Why go to school?
 
I’m always amazed when a natural phenomenon catches media attention and bewilders local residents. Tornadoes in the Midwest, tsunamis by the ocean, eruptions of volcanoes. What a surprise! What’s next, asteroids in the Solar System? 
 
Seems that even though we’ve been around as a species for maybe more than 250,000 years, most of those with oral traditions that detail both myth and family, we still haven’t gotten the hang of living on Earth and with natural processes. One would think…
 
Amazing, isn’t it, how we rely on our own experience as truth, but fail to rely on others’ experiences as truth? How every generation seems to be surprised when a drought occurs, when a volcano erupts, when a…? You name it and include blizzards and asteroid impacts if you want. 
 
So, at the time of this writing, I see an eruption in Hawaii is making the news (interrupted only by the royal wedding in England) big time. Concerned officials are offering masks. (That volcanic ash can be airborne little razors of silicates seeking entrances to lungs) And the poisonous gases? Well, some air filter mask to keep particulates out won’t stop sulfur compounds from getting in. And then there are the interrupted vacations and the enhanced ones. “We just went to Hawaii and we got to see the eruption.”
 
Generally, two kinds of volcanoes on the planet: Shield volcanoes and stratovolcanoes, also called composite cones. The latter are more dangerous than the former. The difference lies in the lavas typical of either: Basaltic, less viscous lava of the shields, and either andesitic or rhyolitic, more viscous lava of the stratovolcanoes. Think flowing water and oozing syrup. Andesitic and rhyolitic lavas can plug the conduit, allow gases to build, and result in highly explosive eruptions, ala Mt. St. Helens, Vesuvius, and Pinatubo, deadly eruptions that release pyroclastic flows of ash, rock, and spit lava in a turbulent mass over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. You’re toast if you’re there. The basaltic eruptions of shields are generally less explosive, though still potentially dangerous. The Hawaiian volcanoes are the latter, and they are both active and big. Mauna Loa is the biggest mountain, rising from the ocean floor more than 30,000 feet, piercing the water’s surface and reaching about 13,000 feet in elevation. And the area covered by the shields is usually large, think the Big Island. 
 
Anyway, there are thousands of volcanoes on our planet; some extinct, some dormant, some active. Those that are active have chased away most of the denizens living in their shadows, whereas those that are dormant provide a beautiful backdrop for the urbanized indifferent. “Yeah, it might erupt, but I’m going to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in my home because, well, you know, chances are that it won’t erupt.”
 
You realize, of course, that just saying something doesn’t make it so. Dormant and active volcanoes are Earth’s slot machines. Yes, and a three-wheeled machine might produce three sevens in a row, but there are 8,000 combinations for those symbols on those wheels. One never knows when they will line up to spew out coins, and chances are greater that they won’t than they will.
 
“But,” you say, “Earth’s a risky place, and we have to live somewhere: Volcanic landscape, oceanside, Great Plains, high latitudes. You put your money down and throw the dice. Look, we recently had a close by-pass of an asteroid.”
 
I’m always amazed at how we justify our decisions and ignore our heritage. And I, like you, do so. Along anyone’s life path, someone from an older generation offers advice or reports on an historical event, local or regional, with a warning that such events can recur. Warnings aside, we have as humans a protection against risk: The acquisition of knowledge. Unfortunately, we fail to learn or justify our ignorance by declaring this or that to “be so.” Life below Vesuvius today goes on as though the eruption of 79 didn’t occur. Life along the San Andreas, in Tornado Alley, beneath perched masses of snow, and on islands in the paths of hurricanes continues. 
 
Volcanologists warned people living near Pinatubo, near the Soufriere Hills, and near Mt. St. Helens that an eruption was pending. Still people died because they remained, thinking the three-wheels were unlikely to hit three sevens in a row. The same happened to residents of the Gulf Coast during Katrina. Warnings went out from the President on down. More than a thousand died.
 
There’s something amiss in our educational system. It’s as though we don’t see any relevance to our lives in that 250,000 years of accumulated knowledge. And maybe our ignorance of very practical matters, like the dangers posed by a volcano, a fault zone, a hurricane, is what marks our education. Think Dust Bowl of the 1930s, for example. Ignorant that they were jeopardizing the very thing, the soil, that gave them sustenance and an economy, farmers of the Southern Plains plowed and plowed and plowed. When the drought hit, the windstorms lifted and carried off the soils, estimated for two windstorms in May, 1934, to amount to 650 million tons, for example. Ignorance of Earth and Earth processes has led to some of the greatest disasters and migrations. 
 
