Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 37

Converging Echoes

A splendid episode of Nature on PBS last night brought us the latest news, you might say, of the Lipizzaners of Austria: “Legendary White Stallions.” The subject is close to home because, as I’ve had occasion to report quite a while back now ( link ), my Father was a dedicated patron and practitioner of dressage, the peak, you might say, of equestrian pursuits. Yesterday’s program (a rerun, I can’t find when it first aired) centered on the horses, their breeding, training, and ultimate retirement. This is a highly traditional activity, evidently very well funded, and seems to preserve, but in a fully-alive version, something grand that, surely even when it began, in 1565, in Vienna, would have seemed as strange and wonderful as it still appears to us today. This, then, is one of the echoes from the past I want to note.
The other begins with the program itself, Nature. Nature is the production of THIRTEEN, the New York-based PBS station. A lonely tree in what appears to be a desert-like region is its signature. I forget how this linkage got established, but I can never see that picture without immediately recalling a mini-series of the 1980s called The Flame Trees of Thika—indeed thinking, when I see it, that Nature’s logo is a flame tree. Yesterday I stood corrected. Brigitte, who is a great fan of that image, was a little startled when I called it the “flame tree” yesterday. “No, it’s not,” she said. “Thika? That’s a different sort of tree.” So off I went to check this matter out.
As always, in such situations, I was convinced that Brigitte was right, of course. Her eye for shapes is as infallible as is Pope Francis when addressing faith and morals formally. What I wished to discover is why I had made that linkage.
The first clue here was that both Nature’s tree and the Flame Trees are African. Nature’s image is an African acacia. And the Flame Trees of Thika? Well, the mini-series was made from a memoir written by Elspeth Huxley about her childhood in Kenya. Elspeth Huxley is part of the Huxleys—of whom Brigitte and I very fondly remember particularly Laura Huxley, the wife of Aldous, whose books, particularly This Timeless Moment and You Are Not the Target helped us cope with life in the long ago. So here is another echo. But back to those trees.
I bring two images. The first, by Peter Pazucha, a retired photographer ( link ), shows a panoramic view of flame trees. The second is one of the covers of Huxley’s memoir itself, showing the same shapes but not quite so prominently.

So it’s all in the shape of the trees. But here is a little more. Some of the flame trees (or those so named) belong to the same family as the acacia: the Fabaceae. But the Kenyan tree is most likely the Spathodea, family of Bignoniaceae; it has red flowers that resemble flames in bloom. Odd how things sometimes resemble one another even when their physical linkages are extremely distant. But in our memories certain things converge and signal the presence of values never forgotten.

Traditional Mysteries

Close readers of the economics pages may have noticed the confirmation of Janet Yellen as Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank—and wondered why, in the stories about this event, pundits are treating the lady as a de facto Queen of Finance in the United States—indeed, as one put it, the most powerful woman in the world.
After all. After all, if we stick strictly with the mechanics of the thing, the policy set by the Federal Reserve Bank is expressed in the decisions taken by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). That body is made up of twelve members and reaches decisions by voting. Seven of its members, including the chair, are members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Five other members are drawn from the twelve presidents of the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks of the United States. One of those, however, has a permanent seat on the FOMC, the president of the NewYork Federal Bank. The other four serve for one year and are then replaced by another four drawn from regional federal banks.
What we have here, in other words, is a straight-forward democratic arrangement in which the Chairwoman of the Fed could just as likely be on the losing as on the winning side of a particular vote. Why then is she treated as the de facto “monarch” of monetary policy.
Well, the simple answer is that she actually is—now that she is confirmed. But the reason for that has little to do with voting and everything to do with the gradual evolution of a tradition. Let me try to describe this.
The simplest way to put this is that the FOMC is governed by consensus—not really by majority vote. The consensus forms around the person of the Chair. In the course of FOMC meetings, members of the committee may disagree with the Chair and may also express their dissent in so many words; but when it comes to a vote, they will back the Chair. It is customary for all Governors to vote unanimously with the Chair—and to be joined by the President of the New York Fed in doing so. That produces a majority of eight, each time. But the tradition at the FOMC is that no no more than two members may dissent. This is described as the “informal policy of the FOMC.” Dissents, some say, are intended to signal potential changes in policy in the future.
It’s quite amusing, in a way, to read how academic observers of this process attempt to explain it. At best they merely describe how it has gradually come about. As for the Why of this curious centering of effective power in one person, students of the process fall back on equally nebulous phrases. The importance or prestige of the office has gradually increased. A “tradition” rules this community; it is made up of, after all, highly qualified experts who’ve spent entire working lives in or around banking and finance. They all abhor the evil consequences of signaling rifts to the Market. The real decisions are worked out in privacy and out of the glare of journalistic light. Therefore, you see. And, presumably, whoever is appointed to be Chair of this institution will be reliably a member of this community and will uphold the traditional way. She or he will move to a vote only after the decision has been sanctioned by consensus.
No wonder, then, that chairs of the Fed are by any measure the most careful speakers in public—and their words are subjected to careful parsing as if they were an omen or issued from some being beyond the clouds.
It remains a fact, nonetheless, that this very sane and deliberate tradition of governance—at least of a part of our public affairs—could break down and, given time enough, someday will do so. Not, we hope, under Janet Yellen. May she rule in peace.

