Light inside

The soul, like Dante in the woods, is always losing its way. It obsesses and broods. Like Proust, it is drawn back and back into a childhood still vivid and full of causes.

It is with our souls that we truly inhabit our lives, tasting fresh black coffee, so delicious, so bad for us, and the kiss, brief and full of consequences. The soul is always learning, always fallible. It develops well or ill. It grows and deepens and responds to our late-learned tenderness toward it. Through soul we bless our lives and come to love them in all their moods and aspect. It is always trying to embrace things, to inhabit the brokenness of the world. Its light is made real by the surrounding dark. Its bounty earned by a perilous journey.

The world is understandable

Paul Dirac was one of the founding fathers of quantum theory, and he spent his life looking for beautiful equations. It may sound a rather odd idea, but mathematical beauty is something that those familiar with such matters recognize.

Dirac looked for beautiful equations because time and again, he found that they were the ones that described the physical world. He once said that it was more important to have beauty in your equations than to have them agree with the experiment. I don’t believe he meant that it didn’t matter whether or not the equations fitted the facts, but if there was a discrepancy it might be due to not solving the equations correctly, or, even, that the experiments themselves were wrong. At least, there was a chance that it would all work out in the end, but, if the equations were ugly — well, then there was no chance at all.

When we use mathematics in this way, as the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe, something very unique is happening. Mathematics is pure thought. My mathematical friends sit in their studies and they dream up, out of their heads, the beautiful patterns of pure mathematics, and that’s what mathematics is really about, making and analyzing patterns.

What I’m saying is that some of the most beautiful of these patterns are actually found to occur out there, in the structure of the physical world around us. So, what ties together reason within — the mathematics in our heads — and the reason without — the structure of the physical world. It’s a very integral connection, going far beyond anything we need for everyday survival. In this sense, the world is understandable.

In the fire, what you get is fire

You know, I think that “depression” is one of the most misleading and inadequate words in our vocabulary. When I try to describe the experience, I find myself grasping to say what it is not. Depression is not essentially about being sad, or down, or blue, though these may be symptoms. The opposite of depression is not happiness — it is “human vitality.” It can have purely physiological origins. It may be triggered by old sadnesses grown unbearable or anger turned inward, as one saying goes. But it becomes a way of being in, and moving through, the world. 

I think that all of the talk about, ‘Oh, well, this time will, you know, be really good for your soul or your character, this will make a better person of you,’ feels like absolute rubbish when you’re in the midst of the wretchedness of depression. But I think that in a way it almost feels sort of physiological. If the soul were material, I think depression sort of works on it the way you could work a piece of clay, so that it softens and it becomes more malleable. It becomes wider. It becomes able to take in more. But that’s only afterward. In the fire, what you get is the fire.

And there is a poem called “Questo Muro.” It is a phrase from a passage in Dante’s Purgatory. Dante has been in the depths of depression, in the depths of the inferno, and he’s now working his way out of it toward Beatrice, who is — you know, you could call her the soul or the anima. And he and Virgil are climbing the mountain, and all of a sudden they get to a wall of fire, and you can’t go any farther unless you go through it. So this is really is a poem, I think, about finding the courage to persist, to go through that fire.

I am walking through that fire.

For Oleg

The imaginary part I[z] of a complex number (z = x + i y) is the real number multiplying i.

So I[ x + i y] = y.

A complex number is said to be purely imaginary if it has no real part, i.e., R [z] = 0.

We actually haven’t got a clue how the laws of physics are embedded in the universe. We know they’re there and we know they’re effected. We don’t know how they are embedded. Almost anything where there are quantities involved there’s a mathematical model.

Here’s your quote. I copied this down. You conceded that if God existed, there might be special reasons for subscribing to morality. But concluded, “Unfortunately, the very concept of God is incoherent. Religion itself is incurably unintelligible.” I mean, is that a kind of attitude that was familiar to you previously as a researcher. Or does it make you think about the limits of science.

The fake language of intimacy

You know, everybody says, ‘Have a nice day’. Can you imagine if you went — like turned back to them and said, ‘God, I really wonder if I’ll have a nice day or what the day will be like,’ things could get complicated very suddenly, you know.

