Author Archives: Greg Wees

Transit of Venus

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On June 8 Venus, as she does twice every 113 years or so, insinuated herself between Earth and Sun. Gliding across the disc of the sun like a ship on a sea of fire, she once again faithfully described her transit to earthly observers.

“The first Transit of Venus observed by humans occurred  in 1639, witnessed by one Jeremiah Horrocks in Lancashire. The suggestion that a Transit of Venus, observed from different parts of the world, could be used to measure the actual distance of the Earth from the Sun, was first made by James Gregory and Edmund Halley, (Astronomer Royal 1720-1742).

The realization that the transits of Venus could solve, what many saw to be `the last great problem in astronomy’ provoked enormous interest in the 18th century, and even countries that technically were at war (Great Britain and France) collaborated in this great international scientific experiment. Expeditions were dispatched to distant lands to observe the transits over as large a geographical area as possible. Captain Cook was sent on his first voyage to the Pacific by the Royal Society to observe the Transit from the island of Tahiti. Other astronomers traveled to Africa and throughout Europe to time the exact instant of transit. King George III built himself an observatory at Kew specifically for the purpose and Charles Mason traveled to Ireland to view the transit from Donegal.”

—from Armagh Observatory’s “Story of the Transit of Venus”

I missed the transit of June 8, which is not as sad as it may seem since this part of the world only had a piece of it, and the skies of the Plains were up to their usual cloudy tricks.

This was, however, one of those odd convergences I enjoy so much. I was paying close attention to the transit, because just a couple of weeks earlier I had begun reading Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon, a sprawling historical fiction concerning the exploits of Mason and Dixon before, during and after the surveying of their famous line.

The early parts of the novel (I’m still reading the bastard) are given over to a fictional account of Mason and Dixon heading down to the Cape of Good Hope to observe the 1761 transit for the Royal Society. Actually, Captain Cook was dispatched by the Royal Society to the South Pacific, where he observed and made detailed notes on the transit. But Mason himself did indeed, as the above excerpt notes, carve out another place in history for himself with his view from Donegal.

For Pynchon, the excitement generated in the 17th century over the Transit of Venus was emblematic of the age, when the mysticism and folklore of the past collided with a new spirit of scientific inquiry governed by reason and–observation.

They found their parallax view that year, and charted the distance to the sun, confirming the astronomical unit forever. It must have been exhilarating, to finally know for sure. It was an age of such times, of learning the orbits of the planets, the working of the human circulatory system, the structure and forms of matter.

Yet it was also a time of loss, when the Earth lost its place as the center of the cosmos and was unceremoniously relegated to a standard orbit around an average star in an outer arm of a run-of-the-mill galaxy. Witches lost their powers, and the elves and fairies faded into lore.

And now, as science itself has become the repository of received wisdom–and belief–the transit generates only mild interest in a fragmented society busy with its 24-hour news cycle, its frenetic work week, its American Idols. Science has done with Venus, for now, for she has told us all she can about our world.

And just last week my friends held their annual Summer Solstice party, an evening of music and beverages, with the band under the stars on a garden stage. I missed most of that, too, as I rushed from a restaurant. But I showed up, wearing a special t-shirt I had made to commemorate the occasion. It depicted the sun, with the words Solstice 2004 above and “Transit of Venus” below. I put a tiny dot on the edge of the sun to represent Venus at the end of its crossing. To me, it also represented the end of such events as occasions of national interest. I think we are done with “national interest,” at least of the non-catastrophic kind.

So Venus makes her silent transit, just as she always has, just as she always will.  And some of us marked the occasion, and some didn’t. In 2012 it will happen again, and then she will be off to her outside orbit until the next transit in 2117, when none of us will care. The serious, deliberate consistency of the cosmos goes on. The distracted attention of humanity fixes on what it will, when it will, perhaps understanding and perhaps dismissing this cosmic convergence or that. And therein, I suppose, lies the difference between the eternity of planetary motion and the immediacy of planetary living.

