far above the world
- September 16, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids, Parenting, Science, wonder
- 23
I’m on about bedtime again— but this time it’s the soundtrack.
My mother sung me to sleep for most of my childhood, and I love her for it. In hopes that my own children will profess love for me in their eventual blogs, I sing to them every night as well. And for no other reason.
At an average of two songs per child per night, that’s nearly 20,000 songs so far. Easily bored as I am, the repertoire doesn’t stand still for long: Stardust, Yesterday, Danny Boy, Kentucky Babe, Long and Winding Road, Witchdoctor, Cat’s Cradle, Unchained Melody, Stand By Me, Blackbird, Michelle, The Christmas Song, Lady in Red (not that one), Imagine, Close to You, Mean Mister Mustard, Everything’s All Right (from Superstar, with Judas’ angry outburst included), Happy Together, The Galaxy Song, Our Love is Here to Stay…you know, stuff like that.
A few nights ago, an old friend floated into my head, unbidden—and I began to sing a song that once reached further into my imagination than perhaps any other before or since:
Ground Control to Major Tom…
Ground Control to Major Tom…
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on…
“What…in…the…world?!” Erin’s head was off the pillow. I could feel the puzzled glare cutting through the dark.
(“10”) Ground Control (“9”) to Major Tom (“8”)…(“7”)
(“6”) Commencing countdown, engines on…(“3”)
(“2”) Check ignition, and may God’s love be with you…
“This is weird,” said Delaney.
“This is TOTALLY weird,” said Erin, leaning forward on her elbow.
“This is…”
THIS IS GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM
YOU’VE REALLY MADE THE GRADE
AND THE PAPERS WANT TO KNOW WHOSE SHIRTS YOU WEAR
NOW IT’S TIME TO LEAVE THE CAPSULE IF YOU DARE
I was only slightly older than Delaney when Neil Armstrong celebrated my wedding anniversary by landing on the moon 22 years in advance, to the day. It was the same year David Bowie gave us Major Tom. I watched the moon landing with my parents, who tried very hard to impress the significance on me. I was a complete NASAholic by age eight.
As I built model after model of the lunar module and command module and watched telecasts of one Apollo crew after another in grainy black-and-white, I recall being both awed and miffed at the astronauts—awed because I wanted so much to be in their boots, and miffed because they were all business. Houston this and Houston that. Engaging the forward boosters, Houston. Switching on the doohickey, Houston. Even in elementary school, it occurred to me that there should be a little more evidence of personal transformation. I wanted to hear them say Ooooooooooooo, in a fully uncrewcutted, unprofessional way. Holy cow, I wanted. I’m in outer space.
Eventually we got golfing on the moon and some zero-G hijinks. That’s fine. But that’s not transformation. I wanted evidence that they were moved by their experience, that they would never be the same after seeing Earth from space. They wrote about it years later when I was in college, but it was in high school that a Bowie song I’d never heard before finally said what I’d waited to hear. Take it, Major Tom:
Here am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can doThough I’m past 100,000 miles
I’m feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows.
For three days now we’ve listened to Bowie’s version rather than my own at bedtime, complete with those epic Mellotron strings, and debated what exactly happens in those final stanzas. The girls demand to know: Is he okay? What happened? Does he come back?
Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can youHere am I floating ’round my tin can,
Far above the Moon,
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do.
“Omigosh,” said Connor after one hearing. “He killed himself.”
“No he did not!” I was indignant, partly because it had never occurred to me.
“Yes he did. ‘Tell my wife I love her very much’—and then his circuit goes dead? Come on, Dad.”
I’d heard the song a thousand times. Yes, I thought he might not have made it, but it never once occurred to me that he’d done himself in. Huh.
It makes sense. He was moved, all right. He was so transformed by the experience that he liberated himself from Ground Control, unhooked his tether, and went careening, blissfully, beyond the moon.
Okay then. Be careful what you wish for.
Ariadne’s threads
I was seeing my girls off to sleep Sunday night when suddenly, without warning, the Bronze Age broke loose.
It was one of those breath-holding parenting moments when you can’t believe your luck at being there to capture it. Delaney (5) announced that she had made up a myth of her own. For some reason I had the presence of mind to grab my laptop and transcribe as she spoke. Read it, then we’ll chat:
The Wall of Parvati
There was a girl named Medusa. And she knew this wall, a big wall, and she hated it. So one day, she sailed off in a boat with her sharpest sword and she went to that wall. When she got there, she took out her sword and destroyed the whole wall.
The god Parvati was watching her, the god of destroying, because it was her wall. So when Medusa left the wall, Parvati made the wall grow back up. When Medusa found out that it grew back up, she sailed off in her boat again, and when she got there, she cut the wall down again.
Parvati saw this happen (she’s an Egyptian), and when Medusa was gone again, she sent two of her Egyptian gods down to that wall and they made the wall grow again.
When Medusa heard about that, she didn’t want to come out in her boat again, so she put out one of her fastest snakes and made it slither to the wall. The snake used its very sharp tail to whip down the wall. But he couldn’t because the two gods were still there. He whipped the gods with his tail, and the poison went straight into them and they fell asleep, and then the snake whipped his tail against every piece of that wall and slithered back to Medusa.
