Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 40

The Shires of England

With the exception of a single landing once in London Airport, I’ve never been to England—if you can count a two-hour layover as “being” anywhere. Brigitte did a wee bit better. She spent a brief time in Halstead, northeast of London, visiting a distant relative in anno long ago. Halstead is in Essex. With such exposure, we are therefore quite challenged when reading novels set in England or watching television series set in such places. The county in English life is of major importance—unlike county here in the United States, particularly near big cities. With that in mind, I thought I would produce here a map of the shires of England, courtesy of Wikipedia ( link ). As a minimum the map will serve us in reading and watching TV.
On the map that I am showing, space does not permit the spelling out of all the counties/shires, therefore this additional gloss. Read North to South and West to East. Clicking the map will enlarge it.
Greater Manc:  Greater ManchesterSouth Yorks:    South YorkshireDerbs:              DerbyshireNotts:              NottinghamshireStaffs:              StaffordshireLeics:               LeicestershireWorcs:             WorcestershireWarks:             WarwickshireNorthants:     NorthamptonshireCambs:            CambridgeshireHeref:              HerefordshireBeds:                BedfordshireGlos:                GloucestershireOxon:              OxfordshireBucks:             BuckinghamshireHerts:              Hertfordshire
One of our recent series, Foyle’s War, took place mostly in and around Hastings. That place is in East Sussex on the south-eastern coast. An earlier series I’ve noted recently, Cadfael, took place in Shropshire and in adjoining Wales.
Reading the novels of Anthony Trollop—and Angela Thirkell, who put her stories into the same county—we have Barsetshire, England. Alas, it is fictional. And a series we are now revisiting, with somewhat mixed feelings (are people really so deeply corrupt, we wonder), takes place in Midsomer county and its many hamlets—also fictitious. That’s Midsomer Murders—based on the novels of Caroline Graham. By now a year or two in the past, watching Lark Rise to Candleford provided us with much more quiet pleasure. That place, Lark Rise, is placed in Oxfordshire, and the series was based on a trilogy by Flora Thompson.

The Cockles of My Heart

Seashells in their habitats tend to come in pairs. The creatures that make use of this kind of outer body, invertebrates all, like clams and mollusks, belong to the biological class called Bivalvia. Our word “valve” comes from there and originally meant, in Latin, a section of a revolving door. Bivalviadates to the seventeenth century and means “halves of a hinged shell” (Online Etymology Dictionary (OED)). What happens when clams shuffle off this mortal coil is that the hinge eventually breaks; what we then collect on the seashore are the halves, not the whole.
The most likely origin of the phrase, “that warms the cockles of my heart,” originated in 1660 per OED. “Cockle,” as a synonym for “shell,” has lost currency if you ask Google’s Ngram facility, which tracks words used in writing in the 1800-2000 period: it was used nearly seven times more frequently in 1809 than in 2000, and even in old times, “shell” was much more popular. Nonetheless, we still have that song, Molly Malone:
In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so prettyI first set my eyes on sweet Molly MaloneAs she wheeled her wheel-barrowThrough streets broad and narrowCrying cockles and mussels, alive, alive-O!
The legend of Molly Malone, who died young of a fever, produced the belief that such a lass actually lived once in the seventeenth century. Scholars demur, but the Dublin Millennium Commission opted for reality, at least that of the heart. It proclaimed that a real Mary Malone, who died on June 13, 1699, had been the original—and declared June 13 as Molly Malone Day—and we’d say Cockles and Mussels Day. Mussels are yet another kind of shellfish. And as for Molly, I owe that to Brigitte—who started to sing the song as I was reading the first version of this post to her.
Cockle comes to us from Old French, coquille , Shell from Old English sciell—and the predominance of “shell” is probably due to the fact that eggs are much more commonly consumed than mollusks.
The image I am showing, depicting the Giant Atlantic Cockle, photographed by Andrea Westmoreland (link), makes it plain how the bivalve creatures resemble the heart shape. The next question then becomes, what does warmth have to do with these cockles? Turns out that closed shells, when heated, begin to open. Therefore whatever “warms the cockles of my heart” causes my heart to open in sympathy and in approval.
The inspiration for this post? Last night late I spread a minute amount of Smucker peanut butter on a single Trisket and took it to Brigitte. She’d said that she was getting cold. “Something to warm the cockles of your heart,” I said, handing her this tiny snack. And then got to wondering about those cockles.

Where is that Peak in Darien?

To introduce the phrase, herewith a famous poem by John Keats (1795-1821) entitled “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Some preliminary notes. In the paranormal field, a vision of the realms beyond this one, call them the heavenly regions sometimes glimpsed by people on their deathbed or in near-death experiences (NDEs), is called a peak in Darien experience, that phrase itself drawn from John Keats’ poem. It is in such a context that I first encountered the phrase.
Cortez (formally Hernán Cortés (1485-1546)) was a conquistador; Darien, therefore, is presumably somewhere in South America. But Cortez is famed for his conquest of Mexico. So far as we know, he never ventured much west of what we call Mexico City today. He couldn’t have “stared at the Pacific” at all. The so-called “discoverer” of the Pacific—that word in quotes because, of course, it had to have been a European—and the natives that looked at it all the time where not “discoverers”—was actually Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475-1519). Therefore Keats must have been wrong or (more likely says this verse-maker) Balboa has one-too-many syllables for that famous line.
Now Balboa’s travels had him crossing today’s Panama. And in the eastern portion of that country is a region called Daríen, complete with some meaningful mountainous formations some of which, no doubt, feature peaks. So a peak in Darien is in Panama. Balboa really did see the Pacific, the first European actually to do so.

Today in that region—marked on the map that I show—is a very extensive national park, called Parque Nacional Daríen. It has plenty of peaks in its western-most region—and while Balboa did not get quite that far down, he did travel to the big island in the Gulf of Panama; it was known by his people as Isla Rica and is on today’s maps called Archipélago de las Perlas. Gold was what the conquistadores wanted; but they took pearls when they could.

What Goes Up Must Come Down?

After my mention of technology yesterday, I got to musing about an interesting fact. It is that all things cycle in human experience, but inventions cumulate and seemingly are never lost. Empires may crumble but useful knowledge is never forgotten. A significant test of that lies ahead in coming centuries if, as I am fairly convinced, modern culture will collapse as one of its major supports, fossil energy, is finally exhausted. Will the use of electricity—unquestionably the most important discovery of this particular era of modernity—also disappear? My bet is that it won’t. What goes up must come down—to be sure. But useful knowledge just keeps rising.
That titular phrase is interesting. Pop culture attributes the line to Isaac Newton, who never actually said it. What Newton did say, in Principia Mathematica, was something else. He said: “Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” Translated into pop lingo, Newton said: “What goes up will come down—as soon as it gets tired.”
We may exhaust our fossil fuels, but the knowledge that motion can be used to capture invisible energy that’s simple there, in the air, you might say, will not be lost. Knowledge belongs to a range of human experience not in the least affected by gravity or external forces. We may be on the way into a new Dark Age, but it will be lit by electricity. Somehow. Somehow we’ll manage to keep the copper turning inside its jacketing magnets to hold on to something that went up, spectacularly, in the nineteenth century and will never be forgotten again.

What Comes First?

In one of our discussions yesterday, Brigitte suggested that technology comes before science! I certainly wholeheartedly agree. The example that always comes to my mind is Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell; I had a post contrasting those two early last year ( link ). Faraday was a foremost discoverer of electromagnetism; Maxwell captured the laws of this phenomenon in mathematics. In Wikipedia entries (and that publication may be seen as a random sample of current views), Faraday is described as a “contributor” to electromagnetism and electrochemistry; Maxwell, in contrast, is described as a “great unifier” in physics, the second after Isaac Newton; the third, one presumes is Einstein.
My interest today, however, is not in physics or the emergence of reputations; it is in what comes first. It does not in the least surprise me that in the physical realm all of the great discoveries begin (and began) with hands-on experience—and that the formal descriptions of experimental results come (or came) later. Without observations, no one can later, by measurement and analysis, discover hidden laws.
But what comes first in those realms of experience not rooted in the physical? Let’s pick on ethics and render it simply as “the right thing to do.” What is the root of morality? A very difficult subject—particularly in such times as ours. First of all, in our times, all things are rooted in the physical and anything transcending it is denied to exist. But if that is so, “the right thing to do” loses its absolute grounding. Therefore our times are suffused with pragmatism. The right thing to do is that which produces the best results: pragmatism. How “best result” is to be defined is, of course, relative to the viewpoint of some person—never an absolute.
When we come to hard grips with this situation—where outcomes justify the means and the outcomes themselves are relative—we begin to see in quite harsh light just what is wrong with our collective life. It is built on the sands of relativity and, if we like the outcome, the ends justify the means.
Am I stirring the sewage here? Over the last few weeks we’ve watched the entirety of a very laudable British series called Foyle’s War. It has a mysterious attraction. The right thing to do is shown us, in that series, as an absolute, its root the inner nature of the human soul and Whatever created it. Innate, as I would call it. Such thoughts, therefore, tend to arise.

Seasonal Notes

November marched in with big splashing steps through puddles. Today a let-up and, with the sun lifting all hearts, the autumn colors around here were quite unbelievable this morning—probably peaking, we thought.
Belatedly I updated my chart on World Series winners, first shown on this blog October 7, 2011. Brigitte asked for some dates on that chart, and that version I show next.
Yes, the period in which World Series have been held now extends for 111 palindromic years into the past. The teams marked in green are those that we have rooted for; the years when those teams last won a series are shown—and those dates illustrate how rarely most fans are able to celebrate a World Series victory. The drama of this season for us was simply being in the playoffs. The sadness came when we learned that the Tigers’ manager, Jim Leyland, a man we much admire, is retiring. The famous Uncertainty Principle, therefore, will overshadow the 2014 season…
Hereabouts we are, this time of year, close observers of temperatures. The time to bring the plants indoors are fast approaching. Last year it was November 11. It’s very cool but still just above freezing by night. Everything is ready, however. We’ve polled our jade plan population and noted that we have too many to fit the winter, indoor space. I put ten out on the driveway with a sign yesterday:  Yours For the Taking. By late this afternoon all had been taken—and the last visitor seemed to like my sign, and the brick that held it in place, as much as the jade plants. Everything had vanished.
Last tomato note. Our plants are still attempting to make red tomatoes out of green ones—but in a fit of perversity they are producing fruits one half of each of which is red!
The most novel seasonal event this year was a fruit fly invasion of our kitchen—due no doubt to leaving the sunroom door open on very frequent trips in and out as winter’s preparations were ongoing. We’ve discovered that the way to deal with fruit flies is to use a vacuum cleaner to catch them and, by night, to trap them using apple-cider vinegar as bait.
Raking is still largely ahead. The bright colors, thick in the trees, are, on the ground, still relatively thin and brightly yellow.

October’s Last Hurrah

How the body matches weather!Gloomy skies and drizzling rain.Green is now a shade of heather.The sweeper’s come to sweep our lane.
Tonight in rain will come a few,From tiny tot to full-grown teen;Umbrella-toting parents tooWill come because its Halloween.
The children active, all pragmatic.“Trick or Treat.” The open bag.Never mind the Fall thematic,The costume of the tiny hag.
It is a sort of rushed routine:Up the stairs. The eyes are hidden.Candy is what Halloween is…From our to their kitchen midden.
And depart. “What do you say, Lilly?What do you say?” “Thank you,” she says.And then she’s gone.

Reinventing Higher Education

I’ve seen much the same headline several times before in recent years. Today, in the New York Times it was Interest Fading in Humanities, Colleges Worry. The targets of erosion are no longer Latin and Greek—which once gave people access to the literature of our parent civilizations, the Greek and Greek-influenced Roman. The paper cites as an example the closing, at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, programs in German, philosophy, and world languages and culture. Rather than saying here that Inhumanities are on the rise in education, it may be kinder to say that college education is pupating into trade education, and when that pupa finally opens and releases its inhabitant, it has the appearance of what we see all around us. Meanwhile, you might say, Humanities are quite alive and well—but almost invisible. The children of a tiny elite still attend such schools. A while back I had a brief post on one of these, St. John’s College (link). My guess is that the numbers engaged in such education are, in proportion to the total population, much as the educated were in proportion to theirs in, say, the thirteenth century.

