Goines On: Heavenly Productions, Ltd.

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The psychology of “faith the substance of things hoped for” wouldn’t let go of Goines. He wondered about scientists who believe in the divinity of Jesus. Do they accept Christianity’s doctrine of salvation out of a deep need to know things beyond science’s reach, things they can then expect God to reveal to them someday?
    Remembering his college logic studies, Goines thought of another thing the writer of the letter to the Hebrews in Jerusalem could have been doing with the “faith is evidence” maneuver – establishing an axiom to throw in whenever he couldn’t prove something any other way.

Interview: Martha Sink on making pots

Inspire • Create • Serve

Interviewed by Moristotle

I became acquainted with Martha Sink in her role as a librarian with Alamance County Libraries. Questions would arise when I tried to use the libraries’ website, and I was directed to Martha as the person who could answer them for me. Indeed she could, and she was also quick to act on suggestions I made for improving the website. My wife and I even made a special trip to the libraries’ main location so we could meet her.
    When I emailed her recently just to say hi, she told me that her 37 years as an employee of the Alamance County Libraries system had been “a long time” and she had “a new career lined up and underway.” She said that she “figured that when [she] was more interested in throwing pots than coming to work, [she]’d know it was time to retire!”
    I told her I thought my readers would like to hear about her plans, and she agreed to do an interview. My questions are in italics.
    Photographs of some of her creations are interspersed throughout the questions and answers.

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?

11/11/11: The same, palindromic day all over the world

Yes!—at least, it's the same-notated day in North America (month/day/year), Europe (day/month/year), and China (year/month/day). (For a more precise accounting, by country, see Wikipedia.)
    I prefer the Chinese convention for file and folder naming, so much better for sorting reliably by date:

[20]10-01-08
[20]10-11-11
[20]10-12-14
[20]11-01-15
[20]11-03-07
[20]11-08-14
[20]11-11-03
[20]11-11-11

    In North America, the files would sort this way:

01-08-[20]10
01-15-[20]11
03-07-[20]11
08-14-[20]11
11-03-[20]11
11-11-[20]10
11-11-[20]11
12-14-[20]10

    And in Europe, this way:

03-11-[20]11
07-03-[20]11
08-01-[20]10
11-11-[20]10
11-11-[20]11
14-08-[20]11
14-12-[20]10
15-01-[20]11

    Our Chinese predecessors understood sorting.

I'm reminded by this superfluge of 11's that Youie's number, when I was manically besotted with magic and deity, that Summer of '89, was 11. Wouldn't today have been the day to go Youie-manic?
    No, today is as good a day as any not to fall down that rabbit hole. Retain your rationality, young and old.

November 11, 2011,
11 November 2011,
2011 November 11—

they're all the same day on the planet to which we all belong.

By the way [my wife just reminded me], today is the grand opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, located in my Arkansas sister's hometown of Bentonville. WalMart heiress Alice Walton's name is barely mentioned on the museum's website, but she's behind it all, as described in the June 27 New Yorker article, "Alice's Wonderland." 11/11/11! Go, Alice!
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Further reflections on Crystal Bridges

Synchronicity?

Yesterday I published an entry on intellectual property. This morning I read yesterday's newspaper and discovered that Ian McEwan has published a new novel, Solar, a portion of which I had read (and commented on back in December). A couple of sentences from Hephzibah Anderson's review (on Bloomberg News):

The story pivots on a freak accident that catapults a tubby physicist, Michael Beard, to the forefront of the race to find a sustainable energy source. Pursuing this worthy goal in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change, the balding British boffin will clock thousands of miles and resort to intellectual property theft and worse. [my emphasis]

Isn't this just a coincidence? Or is it a Jungian synchronicity? A synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.
    Or some emblem of divinity saying something like "God is watching over you"? In my manic excitement during Youie summer, I took all of the innumerable coincidences I was noticing as just such emblems. (There didn't seem to be anything of any more precise significance that they could possibly mean.) Coincidences have provided many a man and woman an assurance that life is not a matter simply of chance.

How could it be a coincidence [they ask themselves] that I could publish "Intellectual property" the very day that the personally most interesting book review in the local newspaper should use that phrase, and not just casually but by way of characterizing the pivot of the book! This cries out with significance!

Uh, yeah, but what significance? Remember that Carl Jung espoused the procedures of I Ching [The Book of Changes], a "system of divination" in which the adept meditates on potential meanings of chance juxtapositions.

Any juxtaposition can be used creatively to find hidden significance. We can, for example, open a book (any book, a dictionary, say, though a Christian might favor the Bible or a Muslim the Qur'an) and place our finger down at random on a verse. If we then read the verse (or the definition) with the expectation that something of personal import will be suggested, then it is highly probable that something will indeed come to mind.
    Note, though, that this works for almost any occasion. But we don't do it on just any occasion: it takes something like a striking coincidence to push us in that direction.
    Nevertheless, what might I make of this "intellectual property" coincidence? Do I have a valuable intellectual property in Moristotle that I am giving away free on Blogspot? Or should I focus on Michael Beard's theft, mentioned in the book review? Beware, Moristotle, quit including overlong quotations in your blog from the intellectual property of others!

Intellectual property

"Until now," writes Lev Grossman (author of the novels Warp, Codex, and The Magicians, a senior writer and book critic for Time Magazine),

the value of a piece of intellectual property has been defined by how few people possess it. In the future the value will be defined by how many people possess it.

    While it's difficult to know just what Mr. Grossman meant by this, or what he might say if asked what his point was, I think that the reversal from the few to the many depends on a bit of sleight of hand, for he seems to switch from one meaning of "value" to another.
    Intellectual property is a legal concept. The legally protected owners of certain artistic or commercial creations of the mind enjoy the benefits of the exclusive use of those creations (or of fees for licensing their use to others). The value of the few, in this context, refers to the size of the benefit (especially monetary) enjoyed by the legally protected owners.
    The value of the many, on the other hand, seems to refer to the practical benefit of an intellectual property to all of those who are able to apply it. The more who are enjoying such practical benefit, the greater the value of the property in that sense.
    But the two values go hand in hand. The legally protected owners can't enjoy much monetary benefit from their properties if there aren't many people who can benefit from the properties practically. That has been true in the past, and it will continue to be true in the future.
    In this case at least, Mr. Grossman's skill at prognostication seems to have been eclipsed by his skill at obfuscation. I can't speak for any of his other writings, but he may be a better novelist than a journalist.

"The actual, not the magical..."

Brain surgeon Henry Perowne, in Ian McEwan's 2005 novel, Saturday, has, under his daughter Daisy's direction,

read the whole of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary...
    They had the virtue, at least, of representing a recognisable physical reality; which could not be said for the so-called magical realists she opted to study in her final year. What were these authors of reputation doing—grown men and women of the twentieth century—granting supernatural powers to their characters? He never made it all the way through a single one of those irksome confections. And written for adults, not children. In more than one, heroes and heroines were born with or sprouted wings—a symbol, in Daisy's term, of their liminality; naturally, learning to fly became a metaphor for bold aspiration. Others were granted a magical sense of smell, or tumbled unharmed out of high-flying aircraft. One visionary [in McEwan's own novel A Child in Time] saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him.
    A man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains is bound to respect the material world, its limits, and what it can sustain—consciousness, no less. It isn't an article of faith with him, he knows it for a quotidian fact, the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs. If that's worthy of awe, it also deserves curiosity; the actual, not the magical, should be the challenge. This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible. [pp. 95-97]

Serendipity

Today's Word^*

serendipity \ser-uhn-DIP-uh-tee\, noun:

The faculty or phenomenon of making fortunate accidental discoveries.

"Still, I was more subject to serendipity than I yet knew. Soon risk, chance, and a letter from Sir Alun Reese-Jones, the Master of Trinity, my college at Cambridge, were to set my life on an adventurous course."
            – David Freeman, One of Us

"Yet even as I planned a rough route, leaving plenty of room for serendipity, I was uncomfortably aware that journeys have a way of creating their own momentum."
            – Lesley Hazleton, Driving to Detroit

"There again, perhaps because of serendipity, or an especially conscientious team of doctors, it can also happen that the crucial clues are noticed and recorded for posterity."
            – Edward Hooper, The River

The word serendipity was formed by English author Horace Walpole (1717-1797) from Serendip (also Serendib), an old name for Sri Lanka, in reference to a Persian tale, "The Three Princes of Serendip," whose heroes "discovered, quite unexpectedly, great and wonderful good in the most unlikely of situations, places and people."

Long a devotee of serendipity myself, I admit that I have taken my own pleasure in numerous serendipities in my life. With a colder eye now, though, I observe that we probably encounter just as many things in life (if not more) that could be unfortunate accidental discoveries. But so far as I know we don't have a word for that. We have the word serendipity because it serves us better and makes us happy to focus on and accentuate the positive. Rather, I suppose, like believing in a benevolent God and various other varieties of favorable magic. We believe in what we want or need to believe in.
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* http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/

PTL xxxx

When I saw the North Carolina license plate "PTL xxxx" this morning, I thought of the club started by the televangelicals Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in the 1970's. "PTL" stood for "Praise The Lord." The late Jerry Falwell even got involved after the club fell on hard times owing to Jim's drugging and raping a church secretary. According to Wikipedia,

The September 21, 1987 issue of Time Magazine noted that Jerry Falwell "plunged" down a 163-foot "hellish" water slide in fulfillment to "a promise made during a fund-raising drive that netted $20 million for the debt-ridden PTL."

And PTL reminded me of a placard on the wall of my sister Mary's guest room: "Praise the Lord...anyway." That is, Praise the Lord not only because something good has happened to you (you're still alive, for example), but even though someone else may have been raped, murdered, or killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq....

We silly, magic-believing humans want God to be good. And for the bad that God is probably responsible for (if He, She, or It is responsible for other stuff), we make up reasons why that's really good too. Someone's got to die to make room on the planet, for example. One animal has to be slaughtered if another is to eat. Eat meat, anyway. Humans need bad stuff to happen so that they can have "learning experiences." Nevermind if the ones who get crushed under a bus flunk the exam immediately. Stuff happens, and they get to take a make-up in the afterlife. Maybe other animals don't get that second chance, but...well, they don't really feel pain anyway, right? Et cetera, et cetera.

I actually started thinking about this before I saw the "PTL" license plate. When I woke up this morning, my book tape player had of course gone all of the way to the end after I fell asleep last night listening to David Lodge's Small World: An Academic Romance. I figured I might as well wake up by listening to a few more "pages" before I got up. (I certainly didn't feel like springing out of bed yet—not that I feel that way often anymore, alas.)

I didn't know at what spot on Side 3^* of the tape I'd fallen asleep (that is, approximately how many seconds I might need to rewind), so I tried to tune in to "my spirit self," which never sleeps and observes everything, and sense when he (or it? or she?) was telling me to stop. When I felt something, I stopped the rewind and, sure enough, I was at a spot I sort of remembered listening to not long before I fell asleep. It had worked again.

Whenever it "hadn't worked," I'd always thought that I had failed to tune in and so didn't sense when my spirit self was telling me to stop. But what I got to thinking this morning was that my expectation that my spirit self wouldn't try to trick me (that is, wouldn't lie to me) might be a false expectation. What if he let the tape run all the way back without saying anything to me at all? What if he said it almost instantly and kept saying it as I inched my way back? In fact, might this have been what was happening on certain occasions...?

And what if God plays tricks on us? He certainly seemed to play them on the other folks who didn't wake up this morning (or on those who died yesterday and didn't even get to go to sleep last night, and especially on the Iraqis and on the Americans that Bush keeps sending to Iraq for whatever his reason is this week).

Or, to "simplify" things (although I don't understand how it could possibly make things simpler), what if there isn't any spirit self, and what if God doesn't exist? What if there are other reasons or agencies—chance, neuronal activity, who knows what?

But we'd probably still believe in magic.
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* This special recording medium from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped has four sides packed at half-speed (15/16 inches per second) on each cassette tape.