Turning 72 in 2018: I Dwell in Possibility

Returning to my reposts of birthday essays, which will eventually form an almost continuous series of observations, expectations etc. spanning nearly 20 years.  

It was a pretty good 72nd year.  No one close to me died, or came down with a serious illness or injury, though I certainly know people my age with significant health challenges.  The exception is our beloved cat Pema--we're currently nursing her through a terminal illness, making this a sad and anxious time. But as for my health, I'm looking forward to my annual trek up Trinidad Head later today. Yesterday I set my home court record with 7 straight midrange baskets (I can't in good conscience call them "jumpers") and 9 out of 10, before I missed two in a row.

I'm pleased with writing I did this past year, including what amounts to drafts of two short books which I have cleverly hidden within my blogs on the Internet.  My recollections--first of books, but especially of my senior year of college fifty years ago-- went very well, by my own lights anyway.  The process was fascinating. Reclaiming context through factual research seemed to evoke and free memories, some of which came to me in the act of writing.

Lately I've had episodes of visual memories, which have been rare before now. I'm not good at visualization.  "Imagine yourself on a beautiful beach" etc. has never worked for me as a meditation or relaxation technique, for example, if it depends on seeing it.  But lately, visual memories have come almost unbidden, and once I've had them (usually on the edge of sleep but not always), they more or less remain accessible.

The past, both culturally and personally, remains my focus, my fireplace (which is what "focus" means.)  I'm interested in depth, reiteration, a more thorough exploration, rather than new places and experiences.  Fortunately I don't have to defend that choice.  "Don't Want To, Don't Need To, Can't Make Me, I'm Retired."

At the same time, I am exploring new ideas, though they tend to be more like going farther along a path I darted down for awhile before.  Some of these bear upon that other area of concern, the future.

The future has looked dark many times in my life, probably most times.  But there was always an idea or two that suggested the possibility of light coming into being. That is less so now.

The newest ideas I'm still learning about are actually 20 or 30 years old.  It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, that the scientific ideas informing the Gaia hypothesis were percolating.  Its basis was formulated even earlier, in the late 1960s when I was in college (but it was so unorthodox that it never would have been mentioned in a science class.)  In studying the atmosphere of the planet Mars, James Lovelock discovered that the physics and chemistry of that planet predicted what it was like.  But the physics and chemistry of Earth does not describe its actual atmosphere.  There is another element determining and regulating Earth's atmosphere, and keep its temperature fairly constant despite changes in the heat coming from the sun.   That element is life.

The Earth is self-organizing and self-regulating through its specific lifeforms. Living systems, from the smallest bacteria to the entire surface and atmosphere, self-maintain.  That makes the Earth a single system, and by some definitions,  a kind of organism.

The implications were vast, and go beyond ecology--the study of the Earth as our home--to the study of the Earth as our body.  The idea of Gaia was an immediate magnet for various New Age enthusiasts but in the late 1980s, William Irwin Thompson and the Lindisfarne Association published a couple of collections of essays derived from conferences the Association had held since the early eighties. (Gaia: A Way of Knowing, and Gaia 2: Emergence).

The authors were serious people, including James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the scientist who helped him develop the hypothesis, as well visionary cybernetic pioneer Gregory Bateson, visionary neurobiologist Franciso Varela, physicist Arthur Zajonc, botanist and popular writer Wes Jackson, economist and futurist Hazel Henderson and W.I Thompson himself, who promoted the idea that Gaia could be the guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s.

As far as I can tell, there didn't turn out to be a guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s, nor do I know of any guiding idea since.  At best, some segments of society sort of caught up to ecological ideas of the 1960s and 70s.  Others got sidetracked by computer technology to contemplate bogus ideas like "the singularity" or just got sucked into the social media vacuum.

But lately I have been reading Slanted Truths, a book of the mid-90s, a somewhat shaped collection of essays by Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan. (He is also the son of Carl Sagan, and has taken on his father's job of popularizing science, though he's much more his mother's son in the science he attempts to popularize.)

Their essays were mostly published separately in periodicals and are often repetitive (which is actually good, since the ideas are still new and the science unfamiliar) so it is an immersive experience.  (These writings are however more coherent than either of the authors speaking: Dorion does not have his father's skills and both are pretty unorganized in the events YouTube has preserved, though Margulis is nevertheless magnetic and occasionally mesmerizing.)

Margulis herself transformed life sciences by concentrating on microorganisms, and showing the crucial role they played in evolution.  She also showed that these are the organisms upon which Gaia's ability to self-regulate depend, more than any other.  Bacteria is the essential lifeform to maintain the life of planet Earth, including its atmosphere.