Storm Center

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Today is my birthday, and here I notice that I’ve kept this log for about a year. My first items–from the mental backlog–sprang forth last spring, and here we are again, enjoying spring on the plains. Another year older, but not much smarter. The Iconoclastic Dog is a year older too, yet she remains the same, eschewing labels. Give me green grass and a hint of rabbit ‘neath the firs, and I’m happy, she avers.

And, as always, I agree. Say what you want about her, she is not one to over-analyze. And while I may not be able to emulate such a philosophy, I do admire it.

It was a wet May. Out here the weather patterns tend to set themselves for a while, offering calm or violence as is the gods’ wont, then abruptly shift to something new. To a Midwesterner, it’s a kind of weather roulette. Folks in San Diego wouldn’t understand, but we enjoy the challenge.

So May offered weekend storm after storm, followed by strangely calm work weeks (feeding rumors that the weather pattern is somehow tied to the Dow Jones). One Saturday was particularly spectacular, offering up 18 twisters in a single night for Nebraska, flash floods in Iowa, and massive storms in Kansas, Oklahoma  and elsewhere. The little town of Hallam, in south-central Nebraska, was destroyed. Less than 10 percent of the buildings were left standing, and the entire town has been condemned, its homes unlivable. People joke about it, but this was actually one of those Level 4 storms that had folks spotting cattle flying through the air. Not funny when you’re the cow, or the owner of the cow.

Dozens of the town’s residents broke into the bank and huddled in a vault as the tornado swallowed up their homes. They say the sound is almost unbearable, and this one took a slow saunter through town, finishing the place off with a businesslike thoroughness. The brick bank building, like most others, actually collapsed. But the people, who are at least as important as currency but not always so well-housed, were safe in the vault. One woman died in her home, struck by debris before she could reach her basement stairway, but that was the total mortality. Mostly these people lost their past and present, and the future doesn’t look so bright either. But they live.

Our experience in the city has been less dramatic, but we’ve had our share of excitement. On the Saturday following the destruction the storms were back, and this time they hit the city pretty hard. We were having a dinner party and at times had to shout over the thunder. Our guests exhibited that nervousness we sometimes feel when experiencing a cataclysm away from our familiar homes. It was a celebration of electricity and raw power, without regard for the plans of the men and women. The point was not lost on us.

We cling deftly but precariously to the exposed surface of this world, which at any time might be swept clean of us or our neighbors by indifferent nature. Yet we cling, and we hope that today’s storm will pass us by, and we try not to think of what realms it will cleanse instead.

We live in the sometimes violent plains, but no one is safe from the storms, which take so many awesome and terrible forms these days. And there is no preparing now, no safe haven really, if there ever was, from what may come. All we can do is keep our grip, and remind each other of how wonderful, how beautiful it all has been. And will be.

Safety and Politics

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It’s tax time in America. The time when we fork over our dough to the elite ruling class, so that they may distribute it among themselves – the corporate welfare, the pork projects, the subsidies and the arms deals that make this country great. Never mind that the bridges and schools are falling apart, or that the parks and libraries are closing due to lack of funds. Those limos don’t pay for themselves!

But that’s all the ranting I’ll do about it. In principle, I don’t mind paying taxes at all. But when we have to pay more and more for less and less visible results, it gets frustrating.

What’s really on my mind is a kind of “Eureka” moment I had the other day. My wife asked, rhetorically, why it is that we can’t even determine whether — forget about “why” or “how”  — anyone in the government screwed up in failing to protect the country from the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Although I had been following the 9/11 hearings, I hadn’t been dwelling on that angle. But she was right. No matter what happens, you can be sure that no one of any consequence will be “blamed” or held accountable for what did or didn’t happen in the weeks and months prior to the event. And because no one will be blamed, no “fault” will exist.

