Crib for the cradle
Is war just God’s way of teaching Americans geography? Brush up on your own history of the legendary land of ‘Middle East’ with a fast crib for the cradle of civilisation, courtesy of mapsofwar.com. 5,000 years of history in 90 seconds!
Unbelievable: the poetry section of Kepler’s, the big bookstore outside the gates of Stanford University, offered only a single copy of one collection of verse by August Kleinzahler, recent winner of the Griffin Prize, living and working just up the peninsula in San Francisco. And nothing by noted Californian poet Carl Rakosi; nothing by Marilyn Hacker. I suppose these stores know what they’re doing.
It was of course his latest collection The Strange Hours Travellers Keep, so I bought it for Arthur Whitney’s daughter Natasha, if only for the title piece (check it out, Arthur) and asked her to show me something she liked. She pulled out a William Carlos Williams poem, and I must have been too tired to get it it, but wisely bought it – Williams has been enjoying excellent but too numerous company on my ‘gotta read ’em one day’ list– and got stuck in to Williams on today’s flight home. Love it; shoulda been reading him years ago.
Way to go, Nattie; thanks for cuing me in to Williams. And what a pleasure to discover (on the plane, yet) the title of Kleinzahler’s poem and eponymous collection to have been taken straight from Williams:
I have discovered that most of
the beauties of travel are due to
the strange hours we keep to see them:
“January Man”
September a poem by August Kleinzahler, copied from the issue of the London Review of Books I left in Palo Alto.
The long-beleaguered home team,
black hats and orange piping,
is eliminated on a cool night,
the very end of September,
with the Phlox zerspalten by rain,
as Benn wrote,
and giving forth a strange animal smell,
seltsamen Wildgeruchs.
While the neighbouring team
from across the Bay,
the ones with green leggings,
younger and more brazen,
were finished earlier still, after the clamour
attending their mid-summer surge.
Frucht- und Fieberschwellungen
abfallend…
Even the strongest
of young arms
tires over a long season.
Tumescences of fruit and fever…
Knees give out, just as the parapets
of Troy rear into sight.
What do the sky and gardens know
of such disappointments?
Of the quiet on the street,
life ebbing from the barrooms like a yeasty tide?
Go home, everyone go home.
The cupped flame,
the extended sigh of smoke in the shadows
of a hundred doorways.
Go home to your wives, go home.
Why must it always end this way,
every year the same?
It is only we who change, Time
eroding our powers—
des Sommers Narr, Nachplapperer,
summer's fool, jabberer—
putting to rout our boyish hopes.
And even with the air so sharp
once night has settled in—
vor dir der Schnee, Hochschweigen—
when the season’s first hearth fires
mingle their exhalations
with night-blooming vegetation,
snow and silence ahead of you,
the sun next day pours down
with such intent as if it could surpass
what only it might emulate,
its counterfeit betrayed
by the very merest wash of bronze
enveloping the Chinese lantern,
jasmine and flowering lavender
in a memorial glow
while, still, they bloom, thrive, reach
up, upwards, toward the light
and out from amidst the withered stalks and ruin
of what summer has left behind.
August Kleinzahler
To Kepler’s bookstore in Palo Alto last night to hear Richard Dawkins speak about his new book The God Delusion. Dawkins’ thesis is that religious beliefs are not merely false but also harmful. He makes a strong case against the Old Testament and has harmless fun ridiculing it as a source of morality. He draws on his authority and reputation as a scientist to encourage atheists to stand up against claims that religious beliefs and sensibilities should be exempt from challenge. This is fine as far as it goes, but it is not enough, and it less than we deserve from Dawkins.
I believe that men and nations can live in peace and harmony—when they’ve tried everything else.Religious tolerance is part of what constitutes the liberal democracies. It presumes that religion is a matter of individual belief and practice: the celebrated separation of church and state. This is not a dispensation of secularism. Rather, secularism emerged in the space provided by this settlement, itself the product of countries harrowed by religious war. It took much blood to produce societies in which we agree to differ.
Dawkins' line jeopardises this settlement without offering the means to replace it. Secularism does not remove the impulse to worship. Substitute religions have flourished in secular societies and still do. John Gray argues that Communism, Fascism, and the widespread belief in Modernity and Progress are but secular versions of Judæo-Christian millenarianism. The latter has spawned the lesser cults of wealth and celebrity, and the American veneration of their own constitution. This has long since transcended the status of an eighteenth-century political settlement and now occupies a hallowed realm as a universal dispensation for mankind, its own mechanisms for change by now rusted into disuse.
Humans are pack animals, disposed to follow leaders. When we invented language and began to understand the world through the stories we tell about it, we became susceptible to what Dawkins calls ‘the God delusion’. No leader is so strong or charismatic that he would not prefer to be seen as the the humble instrument of an all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural leader who always wins and who will settle all scores in an afterlife opaque to human scrutiny. This is the paradigmatic meme.
If God did not exist, we should have had to invent him.Voltaire didn’t go far enough. We didn’t have to invent this meme; it invents itself.
Voltaire
And so Dawkins doesn’t go far enough, at least not on the strength of his talk last night. A biologist should have a lot to say about our vulnerability to religious thinking and how it permeates our life. (This is why ordinary people fear religious cults. You might think sensible, educated people immune to absurd and extravagant belief. In our hearts we know we are not.) We need more from Dawkins and his colleagues not just on the pernicious effect of religious belief, but on how to come to terms with our vulnerability to it. We all need to see ourselves as recovering believers; most of us have not even taken the first step of recognising the problem we have.
