Adrift in the Tides of Time~~Random Notes 2

Basic Quest for Closure

XXXIII 

Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn 

In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn; 

Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal'd 

And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn.

~~Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat (Tr. Edward Fitzgerald)

While ubiquitous luminaries in punditland, notably Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer, discombobulate over what they deem ‘psychotic’ wall-to-wall reportage on the hunt for MH370, Jack Shafer and Greta Van Susteren opine the show must go on.  Admittedly, at times the coverage does not include news any longer but stale narratives on recycled events.  Nonetheless, I count myself in the latter camp of continued coverage.

The search for Malaysian Airlines MH370 needs to continue until a point is reached when closure is deemed to have been attained.  Closure, however, is a very relative concept neither arbitrary nor quantifiable.  It is definitely subjective, mentally and emotionally.  It is a reckoning that each individual must calibrate the measure of equilibrium in his/her own soul.

To take a very personal example, I have just attained another degree of closure on the disastrous 11-Sep-01 events (internally I refer to as Jihad911) after I had written about it.  In that disaster I only lost a contract for a consulting engagement, not kith and kin.  And I’m still seething in umbrage that the dead should be properly avenged, any which way we can.

To bury your own dead with respect and deference, if not veneration had been an institutional ritual through time immemorial.  It has been integral to not only the Judeo-Christian ethical mores but also true of pagan societies of antiquity.  If by a plethora of happenstance you find yourself unable to take part in such rites the pangs of frustration and remorse gnaws at the fabric of your soul.

I am somewhat of a foremost authority on the gravity of this predicament.  By a combination of choice and circumstances, mostly of my own making [cf. pp.12~13, op.cit.], I was not able to attend the funerals of both my parents.  Rationalize it as I may, it has remained a heavy burden on my conscience that I’m certain shall stay with me till I retire from this mortal coil and fulfill the promise to [p.105 op.cit.]

. . . donate my cadaver to the Stony Brook University Medical Department, for cute and curious medical students to slice up. I consider it a more desirable arrangement compared to the prospect of being served up as an unwilling if non-resenting victual for ungrateful fat little earthworms.

It is therefore with more than just a generous dose of Verstohlenmitleid that I absorb and personalize the anguish on the faces of the would-be mourners for the 239 victims of the ill-fated MH370.  To the pragmatic in outlook and stoic in disposition, the reality of mourning is not grieving over the departed but over ourselves who are left behind.  The departed have paid their dues and crossed the bar.  Ergo, as Abraham Lincoln famously emphasized, 

. . . .It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they . . . have thus far so nobly advanced.

Whether or not we prove ourselves equal to the task remains to be seen.  As we venture to find out we can only allow to

Let tears flow free now to our sorrows’ vent

Sad thoughts are lighter made if by tears spent;

Receive the cheers that whosoever sends

Sorrow is lighter made if shared with friends.

~~Asumen, A Note of Consolation [p.158 op.cit.]

Some proponents of continued coverage hasten to justify their advocacy by purporting to “address the human interest elements” of the story.  I prefer the less pretentious angle, namely, that it’s a matter of personal taste.  You pursue whatever tickles your fancy.  It would be flagrantly disingenuous to advance your human interest angle on the story primarily in terms of the number of potential victims.

The specter of two hundred thirty-nine potential victims of an accident whose cause is yet unknown, pales in comparison to other human tragedies routinely taking place in our midst that we don’t even notice.  For instance, on average 3,425 American babies of all races are killed every day by abortion, a practice routinely subsidized by taxpayer dollars.  There are even several advocacy organizations designed to provide financial, logistical and jurisprudential support for the practice.

Western civilization, by default, had planted the seeds of its demise and nurtured it into a formidable instrument of its own destruction:

1.   It has treated reproductive responsibility as a leisurely hobby, producing an average of one designer baby per potential mother at the twilight end of the woman’s fertility years.
2.   It has institutionalized the systematic destruction of the defenseless and most vulnerable of the next generation with abortion on demand.
3.   It has promoted and glamorized conjugal cohabitation not conducive to procreative reproduction.

