Anywhere but here and now

I just finished listening to the Pensees or Thoughts on Religion by the French thinker and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). Among other things, he designed a calculating machine, arguably a distant forerunner of the computer. 

He also apparently had a mystical experience of which he wrote 

"From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve … FIRE … God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the philosophers and savants. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace."

For those of us out of the math world, he's best known for nuggets from the Pensees, such as "the heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of."

This time around, I found his insights on the human condition to be brilliant and his theological musings a bit dogmatic, which is probably what he was going for.

He was a devout Catholic, although one accused of being a Jansenist heretic, (Jansenism was an almost Calvinistic tendency in the Church), but sometimes he sounds downright Buddhist. Example: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Here's a great passage from the Pensees about our chronic tendency to be anywhere but where and when we are that could have come out of an old school dharma talk:

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

Ouch. That hit close to home. 

 

Totally disinterested

According to WV Public Broadcasting, business groups have been shoveling big bucks to a committee charged with "reforming" WV's tax system. Golly gee, reckon they are selflessly concerned with the common good? Surely ROI (return on investment) has nothing to do with it, right?

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. I'm not always or even usually on the same side as the writers on the Daily Mail side of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, but they gave a nice shoutout to a worthy program helping kids and families in a community with lots of challenges.

MINDFULNESS FOR ATHLETES seems to help. Come to think of it, this shouldn't be a huge surprise. I've often found it helpful to pay attention to how miserable I am during endurance events.

Alertness

Woody Allen said that eighty percent of success is showing up. I think that's about right. I'd say most of the other twenty percent is paying attention and being ready. The remainder consists of striking skillfully when an opportunity occurs, which itself only takes up a fraction of the overall time (although learning how to do that may take years).

One reason why I've been strip mining Thoreau's Walden these days is that I've really found some of the ideas he expresses to be of great value in trying to change things that need to be changed or preserve things that need to be preserved.

Here's a great line in a great passage. Because it's so good, I want to highlight the key line before the whole passage:

No method nor discipline can supercede the necessity of being forever on the alert.

Here's the rest of it:

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, now matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

By way of qualification, I don't think this means being hyper vigilant all the time, which can be a kind of mania and is impossible in any case, but at the very least tracking things the way so many animals do, watching changes, observing trends, moving when appropriate.

I never throw a scrap of food into the yard without seeing a some chickens responding right away. Our lazy cats seem to zone out most of the time but tune right in when there's something to see. The goats notice the least little change. Dogs track motion. Maybe we'd be more successful in our undertakings if we were better animals.

GOOD FOR A LAUGH about something that isn't funny: here's Jon Stewart on America's endless quest for an energy policy. Thanks to Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo for including this link.

SOMETHING ELSE THAT ISN'T FUNNY. Here's an interesting blog post from the NY Times Economix about how people think about unemployment.

A HOLE IN THE WORLD. Here's Naomi Klein on the BP Gulf oil disaster.

SLIP-SLIDING AWAY? Here's Bob Herbert from the NY Times on missed opportunities for greatness.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Book it

The Library Company of Philadelphia. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has been musing lately on the long, active and generally useful life of Benjamin Franklin. His life is, among other things, a textbook example of the usefulness of social capital in making good things happen.

As mentioned in previous posts, Franklin and friends formed a discussion group called the Junto to discuss important issues of morals, politics, and such. Sometimes these discussions yielded very practical results. One such discussion mentioned yesterday led to the formation of a pretty sophisticated volunteer fire department.

Another such outgrowth was a lending library. During one of the Junto meetings around 1731, Franklin recalled that

a proposition was made by me, that, since our books were often referr'd to in our disquisitions upon the queries, it might be convenient to us to have them altogether where we met, that upon occasion they might be consulted; and by thus clubbing our books to a common library, we should, while we lik'd to keep them together, have each of us the advantage of using the books of all the other members, which would be nearly as beneficial as if each owned the whole.

That arrangement worked well enough for around a year, at which time he took the idea to a different level:

And now I set on foot my first project of a public nature, that for a subscription library. I drew up the proposals, got them put into form...and, by the help of my friends in the Junto, procured fifty subscribers of forty shillings each to begin with, and ten shillings a year for fifty years, the term our company was to continue. We afterwards obtain'd a charter, the company being increased to one hundred: this was the mother of all the North American subscription libraries, now so numerous. It has become a great thing itself, and continually increasing. These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defence of their privileges.

The Library Company of Philadelphia is still in existence today and these early subscription libraries helped pave the way for US public libraries as we know them today.

Not too shabby.

A GOOD FIRST STEP. The recovery package recently passed by Congress might help stem some job losses in the states, but more remains to be done.

UNCOVERED. A new report from Families USA found that one out of three Americans under 65 was uninsured at some point last year.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, there is also the issue of the under-insured, i.e. those with some coverage but not enough to cover basic health care costs.