The Closing Bracket

Brigitte reminded me this morning that it is Three Kings Day—Epiphany. “Ah yes,” I thought. “The sixth.” In Europe, at least if you were a child, the Christmas Season began with St. Nicholas day—not with the first Sunday in Advent. St. Nicholas day falls on the sixth—of December. As children we put our shoes on the window sill the night before and went to bed. In the morning the shoes were filled with fruit, candy and cookies; bright red paper and twigs of fir decorated the display; and for good measure each child also received a switch, to be used on our bottoms if we should be bad. And the season also ended on the sixth—of January, when the angels notified the shepherds and the Three Kings came to visit the Christ-child in his manger. That day—both for Brigitte (who lived her childhood in Poland) and for me (in Hungary), that day was also traditionally appointed to take down the Christmas tree and to store the Christmas decorations for another year. The season lay between brackets, you might say, isolated from the relentless flow of the world—thus outside of time.

Let’s Kick It

It’s high time now for 2013 to kick the bucket—I mean on this blog. Until a 2014 post appears, the last year hangs around, at least in the margin. So it is time. That phrase—“kicking the bucket”—appearing in my mind, I did what I’ve done at least five times before since the appearance of search-engines. I tried to discover the origin of that phrase. Wikipedia does its best ( here ) but largely fails, I think. Suicide? Not very likely. The reflexive, spasmodic stiffening of leg muscles appeals to me, accompanied, no doubt, by that “last gasp.” For me the best depiction of this supposed terminal action is held in the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The kicking is done by Jimmy Durante quite early in the movie, and it looks awfully authentic.
In my childhood back in Europe, comedy put its stamp on the last day of year on the radio. Even as young children, Brigitte and I used to listen to those broadcast as bright children would, not really getting the jokes but enjoying the novelty of late, late, late-night radio listening. On my last shopping trip in 2013, also listening to the radio, I noted with pleasure that NPR had embraced that sort of programming too on the 31st. While my trip lasted, the object of the jokes was Microsoft and its famed leader, Bill Gates. And the snippets were extremely funny.
Therefore it’s appropriate to part with that year lead by Jimmy Durante. Like all real comics he was a contrarian figure who managed to delay his own passing by almost a whole month. He kicked the bucket in actuality on January 29, 1980—no doubt needing to rest up, first, from his antics on December 31, 1979. Humor lifts us above the dreary fray. Our  sense of humor may well be our best gift from on High.

