Hi everyone! I wrote a poem today, then a drew an illustration for it, then I recorded a music background for it.
Click here to hear the poem:
Click here to listen to my piano soundtrack:
I’ve been where the pope is at—I can sympathize. He doesn’t feel he has the strength to do all that a modern pope is expected to do—the travel, the heated debates over orthodoxy, the public pronouncements and appearances across the globe. He is undoubtedly unhappy about ceding his life’s greatest achievement before his time—but he knows that he simply hasn’t the strength to do the job properly.
And I know what it’s like to be barraged with outrage and questioning—‘all the other popes died in office!’—‘how can he let the church down this way’—‘what is the real reason he’s abdicating?’ ..and so on. The questions only deepen his sadness at having to appear to ‘quit’ when he is actually acting in the best interests of his flock. How disgusting it must be for him to have pederasty be the most publicly discussed aspect of his church. How conflicted he must be about the conditions caused by overpopulation in the world’s poorest areas—and reconciling that with church dogma forbidding birth control of any kind.
It won’t be long before we have to discuss the status of manufactured humans—or, worse yet, creatures with only partially-human DNA. Are they property?—are they a crime against nature?—do they have souls?—is owning one a venal or a mortal sin—or no sin at all? The pope that gets that one in his lap will need a degree in biology just to issue an edict.
Women are being accepted into many faiths as pastors or priests—how can the Catholic Church respond to the self-evident equality of men and women when it contradicts their deepest beliefs? And consider Celibacy—it has been made painfully clear that priests have sexually abused children as far back as living memory—which implies that it’s gone on longer even than that. What good is a vow of celibacy when it is connected to that horrendous history? Catholics might be better off with married priests—they certainly can’t be any worse off. Can a modern pope process this unfolding tragedy into a renewal of dignity and self-sacrifice that has been, until now, only a false gloss over the real activities of working priests? I’d hate that job—kinda like being the judge and the defendant at a murder trial.
But worst of all is Obedience. It is a central tenet of the Roman Catholic Church—it really can’t be removed without losing the entire structure. But obedience is a problematic concept when it is used to hide stupidity and corruption. This is a problem for many faiths, really. The idea that authority shouldn’t be questioned is part of the zeitgeist of a religion—it draws a parallel to the concept of questioning the faith itself, and thus makes it forbidden.
This is the crux of the conflict between modern civilization and the major faiths—the world has learned that government should be accountable—that it is our duty to question our leaders and criticize their mistakes. The world has also learned much science—a practice based on never-ending questioning of everything! The validity of disobedience has been glorified by the American Revolution and the more-recent Arab Spring. The validity of scientific inquiry is even more desirable—weapons, medicines, agriculture—you name it, science will add some nitrous tanks and boost the hell out of it.
Where once caste systems, total power, and superstition made a nice, neat fit with Religion, the modern world has inverted the principles of both Government and Reason. Those two legs of the tripod of tyranny have become actively averse to their old teammate, Religion. Separation of church and state becomes more true with every passing year—even in places other than the USA. The Neo-Cons made an impressive effort to roll back time, for a while. But their need to do so was even more impressive—church memberships are plummeting, as are the number of divinity students and acolytes.
It can’t be helped, really. The example I always use is the bible story about God stopping the Sun in the sky. The fundamentalists have come up with debate-points that ‘teach the controversy’, but it’s hard to overlook the fact that the people who believed in God back then also believed the Sun moved across the sky. Science has overtaken this myth, just as it has turned ‘Heaven’ into our ‘Upper Atmosphere’, followed by ‘Outer Space’—places we regularly fly through.
We’ve gone ‘all in’ on global technology—and, too late, the pious have realized how thoroughly incompatible Knowledge is with Religion. In the Middle East, countries use nuclear-science-based weapons to threaten the infidels (the people with different religions) and blithely overlook the fact that the science of our universe is unchanged by one’s faith. No matter what superstitions we cling to, Einstein still applies. But then, Einstein believed in God—so, there you are.
Blizzard! Fine with me. Sorry about anyone getting blackouts or road-stranded, but I’m a well-seasoned stayer-inner and I have no plans or meetings that can’t be delayed until better weather. One cannot fully appreciate ones home without some outside conditions one would hate to be stuck in. Snow and high wind may be deadly, but they’re very pretty from behind a cozy window. This is the essence of human existence—a dry cave, a roaring fire, both warding off the cold and dark. In our case, it’s insulation and an oil-burning furnace, but it’s all the same thing—Mother Nature is a bitch out in the open—but she’s merely scenic from behind the warmth and shelter of a human dwelling.
Our larder is stocked, our tub is full of water, we’re as ready as we can be for a black-out, or a forced migration. The wind has battered we New Yorkers twice already this season—we’ve been ‘pre-disastered’, as John Irving’s “Garp” would put it. Better still, we’re not only in good stead, probability-wise—we also have a lot of very recent maintenance on the utility circuits to help us through a rough time. Mother Nature can still kick our ass, but she’ll have to use some elbow grease!
I’ve got a new medication that quells my ever-worsening tremors—it makes me kinda punchy, but it is such a pleasure to have the use of my hands back. I’m thinking of recording some Brahms in the near future. This respite can’t last forever—I’ve got to make hay etc.
Claire has several days of school-closing to bask in—she still has studying to do, but no travel, no classes, no working part-time for the Dept. Head. Snow is weird, man—it gives you a day off, but it doesn’t let you visit anyone.
Music can never be expressed in words alone. Light can never be expressed in paint alone. Even love’s expression leaves off at the limit of an embrace. Artists must always face the futility of their efforts, trying to do what cannot be done—and in the end it is the effort, not the achievement, which resonates with an audience. Art begins as an ache, a compulsion to fully share our thoughts and feelings—and the harder we try, the more beautiful our failures. But to be an artist is to put success permanently out of reach—otherwise, someone would have done it right already, and we’d be finished with art.
It is strange to think that science is the same—it seems more rigid, more absolute, but it is just as ephemeral as art, just as impossible of completion. Our answers always create many more questions, we discover physical ‘laws’ only to discover their exceptions, we quest among the four dimensions of our experience for explanations of a universe with dimensions more than twice that number. We use perspective, in art, to transform a flat two-dimensional canvas into an illusion of three-dimensional space. In science, we strain our brains to encompass the truth of a universe that (most theorists agree) exists in an estimated eleven dimensions. What those remaining seven dimensions have, as their ‘length’ or ‘width’ or ‘timespan’ characteristic, we may never know.
And even when we get answers, they can be incomprehensible. The number one-billion is such an answer. We can name it, we can do math with it, but we can’t really comprehend it. We can break it down—we can try to get to know it—it’s one-thousand million, it’s ten to the power of nine, it’s too many to count out loud. From a practical perspective, even one-thousand is too many to count aloud—thinking of one-hundred as ten tens is just about the limit of human cognizance. Every culture has its cut-off point with numbers—the older societies would stop at ten or twelve and count anything more as ‘a lotta’. We snobbish sophisticates have one, too—we call it Infinity. If any count exceeds a googolplex (an incomprehensible amount, itself) we don’t bother with further measurement, we just say ‘infinity’.
Or take that ‘quantum’ theory—particles and energies become interchangeable, and both become uncertainties—our universe becomes a mass of ‘probabilities’—how sad for the scientists, to discover that the final answer to the universe is ‘maybe’. Then there’s string theory, or chaos theory, or Mandelbrot equations—sharp-minded scholars study for years, not to actually understand, but just to gain a better appreciation of what we don’t understand!
So when someone tells you science is cold and machine-like, don’t you believe it. If there is anyone on this planet that has the best appreciation of the mind of God or the purpose of existence—it is a theoretical physicist, not a preacher. The awesome complexity, the mind-numbing vastness, the mystery of the human race, the deadly power of the energies that stream through infinity, beyond our little ‘Goldilocks’-planet cradle—the nature of life is far better represented by science research than by enforced ignorance and faith in magic.
You don’t have to worry that the ‘charm and magic’ of your life will be dulled by trading religion for theoretical physics—they are equally humbling, equally inspiring, and equally arcane. (In truth, I’d give the edge to science—it goes way past the childish fears and transference of the great god, HooDoo.) If science has a drawback, it is the infinitesimally remote part that we humans play in the universe. So, there is a choice to be made there—some people, I’m sure, would be more comfortable with human-centric belief systems. It’s a matter of dedication to the observable truth.
I see science as something which cannot be ignored. I see religion as something that holds us back from admitting what’s as plain as the nose on ones face. The church rose up against witches—in the process, they destroyed pharmacological lore that had taken hundreds of generations to accrue. The church rose up against astronomers—in the process, they persecuted the most intelligent scientists of their time. The churches of the Southern States once quoted Scripture to justify their desire to keep human slaves. The church fought against equality of human rights between the sexes—in the process, they kept a boot on the throat of womanhood for centuries—and this fight, and others, still plague us here in the 21st century.
The trouble with all this is that the church never fought applied science when it was uninvolved with scripture—light-bulbs, telephones, cars, radios—the churches were all Jake with this stuff. But the Amish show us that religion and technology are not comfortable sharing a couch together—we can live in a magic world or a science world. The modern major faiths are trying to maintain the magic of a world that has been photographed from heaven, seen people with artificial hearts in their chests, and rolled beneath the window of a seat on the Concorde at twice the speed of sound. Our science is our magic—we don’t need the magic of primitive cultures anymore. We have answered some questions that older civilizations assumed were unanswerable—we have done what was once thought un-doable.
We can’t cling to the faiths of the ignorant past and progress in our scientific study at the same time. The Jihads of the Islamic and the Papal Bulls of the Catholic are but two of the most obvious points of friction between common sense and the charm of religion. The faiths we have can come from ideas and beliefs. We all have faith, but some faiths are friendlier than others—our faith in each other is a positive good. Other faiths held by more pious people can only be described as nonsensical. But, good or bad, a person’s faith cannot be changed by force—nor should it be.
That is the importance of religious freedom. Two groups of people—each side sure that the others are mad as hatters. We can only live together in peace if we all allow a little leeway for each other.