• About Me
  • Title Page

The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Monthly Archives: March 2012

Harbingers of Spring?

29 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Tom Cooper in Astronomy, Birth of Jesus, Calendar, Easter, History, Science, Seasons, Spring

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Astronomy, Easter, Nature, Spring

I stepped out for a run a few nights ago, just past eight o’clock. It was just dark, the sky steely blue but carrying the memory of daylight, and high in the western sky was a crescent moon standing with Venus a few inches away. Unusually close and unusually bright, it seemed that if you stood still and watched you could see them move towards each other, like things swimming in a calm pool.

I am a librarian. Once upon a time, people came to me for answers. One of the things they asked repeatedly at this time of year, and which I had to find in the Almanac each year, was the formula for figuring the date for Easter. It is a curiosity, since Easter Sunday can fall anytime from March 22 to pretty late in April. I know the formula by heart, it is engraved in my memory, though it has been years since anyone asked: the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. This is because, in scripture, Jesus was executed the day after the Last Supper, which, according to many traditions, was a Passover Seder. Passover, by the Jewish lunar calendar, is observed the first full moon after the spring equinox. Thus the Sunday after that would be the day Jesus arose.

That swimming crescent moon is waxing now, and will be full on Friday, April 6th. Sunday the 8th is Easter. No matter how early or late it comes, by Easter, we are deep into spring, and most of the cliches are past. Spring has sprung. The harbingers of spring–whatever you perceive them to be–have come and gone. Robins, crosuses, daffodils, asparagus. It is time to move on to tomatoes and corn, baseball, the opening of swimming pools and the things of summer.

It’s funny that we recognize ‘harbingers’ of spring, and don’t use the word for much of anything else. (I have heard ‘harbingers of death,’ which is closer to its original meaning.) The word comes from an old French word meaning hotel or inn, or, by transference, a place of refuge. In French military parlance (and after the Norman Conquest, English military parlance) a harbinger was a person who traveled ahead of an army seeking places for them to stay. So you can see how the word eventually came to mean something that comes before something else, announcing its coming. Still, I don’t know why it took on its cliched use with symbols of spring, while it is hardly used anywhere else.

It puzzles me that while I am keenly interested in the seasons and their effects on us, I am at the same time put off by what I just referred to as seasonal cliches–crocuses in spring, photographs of falling leaves in autumn, a snowman in winter. Somehow it seems to me that the seasons, or what I mean by the seasons, is more profound. What do I mean by more profound? Probably nothing.

You can have the deepest respect or appreciation for the things of nature, and still find them to be represented in its simplest manifestation. Some people see God’s handiwork in each little flower. (For one of the best expressions of this sentiment I will refer you to the John Updike short story Pigeon Feathers.) Even for people who don’t believe this, the mystery of a flower coming to life when the ground starts to warm is often all the mystery they need.

I tend to look to the night skies for seasonal indications. Is the appearance of Venus or Jupiter, or Orion rising on the horizon any more profound than a robin building a nest in my pear tree? Perhaps my attitude is that anyone can spot the robin. Knowing the names of stars and planets is a lost skill for most people. But whether we are looking up or down, when we find the signs of seasonal change we are all participating in a pastime that goes back to our beginnings as a species, whether we find them scattered in the night sky, or in Mrs. Barton’s flowerbeds.

Keeping Track of Time

18 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by Tom Cooper in Archeology, Birth of Jesus, Calendar, Dates, Dionysius Exiguus, Gregorian Calendar, History, Julian Calendar, Prehistory, Religion, Science, Seasons, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

I was at home one day with my teenaged daughter when she suddenly groaned out loud and tossed a weighty textbook across the room. The book was The Eternal Paradigm or Our Ceaseless Meandering or whatever it is they name AP World History books these days. She does not share my love of history, this child of mine; among many subjects at which she excels in school, it is just about her least favorite. I think a love of our past is something you have to mature into. I recall lots of kids, back when I was young, who loved math or science, literature or art, but I don’t remember anybody who just loved history.

