One of the joys of parenting is fielding unexpected questions. Today on the way to church, my 7 year-old daughter, who was playing in the back seat with a certain egg timer that has become one of her most cherished totems, suddenly asked whether there were more grains of sand in her egg timer than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. This was not altogether a surprising query; for weeks we have been talking about stars and galaxies, and I have tried to give her some appreciation of the immensity of the universe by letting her help me classify newly-discovered galaxies via NASA's laudable web site. As a result, she understands, perhaps better than most of her peers, that those distant smears of light we call galaxies are in fact congeries of stars whirling through the void at unimaginable distances from our humble earth.
But how did the pink-hued sands in her own egg timer compare with our galaxy? I told her that I seriously doubted that there were 300 billion grains of sand in her timer, as there are estimated to be stars in our galaxy (though that number may be a severe under-calculation; astronomers have ascertained that M-31, our galactic "twin," the great spiral galaxy in Andromeda, probably contains as many as a trillion stars).
In point of fact, galactic numbers are almost disspiritingly large. Our own galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across, meaning that a beam of light, even if it were sufficiently brilliant to be perceived across such an expanse, would take 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. Even the very nearest stars outside our own sun -- those in the so-called "solar neighborhood" -- are trillions of miles away. One light year being roughly 6 trillion miles, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is more than 4 light years, or 24 trillion miles, distant.
And how large a number is a trillion? Well, there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. That means that, counting by seconds, it would take more than 31 years just to count to 1 billion (I've been on the earth for a little more than 1.5 billion seconds). But a trillion is one thousand billions, so it would take more than 31,000 years to count to 1 trillion, and 186,000 years to count to six trillion -- the number of miles in a light-year.
In the last couple of years, there has been some excitement in the astronomical community over a family of planets found to be orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581, at least two of which have been tagged as potentially habitable. This star is among the closest to earth, but at a "mere" 20.3 light-years (119 trillion miles), it is inconceivable that we shall ever be able to go there ourselves. After all, the light from that star now reaching the earth started its journey back in 1992 (from our vantage-point), before most of my university students were even born.
And many of the brightest stars in the sidereal heavens are much farther away than that. The blue supergiant Rigel in the constellation Orion is about 860 light-years out; the light of Orion's brightest star began its journey to earth sometime around the Second Crusade, in the time of Bernard de Clairvaux and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Deneb, the most distant first magnitude star, is perhaps 1500 light years away (though it may be as far as 1800 light years), meaning that in Deneb we are seeing luminosity generated sometime between the time of Septimius Severus and Justinian. The entire Dark Ages and rise of Western Civilization transpired while the photons from Deneb now arriving on the shores of earth were traversing interstellar space.
All these are still very local objects. In an object 100,000 light years across, the distance from earth to Deneb is a tiny hop. The halo of ancient globular clusters in which our spiral galaxy is immersed extends tens of thousands of light-years above and below the galactic plane, while the galactic center, where a mysterious source of extraordinary energy is hidden among dense clouds of brilliant stars and nebulae, is at least 20,000 light years from earth. Thus the light arriving at our remote corner of the galaxy from the galactic core has been in transit for many millenia before any semblance of human civilization appeared on earth, since before the last great ice age even began, in all likelihood.
Beyond our own galaxy lie countless others, stretching out to the very limits of detectability at more than 10 billion light years. The light from those objects originated long before the earth or solar systen even existed, even by the most generous geologic chronologies. And every one of them is as immense and unknowable as our own star system. Little wonder that the Lord, in attempting to help his choicest servants, like Moses and Abraham, comprehend the grandeur of the cosmos, characterized his creations as uncountable. "Worlds without number I have created," he informed an awestruck Moses, adding, "Innumerable are they to man, but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them."
