CORONA VIRUS CONSEQUENCES: AMERICANS AS KULAK

Stalin would approve of the corona virus, as it is destroying the middle class. Mao and Pol Pot would also agree such destruction is wise. Power-mad people seemingly do not approve of anyone besides themselves holding power.  They fail to see others have gifts, and that God made us as different as our fingerprints, with each person gifted with beauty all their own to express, which requires that individuals have the power to express. Dictators are actually denying themselves great beauty and talents, when they fear the latent power of the middle class.

The middle class is stifled by the corona virus, kept from working and forced to stay at home.  When you are basically living hand-to-mouth, (as much of the middle class does),  this enforced sloth is a swift road to bankruptcy. While some of the efforts politicians are making to print money and help small businessmen through these hard times are commendable, I think it is important that people understand the far left does not at all like small and independent businesses, and would be glad to see them fail.

People should read up on Stalin’s policy of “Dekulakization”. It was a nightmare for Russia, as millions starved or were sent off to “reeducation” in Gulags. To see any sense in the senselessness, or “the method in the madness”, requires a bit of history.

Russian history has some fascinating parallels with American history, in that they freed their slaves (serfs) in 1861, a year before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the leader, Czar Alexander II, who dared enact their emancipation, wound up assassinated like Lincoln did, though he survived sixteen years longer than Lincoln.

After freedom was granted both nations faced problems involving what to do with the master-less and unemployed new-freemen, whether they were slaves or serfs.  Both nations had vast lands to settle, with the United States building railways westward and Russia building railways through the enormity of Siberia to the east.  Both nations had struggles with the indigenous populations they overran, and both nations had to come up with incentives to lure people out into the wilderness. In both cases the temptation of free land, and owning your own tiny farm-kingdom where you were the ruler, proved irresistible. In both nations the settlers were failures more often than they were successes,  but in both cases those that succeeded enacted remarkable achievements, and both nations saw great expansion. Allowing simple men freedom achieved great things.

In both nations there was also a resistance to allowing individuals the freedom of owning their own land. Older, orthodox arrangements had been devised to deal with certain problems which always arise between neighbors, quarrels that have arisen since the dawn of time. No man is an island, and neighbors must be dealt with, and this leads to the creation of governments and courts which arrive at judgements, infringing to some degree upon the absolute freedom of the individual.

Though all men are created equal in the eyes of God, some are gifted with greater strength, and a stronger farmer can work harder than a weaker farmer, and therefore is likely to harvest a bigger crop, be better nourished, have taller and stronger children, and have more leisure time to think up better ways to work, until before you know it you have a rich farmer and a poor farmer, a landowner and a renter, a nobleman and a peon, and the spiritual dilemma caused by the clash between generosity and greed. As a general rule, societies which value generosity and kindness are more peaceful and happy than those based upon greed and hate.

In theory one could even be a slave, and, if their master was filled with kindness and generosity, they would feel fortunate rather than oppressed. However such a master would likely be as poor as his slave, if not poorer, for he would give everything he had. With the exception of the Christ, few masters are anywhere near that generous. Benevolent dictators are few and far between, though despots are constantly attempting to portray themselves in such a light. When you read how the American south sought to portray slavery before the Civil War, you would think they were a pack of Mother Teresas.  Then one takes a single quick glance at the famous picture of the scarred back of “Whipped Peter” in 1863, and one shudders .

The simple fact is that we humans have weaknesses, and if we get too much power we are bound to screw up. For that reason it is generally wise not to allow others to have too much power over us, and also not to allow ourselves to have too much power over others. This is a simple and fundamental reality understood not only by America’s Founding Fathers, but by simple men, whether it be in small neighborhoods of big cities, or small rural communities. Rather than attempting to whip a disagreeing person into submission, sometimes it is better to shut up and listen to his opposing view. This is the concept of Freedom of Speech.

The American concept of a “Town Meeting” is not as unique as some Americans like to think. A very similar gathering was traditional among the Slavic serfs in Russia.

This Russian sort of Town Meeting was called a “Obshchina”, and at its best was a Slavic tradition of great beauty, for in essence it was an entire community behaving like a big and loving family. Socialists like it because all the farmland was “owned” by everyone, in a sense. It was as if a farm family sat down at the end of a long winter to decide how to divide the work, in order to make the farm most productive. What socialists don’t like is the fact the serfs decided on their own. The Czar, and his local duke or lord, had little say in a “Obshchina”, and actually hoped to avoid being called in (as sometimes occurred) to make lordly decisions involving hardhearted feuds and divorces. For the most part an Obshchina involved who would work which plots of earth to create the best harvest, and all the nobility-outsiders cared about was that the harvest was big enough to pay the taxes.

The problem with the Obshchina was that a farmer could put a lot of work into one plot of dirt, hauling seaweed from the shore to enrich the soil, and then the next year be given a different plot by the village elders, for reasons of their own. Sometimes the reasons made sense; you might have broken your leg and there was no way you could work that acreage,  or your three burly sons might have been conscripted to fight for the Czar and you were shorthanded, but other times the village elders were corrupt and wanted a fat nephew to get the best land, heedless of the fact the best land was best because someone besides the nephew sweated to make it the best.

The village elders did not at all like a new and radical idea, which suggested land was not owned by everyone, but rather by a particular farmer. And, in the older areas to the west, the new ideas didn’t make much headway. The local lord told the elders the taxes the Czar needed, the elders appointed certain farmers as managers of certain plots, and everyone else was farm hands. But farm hands could dream, and, when the Steppes beckoned, and there was an opportunity to be the boss of your own little patch of dirt, the farmhands did a shocking thing. They left. Originally they could not legally do this, for to leave would be like being a runaway slave, however there was an interesting stipulation in Russian law: If a serf could avoid being recaptured for more than twelve months, he became a freeman. Therefore out at the fringes of Russia a far more freedom-oriented culture developed, in an environment of incredible danger, due to the raids of the Tatar, who exported ten of thousands of Slavs to the Ottoman Empire as slaves every year. (The word “slave” is derived from the word “Slav”). This prompted a push-back on the part of the Slavs, a push-back that evolved people known as the Cossack, who battled and eventually, after centuries, crushed the Tatar. When asked to submit to a higher authority, the reply of Cossacks was not always diplomatic.