WORKING WITH THE MEDIA. Here's a how-to guide to getting attention to issues that you think are important.

LOSING ONE'S EDGE. Sometimes mindfulness can be boring.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: IMPASSABLE

The bed of Odysseus

Odysseus and Penelope by Francesco Primaticcio (1563), courtesy of wikipedia.

Along with links and comments about current events, the ongoing theme at Goat Rope for quite a while now has been the Odyssey of Homer. El Cabrero is striving mightily to wind it up but it takes a while to stop at train or turn a ship around. I'm trying though.

Whatever else you can say about Odysseus, as strange as it may seem he really did have a loving bond with his wife Penelope. This is true despite his 20 years of wandering and the occasional dalliance with a goddess or two. After all, he gave up Calypso's offer of immortality to go home to her.

One symbol of the power of that bond is the story of their bed. Toward the end of the epic, Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, gradually reveals himself to his family and faithful servants. It's hard to tell when the recognition occurred since they are all operating under stress from the threat of more than 100 insolent suitors. It's sort of a game of classics geeks to speculate about what did Penelope know and when.

Penelope in particular is skeptical of anyone who claims to have knowledge of Odysseus after many years of lies and rumors. She also fears being deceived by someone who claims to be her husband. When at last they talk, she pretends to doubt him, which leads him to protest

"Strange woman! So hard--the gods of Olympus
made you harder than any other woman in the world!
What other wife could have a spirit so unbending?
Holding back from her husband, home at last for her
after bearing twenty years of brutal struggle."

As a way of giving him a final test (or of just messing with him), she asks the maid to move their bed so that the stranger can sleep on it--alone.

Now here's the thing about that bed. It is absolutely immovable by any mortal, have been built around the stump of an olive tree. He is devastated at the thought that anyone could have moved it:

"Woman--your words, they cut me to the core!
Who could move my bed? Impossible task,
even for some skilled craftsman--unless a god
came down in person, quick to lend a hand,
lifted out with ease and moved it elsewhere.
Not a man on earth, not even at peak strength,
would find it easy to prise it up and shift it, no,
a great sign, a hallmark lies in its construction."

With that, she knows she's got her man:

"...now, since you have revealed such overwhelming proof-
the secret sign of our bed, which no one's ever seen
but you and I and a single maid, Actoris,
the servant my father gave me when I came,
who kept the doors of our room you built so well...
you've conquered my heart, my hard heart, at last!"

The goddess Athena even gives the couple a special break:

She held back the night, and night lingered long
at the western edge of the earth, while in the east
she reined in Dawn of the golden throne at Ocean's banks.
commanding her not to yoke the windswift team that brings men light...

They had a lot of catching up to do. The lengthened night gave them time to love, talk and sleep.

There are some powerful images in the Odyssey, like Penelope's loom, and this is one of them. The image of this immovable bed symbolizes a deep bond between a couple that not even the ravages of the years can uproot. You don't see a whole lot of that these days.

OH GOOD. The US lost 159,000 jobs in September, the biggest loss since March 2003, according to this Jobs Byte from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE, this snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute looks at trade deficit related job losses in 2007.

HOMO ECONOMICUS don't live around here.

WAKE UP. Here's an item on the medical utility of mindfulness meditation.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC HEALTH

Improvements in human longevity and physical well-being over the last hundred or so years have come more from improvements in public health than in the treatment of individual patients and diseases.

I'm just talking about the basics, like clean water and a sewage system. This is still an issue in many parts of the world. In the developing world today, diarrhea is the leading cause of child deaths--two million per year. Around six million people of all ages die from it annually.

Dr. James Gilligan, author of the 1996 Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, suggests that we take a public health approach to violence prevention and reduction at both the interpersonal and structural level.

Rather than conventional moralistic condemnations,

the only way to explain the causes of violence so that we can learn how to prevent it, is to approach violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine, and to think of violence as a symptom of life-threatening (and often lethal) pathology which, like all forms of illness, has an etiology or cause, a pathogen. To think of violence as evil--if we confuse hat value judgment about violence with an explanation of it--can only confuse us into thinking we have an explanation when we do not.

Based on experience over 25 years in working with violent offenders, Gilligan believes that he has identified the pathogen or "virus" that causes violence. And that pathogen is shame.

More on that tomorrow.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE UPPER CLASS? They're still there.

TWO FROM THE NEW YORKER. Here's George Packer on the future of movement conservatism. And here's an item on the elusive search for a cure for the common hangover.

NIRVANA. Not the band, the state of being. Here's an interesting article about a brain scientist who experienced it by way of having a stroke.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, more and more therapists and researchers are giving Buddhist-inspired mindfulness meditation a second look.

CLOSING A GAP. Some colleges are trying to break down the barriers between the sciences and the humanities.

DEATH'S DOOR. The Rev. Carroll Pickett, for years a prison chaplain at Huntsville, Texas who witnessed 95 executions, has come to oppose the death penalty and is the subject of a new film.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED