Goines On: Toe’s up!

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The very evening of the day Goines had reviled himself for uttering his “T”-cap joke to the landscaper, he stubbed a big toe on the stepping stone the landscaper had recently installed just off the lawn near the composting tumbler, which Mrs. Goines had suggested be positioned near their back porch for his convenience. He didn’t sleep well that night, with a throbbing, electric pain, about level 3 out of 10, but enough to slow his going to sleep, or back to sleep each time he awoke to pee.

14 Years Ago Next Week: Monday Musings

I took this photo in the gardens
of the Rodin Museum in Paris
on April 27, 2016

By Moristotle

[Originally published on January 29, 2007, without an image.]

The other day I had occasion to share with someone something that I have thought for many years:

God [if God exists] can communicate with us any damn way God pleases [that is, through the Bible, the Quran..., the angelic kindness of a stranger...]

"Nothing happens by accident," he said

"You're a plantiff's lawyer?" I said to the snappily dressed young black man facing me from the port side of the Chapel Hill bus this morning on my way to work. His brown loafers shined, his socks looked expensive, his light-weight sports jacket possibly tweed.
    "No," he said, "but it's an honor to have you say so."
    "So," I said, "you're not in the UNC Law School?"
    "No," he said, "I'm in Health Care."
    "You said it would be an honor to be a plantiff's lawyer, though," I said; "could you have missed your calling?"
    "It could be," he said. "Nothing happens by accident." And he tapped his shoulder, which I understood to suggest that he believed my remark might have been arranged by his guardian angel.
    "Ah," I said, "hmm."
    "This conversation might appear in a book someday," he said.
    "Shall I tell you my name, then?" I said, "so you can identify whom it was with?"
    He reached out his hand and said his first name. It sounded Arabic, or Muslim.
    "Morris Dean," I said. "And your name, does it have an apostrophe?"
    "My last one does," he said, and said his whole name.
    "Are you a retired professor?" he asked.
    I smiled. I always love to be asked that question by a young person. "No," I said. "I work up here at UNC General Administration, where President Ross's office is."
    "The Spangler Center," he said. "I know it."
    "You've been there?"
    "No, but I'm at Harvard, and Dick Spangler has an office there."
    At my stop outside the Spangler Center, we both rose and shook hands again. I repeated his name.
    He repeated mine, too. In case he needed to remember it for his book?
    "Good meeting you," he said.
    And I bounded off the bus with a little more energy than usual, today's log just handed to me, as though by angelic intervention.

Angel-one, angel-two

Until around about 1996, I had counted seconds the usual way by saying "thousand-one, thousand-two," etc. But in 1996 (or thereabouts), when I was an active Toastmaster and working towards becoming a professional speaker (i.e., paid big bucks to deliver keynote addresses and entertain and motivate people from a stage), I got the idea of a sort of "trademark" for my speeches. I would suggest that people in the audience count "angel-one, angel-two" instead of the usual way, thereby reminding themselves that they had a guardian angel looking over them, guiding them, protecting them, and so on. A sort of touchstone, in other words, that everything was going to be okay, they had an ally when the going got rough. Supportive stuff.

In those days I was reading a book by Rupert Sheldrake, an English biochemist, plant physiologist (and, perhaps, pataphysicist¹): The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).
    The fact that I was then trying to find a scientific foundation for things spiritual may have been the major reason that about ten years later I abandoned believing (or attempting to believe) in angels (and gods).
    But I still, from force of habit, count "angel-one, angel-two," and I do so even though I've made some effort (admittedly half-hearted) to switch over to "Darwin-one, Darwin-two."

I've decided I don't mind. It is a fact of my life that I need to honor that for many years I believed in angels (or, at any rate, tried to do so). And counting "angel-one, angel-two" always reminds me of another fact I honor more: I concluded that there aren't any angels (or any other supernatural beings) to believe in.
_______________

1. Or pataphysician; see comments on "A most extraordinary mathematical proof."

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Yesterday I revised my blog profile and adjusted my masthead accordingly. Today, newly affirmed in my status as a nobody, I find myself in one of those moods of "not wanting to die just yet." I want to lounge and luxuriate for a while in the idyll of nobodiness. I want to start again and this time finish reading James Joyce's Ulysses (I've already begun) and re-read Hugh Kenner's books about Joyce and other American, Irish, and English modernists. Already, time seems to have slowed down for the enjoyment of these activities and for savoring, too, the most trivial acts of daily routine.

