Another local walk

Shadow portrait of the members
of my RunKeeper "street team"

With the RunKeeper app now installed on my Droid, I and the other members of my "street team" walked 4.35 miles this morning, south along the country road from which our residential neighborhood can be accessed by automobile. The total elapsed time for the walk was 1:49:25. (We don't walk fast, as you can calculate.)
    I took a few photos along the way.

Note the moon (top center)

The order of "The Idea of Order..."

Early blue and white ware,
first half of 14th century

In Wallace Stevens's poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West," the narrator and his friend Ramon Fernandez listen to a woman singing in imitation of the sea, the narrator reflecting on the metaphysics of the situation before they turn back toward the town and the narrator asks his friend why the lights being turned on as night descends seem to demarcate the vista, at which point the narrator realizes that it's because of their "rage for order"—the same rage that prompted the woman to sing.
    The poem's seventh (and last) stanza:

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Stevens's act of making the poem sprang from the same rage. The poem expresses a human's drive to understand and represent what he or she experiences.
    As I understand the "rage" Stevens was talking about (the biological promptings of the human brain; in the poem, the sea has no such promptings and is therefore not singing), my blogging springs from the same source, and so, I think, did the idea yesterday (even if a joke) that the blue & white porcelain pen had magical properties.

By the way, the hypothesis about the pen has already been falsified, alas. This morning, I erred in attempting the third Sudoku using the pen...But there is, I suppose, the "magical" possibility that the failure was really the pen's indicating to me that my interpretation of "The Idea of Order at Key West" is also wrong. Could that be the true way to order my experience here?

A magic pen?

Early Chinese
blue and white porcelain,
manufactured circa 1335

This morning's kitchen tenor was distinctly different from that of yesterday's. It was a bit glum. The "aliveness" I reported yesterday was missing from today's thoughts parading before my consciousness. Had I insufficient sleep last night, or less effective—something as simple (and complex) as that?
    Harris did write in Free Will that:

It is one thing to bicker with your wife because you are in a bad mood; it is another to realize that your mood and behavior have been caused by low blood sugar. This understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings: A bite of food may be all that your personality requires. [emphasis mine, p. 44]

A bit more or better sleep perhaps?
    But then, immediately after breakfast, while diligently starting up my computer and seeing the Library of America's Collected Poetry & Prose of Wallace Stevens, I remembered my intention yesterday to read today the poem "The Idea of Order at Key West."
    As soon, then, as I'd finished both of today's Sudokus (from the newspapers left on our driveway), I read it. And instantly my glumness vanished in the reader's delicious sense of having gotten it, having in this case gotten something supposedly difficult to get, for in Wikipedia yesterday I had read of the poem that it

is philosophically complex. Stated by critics as “perhaps impossible to interpret fully,” the poem “affirms a transcendental poetic spirit yet cannot locate it.” One critic has deemed the poem as "desperately" ambiguous, containing unresolvable difficulties.

What critics? Hardly ever have I read a "difficult poem" whose "meaning" seemed so readily discernible.

    I'll give you a day to read the poem too, before I summarize what I think it "means." The poem's first (of seven) stanzas:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

In the meantime, a note about the Sudokus.
    To do them (I always use a pen) I deliberately used a beautiful new pen given me yesterday by a friend—a blue and white porcelain pen from China. Literally from China, for my friend had purchased it there and brought it back after her visit with family and friends in and about Nanjing. (She also provided a link to a Wikipedia article about blue and white porcelain, from which I obtained the photo.)
    Using the beautiful and beautifully flowing new pen, I correctly (and quickly) completed both Sudokus. And into my mind popped the idea that perhaps I am the beneficiary of a magic pen?
    On the hypothesis that my new pen might indeed be a magic one, how many Sudokus need I complete with it to more or less prove the hypothesis? (Or how many difficult poems need I understand after using it?)
    Note that proving the hypothesis is a good deal more challenging than disproving it. To disprove it, I need fail to complete only one Sudoku (or fail to "get" only one difficult poem?). But could I ever prove that it's a magic pen?

