February

At the stroke of midnight tonight, we gratefully leave two-faced January behind, and trip lightly into February.  In many ways, it's an odd month.

First, and most obviously, it's a runt.  Only 28 days under normal conditions, expanded to 29 during presidential election years.

But it has other oddities.  It didn't used to exist.  The Romans had ten months, originally, beginning in March and ending in December.  They didn't bother giving names to that desolate wasteland between the end of December and the first of March.  It was like an undeveloped tract of land in the middle of an otherwise tidy neighborhood -- it was there, but there wasn't a whole lot worth saying about it.  Even in Rome, where winter wasn't quite as dismal as in Minnesota.

Then, in 713 B.C., the fellow who is considered the second king of Rome decided to subplat the wasteland into two months: January and February.  I'm not sure whether those were the original names, but those names do go back a long way.

January was of course named after Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings.  Most months were either named after an appropriate god, or just given a numerical name, the way that September through December still are.  (Two numerical months were much later named (by themselves) after Julius and Augustus Caesar, but let's not make Trumpian jokes). 

But February was, somewhat lamely, simply named after the month's most important holiday, the ritual of purification, or Februa (later incorporated into the Lupercalia).  Kind of like naming November Turkey.

February remained the last month of the year until about 450 B.C., when December was relegated to that position.  I suppose that celebrating New Year's Day in January thereafter made more sense.

Tangentially relevant, but interesting (to me), is the fact that until Julius Caesar proclaimed the Julian calendar, the calendar year was only 355 days long, which meant that the months tended to get out of whack with the seasons.  So every two or three years, whenever proclaimed by the Pontifex Maximus, a leap year would be observed with February shrunk to only 23 or 24 days, and an "intercalary month" of 27 or 28 days called Mercedonius ("work month") or Intercalaris was inserted between February and March.  Just when you thought spring was almost here, Mercedonius loomed up before you.

That funny little month straightened the calendar out for a while, until the ten day disparity between solar year and calendar year once more caused the month and season to be out of alignment.

When I was young, there was a recurring proposal for a 13-month calendar, with every month having 28 days.  This would mean that if the third day of January fell on a Tuesday, the third day of every month also would fall on Tuesday.  This would put calendar makers out of business, and was never adopted.  Since the year would have only 364 days, there would be an intercalary day between June 30 and July 1, a day that would not have a day of the week attached to it.  Every four years would be a leap year, as now, when there would be two intercalary days.

This idea sounded fun to me as a kid, but it was devised by the same kind of people who are uncomfortable with towns not laid out in a grid pattern, or insist on instant replays in every sport to insure absolute perfection in rulings.  But that's a subject for another day.

So Happy February, and don't forget to run naked through the city, striking by-standers with strips of flayed goat skin.  It's part of your Februa celebration.
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Apology -- After writing this entry, I discovered that I had written a similar essay in the past. Even using some of the same clever analogies. I feel like the guy that tells the same joke to the same group of friends every time there's a party. But this covers some matters not discussed earlier. And besides, I can't bear to just throw it away.

Our wild and precious lives

The Summer Day

 

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper? 

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

 

 

My knowledge and appreciation of poetry doesn't extend much beyond college freshman English, but occasionally I glance at a poem -- say in the New Yorker -- read it, and read it again, and realize that it grabs me at some level.  I'd never heard of Mary Oliver, who died this month at the age of 83.  I first heard of her last Friday, in fact, when my parish's pastor quoted the above poem -- one of her most famous, I now learn -- in its entirety, in his weekly email message.

 On January 17, as the world was preoccupied with the dissembling of the American President and the weeping of separated children, with American bombs exploding in Yemen and teachers preparing to strike in Los Angeles, Mary Oliver, one of the greatest of these new Desert Mothers, died quietly in her home in Florida.

In a moving tribute not only to Mary Oliver, but to poets in general, he compared their mission with that of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, of the hermits and mystics, in centuries past.

In this beautiful little poem, Oliver consciously and intentionally withdraws from the general or theoretical—“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is”—choosing instead simply to encounter the world in its particular reality. It is not bears or grasshoppers about whom she speaks, but the bear and this grasshopper, whom she can see and hear and watch and feel. And through this encounter with reality, rather than through theology or spirituality, she enters into the mysteries of death and life, and the summoning question given to all who live not as ideas or concepts, but—like the grasshopper or the black bear—in the irreducible mystery of the existing world.

Even after reading this tribute, I thought perhaps Ms. Oliver wasn't really all that well known -- after all I myself had never heard of her.

And yet, I was humbled to note that the news of her death was carried in all the newspapers.  Today's New York Times carries an In Memoriam at the bottom of the first page of its arts section, providing her years of life, 1935-2019, and quoting the final line of "The Summer Day":

Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?

That question led the pastor into his greetings and congratulations to the young people of our parish who had been confirmed last week, and to pose to them the same question:

May each of the young people confirmed this Saturday live well and lovingly … and filled with the power of wonder and love. May each hear the voice of that Desert Mother, who invites them, invites all of us, to be about our work: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” 

And it leads us all, young and old, to consider how best to spend the remaining years, days, hours -- however many or few they might be -- of our own "wild and precious" lives.

Nine Lives -- "The Monk's Tale"

To help prepare for my travels in India in a couple of months, I've been sent a short list of suggested books to read.  One of those books is William Dalrymple's City of Djinns (1993), which I read three years ago and discussed in this blog.  Another was his 2009  book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.  I eagerly bought and have been reading this work.

