Via Negativa

A “doomsday” that is billions of years away has little or no meaning for members of a species less than a million years old. (We’ll be lucky to survive the next hundred years!) So my initial reaction to a story on current cosmological hypotheses entitled “From Space, a New View of Doomsday,” is a snort of derision. Apart from the framing, however, this story (by Dennis Overbye in today’s New York Times) is full of interest, as the following excerpts demonstrate:

“That number, known as w, is the ratio between the pressure and density of dark energy. Knowing this number and how it changes with time – if it does – might help scientists pick through different explanations of dark energy and thus the future of the universe . . .

“One possible explanation for dark energy, perhaps the sentimental favorite among astronomers, is a force known as the cosmological constant, caused by the energy residing in empty space. It was first postulated back by Einstein in 1917. A universe under its influence would accelerate forever.

“While the density of energy in space would remain the same over the eons, as the universe grows there would be more space and thus more repulsion. Within a few billion years, most galaxies would be moving away from our own faster than the speed of light and so would disappear from the sky; the edge of the observable universe would shrink around our descendants like a black hole. . . .

“Another possibility comes from string theory, the putative theory of everything, which allows that space could be laced with other energy fields, associated with particles or forces as yet undiscovered. Those fields, collectively called quintessence, could have an antigravity effect. Quintessence could change with time – for example, getting weaker and eventually disappearing as the universe expanded and diluted the field – or could even change from a repulsive force to an attractive one, which could set off a big crunch. . . .

“But the strangest notion is what Dr. [Robert] Caldwell has called phantom energy, the dark energy that could lead to the Big Rip. . . .

“While the density of the energy in Einstein’s cosmological constant stays the same as the universe expands, the density of phantom energy would go up and up, eventually becoming infinite. Such would be the case if the parameter w turned out to be less than minus 1, say physicists, who admit they are stunned by the possibility and until recently simply refused to consider it.

“‘It crosses a boundary of good taste,’ Dr. Caldwell said, calling phantom energy ‘bad news stuff.’ Phantom energy violates physicists’ intuitions about how the universe should behave. A chunk of it could be used to prop open wormholes in space and time – and thus create time machines, for example.

“‘It could lead to such bizarre effects as negative kinetic energy,’ Dr. [Lawrence M.] Krauss said. As a result, objects like atoms would be able to lose energy by speeding up. . . .

“Dr. [Robert] Kirshner said phantom energy had been dismissed as ‘too strange’ when his group was doing calculations of dark energy back in 1998. In retrospect, he said, that was not the right thing to do.

“‘It sounds wacky,’ he said, referring to phantom energy, ‘but I think we’re in a situation where we’re going to need a really new idea. We’re in trouble; the way out is going to be new imaginative things. It might be our ideas are not wild enough, they don’t question fundamentals enough.'”

O indigence at the heart of our lives,
how poor is the language of happiness!
– Osip Mandelstam (Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, trans.)

Via Negativa is two months old today. Calloo, callay!

I started out expecting to write mostly short entries, but they’ve gotten longer and longer. I set myself the goal of going nowhere, proving nothing and avoiding relevancy at all costs, but I think I may have slipped up once or twice. I have written probably more about religion than is healthy, less about science and nature than I’d like and as much about philosophy as I can get away with without betraying my abysmal ignorance. Via Negativa has at least six regular readers and perhaps another dozen who check in from time to time. I continue to discover new blogs worth adding to my list of favorites. The writing is still its own reward. I hope to continue for at least another ten months.

UPDATE: Now we are green – for no better reason than that Change is Good. We have an Atom RSS feed . . . and no, I don’t have the slightest idea why that matters. There’s a new a la carte list of high points in the sidebar, ’cause I always like it when other bloggers do that. Please e-mail me if you think I overlooked something that should be on the list – or if I listed something that doesn’t belong there.

Yesterday Kurt at The Coffee Sutras posted three translations by Izumi Shikibu, the 11th-century Japanese poet I quoted Czeslaw Milosz about last month. These are perfect translations, from a book I wasn’t aware of called The Ink Dark Moon (I haven’t really been keeping up with East Asian translations in the last 15 years).