But nothing will change. A question posed to Bill Nye by CNN’s Deb Feyerick indicates that those last 250,000 years of experience with physical processes and entities has gone for naught. Feyerick asked whether or not an asteroid’s passing close to Earth was related to global warming. Duh! Similarly, when a powerful earthquake along a subduction zone caused a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people, some asked whether or not it was the result of global warming. What practical knowledge will such people pass on to the next generation and to the next 250,000 years of generations? 

Sorry for the politically incorrect term Man. Sign of my age. Like Neil Armstrong, I think inclusively with respect to our heritage of language. Man, capitalized, mankind, lower case, is genderless. Just a term for humans. Offensive? I guess one takes offense at and from whatever one wants to take offense, like terms for genetic heritage, religious heritage, political heritage. 
 
Story my late dad told me: One of his cousins of Italian heritage moved to the upper Midwest of the USA in the 1940s. Moving into the rural community, he found himself a stranger to whom a local, not of Italian heritage, asked him, probably in an attempt either to humiliate or incite, “Do you know what a Wop is?” Unfazed and unoffended, the cousin said, “Yes, it’s the sound made when you take one cow chip and smash it against another.” Story over. No further confrontations, peaceful coexistence. Sticks and stones might hurt my bones, but words….
 
Today, that incident would be a social media sensation. Outcries would abound. But I digress…
 
So, back to Man, specifically, categories of man. Do you have any? Come on. ‘Fess up. You know you do. What are they? Let me guess. Some of your categories are economic, some religious, some psychological, some physical, some historical, and some I can’t imagine because, well, they’re your categories born of inculcation and experience. And they serve a purpose, of course. You can’t handle all the details and variations, so you categorize. Categorizing makes the world easy. In this we’re all a bit obsessive-compulsive. This isn’t a judgment. I categorize, also. I guess I can’t help it. And like you, I probably can’t be totally objective if someone categorizes me. We like boxes except when we’re placed in one. 
 
In the “One small step for a man, one giant leap for Mankind” (Yes, Armstrong said “a”) vein, let’s take a look at some categories as outlined in the nineteenth century to see whether there’s some continuity that we have either maintained or interrupted, elaborated or eliminated, or fully replaced. In 1898, Professor Daniel G. Brinton delivered a lecture to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia entitled “The Milestones of Human Progress.” Some of you will be happy to learn that the good Professor Brinton makes limited use of the term Man or Mankind in his talk even though the terms were universally understood to mean human. No, he used human and people as well. Now, remember, it’s the nineteenth century, and as bright as the Professor might have been, he had no familiarity with gender-neutral bathrooms unless he so designated a big tree or bush on a camping trip or used a local outhouse.
 
Brinton starts his lecture* with a note that some people of his time “still think” that people began in some noble state, “Arcadian simplicity” as he calls it, but that “minds…trained in archaeological studies and in ethnographic observations” know that in ancient times man lived in the “rudest possible condition of savagery.” So, there’s a hint on where this categorization stuff is headed. Right of the top, Brinton thinks “savage” and “civilized.” He remarks that the difference can be seen in the materials for tools: Stone, bronze, and finally, in his own age, iron (and steel). He mentions these materials because they “bear a distinct relation to all man’s other conditions at the time. “A tribe which had never progressed beyond the stone age…could never proceed beyond a very limited point of civilization.” And then he mentions the “celebrated chemist” Baron Liebig, who laid the difference among humans in a categorization of human progress in a single substance: Soap. Cleanliness, you remember is next to….
 
The Germans of Brinton’s time had two categories, also based on relative savagery or civilization: Natur-Voelker and Kultur-Voelker. Brinton says the people in these categories are “psychological,” the former are tied to Nature as “wild-people,” whereas the latter are free from the control of Nature. Brinton, like you and me, is a product of his times, so he judges the wild people as living a largely unconscious life. Those culture-people live self-consciously. 
 