I am reading this in the context of a year in which it seems that the collapse of civilization within the next century, and perhaps the fall of the American Republic much sooner, seems more and more likely.  On a somewhat longer timeline, the fate of the human species is in question.  If the climate crisis and mass extinction are as bad as they seem they will be, homo sapiens may be facing enough reduction that extinction is possible.  In a previous climate crisis, homo sapiens were down to perhaps 2500 beings in one small location.  Coming back depends on how extensive the changes are, and for how long.  Nuclear weapons complicate this further.

Mass extinctions may wipe out all large mammals and perhaps too many keystone species we don't even know about.  But the ultimate threat to life seems to depend on what happens to the oceans, and whether we end up killing them.

Margulis and Sagan leave me with at least this hope for the future of life: that bacteria are likely to endure and adapt, and since from them in time came all of the species we know, they can just start again.  Raccoons or rats or even ants may be faster to develop but then, does the planet want to go through all this again?  I sometimes wonder whether a species that invented helicopter gunships even deserves to survive.  Maybe evolution will settle next time on a scenario like that in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Galapagos, in which descendants of humans are more like porpoises, who frolic in pools with fins, incapable of building anything.

For the near future, Gaia offers some possibility of offsetting the worst effects of global heating, in that we don't understand exactly how life regulates the atmosphere.  Perhaps that self-regulation can overcome excessive global heating, although it seems there is unlikely to be enough time to adapt.  But maybe.

Which suggest another source of hope: our ignorance.  We think we know a lot, but all we've learned are a few limited mechanisms and how to do some stuff, mostly through trial and error.  We've just done too much of it, on too large a scale. Because in part there are too many of us.

In fact we know almost nothing about our world and our universe.  Steven Wright used to joke: "I bought a packet of powdered water but I don't know what to add to it."  We don't really even know what water is.  We certainly can't make the stuff.

We've made up all these categories and theories that soon reach their limits, though we insist they are universal, they are "laws."  Science has at least acknowledged that Newtonian physics doesn't apply in all realms. (And that's because we know how to do some stuff using the math of quantum mechanics, but we have no idea why they work.)  It took recent scientists like Lynn Margulis to begin showing that Darwinian evolution in its traditional definition doesn't apply to everything alive, or even to the origin of species.

Margulis and other microbiologists also showed that many of the assumptions made about how life works in general was based only on larger lifeforms: animals and plants.  But many of those "rules" don't apply to microorganisms such as bacteria.  Either these rules operated in a limited field or they are generally mistaken.

We use definitions as tools and then get captured by our definitions.  The most interesting philosophical essay I read this year, by Galen Strawson, suggests that the conundrum of consciousness as a non-physical phenomenon may lie in a restricted definition of "physical."   The universes of the very small and the very large have shot down a lot of our middle-range assumptions and definitions.  With dark matter, dark energy and all the other more or less theoretical aspects of the universe, exactly what "physical" means is (or should be) in doubt.

So maybe there's something we'll learn that we can't now foresee, something that will make enough of a difference to avoid catastrophe.

For those younger than me who will live in the future, hope is a daily commitment to make things better.  Hope isn't what you feel, it's what you do.  For me, looking at a future that extends beyond imagination, I am buoyed by possibilities we can begin to imagine but can't quite imagine, way beyond anything fantasized in Silicon Valley.

So I greet the beginning of my 73rd year with a poem by Emily Dickinson.  She was a favorite of Lynn Margulis (though admittedly not of mine)--I saw a line of this one that was sort of quoted by Dorion Sagan.  The whole poem however is what I want to say:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

Origins: "The Holidays", Christmas and New Year's

 

If you were a Catholic during the first two centuries of Christianity and you wanted to celebrate the birth of Jesus, you would be committing a sin and would go straight to hell.

That's because the Church fathers were emphasizing Christ's divinity and not his humanity.  Besides, no one knew (or much cared) when that birth happened.  The Biblical accounts point to spring, but it was kind of so what.

Then by the late third century the Christian church was large and influential enough to challenge the Roman gods, competing with the contemporary cult of the sun god Mithras, imported from Persia and popular enough to be declared the official religion of the Roman Empire.  It celebrated the birth of Mithras, or Natalis Solis Invicti, with a good long festival centered on December 25.

 It just happened to be about then that the Church got interested in Christ's birth, and more or less arbitrarily declared it was--surprising coincidence!--on December 25.  It took awhile but Christmas began to be celebrated throughout the Empire by the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Constantine was baptized a Christian.  

This December date is roughly that of the winter solstice, long a traditional time for ritual and celebration (including in surviving Indigenous cultures), as the days start to get longer, announcing the coming birth of spring.  In my life it was my Uncle Carl who explained the solstices and equinoxes to me--the nuns teaching me in school never mentioned them, possibly because such knowledge still seemed darkly pagan.

Like those of most holidays, Christmas customs are a mishmash of approximated traditions from many cultures in many eras, often shorn of their original meanings. But an impressive number of them are pretty recent--from the nineteenth century to the World War II era and beyond--especially the songs.  

When I was a child in the 1950s, we used to hear Gene Autry's original recording of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" on the radio--it was a poem devised as an advertisement for Montgomery Ward department stores that was set to music in 1949 and became a massive hit for him.  It has since sold more records that any song except Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," which itself was written in 1942 by Irving Berlin for the Crosby movie "Holiday Inn."

That's me in 1951, defending my sister
Kathy in my new Hopalong outfit

Crosby had another Christmas hit the next year with "I'll Be Home for Christmas," very definitely a World War II song. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire...) is from 1945. 

Though Perry Como had a bigger hit with it in 1953, Gene Autry followed up his Rudolph bonanza with "Frosty the Snowman" in 1950, and I used to see the animated accompaniment to the song on WJAC-TV in Johnstown;  the station puts it on the air every Christmastime to this day. 

  "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas" is from 1951, with its specific reference to the first television star to generate product lines, the cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy.

Even the venerable "Jingle Bells" is from the mid-nineteenth century, but for years it was simply one of many songs of that era about sleigh rides, and was first performed in minstrel shows.  It took at least a decade or two before it became associated with Christmas.  Now it is perhaps the most familiar Christmas song in the world.

Rudolph's origin in advertising wasn't unique.  Advertisers were mighty drivers of Christmas imagery for obvious reasons.  They were also apparently responsible for changing the expression "the holidays" from referring to school vacations in the summer to the Christmas to New Years period (and conveniently so, for this was before the non-Christian holidays such as Hanukkah and Kwanza were widely included in general public perception.)  The earliest example of "Happy Holidays" imagery appears to be a 1937 ad for Camel cigarettes.

When I was a kid in the 50s, the holidays were really "the holidays"--they extended past New Years.  I notice here in Arcata these days that holiday decorations go up early (I saw Halloween decorations in late September), which is of course how retail stores and related businesses have done it for decades--get in the spirit (and the spending) early.  But Christmas decorations are often taken down even before New Years.  In my childhood we didn't decorate until the week before or even the week of Christmas.  In some families it was traditional to trim the tree on Christmas Eve or maybe the day before that.  

Christmas itself was for children, and the close family gathered on the Eve and the Day.  But after that it was more for the adults.  Certain pastries and other foods and certainly drinks came out that weren't around at other times of the year.  And then the visiting commenced.  Close family again sometimes, but mostly more distant relations and my parents' friends and their families would visit us or we would visit them, or both.  These could be my mother's old friends from high school (who were often related to us somehow anyway) or my father's current and past work colleagues, and then later those of my mother's when she started working in hospital administration.  They weren't the most fun times for me but they were memorable--my chance to observe adults in their natural environment.

This would go on past New Years, and the decorations would stay up until early January.  It was a long Christian tradition to take them down on Twelfth Night (which is what they called January 5 in England), the night before the feast of the Epiphany, or the visit of the Magi. We weren't that exact, but it usually was around then.  Maybe sooner, if the Christmas tree was drying out and shedding needles.  It's worth noting that commercial activity was at a low ebb after Christmas then, until perhaps the January White Sales.  So they really were the holidays.

Like Christmas, New Years traditions are a cultural hodgepodge.  But there are some revealing origins, mostly associated with the new year as celebrated in the spring. January 1 became the first of the new year with the introduction of the Julian calendar in Rome, but wasn't firmly established throughout the world until the universal adoption of the Gregorian calendar, which took centuries.

But because the new year had been celebrated nearer the March equinox, many traditions were associated with crops and their fertility.   Next to the Fourth of July, New Year's Eve is the holiday most associated with making noise, including explosions.  This tradition was originally to scare away the demons that destroyed crops, especially with diseases.  

On the other hand, some new year traditions were to encourage growth.  The tradition of wassail, a hot drink with alcoholic properties, was part of ancient Anglo-Dane and Anglo-Saxon holiday rites.  In some areas of England, the tradition was all about conviviality, and was associated with Christmas. But at least in one region it was part of another ritual.  Some sources say it was a Twelfth Night ritual, but Henry David Thoreau writes about it in detail (in his essay "Wild Apples") and associates one part of it with New Year's.

In Thoreau's account, the drink was an apple cider, and was used in a rite to encourage apple trees to be fruitful.  It would be shared with the trees on Christmas Eve, and people would dance around it and chant a particular song, to call for a bountiful harvest.  Then on New Year's Eve, in another ritual of noise, a group of boys would visit apple orchards and engage in what was called "apple howling" to encourage the trees, and once again perform a chant while circling them. They also rapped on the trees with sticks, which was called "wassailing," according to Thoreau.  

A New Year's tradition of the Iroquois in America, still existing when Europeans arrived, was to build a huge bonfire and throw their possessions into it, so it would literally be a new year.