Captain’s Log, Stardate 11312.31

Well, let’s see now. If Star Trek is any kind of guide on how we shall measure time in the distant future, thus  roughly from the next century onward, it appears that a kind of chaos of dates will dominate and every household will have to accumulate, at the beginning of each year, a quite diverse set of calendars. A quite amazing welter of mostly opaque information on Star Trek dating awaits the avid fan. I’m something even less than a rank amateur. Therefore, to mark this last day of 2013, I will stick to the dating convention that began with Star Trek, The Next Generation—a phrase that experts abbreviate as TNG.
The dating in that series was based on a five-digit number and a single-digit decimal. Suppose the stardate was 42437.5. In that case the digits have this meaning:
4          [Twenty]-fourth century2          Star Trek TNG Season 24          { A three-digit number ranging from 3          { 000 to 999, advancing in 7          { uneven intervals through the season..5          Time of day expressed as a decimal fraction. 0.5 is noon, thus half of a day.
The first stardate used in this format was 41153.7 for the first two episodes of TNG. The last was 47988—without a decimal point, therefore suggesting midnight of the release day. The stardate I’ve parsed out above is the date of the sixth episode of Season 2, “The Schizoid Man,” which so happens to feature Darnay’s disease ( link ).
Needless to say, there is no way to march from a stardate to an actual year except by searching the dialogue in each episode. In some of them actual dates using our own calendar—and presumably still in use then—are mentioned. And for the avid fan, this produces hours, days, even years of useful occupation.
The Powers that Be behind Star Trek’s creation, not least Gene Roddenberry, wished to avoid repeating actual years some 200-plus years in the future. People might then be tempted to speculate if such and such a technology could or could not as yet have been invented.
My own rationalizing attempt in that title is to bow respectfully in the direction of obfuscation. Therefore I use 1 for the [twenty]-first century, two digits for year, two for the month, and two digits beyond the decimal to indicate a day. That’s good enough for dates up to the twenty-ninths century into the future until a new convention must be introduced. And no pesky annotations like Anno Domini or Current Era need clutter up the pristine screen.
Happy New Year!

Color it Brownian

Back about ten years ago I wrote a family memoir; its well known to the family. It covered our history in Europe and ended with our variously dated arrivals in the United States. Even looking back to our great grandparents, Brigitte’s and mine, it was clear that war played the major role in the history of all our lives then; it was the sky, and the turbulence in it, that formed the dome above. Therefore that book had a strong thematic. And because large parts of our families emigrated—to the United States, Canada, Latin America, and even to Australia, the theme was a kind of movement toward the goal. The title, Majd Amerikába, holds that thematic. Literally it means, Wait Until We’re in America. My Mother used that phrase often when we wanted something that could not be had.
Years after writing that book, I hazarded another. It never got finished. I had titled it America: Our Random Walk. In fact I’d quite forgotten that title; it came back a couple of days ago when, in one of our discussions, Brigitte mentioned Lauriston Place, one of our streets. And that had me checking back in that manuscript to see where it was located in relation to two other places where we had lived in Fairfax, VA.
That narrative ran aground after a dozen chapters precisely because the random nature of our life amidst the peace and plenty of the once mythical Amerika produced problems of story-telling. The tale split into two rather incompatible tines, as of a fork. The family history retained its meaning—but the outer world became chaotic, so much so that actually describing it, meaningfully, came to demand more and more space. It was a family history—not a sorting out of an ever more shattering economic/political history which here, in this land, became the sky under which we continued doing what mankind had done forever and ever—raising a family.
The random is quite difficult—to understand, to integrate, to see comprehensively. The second chapter of an old book we got for Christmas, The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance, deals with the difficulties. It is titled “The Lure of Completeness.” When too many things in some kind of motion impinge on too many other things, and vice versa, we get situations which are theoretically capable of explanation—but always only theoretically. And if we could somehow slow down and freeze the motion, infinite time would be required to trace its lawfulness. And then, suggest the author of the essay, Sir Hermann Bondi, we’d probably discover something deeper to plunge us right back into ignorance.
Color it Brownian, one might say. Brownian motion, discovered by the botanist Robert Brown in 1927, is one form of the random walk—which, whether used to understand Wall Street or those who work on Main Street, is rather a poor environment for story telling. The human experience is resolutely and defiantly teleological. Brigitte heard me say this sort of thing about that unfinished book and said: “Why don’t you just simplify it? You’re good at that. And stick with the family.” I might do that. But let’s wait for Spring.

Urbi et Orbi

That Latin phrase must please all those with even a weak ear for the poetic. The words are big this morning because the papers are reporting the Pope’s address to “City and World” (or “City and Earth”); it is the Pope’s the Christmas address. It happens to be newsworthy, this year, because, in praying for peace, Pope Francis included the following sentence: “And I also invite non-believers to desire peace with that yearning that makes the heart grow: all united, either by prayer or by desire” ( link ). Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal rendered “non-believers” as “atheists,” perhaps because that word is more dramatic; but never mind that. In the spirit that Pope Francis urges, I enfold the media in a peaceful embrace today.
I had been under the impression that “Urbi et Orbi” goes back to ancient Rome as an early sort of “State of the Union” address. Turned out I was wrong. Wikipedia dates the address to the thirteenth century and the reign of Pope Gregory X. Wiki then adds a reference to the Polo family (whose most famous member is Marco). Soon after Gregory’s election, Niccolo and Matteo Polo brought him a message from Kubla Kahn, and the Pope then responded to it. Some people, anyway, link this fact to the name of the Christmas message—although, seems to me, the Pope is alwaysaddressing the earth, not just the City of Rome.
Urbs, in Latin, simply means “city”; the origin of that word is not know, but, seems to me, might be a modification of orbis, meaning circle, ring, hoop, or disk. Online Etymology Dictionary notes that the “circle” had begun to transform itself into a “sphere” or a globe by the thirteenth century already (in Old French)—thus by Gregory’s time. Galileo didn’t arrive until the sixteenth and died in the seventeenth century. To us in the twenty-first, “orb” certainly means a sphere and no longer a circle. And as that geometrical concept has expanded, so has our concept of peace, at least as Pope Francis sees it. It has claims on all of us, believers or unbelievers alike.