Hate to burden you with too much, but consider Brinton’s words in light of your own categories:
 
     “To make this difference between the two still more apparent, it is the conflict between the instinctive desires and the human heart and soul and the intelligent desires—those desires which we have by instinct, which we have by heredity and which have been inculcated into us wholly by our surroundings, which we drink in and accept without any internal discussion of them: those are instinctive in character. We go about our business, we transact the daily affairs of life, we accept our religion and politics, not from any internal conviction of our own or positive examination, but from our surroundings. To that extent people are acting instinctively; and, as such, they are on a lower stage of culture than those who arrive at such results for themselves through intelligent personal effort. This is a real distinction also, although somewhat more subtle, perhaps, than the ones previously given. Therefore, the differentiation made by the German ethnographers between wild people and the cultured peoples is, in the main, right; but it does not admit of any sharp line of distinction between the two. We cannot draw a fixed line and say, ‘On this side are the cultured people and on that the wild,’ because there are many tribes and nations who are about that line, in some respects on one side of it, in others on the other; but in a broad, general way this distinction (which is now universally adopted by the German writers) is one we should keep in our minds as being based upon careful studies and real distinctions."
 
You’re not buying it, right? And the reason? You’ve had more than a century of psychological, sociological, and anthropological studies and decades of psychobabble behind your views. Brinton didn’t have any of that. So, he continues to list categories from his nineteenth-century perspective: Hunter-gatherers vs. Farmers and Domesticators, for example. He argues that caring for animals makes man more humane—as though Elsie the Cow’s slaughterer couldn’t also be a serial killer.
 
Then Brinton turns to food supply as a way to distinguish humans in four stages of culture: The hunting and fishing stage, the nomadic or pastoral, the agricultural, and the commercial. And he mentions Lewis H., Morgan, an American ethnologist who categorizes humans through stages: Savagery, barbarism, semi-civilization, civilization, and finally enlightenment. In 1898 the world was still a decade and a half from the savagery of World War I, but surely, Brinton knew about the savagery imposed by individuals and groups in his own civilized times.
 
Balls in your court now. How do you categorize Man (okay, humans)? Do you do so through some historical perspective, some development or evolution? No? What’s your approach? What governs your categories? We all know you have them. You know you have them. But have you really thought about them? Do you keep revising them because of current influences? Finally, are your categories mutually exclusive?**
 
 
*Scientific American Supplement, June 25, 1898, Vol. XLV, No. 1178, p. 18766. Thanks to the Gutenberg Project, you can read Professor Brinton’s complete lecture online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18265/18265-h/18265-h.htm#art02
 
**Nothing like a little grey to overturn a black-and-white perspective.

Words. They get us into trouble all the time. So many meanings. So many connotations. Just the way we say them can evoke an unexpected response. But the very nature of words reveals how brains work: Their truth is the truth of the moment, of experience, and of wish. Stay tuned; this one’s bound to offend someone.
 
If you rummage around the www long enough you’ll eventually stumble upon journals that cover just about every subject. I’m not talking Vogue,Time, or People here. Scientific journals. Their titles give a hint of what they contain. Food for thought here: What is the focus of Journal of Agricultural Science and Food Research? That’s an easy one. How about Irrigation and Drainage Systems Engineering? Not interested? Yeah. That one is pretty specialized. Okay, try this one: Journal of Physical Mathematics. Perplexed? Don’t blame you. Me, too.
 
Now, I don’t doubt that the subscribers to Journal of Physical Mathematics are bright people with bright ideas. There’s something about the word mathematics that makes us think Einstein, Hawking, and professors with chalkboards, chalk dust, and strange symbols with intermixed numbers. Here are a couple of the journal’s articles that might catch your eye, some readings you promise you’ll get to later: “New Exact Solutions for the Maccari System,” “The Homotopy Analysis Method for a Fourth-Order Initial Value Problems” (Huh? “a”?), and “Bound State Solutions of the Klein-Gordon Equation for…yada, yada, yada.” Yes, you have to be specialist to have both interest and understanding.
 
Okay, forget the part about not being a mathematician and not having any interest because of that math class you had to suffer to get a diploma or degree. Let’s just concentrate on the title of the journal (Journal of Physical Mathematics in case you forgot). Think about the combination of physical and mathematics. If you are like me, you’ll say, “Are those words reversed? Are we talkin’ mathematics of physics? Now, that I could see. That makes sense, since outside of observing processes that involve energy, forces, and matter, most physics is conducted through mathematics. But “physical mathematics”? Isn’t that what I did with an abacus? With apples? “If Dorothy has two red shoes, and the Wicked Witch takes one away, will Dorothy have to hop down the Yellow Brick Road?”
 
You see the brain’s problem with words. Even the most precise use by the most intelligent among us can lead to misunderstanding because we always communicate with another brain that has a different experience of the world. Even in the most precisely constructed sentence some reader or listener might find a connotation that is personally based and often biased. As a result, we often guess meaning and intention, sometimes embarrassing ourselves in awkward first meetings, for example.
 
