Once Again, for Emphasis

And let's remember, in this game only, the correct QUESTION is the correct ANSWER!

Alex Trebek -- "What is the specific heat capacity of a potato?  What is the specific heat capacity of a potato?"

 

Visitors From Our Future?

Over the last ten years or so, I have placed myself under such an avalanche of information of a roughly paranormal nature, some of it compelling and some of it clear nonsense, that I feel it as a permanent burden on my back.  And yet, curiosity nudges me forward.

At the fringes of the fringe is the phenomenon called "remote viewing" or RV -- the supposed ability to see things that are far away geographically, or even in time, when asked to focus in a particular way.  It is said that everyone has this ability to one degree or another, and that it can be honed with practice.  It is also said that during the Cold War, the US and the Soviets each had secret programs to use RV for purposes of spying on the other; for example, an American psychic was able to pinpoint the precise location of an underground facility in which the Russians were building the largest submarine that the world has ever seen.

The phenomenon right now bumps up against our latest mad world-historical event.  Primitively-drawn pictures are circulating on social media.  They are said to have been sketched a few months ago by RV practitioners.  One quite clearly shows a crowd of people, a figure at a podium, the cross-hairs of a gun, and stray verbal cues, among them "assassination" and "failed?".

It will be easy enough to verify, or to debunk, the validity of these pictures in this our world of social-media foreverness.  And if they are real, what do they mean?

One theory purports to tie them to the notion that time is navigable, as in an H.G. Wells novel.  This notion is advanced now as well in an entirely different context -- the examination of the so-called "Nazca Mummies" found in the coastal deserts of Peru.  These desiccated creatures, which share features of homo sapiens but also of reptiles, are said not to be extraterrestrial, but to be our own descendants, returned in 800 A.D. or thereabouts, perhaps to steer our development away from some catastrophe.

But many scientists and philosophers long have educated us about a paradox that would seem to make time travel impossible, a self-cancelling circularity of causation if you will.  If I were to go back to Westport, County Mayo, in 1900, and to convince my maternal grandmother, Mary McGreal, not to board the boat for Boston, then I, of course, would never be.  I would disappear, in which case I couldn't very well go back to Eire.

The larger picture, though, is that things indeed and not just in my understanding of them, grow curiouser and curiouser, as if the world is facing right now a foundational shift, "slouching towards Bethlehem to be born."

 

In the Lowest Times of My Life

Which times came early on, in my adolescence and then sporadically into my twenties, I felt an isolation from other people so deep that it skirted the edge of madness.

I did not hear voices that were not there, but the actual heard voices, even of loved ones, passed through a filter that made them sinister, malevolent, without regard to what was actually said.  It was a phenomenon that you couldn't walk or run away from; after all, you take your broken mind with you wherever you may go.

Happily, these incidents were rare and short lived.  When they subsided, I felt as if I had been welcomed back into a zone of comfort, but I told no one about it.  To be permanently in such a place, in those days when treatment might consist of blunt-force drugs and physical constraints, would have been a horrible fate indeed.

 

Deep in the Weeds of English

A young woman properly can be said to be an "ingenue" and at the same time to be "disingenuous."

 

Cry, the Beloved Country

The expression belongs to another time, another place.  Out of principle, I won't look it up.  If memory does not fail (failed memory serendipitously holding center stage), the place was South Africa, and the time was under apartheid.  But it is apt for the here and now as America, like one of those drone-wounded Russian armored personnel carriers, careens pilotless towards a ditch, with its turret spinning hopelessly out of control.

 

She Said It in Wonder but Without Hubris

She said it as if she were outside herself, as if she were looking on from above, perhaps from a high hill.  She said it almost anthropologically -- "My soul magnifies the Glory of the Lord!"

In 20 centuries, who else has been entitled to say it?  Perhaps the bodhisattvas, but even then only in the hour of their ultimate death, when they are said to be irradiated, for all to see, in pursuit of Nothing at All.

For Us As For the Children of Pompeii

Did not the Bible tell me so?  Did not Jesus Himself say it?  He said that there would be no time at all for us to gather our things, to pack our bags, when the "blood-red tide is loosed upon the world."

We will be like the children of Pompeii.  We will be like the wife of Lot, arrested in flight, our very eyes turned saltine, caught gazing back at the Twin Cities -- Sodom and Gomorrah, Chelsea and Everett, Methuen and Billerica, East and West Orange, Minneapolis and St. Paul,  Buda and Pest.  No one, I say, will be spared.