pensees

"Where have you been?"

"Chess."

"It must have been a long game."

"It is just beginning."

She waited for me to say something more.

"The board exists only in the future. No - that's not quite right. A corner of it always touches my present; sometimes an entire edge. But the rest of the board is somewhere next week, two months from now, six years from now. And never the same. And I play against several opponents."

"The pieces have no names. Not yet, anyway. Their moves I am just beginning to learn. Some are conventional, most are not. There are rules that govern them, but I am learning as I go along. I take a long time between moves."

"Have you lost any pieces?"

"Yes. I need to be careful. But I will win this game."

"From what you have said I think that unlikely."

"Perhaps. But I have seen something which has encouraged me. The tactics for such a game I quickly saw to be something new for me, requiring me to enter some part of my mind I had never entered before, some room, perhaps lit, perhaps dark, its doorway unpassed before. In my struggle to play this game well I found myself there. And as I looked around, I smiled. I recognized the arrangements easily, instantly, as you would have: symbolic representations of ideas, the particular symbols new to me, of course, articulating with the present and extending away, into time, into expectation. Hope and desire."

"Where were you?"

"Language. We have been doing it all our lives, effortlessly, this most complicated chess game. And we're good at it. And you know what? I have never started a single sentence without engaging a kind of genius gift which is strong enough to rebuild a galaxy. Every thoughtful phrase, dammit."

"Damn what? It's a transitive verb and requires an object."

"What? Smallness. Fear. My own physical limits. You know...the stupid stuff."

"Go finish your chess game."

"I may never finish."

"I know. Strengthen your position for the middle game. Threaten spin as you attack market with thermodynamics, while you bring out Aesthetics. Advance your right friendship, then left, to hold center, and you will capture avarice with wit over the black diagonal. They have more. Be careful."

"Wit moves like a knight?"

"Better. Longer and stronger. Attack their 'big D' and you'll see that it moves like a pawn, usually behind greed. Attack but don't capture the D. Open the line on Kepler's laws of planetary motion."

"Attack democracy?"

"Do it. You have a pawn which doubles its power each time you play it. Keep media back - it makes for a clamorous but weak opening. They'll bring her out too early. Their queen. Greed. She'll kill you with a move you'll never know until its over."

"Which one? Which pawn multiplies strength?"

"Figure it out. Your opponent never will."

"How do you know?"

"Long story. I've been around. But not always in English. Fare well, love."

Peace
There are no satisfying antonyms for peace. I have tried them all: anxiety, worry, trouble, pain, restlessness... these all work, but weakly. There is a carefree abandonment of self which happens in peace. We lose it when those intangible and precious endowments for our lives are looted, and the whole weight of the universe seems to come down in a sharp point on top of us. Then the most keen awareness of impropriety touches all our moments. Perhaps peace, like the gift of breathing cold, clean, oxygenated air, is best defined by regarding its opposite - the state of its absence. That opposite is something we all know, and there will never be a word strong enough to name it.

Five days ago something happened to my right eye. I had been using chain saws and table saws and whacking away at this old farm in a Saturday kind of way. There is always a bit of dust and grit that meets the working eye, but you blink it away and work on. But Saturday night, about and hour after going to bed, that intense foreign body sensation interrupted my rest. The usual maneuvers failed. One doesn't see well in a moment like that, so we ask for help: can you see anything? No? Probably a virulent conjunctivitis; I'll get some gentamycin tomorrow and clean it up...

But tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow brought no relief, only the insistent protests of a very small member of my life. Don't move. Don't engage the muscle groups of lateral and medial movement. Keep that lid closed. Don't gaze, explore, work, drive, read, watch a film, or engage the vestibular balance system which might reflexively recruit an instant of nystagmus. Retreat from all the pleasures and duties of normal life. Become a parody of yourself. Hope for a better day tomorrow, but learn, hour by hour, that it will not come. Abondon rest, that momentary relief gained by immobility, for it shall be poisoned with the understanding that in an instant the pain must return. Then the secondary pains kick in: cilliary spasm, inflammatory swelling, immune mediators, headache... and time, which was to be an ally of healing, has become the treacherous companion of affliction.

