Fiat Lux!

1. This Little Light of Mine 

This is the season of darkness; this is the season of light. On December 8, 2013, I wrote a little essay, "Have Yourself A Merry (Little!)Christmas," https://thomasdorsett.blogspot.com/2013/12/have-yourself-merry-little-chhristmas. "How to stay serene and happy, while those around you are caught up in Christmas rush?"  is the article's theme. It depicts a scene of madness. I was waiting with bags of groceries for Nirmala to pick me up in the car. Shoppers everywhere! There was no parking space; we had parked several blocks way. The parking lot, in which I was standing, was full; cars kept on circling, drivers were desperately seeking an opportunity to park and shop. Traffic around the parking area was reduced to a snail's pace. The din of cars honking was everywhere. The people who rushed by looked obsessed--and unhappy. I struck up a conversation with a woman waiting, like me, for someone to pick her up.

We had a memorable conversation. We decided that the way to enjoy the holidays, and life in general,  was to tone things down, be thankful for little things, to lower expectations, to live in the joy of the moment.

Those were the days! The parking lot is gone--condominiums have taken its place--and a virus has been sedulously picking up humans as if it was an evil, invisible kid picking up pieces of stolen candy.

Not only is the parking lot gone, but the adjacent mall (I imagine) is empty. This is going to be a very different Christmas. The pandemic has shattered plans of family get-togethers. Many people are without jobs. Empty stomachs; empty malls.

Why am I feeling guilty? Because I am feeling happy. Even serene. As a senior citizen who has several underlying conditions, I have remained at home, except for masked excursions for groceries. So far I have escaped the deadly virus, so far. But that's not the only reason why I feel happy.

I am one of the lucky ones. There is a lot of suffering going on, I know, and I hope the light at the end of the tunnel, the vaccine, will soon restore health and a sense of well-being. How can I, albeit sympathetic to the plight of others, still manage to feel good?

2. Let there Be Light

As I write this, we are only two days away from the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. It is cold; it is gloomy. It is easy to feel cold and gloomy as well. What better way to counteract surrounding dark than to celebrate days of increasing light,  at the height of light's relative  lack, by bringing light into the house, by bringing light within?

I do what many people do--decorate and light a Christmas tree. It doesn't have to be a tree  in order to celebrate a festival of lights, however, a large, festive menorah would do as well. The important thing is an extra-abundance of photons.

I am spiritual--I perform Buddhist meditation twice daily--but not Christian. I used to worry that setting up a tree would be inconsistent with my identity, but I realize now that this was silly. Bringing a tree inside the home was, after all, a pagan custom adopted by Christians. The gospel of light belongs to all; it illuminates all creeds.

I think mostly everyone suffers from at least a mild form of SAD, seasonal affective disorder, sadness caused by reduced light in winter. For me, contemplating a lit tree in a dark room is a source of delight.

Light is said to increase serotonin, a hormone which lifts mood. It also gets me to thinking, that is, contemplating...

3.A Little Bit of Physics

A founding father of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, once stated that if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't. The most mysterious of all quantum particles is, I think, the photon, the source of light.

Everything we know can be classified as a thing. Books, boulders, stars--even in the strictest sense, persons. (Everything inside a human, brains included, is composed of elements found elsewhere in the environment as well). Even thoughts, chemicals
 stored in  neurons, are things. And all things have mass. Except the photon!

How can something, depending on observation, sometimes behave like matter, sometime like a wave of energy? This wavicle-oxymoron is an impossibility. Yet light has achieved it!

 

This electron microscope image illustrates the dual nature of light--its property of being both a wave  and a particle (an oxymoron)--This property, known since 1905, has never before witnessed in this way by human eyes. The wave element is evident at the top of the image.

An oxymoron is the photon, a massless thing. But here the oxymoron isn't used as a literary device, such as the oxymoron "bittersweet" denoting mixed emotions, such as "Parting is such sweet sorrow." As far as I know, the massless photon is the only example where an oxymoron has no emotional, that is, human connotation .

A thingless thing--how can we imagine something like the photon? We don't have to--they are all over the place, the very foundation of vision.