How this can be so is far beyond the grasp of mortal man, even one so enlightened as Moses. We are told that the grand purpose behind all of the works of God -- behind the totality of the observed and observable universe -- is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, a life frequently characterized by the syntactically curious modifier "worlds without end." For Latter-Day Saints, the human race extends far beyond this earth, both in time and space. The race of beings sired by Heavenly Father populates the entire cosmos; there are countless worlds beyond our own peopled with such as ourselves, and perhaps by other intelligent races as well -- more than this we are no better informed than were Moses and Abraham.
But we know enough to say that the universe is purposeful, that it is intelligent, and that the great drama of the human race is being replicated, perhaps in infinite variety, all across the immensity of the cosmos: the eternal pageant of Intelligence, or of intelligences, as they are conducted upward from primordial awareness to eternal perfection, worlds without end.
Not only is the macrocosm grand beyond imagining. I pointed out to my daughter as we passed the green fields near the chapel, which are already thick with foot-high grass and spring wildflowers, that the number of blades of grass in a single field is impossible to reckon, let alone the totality of grass blades in our home state of Pennsylvania. So too with the number of leaves on a single wooded mountainside, or the grains of sand on a single beach.
It is to the sand metaphor that we are ineluctably drawn back, in contemplating such matters as these, the macro and the microcosmic. For while it is mind-boggling enough to consider that the Lord's reckoning can keep track of every blade of grass -- or, indeed, of every molecule in every cell in every blade of grass -- as easily as it can tabulate all of the grains of sand on all of the beaches of all of the worlds in the universe, it is sobering to consider that He uses the sand descriptor to characterize the posterity of the righteous. It was Abraham -- and by extension, all those of his literal and adopted posterity who receive the covenants he received -- who was promised posterity as numberless "as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore" (rough estimates have reckoned the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the world at 7.5 quintillion, and of the number of stars in the universe as at least 100 times that number!). And this promise, we understand, is not confined to mortality, but will be in force forever. These are, perhaps, not matters that a new parent, struggling to change a dirty diaper, will want to consider too deeply!
Yet they speak of the capacities that we will develop, sometime in eons to come, of participating in the great work that is our Heavenly Father's primary task, to multiply and replenish the cosmos with our own kind, and to help as many as are willing of our own eventual posterity to grow to exaltation and eternal lives in their own turn.
Sand, then, is an emblem both of time and of eternity, of both the fleeting limits on our mortal lives (as even the old soap opera tagline used to express it) and of our eternal potential beyond the veil.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Bees
A lovely, sunny Easter weekend, and yesterday found me sitting on the back porch, strumming my banjo and watching my daughter play among the dandelions and violets that grace our patchy back lawn. My house, a shabby duplex on one of my hometown's shabbier streets, plays host -- as so many old buildings do -- to a wide array of opportunistic fauna, from carpenter ants to a raucous family of starlings that nests every summer in the rickety rear gutter. As was the fashion in the mid-20th century, my house is sided with rust-red tarpaper shingles. Many of the nails that once held the shingles in place have fallen out or sunk into the aging wooden walls, leaving many small punctures reminiscent of woodpecker holes. As I plucked my banjo, I noticed that many of these nail-less holes were now harboring leafcutter bees, small cousins to the honeybee that line their dwellings with pieces of leaf that they meticulously scissor from living folliage with their precise little jaws.
Leafcutter bees pose no threat as long as they're left alone. They came and went by the dozens as I sat and played. There were at least twenty different nests in the wall of my back porch, a number likely to grow as the shingles continue to peel away from the nails that once held them in place, and my hands-off landlord continues to ignore the deteriorating exterior of a once-proud structure. It is not, after all, the fault of these tiny bees that siding a half-century old is yielding to the exactions of Pennsylvania's fickle weather.
I rarely sit on the front porch, not merely because of the street noise and neighbors who smoke and drink, but also because the wooden front porch railing has attracted another kind of bee, the carpenter bee. These are large, in-your-face bees with gleaming black abdomens and a disquieting habit of hovering aggressively in front of your face. Like leafcutters, they are solitary, but unlike them, they love to fight with one another, whirling and tumbling through the air in angry fits of territoriality. Also, carpenter bees are destructive, chewing large .40 calibre holes in untreated wood, an activity that leaves mounds of sawdust all over the porch.
