Nowhere Man

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John Lennon, The Life Philip Norman, 2008

I read the news today, oh boy

About a lucky man who made the grade

And though the news was rather sad

Well I just had to laugh

I saw the photograph

He blew his mind out in a car

He didn’t notice that the lights had changed

A crowd of people stood and stared

They’d seen his face before

People differ in their need for stimulation.  There is the nerdy kid who can’t tolerate a rolling coaster ride or a scary movie, and there is the test-the-limits thrill seeker like John Lennon.

John Lennon relentlessly sought sensation, and defiant self expression.   He got himself into trouble, all the time, and pulled others into trouble with him.  Paul McCartney’s father called him “that Lennon”. He was precocious – with drinking, with drugs, with sex. He was also intelligent, and artistic. He liked imaginative writing, had a talent for music, and a sense for authentic, emotional expression. He took the time to learn the craft of playing guitar, writing songs, and singing, and he became very good.  Rock and roll was it, he went crazy for Elvis Presley. Listen to Elvis in ‘Trying to get to you’, you will hear the Lennon inspiration.

“I was a rhythm guitarist. . . I can make a band drive” . . He rejected any aesthetic of thinking – “that excellentness which I never believed in“.  He disliked Paul’s literary songs.  “I go for feeling“.

He could also be mean. He truly was “a jealous guy“, ever fearful of being up-staged.  He was quick with the verbal put down, and created bully loyalty. He could be violent with alcohol. But he was also an engine for success. He was bold and could drive a crowd.  He could be endearing and needy and funny. Women were drawn to want to care for him.

He suffered boredom like some ghastly memory, and seemed haunted by loss.  As he achieved phenomenal success, he found himself maddingly unsatisfied.  There is a pained disappointment in his best songs.  He was just not able to find peace of mind. He descended into out-of-control pill taking, drinking, marijuana, LSD, and heroin. When Yoko first met him, she found he would wake up and take “handfuls of pills”.

His recklessness cost Lennon/McCarthy ownership of many of their songs.  He betrayed friends and mentors – Brian Epstein, George Martin, and sadly, Paul.  His interviews have blame, special pleading, and self pity.  He would both decry fame and stoke it.  Being lionized while feeling empty made him cynical.

Who was John Lennon?  Creative, engaging, and appealing, but also disturbed, difficult and ultimately tragic.  He could not achieve inner reward.  For someone fantastically famous and wealthy, one of the luckiest people on the planet, he was unfulfilled.

He’s a real Nowhere Man

Sitting in his nowhere land

Making all his nowhere plans for nobody

Doesn’t have a point of view

Knows not where he’s going to

Isn’t he a bit like you and me?


The Strange Case of Lee Harvey Oswald

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“Sen. Russell Long (D-La.) has told us that Lee Harvey Oswald. . . trained with Castro revolutionaries in Minsk during his Soviet stay” Jack Anderson, Washington Post, March 7, 1967

Ion Mihai Pocera defected to the West in 1978.  He was head of Communist Romania’s foreign intelligence service, and was responsible for recruiting foreigners – particularly disaffected, low rank American soldiers like Lee Harvey Oswald.  In Programmed to kill:  Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, 2007, he finds that the Oswald story has very strong signs of Soviet Foreign Intelligence involvement.

Procera proposes that Oswald was likely recruited while stationed at the U-2 Atsugi base, and that Oswald’s information was instrumental in shooting down U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, which resulted in a great PR triumph for Khrushchev. This made Oswald a hero to Soviet foreign intelligence and his visit to the Soviet Union was likely his reward (this being a common practice).  They wouldn’t have wanted him to stay, his cover would be suspect and he would be more useful in the U.S., but he forced them to acquiesce – ever the loose canon – by publicly revoking his U. S. citizenship at the U.S. embassy in Moscow.  While living in Russia, he received extensive espionage training, and was then sent back to the U.S. with an arranged Russian agent wife (another common practice), to function (both of them) as sleeper agents in the U.S.

