Category Archives: Current Events

So Long to the Space Shuttle

Posted on by
3

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped at a Starbucks and used an app on my smartphone to pay for a drink.  Then I glanced at my email while waiting for the barista to finish my frappacino.  I would not be doing any of that without the the US space program, which has reached the end of an era with the last space shuttle flight.

For it was during the ten year “space race” to put a man on the moon, that miniturization of electronices found the means, motive, and opportunity to thrive.  Intel opened its doors in July, 1968, a year before the moon landing, with 100 employees and a plan to make SRAM’s.  Three years later, when they introduced the first microprocessor, the game was afoot.

In hindsight, we can see that during the tech boom, the law of unintended consequences was operating full tilt, carrying many seeds of our current bust:  the sophistication of the internet which enables the “offshoring” of hundreds of thousands of jobs even as ever increasing “efficiencies” allow employers to do more with fewer people.

Where will the “next new thing” come from?  From dreamers like  Jobs and Wozniak, who built the first Apple computer in their garage.  Or from childhood friends, like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who were inspired by the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics to build and sell an early BASIC Interpreter and form a company that Allen named, “Micro-Soft.”

***

In 1972, when Adam Frank was ten years old, a collection of books on space exploration  in the local library changed his life.  He decided to become a scientist.  Now an astrophysicist, teaching at the University of Rochester, he asked a number of scientists across disciplines what set them on their path.  He found that fully three generations of dreamers claim they were inspired by NASA.  What is going to ispire the next generation of scientists, he asks, for:

The loss of that dream would feel terrible for the 10-year-old I was all those years ago. More importantly, it would be a terrible loss for all the 10-year-olds dreaming now of exploration and science. And for a nation that needs science and scientists to survive, it would the most terrible loss of all.  http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/07/08/137678718/the-inspiration-gap-and-the-shuttles-last-launch

***

Beyond all practical considerations, the space program gave moments that those who lived through them will never forget.  If you’re old enough, you probably remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

You probably also remember that beautiful day in January day when Challenger exploded.  Who had any idea that the loss of that crew could cut so deep?

We all know there are rhythms of expansion and contraction, of dreaming and the end of dreams.  The stars aren’t going anywhere.  Let’s hope we are able to stretch ourselves toward them again soon.

Marginal People, People of the Margins

Posted on by
4

Given the doings and structure of the psyche, there is no such thing as being alone.  If you are the only one in the room, it is still a crowded room. – Michael Ventura

While reading and enjoying the interviews in Bill Moyers Journal (which I discussed here, https://thefirstgates.com/2011/05/24/bill-moyers-journal-the-conversation-continues/), I came upon a phrase that evoked a cluster of other ideas.

Moyers interviewed author, Louise Erdrich, concerning her novel, Shadow Tag, which he considers exceptional.  During the interview, Erdrich, who is the daughter an Ojibwe mother and a German American father, said “I live on the margin of just about everything, Bill.  I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable.”   I recommend the interview as a whole, as I do the others in Moyers’ book, but right now I want to focus on the phrase Erdrich used – “marginal person.”

Louise Erdrich

In context, she was talking about the split between people’s waking selves and their dream selves, which is one of the subjects of Shadow Tag.  She was also talking about the tensions between her Catholic upbringing and the Ojibwe culture, as well as the tensions between her various roles, such as mother and writer, which don’t always fit well together.

In short, I take the phrase, “living on the margin,” and being a “marginal person,” to mean”outsider,” one who stands at the edges watching, related but not quite part of.  I am going to take this notion a step further, because it accords with recent thought in depth psychology as well as conditions in our culture.

James Hillman, a prominent post-Jungian thinker, has written eloquently of our “polytheistic” psyches, formed of a number of archetypal forces that often compete with each other.  This is in distinction to Jung’s “monotheistic” psychology, which posits a central “Self” which is alpha and omega of the psyche.

James Hillman

Here is what Michael Ventura, a journalist, screenwriter, and friend of Hillman’s has to say:  There may be no more important project in our time than displacing the…notion that each person has a central and unified “I” which determines his or her acts.  “I” have been writing this to say that I don’t think people experience life that way.  I do think they experience language that way, and hence are doomed to speak about life in structures contrary to their experience.  Ventura adds, The central “I” is not a fact, it’s a longing – the longing of all the selves within the psyche that are starving because they are not recognized” (Michael Ventura.  From “A Dance For Your Life in the Marriage Zone,” in Shadow Dancing in the USA, 1985, out of print).

Ventura’s essay on marriage names a few of these “selves:”  My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel.  I am your homeless waif and you are my loving mother.  I am your lost father and you are my doting daughter.  I am your worshipper and you are my goddess.  I am your god and you are my priestess.  I am you client and you are my analyst.  I am your intensity and you are my ground.  These are some of the more garish of the patterns. 

You get the idea, and though you may find it mildly interesting, perhaps you wonder, what is the point, and what does it have to do with margins?

Plenty, I think, and it’s all wrapped up in a word in a word related to margins.  The word is liminality, from the Latin word, limen, which means, “threshold.”  People and cultures in liminal states are “betwixt and between.”  The definition given in Wikepedia is:  a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes.  Though the word was initially used by anthropologists to anaylze the middle stage of ritual practice, it has passed into broader usage, with this important meaning: [liminality is] now considered by some to be a master concept in the social and political sciences writ large…very useful when studying events or situations that involve the dissolution of order, but which are also formative of institutions and structures.

Hermes, the Greek messenger god, is the archetypal figure of liminal states, for he can easily pass between the worlds and speak to gods and mortals.  His Roman name, Mercury, is synonymous with quicksilver, that flashing liquid metal that is not quite one thing or another and cannot be contained.  My suggestion is that marginal people, people who are at home in the margins, people whose psyches welcome Hermes, are fortunate in this liminal state of our culture and world, as it becomes increasingly hard to bury our heads in the sand and fail to note “the dissolution of order…which [is] also formative of institutions and structures.”

Hermes, Messenger of the Gods

My previous post on nonfiction writing spoke of the “dissolution of order” in publishing and the nimbleness that is likely to characterize and benefit those writers who can adapt and even help create the new structures that are going to emerge.

The landscape of work is another example that touches everyone.  My father worked forty years for the same company, doing the same sort of job, before retiring with a pension.  Showing up as the same person every day served him well.  I had three distinct careers in six different organizations; that is the current statistical norm, and I bet it will seem tame to the generation now coming of age.  Access to a variety of “selves” was an asset in sailing those waters.

Rigid and hierarchical structures are not faring well this year, be they Arab governments, the government of California, the management of Borders, or people in almost any endeavor who cling to business as usual.

If you recognize yourself as a marginal person, a child of Hermes, one who has never been quite “this” or “that,” but both and neither, relax.  These may be the very times when you shine, when your gifts are needed, and when the ways will open as you come into your own.

High School Confidential

Posted on by
2

The day after our local graduation made me pause and consider high school for the first time in a long while, an interesting article arrived in the June 20 issue of Time.  In “Life After High School,” Annie Murphy Paul says, “We’re obsessed with those four years.  But new research shows we’re not defined by them.”

“Obsessed” will seem an appropriate word if you follow and enjoy popular media as I do.  Think of Rebel Without a Cause, Grease, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Breakfast Club, and any number of recent TV shows, some of which I really enjoyed, like Buffy and Joan of Arcadia.  Think of all the new authors piling into young adult fiction.  Think of Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” or “Married With Children’s” Al Bundy, whose life has been downhill since the day when he caught three touchdown passes (or was it four?).

At the core of Annie Paul’s article are a number of studies, now yielding results, on high school experience as a predictor of futures.  The longest running study, sponsored by the National Institute of Aging, followed 10,000 members of the class of 1957 in Wisconsin for 50 years.  There seem to be correlations, but they are not all that clear cut.  “Coveted as they are in high school, brains and popularity get you only so far in the real world,” says Paul.

Author Alexandra Robbins coined the term, “quirk theory,” to explain the fact that, “Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the identical traits or real-world skills that others will value, love and respect…in adulthood and outside the school setting.”   In her recent book, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, Robbins says, “I’m still a dork,” but believes that helps her connect with those she was interviewing and her readers.

Nothing is fixed, the various researchers seem to be saying, except the ideas we may hold of ourselves.  Such considerations may have motivated a University of Virginia psychologies to say, “Our work shows that popularity isn’t all that important.  The key is finding a group of people with whom you can feel at ease being yourself.”

In that respect, nothing much has changed.

A Change of Seasons

Posted on by
Reply

It may finally be summer.  Or spring.  Or whatever we’re calling it this year.  A week ago it was hailing, and today it’s in the mid-80’s.  By itself I would probably not notice since it’s gone back and forth from hot to cold so many times, but this week there were other changes as well

We cut down a huge liquid amber tree that was big when we moved in 25 years ago, and had grown huge over the last quarter century.  None of the neighbors could agree on how tall it was, but most guesses came in at 70′ – 80′.  The shade in the summer was enough of a bonus to make up for having to trim the limbs every few years, but this winter, which went on forever, it got to be too much.  The sap and the birds in the bare branches did a number on my car every night for weeks and weeks and weeks, and weeks and weeks.  Did I say it went on for weeks and weeks?  That plus the need to replace our roof this summer made up our mind, for we always eyed this behemoth tree warily during storm season.  Especially the last few years.

Now two small maple trees about 10′ high stand in the front yard, all staked and watered and fertilized.  They seem hopeful and sad at the same time.  Hopeful in the golden light of morning and evening, for they carry a promise for the future.  Sad in the flat light of noon which seems to emphasize the bare dirt where the stumps and roots of the old tree stood.  No amount of wisdom ever entirely gets your gut ready for change.

That’s nothing compared to what the guts of the graduates from the local high school are doing right now.  The school is just around the corner.  This morning, just after 7:00am they started to drift up the street with parents and grandparents and friends.  By 11:00 it was over and all the cars were gone from the curbs.  I found myself remembering my own graduation and the biker who led us into the ceremony with a psalm.

As we stood in our caps and gowns in alphabetical order, one of the “A’s” at the front of the line raised his voice and said, “Bretheren and Sisteren, I have a few words to share with you!”  Now this was a large biker guy who seldom spoke; he usually just sat around and glowered.   But just as they struck up Pomp and Circumstance, this guy pulled out a bible and read the 23d psalm.  When all the other memories of high school have faded, that may be the one I remember.  Well, maybe not, but it will be right up there.

This morning I found myself watching people returning from the ceremony.  A few were laughing and joking, but in general, no one seemed especially upbeat or inspired.  School officials mean well, but how can a bit of speechifying while you sit on folding chairs really commemorate what happened, or represent any useful guidance for what comes next?

Too bad the graduates cannot experience the vision quests the plains indians held for their young people.  Coming of age should be a time for discerning the themes of one’s life, and the nature of one’s guiding spirits, but that is very seldom what happens these days.  Or rather, we all still go on a vision quest, it just is not so well organized or safe.  If we are lucky, after a few decades, we begin to get a clue.  I found myself wishing the new graduates well, and wishing them a fruitful voyage into the wilderness.

State Parks That Are Going Away

Posted on by
3

Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone – Joni Mitchell

An article in Sunday’s Sacramento Bee, “A State Park Bucket List,” gave pictures and descriptions of 15 favorites among the 70 parks and historical sites we may only have another 13 months to see. http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/05/3673215/a-state-park-bucket-list.html

Casualties of the California budget crisis, all these sites are scheduled to close in July, 2012.  Without ongoing maintenance, many of these parks, and especially those with old or historic structures, may never open again.

This includes the Jack London State Historical Park, which I wrote about on this blog last fall. https://thefirstgates.com/2010/10/23/of-words-and-wolves-thoughts-on-jack-london/

It includes the Bidwell Mansion in Chico, home of Gen. John and Anne Bidwell, founders of the town, who donated a magnificent 3600 acre park where the Sherwood Forest scenes for the 1938 Robin Hood withErrol Flynn were filmed.  Sherwood is a pleasant walk or bycycle ride from the center of town.

Those who can might want to check the newspaper link and plan a trip to see some of these gems while they still are open.

PS – One of my facebook friends just gave me this website which is open for donations to help save these parks, under the auspices of the California Institute of Man in Nature:   http://www.johnolmsted.net/   Donation buckets with the John Olmstead logo are also going to be available at California parks this summer.  FWIW, I just made a small donation through paypal.

Memorial Day, 2011

Posted on by
2

I had a friend at work who was rather vocal about his support for liberal social issues and his disdain for the political landscape during the Bush administration.  In 2007 or 2008, he spent three weeks in Shanghai on business.  On the last morning he was there, the television showed a stadium full of people who had gathered to witness an execution.  Three young men were shot by a firing squad for first time possession of marijuana; no appeals, no clemency.  My work friend said he wanted to kiss the ground when his plane touched down again on American soil.

Memorial Day always pulls me up short like that.  We have 364 other days each year to debate our past and present military engagements.  This is a day when people’s  thoughts turn to the courage and sacrifice of men and women in uniform who have done their best to defend a culture that gives us trial by jury, a constitution that says the punishment must fit the crime, and countless other benefits it is easy to take for granted until they are threatened.

This is a day when I think of my grandfather, Morgan.  At 17, he lied about his age so he could enlist for the war to end all wars.  To his great disappointment, it was over before he made it “over there.”

I think of my father, Howard, who served as a radar technician in WWII.  His old navy manuals fueled my own interest in ham radio, and ultimately led me down my career path.  As a non-combatant, my father avoided the worst physical and emotional scars, and yet even though he looked so young at 23, he and most of his generation always seemed older than their years.

My father in uniform, ca. 1943

Time paints the conflicts of the past with the sepia tones of memory.  The poppies grow in Flanders field, and the last World War I veteran died on May 5 of this year.  At 14 he lied about his age to join the Royal Navy and then lived to be 110.  This is the stuff of historical novels.  Present realities are never as tidy.  Yet this is a day to be thankful for all those who find the courage to serve, even if for the “wrong” reason – like a friend of mine who enlisted for Viet Nam in an alcoholic blackout.

Not long ago, while walking the dogs one Saturday morning, we passed a military honor guard waiting outside a local church.  I thought of the solemn dignity of the honor guard that folded the flag and handed it to me at my father’s memorial service.  Such rituals are very important.  By whatever means we have, these are things we have to remember.

Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues

Posted on by
3

“Democracy cannot survive without disinterested people to speak truth to power.”  –  Bill Moyers on NPR, May 23, 1011

I interrupt my previous thought train (unforgettable stories) to suggest that everyone listen to an unforgettable journalist who I happened to catch on “Talk of the Nation” on NPR yesterday:  http://www.npr.org/2011/05/23/136583949/bill-moyers-shares-favorite-journal-interviews.  This was a compelling conversation with a man of high ideals, who isn’t afraid to speak uncomfortable truths.

We like to think of ourselves as democracy, Moyers said, but the word “oligarchy” better describes our government – rule by a few people of wealth and power, who do things like deregulate banking and finance, which guarantees that events like our recent financial disaster will happen again, since nothing structural has changed.  Few significant differences remain between Republicans and Democrats, Moyers added, and neither party really cares for he interests of working people.  Yet Moyers’ voice was animated and full of joy and hope.  As well as current events, Moyers talked of his love for poetry and the inspiration he and millions of PBS viewers found in his conversations with Joseph Campbell.

This interview celebrated the publication of Moyers collection of 47 interview with “independent thinkers,” taken from his PBS probram, “Bill Moyers Journal,” that ran from 2007-2010.  This isn’t the sort of book I usually read, but Moyers is one of those rare talents, like Ken Burns, who I will listen to no matter where he chooses to go.  I downloaded the book to my kindle, and after listening to the radio interview, you may just do the same.

The Royal Wedding, Rowan Williams, and Generosity

Posted on by
5

Having declined the invitation from a British friend to watch the Royal Wedding live, Mary set the DVR, and we watched the event when we were home during the day.  I was busy with other things, but looked up at several points, for there is something hopeful and compelling about such a pageant.  At the same time, I’d watched Helen Mirren in The Queen the previous week, so I couldn’t help but think of Diana.  You have to wish this couple a happier fate.

What really caught my attention – and we backed this up to hear it again – was the homily delivered by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, after the vows were taken.  The gist of it was, as faith in God or a Higher Power has receded, we do a disservice to our marriage partners by demanding of them a fulfillment another human being cannot provide.

I searched online this morning but could not find the sermon.  I did find this interview with Williams conducted before the ceremony.  The word I most often heard him use was “generosity.”  He hoped that watching this service might renew our sense of generosity to ourselves and to others.  It’s a very nice way to think of the Royal Wedding.

Any priest or minister conducting a wedding is bound to feel a huge sense of privilege.  You’re invited into some intimate places in people’s lives.  You’re invited to take part in a very significant moment, a moment of hope; a moment of affirmation about people’s present and future.  And I’ve felt very privileged to be part of this event for those reasons.  Here are young people sending a message of hopefulness, sending a message of generosity across the world.  And it’s my privilege to be able to bless that in the name of God, to witness it in the name of God, and to send them on their way. – Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury

http://www.youtube.com/user/lambethpress?blend=23&ob=5