I don’t think we’re less capable of love and commitment and relationship in a mature sense in our time than previous generations were. I think we’re more unpracticed at it and therefore more desperate for it. And I think it’s a matter of attention really, just attention. That if you realize how vital to your whole spirit — and being and character and mind and health — friendship actually is, you will take time for it, you know. And the trouble is though for so many of us is that we have to be in trouble before we remember what’s essential. And sometimes it’s one of the lonelinesses of humans to hold on desperately to things that make us miserable and that sometimes we only realize what we have when we’re almost about to lose it.

So, I think that it would be great to step back a little from one’s life, and see who are those that hold us dear, that truly see us, and those that we need, and to be able to go to them in a different way. Because the amazing thing about humans is we have immense capacity to reawaken in each other the profound ability to be with each other and to be intimate. That’s one of the things I’ve always noticed is that, you know, there is this intense loneliness everywhere which is covered over by a fake language of intimacy similarly met everywhere.

Niebuhr (cont.), new realities and the liberal self

The world has changed in ways that would make it practically unrecognizable to Reinholt Niebuhr and his contemporaries. In Moscow, the ten minute walk between the Kremlin and the Lenin Library now passes through an American-style shopping mall with your choice of familiar fast food outlets. South Africa has its second black president. Europe has its own parliament. So does Scotland. The alleged leader of the most dangerous force arrayed against the combined military might of the Western democracies is purported to live in a cave somewhere on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Reinnie would think that we have gone crazy.

But Niebuhr’s past analyses are more than a series of astute observations that he made about the events of his time. His work rested both on paying careful attention to events and on a theological understanding of human nature and history that transcends its application to his own times. Certain key ideas in that understanding are easily summarized: The human being is both a finite, limited creature and an image of God. The final judgment on human history lies beyond history, and it falls equally on every particular human project, no matter how good or how evil that project may appear within history. Precisely because of that eschatological judgment, relative good and evil are real and make a difference within history. And, we are human beings, not God.

Niebuhr’s balanced realism, however, anticipated neither the systematic defense of liberal democracy nor the intense moral criticism of it that developed in the three decades following his death. His vindication is insufficiently appreciative for a Rawlsian liberal, and yet from the perspective of the cohesive moral community of Aladair MacIntyre or Stanley Hauerwas, Niebuhr’s idea of democracy is insufficiently coherent to vindicate anything.

A realist who is also a moral skeptic will not be particularly troubled by this. A realist who is also a moral skeptic will say, “Of course public discourse is moral gibberish. It isn’t supposed to mean anything. It’s merely cover for the self-interested, power-driven decisions that political actors make. Realism is designed to explain what people in politics do. What they say while they are doing it is irrelevant.”

But not all realists are moral skeptics. Many of them make claims like MacIntyre’s claims, based on a substantive notion of the human good and the perennial requirements of human community. That is why Niebuhr’s elaboration of those moral base points in the Christian tradition had such resonance with so many of them. So realists, especially religious realists, feel a certain affinity for the Hauerwas/MacIntyre critique of liberalism, despite the fact that Hauerwas and MacIntyre say unkind things about realism that suggest that realism is just a particularly sloppy way of being a liberal. Realists suspect that the procedural rules of liberal political discourse are too abstract to trace the complex interaction of interests and ideals that shapes real politics. Liberal reasons fall too neatly into categories of public and private reasons, religious reasons and secular reasons. The liberal self is too clearly an intellectual construct.

The liberal self is, to put it briefly, unrealistic.

Inner landscape

An awful lot of urban planning, particularly in poor areas, has doubly impoverished the population by the ugliness which surrounds them. And it’s understandable that it is so difficult to reach and sustain gentleness in these places. And I do think, like, a friend of mine, just in the last week, who was absolutely exhausted in NYC, just went away to southern Maine and spent the week by the slow ocean and she’s totally recovered, you know, come back to herself.

