01.29.08
Posted in Sierra Nevada, California at 7:35 pm by Dan Jensen
An enumeration of the elements of California might proceed as follows:
- The San Andreas Fault
- The California Current
- The Sierra Nevada
- The Central Valley
- Redwood Forests
The San Andreas Fault
The Pacific and North American Plates, two of the world’s largest, collide from the Gulf of California to Shelter Cove, just south of Cape Mendocino, California. This collision, roughly delineated by the San Andreas Fault, is what put the place we call California on the map.
The California Current
California is probably best known for its climate, a phenomenon which owes no small sum to the fact that California is a collision between continental and oceanic plates, with two particular circumstances:
- The collision has a north-south orientation, with cool ocean currents flowing from the north.
- The collision occurs across a broad spectrum of tropical, subtropical, and temperate latitudes, from 23 to 40 degrees north.
All this adds up to a mild, sunny climate. Add to that an occasional quake to keep everybody on their toes, and you have the California of the Padres.
The Sierra Nevada
Another California was born in 1848, not of sunshine and mild weather, but of greed. That rebirth was initiated and sustained by four gifts of the Sierra Nevada:
- gold
- water
- soil
- beauty and recreation
The massive Sierra Nevada traps large volumes of atmospheric moisture, leaving the lands to the east dry. It being a large mountain block, much of that moisture is stored as snow and ice, meaning that the moisture is released when it is needed most, during the warm, dry springs and summers. As that moisture is released, it carries with it the sediments that become the soils of the great Central Valley.
As lady luck would have it, a smattering of that sediment is gold. It was the glitter of gold in Sierra streams that set the tone for the future of California and America, just as that glitter brought the world to California before her greatest riches were discovered. Beyond the extravagance of gold and the practical benefit of water and soil, we must not forget the beauty and recreational value of Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, the High Sierra, and the Giant Sequoia (more on that to come).
The Central Valley
Without Sierra Nevada sediments, much of the Central Valley might be known today as the Central Sea, like the Sea of Cortes (the Gulf of California) to the south, but the Sierra Nevada does not entirely account for the Central land form of California, be it land or sea, and there are other mountains that feed the Central Valley. The Sacramento River is proof of that. The Sacramento River is fed by the southern end of the Cascade Range on east, and the Trinity Mountains and other ranges on the west.
Redwood Forests
“From the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me.” — Woodie Guthrie
Another natural resource that plays a central role in the California myth is the California redwood tree, which lives along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Coast, from Big Sur the far southern Oregon.
Where is California?
Having taken all these elements of California into account, a natural eastern boundary of California can be seen to proceed along the following features:
- The east coast of Baja California.
- The Colorado River.
- The crest of the Chocolate Mountains (just east of the San Andreas Fault).
- The crest of the Little San Bernardino Mountains.
- The crest of the San Bernardino Mountains.
- The crest of the San Gabriel Mountains.
- The crest of the Tehachapi Mountains.
- The eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada.
- The eastern edge of the Cascade Range. The boundary continues northward here to include the watershed of the Sacramento Valley.
- The crest of the Siskiyou Mountains.
- The northern boundary of the Smith River watershed. This is the approximate northern boundary of the region called “the Redwood Empire”.
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01.24.08
Posted in The Mission at 6:05 pm by Dan Jensen
His body was scarred red with severe burns. A tangle of short black hairs carpeted his brow. His scarred scalp was bald, except for the occasional stray hair. Between his small but piercing eyes protruded a hard, hooked beak. His eyes were not blue, green, or brown, but an orange-red, like his skin, but brighter—luminescent, as though flames might be harbored within. He had no lips. His long neck was wrapped in a furry, black scarf. Most of his scarred body was wrapped in a cloak of black feathers, with two rows of white feathers on the inside. The cloak looked as though it might have once been white, but charred black in a fire.
He opened his cloak, and it spread nine feet wide against the sky as he soared above her. He hovered overhead, watching Cynthia, as if waiting for her. She could not speak or even cry out. She lay paralyzed, trembling. “Cindy?,” she heard a familiar voice, then something began to shake her. “Cindy! You’re dreaming,” said her brother as she opened her eyes to see a less frightening countenance over her. “You’re sweating,” Armen whispered. “Breakfast is ready.”
