts.

I also have my books, hundreds of them. History has been my addiction of late, primarily Classical, Byzantine, and Medieval. I've read almost every book in the English language on Byzantine History (not a difficult feat, actually, for such a neglected field), and nearly everything of the classical historians, from Herodotus and Thucydides through Ammianus and Procopius. At the moment, I'm reading a history of American banking (I went on an economics binge a decade ago, and like to revisit that area from time to time). I even have a small collection of rare books, including a first American addition of Millot's Elements of History (the Founding Fathers' favorite "universal history") in five volumes, from the printing press of Isaiah Thomas himself. Of all the commandments of the Almighty to the Latter-Day Saints, I love most the injunction to study, learn, and "seek out of the best books." It's even in my Patriarchal Blessing, if memory serves.

Finally, there is my faith. In spite of what has happened, I remain true to my religion, to what we Latter-Day Saints call my "testimony," that ineffable conviction of the truth of the Gospel as propounded by Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. I gained that testimony years ago as a high school exchange student in South America, and have never deviated from it, although there have been times I have wished for a return to what sometimes seems to be the bliss of ignorance. But like that great Hollywood metaphor of the red pill, there can be no turning back from a testimony; once that threshold is crossed, one leaves the embrace of ignorance forever. I cannot un-know what I have learned, nor deny truth that is deeply rooted in my soul.

What is the purpose of this blog? I don't really know. I have been told by my brother, a minor celebrity in one corner of the blogsphere, that blogging is therapeutic, whereas I've always regarded it as little more than self-promotion. Be that as it may, I suppose this will be a flash in the pan, an anonymous reaching outward at a time of crisis, a sharing both of ideas and the matrix of feelings that begot them, a testimony of faith, a hankering after understanding. I suppose that my creativity and enthusiasm for such a project will expire in due course, and have no illusions that any but Almighty God, who hears every prayer of the heart, will ever pay these musings the slightest attention. But nevertheless, to the extent that I can anticipate the direction this enterprise may take, I offer these words to the broken-hearted, to all inquirers after truth, to lovers of liberty, to those who are children at heart, and to anyone who can appreciate the ineffable wonder of the night sky or the minute architecture of an insect's wings. In me you have a kindred spirit.

My little one still sleeps. All is well.