The Best in Bread

For many Europeans living in the United States, bread’s an issue. My family arrived in Kansas City in 1951; I was then 15. In those days hard, dark, German-style rye bread was nowhere to be found; soft white bread owned the market undisputed. It was a shock. Even toasted—and we never ate that sort of bread without first toasting it—white bread, was certainly not wonder bread for us; it lacked something. Many years passed before, in the 1960s, a store on the Plaza (mid-town) finally offered decent bread. But it still wasn’t the real thing; close, but not the hard, unsliced, dark loaf, the kind you could buy anywhere in Europe, in the smallest bakeries and in various sizes, including huge round heavy loaves. Things have improved, but throughout our history here, moving to another city always meant “finding bread.” The last time we went though that process was here in Detroit. Then we found Burkhardt’s and visibly relaxed. We’d found it, had a new source! Real bread. That was in 1989. Disaster then struck three or four years ago. News came that Burkhardt’s was closing. Fortunately we already had an alternative, indeed a superior alternative, and easily reached. At the Village Market, three blocks away, therefore reachable on foot (natural for Europeans) we could buy Dimpflmeier’s rye. And we had bought it many times before by then. It was better than  Burkhardt’s but much more expensive. Around here—adjacent as we are to Canada—it is, to put it simply, the best in bread.
Dimpflmeier’s Bakery was founded by Alfons Dimpflmeier, an immigrant from Germany. He settled in Etobicoke, Ontario (read Toronto) and started his business in 1957. Dimpflmeier bakes the real thing; not only are all the ingredients traditional, Dimpflmeier also bought himself a natural spring in Terra Cotta, northwest of Toronto, and uses it in baking. Some seventeen places sell Dimpflmeier’s across the border in Windsor. On this side there is Village Market in the East and Hiller’s in the West—and probably many more places yet I don’t know about. Thus, thank the Lord, we have bread.
Natural rye bread is so common in Europe I didn’t even know the word sourdough (speaking strictly for myself) until my first trip to San Francisco where I saw good-looking loaves sold at the airport and, bread being always to the fore in this house, arrived from my trip with three loaves in a bag. Now there is a bigger story behind that. I’ve learned since then that sourdough bread was the bread of the California Gold Rush. The mascot of the NFL team, the San Francisco 49ers, is Sourdough Sam. Early gold prospectors rushed to California in 1849; they gave this term its name. Why sourdough? It was the reliable way to ensure that you had bread. The 49ers carried little pouches of sourdough starter on their belts, a valued and highly protected possession. Sourdough was easier to use than yeast and baking soda. Sourdough also played its significant role in the Klondike gold rush in the 1890s in Canada and Alaska. America thus has a long, strong relationship to real bread—but not everywhere!
Natural rye bread is sourdough bread. Rye flour has less gluten and responds less effectively to yeast. The active agent in sourdough is a genus of bacteria called Lactobacillus. In fermenting the flour, the bacteria cause the formation of lactic acid. Sour. But after active baking, you have to keep a bit of the dough and store it for the next time. This gives the process a certain traditional aspect not exactly conformant to the modern tendency. The baking of the finished dough also takes longer—and time is money.
Tradition! Many good things are linked to Lactobacillus, not least (per Wikipedia’s article on the bacterium) yogurt, cheese, sauerkraut, pickles, beer, wine, cider, kimchi, and chocolate. Kimchi, a Korean-style of fermented vegetables, may seem unfamiliar, but as for the rest, which ones would you like to give up? Chocolate?
Yes, Lord, we pray thee, do give us our daily bread—and if at all possible, make it sourdough rye!----------------This post originally appeared on the early LaMarotte—removed some time ago because I could not control the appearance of advertising on it. Subject arose again just now, what with our discovery of another nearby bakery. So I thought I would resurrect this paen to sourdough.

Spontaneity Sapped of Its Will

Herewith some notes on the “word play” that takes up at least a small part of our every day, Brigitte’s and mine. One of these words was spontaneity, the other was sapper.
The automatic (should we call it spontaneous?) reaction of Google to a search on the first word produces this interesting definition:
The condition of being spontaneous; spontaneous behavior or action.“She occasionally tore up her usual schedule in favor of spontaneity.”
This is, of course, the kind of definition which dictionary editors ought to avoid like the plague. Why bother if all you do is to replace a noun with an adjective. The definition in the above comes entirely from the example in quotes. There deliberate planning is “torn up” in favor of what? As people now say, in favor of—whatever. Our discussion took it as established that spontaneity meant just what Google here claims. It struck me that while the public assigns a highly positive value to the word, I could think of all sorts of spontaneous behavior (again, to emphasize, as understood above) that produced a great deal of harm to everyone involved. I suggested that, to capture the notion of behavior that tended always to the good, innate was a much better word—assuming, of course, that a higher power made us. Just to make sure, we did the usual: we looked the word up. Where did that sponor spont originate? We knew what innate meant without the big book.
Well, it turns out that sponte, in Latin, means “of one’s free will, voluntarily.” But that lady, who tore up her schedule, presumably made it, in the first place, following her will. So what is the secondary meaning? And does it weaken or sap the word of its original meaning, in which the will played such a strong part? Does it now mean “impulsivity”? Probably. And the roots of impulse only the gods know; some, clearly, are better than others. So why the positive flavor? Is reason and deliberation so yesterday? Probably.
Sapper came at us from some written notes to one of the Foyle’s War episodes. The context was bomb demolition. Sounds like a right proper English word, doesn’t it? Brigitte, however, would have it looked up. The word was new to her. “You haven’t read endless war books,” I said. “And the word’s no longer in much use.” ( I turned out to be wrong. It beats the word dapper by a nose on Google Ngrams—but it has slipped far down in frequency of use from World War I, when it shot up, to the end of World War II, when it began to fade significantly).
Sapper is a curious word. It comes from the French word, sappe, meaning a spade, and a sapper was a man who dug trenches to reach the enemy’s position. Late sixteenth century. Sap, of course, is the liquid in plants. And it was digging trenches on the one hand, from “spade,” and from the Proto-Indo-European sab, for “juice,” on the other, that we get the verb to sap, meaning to drain something of its—whatever. And this removing something undesirable (like liquid from a swamp or explosives from a bomb) that produced the assignment of sapper to people who engaged in demolition.
Spontaneity defined as an action of free will is dangerous. Let us remove the will and leave only the impulse. Right on, right on.