I happily discovered the other day that my sense that events in my life were now repeating themselves with accelerating speed was but a foolish illusion (and one that I'd have done better to reject than to accept and pay lip-service to—"Time is passing so fast!"). I discovered this upon examining how often it seemed to be that we were once again running the automatic dish washer. It had come to seem that the time between one running and the next was getting shorter and shorter. But I discovered that this impression was quite false and had been formed because I was focusing on the days when we ran the dish washer and ignoring the days we didn't run it. And there were more days we didn't run it than there were when we did. It was as though I had been ignoring the spaces between the notes of a melody. Ignoring the silences.

As I was warming up my computer moments ago, I opened Kenner's own book titled Ulysses and, reading its thematic quotation (from Plato's Republic), felt a tremor:

And it was a sight worth seeing to behold the several souls choose their lives. And a piteous and a laughable and amazing sight it was also. The choice was mostly governed by what they had been accustomed to in their former life...
      It so happened that the soul of Odysseus came forward to choose the very last of all. He remembered his former labours and had ceased from his ambition and so he spent a long time going round looking for the life of a private and obscure man. At last he found it lying about, ignored by every one else; and when he saw it he took it gladly, and said that he would have made the same choice if the lot had fallen to him first.
            – Plato, The Republic, X-620, trans. A. D. Lindsay

What to make of this "synchronicity"? How did it happen that the first words that fell under my eye should be so perfectly apt? Mere chance? No, I don't think so. Angelic intervention, then? Again, no, I don't think so...unless the angels that intervene in our lives are the wraiths that emanate from our own psyches and hover around us continually. The haunting mists we saw shrouding the Vermont hills two weekends ago come to mind. There weren't any the day I took the photo below; alas, I had been too agog of the mists the days before to think then of photographing them.

I'll be glad to think of my psychic wraiths as "angels," for I am well-disposed toward angels and it's comforting to think that I can have them in my life still, even though I seem at last to have succeeded in cleansing my belief of "God."

For I had read this book by Kenner a few years ago, including of course the thematic quote. In fact, I had read Plato's Republic many years ago (Edith Hamilton's translation), and it is conceivable (if improbable) that the passage struck a chord with me even then—even though I don't think that the young man I was then was looking forward to becoming nobody:

And it fell out that the soul of Odysseus drew the last lot of all and came to make its choice, and, from memory of its former toils having flung away ambition, went about for a long time in quest of the life of an ordinary citizen who minded his own business, and with difficulty found it lying in some corner disregarded by the others, and upon seeing it said that it would have done the same had it drawn the first lot, and chose it gladly.

I'm glad today, and determined to be glad tomorrow, for the silences in my life....

The reading is great

If the writings of the atheists are so much more in vogue today than anything by the "believers" (and they are more in vogue, aren't they?), I'm wondering whether it isn't because what the atheists are saying seems more to the point and sometimes even more inspirational?

At any rate, I'm relishing the latest "atheist book," God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. And I don't even grant that "religion poisons everything," which is an obviously overgrasping, sell-some-more-books sort of thing to say. Plus, if God actually exists, then I'm certain that He (or She or It) is very great indeed, thank you very much, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens (the author of the latest). Hitchens's book crackles with erudition. And, because I've become surer of my own tolerant position in the middle—where I "believe all things"—I'm finding it very entertaining.

For you to enjoy with me if you can, here are some excerpts from Chapter Five, "The Metaphysical Claims of Religion." I may have enjoyed this chapter particularly, because it sort of surveys the territory I trod as an undergraduate forty-five years ago:

...Aquinas half believed in astrology, and was convinced that the fully formed nucleus (not that he would have known the word as we do) of a human being was contained inside each individual sperm. One can only mourn over the dismal and stupid lectures on sexual continence that we might have been spared if this nonsense had been exposed earlier than it was...He also fabricated the mad and cruel idea that the souls of unbaptized children were sent to "Limbo." Who can guess the load of misery that this diseased "theory" has placed on millions of Catholic parents down the years, until its shamefaced and only partial revision by the church in our own time? Luther was terrified of demons and believed that the mentally afflicted were the devil's work. Muhammad is claimed by his own followers to have thought, as did Jesus, that the desert was pullulating with djinns, or evil spirits. [p.64]
      ...Laplace (1749-1827) was the brilliant French scientist who took the work of Newton a stage further and showed by means of mathematical calculus how the operations of the solar system were those of bodies revolving systematically in a vacuum. When he later turned his attention to the stars and nebulae, he postulated the idea of gravitational collapse and implosion, or what we now breezily term the "black hole." In a five-volume book entitled Celestial Mechanics he laid all this out, and like many men of his time was also intrigued by the orrery, a working model of the solar system as seen, for the first time, from the outside. These are now commonplace but were then revolutionary, and the emperor asked to meet Laplace in order to be given either a set of the books or (accounts differ) a version of the orrery. I personally suspect that the gravedigger of the French Revolution wanted the toy rather than the volumes: he was a man in a hurry and had managed to get the church to baptize his dictatorship with a crown. At any event, and in his childish and demanding and imperious fashion, he wanted to know why the figure of god [Hitchens doesn't capitalize the word] did not appear in Laplace's mind-expanding calculations. And there came the cool, lofty, and considered response. "Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse.".... [pp.66-67]
      One medieval philosopher and theologian who continues to speak eloquently across the ages is William Ockham....
      He was interested, for example, in the stars. He knew far less about the nebulae than we do, or than Laplace did. In fact, he knew nothing about them at all. But he employed them for an interesting speculation. Assuming that god can make us feel the presence of a nonexistent entity, and further assuming that he need not go to this trouble if the same effect can be produced in us by the actual presence of that entity, god could still if he wished cause us to believe in the existence of stars without their being actually present. "Every effect which God causes through the mediation of a secondary cause he can produce immediately by himself." However, this does not mean that we must believe in anything absurd, since "God cannot cause in us knowledge such that by it a thing is seen evidently to be present though it is absent, for that involves a contradiction."...
      ...It has taken us several hundred years since Ockham to come to the realization that when we gaze up at the stars, we very often are seeing light from distant bodies that have long since ceased to exist. It doesn't particularly matter that the right to look through telescopes and speculate about the result was obstructed by the church; this is not Ockham's fault and there is no general law that obliges the church to be that stupid...[W]e can now do this [knowing] while dropping (or even, if you insist, retaining) the idea of a god. But in either case, the theory works without that assumption. You can believe in a divine mover if you choose, but it makes no difference at all, and belief among astronomers and physicists has become private and fairly rare. [pp. 69-70]
      Credo quia absurdum, as the "church father" Tertullian put it, either disarmingly or annoyingly according to your taste. "I believe it because it is absurd." It is impossible to quarrel seriously with such a view. If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding, and has confronted us with findings far more "miraculous" and "transcendent" than any theology.
      Actually, the "leap of faith"—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a "leap" that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the "leap" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn't in fact rely on "faith" at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected "proofs." This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion's monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are. [p. 71]

Ah, my potato-sack miracle! my two angelic interventions! Reading Hitchens leaves me with the contented feeling of a reader enjoying himself and not feeling dismayed by the multifarious contradictions of a world that seems more and more to be mad enough to have been made by the Being its beings into Being prayed.

People can (and will!) continue to believe what they want to believe, and I will not condemn them, so long as they do so benignly, not proselytizing me or others or trying to tyrannize us in any way.

Only thing is, of course, what are the chances of that?

First-person report of two angelic interventions

On Friday I wrote to two people whom I told that an angel may have been prompted me to do so. One was my cousin Evelyn. I told her that I had thought of her so often lately, I wondered whether something was going on with her and her husband. She said that there didn't seem to be, but maybe the angel was prompting me to give her the occasion to remind me of the family reunion scheduled for this September in Nashville. Immediately upon reading this I had an inrush of feeling that indeed perhaps it was time for me to give up my rather wrong-headed, curmudgeonly stance regarding the get-together and...just go. I called all three of my surviving sisters and learned that the two of them who are physically able do plan to go to Nashville in September. Now I do too.

The other person I wrote to was my old boss at the University of North Carolina. He retired a few years ago and we've pretty regularly kept in touch. But I hadn't heard from him for several months. He wrote back that my timing was "amazing," for the very next day he and his wife were leaving town for six months....

Angelic inverventions? Perhaps. I like to think so. If this be religion, it seems to be only benign, no possibility of tyranny anywhere in sight.

Monday Musings

The other day I had occasion to share with someone something that I have thought for many years:

God [if God exists] can communicate with us any damn way God pleases [that is, through the Bible, the Quran..., the angelic kindness of a stranger...]

This morning as I was about to enter the allergy clinic for my bimonthly antigen injection, a vibrant, dark-skinned young nurse called out to me from down the hall, "Hi! What's your name?"

"[Moristotle]...What's yours?"