Pocera doesn’t believe that the Soviet Union ordered Oswald to murder President Kennedy, but he emphasizes that Oswald was a difficult, restless agent, a true believer wanting more heroic work, who became more and more intent on getting into ‘revolutionary’ Cuba.  He spun out of control, and possibly into the hands of pro-Castro Cuban agents (whom he met in Minsk?) working in the U.S. Oswald was both deluded enough to allow himself to be lured into shooting Kennedy in order to help Cuba, and gullible enough to allow himself to be set up to play the patsy role in a plot. Adult fetal alcohol syndrome?

Before November 22, Oswald mysteriously does pro-Castro advocacy, and then also mingles with anti-Castro Cubans.  He visits Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico.  He carries out noticeable and self-incriminating actions – shooting practices, meeting prominent Cuban exiles, hinting at planned assassination, seeking to buy a get-a-way car.

Lee Harvey Oswald was the only employee of the Texas School Book Depository not accounted for during time the shots were fired.

After the shooting, he seems to improvise an escape from the scene, as if a planned meeting doesn’t occur.  He returns to his apartment for his gun – he must have thought he wouldn’t need it, but now clearly thinks that he may.  He seems to head in the direction of a small airport nearby, or to a bus station to take him to Mexico (he had made that same bus trip one month before).  He calmly murders Dallas police officer Tippett, who alone has threatened his movements. He brazenly re-loads his gun in front of numerous eye witnesses.

Napoleon in Egypt

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Mirage, Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt, Nina Burleigh, Harper Perennial, 2008

“Napoleon Bonaparte was more than just a celebrated man, he was the nearest thing to a rock star the late eighteenth century would see.”

In 1798, just before Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their exploration of the American West and their encounter with primordial, paleolithic humanity, Napoleon Bonaparte set off for Egypt and an encounter with primordial, ancient civilization.  Ever the narcissist, Napoleon saw himself as the new Alexander the Great.  He had conquered continental Europe, and now sought empire in the East to counter England, which he couldn’t oppose on the open sea.   No European had been to the Middle East since the crusades.  Ruthless and romantic, a dreamer both inspiring and callous to his followers, Napoleon blundered his way across Egypt and into Syria, finding an Ottoman world, magnificent ancient ruins, and the Rosetta Stone.

Like Apollo to the moon,  Napoleon’s expedition not only explored, but made deliberate study of its destination. Napoleon brought scientists, 150 of the best scientists of France.  They studied, travelled, catalogued, and made drawings of fantastic ancient ruins that were covered with the mysterious hieroglyphics, many of them filled with sand, used as garbage dumps by the local people.  They spoke with Islamic followers about life diversity,  and the origins of the world.  They found, first hand, the temple of Isis on the island of Philae as the uppermost Nile reaches Nubia, now removed as the island is under the water from the Aswan dam. They discovered the colossi of Memnon statues at Thebes, which ‘moan’ as the sun rises.  They found the intact Zodiac base relief ceiling at Dendara, made during the time of the Greeks, and the great temple of Hathor. They suffered the plague, and a near-blinding eye infection called ophthalmia.  They created modern archeology.

“stuck dumb by the combination of silver moonlight on the desert, the black, whispering river, and the sudden, towering shadows of temples and columns”

They suffered most the self-centered whim, and reckless, impulsive leadership of Napoleon.  He promptly lost his navy to the British, by surpise, in the Battle of Abukir Bay, while mooring at Alexandria.  He led his army to needless defeat in the Syrian campaign.  In the failed siege of Acre, he ordered euthanasia for the dying and retreating French soldiers.  At Jaffa, he ordered the murder of 4000 Turkish prisoners. As news arrived of France in trouble and Italy lost, Napoleon slipped away with a small group back to France, leaving the others to fend for themselves.  A shrewd publicist, he regaled his deeds in Egypt before the others could return. He eventually became Emperor.

Of 34000 land troops who sailed to Egypt with Napoleon, 21,500 returned alive.  Among the survivors were 3,000 sick and maimed.  Out of the expedition’s 16,000 sailors, only 1,866 – barely one in nine- are known to have returned to France.