Not the normal course of even a most virulent bacterium. I asked my ophthalmologist colleague to take a look. The microscopic exam showed the tracks of some mechanical offender. He turned the place inside out to find it.

"There's a big piece of wood up here," he said, pulling it out with a long cotton swab. A long thin splinter had imbedded itself high under the upper lid.

The plank was out.

And there is something about the state which follows which can only be called peace. Something so small, but so out of place, had been cured. The universe had changed back; I could forget myself and my state, resuming childhood's blessed and carefree liberty, returning to that which I am to be this day: one who moves, and sees, and works, and plays, and rests..

Forgiveness is the only thing I can compare it to. Here is a restoration, a gift of similar potency, a restructuring of the universe, a reinstatement of peace. Like the splinter in one's eye, one cannot do it himself. Only another human can attend such need. And it will be done best by one who has known what it is like to carry such a pain.

This is our calling. Mine, at least, and I know it best when I remember what peace is and what the loss of it feels like. May I be one who sees the splinter and takes it away. May I be one who forgives. One who conveys, somehow, the mercy of God.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Learning
Our best teachers are not always the most accomplished nor the most brilliant. Boswell said that Samuel Johnson, despite his genius, was particularly inept. The great teachers somehow see the whole tangled cord of connecting ideas, and know where it starts and where it ends. And then gently, remembering the natural power of the learning mind, they take us to the beginning. It is a secret place, but they know where it is. "Start here," they whisper, and show us how to make our first efforts. And, at their side, we find that except for the inevitable awkwardness of the unpracticed, we know the steps.

On Bertrand Russell
"The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid."
Chesterton. Orthodoxy

Bertrand Russell was still a young man when his article on language appeared in Mind in 1905. He recycles his arguments forty years later in the final chapter of A History of Western Philosophy; Simon and Schuster, 1945. Despite his firm opposition to Meinong's inconsistencies he has softened a bit. Two world wars, the rise of relativistic science and realpolitik collectivism, a fading British aristocracy...these things, he admits, influence a man.

First editions of A History of Western Philosophy have an interesting clue on the back side of the title page: an apology from the War Production Board regarding the appearance of books in wartime. Explanations for the light weight paper and narrow margins follow. One feels a small bit of the war while handling the fragile pages. Russell's bellicosity is no less potent as he takes on the limits of Aristotelian syllogism and deduction, Kant's assault on pure reason, and Dewey's arrogance regarding the collective power of man. Before his final chapter, The Philosophy of Logical Analysis, he admits this humane reflection:

"In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of "truth" as something dependent on facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness - the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fitch, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy, which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster."

Then his final chapter, eager for what the Logical Positivists would call a Rational Criterion of Meaning, away forever from the fanaticism and superstition and subjectivism behind so much of human grief. The end of his true philosophy would be, he hopes, an "increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding."

The mind of my brother. A linguistic impasse. And the chief aim of true philosophy. In the end Russell seems a disciple of mystery as devoted, and as desperate, as any I have ever known.

BCA II
Flight. What is this troub'ling, untamed thought,
This unfamiliar swell, This quickening,
This change, like mid-gestation, when the new
And wholly other self begins to move,
The touch of God, they used to say, that sparks
A mass of unnamed cells to struggling Life;
The instant welcomed, feared, like one who stands
Before a dreadful voice which bids one come,
Which bids one to the opposite of flight
As I have known it, fleeing, until now.

Puparium (for Boulder Creek Academy) Part I
Encased within a cell I did not weave,
Its fabric shackling each attempted move,
Killing the quick connection between
Willful thought and capability -
...Or did I in some unrecalled past
Spin this constraining prison for myself,
In dumb compliance to some posing law
which now disables all things natural,
The natural obedience of limb
To mind uncoupled now...and remnant thought,
Last refuge of the self, lives just enough
To sell to all my moments fresh despair:
For well I know that should my stolen strength
Be wrested from its hiding place, and turn'd
Onto these limbs I'd tear these walls apart.
- I have become this mad'ning paradox:
I cannot break these walls 'til I can move;
I cannot move until I break these walls.

After JSB the World Would Never Be the Same...
It snowed a little last night. About an inch. My woodstove is popping with the cleanly burning sections of Grand Fir we culled from the forest last spring. And I have a pretty good cup of coffee. Coffee is best when it is so hot you can barely sip it, and when you set it down in the stream of sunlight you can see the steam rising, and the little galaxies of steam droplets hovering like tiny tropical storms just over the surface, energized and dancing, telling a story about the universe.

I need to tie this up: music and physics. If you have it put some Bach or Mozart on as you think about this...

The Baroque instruments were as fortuitous an inheritance for western culture as the imaginations of the great composers, for the sounds of vibrating strings were isolated, enriched by the wood, and showcased in the compositions - the composers learning from the energies in the strings. Watch a guitarist tune harmonically if you get the chance, and listen to the wavering dissonance give way to resonance.

If we throw the frequencies of a vibrating string onto the screen of an oscilloscope, or some similar analytical device, we see what we hear; what the listeners in the sixteenth century heard and what the Pythagorean mathematicians heard - harmonics. Disparate levels of sound energy generated by the primary vibrational wave (a function of length and tension) and the secondary, tertiary and quaternary waves, etc. We have a whole set of tones, not a single pitch. Acoustic strings (not electric) separate the tones more crisply than other instruments because their simplicity and power are most directly connected. On the scope we see the lines of the harmonic energy: clean and focused multiples of wavelength function. They are the same kinds of lines we find when we explore atomic and molecular energies. We have entered a domain of quantum mechanics - and find that Bach and his contemporaries have been there all along, playing with the discrete energetics the way we play with legos when we are building at our best.

For what I represent as most cleanly and highly represented in Bach had been heard and exploited , less perfectly, by musicians for millennia: the harmonic series, the overtones that hover for an instant in time, waiting for those cleanly congreeting energies that would arise, confirming, from a new and different nucleus. Or, as it seems, some harmonies just work. Some combinations of tone generate an instinctive ear-verified resonance, some an allowable dissonance -and scalar sets of notes celebrate the math. Some better than others.

Do not be surprised when behavioral pundits assert the powers of Mozart on the developing mind. His arpeggios and scales are teaching us mathematics backwards; we are hearing and feeling, in playful and sublime context, a natural quantum universe.

And if you want to begin to understand atomic physics and chemistry, forget those sorry little balls they will draw for you with appendages of broken + and - algebra. Get Bach into your headphones, close your eyes, and listen to the best of all representations of the physical universe in which we find ourselves.

Biology
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But while this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene I

And yet the baroque composers were charged with just that: hear the natural order of music, and let artistry and craft conform to it, gently, and without excess. This was the musical tradition inherited by Handel, Bach, and their fellows; this the foundation they built upon: obedience to the sublimity of harmonic and rhythmic order.

The music of the spheres would not be found only in the ethereal realm ( i.e. beyond the orbit of the moon) -
It was beneath our fingertips as well; indeed, we would find it within our fingertips, in the very atoms that define our locus. Harmony is telling the story of the molecule. Music shall be our teacher in this most elemental realm of biology, and when we have contemplated the beauty of the atom and the molecule we will be ready for bigger things.

We watch for the ghost in the machine, but the machine is in the ghost. It is a machine that sings a song that only a ghost can hear.

Where, Pray, is this Rant Going?
We recently borrowed a biology textbook from the high school. It was new and shiny and heavy, a state-of-the-art edition of modern educational force. We were curious about the fashionable notions in biology because Samuel was about to begin an introductory course at a public institution.