Dalrymple has apparently matured since City  of Djinns, as well as since his first work, In Xanadu (1989) (also discussed in this blog).  In Xanadu was a lively account of an adventurous trek -- by a university boy from Scotland -- across Asia in search of the "stately pleasure dome" of Kubla Khan.  City of Djinns presented, seriously, in a scholarly yet still rather lighthearted manner, the history of Delhi, filtered through his own experiences while he and his wife lived in that city.

Nine Lives is different. By the time it was published, Dalrymple already had six published books under his belt, all but the first about India.  As I wrote in my review of City of Djinns

We learn Delhi's history as a by-product of Dalrymple's adventures in the modern city, the people he meets, the weather that appalls him and his wife, the foods they eat, the disturbing sights that he happens upon.  Dalrymple's book is presented as "the cool year my wife and I spent in Delhi"; the history is the medicine we swallow -- always willingly -- along with the sweet syrup.

It was a formula that worked.  But in Nine Lives, he chooses to talk extensively with nine people in nine religious traditions, letting them tell their stories with a minimal amount of editorial comment from himself.

I have tried not to judge, and though my choices and arrangement no doubt reveal something of my views and preferences, I have tried to show rather than tell, and let the characters speak for themselves.

The result lacks the humor of his earlier works, but shows great empathy and ability to listen.  The book affords us the opportunity to appreciate how seriously nine individuals take their own, often very strange (to us) belief systems, and to consider how their beliefs affect their choices in how to live their lives.

The nine lives include a Jain nun, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a female Sufi devotee called "the Red Fairy," and a Hindu follower of the goddess Tara.  They also include men and women intensely devoted to local or more obscure religious traditions, who in many ways are as interesting or more interesting than those devoted to more mainline traditions.

But because I'm visiting Kashmir and Punjab in March, with Dharamsala as our first stop after arrival in Delhi -- and, I suppose, because his spiritual journey is one of the easier ones for a Westerner to understand --  I paid special attention to the chapter devoted to a Buddhist monk who had fled from his home in Tibet and ended up in his old age in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama's "residence in exile."

Dalrymple interviewed Tashi Passang for several days, as the old monk went about his daily schedule, surrounded by hordes of Tibetan pilgrims.  They would sit "in the winter sunlight of the temple tea stall, high above the cork-screwing mountain paths of Dharamsala," -- "high above the Kangra Valley and the dusty plains of the Punjab," talking as Passang twirled his prayer beads.

Passang recalled his happy childhood in Tibet, herding the family cattle up in the mountain pastures.  Without telling his parents in advance, he joined the local monastery at the age of 12, convinced that his life's aim should be a rebirth to a "better" life next time, with the ultimate goal of attaining Nirvana.  He seems to have been naturally religious in his thoughts and instincts, even as a child, and he recalls being very happy in the monastery. 

After three years, new monks were sent to live alone in a cave for four months -- rising every morning at 1 a.m., attending to devotions (which were physically as well as spiritually strenuous)  all day, and going to bed at 8 p.m.

I discovered a capacity for solitude I hadn't known I had, even in my days in the mountains.  My mind became clear, and I felt my sins were being washed away with the austerity of the hermit's life; that I was being purified.

But then, after he returned to the monastery, the Chinese arrived.

At first apparently friendly, the Chinese became more and more aggressive, and finally demanded all the monastery's guns and other weapons.  Passang and most of the other monks asked to be released from their vows so they could fight -- Buddhism permits violence if necessary to defend the dharma (the Buddhist belief system).  Passang escaped into the hills with his gun, saved from back in his days herding cattle.  

The Chinese came looking for him, and demanded that his parents reveal where he was.  Although the parents didn't know their son's location, they tortured his mother physically, day after day.  She later died from internal injuries.

Eventually, Passang and others were recruited to escort the Dalai Lama across the mountains to India.  The Chinese made great efforts to prevent the escape, and Passang was one of the few escorts who survived.  He later was recruited by India to fight in the 1971 war in Bangladesh.  Passang had no option but to fight, but was conscience-stricken because the killings had no relationship to saving Buddhism.  As soon as he was released from the Indian Army, he moved to Dharamsala.  He decided to spend the rest of his life making prayer flags of the highest possible quality as reparation for his sinful murders in the Army. 

After many years, he decided to become a monk again, and was accepted again with no difficulty by the Dalai Lama.  His years since have been the happiest in his life.  He fought successfully against hatred of the Chinese, for having tortured his mother, by forcing himself to order Chinese food in a Chinese restaurant.

His Holiness is always preaching that it is not the Chinese, but hate itself that is our biggest enemy.

 He still hopes for Tibetan freedom, but with a certain detachment.  He muses that maybe, now that China has essentially renounced Communism, Tibet will convert China rather than China dominating Tibet..

After a life of much hardship and tragedy, he has attained a peace and happiness that many of us could envy.  He finds the world to be interesting -- he seems well informed and intelligent -- but he is not "attached" to it.  He quotes Lord Buddha:

The world is on fire and every solution short of Nirvana is like trying to whitewash a burning house.

Something to think about.
     

Hour of the Wolf

As  a teenager I read a short story -- I don't recall its title or author -- about a man invited by local aristocrats to join them in a fox hunt, only to discover too late that he was the fox.  Similarly, in Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf (1968), the sensitive artist Johan is invited to the castle to dine with the upper classes, only to discover that he is the dinner.

Maybe.  In Bergman's film, the line between reality and psychotic hallucination is very fine.

The film starts in typical Bergman-esque fashion with Johan and his pregnant wife Alma being delivered by boat for the summer, in flat light, black and white cinematography, on an isolated Swedish island.  Johan is a celebrated artist who, as it develops, trails something of a history of controversy and sexual scandal behind him.  His wife is calm, loving, and conspicuously normal.

Johan has trouble sleeping, and is afraid of the dark.  He spends his days with his easel and paints, wandering the island and preparing canvases.  He returns to Alma with frightening stories of people he has met.  Or has imagined.  Grotesque people:  the Birdman, the Insects, the Meat-Eaters, the Schoolmaster and the Lady With a Hat.   Alma becomes nervous.

To this point, I had assumed that the couple had this small island to themselves.  But then a finely-dressed, older woman suddenly appears to Alma, outside their cottage, offering kind but quixotic warnings about Johan, telling her that Johan hides his diary under the bed, and suggesting that Alma read it.  Don't be afraid, she tells Alma.  You can touch me.

And then she's gone.

Reading the diary does nothing to ease Alma's worries.  Johan has had visits -- real or imagined -- from his former lover, Veronica Volger.  He has received an invitation for the couple to visit a baron in his nearby castle.  The diary continues.  Johan describes -- the film shows -- how he has murdered a pre-teen boy in a bathing suit who came near him while he was fishing, and who, in the midst of a struggle, had taken a bite out of him.  Johan crushed the boy's head repeatedly with a rock and hurled his body into the sea.

The couple go for dinner to the castle, where the guests appear to be the embodiment of the creatures who appeared in Johan's diary.  They are either caricatures of decadent nobility, or bizarre creatures with vicious senses of humor.  Johan and Alma eventually become frightened and leave.

Alma sits up with Johan at night, because he is afraid to sleep and keeps lighting matches.  He tells her that the hour before dawn is the "hour of the wolf"

It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are more real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful.

Johan has his nightmares.  He has his demons.

Eventually, Alma tells her husband she has read his diary, and asks him about his apparent continuing relationship with Veronica.  They argue, and Johan finally fires three shots at her and runs off to the castle, obsessed with seeing Veronica again. 

Weirdness ensues.  Horrible, degrading, frightening, and humiliating weirdness.

Alma, it turns out, was only slightly wounded by the gunshots.  She makes her way toward the castle, only to find Johan outside, being attacked by the guests who, quite possibly, were vampires.  

Back in the cottage, she muses before the camera, wondering -- as she had before -- whether couples become so much alike over time that they can read each other's minds.  Is that why she could see demons that existed only for Johan, hallucinations of his imagination?  Or were they real?

I asked myself, were even the castle and the baron real?  Or was the lengthy and elaborate dinner in the castle a joint hallucination of the couple?  And if was all only a joint hallucination -- where is Johan now?

Bergman probably would say, "Hey, don't ask me!  I'm just telling you a story."

Food handler

"It's like working in the paper mill as a college student," I thought to myself.  "Except, back then, I got paid union scale.  Now I'm doing it for free. "

Actually, it wasn't a good comparison.  I spent 40 hours per week of drudgery at my summer job; today I was through after 2½ hours, working alongside friends.  But I was older, and it felt longer.

I was sorting and boxing discarded food for distribution to those whose paychecks, if any, weren't enough to keep their families fed.  A former law firm colleague of mine has been doing this volunteer work for years, and several times a year she asks for additional volunteers.  I bit.

And I'm glad I did.

The non-profit agency maintains a large warehouse and processing facility just south of Seattle.  Grocers and other food vendors donate food -- produce, in today's case -- that remains unsold beyond the expiration of its formal shelf life.  Much, but not all, of the food is still both safe and edible. 

And that's where we came in.

My 2½ hours were spent in a huge, cold room, working with about six other volunteers sorting box after box of discarded fruits and vegetables.  Looking for mold, for rot, for over-ripeness.  Sorting acceptable food between that which needed to be distributed within 24 hours, and that which had a longer edible life span.  And then packing the fruit and vegetables of all kinds into large boxes for storage and/or transport to the large number of food banks across the state.

Transported to food banks doing the job of feeding the poor that government programs no longer are able to satisfy -- because of both governmental cutbacks and increases in the number of impoverished citizens.

Much of the donated food, upon inspection, had to be discarded.  I found out like what it's like to handle disintegrating produce of many kinds, at all levels of disintegration.  I passed food, because it passed minimum standards, that I would not buy at the market or care to eat myself.  But it was safe and it was nourishing.  It would keep families healthy.

After we finished, we were given our results.  In our short hours of labor, we had packed 3,651 pounds of edible food.  Enough to provide 3,229 meals to men, women, and children who were hungry and often malnourished.  We were told our figures were significantly higher than average for voluntary work at the facility (thereby satisfying that good ol' American competitive itch).

Less than three hours of work out of my leisurely retirement.  But a week of work in a paper mill never offered as much satisfaction.

Eclipse

As I write this, the Moon is in eclipse.  Or, as the news services proclaim it, tonight we have a "Super Blood Wolf Moon." 

I've seen many a lunar eclipse, but they never fail to entertain.  Even having known since childhood the mechanics of an eclipse, even knowing that the exact date and time of every eclipse can be predicted centuries in advance, the actual event still induces a small, primal chill to run up and down my spine.

Imagine how it appeared to our ancestors, people who were far more attuned to events in the sky than are we in our cities with all our light pollution.  The full moon comes up as usual.  And then, someone looks up and notices a small nibble being taken out of the edge.  More and more disappears.  Finally, only a small portion remains -- the north "polar ice cap," as it appeared tonight -- but a blood-red disk emerges into view.  What were they to make of it?  Harbinger of war, or disease, or other disaster?

What a relief when, an hour later, the dull red disk once more begins to be re-lit.  And, of course, if prayers and sacrifices had been offered as a way to bring back the moon, their efforts were clearly proved successful.

The eclipse was clearly visible from my front window, the Moon's disk slowly being eaten away as it rose higher in the sky.  The last half hour, I observed it from my back yard, standing like an idiot in wet grass and in near-freezing temperatures.  But we scientists are used to hardships.

The official time for totality was to be 8:41 P.S.T.  I can announce that in my back yard, at least, the north "polar ice cap" (as it appeared) did not disappear entirely until 9:05 p.m. at the earliest.  The disparity was probably due to where my house lies in the P.S.T. time zone.

But it was a pleasant experience, watching the eclipse unfold.  Even in the cold, even in the wet grass.  Orion looked quite handsome, standing off to the right of the Moon, and what I believe to be Sirius was shining brightly blue down closer to the southern horizon.   I realized how seldom, here in the city, I look up at the heavens.

Well, after all.  This is Seattle.  What's there to see but clouds?  We struck it lucky tonight with clear skies.

But I neither saw nor heard any wolves.

Winter Light

From 1961 to 1963, Ingmar Bergman released three films that have been called, retrospectively, the "Silence of God trilogy."  Last season, the Seattle Art Museum exhibited the first and third of those films, Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence, as part of a nine film Bergman series.  Last night, as a part of this year's series, we saw the middle film, Winter Light (1962).  It should be noted that the three stories are entirely different; they have only the theme of the "silence of God" arguably in common.

Winter Light opens in a Lutheran church in contemporary rural Sweden.  The pastor Tomas (Gunnar Bjornstrand), suffering from a cold, stands in front of a congregation of perhaps six or seven, offering the eucharistic liturgy.  The service, amazingly, occupies nearly one-fifth of the film.  

Pastor Tomas is unsmiling, as are the members of his congregation.   Communion is offered to each member of the congregation as they kneel at the communion rail.  Tomas recites the communion verse mechanically and methodically with each, as he offers them first the consecrated bread and then, on a second pass, the wine. 

The film is black and white.  Outside is snow. The church appears cold.  And so do the pastor and his small flock.

Following the service, we learn that one of the communicants, Marta (Ingrid Thulin), is both an atheist and a former mistress of Pastor Tomas.  It is clear from the outset that Marta still loves Tomas, and that Tomas can barely tolerate Marta's presence.

Another member of the congregation, Jonas, is suffering from depression.  His wife points out that Jonas has been in despair ever since reading that China has developed nuclear weapons and is threatening to use them on the West.  Tomas talks to Jonas in private; Jonas can't understand how a loving God could allow such a development.  Instead of offering him consolation, Tomas rambles on about his own experiences during the Spanish Civil War, when he suffered the same despair.  He often thinks, he comments, that life would make much more sense if God did not exist.  We would have no problem accepting evil, because that's all we would expect from our fellow men.  And death would be a release from life's horror.

Not surprisingly, immediately after leaving the church, Jonas commits suicide.  Tomas goes to the scene and, without offering any comments, helps move the body into an ambulance. 

In a moving scene, Tomas reads a letter from Marta -- filmed showing Marta facing the camera and speaking the lines -- in which she tells Tomas how much she loves him, acknowledges that he does not return her love, apologizes for bothering him, and hopes that things might change.  He meets her soon thereafter, and in a rather stunning monologue tells her how much he dislikes her and can barely tolerate her presence.  Marta accepts this rejection stoically.

He then asks her if she'd like to go with him to Jonas's house where he must break the news of the suicide to Jonas's wife.  She agrees.   He tells the wife the bad news, offering no consolation beyond polite condolences.  "I'm sure you did all you could for him," she replies. 

In a minor scene that I thought was telling, shortly before giving the wife the shocking news, Tomas talks briefly to one of Jonas's sons  He asks the boy, who is unfailingly polite, a number of formal, awkward, and intrusive questions about the boy's life.  The boy, petrified, responds briefly to each question.  The boy then meets Marta as he leaves.  She also questions him, but her casual questions display warmth and affection for the boy.  The boy talks happily with her.

Tomas still has an afternoon service to offer in a neighboring town.  He drives with Marta to the church.  No one shows up for the service but the organist and a sacristan.  They both suggest that the service be canceled, but Tomas rejects the idea.  The bells ring and the organ plays, and Marta, the atheist, falls on her knees and prays for Tomas.

Tomas faces the empty church, empty of all but Marta, and begins:  "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts." The film ends.

Bergman once said that Through a Glass Darkly suggests that the question of God's existence is best answered by accepting that God is love.  In Winter Light, just one year later, he questions whether even love explains God.  Atheists have gleefully claimed that Winter Light proves that Bergman finally became an atheist.   But what Bergman himself said was merely that with Winter Light he had said all he had to say about the existence of God.   In later films, he would turn his attention to other matters.

In his films, Bergman asks questions.  He rarely provides definitive answers, or even opinions.

The absence of love -- or even of any significant human connection -- between Pastor Tomas and his flock is glaringly obvious, and this absence of human love is either a reflection or a cause of his lack of love for God and of his sense that God doesn't love him -- or even exist for him.   As he told Johan, life would be so much simpler if God did not exist.  God, to Tomas, is a distant Power, a being who makes difficult demands and who requires formal worship.  Even a communion service  when there is no one to receive communion.

As the sacristan in the afternoon church, a good natured friend, observes to Marta, it's surprising how little attention Tomas pays to Jesus himself.

By coincidence, the weekly email letter from my own church's pastor -- in which he ties together the week's gospel reading (the marriage at Cana) and the celebration of Martin Luther King Day -- touches on Tomas's anguish.

 Far too often in our world, people who profess themselves to be Christian distort the fullness of the gospel by turning Jesus into a lonely hero, who singularly understands and proclaims the salvation of God. In this vision, all others become not just subjects of Christ the King, but slaves and servants, who have no role in the proclamation or building of the Kingdom. It is all God’s work, and we are simply to pray for it to happen. But if Christ Jesus is the one true Son of God, he is not alone in the work of God, for we—as Jesus himself declares—are his friends, and as Paul notes, he is but the first of many sisters and brothers.

If this view is correct, God is not an alien and distant being -- a "spider" with unfathomable thoughts, as characters suggest in both Through the Glass Darkly and Winter Night -- but a father who calls his children to work together to build their world.  Rather than brooding alone in his sacristy, agonizing about God's nature and existence, Tomas might more wisely seek God by actual communion -- not just sacramental communion -- with his parishioners. He himself might become a loving pastor to his flock -- a friend and brother -- rather than a "spider" figure of authority himself.    Christianity

reminds us of the power of lived prayer to move a God who has willingly become subject to our need, subject to our call; it reminds us that each act of ministry, each moment when we allow the Spirit to move through us, begins a chain of ministry, in which others are likewise invited to take up their own roles of service and celebration.

Marta, alone in the pews praying to a God in whom she doesn't believe, praying for Tomas, full of love not only for Tomas but for others, instinctively understands Pastor Tomas's Christian faith better than he does himself.

Perhaps Marta offers us the potential for a happy ending -- the hope that her unbelieving prayers might, somewhat ironically, be granted and Tomas be saved from himself.

(A rather heavy blog post, but Bergman will do that to you.)

The "Seattle Squeeze"

Demolition begins
(Seattle Times photo)

In 1963, when I  drove north to the University of Washington to register for post-graduate classes, there was no I-5, at least in the Seattle area. (The I-5 freeway through downtown opened the following year.)   Instead, I drove up US 99, which ran along the waterfront on an elevated double deck structure, the Alaska Way Viaduct. 

After leaving the Viaduct, US 99 dove into the Battery Street tunnel, joined Aurora Avenue upon emerging from the tunnel, and eventually crossed the ship canal over the Aurora Avenue bridge, after which I drove east on city streets to reach the university.

The Viaduct at that time was ten years old.  Saturday, construction equipment began the lengthy process of tearing it down.  Seattle has mixed feelings about its demise.  Motorists loved the views of the Sound and the Olympic mountains from the top deck.  Users of the waterfront lamented the noise, and shadows, and … and the looming bulk of the Viaduct.

San Franciscans who recall the Embarcadero freeway will understand.

The opening of the Viaduct in 1953 was a critical step in Seattle's development as a city.  Until that year, US 99 traffic passed on city streets through the heart of the city -- up Fourth Avenue to Pike Street, where it angled down Westlake, passing through what is now the heart of South Lake Union, Amazon territory.  It took a couple more turns before following Aurora north.  Until 1932, when the high-level Aurora Avenue Bridge was constructed, US 99 had followed Dexter Avenue rather than Aurora, and crossed the ship canal over the Fremont Bridge.

The Fremont Bridge is still in use.  It is a small, low level drawbridge, on which traffic backs up at rush hour.  It is hard to imagine the bridge's having once served as a critical link in US 99 as it carried traffic from Mexico to Canada.

Before creation of the national highway numbering system in 1926, US 99 had been known as the Pacific Highway -- a label cooked up by auto enthusiasts in 1913 -- and in Washington had been labeled as State Road 1.  Our "state road" was essentially a route for cars to follow along already-existing streets and roads.

For the past few years, a new highway tunnel has been laboriously bored under First Avenue, from the area of the football and baseball stadiums, extending nearly two miles north to Aurora Avenue.  The old Viaduct will be reduced to rubble, and the rubble used to fill and close off the Battery Street tunnel.

The Seattle Squeeze.  We have now begun a three-week period of traffic horror, during which neither the old Viaduct nor the new tunnel will be available for use.  Contractors need that length of time to remove the old on-ramps to the Viaduct, and to pave new access ramps that will reroute US 99 (now SR 99) into the new tunnel.  Luckily, if I need to go downtown I have easy access to light rail (which will be strained beyond capacity during this transition period).  (The Seattle Times reports that traffic on this  first business day since closing of the Viaduct went much more smoothly than anticipated.)

But in three weeks, we'll have a brand new system for driving from the south end of downtown to the north end of downtown.  But it will have no exits into the downtown itself.  And it will have no views of the Sound or of the Olympics.

And if you use it, you'll help pay for it by paying a toll.  Progress comes to the Northwest Corner.

On-line travel journals

July 23, 2006 -- Paris
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We then took the Metro to the FDR station on the Champs Elysées to make reservations for dinner tomorrow.  The restaurant personnel apparently looked Chris and Kathy over carefully -- they were dressed in shorts and t-shirts -- and gave us a 7 p.m. reservation somewhat reluctantly.  They added that we had to be finished by 9 p.m.
***
We arrived at the [restaurant] right on time at 7 p.m.  A very attractive and enjoyable restaurant, decorated in a clean style that I'd call West Coast, but that Frommer calls "post-modern."  Certainly not the heavy, plush, classical French style I'd anticipated.  We ate ourselves silly, course after course, wine after wine, to the tune of €544 for the six of us.

Once the wait staff saw that we had come to eat and drink in earnest, there was no further mention of any 9 p.m. deadline for us to be finished, and we ate ourselves considerably past it.