These bees are the bane of old wood houses; all up and down Logan Avenue, which is lined with century-old wood frame houses, carpenter bees are destroying the porches. They swoop agressively at pedestrians on warm spring days. By early summer, they disappear into their newly-chewed tunnels. What shipworms are to docks and wooden hulls, carpenter bees are to front porches.
We Latter-Day Saints are fond of bees -- of honeybees, at least, which Brigham Young chose as the symbol for what became the state of Utah. Honeybees, at least, are not only industrious but also productive. Honey is one of the least-perishable substances known, mysteriously preserving its virtue for years. Unlike carpenter bees, honeybees do not destroy in order to create space for themselves; rather than reducing good wood to sawdust, they find a convenient hole in a tree or wall and fill it with combs. Some varieties of honeybee, such as those found in India and Nepal, construct huge hives on the exteriors of cliffs and temple towers.
Besides these, there are thousands of other varieties of bees to be found almost worldwide, from the treeless arctic to the equatorial rain forests. There are parasitic cuckoo bees which, like their avian namesakes, parasitize others of their kind rather than going to the trouble of building their own nests. There are the inoffensive bumble bees (or humble bees), which nest in holes in the ground and are active anytime there is pollen to be gathered. There are the brightly-colored halictid bees, certain of which, known colloquially as "sweat bees," are fond of lapping up perspiration and stinging when they can't get any more.
Ideally, we Latter-Day Saints should be like the honeybee -- the most highly-evolved of all insects -- industrious, orderly, cooperative, and above all, productive. No solitary bolt-hole dwellers we, nor vexatious parasites. Yet the Deseret metaphor sometimes seems dated, given the drift of modern culture and our willingness, even need, to follow in its wake. The era of Deseret was an era of unexampled industry and risk-taking. Mormon pioneers literally wrote the book on taming the desert wastes. Out of the torrid sagebrush basin the early Saints erected not only towns, but farms, ranches, schools, universities, banks, factories, and all manner of mercantile establishments. Karl Maeser, Jacob Spori, John Moses Browning, Philo Farnsworth, John Widtsoe, James R. Talmage, Hugh Nibley, Ezra Taft Benson, B. H. Roberts, and many other innovative, creative souls were products of that culture.
Nowadays, it seems to me, we are mostly content to find a niche somewhere and accomodate ourselves to it. Like the leafcutter bees, we work hard but create little, happy to take whatever the world gives us and to be secure in our respective stations. This is not necessarily our fault; it is a survival strategy forced upon us by a world increasingly under the sway of Management, where initiative is stifled by a myriad bureaucrats and a web of laws and regulations so complex that virtually all human activity is subject to some form of control (blogging being, at least so far, a happy exception). This is the world of Egypt in which Joseph prospered by finding his niche. It is also the world of the Roman imperium, where the primitive Christians learned to submit to the irresistible authority of the Caesars. It is the world of the Medieval Jew who, relegated to the status of second-class citizen, found niches in the financial service sector that allowed him to hold his own amid a hostile majority. It is emphatically not the world of Moses and the Israelites in the desert, nor of the early Jaredites, nor of Lehi and his progeny in the Arabian wastes. The world of Deseret is, in so many ways, the world of the pioneer and the emigrant; it is not the world of so-called civilized man, whose survival depends more on his ability to adapt and to conform than on his creativity, inventiveness, or willingness to take risks.