Alive morning

My wife and I stood on the patio
beyond the window yesterday  to
view a Green Heron in a distant tree

Thoughts of various pleasing projects ran through my mind as I prepared our breakfast this morning, accompanied by the sort of "meta-thought" that the more immediate thoughts were enlivening me and I appreciated them.
    The pleasing projects weren't earth-shaking, just little, ordinary things that make up my life. Write to someone. Tinker with some wording on a recent post. Ideas for further reflections on the illusion of free will (such as the potential effects of the idea on people, and on people collectively). Set up my digiscoping equipment this week (maybe get a photo of that Green Heron my wife spotted yesterday, or of the Red-headed Wookpecker I thought I saw on a feeder while we were messing with the fieldscope). Deposit that check.
    Thoughts of these ordinary activities enlivened me by distracting me from bodily aches and pains, by engaging me and giving me something to look forward to, by assuring me that the day and the week (and the rest of my life if I am fortunate to have such thoughts every morning) need not be a drag but can ever be adventurous. (Do I hear some of you laughing at the revelation that such activities constitute "adventure" for me?)

And the meta-thought was a bonus—it provided the theme for today's post. Get it done this morning, and then on to, say, digiscoping, which has been neglected so far for thirty-six days of retirement. Not acceptable.
    Get it done this morning, not partially done in the evening then finished the next day, as I confess has been the case with several posts lately. Not acceptable. (But so far a dependable fall-back when needed.)
    Do it now. Be alive now.

What happens

We went to a theater last December to see The Descendants, and we liked it well enough to watch it again, even as early as this afternoon.

The Descendants (2011: Alexander Payne) With his wife Elizabeth on life support after a boating accident, Hawaiian land baron Matt King (George Clooney) takes his daughters on a trip from Oahu to Kauai to confront Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), the man who was having an affair with Elizabeth before her misfortune.

When we saw it the first time, I don't think I particularly noticed the brief interchange when Hawaiian King confronts Speer to try to find out what happened between Speer and Elizabeth:

King: "How did it happen?"
Speer: "It just happened."
King: "Nothing just happens."
Speer: "Everything just happens."

    I'm sure I noticed it this time because of having read Free Will, by Sam Harris. (I wrote about the reading Friday.)
    The exchange between the two men isn't striking just because Speer summarizes Sam Harris's thesis. Look at the preceding line of dialogue:

Nothing just happens.

    I think that the George Clooney character says that because he's suspicious that Speer, who is a realtor, started the affair to try to gain an advantage in a huge land deal the King family are involved in.
    But out of that context "Nothing just happens" is another way of stating the theistic position:

Everything happens for a reason.

That is, God's in control (or perhaps your guardian angel or angels), and they have a plan....
    Well, if they have a plan, then apparently it calls for quite a few people to believe it...and for the rest not to, and for a good number of the former to believe so strongly that everything happens for a reason that they simply refuse to entertain the possibility that it might not be so. (At any rate, it's people who believe that sort of thing from whom I hear the statement, "You can't make me change my mind.") What a plan.

But seriously, why do people believe that nothing just happens?
    The material world of evolution and "everything just happens" can be very unsettling, as can the facts that people suffer, everyone dies, and justice is not done in this world. Beliefs that deny these realities provide solace. Suffering is for our own good, and it will be made right. We'll be resurrected and live forever (if we follow the right prescription for salvation). God will right the balance of justice at The Last Judgment.
    Solace is the Number One Reason for such beliefs (in the cases where it's not simply that people are paying lip service to the beliefs they've been taught and have never questioned).
    Actually, though, there's a sense in which it's true that nothing just happens—the sense in which happenings have material causes. Believing "nothing just happens" in that sense can inspire a person to try to find out the causes. It can lead to insight, and to science.
    And actually, believing "nothing just happens" in the theistic sense can also inspire a person to look a little deeper into his or her spiritual and moral life, to try to discover why something bad, or something good, or something problematic happened. Insights can be found that way; people can (but may not) become better people as a result. Believing that there's a god and he (usually it's he) has a plan isn't necessarily the end-all of such a believer's life. Life can still be good for such believers (besides the solace). (Hey, I think I really am becoming more accepting of others, just as I said on Friday.)
    The main thing seems to be that we keep looking and seeking and trying to find out. As long as our beliefs inspire that, we're still alive and ticking.