We staggered  out into the warm evening, and Chris led us to the nearby Buddha Bar -- an incredible dark cave lit entirely by small oil lamps, like butter lamps in a Tibetan Buddhist shrine.  A giant Buddha presided over the diners who were eating on the main floor.  We remained in the balcony cocktail area, which surrounded the dining area.  We certainly had champagne.  A fantastic appearing place, although the irony of the contrast between the sybaritic experience of its clients and the Buddha's exhortations to live a simple life were not lost on me.  (There's always one moralist in the group!)
-------------------------------

These lines are an excerpt from one of my travel journals.  Not one of my typical journals, most of which were written sitting on a rock somewhere during a mountain trek, but a journal from the aftermath -- having returned to Paris -- of a private guided canoe trip that seven relatives and friends and I enjoyed on the Dordogne in France in 2006.  I just read the journal today, for the first time in years.  I was reminded of endless details I never would have remembered if I hadn't written them down.

For a number of years, I kept such journals on a number of my travels.  I believe this journal from 2006 was my last one.  On many of my other trips, I instead prepared a summary of my experiences once I returned home, a summary that I sent to family members for their edification -- summaries similar to the one by Pascal that I published last month, but generally not as detailed.

I wrote my journals by hand in notebooks -- not always daily, but at least every two or three days, bringing the trip up to date.  As with this journal from France, I typed most of them up shortly after returning home.

Since 2006, I've been on a number of interesting trips, but for some reason neither kept a journal nor wrote a summary at the conclusion, although I did write abbreviated descriptions of many of the trips here in my blog.  But I have to rely primarily on my many photographs to remind me of the details.  Obviously, photographs would not do  justice to the dinner experience memorialized above -- although I suppose some of the dishes were fairly photogenic.

My trip to India in two months should be filled with interesting sights, sounds, smells, and experiences, whose details I really want to preserve.  Rather than once more writing daily reports with a ballpoint pen, however, I think I'll try doing it digitally, posting each day's report on this blog. 

My entries won't be nearly as detailed as the one above -- I don't think -- because I'll be forced to compose them laborously on the tiny screen keyboard of my cell phone.  But I'll avoid abbreviations, and I'll avoid sounding telegraphic.  I'll post all the entries under one blog post caption, using each entry's date as a sub-title.

This plan may not work out, but I think I'm going to give it a try.  Even if you, my long-suffering readers -- don't find my thoughts and observations irresistible, I'll at least be amusing my future self.  Just as I now find myself amused reading about my experiences back in the France of 2006.

Sawdust and Tinsel

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) directed approximately 45 films during his long career, for almost all of which he was also the screenwriter.  Last winter, the Seattle Art Museum showed, in a weekly series, nine of his best known works -- including the four that made the greatest impact on me as a college student -- The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, and The Virgin Spring.

That still leaves about 36 films yet unscreened, and starting last night SAM began another nine-film series with Sawdust and Tinsel / The Naked Night (1953).  Other well-known films in this year's series are Cries and Whispers and Winter Light.  And two of his more atypical films -- but films appealing to large audiences including myself -- Fanny and Alexander, and perhaps the best film production ever of an opera, Mozart's Magic Flute.

The story or plot of Sawdust and Tinsel is slight.  Albert is the owner and manager of a bedraggled traveling circus whose horse-drawn carriages slog their way across Sweden, from one small town to the next.  The circus doesn't make enough from admission fees to even keep their one animal, a trained bear, from near-starvation.  Albert travels with his lover, Anne, living in a world of mud, sweat, and tears -- and circus performers who struggle at the bottom of their profession. 

Albert is getting up in years, and clearly has had enough of the stress and privation, the humiliations and destitution, that follow his circus wherever it goes.  The circus is headed next for Albert's former home town, where his estranged wife and three young sons live.  He secretly hopes to leave the circus and return to civilized life with the family he had abandoned.  Anne senses that she herself is about to be abandoned, and is hysterical in response.

En route, they lose most of their costumes, and Albert is forced to debase himself before the director of a local theatrical group, begging to borrow some of theirs.  He does no better with his family.  His wife now runs a successful small store and doesn't want him back; his children hardly know him and both fear and dislike him.  Meanwhile, Anne, desperate not to be left alone and penniless, essentially sells herself for a one-night stand with the lead actor from the local company. 

Albert, returning from his wife's rejection, discovers Anne's "infidelity," and challenges the actor to a fight in front of the circus's local audience.  The much younger actor not only crushes him physically, but treats him with contempt in front of his own circus performers and the local citizenry.

In what passes as a Bergman happy ending, Anne -- who had hated the actor who had bought her "services" -- embraces Albert, and the circus pulls out of town.

The story wasn't exciting -- to me, at least -- but the black and white cinematography was striking.  The scenes of the silhouetted circus caravan moving along a ridge, the half-lit Swedish sky in the background, which marked both the beginning and the end of the film, called to mind similar scenes from Bergman's Seventh Seal, released just four years later. 

An interesting early Bergman film, reportedly well received at the time of its release.

In search of self

Al was an undergraduate friend, one of those friends you make accidentally because you live on the same floor in the same dorm.  We weren't best friends, or, really, even close friends; but we enjoyed each other's company more than we enjoyed that of most of our other dormmates.

He was obviously bright, and he had an intense intellectual curiosity -- he was a math major --  but he didn't focus obsessively on his school work.  I rarely saw him studying.  In fact, I rarely saw him absorbed intently in anything.  He was funny, often caustically funny -- but that was the style of humor that our student society inculcated.  He was laid back, he could be kind, he wasn't exactly shy.  But he was -- as one dormmate put it -- socially inert.  He didn't seek out friends, but he had friends.  He didn't date, but that wasn't unusual for nerdy undergraduates in our all-male dormitory society.