Cynthia turned to see the wall of whiteness outside her bedroom window. Her black, curly hair sprang into place as she sat up. She bent down, lifted her robe off the floor, and slid it over her shoulders. She wiped the cold sweat off her face with the collar.
Four bowls of cornmeal sat evenly spaced around the small round table like compass points. Facing the bowls were her brother and parents. She seated herself and her father began a prayer of thanks. She watched his eyebrow and hard, reddened, balding forehead as he thanked the Father for all His blessings. His eyeless lids were collapsed into his sockets. He had not yet put his glass eyes in for the day. The redness of the empty caverns crept out between his eyelashes. She had seen him countless times before, but this morning she saw her father a little differently, and she sat semiconsciously puzzled, not quite aware that the prayer had ended.
After a momentary pause, spoons began to clank on bowls. Cindy snapped out of the trance and stirred the molasses and half-molten butter into the steaming meal.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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01.23.08
Posted in The Mission at 2:36 am by Dan Jensen
They stood facing each other through the cold, skim milk of the lake bottom.
Armen covered Kurt, the receiver on the right side. Chuck called out the snap count.
As soon as Chuck took the snap, Mehrzad started barking out the rush count and Kurt took off with all his ample speed. Armen turned and did his futile best to keep Kurt close. When he heard the rush count complete, Armen turned to check the action at the line of scrimmage, and immediately realized that he couldn’t see anyone at all. They were all shrouded in the milk.
Suddenly, Chuck materialized through the mirk, cutting across the field from the right. Before Armen could figure out what was going on, Chuck split the field between Armen and the left cornerback, while Kurt and the left receiver turned back to block, and it was over.
As Armen reined back the fruitless pursuit, Mehrzad jogged casually up from behind to greet him. “Welcome to lake football, Arm.”
Armen was new in town. Mehrzad spent much of his winters under Tulare Lake, for during much of the winter that seasonal lake filled the basin wherein he spent his childhood. Tulare Lake is a special kind of lake. Though living in the lake can be quite uncomfortably cold and damp, life usually goes on quite regularly, excepting a few school closures and freeway pile-ups.
During and following a winter rain, the water collects on the level basin floor. Puddles are everywhere. It doesn’t take much water to result in a puddle with a great deal of surface area. Once the storm clears and the sky opens, the earth’s warmth escapes heavenward. In the thinner air of the nearby mountains, the heat escapes even more quickly. As the heat escapes, the dense, cold, mountain air begins to slip down slope. So much of this cold air slides onto the wet basin bottom that a visible lake of cold air forms—visible because the moisture on the basin bottom saturates the cold air, forming a dense cloud with a ceiling as level as the surface of a lake, with no more subsurface visibility than a lake, and sometimes even less.
The school closure days were football days. Once the closure announcement scrolled across the TV screen, Mehrzad would rush off to the nearest schoolyard to meet the boys.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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01.16.08
Posted in California at 8:45 pm by Dan Jensen
This posting is a continuation of the Citadel of Glory discussion.
Having now read much of A. J. Carnoy’s Paradise of the East — Paradise of the West, which I received due to the graciousness of Dr. Josef Chytry at the University of California, I can now speak a little more confidently about Carnoy’s Kár-i-farn conjecture.
One interesting point that Carnoy makes is that the place name “Califerne” in the Song of Roland may have been a hybridization of the construct Kár-i-farn and the theocratic title Caliph. What Carnoy does not discuss is the possibility that the word Kár as spoken by an Arab may have sounded much like “Kál” to an early Frenchman, whose deep ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds were perhaps quite unlike the sharp, shallow ‘r’ and ‘l’ of an Arab or a Persian. Carnoy’s Kár-i-farn could have very easily been modified by the French without any hybridization whatsoever.
