August 3: Heisenberg, Principle of Indeterminacy, Change

Back in 1927 Werner Heisenberg pulled out the rug, and our whole understanding of the universe toppled and collapsed.  For some reason it has not yet trickled down to the man on the street that some physicists now are a bunch of wild-eyed, raving mystics.  For they have perfected their instruments and methods just enough to whisk away the crucial veil, and what stands revealed is the Cheshire cat's grin.

What Dillard is talking about here is Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy that says that "you cannot know both a particle's velocity and position.  You can guess statistically what any batch of electrons might do, but you cannot predict the career of any one particle."  Basically, Heisenberg said that you can't predict the behavior of the universe.  You can guess, but you can never know for sure.  Look through the highest powered telescope or microscope, and all you will see is the Cheshire cat, laughing his ass off.

Of course, that's just my very rudimentary understanding of highly complex idea.  The universe is full of mystery.  Heisenberg lifted the mysterious veil and revealed more mystery.  Scientists and mystics are cut from the same cloth.  They just try to answer the questions in different ways.  The answer remains the same.

I have given up trying to understand the universe.  I've seen the Cheshire cat's grin too many times.  No matter how much I plan, I will never be able to predict the trajectory of my day.  I can make educated guesses--I will write a blog post, grade student essays, eat chicken for dinner--but they are still guesses, nothing more.  As Heisenberg pointed out, I can't know both the velocity and position of my life.

The poet Keats called this Negative Capability--living in uncertainty, without grasping around for explanations.  I have to exist comfortably with the idea that I am not in control of anything, aside from, maybe, going to the bathroom and whether I eat peanut butter M&Ms or plain.  Trusting in uncertainty.  That's pretty much what faith is all about.  The opposite of faith isn't doubt.  It's fear.  I cannot call myself a person of faith and walk around constantly terrified of what's going to happen next.  Those two conditions--faith and fear--are mutually exclusive.

So, tonight, I'm singing the praises of uncertainty.  At the beginning of the summer, I was driving a ten-year-old car with over a hundred thousand miles on it.  I was working a job that caused me great stress daily, and I was finishing my twentieth year of teaching.  Now, at the end of the summer, I am driving a new car, have a new job, and received a promotion from the university.  Uncertainty was a good thing for me these last few months.

Of course, that doesn't mean that life will always be rainbows and chocolate bars.  However, even in the throes of despair, I can say to myself, "This, too, shall pass."  Sadness will give way to calm, which will eventually transform into some kind of joy.  That's what indeterminacy is all about.  Wait a second, and things will change.

Make no mistake, though.  Saint Marty isn't embracing change.  More like trying to negotiate a cease fire.

August 2: Generosity of Spirit, Triffids, Horror Movies

John Cowper Powys said, "We have no reason for denying to the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, large, leisurely semi-consciousness." He may not be right, but I like his adjectives.  The batch of bluets in the grass may not be long on brains, but it might be, at least in a very small way, awake.  The trees especially seem to bespeak a generosity of spirit.  I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany.  We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing, grows toward growing, and growing green and clean.

Plants with semi-consciousness.  Dillard even grants the bluets and trees spirit and generosity.  What are the trees giving away?  Oxygen, maybe.  Green shade in the dog days of August, where there's no wind and the sun is punishing.  Certainly, in those conditions, shade seems like generosity.  But sentient plant life?

As a kid, I loved science fiction and horror movies.  One of my favorites was called The Day of the Triffids.  It entailed a meteor shower, the blinding of the human race, and six-foot-tall plants hell bent on eating people and animals.  It was every kid's nightmare--killer vegetables.  I have never been a fan of broccoli or brussells sprouts, and this movie proved how dangerous they actually were.

Of course, now that I am an adult, I have grown accustomed to greenery.  While I don't sit down and eat salad on a regular basis, I do like a good stir fry every now and then.  I can choke down baby carrots and, in a pinch, celery slathered thickly with peanut butter.  However, my consumption of vegetables is purely for self preservation.  I want to eat them before they eat me. 

I know that the possibility of a meteor shower turning the produce section at Walmart into a triffid war zone is not very realistic.  However, the word "triffid" has now become a colloquialism for large, menacing-looking plants.  Any large, menacing-looking plants.  I used to have thistles growing in front of my house.  Big, purple flower balls with menacing leaves that attracted all manner of stinging insects--wasps and bees and yellow jackets.  They were my triffids.

Why am I telling you all this?  I don't know.  I was flipping through my copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and happened upon the above passage.  It, in turn, reminded me of the low-budget horror movie from my childhood, which made me think of brussels sprouts, which dug up memories of those damn thistles.  Triffids, triffids everywhere.

That's Saint Marty's wisdom for this evening:  vegetables will kill you, given the chance.