Here’s one more by Lady Izumi, my own version. This was written for a screen painting of three people on horseback gazing at wildflowers:

We hold the flowers
in our mind
after we pass,
entrusting ourselves completely
to the oblivious horses.

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I was also delighted to find a link to an exhibition of Huichol yarn paintings over at Mysterium last night. If you don’t have time to click though all the images at the museum’s site, Mysterium reproduces the most elaborate image, with appropriate text, here. Few pictures really are worth a thousand words, but this one might be. I love that visionary blue! For anyone wanting to read more about Huichol shamanism, Barbara Myerhoff’s Peyote Hunt (Cornell, 1974) is excellent.

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On Valentine’s Day, the inimitable Blaugustine celebrated a new find: the site of a cancer patient who is determined to die laughing (if at all). The site is called Cancergiggles, and it breaks the blogging mold by having the introduction on the home page, with more recent entries a click away. The author bills it as “an idiot’s guide to accepting, living with, laughing at and dying from cancer.” This is philosophy at its most essential, folks:

“I have heard many people protest that if they had cancer, they wouldn’t want to know. This is really, really dumb. Have you ever had a nightmare about something real? For almost everybody, the answer is NO. It is the unknown, the shadowy stuff, that normally causes fear. Human beings are actually pretty good at handling real situations and you will probably surprise yourself.”

“Ok so you can handle what is happening to your body. It ain’t doing what it should and it’s not looking like a picnic from hereon in. So you feel sorry for your situation, you regret your wasted life and you sink into a depression. Don’t you dare, you selfish bastard! The only people who deserve any pity are those poor souls who will take care of you and watch helplessly as you eventually begin to slide. There’s no need to think that you should just accept it all and give up hope. On the other hand, accepting that this could be Gods way of telling you that you’re not his favourite bunny can actually be quite positive. Odds are that like me, you may get a pleasant, if possibly only temporary surprise.”

How to account for the continuing popularity of Jung’s crackpot theories? The “collective unconscious” is mysticism lite, and has a strong whiff of racialism about it. And no one ever prayed to an archetype.

The myth-mongers perpetuate a number of questionable assumptions, in my opinion: 1) that the main purpose of religion is to answer ultimate questions; 2) that the role of the individual storyteller in shaping religious narratives is minimal; 3) that sacred stories point inward, rather than outward; and 4) that our experience of inwardness is universal, or at least the norm.

On the contrary: 1) In actual practice, where universalizing ideologies intermingle with local traditions and everyday concerns, religion can play many different roles for many different people. Generally speaking, I think, very few people ever concern themselves with so-called ultimate questions on a regular basis. Those who do may be revered as saints and holy (wo)men, their tombs may become sites of pilgrimage, but few seek to follow their example. Instead, the great mass of believers want from saints the same sorts of things they want from their gods and ceremonies: good luck; affirmation and security; therapy; miracle cures; guidance through life crises; a sense of belonging; better stuff; inspiration; social status; etc. To posit a higher plane where the Big Questions only are permitted simply recapitulates the elitist views of the promulgators of official, institutionalized religion.

The other three generalizations I’ve identified are also colored by ethnocentric and elitist biases unsupported by ethnography. 2) Some peoples do indeed view sacred stories as received wisdom that the storyteller alters at his/her peril. But others expect and celebrate improvisation in the retelling or reenactment of divine escapades. (See examples below.) 3) The ego/environment split is no older than the Industrial Revolution. Reactions included not only the Romantic revolt but also the so-called Great Awakening, where for the first time the fate of the individual soul trumped any concern about community. Before this time, I think it is fair to say that accounting for customs, preserving a community’s sense of identity and inculcating social norms were chief among the purposes served by sacred narratives. 4) A division between inner and outer is fairly meaningless in societies where individualism is not highly stressed, and/or where what we conceive of as the environment is seen as a kind of divine rebus. The World Religions all stress inwardness, but this strikes me as less an innovation than an attempt to compensate for the loss of richness that attended the cancerous spread of hierarchical and warlike societies across the globe. For example, according to one theory, monasticism played a pivotal role in the growth of armies: a conscious attempt to rein in the bands of marauders and brigands that had always posed such a threat to the established order. The shaved head of both the soldier and the monk testify to their submission to collective order and unity.