Where America had “the wild west” Russia had “the wild east”. The primary difference was that America’s “wild west” didn’t truly last a century, while Russia ‘s “wild east” can be traced back a millennium, and was more developed and ingrained in their culture. When a Czar was utilizing his people he had to have an awareness of how different the serfs were in the civilized west from the wild and free east, from the orthodox traditions of the Obshchina to the basically democratic ways of the Cossack, (who the Czar never really attempted to subjugate, but instead “dealt with.”)

In any case, when the serfs were liberated in 1861, many left the civilized west. This was especially true if they were of low status and basically hired hands. They left the safety of the status quo to head east into Siberia, into hardship and very real danger, and some came to bad ends. But some didn’t. These new success-stories became a non-traditional sort of farmer, who owned his own farm and didn’t need to consult any elders at any Obshchina, and just did whatever the bleep he wanted on his own farm. 

Many of these new farmers, freedmen who owned their own land, were remarkably successful. It is remarkable how hard a man can work if the alternative is starvation, and out on the edge of the wilderness that was what farmers faced. The Czar was pleased when they succeeded, for his coffers gained more taxes, not only from their farms, but because their ingenuity and industry expanded into them becoming artisans and having sawmills and grist mills and forges and even small industries on their farms. They became so prosperous they could indulge in home improvements, and their houses looked different from a typical serf’s. They were the serfs who succeeded, and the name for them was “Kulak”. The Russian leaders wanted more of them, and encouraged them, because they had invested in Russia, and desired a stable Russia.

For the same reason, communists loathed the Kulak. They were seen as a counterrevolutionary force, the dreaded “petite bourgeois”, who would resist the creation of the utopia communists imagined lay just ahead, because the Kulak preferred stability to revolution, peace to violence, and arbitration to brute force. 

In essence communism looks down its nose at the very same small farmers and artisans that Jefferson stated were vital to a healthy democracy. I’ve never fully understood how communists can imagine wiping out the section of society that contributes most will improve society, but that is their belief.

As best I can tell, the Kulak were seen as weeds, and it was felt that, if the weeds were removed, the “garden” would produce better fruit. This involved a certain blindness, for by definition a weed is a unproductive plant, yet the Kulak were the productive members of society. In a manner of speaking, communists had the strange belief that, if you uprooted the productive plants and left only the weeds, you would get a better crop. Yet there is not the slightest bit of evidence that communism has ever made a society wealthier by purging the people who invest and have a stake in success, whether you call them “imperialists” or “petite bourgeois” or “backward traditionalists” or “greedy capitalists.”  Instead the opposite has always been the case.

I have had close friends who were or are communists, and in my attempts to understand them I have come to see they have a somewhat juvenile concept of “greed”. They tend to see others as being greedy, and themselves as altruistic. In actual fact, the envy of the so-called “have-nots” can make them more greedy than the wealthy “haves”, but this fundamental reality could not penetrate the thick skulls of my communist friends. Even when advocating the death of neighbors, they did not see their rage as rage, but as “righteous indignation”. What they saw as “hate” in others was a virtue, “moral outrage”, in themselves. So adroit were they in the manipulation of these double standards I could lose my temper, and then they could adopt a condescending attitude,  for the fact of the matter it was my veins that were bulging as I turned purple and foamed at the mouth like Kermit the Frog, as they batted their eyes and looked as exasperatingly civil as Miss Piggy.

However I could claim a sort of high ground, for I could confess my weakness where communists couldn’t. I could confess I turned purple, foamed at the mouth, bulged veins, and even was greedy, while communists pretended perfection. I could admit I was a human, while communists, with their blinding hypocrisy, are inhumane.

This brings me to the shadows of Stalin’s “Dekulakization” of the Soviet Union. Allow me to gloss over the horror, as some things can be understood to be poison without us needing to actually vomit.

Basically, to improve Russia by pulling the weeds, Stalin took all the property of (according to actual communist paperwork) of over a million “Kulak” in a single year. The Wikipedia statement is: “According to data from Soviet archives, which were published only in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931. Books based on these sources have said that 1,317,022 reached the destinations. The fate of the remaining 486,370 cannot be verified. Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who died in labor colonies from 1932–1940 was 389,521. Former kulaks and their families made up the majority of victims of the Great Purge of the late 1930s, with 669,929 arrested and 376,202 executed.”

(I should note Solzhenitsyn stated these official numbers were on the low side, and should be up around six million.)

What troubled me a lot was the mention in the above statement that 486,370 of the Kulak who were arrested never arrived at the Gulags. It suggests a half million were summarily executed.

One wonders how Russians could allow such a slaughter of their neighbors to occur. This was not like Christians killing Jews, or like starving Commoners killing fat Royalty, but rather was more like people making minimum wage killing people who worked far harder to make a only little more. In fact you could be labeled a “Kulak” if you hired a single farmhand, or even if you produced enough extra grain to sell any.

As was described by one of the zealous young communists who arrested Kulak (whom later became a member of the “dissidents”), they felt they were doing a good deed and that “we were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland.” 

The farmers did object to being basically robbed to feed “the soviet fatherland”, from the onset, and, (should you imagine only Stalin overreacted), in 1918 Lenin reacted to the farmer’s refusal to work for free with this gentle response, “Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. […] Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts [kilometers] around the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks”.