What was giving my daughter fits this day was trying to remember dates, particularly dates before Christ, which, thanks to an almost purposely myopic dating system, run backwards. I couldn’t help but sympathize. How many poor students, scratching their heads over a lesson about ancient Egypt or Babylon, have worked to wrap their heads around how years BC–before Christ–run backwards, while years AD–Anno Domini–run forward. Sure, the birth of Christ was a watershed in the history of Western Civilization, but let’s face it, this numbering system was put in place by people who thought the rapture was imminent, and actually keeping track of the years until then was of minor importance. Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian Monk born in AD 470 (and whose Latin name means, seriously, something like ‘Little Dennis’) came up with the idea. Accuracy was out the window almost before he got started, since nobody believes any more that they knew the right year for the birth of Jesus back then. Nor did he think to add a year zero between 1 BC and AD 1, so counting the centuries has always been a trial, remembering that AD 2000 was the last year of the 20th century and such.  We now know that the rapture has been–at least–postponed by a few millennia, and we should have tossed  this system out with the theory of spontaneous generation and the earth-centric universe.

More recent scholars have chosen to use the abbreviations BCE, which means ‘before the common era,’ or ‘before the current era,’ and CE, for common or current era, though one can choose to say Christian Era if one is so inclined. Years BC and AD are identical with years BCE and CE. Some people think using BCE and CE smacks of contemporary political correctness, which they hate, since being sensitive to other people’s beliefs is distasteful to Americans. But the fact is, the abbreviations were first used as early as 1856 CE. What I find troublesome about them is that they only deal with the religious issue–they do nothing to make historical dates clearer. They don’t resolve the problem of running backwards then forwards, or of skipping a year zero, which still confuses people all the time. (Here’s a toast to everyone who mistakenly celebrated the end of the millennium in 1999!)

But my problem with historical dates is but the tip of the iceberg: there’s also the problem of scientific dating. In my research for The Varied God I have read a lot of science. Okay, so it has been archeology and anthropology mostly, some geology and geography. As Sheldon Cooper would say with a derisive snort, Not real sciences. But I have become comfortable enough with terms like palynology and osteology, and with techniques like midden floatation and radio-carbon dating that I can read a journal article straight through without running to a dictionary. But one of the most persistent problems for me, and I’m betting for many people who study these sorts of things, is the simple keeping track of time.

While historical years are dated one way, scientific years, measured by radio-carbon dating and dendrochronology and whatever else scientists get up to, have their own confusing nomenclatures. Popular these days is the abbreviation BP, which means ‘before present.’ Present, in this system, is 1950 AD (or CE), since that was the year radio-carbon dating was first used.

When dates get even older, some prefer to use the MYA abbreviation, or ‘million years ago’–as in ‘the Cambrian era ended 488 MYA.’ Sometimes they just use a simple MA, which means the same thing. There is even the use of BYA–and you can guess what that means.

The worst part of this problem comes when scientific dates, those hoary and inconceivably ancient times in prehistory, begin to tickle up against history, as in the times of what we call the Neolithic Revolution. The Neolithic, by many accounts, began around 11,500 BP, an ancient date, to be sure, but it is also perhaps easier to understand as 9488 BC (BCE). 11,500 BP sounds terribly remote, but 9488 BC, not so much. This is the beginning of human cultures and civilizations, just a few millennia short of the inception of Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, which will be measured in years BC or BCE. Couldn’t we cut out the BPs here so we can wrap our heads more easily around the timeline?

Part of the problem is that the BC and AD dates are usually documented, while the scientific dates are mostly estimates–based on the best science we have, but estimates just the same. Often dates are expressed using the old ‘±’ sign, which means plus or minus a few years. This leads to some confusion, especially when we are talking about fairly recent human developments. They might say ‘samples of emmer wheat show signs of domestication as early as 10,500±.’ It almost becomes meaningless. As someone pointed out recently, we could say ‘McDonald’s restaurants first appear in 1960±,’ and it would look like they were all created at the same time. Do dates expressed this way have any meaning?