He had a Honda 500 motorcycle, which he often let me borrow.  We rode it together once up the Bayshore Freeway, some 35 miles to San Francisco, for some event -- an excursion that seems suicidal now in retrospect.  He wasn't a fearful guy.

Al and another friend and I eventually shared an off-campus apartment for several months, and he visited my hometown up in the Northwest Corner a couple of times during breaks.  So I thought I knew him well.

After graduation, I moved to Seattle for graduate school at the UW, and a couple of years later, Al returned to his home state of Minnesota to attend the University of Minnesota law school.  After his first several months of law school, he sent me a five page letter, a letter that I discovered last night while rooting around in old boxes.

Al wrote that, so far as he knew, he was doing ok in law school.  He was reading and briefing the assigned cases, but wasn't spending much time studying. 

In some ways my life is beginning to resemble that sophomore year spent in [our dorm] (heaven forbid!!) I find it hard to get interested in any worthwhile intellectual pursuits, and I've been spending lot of time just talking with other guys in the hall in somewhat of a similar condition.

He mentioned that he had been egged on by friends to be a bit more socially active, and had attended a party with them.

I ended up with a cute little airline stewardess who, aside from not appreciating Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, was very appealing.

Then he mentioned that, despite not spending much time studying law, he had been reading a lot of books unrelated to law.  He was especially impressed by a book just published by psychologist Virginia Axline that has since become a classic -- Dibs in Search of Self.

This along with the next few books have had quite an impact on my way of looking at my own education and personality development.

The nine other books were all related to personality development in one way or another -- the only one of the nine I've ever read was A. S. Neill's Summerhill.  He told me if I read none other of the books he listed, I should at least read Dibs.

Then Al wrote the sentence that strikes me emotionally today:

I include the book list not only for your reading pleasure; I think that for you to read a few of these books in the realization that I have found special significance in much of what their authors say will give you a much better insight into what kind of a person I am than any letter I could write might give you.

Al finished law school -- despite his lack of enthusiasm -- and became a member of a Minneapolis law firm.  I received a letter from him when he was about 30, which I can't now locate.  In it, he sounded reasonably happy, was married to an African-American woman and was planning to adopt a biracial daughter.  He seemed a little concerned about my reaction to this marriage, which didn't sound like a concern Al would have had, or at least expressed, as a student.  He told me some more about himself, apologized for times he may have been abrupt or insulting when we were students (which was really how we all related to each other in our student days!), and ended up hoping that what he told me about himself would help me to have a better idea of what "your friend" (Al) was like.

We never communicated again.  I looked up his firm in Martindale-Hubbell about 15 years later.  Al had died at the age of 42. 

I have no idea why or how he died.  Early illness?  Motorcycle accident?  Or, what bothers me, suicide?

After reading his letter last night, I downloaded Dibs in Search of Self on my Kindle, and am about 30 percent of the way through.  I may post a review of Dibs later.  (I read it back in the '60s, in response to Al's letter, but I now really recall only the cover of the paperback, not its contents.)  Dibs was a five-year-old boy who his wealthy parents believed to be mentally retarded.  His pre-school teachers at an exclusive private school observed that he never played with other children.  In fact, he never played.  He never talked, aside from an occasional isolated word.  He held himself rigidly.  At most he would skulk around the edge of the class, looking at various toys.  Autism had been ruled out, although some reviewers seem to assume that Dibs was autistic.

Ms. Axline worked with Dibs one-on-one, for an hour per week, applying her theory of "play therapy."  I may describe her approach, which may or may not be dated, in a later review of her book.  The bottom line is that Dibs flourished under her total attention and total acceptance and total optimism.  He was not retarded, although so far in my reading the cause for his extreme disability has not been indicated.  I don't think Axline was even particularly interested in etiology.  Almost from her first session with him, he displayed a vocabulary far beyond average for his age.  He ultimately tested with an incredible IQ of 168.

Axline last heard of Dibs when he was 15, when someone showed a letter he had written for a school publication.  Dibs would always be a unique individual -- that was a basic part of Axline's philosophy -- but a happy and self-confident individual and a person with much to share.

I keep thinking how Al emphasized in his letter the impact that Dibs had made on him, and how he wanted me to read the book, to appreciate the impact it had on him, and -- especially -- as a result to understand him better. I keep worrying, what was it that Al saw in the scared little boy in Dibs that reminded him of himself? How did reading the book help him to understand himself, or offer him guidance on how to live his life? And did it ultimately help? Or fail?

Was he still searching for self at 42? When he died?

When I was an undergraduate, and on into my 20s, I -- like most of us, probably -- was so concerned with my own development, academically, emotionally, personally, that I "understood" my friends only insofar as I saw myself reflected in them.   I wish that I hadn't just brushed off Al's letter as indicating some new intellectual area that had caught his eye.  I wish that I had sensed that there was some pain he was fighting his way through beneath his joking, sarcastic façade.  I wish I could have helped if, in no other way, by just letting him know that I was interested in his feelings and willing to listen to him.

But then I would have been a different person.

Cameras

Taken with my iPhone

I didn't want to wait until the last minute to apply for my visa to India. 

(I spent most my life dreaming of the day I could write that opening line.)

In 2013, when I paid a brief visit to Mumbai, obtaining my visa was a relatively complicated procedure, requiring that I fill out an application form and mail it with my passport, a couple of passport photos (and some money, of course) to an Indian consulate.  I forget how long it took for them to mail back my passport with the visa stamp, but it was certainly not overnight.

Since then, India has simplified the procedure.  I fill out a form on-line and submit it on-line along with scanned copies of my passport and a passport photo (and money).  I will receive back an emailed authorization that I can print and take with me to India.  Upon arrival, presumably, the authorization form will allow the authorities to quickly add a visa to my passport and send me on my way to the baggage claim.