Before I yak this to death, let me repaste her myth with elements cross-referenced to the myths Laney has heard as bedtime stories in recent weeks:
The Wall of Parvati1
There was a girl named Medusa.2 And she knew this wall, a big wall,3 and she hated it. So one day, she sailed off in a boat4 with her sharpest sword5 and she went to that wall. When she got there, she took out her sword and destroyed the whole wall.
The god Parvati was watching her, the god of destroying,6 because it was her wall. So when Medusa left the wall, Parvati made the wall grow back up. When Medusa found out that it grew back up, she sailed off in her boat again, and when she got there, she cut the wall down again.
Parvati saw this happen (she’s an Egyptian),7 and when Medusa was gone again, she sent two of her Egyptian gods8 down to that wall and they made the wall grow again.
When Medusa heard about that, she didn’t want to come out in her boat again, so she put out one of her fastest snakes9 and made it slither to the wall. The snake used its very sharp tail to whip down the wall. But he couldn’t because the two gods were still there. He whipped the gods with his tail, and the poison went straight into them and they fell asleep,10 and then the snake whipped his tail against every piece of that wall and slithered back to Medusa.
1 She knows Parvati from Ganapati Circles the World (Hindu). Parvati is the consort of Shiva and mother of Ganapati (aka Ganesha or Ganesh). Parvati’s also a Gryffindor, of course.
2 From Perseus and Medusa (Greek).
3 The Iliad (Greek). Much is made of the hated wall around Troy in this excellent retelling for grades 2-4.
4 Several of our recent myths included sailing quests — The Golden Fleece, The Iliad, The Odyssey (Greek).
5 Perseus killed Medusa with the infinitely sharp adamantine sword of Hermes (Greek).
6 Shiva’s pro-wrestling name is “The Destroyer.”
7 No idea. We haven’t done any Egyptian myths yet. The Disney flick Prince of Egypt, maybe?
8 This has been a theme in several of the myths we’ve read lately — the sending of surrogates on tasks — including Cupid and Psyche (Greek) and Proserpine and Pluto (Roman).
9 We’ve encountered two magical snakes recently: in the Garden of Eden (Judaic) and in the Sioux myth of the three transformed brothers. And Medusa has snakes for hair, of course, so maybe she plucked one out and sent it on a mission.
10 A jealous Venus tricked Psyche into inhaling a sleeping draught (Roman).
In that context, maybe you can see why I was all agog. My five-year-old daughter had constructed a syncretic midrash.
Midrash is a process by which new interpretations are laid on old legends or scriptures, and/or new stories are synthesized out of elements of older ones, usually for the purpose of instruction. Though early Jews freaked about syncretism across party lines–don’t make me link to the golden calf!–the construction of fictional midrash from within Judaic sources is recognized as a vital part of Jewish teaching.
In The Jesus Puzzle, Earl Doherty argues, with brilliantly grounded scholarship, that the gospel of Mark was just such a midrash, and that “Mark” did not mean it to be taken as literal fact any more than Delaney did. It was a teaching fiction.
But Laney’s work more closely resembles a deeper kind of mythmaking, one common in the Mediterranean Bronze Age and beyond: the syncretic merging of elements from different belief systems into something new and useful. There is much to suggest that the later character of Jesus is such a syncretic construct, sharing as he does the heroic attributes and biographical details of such earlier mythic figures as Mithras (born on Dec 25, mother a virgin, father the sky-god, 12 disciples, entombed in rock, rose on third day, etc), Krishna, Osiris, Tammuz, and countless others.
A fascinating tangent, believe you me, but I’ll never find my way out if I start with that.
So ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures spun new tapestries from the threads of religions all around them. Now here’s a 21st century kindergartener doing the same thing. Makes you think we’re onto something fundamentally human.
If we’d exposed Delaney to just one culture, one religion, she could be forgiven for imagining a no-kidding god on the other end of that one dazzling thread. By instead following a hundred threads, she realizes there are just lots of people on the other end — just plain folks, like Delaney — each of them spinning something lovely and new from the old threads they picked up. Follow enough of those threads and you find yourself outside the labyrinth of religious belief entirely, blinking in the sun.
The thing that left me most awestruck is that she even thought of mythmaking as a thing she could do. Picture a Sunday School kid making up his own bible story. Even though that’s just how Matthew and Luke were elaborated out of Mark, once the 4th century bishops weighed in and made it “gospel,” further creative energies have been (shall we say) discouraged. With rare exceptions, we are now receivers of that written tradition, not co-creators. That’s why the experience of hearing Delaney spin her tale moved me so deeply. She recognizes other human hands in the spinning of the mythic tapestry — so why not add her own?
northing at midlife
Reader Jim Lemire comments:
All this talk of death, these midlife blog changes. what’s next? A Ferrari and a bikini-clad coed?Reader A.C. emails:
You mention other books in waiting. All parenting? All secularist? Out with it!
In the face of those two perfect setups, I am unable to muster the simple self-control to not share an excerpt from one of my unpublished books, Northing at Midlife — my death-obsessed philosophical secular travel narrative. I know I know, the Sombrero Galaxy doesn’t care that I had my midlife crisis while hiking the long-distance trails of Britain. Shut up.
Excerpt from NORTHING AT MIDLIFE ©2005 by Dale McGowan
At midlife, in the absence of much else to strive toward, Death snaps back into focus as – let’s face it – the actual, ultimate goal.
That’s when you begin to notice your heartbeat as you lie in bed and wonder how it just keeps, you know, doing that, and how long it will keep doing that, and whether thinking about it for hours at a time could make it stop doing that. It is gently suggested that you increase your visits to the doctor from – well, never, to pretty much always, and to start inviting gloved fingers to go adventuring through some of your least-often-fingered regions – in search, of course, of Death.
When you hit that barrier to your timeline’s eastward progress, that increasingly three-dimensional awareness of your own impermanence, you have two choices: carom wildly to the south, or veer purposefully northward. It all depends on whether your reaction to that glimpse of the Reaper is screaming denial or a sort of terrible fascination. The forty-five-year old in a convertible with the Texas A&M Pep Squad and Drill Team in the back seat is Southbound. He is busily denying Death by embracing youth – quite literally, in this guy’s case. He has a lot more alcohol, sex and speeding tickets than I, but he will still Die. There’s just a greater chance in his case that when it finally gets him, it will come as a genuine surprise.
Something to be said for that, I suppose.
No I don’t suppose. Not really. I’m Northing, myself. While Southbound Guy is trying to think himself younger, I’m actually thinking myself older, squinting into the distance with ever-less-capable eyes. It’s meditative, Northing is, and introspective, and quiet, and mature – and, I’m fiercely proud to say, humble. Southing happens in public while dressed in a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to the crotch. Northing is solitary. Southing crushes a beer can on its forehead while shouting “Woooo.” Northing drinks alone.
During my first career, teaching at a small midwestern liberal arts college (the name of which escapes me at the moment), I had the golden opportunity of a semester’s leave, during which I took my family to live in England. Being forty-two, I thought it an ideal time to schedule my midlife crisis. I’d long since decided that my crisis, when it occurred, would be of the Northerly ilk, if for no other reason than fourteen years ago I made the tactical error of marrying happily and well, which leaves all the really fun bits of Southing off-limits. So I knew it was to be then, at age forty-two, and there, in England. Still didn’t know just exactly how.
Northing is my authorial heartbreak, the work of mine for which I have the greatest affection but cannot seem to get published after two years trying.
Okay, enough self-indulgence! Back to, uh…blogging!
the total perspective vortex
- September 10, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, Science, wonder
- 0
In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
One of my favorite sillinesses (sillini?) about the human condition is the distance between our self-image and our situation — the gap between how big we feel and how small we are. It is the central joke in the human comedy. I make myself the butt of that joke just about every day.
Every time I sit down to post a blog entry, I feel a twitch of self-loathing — until I remember I’m not significant enough to hate, at which point I laugh at myself and blog about it. At which point etc.
Case in point: my self-worth continues to be joined at the hip with the Amazon rank of Parenting Beyond Belief. To see a running chart of my mood for the past couple of months, click here. Note the horrible slide during the post-Newsweek-dry-pipeline debacle of late July, which I won’t even mention.
The book launched in the second week of April in Amazon’s top 0.1% — around 3,300 out of 3.5 million. This was good, because the success or failure of this book (frankly) will determine whether or not I make a go of authoring as a second career. Just when you thought it was all about raising the next generation of freethinkers, eh? I have five other books in the pipeline, you know, dammit, three of them finished and waiting for publishers. Anyway.
Two days ago, the Amazon rank dipped for a moment to 6600. This is still outrageously good for a book of this type, especially so far after launch, and yes, I know that most authors would sell their sisters to hit 6600 at all — gee hey, how’s my novel doing? — but having become all-too-accustomed to that top 0.1%, my mood darkened several clicks anyway. I had my 4 o’clock G&T at 2:30. A mistake I had made for my favorite freelance client was crushing my conscience. I was a failure as a father, as a husband, as a provider, as a writer, as a citizen of the world.
This morning, as we entered the sixth month of availability, the rank is at 2,600, and everything reversed. I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me. I am Leonardo DiCaprio on the bow of the Titanic, albeit better-looking.
The eye-rollingly pathetic lunacy of both of these reactions is plenty clear to me without help, thangyavurrymush. But help was present nonetheless on the same screen that brought me both ends of that silly-monkey emotional spectrum:
It’s M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, among the more elegant things in space and (lucky it) my current desktop background. And it doesn’t care what my Amazon rank is. It doesn’t care what I am. Nor do any of the quadrillion intelligent beings who most likely live in M104 know or care that one of the species on one planet in the galaxy they call “that smudge” has named their galaxy after a hat.
It is some comfort to realize that they surely have their sillini, too.
I’ll close with a perspective booster that made each of my three kids say OMIGOSH, NOWAY, or YOUGOTTABEKIDDING three times in one minute:
It’s not a Total Perspective Vortex, but as Douglas Adams pointed out, don’t even wish for that.
MoL at midlife
NOTICE FROM THE MANAGEMENT OF THE MEMING OF LIFE
100 Meming of Life Plaza
Box 8675309
Atlanta GA
Dear employees and visitors,
According to randomly-Googled information, there are 2.8 jillion active blogs today, give or take a plethora. The lifespan of the average blog is three months. So we here at The Meming of Life are feeling pretty darn significant as we approach six months and fifty postings, mostly about being secular, parenting, secular parenting, and the book Parenting Beyond Belief.
The Management would like to take a moment to announce some workplace changes, effective immediately:
1. The following registered users are fired: ViagraBarn223, MeetSexyLocals, and MissTeenSC.
2. All vacation days are hereby cancelled for the blog staff in order to accommodate our new publication policy of shorter, more frequent, and more slipshod posts.
3. Please show a little consideration for your fellow website visitors. If any of the half-eaten sandwiches in the back of the fridge belong to you, remove them before the end of the day on Friday.
4. You may have noticed a new menu bar feature called “about the author and the blog,” added at the insistence of a regular reader. (Happy Mom?)
5. You may also have noticed a button to add this blog to your Technorati favorites. Would it kill you?
6. Beginning next week, lurkers who never comment will be charged for parking.
7. Attempts are underway to make MoL a better citizen of the blogosphere by maintaining a blogroll and quoting from, pointing to, and communicating with other blogs. No blog is an iLand.
8. Posts currently in production include
> i heart sam and richard — a skimmer’s lament
> bigger than myself
> guest post by pbb contributor pete wernick
> it’s so humiliating — in a good way
> spare the rod — and spare me the rest
> a peek at pbb2
> the quéstion of québec
> our man in washington — a report from aaicon 2007
> whatever happened to capital letters?
> seeing is conceiving — the power of the visual
> emancipating kids from talent bondage
Several of these are in direct fulfillment of reader requests. Others are in direct defiance of reader requests. Don’t hesitate to drop us a message so we can fulfill or defy you: dale [AT ] parentingbeyondbelief DOT com
Sincerely,
The Management
the long habit, part III
- September 07, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In death
- 9
Death [is] the only immortal who treats us all alike.
MARK TWAIN’S last written statement, quoted in Moments with Mark Twain by Albert Bigelow Paine
Why is it, that those who die (or nearly die, depending on your definitions) and are revived, regardless of culture, religious beliefs or age, so often describe the near-death experience in the same way – a journey through a tunnel toward increasingly bright light, accompanied by out-of-body sensations, flashes of memory, visions of loved ones, and feelings of overwhelming peace and contentment?
The traditional answer, of course, is that the dying person has glimpsed a paradise beyond death. And the universally paradisaic nature of that moment seems to suggest we all make the grade in the end. Who ever heard of people coming back on the operating table with stories of flames?
Near the beginning of my midlife stare-down with the Reaper, I got to wondering if any competing hypotheses existed for the Everybody-Goes-to-Heaven explanation of the near-death experience. Not that I had any problem with that one, you understand: having taken Pascal up on his Wager, I’d be happy to have a free pass in the unlikely event that I and my fellow Sunday morning recumbents have it all wrong. But I’ll settle for the actual truth anytime. So I wondered.
Imagine my surprise to learn that not one of those phenomena – tunnel with bright light, out-of-body feelings, hearing what others in the room said after you’ve died, memory flashes, appearing loved ones, peace and contentment – not one of them is the least bit mysterious. We know why they all happen.
The Air Force puts its high-altitude pilots through intense testing. One of the tests involves sitting a pilot in the world’s largest centrifuge and spinning him or her until all of the blood runs out of the brain into the blood vessels on the periphery. (Call your local Air Force recruiter.) They pass out when this happens (wimps) – at which point the centrifuge slows, the blood returns to the brain, and they very often wake up laughing and woohooing. Ha ha ha, woohoo!
Guess what else? Tunnel, bright light, memories, loved ones, contentment. The works. These pilots report experiences that are essentially identical to the “near-death” experience. Why?
When your heart stops beating, the blood, not surprisingly, drains from your brain. The Air Force centrifuge simulates that blood-starved brain without stopping the heart. And we know, from these and other experiments, what happens when the blood drains out of the brain: billions of cortical neurons begin to fire randomly. Neurons in the visual cortex are more densely packed toward the center (fovea), so when those neurons begin to fire randomly, the person “sees” darkness at the periphery and increasing brightness toward the center. As more and more neurons fire, the bright center grows in size. The effect is one of moving toward a bright light down a long tunnel.
The neurons firing randomly in the prefrontal cortex trigger random flashes of memory, giving the effect of “life flashing before your eyes.” As the sensory neurons connecting us to our bodies fail, an out-of-body feeling naturally kicks in. Again—these aren’t guesses, a competing hypothesis to put next to heaven in the lineup. We know they happen, and how, and when, and why.
Hearing is the last sense to go, which explains reports of having heard what others have said after apparently being demised.
And the laughing of the pilots, the woohooing? This is the loveliest part, the experience that cured Montaigne of his fear of dying. As our head loses its lunch, the anterior pituitary gland, our private little opium den, floods the brain with endorphins. Whenever the body is stressed – and having the blood sucked out of your brain apparently qualifies as stress – these endorphins, powerful opiates that they are, suffuse us with feelings of tremendous happiness and well-being, an adaptive response that helps us make the best possible decisions in dangerous circumstances. We feel wonderful, peaceful, contented. This contentment combines with the fireworks in the prefrontal memory to produce scores of our happiest memories—like loved ones embracing us, accepting us, welcoming us. So that’s what’s most important to us: love. I’ve got to write that down. Hey, I just did! Woohoo!
The near-death experience stands fully explained not by guesses but by things we know for a fact occur. So why do we still opt for the other explanation?
Silly rabbit.
