[ friday, january 25 ]

there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to walt whitman for a while, but I’ve only just now figured out exactly what it is.

we read when I heard the learn'd astronomer on the second day of my ninth-grade english class. I focused very hard on the alliterative flow of consonants and the long, flat, rhyming i, so that I wouldn't have to listen to the things my classmates were saying. I couldn't help but hear them, though, and they all seemed thrilled to have found a conspirator in whitman: a real writer, one of the venerable dead white guys, someone to be taken seriously for sure, a man of true intellect who did not like science. It made him "tired and sick," he said, and my fourteen-year-old classmates couldn't agree more.

"do you think the two are mutually exclusive?" my teacher asked. "do the mathematics and the columns of figures mean that the night sky loses its mysticism?" oh yes, they said, and those poor astronomers with their numbers and diagrams and knowledge, they've completely lost touch with the pure, silent beauty of the stars. I scanned the last line into iambic pentameter and kept silent myself.

in song of myself, there is grass everywhere and "the smallest sprout shows there is really no death." sure, there are young and old men and women and children underneath the dirt, but their slow, quiet decay is leading life forward, cradling and nurturing the tender little grassling roots. death is an ending on only the smallest, most selfish of scales, and with a step backwards we see the cycle that carries life up, "onward and outward" from the ground to the grass to the animals and back; we are lucky, even, to share in our transience the same atoms with the flora and fauna around us, and with the very air that keeps us embraced in the interim between the opposite beginnings of birth and death.

and those atoms? it takes a few more backwards steps before a big enough picture becomes visible, but look: we are as connected to the stars as we are to the grass. all these atoms were born in the stars, and in their deaths. the red-mouthed men and the waiting laps of young mothers and the hopeful green sprouts were all, once, part of that mystical, silent night sky. the point, I think, is the glory of nature; if the world -- the universe -- is so incredible, and we are inextricably, eternally a part of the universe, than we must be incredible and glorious ourselves. and we are, and so maybe being born is luckier than we supposed, as well.

I am neither a poet nor an expert, only an apprentice and a still learning astronomer. but still, I want to make everyone be attentive and quiet for a moment while I tell him: walt! If you had only waited a while, a few minutes or maybe a century or so, perhaps you could have seen the beauty in those carefully-arranged figures and diagrams, and perhaps when carl sagan told you that you are made of starstuff, you would have smiled, lucky.
[  08:46  •  +  ]

[ wednesday, january 23 ]

at the train station this afternoon there was an old woman, seventy at least, who was wearing a long purple raincoat with an umbrella stuffed in the pocket and a strawberry hat on top of her short white hair. she had crowded, crooked grey teeth whose ashy color was somehow made all the more noticeable by the bright pink lipstick she was wearing. her eyes were milky-pale blue, edged with smudgy green eyeliner.

I was wearing headphones. she asked me, "is that a radio or just a tape player or just a radio?" I said, it's both. she wanted to know if they came any smaller, and I held up my hands to show her how skinny the just-radio ones could get. "I've been wanting to get one," she told me, "because you know that music on the fm radio is just marvelous!" I grinned and glanced down at my radio, which was tuned to 90.9. yup. we talked some more about prices, reception, department stores, headphones. I advised her to get a little more music in her life. she smiled widely and thanked me, and even I was surprised by the genuine sincerity in my voice when I said, you are very welcome.

a few minutes later she turned to me and pointed at the man who had walked up the stairs next to us, holding his cellphone against his head with his entire hand cupped around it to protect it from the rain. "we americans are terrible," she told me conspiratorially, "always with phones and keypads and I bet he has one of those little finger things too, what are they called?" palms, I said helpfully. "yes, and palms, and I bet he has something else too. as if a moment of peace and quiet would be so bad!" I was laughing; I couldn't help it. moments of music aren't so bad, I pointed out through my twittering. she nodded.

on the train there were two little girls, preschool-age, with their hair all in fresh braids and bright plastic-baubled rubber bands, standing up on the seats and singing nursery rhymes in near-perfect unison. when the conductor came to punch our tickets, he raised his arm during a pause in the music and commanded, "everyone, now!" and the whole car giggled. I sang along to twinkle twinkle little star under my breath. when he reached my purple-raincoat friend, who was sitting in front of me reading the ceremony of the circle of life, he took her ticket with a flourish and said, "hello, strawberry-shortcake! are you having a good day?" she said she was.

me too, I thought.
[  22:52  •  +  ]

[ tuesday, january 22 ]

I've had a little trouble getting used to the boy who sits next to me in wind ensemble. it's not that I dislike him, but he never talks to anyone and always seems to be playing at least twice as loudly as he should be. and he kind of scares me a little bit. his eyes always seem to be looking at something in the air in between me and him, and I wonder what I'm missing, if there's some otherwordly creature living right in front of my face.

at rehearsal tonight, he was shuffling around next to me rather frantically as we were warming up. I watched out of the corner of my eye but couldn't figure out what was wrong. finally he turned to me, holding up his ligature-less mouthpiece, and whispered (loudly), "do you have a rubber band or anything?"

me, the girl with waist-length hair and busy hands, have a rubber band? of course I did. I took my ponytail down and handed him the black elastic that had been holding my hair back. he wrapped it around and around his mouthpiece, stuck his reed underneath it, and said (not even whispering!), "thank you very, very, very, very" -- at this point I started giggling -- "very, very much." and, as far as I could tell, the makeshift ligature lasted through the entire rehearsal.
[  21:08  •  +  ]

[ monday, january 21 ]

I've had two classes already, but I still feel a little bit in limbo between semesters. this afternoon in the astrolab I looked up at the clock and momentarily panicked because I thought I was supposed to be in a seminar. I've been filing away grade reports, unpacking my folders that are still filled with physics problem sets, going over my final exams from last semester.

last year, I was reading the news and came across an article about how some scientists had developed a blood test for schizophrenia, based on a study of medicated, hospitalized patients. and, well, that's stupid. I half-jokingly said that logic should be a required premed course, without really knowing what the discipline logic was.

well, now I do. I took logic last semester and hated it. the symbolization, the abstraction, and the -- as it seemed to me at least -- complete impracticality of logic made me feel like my brain was always on the verge of spontaneous liquefaction. and then, on the final exam, the essay question -- the one thing I got to do that entire semester that involved really writing! -- was, should we submit our arguments (in ordinary discourse? in philosophy?) to the discipline of formal logic? discuss this as freely (though intelligently) as you like.

I found myself remembering my cheeky dig at med students. there is something to be said for logic's relationship to science, if not to the scientific method. one of the things we talked about towards the end of the course was the case where something (a statement, an argument, whatever) is clearly true but is still difficult to adequately symbolize using the formalities of logic. it's easy to "see" or intuitively understand that something is true when we have sufficient, trustworthy experience, even when coming up with a rigorous symbolization is next to impossible. there's another side to that coin, though: sometimes experience can be misleading, because we know from the outset what we expect to see. abstract symbolization lets us detach ideas from their meanings and assess their validity independent of context. it sounds weird, almost wrong (how can you talk about something without knowing what you're talking about?), but I think it can be useful.

(as a somewhat oversimplified example, consider our experience with rain. if it rains, the ground gets wet. that's a p-then-q relationship. so if you were to come out of your house in the morning and find the ground soaking wet, you might assume it had rained the night before. intuition says that's okay; logic says it's a q-then-p fallacy. for all you know, some martians came down with a giant garden hose and dumped a bunch of water on your lawn.)

in scientific fields, which are inherently biased by education, society, prejudice, and whatever other human factors you care to think of, but which need to maintain as much objectivity as possible if they are to be legitimate and useful, the ability to recognize an invalid argument is crucial -- especially when our experience is likely to lead us to faulty conclusions. those assumptions, the ones like "rain made the grass wet" that are so deeply ingrained into our sense of the world that we don't even notice when we're making them, let alone think to question them, can be a pretty big handicap. sometimes the biggest obstacle in between us and our understanding of the real causes of the effects we see in nature (including our own behavior) is us. and if logic lets us think about our arguments and thoughts abstractly, without the bias that is sometimes inseparable from the subject matter, then, well, good.

and that, more or less, is what I wrote in response to that question. I'm not the kind of person who will write what I think the professor wants to hear, so I guess I must have gotten something out of that class in spite of myself. who knew?
[  20:35  •  +  ]

I am back in school and it is oh so twenty-first century; my poetry anthology has an (incredibly ugly but still useful) online companion and my galaxies textbook has a list of ostensibly useful websites in its first chapter. I laughed, though, at the electronic universe -- what is it with academics and web design? I think they all got stuck in 1995.

(it's been over two years since I last had an english class and I almost didn't know what to make of the endless discussion... no right answers, no numbers, no formulas, just words! ha! I'm a big fan of this semester so far.)
[  15:29  •  +  ]