No big deal here. Just a tiny thought: Sign language, body language, winks and facial expressions, cultural gestures, and, yes, words add up to a general understanding of what we want from one another or what we want to give to one another. Let’s end with an example that led to a famous incident retold by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” 

​Six hundred seventy-three English cavalrymen of the Light Brigade charged through the “valley of death” during the battle of Balaclava (Ukrainian Балаклава; town for which the knitted ski mask is named) during the Crimean War. The charge became almost instantly famous (or infamous) thanks to the telegraph and to Tennyson. Two rival brothers-in-law, the Earl of Lucan and the Earl of Cardigan (for whom the sweater is named), had long been at odds. During the campaign against the Russians, both headed cavalry, with Cardigan in charge of the Light Brigade and Lucan designated his superior and the one in overall command of both the “heavies” and the lightly armed—and swift—light cavalry brigade. Superior to both was First Baron Raglan who issued the order to retake guns and the redoubt captured by the Russians on an adjacent highland. 
 
Raglan’s position during the battle was from a highland west of the North and South Valleys. Raglan sent Captain Louis Nolan to tell Lucan to recapture the guns lost to the Russians, but Lucan could not, from his position, see any such lost weapons. So, when Nolan said he must attack, Lucan asked, “Attack what?  What guns, sir?” Nolan waved imprecisely toward what was to become known as the “Valley of Death,” and not toward the redoubts on the adjacent hill where Raglan had meant for them to attack.   
            
Lucan and Cardigan allowed their dislike of each other to influence their field decision. They also blindly followed an order they misunderstood. The Russians had men and artillery positioned along the sides and at the opposite end of the valley.  Cardigan, never known as particularly bright, could see that the Russians had lined the sides and opposite end of the valley with artillery and riflemen, so he questioned the order. Lucan, however, told his brother-in-law, “We have no choice but to obey.” 
 
Mentally map this. Put yourself in this position. You don’t have exact knowledge of the task; you see folly in the task as stated, and you have to obey an order with obvious dire consequences. The consequences of the reckless charge? One hundred ten cavalrymen were killed, 129 were wounded, and 32 were captured. 
 
I know, this seems a stretch from the Journal of Physical Mathematics, but think about all that any brain has to do to communicate with another brain “precisely” to achieve a goal. Words have connotations. People have their own experiences. Levels of intelligence and learning vary.
 
The next time you get a bit huffy because you weren’t understood exactly, think of the burden on that other brain that has to handle not only your words, but also your demeanor, your actions, and its own complex issues and demeanor.
 
            “Forward, the Light Brigade!”
            Was there a man dismay’d?
            Not tho’ the soldier knew
            Someone had blunder’d:
            Theirs not to make reply,
            Theirs not to reason why,
            Theirs But to do and die: 
            Into the Valley of Death
            Rode the six hundred.
 
Choose your words and gestures carefully. 

Apparently, Koko the gorilla is a happy camper. Koko, capable of sign language, has a vocabulary of 1,000 words, is fed regularly, has pet cats, and knows the trainer well. It’s been a happy life. No so for Koku. Koku Istambulova is 128 years old and says her longevity is a punishment. In fact, according to a report in the Mirror, she “hasn’t enjoyed a single happy day in her life.”* 
 
What’s wrong with this picture. A happy gorilla and a sad human. Is that our lot? 
 
“Well, no,” you say. “I’m happy, well not all the time but most of the time or at least half the time, and I would be happy all the time if it weren’t for all the interference by people. People. Humpf. Can’t be happy without them; can’t be happy with them.”
 
Poor Koku. She’s had a hard life. Lots of tragedy, including exile. But think about her life, lived by the way rather simply and centered in her garden. All her woes have come from the outside. Left alone, she might have been as happy as Koko in her cage. 
 
Now, there’s a thought. Koko is essentially a prisoner, a caged animal. And that’s about all that Koko has known, living in a cage and being trained in sign language since she was one. She’s been in a prison school. But there have been advantages. Food for one, medicine for another. Chances are that in the wild gorillas don’t have access to Rite Aid or CVS or a vet. At night she makes herself a nest as her uncaged distant relatives do in the forest. One could say she tends her cage and is happy to do so.  
 
Back to Koku. From childhood on she’s lived through wars, displacement, and poverty. She’s recently lost her daughter who was over 100. Geez. I can’t comprehend it. Can you? Well, if you’re old, maybe.
 
I just can’t get over Koku’s statement that she hasn’t enjoyed a single happy day in her life. And then I think of wimpy youths crying over their poor state of affairs as they wear their wealth in ever-new fashions and carry their wealth in high tech objects too numerous to mention. Lord, will they still be wimpy if they live to be 128? Probably. Wimpiness is a cage in itself, a self-imposed one. 
 
Well, at least Koku is articulate. And she can still hear. At 128 she has her faculties. She has her garden, and she says it is her solace. Maybe she’s following Voltaire’s advice at the end of Candide: “Tend your garden.”  
 
 
*The Mirror online: “Oldest living person ever at 128' wishes she had died young and says her longevity is ‘a punishment.’  Koku Istambulova says she hasn't enjoyed a single happy day in her life and has ‘no idea’ how she has lived so long.”https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/oldest-living-person-ever-128-12543657
​

We all have those moments we wish we could relive. They originate in an ongoing life, and almost all of them lie only in the memories of the dour doer. Those moments are fixed, and some of them have changed our lives significantly: Accepting or rejecting a proposal, responding to a circumstance, behaving in some self-destructive manner, missing an opportunity, rejecting or taking a risk—all such moments, in our personal perspectives, have had positive or negative effects. 
 
The Younger Dryas was a period of rapid climatic cooling that began about 12,800 years ago in the Northern Hemisphere. Its significance is that it interrupted the warming trend that ended the last glacial maximum. Earth was heating up; the ice was melting. And then a couple of Dryas cooling trends intervened. Real cooling trends. Like eight degrees Celsius cooler for hundreds of years. The cooling slowed the rise of seas as less meltwater entered them. The Younger Dryas (named for an eight-petaled tundra flower) seems to be one of those moments with consequences beyond affecting nature and just making our ancestors shiver. North America’s Clovis culture declined and in the Middle East, people rather rapidly turned to agriculture. 
 
Why did Earth suddenly cool? Answering that question for the distant past is just as difficult as answering the climate questions of the present. We live on a complex planet, and everything from solar output to shape of our orbit to tilt of our poles to volcanic eruptions to orogenesis to atmospheric and oceanic composition and circulation, have influence. And there’s another possible influence: Impacting fragments of a comet. At least, that’s the argument of Wendy S. Wolbach and co-authors of an article on “extraordinary biomass-burning” as a cause of the Younger Dryas. In short, Wolbach et al. say that there’s “considerable evidence” that “The radiant and thermal energy from multiple explosions triggered wildfires that burned ~10% of the planet’s biomass”(179).* How did they discover the fires of so long ago? Ash. Lots of it in ice cores dated to about 12,835 years ago, the time of the Younger Dryas.
 
So, what do impacting comet fragments have to do with you? The Younger Dryas appears to have given people in the Levant the incentive to become farmers, changing their nomadic lifestyle. Farms allow more people to survive, villages to sprout into towns, and towns into civilizations. The ash of the Younger Dryas, however “bad” the moment was for the Clovis and for other Northern Hemisphere people and possibly for the large fauna of the time, appears to mark a turning point. The ash also tells us that Earth was minding its own business when a chance encounter with fragments of a large comet radically altered what was going on. In other words, Mother Earth, if we could think anthropomorphically for a moment, didn’t make some regrettable mistake. The turning point came from an external source, and she just didn’t have the time to avoid the incident. Her reaction was instantaneous.
 
So, too, were some of those reactions that became turning points in your life. You might wish to go back and undo them, but the reality is that no one is prepared for all the circumstances into which life’s orbit takes him or her. Once the event occurs and precipitates a rapid change, the best tactic seems to lie in adaptation. 
 
The record of the moment will be locked in the past like Younger Dryas ash deposits in Greenland ice. They tell of a moment when long-term warming trend stopped and a short-term cooling trend began. But those deposits won’t always be there; they will flow out with the meltwater with further warming that began a long time ago. And the deposits of ash from your embarrassing and life-altering moments will also wash away with the current trend of your life unless you insist on holding onto what you were instead of furthering what you are. Want it put another way? Don’t make an ash of yourself.
 
*Wolbach, Wendy S. “Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ~12,800 Years Ago.” The Journal of Geology, Vol. 126, No. 2, March 2018. Pp. 165-184.

Solved a mystery, and all I had to do was look at my car. 
 