But I do need a photo.  So, today I walked a couple of miles to a nearby shopping center where I've gone before to get passport photos. There's a rather nice camera shop there, where for a small sum they will quickly photograph me and give me as many copies as I care to pay for.

Or, I should say, there was a nice camera store there. Camera stores, like bookstores, have been shutting down all over town.  Everyone's gone to, respectively, smart phones and Kindle.

Including me, of course.  When I bought my first iPhone, a mere four years ago, I doubted if I'd ever use the camera function.  I had (have) a very nice Nikon SLR digital camera that takes excellent photos, and that I'd taken all over the world -- traveling in cities, trekking in mountains.  I felt very devoted to it.

And yet, here I am, just four years later, taking virtually all my photos with my iPhone.  Not just the snapshot variety, the ones of cute kids playing with cute cats.  No, also my travel photos, even ones where one would expect to prefer the superior lens on a single lens reflex.

The problem is that the Nikon undoubtedly is superior, but it's not noticeably superior at my skill level and with most of the photos I take.  The iPhone photos are sharp and clear, and the color is true and accurate.  There is no telephoto lens, of course, but I can get the same effect (within limits) by cropping the photo either in the lens while taking it, or afterward on the camera or on my computer.   I always carry my phone, no matter what I'm doing.  Therefore, the heavy Nikon SLR seems an unnecessary burden, especially while hiking.  The phone fits in my pocket; the camera does not.  Before I got my iPhone, I joked that I had misplaced or lost cameras in virtually every nation on earth.  It wasn't really a joke.

Also, while traveling I like to leave a photo trail on Facebook, and email photos to friends back home.  I can do that with two clicks.  With an SLR, I have to wait until I get home, download the photos onto my computer, and then send a group of photos to Facebook or to individuals.  I don't claim that to be a horrific burden; it's how I handled my photography for years.  But the iPhone is simpler, and my hordes of adoring fans can watch me brag, day by day, in real time, about the fun I'm having.

So -- and no, I haven't wandered from my point -- there's a reason why I couldn't find my camera store today.  My name is legion.  Aside from serious photographers, everyone is switching from cameras to smart phones.  I have met the enemy, and he is me.

But I may now have shamed myself into taking my camera with me to India in March.  The sights of the Punjab and Kashmir are dramatic and dazzling.  I may find it worthwhile to take the highest quality photos I can.  And I'll always have my iPhone as a backup. 

For my long-suffering audience back on Facebook.

West Coast public transportation

Seattle's Beacon Hill
station, published with
NYT article, credited to
Seattle Times

When Seattle’s King County Metro won the award [for outstanding public transportation] in September, it was praised as “a system that is expanding and innovating to meet rising demand” — not to mention a program that offers lower fares for poor riders that has served as a model for New York and other cities. Transit ridership in Seattle is growing, and car use is down.
--New York Times

Yesterday's article in the New York Times, lamenting the condition of rail transit in New York and other eastern cities, was surprising -- not because the problems with East Coast transit haven't been publicized before, but because of the article's unfavorable contrast of East Coast (and specifically New York City) transit with developments on the West Coast.

Experts quoted in the article gave two primary reasons for the West's superiority -- first, the fact that eastern subway systems are old and in desperate need of maintenance, while western light rail systems are still new and in excellent shape, and second, the fact that New York's system, especially, depends on largesse from a largely unsympathetic state legislature, while Seattle and Los Angeles area residents have the legal ability to vote taxes on themselves to build and improve their rail networks.

In addition, New York and New Jersey state governments have also been unwilling not only to improve their systems, but even to provide for basic maintenance.  The article complimented Seattle, specifically, for including future maintenance costs in the amounts submitted to and approved by the voters.

Seattle also wants to learn from the East Coast’s mistakes, [King County Executive Dow] Constantine said.
“I made sure we included funding for long-term maintenance,” he said, “so you don’t get the situation we’re seeing in New York and Washington where the systems have been neglected and it’s expensive and inconvenient to rebuild.”

All this is heady stuff for us long-time Northwest Corner residents.  As a 14-year-old visitor to Chicago's north shore, I was asked by a girl my age about relations with Indians in my home state.  She didn't think the Indian wars were still on-going, but she somehow envisioned Indian settlements -- teepees perhaps -- as a common and unmistakable sight as one drove away from Seattle.  Perhaps trading posts where fish and gold dust were exchanged for blankets and trinkets.

 

I'm proud not only of our relatively new and still rather small rail transit system -- small, but extremely useful to me as it already exists -- but in our comprehensive bus system. We get lots of complaints about transit in Seattle, and about the cost of expansion.  But as the article notes,

Seattle has won accolades for its transit system, where 93 percent of riders report being happy with service — a feat that seems unimaginable in New York, where subway riders regularly simmer with rage on stalled trains.

But let's keep our perspective.  Yes, New York's system does seem ancient and creaky, and its stations dark and dingy.  And even Washington's system -- which I still consider "new" -- is getting a bit tired in appearance and service.  But both systems -- and especially New York's -- are huge by comparison with Seattle's, and even with LA's.  Trains may run late, but they run, and they run seemingly everywhere.

If I were a tired commuter in New York, riding the trains to and from work daily, I might be bitter about late trains, crowded trains with standing room only, and dingy stations.  But as a tourist, the New York and Washington systems are both a delight, enabling me to get virtually anywhere I want in four of the five New York boroughs, and into Maryland and Virginia suburbs from Washington.  Our eastern older brothers should be proud of their ancestors who bequeathed them the comprehensive systems they have today.

But they really should bring them up to date.