Illness

Being ill almost compels one to focus solely on the current moment: you can't plan ahead when you're in pain. I'm now convinced that I have something called Costochondritis, "an inflammation of the junctions were the upper ribs join with the cartilage that holds them to the breastbone or sternum." The cause is unknown and it usually goes away. That has been true in the past, but this time it seems to be hanging on, making it impossible to sleep on my right side, making sleep fitful and making me tired. So far: not exactly the summer of Rog.

Definitions

Praying is actually begging.
Wisdom is resignation.
I read Sam Lipsyte's Venus Drive and Home Land. They won't last--but they have amusing parts. A writer needs to be both good and lucky: Joyce wrote about growing up in a suffocating land that was about to explode. He was good and lucky. Post-modern American mall culture just doesn't lend itself to noteworthy literature. Maybe when the oil runs out and we're going crazy trying to step on our neighbors, then we'll have a literature that both good and noteworthy.

The True Nature of History

I read Marc Bloch's relatively boring The Historian's Craft. Even though his plea for a rational historicism is utterly understandable, given that his country had been occupied by Nazi Germany, a nation not particularly interested in rational explanations of anything, and depite the fact that his basic points--history is about human beings, is about consciousness, must strive to understand, not judge--could have been made in three pages, his analysis of the nature of history is incapable of realizing the true nature of history. In his last, unfinished chapter, which discusses historical causation, Bloch asks: "What military historian would dream of ranking among the causes of a victory that gravitation which accounts for the trajectory of the shells, or the physiological organization of the human body without which the projectiles would have no fatal consequences?" This is precisely the subject of science fiction, a genre that attempts to look past the shallow aspects of human psychology to the realm of the physical universe--its laws and probabilities. It involves an almost incomprehensible perspective--one that steps away from the petty and predictable choices that human beings make and focuses on how physical forces (like gravity) and shape and function (like physiology) do determine much of what has occurred. Bloch's belief in the empirically visible simply is too small to fully understand the larger context of human history.

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.