A Misunderstood God

And Other Essays

G. J. Lau

Copyright © 2011 G. J. Lau

Smashwords Edition

The Windroot Press

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The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author. The essays are for the most part in their original form, although grammatical corrections and other minor edits have been made by the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4580-4391-7

Homepage: http://www.windroot.com

Blog: http://www.windroot.blogspot.com/

Other Books by G. J. Lau:

The Magpie’s Secret at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/36482

SitRep Negative: A Year in Vietnam at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/49814

Fifty Years of Global Warming at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/56573

Introduction

At some point in our journey from cradle to grave, we all ponder the meaning of life. This seems to be—insofar as we can know such things— a uniquely human trait. Presumably, the other animals we share the planet with don’t feel they have a need to know. Hard to say who are the lucky ones.

These essays chronicle my encounters with the natural and unnatural world along the way to a different understanding of what it all means. I don’t have any new answers, just more questions. Maybe God doesn’t have a plan, but I do believe there is a process that was set in motion at the point of creation, a process that will inevitably lead to a result, a result that we can influence through our individual and collective actions.

As I re-read these essays, one thing that came through was the joy to be found in the small things in life, be it sitting in the backyard watching the birds, or playing with blocks, or feeling the bite of a wintry wind against my cheek. I like to think I share that much in common with my fellow animals—an appreciation of the now.

If I were to hope for one thing a reader might take away after reading these essays, it would be a greater appreciation of the mystery that permeates everything around us. From the flight of a bird to the subatomic particles dancing all around us and within us, nothing is as simple or as obvious as it seems. To me, that sense of how little we truly understand about everything is the first step towards understanding anything.

What’s In A Word?

Words are the gene pool of our intellect. Like our biological genes, words contain within them a history of what went into their making, and they contain every conceivable future in their expression of new combinations of thought and insight.

Given that our edge as a species lies in our ability to reason, you’d think that words would be treated with respect rather than the carelessness that has become so commonplace in our national dialogue.

Maybe that is what drives a writer to write: the appreciation of the value of words, an appreciation that fuels the passion to use words to dig into the past and to the make visible a future perhaps undreamt of until it took shape inside the writer’s brain.

But it begins with a respect for words and the spaces between them, a sense of words as discrete bundles of intellectual energy that singly and collectively contain the accumulated wisdom of an entire species, from its earliest days until now.

What’s in a word? Everything … and more.

Behind These Prison Walls

I hear the geese before I see them. The syncopated honking heralds their passage, a wedge plowing a furrow through the night sky under the watchful eye of a waxing moon.

They carry with them secrets our science will never fully unravel. Is all that ceaseless honking the amiable bantering of any group traveling together or instructions being passed down the line? How does it feel to lock on to a line of magnetic energy and just know it is the right way? For that matter, how do they know where to go or when they have gotten there?

Perhaps it is punishment for some original sin or just the way things turned out … I don’t know. But the older I get the more I am filled with sadness at being shut out from so much of the natural world around me.

We got to where we are thanks to our intelligence, but at what cost? In the solitary confinement of our brain we can look out through the prison bars to the very edge of time, but the geese and their secrets are forever beyond our grasp.

Prudence

Ezra Pound was none too pleased at the prospect of winter (Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM). That’s a pretty typical reaction. Winter gets a lot of bad press and for good reason.

This is a season that has teeth. Winter winds will gnaw your flesh away if you linger outside for too long on a really cold day. Fall through the ice and you have minutes to live. Forget to pay the electric bill and you have hours before you slowly slip into the big sleep.

Winter is all about being prudent. Prudence is an underrated virtue in these self-indulgent times. Growing up in the New England of the 1950’s, when the winters were still very hard, one quickly developed a natural caution.

You didn’t just go outside. You thought about what to wear, the condition of the roads. You sniffed the air, trying to catch the scent of any snow that might be heading your way. You always made sure there was enough milk, bread, and toilet paper—the Holy Trinity of winter survival—to last a fortnight if need be.

That prudence was the legacy of a uniquely New England Puritanical fear of having too much of anything, an instilled distrust of excess that made you hedge your bets. Prudence served as a flywheel that kept your life from spinning out of control. Not so much any more, or so it would seem.

Mackerel Skies

Sitting by the ocean gives you a sense of the immensity of nature and also its fragility. You can look out beyond the waves to the earth’s curve while the morning tide deposits the flotsam and jetsam of civilization at your feet. A nor’easter can move mountains of sand in a single night. A rising sea can slowly overtake islands and coasts over the course of decades.

Sitting by the ocean leaves you mesmerized by the waves lapping against the shore in the same rhythm that soothed us in the womb. Their sound was the first thing heard on earth and will probably be the last thing heard before the sun novas out.

Sitting by the ocean connects you to the deep past. Stay for an hour, a day, a week, a month, a lifetime and the rhythm of the tides will never vary. Only the gods have longer memories, and the sea has outlasted more than a few of those.

Sitting by the ocean forces you to accept the indifference of nature to the fate of the living things it nurtures. What happens to clams or men is of no concern to the sea. It gives us life; it is up to us what we make of it.

