Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
—Emily Dickinson
“I am an optimist against my better judgment.”
—Abraham Joshua Heschel
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise
—William Blake
Yeshua said, Be passersby
—Gospel of Thomas 42
The joy is passing by or you are passing by. Unattached.
Joe sits most days on the porch of his house on Main Street. Everybody knows Joe, most everybody likes him. People passing by stop and chat. They listen to Joe’s wisdom, his stories about his life, what he’s done, what he’s seen. He can get a little nostalgic, but that’s just Joe being Joe.
Don doesn’t live on Main Street. He lives in a mansion on the hill. Every day his driver brings him around. He gets out of the limo, walks around, grabbing anyone who’ll listen. He talks and talks and talks, mostly about himself or about some cockeyed vision of the town and how it’s going to hell, unless he saves it. Some people like Don, but most people are just scared of him. He seems to be getting crazier every day. He is frightening, but some say that’s just Don being Don.
Election for mayor is coming up soon. Joe and Don have both decided to run. People are sad, because they know the town has other people who could do a better job. Will Joe get off the porch? Will Don stop threatening people? Is there something wrong with the town?
© 2024 by Bob Schwartz
What is mysticism? One of many words that can mean many things. As Humpty Dumpty said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
In The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism, Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis tries to define it:
The term “mysticism” is one commonly applied, but imperfectly defined….
Scholars have struggled to give a precise definition to what constitutes mysticism within the Western religious traditions. Most regard it to be the impulse, ideology, and discipline to experience the unmediated presence of God or, more radically, union with divinity or a more broadly defined “Absolute.” Evelyn Underhill calls it, “… the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula under which that order is understood.” Others see mysticism as a project of human transformation, the radical revision of human nature in relationship to the divine.
There is a substantial body of mysticism in Judaism, as there is in its younger siblings Christianity and Islam. The place of mysticism in these religions is complex and varied over time and circumstances. While mysticism might lead to fierce conflicts (“my enlightened vision is better than your enlightened vision”), the “radical revision of human nature” can also lead to followers experiencing other people and things in a more humane, open and divine way.
I don’t know of research measuring the study and adoption of mysticism among contemporary Jews. My anecdotal observation is that it might be small.
To a certain extent, materialism is the opposite of mysticism. Things are things but also transcendentally more than things. Land is land but transcendentally more than land. As religionists say, the phenomenal and the noumenal. We need and can’t avoid having and using the things, but that leads to attaching to the things, which inevitably leads to trouble, within ourselves and in the world. Mysticism, easily lost in the everyday of religions, including Judaism, and certainly lost in the turmoil, could be helpful right now.
© 2024 by Bob Schwartz
Moon landing goes sideways: Odysseus mission will be cut short after craft tipped over
Flight controllers are expected to lose contact Tuesday or Wednesday with the Odysseus lunar lander – just days after it toppled over while completing a historic moon landing.
The private U.S. spacecraft made it to the moon last Thursday and ushered in a new era of lunar missions since NASA’s Apollo program ended five decades ago.
Then things went, well, sideways.
Intuitive Machines, the Houston space company that built Odysseus, said it’s likely that the 14-foot-tall lander tipped over when it touched down on the moon after its foot caught on a rock. Fortunately for Intuitive Machines – and for NASA, the mission’s primary customer – the lander maintained limited function even though its antennas were not pointed at Earth.
USA Today, February 27, 2024
This story isn’t funny. Maybe a little funny. No one got hurt, unless the moon lander is a person.
A lesson. In humility. In chaos and randomness. Of all the rocks in all the universe its foot got caught in that one.
I asked ChatGPT what the odds of this happening are:
The odds of a moon lander tripping over a rock on the moon depend on various factors, including the size and distribution of rocks on the lunar surface, the design and capabilities of the lander, and the precision of the landing process.
Here are some considerations:
Rock Distribution: The lunar surface is covered with rocks of various sizes, ranging from small pebbles to larger boulders. The density of rocks can vary significantly depending on the landing site.
Lander Design: The design of the lander plays a crucial role. Modern lunar landers are equipped with advanced navigation and hazard avoidance systems to detect and avoid obstacles during descent and landing. These systems use cameras, radar, LIDAR, or other sensors to assess the terrain and make adjustments to the landing trajectory accordingly.