As commerce and empires spread their monocultures of the mind (in Vandana Shiva’s evocative phrase), cultural diversity suffers. Where once the body might have been thought to harbor three or more souls, now it houses only one. Where once one’s afterlife destination(s) might have been viewed as a consequence of the circumstances of one’s death – to the extent that it was thought about at all – now it is seen as reward or punishment for the conduct of one’s life. (This points in two directions: toward the breakdown in social taboos associated with the growth of polities to a point where anonymity is possible, and toward the projection of the apparatus of the state upon the cosmos.) Local gods are abandoned or subsumed by an ever-more-remote godhead, and tricksters vanish or turn sinister. Divine possession and other forms of ecstasy are demonized or pushed to the social margins. Ritual performance becomes the monopoly of an elite few. Religious behavior becomes monotonal, a matter of high seriousness. With the growth and spread of literacy, the stories can be effectively frozen in time. The sacred text becomes a new idol. The world of nature becomes increasingly stereotyped, its revelations dismissed as illusory or worse. Eventually, even reading out loud is abandoned for the quintessentially inward experience of silent reading and study.

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Myths of the origin of humans vary widely in the Chaco, not only from tribe to tribe but from teller to teller. . . . In a Lengua account the Creator is said to have been an enormous beetle, who first caused evil spirits to come out from under the ground, then produced a man and a woman from the grains of soil he had thrown away.
John Bierhorst, The Mythology of South America (William Morrow, 1998)

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Weep Wizard, 1979:
One of the Power-People had a dream. Some say it was the first Power-Man, some say it was the Ultimo and some say Maria Castellana: one of them had a dream. They would find what they wanted in a place struck by lightning, said the dream. Well, let’s say it was Diego Poklaj: he walked along the ridge of Volcano-Volcano and on down to Volcano-Her-Children [= local toponyms]. There he was caught by a strong south whirlwind rain until he took refuge under a tree. He got soaked. A big lightning struck there and he knew it was a sign, but a sign of what he didn’t know.

In the afternoon, the sun came up and nearby where Diego Poklaj, Diego dust, had taken shelter and had his dream, there was this old, beaten up tree: a tz’ajtel tree, an old one, really cut to pieces and hacked about. Diego Poklaj looked at it and said to himself, ‘Christ! They couldn’t mean this thing, it’s a mess, it’s far too soft, it sucks!’ And he passed it by. So he heard a whistle behind him. He went back to the tree and asked, ‘What’s the big idea?’ the tree just grunted back. ‘Are you the chosen one?’ said Poklaj. The tree just grunted. So Poklaj took out his stone hatchet and chopped.

Nathaniel Tarn with Martin Prechtel, Scandals in the House of Birds: Shamans and Priests on Lake Atitilan (Marsilio, 1997)

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Abstractions do not provoke loyalty in [the Vodou priestess] Alourdes. She continues . . . to locate those individuals who can be called her people because she knows them and because they have earned the title.

But these days she casts her net more widely, and the group she includes in it is more diverse. Alourdes has always shown courage and creativity in taking on the new and the foreign. Through her, at my marriage ceremony, Danbala moved her whole community to a broader response to the question, Who are my people? This may be the way of the future for Vodou in the immigrant communities. But such a path leads to both gains and losses. Vodou can share its wisdom and its healing techniques with a larger and more varied group; but as the group of potential devotees expands, the spirits will also become more universalizable, the faces of the spirits less transparent to those of the ancestors, and the stories that carry the wisdom of the religion more abstract.

Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (University of California Press, 1991)
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See also That old-time religion, Cat’s cradle and It’s art, dammit!

Everyone knows the first line; here’s the whole poem. This is #466 in R.W. Franklin (The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Harvard/Belknap Press, 1999).

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

1862 was a banner year for St. Emily. She wrote the magnificent “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” and immediately afterwards a poem whose last couple of lines deserve equal renown (#373):

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul –

#413 is probably too abstract and explicit to rise to the level of these others, but is valuable precisely because it lays bare one of her central themes:

Heaven is so far of the mind
That were the Mind dissolved –
The Site – of it – by Architect
Could not again be proved –

‘Tis Vast – as our Capacity –
As fair – as our idea –
To Him of adequate desire
No further ’tis, than Here –
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Cross-reference: Poem # 910