By the way, it would seem from the considerations above that Harris believes both that nothing just happens and that everything just happens. But it's based on an ambiguity.
    He believes that nothing just happens, because everything that happens has causes. And he believes that everything just happens, in the sense that it's an illusion that our free will is one of those causes.

Sunday morning

We took a quiet walk this morning through an older neighborhood just a quarter-mile from our back yard—but over the creek and "in the county" from us "in the city limits."

Because it was Sunday, the walk reminded me that we plan to visit Key West later this year. Only three degrees separate the walk and Key West, three links in the memory chain from the one to the other.
    Sunday morning—at any rate, a quiet one outside rather than inside cleaning up the kitchen while my wife and Siegfried go walking alone—sometimes puts me into a spiritual mood, or at least a deeply reflective one. And what else is a "spiritual mood" than a deeply reflective one? (Well, sometimes it's hardly reflective at all, just a feeling of "being at one.")

    Anyway, this morning's mood led directly to the poem "Sunday Morning," published in full in 1923 (and, I just learned from Wikipedia, "now in the public domain").

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights...
...
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

    It was a quick step from there to Wallace Stevens, the poem's author. Or maybe I thought of him first, and then of his poem.
    And thence to Key West, which Stevens visited numerous times from 1922 to 1940, where he generally lodged at Casa Marina, which opened in 1920. (We don't have reservations there.)

Harry S. Truman and Ernest Hemingway have historic sites in Key West, but so far I haven't discovered that Wallace Stevens has one (or Robert Frost, who tussled with Stevens there a time or two). I may have to take Stevens with me, in the form of his Collected Poetry & Prose in the American Library edition.
    It contains his essay, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. I might read it again, see whether it speaks to me differently after fifty years.
    For a while on the walk I questioned my current plan (or recent plan, at any rate—the last time I told anyone it was my plan) to write a screenplay on the theme of animal rights. I wondered whether my spirit might be better served to try my hand again at poetry— birthed emblems of reflection (like most of Stevens's), or songs of feeling at one with one another human and with other animals and all life on Earth, and of the beauty of all, predator and prey alike.

View from the shed

Click to enlarge

As I emerged from the garden shed after today's yard work, I was greeted by the sight of our inviting back porch, and of the sky, which I hadn't really seen because I'd been looking down at the Iris clump I'd shoveled  up (leaving the numerous thriving Earth worms in the soil), at the yard lights I'd been rewiring and moving and replacing bulbs in, at the clay pots I'd carted around to the front and photographed for the "Free for the Asking" page on our community's social network, at Siegfried's poop I'd bagged up, at the grass to pick up pine needles that had fallen out of the bales of "straw" I'd unloaded from the trunk of the Honda and carried around back to the utility area in the far corner, behind the shed.
    I just had to take a photo, even if only with my cell phone. Something to blog home about, a remembrance.
    The sky is still lovely.
    And I am yet here.

It depends (and so do I)

Click to read the Carl Sagan
quotation (photo source)

For 47 years, I've known that I didn't create myself and do not have the power to sustain my existence for a single moment. I know it has been forty-seven years because I was twenty-two years old when I had a dream that seemed to confirm the dependence, and I'm sixty-nine now. (I described the dream a few years ago, in a post titled "Creatures.")

Sam Harris, in his latest book, Free Will,¹ describes a similar situation with respect to what he argues is the illusion of free will:

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime—by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? [p. 40]

Why does Harris argue that free will is an illusion? The main reason (aside from considerations like those above) seems to be that brain activity that signals awareness and initiation of action precedes our conscious awareness of it. When we become aware of an intention, for example, the intention has already happened, and we had nothing consciously to do with it.