The result is an aging civilization that does not have much regard for its values to the point that it has grown indifferent to its own procreative perpetuation.  Western culture has effectively consigned custody of The Human Condition, “the problem of reasserting the politics as a valuable realm of human action, praxis, and the world of appearances” to parties unknown, unconcerned, and unaccountable.

This does not in any way denigrate the fate of the 239 souls on board MH370.  Contrariwise, we endeavor to find them because it is for us the living to account for what may have occurred.

We need closure for our own edification, peace of mind and tranquility of soul.  We need to know whether their demise needs to be avenged.  If so, by who?  Failing this most basic obligation to the departed would be tantamount to surrendering to the Barbarians at the Gates the rites of presiding over our civilizational funeral pyre.

Hopscotching the Kabuki of Political Burlesque

Hopscotching the Kabuki of Political Burlesque

XXXIV 

Then of the Thee in Me that works behind 

The Veil, I lifted up my hands to find 

A Lamp amid the Darkness; and I heard, 

As from Without--"The Me Within Thee Blind!

~~Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat

 To simultaneously paraphrase and parody Shakespeare, this is the winter of our discontent made summer by the Solar Flare of Presidential incompetence on the State of the Union.

Beyond its ceremonial obeisant significance, the State of the Union Address had been diminished since we anointed a community organizer into the Oval Office.  Maybe you were just too dyslexic to even notice it.  That its yearly occurrence has been ensured by a Constitutional mandate  (Article II, Section 3) had not made the sufferance thereof any more endurable.

This year’s version consisted of more than sixty-five minutes of bloviation, unadulterated by any pretense at attempted adherence to civil decorum.  It was a global media extravaganza the closest approximation to attaining the consummate Nirvana of solipsism.  It was a far cry from the one-paragraph note that Pres. George Washington transmitted to Congress for the first State of the Union Report.

Admittedly, the shortening by five full minutes over the one I painstakingly endured through four years ago was a definite improvement.  While I had delved into that earlier version at length, {see, ch. 26 op.cit. at pp. 293 ff.} some of the comments therein bear repeating for clarity, since they are apropos of this year’s version to the proverbial “T”:

The self-proclaimed transformational President proceeded to transform a traditional ritual of governance in the hallowed halls of Congress into a locker-room pep talk on his expectations of how the nation ought to behave and think, and how his party and the opposition should conduct themselves in order to live up to his standards of decorum and accomplishments.

I did not have the nerve to suffer through the State of the Union festivities of 28-Jan-2014.  To circumvent the risk of shattering the TV set with my laptop (or vice versa) in a vain attempt to skip the farce, I resorted to watching the second tape of The Great Escape (no pun intended), the star-studded WWII classic.  I just could not ungrudgingly countenance soaking up Presidential shenanigans at primetime.

To atone for my deficit in patience and intestinal fortitude, I needed to go back to the official White House transcript of the address.  Buttressed with commentaries from the usual suspects in The Fox News Channel, I commend myself for having gallantly escaped the rites of martyrdom without missing much of the substance of the occasion.  Thank goodness for some residual freedom of choice.

I avidly love Opera but find the subtle intricacies of Okuni Kabuki of the Genruko period of feudal Japan too esoteric and bizarre, even for my not overly delicate sensibilities.  Even when I sojourned in the Land of the Rising Sun I did not have much stomach for the Grand Kabuki which has become the mainstay of the Obama Regime’s paradigm for governance. 

Pres. Obama’s State of the Union Addresses had been political vaudeville at its most grotesque embodiment.  This year’s version was no exception.  If anything, it had gotten worse in both form and substance.  It is a showcase of the political class’ calculatedly acquired expertise in squandering and abusing other people’s money.

