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.

Yelling at Children

The fourth of July celebrations of USA Independence Day seemed unusually hollow this year to me because of the reaction of USA citizens to the arrival at the USA-Mexico border of large numbers of war refugee children and mothers. These poor children and their mothers were seen here as “a threat to our very existence,” had their buses blocked by USA patriots and even received death threats.

The best single comment I read on the occasion was from Duncan Black:

     “July 4th:  Should we yell at some poor children or something?”

This occasion seemed to me to be a new low for the US and I tried writing something out to that point, but soon realized that it was not at all a new low.

Canada Day 2014 - My Appreciation

I used to love going to Canada, particularly between 2001 and 2008, when I had a big truck. I had some very good friends there, too, and lots of memories.

But something went wrong over time so that I got “flagged” in the Canadian customs/immigration computer for something- they never tell you what it is, why – so I eventually came to feel that this country I loved so much had something against me. Every time I would cross the border, I would get detained and grilled and then seemingly grudgingly and suspiciously admitted.

I talked with an older, decent, kind, truly experienced Canadian customs official about this one day when I crossed the border into Cornwall, Ontario. He relieved a lot of the sourness I was developing by saying to me: “Don't take it personally, it's just the rules,” and by recognizing my love of Canada and sharing his love of Canada with me. I told him about how I used to feel coming across that high bridge over the St. Lawrence and seeing the lights of Cornwall spread out down there before me on the other side. He spoke of Manitoba. That old guy represents Canada to me. Yes, Canada has its problems, but here was the heart of it.

Crossing the other way, from Canada into the US, was an entirely different matter. I was not “flagged” in the US customs for anything. The trouble I ran into there had nothing to do with “rules,” and in fact the problem was just the opposite – no rules. The absolute worst US customs officials and border guards were at Port Huron, Michigan, where you come in from Sarnia, Ontario. These guys were simply sadists – swaggering, violence-obsessed, self-important, vicious bullies. I don't have the vocabulary.

The idea that “It's just the rules” does apply in Canada, in general.

The idea in the US is that rules and justice are bullshit, and that the essence of “America” is exactly that. I will do just whatever the hell I want and screwing you over, eventually destroying you, is the best part of that.

Speaking Truth to Power

One of the surprising things about being "old, alone, and at the edge of death" is a new redeeming perspective on telling truth to power.

The powerful do not like having truth spoken to them, as anyone who has ever tried it knows only too well. Solzhenitsyn cites an old Russian proverb at the end of his Nobel Speech which goes: one word of truth can change the world. Tolstoy says similar things in many places, in one of which he says that the rulers of the world know this very well, so they zealously guard against its emergence.

They say things to you like “You'll never work in this town again,” in its many variants but probably they just do their destruction on you long before you know a thing about it. A favorite twist on it is to threaten your family.

Some contemporary truth speakers who come to mind are Snowden, Greenwald, Assange, Manning and Ellsberg.

I just loved McGovern confronting Donald Rumsfeld at a lecture that Rumsfeld had just given in Atlanta. McGovern took up Rumsfeld on his lie that he knew where Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were – north, east, south and west of Tikrit and Baghdad. The audience started getting physical toward McGovern for being such a rogue, so impolite, as to confront Rumsfeld on an obvious lie. You know just from the way Rumsfeld cited each of the four directions, that he was pulling it out of his butt. They started going for him physically and he said “Hey, this is America!” It was a brilliant thing to say to such people, and it worked.

That little bit of truth speaking may have saved far more lives and had a bigger effect on the world that was first apparent. The reaction of the crowd was just everything I despise. A courageous, truthful man speaks the truth and thereby does untold good, and “Real Americans,” patriots, wannabes and hangers-on-to-the-system and apparatchiks and the arrogant try to stop, even to murder him with their mindlessness. If you try some truth-speaking you will likely get death threats, and when you go to the police for protection on these occasions you find out very quickly who side they are on. The police told me on one such occasion, “Well, if I were you, I would get out of town for at least three days.”