Here’s the mystery told online on PLOS Research News in an interview of Casper Hallman by Beth Baker (nee Jones).* Hallman and colleagues have chronicled the decline in flying insects over a 27-year period. The group measured the biomass of flying insects by capturing them in Malaise traps. Hallman says, “We were very surprised by the extent of the decline in flying insects that we found, measuring over three-quarters of the total flying insect biomass over 27 years.”
 
Of course, Hallman and colleagues have a life’s work ahead of them: “We would like to further consider the causes….” Say no more. Grants will fly across the academic highway to the group for years to come. 
 
Think I have an idea, but I don’t want to prevent Hallman and colleagues from getting more grants to study insects that aren’t there. So, keep this between the two of us.
 
Projected global car sales for 2017 were 79 million units according to Statista, The Statistics Portal (Statistics and Studies from More than 22,500 Sources).* Now consider this: The United States has 6,722,347 kilometers (4,167, 855 miles) of roads; China has 4,733,500 Kilometers, and Germany, the country of the high-speed Autobahn and Hallman’s insect study, has 644,480 kilometers of roads. No kidding. You can look it up.*** Many of those roads have multiple lanes, and many of those lanes have multiple cars. What’s that chance of crossing one of those highways without being hit? Dumb bugs.
 
See where I’m going with this? Is there a windshield anywhere in the summer or in the tropics and subtropics all year round that doesn’t sport a splattered flying insect? Think; if just one insect hit the windshield of each of those 79 million vehicles sold in 2017, Earth would have—yes, your math is correct—79 million fewer flying insects. 
 
You want to bring back flying insects, Casper? Eliminate cars.**** Oh! And outlaw kids eating ice cream cones while they ride their bikes through a swarm of gnats. 
 
* http://researchnews.plos.org/2017/10/18/fraught-future-for-flying-insects/
** https://www.statista.com/statistics/199974/us-car-sales-since-1951/
*** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_network_size
****I can't say for sure, but I would hazard a guess that Casper drives a car, and maybe drives fast enough to kill a flying bug. Is this a case of do as I say and not do as I do?

Certainty has a certain value. It helps us get through the day by keeping us from constant doubt about ourselves and our personal interactions with people, things, and processes. We like reliability, and assumptions make life psychologically easy by providing stable platforms for ideas and behaviors. Axioms are the ultimate assumptions, the self-evident truths of Euclidean geometry. 
 
In whatever way you want to refer to them, axioms underlie your thought, so you expect them to be reliable and stable. When axioms fail, everything built on them teeters and eventually falls, a Leaning Tower of Pisa leaning too much to save. You assume your grounds for thought will support your complex thinking, and you are troubled whenever the thoughts you construct begin to lean on a weak foundation.
 
Unfortunately, only a few assumptions seem to be stable. General Relativity, for example. Nothing built on it has leaned and fallen. The Uncertainty Principle? Maybe another stable base. Search your mind for some others. 
 
What about spirituality? Anything (Sorry for the word choice) there? An ultimate and stable ground? 
 
More on this later. And after that. And so on. Thousands of years and uncounted attempts to find the underlying stable spiritual axiom on which we all can build some permanent structure have not given us a universal. So, we’ll go on, and on, and on: Debates aplenty in efforts to tie the physical world to the spiritual one—or to untie them. Debates that endlessly stop where they start. And all sorts of New Age attempts to do what the nineteenth-century Romantic poets and artists wanted to do: Identify some natural spirituality or spiritual nature on which we can understand the relationship between the physical and nonphysical worlds. 
 
Certainly, you have some horse in this race, some reliance on some axiom or set of axioms you believe to be universal. Euclid had five axioms. Mathematician David Hilbert had five sets of axioms. How many do you have?  

No one knows the count of stars in the Milky Way. Estimates run between 100 and 400 billion. It’s not for want of counting. The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft recently made a survey of 1.3 billion stars, but that’s a long way from the estimate. Also, the galaxy seems to be home to uncounted millions of small black holes. Estimates are difficult when walls of matter block one’s view. Being inside all the time isn’t an option; we don’t have a means of getting outside to look in.
 
And that’s the way we also see traditions that house us. Now, you might find my interpretation disagreeable, especially if you are a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer, but I find that we are steeped in the details of traditions as numerous as the stars and that we can’t know all those details because some of them block our view of others. We’re inside, and, regardless of what philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Gadamer tell us, we really don’t have an objective method to make comprehensive new and more accurate counts. Simply, I say, because we are inside, we can’t fully rethink what we are; something hidden behind the walls and out of view might influence us, and we’ll never really know.
 
That pretty much sounds pessimistic, but we have to deal with what we have to deal with. The view that we are inside tradition’s house as we are inside the Milky Way has its flaws, of course, flaws that I recognize. One might say, for example, that if we look at other galaxies, we can draw very good comparisons, and if we look at a variety of cultures and traditions, we can see how ours might compare. But that’s assuming we can truly understand the hidden details of another culture. Remember, we can see the Andromeda Galaxy, but we really only estimate its star count because it, too, has interior walls that block details of its composition. Billions of stars lie between outside observers and billions of other stars. 
 
“The conceptual world in which philosophizing develops has already captivated us in the same way that the language in which we live conditions us,” says Gadamer.* 
 
“Baloney,” you say. “What about multilingual people? Don’t they see one language from the perspective of another? How are the details hidden from them.”
 
That’s a good point, and I’m glad you made it (I can’t say how much I enjoy your challenging input). But if anyone who communicates in any language suffers from the inside-the-house blindness, those who attempt to adopt a linguistic tradition are similarly bound. We just can’t see all the details of another tradition just as we can’t see all the details of neighboring Andromeda.
 
“But look at what astronomers are discovering!” you continue. “They’re finding new stuff all the time, stuff that overturns previous knowledge and that provides new information. And their technology is giving us ways to see that we never had. We even have a gravity-wave sensor in LIGO.”
 
Yes, and as Gadamer says, we can be surprised every so often by some insight, some discovery about tradition that we previously didn’t recognize until experience gave us new details. Some new way of seeing. Yet, that aha! adds only another detail to our understanding, not the sum of details, not all the details. No, you might disagree, might call me too Freudian or even Jungian, but I’m going with a hermeneutics of hermeneutics that says we’re fundamentally driven to interpret our world, our societies, and ourselves by largely opaque traditions.
 
Does that mean we shouldn’t send satellites to look for more details of the Milky Way or that we shouldn’t look to see where experience reveals something about tradition? No. But here’s a dilemma that Georgia Warnke says is worth examining. In “Experiencing Tradition versus Belonging To It: Gadamer’s Dilemma,” Warnke writes:
 
     “On the one hand, our socialization into historical traditions means that we are part of them and that they set the terms for our orientation toward our world. On the other hand, we can have experiences of our historical traditions in which they surprise and challenge us.”
 
Warnke follows that with poignant questions all of us might ask: “Yet if we are part of historical traditions, how can we experience them in this way? If they orient us how can they also surprise us?” (347)**
 
See the implication? If you can see a “detail” through personal experience, aren’t you separated from that former position on the “inside?” (Ibid.) That’s the dilemma: Being inside while having an outside experience. Being bound and unbound. Being part of something but simultaneously separate from it.
 
Look, I’m certainly not going to tell you not to count stars. The more you count the more we’ll know. But we’re limited by time in this. Galaxies keep making stars, so just when you think you’ve counted them all, darn, there are more, some hidden by the very stars you already counted. And just when you think you fully understand the tradition that predisposes you to interpret the world in a particular way, darn, you find some hidden detail all the while becoming part of an evolving tradition. 
 
So, here we are, some 13.8 billion years after the origin of the universe and some 2,500 years after the birth of philosophy. We’re bound to the “traditions” of both. In the West, we think Greek. Plato and Aristotle and their immediate predecessors in Miletus. What’s that you say? Yes, we’ve incorporated some of the East, we’ve added a layer of Buddhist tradition, Confucianism, and several other traditions. All that did was add stars, like some merger of galaxies. It was tough enough to discern the star count with just one galaxy; with the merger, we added more walls to the house that hides uncountable details. 
 
 
 
*Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, translated by Joeld Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. 2ndrevised edition. New York Crossroads Publishing Co, 1992, p. 358.
 
**The Review of Metaphysics,Vol. 68, No. 2 (December 2014), 347-369.

Seventeenth-century essayist/poet John Dryden wrote a verse satire entitled “Absalom and Achitophel” that attacked some of the political/religious goings-on of his time, one of which was the attempt to exclude James, presumably the next in line for English kingship, from the throne because he was Catholic. Three attempts at exclusion never made it into law, but they generated two political parties: The Whigs supported the exclusion, whereas the Tories opposed it. Now, it’s a bit difficult for us so far removed from that century to put our pollex on the political climate of the time, but suffice it to know that England had weathered a civil war, a reinstatement of an exiled king, and a series of reverberations bouncing across the Channel because of family royalty ties, Reformation related battles, and a desire on the part of some to unify England and Scotland. In that context, simplified here, Dryden satirized.
 
One of Dryden’s lines, line 305 to be precise, catches my attention. Dryden writes, “Desire of power, on earth a vicious weed….” Most likely, the line took root in my mind because it’s spring, and I just put a weed-and-feed product over my lawn.* So, weeds have been on my mind. 
 
The desire for power has been a vicious weed, not just in Dryden’s time, but in ours as well. Like all weeds, that desire has been invasive and pervasive throughout history, often fulfilled by exclusion. That such a desire manifested itself in the doings of English royalty and political parties of centuries ago shouldn’t be a surprise, nor should its manifestation be a surprise in our times. Weeds are tough to control. Evidence for that seems to lie in the rise of Whigs and Tories, the latter arising as a weed in the exclusive lawn the Whigs intended to plant and maintain.  
 
I find it ironic that the weed of desire for power often fulfills itself by excluding “plants” perceived to be weeds. After all, isn’t a weed just a plant someone doesn’t want? “Not in my yard!” And the same seems to apply to the current milieu of excluding those whose thoughts are “weeds.” Think now of universities and university students controlling their yards because someone of a different point of view wants to plant some seed of thought, wants merely to “enter the yard.” 
 
Power by exclusion makes a very uniform lawn. But as satisfactory as a lush grass-only lawn is to the king of a yard, such a lawn is also rather boring. Nothing challenges the status quo, nothing different shows the variety of life evolution has generated. Or, in the case of thoughts, nothing in a uniform, albeit pretty, intellectual lawn presents an argument for yellow dandelions, violets, or Queen Ann’s lace. Uniform green. Acquired by exclusion.
 
The desire for power has become the desire for sameness. Is it possible that just as we have been influenced to think an area of uniform grass is worth our time and money so we have also been trained to think that all political thought, our political thought, should be uniform? Universities with beautiful campuses have spent millions of dollars on lawn care. That expenditure now seems to extend to thought care. And all because of a vicious desire for power, power acquired by weeding and feeding. 
 


​*Grasses have done all right by themselves over the past seventy million years or so. The evolution of human desire and folly is a relatively recent phenomenon by comparison. That grasses have adapted to many climates and geographic locations without human help seems to make the folly of helping them grow in a weed free environment a prime example of both pride and folly. Or is it another example of the desire for power? “I declare my lawn weed free. I exclude all weeds; let them be banished from my little ‘island.’”

Beautiful and expensive dresses, all tailored, and rented tuxes of colors matching or complementing those dresses: Prom night. A version of the coming-out party that harks to May and Mary celebrations, to fertility rites, to Ceres welcoming Proserpine in the sunshine, serially celebrated in spring. And old things: Trees and buildings that serve as backdrops for photos of the exuberant though nervous young, surrounded by parents, siblings, and friends taking pictures too numerous to print except for a few for the scrapbook and one for the wall. 
 
Want to bet? I’ll wager a blog that most of those pre-prom pictures are, weather permitting, of outdoor poses, the ladies with bouquets in hand and their escorts with boutonnières pinned to lapels, big old tree in the background, or worn steps, or porticos, or bricks in need of repointing: The contrast between the young and old never so obvious as it is during the shoot among the spring shoots on old trees. 
 
Of course, there’s no way I can pay if I lose the bet. If you win, write yourself a blog, and make it about where you stand between the emergence of youth and the experience of age. The blog is your photo, that captured moment worth keeping, my gift to you (I’m thinking Elton John, “This one’s for you”). 
 
Really, you deserve a personal blog, a bioblogography that highlights that moment in your youth that was like a pre-prom photo shoot, somewhat balanced between total awkwardness and confidence, that moment when everyone saw you against the background of those who paid for the dress or the tux, the corsage or boutonnière, and the ticket to watch you parade in the Grand March into your future. 
 
Even if you never went to the prom, you understand that moment when the seesaw was momentarily balanced between youth and age, the tipping point into realities too numerous to mention, realities that loosen the mortar between bricks in life’s building. Glittering clothes and dull, older finishes. Liquefaction against solidity. What a great contrast! Things that have weathered time and that stand stately, serving as backdrop for things yet to come.
 
It’s spring. Pull out the moment’s memory when you posed in obvious contrast to age. Everyone has some version of a prom night. What is yours?