Ossification

In my 100th post, which now seems so long ago, I quoted Leibniz's words: "Whatever acts cannot be destroyed." If a thing has motion, it exists and continues to do so.

As I grow older, this has become more and more important. When not in motion, muscles tire from inactivity and get stiff. When stiff, they seem harder to coax back to life. I am turning into a rock, a fossil, an ossuary of my own bones.

I need to keep moving. It is not elegantly expressed, that thought. I do not want to become an abandoned house while still alive, I do not want to become a waterfall of stone.

Tennyson expressed it with more passion, more beauty:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...

I must keep moving. I must.

Metempsychosis without Reincarnation

Inspired by unicorns and suchlike, I come again to Donne. My summer fades into autumn, but is still heated enough for summer. I am in myself entire and yet not whole. I feel that a lot is going on in me which I have little control over, and that all the dietary advice and chemical knowledge and suchlike is just a human way to pretend that one has control over the microcosm, while being subject to the vagaries of nature.

I think I should just exercise when I feel dull, eat when hungry, sleep when tired, work when enthused. To those who would complain that I have choices they don't, too bad then. Sometimes you make your own situation, sometimes you make of it whatever you can.

Here are two fragments which have occupied my thoughts of late; the first is of Donne, the second of Tennyson. Each has his own way of struggling with human frailty.

Extract from 'Meditation I'

  by John Donne

Is this the honour which Man hath by being a little world,
that he hath these earthquakes in himself, sudden shakings;
these lightnings, sudden flashes;
these thunders, sudden noises;
these eclipses, sudden obfuscations, and darkenings of his senses;
these blazing stars, sudden fiery exhalations;
these rivers of blood, sudden red waters?

Is he a world to himself only therefore, that he hath enough in himself,
not only to destroy, and execute himself,
but to presage that execution upon himself;
to assist the sickness,
to antedate the sickness,
to make the sickness the more irremediable, by sad apprehensions,
and as if he would make a fire the more vehement,
by sprinkling water upon the coals,
so to wrap a hot fever in cold melancholy,
lest the fever alone should not destroy fast enough,
without this contribution nor perfect the work (which is destruction)
except we joined an artificial sickness, of our own melancholy,
to our natural, our unnatural fever?

O perplex'd discomposition,
O riddling distemper,
O miserable condition of Man!

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Extract from 'Ulysses'

  by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life pil’d on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is sav’d
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Ulysses and the Scientists

Of all poems, perhaps the one that has spoken most (and most frequently) to me from all the world of secular literature is Tennyson's Ulysses. To me, it is one of the markers of that curious cusp of time around which the worlds of science and mysticism and religion met and churned alight the fires of this present age.

We meet the aging king, Odysseus of ancient fame and wiliness, grandson of crafty Autolycus, musing at his home. He wants something to do before the lights go out across his world.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

For him, the quest has always been about knowledge, not war or fame or fortune, not even progeny or technology, even though he has succeeded at both. It is the quest for the new, for the unthought-of, for the saving of things against the tide of night and silence. He sees the game coming to an end, and he is restless to just let it come to that end without a fight. He sees men as active participants in that game, not just pawns:

Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

He does not dispute the Gods or dispute with them; he just wants to do what he can with his active end of the board. It is what impels his quest for knowledge, the idea that he can save something, do something, contend with God if he has to. The idea is not new: even the Old Testament is full of that. What's interesting is that he acknowledges both Time and Fate, Chronos and Ananke, just as the writer of Ecclesiastes does:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

It is the rash scientist who scorns such things or who tries to say that wonder can stem from science alone; wonder is a child of Time and Fate. It is the impulse that sets the wanderer off on his journey to seek what can be sought.

Thanksgiving Reasons

There is always a reason for the things we do. Of late, I've been thinking and writing about food even while part of my brain contemplates globalisation.

The first wave of globalisation was great, but landbound. Alexander's host swept out of Macedonia. By the time he died in Asia scant years later, the Hellenic wave of philosophy and understanding had reached India. The great empires of the time were Hellenized: the Egypt of the Ptolemies, Persia, the Rome that was growing from a seed. India and China felt it, but their masses of culture were more resistant.

In the light of that wave, the Pax Romana was a secondary wave. It built on the remains of the Greeks, for Alexander was heir to Aristotle, and Aristotle to Plato, and Plato to Socrates. And Rome was Plato's Republic writ large, but different from what the old sage would have thought. The Imperium filled a lot of Europe, and all the Mediterranean, with the language and the voice which we hear today echoed in Catalan, French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish.

Later, the third wave built on these two waves with the ascent from Elizabeth I of England to Victoria, Empress of India and, by the grace of God, Queen of England. It is this third wave, a tide of British vigor crossed with Graeco-Roman pollen, which spawned the bastard sons and daughters of Empire. To this day, the Venetian lion of the sea is echoed in the merlion of Singapore and the trident of Barbados.

And behind, and with, and through all these waves, we learned to eat many things. Bananas, chocolate, wheat, tea, prawns, coffee, cinnamon, rice; we learned to eat the flesh of all things that crawl and walk and swim and fly, the fruit of all things that sprout and bloom and spread. Not all of us eat all things. Many of us eat many things.

Today, I was at the eating house called Gastronomia da Paolo when it hit me. I eat the sun-dried tomatoes and the durum pasta of ancient Rome. I eat the chocolate and the fruit of countries distant, the scones of a British summer, the stuffed vine leaves of Greece. I am the son of the waves of change and empire crashing on the shores of the once-immutable and mysterious East.

All of these things are miracles of time and space and energy. All of these things are to be appreciated and enjoyed. I give thanks for every single bastard child of these phenomena of greed and gain, of adventure and daring, of life and empire. For we are all the world, and all the world is us.

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From last lines of Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

From the last lines of Prometheus Unbound by Percy Shelley:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!

Crossing The Bar

The phrase 'crossing the bar' has many different resonances for people. In financially-obsessed parts of the world, it often refers to making the grade for a higher salary division. Of course, this isn't the same as being 'called to the bar' - what happens to a lawyer when he becomes a barrister. (Which, in turn, is not the same as serving at a coffee bar as a barista.)

But here's a bar chart which might be interesting to you. I first spotted it on my IP Hosting blog.

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	8.8
Mind:	9
Body:	9.1
Spirit:	8
Friends/Family:	6.8
Love:	6.4
Finance:	9.3
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

I shall leave you here with a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson - who on occasion produced totally cinematic poetry with the power to provoke intense reflection.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have cross’d the bar.

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Note: For those of you who like literary challenges, try these questions.