Friday, January 27, 2012

Dying

posted by Chet at 11:55 AM UTC

I'm sure I have written here before about Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm -- about the size of this letter i (without the dot) -- that has become one of the most thoroughly studied animals in biology. Its habits are humble. It is nonpathogenic, noninfectious. It breeds prodigiously. It is transparent. It can be frozen and thawed alive. And heaven knows what else makes it the darling of the wormologists..

More than anything else, it is about a simple an organism as you can find with a nervous system. C. elegans (of the dominant hermaphrodite variety; there are also a few males to enliven the mix) has just 959 cells, which have been individually mapped, exactly the same from worm to worm. Think of that! Less than a thousand cells and it eats, defecates, wiggles from place to place, lays eggs, and otherwise lives a rather full and robust life. Contrast that with the tens of trillions of cells in the human body.

More. C. elegan's genome programs not 959 cells, but 1090. Of these, 131 are slated in advance to die, rather like the cells that die between the webbed digits of a human embryo to give us our useful fingers. Apoptosis, it's called. Programmed cell death. The 2002 Nobel Prize in physiology went to Sydney Brenner, Robert Horvitz and John Sulston for their work on programmed cell death in C. elegans. Tens of billions of cells in our own bodies die each day by apoptosis. We are dying all the time, in bits and pieces. Death is always with us, holding hands with life, hitchhiking in our genome. Whispering in our ear: "I'm here." Nibble, nibble. Waiting, waiting, for the full feast, the final meal.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Books

posted by Chet at 11:49 AM UTC

Last week's New York Times Book review highlighted the ten bestselling non-fiction books of 2011. Here, I thought, is a good snapshot of America.

Let's start with #10: Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, the story of the presidential assassination and its aftermath. Sounds like the kind of story I'd like to read, except the primary author puts me off. Unfair? Maybe. But I prefer my history from historians without a political ax to grind.

#9: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Read it and wrote about it here. A smart, honest book by an unbiased historian. Three cheers for Jobs; three cheers for America.

#8: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Don't know why I haven't read any of Gladwell's books; he seems to define a genre all by himself. I suppose I should slip one or two on the bottom of the pile, just to be au courant.

#7: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Seems like I read this book a decade ago, and here it is still on the best-seller list. As an author, of course, I'm madly jealous. Give this to Walls; it's a compelling read.

#6: A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard, the girl who was kidnapped at age 11 and held prisoner for 18 years. I'll skip this one, but I'm glad she's getting something to compensate for her lost youth.

#5: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, the story of the US ambassador to Germany and his daughter during the run-up to World War II. Read this on the recommendation of my spouse, and because I'd read and enjoyed Larson's previous outings. A smart book that fumbles to a close.

#4: Bossypants by Tina Fey. I'd probably like it. If Tina had been McCain's running mate last time around, I might have voted Republican. (Just kidding.)

#3: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Blogged this here. A generous, big-hearted book that recounts the history of cell research during the past half-century, along with the story of Henrietta. Amazing, and heartening, to see it here, #3, two years later.

#2: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, "an Olympic runner's story of survival as a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II." I know nothing about this book, but like the others above, it suggests that the American reading public has nothing to be ashamed of.

And then, after 50 weeks on the bestseller list, we come to #1: Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent, "a boy's encounter with Jesus and the angels." I've taken note of this book before. Where's Tina Fey when we need her?

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Staying connected

posted by Chet at 12:06 PM UTC

Visitors here will know that I'm an early riser, and the first thing I do -- after coffee and sunrise -- is post a musing. You will also have noted that a few times since I arrived on the island the posts have appeared late in the day. This is a small island, in an unwealthy country, and my connection to cyberspace is not always ready and waiting. If anything goes amiss during the evening or night, it's not likely to be fixed until someone arrives at work the next morning.

Other utilities are equally dicey. One memorable day last week, the internet, telephone, water and electricity all went out separately during the same 24-hour period.

I'm not complaining. That's why we are here. And things are infinitely better than when we first arrived nearly 20 years ago. What attracted us to this place was precisely its tenuous hold on modernity. Here were a cheerful people not yet caught up in the rat race, who still preferred an extra hour of leisure to an extra hundred bucks, who knew how to relax, make do, improvise, grow a cabbage, sip their coffee and watch the sunrise. When the electricity went off, well, you just stopped what you were doing and waited till it came back on. If the water slowed to a dribble, you probably didn't need that shower anyway. If there was no fresh milk at the market, you opened a packet of Parmalat and waited till the weekly mail boat arrived.

I don't want to sound like a happy-go-lucky Robinson Crusoe, or a condescending affluent American. I am grateful for the privilege of being here, and I am glad to see the island catching up with the times, especially as we get older and less resilient. But I know too that something is being lost, not least because of the homogenizing influence of American cable television. The kids at the high school are losing the gracious courtesy that used to astonish us when we picked them up along the road. They didn't have cell phones, but they had impeccable manners.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Raptured by fact

posted by Chet at 11:42 AM UTC

Why are the ancient stories so resilient in the face of the overwhelming practical success of science?

An obvious answer: Because the ancient stories promise that death is not final.

Then there's the possibility of habituation: We adhere to the traditions we grew up in. The overwhelming number of Christians, for example, would almost certainly be Muslims had they been born and raised in Qom, Iran. Once a story of "how things are" gets tangled in the neurons of the brain, it's a devil of a time to shake it free.

Add to this the solace of believing that the creator of 100 billion galaxies has me -- yes, me personally -- in mind. It's like getting a birthday card from President Obama ("Good luck, Chet. I'm thinking of you on your special day."), except in spades.

And so on. All of this against a one-size-fits-all scientific story of how things are that is hard to understand in its details and sets us adrift in an (effectively) infinite universe with no one to man the oars but ourselves.

But let me put a more congenial spin on it. We are curious creatures by nature. We want answers to the Big Questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the universe the way it is and not some other way? (That is to say, why are the laws of physics what they are?) How did life begin? What is consciousness? These are fair questions. They are among the biggest questions we can ask. The fact that we ask them is a defining characteristic of our species.

The ancient stories of how things are provide answers -- anthropomorphic, animistic, artificialist -- stories that are satisfyingly easy to understand because they mirror our sense of self.

The scientific story doesn't provide answers, at least not yet and maybe never.

Which brings me back to Ursula Goodenough; "The realization that I needn't have answers to the Big Questions, needn't seek answers to the Big Questions, has served as an epiphany," she writes. It is, in fact, a kind of liberation -- freedom from thrall to the Big Questions -- liberation to revel in the pure "is-ness" of creation, the inexhaustible miracle of the here and now. But "is-ness," in all of it depths and dimensions, requires attention, study, and a certain poetic openness to particulars -- the flower in the crannied wall, the grain of sand. Which is why the scientific story of how things are will not replace religious myths that are there for the effortless taking.

Monday, January 23, 2012

How things are

posted by Chet at 11:55 AM UTC

Any global tradition needs to begin with a shared worldview -- a culture-independent, globally accepted consensus as to how things are. From my perspective, this part is easy. How things are is, well, how things are: our scientific account of Nature, an account that can be called The Epic of Evolution. The Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets, the origin and evolution of life on this planet, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures -- this is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true.
I quote from the Introduction of Ursula Goodenough's wonderful book The Sacred Depths of Nature. Readers will know of my admiration for Ursula and her book (if you want a concise introduction to biology, you can't do better). However, I would take gentle exception to one statement in the above passage: "because it happens to be true." I would have said: "because it is the most reliable story we have at the moment."

Actually, I think Ursula would agree. Science is not an infallible body of doctrine. It is an always evolving approximation of "the way things are" based on the widest possible consensus among scientists at any given time. Is it true? It is as true as you can get until it isn't.