Sitting by the ocean makes you think of generations to come as you listen to the squeals of delight from children as they try to outrun the waves that nip at their heels. You know right then and there that you would do whatever you could to protect them from the dangers that you as a parent know are out there.

Sitting by the ocean teaches you to see and feel the changing world around you. The beach is calm even as storms are forming far out at sea, beyond the horizon line. But nature plays fair, sending mackerel skies ahead of the storm to let us know that a sea change is coming. Such signs are all around us. You just have to know where to look.

Summer’s End

Moiré clouds dawdle across the early evening sky. A cooling wind is freshening from the west, clearing away the humid remains of the day. There is a feel of autumn in the air, the end parenthesis closing in on summer.

Around the side of the house, pumpkins are slowly turning orange, in anticipation of the fall colors that are due in another month or two. This year’s patchwork quilt of reds and yellows and purples moving slowly down the slopes of the mountains will be lackluster, another casualty of the months-long drought that has afflicted this region.

The drought this year has been hard on the garden. The older plants and the weeds have managed to make it through just fine, but perennials newly planted in the spring have struggled against the dry sapping heat. Miss a day of watering and the leaves begin to droop, curling inward in a desperate attempt to thwart evaporation of their life’s blood.

High in the locust tree, a squirrel has curled up for an evening’s snooze. His tail hangs down, swaying gently in the breeze. Finches dart across the yard on their way home to their roost. The air grows cooler, raising small goose bumps on my forearms. It’s time to go in.

A Small Tragedy

I live in a typical suburban neighborhood on a quiet cul-de-sac. We have a relatively small fenced-in backyard that harbors a variety of different birds: sparrows, finches, cardinals, robins, mourning doves, black-capped chickadees, goldfinches, snow birds, mockingbirds, catbirds and the odd assortment of migratory visitors.

Over the years I have learned a lot about the birds in my backyard: the ones that like to flock together, the loners and the players, the predators and the solid citizens. One thing they all have in common is a fierce devotion to protecting their young.

The smallest bird is fearless when it comes to standing between one of its babies and any kind of threat, be it a human who has unwittingly walked to close to a well-hidden nest or a predator like a blue jay, the T-Rex of the local avian community.

I was witness to an example of this the other day when I heard a commotion in my backyard. My dog, a Parsons Russell terrier named Mabel, was being attacked by a pair of cardinals. It took a second for me to process the fact that they were probably guarding a baby that was trapped on the ground.

Unfortunately for them, I was too slow, and Mabel was too quick. The next thing I knew, she was running to the other side of the yard with an already dead baby clenched in her jaws. I’d like to say that was the first time, but it wasn’t. She is a terrier, and that is what terriers were bred to do.

Still, I felt bad for the cardinals. They hovered over the area where the baby had been taken, swooping in and out in hopes, perhaps, of a last minute rescue. A couple of hours later I walked by that part of the yard and saw a male cardinal perched on the fence right where the baby had been lost.

It struck me that perhaps he was still mourning the loss of his child. I looked for his mate and couldn’t spot it, which got me to wondering if their union would survive the stress of this loss.

I know what you are thinking. Animals are not capable of those kinds of emotions. Only we humans possess such feelings of loss. Only we humans understand the finality of death.

Well, I wonder about that. It seems to me that this gulf that supposedly exists between mankind and all other living species may not be as wide as we think it is. Certainly those cardinals knew malice and menace when they saw it, and were prepared to resist it with everything they had, no matter what the odds.

Maybe we need to believe we are special in order to buttress our belief that God cares only about us. Personally, I think we would do better to see ourselves as a little less special and all the other living things on the planet as a little more special.

A Misunderstood God

Heinrich von Kleist wrote from 1799 to 1811. His collection of short stories, The Marquise of O and Other Stories, foreshadows a time when the optimism of the German Enlightenment—with its belief that the world is rationally ordered and that all things can eventually be understood—was beginning the long slow fade to black we now call the 20th Century, where nothing seems to have worked out as planned.

I know what you are thinking. German writer … 19th Century … got to be dull. Not so. Kleist writes about ordinary people whose lives are caught up in increasingly bizarre twists of fate that carry them forward into their unexpected destiny. The writing is deceptively simple, the voice flat, the plot an inexorable progression from normal to abnormal.

My favorite is The Earthquake in Chile, which explores the aftermath of a cataclysmic earthquake. The story centers around two lovers and their illicit child. Let’s just say it doesn’t go well for any of them and leave it at that. The horror of the tale is intensified by von Kleist’s way of just letting the story tell itself. The opening sentence is a brilliant example of von Kleist’s dense yet mesmerizing style:

In Santiago, the capitol of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jerónimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and was about to hang himself.

What brought von Kleist’s story to mind was last week’s terrible events in the country’s midsection. Parts of Oklahoma and Kansas were devastated by a storm system that spawned more than 70 tornadoes in a destructive rampage that leveled hundred of homes and left dozens dead. The intensity of the destruction was reminiscent of the damage caused by Hurricane Hugo.

