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.
Friday, August 14, 2009
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.
Friday, March 20, 2009
The Widening Gyre (and other musings)
"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.
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.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
A Perfect Day
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Finis Saeculi
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Working Vacation
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.
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.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Rarae Aves
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)