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?...People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about. [p. 31]
    ...From the perspective of your conscious awareness, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world. [p. 36]
    If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process....
    You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts. You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. [p. 38]

Even before reading Harris's book, I had written here about watching myself to see what I would do next, and writing to find out what I thought about something. I had already discovered, from my own personal experience, that what I did and what I thought were things that happened. Harris's book not only serves to confirm this, but also explores some of the implications of it, such as its effect on morality and criminal justice.
    What about its effect on me—or on you if you choose to adopt this way of thinking (or even just experiment with it)?
    I'm still observing its effect(s) on myself. On the one hand, they are, ironically, liberating. I am more accepting of other people (and of myself) the way they are, the way I am.
     But on the other hand, I wonder at times whether I'm missing out on something by giving up the option I thought I had of "using my will power." So far, at least, I haven't missed a day of blogging since my retirement began (one month ago today).
     The jury (the various parts that constitute "me") are still out.

This morning I observed a young woman who lives down the street walking her dogs and letting them defecate in someone else's front yard—fairly near the front door. She didn't pick up the poop, but blithely turned around and led the dogs back home.
     Blithely, did I say? Well, I'm not sure. I think she has to know that not scooping her dogs' poop is unneighborly (and expressly prohibited by the neighborhood covenants), for this has been discussed at some length on our private social network (on the web), of which she and her husband are members. But this is what she does (my wife and I have observed her doing it on a number of other occasions).
    Could I have gone out and let her know that I'd observed her, and reminded her that what she had just done (and had done many times) was wrong? Could I have? I did consider it.
    Some reasons why I think I didn't do it are, first, the prevalent reluctance to "confront" a neighbor, which the people who live in our neighborhood very rarely do. (I'm sure that the vast majority of them have never confronted one of their neighbors—judging by numerous discussions on the neighborhood network. I'm very reluctant to do it myself.)
    Second, I supposed that the young woman has her own reasons for what she did, and that they probably aren't trivial or negligible—doing that seems to be her routine.²
    Third, I was ambivalent about what my motives would have been. If they would have been to "make" her stop leaving the poop (or to stop letting her dogs go in other people's yards), I had little confidence that that would have been the result. She could as easily have become defensive and tried to justify her behavior [see Wednesday's post]. If my motives would have been to demonstrate my "superior neighborliness," what would have been the point of that?
    These considerations passed through my mind. According to Harris, I didn't choose for them to do so; they just did. And I didn't choose not to go confront her; I just didn't.
     It all depended on so many things, one of which apparently wasn't my free will (or hers).
_______________

1. Free Will (2011: Sam Harris) [A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion.
        [In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life. (–The Free Press)]
2. What if someone had observed Jeffrey Dahmer luring a boy home and gone over to confront him? "That's wrong what you're doing, Jeffrey—you shouldn't kill people or eat their flesh." Might the young neighbor woman have been as unlikely to mend her ways as Jeffrey Dahmer his? Or you or I ours, whatever they are?
        Maybe the answer is "no," but how sure are we?

When you go fishing...

Carl Jung (1875-1961), who
made much of synchronicity
(roughly, spiritually
meaningful coincidence)

On Monday, in my Mad Men post, something prompted me to suggest that the episode (in particular, Ginsberg's jingle)'s theme might be that one of advertising's missions is to persuade us to accept the delusion that we can "truly own" anything we can afford to buy (like a Jaguar automobile).
    And Ken fairly commented, "OK, I'll bite. Why can't I truly own something I've bought? I don't own the computer I'm using?"
    And I replied, "The truth is that my statement expressed a vague intuition I was having at the time, and I can't replicate it at the moment. If it returns, along with some words to express it better, you'll be among the first I'll tell them to."
    In other words, my intuition had told me that there was something illusory (or delusional) about the idea that we could "truly own something"—or "anything we can afford to buy."

"Father and Daughter" was written
for the children's animated film
The Wild Thornberrys Movie

So it was striking today that while watching Paul Simon and Friends (via Netflix download), the 2007 ceremony of performances at the Library of Congress honoring Mr. Simon for the first-ever Gershwin Prize for Popular Music, I heard the following lyrics from "Father and Daughter" (2002):

Trust your intuition
Its just like going fishing
You cast your line
And hope you get a bite [emphasis mine]

    Well, in my case it seems to have proven to be like going fishing, but I'm not sure what, if anything, I was hoping to catch. I'm certain I wasn't hoping to catch a question I couldn't answer. (Ken has asked me a few of those.)