What the Mormon pioneers were able to accomplish a century and more ago would be literally impossible in today's world. Homesteading has long since been discontinued by the federal government, even in far-flung Alaska. Most of the land in the Intermountain West now belongs to the federal government, and every human activity undertaken by the pioneers is nowadays so tightly regulated -- on environmental, social, economic, or other grounds -- that such an enterprise as founding an entire town in the desert is not to be thought of. Farming, ranching, and timbering are viewed with narrow suspicion by Those Who Matter -- inside the Beltway and in the hallowed halls of state government, for the most part -- for their alleged ill effects on the environment, the water supply, and whatnot. Farming and ranching destroys native prairie habitat, while lumbering strips away virgin forest. Humans in large concentrations anywhere are viewed not as sons and daughters of God, with unimaginable potential that ought to be encouraged, but instead as a herd of livestock who require, in Saint-Juste's cynical prescription, only to be told where to browse. It is the aim of mature urban civilization everywhere to furnish not opportunity but security, and in the providing of the second, the first must be systemically curtailed. Thus our morphing from honeybees into leafcutters.
This, then, is why most of us modern Latter-Day Saints look to the safe professions -- law, finance, medicine, the academy, etc. -- as a route to temporal salvation. Few of us would consider starting a business of our own, or purchasing a farm, or any other such, because we know that self-employment is penalized as against seeking to work as a subaltern in some large, established corporation. For myself I am reminded every year, when I pay the double FICA tax on my side earnings as a free lance writer, that the world to which I have been consigned punishes initiative while encouraging and subsidizing conformity and compliance (in the professional and legal sense of the terms).
I suppose that the Deseret ideal will never be fully re-enshrined this side of the Millenium, if for no other reason than because most Americans do not really want it. Comfort and security have become our watchwords now, a natural inclination for those in search of something other than the Father of Lights in whom to repose their trust.
Leafcutter bees pose no threat as long as they're left alone. They came and went by the dozens as I sat and played. There were at least twenty different nests in the wall of my back porch, a number likely to grow as the shingles continue to peel away from the nails that once held them in place, and my hands-off landlord continues to ignore the deteriorating exterior of a once-proud structure. It is not, after all, the fault of these tiny bees that siding a half-century old is yielding to the exactions of Pennsylvania's fickle weather.
I rarely sit on the front porch, not merely because of the street noise and neighbors who smoke and drink, but also because the wooden front porch railing has attracted another kind of bee, the carpenter bee. These are large, in-your-face bees with gleaming black abdomens and a disquieting habit of hovering aggressively in front of your face. Like leafcutters, they are solitary, but unlike them, they love to fight with one another, whirling and tumbling through the air in angry fits of territoriality. Also, carpenter bees are destructive, chewing large .40 calibre holes in untreated wood, an activity that leaves mounds of sawdust all over the porch.
These bees are the bane of old wood houses; all up and down Logan Avenue, which is lined with century-old wood frame houses, carpenter bees are destroying the porches. They swoop agressively at pedestrians on warm spring days. By early summer, they disappear into their newly-chewed tunnels. What shipworms are to docks and wooden hulls, carpenter bees are to front porches.
We Latter-Day Saints are fond of bees -- of honeybees, at least, which Brigham Young chose as the symbol for what became the state of Utah. Honeybees, at least, are not only industrious but also productive. Honey is one of the least-perishable substances known, mysteriously preserving its virtue for years. Unlike carpenter bees, honeybees do not destroy in order to create space for themselves; rather than reducing good wood to sawdust, they find a convenient hole in a tree or wall and fill it with combs. Some varieties of honeybee, such as those found in India and Nepal, construct huge hives on the exteriors of cliffs and temple towers.
Besides these, there are thousands of other varieties of bees to be found almost worldwide, from the treeless arctic to the equatorial rain forests. There are parasitic cuckoo bees which, like their avian namesakes, parasitize others of their kind rather than going to the trouble of building their own nests. There are the inoffensive bumble bees (or humble bees), which nest in holes in the ground and are active anytime there is pollen to be gathered. There are the brightly-colored halictid bees, certain of which, known colloquially as "sweat bees," are fond of lapping up perspiration and stinging when they can't get any more.
