Time and Again

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One score and ten years ago, I graduated from college. I also enrolled in seminary and worked in a United Methodist summer camp. I bought my own car and worked as a bag boy in a grocery store. I also met my future wife. Last night we watched Back to the Future, the sleeper hit and highest grossing film of 1985. There’s been a bit of buzz about it because, discounting the sequels, Doc Brown wants to travel thirty years into the future, yes, 2015, which seemed impossibly far off back then. I have to think his envisioned 2015 was more advanced than what we’ve actually managed. Technology, instead of sending us to Jupiter like Arthur C. Clarke imagined, has instead focused on the incredibly tiny. We now do finally have Dick Tracy wrist-phones with real-time images, but we’re still pretty much earth-bound and our rockets are aimed at other people rather than outer space. Instead of fighting aliens with lasers, we’re shooting fellow humans while at church, synagogue, or mosque. Instead of presidential candidates who want to see how far we can go, we’ve got a stagnant pool of people who want to turn the clock back to, well, 1955.

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Don’t get me wrong—this is a fascinating time to be alive. Just yesterday I sat down to recollect the number of computers we’ve purchased as a family and what each could and couldn’t do. Our first couldn’t connect to the internet since no such thing existed. Our first laptop—which we still have—weights as much as a current desktop and has a black-and-white screen. Now we walk around with the internet in our pockets, never really disconnected from a web in which, I’m sure, lurks a huge spider. But back in 1985 you could make quite a few, as it turns out, false assumptions. Church attendance was healthy and would always continue so. We had space shuttles and were looking to walk on other planets. Rock had matured into a provocative mix of selfishness and social protest. Despite the president of those years, things seemed to be improving.

In Back to the Future, Marty McFly returns to the same Hill Valley he left. A fictional town, I noticed last night, that had a seedy downtown square with adult themed stores and movies. The 1955 square had bullies and manure trucks, but a cleanness that was only on the surface. When Marty’s DeLorean reappears in the square in 1985, he crashes it into a Church of Christ. Although this detail had escaped me before, now it strikes me as somewhat prophetic. Thirty years into the future and, like Marty, we are backing out of the church into an age of nones. Our nones not only refer to our religiously unaffiliated, however. We have nones who’ve lost faith in our government, our economy, and our worldview. Instead of going to Jupiter, we stare at our palms. And like Doc Brown, we look back thirty years with nostalgia and wonder at how wrong we are when we believe in the status quo.

Last Chance to Sea

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I wasn’t brave enough to don swimming trunks in front of academic colleagues and climb into the Dead Sea. Instead, I dipped a finger in an touched it to my tongue. I’m not sure if it was the bromides or some other toxic minerals, but I immediately wretched and knew that I wouldn’t be putting any Dead Sea salt on my chips. Years later, for comparison, I tried a bit of the Great Salt Lake. Disappointing, to say the least. Already by the time I’d visited the Dead Sea it was dying further. In a recent article on NBC entitled “Thousands of Sinkholes Threaten Dead Sea’s Tourism Industry,” the fate of a sea already dead grows even worse. Water is always an issue in dry climates, and the only real source for renewing Dead Sea water is the Jordan River, which is being dammed and used for human purposes, robbing the Dead Sea of its renewal. The sinkholes are a result of underground salt deposits being dissolved by fresh water as the salty matrix gets siphoned away for industrial chemical farming. Dead Sea levels have dropped 100 feet since 1980.

The Dead Sea is one of the most striking regions on the planet. It is as far as you can go below sea level and still be on dry ground (at least on the shore, that is). The air smells like sulphur and the thickness of the atmosphere at that depth protects you from the sun’s rays, despite the heat. The water is so saline that only bacteria can live there. (The article, ironically, states, “it is very difficult for animals and plants to thrive there.”) By comparison the Great Salt Lake is practically drinking water. Famously, people are unable to sink in the Dead Sea, as its salt enhances buoyancy, so that you can read a newspaper while floating on your back. Like most natural wonders, humans are destroying it. The sinkholes are prophetic, I fear.

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Great evaporating beds line parts of the Dead Sea shore where minerals can be obtained without having to dig into the earth. You can buy some as cosmetics at the local mall. These mineral salts are what make the Dead Sea what it is. And it is shrinking. Satellite imagery of the Sea can bring salty tears to my eye. We’ve slowed the flow of Niagara Falls, and we’ve begun melting our polar caps. Even so, we can’t get enough water to sustain our lifestyle. It has been said that the next major war will not be over oil, but water. Even a glance at California can make me thirsty. In a rare show of cooperation, Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority are building a pipeline to bring Red Sea water into the shrinking Dead Sea. I hope that this might bode well for the future in the region. Although there is no love lost between these neighbors, they all realize that something unique lies on their border, and when it’s gone it will be a loss to the entire world. That is the real Sodom and Gomorrah.

Witnessing Angels

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OrdinaryAngelBack in my undergraduate days, I wanted to learn more about angels. Surprisingly, there were no courses offered on the subject, even at evangelical Grove City College. When I finally took an independent study on angels, I found that few serious books had been written on the topic. I was immature as an academic, and I hadn’t learned that the subject of angels was a kind of scholarly embarrassment. Although many biblical scholars still clung to the idea of God, most had jettisoned angels along with other Medieval fabrications such as dragons and virgins. We inhabit a hardened, material world with no room for spiritual beings flitting about. As a student of ancient Near Eastern religions, I discovered angels possessed a hoary pedigree stretching back to Mesopotamia and perhaps beyond. Susan R. Garrett’s No Ordinary Angel opens the question again, and considers the many roles that angels have played and continue to play.

Subtitled Celestial Spirits and Christian Claims about Jesus, the book goes beyond the issue of angels per se, and addresses the distinctly Christian concern of how Jesus differs from them. What becomes clear in the reading of the study is that uniformity isn’t to be had. The earliest Christians already had divergent ideas on many concepts. As Roman Catholicism developed, angels attained a natural role in a world that still allowed mystery and shadows to exist. Protestants, the progenitors of much of science, cleared the closets of supernatural beings, leaving God and a table instead of the hosts of Heaven and an altar. I’m oversimplifying, of course, but there’s a sense in which the more liturgical traditions have more room for angels and demons. You don’t call a Protestant for a proper exorcism. Still, Garrett knows her stuff and shows how angels insinuate themselves into several aspects of sacred experiences of both Protestants and Catholics.

Angels come at births and deaths. They heal the sick, they protect people and they worship God. They rebel and fall, becoming Satan and his minions. Angels are, by their nature, liminal figures. They help to transition people between different states and worlds. As early back as written records, people believed in them. Outside of academia, people still do. God has become wrathful and distant in his old age and, well, you can talk to an angel without having to worry about vaporizing. In antiquity they were messengers. When God didn’t condescend to the earth, angels would come down. Now we get the sense that they’re more like us than we might have originally thought. Or maybe we’re more like them. Angels, even though they may have fallen out of academic fashion, are sure to endure longer than most weighty treatises, no matter how well footnoted they may be.

A Writer’s Life

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WeHaveAlwaysLivedSometimes, an experienced editor once told me, the author’s life is just as important as the book she’s written. I can’t pretend to know much about Shirley Jackson, beyond that she wrote compelling fiction and that her name is barely recognized today. Best known for her short story “The Lottery” and her novel The Haunting of Hill House, she didn’t match the output of more prolific writers and therefore, in a world driven by capitalism, didn’t receive much notice. Her work is difficult to classify. Not exactly horror, it is nevertheless unsettling by implication. There’s something wrong beneath the surface. Jackson apparently suffered neuroses for much of her adult life, and her ability to translate angst into literature has gathered her a following among fans of ghost stories. I just finished reading her last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a funny, quirky, and serious story about two young women who live alone and who, one suspects, are thought to be witches by the local population.

This little novel is difficult to lay aside for long. The characters of Constance and Merricat are too compelling to leave alone for any length of time. The fact that they are pariahs makes the reader want to ensure that they are safe as they remain carefully inside the home they’ve always known. Even though you know one of them murdered her family, you want them to be happy and secure, perhaps because the whole town is against them. I wouldn’t presume to say what Jackson meant by this story, but to me it seems a clear description of xenophobia by a woman who felt she was never accepted. Women being persecuted in New England always brings witch trials to mind. Although we don’t know why one of the girls killed her family, it is easy for the mind to fill in the blanks.

Although Jackson died prematurely, her work has influenced novelists such as Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. Uncompromising in her outlook, she allows her characters access to those strange places of the human mind where many of us wander from time to time. Merricat, for example, practices that sympathetic magic that we all, if we’re honest, admit that we attempt every now and again. Hoping in magic doesn’t make one a witch any more than prayer makes one a priest. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, although as old as I am, reflects a world in which reality can’t be pinned down. Assumptions are made and challenged. Protectors turn out to be exploiters, and the only ghosts are very human characters hated by the community in which they live. Still this is an uncanny tale, haunted by a reality that women still face in even the most progressive countries. Listening to their voices, even if from beyond the grave, may demonstrate just how much a writer’s life might mean.

By the Time I Get to Phoenix

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I remember when flying involved going to a travel agent, explaining where and when you wanted to go, and how much you could afford. The agent would contact airlines, get you your best price, and you left knowing that you’d just have to show up at the airport maybe half an hour before your flight so you got there before they closed the door. For our vacation trip, my wife used priceline.com. I’ve used it for business travel myself, but when I am going for work, certain strictures apply. For this trip, expense was a major factor. We flew, outbound, to Spokane, Washington via Seattle, on Alaska Airlines. Since our final destination was Spokane (at least for the air portion of the trip), that involved a bit of back-tracking, but, being Alaska Airlines, who could really complain?

In order to make the trip affordable, we flew back on a different airline (I’m still not sure if it was American or U. S. Air; both reference the same entity, apparently) via an alternate route. Whichever airline it was had a hub in Phoenix, so we flew from Spokane to Phoenix before heading back to Newark. I’d visited Phoenix on Routledge business, but I didn’t spend much time in the airport. It became clear from this trip, however, that the Day of the Dead is a big deal for tourists. Given the popularity of Halloween, I suppose that’s not so surprising. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of Day of the Dead merchandise was stunning, considering that these were, for the most part, impulse, carry-on items. Figurines of various sorts comprised the most popular arrays. Skeletons, fully dressed, engaged in many quotidian activities, although deceased.

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Amid the many daily scenes, I spied a last supper tchotchke. Skeleton Jesus and twelve skeleton disciples gathered around a table for a final meal. Maybe just a little too late. While not a theologian, I couldn’t help but wonder about the implications of this. I know little about the Day of the Dead beyond its association with All Souls Day. The last supper is set up in the Gospels as the grounding, in some way, for a divine plan or redemption. In other words, it doesn’t work if the principals are dead. Already jet-lagged and fuzzy-headed, I couldn’t think to take out my wallet. I really can’t afford baubles in any case, yet there was something profound to think about here. For some reason the market will bear much more in an airport than it will in no-fly zones. Still, as I struggled to stay awake all the long way to Newark, I couldn’t help but think that this was an appropriate image to signal the end of a much needed vacation.

GSP

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According to New Jersey Transit, rates for services will go up by 9 percent in October. I may still be on this bus by then. It was like many evening commutes–late. My usual driver didn’t make it to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and a new driver pulled up tardy. Par for the course. After about an hour on the bus, I realized we were still on the Garden State Parkway, locally known as the Garden State “Parking Lot.” I texted my wife who told me there had been an accident, so that would explain things. We crept along. I read on the bus. I can’t stand just sitting for a two hour commute, staring out the window. My stomach started rumbling. I had to pee. These things don’t usually happen on the trip, since I take care of the latter before I leave work. But this bus is cold, and you know how it is in winter…
Glancing out the window, I realized we’d driven into the Twilight Zone. I had no idea where we were. I pulled out my phone and opened the Google Maps app. We were in Irvington, about 20 miles off course. Widening out the map, I could see no way even to reach highway 22 from where we were. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a kangaroo come hopping by. At this point I realized that in less than 12 hours I’d be back on a bus in the opposite direction. I hadn’t had supper or sleep, but maybe I should just stay the night? We are very well acquainted, this bus and I. With a shudder I remember that the driver got out to pee before he started this run. Did he have an alternate plan?