Scientists are constantly holding the scientific story of how things are against the refining fire of experience. Generally this means tinkering here and there on the edges of "truth." Occasionally it means a wholesale revamp of fundamental ideas. One could write a book on the confirming characteristics of scientific "truth": empirical consistency, economy, beauty, parsimony, and so on. But if you want the most impressive confirmation of the reliability of the scientific story of how things are, look around you. Science is a truth system that has given us the entirety of modern technology and medical science. As the old Rheingold beer commercial used to say, "We must be doing something right."

It's a story that has the potential to unite us, as Goodenough says, and in practice it does (we all fly airplanes, use the internet, and rely on penicillin). But only in practice. I fear Ursula is too optimistic if she thinks the scientific story of how things are is about to replace any of the other stories of how things are that dominate the lives of the vast majority of humans -- and set us at each other's throats, story against story.

Why are the ancient stories so resilient, in the face of the overwhelming practical success of science? A suggested answer tomorrow.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

My art history

posted by Chet at 11:18 AM UTC


Click, and then again, to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Under the el -- a Saturday reprise

posted by Chet at 4:34 PM UTC


A few words of appreciation for English-born artist Rackstraw Downes. (Click pic to enlarge.)

I am not generally a fan of photorealism in painting, preferring some element of abstraction in my landscapes, such as in the work of Wayne Thiebaud. But there is something compelling about Downes' meticulous renderings of urban, industrial and scrubby country environments. He has been called "a bard of weeds." He might equally be called a bard of rust, or crumbling concrete, or dirt.

But no. That is to ignore a delicacy of light and shadow, of water and air, of stainless steel and glistening glass.

You can visit some of his work here.

There is more going on in these paintings than composition, color, and technique, more than disquisitions on the visual perception of three-dimensional space and its representation on two-dimensional surface. Downes wants us to see something that is so commonplace that we seldom see it al all, something that is all around us on every side -- the human-made environment. A world made willy-nilly by human artifice. A world that in some eerie sense overwhelms its makers, ignores us even, mocks us with its own disturbing inorganicity.

But beauty too.

Very little of what Downes chooses to paint was contrived to be beautiful. Its purpose is almost exclusively utilitarian -- a vast untenanted space in the World Trade Center, for example, redeemed from total artifice only by shafts of winter sunlight. But there is a beauty in these paintings that the artist's eye discovers. Or does the artist's eye impose the beauty?

One has to look carefully at Downes' paintings to find the occasional human presence, diminutive doll-like figures going about their business. But there is one human presence that can't be ignored -- that of the artist, the eye that beholds, and through his "being there", we are there too.

Because these images were made brush stroke by brush stroke over an extended timespan, and not by the click of a camera's shutter, we stand there with Downes, watching, watching, watching as he painstakingly applies paint to canvas, forced dab by dab to see the world we have made, a world in which utilitarian artifice has squeezed the organic into graceless nooks and corners. What is required, the artist seems to be saying, is a new esthetic, one that -- for better or worse -- makes room for the patently artificial.

Friday, January 20, 2012

E-read

posted by Chet at 11:56 AM UTC

OK, I've done it. I've lost my innocence. I've slept with the devil. I've sold my soul in a Faustian bargain. I've bartered paper for e-ink.

Yep, I've now read three books on a Kindle.

Son Dan gave my spouse a Kindle for Christmas. He knew better than to give me one. But M.? She promptly downloaded the complete Agatha Christies and Eric Larson's In the Garden of Beasts, and off we went to the Bahamas.

I snorted in derision.

But then here we are, on this tiny island with its tiny library, which I have long since read my way through, and which has no budget for buying books, and so relies on the occasional contribution from passing patrons, which consist mostly of airport paperbacks, Mary Higgins Clark and James Patterson, say.