And it all fits with Montaigne’s description rather nicely, don’t you think? One minute you’re vomiting blood and writhing in pain; the next you can’t feel your body and you’re stoned on methadone. Going forward would have to seem more attractive than heading back. Hell, I’d push life off my lips, too.
There’s a symmetrical loveliness to the fact that my body’s lifelong tendency to cling to survival is reversed once it’s time to go — that the gears that now keep me impelled toward existence will, when the time is right, shift ever so gently, and impel me no less confidently toward nonexistence. I’m consoled by the way that underlines the naturalness of death, and by the further realization that this body of mine, yet again, seems to know what it’s doing. I can relax a bit further into my seat and enjoy the ride.
We’re never going to be free of our natural, adaptive, and understandable fear of losing the magnificent experience of being alive. But the thoughts of other mortals like Epicurus, Montaigne, and Lewis Thomas – who all had the same personal stake in the subject that you and I do – lead me further away from fear and closer to acceptance and understanding. Closer. And they can do the same for our kids as they get older and more sophisticated in their wonderings. The single most significant and profound thing about our existence is that it ends, rivaled only by the fact that it begins. The more knowledge I gather about the two profound bookends between which I find myself, the more I seem to settle into my seat.
I’m still not ready to give Death a big wet smooch, but thanks to some of these reflections, I can at least bear to look at it now. From a distance.
Let’s say about forty years.
***
For more on near-death research, see this article in The Guardian.
A summary of the study that first noted similarities between G-LOC (gravitationally-induced loss of consciousness) and near-death experiences can be found here (there’s also some hooey on this website–but this page, at least, is useful)
I first learned of the centrifuge studies from Intimate Universe, a simply spectacular video series about the human body and human development that was created by BBC Films several years ago. Discovery Education apparently issued an American version of the series, leaving out (imagine my surprise) the last segment, which deals directly and poignantly with death. Grab the BBC version if you can — many public libraries carry it.
***
the long habit, part I
What, me worry?
Epicurus of Samos, philosopher
The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.
Thomas Browne, dead person
If you haven’t visited The Death Clock, you really must. Enter your date of birth, height, weight and Body Mass Index — a measure of fitness, or more to the point, fatness — and the Death Clock spits out the day and date on which you’ll hear the galloping hooves of the pale horse.
Mine is Tuesday, December 9, 2036.
Until that date I can step whistling into the paths of all manner of passenger and freight vehicles. I can season my steak with asbestos and press my vital organs against the microwave oven as it cooks.
Unless, here at midlife, I absorb the other, far more important, more honest and less entertaining message of the Death Clock. You’re probably not going to Die today, goes that message — but you are, most assuredly, on some actual date in the easily-conceivable future, going to Die.
The difference between death and ice cream — and yes, there is one
I am afraid to die. This puts me in the company of most sane people, Christians included. It’s something to leave off the résumé should I ever apply for a position as a suicide bomber, but aside from that, I don’t think it should count against me.
Reporters always (always) ask how, in the absence of religion, I intend to make the contemplation of death go down my children’s conceptual gullets like butter brickle ice cream on an August day. Or words to that effect. Depending on my mood, I either pretend that’s possible, or I don’t, since it isn’t. Death is hard to take, and it always will be. Darwin rather insists on it. And I like seeing a bit of the fear of death in my kids’ eyes now and again. Makes crossing the street so much easier.
And I can tell by the applause all around me — ancestors behind, descendants ahead — that “I don’t wanna die” is just the sort of thing that I, as the ziploc-baggie-of-the-moment for my family’s genetic material, am supposed to feel, for their sakes. I’m the keeper of the keys.
Wait a minute. Come to think of it, that’s no longer true. Between 1994 and 2000, I lent my wife the keys enough times to produce three new bags of DNA, then went under the knife to ensure that, genetically speaking, I would be of no further use. My shift is over. I can clock out any time.
As a result of having completed my sole genetic responsibility, my fear of death no longer serves any real purpose. Perhaps vasectomies will eventually engender a population-level selective response whereby the severing of the vas deferens leads the now-superfluous man to impale himself, thornbirdlike, on the surgeon’s waiting blade, thus relieving the tribe of thirty additional football seasons of pressure on the stocks of Cheetos and Michelob. Until then, boys, fear death and eat up.
Doubting (Dylan) Thomas
I do think there are ways to diminish the fear of death and dying, and a post last spring (Milk-Bones for the Immortally Challenged) included a tip or two from Epicurus, who has now had 2,277 years to test his hypotheses. (No word yet on how it’s going, which tends to support his point.) But there are others, and a recent conversation with my boy reminded me that I hadn’t blogged death in awhile.
I don’t remember how it came up, but Connor and I were talking about the last moments of life. Though I don’t want or expect my kids to ever find death yummy, I’d like to keep their concerns about it manageable, and I’ve always found understanding to be the best path away from fear. In this case, I was able to draw on another in my arsenal of death-softeners — the fact that most people, by all accounts, don’t go out kicking and/or screaming, but do, in spite of Dylan Thomas, go gentle into that good night.