  

 

Now I’m not one to tell a driver how to do his job, and I was, I suppose, secretly cheering him on in his personal quest to find the Northwest Passage. When we finally came to the first stop I became a believer in miracles. It was 7:30, and I had another hour to home. It occurred to me that New Jersey Transit must be raising its fares to pay for the extra gas. Who wouldn’t want to see Elizabeth in the evening? Or at least smell it? There are no toilets on NJ Transit buses. Maybe that accounts for the smell. I’ve been riding New Jersey Transit for four years now, not always contiguously, and I’ve had some epic commutes. A simple accident leading to a three-and-a-half hour trip home was some kind of new record. A personal best for the driver. Get Guinness on the phone, and get one out of the fridge. I still need a bathroom. That can wait. The only thing that really matters is that life is a journey. And for those of us with unpaid past sins, it’s a journey on New Jersey Transit.

Martian Ethics

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MartianIf you need a boot of optimism, look to Mars. Or, more specifically, read Andy Weir’s The Martian. Not that it’s the greatest literature ever produced, but it is a story brimming with humanity. Mark Watney is accidentally stranded on Mars. His crew-mates, in the midst of their multi-month-long return journey, adjust their course to go back for him. Naturally, nothing goes as planned. Although much of the story is far beyond the believability scale, Weir has the technical background to make it all sound plausible. As an engineer, Watney fixes most problems with an optimism that would leave many humanities specialists weeping in the dust. Time after time a potentially fatal situation develops that is solved by technological ingenuity. Relying on his will to survive, and good humor, the protagonist makes a remarkable journey across the surface of the Red Planet to a potential means of escape. I shouldn’t throw too many spoilers into this post since the book is fairly new. I will say it left me feeling good about being human.

Part of being human is thinking about larger issues. Often, throughout the book, Watney wonders about belief in God. Not enough to make it a main theme, but enough to merit mention on this blog. In a somewhat humorous moment, one of the mission controllers says that he’s Hindu, so he believes in lots of gods. In contrast, Watney, alone on Mars, has a vastly different perspective. Without divine intervention, or even any aliens, he finds a way to persevere when the Fates (or the author) have stacked the odds against him. Mark Watney believes in himself, and he believes in human goodness.

The decision of his crew-mates to return for him is one of potential self-sacrifice. There are no guarantees that they’ll survive. Nevertheless, there’s no second thoughts. When they learn Watney is alive, they decide to go back, no matter what might happen to them. The story awoke a strange optimism in me. Although people are capable of horrendous acts against each other and the planet, I do believe that we are basically good. The bad ones make it into the news. We could all be better, I’m guessing. Still, we will help others when we can, even if all we get from it is the good feeling that we’ve done the right thing. Unfortunately, the only people, it seems, that don’t have the best interests of others at heart are our politicians. Watching the posturing before the primaries I do have to wonder if one wouldn’t stand a better chance abandoned on Mars than in the land of the free. This may be one of the times, it seems, that trusting in human goodness might well be equated to a prayer.

Sickness unto Death

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It’s like Nightmare on Elm Street, as my daughter suggested: if my laptop falls asleep, it dies. Actually, that only happens if it turns off. As much as I rail against technology, I have to admit that I get a little choked up thinking about it—my laptop has had its final reboot. Finally back home from a trip where my MacBook died in transit, the local Genius Bar genius told me the frank truth. The on-off switch has stopped working. He was able to take it in the back and get it started with a “hard reboot” and I can’t help but imagine that it involved tiny little defibrillator paddles and a techie with a trendy haircut shouting “Clear!” before jolting the little guy back to life. If it turns off again, though, they can’t guarantee that they’ll be able to bring it back to life. At five years it’s suffering the effects of old age. Planned obsolescence means that you shouldn’t get too close to your machine. Still, with all this talk of artificial intelligence, I wonder if we haven’t given this laptop life. It sits right on my lap every day. It has for five years. It keeps me warm in winter and too warm in summer. It knows my deepest thoughts.

Like Logan, however, it was only planned to live for a few years. Its crystal is flashing, and I’m getting kind of emotional. Yes, it’s been running slower and slower. Sometimes it doesn’t hear my commands. It takes its time waking up in the morning. Still, it has become like a friend. So when the disciples came to Jesus in a panic saying Lazarus was dying, he replied that the sickness was not unto death. Lazarus died nevertheless. And Jesus wept. I wonder if he would’ve felt the same about an old laptop. This machine has been with me through several jobs—it was purchased to help with my teaching at Rutgers, but it has kept me company on many long flights and lonely nights traveling for publishers and trying to remain sane when there was only a whiff of a wifi scent to latch onto. We’ve done a great deal together.

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It can be fixed, the genius said. I have to send it to the iHospital where a new switch will be installed. It will cost a lot of money and if it goes bad again, Apple won’t be able to replace the parts because they don’t keep them on hand all that long. The best solution—buy a new laptop. Spoken like a young man without a child in college. I’m dithering here. I can keep this computer running for a long time without shutting it down. Still, it’s borrowed time. The genius helping the next customer over said, “It’s not a matter of if a hard drive goes, it’s a matter of when.” We’re living on borrowed time. Our devices are meant to be tossed, but my gray matter understands things differently. I like my old laptop, and when Freddie Krueger comes for its soul, I know I’ll be wide awake.

For the Birds

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Identifying birds has never been my strongest skill, although I spend hours pouring over animal indentification books.  Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted to be able to correctly identify what I’ve seen. So many birds, however,have similar coloration and a morphology designed by evolution to do similar things (fly, hide from predators, move quickly, etc.) that even with a good nature guide I still get lost. Yesterday was our last day at the cabin. Always sad to let paradise melt back into the mundane, I was looking out the window when a blur of motion startled me. A bird–I don’t know what kind–had flown into the window and had fallen, stunned, to the ground. Not knowing what I could do, I went out to see if I could help. I’ve only ever rescued one bird, and that was with the help of an animal shelter’s advice in Wisconsin.
Cautiously, because I’m very squeamish, I rounded the corner to find two birds. One, sitting on the ground with its eyes closed, was obviously the one who’d hit the window. Nearby stood another bird of the same species (I can usually tell that much), looking as concerned as a bird can. Spying me, it began the chirp and limp technique to draw me away from its fallen mate. I used to spend a lot of time outdoors, so this wasn’t entirely new to me, but as I was close enough to touch either bird, I began to consider animal intelligence again.  Nesting birds will use this ruse to draw enemies away from their mates and young, and it may cost them their own lives. In this case, an artificial scenario (a cabin with very clean windows) had intervened in nature. Nature, In turn, kicked in to save the fallen one.  How did the healthy bird know to do that? It wasn’t protecting a nesting mate, but it had transferred the appropriate behavior to a novel situation.  Instinct, it seems to me, is the ultimate fudge factor. There was some thinking going on here. Not only was thinking evident, but specifically a kind of thinking more advanced than some human thought (yes, I’m thinking of you, one percenters). The Sermon on the Mount mentions God’s concern over one sparrow falling to the ground. That concern is evident in the show of nature.


Nearing midnight, my plane circled New York City, with its fortresses of wealth. Sparkling like its own galaxy in the night, it seemed a world unto itself.  Just that morning I’d awoken, as it were, far from the madding crowd, but where the fate of one little bird had brought out the willing sacrifice of a friend. Not for the first time in this week away from civilization, I was forced to wonder why, if capitalism is so great, so many people are eager to get away from it. Up in the north woods, getaway cabin building is booming. People want to make enough money to get away from making enough money. I stepped back outside to check on the little bird again.  It cocked its head at me, curiously. Its mate was standing by. If only its lesson could be learned, my day’s destination might have seemed just a little more like paradise.

Call It Civilization

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Being in nature inspires a Psalm-like awe. Civilized to the point of spending virtually all my time indoors, spending all day in the lake or among the trees, it is easy to understand how religions began. Our consciousness tells us that we’re somehow special, but nature has a way of giving the lie to that conceit. Out here in grizzly bear habitat, I’m not the top predator (vegetarians seldom are). Not a swimmer, I’m bound to either boat or dry land in order to survive. Out here I’m just a part of nature.
  
Mountains, as the sites of tremendous geological forces, bring rare resources to the surface. The entrepreneur sees this as an opportunity while the mystic sees it as a chance to worship. Miners have long excavated for metals and gems. Loggers have trucked away timber for everything from houses to match sticks.  The outflow of the lake is dammed to create energy and keeps the water level steady. Standing on a mountain trail dwarfed by mammoth cedars, tripping over rocks, feeling the chill of the cold water straight from last winter’s melt, I am no monarch here. I am but a creature among other creatures.

  
Some feel threatened by such belittlement. I lay on my back and watch the stars begin to twinkle to life and I know the truth is on the side of nature. Out in the wilderness civilization feels like the real predator. The years I’ve spent away from this place have somehow depleted my soul. I’ve been mined and lumberjacked and dammed by a society that sees only money where the mystic feels nature. Yes, religion is found here in the dying gasp of freedom about to be conformed to the uncomfortable clothes and unforgiving pavement of something I’m told is better than this. The sky above me, I know, stretches out to eternity. The “reality” to which I’m about to return reaches only as far as the bank.  Nature is the true civilization.

Growing Green

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It was bound to happen sooner or later. I married into a family of singers, and when we gather at a cabin in the woods, singing breaks out. In the drought-tormented northwest, under an extreme fire ban, there was no campfire, but that doesn’t stop the music. Once campfire songs begin, “Green Grow the Rushes, O,” always appears. I’m no singer, but I spent a couple years as a camp counselor, and many years before that as a youth conference attendee in the United Methodist Church. I know the song by heart. Usually it is now a sign for the adult males to sneak back to the cabin rather than endure the twelve repeating verses. Nevertheless, the question invariably comes up: what do the words mean? We have a couple of lists, here and there, explaining the lyrics, but the fact is the origins and meaning of the carol are obscure. It’s origins appear to be England, but the countdown of twelve verses contain imagery that is Christian, Jewish, and pagan. Over time, many of the verses have, like most oral tradition, undergone corruption. In many respects, it is almost biblical.
While it might be fun to run down all the verses and discuss their potential meaning, that is a task best left to a day when I have my computer working again. With limited internet access and an iPhone from which to post, full-scale exegesis is a daunting task. One aspect of the song, in any case, is clear—it is generally accepted to be a Christian catechetical tool. Repetitive and, especially before adulthood, fun, the song rewards those with strong memories for such obscure phrases as “April rainers,” “symbols at your door,” and “bright shiners,” in the proper order. After the song is over the teaching begins.
I have a book of camp songs from my counseling days, and it suggests a hermeneutic key to the song. My wife studied musicology, and she provided a somewhat more authoritative source. Then, of course, there’s Wikipedia. On some of the verses there is a general consensus, but most are open for debate, with some seeming to point to pagan origins. Tied up with the fact that the song is, in some places, connected with Christmas, this blend of Jewish, pagan, and Christian ideas comes as no surprise. The age and origins of the song are unknown, but it features references to Greek deities, Jewish laws, and Christian miracle stories. Musicologists have had a crack at the song, and surely will examine it again. The strangeness of the lyrics suggest a mystery to explore. Some mysteries are still to be found around the campfires of the north woods on a summer’s night.
  

The Reign of Rain

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I’m on vacation for a week. My job is such that taking vacation is becoming a rare commodity, what with precious few allotted days and move-in, move-out schedules of a collegiate child, and so on. And also company policy about keeping employees in the office between Christmas and New Year. Anyway, now that I’m here I should be kicking back and enjoying the beautiful lake and getting out to do the things inmates of the city seldom do. It has, however, rained every day that I’ve been here. Not all-day rains, of course, but just enough that plans have to be interrupted or changed at the last minute. I end up sitting in the cabin playing Solitaire when I should be out getting some fresh air. So it goes.
Ironically, I am staying in the drought-stricken west. The western United States, I learned when researching for Weathering the Psalms, has been ensconced in a decades’ long drought. In fact, prior to my family trip here it hadn’t rained in quite a while. Our arrival with the clouds was, after all, mere coincidence. Still, it’s hard not to take the weather personally. I know that the weather is larger than any one person’s needs or desires. I also know that water is a commodity even rarer than vacation days, largely because of our misuse of the limited supply that we have. California’s plight has been in the news. We have large cities in water-challenged environments and people treat water like there’s no end to its abundance while the opposite is the case. Just thinking about it makes me thirsty.
There are many things a person can go without, some of which feel absolutely essential at the time. Many vacations, I know, are extravagant. Fancy hotels, high-priced entertainment, exotic locations. Work can feel so crushing that vacation my become the one island of sanity in the midst of a hostile ocean of obligation. For me, vacation is time with family in a stripped-down, natural setting. Of course, we do indulge in some of the comforts of home, but having nothing in view outside the window beyond that which nature dictates is a transcendent experience. From where I sit, I can see nothing of human artifice. I do see clouds, however. I know that more rain is on the way. And I know that it is a gift, complain as we might, of the highest magnitude.
  

When You’re Alone

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The story is told of how evangelist George Whitefield, on one of his several Atlantic crossings, traded some commodity for a deck of playing cards that he immediately threw overboard. The antipathy to card-playing among some Evangelical groups is, of course, well known.  The idea is that instead of wasting time on trivial pass times, one could be improving one’s soul, growing closer to God than to dissapation. Similar objections were raised to drinking alcohol and going to the theater.  Leisure was a fairly new development as food production became more efficient and trades became specialized and the concept of the work day emerged. The real issue is what you did with your time off.  Here at the cabin, Whitefield might have experienced apoplexy.  Decks of cards are found in profusion, often in use over breakfast and after dinner. I learned to play Solitaire while in high school. Although we were evangelical, we never really had a problem with cards. An abandoned mother with three little boys could hardly come to any other rational decision.  

Solitaire, of which I believed there to be only one canonical version, was the ultimate game for when you were alone.  Nobody was around, and you were bored.  Grab a deck of cards.  Solitaire, as I eventually learned, specifically Klondike, was notoriously difficult to win.  And, in the right circumstances, can be very addictive. Often I’ll marvel at five or six people all sitting at the table playing Solitaire at the same time. As I join them, I wonder–why does it feel so good to win at Solitaire? It is a game with no opponent but chance. Your starting hand often determines your success.  

Why should I care if I can stack all my cards up on the aces? What does that prove? Whom have I beaten? Is it my rage against the gods, or the inherent unfairness of the universe? Repressed aggression against all those many people who’ve underestimated me, or never given me a chance?  Why should this make me happy?  At least with poker, crazy eights, hearts, rummy, or nerts, I have used some skill to win.  Instead I’m here taking on the multiverse itself, wrestling with the divine. I could say more, but there is a deck of cards in front of me, and nobody else is awake yet. I do what anyone would do alone in such circumstances.  

