Chanson de Printemps/ Song of the Whippoorwill

     Song of the Whippoorwill / Chanson de Printemps

     Long before I began to understand a winter like that of Montreal--<<Ce n'est pas mon pays, c'est l'hiver...>>--I used to look forward to a sign that there would be no more cold weather in my home near Savannah.  That sign was something I never saw but only heard--the song of the whippoorwill.  It always came just after dusk from a westerly direction in the deep woods across from our house. Not even the nightingale of Keats and the other Romantic poets could begin to alter for me my gratitude to this unseen spirit of the air which truly marked the end of winter.  Never was there ever a cold day after I heard that magical sound.  I listened with a rapt joy rarely excelled in my life.  Gone were the bitter winds that buffeted me in my leather jacket as I sat outside on the south side of the house trying to soak up what warmth I could from the rays of a sun still in the thrall of the constellation of Orion, all too visible in those chilly night skies that were now a vague memory.  The wheel of the seasons had finally rotated where I could count on the rebirth of sun-worshipping plants.

      Of course, in my pantheistic excesses of romantic sentiment, I forgot the summer heat on the way or the hordes of biting insects or the poisonous vipers that would soon awaken to waylay me on my urgent errand to the outhouse some fifty yards from our back door.  Copperheads would soon be sunning themselves in that path covered in old brown oak leaves that resembled all-too-well the patterns on this sluggish viper’s outer coating.  I always hated to disturb their naps but needed some clearance to get by them without risking a sudden awakening of these deaf creatures whose eyes never closed even in deep somnolence.  They crawled off slowly as though disturbed from a trance.  I passed by with a safe clearance to my meditative reveries over the deep hole in the earth that constituted our ecologically correct disposal unit, well before compost toilets became fashionable.  The only sign of such compostings were rectangles of deep blue-green grass scattered about the large back yard that held our version of a purely natural septic tank. (The outhouse was moved at regular intervals when the hole was nearly full.)

     Despite these healthy doses of reality that might challenge even Jonathan Swift to describe in detail, I nevertheless managed to maintain my romantic image of the Great Outdoors, called “Nature” by more insistent folk.  I took the snakes, mosquitoes, yellow biting flies, and chicken hawks as part of this great realm beyond human creations.  When I read Spinoza on the presence of God in Nature, I did not exclude the great inconveniences of outdoor life.  Pantheism was not for me a great sappy faith in the kindness of natural surroundings toward human beings.  I may not have said with Thomas Hobbes that life in “the State of Nature” was “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short,” but I did believe hurricanes and nasty lightning strikes were a part of this non-human realm.  I read John Muir’s description of being caught out in a thunderstorm with considerable understanding of the excitement he experienced with his racing thoughts as well as the terror that was a part of that event, having myself been nearly struck several times in my youth.  Still the realm of Nature was exciting for me.  Maybe it was the “sturm und drang” of my hormones but I doubt it.  I was reading philosophy at fifteen and I got more excitement in those days from Bergson’s “élan vital” and all those other heady ideas by which I filtered my experience. I even remember counting flower petals to confirm my belief in the “argument from design” that hinted at some great divine force beyond all this “phenomena.” I’m not sure my theology has ever advanced much from this adolescent revelation handed down, no doubt, from some student of Thomas Aquinas.  (It would be years before I undertook more systematic examinations of some of those great notions from theological studies.) Mathematics and science were my two passions and Alfred North Whitehead my guide to what he called in one book, “the adventures of ideas.”

    The song of the whippoorwill is still a touchstone for me of the glory of what we call “Nature.”  I love spring in the far flung world of New England which brings bird symphonies every morning just before until just after the first light of dawn.  Mockingbirds, cardinals, and song sparrows are strong players but every bird seems to know how to join in this harmonious exuberance that marks early spring.  It nearly matches the magic of the whippoorwill.  There are tornados, to be sure—just ask the people of Monson—but I do not reject nature for the realm of human beings alone because of it.  Nature, for me, has the same terrifying beauty it had for Saint-Exupery caught in a whirling gale off the coast of South America.  He was too busy trying to save his life and his cargo as he plunged and dived in the grips of this monster to notice the beauty of the Andes in that moment.  But he reverently and soberly acknowledged the beauties and wonders of these terrifying places for an airman in his open cockpit airplane despite the dangers.  We will all disappear, as he did on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean in World War II, in some mysterious way that we will never understand this side of the Mystic Veil that covers life for us.

Childhood in the Land of Civil War: Savannah, Georgia

      As a child I used to go out into the dirt road after a heavy rain and search for fragments of Civil War relics. I often found fragments of clay pipes, slate tablets, bullets--one with the cap and powder intact, rusty grape shot, and Confederate belt buckles. By the time I was in high school my collection rivaled that on display at the Georgia Historical Society in downtown Savannah. Ridge Road, where I lived, was just off US 17, and between Richmond Hill (where Fort MacAlister was during the Civil War, taken by surprise from the rear by Sherman's troops) and Savannah (where Sherman relaxed before invading and laying waste to South Carolina). Playing in the heavy woods around the houses on our road we found the path of old trenches used in the Civil War.  Almost every time we plowed up our sandy soil we would find more grapeshot, the deadly iron equivalent of shotgun pellets blasted from cannons at approaching enemy infantry.  Not surprising that this was one of the bloodiest conflicts in the history of the United States of America.  The soil I grew up on was literally blood-soaked with murderous exchanges as Sherman approached Savannah in that terrible "March to the Sea," a swath of destruction sixty miles wide from Atlanta to Savannah. It did not take an overactive imagination to picture the ghosts of those terrible, bloody exchanges wandering around our road and in our fields on dark nights and in the light of a full moon. I'm glad I had not at that time read James Hillman's book called A Terrible Love of War.  He maintains that "blood-soaked soil cries out for blood." I would not have slept well during my whole upbringing had I thought any such thing.
      In grade eight in Savannah you were required to take a course in Georgia history. Neither the textbook writers nor the teacher could admit there had been a "Civil War;" they insisted we call it the "War Between the States." Maybe they would have liked the French way of designating the conflict--the "War of Secession."  But Civil War it was and all the euphemisms in the universe of discourse cannot disguise the bloody truth.  Some truths seem hard for people to swallow.  A hundred years after that War, some people could not accept the simple fact that the root cause of the conflict was the evil of slavery.  The dark history of human bondage in the United States still casts a long shadow over American history and politics.  Little boys like my earlier self were imbued with an awe and respect for the Confederate battle flag, we learned to hate the very name of Sherman, and we learned to mistrust Yankees and their funny way of talking.  My Uncle Jesse, a military careerist who was stationed in many different countries and who lived many years in the North, finally came home with his Yankee wife.  She did not like living in the South.  He was later remarried to a good Southern woman, the "salt of the earth."  But he never lost his funny accent, his Yankee speech with its foreign intonations and turns of speech.  I had mixed feelings since he was one of my favorite uncles.  But his damned Yankee accent was offputting! (Many years later, even to this day, my sister who never left the South, is put off by my accent  and what she thinks are my "Yankee ways."  And that, despite the fact that my accent is really more Canadian after living nearly twenty years in that country. I feel more Canadian than American and even prefer the French language to the English language. That puts me very far from the country of my origins, the American South. (The real irony in all this is that I like French Canada because it reminds me of the South!)
      (...)

Life After Life: Hints of a Metaphysical Snark

     The most poignant view of the afterlife for me is the ancient view found in Homer of a dark place where souls lead a kind of shadowy existence that echoes their previous way of living. The heart-wrenching story of Orpheus and Eurydice suggests all-too-vividly the irreversibility of the linearity of Time. Dante presents us with perhaps the most elaborate vision of the afterlife influenced by Christian theology. I always liked his picture of some sinners upside down in a kind of flaming container much like demonic barnacles.  I do not require any vivid aids to the imagination as such to be fearful of our ignorance and darkness around our cosmic origins..  It is terrifying enough to me to be presented with infinite space and time, Pascal's abyss. In the Tenth Book of Plato's Republic, he tells the story of souls choosing their next life on earth based on the wisdom they acquired in their previous lives. If that is so, I figure I would come back as a rhinoceros, being quite short-sighted, ill-tempered, and somewhat lumbering in my gait in this life. If I could design my own tombstone I would have Dürer's rhinoceros engraved on a slab of malachite to echo the rhinos in Ionesco's play. Though perhaps this flatters my vanity too much. I might with more justice have a little tapir engraved on it. Or perhaps a little pig with "Porcellus" as my secret name, a compensation perhaps for never having been elected to the Porcellian Club while at Harvard. (And that despite my having been (probably) the only Harvard graduate who had a pet pig when he was growing up.)

      The most vivid portrayal of the afterlife came for me in a visit to a Revival Meeting at a local church, the Silk Hope Baptist Church just south of Savannah, Georgia.  The name reflects an early ambition to grow silkworms in the Colony of Georgia.  This attempt failed but the name remained for this small community.  Every year the church invites some inspirational speakers to get complacent churchgoers into a more enthusiastic state for the sake of their souls.  Usually it brings in a number of potential new members as well as curious folk attracted by the prospect of a little rousing oratory. Savannah has a long tradition of such oratory having been host to George Wesley nearly two centuries earlier as part of the movement called "The Great Awakening."  My mother used to watch with keen interest and devotion similar gatherings on TV with Reverend Billy Graham whose crowds often filled great stadiums. Our local visitor, whose name is lost to memory, was quite something.  A fire and brimstone sermon was supplemented by an artist working on large tablets right next to the minister.  As the preacher described the fires of hell, the illustrator, using vivid pastel crayons under an ultraviolet lamp, sketched the flames with a frenetic enthusiasm that nearly took him right off the margins of the tablet.  We were assured, on the other hand, that there was ample room in heaven for those who wished to accept Christ as their Redeemer.  He even gave the astronomical location of this vast heavenly space. I often wish I had remembered it when I look into the night sky.  I was duly impressed at the time and in the days following the meeting, I finally took that fateful walk down the aisle during the invitational hymn, "Just As I Am," when I was about fifteen.  The following Sunday night I was dressed in a robe of white and fully dunked in the baptismal pool that can be revealed on such occasions behind the pulpit.  I remember thinking of that event as a kind of cosmic insurance policy.  Later, reading the Thoughts of Pascal, I learned to call it "the wager of Pascal."  Still later that great theological ironist, Soren Kierkegaard, referred to such a move as a kind of "leap into faith," a kind of revelation beyond the bounds of reason.  Preachers do a good job of scaring people with thoughts of death and the lurid flames that await the unsaved.  Who can say that such fear is entirely unreasonable?

      Sometimes I feel I will never leave the earth and that long after I have "passed over" (to use one of many euphemisms for the mystery and finality of death) I may be found wandering the streets and byways of the many cities I have loved or wanted to visit--Boston, New York, Montreal, and Paris (a city I have only imagined and dreamed about, like Istanbul with the Hagia Sophia, but never really visited).  At times in the night, wandering the streets, I sense the presence of many other souls who once lived here--no matter the city or town--and perhaps walked  these same streets. If so, there are many overlays of spirit beings in every city. What crowded places each old city must be!  If we are fortunate, these spirits are tutelary beings who guard and protect the living; if not, God help us not to feel too strongly the passions that those anguished souls may still feel who died violent deaths or who feel some great purpose in their lives was unfulfilled.  In the current conventional beliefs about such afterlife stages, many souls have to be encouraged to go "into the Light" to leave their earthly abode for parts unknown.

      I always loved the story told of the physicist, Richard Feynman, that someone found a letter among his possessions, a letter written to his wife some years after her death.  It reportedly begins: "I would have written sooner, but I was not certain of the forwarding address..."  Who would not love that man after hearing of such a story? But this letter suggests a more mundane view of the "afterlife:" we exist as we are remembered and celebrated by those who love us or have loved us.  If I have one firm belief it is that love is capable of transcending the boundaries of our lives. I often see those I have loved in vivid dreams. I awaken with deep regret for their passing but thankful for the gift of having known them on this plane of existence. Religious views of the afterlife for the blessed I find inspirational but perplexing.  I am less happy to contemplate the life after life of those whose lives have taken them far from divine commandments and moral imperatives. Divine retribution for sin may be a necessary balance in our view of justice sub specie aeternitatis but I do not require fear of such a fate to strive for moral excellence. I accept David Hume's life as exemplary despite his failure to be persuaded by the tenets of any religion--even that which he called "natural religion." His philosophy may have had corrosive effects on his generally conservative views of society and politics but he was still le bonhomme David.  His works as well as the memory of his friends give him quite an "afterlife."  I cannot imagine Homer or Dante portraying Hume as an unhappy man in the next life. I cannot believe a merciful God would provide any horrible punishments for his philosophical errors.  A heaven without Hume or Feynman would be a very dull place. I should think the modesty of both men would be an advantage in the afterlife judgment of each man.  Besides, I always thought God had as good a sense of humour as any of his more hubristic creatures.  (If not, I am in a lot of trouble for my views as a "metaphysical snark.")

Savannah: The City of My Birth

      Thinking about Savannah I always get very different images from the city experienced by tourists. Living there in the 1990's briefly after many years of absence, I tried to understand a little of how the city influenced me.  As an adolescent I had often wandered around the city, visiting churches and synagogues to meditate and pray at their altars, even sleeping on tombstones in the Colonial Cemetery, all in the vain attempt to understand the birth and death that frames our lives with so much mystery.  A useless exercise, the naivete of youth. I have since those many years ago lost many good friends to death without feeling I have any real understanding of this natural phenomenon. Savannah is the numinous locus of these early explorations of metaphysical meaning.  Only at night did I seem to sense the meaning that eluded me in sunlight. Moonlight was better for reflection. Meaning, I believed, could only emerge out of the shadows in that softer light.
     My mother may have inadvertently started me thinking about such matters: her favorite walk with me in a stroller was through the Colonial Cemetery.  We lived in downtown Savannah, at No. 10 Jones Street until I was four and we moved to Ridge Road, a wooded area about six miles Southwest of the city off U.S. 17, the old interstate route to Florida.  I could hear the bells of the Cathedral of St. John from ur apartment and acquired a lifelong love of those sounds.  I remember looking up at a slanted cement wall with cracks and tiny pieces of mica or quartz that sparkled in the sunlight.  It was just outside my front door and was my boundary for playing outside. Many years later I was amazed to see that this so-called wall was a slanted cement barrier that started about a foot high and ran up to about three feet.  (Our memories, the earliest at least, seem proportioned to our own heights.) We lived downstairs and had a back door that led into a small courtyard where my mother did the washing on warm days, hanging the clothes up in the sunlight.  I remember being fascinated with the action of siphoning water from one tub to another.  Could water really be persuaded to flow opposite to the force of gravity?  It still puzzles me.
     Another walk with my mother was to Forsyth Park which had a fountain amidst a pool with goldfish. I found the statues of mythological figures less interesting than the fish darting around in the pool.  The statues were only interesting for the water that gushed out of them in sprays and splashed into the pool.  The fountain is a copy of one found in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.  The park around the fountain has numerous benches below the many spreading live oaks with Spanish moss.  In the spring the azaleas provide spectacular bursts of pink everywhere, especially in the squares further north along Bull Street which runs right up to the dome of the Savannah City Hall behind which can be found Factor's Walk and the cobblestone roads leading down to the waterfront along the Savannah River, looking across toward South Carolina.  Confederate troops fled across this area of the river in 1864 to escape the inexorable the Yankees in Sherman's March to the Sea as they came into Savannah.
     The canny merchants of the city marched out to meet Sherman with a key to the city and a welcome that included a grand residence for his headquarters, the Green-Meldrom House (now the Parish House of the Episcopal Church next door).  We lived about two blocks from this location. A few blocks way, many years later when I was in Savannah in the 1990's, I had to go around my favorite square so Forrest Gump could be seen on a park bench with his box of chocolates.  His bench, however, was a Hollywood invention and was placed 90 degrees from the real direction of the benches where I sat.  I love the opening of the movies best when a feather is seen floating down to where Forrest Gump sits.  The filmmakers had in mind an editorial about the role of pure chance in one's life.  I might agree were it not for Hildegaard of Bingen.  She wrote a beautiful piece of music called "Feather On the Breath of God" and that is what I hear every time I watch this movie.  The church tower in the movie belongs to the Independent Presbyterian Church just off that square where President Woodrow Wilson was married. 
     Once when I dreamed of Savannah it was of Forsyth Park, a little past the fountain to the spot where I used to play basketball in Junior High School, next to what was an old powder magazine in the Civil War. This area was just before the statue of a Confederate soldier where we used to line up our high school band to march in the St. Patrick's Day Parade.  In the dream it always seems dark and the powder magazine is somehow ominously back to its original use.  I awaken fearing an explosion.  Other times I am driving through the city near this same area where the street diverts around the park and I get lost.  I somehow end up in what used to be called "the colored section" of the city.  People stare at me from their front porches and wonder why I am in their neighborhood.  Then suddenly I am walking along near 37th Street, on the border of the city where many blacks lived; I am worried about finding my way out and getting home.  Finally I am outside the city and trying to walk the last miles home when
I wake up.
     The racial topography of the city is something most definitely NOT in the tourist guide book. I have followed the shifts over the years from the sixties until now, about a half century.  Racial boundaries, though somewhat fluid at the edges in this small city, were well-known to locals.  I was always amazed by this area as my father drove along US 17 into Savannah.  We had to drive through a black neighborhood at the outskirts of the city before going into the heart of the city, mostly white.  Once, when the traffic was intense along his usual route, he turned down a side street and went deeper into a black neighborhood.  We passed a three story building with a large playground where black school children were outside playing at recess.  It was just a gray, dusty courtyard without any play equipment except for one set of swings.  The black children against that background made me think they were the sons and daughters of the earth--like the story in Plato about such a race who were, as a result, very attached to their place of origin. I was not aware at the time how much they suffered in their schooling from the so-called "Separate but Equal" doctrine (effectively "Unequal").  Many years later in the 1960's I met a young black man from Savannah who told me how they got hand-me-down schoolbooks from the white schools.  Worse yet, he told me, his mother was turned away from the emergency room of a white hospital once and barely made it all the way across town to the black facility, understaffed and underfunded.  No, the tourist view of Savannah is an Ignoble Lie.  Slavery is barely mentioned though it dominated life in Savannah before the Civil War.  The largest slave auction ever held in the country was there in 1859, the year Darwin published The Origin of the Species.  The slaves were from the Butler rice plantation on one of the islands just off the coast and were sold to pay off the gambling debts of the owner who resided in Philadelphia.

The Unfolding Future: Reveries of the World to Come

      From time to time I have had dreams which seemed to be a future event or setting. Later, fully awake, I suddenly encounter something which brings up the dream so vividly the effect is deja-vu, as if I am living something I already experienced. Once I seemed to be in the city of Savannah where I was born but at some distant time in the future when the city is more like Venice, a place with canals and riverine housing along these canals. I was somehow inside one of these houses looking out a window-like French door with muslin curtains.  I saw a courtyard next to a canal with elaborate garden landscaping and a fountain in the center, the focus of the garden area surrounded by wrought iron fenching and an ornate gate. I woke up thinking I had dreamed of the city when global warming brought the sea into the streets, a time many decades in the future. The next year I was walking around Savannah on a vacation trip and passed by a courtyard very much like the dream images. I was stunned. I could hardly believe the evidence of my own sight. It was just one luxurious house behind wrought iron gates. There were no canals. At least not yet.  But the house and the courtyard with the fountain were much as I dreamed them. So, are dreams sometimes a kind of memoir of future times?
     There are future possibilities I would rather not envision for my city or that of anyone else.  In Grade Seven we used to have Civil Defense drills for possible nuclear war--about 1956.  We had to leave the school and walk to a railroad location nearby where, presumably, we would be taken far away from a possible Ground Zero.  Even then I knew the timing was all wrong. We would never have such a luxury of time to escape incoming bombers or ballistic missiles.  But it was a beautiful spring day and I was flanked by two beautiful young girls who enjoyed my shyness and who insisted on holding my hand all the way to the railroad tracks.  What a way to go!  If I was going to die it was a wonderful sight to have as my last view on this planet. I can still see them vividly, one with reddish blonde hair and the other black gypsy-like tresses. They both leaned over my desk with their loose blouses before the walk, talking to me and letting me glimpse treasures far beyond my shy imagining. (I turned red but also felt an intense and mysterious exhiliration.)  Their smiles in the spring air made the excursion one of the most pleasant in my school career. On a later visit to my old school I saw a sign on the outside of the nearby post office building to mark an air raid shelter, the familiar radiation symbol with black and yellow triangles and the letters CD for "Civil Defense."  I tried to remove one for a souvenir of the official craziness that regarded such places as safe from nuclear weapons.  It held fast.  It would remain long after even bureaucrats were faced with the brutal reality of how inadequate such shelters were. 
     Fortunately, I have had many dreams which did not come to pass so I don't have to panic whenever I have a terrible dream that seems "pre-cognitive" or prophetic.  I dreamed of being on a large airplane that crashed right into downtown Savannah. I can vividly remember how the buildings looked as I gazed out the window just before the crash into the area near Forsyth Park and toward the City Hall.  John Allen Paulos in his book, Innumeracy, says we all have dreams which project the future so it is hardly surprising if some predictions occasionally come true.  Scientifically trained, I was quite willing to take his rational explanation at face value. But my dreams that have been true are incredibly detailed and hardly likely to be mere coincidental events.  I once dreamed that a friend I had not seen in a long time had moved and I saw vividly the place she moved to.  I called her and told her about a rose trellis in her garden.  She said it didn't exist.  A few weeks later I visited and found the rose trellis for her to see.  That is only one of many dreams I have had over the forty years I have known her and often they are remarkable accurate.  How does one explain that?
       Once, many years after we had not seen each other and she was somewhere in Europe, I dreamed I saw her in a place in Austria called the Goethehaus Restaurant.  I saw the interior vividly down to the sawdust on the floor in the deli area.  Just before waking I remembered seeing her in Cambridge, England. Later that morning I called a mutual friend who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  She nearly dropped the phone when I related the dream.  She was flying out to meet the person I saw the following day--in Cambridge, England.  Later after I did really see the woman of my dreams again, it took her a few years to tell me she had eaten in a restaurant that was like the one I described.  Black Elk, the Sioux Elder, was in Europe and very homesick when he dreamed of flying over his village out in the American West.  He saw the people vividly.  Later when he returned he was able to verify that what he saw was accurate.  There are no simple explanations for such dreams.  Come to think of it, there are no simple explanations for life itself.  Dreaming and waking have always been a little hard to distinguish at times.  For those who go mad perhaps they become equivalent.
     When I taught on a Mohawk Reserve I learned to take "synchronicity" (or "meaningful coincidence") as a normal mode of perception. Indians often meet without any explicit plan.  Once I wanted to give a present to a Mohawk woman who had drawn a beautiful owl for me, one in the act of transforming into a person.  I had no idea where to find this woman and was living in Montreal.  I had two crystals to give her, a piece of amethyst and a piece of clear quartz.  I was walking down the street when I saw a postal employee who delivered mail in my neighborhood.  I told her my story.  She said, without surprise: "Oh, I know her--I will deliver your gift to her."  I gave her the crystals.  Later I learned that they were roommates.  But with Indians such matters as "meaningful coincidence" are not considered at all unusual.  In fact I got the job there not long after consulting a palm reader and astrologer with my last fifty dollars of unemployment benefits.  He said I would be working soon with a totally different culture and language. (He was from India himself.)  I asked if he meant French and he said he did not.  I was astonished later when I reviewed what he saw in my palm.  I have no explanation for all this.  It is a different way of looking at what we call "reality."

A Preface for Unpublished Works

      Montaigne said he was able to entertain both Catholics and Protestants--at separate times, of course--who were slaughtering each other by following one simple rule: no one was to share with him any secrets.  I try to imitate his noble example in reverse: I will not share any secrets here or anywhere else.  Silence is an essential part of any civilized discourse. If my doctors have any knowledge about how to cure mortality as the common fate of all living beings--except possibly those capable of simple fission for reproduction--they have not told me. If they know they will find me willing to listen. But I am mindful of Jonathan Swift's portrait of immortality in Gulliver's Travels so I am not certain I would even want to know the secret of earthly immortality.  I am grumpy enough at 68.  Swift understood our Yahoo frailty all-too-well. Though, God knows, I am balky about my ephemeral nature, I am nevertheless grateful for all the days of my life, even those I try not to remember too clearly. Trying to think clearly is one of my greatest joys.  I wish I could declare more than merely intention but I would fool no one if I did.  Spontaneous writing is more revelatory than one might wish. Any teacher will tell you that students have lynx eyes for your foibles. However, both teachers and students are a little too hasty to imagine they see with divine insight.  A little scepticism goes a long way to deflate such pretentions.  The Biblical verse that includes the phrase "through a glass darkly" perhaps expresses best our limited understanding of each other and of every other thing in this most amazing universe.  It still astounds me to look up into the night sky and think about how many years ago the lights of those stars began traveling to our world.

Blade Runner: space-time, memory, and tears in rain

      Blade Runner is cinematic poetry. The mystery of human existence is explored by examining artificial beings called replicants, advanced cybernetic creations of artificial intelligences that mimic human beings so closely they raise the deepest ethical dilemmas. A dark, futuristic vision based on a science fiction story called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip Dick.  This movie is a means of breaking through maya, the illusions caused by our forgetting the ephemeral natures that we possess.  The replicants in the cinematic story have been created with a short life span of four years.  They rebel at the enslavement imposed on them as workers in the "Off World" of outer space and return to earth desperate to find a way to prolong their lives.  Blade Runners are special police charged with finding and retiring them before the public can panic about their presence on earth.
     The movie is filled with violence and mayhem, too much for a friend who tried to watch it with me. She could barely manage to get through the first ten minutes.  It has the dark, chiaroscuro atmosphere of a Philip Marlowe detective story but is set in the dystopian world of Los Angeles in the year 2019.  You expect to see a character with the general attitude of Humphrey Bogart in The Deep Sleep.  And you are not disappointed when these expectation play out in the appearance of a retired Blade Runner, Harrison Ford, who is quite surly about being called back to action by the police who need his special detection skills.  I am as much intrigued by the designers who created this futuristic nightmare as I am by the action, dialogue, and characters.  The narrative is mostly unsentimental but not without romance as a relationship unfolds between Deckard (Harrison Ford), the Blade Runner, and Rachel (Sean Young), a woman from the Tyrell Corporation, the makers of the replicants.  She is an advanced model of the type who are now a menace on the planet.  But she has been given memory implants to insure a gentler, more pliable replicant.  As Deckard pursues the dangerous escapees from Off World, he is gradually drawn into a close and loving relationship with Rachel the new replicant.  She saves his life and the favor is returned in full measure.  But the power of the film is not for me primarily in this relationship but in the eerie atmosphere of the city and the themes that underlie the narrative.
     The themes are variations on the exposure of our technological hubris and are perhaps best summed up by Norbert Wiener in his work for laymen called The Human Use of Human Beings where he refers to his fears for our future with the combination of cybernetics (his invention, more or less) and what he called "the venality of engineers."  (Something he should have known well as a mathematician employed at M.I.T..) Tyrell, the C.E.O. of the corporation in the movie, certainly fits the bill with his insouciant optimism about his latest model of replicant.  Beyond this dilemma, viz,. our inability to cope with the full consequences of what Wiener called "the Second Industrial Revolution," is the theme of human identity and the role of memory and the perplexing issue of our ephemeral natures.  Despite the brutal rebellion of the replicants, the final scene of destruction and mayhem, the battle between Deckard and Roy is a paean to the mystery and grace of life itself--even a brief life. Roy Batty, the leader of the replicant rebellion, says when he dies that the wonders he has seen with his eyes, like ships on fire off Orion, will be lost "like tears in rain." An oddly sentimental moment in the life of someone given to merciless killing when it suits his purposes. (As disconcerting as some of the poetry of Villon.)
      Capek touched on similar large themes in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the capacity of our advanced technology to destroy our humanity and the role of memory in grasping the reality of Time,  as did Arthur C. Clarke in his two films: 2001: A Space Odyssey and the sequel, 2010.  We must continue to meditate on these themes because we are still in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution (e.g., try getting a human being on the phone at any office) and because our Promethean arrogance may yet be our undoing as much as our forgetfulness of our mortality and fallibility.  We are still in the romantic stage of fascination with our gadgets, especially our computers. The only serious caution, besides Wiener's books,  I have read is in Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum, another professor at M.I.T.  Arthur Clarke's work seems to glow with a cosmic optimism (not unlike Freeman Dyson); the work of Phillip Dick is far more pessimistic, though the movie seems to suggest some cautious optimism--like the alternate ending of R.U.R. which Capek wrote to satisfy those who found his conclusion too bleak--the complete destruction of the human race.  In Blade Runner, Deckard leaves with Rachel after 'retiring' the other replicants.  It is not clear how long their new found love and happiness will last--a universal dilemma, all-too-familiar to most of us.