Though it’s not simply a matter of the outer presence of the landscape. I mean, the dawn goes up and the twilight comes down even in the roughest inner-city place. And I think that connecting to the elemental can be a way of coming into rhythm with the universe that’s here. And I do think that there is a way in which the outer presence — often in my case through memory or imagination — can be brought inward as a sustaining thing. I mean, I know that as I am writing, that there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they are able to sustain it, because there is in them some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way. I love Pascal’s phrase, you know, that you should always “keep something beautiful in your mind.” And I have often — like in times when it’s been really difficult for me — if you can keep some kind of contour that you can glimpse sideways at now and again, you can endure great bleakness.

Down

Light

Black holes

Black holes are places where big stars have collapsed and effectively disappeared from the universe, except that there’s left behind a hole where the star used to be. So you have there a very strong gravitational field without any bottom. The black hole is the only place where space and time are really so mixed up that they behave in a totally different way. I mean, if you fall into a black hole, your space is converted into time and your time is converted into space.

It is sort of the ultimate relativity.

Niebuhr, realism and imagination

If we are going to read Niebuhr as a conventional voice of mid-century political prudence, it might be better not to read him at all. We already know those lessons about self-interest and power, perhaps too well. Or we might hear his critique of “the vague universalism of liberalism” in ways that make us want to retreat into the distinctive witness of a tradition that is better defined than our liberal public ethics. Or we might find ourselves so intrigued by the forces of nations and empires that we do not hear the voices of those millions of people whose urgent problems in other parts of the globe would receive even less attention that they now get.

The way to read Niebuhr now is to remember how realism displaced progressive optimism to arrive at the dominant position that it apparently still holds. Realism paid attention to what was really happening. In the 1930’s, that meant calling attention to some grim and persistent economic and political realities that would eventually lead to a Second World War, despite resurgence of Christian pacifism that had greeted the end of the first one. From the 1950’s through the 1980’s, realism meant recognizing that deterrence and the balance of power had created a stable international system of relative security, despite idealistic longings for more justice and more peace. Paying attention to what was happening, for six decades, meant reminding people of some enduring, if unattractive, features of the human condition and asking them to trim their expectations to fit those constraints.

Today, I think, paying attention to what is really happening involves accepting the fact that structures of stability that have lasted, not just for six decades, but for five or six centuries, are coming to an end, and we are about to experience cultural change and institutional transformation on a scale unprecedented since the beginning of the modern era. Not all of this change will be good, and even less of it will be welcome, at least in the dominant North Atlantic world. But the theological realist in the twenty-first century will be someone who has the imagination to take all of those possibilities seriously, rather than the twentieth century realist who tries to keep hope and fear within the bounds of existing structures.

If we try to be realists in that new way, we will not say what Reinhold Niebuhr said, but we will be doing what he did. He paid attention to what was really happening, and he looked at events with a wisdom shaped by a theological understanding of history and human nature. This did not give him access to unchanging truths, but it did enable him to describe new conditions in terms that made sense to most people. I wonder if there is any chance that we could learn to do that as well as he did.

Wonder

Why do we come, sometimes spontaneously, to wonder about something. I think that wondering to one’s self occurs when an experience conflicts with our fixed ways of seeing the world. I had one such experience of wondering when I was a child of four or five and my father showed me a compass. This needle behaved in such a determined way and did not fit into the usual explanation of how the world works. That is that you must touch something to move it. I still remember now, or I believe that I remember, that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. I thought, there must be something deeply hidden behind everything.

Shoreline of morning

Everyone is involved, whether they like it or not, in the construction of their world. So, it’s never as given as it actually looks; you are always shaping it and building it. I feel that from this perspective, each of us is an artist. In addition, I believe that everyone has imagination. That no matter how mature and adult and sophisticated a person might seem, that person is still essentially a child. And as children we all lived in an imaginal world. You know, when you’ve been told don’t cross that wall, ’cause there’s monsters over there — my god, the world we’d create on the other side of the wall.

In this sense, we are so strange, and we lose sight actually of how strange we are. I mean, I’m always amazed that we don’t just ask one another, ‘What are you looking for on this day?’

‘I’m looking for yesterday. Where did yesterday go to?’

