She Dreamed a Dream.
When Susan Boyle came out on the stage in “Britain’s Got Talent” — their version of “American Idol” — overweight, frowzy-haired and 47, looking more like a charwoman than a Spice Girl, and confessed that she’d always wanted to be a professional singer, the judges and the audience, Beautiful Young People all, sniggered and got ready for some fun. Then she opened her mouth.
Trembling on the Brink . . .
. . . of huge changes, we are. Will we make it across this threshold? Will we fall back into comfortable darkness, still warm and smelly and shaped to our bodies like a dog’s nest? Will we disintegrate trying to cross the threshold, like a spaceship shuddering apart under the stress of approaching the speed of light?
Science has everything to do with it. Working with science is making me perpetually uneasy. First of all it is disorienting. And humiliating. Finding out how infinitesimally tiny and limited we are. We’re just big enough, and just smart enough, to have found out how tiny and dumb we are, in a teeming, swarming universe that doesn’t need us and that we’re too short-lived and body-burdened, with our brief window of negentropy before we fizzle out like Roman candles, even to get a tiny little piece of. We were better off when we were as myopic and as obsessed with our own blown-large biological affairs as ants, or rutting deer. (Maybe I’m only speaking for myself and how fearful it is to lose the rosy blinders and the purpose of sex.)
With science comes terrifying power that we’re not wise enough to wield, and . . . and a loss of orientation that is expressed both in the unwarranted cockiness of atheists whistling in the dark and in the head-in-the-sand atavism of all kinds of fundamentalists. We’re going over the threshold into an understanding of the cosmos and the gene that will require that we throw out the horse-and-buggy metaphysics that got us this far and almost start over from scratch. Anybody — New-Ager, “Bright,” or traditionalist — who thinks there’s a quick, easy, comfortable answer to that is in denial.
How to stay open, yet to have some guidance . . . what a challenge. You see it in this post at Althouse about Sharia, and you see it in these recent notes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
Even more tha[n] in Hayek’s days, the ecology of the real world is becoming too complex for Aristotelian logic: very, very little of what we do can be safely formalized, meaning asymmetries matter more than ever. Which puts the Western World today at the most dangerous point in its history: unless we get the Bernanke-Summers crowd out of there, it will eventually be destroyed by the machinery of arrogant, formal-thinking civil servants, and Ivy-league semi-retards.
Finally, beyond the current mess, I see no way out of this ecological problem, except through that tacit, unexplainable, seasoned, thoughtful, and aged thing crystalized by traditions & religions –we can’t live without charts and we need to rely on the ones we’ve used for millennia. Le 21e siecle sera religieux, ou ne sera pas!
Is that so? Can religion handle this? Can anything aged handle this, anything that was built on the snug foundation of our ignorance? Can the moral parts of religion withstand cosmology’s assault on its myths? Isn’t religion a willfull staying childish? And isn’t atheism just braggart adolescence with zits? Aren’t all bets off? Can religion’s knowledge about us, what we are, what we need, survive stripped of the myths? Or are the myths part of what we need? If so, then we cannot evolve beyond our current condition, we should never even have gotten this far, and we’ve hit a wall.
Economic lack of confidence coming at the same time is a double whammy. Boom times make people feel manic and optimistic and anticipatory. It’s like those pirates chewing qat for courage. Bust times make us feel shadowed and threatened and like no good can come of this. We’ve swum out too deep, it’s cold and the drug is wearing off.
~ amba, at 4 A.M.
Afterthought: Maybe we must cling to the comforting husk of religion for a while (a century?) the way a butterfly or moth clings to the chrysalis it has just crawled out of while its wings expand. (I’m not saying religion’s knowledge of human nature isn’t deep and wise. I’m saying that scientific discoveries are shattering the myths and explanations that were among religion’s major mechanisms for managing that nature. Of course, I think those discoveries are also shattering the assumptions of mechanistic atheism. So again, all bets are off.)
How Bizarre is This??
Most of our themes do not display the authors name with the post. You would either need to switch to a theme that does display the author or have the authors include their name in the contents of the post.
And this is a service that allows group blogs with up to 35 authors for free???
So if you post on Ambiance, you’ll (or I’ll) have to sign your post, above or below, with your handle of choice.
Oh well. It’s worth at least what you pay for it.
Still getting the kinks out . . .
