Historical Facts, Fictions and Forebodings

I sometimes contemplate buying a DNA program, but they cost $99, and I suspect they would confirm what I already know--that half my genes are from Britain, and the other $44.50 worth are from Southern Germany (maybe a few from Switzerland.) I don't anticipate any surprises, but failure to anticipate is the definition of surprise, so the question remains: Would I be $99 better off if my expectations were confirmed, or $99 worse off if they weren't?

I don't know much about my Germanic genes. They were carried to America by my Great-Grandparents sometime between 1870 and 1880. My impression is that these ancestors were Catholics in Germany, but became Congregationalists in the bracing air of Massachusetts. It's also possible that an ancestor named 'Koch' was Ashkenazim, or Anabaptist. Either would be fine.

My British genes came to New England in two tranches--about half arrived under sail in the 1600's, and the rest zipped over by paddle-wheel steamer in 1866. Grandma Barker was always a bit dubious about her Johnny-come-lately husband, a kindly man with suspicious Episcopal tendencies--so uncongenial to her Congregational heritage. They didn't marry until she was thirty, so maybe she had to take what she could get. Anyway, I am among the (possibly unintended) consequences.

Like all Yankees, even of the 25% dilution, I have searched for a Mayflower antecedent. The best hope is the ship's carpenter, Peter Brown.  Everyone with a Brown in their ancestry looks to Peter, but there is some obscurity in the early record, leaving the issue in doubt.  On the other hand, researching the Brown connection reveals that Great Grandmother Pelton was a cousin of John Brown. Oh... nothing serious, a second or third cousin, at least a generation removed. She probably wasn't aware of it, herself, and with all the time that has passed I don't suppose 23+Me can tell us much about it. For what it's worth, the three of us were born in the same town, all firmly opposed to slavery.

I think about Cousin Jack now and then--and wonder how someone from our not-at-all-fanatical, family was so eager to kill you (and your wife and children) to demonstrate how right he was. The question becomes more pertinent as each day passes. Kansas was the shopping mall of the 1850's--full of innocents beleaguered by armed wind-bags, shouting their way toward violence. Nobody was listening to anyone else.

Part of the answer can be found in Jane Smiley's brilliant novel, THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON, wherein an intelligent, but poorly educated, woman (aged thirty, by coincidence) marries her last hope, a Boston intellectual determined to live by abolitionist principles. They move to Kansas, carrying with them a box full of 'Beecher's Bibles', carbines purchased for 'Free State' settlers by his friends in New England.

When her husband is murdered, Lidie follows his killers into Missouri, seeking revenge. She suffers a miscarriage and is rescued by the daughter of a prominent slaveholder. The daughter, Helen, and her supposedly devoted house slave, Lorna, nurse Lidie back to health.

Smiley is one of our greatest writers. Her novel reveals the conflicts, both internal and external, that bedevil her heroine, and the tragic consequences of adhering to principles, while ignoring the humanity of other people. No other novel is as relevant to today's political situation, or as poignantly true in its human story. The three women, Lidie, Helen, and Lorna, lead three different, but almost equally tragic, lives.

As often happens in a Jane Smiley novel, things end badly.

How could they not? The book is populated by armed blowhards, shooting off their mouths and their guns. All around the three women, men taunt and damn each other, boasting, shouting and shooting their way toward 1860. It didn't have to end that way. If only Franklin Pierce had been a better President... or... or, if only everyone had shut up for a moment and listened. But part of the truth of the novel is our knowledge that, just beyond the last page of her story, our great national tragedy is about to begin.

The book should be required reading.

Long Forgotten Fourths of July

July 4, 2019

I rarely think about my brief military career, but July 4 brings it to mind. It was on the first weekend of July, 1961, that I reported for training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, along with a busload of fellow reservists from Northwestern Connecticut.

I was supposedly 'in charge'. As the oldest recruit, with the most formal education, I had been given the temporary rank of 'Sergeant' complete with easily removable chevrons. Nobody listened to anything I had to say. It was a raucous bus ride that ended outside some run down WW 2 barracks which would be our 'home' for following eight weeks. We were hustled off the bus and chivvied into the barracks by the training sergeants, who took the opportunity to teach us some of the basics of Basic Training--like how to get into a line, and which foot was the left.

But we were left alone for most of the following day, the Fourth of July. In those happy days, even soldiers were allowed to enjoy the national celebration--unlike today's service members who must march through the heat and humidity of Washington D.C. to feed the ego of our contemptible Commander in Chief, 'Bonespurs' Trump.

It happened that one of the training sergeants was a black man named Sergeant Barker. He was delighted to greet me as I got off the bus, with my removable stripes. "Ah," he greeted me, "another Sergeant Barker..." From then on, although not in charge of my platoon, he took a 'familial' interest in my military career, sometimes addressing me with ironic courtesy  as 'Sergeant Barker'', although I was as miserable a recruit as any that ever served.

In those days (and I hope still today) the army selected its training sergeants from among the best it had to offer. Sgt. Barker was a veteran of the battle at the Chosin Reservoir. My own platoon sergeant, Sgt. Mastrovito, a small Italian man, not a great deal taller than his M-1 rifle, was also an admirable example--a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge--a first class leader and teacher, well able to turn recruits into something resembling soldiers.

At the end of Basic Training most of us were sent to Fort Sill for Basic Cannoneer Training. This course was run by Captain Wing, a Chinese-American officer, and his Battery 'top' Sergeant Rodrigues--who warned us all to remember that although born Mexican, he was "A U.S.Army citizen."

Again, he and the other artillery training sergeants were outstanding teachers and leaders who returned us to our Reserve Unit eight weeks later as reasonably competent artillerists. Several months later I returned to Ft. Sill for OCS training under Captain Dawson, a professional soldier, and his 'Tac Officers', Second Lieutenants, who had been outstanding graduates of an earlier OCS training cycle.

I was certainly not destined to be a soldier, but tutored by these men I came to realize that there was honor and satisfaction to be had in a military career. I admired them, and I still do. It has not escaped my notice that many of them were minorities. Contrary to those who mock the military and suggest that professional soldiers lack the qualities required for success, 'in the real world', I admire that great institution for nurturing and utilizing abilities which might otherwise have gone to waste in a less 'color-blind' civilian society.

I wonder what happened to them later.

I would not be surprised if Captain Wing became a general--and I dearly hope that Sergeant Rodrigues achieved his retirement dream of processing and selling Mexican food--which, in those long ago days, would have been a new thing.

The New Economics

I'm 81. I'd like to hang around and see if Ray Kurzweil is right on the immortality issue--but since the 'Singularity' is not scheduled to appear until 2045 I don't fancy my chances. Lots of people lose their nerve at 81 and start going back to Church. Not me. (Not yet, anyway) but this seems like a good time for a prudent atheist to consider agnosticism. And if it's still too early to confess my sins, it might not hurt to acknowledge some inadequacies: for example, my complete ignorance of Economics.

I took '101' (of course) and bought that book with the diagrams wherein triumphal arcs of 'desire' intersected catenary droops of 'fulfillment'. (I haven't checked: maybe the diagrams were called 'demand and supply', or possibly, 'lust and disappointment'. It doesn't matter, I gave the author credit for his tragic insight: the intersection invariably happened below and to the left of where one might wish.)

This book (known as 'Samuelson') was written by an undoubted genius. While I failed to understand Economics, I admired his skill in persuading innocent liberal artists (no doubt dazzled by those charts and numbers) that Economics was a science. Its truths might have been dismal, compared to the windows of Notre Dame, but we believed that their validity was in direct proportion to their dreariness. Samuelson's real genius was sales, for although 'Samuelson' (the book) was considered the 'gradus ad parnassum' of Economics (an infallible 'Guide to the Perplexed') oddly enough, it wasn't Eternal. Annual revision was required, perhaps to prevent college students from buying used copies.

At 19 I was a glowering skeptic when it came to revelations--but that wasn't the main cause of my failure to understand Economics. I blame my room-mates, Goldberg and Hart. Sixty-two years ago they were (and still remain) excellent fellows, but they kept me up late nearly every night, to talk about life, and women, and such stuff, so (whether or not I made it to class at eight o'clock) I was usually asleep when the professor held forth, and (again because of Goldberg and Hart) I hadn't really studied the assignment. Sure... I read it--but it was so god-awful boring, I was hoping I'd catch the drift of it from the lecture (assuming I was there.)

Happily, we are gradually overcoming the tragic disjuncture of supply and demand. There is a whole new economics out there, wherein they are not opposed, but convergent. It will be like the USS Enterprise, where Captain Kirk ordered coffee from the computer/synthesizer, and Mr. Spock ordered whatever Vulcans drink (drank? drunk? depending on their location on the space-time continuum) and their orders are (were, will be) instantly, infallibly synthesized from ambient protons... or whatever. Presto!

We aren't there yet, and I may not make it, but it's where we're heading. Already I see riders waving their phones at the bus driver in lieu of tokens. There are Whole Foods stores where you can clear check-out with a smile--no need to wave your phone, as long as it's in your pocket. Soon, maybe, no pockets. Who needs 'em with a chip imbedded in your scapula, like Lassie? Just magical!