Unfortunately, Carnoy does not appear to claim that he had ever read of the construct Kár-i-farn; rather, he appears to argue that the construct was probably used because it appears to be an obvious construction:
Il serait naturel que les légendes concernant les feux divins, les paradis sur les montagnes, les oiseaux merveilleux qui les gardaient ou les transportaient se soient localisées sur la montagne de Kár ou de Kár-í-farn (”Kár du farnah”) comme on a dû l’appeler.
Here’s my rough translation:
It would be natural that the legends concerning divine fires, the paradises on the mountains, and the marvellous birds which kept them or transported them were located on the mountain of Kár or Kár-i-farn (”Kár of the farnah”) as one had to call it.
Carnoy does not appear to provide any evidence that anyone ever actually used the construct, so we must continue to wait for it to appear. Let’s not hold our breath.
That said, I happen to believe that the construct Kár-i-farn is even more likely than Carnoy contends. In my town, there is something called a fire temple. To be precise, it is called a “Dar-e-Mehr” (or Dar-i-Mihr), from the Farsi for “House of Fire” or “House of Light” (I say “Farsi” rather than “Persian” because the term has obvious Arabic influence). I find it quite noteworthy that Dar-i-Mihr can easily be translated to Kár-i-farn. Mihr and farn(ah), do, after all, carry quite compatible meanings. The actual fire in the district of Kár was even called Farnbag, roughly meaning “Light of God”. As for Dar and Kár, the former is an Arabic word for “house”, and the latter appears to be a Persian root that derives from the Sumerian word for “fort”, and appears to have evolved into a more general meaning akin to “edifice”.
Carnoy appears to think that the construct Kár-i-farn would derive from the name of the district Kár, but it seems to me that the inverse would be more likely: could Kár-i-farn have once been used as a term for “fire temple”?
… And regardless of etymology, wouldn’t Karefarnah be an appropriate name for the Golden State? “Land of Sun Worshippers?” “Temple of Fire”?
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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01.14.08
Posted in Sierra Nevada, The Mission at 10:26 pm by Dan Jensen
Armen sat on his cabin doorstep, chatting with his neighbor about trail crew women, watching thunderheads gather over the canyon. After awhile, it seemed that some smoke was mingling with the clouds. Armen stood up, excused himself, and walked up the road to get a better look. He stopped, turned a frown downward, and returned his gaze up the canyon, where the smoke was rising into the clouds. His eyes began to glow, and his eyebrows relaxed as the frown broke. He sighed with relief, and whispered, “hey old friend.”
On Aug. 7, intense thunderstorms lashed Yosemite’s western edge, sparking more than a dozen blazes. Despite intensive firefighting efforts, several of the blazes grew uncontrollably, destroying the community of Foresta near the park boundary.
Science News, October 27 1990
The bombers appeared soon after the smoke, but not soon enough. In what seemed like no time at all, the canyon was choked with orange smoke, temperatures at canyon bottom had dropped for lack of daylight, and Foresta was no more.
Van Wagtendonk, like many other fire specialists, had expected the prescribed burns to prevent such a blowup. “We had all thought that when the crown fire got to an area that had been prescribed-burned, it would drop to the ground,” he recalls. “I had thought that without the large amounts of surface fuels there, there would not have been enough heat to sustain a crown fire.
“But it didn’t care what was on the ground.”
Science News, October 27 1990
There was a call for volunteers to fight the A-Rock fire, the blaze that had devoured Foresta and was now bearing down on El Portal. Armen chose not to join the resistance. El Portal was evacuated, but then residents were allowed back in after the winds turned against the fire. Later that night, the winds turned back on the town. Armen watched the fire descend the slope. He watched a transformer explode, and then turned in for the night. He lay in bed, listening to the faint crackling and the occasional explosion, remembering Cindy and Zad.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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Posted in Igneous Range, Sierra Nevada at 10:00 pm by Dan Jensen
The job was good medicine, but Armen would feel even better with cash in his pocket. Inconveniently, his paycheck would be deposited directly to his bank account, so he’d need to take a bus up to the Valley to get his hands on it. When he got to the bank, he couldn’t remember his PIN, so he bought a couple cans of soda and decided to walk home. Not wishing to walk the narrow, bus-stuffed highway, he opted to hike home by way of the north rim.
He caught a shuttle from the Village to the Lodge, and hiked up to the rim from there. The dry season was well under way, and the black oaks and manzanita had begun their long, slow roast. As he ascended the south-facing wall, his boots slipped a little with every step on the eroded granite. He’d stop occasionally to inhale the aroma of slowly burning vegetation.
Above the falls, the route turned up Eagle Peak Creek, passed behind Eagle Peak, and then crossed Eagle Creek. So many eagles on the map; he looked upward to check the sky. It occurred to him that the cliffs of Yosemite’s sunny side must be a great habitat for buteos. The thermals must be incredible, he thought, and the visibility for predation—unsurpassed.
Where the trail passed El Capitan, he turned off trail, over the summit to the rim, where he sat down to soak up some sun. While gazing over the massive granite cliff, he eyed a pair of turkey vultures soaring upward on an afternoon thermal. Their wings teetered nervously as if they were each on a high wire. He lay back on the stone floor, and played his best possum. He watched the soaring vultures through the shield of his eyelashes. He thought of his sister Cindy, how she so loved to play possum for vultures, and how she’d made such an art—or religion—of it. He let himself drift off to sleep for a moment.
He returned to the trail, and proceeded west behind Fireplace Bluffs and the Cascades to Foresta, a pleasant, shaded, residential community above the canyon. “Foresta” was an appropriate name for the place, but not for long. He wound down the road to the falls as night fell, and continued to tromp blindly down into the canyon. His feet began to ache. At one point, the white stripe of a skunk bounced out in front of him. Rather than running off into the bushes alongside the road, it proceeded to lead Armen down the dark road; an unwelcome guide in the dark. Together, they crept around yet another Eagle Peak—the one that stands above the community of El Portal. Armen managed to get to his cabin without stumbling over his escort.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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01.13.08
Posted in Sierra Nevada, The Mission at 9:37 am by Dan Jensen
His prospects didn’t look good, and they felt a little worse. As a rule, getting a job wouldn’t be a picnic without a car, and that rule was fully enforced on the Cartesian grid generally called Fresno. After a couple days, he got a job soliciting Madera neighborhoods for donations toward air quality improvement. He might as well have been peddling snake oil. After a demoralizing and exhausting day of knocking on doors and experiencing flashbacks from his missionary childhood, Armen failed to return for further canvassing drives. Fresno—that town among cities—soon felt as big, impersonal, and impenetrable as San Francisco had seemed.
“Grandma,” he started over the sandwich she had prepared him for lunch.
“Yeasss?”
“Do you still have m—do you still have those baseball cards?”
“In the garage. Over the car.”
After lunch he looked through his old Topps cards, some in sleeves and some in stacks. Coming upon his 1976 Brooks Robinson, seeing the glossy green of the turf and the contrasting orange, black, and white of Robinson’s uniform, he stopped and stared, as his vision turned inward and into the past. He rubbed his eyes, as if it might change what they saw as they looked back and turned back to the present. A pragmatic frown flashed over his face, and he got up and looked for the yellow pages.
He found a couple dealers, and set off by bus and foot that afternoon to see what he might get for his most valuable cards. He stopped at the mall to check a bookstore for a pricing guide, and scribbled some prices onto a loose sheet of paper. He resolved that he wouldn’t complete any sales that day. It would just look too desperate.
He considered looking at the surrounding region. He called the local parks and concessionaires, and found that Yosemite National Park had an opening at one of their wastewater treatment plants. He got on the phone and called the park to see if the job was still available. Later that day, he got a call from someone at the park who wanted to make sure that he understood the ramifications of working at a sewer plant, and Armen felt too desperate to entertain a doubt. He had never had a real job before, and he couldn’t be certain that he’d ever get another chance. He began to feel the burden of destiny lift from the back of his neck. He soon received an application form in the mail, filled it out, and returned it post haste. He was formally hired within several days. He packed up his things, bought supplies, and caught a bus to the park.
Armen got off the bus at Wawona, and backpacked up the falls trail. Night fell as he ascended past the falls. He unrolled his bag against a stone trail cut, and fought against the steady wind and rocky ground to get some sleep. The next day, he backpacked north to the rim of Yosemite Valley, where he spent his second night in the mountains above the Valley lights. He unrolled his bag and basked beneath the cool spring stars. He did not light a fire. It had been a long time since he’d lit a fire in the Igneous Range.
The next morning, he descended into the Valley. He rode the shuttle buses, and ambled along the river, visited the falls, and watched the women. In the evening, he caught a bus down to an employee housing complex just outside the park in El Portal, where he found his cabin.
His found his lab job at the sewer plant rewarding. It felt liberating to have a 9-to-5 job with no family, religious, or professional entanglements. It felt invigorating to walk out on the steel deck in the morning and take a sample from the aeration tank. “Independence at last,” he’d think to himself as the atomized sewage dampened his face.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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01.12.08
Posted in California at 12:37 am by Dan Jensen
The name “California” appears to go back far beyond Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandian. This should not surprise us, for Montalvo’s novel implied that the name was well-known when it was published ca. 1510. The word apparently occurred in the 11th Century epic poem the Song of Roland, at a point in the poem where a Christian army had just been defeated by a Muslim army. In the poem, California was spelled “Califerne”, but that spelling may reflect poetic license, as it occurs at the end of a rhyming stanza. The following citation is provided to illustrate the rhyme:
- Morz est mis nies, ki tant me fist cunquere
- Encuntre mei revelerunt li Seisne,
- E Hungre e Bugre e tante gent averse,
- Romain, Puillain et tuit icil de Palerne
- E cil d’Affrike e cil de Califerne.
Lynn Townsend White Jr., a California historian, made the following observation about the legendary country of Califerne:
To them [the Spanish conquistadores] California was a land of Orient with fantastic attributes which have been somewhat clarified by a learned authority on Iranian mythology, A. J. Carnoy. Califerne, he asserts, is the Persian Kar-i-farn, “Mountain of Paradise.” On this mountain dwelt enormous birds, half eagle and half lion, in the West generally called griffins.
I have not read Carnoy, nor have I ever heard of Kar-i-farn in any other connection, so I must remain skeptical, but I can put its constituent words together. For me, Kar-i-farn does not translate to “mountain of paradise,” but rather something like “citadel of glory”. Perhaps that’s close enough.
To be more specific …
The word “kar” means something akin to “edifice” in Persian. The same word in Sumerian and Assyrian meant “fortification” or perhaps “citadel”. One may wonder how “kar” could morph to “kal”, and one would be justified, but consider that the Arabic word for fortress or citadel is “qal`ah”.
The word “farn” or “farnah” is an old form of the Persian word “farr” or “farrah”, which means “glory”, as in the glory of God, or the divine splendor of the sun.
It is no surprise to hear griffins spoken of in connection with ancient Persia. The guardians of the Persian Empire were great statues of griffins called “Homa”, sometimes referred to as the “Guardians of the Light”. It would make sense for these “Guardians of Light” to inhabit a “Citadel of Glory”, but I have not yet been able to corroborate Carnoy’s account.
Was California named after a heavenly paradise out of an ancient Persian myth? Is the California condor thus related to the Homa of ancient Persia through legend and myth? The jury is still out, and may remain out for some time.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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01.11.08
Posted in California at 10:07 pm by Dan Jensen
It’s well known to anyone who has bothered to look that the name “California” originally appeared in a popular Spanish romance by Garcia Rodriguez de Montalvo, published about 1510. Montalvo seemed to have based the name of his fictional land upon a place known to his readers, whether real or legendary:
In this island called California, because of the great ruggedness of the country and the innumerable wild beasts that lived in it, there were many griffins, such as were found in no other part of the world.
Montalvo imagined this island called California east of the Indies, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that when a rugged, griffin-inhabited island was discovered west of America, that it occurred to a Spaniard to call the island “California”.
Yes, you read that right: griffins in California. UCLA’s L. T. White reported that Bisselius insisted
… in 1647, that in California “griffins (gryphes) are found; and this is not a fable but the truth.”
By such statements, it’s easy to see how the name California stuck.
Now we know today that Baja California is no island, but a peninsula, and we also know that no griffins inhabit California. Or do we?
There is actually a very large Californian raptor that once had the scientific name Pseudogryphus californiacus, and for good reason. Today we call it the California condor. It is not even the state bird, yet it may have been one of the primary reasons—or even the primary reason—why California got its name from a romance novel.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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01.09.08
Posted in Religion, Philosophy at 8:15 pm by Dan Jensen
Agnostic Religion
Only God exists; He is in all things, and all things are in Him.
Sufi pantheism, as defined in a footnote to the Seven Valleys of Baha’u'llah
We have previously considered that Islam’s strength is that it forbids idolatry, that is, associating partners with God, and that Islam’s weakness is that its object of worship, Allah, is unknowable, and that this leads to agnosticism. The Islam of Muhammad is a religion of practices and politics, rather than beliefs or mystical experiences.
Forbidden Yearnings
From fairly early on, Muslims began to seek ways to develop relationships with God, and ideas of gnosis began to develop. Sufism was being born. This was a uniquely Muslim form of mysticism, inasmuch as it was a mystical response to a non-mystical religion.
It ought to surprise no one that a mystical religion in a realm where heretics are murdered would be based upon secret knowledge. Severe penalties for apostasy and heresy may have forced mystics to appear more cryptic than they might otherwise have seemed.
The problem with secret knowledge is that it tends to favor the enlightened over the unenlightened. Such favoritism encourages idolatry, so it is easy to see that Islamic mysticism ran the risk of violating what is perhaps the fundamental principle of Islam. Mysticism must not be exclusive if it is to be true to Islam. It must permit no secrets. Unfortunately, secret knowledge was sometimes necessary for survival.
Unity of Being
“I am Truth.” — al-Hallaj
What if we are God? Pantheism provides a possible solution to the problem of non-idolatrous worship. Each individual knows truth in his or her own context. No hero worship is necessary. Muhammad is only a man, no better than any other. Worship is possible, because God is knowable, but idolatry has no place. Perhaps that is what the Sufis ibn `Arabi, Bayazid Bistami, and al-Hallaj were thinking when they made their contributions to the doctrine cited above, generally referred to as Wahdat-ul-Wujood (”Unity of Being”).
Emanation vs. Existence
A metaphysics of emanation is an alternative to pantheism worth considering, but emanation seems to be a construct derived from an unnecessary, artificial distinction between Creator and Creation. Why must I regard myself as a created object, when I possess an existential sense of a will that is my own? Perhaps that is the Will of God that I feel, but even then: why should I presume that Will is not my own?
Existentially speaking, I am no object. I am no emanation, shadow, or reflection.
I do not think of the world as a mere fact. It does possess will, and it does possess a sense of good and bad. This is why I recognize it as divine. For this very reason, I can be neither a strict atheist nor a theist. Pantheism seems to be the most natural view of the world as we experience it.
Omnipotence and Freedom
In Sufi Islam, the only true reality is God, and that the world is but a shadow of that reality. Generally, Islam regards the world as a deterministic effect of God’s will, which is not too different than a shadow. According to the Qur’an, even the most fundamental decisions are made according to the will of God, insha’Allah. Though it presumes a human capacity to choose, it also asserts that unbelievers only continue in their disbelief because God blinds their eyes. Thus the omnipotence of God trumps human freedom.
When it comes down to it, divine omnipotence and human freedom are incompatible. The only way to reconcile the two is to regard them as one and the same thing. Human will is divine will, and human freedom is divine freedom. Why not embrace such a simple and logical assertion? No gnosis necessary; it is really quite intuitive. Of course it requires a deep, subconscious notion of freedom that runs beneath our self-awareness and is ultimately a single Will, but it still allows for freedom. As God is free, so are we.
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