Suns of the Morning

I, blinded by two suns this morn, reveled in their brilliance.
One sun, the sun in the sky.
And a second, the sun in the lake.
Twins from a solar mother, birthed in air and birthed in water,
Radiance upon radiance lit my path.
I gazed upon their beauty, though through shuttered eyes,
Delighted in their ephemeral and yet eternal light;
Ephemeral, in that the hours of light go ever fleeing
Through the few hours before nocturns.
Eternal, in that they reappear day after day
Before and beyond my sojourn here,
Racing in a course brief in duration yet long enduring
As they round and round again that course,
A long race down decades, centuries, millennia.
Shine on, you bright suns, children of a bright morning,
Shine on, and I shall run on, 'til you see me no more.

Words

What are you doing back here? I thought you'd given up on this.

Right. Well, still the words need wrestled with. The things to be said need said. I need a way of saying them. Speaking them. Writing them. Shaping them.

So, the words don't mislead anymore?

Well, maybe. Moon, not the finger; shore, not the raft and all that. But, still, there they are. Where I live. One of the places I live. Still they must be handled somehow. It might as well be well handled. The raft may not be the goal but it still needs to float, if I'm not to drown.

Okay. Wrestle away. Wrangle them, write them, find them, shape them.

Daylight Saving Time

You can tell Congress I said, "Go to Hell!",
They've all but thrown me in some dark well,
Taking away my morning sun, the lovely one,
Whose winsome rays and warming gaze
Had long been absent my morning run.

Now, having won him back with long months of pleading,
Where have they taken the light I've been needing?
I wake, looking to kiss my long time friend,
Only to find the night has not yet found its end.

Daylight Saving Time? Saving for whom?
For when? For why?

But not long now will I keep up my ire,
I spend my venom by spinning bike tires.
At least, 'tis yet spring and she is kind.
Tonight while home I ride, I'll find my friend the sun
And feel his embrace upon my back, and at table.

So wait, I grow calm again and will plead again
With the dear sun, that he return and warm the morn'
And make me glad once more that I was born.
Born to live under his kind reign, and with season's turn
Coax him back again.

Good Fiction

"I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of "low" art--which just means art whose primary aim is to make money--is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas "serious" art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it's hard for an art audience, especially a young one that's been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That's not good. The problem isn't that today's readership is "dumb," I don't think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture's trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today's readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard."

-David Foster Wallace, from an interview with Larry McCaffrey

War, Love, Mathematicians

It was not until late in my college career that I discovered that Mathematics is really interesting. I'd always like math and done well, but it seemed like just manipulating symbols by some set of rules I didn't know about but could implicitly understand. It was only when I found out that Mathematicians spend time discovering and proving the rules and searching for relationships between numbers that I began to see the fascination and beauty. I'd only seen the border of the country they lived in each day.

Much of that beauty is captured in David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk, a novel about the great mathematician Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy's discovery of Ramanujan and attempts to bring him to Cambridge from India. If the idea of a book about math puts you off, I'd recommend 1. taking a second chance, there's not that much to figure out here but some of the mystery of numbers is well portrayed, and 2. don't worry, this is really about people, some of whom happen to be mathematicians. The characters have a diverse set of romantic, familial, and social relations. The grip of the story comes from their attempts to make sense of themselves and others as they seek for love and friendship and struggle with desire and commitment.

Leavitt seems to have done his homework well and thoroughly on the historical figures and also on Cambridge near the beginning and through the first World War. I've read other account of some of the side characters, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein make appearances as do both the Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury group. A strength of the book is the way that the strange times in which social norms were changing but not yet changed comes through in the characters lives and isn't just backdrop but is motivation for what they do and with whom they do it. Marriage as a social necessity and the outcome of marrying for those reasons, the progressive politics in a time of war and the compromises that one makes in embracing them, and the relationship between teacher and student are explored not as abstract themes or historical curiosities but as the realities of the lives of the men and women in the book.

The narrative point of view shifts between characters fairly often, though Hardy's is the main voice, several other character's perspectives are adopted and their relationships with Ramanujan serve to tie together their personal stories. All in all, I think the book strikes a balance by treating abstract ideas and people of ideas with enough hooks to make the book a page turner. It was easy to get engaged with their lives and difficult to put down.