Don't feed the plants!

August 1: Technology, Poet of the Week, Kyle Dargan, "The Robots are Coming"

I think technology is a wonderful thing.  I started this blog six years ago, and I've written close to three thousand posts of greater and lesser quality.  Technology allows me to find a new Poet of the Week every Monday.  It allows me to teach a class of 30 people about film without ever meeting one student face-to-face.  (One of my students this semester is taking my course from India.)  Those are the great benefits of technology.

However, I still don't understand hashtags and Twitter.  Wouldn't know how to Snapchat if my life depended upon it.  Technology, I think, has its limitations.  I will never give up the pleasure of holding a book in my hands, turning the pages, reading it, smelling that new book smell.  My kids are technology hounds.  My daughter was out hunting Pokemons within the first hour that Pokemon Go went live.  I have a healthy suspicion of technology.  Technology is a tool, not a way of life.

Kyle Dargan, the Poet of the Week, has a poem about this subject.  It's a little social commentary, a little history, a little science fiction.

Saint Marty has always thought robots were a little scary.

The Robots are Coming

by:  Kyle Dargan

with clear-cased woofers for heads,

no eyes. They see us as a bat sees

a mosquito—a fleshy echo,

a morsel of sound. You've heard

their intergalactic tour busses

purring at our stratosphere's curb.

They await counterintelligence

transmissions from our laptops

and our blue teeth, await word

of humanity's critical mass,

our ripening. How many times

have we dreamed it this way:

the Age of the Machines,

postindustrial terrors whose

tempered paws—five welded fingers

—wrench back our roofs,

siderophilic tongues seeking blood,

licking the crumbs of us from our beds.

O, great nation, it won't be pretty.

What land will we now barter

for our lives ? A treaty inked

in advance of the metal ones' footfall.

Give them Gary. Give them Detroit,

Pittsburgh, Braddock—those forgotten

nurseries of girders and axels.

Tell the machines we honor their dead,

distant cousins. Tell them

we tendered those cities to repose

out of respect for welded steel's

bygone era. Tell them Ford

and Carnegie were giant men, that war

glazed their palms with gold.

Tell them we soft beings mourn

manufacture's death as our own.

August 1: Forest of Pines, God's Greatest Creations, Cough

Now the point of all this is that there are a million nephrons in each human kidney.  I've got two million glomeruli, two million Henle's loops, and I made them all myself, without the least effort.  They're undoubtedly my finest work.  What an elaboration, what an extravagance!  The proximal segment of the tubule, for instance, "is composed of irregular cuboidal cells with characteristic brushlike striations (brush border) at the internal, luminal border."  Here are my own fringed necessities, a veritable forest of pines.

God is an extravagant creator.  That's Dillard's point here.  The Great Designer has placed within our bodies the ability to create this forest of pines that filters and absorbs nutrients in the kidneys, if I understand the biology correctly.  We humans don't have to think about the planting of this forest--the intricacies of connections and blood and oxygen.  Nope.  We simply have to walk around and be miraculous proof of God's generous plans.

Having worked in the health care industry in various capacities for the past 17 years, I have a passing knowledge of the intricacies of the human.  Enough to make me a little bit of a hypochondriac.  When I was working in a cardiology office, I became highly aware of my heart hammering in my chest.  Every cardiac hiccup and burp threw me into a panic, so much so that last year I had a stress test.  (It wasn't my first.  I've had three stress tests in the past ten years.  In my defense, I have a strong family history of heart issues.)

Currently, I have had a cough for the past couple months.  Not a bronchial bark.  It's a dry annoying hack that comes upon me at night sometimes.  And sometimes when I'm driving my car with the air conditioning running.  Sometimes when I'm sitting on the couch reading a book.  I also have a strong family history of asthma, as well.  Last winter, I caught bronchitis that lasted a good month and a half.  However, I know a person--non-smoker, healthy eater, lifelong runner--who was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.  So, I'm going to see the doctor on Thursday for my cough, more for peace of mind than anything else.  A simple chest x-ray will put my mind at ease.

The human body is one of God's greatest creations.  Infinitely complex.  Filled with forests of nephrons and miles and miles of nerves.  Dillard is right.  Me?  I'm a person with a dangerously tiny amount of medical knowledge.  I respect God's work.  Think the human form is an amazing thing, inside and out (although I prefer the outside).

I'm sure the doctor is going to attribute this stupid cough to asthma or allergies.  I'm confident that I don't have cancer or congestive heart failure.  When you work around doctors and nurses and sick people all day long, however, you tend to get a little hyper-sensitive to the workings of your own little vessel of bones, muscle, and skin.

Thank goodness God never called Saint Marty to minister to lepers.

Okay, I've used this one before, but it still makes me laugh.