We just take for granted that these things fade into nothingness. And that’s one side. The other thing of course is that we have no idea what will land on the shoreline of morning tomorrow. So here we are always actively involved in receiving and shaping, you know, our environment and our time.

Inbetween, there is a place in each of us that neither time, nor space, nor created thing can touch.  And I really think this is amazing. What it means is that our identity is not equivalent to our biography. And that there is a place in each of us where we have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness, where there’s a seamlessness, and where there is a confidence and tranquility. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality, friendship and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

Cheshire cat

Sun and moon and stars

The sun and moon and stars only come on the fourth day. And of course, there wouldn’t be any life without the stars because that’s where the raw material for life is generated. So this doesn’t sound right. Although I believe that one of the reasons why the sun, moon and stars come downstream, so to speak, is that the writer is wanting to say the sun and the moon aren’t deities. They’re not to be worshipped.

Clockwork and Clouds

There are, certainly, clocks in the world. The sun is going to rise tomorrow – I can tell you the exact minute at which it’s going to rise. But there are lots of clouds in the world. That’s to say a process whose outcome is not clear and certain and is not clear beforehand as to what’s exactly going to happen; life is a sort of mixture of the two. If the world were entirely clockwork, then I suppose we’d have to hope that God had designed the clockwork and wound it up in such a way that things wouldn’t turn out too badly. But 20th-century science has seen the death of a merely mechanical and merely clockwork view of the world. It came first of all through quantum theory. At the subatomic level, quantum events are not precise and determinate. They have certain randomness to them. They have certain cloudiness to them, so that the process isn’t clockwork. And we’ve learned, of course, from chaos theory, the “butterfly effect” — very small disturbances producing enormously big consequences — that even the everyday world described by the sort of physics that would have been familiar to Newton isn’t as clockwork as people thought it was.

So the world is certainly not merely mechanical. And I think, actually, we always knew that because we have always known that we are not mechanisms. We are not automata. We have the power to choose, to act in the world. It’s a limited power. We can’t fly, but we have the power of agency. And if we can act in the world, then I think there’s no reason to think that God can’t act in the world as well. So I think that 20th-century science has loosened up our view of the physical world. It’s no longer a piece of gigantic cosmic clockwork. It’s a world in which we can conceive ourselves as the inhabitants and acting in it and helping to bring about the future. Scientists can pray. Not, of course, as magic, but as cooperating with God, if you like, to bring about the best for the future.

Quarks

I think reality is a very rich, many-layered experience, and science, in a sense, explores only one layer of the world. It treats the world as an object, something you can put to the test, pull apart and find out what it’s made of. And, of course, that’s a very interesting thing to do, and you learn some important things that way. But we know that there are whole realms of human experience where, first of all, testing has to give way to trusting. That’s true in human relationships. For example, if I’m always setting little traps to see if someone is my friend, I’ll destroy the possibility of friendship between us.  And this is also where we have to treat things in their wholeness, in their totality. I mean, a beautiful painting, a chemist could take that beautiful painting, could analyze every scrap of paint on the canvas, tell you what its chemical composition was — this would, incidentally, destroy the painting by doing that, and would have missed the point of the painting, because that’s something you can only encounter in its totality. So we need complementary ways of looking at the world. Bits and pieces, like studying quarks, that’s a worthwhile thing to do, but not the whole story.

Blue

Fuzzy

Fuzzy wuzzy wuz a bear. Fuzzy wuzzy had no hair. Because this designer stole all of it.  

Sun

Small Difference

Our situation at the beginning of the 21st century feels similar to that of Europe at the beginning of the 17th century. Then, as now, the landscape was littered with the debris of religious conflict. It is fair to say that religion did not distinguish itself at that time. The secularization of Europe grew directly out of the failure of religion to meet the challenge of change.

I believe in the humanizing power of faith and the stark urgency of coexistence at a time when weapons of mass destruction are accessible to extremist groups, and I do not think we can afford to fail again.

Time and time again in recent years we have been reminded that religion is not what the European Enlightenment thought it would become: mute, marginal, and mild. It is fire, and like fire, it warms but it also burns. And we are the guardians of the flame.