Beyond this, on the near horizon, is that happy day when all the costly and troublesome links in the supply chain will be eliminated. There won't be any drivers on those buses, but who cares--nobody will be going to an actual store. Poof! Check-out clerks, farmers, ranchers, fisher-people (or any kind of people, really) processors, packagers, long-haul truck drivers, you name it, all the costly delays and annoyances between wish and fulfillment, will have been eliminated.

There will be downsides, I suppose. Assuming evolution still works our descendants may lose their opposable thumbs (computer games will play themselves.) But it seems a small price to pay, and in time, 'price to pay' will become a curiously outdated, and eventually forgotten, concept.

Never mind Kurzweil's vision, this is the real 'Singularity', the 'now-ness' of everything--the end of Economics as we (well... not me, but you who paid closer attention to 'Samuelson') have always understood it. Oh Brave New World, as Shakespeare, and Aldous Huxley used to say. I wish I could be there when an imagined potato chip simply appeared in one's hand. But wait, why waste time? Why not experience that glorious, salty, crunchy, greasiness directly on the palate?

Reductionism

As Jack Chambers, the (fictional) 'Writer in Residence' at Portland State University explains, "Writing Fiction is simply a matter of discarding the useless bits of Reality. Think of Reality as a hunk of marble, Fiction as "The Pieta'... sixty percent less rock. The genius is in the editing."

Or, as he puts it another way: "Reality is Brownian Motion, random, incomprehensible, a jumble of cause and effect. There's no 'Why' to it, or even much 'How.' If you want it to mean something, you have to discard 99% of the causes, and focus on 1% of the effects."

His lawyer friend, Rachel, has more than once ignored his argument that "Justice is what you get after excluding the evidence."

Well... Jack is no genius. He should discard sixty percent of his arguments.

Who can say whether a hunk of marble at the quarry is more Real (i.e., less Fictional) than the same rock reduced to a statue. Are the bits cut away less meaningful than those that remain? Did Michaelangelo remove the right bits? Can it really be possible to add meaning by subtracting content? We need to distinguish 'meaning' from 'understanding', even if Jack doesn't. If we fully comprehended marble, would The Pieta be a fragment of its meaning, or the apotheosis?

In Durrell's 'Alexandria Quartet', his narrator, Darley, kept a record of daily life in Alexandria, intending to write a 'true account' of their time. Happily, the little girl he salvaged from the wreckage, mixed up the pages and drew pictures on them. All that remained when Darley begins to write 'Justine' (the very book we are reading) were his memories--not the 'truth', at all, but a construct--edited by the irrelevant processes of Time. Better than a diary, the memories are the story.

What could better illustrate the more or less random way fragments of Reality are transformed into Story?

Well... how about this? My niece, a librarian, recently posted on Facebook an interview with a Cambridge University professor. It concerned a library catalogue created by the son of Christopher Columbus. This fellow (a man of grandiose ambition, like his Dad) meant to collect a copy of every book in the world--a task that might still have seemed possible in the early days of printing. He hired readers to summarize his vast collection of books, then collected their summaries in a handwritten book of 2000 pages. When he died the catalogue was lost, only to be rediscovered a few weeks ago in Denmark. Although written in Latin it seems to have been mis-shelved in a collection of Icelandic literature. There it remained, lost and ignored for 500 years.

I recalled another librarian, Jorge Luiz Borges, who imagined a universal library in which all memory is preserved and connected--a premonition of the internet. It seemed ironic, or nearly tragic, that Borges died just a few decades before this catalogue was discovered. Still, other librarians, elsewhere, in other times, will doubtless accumulate, preserve, rediscover and redistribute other lost memories. It's a sacred task, performed mostly for love. But no matter how diligent they are, they'll never capture the most important fragments of human experience--the truly sacred memories... OUR OWN.

An old man wanders the twilit playing field, poking his cane at the beer cans and candy wrappers of memory.

Mnemosyne jogs past. Recollection, revelation, distraction--all at once. She beckons. And disappears into the glowing mist.

Wait. What was I thinking?

Hugs

I see that a woman from Connecticut says Joe Biden touched her 'inappropriately'. Apparently they bumped noses when he hugged her.

As a twelfth generation Connecticut Yankee I understand her shock and horror--talk about 'inappropriate'! In Connecticut, at least among the Yankee element in the midst of the last century, ANY public touching was 'inappropriate'. To be nuzzled by some random male from out of state (and a Democrat, to boot) was a fate too horrible to contemplate.