Landing Site Selection: Landing sites are carefully chosen to minimize the risk of encountering hazardous terrain such as large rocks or steep slopes. Site selection involves extensive mapping and analysis of the lunar surface to identify safe and scientifically valuable locations.
Mission Planning and Execution: Mission planners take into account the potential risks associated with landing on the moon and develop strategies to mitigate them. This includes optimizing the landing trajectory, conducting simulations and tests, and implementing contingency plans in case of unexpected obstacles.
Overall, while the possibility of a moon lander tripping over a rock cannot be completely ruled out, modern spacecraft are designed and equipped to minimize such risks through careful planning, advanced technology, and thorough testing.
Uh-huh.
© Copyright 2024 by Bob Schwartz
The Democratic establishment is now complaining that “the media” are paying too much attention to questions about Biden’s age and not enough attention to Trump’s legal troubles.
In what universe?
I would be happy to see that the wall-to-wall saturation coverage of the Trump Trials actually had some effect on his chances to be the Republican nominee and to be elected president. There isn’t much evidence of that effect.
By comparison, the coverage of Biden’s age issue, or of his verbal and possibly cognitive slips, is relatively small. These are covered, which is unavoidable and appropriate, whether Biden or the party likes it or not. Politically inconvenient, but not out of proportion.
The Democratic establishment is well-known for dealing itself and holding difficult hands to play. The 2016 demand that Hillary be the nominee, despite her obvious political weaknesses, is a recent example, and one with still-current consequence. Once set, was there any real way of getting out of it? Just do what you can until election day.
That’s exactly where the Democrats are now. What do they expect from their complaints? Will the media stop reporting Biden’s age? Will they report his age but follow every report with the message that age doesn’t matter, even with the oldest candidate ever? The Democrats can’t “manage” this and other issues because even the best crafted message won’t change minds and can’t change what people see and hear with their own eyes and ears. It surely won’t change what the media does.
People who think that Trump is a criminal and a con man already know that, and have decided he should or shouldn’t be president in spite of that or because of that. No overwhelming number of trials is going to affect that. People who think that Biden is too old or too likely to suffer from cognitive decline already know that, and have decided he should or shouldn’t be president in spite of that or because of that.
Two parties holding two terrible hands they dealt themselves—and us. Dispiriting and potentially disastrous. Speaking just to the Democrats right now, it’s not the fault of the media.
A canopy of clouds covered dawn. I started to walk away as a hint of light tinted the dark blanket. I was frozen eyes open. By minute the red rolled over the gray. Afire. A miracle.
If you don’t appreciate everything
You can’t appreciate anything
© 2024 by Bob Schwartz
“The question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually “condition” them against it?”
When I confront the stubborn presence of regressive right-wing political and social initiatives in America (Trumpism, etc.), I might want to say that there are too many not smart/stupid people. I don’t say that, first because it is harsh, second because some number of those people seem smart/not stupid.
This brings me again to the brilliant political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who once covered and wrote about the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his role in the Holocaust. She proposed, in a phrase that has continued to cause trouble for her, decades after her death, “the banality of evil”. Put simply, thoughtlessness is a source of some extreme evildoing.
For me, that is an enlightening explanation of so much that we see, not only in history, but now. The antidote to the poison? Thinking, really thinking.
Thinking is the subject of Arendt’s final and unfinished work, The Life of the Mind. Following is from the Introduction.
Factually, my preoccupation with mental activities has two rather different origins. The immediate impulse came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of “the banality of evil.” Behind that phrase, I held no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought—literary, theological, or philosophic—about the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have learned, is something demonic; its incarnation is Satan, a “lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18), or Lucifer, the fallen angel (“The devil is an angel too”—Unamuno) whose sin is pride (“proud as Lucifer”), namely, that superbia of which only the best are capable: they don’t want to serve God but to be like Him. Evil men, we are told, act out of envy; this may be resentment at not having turned out well through no fault of their own (Richard III) or the envy of Cain, who slew Abel because “the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” Or they may be prompted by weakness (Macbeth). Or, on the contrary, by the powerful hatred wickedness feels for sheer goodness (Iago’s “I hate the Moor: my cause is 2 hearted”; Claggart’s hatred for Billy Budd’s “barbarian” innocence, a hatred considered by Melville a “depravity according to nature”), or by covetousness, “the root of all evil” (Radix omnium malorum cupiditas). However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial —was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness. In the setting of Israeli court and prison procedures he functioned as well as he had functioned under the Nazi regime but, when confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all.