The simple fact that Lenin could refer to the farmers who actually feed the rest of us as “bloodsuckers” should alert you to the fact communism is a rocker off its rails. Did Lenin get his hands dirty planting the food that feeds us? Did Stalin?

Stalin displayed a bizarre and perverse logic, in that he didn’t just kill the people he imagined opposed his seizures. He wasted time, money, and manpower incarcerating such people, torturing them, and extracting confessions. A single bullet would have been far more frugal. But apparently Stalin would take the time to read the confessions, which were sometimes on paper spattered with blood. As he read he would blurt out garbled exclamations, like, “The Proletariat!” I am assuming a lot, but I assume this insane behavior on the part of a murderous madman suggests he had a juvenile faith some good would come of his inhumanity, and that he felt he was “removing the weeds.” In his distorted psyche he dreamed his merciless efforts would make Russia better.

Is it?

I don’t think so. I think the Russians are a beautiful people who have suffered a terrible Karma. Only a fool can look at what their nation has undergone and think communism has benefits.

And the same can be said for the current behavior of China. The corona virus came from them, but they are on record as taking the time to erase the record, and on record as having punished the doctors who innocently tried to tell the Truth and warn the world. Then, despite all this evidence, they have had the audacity to claim the virus originated in the United States.

To me it seems things are coming to a head. The abject failure of communism is driving them to make a last desperate effort. They are striving to replicate Stalin’s Russia worldwide, and have all the world murder the modern version of the Kulak. They do this although China has experienced, in its own past, the starvation you earn if you slaughter your farmers, and the ignorance you earn if you slaughter your teachers. But perhaps this explains China’s amazing ignorance. All their political decisions remind me of the stupid choices I myself made as an adolescent, the difference being my stupid decisions eventually taught me a lesson in the School of Hard Knocks, whereas China’s stupidity could cost millions and perhaps billions of lives, in the School of Hard Knocks called “World History”. Not that I expect China to listen, but I offer them a bit of good advise. Quit the lies, and quit the hypocrisy. Face the embarrassing Truth, for Truth is Beauty.

Communism dislikes religion, calling it “the opiate of the masses”, but, (despite the blundering efforts of inept priests who muddy the waters), religion is based upon a love and benevolence that puts communism to shame. Where communism has led to lies and the deaths of hundreds of millions, religion is theoretically based on Truth. This is not to say religion has not led to horrors such as the Spanish Inquisition, but such horrors were a failure to “practice what you preach”, and were founded on greed and not generosity.

In the end it all boils down to the struggle between greed and generosity. This battle is not a matter of “blaming the other guy” as much as it is an inner battle with weakness we all own, whether we admit it or not. In the words of a Great Carpenter, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own?”

Communism is an immature and childish response to the problems brought about by selfishness and greed, in many ways like a whining child stamping his foot and crying, “It’s not fair! He started it!” People need to see it as it is: Laughable, as long as it remains a childish idea and does not manifest as actual action. As actual action it is hypocrisy, attempting to end greed with greed, selfishness with selfishness, and hate with hate. It can only make slight sense in horrible situations where terrible greed exists in the first place, as an attempt to fight fire with fire, but such enflaming behavior makes no sense whatsoever when there is no fire to begin with.

Communism often seeks to disturb the peace, attacking Kulak who are simply and quietly living good lives. Often this involves seeing evil in others who are not evil, and denying evil in the self where it is. For example, a small child will not understand the necessity of weeding a garden and prefer sloth; communism would portray the successful production of crops as “greed” and the childish sloth as “revolutionary ardor.” The ignorant would rather attack the gardener who is making them weed than to actually weed, and only later do they figure out the result of not-weeding is starvation.

In conclusion communism sees the worst in others, and brings about the worst. It attempts to use the lowest impulses to create high ideals, and only generates fear and loathing.

The corona virus is proof capitalists are not greedy, for they set profit aside to save the lives of their fellow man. However there is great danger involved, for America’s small businessmen are to some degree like the Kulak, and are in danger of being led like sheep to slaughter, should a person like Stalin seek to take the reins. And the behavior of certain governors does give one pause, as some seem to be gravitating toward power-mad tendencies. The desire to avoid spreading germs does not justify some of the ridiculous controls they have attempted to enact by edict, ignoring all democratic processes, behaving more like tyrants than like elected representatives. 

One example was the attempt in New York City to ban going out for a walk, as if fresh air and sunshine could spread germs (when it actually kills the corona virus), and to enforce this ban by setting up a hotline and encouraging citizens to tattle on fellow citizens seen going out for a walk, and to take pictures with their cellphones. Rather than creating informants, the pictures that came in on the hotline were very rude, as if it were the Cossack who were responding. Basically the public was giving the politicians the middle finger.

The danger should be obvious: The public will comply to requests they sacrifice only when such requests are sane. Beyond a certain point one should not go, for it invites rebellion, and rebellion then invites repression. In the United States things could get very ugly very swiftly, for Americans have something the Kulak lacked. They have guns.

Communists actually like the idea of society becoming very ugly very swiftly. China would be pleased to see the United States dissolve into civil war. Some low logic feels pleased, when others become as low as they themselves are. For this reason the United States should strive to avoid such a fate.

What is the alternative? It is to clearly grasp the superiority of spiritual behavior, which involves being honest. Spirituality involves admitting we all have slothful tendencies, lustful tendencies, hateful tendencies, greedy tendencies, and so forth. We need to be held accountable, and able to sheepishly confess when called out. This is the reason our Founding Fathers devised our government the way they structured it, where no one person held too much power, and Freedom of Speech was allowed, and lively debate encouraged. Our personal views can be spoken, but we must listen to the forceful rebuttals spoken in reply. The aim is not so much to “win” and crush an opponent, as it is to Understand. The aim of legislative arbitration is not so much to impose one’s will on another, as it is to Harmonize. Two notes can be very different, but when they harmonize there is Beauty.

It is when the tremendous superiority of spirituality is clearly seen that communism is exposed as the childish tantrum it actually is. It withers and shrinks in the bright light of Truth, like the vast darkness of a cavern quailing back from a single candle.

Yet how are we to achieve such mental clarity and certainty, considering we confess to being slothful, lustful, hateful, greedy and so forth? How can we harmonize when others seek discord? How can we be so stable when others are so bound and determined to destabilize? How can we be granted such a great gift of Enlightenment, when we are so mortal and frail?

Basically we need to do what George Washington did during the darkest days the United States ever knew, when our nation was on the verge of perishing at Valley Forge. It is something communists are forbidden from doing.

ARCTIC SEA-ICE –Shift in the Drift–

Last post I talked about my yearning to see the Russian records of how the sea-ice drifted, in the cases of their 41 Arctic Ocean Bases, going all the way back to  1937, (as well as the 14 Barneo floating tourist-traps for the ober-wealthy, since 2002.).  Unfortunately such information is in some ways “top secret”, (in terms of industrial espionage, if not military). Because of this hidden record-keeping some shifts in the flow of sea-ice are described as “unprecedented” when in fact they have been seen before. The Russians themselves described two general flows of the sea-ice, translated as “circular” and “wash out”, yet the more political side of NOAA made a big deal of a change in the flow during the very-low-sea-ice year of 2012:

If that shift-in-the-drift was a sure sign of Global Warming, as certain Alarmists suggested when the above video was published in 2012, then surely the shift-in-the-drift away from that pattern to what we see now must refute Global Warming. Except it doesn’t. Alarmists either have very short attention spans, or have such overpowering confirmation-bias they’re blinded, or perhaps both.

The current drift is shown by the movement of the Polarstern and MOSAiC expedition, and is quite like the movement of Nansen’s ship “Fram” 130 years  earlier. (Blue line is the Fram after it was lodged in sea-ice).

This similarity is a little embarrassing for Alarmists, (especially when NOAA was stating currents had dramatically changed, only eight years ago). Fortunately for Alarmists, the Polarstern is moving much faster than the Fram did, and likely will cross a similar distance in perhaps only a third of the time it took the Fram. This can be used to suggest that the sea-ice is more “rotten” and that there is less of it, which may well be the case. (Although it may also be that the Polarstern is in the middle of the Transpolar Drift, while the Fram was closer to the Eurasian coast and may have been slowed by a counter-current which runs close to the coast.)

I tend to look about for other reasons the sea-ice may have been thicker in Nansen’s time. One thing that many have noticed is that the sun was “quieter” back then, if you look over the previous five decades. Nansen sailed the Fram at the end of sunspot cycle 13.

The very high sunspot totals (and low number of “spotless” days) of cycles 18 through 23 represent a time our Sun was quite energetic and pouring extra heat on the planet. Though we are now returning to quiet conditions, the arctic is currently still cooling from the warmer times which are called “The Modern Maximum”.  In Nansen’s day, however, the arctic was warming. In fact the high totals of “spotless days” before Nansen sailed are likely not as impressive as they look in the above graph, when you compare the above upward blip with the greater Dalton Minimum which preceded it, and the Dalton was preceded by the Maunder Minimum which is even more impressive. As measured by Carbon 14 in tree rings,  the energy of the “Modern Maximum” is especially impressive. (The graph below ends with the year 1950.)

I can’t help but wonder if Nansen and the Fram were sailing in an Arctic Ocean which “remembered” far colder times, whereas the MOSAiC scientists and the Polarstern are sailing in an Arctic Ocean which “remembers” warmer times, though those warmer times are now over.

Therefore I have a confirmation bias all my own. I am keeping a sharp look-out for changes which shift away from the lower ice-extents of the present to the higher extents of the past. For there can be little doubt the sun has gone quiet.

(Above from Joseph D’Leo’s blog on the Weatherbell Site.)

As my confirmation-bias looks for increases in sea-ice I often see the exact opposite of what I expect, because my thinking is too simplistic. Some of the ways the planet responds to a “quieter” sun are not what you would expect, and are counter-intuitive. Here are two I’ve mentioned in past posts:

First, you’d think less energy from the sun would make air colder and therefore drier, but instead the air gets warmer and moister, because the surface of the sea is warmer and more moisture evaporates. How can this be? I think this occurs because less energy from the sun also makes the winds less, and without strong Trade Winds the very cold waters can’t up-well along west-facing coasts as surface waters are blown off-shore. Therefore the first response to a “quiet” sun would be warmer seas (and El Ninos) and moister, milder air.  And Indeed the El Ninos have been strong and the La Ninos a bit feeble recently, and to this day the planet looks above normal at the equator.

However such warmth draws upon the bank account of the past, robbing from Peter to pay Paul, and there are indications that, in the Pacific, it is superficial, and is currently being eroded away from below:

Only when the cold water reaches the surface and a La Nina occurs is my bias confirmed.

Second, one would think a “quiet” sun would immediately create more sea-ice in the Arctic Sea, but in terms of an important component it creates less.

The captains of icebreakers in the arctic keep a sharp lookout for “biggy bergs”, which are different from sea-ice of the same size and thickness. When an icebreaker nudges against typical sea-ice seven feet thick the sea-ice is a conglomerate, made of a multitude of thinner slabs, and the bow of the icebreaker finds it easy to break apart the many smaller slabs. However when a seven feet thick section of ice has broken from a glacier, it is rock solid, and the icebreaker gets quite a jar, meeting a “biggie berg”, even if the icebreaker doesn’t sink like the Titanic.

What is interesting about “biggy bergs” is that they are more common when the arctic is warming, and are few and far between when the arctic is cooling. And every Alarmist knows why: Warming causes glaciers to calve more. When times get colder the glaciers stop calving, and extend out to sea more, in some cases becoming shelves of ice.