There were many times over the course of my life when I spoke truth and received that response. A big one was my refusal to participate in the Viet-Nam war. Another instance, perhaps even more dramatic in its clarity for me, was when I addressed the faculty of the community college where I had taught for about ten years. The community colleges where visionary, progressive, hopeful places when they first started, but as usually happens with such vision and hope, they became sclerotic, mind-numbing inferior copies of the same old repression that they were designed to overcome or at least ameliorate. A great vision soon becomes co-opted into its exact opposite: what was once a great movement accrues people who are really after money and respectability or ancient ego or hidden malice and they destroy it.

So I spoke to the faculty of this college about it, citing the implications of Plutarch's description of the mind as a fire to be kindled rather than a receptacle to be filled. I was, of course, vilified and voted down for telling the truth. I resigned the job, relatively well-paying and having tenure, at the end of that semester. There were only one or two faculty out of a hundred that supported me, and a third person said,”you are right, but I have a family to support.” She herself had tenure but she was still full of such fear and already so corrupted as not to come out openly in support of me. The anger at me over the meeting was so intense, and faces so red, that I felt things could have gotten physical, although they did not.

So now, in my old age at the end of my life, and having paid the price for truth-speaking, I have come to the realization of redemption. It's easier than ever for me and other old people to speak the truth – you're going to die any day now anyway, so it doesn't really matter even if they come shoot you in the heart, destroy your ability ever to get job again, or lock you in solitary for the rest of your life. That is actually true for anyone, taking anything like a large perspective. Life passes so very quickly.

I can now see with thanks and delight how good it was for me to have stuck with it despite the price, and I see, without any gloating or vindictiveness, what happens to those who do not stick by it. They become so debased and corrupted that they are incapable of redeeming themselves. It's much too long a task - I would say impossible - if they have a massive load of lies they have lived on and under.

There have been late-in-life “conversions,” at the death bed, and all that. But William James would say that such conversions are not immediate acts, but have been in preparation for a long time previously, on the subconscious level particularly.

Every word I have written here is the truth, and I know that there are people out there in the USA who would gladly kill me for writing it, but it doesn't bother me now, yes because I've had ”a glimpse of the promised land,” but also death will definitely happen any day now.

Let's Be Logical Now. Rational.

One of the best descriptions that I have read of the limitations of the “Let's be logical, now,” mindset just seemed to jump off the page at me from a paragraph in Swedenborg (Coelestia Arcana, vol. 2) last night. The context of this piece is his explication of Sara laughing upon being told that she is going to have a child, Isaac (“laughter”), in her nineties. Her husband is 100. “Shall I truly bear, and I am become old?” She laughs. I guess it didn't seem very logical to her.

Swedenborg has a lot to say about this Sara-to-Sarah story but here is the part ( §2209) that was so striking to me last night:

As regards the rational in general, when it thinks about divine things, especially from its own truth, it cannot possibly believe that there are such things; both because it does not apprehend them, and because there adheres to it the appearances born from the fallacies of the senses by which and from which it thinks; as is evident from the examples adduced above; to which the following may be added by way of illustration. If the rational be consulted, can it believe that the Word has an internal sense, and this is so remote from the literal sense as has been shown? And that the Word is that which conjoins heaven and earth, that is, the Lord's kingdom in the heavens with the Lord's kingdom on earth? Can the rational believe that souls after death speak with each other most distinctly, without the speech of words, and yet so fully as to express more in a minute than a man does by his speech in an hour? And that the angels do the same, but in a speech still more perfect, and one that is not perceivable by spirits? Also, that on coming into the other life all souls know how to speak in this way, although they receive no instruction in so speaking? Can the rational believe that in one affection of man, nay, in one sigh, there are such wonderful things as can never be transcribed, and yet are perceived by angels? And that every affection of man, nay, every idea of his thought, is an image of him, being such as to contain in a wonderful manner all the things of his life? Not to mention thousands upon thousands of such things. The rational, which is wise from sensuous things, and is imbued with their fallacies, when thinking of such things, does not believe that they can be so, because it is unable to form any idea of itself except from such things as it perceives by some sense...

This is all definitely “nonsense,” non-sense, the exact word used, to logical positivism, linguistic analysis, operationalism, etc.

The increase in love and humility that can come with age, though - the burning away of ego-centrism - seems to make it much easier to understand what Swedenborg is saying here. No joke!