Here’s another Thomas — doctor, biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas — writing in one of the most profoundly wonderful popular science books of the past century, Lives of a Cell:
In a nineteenth-century memoir on an expedition in Africa, there is a story by David Livingston about his own experience of near-death. He was caught by a lion, crushed across the chest in the animal’s great jaws, and saved in the instant by a lucky shot from a friend. Later, he remembered the episode in clear detail. He was so amazed by the extraordinary sense of peace, calm, and total painlessness associated with being killed that he constructed a theory that all creatures are provided with a protective physiologic mechanism, switched on at the verge of death, carrying them through in a haze of tranquillity.
I have seen agony in death only once, in a patient with rabies; he remained acutely aware of every stage in the process of his own disintegration over a twenty-four-hour period, right up to his final moment. It was as though, in the special neuropathology of rabies, the switch had been prevented from turning.
Lewis isn’t the only witness against Dylan. There are countless testimonies suggesting that the process of dying is more often a peaceful, tranquil one than not. And that’s some darn useful consolation — since Epicurus really (truly) cured me of the worst of my fears of death itself, only the fear of dying remains to be dealt with. For that, I’ll turn next time to my favorite little Frenchman.
carl…is that you?
- August 31, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In Parenting, Science, wonder
- 19
I can’t remember the last time I was so delighted by an essay that I actually sat down and recopied it. Probably something by Carl Sagan. Here’s an excerpt of something that’s very much up Carl’s alley — an alley that happens to run smack-dab into my own.
From Sky and Telescope, August 2007, p. 102:
We Are Stardust: Spread the Word
BY DANIEL HUDONI FIRST HEARD the phrase in Joni Mitchell’s song Woodstock: “We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion-year-old carbon.” I next came across it while reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. But as with any other profound idea, it took years to sink in. Hearing it again at a recent lecture, I realized I could hear it every day for the rest of my life and still be amazed.
Think about it. In their hot, dense cores, stars are fusing light elements into the heavy ones crucial for life, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and iron. The tiny bits of unused matter left over from these thermonuclear reactions become starlight via the most famous formula in physics, Einstein’s E=mc2.
We’ve known this for only half a century. In 1957 Alastair Cameron, Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle solved the mystery of the origin of the elements. They showed that except for hydrogen, most helium, and traces of other light elements born in the Big Bang, everything else has been cooked up in stars.
It gets better. While low-mass dwarf stars like the Sun keep most products of their reactions locked up inside, high-mass supergiant stars spread the wealth in self-obliterating explosions known as supernovae. Some of Earth’s rarest elements (such as gold and uranium) are so scarce because they’re forged only in the spectacular deaths of rare massive stars.
On average, I heard in the same lecture, each atom in our bodies has been processed through five generations of stars. So we’re not just stardust — we’re stardust five times over, billions of years in the making!
Daniel goes on to suggest that we all remind each other of this incredibly profound fact in everyday exchanges (“Hi, my name is John. “Pleased to meet you. Did you know we’re made of stardust?”). He concludes:
Knowing this curious fact can give us pride in our origins: it’s like we’re descended from royalty — only better. Our stellar legacy connects us to the universe and to each other. Like the song says, we are golden — we are stardust. All of us.
If your kids had King Arthur as an ancestor, you’d coo it to them in their cribs. But have you told them yet that they’re descended from the stars? If they don’t know yet — geez, folks, what are you waiting for?
(For the complete Hudon essay, pick up the August S&T and flip to the back.)
Nice Guys Finish–an interview with Hemant Mehta
The annual convention of the Atheist Alliance International (AAI) is coming up at the end of September in Washington, DC. Included on the be-still-my-heart roster of speakers are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Julia Sweeney, Daniel Dennett, and Eugenie Scott.
Oh, and me.
I’ll be the one in bobby sox and a poodle skirt screaming, “SAM!! Over HERE, Sam!! I have ALL your records!! I know all the lyrics to End of Faith, listen, listen: ‘The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a…’ OMIGOSH, HE BLEW ME A KISS!!” (Faint.)
But it’s another AAI convention that’s on my mind at the moment — Kansas City ’06, where I sat listening to an articulate and thoughtful twentysomething lad at the podium as he suggested atheists ought to show a friendlier face to the religious world than we often do.
He made the case that intentional ridicule and insult directed at religious folks are especially counterproductive. Included among his examples was the “Smut for Smut” campaign at the University of Texas San Antonio, in which atheist students offered to trade pornography for Bibles.
“BULLSHIT!” screamed a sixty-ish audience member near me. The speaker continued, so the guy in the audience stood and yelled again. “THAT’S BULLSHIT! Those people have courage, they’re out there fighting for your rights, and you ought to be honoring their courage!! For you to stand up there and…”
You get the idea. A kind of atheist “Support Our Troops” thing.
The speaker, seemingly unrattled, simply expressed his reasons again, while Mr. Bullshit sat, shook his head side to side, and bitched to his tablemates.
It was a powerful moment, a genuine clash between different visions of atheist activism. Both seek to move atheism out of the margins, but only one sees force of one kind or another as the way to get there.
Mr. Bullshit isn’t alone in thinking that a two-by-four between the eyes of religious folks is a good tool for advancing freethought. But neither is the speaker alone in thinking otherwise.
A few weeks ago I received a heartfelt email from a gentleman who saw the Newsweek article about PBB and wanted to express his hope that it did not focus on combating religion:
What I fear is that the momentum there appears to be today [in the popularity of freethought books] will hit an impassable wall of resistance because most people will still see Atheists and Agnostics as negative-oriented “spoilers”….I just don’t think we’re going to win this ideological war with criticism, argument, attack, and anger….I believe the only way Atheists and Agnostics will ever grow as a group is by offering people a joyful, wonderful alternative to religion….And in our own lives we should lead by example of how fulfilling one’s life can be without God.