During the “Modern Maximum” some of the big shelves created by the “Maunder Minimum” broke off, creating handy platforms for the spy-vs-spy bases of Americans (for example “Fletcher’s Ice Island”) and Russians  (for example the basement of their base “NP 22”, which was occupied more than eight years.) However, besides these large “ice islands”, which are few and far between, there are a great many “biggy bergs” deposited into the arctic ocean from glaciers that face north, and whose calving ice is not swept south in Baffin Bay or south along the east coast of Greenland, and instead bobs about in the Arctic Ocean along with more ordinary, conglomerated sea-ice, which is formed yearly by winter cold.

To me it seems “biggy bergs” must have an influence on both “volume” and “extent” of sea-ice, and it seems counter intuitive to me that the colder it gets the less they are seen (because north-facing glaciers cease calving them as it gets colder).

There is a third counter-intuitive thing happening I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on. All I know is that once again my confirmation bias has been sat backwards onto its butt. It has to do with how fast the Polarstern has been progressing across the Pole, and what this means in terms of Svalbard. With so much sea-ice rushing towards Fram Strait, by April 1 sea-ice surrounded Svalbard to levels I’ve never before seen.

The build up of sea-ice around Svalbard is a little embarrassing for Alarmists, for a few years ago the situation was reversed, and south winds had pushed the sea-ice north of Svalbard even on its eastern side, which is relatively rare, and which Alarmists took to be a sign of Global Warming (and the doom of cute baby polar bears).  Now the sea-ice has returned with a vengeance, as have the highly adaptable bears (though hopefully the bears feel no vengeance).

Alarmists likely want to look away from Svalbard, but actually should take heart, for the “second lowest sea-ice extent evah”, in 2007, was achieved largely because a great deal of sea-ice was flushed south through Fram Stait. (Sea-ice south of Fram Strait is doomed to melt in southern waters).

(The site “Polar Bear Science” has a good post on the recent high sea-ice Svalbard situation here:)

Highest Svalbard sea ice since 1988 with Bear Island in the south surrounded

The problem with comparing the situation now with 2007 is that…well…it isn’t the same. That is what is troubling me, and I can’t quite put my finger upon.

Some things are similar: For example 2007 was also close to the minimum of a sunspot cycle, however 2007 was coming off a high maximum while we are now coming off one of the lowest maximums in the past 200 years. Also 2007 was at the heart of the “warm” AMO, while there are indicators suggesting we are now at the very end of the “warm” AMO.  Lastly, while Alarmists like to show decreasing sea-ice by starting their charts in the high sea-ice year of 1979, even their charts show things bottomed out around 2006-2007, and there has even been a slight rise, if you begin the “trend line” at that time rather than at 1979. For example, here is graph for extents in the month of March.

You can’t help but notice the extent is now higher than 2006.

However what was most puzzling to me on April 1 was the sea-ice to the west of Svalbard. That should make any sea-ice geek quirk an eyebrow, for that area is nearly always free of sea-ice. That is where the Fram popped out into open water after crossing the Pole, 1893-1896, and that is where Willem Barentsz “discovered” Svalbard (Vikings likely were there earlier) in 1596. The water is usually open there because a northernmost tendril of the Gulf Stream, the West Spitsbergen Current, bounces off the coast of Norway and heads a little west of due north, entering the Arctic Sea on the east side of Fram Strait.  This current usually has a very impressive ability to melt sea-ice.  I have witnessed strong west winds push large masses of sea-ice across Fram Strait, and seen (in satellite photos) the entire mass of ice shrink and vanish in a few days. But this year hasn’t seen that. What the heck?

My guess is that the WSC (that is what we true geeks call the West Spitsbergen Current) has been cooled this year by the powerful storms we (last winter) saw not stall by Iceland (as is more ordinary) but remain huge into Barents Sea and even the Kara Sea. When such “Icelandic Lows” stay by Iceland, surges of mild air are brought north, sometimes all the way from the balmy Azores, on the storm’s east side. But, when the storms are displaced east, as they were this year, the same waters get north winds on the gale’s west side. This year we saw the waters that hold the WSC blasted by north winds gusting to hurricane force, with waves up to forty feet tall. Not only would this churn and chill the WSC, but it would physically transport the water at the very surface of the current in the wrong direction.

This moves us into an interesting topic, if you are a true geek, involving a sort of water budget.  It must be balanced. The water entering the Pole must be balanced by by water leaving the Pole. The WSC entering the Pole is more than matched by, on the far side of Fram Strait, the very cold EGC (East Greenland Current). More water leaves the Pole by sea than enters by sea, for evaporation is low due to sea-ice and cold temperatures, and much extra water enters via some of the world’s biggest rivers, as well as glaciers.

What is most fascinating is the fact various currents often (but not always) keep their identity as they travel around under the sea-ice. Water from the south tends to be saltier, but is made less salty as it melts sea-ice, yet can still be identified as a separate current.  Some currents dive beneath other currents, because the buoyancy of a current is determined by its salinity and its temperature, which are always changing. When waters are quiet, undisturbed by storms under ice, they can stratify into various layers, with each layer part of an identifiable current. Therefore the WSC, after passing through Fram Strait, forks into the Yerkmak and Svalbard branches, which can be traced all the way around the Pole until they exit as the RAC (Return Atlantic Current) which heads south in the middle of Fram Strait between the Colder and less salty  EGC heading south to the west and the milder and saltier WSC heading north to the east.

To make things either more interesting or more annoying, (depending on your temperament), is that, when you return the following year, things may have changed. For example, the WSC may have three other branches (perhaps more) besides the Yermak and Svalbard branches, but they are not seen every year.