At about the same time, another tragedy unfolded on a smaller scale, but one no less devastating to those involved. A group of kids had been in Mayhill, New Mexico, attending a youth retreat sponsored by a local church. They were returning home to Lubbock, Texas when a spare tire fell from a passing truck and slammed into their bus. Six Lubbock-area girls and a 67-year-old Albuquerque man died in the wreck. Another 27 persons were injured.

To ponder these events is not to make light of them or to diminish the anguish they have caused. But one can’t help being drawn to these events, just as we are inevitably drawn to stand at the edge of an abyss to peer nervously downward at the inverse apogee, perhaps to sway just the tiniest bit as we ponder the closeness of the infinite.

Heinrich von Kleist would have been drawn to just such events as these, using them as a source of inspiration for one of his intricately crafted tales of chance and destiny. In a letter written in 1806, von Kleist expressed the hope that, “contrary to evidence, the world is governed not by an evil spirit, but simply by a God who is misunderstood.” In 1811, at the age of 33, he committed suicide.

Fathers and Sons

My father died 33 years ago. It was just a week before his 61st birthday, and he was playing golf when he dropped dead of a heart attack while he was waiting to tee off. Not a bad way to go, really, especially if you are an avid golfer.

For the first two decades or so of my life, our relationship was ... okay. We were two very different people. He was good with his hands. I was not. Other than the newspaper, he was not much of a reader. I was a bookworm. He loved tools and fixing things. I never met a machine I could understand.

Things shifted between us after I went to Vietnam. He never got to serve in the Army due to an already bad heart. Like other men of his generation, that failure to serve in uniform gnawed at him. I think maybe he got a vicarious sense of vindication from my service. Certainly, I think he felt duty-bound to treat me as a man in full, especially after I came home on leave in my uniform.

What really sealed the deal between us was when I got married. I’m sure he and my mother were both despairing of that ever happening. The fact that not only did I get engaged but also she was beautiful and smart and got along well with them was … well, just about as good as it gets.

My father was a very talented man. He was a professional cabinet-maker and built custom homes in the days when homes were still stick-built. He could fix just about anything with moving parts. He was a scratch golfer who won the championship (First Flight) at just about every club in the area. He loved to play guitar and looked forward to his jam sessions with a few of the other local musicians.

The thing I remember most about him was his inflexible sense of honesty. He was the kind of guy who was honest when nobody was looking, if you know what I mean. I guess it rubbed off on me, or at least I hope it did.

The other thing we shared is a basic gregariousness. (My kids are rolling their eyes along about now.) He taught me that most folks are pretty friendly if you just treat them that way. It sprang from a fierce sense of small-town egalitarianism. Wherever he was, there was nobody any better than he was. After all, this was a guy who used to play with JFK and who knew secrets about Humphrey Bogart.

The one way that I am different from him as a father is in telling my kids that I love them. My father’s generation didn’t do that. I know he loved me, but hearing the words would have been nice. I don’t hold it against him, though. That’s just how things were in those days.

So maybe on Father’s Day it is fitting that I stop for a minute and tell my father that I love him, because come to think of it I don’t know if I ever said that to him when he was alive. Dad, if you are up there listening, “Happy Father’s Day. You did all right in my book. I love you.”

Memorial Day

Family business took my wife and I down to Florida over the Memorial Day weekend. Her parents had moved there several years ago, but now it was time to sift through the stuff that accumulates after decades of marriage and children and grandchildren.

My wife spent hours looking through envelopes, loose papers, and photographs. We rediscovered a lot of family history. This was a Gold Star family of soldiers and sailors who fought in two world wars. They endured the hard times and worked hard during the good times.

Hidden among piles of old McCalls and Family Circles was a Saturday Evening Post, dated July 10, 1943. Flipping through the magazine you couldn’t help but notice that in every article, every joke, and every advertisement the war was mentioned in some form or another. World War II permeated every aspect of life in a way that we can’t even begin to comprehend today. People were totally committed to the war effort and adjusted their daily lives so that the war always came first.

Compare that with what happened after the attacks on the World Trade Center. We sent our soldiers to Afghanistan while back on the home front we were told to carry on our lives as usual and to go shopping. Instead of hitting the beaches at Normandy, we were ordered to hit the malls. Not once were we asked to sacrifice anything for the war. I guess they were afraid we didn’t have it in us.

And maybe they were right. Maybe that is why before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq we remained silent, knowing all the while that our leaders were deceiving us and perverting our most cherished traditions of truth and justice—what we used to call the American Way.

Looking back through the lens of history at how we were in 1943, you have to wonder if we the people could ever summon up the sense of overriding purpose and shared commitment that existed during World War II. I guess there’s a reason why they became known as the greatest generation. Makes you wonder what our generation will be called.

The Bird Feeder

The next time you get all wrapped up in thinking about how important you are to God, remember this. God created birds millions of years before creating mankind. I’m not saying we are an afterthought, but clearly populating the planet with quarrelsome tribes of men was way down on the to-do list.

Birds, on the other hand … God apparently liked to have them around. And what’s not to like about birds? When you think about it, birds are pretty much all good. What can you say bad about a bird? Not much really. Certainly not compared to mosquitoes, which by the way birds like to eat. Another good thing.

