Joyce on the Infinite and the Infinitesimal

Taking the largest possible perspective on things makes me appreciate them more deeply, even though it sometimes seems like this is a cold, heartless, annihilating approach. Taking the largest perspective possible draws me closer to my loved ones and makes me appreciate them more while I am here.

I happened to be reading James Joyce's “Ulysses” recently and came across a passage in which he is writing about what I am calling “the large perspective.” He writes about the incomprehensible expanse out there as well as inside the small. I've elsewhere read a few attempts (Here is one which also quotes Joyce directly) to express this large perspective which were a little clearer than Joyce's attempt. Yet his is worth reading and goes as follows:

   The heaventree of stars hung with humid lightblue fruit.

   With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

  Meditations of  evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of the equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901; of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

   Were there meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

   Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatazoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

I take this humbling increasingly seriously as I come closer to death, although it is only too easy to lapse into the shorter perspective in which I think that things like “survival” are important.

But it doesn't involve a coldness or lack of love and appreciation. Just the opposite is true. Perhaps there is some way in which the vastness really is not that important or annihilating after all. Perhaps we know immediately that love is the central point and all the rest is derivative or secondary to it.

The Ferguson Photos

The recent photos of over-armed police pointing guns at unarmed people in Ferguson, Missouri, have a special resonance with me and apparently to many other people. I've thought a lot about the question of why this is, why these images are so exciting to me, why they are so deeply familiar and meaningful.

The best understanding I can come up with, that I keep coming back to, is that these photos express exactly how I have personally felt going to school and college, living in the USA during the Civil Rights fight and the Viet-Nam and the Iraq wars and  the Reagan-plus years of programmatic selfishness and the hatred-of-Obama years.

The very popularity of such photos as these is a great ray of hope because it suggests that humanity is alive and even unkillable despite all these years.

That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine

Gene Autry wrote a song in 1932 entitled “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine.” The first time I heard it was about twenty years ago, shortly after my own father died, when I happened to be wandering around an old antiques shop in Massachusetts near where he was born. The shop was playing it as background music but it had a great effect on me at the time and I've often thought of it since then.

Many singers have covered it. Marty Robbins' version, below, has been one of the most popular and is worth hearing, although I myself am partial to Mac Wiseman's version. Wiseman has done some Romantic things that seem simply incomparable to me.

Hank Snow, the Canadian singer, wrote a sequel to it, in which he has the father responding to the regret by saying “Just come see me.”
                                    

Now, it goes through my mind that the versions of this old Gene Autry song are not as well known or respectable as, say, the parable of the Prodigal Son or Rembrandt's painting of the silver-haired, old father embracing the repentant son, but that they are working on the same thing. Old, popular classics often carry the mythic with them.

In a vine covered shack in the mountains
Bravely fighting the battle of time
There's a dear one who's weathered life's sorrows
It's that silver haired daddy of mine.

If I could recall all the heartaches
Dear old daddy, I've caused you to bear
If I could erase those lines from your face
And bring back the gold top your hair.

If God would but grant me the power
Just to turn back the pages of time
I'd give all I own if I could but atone
To that silver haired daddy of mine.

I know it's too late, dear old Daddy
To repay for the sorrows and cares
Tho’ dear Mother is waiting in Heaven
Just to comfort and solace you there.