In my humble opinion the study of such currents, and the way they change, is very important. Why? Because they set up certain areas of sea-surface-temperatures (such as the “warm blob” in the Pacific) which have been seen to have a major influence on the route taken by atmospheric jet-streams, which can determine things such as which-crops-are-wisest-to-plant-where.

One such change is the shift in the AMO from “warm” to “cold”, which we know little about because the last time it occurred satellites had barely been invented. It involves some major shifts-in-the-drifts which we will in many ways be seeing for the first time (by satellite, at least). The scant records we have from the past indicate the changes are major. For example, the prime fishing grounds for herring can shift hundreds of miles.

The above newspaper article from 1922 describes how swift and dramatic the change from a “cold” to “warm” AMO was around Svalbard, however it took more than a decade for the warming to start reaching the Russian coast and making the Northeast Passage more passable. (It was fortunate the sea-ice was still low when Hilter invaded Russia, for the British learned it was suicide to attempt to send Russia supplies via the arctic routes during the broad daylight of summer, and despite Stalin’s objections the British only dared do it in the darkness of arctic winter. Had sea-ice been more formidable then supplying Russia might have failed and Hitler might have succeeded.) But, to return to my point,  I assume the change back from “warm” to “cold” might also be swift and dramatic, and might also be first seen around Svalbard.

One major element of the shift-in-the-drift involves a simple fact: Cold water sinks. When the EGC brings cold water south along the east coast of Greenland it stays at the surface because the shallow continental shelf keeps it from sinking, and also to some degree by the fact less saline water is more bouyant than more-saline water, even if it is colder. However down around the latitude of Iceland the bottom falls, and so does much of the EGC.  In a manner that makes niagra falls look like a trickle, humongous amounts of cold water plunge to the ocean’s abyss, and seemingly such cold loses all ability to influence the surface.  But does it?

Allow me to subject you to a simple thought-experiment. Imagine a large box of water is plunged downwards. What will this do to waters at the surface, and what will this do to the waters beneath?

At the surface it is obvious that waters must rush in to replace the water that sinks. But what determines whether it will be warm water rushing up from the south, or cold water rushing down from the north?  History hints both have happened, and that what determines the flows of waters is as varied as what determines the flows of air on a surface weather map. But, on occasions when the flow of waters is increased from the north, the EGC transports south cold water that refuses to sink, called sea-ice. This sea-ice at the surface can change the temperature of sea-surface water hundreds of miles further to the south, changing air temperatures and the weather of lands downwind, and also causing more waters to chill and sink.

Beneath the sinking cold waters is the abyss, which we know little about. However we do know water can’t compress, and when water presses down from above the water beneath must move to make room. Some of this movement is explained by deep sea currents. However such currents are very slow, nor do they vary much. When a charge of bitter cold arctic air causes much more cold water to sink, the deep sea currents don’t speed up, (as far as I know, at this time.)  Therefore things are not adding up. When water presses down from above room must be made for it, but where is the room made?

Two ideas have occurred to me. One idea is that room is made by bulging the thermocline upwards, but this bulge would become a sort of wave moving away through the thermocline like the ripple from a splash, an undersea phenomenon which as far as I know is undocumented, but which, if it did exist, would have some effect when the wave hit a distant coast. A second idea is that, just as when you push a brake pedal an immediate effect is seen in rear brakes far from the actual pedal, when cold waters sink south of Fram Strait, an immediate up-welling effect might be seen in some place far away, because water can’t be compressed. I am well aware this second idea is outlandish, but is it as outlandish as this: (?)

Patient, hard-working scientists have mapped the slow currents of the abyss, and to some degree have mapped the undersea rivers which connect where waters sink and where up-welling brings deep waters back up. Yet none of these rivers ends at the biggest up-welling, off the coast of Peru, which is part and parcel of the switch from El Nino to La Nina.

Only recently have maps started to include a branch of the thermohaline circulation past the coast of Peru, but this shows a warm surface current and not the cold up-welling so vital to the creation of La Nina’s (and to the fisheries of Peru.)

 

The generally accepted idea is that the up-welling off the coast of Peru is caused by strong offshore Trade Winds blowing from South America westward into the Pacific. These winds blow the warm surface water towards Australia, which causes cold, nutrient-filled waters to be drawn up from the depths to replace the displaced surface water.  The problem with the idea is that the up-welling has a degree of independence from the wind. At times the up-welling can even occur before the increase in the Trade Winds, in which case the colder water appears to be causing the increase as much as the increase causing the colder waters. This has two effects. First, it makes El Ninos and La Ninas notoriously hard to forecast, and second, it allows madmen like myself to suggest that pushing water down in Fram Strait can cause water to up-well off the coast of Peru.

In any case the shift-in-the-drift off the coast of Peru has major repercussions, in terms of the world’s weather, just as the shift-in-the-drift in the North Atlantic associated with the switch of the AMO from “warm” to “cold” has major repercussions, in terms of the world’s weather. Such major repercussions are interconnected in ways we do not yet understand. Inquiring minds want to know. Scientists state “further study is needed”, holding out a cupped palm for money.

In my opinion the late Bill Gray’s desire for funding to better understand thermohaline circulation was intuitive genius, while Al Gore’s petty prevention of such funding was the initial travesty which has seen Global Warming politics befoul science. Money which could have been wisely used to further our understanding has been redirected to political hacks. Things important to study have been neglected to study the incidental. Not that I have anything against the study of polar bears, but bears can’t determine which crops to plant in Kansas, while the shift-in-the-drift can.

In order to redirect funding in unproductive ways, politicians always seem to need to invent a crisis, whether it be acid rain, or ozone holes, or global warming, or a corona virus pandemic. The problem is that when you are too unproductive you wind up broke.

End Rant.