Westminster Annual Dog Show

The Westminster Kennel Club 132nd Annual Dog Show was Monday and Tuesday, 11 - 12 February.

The 2008 Best In Show Trophy was awarded to “Ch K-Run’s Park Me In First,” (aka “Uno”) — but this big guy was our favourite.

Somebody Pre-Copernicus

Suppose someone were to grasp the notion of multidimensional space and spaces and finite;  people would say, ‘Why should I care about that? You know, my taxes are high. We’re on a war in Iraq.’ And these are fair questions, but my feeling is that it would change the world in such a fundamental way. We cannot begin to comprehend the consequences of living in a world after we know certain things about it. I think we cannot imagine the mindset of somebody pre-Copernicus, when we thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that the Sun and all the celestial bodies orbited us.

It’s really not that huge a discovery in retrospect. In retrospect, so we orbit around the Sun, and we take this to be commonplace, and there’s lots of planets in our solar system, and the Sun is just one star out of billions or hundreds of billions in our galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

And we become, you know, little dust mites in the scheme of things. That shift was so colossal in terms of what it did, I think, to our world, our global culture, our worldview, that I couldn’t begin to draw simple lines to say, ‘This is what happened because of it’ or ‘That’s what happened because of it’.

Since then we see ourselves differently, and then we saw the whole world differently. And we began to think about meaning completely differently than we did before. And I’d feel the same way if we discovered that the universe is finite or if we had discovered that there are additional spatial dimensions. These things will impact us, I think, in ways which we can’t just draw simple cause-and-effect arrows.

So sometimes I will look at what people feel is very important and not be able to identify with what they think is very important. Then I have a hard time becoming obsessed with internal social norms; how you’re supposed to dress or wear your tie, or who’s supposed to — you know, for me, it’s so absurd because it’s so small and it’s so — funny. The photography has always been about this, though I don’t know if anyone has ever grasped that.

This one species is acting out on this tiny planet, in this huge, vast cosmos. So I think it is sometimes hard for me to participate in certain values that I think other people have. In this sense I guess there is a shift of what I think is significant and what I think isn’t. And it trips me up. If I try to look at it more closely, I would say the split is, things that are totally constructed by human beings, I have a hard time taking seriously, and things that seem to be natural phenomenon, that happen universally, I seem to take more seriously or feel are more significant.

Speakable Content

One reason we find talking about God so difficult is we are part of what we are trying to understand. The thing about spiritual truth is that it wants to be spoken. It is too important, too transforming to be left alone in silence.

It seems to have speakable content.

The problem is that once you speak or show the words to someone else, then both of you are different. The words have changed both of you. And now you must start all over again. I believe that in one form or another this making of words is the touchstone for all spiritual traditions and of all spiritual renewal: To say what is just at the outermost edge of what can be spoken is to deal with words that are so primary and dazzling that they are infinitely personal and intimate.

Origin of Skepticism

I held a long, nuanced conversation with a very close friend late into the night. Through exhaustion I finally conceded by saying: I don’t know anything.

The human mind isn’t really designed to know things. You know, the natural world has designed us to stay alive and to reproduce, but not really to gather truth, and we shouldn’t expect too much from it. We should try to know the world by questioning what we can’t know and take that kind of approach. And, you know, Socrates said he knew more than anybody else because he knew he didn’t know anything. So this could be the origin of skepticism.

Cynicism as a Posture

Cynic means dog, the idea is to live life in the same way a dog does. Why try to press against this mad universe our plans and memories and desires and try to defend them against the cruel world when, instead, we could just kind of go with the flow and not worry about our dignity, for instance? And that’s really the key point of being cynical. Live outside, then you don’t have to defend a house. Live casually. Go to the bathroom in the same way dogs go to the bathroom. Don’t be ashamed of yourself and don’t try to accomplish anything.

What do you ask yourself – what real value is there for a man in all the gains he makes beneath the sun? One generation goes, another comes, but the earth remains the same. The sun rises and the sun sets and glides back to where it rises. Southward blowing, turning northward, ever turning blows the wind; on its rounds the wind returns. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full; to the place from which they flow, the streams flow back again. All such things are wearisome; no man can ever state them; the eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear enough of hearing. Only that should happen which has happened, only that occur which has occurred. There is nothing new beneath the sun.