Fourth Sunday in Year Thirteen

We celebrated our fourth Sunday of Advent in the last few minutes of that Sunday by lighting our last candle around what in Germany we called the Adventskrantz (Advent Wreath). The photography, you might say, phailed me this year; the wreath is not quite visible. And this posting actually comes on a Monday. But as they say, it is the spirit that matters, not its actual physical manifestation. 
With this humble image we send our greetings and best wishes to all who read Ghulf Genes. May your Christmas be blessed—and, as the Germans also say, a good slide into the New Year (einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr).

Butterfly Mecoin

In what struck Brigitte as a meaningful coincidence, the New York Times today, on its front page, brought a story about the Monarch butterfly and Milkweed—to close out a year in which, in the context of butterflies, was a central event in our live this year. Meaningful coincidences, we gratefully note, are frequent enough so that Brigitte has coined a new word to refer to them: mecoin; it’s easier to write in diaries and such than the full phrase with 23 letters.
Yes, we saw our own milkweed—planted in what seemed an almost meaningless gesture to help save the Monarch from ultimate doom—bloom for the first time this summer. Today we discovered that we are not alone. Major public efforts, headed by such institutions as the University of Northern Iowa (once a neighboring state), the University of Minnesota and the University of Kansas (we’ve lived in both of those states), along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Academy of Sciences are collaborating in the establishment of large tracts of land on which the milkweed, and other ecology-friendly weeds, will grow profusely and provide the thinning populations of the Monarch a little genuine hope. To this list I should also add the State of Mexico; it is also striving to reverse this most deplorable population crash.
It’s warmish out; the snow still lies fairly thick on the ground. As it rains steadily. The year is almost over. I thought I’d written all I would, this year, on butterflies back in November. But now a mecoin gives me one last chance to promote this worthy effort.
And, by the way, we are also providing milkweed seed we’ve harvested to members of the far-flung family so that our batch will multiply and once more fill the earth.

Crossword Centennial?

Twenty-thirteen has been rich in important anniversaries, 50-year and 100. Or so it seems. It was the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, the 50th of C.S. Lewis’ passing, also the 50th anniversary of the show Doctor Who. Those of us old enough to have been in our twenties fifty years ago can at least vaguely attest to such anniversaries as that. But what about centennials?
Yesterday was supposedly the centennial of the crossword puzzle—universally proclaimed by Google’s search page. On December 20, 1913, one Arthur Wynne composed, and the New York Worldpublished, the first such thing. But a hundred years are a long time; as I pursued this subject this morning, things began to seem less clear. Wikipedia, in its article on the subject, dates Wynne’s achievement as December 21, 1913 and cites the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as its source, no less ( link ). Wiki adds that Wynne’s puzzle “embodied most of the features of that genre as we know it.” But the crossword is evidently older than that—going back to 1837 in the English magazine called St. Nicholas. Which means that the centennial should have been celebrated in 1937, when I had reached the ripe age of 1. Italy was not far behind. In September of 1890 Il Secolo Illustrato della Domenica published one devised by Guiseppe Airoldi. Early on the feature was named “word-cross.” If we see “the cross” as symbolizing pain, certain puzzles—certainly all those in the New York Times on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays belong to the painful variety. The words were inverted into “crossword” later—perhaps to ease our pain.
Whenever the crossword really began, it has brought Brigitte and me, both of us word-crossed sorts of people, plenty of agony, laughter, and joy—not to mention additions to our already fairly decent personal dictionaries… So let us take pencil in hand and celebrate.