The new issue of Prospect carries an article about how much western secularism has been the product of demographics. After the Industrial Revolution, secular and ‘progressive’ beliefs correlated with better health and hygiene; over generations, secularists outbred believers. That trend is now in reverse and secularism may already be in decline. This is not going to go away.
The man who introduced Dawkins last night spoke movingly of his own strongly religious upbringing and a university education that eventually allowed him to “diagnose his own condition”. This is one aspect of what it takes to free oneself from what we Buddhists call maya, the ‘world of illusion’. Mocking others worse afflicted is not a helpful start.
Thanks for tackling the question of religious belief, Prof., but 2/10 for addressing only part of it. ‘Could do better.’ A lot better.
A productive and hugely enjoyable week as a house guest of Arthur Whitney and Rita Comes in Palo Alto, working on drafts of D Book and mastering the DocBook stylesheets.
Remembering Margaret Bridgwater
Miki had been delighted last year with the earrings I brought her from designer 
Margaret Bridgwater in Copenhagen; and distressed when she found one had escaped her ear during the day. In trying to replace it I discovered the spirited young designer died last November of leukæmia, only weeks after we had met her. Carpe diem. Her work is well known to her peers, and I was able to replace the earrings at the Galerie Hof in Kronprinsensgade and match it with a quirky necklace at the Galerie Metal in Nybrogade, where they still have a small stock of Bridgwater’s work.
Froken Lenes fornemmelse for sjov
There I met the lovely Lene Hald, whose own work is animated by a keen sense of fun. She has created brooches that give the illusion of a hole in the garment they’re attached to, simulating a glimpse of skin and underwear. Hats off to Hald!
The novel Froken Smillas fornemmelse for sne brought its author Peter Hoeg fame when translated and later filmed as Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow. Sjov is fun.
Pumpkins and onions The Kremlin, Brighton Pavilion and Tivoli Gardens all emulate the onion domes of Islamic architecture, but this week Tivoli’s dome is covered by a vast pumpkin Jack O’Lantern as the gardens re-open for a week to celebrate Halloween. This American festival seems to be displacing local traditions here in Yrp. I haven’t in years seen children in London asking for “a penny for the guy”, but they show up in hordes at the door to demand “Trick or Treat”. Perhaps they prefer Halloween’s scary costumes to burning an effigy, though I would have picked malice and ritual violence to win every time. Perhaps their parents just won’t let them out on the streets any more.
I was recounting to an 11-year-old recently how my sister and I when 13 or 14 were cheerfully allowed to go off cycling and youth hostelling for a few days. His eyes were as big as his lost freedoms. Given the choice, would he really prefer Playstation and Grand Auto Theft to a bicycle and a Famous Five novel?
At any rate, Tivoli was packed with families and young children, and after picking our way around for a bit through the throng, Catharina Lovén and I found ourselves a memorable dinner at Reinwalds.
Song of Denmark This week at the Dyalog User Conference in Elsinore, teaching OO APL with Dan Baronet and Gilgamesh Athoraya. At our banquet on Wednesday we helped three members of the Danish Opera sing the lyrics we had written about our work. Dan Baronet had the camera.
Having the singers move among us giving us opera at full volume was overwhelming. We were uplifted and inspired, moist-eyed when they sang us their goodbye. In fact, I felt as if I had been emotionally mugged. So that’s why front seats at the opera cost so much. Gotta try it.
Buttheads
To Richmond Park yesterday to meet Joanne & Neil and watch some hot deer-on-deer action
. (Thank you Candace.) It’s the red deer rut. We found a big stag in a clearing with a dozen does he’d rounded up and was occasionally mounting. Round the clearing another dozen stags and bucks were hanging out, listening to his bellowed challenges. (Is this the “deers talking” people go to Scotland for?)
In the main herd, matters were more lively, with some horny characters tangling antlers and playing stag tag. Reminded me of someone’s observation that the sexual liberation of the Sixties had allowed dominant males more sexual partners, but had broken up the general monogamy that ensured most males got partners. Does this have anything to do with why we feel less safe than our parents did?
Home to resume learning Formatting Objects, the XML vocabulary for typesetting.
Hats off to Gilgamesh Gilgamesh & Lauren returned with bizarre, sorry, bazaar gifts from their Moroccan holiday.
When Miki returns from Japan, we shall celebrate the successful conclusion of Gilgamesh’s apprenticeship. As of this month we’re no longer master and apprentice but colleagues. Last year he went with me to the Dyalog conference in Elsinore as a newbie; this year he’s teaching. Hats off!
Une vraie personne Louis Mahé’s speech from La Sirène du Mississipi:
Tu crois que tu es une vraie personne, que tu es unique. Mais c’est faux, tu fais partie d’un tas de filles qui se multiplient. Pas vraiment des garces, des aventurières ou des putains, mais des sortes de parasites qui vivent en dehors de la société normale. Vous n’êtes ni des femmes, ni des jeunes filles. Vous êtes des souris. Ce que vous êtes d’ailleurs, ça n’a pas de nom exact. Des écervelées avec la tête pleine d’idioties ou la tête vide. Vous êtes amoureuses de votre corps, vous pensez qu’à vous mettre en soleil, vous passez des heures à vous trafiquer le visage. Vous ne passez pas devant une voiture sans vous regarder dans le pare-brise. Tu sais où on en trouve le plus des filles comme ça? Dans les aéroports, partout où y a des avions qui partent pour les longues distances, parce que vous êtes des belles filles et les belles filles on se les dispute. On les invite d’une capitale à l’autre, et elles y vont, elles déambulent partout avec leur petit sac à la main, la guele enfarinée.