A walk through a wood
A walk through a world
A friend
“Man’s best friend”
A crackling campfire
“The most tolerable third party”
A sworn companion
The Logos fire
Henry David Thoreau
A boiling star

Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.

Ishmael, Moby Dick

The consumption of alien beings such as octopi also seems a degree of cannibalism since they too share a degree of intelligence with us, though their intelligence is quite alien to ours.

My mother has also leapt some hurdles. A child of a Dust Bowl farmer, she fell victim to rickets (malnutrition) as a child, and grand mal seizures as an adult. Her tremendous will power has helped her to stabilize her blood sugar metabolism and avoid the seizures that once vexed her. Though she was timid and bereft of self-esteem as a young adult, she has since blossomed and shown herself to be a natural businesswoman with a particular knack for accounting. She and my father appear to have been made for each other, though she has never found a cure for his wanderlust.

Just after my first birthday, my family moved from south-central Los Angeles to Frogmore—a Gullah village on an island off the South Carolina coast, where my parents once attended a meeting of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). After Frogmore, we returned to California, and bounced around Santa Maria for several years. Then we returned to South Carolina, where my parents bought what had once been a boys’ home in a hamlet named Jericho. They’d planned to make the three-story hotel-of-sorts into a regional religious center, but the old building was a maintenance nightmare, and only served to impoverish them. Long before my parents ever managed to sell their “Hotel Jericho,” we moved across the low country into a small trackside house. There was no hope there to make a living, so we moved to the edge of a black neighborhood in nearby Walterboro, where I happened to attend a small Catholic school where I was the only non-black student. After that, we moved up near Greenville. A year later, nearly penniless, we returned to California and moved into a mobile home on the Mojave Desert near Lancaster, then moved to Hanford in the San Joaquin Valley, where business was always good. We did so well in Hanford that we moved to South Africa. That didn’t work out, so we returned to California and pitched our tents in Red Bluff. Next, we returned to South Carolina, and bought a house in Lancaster—our second hometown by that name. We soon went broke again and returned to California. We settled in Tulare, again in the San Joaquin Valley, and business was good—so good, in fact, that we returned to South Africa—well, almost: on the way to Africa, my little brother and I got jobs as security guards in Israel, but our parents went ahead and moved to Africa, and not for the last time, I might add.

Most of that moving was done either for missionary purposes or to finance further missionary work. All the motion left me a bit dizzy and not particularly rich in friends, but it was a valuable experience. It was an ongoing lesson in faith and financing, to say nothing of restlessness and alienation! It has informed my personal view of the world, which has always involved maps.

The maps began as the wallpaper of my childhood. There were the maps we used when moving across county, state, and country. There were the maps used to plan moves that we never made—Belize, British Columbia, etc. There were the maps used to plan missionary campaigns throughout the countryside. At age twelve, I began to explore the countryside on my own, with the help of a county map. Then I discovered the trove of maps at my local library and the libraries of the cities that we visited. I wrote chambers of commerce everywhere, and was rewarded with more maps. Maps became my personal window into the world.

Maps present the world in a form that is at once abstraction and art. They showed me the world in a way that text and photos never could. They facilitate both exploration and imagination. It is in this capacity that maps introduced me to the Sierra Nevada. I can still see in my memory the images of maps that inspired my excursions into those mountains during my high school years.

What I learned from the Sierra Nevada became part of me. With its giant sequoias, granite domes, golden trout, caverns, canyons, wildflowers and wildfires, dizzying heights, blue lakes, waterfalls, alpenglow and starry nights, the Sierra Nevada instilled in me a passion for nature and the natural sciences. The Sierra introduced me to earth science and astronomy, and by association, taught me to enjoy physics and mathematics. More recently, the Sierra has inspired me to study geophysics and plate tectonics, to understand the mechanisms that have forged the Sierra, California, and our planet. From what I have read, it seems that earth science and planetary science are in the midst of a golden, revolutionary age, and I’m off to join the revolution.

Supernova Remnant N 63A Menagerie

I just thought I’d try putting one of my favorite Hubble images at the head of this blog. Seems apropos as good pareidolia.

Looks like some kind of infernal fish

… or is it just me?

… and Burn in Hell, Budget!

Keep your credit cards close to your vest!

I just got a cheque in the mail for $9.95 to be paid to me. It’s a very official, professional-looking cheque, addressed to “California Resident”, and issued from “California Processing Center”. I was set to cash the damned thing, when my wife Carolyn — bless her observant soul — pointed out to me that I was being scammed. She showed me the small print on the back of the cheque:

By cashing this check I agree to a thirty-day trial offer in Just for Me. I understand that the $13.99 monthly fee will be automatically billed to the card I have on file at Budget unless I cancel my membership by calling 1-877-658-9097 before the end of the trial period …

From another blogger who nearly got suckered by the same scam: Beware: Budget Car Rental Autovantage $10 Check Scam

1. Good Thinking. “Good” is regarded in two senses: both as beneficial and as effective. Thus wisdom and goodwill are implied. This “good thinking” is the means by which men are advised by Lord Wisdom.

2. Truth. This is Asha, the most valued principle in Zoroastrianism. Asha is symbolized by fire, probably for fire’s utility in illumination, prehistoric trials by ordeal, and in purifying metals. Asha is generally translated as “righteousness”, but seeing as Asha is generally juxtaposed against “the Lie” in the earliest sources, it probably originates more in truth rather than in obedience to a moral code.

3. Reform. This is often described as “desirable kingdom,” indicating the core objective of Zoroastrianism: world reform. This notion might also be expressed more generally as “order,” which is how Plutarch interpreted it. Thinking of it as order, we can easily see why this principle is closely associated with the heavens. Seeing it this way, “reform” can be depicted as bringing the orderliness of the heavens down to earth, hence the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or as my Bahá’í friends say, “the New Order” or “World Order.” Plutarch describes this Zoroastrian “kingdom” as follows:

   Then shall the earth become a level plain, and there shall be one manner of life and one form of government for a blessed people who shall all speak one tongue.

   I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to interpret “a level plain” politically, rather than physically. Additionally, the principle of world reform need not entail notions of theocratic utopias. The point, I think, is to make a project of ridding the world of suffering.

4. Devotion. This is generally seen in a conventional religious sense, but when we consider that this god of devotion often doubles as a Mother Earth figure, we can see that “devotion” in this usage can be seen as a loving commitment to the welfare of the world.

5. Health. Symbolized by water. Coupled with #6 (see below). Sometimes cast as wholeness.

6. Life. Symbolized by vegetation. Generally specified as immortality or long life. Along with #5, this is often presented as a reward to the righteous. I prefer to think of health and life as values. This is not far-fetched, considering the emphasis placed upon life in Zoroastrianism. Life is, in fact, often equated with goodness itself, opposed to the evil of death. Once the virtue of life is established, the virtue of health can hardly be doubted, but health is also a virtue of its own, for life has significantly less virtue when overcome with illness.

Please accept my apology
for having stooped so low,
resorting to quotations.
Take heart: I don’t cite authority lightly,
but that phenomenon that’s femi-nine—
ambiguity demands one be specific
with one’s sources of information.

I’m sure it’s nothing there’s just a
minor misalignment between the words
and their intention.

Surely it’s a simple matter of definition.

Rest assured, no sooner had she spoken it was written,
and mapped to every match in Webster’s latest
collegiate edition.

Here be where the visitors
seek advisement in these affairs,
among the natives who—
having heard a word more often—
might be a little more familiar
with words whose sounds are similar,
having only sound in common.

There are two readily recognizable boundaries between Good and Evil in traditional Zoroastrianism:

• between the Truth and the Lie (Asha and Druj)
• between life and death

That is to say, as far as particular values are concerned, Zoroastrianism values truth and life above all else.

I’ve been thinking about the Zoroastrian idea of truth, which is called “Asha”, the cousin of the Hindu principle Rta. Asha and Rta both represent universal order, but Asha carries a strong moral connotation. It connotes societal order that results from honesty in human relations. It is such honesty that is the fabric of human commerce, and I am using the broadest definition of “commerce,” including not only the exchange of goods and services, but also intellectual commerce, social commerce, cultural commerce, and even spiritual commerce. Without honesty and trustworthiness, commerce cannot thrive and society loses its very fabric. Hence it can be seen that the two named characteristics of Good and Evil in Zoroastrianism—Asha and Druj—exhibit the emphasis that Zoroastrianism places on human relations, i.e., commerce.

In a nutshell, to value Asha is to value human society. In recent years, we have repeatedly witnessed the damage that a lack of honesty and trust can do to an economy, but that is only a particular instance of a general principle of human commerce, to say nothing of the internal, psychological society of the individual.

For me, the essence of Zoroastrianism is the existentialist basis of cosmic dualism: the value-laden character of phenomena, or perception. As we’ve discussed here before, Plutarch considered this aspect of Zoroastrianism to be the essence of Zoroastrianism, though of course he did not discuss the idea in existentialist terms. Plutarch identified an essential correspondence between Zoroastrian cosmic dualism and the dialectic of Heraclitus. For Plutarch, all things contain a mixture of good and evil, hence existence is characteristically value-laden.

How might we imagine such an idea might be personified?

We have inherited a fairly rich body of Zoroastrian legend, archaeology, and philology from which we might assemble a myth that is both plausible and true to the meaning of Zoroastrianism.

We can certainly imagine Zoroaster as the legendary prophet who retreated to the mountains, but it seems untrue to the myth to see Zoroaster as a man who began as a prophet. What brought the man to the mountains before his epiphany—his revelation?

I’m inclined to envision the young Zoroaster as a man of some status. I do not dare suggest that a barefoot bronze age serf somehow pulled himself up by his bootlaces. Was he a priest? I think he would have had to have been, given the apparent stratification of ancient Iranian society, but the key is that we don’t necessarily need to envision him as a fully-employed priest. Perhaps he was a disillusioned son of a priest who found work as a herdsman. Perhaps seeing him as a merchant would work even better.

The marketplace is intimately tied to common views of morality that consider actions (AKA sacrifices) to be payments made toward some form of compensation, however postponed. The compensation might be delivered by a government, a god, or a force such as karma. There is a single rule at work, and Zarathushtra is no exception to it. The difference with Zarathushtra is that this celestial justice can be seen as serving a higher principle that is intrinsic and fundamental to our personal experience: the Good. The fact that Zoroastrianism makes the salvation of existence itself the priority reinforces this point. Other principles such as karma may imply the existence of a higher Good, but only Zoroastrianism can be seen as making the relationship explicit. When the Good is only implicit, it can be casually merged with notions of celestial power, which has the effect of reducing the Good to a partner—or worse, a servant—of Power.

The idea, where Zoroastrianism is concerned, is that an economy of moral commerce could be conceived. It would be imagined that this economy might trigger a “renewal of existence”. The challenge would be to motivate people to engage in this exchange of “goods.”

Perhaps this mythical moral capitalist—our prehistoric Adam Smith—might have first found work as a herdsman, and then found something to trade. That commodity could lead him to think about value and exchange. One commonly accepted translation of his name “yellow camel” may even hint that he may have been a traveling merchant. Alternatively, he could have partnered with a merchant. A partnership between a merchant and a priest could be the ideal birth of Zoroastrianism.

I remember, as a matter of fact, the rains returning last Halloween, while trick-or-treating with the kids. I remember how warm that first rain was. It even seemed refreshing.

The old Gaelic year ended on Halloween, so I hear. In California, the return of the rains is obviously a big deal, but I’m not sure it ought to mark our new year (as though it represented a rebirth).

I say I’m not sure, but it probably should. It’s ironic because the leaves haven’t even fallen from the trees yet by Halloween, but one can watch the world being slowly reborn through the mild winter months. February and March bring progressively more glory, but it all begins with the first rain in autumn.

My doubt has to do with the role of the sun in all this. To base the rebirth solely upon the return of the rains seems to disrespect the importance of sunlight in bringing about life, but I suppose it’s obvious enough that this is all made possible by the fact that the sun is somewhat ever-present around here.