Walk on

Protests in the streets against police brutality, stoked by the racist psychopath in the White House... an ugly, primitive moment when it's easy to forget that our species has in fact evolved and advanced from humble origins. I return again and again to Carl Sagan's inspired and encouraging words.

"We humans have set foot on another world in a place called the Sea of Tranquility, an astonishing achievement for creatures such as we, whose earliest footsteps three and one-half million years old are preserved in the volcanic ash of east Africa. We have walked far."

That's why I'll be watching closely again when they try to launch that rocket in Florida tomorrow. We've still got a long way to go, and we need to go together.

Philosophers in the rain

Well I was really geeking out with all the pre-launch coverage on NASA's livestream when they scrubbed the launch due to weather at about T-minus 18 minutes.

I'd been texting E & K, each independently assuring me they'd see to it I get to check attending a launch off my bucket list someday. That's generous of them. I prefer to go while I'm still alive, and hope to live long enough to actually go for the ride. Joining Scotty (James Doohan) and Timothy Leary in orbit would be a nice fallback (though no cheaper any time soon, probably).

Can I get to Cape Kennedy before Saturday's re-launch? Better not, that's our anniversary.

So that was disappointing, but also an opportunity to practice my stoic chops and transition from disappointment to expectation. What can you do about the weather but accept it?

https://twitter.com/grantdraws

Guess there's more to the philosophy of weather -- and more to climate than weather -- than stoic acceptance (which need not collapse wistfully in resignation). I'm kind of a skeptic and cynic, but not this kind. Sometimes I'm an epicurean. I'm almost always a peripatetic. I have a stick to notch. So the eclectic philosophy makes sense. Taking the long view takes us well beyond the morning forecast.

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." Walden

We ambulatory peripatetics, unlike astronauts, tend to be pretty defiant of inclement weather. We can "toe that line" because crossing it is rarely catastrophic, our source of locomotion is not explosively combustible. Our defiance (of weather) is rarely life-endangering.

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." I always credit Mr. Twain with that witticism but apparently it was Mr. Warner who said it. Whatever. The implied advice, as William James Buffet said, is to take the weather with you and "sing like a bird released." Sing in the rain. Or think. Or just be.

Point is, we can't control externals but we can surely push ourselves to get up and out and do what needs to be done. We need to explore our world, close in and as far out as we can push. We're wonderers and wanderers who've already walked far, undeterred by a few droplets.

Circling

This afternoon we'll find out if Elon Musk can successfully launch astronauts into the next frontier. "If a private company can loft humans to orbit today, why not the moon next or Mars some years in the future? A successful launch could ignite a future long imagined by science fiction writers in which space is a destination for more and more people." nyt 

Or, it could escalate the monetization and militarization of space. Today, though, I’m going to focus on the brighter prospect and just enjoy the ride.

In anticipation, yesterday I tuned in to the NASA channel’s livestream from the ISS. Round and round the old globe spun, sunrise sunset... It was mesmerizing and, in a way I suppose many others might not fathom, joyously reassuring. Call it the joy of circling the rock.

A section of Sunday’s Times celebrated the unanticipated joys of life in quarantine, including “the joy of circling the block.” That’s nothing new to a peripatetic, we already knew the pleasures of close attention to the expanding circles of one’s native ground.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who just turned 217, was a peripatetic and thus a circler. “This surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding...There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.” Circles

Circling day after day after day, the volatility becomes manageable for those who’ve learned the art of sliding steadily and constantly onward. “We live best as appreciators of horizons, whether we reach them or not,” says my new favorite poet/philosopher David Whyte (“What to Remember When Waking”). 

Hold that thought, it’s full of  evolutionary and  environmental implications I look forward to exploring  in July’s virtual classroom (my reprised summer course Evolution in America) and in a real (!) classroom this fall (Environmental Ethics).

What I remember when waking and walking is what I tend to forget when caught up in everydayness, especially the beckoning horizon. That’s what makes today’s rocket launch so peripatetically compelling. Let’s get out there and see what’s just around the corner. LISTEN

(Postscript, 3:18 pm -- launch scrubbed due to weather, rescheduled for Saturday.)

Memorial

That was a different sort of Memorial Day out in the public sphere, more subdued than the traditional kickoff of summer in years past--even for a holiday officially dedicated to solemn remembrance.  I biked past the empty public pool in our neighborhood, just to confirm that my neighbors have more sense than those oblivious revelers at Lake of the Ozarks. They do. No public bathing here.

But it was a pretty typical Memorial Day in our backyard, with near-90 temperatures making our own little pool inviting, before yet another sudden storm blew in. The grilled burgers and dogs were great, as was the partial family reunion.

I spent much of the morning revisiting old home movies and memorializing my late dad, who passed in the fall of '08. That May, twelve (!) years ago, I sat down with him for a series of meaningful conversations. Yesterday felt like the right time to revisit them. It was a pleasantly-jolting reminder that Faulkner and the old Irish proverb are right: the past isn't dead, it isn't even past.

