Category: Meditations

Rainbow

It rarely rains in the Bay area in summer time, but today we had a few scattered rain showers.

Just now, I was sitting at my desk, and happened to look up at the sky. I can’t see much of the sky from where I sit: trees and buildings limit my view. But there, in the small portion of the sky I could see, was part of a rainbow. I stepped outside to look at it. There was one small rain shower coming down from the clouds to the east — I could see the gray streaks of rain — and a little patch of sunlight just happened to light up that portion of the sky, causing a rainbow that encompassed about fifteen degrees of a complete circle.

I stood and watched it for about five minutes. At its brightest, there was the main spectrum, then immediately under it a smaller spectrum, the blue of the larger one fading directly into the red of the smaller one, and under that an even smaller spectrum. But soon the rain shower drifted out of the patch of sun, and the rainbow faded away.

The ceiling gods

Waking up in the middle of the night and talking to the ceiling gods:— This refers to those moments when you come out of sleep filled with thoughts of all the problems you have to face, at least some of which are probably unsolvable. You lie there in bed, your mind turning those problems around, and you can’t get back to sleep for a long time. This is talking to the ceiling gods. (I think I first heard Wynne using this phrase.)

I suspect the ceiling gods are descendants of the old Roman household gods, the Lares. We have tried to replace the old household gods with the altars of personal computers, and portable shrines of tablets and smartphones. But for every problem my laptop solves, it dumps three more problems in my lap via email; I’m not sure our replacements for the Lares are really doing us any favors. The ceiling gods seem more effective. Perhaps I will start pouring them libations, and leaving them small offerings.

Motives

When Max Planck turned sixty, he was honored by the Physical Society of Berlin. Several scientists gave short talks in his honor, including Emil Gabriel Warburg, Max Von Laue, Arnold Sommerfeld, and Albert Einstein.

Einstein spoke about the motives for engaging in scientific research, “Motive de Forschung.” He said that some people take to science out of a sense of superior intellect, some as a kind of sport, some out of ambition, some for utilitarian purposes. But, said Einstein, some people — including Planck himself — engage in scientific research out of a very different motive:

I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

And there are many people like this in our liberal congregations: finely tempered natures who need to range through pure air and look into eternity.

In the next paragraph of the talk, Einstein went on to explain that this motive for doing scientific research is not simply a negative one of escapism:

With this negative emotion there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that best suits him a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. [Bibliographic information below.]

And again, there are many people in our liberal congregations who engage in religion for the same motive: like the poet and the painter, these are people who do religion the way an artist does art, to help make sense out the world. Among religious liberals, this motive does not impel people to replace science with religion, any more than religious liberals would try to replace painting with poetry. Religion, especially I think for those who are mystics, can be another way to make sense of the world, to look into eternity, to place oneself in the context of the cosmos.

Of course there are other motives for doing religion, just as there are other motives for doing science. Many religious liberals conceive of religion in utilitarian terms: religion is a way to promote justice, religion is way to build social capital, and so on. But there are also the poets and painters and scientists among us, who want to look into eternity and seek to understand our places in the cosmos.

———

Bibliographic information: Albert Einstein, “Principles of Research,” 1918, address delivered at a celebration of Max Planck’s sixtieth birthday to the Physical Society, Berlin. Published in German in a collection of essays: Emil Gabriel Warburg. Max Von Laue, Arnold Sommerfeld, Albert Einstein, and Max Planck, “Zu Max Plancks Sechzegstem Geburtstag; Ansprachen, Gehalten Am 26. April 1918 in Der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft” (Karlsruhe; Müller, 1918). Reprinted in: ed. Carl Seelig, Mein Weltbild (1934, 1953). Published in English: ed. Carl Seelig, trans. Sonia Bargman, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown Publishers, 1954). The complete text of the English translation of this talk is available online, among other places, here.

Memoir

I’ve been leading a monthly memoir writing at church. I do the exercises, too, and recently I wrote about something that happened almost exactly thirty years ago this week. So here are my memories of that day. I’ve changed the names, because there’s no reason to give those names to intrusive search engines.

August —, 1982

During the summer, the lumberyard always hired someone extra to help out in the in the yard, and to help out stocking shelves in the store. Summers were busy, and there was always at least a truck driver, or one of the yardmen, or the stock clerk, on vacation. One summer they hired Bud, whose father worked in the building trades, and who lived in one of the streets back in behind the lumberyard. He was a few years younger than I, which means he must have been seventeen or eighteen. If you saw him, you’d describe him immediately as a good guy: he was always smiling and cheerful, he always worked hard and he was in great shape.

Continue reading “Memoir”

Morse code

Every so often, I set myself the challenge of trying to learn something to which I’ve had little or no exposure; or I might try to learn something I’m convinced I’m not good at. As both an educator and a human being, I find it’s useful to remind myself what it’s like to start learning something from a low level of competence.

My most recent challenge of this sort is Morse code. Some years ago, I started trying to get my amateur radio license, for which you then had to learn Morse code, and I found myself completely unable to do it. I was able to memorize most of the letters, but I never got to the point where I could actually copy Morse code. Part of my problem was that Morse code is heard, not seen, and I am a much weaker auditory learner than visual learner.

But this time, I decided, I’m going to do it: my goal is to learn Morse code well enough that I can copy it at better than five words per minute, with better than 90% accuracy. I bought an audio CD with Morse code instruction put out by the American Radio Relay League, and I found a free audio course online.

What you’re supposed to do is to spend 15-30 minutes twice a day listening to the Morse code recordings and writing down the characters you hear. On the first day, I tried listening to 30 minutes of Morse code, but I couldn’t concentrate that long; I found it surprisingly fatiguing. Nor has it gotten much easier; I’m two weeks into this project, and 15 minutes is still the most I can do. Nor can I yet force myself to listen to the Morse code recordings twice a day; once a day was as much as I wanted.

But ever so slowly it is getting easier. Today I managed to copy a whole sentence in Morse code. It was a short sentence — “Code is heard, not seen.” — but it was very satisfying to finally feel a small sense of competence.

What I’m going through is normal, of course. Whenever I’ve tried to learn something new, learning is painful at first, and it takes what seems to be a long time to get any easier. There aren’t many rewards at first, and those few rewards aren’t worth very much, so you have to exaggerate the importance of early victories to yourself. And you have to ignore the feeling that you are completely incompetent, and just forge ahead, willing to be foolish. I think it’s important to remember to be kind to yourself when you’re learning something new.

This, obviously, is the sort of thing children go through all the time. It also occurs to me that many of the people who come to our congregations having grown up with no exposure to organized religion go through this same sort of thing. And in a society where we are increasingly disengaged from communal activities, it’s really hard to learn how to get socially engaged and build social capital. It can be quite difficult to learn something completely new. It’s much easier to sit at home and stare at the computer screen or TV screen.

Update, two years later: I found myself completely incapable of learning Morse code. Similarly, I find it almost impossible to learn foreign languages. I do not seem to have a very good auditory memory.

The local butcher

I was chatting with one of the guys at the meat and fish counter at our neighborhood supermarket while he was weighing out a pound of Dover sole for me. I asked him if he was more of a meat guy, or a fish guy.

“You have to be both,” he said. “The fish used to come in here whole. We’d gut it over there” — he pointed to the counter where they crack Dungeness crabs for you — “and fillet it. But yeah, I first worked for a butcher.”

“Working with meat must keep you physically fit,” I said. “Having to lift all that weight.”

“No, not really,” he said. “That enough?”

“One more,” I said.

He threw on one more fillet, and wrapped the fish up. “Nah, once you get it on the hook, the cuts just fall off as you work. We don’t get many whole animals in these days, though — but once in a while.” He handed me the package. “Anything else?”

I said no, and thanked him. There was another customer waiting. I moved away, glancing at the door of the cold room in the back, which must have meat hooks on the ceiling, and a band saw, and other butcher tools. I’m seen the butcher work with a knife, and it looks like he’s got good hand skills. I imagined him hauling a carcass up on meat hook, using his knife so that the cuts of meat fell off with little effort, and I couldn’t help but remember Cook Ting in the Chuang-tzu, who tells Lord Wen-hui how he cuts up an ox:

“…Whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.” [Chuang-tzu, ch. 3, Burton Watson translation]

The difference between the two is that Cook Ting is very articulate and gets very mystical about butchering — “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill…” — whereas our local butcher is plain-spoken and down-to-earth. I have to admit, I prefer our local butcher.

Fever dreams

For the first time in years, I’m running a fever. It’s been so many years, I’d forgotten what it can be like to have a fever: the way you can feel like you’re not quite in this reality, the hazy thinking, and so on.

It’s not much of a fever, so I’m not getting any fever dreams, which is a little disappointing. I remember having a fever when I was about seven, and hallucinating that a UFO flew by the bedroom window; the UFO looked exactly the rubber stopper we used to plug up the bath tub, so it was obvious that this was not a UFO; nevertheless, I was convinced that I had indeed seen a UFO, and I remained convinced for some years after that. Such are the power of fever dreams.

I can’t help but notice some similarity between fever dreams and mystical experiences: the vague sense of unreality, strange visions, and so on. The difference is that mystical experiences don’t leave you lethargic, thirsty, and unwilling to eat anything; nor are mystical experiences brought under control by taking aspirin.

In the train station

Carol and I were walking through the San Mateo train station late at night, on our way home. It was very quiet. I looked down, and there was a playing card on the platform, face down.

“A playing card,” I said. “Let’s see what it is.”

I bent down and turned it over.

“Five of clubs,” I said. “That means good luck.” That’s the kind of thing my mother used to say: she’d see some random thing, and say that it meant good luck.

“You just made that up,” said Carol.

“Not me,” I said.

Why I dislike cleaning out desks

This afternoon, I set myself the task of going through a desk that I had used when we lived in New Bedford, but which has since then stood in the garage. I found stationery I had forgotten about, a brass button that had come off my blue blazer, blank checks from a bank that is now defunct, and a set of keys to my parents’ old house. For some reason now forgotten, the keys were on a key ring that originally had held the keys to a 1969 Plymouth Valiant automobile I once owned, an automobile (not that it matters) which I had purchased from a direct lineal descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The sight of the key to the porch door instantly brought back a vivid image of walking up to my parents’ house and letting myself in. This was a disturbing image because when dad sold the house after my mother’s death, the new owners tore it down; nothing from it had been salvaged but everything merely thrown away; while in its place a tawdry three-story mansionette was erected, the new building extending to the absolute limits of what the zoning regulations allowed.

This train of thought led immediately to a consideration of the vanity of human endeavor. This is why I do not like to clean out desk drawers and make them tidy: better, I think, to let some things lie unseen.

On a rainy evening

At last we’re getting a real winter storm: dark clouds all day long; an early dusk; constant rain all afternoon and evening, sometimes light, sometimes heavy; occasional gusts of wind driving the rain against the skylights of our little second floor apartment. A perfect evening to read Jackson Bate’s biography of Samuel Johnson.

I’ve gotten to the point in the biography where Bates describes what Johnson was like when he had just turned fifty: his wife dead; his great dictionary done; well over a million words written and published (half a million alone in his reporting on Parliamentary debates), most of it ghost-writing or anonymous hack work that paid little; and he has always struggled financially, has been arrested for debt, and wears clothes that a homeless person might wear. But however skillfully Bates tells Johnson’s tale of middle age, Johnson himself told it better, more concisely, more pointedly, in this essay from December of 1759:

We do not indeed so often disappoint others as ourselves. We not only think more highly than others of our own abilities, but allow ourselves to form hopes which we never communicate, and please our thoughts with employments which none ever will allot us, and with elevations to which we are never expected to rise; and when our days and years are passed away in common business, or common amusements, and we find at last that we have suffered our purposes to sleep till the time of action is past, we are reproached only by our own reflections; neither our friends nor our enemies wonder that we live and die like the rest of mankind; that we live without notice, and die without memorial; they know not what task we have proposed, and therefore cannot discern whether it is finished. —The Idler, no. 88.