Frank's Frank Faith

Frank Schaeffer caught my attention again last fall when he appeared on a news program criticizing evangelical leaders for not criticizing sentiments that endorsed religious violence against the president. I picked up his memoir, Crazy for God, and I really enjoyed getting a look into his life as the son of a star evangelical writer as well as how things got to be that way. That story was touching and was both critical and loving.

When I saw that he had a new book, Patience with God: Faith for Those Who don't like Religion {or Atheism}, I decided it was worth a look. The book discusses the New Atheist movement, something Schaeffer has written about before but this appears to be the most extended treatment, and what he labels "evangelical/fundamentalism" a way of picking out a literalist, absolutist approach to faith (though mainly to Christianity). As one might imagine from the title of the book, he has little patience for either but he thinks he can still recommend faith in God so long as that faith takes a middle path between extremes. He is himself Orthodox and attends an Antiochian Orthodox church near his home but, unlike some of his earlier evangelism about Orthodoxy, he is not recommending the Orthodox church as a solution itself, there are fundamentalists even inside those walls.

The first part of Schaeffer's book is mainly a critical examination of the two movements mentioned, and this is where I was most critical. When talking about Dawkins and his followers there is plenty of things with which to find fault but Schaeffer falls prey to some of the same moves that he criticizes in Dawkins and Bill Maher. He's dismissive, derisive and makes fun of the people who flock to Dawkins website. I can't see how this is better than Bill Maher's approach to religion in Religulous which comes in for its own treatment in Patience. Dawkins makes plenty of bad arguments, so it seems that would be the place to lay blame not with those inspired by him or with the commercialism of his website that likely has little to do with his personal decisions. Later, when he turns to religion, Schaeffer gets carried away with pointing out the limits of the intellectual resources of such an approach and repeatedly suggests that whether the people are dim or not, they are certainly acting like ignorant children. While the main thrust of what he had to say was reasonable, the tone becomes too close to insults for both atheists and fundamentalists. This seems like taking the low road he accuses these groups of taking.

When it comes to his positive suggestions, I am still puzzling over what they were meant to be. As far as I could tell, the big problem both groups are supposed to have is that they think they know the truth. If they knew what Schaeffer knows, they would know that they don't know that, none of us knows the truth. One problem here is that Schaeffer, at least implicitly, endorses a form of relativism about truth that reduces itself to a contradiction. Another is that he seems to have confused ideas about the limits of human knowledge with the idea of true statements or with making provisional statement of what we think we know. Whatever one thinks the limits of human knowledge are, it seems that a straightforward interpretation of Schaeffer's message would leave us with little to say to one another.

That said, the second part of the book is where Schaeffer finds his stride. It had many of the good qualities of his memoir but wasn't repetitive of that material and seemed topically organized in a way that helped him put together the inchoate ideas of the first part of the book. His recommendations for spirituality become a living out of his doubts and his belief in a life connected to loved ones and the beauty of both art and the natural world. These are where Schaeffer finds existential meaning and the reasons he thinks belief in God is reasonable after all, even if we don't have proof. His granddaughter takes a central role in his meditations and when he talks about his fear for his son (who served as a Marine) and his gradual loss of his mother, he finds his most moving voice and his faith becomes most attractive. It's not clear that case he makes for God is more than a case for leading a life of meaningful engagement with the world, but he makes a good case for that by sharing those who helped him find his way to such a life. Each chapter begins with an epigraph drawn from Kierkegaard and this serves as a good cue to what Schaeffer is about in his book, recommending a leap of faith that he cannot defend as a rational step because the very nature of the leap is that it is beyond reason.

Worshipping the Bible

"Of course, evangelical/fundamentalists can't stand the Bible's obvious flaws because they worship the Bible, not God. So they try to fix their "inerrant" Bible's reputation by torturous justifications. They even make rules for God as if they understand God as some sort of creature trapped in the pages of the Bible, something like a fly caught on flypaper."

-Frank Schaeffer, Patience with God