It was this absence of thinking—which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think—that awakened my interest. Is evil-doing (the sins of omission, as well as the sins of commission) possible in default of not just “base motives” (as the law calls them) but of any motives whatever, of any particular prompting of interest or volition? Is wickedness, however we may define it, this being “determined to prove a villain,” not a necessary condition for evildoing? Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought? To be sure, not in the sense that thinking would ever be able to produce the good deed as its result, as though “virtue could be taught” and learned—only habits and customs can be taught, and we know only too well the alarming speed with which they are unlearned and forgotten when new circumstances demand a change in manners and patterns of behavior. (The fact that we usually treat matters of good and evil in courses in “morals” or “ethics” may indicate how little we know about them, for morals comes from mores and ethics from ethos, the Latin and the Greek words for customs and habit, the Latin word being associated with rules of behavior, whereas the Greek is derived from habitat, like our “habits”) The absence of thought I was confronted with sprang neither from forgetfulness of former, presumably good manners and habits nor from stupidity in the sense of inability to comprehend—not even in the sense of “moral insanity,” for it was just as noticeable in instances that had nothing to do with so-called ethical decisions or matters of conscience.
The question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually “condition” them against it? (The very word “con-science,” at any rate, points in this direction insofar as it means “to know with and by myself,” a kind of knowledge that is actualized in every thinking process.) And is not this hypothesis enforced by everything we know about conscience, namely, that a “good conscience” is enjoyed as a rule only by really bad people, criminals and such, while only “good people” are capable of having a bad conscience? To put it differently and use Kantian language: after having been struck by a fact that, willy-nilly, “put me in possession of a concept” (the banality of evil), I could not help raising the quaestio juris and asking myself “by what right I possessed and used it.”
—HannahArendt, The Life of the Mind
Note: The Life of the Mind (Kindle) is currently on sale for $2.99.
The movie Easy Rider (1969) is full of wisdom, along with being a wild ride. Film experts consider it a turning point in independent filmmaking, but now it is often ignored or shrugged off as just a throwback artifact of frivolous 1960s counterculture.
My view of my time in America is that we are constantly missing opportunities, whether it is failing to embrace beneficial possibilities or failing to address damaging actualities. Maybe the history of civilizations is just one missed opportunity after another.
A couple of messages from Easy Rider:
“We blew it.”
Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) just pulled off a lucrative drug deal.
Billy: We’ve done it. We’ve done it. We’re rich, Wyatt. Yeah, man. Yeah, we did it, man! We did it. We’re rich, man.
Wyatt: You know, Billy, we blew it.
Billy: What? Well, that’s what it’s all about. Like, you know. You go for the big money and then you’re free. You dig?
Wyatt: We blew it.
Hopper and Fonda have been asked what they meant by that. Whatever they said, what I understood is that it wasn’t just about how the pursuit of money is not what it’s all about. I take it to be about the opportunities that they—and the country—missed.
“You represent freedom.”
George (Jack Nicholson) is a Southern lawyer who ends up in jail whenever he gets drunk. This time he ends up in jail with Wyatt and Billy.
George: They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to them.
Billy: All we represent to them is somebody who needs a haircut.
George: Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.
Billy: Freedom’s what it’s all about.
George: Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s what it’s all about. But talking about it and being it, that’s two different things. lt’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Don’t tell anybody that they’re not free, because they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. They’re going to talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s going to scare them. Well, it don’t make them running scared. lt makes them dangerous.
In a stack of news at The Guardian site, among more serious stories, there is this:
William ‘Bill’ Post, inventor of Pop Tarts, dies aged 96
While I often think that news media pay too much attention to fluffy and inconsequential pop culture stories, I had to stop for this one.
I knew immediately why The Guardian had posted this. It is about the origin story of Pop-Tarts. Pop-Tarts.
I haven’t eaten Pop-Tarts for years, though I’m occasionally tempted. But there was a long-ago time when breakfast most days was a Pop-Tart and Carnation Instant Breakfast (rebranded in 2022 as Breakfast Essentials). I didn’t read labels then and didn’t care. It was too delicious to care. This was before I drank coffee, so the morning sugar rush no doubt fueled my success at school.
See a timeline of the history of Pop-Tarts here. (Fun fact: Pop-Tarts was first available only in Cleveland. Cleveland Rocks!)
Thank you, Bill Post.
Bob Schwartz 