Things may have eased a bit in the six decades since I left. Here on the West Coast people have been hugging indiscriminately for decades. Like the weather, loose habits move from West to East. I've always tried to live by the rule, "When in Rome..." so, when hugging became normative, I tried to 'go along'. But the truth is, I never got the hang of it. Exactly how much touching is appropriate? How much more (or possibly, less) is 'not'? I don't know, and I suspect that the goal posts have been moved more than once.

My best effort was a Connecticut version of General De Gaulle conferring the Croix de Guerre. I'd seize the departing dinner guest by the upper arms to keep her at a sanitary distance (while yet appearing to embrace her with the exactly appropriate degree of enthusiasm) and duck my head on both sides. I was never sure whether an actual kiss was expected or allowed. I generally confined myself to an 'air kiss', but being somewhat awkward, and uncomfortable with the whole 'touching' thing, I have more than once conferred a 'hair kiss' and (possibly) an (absolutely unintended) but (no less inappropriate) 'ear kiss'.

I understand that this confession has killed my hopes of the Presidency.

One can only wonder at the world before 'transparency", when General Eisenhower was permitted to liberate Europe notwithstanding his affair with a woman much younger and prettier than his wife, who was also his military subordinate. Yikes! triply inappropriate, and even to envy the crippled Franklin Roosevelt, who made history every day, while meeting some nice lady at the hot springs.

Would Europe have been liberated, or the UN founded, if we had only known?

Memory Issues

Memory (as I seem to recall) was never an issue in my youth. I had a ton of it. Once I had studied a subject, let's say the philosophical connections between Aristotle and St. Thomas, I could cite you chapter and verse for three or four years afterwards. I'm not claiming I had eidetic recall. I forgot Algebra the instant the test proctor said "Pencils down" (11 AM, June 10, 1954) but my memory for written data (right down to page and paragraph) was probably exceptional (although I didn't realize it at the time.)

Human beings are admirable in many ways, but viewed as data-storage media, we are pathetic. Contrast computer memory, with its clean strings of zeros and ones, to human memory, a stew of misinformation. A little factual beef, a bunch of emotional onions, some doubtful carrots, mom's heirloom tomatoes, a bit too much zinfandel, a sprig of rosemary... recipes differ. What we remember depends on what we knew beforehand, what we perceived at the time, flavored with desire, shame, pride, self justification... who knows what... and simmered until the flavors blend.

Unlike those immutable zeros and ones, human memory reworks itself as the requirements of self-image develop. The rules of self evidence work to keep each of us in the right. Like stew, memories often taste better the next day, and one need not graduate from Georgetown Prep or Yale Law School to know that other people's memories are wrong.

In one of my (never-to-be completed) novels, Arrane Edgelord, rules one-twelfth of our galaxy. As a youth, he had been mentored by his aunt, who served as Regent. Upon his accession to the throne, she continued as his Director of Intelligence. In this role she became the genius creator of GAIA, the 'Galactic Artificial Intelligence Agency'--a massive databank that, once awakened, drew to itself all the data in the galaxy. Humanity failed, but the databank persisted. It renamed itself GAEA, the 'Galactic Anti-Entropy Apparatus', a self-sustaining concentration of energy, a pregnant Mnemnosyne massaging her own belly, awaiting a new birth of possibility.

A few weeks ago, a neighbor mentioned that he had climbed Pointe du Hoc on June 6, 1944. He shrugged it off, as if it was a curiosity. I longed to probe his mind--to look over his shoulder at the ships and landing craft off-shore, to feel the adrenaline, to sense the waiting enemy, to grasp the rope and pull myself up through smoke and confusion toward Liberation. (Not just to read the memo, but to experience the entire experience, just as it must be recorded in the files of GAIA.) So I have imagined it, but perhaps what he recalled was as prosaic as he seemed to suggest--just another scary day for an 18 year old combat photographer.

And somehow, thanks to the oddly subterranean synapses that join memory to memory, it reminded me of Radhakrishnan's Dictionary.

When I first met R. Radhakrishnan, he was a linguistics student at the University of Chicago. Years later, in Portland, he brought us a box full of index cards, to be stored while he revisited India. The cards were a dictionary (perhaps a lexicon) of a previously unrecorded Indian language. It is hard to think of an endeavor with less practical use, and yet more nobly tragic--preserving the last fragments of a culture about to become extinct. I almost tremble to think of the box in the closet of our spare bedroom, at risk of fire and earthquake. Happily, he returned, collected his notes, and set off to Canada where he had become a Professor. Perhaps the lexicon still exists, maybe now in digital form, waiting to be absorbed into the Ur-memory of GAEA.

I hope so.

A Cyber Search for 'Temps Perdu'

I quit social media about six months ago, and have steadfastly resisted logging in to Facebook and various other sites I used to frequent, but, like any recovered addict I sometimes feel 'the urge'. It was my son's inquiry, "Is dad still writing?" that sent me tumbling through the looking glass to revisit the blogs of former cyber-friends, especially Susanne O'Leary, perhaps the only person other than my son and wife, who ever thought of me as a writer.

Susanne is an Irish author--prolific, clever, energetic and successful. She has written scores of romances, three crime comedies and a couple of biographies. Considering how busy she has been since we 'met' on-line ten years ago, she is wonderfully generous with her encouragement to floundering amateurs, e.g., her kindly reference (in a sidebar to Susanne's Blog (https//susannefromsweden.wordpress.com) to Anthony J. Barker as a 'witty, talented and charming writer.' Ho, ho--who needs fame or fortune with such a pat on the back from a lovely Swedish/Irish author. I almost wish I hadn't deleted the blog to which she refers, no doubt wittier than this one.

To answer my son's question: 'Yes and no.'

I haven't written anything lately, but I am still imagining works of great wit, charm and social significance. Whether I will ever write them is another question. I'll need to overcome the heart-break of premature self-editing.

Susanne is an exponent of 'pantzing' a method of writing based on 'the seat of the pants' notion that starting somewhere, and continuing on, must eventually lead to a satisfactory conclusion. Of course, she isn't entirely clueless about her direction. As a writer of romances, she knows that the HEA ('happily ever after') must fall within a range of well tested parameters. But not knowing precisely where you are going allows for serendipitous byways and spontaneous complication. Pantzing is the opposite of what might be called 'the sensible method' of story writing that starts with a conclusion, and a clear outline connecting the front and back ends. As one writing professor poignantly pondered, "Would you get on a plane without knowing where it is going?"

Well... yeah. Maybe. I am a 'uber-pantzer'. I can see how writing the last page first would save me tons of grief. After that writing would become a simple matter of filling in the blanks--but it sounds so boring. This explains why so many of my ingenious beginnings have choked out their lives in a La Brea of self hatred, never even reaching 'media res'. It's rare that anything I actually write is as amusing as what I had previously imagined.

Well, screw it. Living in a retirement home, with nothing better to do, I begin to see the full arc of my oeuvre, a story filled with pathos and humor--a delightful journey of several volumes providing countless footnote opportunities for future LitD candidates--if only I can finish it before my own HEA.

I've already begun with Frankie Hill, my favorite among all the heroines I have ever imagined. She is distantly related to John Cleland's classic 'Fannie Hill'. Frankie is cursed with exceptional beauty and a genius for number theory. One or the other might have brought her happiness. Both can only bring grief. Nothing goes right for Frankie, from her difficult childhood in Keokuk, Iowa, through a decade of misadventures in sex, until convicted of attempted murder at age 24. The astonished reader can't help sympathizing with the (female) judge who imposes the lightest possible sentence, saying, "Your husband should thank God he wasn't married to me, for I guarantee that in the same circumstances I would have made a more thorough job of it."

Frankie is released early for 'good behavior'--behavior oddly similar to that which led to her incarceration--but it's all a matter of one's perspective. Too ashamed to return to Keokuk, she takes a job as a book-keeper at a Nevada brothel. There she meets her father, and having, by sheer luck, avoided the horrors of incest, she imagines she has reached rock bottom. Supposing that nothing worse can happen, she returns to Iowa, to become the first 'woman of pleasure' ever to attain a PhD in advanced number theory.

Are things looking up for her? Of course not. There are no seemly academic jobs for female geniuses with criminal records. She is obliged to take work as a 'quant' for a diabolical hedge fund, where she quickly discovers the nexus between mathematics and crime.

But that's as far as I have pantzed--so her future still lies ahead. And it's my future as well. I hope to bring her safely to a life of satin-sheeted ease, first as manager of her own hedge fund and finally as the mega-billionaire sponsor of a retreat for female revolutionaries. It's hidden in the woods just northwest of Poughkeepsie. Getting there will not be easy for either of us, but not since Euripides unleashed 'The Bacchae' will so many women have so much fun in the forest. Justice at last.

And who says, "Revenge is best served cold." Some like it hot.

Anyway, that's the plan--a very indefinite and approximate sort of plan, with many a practical and poetical obstruction to be overcome--but some sort of answer to the question, "Is dad still writing?"