No, when I think of cynicism today, I tend to think of people dismissing even those things dogs love. And this dismissal of everything is inappropriate because it has led people to decide to reject a great deal of the human experience.

The Middle East, Madrassas and Meaning

We play to our own comfort zone in the middle east, which is largely irrelevant to the situation over there, I’m afraid. You know, one example I can give you – we’re currently involved in Pakistan, I think, in a meaningful way. We’ve been there for over three years, actually on the ground, reforming the madrassas, the religious schools that, among other things, gave birth to the Taliban. And what most people don’t understand is the history of these madrassas. Back in the Middle Ages, these were the absolute peaks of learning excellence in the world, and then it was only European exposure to them that led to the creation of our university system. But you take little things like, you know, funding a chair in a given discipline or the mortar boards and tassels you wear on your head at graduation, all of that came out of madrassas.

Although over the years, under the impact of colonialism and the like, they just regressed to where, today, they’re really about rote memorization of the Qur’an and the study of Islamic principles. And the problem with this is, for example, in Pakistan you’ll find those as young as the age of 12 who have memorized the Qur’an from cover to cover and haven’t a clue as to what it means because their first language is Urdu and they’re not given enough Arabic to be able to properly analyze — or internalize.

And then what happens is a local militant comes along and misappropriates pieces of scripture — which all religions are prone to do from time to time — to recruit them to their cause, and these kids are just easy prey. They’re totally without any ability to challenge or question. Thus currently there are two objectives there. One is to expand the curriculums to include the physical and social sciences, with a special emphasis on human rights (particularly women’s rights) and religious tolerance. And the second, which I think is even more important, is to transform the pedagogy to develop critical thinking skills among these students.

Madrassa leaders have been afforded a lot of ownership in the process; inspiring them with their own heritage, pointing out how many of the pioneering breakthroughs in the arts and sciences, including religious tolerance, took place under Islam a thousand years ago. Once they start internalizing this, it stands to reason they will start walking a little taller and thinking, ‘Hey, maybe we can do better.’

It is about common sense and practical application.

Diplomacy and Religion

You know, we’re one of the most religious nations in the world today, and yet we so compartmentalize it that unfortunately we’ve let our separation of church and state – which I would not suggest that we change at all —  but we’ve let that become a crutch for not doing our homework on how religion informs the worldviews and political aspirations of others.

For example,  I believe a key to engaging with Iran is religion. You see, they don’t trust us politically — we say things out of both sides of our mouths — but they do believe in religion. And if you start out with a religious framework, you can segue into talking about anything you want: nuclear weapons, the whole nine yards.

But, you know, when push comes to shove, it is the case that more often than not in government and even in industry, when people hear the word “religion,” they run for the hills.

Mercury

Mercury was a rescue.

When she was first discovered, about two years ago, a group of boys had already successfully kicked out all of her teeth and were trying to set her on fire.

Snatched her, ran like hell. Once home, began sobbing.

My good neighbor is her rather full-time caretaker now, and she is quite content in her tiny apartment, eating mushed up sweet potatoes or protein drinks and slowly saunters up and down the hallway at night.  She’s a secret on our floor between the 9 of us who live on it; the landlord is strictly against owning pets of any kind.

It’s Called Too Much Black Tea

This is going to sound really dangerous, but a totally humanly constructed thing like who we elect as an official in our government, is useless. Of course, I take very seriously our voting process and I’m — I try — to be politically conscious. But sometimes, when I think about it, I have to laugh that we’re all just cosmetically agreeing to respect this agreement that this person has been elected for something. And that is really a totally human construct that we could turn around tomorrow and all choose to behave differently.

We’re animals that organize in a certain way.

So it’s not that I completely dismiss it or don’t take it seriously, but I think a lot of the things we are acting out are these animalistic things that are consequences of our instincts. And they aren’t, in some sense, as meaningful to me as the things that will live on after our species comes and goes. Does that make any sense?