6/29/23

 Thursday, June 29, 2023

In bed at 9 and up at 5.  63℉ and a high of 78℉.  We're still on the Air Quality Alert with an AQI of 180, Unhealthy.  The wind is SSE at 6 mph, 3 to 10 during the day with gusts up to 16 mph.  My weather app tells me there has been no rain in the last 24 hours but the ground is very wet as I let Lilly out.  Very little rain is expected today,  The humidity is 89% and will average 80% today with dew points from 57 to 67.  Sunrise at 5:14, sunset at 8:35. 15+21.

Yesterday's driveway news.  We need to get our culvert pipes replaced by the village before the driveway can be repaved.  Cost anywhere from $6500 to $10,000.  The joy of home ownership. Grumble, grumble.

Dinner last night with Geri and Rita.  Geri made a wonderful rolled lasagna, the best ever.  I'm thinking this morning of Yeats' The Stolen Child, of Jimmy, Eugene O'Neil, and other thoughts.  Not sure why.

It was a dark and hazy morning.  My entry for this year's Bulwer-Lytton prize for the opening sentence of the worst possible novel.  I'm looking out my window an hour and a half after sunrise and it is indeed 'a dark and hazy morning.'  There are 500 active wildfires in Canada as I write, half of them out of control.  There have been 3,000 so far this year.  31,000 square miles have burned, an area about the size of South Carolina with the smoke smothering much of the U.S. and now reaching to Europe.  Carried by the jet stream it may be on its way around the world, literally.  Climate change?

Mind-blowing news this morning of the discovery of 'gravitational wave background' or ripples in our space-time cosmic fabric.  I don't know what this means.  I don't understand most of what I read about modern astronomy and even less about subatomic science, all that 'quantum theory' and 'quantum mechanics' stuff.  Stories like this one remind me of how vastly and profoundly ignorant I am, of how incapable I am of apprehending basic science and the mathematics underlying that science.  This seems to be in large part a failure of imagination.  The news story relates that 'there are many billions of galaxies.'  I can barely conceive of our solar system, our one sun with its planets and other stuff circling around it in accordance with the law of gravity.  And we are a small part of one galaxy, our Milky Way.  And there are many billions of galaxies in the cosmos?!? Egad!  The story also differentiates between 'stellar mass black holes having masses akin to 10 or 20 or 30 suns' and 'supermassive black holes' having 'the mass equivalents of millions or even billions of suns.'  And of supermassive black hole binaries 'dancing with each other' and generating the background gravitational waves spreading through the cosmos.  The mass of millions or even billions of stars???  How to conceive of that?  And what the heck is 'mass'?  We're told that the universe is made up of mass and energy and they are interchangeable, E=mc squared.  I think of mass as 'stuff', that which we can see and feel, etc.  But in black holes, none of the 'stuff' is seeable, etc.  How does it even exist if the gravitational forces are so strong that even light energy cannot escape it?  Why am I reminded of the submersible that just imploded under the high pressure of the sea at depth?  The story speaks of "pulsars," a type of neutron star, the ultradense remnant of a dead star" that 'spin rapidly, hundreds of revolutions a second, and emits radio waves in a steady pulse.'  Whoa!  Why would a 'dead' star revolve hundreds of times a second?  Where does that energy come from if it's dead?  And why doesn't it run out of energy at some point, or does it?  And what with the steady stream of radio waves?  And, by the way, what exactly is meant a "wave"?  And what distinguishes a "background wave" from other kinds (s) of waves(s)?  Lord, have mercy on me, an ignoramus.

There is an unrelated book review in this morning's NYT: "The Philosophers Who Used Word Puzzles to Understand the World:  “A Terribly Serious Adventure,” by Nikhil Krishnan, brings to life the 20th-century Oxford thinkers whose methods of linguistic analysis were deeply influential and vigorously debated."  The book discusses 'linguistic' or 'analytic' philosophy as professed by a group of Oxford philosophers who were preoccupied with language, words and their relation to Reality and Truth.  The ever-present question was 'What exactly do you mean by . . . "  It sounds to me akin to the so-called Socratic dialogue and its former (?) use in legal education, but it reminds me of my wondering what exactly is meant by 'mass,' 'energy,' wave,' 'force,' etc.

Racism is something that is done to us.'  By happenstance, I watched Michael Steele's podcast today featuring an interview with Mary Trump.  I stayed with it because Mary T. and I live in the same silo, believing deep inside us that the basic problem in America is Race, and as Michael Steele said, it's Black and White.  It's not Asian, Hispanic, Muslim, etc.; it's Black and White.  Mary Trump caught my attention with her statement that the number of White people in this country who do not suffer from racism is vanishingly small.  Not that such people are racists, because being a racist is something one chooses.  She was speaking of the non-racist Whites who grew up in our society, our culture, our economy, our world in which racism is something that is done to us.  I've written about it as racism was in the air I breathed as a child growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s.  It was ubiquitous, everywhere, all around.  Mary Trump to White People: racism is something that was done to you, you're not responsible for what was done to you but what you can do is take responsibility for undoing it.  ["The Psychology of America," Michael Steele Network.]

From Notebook of a Tamed Cynic: 1918 (after a trip through the war training camps._  "What I dislike about most of the chaplains is that they assume a very officious and also a very masculine attitude.  Ministers are not used to authority and revel in it when acquired.  The rather too obvious masculinity which they try to suggest by word and action is meant to remove any possible taint which their Christian faith might be suspected to have left upon them in the minds of the he=men in the army.  H_____ is right/\.  He tells me that he wants to go into the army as a private and not as a chaplain.  He believes that the war is inevitable but he is not inclined to reconcile its necessity with the Christian ethic.  He will merely forget about this difficulty during the war.  That is much more honest than what I am doing."

This reminds me of my experience with chaplains in the Marines.  The one I remember most vividly was the Navy chaplain, a Protestant of some sort,  who served as chief chaplain for the 1st Marine Air Wing.  He was there at Wing HQ at the Danang Air Base.  I remember walking into the Officers' Mess one afternoon in December 1965 and the chaplain was decorating an artificial Christmas tree and singing loudly "Christmas is a-coming and the goose is getting fat, please to put a penny in the old man's hat.  If you haven't got a penny then a ha'penny will do.  If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you."  He was the type that Niebuhr described as "too officious and too masculine."  I felt like punching him in the face.  The other chaplain at Wing HG was a little Catholic chaplain.  If he wasn't gay, I'd be surprised.  He was the opposite of the Wing chief chaplain and everybody liked him because he made a point of nabbing ice cream from mess halls and bringing it to Marines where they worked.  It must have been his way of honoring Matthew 25: 31-46 -- "I was hungry and you fed me", etc.   The third chaplain I remember was a reservist with the unit for which I was the I&I, inspector-instructor at NAS Willow Grove, PA.  What I remember about him is that he purported to be an atheist and suggested to me that most theology students didn't believe in God.  As I think about this now, I recall that going to Divinity School was one way to get a deferment from the draft, at least in 1966-67 while I was at Willow Grove.   In any event, I smile at Niebuhr's approval of his minister friend who intended to enlist as a private rather than accept a commission as a chaplain because "he is not inclined to reconcile [the war's] necessity with the Christian ethic.  He will merely forget about this difficulty during the war."  This reminds me of Katie at the law school telling me the tale of a friend of hers who struggled with the doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.  When told it was a dogma and that as a Catholic he had to believe it, he said "Well, I may have to believe it but I don't have to think about it."

LTMW at Barkis and Peggotty feeding together on the same half-orange.  They seem to be quite a close couple.  A big white-bellied nuthatch is working on the sunflower tube,  also a female English sparrow.  A brilliant male goldfinch works on the niger tube.

More from Notebook of a Tamed Cynic:  1918  "I can see one element in this strange fascination of war which men have not adequately noted.  It reduces life to simple terms.  The modern man lives in such a complex world that one wonders how his sanity is maintained as well as it is.   Every moral venture, every social situation and every practical problem involves a whole series of conflicting loyalties, and a man may never be quite sure that he is right in giving himself to the one as against the other.  Shall he be just and sacrifice love?  Shall he strive to beauty and do it by gaining the social privileges which destroy his sense of fellowship with the underprivileged?   Shall he neglect his family and serve the State?  Or be patriotic to the detriment of the great family of mankind?  Shall he be diligent at the expense of his health?  Or keep healthy at the expense of the great cause in which he is interested?  Shall he be truthful and therefore cruel?  Or shall he be kind and therefore a little soft?  Shall he strive for the amenities of life and therefore make life less robust in the process?  Or shall he make courage the ultimate virtue and brush aside the virtues which a stable and therefore soft society has cultivated?   Out of this mesh of conflicting claims, interests, loyalties, ideals, values, and communities, he is rescued by the psychology of war which gives the state at least a momentary priority over all other communities and which makes courage the supreme virtue. . . . . Unfortunately, all these momentary simplifications of the complexities of life cannot be finally satisfying, because they do violence to life.

Why am I reminded of the tax collector in Luke - Lord have mercy on me, a sinner?