My religion is nature

Oliver Sacks, protean man that he is, had some gems in the Sunday New York Times. Actually, fossils, thoughts about fossils and other gem-like thoughts. This post is cribbed shamelessly from an interview by David Colman.

Sacks collects fossils, and he has a slice of fossilized stromatolite, one of earth's earliest life forms. It dates from the Archean era, more that 3 billion years ago. Long thought extinct, a colony was discovered still alive in Shark Bay in Western Australia.

Stromatolites are made up of large colonies of bacteria, blue-green algae and sedimentary deposits. Stromatolites are thought to have converted the abundant carbon dioxide of early earth's Archean-era atmosphere into oxygen. “Over the years, they made enough oxygen to make life possible for the rest of us,” he said. The stromatolite is the fossil in the middle.

“I am horrified by transience,” Sacks told Colman. “If you’re religious, you can believe in the eternal. For me, the next best thing is the enduring.”

Sacks said he came to the natural sciences as a refuge from a chaotic boyhood. He cherishes these sciences when their integrity is under attack by religious fundamentalists.

“My religion is nature,” he said. “That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”

Sacks also loves ferns and cycads, believing that plants that make a garish show of their sex organs — what we call flowers — are perhaps a bit vulgar. “I feel that flowers are Johnny-come-latelies,” he said, noting that ferns predated flowering plants by more than 200 million years.

Go Hillary Go: Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island!

Hillary drives the roller coaster. Go girl go!

I still like Barak a lot, but she's turned the tide on him. Which is strategically important, either way. He needs to be toughened up if he is to fight McCain, and she needs to be very tough to fight McCain. The Dems, as Karl Rove said and I have been thinking for weeks, will stay on page one with their titanic struggle between two of the most qualified and brilliant candidates we have seen in decades while McCain will fall to page 8. Not that everyone reads the newspapers, but it's as good a barometer as any on public attention. Just add up the numbers of voters who turn out for the Republican primaries versus the Democratic ones. Astounding difference in favor of the Dems two to one.

Keep the long term in mind. It's security and the economy. She has the right mantra now: national security and economic security. And she's turned the tide on "hope." "Let's turn hope into reality!"

How exciting!

Two Poems by Wislawa Szymborska

She is my favorite poet for the last several years. Here are two of them:

Instant Living

Instant living.
Unreahearsed performance
Untried-on body.
A thoughtless head.

I am ignorant of the role I perform
All I know is it's mine, can't be exchanged.

What the play is about
I must guess promptly on stage.

Poorly prepared for the honour of living
I find the imposed speed of action hard to bear.
I improvise though I loath improvising.
At each step I trip over my ignorance.
My way of life smacks of the provincial.
My instincts are amateurish.
The stage-fright that is my excuse only humiliates me more.
Mitigating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and gestures that cannot be retracted,
stars not counted to the end,
my character like a coat I button up running ---
this is the sorry outcome of such haste.

If only one could practice at least one Wednesday,
repeat a Thursday!
But now Friday's already approaching with a script I don't know.

Is this right? -- I ask
(in a rasping voice
since they don't even let me clear my throat in the wings.)

You're deluded if you think it's only a simple exam
set in a makeshift office. No.
I stand among the stage-sets and see they're solid.
I am struck by the precision of all the props.
The revolving stage's been turning for quite some time.
Even the furthest nebulae are switched on.
Oh, I have no doubt this is the opening night.
And whatever I'll do
will turn for ever into what I have done.

Translated from the Polish by Adam Czerniawski from her collection, People on a Bridge.

THE JOY OF WRITING

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

trans.: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

And, a link to her Nobel lecture. Nobel for Literature, 1996.

What Jeanne Steig's Husband Saw

William Steig's drawings always seemed to plumb the depths of the soul. I kept this drawing for nearly five years. And now I have something I can do with it besides look at it every six months as it gained the dust and newspaper yellowing of age on my shelf. Never put away, always ready to be pulled down, in case I could share it with someone.

Jeanne Steig wrote then, right after his death, "Bill frequently drew men thinking. They were often leaning on rocks and their thoughts were somber thoughts. This drawing is a happy combination of rock and man, with a few leftover heads for good measure. Or are all three of them just rising up from the ground, over the horizon, already grim about what they might be letting themselves in for?"

Follow the link. She writes in as lovely a way as he drew. But the linked article doesn't have the drawing any more. It was sandwiched on the Op-Ed page, between Nicholas Kristof's "Secrets of the Scandal" about the Valerie Plame leak, on the left, and David Brooks, on the right, "Bigger than the Nobel" lamenting that Pope John Paul II would never receive a Nobel Peace Prize, even though Brooks quoted the Pope as saying, "the evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverizaion, of the fundamental uniqueness in each person."

I am still going to keep my yellowing copy of the page out at the ready, in case anyone might like to see it.

Run Don't Walk to NYC Before March 16

We have only two chances to see the William Steig cartoons in full glory: until March 16 in New York at the Jewish Museum and then San Francisco at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
After that, it's the book/catalog.

Here's why we should go.

Drawings courtesy New York Times, March 3, 2008

Which Way is She Whirling?

My sister Alex sent this image to me. It was accompanied by a discussion of right brain and left brain. I don't remember which was which.

The image is whirling. Either clockwise or counterclockwise. Click on the image to see her whirl. For some reason, she only whirls off-page.

The question is does she sometimes go the other way? Can you make her go the other way? And, if you can, or if sometimes it happens, how does it happen? What is in the mind's eye that makes it change direction? Can you make it change direction at will?

Where is the thing seen? On the screen or in the mind?

The Fear Machine Revvs Up

The Republicans are building up to a thunderstorm of criticism of the Democrats, and particularly Barak Obama, on the question of terrorism and security. For example, today's Washington Post carried the following lead:

TYLER, Tex., Feb. 27 -- Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) accused Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of making ill-informed comments about Iraq and al-Qaeda in Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate, signaling that a general-election brawl between the colleagues would center in part on who has the foreign policy experience to lead a country at war.

The NY Times article about Colonel Davis, the former chief bulldog colonel for the military trials against Guantanamo detainees who has turned detainee supporter, quotes him stating the obvious: top Pentagon brass discussed timing the upcoming trials to match the run up to the 2008 election. Duh. How many salvos of fireworks can they keep coming? Building up to a crescendo in September, with the cooked "evidence" of these dangerous terrorists (who have been held in stinking hell holes in Guantanamo for the last 6 years and must look withered and wizened by now). Another round of fireworks in the hellish bouquet of attacks and fear-mongering being hatched by the Republicans.

The Republicans will run on two themes: security and taxes. On security, not war but security, who can better protect the nation? A McCain who knows the guts of war, who supported and supports the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing war or Obama, who was against the war?

Obama has to posit a totally different mythology of America in the post Cold War, flat earth reality: it has to be rooted in a view of the world that says that the war should not have happened, the it has inflamed rather than doused anti-American sentiment around the world, that it has cost way too many lives and will have mired us in an intractable position in the Middle East for decades to come. And that it is ruining not only our standing among nations but brand "America" and our capacity to export our brain products (no matter how low the dollar sinks). A vision that says that we not only should not have gone to war and brought down Saddam Hussein, but we now have to reverse the outcome, make it all better? Make it so the middle easterners like and respect us (but allow us to continue full support of Israel). Make it so that militant Muslim terrorism calms down to a whisper? A policy that makes it safe to be an American abroad again. That vision is going to not only have to be compelling, it has to SELL and counter act the fearful and fearsome vision the Republicans paint.

That is a tall order, when we are a nation that feeds off the notion of our superpower strength, our righteousness, and are more than willing to defer to the one who pounds the drum the loudest. Bush still dominates the debate. (Is the Democratic Congress impotent or what?) He will have to defend the war all the way to election day. It's his war. And he intends to assure his legacy.

Taxes on the other hand is easier to reframe and change the subject from "it's your money; they will take it away and spend it on bloated boondoggles" to the Democratic fear machine: "health care is a disaster, education is a disaster, the infrastructure is a disaster, we have allowed the richest 1 percent to siphon off all of the wealth of the nation that could go to reducing infant mortality, increasing literacy rates, improving inspection of slaughterhouses to assure humane animal treatment and healthy meat, etc., etc."

How can it be that the richest nation in the history of the world can't afford to pay school teachers? or care for the disabled and the elderly?

My Democratic friends think Obama can bring in enough new voters who aren't going to respond to the Republican fear machine and who will support the Democratic fear concerto to win the election.

I am worried. Fear is a poison and a stimulant. At least the Democrats can point to actual visible problems and actual, acceptable, visible solutions. So the fear can be alleviated. The Republican fear seeps into the country's bones. It aims at the lowest common denominator. It uses bogeymen to scare us. We are a nation addicted to fear and to the aggressive response. All adrenalin all the time. The Swift boating of Kerry may look like amateur hour compared to what will be mounted against Obama.

PS: I am sad about Hillary. She would have made a much better president in terms of dealing with problems. Whether she could lead is another question. She has the chops on the war issue that Obama doesn't. Hillary is a realist. Iraq IS. We have to deal with it. "I was against the war from the start" means Obama has to create a whole new vision that gets us out of the very dangerous quagmire the Republicans have put us into (along with Democratic complicity).

PPS: The issue isn't who is right but who can paint the most compelling vision of how to deal with the world as it is (while painting the picture of what that world IS to suit the proposed remedies). The Republicans will paint a dangerous world that only more aggression can make safe. The Democrats have to paint a vision of a world with different premises and different outcomes. The US has seldom opted for the kinder gentler vision.