Instead, the blame will go to “policies” and “structures” that did not allow the otherwise competent folks in the government to get the job done. They would have, the story will go, but their hands were tied by the restrictive operational rules of their respective agencies. The solution? My guess will be a long-term, costly “revamping” of this or that agency, with no accountability down the line to see if it actually did any good. Memos will be written, departments will be restructured, policies will be retooled — and none of us will be any safer than we are now.

So my answer to her was, “Because there is no one left in this country’s government who can look at anything from a point of view that is not shaped by politics.” In other words, even though the 9/11 hearings are seemingly meant to address the gravest, most serious threat to America’s future since World War II and help the nation overcome that threat, no one participating in them sees them that way. They truly do not. They do understand that is the contextof the hearings (or, for the more cynical among them, the pretext). But they are also acutely aware that the important stakes for these hearings are political, and will be won or lost on November 2nd.

The next general election–rather than the next terror attack–is what drives the majority of participants’ responses, their analysis, their very thought processes in preparing to testify or question those who testify.

It’s unfortunate, but I believe we are at such a point. We have reached a state of politicization and polarization that does not allow for any situation, however much it may endanger the populace, to override the single guiding principle of all activity in Washington today — which is to preserve power (for those who hold it) or to gain power (for those who do not).

What this means in the context of testimony and questioning at the hearings is equally straightforward: no testimony means anything, because its meaning is interpreted by virtue of which side you’re on. It’s akin to Orwell’s true definition of doublespeak: you say one thing, believe an entirely opposite thing, and yet can embrace both concepts as inherently “true” because one is “objective” truth (for example, that the war against Iraq was a war of choice) and one is “political” truth (the war against Iraq was a war of necessity).  Take Condaleeza Rice. The pundits have been batting her testimony around for weeks, and if you read the analysis you come up with two perfectly opposing versions of what she said.

If you’re anti-Bush: Rice spun the facts and misrepresented the nature of pre-attack warnings from intelligence agencies to cover for Bush’s and her own inability to effect top-down control over security agencies in the face of clear warnings and evidence of impending attacks.

If you’re pro-Bush: Rice acquitted herself and the administration admirably, providing a solid basis for her assertion that there was no “actionable” intelligence for the administration to act on and that no one could have predicted the time, place and scale of attacks prior to the event based on the intelligence at hand.

Can both versions be correct? Probably not, but each are effectively “true” for the equal halves of the country that believe each version. Does the truth inhabit some “middle ground” between the two partisan interpretations? Possibly, but not necessarily–the moderate answer is not more true by virtue of its being  non-partisan. It may simply be a wishy-washy interpretation of baldly partisan rhetoric.

And the result? Paralysis. Since it cannot be determined which version is “empirically correct” without access to an independent evaluation of the evidence (as opposed to the conclusions of a “bipartisan” committee, which can be painted as political by those who don’t like them), the result for politically dispassionate observers is a kind of circular syllogism of cause and effect:

If A is true, it follows that B is true
A may or may not be true
therefore,
B may or may not be true

To put it in the context of 9/11:

If our leaders were warned of impending attacks, they should have done something to prevent them.
Our leaders may or may not have been warned of impending attacks;
therefore,
they should or should not have done something to prevent them.

And so on, forever. So we might as well get used to the terror attacks–while it may be theoretically possible to prevent them, it’s become politically impossible to figure out whose job it is.

What’s a Blog?

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I read an article the other day on a piece of cultural ephemera – the Web Log or “blog.” The article, from the AP, reported that a lot of “bloggers,” as these diarists are called, are less than faithful to their sites, and that of X number of blog sites reviewed, only such-and-such percentage had been updated in the last week. The cynical journalistic conclusion was that Americans continue to be a people struck by techno-fads but unable to stick with their passion of the moment.

The interviews were the typical kind of lament, the “Well, I started it for our Hawaii vacation but just kind of lost interest” sort of thing. Or the blogger simply “got busy” and dropped off the Internet like a faithless pen pal.

Which brings me to note that had this secret site been reviewed by the blog police, I too would have shown up as a “slacker,” or one who has abandoned his blog, since I haven’t felt the urge to add in about seven weeks or so.

But I am no blogger. In case there’s any confusion, this is my life here. This is not a scratch pad or short-term journal of days. No, this is me all told. Or at least as much as I care to tell. My plan is enormous – to log the rest of my days here, the iconoclast unbound. Further, I don’t use this space to dash off random thoughts on the events of the day, as these bloggers do, but plan and craft these little essays to stand alone as moments in my life. These are statements of how my life is framed at a given time, how my thoughts are coalescing around the days.

I figure there are enough people commenting on what Bush said last week, or what the new Vines album portends for pop music.

Also, among the few “successful” blogs I’ve encountered, the practice of massive hyper-linking abounds, setting it apart from my purposefully hyperlink-free entries. Such a mass of links to “what’s happening now” material belies the temporary nature of the writing, since most of those hyperlinks will point to nothing within a few months or years.

The very word  – blog – smacks of cultural flightiness, of a term of the moment, and I predict it won’t be around much longer. This fad, like all the others, will drop off the radar of the major cultural engines. Those who are left will be blogging for themselves alone. Or they, like all the rest, will simply give up out of ennui, or, more likely, because some new techno-fad came along to entice their distracted minds.

So though I sometimes tell myself I need to write a bit to stay consistent and to keep the flow of my life chronicled, I will not write here simply to write something. I have no use for electronic doodling. And although my log will contain a measured amount of asides – like this one – I hope to keep the main subjects as timeless as the thoughts that invade every mind as it encounters life in passing. These have always been – and remain – topics of the heart, of the mind, and of nature.

So I’ll be seeing you soon – but how soon, I can’t say.

Undici Quarantacinque

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It doesn’t matter where you go, or how long you stay. When you return from a trip, you bring back both memories, which are temporal, and  impressions, which are ethereal.

Or so it is with me. For now I can roll the experience like a movie in my head, from start to finish, and remember most of what happened. That’s the memory, and it will fade. But I also have the impressions, the all-senses recordings of a moment, or a place, which I know I will carry with me forever.

With regard to Florence, I’ll now have two sets of impressions, and two faded memories. Of the impressions from my childhood visit, I spoke somewhat in my last essay. But specifically, there is the fried potatoes at the little Trattoria we found quite by chance one evening. I remember my father, mother, sister and I had been wandering around aimlessly in our characteristic way, probably searching for the cheapest of the restaurants, when we finally stumbled into one, literally a hole in a wall – the door was broken off its ancient hinges. It had about five tables, with Mama doing the cooking and Papa working the tables. I was a bit intimidated by this place, its earthiness, but I knew what I wanted: French fries. And by chance he was willing to make them, what are known locally as patati frita. I ordered them, and ate them with salt and a little wine, and they were the best thing I had ever eaten in my life. I think it was the olive oil.

So I suppose it was the sensory memory that created the lifelong impression of those French fries. At any rate, I know I’ll never forget them. Nor will I forget the greasy face of that hard-working owner, stooping over my chair, peering inquisitively into my greasy 12-year-old face stuffed with fries, saying with a twisted grimace that may have been merely questioning or may have been a little challenging – “e bene?” I was satisfied the place was not dangerous, comfortable with my wine, and knew enough Italian to reply with gusto: “Molto bene. Benissimo.”

This seemed to please the old man. He had impressed the Americans. (I should point out that in the early 1970s, American families strolling aimlessly around Florence was not a common thing. We were like Bigfoot.)

And this year’s trip – I know for a fact I will never forget the Uffizi man. The Uffizi man had what I consider the most stressful job in Italy. It was his task to stand outside the Museo dei Uffizi – one of the most visited museums in the world – and try to manage controlled entry for a frenzied crowd of over-scheduled, over-stimulated, reservation-holding art lovers.

It must be understood that in Europe, people do not necessarily queue up for entry into a place the way they do here. They more or less bunch up around the entrance, forming an organic blob of people with no beginning and no end.

These days at the Uffizi, the non-reservation entrance is a blob of people about half a mile long at any given time (in 1974 we just wandered in). The usual wait to get in is about two to two-and-a-half hours. But for those in the know, there is a special entrance for timed entry. You simply call a few days ahead, book a time of entry, and they give you a reservation number. You show up at the reservation entrance at that time and avoid the big blob of tourists in the regular line.

Still, it’s a harrowing experience. The people still bunch up, fearing they will miss their time. So about 75 people or so–those who are on time, a little ahead of time, or a little late–are all standing there, pushing toward the door, waving their reservations at the little old man standing behind the velvet ropes that guard the door to Botticelli, Leonardo, Titian, Michelangelo, Rubens and the rest.

He is about 60, or maybe older, aristocratically thin, short from an American perspective, careworn, with a big blue jacket, fashionable pants and shoes (he’s Italian) and a good head of silver hair. He looks about himself, rarely into the eyes of his supplicants, but beyond and a little above them, as if he’s waiting for some superior force to come and make them all go away. He answers his cell phone and cups his other ear to hear over the crowd. He stands behind the ropes which only he may touch. He lights a cigarette, smokes it hurriedly, then stubs it out after a few puffs. He points to his watch, he shrugs his shoulders, he listens to plaintive stories in Italian or French, answering back in tones of regret, of pragmatism, of powerlessness. But mostly he says, in a loud but not hostile voice – more a plaintive one – the time. He announces the time, like some town crier, at fifteen minute intervals.

“Undici quarantacinque,” he says. 11:45. That’s our time, all of us. When he says it, we wave our little slips of paper and, like good Catholics, chant the responsorial song: “Undici quarantacinque! Undici quarantacinque!” He nods knowingly, waves his arms to take us all in, his 11:45 flock. But then he shakes his head, points to his watch. Not yet.

“What time is it?” I ask my wife in a too-frenzied tone. She is calm like the Arno. “It’s only 11:35.” “Oh,” I say, “it really seemed like it should be time.”

“Undici trenta?” The man says to anyone who may find wisdom in the statement.

All of these people, including me, are thinking the same thing. They’re not sure how the system works. They’ve planned for months, come from far-flung lands, spent a fortune, with the Uffizi as their main object. They have a reservation, but what if they never get recognized by the little man? Occasionally he opens the magical ropes and lets a few people in. He has inspected their reservation. They must be a little late, I think. They must be undici trenta – yes, I’m thinking of time in Italian now. It just seems more efficient.

I am staring at this man as one would stare at a judge empowered to suspend an unjust life sentence. He is good at his job, he does not acknowledge me. He looks at his watch. I look at my watch. The crowd surges, it – as if evolved into an organism – is getting impatient. I’ve been at the front too long. Like cellular waste in the amoeba, I will be sucked away from the nucleus to the edge of the crowd creature and disgorged.

People yell from the back – “Dodeci!” Twelve noon. They are a million miles away. Just stay the hell away. The man shakes his head, waves his arms around our now intimate group – the in crowd – the undici quarantacinque crowd – and says it with polite resignation: “Undici quarantacinque.”

Hours seem to pass. Suddenly he looks right at me. He says it out loud, “Undici quarantacinque,” with a finality in his voice, a beautiful fatalism, and I, gripping my wife’s hand, surge ahead, realizing our time has come. The rope comes off its hook, and I thrust my little scrap of paper into his face, and he inspects it and nods his head resignedly. We pass beyond, through the ropes, the glass doors, into the lobby, and head toward the ticket window. I am ecstatic. I’ve done it. Four thousand miles and I’m here. And it will be fantastic.

And as we enter, I hear in the background, faintly now, that voice: “Undici quarantacinque…undici quarantacinque.” And I always will.