For Profit

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In Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell provides a clear treatment of the economic principles that underlie capitalist economics.  First he explains the fundamental mechanisms of capitalism, then he shows how even educated people tend to misunderstand these basic concepts. This book is not just an introductory course in economics, it is an explanation of its counter-intuitive logic.

As Sowell defines it:

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses.

“that have alternative uses” – that is the key. Most people understand that capitalism is driven by profits. Producers are motivated to create companies and sell products because they can retain the difference between production costs and the price the customer pays.  And customers will pay a higher price for products that are more valuable to them. That is simple enough. But Sowell explains further that producers compete with each other for inputs, the materials needed to make their products.  To maximize profit, producers seek the lowest possible input costs, and so they use inputs, whenever possible, with the least valuable alternative use.  They are less in demand and therefore lower in cost. This creates efficiency in the utilization of resources. The profit motive thus drives the match of  the value of resources with the value the customer seeks.  More valuable resources get used to produce what customers value most.

There is an all-to-common characterization of profit as a selfish cheating of the customer, motivated by ‘greed’.  With Dr. Sowell’s reasoning, profit is a moral pursuit. A business that does not earn profit is needlessly employing scarce resources that could be used more effectively in some other way.  The story of profit capitalism, then, is products being made the same or better, but with less resource inputs – doing more with less. A firm either produces a higher quality product using the same cost of inputs, or makes the same product using lower cost inputs.  Resources get utilized efficiently, desired products are produced, needs are satisfied, fortunes are made, and wealth is created.  And all with price and profit, not control and coercion.

Sowell is frustrated that the advantages that drive a capitalist economy are strangely dismissed, often, by the very people who enjoy its fruits.  The failures of controlled economies should drive us to embrace the benefits of capitalist economics and profit.

The trend of the last century is encouraging:

The twentieth century began with high hopes for replacing the competition of the marketplace by a more efficient and more humane economy, planned and controlled by government in the interests of the people…But the most decisive evidence for the efficiency of the marketplace was that even those who were philosophically opposed to capitalism turned back toward it after seeing what happens when industry and commerce operate without the guidance of prices, profits and losses.


The Strangest Man

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The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo

This biography of Paul Dirac, the Nobel winning British physicist who pioneered quantum mechanics, is foremost a mental biography. It is the story of an intuitive, mathematical mind that, using abstract thinking alone, correctly predicted the existence of anti-matter. He did no experiments.

The author chronicles Dirac’s social behavior, his impact on others, his emotional blindness, his insistence on mathematical and theoretic purity.  Farmelo makes the case that Paul Dirac had Asperger syndrome, a form of autism.  He was mathematically brilliant, but lacked social intelligence –  the ability to ‘read’ other people as the complex emotional beings that they are, which is the hallmark of Asperger syndrome.  Weak social intelligence can seem like callousness.  Dirac’s lack of personal connection seemed to be on purpose, and people were offended and would think him mean. When someone like Dirac is also known to be very smart, what else can explain his manner? Dirac just did not give the personal regard that people seek. He did marry and have children, but his wife came to be very frustrated, and his children did not fare well. He loved watching Cher, but had no other interest in music.

People like Dirac can seem to be like sociopaths, but poor social intelligence is not sociopathy.  Sociopaths often have a very strong social intelligence, indeed a powerful ability to understand what others are feeling, what others want. This is what makes them often skillful manipulators. Their lack of empathy allows them to avoid guilt as they use others. They can convey warmth and concern, all the while acting viciously.

This was not Dirac.  He could eventually understand people, after using deliberate and careful perception, logic and analysis.  And when he did, he could be caring and loyal.

His contributions to physics were substantial.  He solved many of the important issues of early quantum mechanics, and won a Nobel Prize, but his later years were not very productive. He insisted on abstract mathematical beauty and was unable or unwilling to engage the rough promise of new experimental results.

Social intelligence uses a great amount of mental capacity, and may be the chief reason our brain’s evolved so large.  Weak social mentation can liberate other mental talents, free up ‘disc space’ for other types of mentation, such as visual or spatial thinking.  This is the story of the savant, of people like Dirac.

Dirac was lucky to arrive in Niels Bohr’s time. Bohr’s genius was leadership.  He had a great managerial intelligence, even though he was a clumsy speaker and writer. He and his loving and intelligent wife fostered an intensely supportive environment for gifted and varied personalities, some with social intelligence and empathy, and some without, Nobel minds like Schroedinger, Einstein, Pauli, Dirac, and Heisenberg. Even Bohr’s son would eventually win a Nobel Prize.

Under Bohr, these great minds unravelled, in a short few years, the mysteries of chemistry and nuclear forces and brought human knowledge to the very edge of what is knowable, a place we have yet to surpass.

Leonardo from Vinci

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Leonardo da Vinci, The flights of the Mind, Charles Nicholl, Penguin Books, 2005.

During his lifetime, Leonardo da Vinci was not considered the greatest visual artist of all time.  No, his personal lot was difficult, and endlessly trying.   He was an illegitimate son, a homosexual, a genius without peer, and always dependent for financial support on petty, vain, narrow-minded, and falsely pious rich men of medieval Italy.  He suffered fools continually.

A genius can’t really know what non-genius is like, and so life is puzzling, other people are baffling. The genius feels oppressively different and lonely and can be driven to seek expression, if not in this life, then for in the future.   This is how it was for Leonardo.  His work speaks to us 500 years later. His genius was visual, as Mozart’s was sound, his creativity futuristic, astonishing the world to this day.

“My advice is not to trouble yourself with words unless you are speaking to the blind.”

Three paintings:  The Lady with an Ermine, La Belle Ferronniere, and Mona Lisa are exquisite masterpieces. Leonardo presents his subjects radiant, unposed, mysteriously bemused, elegant, and subtly but powerfully defiant. We look at them, and they look at us.  We sense that they are unmistakenly people, individuals with thoughts, and hurts, and hopes, individuals who have a story.  There is a feeling of intrigue, something has happened. Leonardo doesn’t just capture pose, and clothing, and expression, he captures mentation, one can feel them thinking.  And they have dignity. Leonardo feels for them, and wants us see and feel for them also.  They are prisoners of sorts, sexual prisoners, sold into marriage by their families, to rich, older men.  They are confined – perhaps like him – by sexuality, the circumstances of the times, by the mediocrity of the powerful.  And so, too, with his Jesus. In The Last Supper, his Jesus is a person, not an icon.  This Jesus has resignation, disappointment, regrets, friends, and human needs, and is resigned to being misunderstood.

Leonardo’s paintings are astonishingly few. Late in life he regrets this, yet one senses that an element of purpose limited his output.  A subtle protest, perhaps, as if he felt it a blasphemy to give his artistic gifts over to the despicable, undeserving wealthy.  He was most proud of his work on medical illustrations, created from laborious dissections of human cadavers, carried out in the hospitals full of the unpretentious, common humanity.  He hoped to aid medical knowledge and treatment. This was his way to contribute his talents to the deserving.

Leonardo sensed the mystical in visual experience.

“Observe the flame of a candle and consider its beauty.  Blink your eye and look at it again.  What you see now was not there before, and what was there before is not there now.  Who is it who rekindles this flame which is always dying?”

J.R.R. Tolkien

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J. R. R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, by Tom Shippey, Houghton Mifflin Company 2000.

“The oldest and deepest desire satisfied by fairy tales is to tell tales of the great escape: the escape from Death.”

There is a sublime sadness in the eyes of the hero, Aragorn, within the triumph of resilience that is the story of The Lord of the Rings.  J.R.R. Tolkien suffered loss of his father to rheumatic fever, when he was four, and loss of his mother to diabetes when he was twelve.  He was raised by Catholic priests. He was gravely sickened with trench fever in World War I.

“By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”

He eventually married – a long and good marriage – and became an Oxford professor of old english, the literature before Shakespeare.  He taught in the years when Britain lost its confidence, Orwell wrote of the corruption of language, society abandoned religion, and Hitler rose to power.

For Tolkien, the great legends, such as Beowulf, speak eternal truths, the truths known before writing, known before civilization, truths that even the authors themselves do not realize they are telling, truths from God.

For Tolkien, God tells a legend story that He makes to actually happen:  the story of  Jesus Christ.

Modern times chose to turn away from the old stories and their truths.  For them, the past was not wisdom, it was superstition, Mythology doesn’t teach, it is artifact.

And for Tolkien, the price paid was ghastly wars.

The Lord of the Rings is a re-telling, for the modern ears that will hear, the old knowledge.  Tolkien re-tells the ancient lore for the modern reader, he re-presents the immemorial truths.

The Lord of the Rings is a story of common people and the power of common loyalty, of the universal temptation of power and the sure corruption by power, of the dangers of disbelief and the meaning in mortality, of the journey of living and courage in the face of despair, of the necessity of resisting evil and of staring annihilation in the face, of looking to one’s own sin and resisting the of sin of others, of facing insurmountable odds and of holding fast, of the power of simple friendship and the king restored to his throne.

“Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat” – although it contains glimpses of final victory.”

History is not progressive, it is the perennial story, the recurring struggle with sin and death.

There is deliverance.  There is the Evangelium – joy beyond the veil of the world, the truth of the living God.


Modal Consciousness

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Zen Mind is described as a state of egolessness, devoid of self consciousness.   One can utilize this state of mind, Zen shows us, in archery, martial arts, and calligraphy.  Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugene Herrigel, is the short classic story of a westerner’s attempt to achieve Zen Mind and become a skilled archer. During the author’s eight years of training he is continuously redirected from trying to hit the target.  The arrow should release itself, you see, like a tree branch that bends to release a load of snow.  One doesn’t aim.  Without ego the arrow finds the target.  Zen Masters blow out candles with their arrows at 80 yards, blindfolded.

The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of LIfe, by Alison Gopnik, reviewed by Michael Greenbergin the New York Review of Books, March 10, 2010, describes what the author has discovered about human consciousness before age 6.  Children this age, she reports, have “lantern” consciousness as opposed to “spotlight” consciousness, which develops soon thereafter.  In “lantern” consciousness one does not have a sense of being a self observer as one is having experience, one is just “taking it all in”, with no intentionally focused attention.  This is likened to what an adult experiences watching a movie, immersed in the unfolding visual and auditory experience, with a suspended sense of self.

In “spotlight” consciousness, after age six, we develop the focused intention of the self-conscious observing self.  We direct our ‘show’.  We have a sense of me looking to see what I seek to see.  We have ego, filtering and directing our experience.

As adults we seem to be able to do both “lantern” and “spotlight” consciousness. This is empowering, and maddening.  Zen shows us that suspending “spotlight” for “lantern” consciousness can take some effort and training – it doesn’t seem natural – but it can be quite beneficial for perceptual and motor tasks.  Having unattached attention, any golf professional will tell you, refines skill and improves ability to perform body kinesthetic and hand-eye movements.

“Lantern” consciousness seems more like animal consciousness.  “Spotlight” consciousness may be uniquely human.  Why did it evolve?   Perhaps “spotlight” consciousness is for social living.  Having me at the center of my perception may be very important for negotiating the interpersonal landscape.  The social environment is every bit as perilous for humans as the predator environment is for animals.  Human survival depends on successful membership in groups.

“Lantern” consciousness may be more effective for acts in the natural world.  Animals hunt, move, and fight very well.

This duality can be maddening.  Our consciousness can shift.  This is not fully manageable.  We choke in sports, freeze on stage, lose our golf swing, suddenly forget what we were going to say.

History of Christianity

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Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek,  and author of American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House, reviews Christianity, the First Three Thousand Years, by Diamond MacCulloch, in the New York Times Book Review, April 4, 2010.

Meacham tells us he is officially sympathetic to christianity.  ” I am an episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously“,  but then, with qualification: “if unemotionally“.   He notes, too, that MacCulloch is also sympathetic to christianity, but also with qualification:   “I would now describe myself as a candid friend of christianity. I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human experience and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems” . . yet, “I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species.”

So, Religion is OK, but only unemotionally, and don’t forget it is crazy.

Meacham seems to accept that religious faith is necessarily dogmatic, rigid, opposed to critical thinking, and intolerant.  He doesn’t seem to know that what makes religious faith, faith, is that it is a decision held knowingly in the face of known doubt and uncertainty.  And contrary to his concerns, the history of christianity is full of debate and philosophy and disagreement.

Meacham seems also to equate having religious faith with being ‘literalist’ –  taking the words of the Bible as only factual, without metaphor.  In this thinking, one is all or none – the Bible is all factual truth or all metaphor.   Yet he very likely would not deny that the Bible is great literature, written over thousands of years by numerous authors mostly unknown to each other, truly an authentic compilation of human literary effort.  And he would without doubt affirm that there is great truth in literature.  Not one element of profound literary theme or structure is missing from the Bible.

To the religious, the question of the literal truth of the Bible is not a meaningful, or even valid question.  It seems intended to diminish the sophistication of faith, and deserves no answer.  Is not all knowing, all conceptualization, ultimately metaphorical?  Is not story a powerful way to communicate profound truth?

Meacham approves of MacCulloch’s accusation that the Apostle Paul justified slavery.  But this is a weak point.  Paul wisely advised the very fragile early church to avoid radical opposition to the “existing social distinctions.”  This included slavery, which was, in those times, the ubiquitous norm of all civilizations. Meacham seems unaware of the powerlessness of the early christians, despite having read this history.  Their swift demise would have quickly followed any political stance against Roman power.  This, after all, is precisely what happened to Jesus.  A surviving movement was better than no movement at all.

Meacham also notes, approvingly, another MacCulloch opinion:  “For most of its existence, christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competition, with Judaism a qualified exception”. Huh?  Christianity has had its corruptions, and has been an instrument of political power, but what religion has built more hospitals, schools, and universities?  What religion has most fostered the independence of learning and the pluralistic societies of our day?

Men in Combat

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“Combat fog obscures your fate…and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between men”

In Sebastian Junger’s War, a book about a company of soldiers in the Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan, we experience war conceptually, and devoid of the cynicism of most war commentary.  Junger doesn’t speak to whether war is good or bad, but what it is. The book is a case study of men in combat, and it illuminates a wonderful aspect of our humanity.

Survival in combat depends on the precise coordination of individuals in a group.  It is the group that moves, acts, responds, not the man.  Alone in a firefight every man would die.  And so, out of necessity men in combat become a network of acute mutual dependence.  It is more powerful than any bond forged in peace.  Like a parent to a child, a man knows that the group depends on him for its survival, and like a child to a parent, he depends on it for his own.

In war, every part of a man’s life becomes devoted to his participation in the network of dependence.  All his decisions of personal organization and conduct affect the web of mutual protection.  He makes sure his boots are laced, or else he is too slow to his gun.  He monitors his supply of water and nutrients, or else he risks exhaustion while on patrol, slowing the group, exposing them to attack. Every daily act has a meaning as profound as life and death.

What is striking is how immediately men adopt the identity of the team: one gets the sense that we are evolved to coordinate and move as a pack.  But men that experience combat invariably have difficulty adjusting to peaceful society.  They struggle to leave the mindset of battle.  Despite the terror, fear, and death, the men in Junger’s unit miss combat—they crave it.  They have become adrenaline junkies (like the soldier that yells “better than crack!” over the roar of gunfire), but strangely, excitement alone fails to explain the feeling of loss felt by a soldier who leaves combat:

“In these hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not the most alive—that you can get skydiving—but the most utilized.  The most necessary.  The most clear and certain and purposeful.”

Junger observes that an act of courage in combat is indistinguishable from an act of love.

It seems we are not meant to live frivolously, leisurely, and lazily, as we do too often when our survival is not threatened.  We have the capacity to live vividly, to experience each personal decision as profoundly important to our survival and the survival of our group.  We seem to move closer to what we are meant to be, when we are forced with every step to consider the well-being of those on whom we mutually depend.