hearthsmith

Manifesto

2010-10-28T03:29:00.000-07:00

Who am I?

I am not the stocks in my portfolio, the balance in my bank account, my pay grade, my annual profit or loss, my bottom line, my credit rating, my debts, nor the cash in my pocket...

I am not the label in my suit coat, the slogan on my t shirt, the brand name on my jeans, the gems on my fingers, the tattoo on my skin, the style of my hair, nor the color of my skin...

I am not my philosophy, my world view, my theological scheme, nor my first principles...

I am not the tools in my toolbox nor the weapons within my reach...

I am not what I have learned, what I have memorized, my academic degrees, my GPA, my test scores, nor the university I attended...

I am not my career, my profession, the business I started, the company I work for, the contract I wrote, the clients I signed, the pay raise I earned, my promotions nor my prospects...

I am not the billboard's display, the critic's review, the newspaper's headline, nor the gossip's whisper...

I am not my gifts, my arts, my skills nor my unique abilities and insights...

I am not my inventions, my buildings, my fields, my farms, my barns, nor my stores...

I am not the films I have watched, the play list in my iPod, my Facebook site, the television program, the actor on the screen, the media forced my way, the magazine assertion, nor the book in hand...

I am not my present shaping, my time on the track, the reps I can lift, nor my athletic skills...

I am not my genes, my ancestry, my parents, my siblings, nor the family I have raised...

I am not my arousal, my virulence, nor my sexuality...

I am not what the doctor diagnosed, the scheduled medications, the test results, nor the prognosis...

I am not the physical pain I feel, the mood enfolding me, the emotion I display, nor the heartbreak I have known...

I am not the decades I have lived, the texture of my skin, the lines on my face nor the changes in my hair...

I am not my triumphs and my failures. I am not my errors and omissions. I am not my sins...

I am not the dialect that sounds out my speech...

I am not a sign in the stars nor the zodiac's product...

I am not the place on which I stand nor the place I wish I could be...

I am not the natural realm which surrounds me...

I am not my nation, my clan, my platoon nor my team...

I am not what this culture says I am...

I am not this body, these atoms, nor this material form...

These are only the clothing, the adornments and the burdens worn by this soul. What's left? What remains underneath when all these are stripped away? What would I put down on a resume I was going to hand to God?

Sometimes I think we are like a colony of animals who have inherited a dusty plane, and we invent little hills of dust to elevate ourselves above the flatness. Scrape the dust up in piles with our wings and then stand there on top, claiming our ground, insisting that each millimeter of altitude is a good thing, for we were made for elevation. We pick our pile, fight for it, market it, pass it on to our children, all the while calling it high and good deriving from it our identity. But wings were given for something else.

I would like to be able to put on my resume that I learned to fly. Just a little. And helped others fly even higher and better.

And flight, of course, is a metaphor for what we are when the power of life - real life - and the devotion of love momentarily meld in human existence. For love without Life is a Hallmark card - light and thin and sentimental. Life drags in something breathing and bleeding, something dangerous, wet, full of desire, something liable to break things to pieces. Life gives love muscularity in service, meticulous care in devotion, ferocity in defense, aggression in desire. Life without love is homelessness, a bright fire warming no one , a high flight with no destination, a clanging triumphal procession by a soul which has never triumphed over a single instant of its existence.

We have been taught to pick one dusty hill and stand happily on its summit, surveying the world from our unique vantage point, imagining an identity somehow derived from a good situation. And every such identity is limited, short-sighted, and ultimately dead, for the hills of dust can never be more than well shaped parts of a dying world. And if one insists on clinging to their hilltop identity they will ultimately remain alone - for the hill is never finished; it is never high enough, and it is always tumbling down, and everyone becomes an enemy threatening your absolute work. And the sound of wings heaping up the dusty earth forever sounds there, and no one will ever join the task of the dead.

Fraternity

2010-10-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about something that happens in the human psyche which is basic and instinctive, but at the same time quite profound - one of those occurrences when two pieces click into place with a satisfying snap, such that one knows that they were designed to fit together.

I am thinking about the coupling of the personal pronoun I with the transitive verb to understand. Not just the language use, but the mating of the concepts represented by those words.

Bipedalism, one hears, is the trait that lifted the heads of Homo sapiens. I won't deny that this is a great convenience, but I think the above conceptual association is the thing that really raises us off the ground. And I would add that the calculations and reasoning surrounding the claim need not be complete or accurate to produce the sanctifying result. The instinctive claim to understanding is enough, whatever nonsense Mssr sapiens believes he understands. He begins to scale the cosmos, the stars and nebulae becoming his handholds, the galaxies his stepping stones, and he finds himself eye to eye with beings very different from the animals walking the earth.

Nor can he easily go back, returning to the soup below to escape the angel's conversation. I understand I am but broth does not serve one well if he also believes broth has no claim to any sort of understanding. All is meaningless might serve, if one could limit his language and thought to expressions of fear and desire, but those pesky notions of injustice, propriety and truth continually ambush the organism. Like an infantryman deposited onto a beachhead, under fire and with an angry sea at his back, the only way open is foreword attack.

And pressing ahead, determined to grapple with the vast unknown that waits on the other side of understanding, the combatant will glance to his right, and to his left, and find that he is not alone, and that he advances in the company of his brothers.

Such is understanding, our status, and our university.

Legacy

2010-09-15T16:24:00.000-07:00

Am I the old man now? The grandfather? Is there some prayer, some blessing, that I might offer which would secure the well being of this farm and those who name it as a part of their heritage? I know that I am not wise enough, nor good enough, to provide such a thing. My prayers are like hollow, empty things, despite my genuine assurance of the sufficiency and grace of our God. Perhaps I simply do not do nineteenth century faith behaviors very well...

Yet in the midst of this God finds a way to continue whispering to us. It was Sunday, about lunchtime, and away from the gentle chaos of serving up the meal I noticed Bess and Bryan and Chloë nested together on a couch, removed a bit from the noise. I heard Bess and Bryan's voices very quietly singing, bent over little Chloë, a little congregation of three, or perhaps I should say four...later I would ask what I had heard them singing, and they told me Saint Patrick's Breastplate:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,

Christ behind me, Christ before me,

Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

Christ to comfort and restore me,

Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,

Christ in hearts of all that love me,

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

The ancient melody like a whispering in the room, a quiet confirmation of the blessings that had been poured out upon that farm, generation after generation for some hundred and forty years...

confirmation that the great risks and human investment and extreme sacrifices stood like foundational stones, massive, still in place, unshakable. Their song took its place alongside the small and the great movements which make a farm, from the first furrow torn through the prairie to the construction of a tiny home to the harvests, the winters, the plantings, the loss of a son and brother, the autumn of those strong, sweet lives...Bess and Bryan's hymn held all these things, but also held a hope for what will come next; perhaps I sensed in this moment Chloë's generation, safe in the arms of Christ, protected, somehow, from the winds of trouble by the solidarity of this old farm.

Essential Mythology

2010-09-08T08:26:00.000-07:00

Thus do we paint with over broad strokes these portraits of those we have never known, reaching for colors given to legends, framing our guesswork in gold, hanging it in the half-lit hallway where mythology visits like a regular and comfortable guest. Historically our living creations are malnourished and impoverished; even so they move through our minds and touch realities that no one else could ever touch, and thus haunted by breathing uncertainties we begin to breathe yet deeper still...for I have now held in these hands the antique skates a Swedish teen once strapped to her small feet, and I am able to imagine her gliding across her frozen lake as she ponders a new life in a new world, where a young man who promised his love awaited her...hers, too, was a mythology, a mythology of her future, and the futures which would grow up from that.. in which Chloe and I and all of us now walk, looking eastward from time to time, toward that land and that time from which she came, remembering, and imagining, as best we can.

"Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in daylight?"
"A man may do both. For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day."

Sanctuary

2010-09-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

My grandfather Oscar cussed us all from time to time, usually when we were out in the fields working with him. Mild stuff as profanity goes, especially by today's standards, but it was a novel experience to us, weirdly fascinating and threatening at once. It added a spicy flavor to the hard rations of summertime farm work.

At mealtime, the big dinners, he would bow his head and pray. This did not happen at every meal; only the more formal dinners as I recall. His prayers were not out of a prayerbook, but simple, heartfelt, the great man's melodic voice nearly breaking to tears as he thanked God for what we had. These were powerful moments, and absolutely genuine, and I vividly recall their essence even now.

I saw no contradiction or fallacy as I beheld the two sides of the man, for I knew him. The Iowa soil on his boots and the coronary stain of sweat on the work hat, the encroaching blindness, the small luxuries he granted himself, the way he treated his animals and the way he tended his fields...I worked and walked beside the man who thus touched that small part of the world.

Now, suddenly, I am the grandfather. And the thing I find myself wanting to pass on to Chloe's generation, more than any material thing, is the awareness of these souls they can never know. As I never was able to know my great grandmother Clara, or great grandfather John, or my Uncle Carl...but I have their stories, their letters and books, and we have the soil they worked and the farm they built. And I find myself taking these little seeds of knowing and planting them in my imagination, trying to grow the person up out of that fertile soil; this is inevitable, I guess, and unfair, for what springs up cannot be accurate. But it is far, far removed from the desert of knowing nothing about one's past and the ascendants who built the world one inherits.

Something Old, Something New

2010-08-31T08:15:00.000-07:00

Here, then, is a symbolism equal to all the great constructions to be found on this farm. Great barns and powerful machines and well engineered roads were all a part of our past, and ought to be seen and touched by my children, and their children, and thoughtfully measured from top to bottom...but we must measure the small parts too, for these tell us much about who we were, and who we are.

There is a sense of triumph here. Grasshoppers may have devoured the threads of the curtains Clara placed in the windows of that first small home, but they cannot devour the idea of transformation - in which a wilderness is transformed by something we so feebly have named home, and where a simple structure is transformed by the small particulars which render it beautiful. They cannot devour hope, and they cannot devour love; they cannot devour the spirit in a man who believes he can improve his world by means of intelligence and strength and hard work. Their notions of order and propriety and decency survived the grasshoppers and the blizzards, ill health and hunger, economic hardships and climactic extremes...the books and curtains being the outward manifestations of something very large, and very strong, in these Scandinavian hearts.

Clara's Skates

2010-08-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

These are the ice skates my great grandmother Clara brought to this country from Sweden. I imagine her packing her trunk on the home place in western Sweden, her parents brokenhearted at her departure to another world, knowing they would probably never see her face again...perhaps with blessings, perhaps with severe Scandinavian imprecations not to give herself to such an impulsive scheme...what does one pack in her trunk in such a moment? What does one take along from a life she will never touch again? What are the seeds one brings along to plant in a new world where magical soil might allow anything to grow? We know she packed these old skates, marked with the W for Wennerstein, her maiden name. And she made room for the great lines of sleigh bells, spherical brass units of graduating sizes affixed to long leather straps, the largest a couple of inches across and singing rich deep tones below the cheerful chirping of the smaller bells...it was a heavy musical load which must have generated a muffled jingling all the way from that Swedish farm to the untamed prairies of western Iowa. And she must have brought lace curtains - the same curtains she lost when the grasshoppers swarmed across the land. Stories telling us about the plagues of locusts also tell us about the lace hung across the window, and perhaps just a little about the hand which hung it.

Out of the Trunk

2010-08-25T20:46:00.000-07:00

Here is the lovely Katherine modeling one of her grandmother's gowns. My mother was quite the seamstress, and threw this together from a batch of Italian silk provided by one of her admirers. She wore this, along with some of her other amazing creations, when she crossed back from France in '51 on the S.S. Liberte. She danced her way back to New York, gracing the captain's table every evening with Iowa farmgirl charm and an adventurous wit.

Katie is about her size, so she had the privilege of swishing about the house in these unique and amazing gowns.

Care to dance?

Oscar Heline

2010-08-24T18:49:00.000-07:00

This is a photo of my grandfather in about 1901. I am guessing here, but I think he looks about eleven years old. Maybe twelve. Which would give the photo such a date.

While we were on the farm we found a recording of Oscar when he was 78. The Studs Terkel interview. A few scraps of it, as they discussed the depression.

I think you can pick it up here:

http://www.studsterkel.org/htimes.php

(Scroll down to the first audio archive.)

The Homestead

2010-08-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

This small structure was the family home in the 1870s. During these years the first children were born, the tallgrass prairie torn into cropland. During these years the grasshoppers came; for two consecutive summers they swarmed in, darkening the sky, devouring crops, gardens, lace curtains, even the wooden handles of the tools. Winters were long and dark and severe, but worse was yet to come...

This structure survives because after they built the larger home it was used as housing for the hired men and their families. Later still it became a granary, reinforced with long steel rods running wall to wall through the interior. Aunt Nancy cleaned it up and painted it a few years ago. She and my mother remember the stories they heard from their Grandmother Clara, who gave birth to three children here. Sometimes the Indians came up to the house and peered in the windows as she nursed and cared for the children. They shared what they had; the Swedish and Lakota swirling like immiscible liquids, the infant sounds providing something universal, clearing away a space for sympathy...we tell these stories with Chloë nursing at Bess' brest, singing her little infant songs, pulling away wide-eyed to stare around the room before going back to her meal.

After the Storm

2010-08-08T19:12:00.000-07:00

Daniel.

Iowa country road.

Thunder in the distance.

Rainbow over the cornfield.

The muses were walking by and saw him standing there.

Roots

2010-08-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

This is the second home built on the Iowa homestead. Very little English was spoken on this farm during these years. We are Swedish.

My grandfather Oscar was born upstairs in 1889. My mother was born in the same room thirty one years later. The family's dead rested in state here. The telegraph about Carl, killed in France in '45, came up these steps. The harvest crews crowded around the big table and devoured great noontime meals. Diphtheria, Scarlet Fever and influenza passed through these rooms, leaving their scars on the lives they touched. Pancakes, quilts, great literature, nature's mysterious beauty and power, backbreaking work, ingenuity and invention, family devotion, genuine piety, laughter, love and indescribable grief...these are the echos sounding through these rooms.

Katie is sleeping in the birthing room. I am in the room my mother decorated in organza once upon a time. The boys are crowded into the room where old Grandmother Jacobs painted away her final years. I may have it mixed up; it doesn't matter. I am here to learn. I am here to be born.

Searching for Solid Ground

2010-07-25T07:28:00.000-07:00

To the extent that a parent secures a child's well being that child is privileged to know one of the great lessons of loss. I suppose I had always imagined that when either my father or mother died a good part of the universe would crumble. These are the instincts of the child. The instinct is no less intense in the adult son or daughter, although one might use the language of grief to explain one's expectation. The world should be shaken by such a loss.

I watched myself, and my family, and the universe when my father died. The disturbances at the center were infinite, but the energy did not carry very far. The world did not crumble, nor even shake for more than a second or two. It was as if we laid our line of geophones across vacuous space; after the original concussion nothing registered down the line. Such is the conductivity of a vacuum.

One reworks the equations after seeing this. After death. I did. My estimations of my father did not change; they have only increased as the years have passed. But I have come to think much less of this world.

The Request

2010-07-14T04:09:00.000-07:00

While you are a guest in my home I am going to ask you to do something for me: turn off all your electronic gadgets and noises. Leave them off until you leave my property. Then you may use them again if they still interest you. I will make this same request to everyone who visits my home.

I ask this not because I hate your music or your games or your pathological dependence on coarse electronic stimulation. I am simply listening to something much more interesting and much more beautiful; something which I believe to be critically important. And I would like to preserve my opportunity to do so. I have invested considerable resources to secure the freedom and solitude which makes this possible, and would ask you to respect that as willingly as you might respect a man's ticket to some entertainment spectacle. But mine is a very different sort of opportunity. I am inviting you to come along if you'd like, and you don't need a ticket. You shall, in fact, have the best seat in the house.

You would understand my position better if you could know what the years have brought my way. Moments which have been most instructive and most deeply enriching have often been centered around acoustic experience. It is difficult to describe such gifts with written language; one finds himself appealing to that same sense of experience in the reader rather than teaching about the encounter. How does one convey what is heard when one listens to a heartbeat? Or a whippoorwill's song? The wind in aspen leaves, or a distant train? I could make a very long paragraph here but it would be a tedious read for young readers. But the songs I have heard are like the whisperings of the muse, like nourishment to a starved sanity, and sometimes like the language God chooses to speak to my soul. What I have heard still echos in my mind; what I have not yet received I am straining all my self to hear.

While you are here you will know a kind of freedom which is increasingly unavailable. No one and nothing will tell your mind what thoughts to think. No carefully conceived advertisements will conduct your neurotransmitters to a particular state. No interruptions will lead you away from what your mind is constructing thought by thought. No coarse distractions will overwhelm the subtle summonings of natural intelligence. In this place you will hear things which will teach you how to listen and how to think.

Rob no one of this gift.

Welcome to my house.

She Shall Be Dressed in All the Splendor of a Summer Morn

2010-07-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

She really seemed to like riding in this snug little wrap as we walked around on the farm.

Dear Chloe

2010-07-06T23:02:00.000-07:00

One thing more I would like to tell you about the day you were born, Chloe. When I first met you you were all wrapped up in something soft - probably the first thing your mama had dressed you in. But a little later your little legs and feet were out. I remember touching them, very gently stroking your soft skin and holding your tiny feet in my hands. I was very gentle, thinking about how fragile you were; how soft and delicate you were. I knew toughness would come later, and that you would probably some day collide with the world in ways that left deep gashes in it, but that day you were more like the petals of a beautiful flower. These are very special, beautiful parts of the natural world but they are not strong. When a flower petal falls to the earth nothing moves except the air. I wonder if one of the reasons God gave us flower petals was for us to remember how our life began.

But looking at you, holding your little feet, I remembered this: "And behold, the Lord was passing by! And a great and strong wind was rending the mountains, and breaking in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a gentle blowing."

And then the Lord spoke to his servant.

This was what it was like, being the with you that day.

Dear Chloe, part IV

2010-06-18T08:44:00.001-07:00

Then your Grandmother Diana held you, and sat down close to your Mom, so all three of you girls were snuggled together in a little triangle. Diana is most strong and beautiful and good when she is with her little ones. As I watched her gently getting to know you, and gently communicating with the woman who had been her own little girl I thought of something I had written long ago when your Mother was ten years old.

Your uncle Isaiah had just been born in the little farmhouse in Oregon. Your Mother, always adventurous and curious and eager to do things, had planned on helping with Isaiah's delivery, along with your Aunt Katie. It was kind of frightening for them when Isaiah's labor was under way, but they stayed close by and helped as much as they could. Here are a few words from the notes I made about that day in December, 1993:

"...the girls rush in, surprised to hear that unmistakable sound so soon, and breathlessly look upon their tiny brother. There is something new in those mature little faces as they look into their Mother's eyes, for they have somehow travailed together, and have discovered new respect for this noble woman, and a curious new bond pulls them toward one another. I wonder if they realize what I can see as I stand aside and watch. In a few short years this bloody miracle may happen again, but next time they will exchange roles."

Dear Chloe, part III

2010-06-17T04:11:00.000-07:00

I would like to tell you what I saw when I stepped back a little and watched what was happening in your home. You were about six hours old. Your Mother had given you your first bath (one begins life kind of a mess, and she wanted you to look your best) and your head had reformed itself into the right shape, so you were looking very pretty and charming and demure. But your parents, reclining together on their big bed, were like a king and a queen, for their presence was one of great dignity and a deep, quiet happiness, very much unlike what one sees anywhere else in the world today. They were exhausted and disheveled, and your Mother was so spent she could not yet master her legs, but they were like two great souls who had fought a tremendous battle together side by side, emerging bloody and torn, collapsed in exhaustion, but together, and victorious. I watched your mother's beautiful face as she rested her head on your Father's shoulder, and I watched him holding you, his first day as a Father; I saw the strength and the tenderness in his hold, and knew that I was watching a man who had been a rock in a violent storm - battered, perhaps, but unfailing. I knew you were in very good hands.

Dear Chloe, part II

2010-06-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

When we arrived at your house we went back to your parent's bedroom where you were born. Your Mother and Father were stretched out on the big bed and your Mom was holding you. You were wrapped up in a soft blanket with a little cap on your head, something your Mother knitted for you when she first found out you were alive inside of her. Your face was relaxed, your eyes closed. All my attention went to your Mother for a few seconds as I confirmed that she was safe. I bent my head close to hers, cheek to cheek hugging her, and kissed her, and tried to say some words which fit the moment. The words were thin and pale against the backdrop of what had just taken place, but I think she knew what was in my heart: admiration, respect, profound gratitude, and a strange newborn camaraderie, for we were both walking the votive path of parenting, both humbled before the miracle she held in her arms.

Then I studied you, Chloe; I leaned over you and looked into your face and spoke to you, and you moved a little at the sound of my voice, and murmured some small sounds, and I said some things, little promises and plans for mischief and learning, the only one of which worth recalling being this: I will teach you where to find the smallest flowers, the minute first flowers of the springtime every year, hidden away like little treasures in the lawns and fields, as I used to teach your Mom and your Aunt Katie when they were my little girls.

Dear Chloe,

2010-06-15T06:38:00.000-07:00

There is sometimes a quality in a mother's voice which conveys a message much stronger than the words which are being said. I hear this sometimes when I am working in the emergency room when a mother tells me about the changes she has seen in her child. There is a subtle but absolute clarity in the tone, something that quietly conveys an unmistakable urgency and purpose...like a radio signal cutting through a dark, foggy night, a crystalline communique from some unseen center of intelligence, and most of the time I don't think those mothers realize what is happening. But it is often an intangible part of the diagnostic process, and experienced doctors can hear the signal. I heard it in your Mother's voice Saturday night when she called me. She calmly described what might be early labor; I heard the tone of a woman who had just begun one of the most dangerous and mysterious journeys of her life. Then a contraction came, and she softly said "I gotta go, Dad, bye." I could tell from her voice where she was, and knew you were almost here.

I thought I might not hear from her again for many hours; first deliveries can be protracted affairs. I waited, and prayed, giving you both to God, as I have done so many times with your mother and her siblings, and we casually spoke to our friends about a miracle unfolding in a small house back in Moscow, Idaho.

The next morning, Sunday, we woke ourselves up early wondering what June 13th would bring. We were driving home on the highway just east of Hood River, in that part of the Columbia River Gorge where one experiences the changes from the deep greens of mosses and ferns and wet forests to those dry browns of burnt basalt and struggling grasses; the wind was hot and dry, but it came from behind us and pushed us along toward home. Then the cellphone buzzed and I picked it up, hoping it was your Mom. It was. She told me you were here, whole and sound and enfolded in the safety of your home.

The sagebrush along the side of the highway looked the same as it had a few miles back, but it wasn't the same. The world had changed. She's here. Here in this place, this divine composition of evenings and mornings, and here was the morning of a soul, a person's strong-cried beginning, protesting and seeking. Now, at last, after many long weeks of feeling your growth and struggle we would greet you face to face.

I made some calculations and told your mom we would detour and could be there in about five hours... and then the miles went by, one by one, and I prayed my prayers of gratitude for your healthy arrival, and wondered mile by mile: who is this Chloe? Who is this small person I am about to meet?

First Mother's Day

2010-05-07T07:19:00.000-07:00

This is Bess on her first birthday. I had skipped out half my medical school classes that day and had gone out shopping for a little doll, trying to get the just right simple doll shape baby; I was kind of clueless. But here she is after receiving it. She became, I guess, a little mama with her baby girl, and she is sort of kissing her - not very well, but here is the clumsy but unmistakable application of maternal affection.

In a few short weeks Bess will deliver a little girl into this world. There will be kisses, and other manifestations of affection which are miraculous, and ought to be seen as miraculous. Love is not an accident.

So Happy Mother's Day to this new mother and her little girl. In about a year there will be another birthday party. I hope to be there, paying attention.

Kellogg Vaulter

2010-05-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

On Expectation

2010-05-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

Hope is a liquid thing, ready to assume whatever shape might hold it. It pours itself into tomorrow, never quite knowing what form tomorrow will take, never insistent on a particular volume or design. Hope is characterized by a constant humility, and because this is so it always finds a place to rest at the end of the day. Hope can camp in the field, lay itself down on the floor in a corner, or sit up all night watching the stars, and at each place find the good that is there.

Something happens as hope hardens into expectation, something like solidification. Freezing. Water becomes ice. It requires a particular receptacle before it can move on. Such firmness can be a good thing when it is used to organize corporate growth, but freezing can kill living cells. And relationships are more like living cells.

The personal investment that may attach itself to expectation is unlike the humility of hope. Expectation often insists on its rights. It likes ownership. It may easily give way to behaviors which are manipulative, intimidating, threatening, or which might otherwise control that which ought to be beyond control.

Hope waits. Hope may request or inquire. And it will flow into the future as surely as the stream tumbles down toward the sea. There always seems to be a place for liquids to go.

David

2010-05-04T07:06:00.000-07:00

David Vaulting

2010-04-28T19:55:00.000-07:00

David's Mom and Dad couldn't be at this meet, so I tried to get a few shots of him in the pole vault. I frequently thought about how proud they would be - not just about his athletic ability, but about the qualities which characterize his life. More photos to follow soon.

mythology at our doorstep

2010-03-19T04:00:00.000-07:00

I will tell you the story of Deborah, in the days of the Titans.
Deborah was a daughter of Iapetus, half sister to the brothers Prometheus, Atlas, Menoeteus, and Epimetheus. She was born very beautiful, fair and frail, and did not seem well suited for life on earth in the harsh days of its formation.

Deborah's father, wishing to provide for her safety, sought some endowment for her and implored Zeus to grant her some special power or unique privilege which might serve as a protection in threatening hours. This wish was granted, but on the condition that she would, in time, give all her heavenly gift away to the creatures of the earth - a little here, a bit there, as she saw need - and that she would arrive at the end her life emptied, formed as she was in her beginning: a frail and beautiful child.

The gods gave Deborah the gift of shrewdness. And she soon found (as her brothers found) that a little wit may foil great strength. And she became reluctant to impart such a valuable thing to her rivals. She kept her gift to herself, and began to misuse it.

She found it easy to barter for that which she did not naturally posses. By means of blandishments and intimidations, promises and twisted trades she gained the natural physical strength she had not received at birth. She took strength from her brothers, from the newly formed animals, from the earth itself, and in the process traded away, bit by bit, her delicacies, her feminine beauty, and her childhood loves.

The gods would not suffer it. "Excessive strength shall become its own punishment," they said, and laid hold of her with shackles which shortly and unnaturally clinched a leg to an arm, such that any forceful move would cruelly pose member against member. But Deborah had the strength of the earth in her veins, and easily snapped her restraints.

Those whom the gods cannot contain they will destroy, and as they bent their heads together to plan the execution, lovely Athena appeared.

"Whom do you now destroy?" she asked, seeing their mood.
"Deborah the Titan. By her action wit has come to reside unjustly in one place. She has gathered strength unto herself unnaturally, and thus intoxicated she seeks yet more strength. Soon she will be most powerful of all on earth. Our disciplines have failed. No physical substance can bind her, nor do our rites and customs hold her."
"Is she not still a woman? Has she yet a woman's heart?"
"In form one would not know it. She is so strong that her appearance has been altered."
"And her heart?"
"Some part of what she was may yet remain."
"I will bind her," said Athena.
"How will you do this? Neither bronze nor iron have held her."
"I will make another kind of cord. It shall be woven of the smallest things; fine hair, soft sounds, aromas, touches, growth, and language...such things that she cannot break..."
"These are the most dangerous cords of all." said one. "Such ties might save, or they might drag one to his death."
"Indeed," said Athena. "Both, perhaps. I am giving her a son."

Travel

2010-03-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

One should navigate with maps that do not bear one's own name.

Earth's First Springtime

2010-02-28T09:11:00.000-08:00

There was a day,
When our sun hoarded all its given strength into itself,
Refusing to release even a candle's worth of light,
Spinning electromagnetic energy into magnetism,
And magnetism into hardest order gravity,
Where even photons become dark things,
And a sun becomes a hole digging itself
Always deeper, always black,
A terrible hellish power, small enough to be poured into a coffee cup.

There was a day,
When all the sky of earth did hoard its rain,
When hydrogen and oxygen had not yet kissed,
Diffident clouds unto themselves,
When all our world was dry and unalive.

Love was the spark inside the sun, releasing it,
Uncoupling its descent into itself,
When, inside out at last, he became a light
Of brilliant positive-quantum force,
Brushing lightyears across a black canvas with hurried strokes,
Filling the frozen void with colored flame,

Love was the spark that let shy oxygen
Hold fast to something smaller than itself,
A single molecule of H2O,
The first drop of rain to fall from the clouds,
Touching infinitely wet on earth's hot crust,
Sizzling back as steam into the sky,
To call his brothers on.

Love was the sky pouring its rain onto the earth,
Love was the sun throwing its light onto the land,
Pouring themselves recklessly away,
Onto a hard and lifeless plane,
A place where, impossibly,
Rainbows color the sky,
And a planet becomes green with miracles.

Thaw

2010-02-25T06:54:00.000-08:00

Forestry

2010-02-18T08:14:00.000-08:00

Isaiah and I sat down here to rest, leaning against the roots of this hundred year old Tamarack. This was about a year ago. Most of our land was blanketed with snow, but the miroclimate here had left a little open ground - moist and aromatic, the kind of forest soil you pick up in handfuls and hold close to your face and breathe in like medicine...one of those days. We had been working hard, thinning and pruning and pulling up noxious brush plants by the roots, getting the burnable wastes to the small fire. As we sat here beneath this tree we had this conversation:

Isaiah: So...Dad. How come you say nature is perfect, but we come out here and chop and cut and burn and work hard to change it, and when we're done, it's better. (The nature is perfect part is a reference to what I have sometimes said about man's position in creation, which goes something like this: The subatomic particulars in a sulfur atom play the part their Creator intended for them to play and therefore interact harmoniously with every part of the cosmos - materially, thermodynamically, and chronologically. There is no abdication from the holy station to which they were assigned. How shall I define myself? and How shall I increase my influence and my holdings? are not considerations by nature's parts. Man alone is displaced from the matrix of heaven, and dissonant to the harmonies of God.)
Me: What?
Isaiah: We change the woods. And it's better. Wasn't it perfect before we worked on it?
Me: Oh. Yeah...OK. Nature is perfect in the sense that its parts are obedient...well maybe that's not the right word, because they cannot very well be disobedient, but they are what they're meant to be. At the atomic level, and the molecular, and this translates to the geological, biological, and meteorological. It's perfect, but there's a plasticity to it, a periodicity, and a flow. It is moving, aligning itself with the polarity imposed by the greater forces of nature that are at work on this particular environment. The weathering mountain, the retreating glaciers, the coniferous distributions, the pests and diseases and fires, the climate..
Isaiah: So why not just let things work themselves out?
Me: We could. And over one or two thousand years we would get a mature forest, a balance, which around here would mean huge pines, scattered across the grasses on the south facing slopes, and a mixture or firs and tamarack on the north slopes, more dense, the understory breaking through where the wind breaks open the canopy. And giant, ancient cedars where it is wet. But you and I working...we are a thousand years of fire and natural selection. We become the weak trees dying of disease and overcrowding. We're the dense canopies shading out the pesky brush, and the deer browsing, and birds dropping seed...if we're smart, we work like that. And we can condense five of six centuries of natural progression into three or four decades. By means of wit and care and working with these tools. And fire.
Isaiah: you didn't actually say it like that.
Me: I know. But that was the idea of it.
Isaiah: Can we go back to the house now?
Me: Yeah, sure I guess so. That's enough for today.

Life

2010-02-09T07:06:00.000-08:00

This is Heather. She loved this seedling, and nourished it with her attention. When her cat bent it over she made a little splint for it, and it survived, maturing as it was meant to mature.

I tend to think of life as that which happens to me as I pass through this place. But it's more than that. Life is what this soul does with the cosmos. What it does to this cosmos. If, in fact, this soul is Alive.

Final Notes on Enlightenment vs. Romantic

2010-02-01T07:41:00.000-08:00

Early on in this series I made some note about the epistemological state of our present culture, comparing it to the epistemological state of the early Enlightenment - the optimistic phase, when light and reason and science were about to triumph over all the ills of man. The new tools in the toolbox - scientific reasoning and logical problem solving - were extraordinarily useful and obviously successful. One need only look at the scientific record to see this. And political reform, especially outside of France, was equally exciting.

What I would try to expose is the overreaching and the arrogance that infected the early French Enlightenment - perhaps the inevitable consequence of frail men handling such powerful tools. I am making these notes because I think we are in a similar situation.

Comparisons

For the Enlightenment thinker, Truth was, and could only be, a product of the rational process. For the computer savvy twentysomething today, Truth is what the computers tell us.

For the Enlightenment philosopher the rituals of precision occurred when he measured the natural universe. Careful observation and improving instruments of measurement were how his understanding would advance. For the computer dependent today, the ritual of precision occurs when interconnecting with the existing computer universe.

For Enlightenment man the prerequisite for a reliable rational process was
a candid state. For our computer dependent it is, whether he realizes it or not, purified silicon oxide, from which constant semiconductor platforms are built. This requirement may express itself commonly as the consumer impulse for fast, reliable hardware - but the instinct for unimpaired processing is the same.

First principles for the Enlightenment philosopher were instinctively absolute - the legacy of judeo-christian and classical thought. But a significant shift was occurring: the primacy of revelation was ending, and in its place men laid a foundation of natural law. The modern mind admits no absolutes, but cannot create a stable society from random values. The momentary concensus of influential players becomes a sort of utilitarian law, and provides the instinctive starting point for the practical modern philosopher.

Data, for the Enlightenment idealist, were defined points of the material universe - carefully measured and confirmed by his most sensitive means. Now data are whatever is on the web. If it is not represented in binary code it doesn't exist - and if it is represented electronically, that caricature becomes the reality rather than the representation.

For the Enlightenment thinker data was analyzed in a specific process: deductive reasoning. The analyst today uses whatever software is popular and affordable, or resorts to cloud processing. In either case the logic of the program determines the result.

For the Enlightenment philosopher the epistemological product of all his careful work was self evident truth. Modern man hits ENTER and gets something which is popular truth - immediate, modestly authoritarian, and incontestable - isolated from historically valid methods and sources of critique.

Conlusion

As in eighteenth century France, the individual today is losing his place. An informative and analytical process - undeniably useful and unprecedented in power - now looms over the individual with massive and irresistible presence. Here is Voltaire's 'bloodless thinker' grossly enlarged; omnipresent, authoritative and ruthlessly efficient. The individual feels his soul displaced and his life divested of the very things that gave meaning to virtue, honor, and happiness. And to the extent that popular truth takes authoritative form, he knows the loss of his liberty.

How does the individual push back?

We will take our lessons from those who pushed back before. Those who became the 'measured, well-crafted No' that I wrote of earlier. The Romantics. We behave courteously. We respect societal conventions as much as we may. We invite the muses to inhabit our dissent. We live, and grow, in the Light, and we stay in the Light. And thus informed, clothed in this tattered human form, we protest.

We are the Neo-romantic.

Two More Observations

2010-01-31T07:34:00.000-08:00

The Romantic dissent was an example of the smoldering conflict that runs throughout history; we referred to this on the first post in this series: We've Done This Dance Before, November 9, 2009. The quote was from Bertrand Russell, in which he observed the reactionary postures of Passion vs. Prudence. This tension is as old as human society.

Finally, I would note that true Romantic movement is a societal phenomenon; that is, it is a dissent that relies on, and to a great extent respects, preexisting social configurations. It is courteous, ordered, and summoning, rather than violent or threatening. The muses are comfortable in its house. Artistic expression of the romantic ideal is instinctive. Populist sentiments thrive. Religion looks more like the beatitudes than subordination to some distant authority. The aesthetics of simplicity influence commerce, government and civil structure.

The Romantic does not need bombs or terrorism to advance its cause.

Observation

2010-01-25T07:40:00.000-08:00

The Romantic wants boundaries.

At its best the Romantic is a land of moist, sun drenched soil. There the gestures of the resistance fall like seed, germinating, maturing, yielding at last the reforms and innovations which are just, true, and absolutely beautiful. It is a land where growth subsists within the higher economy of external light; where days and seasons and weather and geography define, and limit, what kinds of growth may proceed.

But the intoxicating potency of The Romantic Hero may produce another kind of fertility: that of the fetid cesspool. There in that darkness chemosynthetic life forms absorb the nutrients of decay and leach the energy from molecular bonds - the legitimate inheritance of another life lived in the light - pouring across the once-live landscape in a soup of multiplying germs swimming in acidic waste. This is the end of the self aggrandizement, self importance, and primacy of agenda which may infect any movement, and to which the Romantics are inclined if not governed by higher impulses. Germany in the era 1850-1940 would become the testing ground.

Albert Speer's autobiography (Inside the Third Reich) gives us some insight into the complexities of the German psyche at the turn of the century, when Romantic force had slipped into cultural and nationalistic channels. Speer was born in 1905. He remembers:

"Many of our generation sought such contact with nature. This was not merely a romantic protest against the narrowness of middle-class life.
We were also escaping from the demands of a world growing increasingly complicated. We felt that the world around us was out of balance."

But there is also this:

"Often, from the mountain tops, we looked down upon a deep grey layer of cloud over the distant plain. Down there lived what to our minds were wretched people; we thought that we stood high above them in every sense. Young and rather arrogant, we were convinced that only the finest people went into the mountains."

Here is the hubris Toynbee warned us about. Disaster inevitably follows.

Hamann's Protest Expands

2010-01-22T06:44:00.000-08:00

The seeds sown by Hamann burst to life in the Germanic states. There the counter-Enlightenment dissent was nourished and grew strong, finding voice in many artistic forms: literature, theology, the Sturm und Drang movement, musical composition, philosophy, architecture, painting...here was the momentum which could counter the advance of an enthralling scientific society; here was the tale of a solitary soul, standing exposed in the torn veil of his humanity, facing the onslaught of an annihilating, impersonal force. It was a song western man took up eagerly.

The Romantic, writes Wills, is "Faustian, Promethean, Dionysian, Dostoyevskian".

These forces shaped the identity of an adolescent nation; Americans became explorers and abolitionists and transcendentalists, invented new religions and utopian societies, redefined education, and nourished the sentiments that engendered spiritual revival and awakening.

The Romantic, continued

2010-01-21T10:56:00.000-08:00

The quote from Isaiah Berlin's book somehow got all chopped up when blogger set it, which irritates me. Part of reading is layout. We compose prose and poetry, to some extent, with geometry framing the syntax and meter. So I will honor Mr. Berlin's words, and his readers, by retyping his language:

The sciences, if they were applied to human society, would lead to a kind of fearful bureaucratization, he thought. He was against scientists, bureaucrats, persons who made things tidy, smooth Lutheran clergymen, Deists, everybody who wanted to put things in boxes, everybody who wished to assimilate one thing to another, who wished to prove, for example, that creation was really the same thing as the obtaining of certain data which nature provided, and their rearrangement in certain pleasing patterns...Therefore the whole of the Enlightenment doctrine appeared to him to kill that which was living in human beings, appeared to offer a pale substitute for the creative energies of man, and for the whole rich world of senses, without which it is impossible for human beings to live, to eat, to drink, to be merry, to meet other people, to indulge in a thousand and one acts without which people wither and die. It seemed to him that the Enlightenment laid no stress on that, that the human being as painted by enlightenment thinkers was, if not "economic man", at any rate some kind of artificial toy...

Isaiah Berlin, on Johann Hamann

The Romantic

2010-01-20T06:48:00.000-08:00

One learns much about the biology of viruses by studying all things antiviral: immune response, vaccine physiology, pharmaceutical interferences. So it is with history. I am finding that I understand the Enlightenment much better when I look at the resistance raised against it.

Garry Wills book Head and Heart, American Christianities is helpful here. In his discussion on the development of Christian thought and culture in the nineteenth century he explains the influence of German counter-enlightenment thought. Isaiah Berlin, a leading romantic historian, is frequently cited. Berlin claims that the reaction against the enlightenment was "the most decisive event of modern times. It was certainly the largest step in the moral consciousness of mankind since the ending of the middle ages, perhaps since the rise of Christianity".

Here is Berlin explaining the defiance of Johann Hamann, one of the earliest European dissenters:

The sciences, if they were applied to human society, would lead to a kind
of fearful bureaucratization, he thought. He was against scientists,
bureaucrats, persons who made things tidy, smooth Lutheran clergymen,
Deists, everybody who wanted to put things in boxes, everybody who wished to assimilate one thing to another, everybody who wished to prove, for example, that creation was really the same as the obtaining of certain data which nature provided, and their rearrangement in certain pleasing patterns...the whole of the Enlightenment doctrine appeared to him to kill that which was living in human beings, appeared to offer a pale substitute for the creative energies of man, and for the whole rich world of the senses, without which it is impossible for human beings to live, to eat, to drink, to be merry, to meet other people, to indulge in a thousand and one acts without which
people wither and die. It seemed to him that the Enlightenment laid no
stress on that, and that the human being as painted by Enlightenment thinkers was, if not "economic man" at any rate some kind of artificial toy...

The dissent which rose up in the germanic states was reinforced by a necessary opposition to French domination: whether the etiquette of Louis XIV's court, postrevolutionary nationalism, or Napoleonic aggression, the modest European state was becoming something of a relic. French social philosophy was no small part of the presence which cast so great a shadow over Europe in the early nineteenth century.

Birth Pangs and Bloody Delivery

2010-01-12T18:55:00.000-08:00

Now this writing exercise begins to close its circle; what I began weeks ago with the post We've Done This Dance Before I can now begin to summarize. I had made comments on facebook about the romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, and a couple of friends (Anne Babb and Katy Schaff) commented with interest. That, I guess, got me going. That and the health care debate.

As Rousseau and Diderot pushed back against the established powers of the French Enlightenment they made enemies. What is popularly understood about Rousseau is, to a large extent, derived from Voltaire's criticism. But Rousseau was the advocate of a complete philosophical system - one which actively included the lower strata of French society in a way that genuinely provided for their liberty.

The problem was this: if men are free and brutal (rather than reasonable) how shall they govern themselves and still produce a prosperous, enlightened society? Absolute democracy is dangerously frail since the voters, subject as they are to animal passions, are inevitably manipulated by those with political skill. The strong arm of the governor might secure the good of the citizen, but domination by ecclesiastical or regal authority is often ham handed and pitiless; control by the scientific elite (Voltaire's bloodless thinkers) would be equally cruel and dehumanizing and ultimately lifeless.. Diderot's solution was an elected aristocracy,
in which the guardians of society were always selected by the people and, once elected, subordinate to the comprehensive moral requirements of leadership.

Something powerful and something dangerous was being born as Diderot and Rousseau defied the philosophe agenda. Here was a conflict which marks the beginning of a resistance which would, over the next hundred years, effectively oppose intrusive authority of every kind - civil, societal, religious and academic. Here was the birth of a company of fighters who would, in time, faithfully resist the emerging forces of idealistic folly, mindless fashion, nationalistic aggression and dehumanizing industrial excess. Here is the beginning of that tradition in which we stand up to the soulless manipulator who would grasp our lives to achieve our welfare. Here we begin to recognize that reactive force, the measured, well-crafted No, which we feebly name The Romantic.

And to the extent that we have not forgotten what it means to breathe the air of Liberty and lift one's neighbor with native human Strength, it is a large part of what it means to be heirs of Western Civilization.

2010-01-12T07:18:00.000-08:00

In 1749 l'Academie de Dijon advertised an essay competition, the idea essentially this: now that we are Enlightened, how are we doing morally?

It is instructive that the question was published and broadly received, but such was the temper of 1749. Diderot and his young friend Rousseau jumped at the opportunity to get in a blow. Rousseau's entry, pointing to the corrupting effects of Enlightenment culture, won the prize. He was quickly elevated to popular status, and was perceived to be something of an emancipator by the citizen weary of authoritarian enlightenment ideals. He became a celebrated champion of something better which I would call populist enlightenment, in which the citizen participated far more in the moment to moment forces of life and society.

Rousseau's winning essay A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences is an interesting read. He attacks the culture that had developed around the intellectual reformists which had become stiff, wholly prescribed and lifeless. Theirs was an amalgamation of rigorous Louis XIV etiquette and the mathematical grammar of abstract philosophy; Rousseau and Diderot had lived within those suffocating confines long enough, and had seen that the system offered little for their fellow citizens.

The grave immorality of the culture, Rousseau wrote, was weakness. The contrivances, concessions and calculated impotence of the society was nothing less than a perpetual slavery to the reigning class. Men's souls were being sold in exchange for amusements and conformity. Real strength and life and Liberty would need to be found by some other means.

Pushing Back

2010-01-11T07:23:00.000-08:00

What happens when Reason shows that we are unreasonable? I think this dilemma represents the higher conflict of the middle enlightenment pretty well.

Voltaire and those intellectuals within the controlling aristocracy (the monarchy and the propertied elite) solved the problem by constructing a paradigm in which civil authority enforced the reasonable behavior of the citizen. But the sacrifice of Liberty was contrary to the highest principles of the cause. A couple of young idealists sought ways to fight back.

Diderot was a country boy, the son of a cutler. Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker; he grew up in the austere climate of Calvinist Geneve. Both were gifted enough to work their way to the highest levels of Enlightenment society, but they never lost their practical affection for the common citizen. Tough living had given them something Voltaire didn't have: a backbone of realism that helped form and support their ideas. Barzun states it like this:

Diderot ranks as the pivotal figure of the century because his
thought evolved, passing from critical effort based on reason to a
conception of man and society in which impulse and instinct are seen as stronger than reason. The pivot for Diderot's gradual turn is the Encyclopdie. It was toward the end of its production that Diderot began to write the masterpieces embodying his doubts and his new inferences.

If men are apt to behave like animals rather than scientists, how do we elevate them and at the same time preserve Liberty? This had become the question of the day. Rousseau's answers would not make the aristocracy happy.

The 1730 -1780 Watershed of France

2010-01-03T09:02:00.000-08:00

To review: Enlightenment optimism gave way to something else. This something else became foundational to what society is today.

In the 1730s and 1740s the Enlightenment philosopher thought something like this: society is a ship which need not be powered by regiments of stupefied galley slaves, each beating an oar to the unifying cadence of superstitious authority. The ship might instead hang canvas, letting the winds of heaven drive it, and all rowers shall be freed.

But a heap of canvas does not make good sail. Supports of stout masts and strong lines and the industry of an organized crew all become vitally necessary. What would supply that intelligence and that energy?

The moral demands of Reason, however new and different, were as exacting as those of Christianity. We forget this if we look only at late effects of the enlightenment, but the thinker of the day was noticing the happy results of experimental science and sought to translate that progress to everything else. It was an unforgiving discipline and not for the halfhearted participant. The rules of the game quickly became serious, taught, and unforgiving - constraining, when one had expected liberation.

The great paradox of the period was this: Reason was indicating that men behaved irrationally if given the choice. A firm hand would be needed to deliver them from the oppression of the firm hand.

Decisive

2010-01-03T06:34:00.000-08:00

We understand the idea of the decisive event: one might imagine a raindrop falling along the continental divide; if it comes down here it flows to the Atlantic; a centimeter further west and it flows into the Pacific. A difference of a few millimeters becomes, with time, a difference of several thousand miles - if in fact those original points are separated by a decisive line.

The analogy breaks when I try to apply it to human history. The Atlantic and the Pacific exist and shall continue to exist whichever way the raindrop runs. Human moments fall like raindrops on the watershed's divide, and flow into their course as human movement will. But the other side of the mountain, the other drainage, its streams and rivers and its ocean - this is history never born and which can never exist. The other side of the mountain has vanished forever.

An historical example might serve: Syracuse, 414 B.C. The written characters now facing you on this page are Roman derivitives rather than Greek because of feeble Athenian policy and strategy at the seige of Syracuse. Imagine the fonts we might have with a greek alphabet - and all the other changes we might have inherited had the classical world been dominated and molded by Athenian culture rather than Rome's. Did we gain more than we lost?

Does it matter who sits in the governor's chair? Are not he real and important parts of life above that plane? Do not mothers still nurse their babes and fathers teach their sons and honor that which is honorable? Or may human moments somehow be channeled into that watershed where such things have vanished forever?

What would the other side of the mountain have been like?

Man the Machine

2009-12-02T08:06:00.000-08:00

Back to France: when optimism ends, what takes its place?

I am going to try to erect a fragile scaffolding - thin lines connecting the points as I now see them. This is meant to serve as a learning tool, not as a definitive essay by one who has mastered the material. However frail and imperfect, it is a skeleton on which I will hang the muscle, nerve and blood of real learning - a decades-long process. The skeleton will change, no doubt, the way a broken bone reorganizes as it heals, contouring its lines according to the stresses it bears. This is how learning begins for me. Hopefully, at some point in the future, one will recognize a virile understanding. French society between Candide and 1789 was impossibly complex, but it is a storm I would try to look into and perhaps name some of the forces.

-----------

Christian tradition and judeochristian revelation had been discarded, and with these the authority which had governed much of society. The convenient replacement was the new philosophy, simplified and organized for the citizenry. The newly realized power of a popular press added to the intrigue and hastened the transition - once again the word spoke to men's hearts and bid them follow, but now it was a word safe and small and something the pamphleteer could place directly into the commoner's hand. Diderot's Encyclopedia, or Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts became emblematic of the new authority of Reason. Materialism, whatever it was, became the basis for the new morality, and in its vague and malleable forms citizens at every level of society discovered the irresistible systematics of payback.

An Epistemological Appeal

2009-11-20T08:25:00.000-08:00

Ruins, slave quarters, Monticello. Photo Katherine Heline Botkin.

Jefferson built his case for American freedom on an epistemological foundation - the epistemology derived from Enlightenment philosophy. The book to read is Inventing America, by Gerry Wills. I refer to this moment in American history simply to emphasize the strong influence Enlightenment belief and methods had on social and political movement in the eighteenth century. Consider Jefferson's declaration:
...the course of human events...implies a flow fixed by natural laws.
..Nature and Nature's God...make no mistake, this is not the God of the ancien regimen.
...we hold these truths to be self-evident.. why not 'evident'? Why not 'truth as revealed from Heaven'?
...let facts be submitted...political science, like physical science, could construct irresistible proofs through rigorous application of deductive method. The necessary elements in this process were 1) good measurements giving solid facts, and 2) a candid starting point.
...submitted to a candid world...the inductive and deductive processes which produce truth have this prerequisite: one must begin without prejudice, bias or interest. This was the candid state of the soul, wiped clean of the foul stains of tradition, custom, or creed. The American appeal to a worldwide brotherhood of states would presuppose such whitened judgment...for without such beginnings, the rational processes which produce truth must inevitably fail.

A side note: the fireplace above looks like it was hastily constructed from a wide assortment of gleaned materials. But the firebox - look at that. Shallow firewall, high mantle, forward throat... this is a Count Rumsford design, the most scientifically advanced concept in fireplace engineering in Jefferson's time. I guess I am not surprised that this complicated man would find a way to order even waste materials into scientific form.

The American Experiment

2009-11-19T09:02:00.000-08:00

This is Jefferson's sundial at Monticello (photo Katherine Heline). Jefferson was, in many ways, a child of the Enlightenment, and in his own way found room to retain some of the optimism which had withered in France. Whatever one has to say about Jefferson's philosophy, I have always found it easy to sympathize with his foundational confidence - that we could be a republic where strength and liberty rose up from the land itself. America would be a practical, agrarian realization of the sound principles of Enlightenment. His head may have been in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground, and he stood on good earth. And his neighbors, however unsophisticated their philosophies, were lords of something fresh and limitless and bursting with life. It was a powerful application of the scientific and moral constructions coming out of Europe.

...But we (as opposed to Europe) have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.... Dependence (mean commerce) begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
Thom. Jefferson
Notes on Virginia, query XIX

After 1755

2009-11-18T07:22:00.000-08:00

Writers, like painters, sometimes need drama to quicken their work. Strong, angular (c.s.) lighting works because of the contrasts and depth it creates. Commentary such as Voltaire cast aside his optimism is pretty strong. Lots of contrast there. Maybe the writer is striking for effect, without much basis for his theory. Such were my thoughts after yesterday's post. This morning, reading Mss'r Barzun, I noticed his quiet assertion:

In Candide (published 1759), moreover, though the fact has been strangely overlooked, Voltaire no longer believes in progress through light and reason.

Perhaps noting the sharp contrast in the great man's life is important.

Even so, life goes on, with or without the optimism. In France, Enlightenment philosophy had provided a system useful for exploding all manner of inconvenient traditions and claims - especially Christianity. Such a tool wants to be retained. And if religious authority could be dismantled, why not political and economic authority? Already in France the philosophe was undermining the foundations of Divine Right and privilege, with only modest opposition by those threatened powers. But across the Atlantic the methodological criticism supplied in French thought would prove useful to American colonists seeking separation from the British crown.

"le mal est sur la terre."

2009-11-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

For the honest man who would remain the optimist this world lays traps at every turn. Voltaire was sixty one years old in 1755. He had never been physically strong. We can only guess what the burden of personal physical decay might have added to the disappointments borne as he surveyed a crumbling philosophical landscape.

The greatest blow was the disaster at Lisbon. On All Saint's Day, 1755 a violent earthquake struck the city which was filled for the holiday. Gaping streets engulfed citizens and pilgrims, and churches collapsed on the massed celebrants. The destruction was unprecedented in modern Europe, and the tragedy was acutely sensed by the intelligentsia of the day. Voltaire was deeply disturbed - not only by the tragedy, but also by the modern thinker's responses to it. His troubled thoughts are expressed in his work Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne. Here are a few lines:

Nay, press not upon my agitated heart
These iron and irrevocable laws,
This rigid chain of bodies, minds and worlds,
Dreams of the bloodless thinker are such thoughts.

Much of the poem expresses the difficulty of the continuation of evil in the presence of a just God. In Voltaire's poem the problem is unresolved.

Whatever side we take we must needs groan,
We nothing know, and everything must fear,
Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it,
The human race demands a word of God.

What is man?

Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
Our being mingles with the infinite;

Toward the end, we see a significant renouncement of the popular Enlightenment optimism. I see an interesting replacement:

All will be well one day - so runs our hope.
All now is well is but an idle dream.

('All is well' was the idiotic axiom of the day, universally applicable to every inconvenience or happy accident. Voltaire was through with it.)

The poem ends with hope.

A Bright Moment - and Only a Moment

2009-11-16T07:23:00.000-08:00

The intoxicating optimism of the early Enlightenment was a prairie fire - it flamed up brightly, fueling itself on the rotten fodder that lay before it. It raced across the culture, fanned by the winds of European change. And it died down as quickly as it had sprung up. Enlightenment constructions and prejudices would linger for generations with mixed effect, but the optimism that had inspired its French beginnings lay in a heap some twenty five years after its illustrious birth.

Voltaire was in England in 1726, returning to France in '28 or '29. Details are scarce about his time there, but we know he was deeply impressed by the English mood, especially with regard to religious toleration, political reform, and physical science. He witnessed Newton's funeral, where "...a mathematician was buried with the honors of a king". He and his contemporaries succeeded in importing something of this society into France during the next two decades; the happy effects and the unlimited potential of the new philosophy provided an impetus which was received worldwide - and especially in colonial America.

Here are comments from Christine North in her introduction to Voltaire's Candide:

...men were at length acquiring enough knowledge to throw off the fetters of ignorance and superstition which had so long weighed them down, and were ready to gain control over their environment and themselves. If they could, through the works of Newton, explain the apparently unfathomable movement of matter by a few simple physical laws, and with Locke move toward a rational analysis of the mysterious mind of man, why should they not learn to understand and control their own nature, and then their own surroundings?

Men rose in their own estimation. As they made more discoveries and arrived at explanations of what had been inexplicable, so they criticized more and more the old way of life, the so-called Ancien Regime, with its oppressive religious, political and philosophical bases...

This criticism, so effectively developed, would acquire a life all its own, and the echoes of its shouts would sound around the world for decades. The optimism, based on the superficiality of the human self, died an uneasy death. The tombstone might well site November 1, 1755 as the day it died.

Conflict, Part III

2009-11-12T07:23:00.000-08:00

I am suggesting that in our global society the epistemological map is being redrawn, and that the lines may be a little more clear than they were twenty years ago. It is an epistemology built upon deep psychological footings, and it is pervasive, that is, it is part of the shared cultural experience. Economic alliances will enforce its claims on the everyday lives of our neighbors. This is a strong philosophical trend, even if it is poorly defined in the citizen's mind. But let's define it:

Truth is what the computers generate (or what we get from institutions most closely associated with powerful computer technology).

I began a couple of days ago under the headline "We've Done this Dance Before". I think there is an historical period which is analogous to our present age, especially with respect to our allegiance to the increasing powers of computer processes. It was an age in which popular confidence was eagerly lent to a new philosophical system; a system promising individual liberation, political and scientific strength, and a prospect for growth unlike anything that came before it. I know of no writer who conveys the feel of this period better than Jacques Barzun, one of the premier scholars of the twentieth century. Mss'r Barzun was born in France in 1907, came to the States in 1920, and developed his brilliant academic career at Columbia. In the year 2000 he published From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present. It is a beautifully written account of western cultural decline. Here is Mss'r Barzun on the early Enlightenment:

Encyclopedia - the "circle of teachings" -may be taken as the emblem of the 18th century. Like the Renaissance, the age was confident that the new knowledge, the fullness of knowledge, was in its grasp and was a means of EMANCIPATION. Confidence came from the visible progress in scientific thought. Science was the application of reason to all questions, no matter what tradition might have handed down. Everything will ultimately be known and "encircled".

Sounds like the cutline from yesterday, no? But back to Mss'r Barzun:

The goal of exploring nature and mind and broadcasting results was to make Man everywhere of one mind, rational and humane. Language, nation, mores, and religion would cease to create differences, deadly as everybody knew. With a single religion and its universal morals and with French as the international medium of the educated it would be a world peopled with - or at least managed by - philosophes.

Conflict, Part II

2009-11-11T05:23:00.000-08:00

The current issue of Popular Science (December 2009) includes an article in which a photograph carries this cutline:

WOLFRAM WANTS IT TO COMPUTE ALL OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

The article is about Stephen Wolfram, the creator of the Mathematica software, author of A New Kind of Science and designer of the analytical engine WolframAlpha.com. The article neatly summarizes Mr. Wolfram's accomplishments, which demonstrate how much a brilliant man can accomplish working outside the traditional boundaries imposed by state, corporation and academia.

My point is not about Mr. Wolfram's work, but about the cutline, and how we might read it. And my hypothesis is this: those words, and any similar phrase celebrating the broad powers of computing, are going to have a much different feel to the reader born into homes where computers were present and influential. If one was born after, say, 1995, and experienced an association with a home computer throughout the formative years, and came to know its utility and adaptability in learning, shopping, entertainment, socializing and simply exploring human knowledge, he or she will perhaps have an instinctive sympathy for ideas which champion the strength of computing. And this sympathy may be complex - not simply an optimistic observation, but psychologically deep, especially as it becomes intertwined with the unique neurobiological processes instilled by intense personal computing.

The "yeah, right" scepticism is becoming "cool. whatever." What, if anything, is lost here?

2009. Seems Like We've Done this Dance Before.

2009-11-09T07:01:00.000-08:00

One of the benefits of having a brilliant and adventurous daughter is this: when she returns the borrowed camera it is loaded with really interesting photographs. Things I have never seen and places I will never go. The municipal clock shown here is in Prague. I especially like the four attendants standing along side, medieval witnesses to the last four or five centuries. I do not know the particular history of this clock but maybe one of my readers will.

Over the next few days I will write about the conflict that exists between certainty and mystery. Civilized societies have always needed to balance these psychological quantities, and as we look back at western history we may see moments when the conflict is most strident and the contrasts most sharp. I think we are moving through a similar moment now, and I believe that the philosophical posture our society assumes will have much to do with our children's future.

Let me begin with a thought from Bertrand Russell. One does not need to read very far in his History of Western Philosophy to encounter the conflict. He sees the rise of enthusiastic religion as a reaction against the enervating constraints of a severely logical Greek society:

It is evident that this process can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by the miser. But without going to such extremes, prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Bacchus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of everyday preoccupations. Much of what is greatest in human achievement involves some element of intoxication, some sweeping away of prudence by passion. Without the Bacchic element life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict which runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.

2009-11-07T18:55:00.000-08:00

The Gospel Acording to Karen B.

2009-11-07T08:07:00.000-08:00

Our friend Sandy died this week. I met her seven weeks ago when I admitted her to my hospital service for palliation of end stage pancreatic cancer. She had no family up here and had no place to go. Where does one go to die when she knows she has only a few days left? Somehow she came our way.

We fixed some things, physiologically, and balanced the pain meds as best we could, and watched a flower open up. I guess that can happen even in a desert; a little rain falls and the strength of the blossom lifts out of some deep place where it slept during all those dry years. It flows up in the swelling bud and opens, brightly colored and fragrant, an extravagant display of presence and power and persistence, like a sign to the universe that Life will not be dominated by adversity. That was Sandy. When she smiled it was like that.

Other times were not so good. Sandy was suffering through hypoxia and weakness and pain and the physical transformation of feminine beauty to something misshapen and foreign to self...these are very heavy hardships for the struggling soul. I gave her my best words during those moments, the analogies and examples and stories illustrating the sufficiency of a Father's love...she knew those things, but in those terrible moments did not feel those things. Words did not seem to mean much.

Toward the end, on one of those bad days, I was saying the words when Karen B. came in. Just to meet Sandy and visit and be kind to someone who was walking a terribly lonely path. Karen brought chocolate, and when the taste of that dissolved in Sandy's mouth it was like rain again, nourishing the dry places words can never reach. You could see this on Sandy's face. Karen brought lotion, and massaged Sandy's feet. Karen knew this was a good thing because that's what she likes.

Karen didn't have many words. Just a bag with lotion and chocolate and a heart like a raincloud, ready to pour itself out on a desert place. Which is what a desert wants. Karen was the rain, and in the desert rain changes everything.

Palouse Sunset

2009-11-06T06:25:00.000-08:00

Tablecloth

2009-11-06T06:11:00.000-08:00

What if God had a kitchen?
One of those small farmhouse kitchens
With an old oak table in the center of the room,
And we could sit there in creaking chairs
And drink our tea,
The warmth of the oven
Radiating over us, and over all our thoughts.
I would choose my words carefully,
Trying not to break the magic
Of such a moment in such a place,
And I would look at you and see all the beauty
That I had forgotten how to see,
And speak of it, maybe,
Wondering if you had changed,
Or was it just the way I looked at you,
Across that tablecloth
In that warm light.
And there would be something delicious baking in the oven
Just behind us,
And we would notice that good smell and breathe it in,
And God might say it will be done when it is done
And not before.
The baking time is six days.

Our Path through the Wood

2009-11-03T04:41:00.000-08:00

This is the road Isaiah and I have carved through out forest; one of many, actually. The bear and deer make free use of our paths, which ought to be the measure of a decent passage. I spend a little time out here every day, working quietly, mostly with hand tools and fire. I move things and I subtract things, and let natural forces build upon what God has placed here. Beauty grows easily when given a chance.

My Night

2009-11-01T14:02:00.000-08:00

We are wired for enchantment.

For they (the beautiful encounters) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not seen, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.
C. S. Lewis, sermon, Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, June 8, 1941

I awoke early yesterday and found the stars peering in my windows and a nearly full moon casting its icy silver light over our farm. A cold front had dropped down from Canada, crystallizing the night; my world had become deep and dark blue and cloudless. I stood outside shivering under this for about a minute before going back in to build a fire in our stove. Cedar was popping and the coffeemaker chattering a few minutes later. It was about 4AM. I checked the moon again and planned my morning.

By five I was warmly dressed, driving slowly south on the deserted highway. About six miles south of our place our state highway joins U.S. 95. If you take that north for about a mile, driving up the long hill, there is a scenic overlook. I pulled off, shut down the car and the lights and stood there, looking out over the dark valley and the Selkirk range rising up on the far side, the yellow moon lingering above the snow on a mountainous horizon.

The slope before me was forests and rock outcrops and small farms cut into the terrain; the valley floor further below was mostly open farmland spread between the loops of a slow and mature river. All these parts slept beneath a faint illumination of silver light. Overhead Orion had begun his westward descent, and the Pleiades, further west, were washed in the moon's glow. Behind me in the darkness some large game animals clattered over the rock. The wind gently moved down the mountain slope, dense and cold, carrying the scent of soil and conifers and recent rain - like the pheromones of a strong and beautiful and dangerous creature, claiming one's attention irresistibly and unforgettably. Listening to the stillness I could hear the energy of the air moving over the needles of thousands of acres of pines and firs - a low-pitched, sensuous hum, an easy flow, a mountain's breath, falling onto the valley below.

The photography was not going well for a couple of reasons. I didn't press it. Maybe it seemed that a kind of shyness was appropriate, as if the night was asking for a little privacy with that kind of intimacy. Perhaps what I had seen and smelled and listened to was not something to photograph and pass around. For the hour or so I was out on the highways and watching from the overlook not a single vehicle passed. Except for my own noise there was not another man-made sound.

Driving home I watched the fog condensing over farmer's fields. It caught the last ivory light of the moon as it slipped behind the mountains. A hint of dawn was beginning behind me. Venus rose over the eastern mountain line. I would have the stars for a while longer. The cold, dense atmosphere of the night moved around me, on its way to the valley floor.

Overture

2009-10-31T07:56:00.000-07:00

I am learning to pray for someone new: something enfolded in mystery and as common as the dawn of day. Bess is in her seventh week of her first pregnancy. The little person shown at left here is eight and a half weeks, so Bess' embryo is just a bit less developed. Bess is building another world within her, something wholly new; she and the Creator of the universe are together composing a new song note by note and line by line.

Here is a melody that will change the universe.

Life is hard to describe with unclothed language. Poetry and gifted prose may say much about the experiences of life, and the sympathetic, honest reader will nod in agreement, even at the hardest parts of these confessions. But life itself, Life, is like music - moody, complex, and moving; melody and harmony, counterpoint and supporting chord movements; the triumphant major and the melancholic minor; fortissimo and pianissimo...one prays not so much for this as with this.

That is, admittedly, opaque. But it seems hard to strive for heaven when one finds himself already there. And it seems hard to ask for blessing when we are already so extravagantly blessed. The love Bess and Bryan have for one another have everything to do with this. My prayers for this new life begin with gratitude and celebration.

The Visitor

2009-10-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

Grizzly Bear tracks. Isaiah and I were cutting a small road through our forest using shovel and ax and rake. It was dry, September, I think, so the clays in the soil turned to powder beneath our tools and our boots. Isaiah raked one section smooth when we were done for the day, hoping to register the tracks of some of our common animals - deer, turkey, raccoon, perhaps something unusual. The next day we found these. Hindfoot is 11" by 7".

The Road Less Traveled is a concept that plays well in photography, poetry, and popular psychiatry, and rightly so. But it is not enough that we find such paths. Someone has to create them.

A quote from Isaiah

2009-10-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

I discovered a scrap of paper in my pile of notes which showed something Isaiah said about three years ago. He said Superman is boring unless Kryptonite is everywhere.

Isaiah will be sixteen in a couple of months. He will be learning, I guess, that he is Superman, and that Kryptoite is everywhere. And, yeah. It's not boring.

What the Forest Gave Us

2009-10-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

Something from Helprin

2009-10-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

Last summer, in Venice, I was walking from room to room in the Accademia, which, unlike timid American museums, throws its windows wide open to the light and air of the day. As if to bring even further alive the greatness and truth of the Bellinis and the Giorgiones on the walls, the galleries were flooded with music. As with most everything in Italy, it was unofficial. It came from a guitarist and a soprano on a side street. He played while she sang - gloriously - Bach, Handel, Mozart, and anonymous folk songs of the 18th century. Because it was music, I cannot properly convey to you how beautiful it was, but it was accomplished, precise and infused with the ineffable quality that lifts great art above that which merely aspires to or pretends to be great art. I could not see them from the windows, but when, several hours later, I went outside, they had neither ceased, nor skipped a beat, nor produced a single false note.

They were impoverished Poles, who appeared to be in their late twenties. She was thin, sharp-featured, and hauntingly beautiful. Most people simply passed them by, some dropped a few coins in a basket at her feet, and the visitors to the Accademia had no idea who they were, but she sang as if she were bathed in the lights of La Scala, where she should have been, and where someday she may be. It did not matter that they were unrecognized, that they sang on the street, or that they were desperately poor, because that day in Venice they rose above everyone else, except perhaps the saints. In this they shared a brotherhood with the American soldier who made the first parachute jump, in the dark, into Afghanistan. For they and he were defending the civilization of the West, and they and he are inextricably linked. Without the soldier, they could not exist except in subjugation, and without them, he would not have enough to fight for.

Mark Helprin, speech at Hillsdale College, May 24, 2002.

Portrait of Isaiah

2009-10-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

I like this photo. The light and darkness wrap up the person, saying something about all of us.