High Treason of the Full Moon

(contra Richard Dawkins in a variation on a popular tune)

How can I tell you how I feel when I don't know?
Words have no meaning in a language from so long ago.

Are you the uncreated guide
Or songs of children who have died?
Is it love or is it pride
That needs an art it knows has lied?

Tonight, I dare define
Your face as one divine
The moon is something more than just its glow.

Save us both some time
Just give me a sign
Give me something more than just a show.

Now that an age draws to an end you cannot leave me.
I was not made to believe in something I can’t see.

You must have a face
We cannot embrace
A cosmic plan of transcendental grace.

Thus we apprehend
The universal trend
The larger purpose in what we intend.

Just as the moon directs the tide
There is a light that is our guide
And what the stars cannot provide
Is left for mortals to decide.

Here is the proof that I propose:
Before the moon from earth arose
It held a secret to disclose
Stranger than we can suppose.

Truth Fades Like Beauty

No timeless treasure wrought bright and cold
Truth fades like beauty, more leaf than gold.

Wu Wei

Darash

דָּרַשׁ

"Jewish exegesis would be called midrash, which derives from the verb darash, "to search," "investigate," "to go in pursuit of something" as yet undiscovered."

And They Laugh

"I have a friend who has a test for the best science questions. You're sitting around at the observatory, ready to start your observing, and you tell the other scientists what you're doing, and they laugh, and that's how you know you have a great program, because it's not something that everybody else is doing."

Anne Kinney, director of the Astronomy and Physics Division in the Office of Space Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C, in the television series, The Planets, episode "Our Destiny."

The Advantages of Ambiguity

Ambiguity is underrated. It is often more valuable than precision. Nature is an economizer, adapting existing structures in novel ways. Very precise adaptations with no other uses are a sure-fire path to extinction in a world of perpetual change. Language that is too precise, that never changes spelling, meaning, or pronunciation, has all the excitement of a life insurance contract or a will.

To Go One's Own Way

αίρεσης

"In a pattern that would be repeated in later secular states, inquisitors sought out dissidents and forced them to abjure their "heresy," a word deriving from the Greek airesis, "to go one's own way."

Look to the End

"Look to the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often enough God gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him."

Everything is Water

"Everything is water and the world is full of gods."

First Origin of This Creation

"He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not."

The Rig Veda/Mandala 1/Hymn 121

Saints and Devils

"The scientist is our contemporary saint, when he is not our contemporary devil. Not that there is much difference between the two when we observe how we use saints and devils."

If I Was Made for Art

S' io nacqui a quella nè sordo nè cieco,
Proporzionato a chi 'l cor m' arde e fura,
Colpa è di chi m' ha destinato al foco

If I was made for art, from childhood given
A prey for burning beauty to devour,
I blame the mistress I was born to serve.

Misleading Notes to Myself

Markets are like wives: they tell you what you need to know, but you don't always like what you hear.

***

There are many fine and worthwhile things beyond the comprehension of individually articulated reason. Beyond the mind of any one man there are the minds of all.

***

Creativity does not begin with logically solving a problem; it begins with an inspired solution.

***

Life has two parts. The first is finding what you love and learning how to love it. The second is learning how to let it go.

***

Who does not hope for a life after death? Only those who believe that love is never misunderstood in this one.

***

Entrepreneurs are the deviants hiding in the closets at business schools.

***

Rast's Law: Every successful business eventually turns into the department of motor vehicles. Then it dies the death that it deserves.

***

When one animal meets another, it has one of only four instinctive reactions: kill it, cooperate with it, ignore it, or flee it. Consider it a measure of human progress that we are at least more likely to oppose those we meet than we are to kill them.

***

Much to the dismay of all sorcerers and an uncomfortably large number of scientists, human invention is not formulaic.

***

One life always depends upon the lives of others. You may obtain what you need from others by force, fraud, aid, or trade, but if you successfully use force or fraud, you will create the social condition where you must constantly seek a more clever fraud or a more effective force when you aim to improve your standard of living. In other words, you will enter into an arms race of force and fraud with other self-serving bullies and liars, a pact of social suicide.

***

Art is religion without divinity. Religion is art with the divine. Why do people go to museums? For the same reasons people used to go to church.

***

Three things you should acquire in an education, regardless of major:
1. The ability to think logically.
2. The ability to present your ideas well, in writing and orally.
3. The ability to calculate.

****

Even our most beautiful words are poor clothes for God. We are like dogs barking at the moon, inspired by what we see and very proud of the sounds we make.

****

Although we would not choose it, it is our struggle that makes us most fully what we are.

****

We make a serious mistake when we try to turn one kind of knowledge into another. Prices are like words: they are not scientific constants and cannot be managed as you would manage temperature, melting points, or atomic weights.

****

Accounting is more language than math. Contrary to what many people expect of accounting, it does not offer us a world of unchanging facts. It offers us a reliable but only temporary and largely metaphorical way of describing reality.

You Belong on Bull Street

One man has many beginnings
One of mine is here
My parents married at the manse of Centennial ARP.

They were not doctrinaire
They were in love.