Sadly, I can’t seem to find people who want to take this approach. I do not believe we can get [out of the margins] by attacking religion and people’s belief in God. Nor can we get there by assuming that Believers are usually stupid, ignorant, or brainwashed. I believe we can get there by offering an alternative that is as viable as religion and belief in God. I believe we can also coexist with Believers.
I gently suggested that, if he couldn’t find others taking that approach, he should look a little harder. There are scads of people out there working toward exactly the vision he advocates. I offered, as a shining example, this guy:
In addition to being the aforementioned speaker in Kansas City, Hemant Mehta is the author of The Friendly Atheist, one of the sharpest, wittiest, and most informative blogs on the block; author of I Sold My Soul on Ebay, a thought-provoking and fresh look at religious belief through a nonbeliever’s eyes; chair of the board of directors of the Secular Student Alliance; and one of the foremost advocates of nice-guy atheism. He was kind enough to take a moment to answer a few prying questions.
Q
Why so friendly?A
Most religious people I know aren’t doing the things atheists are so opposed to… They’re not pushing an anti-evolution agenda. They’re not trying to stop gay marriage or impede embryonic stem-cell research. But they do pray and they do have faith in God. I wholeheartedly accept that they are wrong in their beliefs, but they’re not the major problem.I think we can reach out to those people and get them on our side. We need to do that. They already are on our side about most social issues and they believe in separation of church and state. Those concerns are much more important to me than their belief in the supernatural.
And the way to reach out to those people is to be friendly and to explain who I am, why I’m an atheist, and why that’s ok. It doesn’t mean I agree with their beliefs or that I am conceding anything to them.
Hemant is one of those rare people with whom I seem to agree constantly. You know the type? Read his blog and see if you don’t find yourself nodding like a damn bobblehead.
Q
I know some non-religious folks (UUs, mostly, come to think of it) with a sort of “universal friendliness” toward religion and religious ideas. You seem to strike a more careful balance, discerning between those things that deserve respect and those that deserve critique. How do you strike that balance?A
If their beliefs are personal and they’re not hurting anyone else, I’m not too worried about it. Sure, I can debate with the people and try to convince them that they’re wrong, but it’s not going to do much good. Even if you “win” the argument, you haven’t accomplished much.On the other hand, when supernatural beliefs start causing harm, we have a problem. I’m referring to terrorists who act in the name of God, “psychics” who con vulnerable (and gullible) people out of their money, or certain Christian leaders whose clout helps bad legislation to get passed. Those people deserve to be criticized. Their faulty thinking and ignorance — due to their faith — is hurting others. By calling out their beliefs, we’re helping others who may be victims of their actions.
Q
Atheist meetings of all kinds, from local chapters to national conventions, are often far too self-congratulatory for me. I’d like to see the same critical balance struck when we look in the mirror. What is the biggest whack in the head (or two or three) you’d like to give to atheists as a group?A
Here’s a story for you. There was recently a poll on the website for Larry King Live, asking people about their religion affiliation. Initially, “Christians” were in the lead and “atheists” were in second. Some websites, mine included, encouraged atheists to submit a vote in the poll. A day later, the number of atheists was *overwhelming* — apparently, we were over 70% of the population.Obviously, that’s not a scientifically accurate poll. But as one astute commenter mentioned on my blog, the results showed that we can get atheists to work together when it comes to irrelevant stuff, like this poll. When it comes to “rallying the troops” during election time or supporting national organizations who can speak on behalf of atheists on a large stage, we’re pathetic. I wish we could get our act together and convince other atheists that by ourselves, we’re not going to be able to accomplish much. We won’t be respected or accepted. But by supporting common causes and like-minded organizations, we could change that.
It’d also be nice if atheists would work harder at pointing out the benefits of a Godless worldview (as opposed to a religious one) and how you don’t need religion to be a good, moral, happy person. Instead, we just find joy in telling religious people how stupid they are. It gets us nowhere. But it does create more enemies.
Q
And how about the other side — I mentioned the heckler in Kansas City. Do you get much of that kind of flak from atheists who think you’re too accommodating of religion?A
The flak I get isn’t as bad as the Heckler 🙂 There are some atheists who think I’m too easy on religion. We may hold the same (non-)beliefs, and I’d say we also have the same passion for atheism, but like I said, I don’t think we’re focusing our energies where we should be, and they disagree.One thing I do want to point out: I get very *little* mail from Christians who tell me I’m going to Hell. That was very surprising to me. Not all Christians love what I wrote in the book, but most of them write very civil emails. I was told by other atheists to expect a barrage of angry Christian letters, but it never happened. Most Christians that write me resonated with the tone of the book.
Q
You know, I heard the same dire warning and got the same civil result. I think we pay so much attention to the nuts that we begin to expect that of all religious folks. Okay, another question. Give me two visions of the future, 50 years down the pike—one pessimistic, the other optimistic. You’re in your late seventies, I’ve been dead for 49 years, the Hilton Administration is in its third term. What’s the religious state of affairs in the U.S.?A
Pessimistic vision: You’re dying in a year, and I’m supposed to be pessimistic?! 🙂Okay—the world in this state wouldn’t be very different from where it is now. Our government may not officially be a theocracy, but the Christian Right has the power to make decisions for all of us. We’ve made no progress in obtaining rights for all people. Scientific research in the field of biology is all but halted because we can’t get federal funding for the most promising research there is. And I wouldn’t be surprised if abortion was made illegal.
Optimistic vision: Religion’s not going to go away, but ideally, in 50 years, I could see a country with a higher percentage of atheists (from ~15% now to possibly 30% in the future). We would have more seats in local and national government. We’ve helped acquire rights for all people and passed legislation that helps all people, religious or not. We’re not interfering with the private decisions of Americans, as long as they’re not stopping anyone else from living their own lives as they wish. And when a person says publicly, “I’m an atheist,” no one flinches. I think that’s entirely within reason. But it won’t happen if atheists continue acting the way we have been for so long.
Q
One more: how’s I Sold My Soul on Ebay doing?A
It’s going well… I have yet to see exact numbers (in terms of sales) but there is a lot of response from people who have read the book. Many bloggers and mainstream media have written about it, and there are still some projects stemming from the book in the works. It has also helped me transition into writing my blog, which I probably would not have started without the eBay auction. At many atheist conventions I’ve gone to since the auction, more people have heard about my website than the book! And I think that’s wonderful; it just speaks to the message I’m trying to convey, that we could achieve more success with a “friendlier” image.
Helluva guy, don’t you think?
One of the trickiest bits to negotiate in raising kids without religion is engendering the right attitudes about religion and religious people. Some aspects of religious belief deserve a helluva lot of loud and direct critique. I want them to learn to do that fearlessly, like Harris and Dawkins. But other aspects and actions deserve loud and direct applause. I want them to learn that as well [LIKE DAWKINS AND HARRIS. More on that later]. Discernment is called for. While never hesitating to criticize religious malignancies, we should bend over backwards to catch religious folks being and doing good if we ever expect them to notice us being and doing good. It stands to reason.
I feel a coinage coming on: Let’s call that hemantic discernment.
No marginalized group in history has gained a place at the table by telling the majority it is too stupid to live, or by closing its eyes and telling the majority you better damn well be gone before I count to ten. Imagine the dead end that gay rights would have encountered if the movement spoke of working toward a world with no heterosexuals. Imagine the grinding halt to civil rights legislation if black Americans insisted that white be recognized as inferior to black. By instead seeking nothing more or less than a shared place at the table, these movements moved. Until we realize the same thing and extend a far friendlier hand to the more reasonable representatives of the (most likely shocked and surprised) religious majority, we will be deservedly stuck on the margins.
Don’t worry. People like Hemant just might manage to save us from ourselves.
i’d like to buy a consonant
It’s not that I’m spoiling for a fight. Like I said, I’m not about to start shooting my mouth off about church-state boundaries here in the dawning months of our entry to the Deep South unless my kids come home from school with John 3:16 tattooed to their foreheads. In permanent ink. A little temporary kiddy gospel tatt…well, where’s the harm in that.
When in Romans, I always say.
But my trigger finger flinched just a wee bit at my son’s middle school curriculum night tonight as I sat in his Family and Consumer Sciences (FACS) class, listening to the teacher as she explained her fascinating grading rubric.
My eyes drifted around the room, coming to rest at last on a sign taped in the upper left corner of the blackboard: CHARACTER BUILDERS!, it said, with a bunch of tiny cartoon construction workers crawling all over the big cartoon balloon letters.
Running across the top of the board to the right of the sign were twelve more laminated signs, each with a character word in colorful cartoon balloon letters, each crawling with adorable little hardhatters from Animated Workers Local 382:
HONESTY was first, followed by LOYALTY, ACCEPTANCE, PERSEVERANCE, RESPONSIBILITY, COURAGE, GENEROSITY, RESPECT, CONFIDENCE, KINDNESS, COMPASSION…
Corner-tacked to a strip of cork above the far right end of the board was a lone piece of paper dangling lazily over the twelfth and final character word, obscuring all but the first two letters:
FA
Uh oh.
The voice at the front of the classroom had become Charlie Brown’s teacher — wah waaaah wah, wa-wa-wa-waah — when I suddenly noticed that the wafting breeze of the air conditioning vent was lifting at the corner of the paper, ever so slightly, teasing me with the hope of the third letter. One gust, slightly stronger than the rest, lifted the paper enough to reveal that letter:
I
Oh crap. I broke out in a cold sweat. This is one of the exact scenarios Stu Tanquist described in PBB, an explicit endorsement in a public school of FAITH as a necessary component of character. In choosing his battles, that was one Stu rightly chose to fight.
Dammit! I don’t wanna. I really don’t.
I took the measure of my mettle and a deep breath. By the time I exhaled, I had decided. If FAITH is listed in my son’s classroom as a “CHARACTER BUILDER!”, I have to address it. Somehow. Delicately, judiciously, I would have to address it.
Dammit.
Suddenly the parents around me rose from their seats and began filing out of the room. The wah-wah had ended, the session was over. I let them file past me, then followed the last schlumpy dad toward the door.
As I passed the dangling sheet of paper, I glanced furtively from side to side, then lifted it to see the word beneath:
FAIRNESS.
Oh. Well okay then.