If you want to learn more about birds or just enjoy them, there is no simpler way than to put up a bird feeder. Whether you live in the country or the city, whether you are rich or poor, you can feed birds and in the process enrich your life and your understanding of the natural world.

I have lost track of how many generations of finches I have supported in part with my feeder. Our feeder hangs on a hook right outside the kitchen window, where two generations of children have delighted in the sudden appearance of a goldfinch or a little Carolina wren.

Some of the seeds get scattered on the ground, but that’s okay. The mourning doves and snowbirds and other ground feeders are there to mop up. Even our dog, Mabel, gets in on the act. Turns out she likes sunflower seeds, too.

After a while, you begin to see that the lives of birds can be quite as rich and complex as any other living thing. Mourning doves form very tight families. Cardinals mate for life. Mockingbirds are very bossy, and blue jays ... well, we just won’t go there.

Spring is the perfect time to get a feeder going. In my experience this is when birds feed the heaviest. So if you can, get a feeder, load it up with the seed of your choice, and sit back and wait a couple of days for the birds to find it. After that, you will find them to be wonderful companions who reward your generosity many times over.

To See A Mockingbird

Walking to work this morning, I saw a mockingbird perched atop a lamppost. Most folks wouldn’t think twice about something like that, but for me, to see a mockingbird is always a little special because it is my bird.

What do I mean by that? Well, I’m not sure I can answer that because I’m not sure myself what it means. I just know that several years ago it struck me how often I would look up and there would be a mockingbird perched somewhere near by.

I see lots of different birds, but somehow this was different. I began to believe that the constant appearance of a mockingbird at unexpected moments had meaning. So, one day I just decided that the mockingbird was my bird. From that point on, every time I saw a mockingbird I felt reassured, as if nature was taking a moment to let me know that it was still thinking of me.

I can’t explain why I feel this way. I guess this is what they call faith. Come to think about it, this must be what religious folks feel when they talk about believing in God or Allah or whatever name they use. They probably would scoff at my connection with mockingbirds, but I can’t say that what I believe is any stranger than what passes as gospel in some organized religions.

So, I get the idea of faith. What I don’t get is the idea that you have to believe what I believe. I don’t expect or need or want you to believe what I believe about my personal relationship with mockingbirds. How about returning the favor? What’s so hard about that?

But I guess it is too much to hope that we humans could come up with something besides a God whose rules you have to follow or else it’s off to the fires of Hell. The recent controversy over Rick Warren’s waffling over his position on gay marriage in California shows how carefully even a big-time religious leader has to tread, lest the righteous rise up in wrath.

As far as I know, there have been no religious wars fought among birds about their sexual proclivities, which as I understand it are all over the map. That’s something only a more advanced species like we humans could come up with.

Church of The WYSIWYG

I started out as a Roman Catholic. I come from an Italian family; so going to Mass was not a subject for debate in our household. I was even an altar boy for several years. The best part was getting out of school to serve at funerals. Even so, Catholicism never really stuck. The part of my brain that was supposed to respond to the religious impulse did not seem to be functioning too well.

The terminal phase of my active Catholicism began when I entered Georgetown University, a Catholic college administered by the Society of Jesus, or as you probably know them, the Jesuits. The combination of being away from home and being exposed to a form of religion not geared to the European peasant created doubt, a state of mind fatal to the religious experience.

This was a time of great upheaval in the Church. Pope John XXIII’s attempts at liberalizing the Church generated a counter movement among the Church’s conservative hierarchy that continues to this day. The Catholic Church was no longer “one Church universal and apostolic.” In the wake of this turbulence, I became part of a unique generation of Catholics: born in the 40s, raised in the 50s, confused in the 60s, and lost in the 70s.

I now belong to the Church of the WYSIWYG: What You See is What You Get. How does it work, this Church of the WYSIWYG? Simple. To understand God’s plan, look at the world about you. If you see it, then it’s part of the plan. If you don’t, then it’s an assumption, an attempt to explain what may be unexplainable.

Death … real. Heaven or hell … assumption.

Evil … real. Satan … assumption.

Chromosomes … real. Predestination … assumption.

Getting the idea? The Church of the WYSIWYG seeks God through His creation. A thing exists either because God wants it that way or else because He is willing to let that thing be a possibility among potential outcomes. He lets us die, because that’s the way He wants it … or because He is unwilling to prohibit it. Bad things happen to good people: maybe its part of the plan or maybe He just doesn’t worry about things like that.

The Church of the WYSIWYG requires no elaborate theology to explain away inconsistencies in God’s creation. We’d rather think that these inconsistencies are due not to God’s plan but to our limited ability to perceive that plan.

What’s The Plan, Stan?

I have become comfortable in my agnosticism. An agnostic is one who believes that the essential nature of God (or anything else, for that matter) is unknown and unknowable. God may or may not be out there. (S)he probably is. God may or may not have a plan. (S)he probably did at one time. The plan may or may not be unfolding as it should. God only knows.

My agnostic comfort zone has expanded as result of three conclusions I have come to after years of pondering the two mysteries at the heart of all religion: What happens to us after we die? Why do bad things happen to good people? I have finally come to accept that there is no afterlife. I have also come to accept the fact that like it or not, shit happens for no apparent reason.