In any case it will be interesting to watch the sea-ice in the North Atlantic as the winter gales die down and the quieter summer weather arrives. For five years now the two long-term measuring points of the Norwegan Current, which feeds into Barents Sea, have been noting a decline in water temperatures:

Sea-ice extent is within two standard deviations from normal, and high for recent years, though still low.

Both the Kara and Laptev Seas have seen a lot of sea-ice exported north into the Central Arctic this winter, and thin baby-ice now skims them, so I expect a fair amount of Alarmist hoop-la to occur when they become ice-free this summer. This may be reflected in a plunge in the extent graph, as they melt. However the hoopla may then die down as the extent graph flattens, as other parts of the Arctic Ocean see sea-ice more stubborn. If the PDO remains in its “cold” phase it will be especially interesting to see if sea-ice remains stubborn north of Bering Strait.

The “volume” graph is currently very low for this time of year, likely due to the thin ice in the Laptev and Kara Seas, and also due to an incapacity inherent in measuring the volume of pressure ridges, which are numerous in the Central Arctic due to all the sea-ice transported north from the Kara and Laptev Seas. I expect the “volume” graphs to become more normal later in the summer, when pressure ridges tend to crumble and spread out, and be included more easily in the totals.

The MOSAiC expedition is now experiencing 24 hour daylight, and I am enjoying the pictures I crave, which have been sorely missed since the camera-buoys stopped being funded. The scientists are enjoying the one part of the world without corona virus, and witnessing first hand how very dynamic the sea-ice is. A large lead snapped the cables powering one of their remote station, forcing them to operate at a reduced capacity with generators for around three weeks until they were able to lay a new cable.

Other leads have opened and crushed shut again, forming pressure ridges.

Some of the things they are studying are fascinating, such as the biology under the ice. Other studies seem based on the Global Warming narrative, and make me want to roll my eyes. (I will bite my tongue, regarding measuring the nearly non-existant amounts of nitrous oxide exuded by the Arctic Ocean.) (Of course, data is data, and when I was young I would have counted the number of leaves on a tree, if it let me avoid getting a Real Job.)

What really interests me is the shift-in-the-drift, but things do get more tranquil in the summer, and the currents slow down. (The WSC north through Fram Strait nearly halts at times.) While the Polarstern had been making steady progress towards Fram Strait, it recently experienced a bit of “wrong way” drift.

 

This expedition is experiencing some interesting resupply problems they are not talking about, due to the rest of the world going crazy due to the Corona Virus. If they dawdle too much, getting down to Fram Strait, their story could get interesting.

Stay tuned.

PUNKY WOOD –Part 8– –A High Point–

When I look back over my education one thing I rue is my lack of gratitude, at the time, for teachers who did their best, and helped me in many ways, but who I felt compelled to reject. Twenty-twenty hindsight allows me to see that, even if their human imperfections made some degree of rejection inevitable, they still elevated me to the level where I became capable of rejecting them. Were it not for their labors I would never have become so high and mighty.

Not that I was actually high and mighty in worldly terms, but when you are seventeen you are a living legend, in terms of your own awareness. You have your whole life before you, and anything seems possible. You are less liable to be resigned than you are fifty years later, when you’re looking backwards.

One thing I looked forward to was freedom. School seemed like a jail and teachers like jailers. I failed to appreciate what discipline had done for me. Instead all that I could see was opposition, a power holding me back.

There are certain disciplines in life which feel like opposition, but which actually keep you uplifted. A good analogy is a tug-of-war. The opposition seems to be pulling the opposite direction from the direction you want to go, but if you let go of the rope you fall down. I assume it is for this reason that freedom often is not so sweet as it appears from the window of a jail cell. Partners think life will be easier after a divorce, but some later see how the opposition kept them upright. Men in the military crave the day their enlistment is up, but some wind up drunkards once they are free. Jailbirds wind up back in jail.

My teachers in Scotland were taskmasters, demanding far more from me than I felt was kind. But by demanding more they achieved more, and I saw I was capable of things I would have never known I was capable of.

One thing I had no idea I was capable of enduring was an intensely structured routine, where nearly every minute of every day was allotted to specific activities. There never was time to dawdle and dream, although I felt dawdling and dreaming were prerequisites of poetry. I often would march to my housemaster’s office and announce I’d had enough, and that my creativity was being stifled, and that I had to leave the school, only to be intellectually out-argued (and perhaps intellectually bullied) into accepting the fact great poets had overcome great hardships, and “that it is through struggle ones character is honed”, or some such thing. I actually have an old diary-entry describing such an episode:

Tuesday, October 13, 1970
As of now I am supposedly turning over a new leaf. If the past is anything to go by the only leaf I turn over will be the one I’m writing on.
Yesterday I skipped a triple period of Physics so I could do my Economics and I got caught. It seems it is a federal offense in this school. I went to have a long talk with the housemaster. I couldn’t tell him what a drag Physics was because my teacher is his wife. So instead I bullshitted about how all the work is piling up and is crushing my creative writing (he is my English teacher).
Time for Chapel
FIRST PERIOD, I have a work period now, but think I am going to write in this before I turn over my new leaf.
…is crushing my creative writing.
The housemaster went on to tell me how many great writers wrote under fantastic pressure and how I would write no matter what if I was serious.
Then he told me how important Physics is; not that I need it, but it would be great to have in my general knowledge as it involves a completely different type of thinking.
Stop it! Stop it! Have mercy on this poor child. I know all that. Why do you think I took Physics in the first place? It’s just that I’m so tired and I wanted to quit Physics so I could have a little time to think.
Yes…….I’m lazy…….I know I could do it all…….but it’s so much work and I love sitting around thinking…….Yes……Yes, conscience…….I’ll give it another try…….Yes, a new leaf…….
Shit.
I almost ducked my personal responsibility that time.
Fuck the Housemaster.
Fuck my weak will.
I hate it when they are right.