Light is even weirder. As Einstein's theory of relativity teaches, during acceleration time dilates and space shrinks. We cannot ever go faster than the speed of light, because as we approach 186,000 miles per second, the matter being accelerated approaches an infinite weight; it would take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light. Impossible! Yet light has done just that! Another way of saying it is that as an object is accelerated, space is converted into time. At the speed of light, space has become nothing, zero, while time has stopped--And another way of saying time has stopped is saying that it has reached eternity, the state of infinite time-dilatation. 

Open your eyes--Eternity is always right in front of your nose!

4.  Photons and Symbolism

A line by the 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan has always impressed me: "I saw Eternity the other night." Now we know that this statement is literally true--provided he wrote it by candlelight!

In the West, light is very close to God, if not God. In Genesis, God gets the universe going by declaring "Fiat Lux," "Let there be Light." (In the East, enlightenment comes by meditating, closing the eyes and listening. In this tradition the drumbeat, the dhamuru, is the symbol of creation. --See my blog about Nataraja, The Cosmic Dance, https://thomasdorsett.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-cosmic-dance.html.)

Milton brilliantly described the connection between divinity and light in the following excerpt from Paradise Lost:

Hail, holy light, offspring of Heav'n first-born,

Or of the' Eternal Coeternal beam

May I express thee unblam'd? since God is light,

And never but in unapproached light

dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee,

Bright effluence of bright essence increate.

Beautiful words, signifying a beautiful and literal truth. There is also a problem here, of course. Theistic religions take the concept of God as a person literally. For me, it is  metaphor. Yes, God is light, but every photon is exactly alike. (As Jesus of Nazareth pointed out, light shines on both good and evil, making no distinction between them). Finding a personal God in light is a literal confusion, a true oxymoron.

Conclusion

Lighting up one's house, say, with a Christmas tree, is a wonderful source of delight, especially during the darkest time of the year. The presence of light warms, the concept of light enlightens. 

My favorite word for the divine is the ancient Tamil word, Kadavul, which literally means "Outside/Inside." Taking light inside is like inviting Kadavul into your home. (This inside/outside dichotomy is a way of indicating what some of us intuit but none of us understand: light (outside) and love (inside) are basically the same thing, as expressed by the statement, God is love). 

Light can warm us, and thus cheer us up, but it is impersonal. The missing piece in this puzzle, what makes mystery personal, is relationship. Schiller, in his immortal poem which became the text of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, perhaps said it best;

Wer ein holdes Weib errugen,

Mische seinen Jubel ein!

That's exactly what we've been doing. The two most important things in life, which are mystically related, light and love, are everywhere and free. 

More light at the time of the 2020 winter solstice informs me that this horrible pandemic is coming to an end. The light of the human mind has produced a vaccine in record time, a secular miracle of sorts. No wonder I'm feeling serene!

If you're not feeling serene, which during these dark times is understandable, try adding more light--and love--into your life. You won't regret it.

Addendum

I forgot to include one of the most famous references to light of all,  the niche sura from the Quran. Here it is an excerpt:

God is the Light of the heavens and the earth.

His light like a lamp within a niche, of glass like a brilliant star,

Lit from a blessed tree, an olive tree, not from the east nor from the west,

Whose oil would burn and glow even without fire.

Lift upon Light!

God guides to His light whom He wills,,,

Desultory Diary, Episode 38: Good News?

 I'm writing this with less than six weeks to go in the disastrous Trump presidency. Contrary to many dire predictions,  it is increasingly likely that he will leave office with more of a whimper than a bang. He has unleashed a lot of discord, but no war. It is also true, unfortunately, that his whimpers will be amplified by his followers, the cacophony of which will give democracy a headache for a long time to come.

Nevertheless, democracy has won. His attempts to overthrow the presidential election have failed. But, to give a contemporary example, would democracy have won in Belarus? And what about the golden example of Fool's Gold in the past? How was democracy so easily overturned by Hitler?

I think a brief discussion of the disastrous German past can give us reason to be cautiously optimistic about recent American politics.

After Germany lost the First World War, democracy was imposed upon the country by the victorious allies. There had not been a strong tradition of freedom in the country, however, and there were no laws comparable to the Bill of Rights and the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution to guarantee it. Obeying authority with echoes of St. Paul and Martin Luther were stressed. The Weimar Constitution, written with considerable input from the United States was modeled on the American original. It lasted until 1933.

There was a fatal flaw in the document, Paragraph 48, the so-called Notstandsgesetz, The Emergency Law. The Paragraph stated that, "If public security and order are seriously disturbed or endangered within the German Reich, the President of the Reich may take measures necessary for their restoration, intervening if necessary with the assistance of the armed forces." In a country used to authoritarian rule, this was a dangerous directive, which could prove fatal to the rule of law. And so it did.

The codicil was used sparingly during the turbulent twenties, and shouldn't have been used at all. Any use of it gave the impression of rule by fiat. An example of its use was dissolving Parliament and calling for new elections. Note that the assumption of the Emergency Law was that it was intended to be temporary; the return of democracy was to be as soon as possible.

Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933. On February 27, 1933, the Parliament, the Reichstag, was partially destroyed by fire. No one knows to this day what caused the fire, but the Nazis were most likely responsible. Hitler blamed it on the Communists. He subsequently declared martial law, citing paragraph 48. He did this as a means to consolidate power. He never rescinded it. Democracy was finished, until its restoration, after a horrendous war, twelve years later.

In Germany there was no tradition of strong measures of checks and balances; no faith in an independent judiciary or in an independent parliament.

Trump may be seen as a comic, incompetent version of a classic dictator. Modern day Charlie Chaplins e.g. Seth Meyer, Trevor Noah, Steven Colbert, have had no shortage of material. The joke has been on democracy, on us, but, due to Trump's incompetence and America's strong tradition of judicial checks and balances, it has remained on a farcical level. For the time being--victories of democracy are always provisional--democracy has won.

If the country I'm writing from was, say, Belarus, we'd be in a lot more trouble than we are in now.

Trump is like a ladybug; during her lifetime, she never changes her spots. When Trump was just an incompetent real estate mogul, he, as is well known, often stiffed his employees, cheating them out of their salaries. He did this by intimidation: he might be incompetent, but he is an expert in bullying. His wealth enabled him to hire lawyers at will; individual employees didn't have a chance. Throughout his career, he frequently sued them; his suits were often absurd. As an example, he sued Bill Maher for libel because he found a similarity--a joke--between the mean man's mien and that of an orangutan! He was able to do this as a businessman; his strategy was less successful as a president, since government is able to hire lawyers as well. As President, Trump's lawsuits are frequently reported by the press; ridiculous lawsuits thus became ridiculously apparent. 

He got away with his use of the courts as a means of bullying, but not recently. After he lost reelection, he tried to overturn the results with scores of lawsuits, all of which have been thrown out. The recent suit, backed by Trump, where the attorney general of Texas tried to overthrow the results in four swing states--Texas has jurisdiction only over Texas, making the suit doubly ridiculous--was perhaps the most egregious example of Trump's failed strategy. The bully's bulbous nose has become apparent; this fascist is a clown.

Trump, as I have pointed out in many articles, is a pathological narcissist. The worst thing for someone like Trump to come to terms with is defeat. He never encountered defeat before. The fact that he was not impeached, which he interpreted as a stunning success, even though Muller hardly exonerated him, hurtled him into outer/inner space, as it were, much as a rocket uses the orbit of Jupiter as an energy boost to hurl it into the beyond. 

Look into his face during recent photos; the apparent anger and misery indicates that he knows he lost. (A chorus of Loser! Loser! or Lock Him Up! during a rally would undoubtedly drive him wild).

Many of us felt confident that Biden would win--I expected him to win by a greater margin, however-- we were worried of the damage he could do in the lame-duck period. I'm still worried--at the time of this writing we have a month of the lame duck's White Spite to go--but I basically agree with Mary Trump, the President's niece. She has full confidence in his lack of ability. He is basically a Mouth Hero. That, and the American system of checks and balances, is what reveal Trump as playing the clown to Hitler's devil. They are both fascists, but only one had the competence to realize his agenda. And, of course, Trump has no agenda than being the object of adoration; coming out on top is his only ideology.

Although democracy has won, much damage has been done. In a previous article, I presented the image of a "negative pyramid". Trump, at its apex, would fall flat on his face without the support of his base, The boulders immediately under him are the vast majority of Republicans who mostly still support him.

Most Republicans in office have supported Trump's insane attempts to overthrow the will of the people in the last election. They are not stupid; most realize that Trump's view that he won the election is nonsense. They are putting greed before the interest of the nation. They are afraid that a whimper of criticism would lead to their removal from office by Trump's irate yet faithful base.

The self-destruction of the Republican party is indeed bad news; the preservation of a two-party system is vital.

Trump's inane claims that there was widespread fraud in the election is nothing short of another example of a conspiracy theory. This is especially dangerous in our polarized times. Trump is encouraging these theories; he often passes them on via his tweets. It's like giving testosterone shots to men with prostate cancer. Encouraging metastasis of poison in poisonous times--this is the cancer that Trump has been spreading.

Trump is mentally ill--does he really believe what he is saying?  Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps, like Hitler, he is a shrewd populist--perhaps he is knowingly spreading his lies as a means to keep the support of his fanatical base at fever-pitch. I don't know; but it really doesn't matter. Either way, the damage that Trump has done will take years to repair, but it can be repaired. For now, though, I am cautiously optimistic, for democracy has, for the time being, won. Hurrah!

Timothy McVeigh and the Rabbit

Yesterday, as I unfortunately frequently do, I got up in the middle of the night. I usually sit at the computer for a while, read a few articles from the NY Times, and check out the increasingly depressing Covid statistics. One announcement moved me deeply. Trump's Justice Department carried out the execution of Brandon Bernard, age 40, who had been on death's row since the age of eighteen. He had been the driver of a getaway car; the planned robbery went awry and two people were brutally murdered. However, Brandon didn't murder or intend to murder anybody. Some disculpatory evidence had been withheld, the surviving jurors who had convicted him were now against his execution, as well as one of the prosecutors. His behavior in prison was exemplary.

The execution was a national shame.

Trump's team is planning to execute five convicts before Biden assumes office--Biden is against the death penalty. Another example of what I call White Spite. The rush to kill is truly unprecedented; it hasn't occurred in the past 130 years. (In Grover Cleveland's time, the death penalty was rarely questioned.)

Bernard was Black and poor. It is well established that Blacks are much more likely to be executed than whites. It also depends on the state in which a murder occurs. But I'm less interested in all that. I think the death penalty should be outlawed, as it is in Europe, in all cases.

This afternoon, my wife was going through some old papers, and came across an old article of mine, entitled Timothy McVeigh and the Rabbit. I wrote it at the end of Timothy McVeigh's trial for his participation in the  Oklahoma Bombing of 1995. (Some of you might be too young to  remember the incident. McVeigh was what we would call a White Supremacist terrorist today; he hated anything to do with government, and bombed a federal building, during which many died.) I am sorry to say that what I wrote a quarter of  century ago is still pertinent today; I will now quote the article in its entirety.

Timothy McVeigh and the Rabbit

There is a familiar Buddhist tale, typical of many, that concerns one of Buddha's incarnations. According to this symbolic story, the Buddha had cone to Earth as a rabbit. After a long life as a model hutchholder, he roamed the countryside performing good deeds. During a time of famine, he came across a Brahmin who was near death from starvation. A pot of boiling water lay over a fire, but there was no food. The rabbit-Buddha did not hesitate. He shook himself vigorously to save any fleas that might be in his fur, then jumped into the boiling water to become the Brahmin's dinner and thus saved his life.

We Westerners cannot help reacting to the extremism of such stories. I remember being repelled by this rabbit who forgets that the one who loves deserves to live, too; then I looked deeper. If we were less radical in our wrongs, we would need less radical examples to help us become more kind. The ancient Buddhists knew human nature; extreme examples of self-sacrifice were used to lift people towards a more morally balanced life. Without such guides, modern humans have sunk very low indeed. Compassion is in very short supply. A good example is how ardently most of us wish that Timothy McVeigh be put to death. Where is that rabbit now? If he could testify at the penalty hearing of Timothy McVeigh, what would this wonderful rabbit say?

First and foremost, the rabbit's sympathy would go out to all those people whose lives have been devastated by McVeigh's crime. He would listen without judgement to their expressions of vengeance. It is understandable; hate can give temporary shape to the shapelessness that McVeigh injected into their lives, forever. However, what is understandable is not always right. The rabbit would be firmly convinced that in the long run hate always proves to be salt not suture; it can never accomplish so-called closure of their terrible wounds.

What about the rest of us whose lives were not immediately affected by the bombing, who are clamoring that McVeigh receive the death penalty in the name of retributive justice? What about the woman on The Today Show who not only said that death was the appropriate punishment for "that animal," but that the death should be slow and painful? In my mind's ear, I hear the rabbit say, "Thousands of years have passed since my birth; how can it be that people are still the same?" In my mind's eye I see him pack a few carrots and, for the benefit of us all, head straight for Denver. (Editor's note: Denver is where the trial took place.) If he had been allowed to speak, would things have turned out differently?

Let us in our imaginations return to the penalty phase of the trial. Under his spell, Judge Matsch lets him speak. The rabbit cites obvious reasons for his opposition to the death penalty: it doesn't act as a deterrent; it is whimsically and inconsistently applied; it doesn't save taxpayers' money, since the expenses of appeals are more than the expenses of a lifetime of incarceration. Then he speaks from the heart.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, you claim that putting this man to death will help alleviate the suffering of his victims and assuage your anger and grief? I am only a rabbit; I cannot judge you. But many generations after my birth, I will become the Buddha. And as the Buddha, I will have said something which you very much need to hear: 'He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me--those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred. He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me--those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.' Who is right, Buddha or you?" He paused, then looked out to a member of the jury. Her nose had become red. Did she understand? Or was she simply allergic to rabbits? Regardless, the rabbit continued.

"It is clear that hate will get us nowhere. But what about justice? Many of you claim that justice cries out for the death penalty in this case. Is that so? You have this idea, due to the notion of personal responsibility. It is a noble concept; without it none of us can lead a moral life. But I ask you: do we ever know enough about a person to judge him--rather than his behavior? Isn't science teaching us that we are determined in ways we hadn't suspected? Although each of us must hold ourselves accountable for our actions, dare we assume that we know another enough to judge him?"

"Many of you hold a certain historical figure in very high esteem. Did he not say, 'Judge not, lest ye be judged?' Have you forgotten what he said about forgiveness? I am only a rodent, but it seems to me that someone who professes to follow someone without heeding his words is a hypocrite indeed. Humans, are you not ashamed?" A few more noses had become red.

"You may ask, where is justice if we forgive? We must first of all be just to the rest of society. We must assure that McVeigh never commits such  a crime again. the one who did it is much more capable than the average person of doing it again; therefore there should be no possibility of parole.  In my opinion, laws should be there to protect society, rather than to punish or to seek vengeance. As far as higher justice is concerned, remember that McVeigh is still human. Is it possible that, after years of confinement, he will realize the enormity of his crime? What better punishment than that? It also entails the possibility of redemption. God works in strange ways, you say; is it up to you to straighten Him out?"

"In conclusion," said the rabbit, "did not a very famous rabbi, Rabbi Hillel say, 'What you wouldn't want done to yourself, do not do that to others?' Doesn't 'others' include everyone, criminals not excepted? Would you like to be executed by lethal injection?"

By the end of his testimony, every nose had become red. Red with shame, red with emotion, red with joy, for they had gained in wisdom. Only one nose remained unchanged: it lay on the expressionless face of Timothy McVeigh. He was still convinced that the government was evil. He knew that you couldn't make an omelet without breaking eggs. He knew many things. He was a real man. He wasn't about to learn wisdom from a rabbit, especially from a brown one. What about you?

In this photo, the kind personality of Brandon Bernard shines through. He looks more than a little like my son, who is also Black, approximately the same age, and, thank God! still very much alive. R.I.P. Brandon Bernard.