Love does not worry about the institutes of the Christian religion
Love reconciles all contradictions
At least until the lovers learn
That love is the greatest contradiction of them all.

Reasonable people aren’t supposed to contradict themselves.
Good luck with that.

At one end of Bull Street
There stands a public university
At the other, a lunatic asylum
And sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference
Or know which way love comes from
Or know which way it might go.

The Root of Knowledge

"There are many gifts that are unique in man; but at the centre of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see."

A Comet is an Ancient Fear

This long-haired star ruined men and nations;
Drove women mad; deformed children;
Filled all the world with perturbations.

It was the thick smoke of human sin
Burnt before the face of God;
Or the flash of the Devil's grin.

When Halley said this dirty clod
Of ice would always reappear
On its astral promenade,

The comet's nature wasn't clear.
Even science, blessed with observation,
Found poison in the comet's rear.

A comet is an ancient fear,
A remnant of creation,
Trapped by the presence of a star
In eccentric isolation.

Second Place in the Financial Times "Sky Paths" literary competition, 1986

Rats, Mules, Cats, Dogs, and Horses

"You were born too late to be acquainted with mules and so comprehend the startling, the even shocking, import of this statement. A mule which will gallop for a half-mile in the single direction elected by its rider even one time becomes a neighborhood legend; one that will do it consistently time after time is an incredible phenomenon. Because, unlike a horse, a mule is far too intelligent to break its heart for glory running round the rim of a mile-long saucer. In fact, I rate mules second only to rats in intelligence, the mule followed in order by cats, dogs, and horses last -- assuming of course that you accept my definition of intelligence: which is the ability to cope with environment: which means to accept environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty.

The rat of course I rate first. he lives in your house without helping you to buy it or build it or repair it or keep the taxes paid; he eats what you eat without helping you raise it or buy it or even hand it into the house; you cannot get rid of him; were he not a cannibal, he would long since have inherited the earth. The cat is third, with some of the same qualities but a weaker, punier creature; he neither toils nor spins, he is a parasite on you but he does not love you; he would die, cease to exist, vanish from the earth (I mean, in his so-called domestic form) but so far he has not had to. (There is the fable, Chinese I think, literary I am sure: of a period on earth when the dominant creatures were cats: who after ages of trying to cope with the anguishes of mortality -- famine, plague, war, injustice, folly, greed -- in a word, civilised government -- convened a congress of the wisest cat philosophers to see if anything could be done: who after long deliberation agreed that the dilemma, the problems themselves were insoluble and the only practical solution was to give it up, relinquish, abdicate, by selecting from among the lesser creatures a species, race optimistic enough to believe that the mortal predicament could be solved and ignorant enough never to learn better. Which is why the cat lives with you, is completely dependent on you for food and shelter but lifts no paw for you and loves you not; in a word, why your cat looks at you the way it does.)

The dog I rate fourth. He is courageous, faithful, monogamous in his devotion; he is your parasite, too: his failure (as compared to the cat) is that he will work for you -- I mean, willingly, gladly, ape any trick, no matter how silly, just to please you, for a pat on the head; as sound and first-rate a parasite as any, his failure is that he is a sycophant, believing that he has to show gratitude also; he will debase and violate his own dignity for your amusement: he fawns in return for a kick, he will give his life for you in battle and grieve himself to starvation over your bones. The horse I rate last. A creature capable of but one idea at a time, his strongest quality is timidity and fear. He can be tricked and cajoled by a child into breaking his limbs or his heart too in running too far too fast or jumping tings too wide or hard or high: he will eat himself to death if not guarded like a baby; if he had only one gram of the intelligence of the most backward rat, he would be the rider.

The mule I rate second. But second only because you can make him work for you. But that too only within his own rigid self-set regulations. He will not permit himself to eat too much. He will draw a wagon or a plow, but he will not run a race. he will not try to jump anything he does not indubitably know beforehand he can jump; he will not enter any place unless he knows of his own knowledge what is on the other side; he will work for you patiently for ten years for the chance to kick you once. In a word, free of the obligations of ancestry and the responsibilities of posterity, he has conquered not only life but death too and hence is immortal; were he to vanish from the earth today, the same chanceful biological combination which produced him yesterday would produce him a thousand years hence, unaltered, unchanged, incorrigible still within the limitations which he himself had proved and tested; still free, still coping."

Man Alone

"Man is not the most majestic of the creatures. Long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses, a jig-saw of faculties which alone, over three thousand million years of life, make him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created."

The Hard Facts of Life

"I'm sure you have often noticed how ignorant people beyond thirty or forty are. I don't mean forgetful. That's specious and easy, too easy to say Oh papa (or grandpa) or mama (or gradma), they're just old; they have forgotten. Because there are some things, some of the hard facts of life, that you don't forget, no matter how old you are. There is a ditch, a chasm; as a boy you crossed it on a footlog. You come creeping and doddering back at thirty-five or forty and the footlog is gone; you may not even remember the footlog but at least you don't step out onto that empty gravity that footlog once spanned."

Nothing is Ever Lost

"Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable."