Words Matter: Less Than Fewer

 

What are the human and political
implications in the difference be-
tween "fewer migrants" and "less
migrants?"

“where will the meanings be

when the words are forgotten”

--W.S. Merwin

 A number of years ago I began noticing that in print and common speech, there were fewer and fewer instances of “fewer,” and more and more of “less.”  By now, “fewer” has more or less disappeared.  And our language is the lesser for it.

 It used to be that people wrote and said “less water” but “fewer people”; “fewer fingers” but “less hair.”  There was a reason for the difference.  For generations we learned in school that you used “less” for quantity, and “few” and “fewer” for numbers of individual entities. “Less” was about measurement, “few” about counting.  Therefore: less cement and fewer bags, fewer parties and less dancing.  (There are a few complicated cases, but that's the basic--and meaningful---difference.)

 Few and fewer even held a kind of pride of place.  Because less covered more things (including abstractions etc), the words that merited “fewer” were fewer, and their individuality and specificity were emphasized.  

 Today everything is less.   I knew we reached the nadir when I recently read the expression “less units.”  That sounds like the death knell of the distinction between number of individuals (or units) and quantities.

 It’s ironic that it is happening in the computer age, which is probably responsible for it in part, with its vast power to quantify everything.  For the digital age is based on digits, meaning numbers.  Most lives now center on various but precise numbers of zeroes and ones strung together. 

 As far as I know, nobody simply decided that there was less need for fewer, but the implied argument is that the opposite of both few and less is “more.”  So why not get rid of the complication, the possible confusion and embarrassment of using the wrong word, by getting rid of the word? It’s one less word to worry about, right?  

 As “fewer” has disappeared into “less,” so “number” has disappeared into “amount.” For instance, Bill and Luke Walton are the only father and son to both win two NBA championships, or as Wikipedia puts it, Luke’s two rings are “the same amount as his father won.” 

 The disappearance of the few/less, or number/amount distinction isn’t just an American phenomenon. A quick Internet search yielded examples from most English- speaking countries, including articles from UK’s Economist (“less people, more water”) and AllAfrica.com. (“Less People Buy Bibles as Condom Sales Soar.”)

  “The use of ‘less people’ etc. is so common in British English that there seems little point in claiming it as an error,” wrote a teacher in Great Britain to her listserv. Another agreed that “fewer” is archaic.  “…Less means the same as fewer,” wrote someone in a different discussion on the subject. “ So what is wrong with plain English, simpler English?  Want to write a Victorian novel?  Use fewer.”

Apart from the dismissive scorn, the implied point is that we moderns understand that fewer words makes more sense. In plenty of cases this general notion is demonstrable, but depleting the language of a meaningful and useful word only lessens the ability to make the distinctions that a sophisticated language is built to express.  That’s important in a complex society as well as a democracy.  

The other argument for less is the natural evolution of language, but not every change is better, let alone necessary.  We’re clearly in the midst of a pendulum swing from the sternly prescriptive model to the mindlessly (or should I say robotically) descriptive, which will only accelerate as hyper-descriptive AI programs rule the information world.  Unfortunately, words are not objects of fashion.  They aren’t handbags or hats. They are text and subtext of communication and meaning, and in the end they tell us who we are.

Just as the relatively sudden elimination of the fewer/less distinction may have subconscious causes, the effects of it may also seep into how we see the world. There may even be an attack on certain values of our society reflected in this elimination.  Perhaps we need to ask what has changed with the phrase “less people.”  Is it only the grammar of “fewer” and “less,” or is it our underlying idea of people?   

In changing how we express the outcome of a count, are we changing our conception of what we are measuring?  Do we see people only in aggregates, and not in affiliations?  Do we now consider people not as integers with integrity, but as quantities that are classified according to common characteristics?  

 Perhaps in our marketing-minded society, numbers of people translate too easily into quantities of money, or of votes. If votes are just quantities, then stealing them is just theft. But if votes are individual commitments added up, to cheat is to dishonor the people who stood in line at the polls for hours in the rain.  “Count the votes” means the voters must count more than the outcome.

  Quantity applies to objects, implying a passivity, of being acted upon.  Number and counting suggest subject, capable of action:  “Stand and be counted.”  Few can become many. When quantities of money have overpowering political effects, only numbers of people can balance it.

 “Fewer” has a dignity lacking in “less.”  By treating persons as quantities we send a message of disrespect, which then becomes a deficit of self-respect.The cause of human rights is based on the individual as significant, not as an indistinguishable element in a quantity that doesn’t count. When justice or health depend more on quantities of money and power, individuals count less.

  Turning people into quantities denies their individual qualities, and their individual stories.  Individuals must be judged on their merits. They must be counted.  Quantities don’t count—they can more easily be objectified, the first step to othering.  

Where people appear most as quantities is at the border, literally.  Immigrants are not only the most conspicuous other, they symbolize the other as a mass, as quantity.  It is the fear of their quantity that haunts people now, especially a subset of those who define themselves as white people.   Think about the human as well as the political implications in the difference between "fewer migrants" and "less migrants."  As in "Fewer migrants might have drowned had surrounding ships attempted rescue sooner."  Or "There are now less migrants because the ships did not attempt rescue."  

We see what we now call “migrants” as amounts, but seldom look at any—or even pictures of any-- as individuals. If we did, we would perhaps recognize a smile like an uncle had, or a frightened child like we once were. But even if they remain as strange looking as perhaps our own ancestors, we might hear individual stories of fleeing violence, oppression and the ravages of climate disruption. We would have to see that they count as humans like us.  Or like our blood ancestors, even parents or grandparents, when they were immigrants.  This is not to deny that mass migration is a problem for nations—it will become an ever bigger one as climate distortion effects worsen and spread.  But losing a sense of individuals is a poor way to start addressing it. 

 Losing the related sense of number to the universal amount also robs us of specificity and perhaps even poetic impact.  We speak of the amorphous amount of time but the number of days—a more specific and powerful accounting of time, as in the Biblical verse: “Teach us to number our days that we may get us a heart of wisdom.” 

 Our language is less flexible and exact for losing fewer, and so are we as human beings, and as human societies.  I suppose there may be an entire generation by now that has never used or even heard the word “fewer” in many contexts.  But neither that, nor anyone’s snide scorn, will take the word away from me, because I know at least some of its value. This word matters. So I’m proud to be counted as one of the few.

Updates to Recent Posts

 Nine days after the Climate Distortion post, about 175 million people (or close to the total US population in 1960)  in every region of the United States were under heat advisories with many experiencing high heat indexes. The temperature of the ocean off Florida was 100F.  High ocean temperatures in the Atlantic may fuel storms in the fast-approaching hurricane season.  After forty days of excessive heat, the southwest was anticipating moderating temperatures but higher humidity as monsoon rains were forecast for early August.  There were forest fires in ten European countries, as well as Canada and elsewhere around the world.  Antarctic sea ice is the thinnest on record for this time of the year, beating the all time record in 2017 by a considerable margin. The era of global boiling has arrived, said the UN Secretary-General. 

Apropos of the New College of Gilead/Florida post: for the start of the upcoming 2023-24 academic year, New College of Florida announced that 36 of 100 full time teaching positions were vacant.  Six vacancies were the result of resignations, and a quarter of them followed the extreme right takeover of the board of trustees.  In Florida universities generally, the loss of faculty this year is expected to at least double and perhaps triple the normal turnover.  One senior professor at the University of Florida law school who is Black said simply: "Florida is toxic."  He said there's been no new hires of Black teachers for years.  He has left the school and the state, partly for his own safety.  More at the Guardian.

Where Everything is Music

Don’t worry about saving these songs!

 And if one of our instruments breaks,

 it doesn’t matter. 

 We have fallen into the place

 where everything is music.

 The strumming and the flute notes

rise into the atmosphere,

 and even if the whole world’s harp

 should burn up, there still will be

 hidden instruments playing.

 So the candle flickers and goes out.

 We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

 This singing art is sea foam.

 The graceful movements come from a pearl

 somewhere on the ocean floor.

 Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge

 of driftwood along the beach, wanting! 

 They derive

 from a slow and powerful root

 that we can’t see.

 Stop the words now.

 Open the window in the center of your chest,

 and let the spirits fly in and out.

 --Rumi

translation: Coleman Barks

BK photo

Popped Out

Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, falls the Pop-Up.

 No sooner do I begin reading a news or informational website than the words I am reading disappear under the sudden blot of a pop-up.  The rude wiggling ad or automatic mini-video screen at the margins are distracting enough, but the pop-up is a total interruption and thorough disorientation.

 It’s an ad, a plea for subscription or donation, or more often these days, an opportunity in the form of a visual demand screaming in your face to sign up for one newsletter or another.  Everybody has newsletters now, it’s the latest way to get your email and pile it high with opportunities in the form of spam until you hardly bother to check it anymore.

 Meanwhile you’ve lost the continuity of whatever you were reading.  And on many sites it doesn’t stop there. A pop-up totally obscuring the text may itself soon be obliterated by another pop-up.  That’s after the ad or message at the top of the page expands until you remove it to read the text, while a message below the text expands upwards, effectively squeezing what you’re reading into three or four visible lines.

 This is of course assuming you can get any text at all, without subscribing or registering or becoming a member or whatever.  But even a subscription or a membership won’t necessarily free you.  There are Levels to these things now.  The start page New York Times for instance has at least four categories (consumer guides, food, most sports, and games) that require additional payments beyond a mere subscription.  On other sites there are levels of membership privileges. 

 But along with your subscription comes cookies (and therefore the possibility if not the certainty of tracking) to “enhance your experience” and spy on you for profit. And more spam.

 What I’ve learned along the way is that a lot of those stories I clicked on aren’t really worth the trouble. There’s a lot of eye-catching “content” out there but precious little substance.  Sometimes a pop-up breaking the trance will help me realize I’ve been duped, I’m wasting my time.  So thanks a lot, I’m gone.        

Telephone Ringing

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth

 Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

 It is you it is you it can only

 be you calling and I cannot answer

 in time whatever time is with no answer

 though I can hear your voice without its words

 your own voice yours alone speaking to me

 through the dark echoless ageless corridors

 of six decades out of reach and beyond

 answering if I knew what to answer

 then we laughed as we talked about likeness

 and difference and the echoes of change

 about recognition and its one sound

while we changed without knowing we were

 answering but the question was still there 

we never answered it I remember now

 as I do not answer while it keeps ringing

 while it rings on and I do not answer

 and still do not know what the question is

--W.S. Merwin

Climate Distortion

Update: Nine days after this post, about 175 million people (or close to the total US population in 1960)  in every region of the United States were under heat advisories with many experiencing high heat indexes, and the temperature of the ocean off Florida was 100F.  After forty days of excessive heat, the southwest was anticipating moderating temperatures but higher humidity as monsoon rains were forecast for early August. The world is boiling, said the UN Secretary-General.

The current heatwave in the US south and southwest (as well as northern Mexico) is expanding.  The National Weather Service predicts that this weekend about 80 million people will experience temperatures or heat indexes above 105F.  And the heat is likely to continue into next week.

When you add up everyone in the world dealing with excessive heat for weeks at a time, and then factor in those dealing with torrential rain and flood, firestorms and smoke, and all the associated problems, that number must be in the hundreds of millions if not billions.

This is the summer that climate distortion comes home.  The heat is no longer a temporary inconvenience, nor are the floods and fires.  They are much harder to ignore, and for many they are fatal to ignore. Their reality changes everyone's daily reality: how they think, plan, act and feel.  It should be motivation for institutions to make more than temporary fixes.  Gaps in public services become more apparent and must be addressed.  Even when the weather changes.

Climate distortion--though not necessarily this summer's weather--is here to stay, for a very long time.  It seems important to me to understand what's happening.  Some people call it climate change (a name invented by a Republican consultant so it wouldn't sound so "negative").  But the climate hasn't changed.  It has been distorted.  From a different point of view, some call it climate derangement.  It's colorful, but it isn't any more accurate.  The climate has not changed nor has it gone insane.  The climate is doing what it has always done in these geophysical circumstances.  But something is distorting the climate--usually making it more extreme and violent.  Something is interacting with ordinary climate phenomena, like El Nino and various other cycles.  That something is excessive CO2 and other identified gases spewn into the atmosphere by industrial age human societies, and the global heating they have caused.  

The effects of these distortions can be predicted in a general way, but not in a weather forecasting kind of way.  More days of higher temperatures in the summer, for instance, has been widely predicted for decades as an effect of global heating caused by greenhouse gases.  But distortions are inherently volatile.  Nobody knows how they will manifest in a given year.  A distorted climate is full of shocks and surprises.  There may be baseline changes within all this, but those probably won't be known until some time has passed.  But because of time lag effects, a distorted climate is here to stay.

The distortions in turn can distort various major ocean currents and atmospheric currents that play a huge role in determining weather patterns.   Then we're in the area of feedbacks and tipping points.  That's climate distortion.  They can eventually alter key features of the planetscape that affect climate, like polar ice.  They can affect life directly as well as indirectly, with cascading consequences.

Some people won't care much why this is happening, but they may face the fact that it is happening. Maybe some other people will finally listen to the basic findings of climate science.  I am not one of those who make a  rigid slogan out of "trust the science."  First of all, there is no such thing as "the science." Scientists, for any number of reasons on a scale from benign to corrupt, sometimes sell conclusions derived from bad science.  Science is not pure.  Human knowledge is much weaker than we like to pretend it is, and that's really true of western science.  You usually have to use your judgment in which "science" to believe.  

But climate science--which is really a name for those studying chemistry, biology, physics and various more complex hybrids of inquiry applied to climate--has come at its conclusions in a variety of ways, from measuring aspects of today's world to measuring aspects of the deep past, to modeling various possibilities.  Some requires sophisticated computation; but some is based on quite elementary physics and chemistry.  All of this should be clear to anyone who has read or seen An Inconvenient Truth since 2006, and there are more sciences involved now. 

For decades now, thousands of scientists of various kinds from every nation on the planet have come together to share their findings and put together a consensus in UN climate reports.  No subject has been studied more thoroughly by more people over a longer time in a cooperative way, and come to the same conclusions.  In comparison, your doctor's diagnosis is the equivalent of a coin toss.  

There are a number of practical lessons to be derived from this, including that the resistance to climate crisis conclusions is largely in the murky realm of the psychological (though it is excused and made easier and therefore more cynical and corrupt by politics.)  That should tell us that in order to address climate distortion, its effects and its causes, means exploring our inner distortions--fears, needs, desires as well as such unconscious drivers as denial and projection.  It means exploring the inner distortions related to social media, algorithms, group dynamics and so on.

Finally it means finding again the core of our beliefs in ourselves, what we're all about, our operating principles, our deep commitments and ideals, all of which may have been distorted by the rush of complexities around us.  It's not going to be easy, navigating the increasing number of hotheads around us (is it coincidence that mass shootings have gone up recently along with the temperature?) but in the end society and the individuals within societies will rise and fall on whether "you'd do the same for me" remains a transcendent impulse of what used to be called decency. 

Heat is Global

 Updates 7/18: The high temperature in Phoenix equaled or exceeded 110 degrees F for the 19th straight day, and for the eighth consecutive night did not dip below 90. On Monday, a huge dust storm blew over the city.  Death Valley CA reached 128F daytime and 120 between midnight and 1 a.m. on July 17. These are air temperatures--it was estimated that the sidewalks were 200F.  Parts of Nevada struggled to go below 100F at night.  Parts of Texas continue to be gripped by a heatwave that is challenging power reserves for air conditioning.  

But the most dangerous place on Earth seemed to be Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, where the heat index reached 152F.  Iran is suffering from water shortages as well.  All of these are getting close to fatal combinations of heat and humidity, called wet bulb temperatures. Even in Europe, where parts of Spain topped out at nearly 115F, and Italy at 113.  The hot temperatures in Greece are accompanied by fires raging around Athens.  Triple digit heat continued in China and Japan.  One town in China recorded a Death Valley-like 126F.  

Meanwhile the smoke from Canadian fires is again pouring down over Chicago, New York and other US locations.  Intense rain in eastern PA caused a sudden flash flood--4 feet of water suddenly washed over cars on a rural road.  Only two members of one family survived.  

So for the first time I can recall, heat has been consistently in the headlines for days at a time, linked to climate disruption caused by greenhouse gases. 

On July 3, Earth as a planet had the highest temperature ever recorded.  Scientists estimate that the world was hotter than it has been for something like 125,000 years.  That's about 90,000 years before the first known human cave paintings.

  The next day, July 4, it was hotter.  Two days later, hotter still. 

The temperature rise was worst in the worst places for future prospects, like the oceans and the Antarctic, but there are days and weeks already this summer of record-breaking heat in China, India, and Africa where drought persists and spreads, and far northern Canada, where forests continue to burn, week after week.  Texas is still in the midst of a crippling heat wave, while its governor signed legislation prohibiting local governments from giving outdoor workers a fifteen-minute water break.

 Parts of Arizona were also breaking heat records, and more heat is forecast for much of the Southwest and interior California this week and perhaps for longer. Meanwhile, sudden and intense rain storms—other manifestations of climate distortion-- flooded parts of the northeastern US and southern California.  This was after dense smoke from Canadian fires choked areas of the northeast and Midwest—smoke that is very likely to return.

  This is all happening even before the Pacific ocean phenomenon known as El Nino was predicted to start bumping up temperatures; scientists forecast it would be doing that six months from now.  Global heating, augmented by other atmospheric and ocean factors, is likely to make this the hottest year on Earth.  Until maybe next year.

The phenomenon of global heating is a condition of the atmosphere that surrounds every inch of the Earth's surface. Its basically distorts the climate systems that have harbored life as we know it for, say, 125,000 years.  Hotter weather is one of its manifestations, at different places and times.  But where heat and its other expressions occur, their effects are global: everything is affected.  

 Here’s the basic fact to consider about these current manifestations of climate distortion-- the fiery winds, the relentless floodwaters, the smothering smoke, the rising tides, collapsing land, deathly drought, titanic storms, and the implacable blankets of heat: they don’t notice if your house is worth fifty thousand dollars or five million. They don’t care about your stock portfolio or your credit score. They don't read your bumper stickers or yard signs. They don’t take into account your race, political party or religious affiliation.

 You can’t threaten heat with your AK-47, and you can’t shoot it dead.  You’ll sicken even quicker in your body armor.  You can't stop it with a gene-splice or an AI program.  There isn't an ap or a hack that makes it go away.  Congressional hearings just add more hot air.

  Heat doesn’t care if you live off the grid or in a metropolitan tower.  It doesn’t care where you get your news, or whether your smartphone is the latest.  It doesn’t know if you are a banker or an influencer, a feminist or a Proud Boy, or if you hate liberals or hate baby boomers.  It doesn’t care what your pronouns are.  It doesn’t notice how many likes you’ve collected. 

 It doesn’t care that you resent the rich or fear the poor.  When the tarmac melts at the airport, neither the airbuses nor the private jets can take off.  When the asphalt sinks, the Mercedes and the Volt alike can’t get very far. When the grid goes down from too much demand, and there’s no more fuel for the home generators, not much about you matters except where you are and who will help you.

 It took an entire year to gather and interpret the data, but it turns out that last summer in Europe—the hottest in its history so far—more than 61,000 people were killed by the heat.  Some died from heatstroke, but in more cases, heat killed people with serious conditions that otherwise would have lived.

 How many strokes and heart attacks are caused by the inability to breathe caused by intense heat? How many accidents are caused by overheated brains?  How many more diseases carried by insects that thrive on heat are spreading? How many infections and chronic conditions are related?  These things may not get counted quickly or at all, or widely reported (especially if they involve so-called migrants, the poor generally, the old) or even noticed, but that doesn't mean they aren't happening. 

 The current and upcoming heat wave in the southwestern US is at least happening at a time of the year when the air is dry.  If it recurs later in the summer, with higher humidity, it could conceivably reach the most dangerous condition in which (if the AC goes) thousands and even millions could die in a few days. Poorer places in Asia are even more vulnerable to this outcome, but parts of Texas and the Midwest are likely to see both triple digit temperatures and high humidity in the coming days, and the  Southeast is always prone to that potentially lethal combination.  The Pacific Northwest may be in for its second once-in-a-thousand-years heat dome of this year.

Heat affects the body and the mind, mood and emotions, and the ability to think clearly. The heat debilitates, and it can kill you even if you don’t believe in it, and all your cyberspace friends agree. It doesn’t weaken if it polls badly.  You can’t shout it down or argue it away.  

 Of course, it doesn’t hit everyone equally—not at first.  But the effects spread and cascade, so eventually it doesn’t matter if you are a billionaire or homeless, a buffed-up model or a helpless elder. It still happens.  Even if it isn't hot now where you are, you will still feel its effects eventually.

 The heat beats down on the animals crowded into mechanical meat factories, and in the fields and forests.  It bakes the soil and kills the roots of once-future food. It boils the water and the fish in it. It scalds the oceans and the tiny organisms that provide us with most of our oxygen. It kills the bees that keep plants growing, the insects that feed the birds (though it’s relatively kind to mosquitoes) and on up the chain.  Heat doesn’t care if you’re a vegan or a vegetable.  It just is.

 There's a lot that can be done to address the effects of climate distortion, and to address its causes so it doesn't get hopelessly worse in the far future. It’s a complex crisis but with a fundamental choice.  Either society works together for all, so that chances increase that many survive, with life on the planet relatively intact and the future is better, or it ultimately becomes every being for itself, with misery and violence for most, when at best only few survive, in conditions no one wants to contemplate. 

 Not everybody has to buy in, but the appropriate institutions on every level must be strong and courageous, and focused.  As time goes on it will take many more capable and dedicated people to do this work. This is a planetary emergency that is also many national and local emergencies.  All other distinctions among citizens ultimately become fatal distractions.  Until there is nothing but confusion, anger, desperation and then just dull heat in anyone's head.    

R.I.P. Carl T. Severini 1932-2023

Carl outside home in Youngwood with his sister
Flora (my mother) and his mother Gioconda

 Carl Thomas Severini was my mother’s younger brother. He was born in 1932, one of the worst years of the Great Depression.  Nevertheless he grew to be about a foot taller than either of his parents and either of his sisters.  He played pickup football with neighborhood friends in the very small western Pennsylvania town of Youngwood, even when nobody could afford an actual football.  They used an old evaporated milk can, sealed at both ends. 

 He remembered flooded railroad tracks before New Deal era flood control projects cut down on their frequency, and he remembered watching people stream past his house on Depot St. with food baskets, on their way to catch the special train to Idlewild Park for Youngwood’s community picnic. His family soon joined them.

 During World War II, Carl participated in scrap drives, collecting cans, old nails and other discarded metal in his wagon, which he took to Holy Cross school, so it would eventually be loaded into box cars at the Youngwood depot and sent off to be re-purposed for the war effort. He remembered hearing the news of President Roosevelt’s death on the radio.

 The Severini home in Youngwood had a player piano—not uncommon in those days—and Carl began taking piano lessons when he was about 10.  By the time he started college he performed in a series of local dance bands.  

He was such an excellent student that he completed two grades in one year, and finished 10^th grade with honors at the age of 14.  Perhaps influenced by his Tom Swift novels and other futuristic fiction, he was interested in science. By the time he was a senior at Youngwood High, he told the school yearbook that his ambition was to become a chemical engineer.  He also expressed preferences for Cary Grant, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, relaxing at the Rexall Drug soda fountain and playing basketball. He and his neighborhood friends had chipped in and bought a hoop that they mounted on a pole on First Street.

 He graduated from nearby St. Vincent College in 1952, and in 1954 he married Rose Morozowich, my beloved Aunt Rose.  They eventually would raise three daughters and two sons in a marriage that lasted for 67 years, ended only by Rose’s death.  

One of Carl’s first jobs was at Callery Chemical in Evans City, PA.  As the newest employee, Carl was often left to mind the store when everyone else went to lunch. That’s how he met Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was overseeing the construction of the first nuclear powered submarine.  He was touring facilities that might contribute to the Nautilus, and arrived at lunchtime, so it was up to Carl to show him around.

  Callery soon decided it could use an employee with a law degree to handle its patents, and offered to pay (or perhaps help pay) for law school. After someone else turned it down, Carl jumped at the offer.  He graduated from the law school of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1960.  Patent law would become his career.

 He soon became a patent attorney at PPG—then still known as Pittsburgh Plate Glass-- and remained there for 32 years.  He became PPG’s Chief Patent Counsel, and served as president of both the Association of Corporate Patent Counsels and the Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association.  His work involved extensive travel around the United States as well as Europe and Asia. Sometimes he would drop into antiquarian bookstores to find first editions of the Tom Swift series he’d read as a boy.  He eventually collected the entire series.  

My Uncle Carl was a major figure in my young life.  He was just 14 when I was born. To get a little perspective on that, my mother—his oldest sister—was 12 years older than him.  While I never thought of him as an older brother, his youth and the things he did—playing basketball, playing piano, going to college—were more interesting and exciting.  He was also fun.

 At some point in my first few years he worked in the summer at a drug store in downtown Greensburg, and would walk down to College Avenue to our apartment, where my mother would make him lunch. But my first memories of him are situated at my grandparents home in Youngwood, where he lived in high school and college. I recall watching him play piano, his left hand flying back and forth on the base notes while his right hand did something completely different.  Sometimes I would crawl under the keyboard and listen from there, watching his feet work the golden pedals.  If he wasn’t at home when we visited I would ask where he was.  At least once I found him playing basketball on First Street.

 We moved into our house on what was then called Lincoln Avenue Extension just outside Greensburg when I was four or so. Probably when Carl was at St. Vincent College he would suddenly show up in his car.  Though he spent most of the time with my mother, his visits were special events for me.  Once before I started school I was out in the yard writing numbers and letters on a blackboard.  He approved, but noticed that I was making the 4s wrong.  I didn’t make that mistake again.  His visits were impromptu, or a least I usually didn’t know he was coming.  Once it occurred to me that when he wasn’t there, he was doing other things that I didn’t know about.  At first I could almost understand how he had a life away from me—or that in general things could happen without me being there, then I couldn’t, and then I could again, and forever.  These are some of my earliest memories, and there aren't many more.  My Uncle Carl was part of them.

 When I was nearly 8, his wedding reception at the Roof Garden of the Penn Albert Hotel was a major event—perhaps the first time I’d heard a live band.  This was when wedding bands played Italian tunes as well as Big Band numbers from the 1940s.

  When I was old enough, Carl’s visits to our house included playing catch with baseball or football.  I threw my first forward pass to him, leading him and hitting him in stride on my first try, earning his praise.  A big moment.

 Now I notice that in the photos I have of the two of us from my childhood, we are always in physical contact.  Twice I’m perched on his shoulders, and there’s a group photo taken in the early years of his marriage.  We are all visiting his other sister, my aunt Toni, in Federalsburg, Maryland.  We’re sitting on the stoop of her house at 305 Morris Avenue (an address I remember because it was one of the first I learned—my cousin Dick was probably my first correspondent.) There’s Carl and his wife Rose, my sister Kathy and cousin Dick.  I’m sitting on a step between Carl’s legs, with his arms draped down over my shoulders.  I remember the warmth and comfort of that contact.

 Even when he and Rose moved away—to Butler, to Evans City—we would have family visits, and of course the big family meals in Youngwood, especially on Christmas and Easter.  When his first two daughters (Susan and Shirley) were little girls, and I had two younger sisters (Kathy and Debbie), our families took a vacation trip together, through New York state to Niagara Falls.  Then when I was in high school, Carl discussed colleges with me.  He was the only person I could talk to in person who’d even been to college.  He told me what only a graduate knows: that the people you go to college with will remain in your life to some degree thereafter.

 Carl and Rose’s first son Tom was born in 1959, then their third daughter Nancy ( I remember carrying her as an infant to the front door of another relative’s house.)  Steven was born when I was away, but I saw more of him when I had moved back.  Our dinners at Carl and Rose’s home in Murrysville, and later at their vacation farm, would typically involve Carl leading some athletic activity outside afterwards with all the kids, usually involving a football. I noticed that at that point we did a lot more running around that he did.

 Once when he was in Boston in the 1970s and I was an editor at the Boston Phoenix, we had dinner together atop the new Prudential Building. Over the years, Carl was present at important family moments, from weddings to funerals. He spent time with my father in the months after my mother died. When his father died he watched over his mother for decades, and oversaw her care in her last years.

 After I moved to California I made it a point to see him on my infrequent visits to family in Pennsylvania. I had lunch with him on one such visit and told him what he had meant to me as a child.

 When he was in his late 80s, Carl and I began corresponding by email regarding his early memories.  He remembered the names of grade school teachers, his first music teacher, and the bands he’d played in. He especially remembered my mother, and her kindnesses to him as a child. 

 The last time I saw Carl and Rose was a little earlier, in the fall of 2019.  My sisters and I visited them at their home in Murrysville.  We marveled how little it had changed.  The piano that had been a fixture of my grandparents’ house was still in their living room.  They looked and seemed the same, even as they told us about the many cruises they had taken after Carl retired.  Carl still had his lively sense of humor, perhaps even more so.

   We had some wine and cheese—Carl pointed out that the wine was a Montepulciano Abruzzi, made in the region when the Severini family came from and where Carl had visited several times, maintaining ties with the Old World family (though they were actually descendants of my grandmother.) Then we went to dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant.

 It was a still point in a turning world.  For as unchanged as they seemed, both Carl and Rose had experienced serious health problems by then.  In the next several years, they sold their house and moved closer to their last child who still lived in Pennsylvania. Their daughter Nancy and her husband John took care of them from then on.

 Carl had a series of heart problems and was near death more than once.  But it was Rose who passed away first last year.  Carl moved to a skilled nursing residence nearby. He celebrated his 91^st birthday in January. As this June was coming to a close he had a particularly alert week, visiting with daughter Nancy on Sunday the 25^th.  He had a good morning on Monday, and then suddenly slipped away. 

 May he rest in peace.  His legacy lives on.

The Wonder of the Imperfect

 

Nothing that I do is finished

 so I keep returning to it

 lured by the notion that I long

 to see the whole of it at last

 completed and estranged from me

 but no the unfinished is what

 I return to as it leads me on

 I am made whole by what has just

 escaped me as it always does

 I am made of incompleteness

 the words are not there in words

 oh gossamer gossamer breath

 moment daylight life untouchable

 by no name with no beginning 

what do we think we recognize

 --W.S. Merwin

BK photo

Dedications/Pledges/Commitments

 

For the past.

 For my own path.

 For surprises.

 For mistakes that worked so well.

 For tomorrow if I’m there.

 For the next real thing. 

 Then for carrying it all

 through whatever is necessary.

 For following the little god who speaks only to me.

--William Stafford

BK photo 2023

Your Daily Lear

 

--words and image by Edward Lear

And happy birthday to Janice Timko, who apparently now lives in Austin, Texas.

Your Daily Lear

 

---words and image by Edward Lear

Men Made Out of Words

What should we be without the sexual myth, 

The human revery or poem of death?

 Castratos of moon-mash---Life consists

 Of propositions about life. The human

 Revery is a solitude in which

 We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

 By the terrible incantations of defeats, 

And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

 The whole race is a poet that writes down

 The eccentric propositions of its fate.

---Wallace Stevens

photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

London, 1950s or 60s

New College of Gilead (Formerly Known as Florida)

Update 7/30/23:At the start of the 2023-24 academic year, New College of Florida announced that 36 of 100 full time teaching positions were vacant.  Six vacancies were the result of resignations, and a quarter of them followed the extreme right takeover of the board of trustees.  In Florida universities generally, the loss of faculty this year is to at least double and perhaps triple the normal turnover.  One senior professor at the University of Florida law school who is Black said simply: "Florida is toxic."  He said there's been no new hires of Black teachers for years.  He has left the school and the state, partly for his own safety. 

In addition to attacking school libraries and curricula and K-12 schools themselves, the rabid right officials of Florida are completing their takeover of a previously progressive college, known as New College of Florida.

Recent stories about it reminded me of something I’d entirely forgotten: in high school, when I was exploring where I might go to college, I considered applying to what was then called simply New College. 

At that time it really was a New College—in fact, it didn’t have students yet.  I don’t know exactly how or why I was receiving unsolicited information from them, but their letters and brochures were very inviting. 

 It was to be a liberal arts college for academically talented students, who would have a wide latitude in following their own lines and areas of inquiry.  Students would be given written evaluations instead of grades, and each semester they would set goals and sign a contract to fulfill them, which included agreed upon standards of passing or failing.  The student body would be very small but also racially, culturally and economically diverse, and (vital to me) there was financial aid available.

 The brochures as I recall them made much of the most recognizable name on the charter faculty: the eminent historian Arnold Toynbee.  Toynbee made his academic mark in the 1940s and 50s, and was known as well for his international expertise.  Though his academic influence apparently declined by 1960, and he’d retired from teaching before New College persuaded him to join them, he gained new currency with the election of John F. Kennedy to the US presidency.  That’s why I knew his name. 

Toynbee’s major opus was a twelve volume A Study of History which he began publishing in 1934, with the final volume arriving only in 1961.  His major thesis, as JFK described it, was that nations succeed or fail based on how they respond to challenges.  Kennedy used this as an overarching guide to his approach to policymaking.  

 Describing his New Frontier vision in his nomination acceptance speech, Kennedy said: “The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set a promises.  It is a set of challenges.”  “Challenges” was a frequent word in his public vocabulary. Most of what Kennedy tried to accomplish—increasing US prestige and influence in the world, beginning the control of nuclear weapons, and addressing economic, environmental and social issues (such as racial justice and poverty) in the US—were, in his view, the necessary responses to challenges in what he described as the dangerous decade of the 1960s.  Responding to challenges was both defensive and proactive—the challenge to do better.

 In the end, the lure of Toynbee, the utopian sound of the college, and the Sarasota sunshine, were not enough for me to seriously entertain applying.  Maybe I just lacked the courage (and any more information than the brochures offered), but I did not attempt to be one of the first 101 students at New College that entered in 1964.  

Over the years New College seems to have maintained this initial character, and it worked pretty well.  It’s near the top in academic rating, and has had the highest proportion of Fulbright scholars of any college or university in the US.  But seemingly due to its small size (between 600 and 700 students), New College went through several institutional permutations to keep going, most recently becoming the smallest college in the Florida state university system, and also its Honors College. 

 That relationship seemed to work okay until this year, when Governor Ron DeSantis exercised state control to appoint six new members of the governing board of trustees, including four known “conservative” activists (who didn’t live in Florida.)  They quickly fired the college president, denied tenure to all five eligible professors, announced their intention to shut down “ideologically captured departments,” disbanded the diversity and inclusion office, fired the school’s librarian, etc.

 Their intention, said the governor’s chief of staff, is to transform New College into one “more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”  Hillsdale is a small but influential conservative Christian college in Michigan. Not heavy on Fulbright scholars, it nevertheless supplied the Trump administration with its alums.  The majority leader of the Michigan Senate testified to the US House January 5 investigating committee that he was pressured to accept a slate of false electors assembled to overturn the 2020 elections by, among others, the vice-president of Hillsdale.

 Besides its institute for constitutional studies that Mrs. Clarence (“Ginni”) Thomas helped set up in Washington, Hillsdale actively trains teachers in American history and other subjects, and has created the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum for students from pre-school through high school.  As described in the May 23 issue of the New York Review of Books, it sounds basically like the kind of history commonly taught in the 1950s in grade school and high school.  In place of the Catholic propaganda added to my history courses, there’s conservative propaganda.  But one overall effect is to erase post-1950s scholarship on race, and impose its own revisionist interpretation of the role of slavery.  Scholarship on other groups missing from 1950s history is also ignored. 

Meanwhile, the current faculty and student body of New College has been in a furor all year, under fire from this educational blitzkrieg.  They had their finals interrupted by DeSantis arriving to sign a series of bills restricting gender and race education in Florida colleges and universities.  Graduating seniors refused to recognize their own graduation ceremony (except to heckle the official speakers, including a Trump advisor) and set up their robustly attended alternative commencement, supported by alumni. As for the faculty, they voted to censure their own trustees.   

 But students are a regularly renewable resource. The new New College is already taking steps to get the kind of “mission-aligned” students (in the words of a trustee) they want by becoming the first in Florida to accept the Classic Learning Test as well as the SATs from prospective students.  “Classic” is the new code word for ultra-conservative and (as one of the trustees described it) “Christian tradition.” 

  The total takeover of New College is not the only DeSantis attack on higher education in Florida. His policies and laws affect thousands of students in large public universities as well, and schools across the state have staged walkouts and protests. The speed, intensity and extent of Florida’s transformation into officially a white separatist, anti-choice, anti-gender diversity enclave is shocking, and like Hitler’s blitzkrieg invasions, it is meant to be.  That intensity encourages acts of overt violence, as well as patterns of prejudice.  No wonder the NAACP and other organizations have issued a traveler’s warning for Florida, as if it were a foreign dictatorship.  One of the state's most recent sports heroes, former NBA star Dwayne Wade has already moved his family out of the state, partly in prudent fear for his trans child.

 Even given all that, this latest move has an especially insidious element.  New College of Florida is a public, not a private institution, like Hillsdale in Michigan.  Transforming it into a Christian college is a flagrant violation of the separation of church and state that is at the heart of the imagined American Fascist governments of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Florida is the Republic of Gilead in the making.

 Arnold Toynbee had some controversial and wrongheaded views, but he had something relevant to say about our times. Maybe he even warned New College students in that class I wasn’t in, that entered in 1964.  He believed that societies rarely fade away to die by natural causes.  They are either murdered, or they commit suicide.  Mostly they commit suicide.

Thinking of Trains at Three in the Morning

Awake. I can’t get back to sleep.

No whistles sound tonight. There are no Now Arriving

or All Aboard announcements. I’ve missed the train

and I’m stuck at the CB&Q depot back when it 

contained a shoeshine stand in the men’s lounge,

when businessmen wore wingtips and white shirts with ties,

when the newsstand overflowed with multiple papers, 

when the white glazed brick walls of the main waiting room

echoed announcements of 38 arrivals and departures,

every day, people sitting on the huge wooden benches,

the ones with massive armrests to prevent lying down

like tonight as I sit here, isolated with a fool’s reminiscence

and these thoughts tend towards vanished trains. 

 I remember riding on the Zephyr at night from Denver,

 the clicking of metal in motion, the gentle sway of the bed. 

 If I were only on it tonight, I’d be sound asleep.

--Jay Matson

These photos (you can click on them to see them full size) are of the old Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad station in Galesburg, Illinois, which this poem describes.  The poet, Jay Matson, lived in Galesburg before and after he attended Knox College, also in Galesburg.  He was a senior when I was first year.  The top photo is from 1961, the one of the waiting room seems older.  (It's a colorized print for a postcard, I think.)  I remember the waiting room as darker and smaller.

My first glimpse of this station and this town where I was to go to college was from the Denver Zephyr to Denver in the spring of my senior year of high school.  In my first college years, I often took the trains from my Pennsylvania home to Galesburg, until there was half-fare flying to O'Hare, and then I took the train from Chicago to Galesburg.   By that time, the mid to late 1960s, the station had probably lost many of its amenities, but it still hosted a kind of diner, famous with students for being open all night and for its blueberry pancakes.   This station was torn down in 1984 and replaced with a smaller one.  Amtrak still runs this route.

 I also grew up with the sound of trains, though our Greensburg, PA station was closed by the time I was five.  (It has since been restored but not as a station.)  All the trains have disappeared from where I live now in far northern California--recently enough that some crossing signals still exist, and until a few years ago, there were abandoned boxcars in Eureka.  When I first got here I did imagine now and again that I heard those whistles in the night.  But not for years.  

This poem is from Jay Matson's latest collection, Old Affairs.

Captain Future, Captain Past

 The irony hasn’t escaped me: under the ancient marquee of Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily, in recent years I have been writing primarily about the past. 

 In particular this was brought home to me by an email I received from Jay Matson, poet, entrepreneur and a student several years ahead of me at Knox College.  He signed it Captain Past.  It seemed a more accurate moniker for what I was writing, as well as for the subjects of his recent poems.

 Sometime around 2005 I adopted Captain Future as a screen name for my posts on Daily Kos and a few other similar sites, as well as in other contexts.  I also began this blog around then. The purpose I had in mind for it was to highlight positive ideas and information for a better future—hence, dreaming up daily.  Even when I got sucked into the morass of contemporary politics, the perspective was to see things as they affected the future.  But I did get sucked in, railing against Bush, the Iraq war, torture, etc., then advocacy for Obama, then immediately unmasking Homemade Hitler in 2016. 

 Those posts, heartfelt and certainly justified, are the fodder of history, and as writing are painfully ephemeral.  I did focus at appropriate times on major threats to the future, such as nuclear weapons and especially, primarily, the climate crisis. Occasionally I highlighted positive steps towards a better future, and certainly tried to articulate principles necessary for pursuing it. Some of these posts remain very relevant. 

 But I also continued to respond to the latest news, to people and events that quickly faded.  And I did that, helplessly and stubbornly, for more than15 years, from the time that blogging was all the rage through the time that “nobody blogs anymore.”

 At the same time, I was exploring aspects of the past, especially my own, in writing that mostly didn’t make it out of the computer.  When I retired and turned attention towards writing projects on past and future, I discovered that my most natural form, and the way I could actually write something whole, was the kind of blog post that I had developed, solely on my own, over those years.  That my blog readership dwindled over the years was somewhat depressing but in the end irrelevant.  Writing these posts here and elsewhere, or essays or whatever they might be called, was its own reward.

 So I did a version of my Soul of the Future project as a series of posts here, but also the History of My Reading and more recently the TV and Me series, which concerned the past.  These evocations of the past increasingly took over this blog, partly because I was feeling more and more alienated from the public present. 

 For especially in the past few years I began to see, to feel acutely, that the world around me has changed so thoroughly that I mostly don’t have a place in it.  Just about everything is significantly different.  I can’t imagine how I would be making a living in this present.  Then again, I can’t imagine how I even would have been able to go to college, or lived in the places I lived.  Which leads me further back, to not even imagining how I could have been born at all.

 Obviously, approaching my 77^th birthday, I have many more days behind than in front of me.  But in this more profound way, my life is almost entirely in the past. I’ve always felt somewhat alienated, as if I might be an alien.  Now it’s pretty clear: I am definitely from another planet, the one that used to be here.  (For one thing, it had more birds.)

 Eventually I may be relegated to a very narrow present moment existence.  But for now, I live powerfully in memory.  Why do we have memories?  They seem an extension of the first requirement of any creature: to know what is food and what is not.  Anyone familiar with dogs or cats will understand how the first function—and perhaps the first step-- of memory is remembering where and when you find food, a vital skill for survival.  So for me, in various ways, memory is related to sustenance.

 What about that future I am supposedly captain of? In many ways, I cannot even conceive of an actual future anymore.  AI in particular has me throwing up my hands.  But in one essential way, the future is all too clear.  Captain Future’s mission was to relentlessly persuade about the need and possibility of acting in the present to further a better future, and specifically to meet the challenge of the oncoming climate crisis.

 I have been writing about the climate crisis since 1990. For the years I wrote about it on this blog, it was the quintessential elephant in the room (forgive me for using one of the many mindnumbing clichés that no longer have much power.) But today the climate crisis is no longer the elephant in the room.  The climate crisis is the room. 

 The climate crisis is no longer avoidable: it is the present and will be the present for the imaginable future.  A few data-driven experts who previously sounded alarms have recently moved the zeitgeist towards believing that the clean energy initiatives especially embodied in the Inflation Reduction Act will mean the United States at least will significantly lessen predicted levels of CO2 emissions in the near future, thereby preventing the worst case level of global heating.  But even if that works out, it does not stop what is happening, and will happen for decades to come.  The climate crisis is not “solved,” (whatever that means.)

 Even if future heating remains below levels that UN climate scientists designate as catastrophic (and that itself seems unlikely), those levels are approximate and truly uncertain.  Add to this the real world fact that when effects have differed from those predicted by climate models, they most have proven worse in reality than in what amounts to educated guesses.    

 I repeat, the elephant has not left the room.  The elephant is the room.  The future world is a hotter world, with accelerating consequences.  Even this spring—April and May—there are or have been intense and long-lasting heat waves in southern Asia, Europe, North America, and always Africa.  There are massive forest fires already in western Canada and Siberia.  Torrential rains have flooded out towns in a region of Italy—the worst flooding in that country for a century.  A heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest—when a similar event happened in a summer month, it was called a once in a thousand years event.  That was two years ago.  Most ominously, the upper levels of the oceans are consistently hotter than they’ve been since measurements began 40 years ago, leading to an array of devastating current and future consequences.  The UN predicts the oceans will continue to heat up until at least 2300 just based on the effects of global heating to the present.

 These events, this suffering and death, this destruction, is going to get worse, year after year. (For instance, the World Meteorological Organization has just predicted a 98% chance that the next five years will be the hottest five years on record.) The financial and social costs of coping with them are eventually going to override denial and demand shocked attention.  Eventually it may even happen that wars will be recognized for what most already are—climate wars. And the migrations that the wealthy countries are already unable to cope with in a civilized manner might even be recognized as directly or indirectly involving climate refugees. 

 The point isn’t that this is a doomsday scenario—the point is that it will eventually and inevitably be the context for everything in the future—including every individual decision on education and profession for the next generations, and eventually on where and how to live.

 To meet the challenge of the global climate crisis required a level of maturity in humanity and its societies that once seemed possible, since it would not have required anything more than heeding those who have foretold the possibilities and the consequences.  But it didn’t happen in enough time to prevent climate distortion, and now nobody really knows where things are going to end up.  Again, this is the context for the work, the hopes and fears, and the lives of those who will live in this future, as it quickly becomes the present.

Apart from the omnipresent threat of thermonuclear extinction in the mid-1960s, this country and the world in general seems less institutionally stable than it seemed when I started college.  Despite "progress" in some areas, there seems to be regression in many more. The global battles between self-righteous reactionaries in their various forms and the self-righteous revisionists in their various forms makes for a peculiarly unstable world, especially in social and political institutions that people otherwise would rely on in times of common crisis. 

 It’s possible to exaggerate how widespread this is in America, but the extremes are jolting.  Guns of unprecedented destructiveness are a bigger part of US life than at any other time in its history, or was ever even imagined.  The return of child labor makes the huge gulf between rich and borderline poor look like the early 19^th century London of Dickens novels. Margaret Atwood’s Gilead society from The Handmaid’s Tale seems more possible than ever, only we’ll be calling it Florida.  And so on. All this at at the precise time we can’t afford to go backwards, to make more trouble for ourselves. But that’s what we’re doing, and expending a lot of energy, resources, attention and social capital doing it, diverting it all from where it is truly needed.  This makes us dangerously vulnerable and fragile as a society, as a civilization.    

 The climate crisis, the onrushing extinctions of other lifeforms, the unsustainable distance between the obscenely rich and everyone else—these are the meaningful vectors now creating any future context I can imagine.   The addition of AI and other technological wonders only magnifies and exacerbates the chaos that also becomes the background if not the foreground of future life. 

So I don’t see much of a role for this Captain Future anymore, except following the lead of Captain Past. I doubt I’ll have much to say about contemporary politics anymore—it’s all the same drone, and out of my old hands.  What I may be able to offer is my particular perspective from these many years I've been around.  My own past now reaches back beyond the experiences of the vast majority.  Perhaps it’s an inevitable discovery of my time in life, or perhaps it’s an historical truth (or I suspect, something of both), but I feel more continuity with my parents and grandparents time than this present I find myself in, and certainly any future I can foresee. That’s certainly not what I expected in the 1960s.  In any case, this perspective is all I’ve got to contribute, aside from bearing witness.

 I may have observations on aspects of the present based on those perspectives, as well as more recollections (I hope to continue and even finish my History of My Reading series, which should go faster through the decades than it has so far.)  I may finally get around to writing about words, another long-planned project.

 I’ll still check the numbers of “readers,” though what’s officially counted may be mostly bots, and who knows who goes uncounted.  Readers may encourage me, but the absence of readers will no more than temporarily discourage me.  The words are what’s real, and somehow I can only abandon my pieces by publishing them. Though I still hope to explore other forms of publication (even as I suspect them of being just as dubious) I will likely continue publishing in this hapless form of the blog.  

 If I do it under this marquee, it’s because Captain Future is a product of the past.  When I started using it as a screen name I actually had no idea that there were Captain Future stories, since they’d been written and largely forgotten in the 1940s.  When I learned that the idea for Captain Future was the result of a visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the World of Tomorrow, that had always fascinated me (and which my mother visited), the link between past and future was made.  In a sense, I am now such a link.

Do Not Sink Into Sadness

 

Joseph the lost will return, Jacob should not

 Sink into sadness, those who sit in the Grief

 House will eventually sit in the Garden.

 The grieving chest will find honey; do not let

 The heart rot. The manic hysterical head

 Will find peace, do not sink into sadness.

 If the way the Milky Way revolves ignores

 Your desires for one or two days, do not

 Sink into sadness. All turning goes as it will.

 I say to the bird: “As long as spring

 Baptizes the grass, the immense scarlet blossoms

 Will continue to sway in your head.”

 Even if the flood of materialism

 Drowns everything, do not sink into

 Sadness, because Noah is your captain.

 Do not sink into sadness, even though the mysteries

 Of the other world slip past you entirely. 

 There are plays within plays that you cannot see.

 Although the way station you want to reach

 Is dangerous and the goal distant, do not

 Sink into sadness; all roads have an end.

Stanzas from a poem by Hafez

translated by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn

BK photo