Francis Bacon wrote, “Men fear death as children fear the dark.” All Christian theology eventually comes down to that. We are all of us, myself included, afraid to die. We live in a world where everything dies. But we are special in God’s eye, so there must be something different in store for us. To satisfy that need, we came up with the idea of an afterlife.

But not an afterlife for the masses. Our Heaven was to be a meritocracy. Only the virtuous could get in. Otherwise, what would be the point of leading a virtuous life? Nope. We needed one place for the saints and that, by its own inexorable logic, meant there had to be another place for the sinners. But the price of admission has grown increasingly steep, as centuries of religious thinkers have come up with ever more restrictive interpretations of God’s will and word. Christians and Muslims especially have formulated very restrictive theologies that limit heaven only to the faithful.

All of this fighting over who has the ticket to Heaven. But what if there is no Heaven? What if we just die? Whoa … doesn’t that simplify a few things. What do I need a religion for if it all ends in the grave? Talk about your Faustian bargains. How much have we bargained away in return for the mere promise of an afterlife that no one has ever really seen? We have no trouble accepting the fact that this is what happens to everything else, even to our most beloved of pets. How did we come to believe that it would be any different for us?

The problem of bad things happening to good people is especially vexatious. We can’t just blame it all on the Devil. God is the Creator, and random acts of unkindness are part of that creation. It is my belief that bad things are going to happen because … well, because that’s just the way it is. They are part and parcel of the warp and weft of creation, and there is no point in screaming at God about it because clearly this is the way (S)he wanted it, assuming that we are indeed God’s handiwork as opposed to a slight glitch in the Big Bang.

So, if the bad-thing deal is in fact all part of the plan, then only one of two conclusions is possible. Either God doesn’t care (which even I would prefer not to accept), or God has chosen not to control the specific events of our specific life. Personally, I have no problem with that. I like to think that maybe God has bigger fish to fry, so to speak. I like to think that maybe it is up to us to work our own way through our own lives. Only if you think that way does the idea of free will begin to make sense and to be meaningful.

There you have it, the sum total of my wondering what is the nature of God’s game. I can only live life as best I can, trying to make the most moral choices I can. I have no expectation of reward or punishment, and I have absolutely no clue as to what it all means. I have become comfortably numinous.

A Twist of Fate

Some questions can’t be answered. Like the time I was home on leave after my tour in Vietnam and I went to the funeral of a local boy who had been killed in action and his mother asked me why I was alive and her boy was dead.

Or maybe you have just watched your house and your neighbor’s house and your whole damn town get wiped out by a tornado, and you are sitting there amidst the debris field of your life wondering why of all the places in the world that tornado had to touch down right on top of you.

This gets to the larger question of why bad things happen to good people, what Herman Melville called "the accidental malice of the universe." Another question without an answer, at least none that satisfies.

I could have told that young man’s mother that there really was no reason at all why I lived and her boy died. I was just a little lucky; he was a little unlucky. Just like the guy across the street whose house was spared while his neighbor’s house was reduced to a splintered rubble pile.

They will sit there, looking at each other across the street and wonder what the difference was. But on that one, God seems to have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, so we are left to fill in our own blanks. Maybe that is the answer.

The Art of Surviving Hard Times

There are two simple pleasures in life that seem immune to hard times: napping and reading a book. I am often able to combine the two during a short visit I make to the local library while on my lunch break. I usually pick something that I suspect will soon render me drowsy. Every once in a while a book will surprise me, and instead of snoozing, I will find myself caught up in a graphic novel or a coffee table book on ancient holy cities or a history of trains used by the British royalty or whatever else happens to be handy that day.

This happened last week with a book with the distinctly unexciting title of 500 Handmade Books: Inspiring Interpretations of a Timeless Form. Surely, I thought to myself, this will have me nodding off in no time. Well, I opened the book to a random page and found myself stunned at the image in front of me: an exquisite creation by Carol Barton called Alphabetica Synthetica. I was hooked. After 10 minutes of intense visual pleasure, I checked the book out to bring home with me.

What was it about the book that was so engaging? Two things. First, the time and the effort and the skills needed to produce these books were evident in every aspect of each book, from binding to cover to paper. Second, the artistic vision behind each book was sufficiently distinctive to produce 500 completely unique works that extended the notion of what a book was beyond anything I could ever have imagined.

The combination of artistry and artisanship just blew me away. It reminded me of the power of art to enable one to perceive the possibilities that lie hidden in the commonplace, just waiting for someone to come along and liberate them. Equally important, I was freed from the tidal wave of bad news that seems to be the curse of the interesting times in which we live. I was able to leave my troubles behind and lose myself in a world I could never have found by myself.

The next time you hear some politician complaining about spending money on art during hard times, remind yourself that a thousand years from now, our humanity will be measured by our art. Indeed, in troubled times art is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

All Good Amoebas go To Heaven

We die. That unavoidable fact plus the mystery of what happens after we die lies at the root of religion, starting with Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden into a world subject “to its bondage to decay.”

Once we defined death as the loss of God’s love, that led to the next thing, getting God’s love back, which led to following all kinds of rules, which since that’s a pain in the ass meant there had to be some kind of reward, which is Heaven, otherwise known as eternal life, which kind of gets us back to where we started.

All that trouble, all that grief, just because we want to live forever. Boy, this immortality thing must be pretty special if God makes us put in all that work just to get to Heaven, where we can live forever.

Well … maybe, maybe not. God doesn’t seem to want you and me to be immortal, but apparently it’s no problem if you are an amoeba. These tiny single-celled creatures routinely cheat death by dividing into two new amoebas instead of dying. This is as close as any life form gets to immortality.

Doesn’t seem fair, does it? But then again, maybe God has big plans for the amoeba, which has been around for a lot longer than we have. Consider the fact that the human genome has 3 billion base pairs of DNA as compared to the 670 billion base pairs in an amoeba.

It’s a long life, this eternity thing, and you never know what might happen along the way if you are patient enough.

Coming Home

The Pentagon recently announced a sad milestone. Suicides in the U.S. Army reached an all-time high in 2008, a rate of 20.2 per 100,000. When asked why the numbers keep going up, Army Secretary Pete Geren’s response was: “We cannot tell you.” Well, I don’t have the answer either, but I can give you a couple of small pieces of the puzzle, something to think about the next time you see a veteran.

There is no such thing as a typical combat tour. Everybody does their own time, but whether you are a cook or a grunt or a supply clerk, a tour of duty in a combat zone is highly stressful. What keeps you going is the knowledge that sooner or later you will leave it all behind and go home. But once home, it doesn’t take long for the returning vet to realize two things.

First, the war comes home with you. It is inside you, like a malarial parasite that flares up at unexpected moments. You jump at any sharp noise. You can’t sleep soundly at night. You can’t just walk into a dark room; you have to wait for your night vision. Memories of the war buzz around inside your head 24/7. And then there is all that anger bubbling up ever closer to the surface.

Second, the image of home you carried in your head while you were overseas no longer matches reality. Everybody but you seems to have moved on with their lives. Mom and dad have gotten older. The neighborhood isn’t the same. Your wife got used to taking care of things by herself. Your old girl friend is seeing someone else. Your best buddy is married and can’t party with you like he used to. Joe got the promotion you would have gotten.

My point here is that every veteran has lived through an experience that takes a long time to process, and it doesn’t help that the coming home party may not be what they thought it would be. It is a lot to deal with. Most do, but many can’t. And the military culture is still uncomfortable dealing with stress-related issues. But then so is everybody else, which is part of the problem.

We used to say that nothing is too good for the troops and that’s just what they get: nothing. Well, for their sakes and our sakes, that needs to change.

Dream On

Dreams are an enigma wrapped inside a riddle. We do not yet fully understand how dreams happen or what they mean. Hell, we don’t even know why we sleep.

I dream every night, often more than once. I know that some dreams are my brain stowing away the flotsam and jetsam left floating around in my head from the events of the day. I have a couple of recurring dreams, old friends who stop by from time to time, the kind that when you hear them knocking on the door you don’t answer right away in hopes that maybe they’ll go away. And every once in a great while, I will have a dream that foretells something about someone.

Most of my dreams are like watching a movie with lots of action. These dreams feature events and places utterly removed from anything I have experienced but with such detail that I feel like I am seeing scenes from someone else’s life playing out in my mind’s eye.

All of which makes me wonder what happens when I sleep, perchance to dream. Am I looking at a play written by myself or am I using ghostwriters?

Buddha By The Sea

My wife and I like to go down to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, usually in April, before it gets too crowded. The weather last spring was pretty good, so we were able to spend time just sitting on the beach, listening to the steady roar of the waves rolling in and out, while in the distance squadrons of pelicans skimmed the surface of the water, rising and falling with the waves.

For some reason I got to thinking about Buddha. The story goes that he arrived at his final enlightenment sitting under a fig tree. I wondered if he would have seen things differently had he been sitting on a beach listening to the waves for 49 days and nights.

I can’t speak for Buddha, but I know what I have learned sitting by the ocean. First, the ocean speaks of creation and continuity. All life began in water, and as long as there is an ocean there will be a place for life to develop again if need be.

Second, the ocean is eternal and unchanging, yet it is never the same. You can sit by the beach for 49 days or 49 years or 49 millennia and the waves will still roll in and out precisely on schedule, but each set of waves will be unique. Unchanging but never the same.

We get hung up wondering whether change happens by evolution or by intelligent design. What we lose sight of is that change is the medium and the message.

Our world may look the same from day to day, but in reality nothing stays the same from one nanosecond to the next. Our world does not and cannot let things stay the same. It forces things to move, somewhere, anywhere. Whether that movement is what we call progress is up to us, but movement there will be. There is no going back.

Dealt A Bad Hand

The world is replete with mysteries so commonplace that we have stopped thinking of them as mysteries. One that hits close to home for me is being left-handed.