What's a guy to do? A guy who spends most of his life blissfully ensconced in a book-crammed college library.

So anyway, I read In the Garden of Beasts on M's Kindle. Then Bakewell's Montainge and Massie's Catherine the Great. And I'll give it this: If you are marooned on a desert island (with access to cyberspace), Kindle is a godsend, like a good knife, a box of matches, or packets of antibiotics.

But otherwise it stinks.

I won't mention the difficulty of accessing footnotes and illustrations. If I read a book, I want to digest it, think about what I read, and write about it. Which means making marginal glosses as I read, and notes in the endpapers. When I read a book I want it to look read -- dog-eared and penciled-scratched -- like my father's wood-handled hammer that eventually took the shape of his hand. Then I want it there on the shelf, as part of an ever-growing personal library, a reminder of where I've been, something I can return to when the spirit moves.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Comets

posted by Chet at 12:12 PM UTC

In the deep winter of 1744, Sophia, a fourteen-year-old minor German princess, was on her way to Russia. She had been summoned, with her mother, by the Empress Elizabeth, as a potential bride for the fifteen-year-old heir to the Russian throne. Somewhere along the way, about halfway between Berlin and St. Petersburg, she viewed the Great Comet of 1744 (now designated C/1743X1). "I had never seen anything so grand," she later wrote in her memoirs. "It seemed very close to earth."

Lovely, spunky young Sophia later became Catherine the Great, empress of all the Russias, and I glean the fact of her observation of the comet from Robert Massie's new best-selling biography. The comet she watched was the sixth brightest in recorded history, and the brightest of her century. It reached an apparent magnitude of -7, as bright as a crescent Moon. In early March, it dazzled in the morning dawn, six tails reaching up from the horizon like a Japanese fan.


Two centuries earlier, or even a century, such an apparition might have been considered a portent or sign from God. By 1744, every educated person in Europe -- and Sophia was well educated -- knew that comets were natural celestial events. In 1705, Newton's friend Edmund Halley had applied Newton's physics to these occasional visitors, and shown that many comets are periodic, including the comet that bears his name. He predicted its return in 1758, but did not live to see it, dying in 1742 -- also just missing the comet that so thrilled Sophia.

And my lifetime? The brightest comet so far was Ikeya-Seki in 1965. I have lovely memories of Comet West in 1976, and Comet Hyakutake in 1996, both of which I have written about in one place or another. But perhaps the biggest thrill was a comet that wasn't nearly so bright (this time around), Comet Halley in 1984, for which Sky & Telescope magazine sent me off to Australia to record what I saw. What a privilege to be in the shadow of Ayers Rock with several dozen other people so bedazzled by comets that they would travel half-way around the world to peek at a fuzzy spot in a dark, dark sky.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Sunrise

posted by Chet at 12:09 PM UTC

I used the word "prayer" in the last two posts, which always causes some mild dismay among those close to me, who think I am lapsing into transcendental delusion. And they have a point. The dictionary defines prayer almost exclusively in terms of a petition or act of communication with God or other transcendental object of worship.

Believe me, I understand prayer in the dictionary sense. I spent the first twenty years of my life in transcendental prayer. Masses. Benedictions. Penances. Novenas. Litanies. Acts of contrition. Rosaries. Night prayers. School prayers. Private petitions of every sort ("Oh, God, let cute Carmen look my way."). In retrospect, it seems as if prayers were never far from my lips. And, in retrospect, I can't say that any one of my prayers was unambiguously answered.

But perhaps I did learn something from all that celestial exercise. How to sit quietly. How to compose my spirit. How to pay attention.

And that, of course, is another definition of prayer, one not so likely to appear in the dictionary. "Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul," wrote the 17th-century philosopher Nicholas Malebranche. "To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work," agrees the contemporary poet Mary Oliver. "I don't know exactly what a prayer is," she writes in another poem; "I do know how to pay attention."

Thus, my sunrise exaltations.

