Ultimate Claustrophobia

From Jeremy Bernstein's Einstein: One way of understanding the universe is "as a sort of sphere in space, filled, on the average, with a small uniform density of matter. A light ray started at any point in the universe will return to its starting point . . .in about 10 billion years" (156). Talk about enclosures! A ten-billion-year wide coffin. And, of course: what's outside the sphere?

Psychoanalysis Psycho

Erik Erikson writes: "We have also indicated the significance of the choice of the buttocks as the preferred place for coporeal punishment; a safe place physiologically, but emotionally dangerous, since punishment aggravates the significance of this general area as a battlefield of parental and infantile wills. The fear that his parents and teachers might ever completely subject him by dominating this area and this gaining power over his will may have provided some of the dynamite in that delayed time bomb of Martin's rebellion, and may account for the excessiveness with which Luther, to the end, expressed an almost paranoid definace, alternating with a depressed conception of himself" (231). This from Young Man Luther. So the Reformtion--indeed, the shift to the individual conscience (and thus, according to Weber, capitalism)--is largely connected to the fact that Luther's parents spanked him? It's at moments like this when psychoanalysis becomes a parody of itself.

Freud and History

I'm reading Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther, and his thesis is apparently that every one has an identity crisis, and certain people--great men--emerge from it, translating whatever particular family oppression they experienced into a public arena: "Millions of boys," he writes, " face these problems and solve them in some way or another . . . .Now and again, however, an individual is called upon . . .to lift his individual patienthood to the level of a universal one and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone" (67). So if Dad ignores you or beats the hell out of you, and Mom is nuts or smothers you, certain people turn this conflict into everyone's problem: thus the engine of history, family dramas made into international issues. Frankly I don't know. Every once in a while he says something interesting--something that resonates--but it's all so pat, playing the same family drama over and over, occasionally replayed in the political world. Luther rebelled against his upwardly mobile Dad (and tried to be good as a monk), then transformed his rebellion into a global one against the Roman Catholic Church. But maybe the Church was a corrupt institution and he had just had it with it? Why couldn't that be a simpler explanation?

The Spanish Armada

I finished Garrett Mattingly's The Armada, his 1959 acount of the 1588 Spanish naval attack on England. If I hadn't been already familiar with some of the people he mentions, I would have been somewhat confused, yet I still found it interesting, especially the collateral impact it had on France (which essentially experienced a coup against Henry III, the last of the Valois monarchs, and then a counter coup). In a sense, the attack never had a chance--and almost everyone seemed to know it. Its goal was to hook up with the Spanish army in what is now Belgium and help guard its transfer over to England (so that it could take control of London and get rid of the heretic Queen Elizabeth), but the Parma, the army commander there, hadn't really been seriously building ships or barges to convey his soldiers--and eventually, after a week of ongoing skirmishes all along the southern English coastline, the effective Spanish tactic of forming into a giant crescent to ward off all attacks collapsed off the coast of Belgium and several Spanish ships were destroyed. The remnants sailed around the British Isles. Mattingly claims that it was in essence the first modern naval encounter--and the commanders didn't quite yet know how to fight it. They were all religious fanatics and conniving plotters.