. . beautiful posts coming in but you can’t tell who wrote them! (Miles Lascaux wrote about the moon; Rod on “have we changed?”) I haven’t figured that one out yet — and I have a crushing amount of work to do. So you may want to sign your posts until I figure out how to make WordPress do it.
Have we changed?
Only six months have passed since October, when a sluggish economy turned into a financial panic, but sometimes it seems like six years. Each day brings home the reality to me in different ways, from the barber who needs to renegotiate his lease because people are getting fewer haircuts, to the doctor who pledged money from his IRA to settle a lawsuit and now faces financial ruin because he cannot fulfill the terms of the settlement. Most folks seem to be living the new reality, skipping life’s frivolities. A new cost consciousness is upon us. But, have we really changed, or is it all superficial? What will we be like if the tide rises?
~ Rod
Haunted Earth
My eyes say their prayers to her and sailors ring her bell, the way a moth mistakes a light bulb for the moon and goes to hell.” [Tom Waits]
Now I think I know what it is about the Moon.
All the other planets have satellites. Most have many: little rat-rocks that chase their tails around a gas giant — it’s not the same. We have something big and bright and near that draws up our tides and our yearnings in the night. So big some wise heads call us two a double planet.
What we have is no captive asteroid. We have a lover, a subtle companion, a Scheherazade made of myth and green cheese and howling dogs and valentines. For all we know she raised us: Tidal pools where the rock-wash baked in the young Sun sprouted life on Earth.
To the eggheads, the Moon’s a problem. It’s all a problem to scientists. The Moon is not like the Earth: It lacks the iron. Therefore our Moon couldn’t have congealed out of the cosmic muck like we did.
They cracked their heads against it and sicced their big computers on it, and they’re getting close to an answer. Heartlessly knocking off all the other theories and models like “American Idol” contestants till they get an answer that fits.
The Moon got pulled out of us. Like a rib, while we slept unborn. It got bashed out of us by a shadow planet. Lilith, passionate and unstable, a firstlove almost big enough to be our twin. A dark Mars that could not share space with us and had noplace else to go.
She fell into us and shattered. And what was torn out of us when she died, and what she dissolved into in her Götterdämmerung, in a year, maybe a hundred years — a teary eye-blink in the history of time — became the Moon in the night.
The Moon hangs guilty and sullen in our sky. We are two, the plodding, stable Earth and her, but there is a third, sensed and gone, and she, too, is in our eyes when we stare up and in the moon’s face when it looks blankly back down on our cheating nights.
Even scientists feel for her. They gave her a name, Theia, which I don’t think is the right name but it will have to do.
They, being scientists, want to look for bits of Theia in the corners of the sky, behind the old armoires of heaven, where the dust collects for years. Maybe they’ll find a girl’s diary, full of tears.
“Computer models show that Theia could have grown large enough to produce the moon if it formed in the L4 or L5 [Lagrangian] regions, where the balance of forces allowed enough material to accumulate,” Kaiser said. “Later, Theia would have been nudged out of L4 or L5 by the increasing gravity of other developing planets like Venus and sent on a collision course with Earth.”
Venus, of course. Who else?
It would be better if we hadn’t known. Now there always will be the shadow between us. These scars, years after the horrible crash we cannot remember, still twitch. It’s not our Moon anymore. It’s not the Earth we thought it was.
“His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.”
~ Miles Lascaux
Half Full
Friends who haven’t seen us for a long time are very aware of how much of himself J has lost. I’m more aware of how much he has retained.
So welcome!
I’ve been saying that blogging in a changed and changing world (for better or for worse, but into the unknown) is like trying to dance to music that hasn’t been composed yet.
So this is a place to try a few steps, begin to put together the notes.
I’m still getting to know the groundrules of this place, but two things are clear:
- Your first comment has to be moderated by me; after that you can post directly.
- If you would like to post as well as comment (or if you write a comment that seems to turn into a post, and you want to move it up), join WordPress (takes about 30 seconds) as a user and then e-mail me the e-mail address you used. I’ll enter you as a contributor (or, if you want to volunteer to interior-design the place, as an administrator).
I’ll be writing some here, and I hope you will too, one way or another. (I’m going to Florida for a few days AND have an editing deadline, so I may not get off to a fast start.)
And Rod is right: stick in “VAL” and you’d almost have “AMBIVALENCE.” (I could make it “Ambience” but it would put me right to sleep.)
Ambiance 