America’s decline diminishes me because by a conscious and deliberate choice, I am a part of America.  Whenever and wherever Pres. Obama is blatantly mocked and disrespected, though I know deservedly so, it’s far beyond me to rejoice.  The sentiment is more akin to John Donne’s somber invocation for all of humanity, famously popularized by Ernest Hemmingway, in a novel on the Spanish Civil War:

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

~~John Donne, For Whom the Bell Tolls

When it comes to what has befallen America, Schadenfreude has never been appropriate.  Even the exact opposite emotion, namely, Verstohlenmitleid does not apply for the simple reason that I am very much a part of the tragic misfortune rather than merely a hapless bystander.  I cringed with both outrage and embarrassment as Pres.  Obama bungled his way through one flashpoint after another from Cairo to Crimea spiced with a hodgepodge of scandalous domestic controversies.

Time was, it used to be a source of bewilderment why nobody else is scandalized by the Obama paradigm of governance.  It certainly cannot be the case that my standard of integrity is far above the one embraced by the hoi polloi.  With barely a smirk and a wink, Pres. Obama maintained with a straight face that there is not even a smidgen of corruption at the IRS.  The rest of the nation ought to have been outraged.  Instead a majority joined the choir of “Amen and Hallelujah.”

A sense of déjà vu is not necessarily akin to vindication.  My observation earlier made remains accurate {p. 262 op.cit}:

. . . it has always been my contention, since I started becoming aware of politics, that without any exception, any nation always deserve the leadership that happens unto them, regardless of the process (or errors) they come by it.

‘There is no doubt that the subrogation of national sovereignty to a global authority is an act that properly falls in the rubric of high crimes and misdemeanors. It is a category of conduct constitutionally impeachable, by law.  But with [the Senate] controlled by the Democrats, in the infamous parlance of Al Gore, there simply is no “controlling legal authority” to make impeachment even a remote possibility.  . . .

Instead of feeling absolved by history, it feels more like having been kicked in the groin by the unfolding of events.  And there is nobody to kick back at to get relief from the umbrage which is verging on the insufferable.  Hence I revert to joining Samuel Johnson in his lament:

Others with softer Smiles, and subtler Art, [75]
Can sap the Principles, or taint the Heart;
With more Address a Lover's Note convey,
Or bribe a Virgin's Innocence away.
Well may they rise, while I, whose Rustic Tongue
Ne'er knew to puzzle Right, or varnish Wrong, [80]
Spurn'd as a Beggar, dreaded as a Spy,
Live unregarded, unlamented die.

~~ Samuel Johnson, London: A Poem

The Blizzard Chronicles Continued

The Blizzard Chronicles Continued

The cold earth slept below

Above the cold sky shone;

And all around,

With a chilling sound,

From caves of ice and fields of snow

The breath of night like death did flow

Beneath the sinking moon.

~~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lines: The cold earth slept below

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Long before the moon had a chance to sink into the abyss beyond the horizon, low-lying snow-clouds rudely concealed her majestic reign over the landscape.  Along with the atmosphere turning much colder, the snow-clouds hovered closer to the ground mimicking early morning fog of late-spring except being far much thicker, it felt like you needed to slice it with a machete or a samurai sword to navigate through, barring possession of Harry Potter’s Sorcerer’s Stone.

As the fog thickened, an inordinate drop in ground surface temperature ensued.  The thermometer outside the kitchen window registered as low as - 12°C.  While the HVAC system in the house was fully functional, I could just enjoy the scenery with a somewhat hidden guilty sense of Schadenfreude since I did not have to venture outside the glass doors if I did not want to indulge my sense of adventure.

A chill no coat, however stout,

Of homespun stuff could quite shut out,

A hard, dull bitterness of cold,

That checked, mid-vein, the circling race

Of life-blood in the sharpened face,

The coming of the snow-storm told.