Maybe something of what I "intuited" is suggested by Simon's next four lines:

But you don't need to waste your time
Worrying about the market place
Try to help the human race
Struggling to survive its harshest night

The words even refer to the terrain where advertising reigns, the market place. Simon (the father reassuring and counseling his daughter) suggests that worrying about it—focusing on what we can buy and sell—shouldn't be our highest value. It isn't going to help us survive our harshest night.
     If we think it is, we're deluding ourselves?

Ken, I know that's more like a poem (or a sketch for one) than an answer to your question.
    Now I need to go back and work on the last paragraph of Monday's Mad Men post.
_______________

Justify the feeling belief

Cover of a book I
only heard about
this evening

I had to "go to the restroom" the first thing at Costco this morning. Even before I was quite through the door into the men's room, I could clearly hear a conversation in progress. But I saw no one inside and realized someone was in a stall talking on a cell phone.
    The conversation was fairly personal, about how the man's daughter, I think—or someone female—seemed to be estranged from him. He seemed to be talking to another man, but I'm not sure. It didn't matter. But, without wanting to, I had become interested in the conversation. And I didn't appreciate having been drawn in.
    The discomfort wouldn't go away. On the drive home, I told my wife about it and surprised myself by pronouncing, "It was an inappropriate conversation to have in a public restroom."

As soon as I heard myself say "inappropriate," I began to wonder what basis I had for the judgment, and I quickly realized that the only reason I had for saying what I did was that the conversation had made me feel uncomfortable. My "logic" seems to have been that, because the conversation was inappropriate, it had made me feel uncomfortable .
    But for us to judge the acts or activities of other people as inappropriate because they "make us feel uncomfortable" would be anarchical—disorderly because of the absence or nonrecognition of authority [according to a web dictionary I consulted].
    Maybe some of us don't care about anything but the way we feel, and that's reason enough for us to make the judgment without a second thought. That's reason enough for some of us to oppose same-sex marriage without needing to write a letter to an editor explaining why we voted for "the marriage amendment."
    But I think most of us want the world and the people around us to fit together in an orderly manner, so we  look for an authority that we think other people will (or should) respect, or look for reasons that we think will (or should) be recognized as authoritative. What, for example, does Miss Manners say about having personal conversations in the hearing of strangers? Or what verses of the Bible show why same-sex marriages are abominable? (I lost count of the letters about the marriage amendment, but there seemed to be about as many for as against—or maybe about 60/40.)
    We look for something to justify our position and get others to agree with us (we hope).

Why do our minds work that way? Why do we feel first, then (if we have the need) look for reasons to justify it? Because, according to Gary Marcus, in his 2008 book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind [according to Annie Murphy Paul in her April 27, 2008 review ("Patch Job") in The New York Times; I haven't read the book], "the brain, like the rest of the human body of which it is a part is an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole" [as Miss Paul summarized it].
     Our ability to form beliefs quickly and act on them for self-protection evolved first, and our brains still depend on the machinery that supports that ability. The need and the ability to justify, either to ourselves or others, evolved latter. Most of us, much or most of the time, seem to use the ability not to decide what to believe, but to justify what we already believe, for reasons that have little to do with evidence.
    My friend Chuck, who brought the book to my attention this evening in an email, wrote that "Kluge cites research on how reasoning works in practice. It’ll scare the hell out of you."
    Perhaps it would, if I weren't already aware that the mind, like the body of which it is a part, evolved by adapting earlier components to new uses. It doesn't work like the text-books on logic say it should. But it did take me a long time to see this, and it was a scary realization.

Miss Manners, by the way, in one of her columns, wrote that

...to eavesdrop is rude. The fact that people in public places may not be able to avoid hearing others talk is no excuse; they must pretend they have heard nothing.

They shouldn't report the talk to their wife.
    Or blog about it?

Orange Terrorist alert justified

I finished reading John Updike's 2006 novel Terrorist this afternoon. After acknowledging five days ago Christopher Hitchens's Orange Alert that Terrorist might be "one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon," I was actually hoping that it would turn out to have been a false alarm. I hoped that John Updike, ill or not, could still have written an excellent and entertaining book. I mentally readied myself to conjecture how Mr. Hitchens could have got it wrong. He was deficient somehow when it came to literary criticism. And why was that? I prepared to adjust my uniformly high opinion of his judgment.

Terrorist (2006: John Updike) [Fatherless eighteen-year-old Ahmad—half Irish, half Egyptian—has been under the influence of imam Shaikh Rashid since he was eleven. Ahmad's Jewish guidance counselor in his inner-city New Jersey high school offers help, but Ahmad agrees to commit violence for his religious beliefs] 05-2012

My high opinion of Christopher Hitchens remains intact.
    Terrorist portrays aging Jewish guidance counselor Jack Levy convincingly, as I hoped I showed by my excerpts. But his young would-be terrorist Ahmad is a clichéd, one-dimensional acolyte, extensively indoctrinated in the Koran and continually reminding himself that he is supposed to abhor sex and hate America and Americans. He shows little sign of being a New Jersey teenager.
    New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani (in "John Updike's Terrorist Imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security," June 6, 2006) seems to absolve Updike for this character by suggesting that "the reader cannot help suspecting that Mr. Updike found the idea of such a person so incomprehensible that he at some point abandoned any earnest attempt to depict his inner life and settled instead for giving us a static, one-dimensional stereotype."
    That's tepid absolution, which I don't think Mr. Updike would have been happy to acknowledge. But it's possible. How does one comprehend a jihadist? Updike may have been determined to write something pertinent to 9/11 despite simply not being well-suited to undertake that particular subject. This can only be spectulation, and unprofitable.

But the plotting. Surely Updike could have done better than concoct a plot with more convenient coincidences than a 43-minute made-for-TV special? Levy, Ahmad's guidance counselor, happens to have an affair with  Ahmad's  mother. Levy's wife's sister happens to work for the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. The secretary happens to suspect that a terrorist plot is hatching in the town where Ahmad and his assistant's sister happen to live. The secretary's assistant happens to speak frequently with her sister, who happens to tell her about this Arab kid her husband the guidance counselor has been trying to persuade to go on to college rather than become a licensed truck driver....
     Isn't it about time for another commercial?

Now back to reading Physics for Future Presidents, which among other things "presents the science behind terrorism...."

Physics for Future Presidents: The Science behind the Headlines (2008: Richard A. Muller) [Physics professor explains basic physics to help government leaders and their constituents make better decisions about issues they face. Presents the science behind terrorism, energy, nuclear weapons and power, space and satellites, and global warming. Debates the future of alternative eco-friendly resources and new technologies.]

    Terror, terror, terror—terrorism everywhere. Not frequently orange anymore, but there in static white noise everyday of our lives.

At last

In the latest episosde of Mad Men, Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman) puts out the line that gets the Jaguar account for Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce (& Harris, who puts out something else needed): "Jaguar. At last. Something beautiful you can truly own."

Mad Men: The Other Woman (2012: Phil Abraham) Season 5/Episode 11: Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) & Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) make career moves.

At last. An opportunity for Joan—
A partnership at 5 percent her own.
    But Peggy says she's finished, through, 
    And does the only thing to do—
"Good-bye, Don." He kisses her hand. She's gone.

This episode (Ginsberg's jingle) could be a symbol for one of advertising's missions: To persuade us to accept the delusion that we can "truly own" anything we can afford to buy. [Follow-up]

Gild my day, Lilies!

Day Lilies have gladdened my days for many years, and may there be many more!

More angels

I didn't mention that in the other Scandinavian movie from 2004 that we watched this week, Lena told Daniel that she could see his angel's wings (and the angel's wings of a few other members of the choir). I mention it now only because in the Norwegian movie we watched tonight, two angels play an essential role in stage-managing things to their rather touching conclusion. Netflix describes the movie as "spellbinding drama," and it is. There are even a few real feathers in this one.