Which reminds me of a story, perhaps apocryphal, told of the octogenarian Voltaire. It seems he climbed with a friend to a hill near his home in France on the Swiss border to see the sunrise. At the top, overwhelmed by the a spectacle of purple, red and gold, the old pantheist/deist fell to his knees and exclaimed, "Almighty God, I believe!" Then standing up and casually dusting off his breeches, he said to his companion, "As to Monsieur the son and Madame his mother, that is another matter."

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Watching

posted by Chet at 12:01 PM UTC

Do the people who live on this tropical island year round become oblivious to the sunrises and sunsets? Are these glorious Maxfield Parrish skies just part of the background, like the wallpaper in a child's bedroom or the bugle that blows a soldier's taps and reveille? Pewter and bronze. Rose and gold. Indigo blue and deep purple. A dozen shades of yellow. Just enough clouds to pick up the palette and splash it from horizon to horizon, not so many as to wash the color from the sky.

Being away for nine months of the year is enough to make one forget, to sharpen the senses, to put an edge on wonder. I step onto the terrace and that old Monet, the Sun, daubs and spatters. Brushstrokes of pure thermonuclear fire.

I hope I never become oblivious, jaded, deaf and blind. I think of a few lines from a poem of Grace Schulman, in a different context, describing a different kind of theatrical experience:
My father said: "It helps us bear God's silences,"

and I knew watching was a kind of prayer,
a make-believe you play by looking hard.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Morning prayer, at sunrise (after Donne)

posted by Chet at 11:55 AM UTC

Batter my heart, four-seasoned god,
Breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
O'erthrow me, and bend your force;
Break, blow, burn and make me new.
Reason, your viceroy, proves weak and untrue;
Untie or break that knot, take me.
Except you enthrall me, never shall I be free,
Nor chaste, except you ravish me.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Birthday

posted by Chet at 11:28 AM UTC


Click, and then again, to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination. Happy birthday, Sis.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Cupid's dart -- a Saturday reprise

posted by Chet at 12:20 PM UTC

What is it about the martyr Saint Sebastian? He has perhaps been represented in art more than any other minor saint, young, lank and handsome, usually naked except for a loincloth, always with a benign and dreamy visage. Sometimes is is shown pierced by one arrow, often near the groin; sometimes he is as prickly with shafts as a porcupine.

I suppose my description hints at an answer: perhaps he is a homoerotic icon, an irresistible subject for artists with homoerotic inclinations. A Google image search would seem to confirm this interpretation.

But maybe that's too simplistic. Straight folks too are apparently drawn to these images, both men and women. Maybe it is the juxtaposition of nudity and mild violence, all those arrow shafts with hardly a drop of blood. "Prick me, stick me, just don't kill me." Whatever is going on, it's got something to do with bare flesh and penetration. Time to call in the psychologists.


For myself, I prefer a subset of the Sebastian theme: The wounded Sebastian tended by Saint Irene, a Roman widow. Here, for example is the representation by Georges de la Tour, suffused with light and tenderness, the candle and the arrow, the hand on the knee, blessedly humane and intensely erotic at the same time. Surely there's a love story here about to develop.

Oh, wait. There is a love story. It's called Valentine (another early Christian martyr who may or may not have existed). And at my suggestion the jacket art of the novel is another representation of Sebastian and Irene, by Hendrick Ter Brugghen, equally tender and and sexy.


Maybe I'm revealing too much of my personal psychoses, but I think it is rather more universal. After all, doesn't Cupid always carry a quiver full of arrows. And think of Bernini's Saint Teresa. Sebastian in Bugghen's painting is pierced through the heart. Irene touches a less fatal arrow as if it were the bow of a violin, as if she were playing on his heartstrings. Look at the composition of the painting: X marks the spot, and the spot is Sebastian's heart, wounded with eros and longing, dead center.

(This post originally appeared in March 2009.)