Inside we found the usual treatments; not a bad platform on which to organize a systematic introduction. The style, however, was unsatisfying: a bright collage of photographs, side bars, text boxes with key words highlighted for emphasis, multiple font styles and colors - in short, an entertainment for the eye, a spectacle in scientific style, containing all the necessary catchwords and slogans for a hip and politically savvy 'education' in biology.

Understanding - that deliberate, laborious, and meditative contemplation of a thing - was not something the authors had been able to include.

I do not doubt that the gifted biology teachers will supply this magic where students are lucky enough to encounter them. I know the summoning powers of science, and of biology in particular, to be of such potency that some students will irresistibly come to a real understanding of its precepts, going on from there to meaningful knowledge in that field. But this will happen in spite of such textbooks, not because of them.

What is the source of understanding? From what fount may my students drink? How do we lay the foundation of a mind such that it will support the weight of a soaring superstructure of true learning? In our house last week, opening a formal biology text for the first time, we asked these questions. We enjoyed the photographs, especially the microscopic plates, and the simpler diagrams, and considered the ordered sequences of the authors, and closed the book. I found a shot glass in the kitchen cabinet and polished the sides extra carefully. Samuel, Daniel and Isaiah watched like they were documenting a case study in madness.

I poured in a bit of olive oil, then added a few milliliters of water, covered it tightly with my palm and shook it vigorously. Then I set it before them as the opaque mixture swirled in the glass, slowing, organizing, separating, finally forming the well-defined layers that they knew would come. They held the small glass in the sunlight, looked through the phenomenon, beheld the mystery and beauty of something powerful in their hand, one of those small and consistent miracles of our earthly neighborhood, and thought...

Here is one small, solid hold, like a solid handhold on a rock face. This one is more like a great shelf of stone, for it is nothing less than a feel and taste and smell of organic chemistry and molecular entropy. Here is the thermodynamic interface upon which life organizes itself; here is an organizational energetic which will power the vast and deliberate machinery of life in defiance of universal slide into second law chaos. Why? Look at it. Try to see it and understand it, and try to imagine the parts that are too small for you to see. Remember it. Walk away with the thing in your memory, and wonder.

..for it is regard of carbon chemistry that gives possibility to understanding biology; it is regard for atomic particulars that gives meaning to ideas of a molecular universe. And here, if you have Bach or Mozart on your play list, is the cue to bring them up...for music, Music, as it evolved from the Greeks to the baroque and continued in classical form, is the guide to atomic harmony.

...the Sound of Quantum Physics, cont'
As men of science began their adventure into elemental order, into the systems of invisibly small things, there was an important parallel underway. Indeed, it was well established by those attending the muses, and men of science would make their way along the same trail without realizing it. I refer to the adventure we began as we learned to discriminate tone from noise. Here was a smallness, or rather a separateness, in sound, which pleased us, a natural appreciation of disparate resonance. We instinctively prized the periodicity of tonal sounds.

I imagine it happening first with voice, then perhaps a hollow log which had seasoned to a crisp wooden integrity, then wooden bells and drums with tight skin heads - and microvibration, whatever it was, was with us, an instinctive technology of tone advancing with each century. By the bronze age cast bells were being designed toward desired resonance and the Pythagoreans were describing music as a branch of mathematics. (Everything was mathematics to them.) The Greeks associated the length of a vibrating string with pitch. Music - whatever the Greeks included in their term - had become a powerful thing, and they knew that by carefully and attentively handling it they would be enriched.

The Pythagorean instinct is startlingly sound, and we owe much more to this philosphical system than we generally admit.Their harmonic analysis of musical tone is particularly worthy of note. If that which we sense or crudely generate here in this human realm is the mean representation of an Ideal, what is musical tone indicating?

The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Quantum Physics
My previous post was about our adventure into the microscopic realm which was so elegantly documented in Robert Hooke's book. It was the final blow to Aristotelian theories of matter ( earth, fire, air, water). Hooke was rigorous in his experiment design ( Baconian training) and therefore organized in his interpretations of a world which was being seen for the first time. He showed his audience the edge of a razor, the printed period at the end of a sentence, a flea, ice crystals, etc. - and took the next step on the path of organized inquiry, which was not wholesale explanation but a whole new set of questions, which, in Baconian method, were tentatively offered theories - including theory on the organization of matter. Dangerous ground, that, for it had been trod recently and recklessly by the Atomists, advocates of a mechanistic elemental domain with no place for the sustaining finger of God - a convenient truth for those ready to reason Him away once and for all.

Hooke sensed the continuing presense of a personal God, but, like the enthusiastic commenters on Ibid's blog, sought a solution in which the science of crystalized organization and the artistry of God would join.

http://home.clara.net/rod.beavon/leanardo.htm. for more on hooke.
http://home.clara.net/rod.beavon/rest3.htm. for one of the plates from the second edition, about 1770.

Clear Glass
I have been meditating on one of the developments that made modern science possible: the invention of clear glass. The good stuff was being produced consistently in Florence in the thirteenth century, an advancement made possible by hotter fires, purer materials, and new formulae for blending the silicate mixtures. The grinding guild seized the moment and soon had a robust trade established in eyeglasses. What does this do for a society if they can, for the first time, effectively extend the close-work abilities of the elders? There was, of course, the usual debate about the spiritual propriety of altering nature and distorting one's gaze. But I digress -

The great leap followed a couple of centuries later in a Dutch lensmaker's shop. The Dutch had perfected the grinding techniques and were perhaps the best in Europe. Two children had entered the shop to pass the time, and amused themselves with the trinkets at hand, which happened to be a variety of expertly crafted lenses. What happens next must be either a fire or a discovery, but this is cloudy northern Europe so nothing burns down. One of the children aligns two lenses in line of sight of a distant church steeple, the focal lengths happily just right, and, look papa! the steeple is big...

Galileo writes that this accident must have happened in many shops at about the same time. The above account is from Boorstein, the account preserved in the patenting disputes that followed in Dutch courtrooms.
However it happened the telescope rapidly advanced across Europe and into Asia, revolutionizing not only battlefield tactics, but the study of the heavens. Men were looking out toward that which is impossible to see with natural sight. It was not, by the way, as great a philosophical challenge as it is often styled, but it was a great moment in science nonetheless.

But the delightful thing to this scientist is that we did not limit our gaze to looking out, to searching the heavens for bodies mysterious and great and distant. We also looked down at the world beneath our fingertips, at that which is impossible to see because it is too small. The rudimentry microscope was developed by the Jansen brothers in Holland at about the same time the telescope was invented, but it took a man in love with the microscopic world to build a compound instrument of genuine usefulness: Robert Hooke, an Englishman with access to Dutch technology, a biologist, a chemist, a physicist, an artist and architect, solved the riddles. He presented the world with his work 'Micrographia" in 1665.

Sometimes I see myself before a door. It is closed, but I may open it if I choose. On the other side I know there to be a great room; a storehouse of all the great moments of mankind. The great strokes of craftsmanship, quietly executed in an obscure corner of society, the maternal and paternal service, the devotion of lovers and faithfulness of true friends, the aha moments of discovery, the disciplined hours of study, the labor, the harvests and feasts, the insight, the repentance, the courage, the words and architecture and fashion and athletic feats and gifts and music, the mathematics, the comedy, the beauty...

There is a deep respect one can bring to his studies if he will, an embracing of former peoples and former times, a generosity and grace which seizes the goodness, however small, in a moment of history. We need not discard the obvious pathos to achieve this, but there is a meditative, creative investment which enlivens such thought. This is the door. What awaits me on the other side is deeply meaningful and illuminating, a brotherhood of human hope which we have always known.

It is difficult for me to convey how important this is to me. What I receive in such study is not limited to intelligence. It is something like a gift being extended to me, Goodness itself, that same Spirit of God which has animated His workers throughout the centuries. I find myself entering the domain of the toolbearers and find opportunity to stand by their side and begin truly Good work. There is not a day that passes that I do not carefully consider His creation and the particulars of the life of Christ, but somehow, for me, this revelation of the calloused hand in history tells me as much about what it means to be created in the image of God as any other lesson. Today it was Abbot Suger, in the year 1139, imagining the ribbed vaults of a new kind of sanctuary, one in which light could flood the interior through paintings of light created by the glaziers, these working from the raw materials of tradesmen who somehow knew how to transform sand, by means of fire, into glass.

Contemplation is an inductive skill one develops by means of practice. I know of no way to induce this in my students except by primitive travel combined with new language acquisition, good books, and graceful behavioral example. The world is our laboratory.

I will tell you of the smallest country in the world. No wars have been fought over its boundaries. No one has argued over its dominion or its politics. It is mostly a plain, with a small elevation in the central part with a ridge that runs off to the edge. It is a place of tremors, a seismic wonder, yet rarely shattered. It is the major crossroads of the inhabited world; most of the highways of commerce and science and art must cross it. It is a few millimeters from north to south. It is the tympanic membrane.

My best friends give me music. They quietly hum the song that vibrates in their soul, or play an instrument, casually or in the ernest way of performance, or hand me a recording of something crafted by a sound artist. I like these kinds of gifts, because no one can ever pretend to own them. Like a story or a sunrise, the power is in the giving away, and though men may argue over the musical manuscript in their hand or copyrights, phonocopies, downloads and who gets to posess the material CD, the only part of music that matters, that gives any value at all to the above machinations, is the giving, the gift that greets my ear and touches my mind - a thing I can never hold in my hand and retain. It is a story for all of us, the good music, and nothing I can do will keep it from my brother's hungry soul; nothing will obviate the profound power it conveys as it touches a beating heart. A song is for all who hear it, the rich and the poor, the owners of things and the dispossesed. It is the perfect gift.

Offering
Two deacons must always count the offering after the service. They were sorting it into checks, currency and coin with mechanical efficiency. The emptied plates were stacked on the right side; the old, darkened wood refusing to shine after all these years, the red velvet squares thin and a little loose in some... the stack was tilted, creating a spiral effect like a fossilized mollusk in a natural history museum. This is how it looked to the priest as he entered. He straightened the stack so it would not fall, but said nothing to the deacons. Their totals had to agree at the end and it was best not to distract them.

From the next plate came something extra, and as it was neither check nor currency nor coin it was hastily pushed far to the side of the table as the sorting continued. The gesture caught the priest's eye. It was a photograph, an old black and white on stiff paper with scalloped border. He picked it up to study the detail, but did not recognize the young girl in the photo. She was smiling, wearing a white sailor's cap tilted to the side. She stood on a field which looked to be more dirt than grass. She had a small suitcase on the ground beside her. Her thin dress was worn and too small for her. A doll rested upon her crooked right arm. She appeared to be seven or eight. The date, printed on the border in small black lettering by the processor read MAY 1963. The girl's face was shining with joy.

"Who is this?", he asked the deacons. They continued their sorting without answering.

"Which checks were in that plate?". He could reconstruct the seating and perhaps figure it out. But the checks had been shuffled enough that he could not be sure. He studied the background of the photograph: a farm shed, low mountains in the distance. He could not identify the place. He turned and walked back through the sanctuary and then onto the street, searching for a face which would match the photo, but found no one. Why the photograph in the offering plate? A prayer, a blessing or plea, a votive gesture? Here we may, as worship, give back, sacrifice, to God that which he has freely given us...the liturgy seemed so seldom real, like a necessary but contaminated thing, and then a photograph of a girl in a sailor's cap cuts through it like a knife. He reentered the office as the deacons labored to get the numbers entered correctly into the record book.

"Three hundred fifty five dollars and change", said one of the deacons without looking up. In a moment it would all go into a zippered bag for Monday deposit. Now it was neatly stacked on the table, the check logos and bank names and the august, tattered images of Jefferson and Lincoln and Hamilton and state buildings, all capable, strong, eager to lend their strength, for a while, to the small church.

"Show me a denarius. Whose image and inscription do you see?"

The priest looked at the photograph in his hand.

Winter Nights
Sometimes it is the parenthetical comments of the writer which most instruct or most delight. These are little gems missed by the editors for me to discover. Yesterday, in Churchill's description of the line of march to Agincourt he names the villages, Amiens and Boves, Corbie and Bethencourt, and inserts this:

.." All these names are well known to our generation."

That is all. Nine words, and the horror of the British sector of the Western Front rises like a specter before the reader. The Front, the effect on the nation, the appalling sequellae. See Robert Graves for the details of this sector. Read him with a good map of France laid out before you.

Today; Bertrand Russell's chapter on Kant, the author noting a biographical detail from Britannica: As he never married, he kept the habits of his studious youth to old age. Russell quips:

" I wonder whether the author of this article was a bachelor or a married man."

Finally, something direct. Bonhoeffer, from prison, May, 1944, writing to an infant family member regarding his baptism and future:

" In the revolutionary times ahead the greatest gift will be to know the security of a good home. It will be a bulwark against all dangers from within and without."

Ingredients
At Charlambe Castle the kitchen's pantry was well stocked with garbanzo beans, cans of condensed milk, and barrels of sugar. It had been so for two hundred years by some bizarre twist of fate which perpetuated their mercantile isolation. Even so, they survived, and developed a cookbook with seventy-seven recipes using the above ingredients. The present cook considered himself a master chef, for he had demonstrated a proficiency in every described creation. "Flame Toasted Beanbutter in Sweetmilk" was his favorite, p.23, the photograph showing it served in a rustic, beautifully glazed ceramic bowl.

Then the stranger came, traveling through from some distant land. He visited the kitchen and watched the proud chef for three days before he spoke, and then tried to describe the real world of culinary possibilities.

The Charlambe chef could not understand. Tomato, butter, flour, olive oil, onion, walnuts and wines, pepper and potatoes..he had read the words in the ancient cookbooks, but they meant nothing to him; relics of an age long past, they were inadmissible to his thought, the unimportant and unneeded vestiges of something not his. He was, he knew, a master chef.

Thursday
Like the classical weddings of the first century, it was an event which spread itself over an entire week, a celebration on a dozen fronts, the work of literally hundreds of helpers. I arrived in town two days before the formal ceremony, which was, interestingly, the most expedient of all the gatherings that week.

I had not seen Bess in a couple of weeks. After attending to the logistics of the evening I set out to find her. Our heart somehow knows the quest we should be on, and though chores come first, our feet should eventually find that trail and take it. It was, I guess, a final evaluation, like checking her in her sleep on the nights she was sick, one last time, watching, making sure I am not missing something; the unconscious slumber, deep breaths, hot skin lightly covered by the cool sheet; was there one more final task? Some question to answer, some tear to wipe away, some tangle to brush out, some gap to fill, some small thing I could provide to make it just right? I could not know until I saw her, until my eyes measured her the way a Father does. I would know when I saw her.

She was at the bachelorette party with an apartment full of energetic females, these partially lubricated with tequila. She grabbed me when I entered and pulled me away to a back room where we had one another to ourselves, and I saw her shining eyes and knew. A few seconds and I knew, and could go. I unloaded my gifts on the floor: the small crate of books, the beginnings of a library of classics, coffee mugs wrapped in useful cleaning rags, and then, kneeling together, my best gift, the earrings: dentalum shells, strands of ivory colored cones with turquoise punctuation, supple, simple, the stuff of history and culture, gleaned from a dusty showcase of a trading post on some Oklahoma backroad years ago; before that, traded hand to hand, perhaps, from the pacific northwest to the tribes of the southern plains - no one quite sure what these strange
things were. I knew. I bought the entire box for five dollars.

Bess put them on and they lit up, highlighted by her long beauty, line complimenting line. They were at home on her, something old and something new.

Something borrowed: my forest service map of the Wallows, where they would honeymoon in the little cabin.

And something blue: A cold bottle of Kokanee beer. For later, some small celebration. Something to slip in her pocket when she walks down the aisle in that white dress if it has good pockets.

more about the wedding
Katherine, my eldest daughter, shines up nice. Get her out of her rock climbing gear and set aside the pile of freshman comp papers she must grade and ask her to be a bridesmaid. The stunning dress, hair done up handsomely; a touch of this and that, and send her down the aisle of a magnificent University hall...Prometheus has been up to his tricks again. But this time he has set a fire in our midst which would endow men with far more than mere arts and sciences, something much more, and then declared ' behold this, but you may not have it. '

He was busted big time when he gave us fire. Now he's just showing us something without handing it over.

"...let a blast blow 1046
to make earth's depth's totter down to their roots!
In ungentle surge let it heap together
waves of the sea in a mass and the paths of the heavenly stars!"

And so she came and quietly stood by her sister, and those who saw her were driven mad by her beauty. The planets are gods, and one of them, most lovely and terrible, has come to earth to visit us. She can be adored, but never posessed.

She crouched a bit, her head just below the barrier of the entrance ramp at the back of the hall. It was an immense hall crafted in high Tudor style; timbered ceilings and delicately carved chandeliers high overhead, cool open space, much like a cathedral. The bridesmaids had all marched away to the front. Only she and I remained at the back. She smiled irrepressibly as her eyes hurried back and forth, the boquet held tight against her chest as if she might forget to bring it along. She was as confident as a diver contemplating the part gravity must play in her dive, as eager as a racehorse at the starting gate, as mischievous as a child playing hide and seek, wanting to hide and wanting to be found at once, working the game expertly to her own delight.

Then the cello began, the foundational notes, alone, dropping over those rich intervals like a soft waterfall to the bottom, then up, up...Pachabel's Canon, the way she used to listen to the recording when she could barely walk, when she knew it would be her wedding song even before she knew much what boys were...then the high notes starting, descending slowly, sweetly, as the matron nodded to us...

I remember the moon, the way it rises the day after it is full - still essentially full to the eye, but fifty some minutes later than the night before, so that only a faint, lingering light illuminates the landscape, the features almost unseen. The moon, coming up over this darkness, transforms the world with its silver and ivory light. Bess is the moon, reflecting a magnificence of Something just beyond our horizon, and as she steps out the landscape is transformed. A beauty that I cannot name fills the hall; three hundred souls are compelled to stand and turn, and as they watch her light fills every face.

She holds my right arm, my best and strongest arm, the arm that cradled her effortlessly when she was newborn, held the feeding spoon, that caught her when she stumbled, touched out the letters for her when she learned to read, brushed out the tangles, soothed her fevered skin, hovered over her as she learned to ride the new red bike...her left hand, closest to her heart, holding it tightly against her,

"Slow down, Dad," she whispers.

She walks across her sky to the center of our world and stops, turning to me. I have practiced this part and concentrate on getting it right, moving smoothly and gracefully. I gently lift the long veil up and over her head, and take a second to get it positioned just right, like any other day, and it is done,and I kiss her right cheek, slowly, and then her left, like we practiced it, but before I can move to the next part she puts her strong arms around me and holds on, a long time it seems, but not long enough, and whispers," I love you, Dad".

No one else heard that part. It was our own small ceremomy within the ceremony, a few unplanned seconds of ineffable communion. It was enough. Enough to fuel a Father for the rest of his days; enough to fuel a galaxy. Here is the fire kindled by the touch of the finger of God, and though I have warmed myself at her hearth for twenty three years sometimes He bends low and fans the flame with His breath, creating a moment of inapproachable brilliance. And yet, approaching, we are not consumed, but find ourselves a part of the flame.