Ideally, we Latter-Day Saints should be like the honeybee -- the most highly-evolved of all insects -- industrious, orderly, cooperative, and above all, productive. No solitary bolt-hole dwellers we, nor vexatious parasites. Yet the Deseret metaphor sometimes seems dated, given the drift of modern culture and our willingness, even need, to follow in its wake. The era of Deseret was an era of unexampled industry and risk-taking. Mormon pioneers literally wrote the book on taming the desert wastes. Out of the torrid sagebrush basin the early Saints erected not only towns, but farms, ranches, schools, universities, banks, factories, and all manner of mercantile establishments. Karl Maeser, Jacob Spori, John Moses Browning, Philo Farnsworth, John Widtsoe, James R. Talmage, Hugh Nibley, Ezra Taft Benson, B. H. Roberts, and many other innovative, creative souls were products of that culture.
Nowadays, it seems to me, we are mostly content to find a niche somewhere and accomodate ourselves to it. Like the leafcutter bees, we work hard but create little, happy to take whatever the world gives us and to be secure in our respective stations. This is not necessarily our fault; it is a survival strategy forced upon us by a world increasingly under the sway of Management, where initiative is stifled by a myriad bureaucrats and a web of laws and regulations so complex that virtually all human activity is subject to some form of control (blogging being, at least so far, a happy exception). This is the world of Egypt in which Joseph prospered by finding his niche. It is also the world of the Roman imperium, where the primitive Christians learned to submit to the irresistible authority of the Caesars. It is the world of the Medieval Jew who, relegated to the status of second-class citizen, found niches in the financial service sector that allowed him to hold his own amid a hostile majority. It is emphatically not the world of Moses and the Israelites in the desert, nor of the early Jaredites, nor of Lehi and his progeny in the Arabian wastes. The world of Deseret is, in so many ways, the world of the pioneer and the emigrant; it is not the world of so-called civilized man, whose survival depends more on his ability to adapt and to conform than on his creativity, inventiveness, or willingness to take risks.
What the Mormon pioneers were able to accomplish a century and more ago would be literally impossible in today's world. Homesteading has long since been discontinued by the federal government, even in far-flung Alaska. Most of the land in the Intermountain West now belongs to the federal government, and every human activity undertaken by the pioneers is nowadays so tightly regulated -- on environmental, social, economic, or other grounds -- that such an enterprise as founding an entire town in the desert is not to be thought of. Farming, ranching, and timbering are viewed with narrow suspicion by Those Who Matter -- inside the Beltway and in the hallowed halls of state government, for the most part -- for their alleged ill effects on the environment, the water supply, and whatnot. Farming and ranching destroys native prairie habitat, while lumbering strips away virgin forest. Humans in large concentrations anywhere are viewed not as sons and daughters of God, with unimaginable potential that ought to be encouraged, but instead as a herd of livestock who require, in Saint-Juste's cynical prescription, only to be told where to browse. It is the aim of mature urban civilization everywhere to furnish not opportunity but security, and in the providing of the second, the first must be systemically curtailed. Thus our morphing from honeybees into leafcutters.
This, then, is why most of us modern Latter-Day Saints look to the safe professions -- law, finance, medicine, the academy, etc. -- as a route to temporal salvation. Few of us would consider starting a business of our own, or purchasing a farm, or any other such, because we know that self-employment is penalized as against seeking to work as a subaltern in some large, established corporation. For myself I am reminded every year, when I pay the double FICA tax on my side earnings as a free lance writer, that the world to which I have been consigned punishes initiative while encouraging and subsidizing conformity and compliance (in the professional and legal sense of the terms).
I suppose that the Deseret ideal will never be fully re-enshrined this side of the Millenium, if for no other reason than because most Americans do not really want it. Comfort and security have become our watchwords now, a natural inclination for those in search of something other than the Father of Lights in whom to repose their trust.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Auld Lang Syne
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!
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!
Friday, December 25, 2009
Per Speculum in Aenigmate
Another year is winding to a close, provoking the usual musings on The Meaning of It All. 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 unavoidable circumstances, all the while paying my tithing faithfully, yet my circumstances are straitened as ever.
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 "substance (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!
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 "substance (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!
Monday, October 5, 2009
Gracias a la Vida
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.
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.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Music at World's End
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.
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
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)