He reminisced about life on the farm in the '30s, recalling meteor showers and nights sleeping under the stars, and the half-moon "privy" house, and the news of the day that got his attention -- things like the crash of the Hindenburg, the construction of Mount Rushmore and the Golden Gate Bridge, sitdown strikes in Michigan...

Then the conversation turned philosophical, and I had an opportunity to share a remarkable 1882 letter William James sent to his dad when word of Henry Sr.'s impending demise reached his son abroad. Having quite recently lost my mother that spring twelve years ago, the aptness of the letter seemed to me quite striking. Dad knew I did not believe in "the other side" where "dear old Mother" might be waiting, but I wanted him to know I understood why such belief might for some, and possibly for him, be irresistibly compelling.

We have been so long accustomed to the hypothesis of your being taken away from us, especially during the past ten months, that the thought that this may be your last illness conveys no very sudden shock. You are old enough, you've given your message to the world in many ways and will not be forgotten; you are here left alone, and on the other side, let us hope and pray, dear, dear old Mother is waiting for you to join her. If you go, it will not be an in harmonious thing. Only, if you are still in possession of your normal consciousness, I should like to see you once again before we part. I stayed here only in obedience to the last telegram, and am waiting now for Harry who knows the exact state of my mind, and who will know yours - to telegraph again what I shall do. Meanwhile, my blessed old Father, I scribble this line (which may reach you though I should come too late), just to tell you how full of the tenderest memories and feelings about you my heart has for the last few days been rilled. In that mysterious gulf of the past into which the present soon will fall and go back and back, yours is still for me the central figure. All my intellectual life I derive from you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof, I'm sure there's a harmony somewhere, and that our strivings will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of estimating, so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the influence.... As for us; we shall live on each in his way, - feeling somewhat unprotected, old as we are, for the absence of the parental bosoms as a refuge, but holding fast together in that common sacred memory. We will stand by each other and by Alice, try to transmit the torch in our offspring as you did in us, and when the time comes for being gathered in, I pray we may, if not all, some at least, be as ripe as you. As for myself, I know what trouble I've given you at various times through my peculiarities; and as my own boys grow up, I shall learn more and more of the kind of trial you had to overcome in superintending the development of a creature different from yourself, for whom you felt responsible. I say this merely to show how my sympathy with you is likely to grow much livelier, rather than to fade and not for the sake of regrets. As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I cant say anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if that were true, all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and ex presses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night. Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don t see you again Farewell! a blessed farewell! Your WILLIAM.

We talked -- well, conversed remotely -- a lot this past semester in A&P (the atheism course) about whether belief in a supernatural afterlife is fully compatible with a meaningfully-human life on earth. I'm on the side of those, like Martin Hagglund (This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom), who think not. Or at least not for most of us, and definitely not for me. But a happy reunion surely would solve and justify much.

More to the point for me is the recognition that days like yesterday, days of pleasant memory and grateful memorial, are sufficient justification of our personal finitude. Dad is still alive to me, I still listen to his words and seek his guidance, wondering in countless circumstances and situations what he would do in my place.

Again, the past is not even past.

May 28, 2008:

Darrow's creed

I've always dismissed the form of magical thinking that imagines it possible to "attract" people and things merely by thinking them, but yesterday was fleetingly tempted to entertain it when I received an unsolicited email from someone I happened just then to have been thinking of.  Then I tried to recall all the times I've not opened emails from people I happened to have been thinking of, and realized the magic is merely a slick trick. Impressive in the moment, though.

Anyway, that email from a respected younger colleague discussed our mutual interest in the famous Scopes defender Clarence Darrow. My correspondent reflected on Darrow's striking views concerning free will and criminal responsibility, and their relevance to conversations we'd had this past semester surrounding "neuro-existentialism" and the challenges posed by neuroscience to conventional notions of blame, punishment, "correction" etc.

I was reminded of a passage in John Farrell's biography Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, from which I'd learned that Darrow and "my first landlord" Winterton Curtis, who made such an impression on me in my early youth, had conversed in Dayton Tennessee in 1925. Curtis divulged to Darrow that he'd just received a terminal cancer diagnosis and thought he had no more than a year to live.

I wonder how the dominoes of my life would have fallen, if Curtis had died three decades before my birth. My parents would have never rented rooms in his home, he'd never have "pulled" dollar bills from my 6-year old ears, my father would never have speculated that the Curtis connection had something to do with my subsequent scholarly interest in evolution.

But that's magical thinking too, isn't it, to pluck particular contingencies from the converging streams of our lives and imagine that they were inordinately pivotal? Still, I'm fascinated by this particular what-if. And by another...

Curtis wrote to Darrow later, Farrell recounts, thanking him for "sharing a creed--'that those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.'" What if we all shared that creed? We might think the resulting ethos of toleration and social comity was magical, indeed.

Growing up

LISTEN. Maturity in the Kantian sense is going to be an anchoring theme in my CoPhi (Intro) classes this Fall, with Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up? one of our new texts. She's a Kantian, and while I'm generally not one in the ethical sphere (leaning pragmatic/utilitarian) I do also endorse the sentiment that accepting responsibility for one's own thought is central to philosophy's civilizing mission.

The Kantian point is another of those crucial remembrances our conformist natures, and culture, press us to forget.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! What is Enlightenment?

Growing up is letting go of the false security that comes when we defer to what "they" all say and know, and realizing our own voice -- but also realizing that our voice is finite, and part of a vast trans-temporal chorus. Self-possession of this sort goes hand-in-hand with a humanizing humility and species solidarity.

It's a late-dawning awareness for most of us, that at last brings real maturity and generosity. David Whyte, again, expresses this so well.

From his 2016 On Being conversation:

I often feel that one of the real signs of maturity is not only understanding that you’re a mortal human being and you are going to die, which usually happens in your mid-40s or 50s — “Oh, I am actually going to die. It’s not someone else I’m going to become.” But another step of maturity is actually realizing the rest of creation might be a little relieved to let you go [laughs] — that you can stop repeating yourself, stop taking all this oxygen up and make way for something else, which you’ve actually beaten a trail for. And it could be your son, your daughter, could be people you’ve taught or mentored; it could be — the more generous you are, the more that circle extends into our society and those who go after us.

More pithily, to repeat that marvelous line about the deepest source of unhappiness:

Why are you unhappy? -"Because 98.98% of everything you do is for yourself, but there isn't one."

So get over yourself, is the lesson. Grow up.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't still have fun, which is why it delighted me to surprise Older Daughter with Ava Duvernay in her mailbox yesterday.

What else to remember

So many things, we're so forgetful.

What do you mean we?, you may say, Speak for yourself. 

Well of course, nobody elected me to speak for The People. We first of all means me, whenever we say it. But I'm not the only one, and I have a strong hunch I'm not alone in noticing that the simplest and most nourishing home-truths, the lessons of a lifetime that make the most tangible, practical, emotionally-sustaining difference  day by day, are also the  hardest to hang onto. David Whyte noticed, for one, lest I too quickly forget yesterday's dawn post.

Remembering how much I like to catch random reflections at daybreak, after sharing Whyte's poem, I pointedly set my alarm for the wee hours and then, predictably as the evening wore on, un-set it. But I awoke this morning well in advance of the designated and abandoned pre-dawn moment, anyway.

Some part of me remembered. I'll sleep when I'm dead, meanwhile there are important conversations to be had, to be rehearsed. Whyte's right, I think, it's the nature of reality to aspire to wakeful words, reflections, recollections, perceptions, and (when the sun's fully present, even on cloudy days in the mode of absence) immediacies beyond words.

Inspired by Whyte, yesterday, I also remembered the wise words of the industriously wakeful Trollope. “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

Really daily: remember not to forget. Every day. Or at least every weekday, more or less. Allowances must be made for Memorial Day, and anniversaries, and milestone birthdays... (I can see you frowning, Tony.)

And remember what Trollope also said, just a couple of paragraphs on (in his autobiography), about Mens sana in corpore sano. Health, in body and mind, is always a matter of balance, and of persistent habit. What worthy achievement isn't, after all?
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Whyte relates an anecdote about an "articulate Irishman" who, writing under an adopted Chinese nom de plume and style of mystic sagacity, asked and answered Why are you unhappy? -"Because  98.98% of everything you do is for yourself, but there isn't one."

And, from Wallace Stevens: "Sometimes the truth depends on a walk around a lake."

Or a creekside, a greenway, a suburban neighborhood... Solvitur ambulando, it is "solved by walking," Diogenes. Q.E.D.

That's today's truth, anyway.

The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience; and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true within those borders of experience. 'Absolutely' they are false; for we know that those limits were casual, and might have been transcended by past theorists just as they are by present thinkers. Pragmatism, Lecture VI

Important to remember that too.

LISTEN... postscript

What to remember

David Whyte's 2010 poem  speaks to our historical moment, as well as to the break of day.

The "other world" might be darkness and dreams, it might be the interior mind struggling to emerge into daylight, it might just be a more functional self. My own view is that, as Emerson said, "there is no other world" in any supernatural sense, but nature permits countless possible worlds of the imagination. And there are countless other worlds in the astro-physical sense too, of course.

Whatever our particular "secret" world is, we're quick to forget it. Good poetry remembers.

WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human
is to become visible,
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance…

Excerpt from ‘What to Remember When Waking’
From RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
Many Rivers Press. ©David Whyte

David Whyte fb

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I wasn't previously familiar with David Whyte's work, before coming across What to Remember just yesterday. But after imbibing just a bit of it, I guessed that he was just the sort of person who might have been a past guest of Krista Tippett's. Sure enough: 4.7.16 (The Conversational Nature of Reality) ... 9.10.18 (The Gathering)