He's literally an angel;
she only metaphorically

Hawaii, Oslo (2004: Erik Poppe) [It’s a hot day in Oslo, Norway, and a bunch of various characters are living out their lives. Vidar (Trond Espen Seim) works with slightly handicapped people and can’t sleep. Leon (Jan Gunnar Røise) is a patient whose birthday is tomorrow and is meeting a girl (Åsa—Evy Kasseth Røsten) for the first time a number of years. Frode (Stig Henrik Hoff) and Milla (Silje Torp Færavaag) are having a baby, but there are issues. Mikkel (Benjamin Lønne Røsler) and Magne (Ferdinand Falsen Hiis) are young brothers whose father just passed away. These characters and a handful of others are all on their own paths, but in time they all cross in some manner. There’s drama with Leon’s brother (Trygve—Aksel Hennie) who is in town (or is he?) for his birthday. Frode and his wife cross paths with Vidar who has had a dream that Leon gets hit by the ambulance carrying them and their baby to hospital…those around him are trying to help him see that this idea is absurd. It was just a dream, Leon is okay, and nothing terrible is going to happen...Just a simple day in Oslo with a bunch of average people making their way through life.] [E] 5-26-2012

My life is only mine

For all the slackness of its opening, the 2004 Swedish film that was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category (As It Is in Heaven) deserved the nomination, if only for the glorious ending to which it ascended.

Så som i himmelene [As It Is in Heaven] (2004: Kay Pollak) [Successful international conductor Daniel Daréus (Michael Nyqvist, who co-stars in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) suddenly interrupts his career and returns alone to his childhood village in Norrland, in the far north of Sweden. It doesn't take long before he is asked to come and listen to the fragment of a church choir, which practises every Thursday in the parish hall. Just come along and give a little bit of good advice. He can't say no, and from that moment, nothing in the village is the same again. The choir develops and grows. He makes both friends and enemies. And he finds love (Frida Hallgren)] [EO] 5-23-2012

The ending is the kind of all-come-together-in-music moment that I think the impresario of American Music Week in Bulgaria would love—and love to see happen again and again during his AmBul festivals. (I speak of my son. Do watch this movie, Geoff!)

    As far into the movie as five to ten minutes (I didn't note the time), I felt bored and ready to try something else, but by the ten-to-fifteen-minute mark I was well hooked by what was becoming a solidly compelling story, as Daniel Daréus latched onto the possibility he saw in the church choir he was asked to come and listen to. In the course of a few weeks, he literally transforms not only the choir itself, but most of its members, who, in responding to Daniel's challenge to find their "own tone," learn even more about themselves and each other.

One of the members is Gabriella (Helen Sjöholm), whose husband (Conny) frequently beats her and becomes predictably jealous of Daniel (who finally realizes that Conny was one of the schoolboys who bullied him). In a stirring act of compassion and understanding, Daniel draws Gabriella out by composing a song for her to sing solo in their upcoming concert. Reluctant (even refusing) at first, she assents and her performance is greeted at first by a stunned silence in the awed audience before it breaks into thunderous applause.
    You can hear Sjöholm's performance on YouTube:



    My title comes from the song's lyrics, and I found an English translation of Gabriellas Sång (side-by-side with the original Swedish) at http://lyricstranslate.com/en/gabriellas-sang-gabriellas-song.html.

Daniel & Lena

However, Gabriella's Song is not the movie's ending. Nor is Gabriella the love referred to in the synopsis above (see picture at right). I believe that if you share my taste in movies at all you'll like this one very much and thrill at the joy it provokes.
    There is a spirituality to it, and I'm sure that many will consider the movie religious (the title, after all). But in some ways it's more anti-religious than religious. The pastor's wife (Inger) is so transformed by the truth she discovers by participating in the choir that she is able to tell her husband for the first time what a hypocrite he is.
    In misguided self-defense, the pastor gets Daniel ousted from his formal leadership of the choir—with the cinematically pleasing result that Inger moves out and the choir separates itself from the church.
    When the pastor asks Inger whether she will come back to him, she says she doesn't know. Maybe the following lines from Gabriella's Song catches where Inger is at this point:

I want to feel I’m alive
All my living days
I will live as I desire
I want to feel I’m alive