We need poetry to wake the dark we are —Osip Mandelstam
Europe needs Mandelstam in its firmament in the same way that Spain can't live without Machado. In today's compromised atmosphere we need contact with greatness. —Jim Harrison
Greetings from the far left coast. Happy International Workers Day, also known as May Day!
Yesterday was Mom's birthday. She was sixty-nine when she stepped on a rainbow October 2, 1997. Too soon. It is always too soon. I remember years ago, back in the seventies, when a friend remarked that Mom would light up when she was with her sons. And I remember earlier, when I was a boy, Mr. Jim Bull calling her Sunshine. It was apt. Memories.
Today began with a nice nine-mile run, temperature fifty degrees when I set out just before seven, sky a mix of sun and cloud. This week I ran in compliance with new CDC guidance and Oregon Health Authority masking guidelines, which is to say, without a mask for the first time since December, when I noticed that being outdoors and able to maintain socialist distance had dropped off the list of exceptions to the state mask requirement. I gladly put the mask aside in situations where it is no longer needed, but in truth, wearing it is not that big a deal. I quickly became accustomed to the mask even while running. Any infringement on my liberty is negligible, minuscule, hardly worth a passing thought. Liberty is not the issue. It is a matter of public health. As I see it compliance with mask requirements is a matter of civic responsibility and decency.
Caution and prudence remain my watchwords. I try not to be too neurotic about it, and I try to avoid doing anything really stupid. Oregon is in the midst of yet another spike, with cases rising more than twenty percent for five consecutive weeks. On Friday fifteen counties were moved into the extreme risk category with indoor dining banned and significantly reduced capacity at gyms and entertainment venues.
The increase may be partly attributable to variants that are more contagious and partly to people too quick to resume what was once normal life. A slowdown in daily vaccinations is another factor. Anti-vax sentiment is distressingly widespread as is political opposition to vaccinations in areas whose populations are predominantly of the Republican persuasion.
Once more into the breach, the treacherous terrain of politics and current affairs. The is no getting away from it.
Joe Biden delivered a solid address on Wednesday. For the record, I like him and I like Kamala Harris. How much of his legislative agenda will be enacted remains to be seen. The dismal truth is that Republicans believe that bipartisanship means that Democrats accept their agenda. It has nothing to do with give and take, compromise, wuss stuff like that.
Tim Scott responded with a standard recital of partisan talking points. I turned away after only a few minutes. Some reports gave him a more favorable review. Perhaps he got better as he went along. If so, I missed it.
This is no time for Democratic complacency. Dems need to work hard and be smart and have some luck to retain their congressional majorities in 2022 even if Republican chicanery to discourage people from voting fizzles. The Constitution puts them behind the eight ball. James Carville makes the relevant points in an interview at Vox:
if Democrats want power, they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. That’s a fact. That’s not changing.
…
And look, part of the problem is that lots of Democrats will say that we have to listen to everybody and we have to include every perspective, or that we don’t have to run a ruthless messaging campaign. Well, you kinda do. It really matters.… And we have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.
Take someone like Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s obviously very bright. She knows how to draw a headline. In my opinion, some of her political aspirations are impractical and probably not going to happen. But that’s probably the worst thing that you can say about her.
Now take someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia. She’s absolutely loonier than a tune. We all know it. And yet, for some reason, the Democrats pay a bigger political price for AOC than Republicans pay for Greene. That’s the problem in a nutshell. And it’s ridiculous because AOC and Greene are not comparable in any way.
Sean Illing
If you’re a Democrat, you could look at the state of play and say, "We’re winning. We won the White House. We won Congress. We have power. It ain’t perfect, but it ain’t a disaster either."
James Carville
We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off. (Sean Illing interviews James Carville, “Wokeness is a problem and we all know it," Vox, April 27, 2021)
Two more good columns from The Bulwark: Kim Wehle on the DOJ probe of Rudy Giuliani and Mona Charen on Ted Cruz's accidental confession. Wehle provides excellent summation and analysis of l'affaire Rudy. And her observation about Merrick Garland is spot on:
The attorney general is not fooling around. Prior to serving on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Garland spearheaded the DOJ investigation into the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, as well as the conviction of Timothy J. McVeigh. In 2016, he was denied even a hearing on his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—a snub that might come back to bite the Republican party in the longer run. (Takeaways from the FBI's Giuliani Raid, April 30, 2021)
Charen passes along this choice morsel from Cancun Ted's recent op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal:
This is the point in the drama when Republicans usually shrug their shoulders, call these companies "job creators," and start to cut their taxes. Not this time. This time, we won’t look the other way on Coca-Cola’s $12 billion in back taxes owed. (quoted by Charen, Ted Cruz's Accidental Confession, April 30, 2021)
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that Republicans knowingly look the other way when major corporations go in for tax evasion as long as those corporations sign off on the party agenda and keep the campaign contributions coming.
These days the reading stack includes Steven Ozment's The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Europe of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. In a section about varieties of mystical experience in that period, Ozment relates how beliefs of the Franciscans may have played a part in the early development of science. He writes that it is a peculiarity of Franciscan mysticism and spirituality to view the world as a sacrament, a sign of God's power and glory. "Every creature is by nature a sort of picture and likeness of eternal wisdom" (quoted from Bonaventura, Mind's Road to God).
Some believe that this Franciscan appreciation of nature encouraged a more scientific stance toward the world; "observational science becomes…the fulfillment of religious obligation." The sacramental view of the world encouraged meditation on its patterns, symmetry, and regularity, which were seen to be manifestations of divine presence, and such meditation, although religiously motivated, led in turn to that detailed examination of nature on which empirical science thrives. Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–92), inventor of a rudimentary telescope, thermometer, and gunpowder, was a Franciscan, and Franciscans, especially Ockham and his students, have their place in the scientific movement of the later Middle Ages. By contrast, both Dionysian and Eckhartian mysticism viewed preoccupation with the external world as a deadly pitfall on the mind's journey to God and confined the pilgrim to the inner world of the soul. [Memo from the editorial desk: Dionysian mysticism is traced to Dionysius the Areopagite, a fifth century theologian also referred to as the "Pseudo-Dionysius"; the Eckhartian flavor goes back to Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–ca. 1327.]
I love this stuff. That attraction is one of the things that drew me away from math and the sciences my freshman year in college to the lifelong study of philosophy and intellectual history (when my brother headed off to Clemson a few years later Mom gave her okay for him to study anything but philosophy). My interest in science was always on a theoretical and intellectual level, never in the practical realm of the lab, where I was hopeless, so maybe the turn is not all that surprising. It was a matter of exposure to the humanities and a shift in perspective.
My junior year I wrote a paper about Martin Heidegger's notion of truth that won an undergraduate essay award. I returned to Heidegger from time to time over the years that followed and eventually realized that while my twenty-year-old self may not have gotten him all wrong, I had only sketchiest idea what he was getting at. Not I claim any genuine understanding now, not of Heidegger nor of Plato and Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and other giants on whose shoulders we stand. I may have a better grasp of my misunderstanding. This is how thinking goes.
One new blog post: Untimely thoughts prompted by the Chauvin verdict; and sundry digressions, with link below in the usual place.
Keep the faith.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: March 1973. I believe it shows Dr. Long presenting your oft humbled scribe with a copy of The Review of Metaphysics.