I would say that somebody needs to work out a good system that will cover all these things. It can’t be that hard. What is hard is getting everyone to use it. A 1975 law was meant to set the United States on the conversion path to the metric system: you can see how well that worked. The change to digital TV was like pulling teeth. So I don’t hold out much hope that keeping track of dates will get any easier any time soon.

Why No Pictures?

07 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by Tom Cooper in Autumn, Birdwatching, Fall, Photography, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Travel, Winter

≈ 4 Comments

I know that I am not a very good photographer, so I don’t own a camera and I don’t take many pictures. This doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the beauties of nature, or the sights of interesting places, or that I don’t want to remember good times with friends and family. It just means that I am not good at recording these things in photographic images. I have noticed that this doesn’t stop some people.

When people I know visit lovely places like Paris or Hawaii, they often come home with their vacation photos, including snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre, of palm trees swaying beside blue waters. These photographs do not compare favorably with professionally done images of the same things, and I wonder both why they bothered and why they think they would interest me. As a tradition, taking travel photographs is a hand me down from a time long ago when photography was new, cameras were rare, and most people had not seen images of the Eiffel Tower or the landscape of Maui. Nowadays it’s mostly just tiresome: people think they are supposed to take photos of their travels. I know a few people who are excellent photographers, who bring some verve and artistic sensitivity to the images they choose to share. But they are all too rare.

In working on this blog, I am often seeking images to use. Here’s a picture of spring; here’s a picture of winter. But what’s the point? People with cameras can’t seem to avoid recording images of the seasons, especially of seasonal change: the first forsythia to bloom in spring, a maple tree glowing with bright copper leaves, snow piled on anything. I mean, these images are beautiful and all that; but do I really need another photo of any of them? I also wonder if the mere act of snapping a photo is too facile a way of recording that image: if by taking the photo, we actually put it out of mind. Are we taking the time to think about the changes our cameras record?

There is a cliche you often encounter in movies and books (it was even lampooned in a funny scene in the movie Crocodile Dundee), that superstitious native peoples do not like to have their photographs taken, because they believe that it robs their souls. It seems a fitting metaphor for how I feel about taking a snapshot of something rather than spending a little more time experiencing it. Often when someone I know comes home from a vacation somewhere nice, they will ask, Do you want to see my pictures? Usually, my answer is no, but I would like to hear a good story. That always gets them thinking. Some people are a lot better than others at telling stories, but anyone who has truly experienced a new place should be able to tell me something interesting about it–unless they were too busy snapping pictures.

Once I was reading a book about birdwatching. It had hundreds of colorful and precise images of birds, to be used in identifying them. The introduction to the book contained tips on how to be a better birdwatcher. It advised that when you see a new and unknown species, you should not immediately pull out the book and try to find it on a page. You should instead spend as long a time as you can watching the bird. After all, the activity is called birdwatching, not bookwatching. And the longer you watch the bird, the better you will know it: does it have a crest on its head? A pointed or rounded beak? Long tail feathers? Are there unusual colors on its tail, head, throat or the tips of its wings? Only after you’ve observed the creature for a while, or after it has flown, should you open the book and seek a picture that matches what you were watching. But remember the key point: it’s about the experience, not about correctly naming it.

So I guess I’ll include an image in my blog when it is truly helpful or instructive, when it really helps to explain something. But if it’s just there so I can say I used a picture, then why bother? You haven’t seen enough pictures of daffodils? Of gathering storm clouds? Of rain?

Recent Posts

  • Second Movements
  • Temperature
  • At Long Last
  • March
  • My Last Summer Here

Archives

  • February 2020
  • July 2019
  • February 2019
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • November 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • February 2016
  • December 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • August 2013
  • June 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011

Blog at WordPress.com.