~~John Greenleaf Whittier, Snow-Bound

Then the wages for my Schadenfreude were delivered in spades.  One fateful night, unbeknownst to us, the fan which reliably pumps the hot air from the attic to circulate it to the rest of the house overheated.  The thermostat was set to auto.  But the sensor was somehow disabled.  The cool off cycle ceased being triggered and the motor burnt to a crisp.

Mercifully, the incident only blew a fuse in the main box but kept the boiler fully functional.  The baseboards remained warm.  But without the air circulation mechanism everything else in the room got as cold as a puppies nose.  My stack of bottled Ylang ylang-scented Banaba extra virgin coconut oil congealed into the consistency of lard or refrigerated bacon fat.

The thermometer reading outside the kitchen window hovered in the range -12°C to +8°C.  Downstairs, the inside thermometer readout dropped from +25°C to +15°C.  Upstairs the readings dropped from +28°C to +18°C, give or take a degree.  A ten-degree drop in room temperature presented a complete shock to my thermostatic senses and my ambient relationship with my emotional disposition. 

Deployment of portable space heaters and a heating pad under the comforter helped some but not enough to ease the nagging feeling of a drastic reversal in fortunes which reverberated in the inner chambers of my reverie.

To fully capture the entire emotional gestalt into a coherent narrative, I ventured to find the exact antonym of Schadenfreude.  To my utter disappointment and near defeat, the only citation I could find was an old National Post blog from which I quote at length:

. . .A syndrome that has no name in English. We all know it; we just have no word for it.  It’s a condition for which even the Germans have no word, and Germans have a word for everything.

 For instance, they have a word for the opposite condition, a notorious word that other languages borrowed and English speakers often use without translation:  The word “Schadenfreude” describes the sublime euphoria that suffuses a person when he hears about the misfortune of another.

Here is why I only conceded a “near defeat.”  Based on my admittedly rudimentary familiarity with the anatomy of the German language, I reverse-engineered the contextual meaning of Schadenfreude to arrive at its exact single-word opposite which should be “Verstohlenmitleid.”  It literally means “furtive compassion.” Just nota bene, for posterity, you read it here first and you learned it first from me.

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So now instead of simply being immersed in Schadenfreude for the comfort and convenience that my modest and humble abode provide, I am simultaneously engulfed by the overwhelming Verstohlenmitleid on spying anybody brave the frigid landscape.  Ditto on hearing my neighbor cardinals peek and peck their beaks at the window pane from the evergreen holly athwart the garage roof-awning.  Unbridled by conscience or care, I can celebrate with Keats the anticipation of spring:

O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind,
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,
And the black elm tops ‘mong the freezing stars!
To thee the spring will be a harvest time.

~~John Keats, The Winter’s Wind

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It took all of ten days to order the parts and schedule the electrician to install the motor and get ventilation humming again.  It is absolutely amazing how we take for granted the equilibrium of normalcy if it were immune from the perturbation of the unpredictable.  Being jolted once in a while by the unexpected adds spice to the humdrum quietus of accustomed tranquility.

With the Ides of March almost upon us, I do not anticipate any further frigid renderings from the precipitate wrath of Chionê, daughter of Boreas and Oreithyia.  But then again, time was, in the last dozen years that we sojourned in this neck of the woods, there was at least one Thanksgiving Day and one Easter Sunday (not in concurrent season) when snow buried the grass by a couple of inches.

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The leaves of grass just started to peek through the compacted frigid mantle.  So, with an unadulterated glee and sympathy I appreciate in awe and wonderment the alacrity and condign composure with which the Fairy Queen endure to abjure connivance with the vagaries that mother nature could conjure.  Consequently, Verstohlenmitleid would afford me the luxury to resonate with Spenser in praise of tenacity and formidable resourcefulness:

Streight, bitter storms and balefull countenance,
  That makes them all to shiuer and to shake:
  Rayne, hayle, and snowe do pay them sad penance,
  And dreadfull thunder-claps (that make them quake)
With flames & flashing lights that thousand changes make.

~~Edmund Spenser, The Mutabilitie Cantos from The Faerie Queene