No one knows why some of us are left-handed. One theory is that we lefties are missing a gene that forces right-handedness, leaving our handedness up for grabs. The other main theory is that stress during birth somehow leads to left-handedness. In my case, I was born with a birth defect, but there is also some family history of left-handedness, so I guess being left-handed was in the cards for me from the get-go.

Does it matter? Well, that’s another open question. My brain probably doesn’t work in quite the same way as a right-handed person’s brain. It has to do with the division of the brain into a right and left hemisphere and that our dominant hemisphere is opposite from our dominant hand. So theoretically speaking, my right hemisphere pulls most of the weight.

Generally speaking, the left hemisphere is the analytical side, while the right hemisphere is the artistic side. Mankind started out pretty even-handed, so to speak, but as tool making kicked into high gear during the Bronze Age, right-handedness became dominant. I guess if early man had decided that cave painting was more important, we’d be mostly left-handers (and maybe a whole hell of a lot better off).

For me, being left-handed was just another way of letting me know that I was different. From where I sit as an adult, different isn’t such a bad thing to be, but as a child it wasn’t always easy. One thing for sure, you learned a lot about people from the way they handled otherness. You still do, I guess.

Ghost Stories

I have had moments when I felt I was traveling through the wake of someone else’s life, past or present. Sometimes it felt okay, sometimes not so okay, but always the feeling was quite real.

So what’s happening here? Well, the way I look at it, we are constantly surrounded by a cloud of radio and television waves, but the only way we can hear or see them is by having a device tuned to receive them.

Similarly, our waking and sleeping brains constantly generate electromagnetic waves, but they generally remain trapped inside our heads because they are very weak. However, maybe there are times when our emotions cause us to generate an especially strong burst of brain waves. Or perhaps our long-term presence in a certain place builds up a patina of memories and feelings that persist after we are gone.

Think about it. How often have you met someone and felt an instant attraction (or revulsion)? How often have you walked into a house for the first time and immediately felt welcome (or unwelcome)? How often have you thought about someone you haven’t seen in years and then, don’t you know it, you see them crossing the street? How often have you had a dream that foretold an event, a dream that you dismissed as just a coincidence?

Every thought and dream we have creates brain waves. Is it not possible that occasionally they might become entangled with other brain waves — both present and past — at some unexpected moment when we let our guard down? If so, then we are each of us weaving our own ghost stories, stories waiting to be found by … well, that’s the question isn’t it?

Tangled Up In Gluons

Two things to think about. Then a question.

First, I have read that every time we shake hands with someone there is an intermingling of sub-atomic particles that goes on at the point of contact.

Second, there is a property in physics called entanglement, which posits that once two subatomic particles exchange information with each other they are aware of changes in each other no matter how far apart they are.

Question: If two people shake hands are they at some level intertwined—entangled, if you will—forever, even after their dead? For all eternity?

Time Management

You could argue that our ability to learn from the past and to imagine future possibilities is what separates us from other living creatures. Throw in speech and writing, and it’s game over. We rule.

Yet bees and ants quietly go about their business, operating pretty much in the present. Throw in a few simple rules hardwired into their brains a few million years ago, and it’s game on. They persist.

Have we evolved past them or not yet caught up to them? Ask me the same question a couple of million years from now … if we’re still around.

Alphabet Soup

Our alphabet has 26 letters, the source of countless books. Our DNA is made up of billions of paired combinations of four nucleotides, commonly referenced by their first letter: A-G or T-C.

So people and books are really no different. Both become a sum greater than its parts. Letters to words to books. Nucleotides to DNA to all living things.

Are alphabets the result of something inside us trying to express the very essence of our creation? Maybe all this time the medium was the message, only we just didn’t know what to listen for.

Dharma Bummer

Ropes are strands of hemp, flax, or wire braided together. DNA consists of two nucleotide strands coiled around each other.

To prevent fraying in a rope, the ends are often wrapped around with cording. To prevent fraying in DNA, the strands are capped with long sequences of non-functioning DNA called telomeres.

Eventually any rope frays, and so does DNA. Each replication shortens the telomeres until the cell can no longer replicate itself. This is what keeps cells from turning cancerous before we can have kids. It also keeps us from living forever.

God moves in mysterious ways.

Of Mice And Men

Science and religion often seem at odds with each other. Each, in their own way seeks answers to the same questions. One group seeks truth in a divinely inspired book, the other in a method of inquiry shaped by fellow humans. Well, no matter where you are on this spectrum, you may find the latest brain research literally mind bending.

Scientists have discovered fetal brain cells that seem to be a fundamental unit of brain matter. These brain cells have two remarkable properties. First, they can reproduce themselves indefinitely. Second, these cells can transform themselves into any one of the three specific types of brain cells needed for the brain to function. This seems to confirm a theory that all the major types of brain cells arise from a common pool of cells that are active in the fetus.

Now here comes the truly strange stuff. To better study the nature of these brain cells, they were injected into a mouse’s brain. Guess what? These human brain cells settled right in and adapted themselves to the mouse’s brain! To make matters even ickier, the same thing has been done with rat brains.

