Bob Schwartz

Hayom harat olam. Hayom ya’amid ba-mishpat, kol y’tzurei olamim.

Today is the birthday of the world. Today will stand in judgment all the beings of the cosmos.

The Birthday of the World: Audio story narrated by Leonard Nimoy
https://beta.prx.org/stories/20145

The birthday of the world
by Marge Piercy

On the birthday of the world
I begin to contemplate
what I have done and left
undone, but this year
not so much rebuilding

of my perennially damaged
psyche, shoring up eroding
friendships, digging out
stumps of old resentments
that refuse to rot on their own.

No, this year I want to call
myself to task for what
I have done and not done
for peace. How much have
I dared in opposition?

How much have I put
on the line for freedom?
For mine and others?
As these freedoms are pared,
sliced and diced, where

have I spoken out? Who
have I tried to move? In
this holy season, I stand
self-convicted of sloth
in a time when lies choke

the mind and rhetoric
bends reason to slithering
choking pythons. Here
I stand before the gates
opening, the fire dazzling

my eyes, and as I approach
what judges me, I judge
myself. Give me weapons
of minute destruction. Let
my words turn into sparks.

Copyright © 2006 by Marge Piercy

If you watch old movies, you notice that nearly everybody smokes—sometimes one cigarette after another, sometimes two at a time—and that nobody wears seat belts in cars.

Around the 1960s, the link between smoking and cancer was being accepted and the movement to add seat belts to cars was ramping up. Smoking was never banned, but social pressure and evidence reduced it substantially. Seat belts became required.

Loud liberty activists then and now are quick to say that they are free to smoke 24/7 and are free to drive without restraint, and while we are at it, without speed limits.

One obvious comment is that if you live totally alone, and nothing that happens to you involves other people, that would be fine. But you don’t live alone and your choices do affect other people. Whether they are the people you care about and who care about you, whether they are the people you share the highway with, and those who rescue you and treat your bleeding body or bury it.

To make it more direct:

People you know, people you love, have been saved by the reduction in smoking and the use of seat belts. You may have been saved by the reduction in smoking and the use of seat belts.

That isn’t hard to understand. Advocates of Covid personal freedom can go ahead and write their erudite essays on the philosophy of liberty, if they can. They might not finish it before they take to their beds or end up in the hospital, or someone they know or love does.

Maybe they can’t write that essay, but I know someone who can. Kris Kristofferson is a great songwriter and performer. He was also an Oxford University scholar. Maybe the lyrics to his famous song aren’t Oxford worthy, but they are true:

Freedom’s just another word
For nothing left to lose
Nothing ain’t worth nothing but it’s free

It is not traditional, maybe not appropriate to some, to associate the iconic characters of Father Time and Baby New Year with the Jewish New Year Rosh Hashanah, which begins next week on the evening of September 6.

I don’t see why they can’t be a little part of the holiday.

Rosh Hashanah and the ten days that end with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, are filled with reminders about the passage of time and with suggestions about how to start fresh and new. So a couple more reminders can’t hurt.

Note that while Baby New Year may not be quite as old as Judaism, the character does go back pretty far. It was first used by the Greeks around the 6th century BCE. So it is very likely that Jews knew about Baby New Year over the centuries, even if it didn’t end up in Rosh Hashanah.

Poetry is to live for

While there are mysteries
There is living to solve
While there is poetry
There are mysteries
About the next line
Or the mystery of
The next line missing

© 2021 Bob Schwartz

I’m fascinated by magic. Not the sleight of hand, card trick, disappearing kind. The kind described this way:

“Magic is one of those terms for a phenomenon that is hard to define, yet easy to recognize. Magic is the overarching term for a ritual for power involving incantations, symbolic behavior, materials, and/or formulae meant to influence events and/or entities.”

Magic has been with us since antiquity, and will continue forever. Thinking, often against reason, that a magical intervention will affect the course of events is very human. We want to believe that wishing and hoping themselves may have such power.

There is a small chance that this fall may see an immediate gradual or dramatic drop in the impact of Covid in America. But every indicator says otherwise. With so many people still unvaccinated, with so many officials banning or limiting effective mitigation (vaccination, masking, testing), and with a more contagious and deadlier variant on the attack, such a drop is very unlikely. Not impossible, given that the behavior of the virus is still full of surprises, but very unlikely.

Yet there are plenty of people and institutions acting as if that isn’t the case. Instead, they are insisting that normal life as it was in 2019 return—right now. Some might call that unbridled optimism. Some might call that ignorance or denial. It seems more apt to call it magical thinking. If we somehow act as if the threat is not there, it will disappear. Like magic.

Covid is here. Like the worst of our enemies, it lives to hurt us and kill us, to hurt and kill our loved ones. All the magical thinking won’t slow it or stop it. People will believe what they will and think as magically as they will. The only “magic” is the one that science is trying to provide. We ignore and reject it at our most dire peril.

True story.

Fall semester is starting at American colleges, and there is a confusing array of covid protocols for students, from mandatory vaccination and masks to anything goes.

One leading university that is not mandating vaccination or masks but is encouraging them actually included this in a message to students:

“We ask that you please keep a facemask with you at all times and respect others who might have personal or family health considerations. Also, masks should cover your nose and mouth, as they are not effective on chins only.”

It is hard to tell whether the administration is serious or being sarcastic, but it strikes me as possibly funny or possibly sad. Very sad if it is a needed earnest reminder to college students that a covered chin is not a substitute for covered nose and mouth. But as crazy as things are right now, you never know.

A friend wrote to me today about the choice of living in a desert city, at this crucial climate time. It led me to this by Robert Frost:

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice

We can no more ignore or discount sense, science and knowledge than we can live unconditionally and entirely by them. People will label the various balance points as enlightenment, pragmatism, rationalism, romanticism, idealism.

Things call to us, we are called, there is calling. The prophets to their caves, the desert fathers and mothers to their wilderness. Most common and human of all, love and friendship, which are not science (despite the attempts to dissect them) but are callings. None of this is stupid, as in a stupor, but soulful.

It has rained in this desert city more than any month in contemporary history. It is only a blip on the current path of heat and drought. The front yard is dirt, rocks and palo verde trees. But the rare constant deluge has grown patches of grass where none were. A deer climbed the hill to munch the grass, having been called by the green.

Rainstorm in the desert

Every day the sun
without relief
heats the hills.
Now clouds rumble
explode in torrents.
Even in the desert
it is always raining.

© Bob Schwartz 2021

As noted before, I believe in the value of randomness, and keep a dish of polyhedral dice on my table as a reminder. I frequently quote Gregory Bateson:

“I am going to build a church some day. It will have a holy of holies and a holy of holy of holies, and in that ultimate box will be a random number table.”

We can take action, for better or worse, effectively or ineffectively, and we should try to. But we are not in complete control. According to different philosophies, that other power takes many forms, from people and institutions exercising their own controls, to higher powers intervening, to the vagaries of randomness.

As with all those belief systems, randomness helps get us out of our self. It removes us from the delusion that we can be, or aspire to be, the perfect mechanics of a finite and knowable machine. We are not those mechanics and there is no finite and knowable machine. What you think there is and the role you play depends on what you believe. But believe what you will, randomness is always there to get us outside our self.

The desk is well worn and love-ly
Surfaces and drawers witness to
Time spent and misspent
On close inspection the gouges and stains appear
Stepping back all you see is the burnished whole
Wholly what it is what it was what it will become
Worn wood arranged to fit a life lived

© Bob Schwartz 2021