North Woods Elementary

 I recently fetched a book being held for me at the Golden Valley branch called Icarus Fallen: the Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World by the French intellectual Chantal Delsol. (It can be interesting to explore what our brothers and sisters in Europe are thinking about every once in a while.) In her opening salvo, however, Delsol sketches the mood of the times with an unusually broad brush: 

Western man at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the descendant of Icarus. He wonders into what world he has fallen. It is as if someone has thrown him into a game without giving him the rules. When he asks around for instructions, he is invariably told that they have been lost. He is amazed that everyone is content to live in a world without meaning and without identity, where no one seems to know either why he lives or why he dies.

I have gotten to know quite a few people in the United States and Europe over time, and I have yet to find even one who matches that description. Perhaps it's an academic disease?

Yes, Delsol is a philosophy professor at a university in suburban Paris. She is perhaps embarrassed to acknowledge that if a significant proportion of the Parisian population feels the way she describes, a half-century and more after Jean-Paul Sartre and others popularized ennui, the reason might be a simple one: the decline of metaphysics.

Metaphysics is the study of elemental things: the one and the many, the parts and the whole, being and non-being, identity and difference. In short, the whole ball of wax. The elements involved are simple, but the reasoning patterns, for precisely that reason, can be bizarre, and firm conclusions elusive.

I have never lost my enthusiasm for pondering the BIG questions. One of the best places to ponder them, I've found, is with Hilary, on the North Shore, under a starry sky, in the midst of the elements, with a carefully selected stack of books sitting on the floor by the fireplace.

 At the top of my stack during our recent New Year's trip were Chet Raymo's An Intimate Look at the Night Sky, the late Robert Bly's My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, and a book called Metaphysics and the Idea of God by a little-known German theologian named Wolfhart Pannenberg. 

I brought Raymo up for the star charts, but found the text, which I hadn't looked at closely for years, fit my mood, too. At one point, for example, he brings up the classic question of Olbers' Paradox: If the universe is infinite, why is the night sky dark rather than bright? Raymo seems to think that the Big Bang Theory, about which Olber knew nothing in 1897, clarifies everything." If the night sky is dark," Raymo argues, "it's because the universe is young."

That makes no sense at all. Most astrophysicists agree that the stars are shooting away from one another at unimaginable speed. If so, then I would imagine that as everything gets farther and farther apart, the universe will grow darker still. In fact, the Big bang Theory would seem to suggest that the universe is NOT infinite but finite, which would shoot a big hole in Olbers' Paradox from the get-go.

These aren't, perhaps, the kind of things you think about when you're standing in the dark under the starry firmament in deep winter, but they are the stuff of metaphysics. Perhaps we could take things a step further and suggest that the concept "infinity" is a human construct created by mathematicians and other speculative thinkers. They draw our attention to the limits of particular things—the hem of a skirt or the edge of a coffee table, for example—and then say, "Now imagine something that has no edges but goes on forever."

When we imagine such things, what we tend to see is deep dark outer space. There might be an edge out there, but probably not; and if there is, we'll never see it, even with the new Webb telescope. And if we do catch a glimpse of that edge, there's no telling if something lies beyond that edge or not.

In short, infinity is a fiction. But it's an alluring one that answers to something deep within our selves, and the night sky brings that connection to the surface. That may be why Plato reasoned that the stars are individual souls twinkling in perpetuity.

We stopped at Sax-Zim Bog on our way up to Castle Danger, ate a late lunch at the Wilbert Cafe in Cotton, and came into Duluth via Highway 53. We drove through the UMD campus on Skyline Parkway, missing a few turns along the way,  and caught several glimpses of Lake Superior far below us, with the pink-orange light of the setting sun sweeping across it, highlighting the patchwork pattern of open water, smooth and shiny, interspersed with the dull, rough stretches of floating ice and slush.

The stars were spectacular that first night. The brightest I've seen in years. No moon, no clouds, and little ambient light beyond a single yard-light well down the road. Above us Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades, Sirius, Capella, blazing in the midst of an intense blue-black screen. With the help of binoculars we also spotted the Beehive Cluster and Andromeda without difficulty.

We went out again the next morning. Still pitch black. It's interesting to see Leo directly overhead, and Cassiopeia upside down, an elongated M on the horizon to the northwest. The frigid air clarifies everything and makes the stars appear more intense. 

During the ten minutes we were out, I saw two shooting stars. It's the Quadrantid Meteor Shower! 

But on our second day the wind came up, the clouds rolled in, and the waves got fierce. Out came the books. Opening the Bly collection I came upon this gem:

Loafing with Friends at Ojo Caliente

Mineral pools remember a lot about history.

Here we are at Olo Caliente, sitting together,

soaking up the rumble of earth's forgetfulness.

   

Why should we worry if Anna Karenina ends badly?

The world is reborn each time a mouse

Puts her foot down on the dusty barn floor.

 

Sometimes ohs and ahs bring us joy. When

you place your life between the vowels, the music

Opens the doors to a hundred closed nights.

 

People say that even in the highest heaven

If you manage to keep your ears open

You would hear angels weeping, night and day.

 

The culture of the Etruscans has disappeared.

So many things are over. A thousand hopes

F. Scott Fitzgerald had for himself are gone.

 

No one is as lucky as those who live on earth.

Even the Pope finds himself longing for darkness.

The sun catches on fire in the lonely heavens.

 

This isn't metaphysics, but the juxtaposition of images may reach important zones of feeling in the same way that the stars do. The kind of feeling that almost seems to drift into a cosmic understanding, or comfort. 

Too often we read a poem hurriedly. We get to the end and say, "I liked that, though I don't know what it means," or "That was a dud." And move on. What are we looking for? How is it possible to dwell with a poem, line by line, collecting the vectors and the valences, as if to generate, from such data, a new vision of the universe?

You can spend hours reading a self-help book loaded with case histories, anecdotes, and sage words of advice. Or you can read:

—the speed of the soul leaping over fences

Brings the toe forward. At other times, a book resting

On my chest takes me backward into my mother's arms ...

 By now, the baked potatoes must be done, and the broccoli is stewing in its own dissipating steam.

______________

The next morning the air is warmer, but little else has changed:gray skies, high winds, big waves. It's still dark outside, though I can see the branches of the spruce tree bobbing up and down outside the window. 

"A theological doctrine of God that lacks metaphysics as its discussion partner falls into either a kerygmatic subjectivism or a thoroughgoing demythologization—and frequently both at the same time."

Good heavens. We wouldn't want that to happen. And a few pages later:

"I am skeptical of the claim that with the notion of highest perfection we have already reached the idea of God. The idea of God, however construed, has a considerably higher specificity ... [It] cannot be separated from the elements of personality (however we are to understand it) and of a will (whatever form it takes)."

I agree, though it all sounds a little vague. We're in the company of Wolfhart Pannenberg now, known to his friends as Wolfie. He seems to be on the right track and is careful not to let the rhetoric become too seriously detached from experience. And yet, he concludes one chapter:

"After all, it is for the sake of the task—the task of achieving a comprehensive interpretation of the finite world—that metaphysics attempts to rise above the multiplicity of the finite toward to idea of the One, a one that grounds the unity of the world and provides a unifying context for the multitude of things within the world."  

Unity? The One? We ought to be suspicious of such concepts. Is that what anyone really desires? Not at all. Unity is dull, oppressive, stultifying, and so all-absorbing as to squelch personal identity and critical judgment alike. What we're looking for in the midst of life's multiplicity isn't unity, but harmony, which is made up of nourishing interactions between things. Including, I suppose, the various parts of ourselves.

                                                   ______________

This afternoon we drove up to Tettegouche State Park and hiked in to the bridge across the Baptism River through spruce woods and aspen woods--a hike punctuated by a few meadow-like openings with impressive views of distant peaks. 

Back at the cabin, the waves continued to roll in, maybe ten feet high, never really forming a pattern, gray and dark, lumbering in, noisy and mesmerizing to watch from the windows. Here comes a good one. And look, that one fractured in the middle, and the previous wave, which showed great spread and promise thirty feet out from shore, has ended up being a dud.

We evaluate the waves like surfers, though almost every crash leads to dissatisfaction. There is no finality to it! When the wind dies down it will take two days for the energy gathered out on the lake to spend itself here on shore. Water foams or slithers away across the rocks just as a new crest approaches. The process is endless, and I suppose the incessant noise might put some people on edge, unlike the various clicks and hums resounding at random intervals from the baseboard heating here inside.  

A pine grosbeak sits in the snow under the window; he's reappeared several times, working his way through the shriveled berries in a mountain ash. Splashes of orange-red under the wings and on the rump, and a little touch of elegant green on the head, but mostly a lumpy gray—the avian equivalent of a manatee rather than a dolphin.

We take a walk down the road toward the highway with the roar of the wind at our backs. Darkness is closing in. We've heard coyotes howl along this road, but not tonight.

On the menu: spicy Thai chicken meatballs braised in coconut milk.

We make the meat balls together, brown them nicely in a beat-up frying pan. Now Hilary is at work at the kitchen counter, chopping the cilantro. Back on the couch, I open a book by Ortega y Gasset at random and read:

"Thoughts arise in the mind spontaneously, without will or deliberation on our part, and without producing any effect whatever on our behavior."