What is more fundamental to our notion of being human than our brains? And now we find that human fetal brain cells are plug-and-play compatible with rat brains. Does this not suggest a common origin beyond mice and men? Does this not raise profound questions in your mind about life and its innermost structures? I haven’t felt this way since the time I saw the layout for chlorophyll and hemoglobin. They are identical except that chlorophyll has an atom of magnesium at it core while hemoglobin has an iron atom at its core.

I don’t know what to make of a brain that is part mouse and part human, but I do know that I have just seen a part of God I didn’t know was there. Awesome, dude.

The New Golem

Thanks to O.J. and the CSIS shows, we all know that DNA is used to solve crimes. We can do this because each person’s DNA is a unique blend of four compounds called nucleotides: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). The A compound always pairs with the T compound; C with G. Put them all together and you have a genome.

A-T...G-C: Four letters in two pairs that taken together can and do represent every single life form that has ever existed … or, more importantly, that ever will exist.

The human genome consists of three billion base pairs. The blueprints for the human genome and that of many other species have been read. The DNA sequence for the human genome was completed in 2000, perhaps the single most important scientific advance in our lifetime in terms of knowledge that will literally change our lives.

Genomics is the science and practice of controlling DNA. Today, DNA researchers are on the verge of creating new life, starting at the microorganism level but ending who knows where. Expect breaking news on this sooner than you could ever imagine, and when you hear it, ponder the following.

Jewish tradition speaks of a magical creature called a golem. This was a creature that was fashioned out of clay and brought to life by reciting a specific combination of words and letters or by inscribing a specific word on its forehead.

Golems were usually created to do the heavy lifting since they were physically very strong. Inevitably it would begin well and end badly. The golem would get out of control and have to be destroyed.

Something to think about as we venture forth into our brave new genetic world.

Beautiful Stranger

This week’s recommended reading is a book entitled The Elegant Universe, a review of modern physic’s search for The T.O.E, the Theory of Everything. The scale on which this discussion occurs is impossible to comprehend. The latest theory centers around one-dimensional strings, each a trillion trillion times smaller than an atom. These strings vibrate in different patterns. As the author Brian Green explains it: “What appears to be different elementary particles are actually different ‘notes’ on a fundamental string. The universe—being composed of an enormous number of these vibrating strings—is akin to a cosmic symphony.”

Today’s paper had a little blurb about an event on a much larger scale—the Big Bang, which occurred about 12 billion years ago. (If you believe in the Bible as literal truth, be advised that what follows may be offensive to your world-view.) According to the current theory, that event should have produced equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. Had that been the case and had the matter and anti-matter exactly cancelled each other out, then there would have been nothing left.

Obviously that wasn’t the case. The search for an answer has led scientists to the meson, one of the ever-growing group of sub-atomic particles that flow between two people shaking hands. Anyway, mesons apparently don’t exactly follow this matter/anti-matter proportionality. Every kajillionth time, a little more matter is made than anti-matter. That’s it. The whole enchilada. We are here because of a little glitch in the meson deal.

I read this stuff not to understand it but to get a whiff of the possibilities. In my mind, the stranger the universe gets, the more intricate its secrets become, the more beautiful it gets. And if there was indeed a creator, then he, she, or it is also beautiful. Whether it is superstrings or mesons or Orion’s Belt glinting in a clear winter sky, the universe is within us and around us.

The Hawk

This part of the country has a history of late-February, early-March snowstorms. On March 13, 1993, we had a so-called “storm of the century” that started in Florida and marched up the East Coast to Maine before petering out near Nova Scotia. When we moved out here 21 years ago, on March 1, 1978, we did so in 2 1/2 feet of snow. Yesterday, we got about 6 to 8 inches of thick heavy snow that stuck like clotted cream to the drooping branches.

When we moved here, there was nothing in our yard but a few shrubs and trees put in by the builder. Over the years, we have planted countless bushes, trees, shrubs, and perennials, most of them ending up dead, doomed by the impenetrable red shale that constitutes the soil in these parts. Eventually we learned what will grow and what won’t. Our backyard showed the genius of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, where the fit survives and the unfit definitely doesn’t.

It is a small backyard, measuring 100 feet wide and about 40 feet deep. We have watched with interest as the mix and variety of birds and animals has grown over the last 20 years. For the first year or two we had killdeer, which like vacant lots to nest in. As the lots filled in with houses, the killdeer vacated the premises, to be replaced by finches, robins, cardinals, mockingbirds, starlings, grackles, mourning doves, snowbirds, wrens, chickadees, and the occasional stray Baltimore oriole. There is great pleasure in knowing that our trees and thick bushes provide a place for birds to live and breed and sing their songs at 3 o’clock in the morning.

Around this time of they year we also get migrating birds. Every year a flock of goldfinches stops in the backyard for an afternoon’s respite. Then they will leave in a yellow cloud, swooping and dipping away to points South, although for the last couple of years we have had some stay behind to nest.

Of course, nature doesn’t always keep accurate time. Like the tourists who have come to Washington to see the cherry blossoms, some birds got caught up in these late season snowstorms, their internal clocks just ever so slightly out of synch with the rest of nature. At one point yesterday, I looked out at our honey locust and saw an early flock of robins, their orange chests puffed up against the cold.

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