Ancient Tech

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I feel like scraping Roman numerals on the wall of my cave with a sharp rock. One for each day I have to spend without my laptop. I’ve been working on this blog, born in this very cabin in which I sit, for six years now. With some exceptions, I’ve posted something new (and, I hope, thoughtful) every day. Even holidays and weekends. Most of those posts have been written on the deceased laptop that’s sitting in my carryon, electronic carrion. This has caused me to stop and consider that the most lasting words—the ones we all quote or at least recognize—tend to come from a far older form of communication technology: the pen and paper. Of course, there are older technologies yet. The Sumerians figured out that clay of the right consistency keeps marks made by a pointed reed pressed into it while it was still damp. Cuneiform writing lasted for millennia as the most advanced technology humanity had devised. The results, however, were bulky, heavy, and fragile. Few could learn the technique. It was an elite skill.

Nobody quotes the Sumerians anymore. Well, maybe the occasional quip from Gilgamesh will work its way to memory, but not much else readily does. The Bible, perhaps the most quoted book of all time, at least in western culture, wasn’t written on clay. By the time the earliest books of the Bible came along, scrolls had been developed. Probably suggesting itself from the way that papyrus naturally rolled up, this early form of paper—indeed, the word “papyrus” gives us our word “paper”—could be marked up with styluses or brushes and ink. Prepared animal skills, or parchment, sometimes called vellum, could also be used, but they were expensive. Pens at this period were sharpened objects dipped into ink, but the most famous words, well, penned by humankind were passed down in that medium. Copied, recopied, memorized. Electricity hadn’t even been discovered yet.

  

Printing presses and their children—typewriters and the consequent qwerty—have led the way since they were invented. Until, however, the 1980s at least, professors would accept only the old fashioned manuscript for papers. Indeed, the medium had given its name to the end result. We still write academic papers, although they are more often published and read electronically. So here I find myself in a cabin on a beautiful lake, surrounded by nature, worried about a communication device that can speak with the stars. There may not be workable clay here—the soil is far too sandy and I don’t have the patience to look up how to make clay on my phone—but there is paper. Pens are scattered everywhere. I am at home in the matrix that has given us the great ideas of humankind.

Death, Technically

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Those of you who punish yourselves by reading my posts regularly may wonder at how different my last couple of posts have been. “Vacation” in and of itself is sufficient explanation for the out of the ordinary—different time zones, unreliable grammar, a certain dreaminess of topic (this is why we should all take plenty of time off work). In this case, however, there’s more to it. My wife injured herself the night before our early morning flight, and although she’s recovering well, another traveling companion is moribund. My faithful laptop that has traveled the country, indeed, crossed the ocean a hextad of times, died in its sleep on the flight over. I shut it down before climbing aboard the plane, and when I tried to boot up after that, nothing. Not friendly Apple starting tone, no wink from the camera, no sign of life from the screen.
I pulled out my phone as soon as I landed and asked Siri if there was a Genius Bar nearby. I was headed into remote parts, where shotguns are far more common than laptops. I had projects to accomplish in the rainy moments. I had a couple of readers to keep updated. Could the geniuses perform a miracle? Alas, the schedule was unforgiving. I hadn’t made an appointment and even though I’d been pouring money into Apple products while the genius before me was in still in diapers, I was up a proverbial (as well as literal) creek without an Apple. He halfheartedly gave my keyboard some kind of Vulcan finger combination pinch, but the look in his eye was definitely more Klingon.
I remember coming to this remote cabin before cell phones were invented. People were just beginning to whisper about this rumor called the Internet. People still wrote each other letters. And here I am in downtown Spokane, weeping over the dead device in my lap. It had its limits, in any case. I can’t take it into the lake with me. It needs, at its age, never to wander too far from a power outlet. And yet, it holds all my darkest secrets and most enlightened ideas. And my thumbs are too fat for typing on my phone. Looking out over the mist dancing wraith-like across the Saran-Wrap early morning surface of the lake, I see two bald eagles fly by. Surely I wouldn’t have seen them had I been behind the large screen of my departed friend. These are, after all, communications from the very edges of civilization, and technology may not, all things considered, save my soul.