The cheerfully schizoid nature of a-mind-facing-discipline is easily recognized by any jogger who has ever faced a steep hill. He owns a split personality; two voices, one of which states “keep going” and another which says, “quit.” It is the job of teachers and coaches and drill sergeants to encourage the “keep going” and discourage the “quit”, so that the jogger or student or recruit gains the great joy of “breaking through the wall” and experiencing a “second wind”. However in an odd way it is the duty of a poet to heed the voice which whispers, “quit”.

This is not to say that poets are quitters, nor that they are undisciplined, but rather that their discipline is often a sort of anti-discipline, a sort of antithesis to a thesis, seeking a synthesis. In the case of a jogger facing a steep hill, poetry asks the unwanted questions, “Is this necessary?” and, “Is there an alternative? Can I go around rather than over?”

Such questioning is not welcomed by a tyrant who wants all his troops goose-stepping in time, but my New England heritage included Henry Thoreau’s statement, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” and Robert Frost’s poem that ended:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Consequently I was in some ways brought up to be questioning, and even rebellious. My opinions mattered, just as my vote would matter when I came of age. This made me audacious in a way that now makes me cringe. I gave far more respect to my own first impressions than to the teachers I was meeting for the first time.

For example, I somehow managed to be tricked into attending a boarding school without having the slightest clue what such attendance entailed, and therefore was utterly appalled by the fact young men were basically disowned by their lazy (or busy) parents and thrown into the custody of strangers. This British system might be centuries old, and have roots reaching back to ancient Greece, but I, at age seventeen, did not approve.

I hadn’t been at the school much more than forty-eight hours when my housemaster ended his English class by filling a final fifteen minutes by requiring us to write a poem. He likely expected a couplet or quatrain of doggerel, and not what I scribbled:

FIST OF A SCHOOL

Hunger’s lonely turmoil
Lives in flickers
In the eyes.
Feel the acne burning boil,
Hair-cut, knickers…
The baby cries.

Do not cry out alibis.
Afraid of the rush
You crush
Your baby born strength.
You’ll go to any length
To hide:
Drag your finger
Nailed across
Your blackboard pride.
Your chalkish finger
Points away
But if relaxed
It may say
What burns inside.

So echo on down corridors,
Prison tread on lonely floors,
Oblivious of other shores.

Next time that you hear your voice
Bleating what you didn’t say
Remember whose subconscious choice
Locked you up inside this way.

One nice thing about that school was that, rather than the class-size being roughly twenty, as it was in American Baby-boom classrooms, I think that class consisted of seven boys. Therefore I was able to scrutinize the teacher as the poems were handed forward, he leafed through them, and was given pause by the length of mine. After a further pause, as he read it, he shot me a smokey, piercing look. Likely he was thinking something along the lines of, “This chap is bloody talented, and is going to be a bloody handful.” At the time all I could see was that he wasn’t entirely pleased, and therefore was different from Audley Bine, who was more than entirely pleased by my poems, and would clap his hands and shout with glee as he read them.

Fifty years later I still like the poem, as it is a first impression. If there is any Truth in it, is the Truth of an honest child stating, “The emperor has no clothes.” It is not as judgemental as it may appear, for it is not directed towards the English Schooling System as much as it is directed towards my acceptance of such discipline. In fact, when I later went over the spontaneous outpouring, I couldn’t alter a word of the verse, but fussed over what the title of the poem should be, and one title I toyed with was, “For Myself, And All The Other Castle Prisoners.”

However it seems obvious the above poem is not the writing of a young man who is aware he is in need of discipline, and is grateful to the older men willing to supply the discipline he needs. Rather it is full of questions about the wisdom of the discipline. Such questions are related to the voice which whispers “quit” when a jogger faces a steep hill.

In one way this put me in competition with my housemaster. In a tennis match I was on the side of the net called “quit” while he was on the side called “be disciplined and keep going”. I’m glad he won most matches. For example, when I said, “Shakespeare’s archaic English is too difficult to read and I want to quit”, he demanded “Keep going”, and, just as a jogger has a “second wind”, I suddenly understood Shakespeare was brilliance personified. Shutters were thrown back and I gazed out over an amazing vista. However once in a while I’d win a match. I’d say something like, “If Shakespeare had only done what his teachers did he would have never been any different than they were, and they are not remembered as brilliance personified.”

My relationship with the housemaster was nothing like my relationship with Audley Bine. Audley Bine flattered me, which encouraged me to write more, but the housemaster was no more inclined to flatter than a drill sergeant is. Instead he was all about discipline.

In some manner the very reality of discipline creates a duality: The disciplinarian and the disciplined, which can initially look like a slave-driver and the whipped-slave. Because no man likes the indignity of being a whipped slave, discipline can create a resistance; a counter culture. The discipline of my housemaster created a sort of underground among the student body, wherein what the housemaster called good was called bad, and what he called bad was called good. If you obeyed and did your homework you were called a “suck”, which was a shameful label among the boys, but if you didn’t do your homework (and especially if you escaped punishment), you were a “skiver” and were greatly admired.

This duality struck me as stupid. It was too simplistic, and ignored the subtlety of reality, yet the teacher-student, boarding-school dichotomy was the reality I had to deal with. I got in trouble with the student body as often as I got in trouble with the housemaster. For example, when I was a “suck” and and disciplined myself to study Shakespeare, and abruptly saw the bard’s genius and raved about his writing, part of the student body regarded me with pity, and as a hopelessly mistaken lost-cause. On the other hand, when my reputation among the student body soared as a “skiver”, simply because I had detoured from a legal “community service” in a nearby town to a pub (which refused to serve a seventeen-year-old) and chatted briefly with a red-headed girl (who refused my advances) and teachers then learned I had strayed, and I wound up in trouble for my unsuccessful (and therefore harmless) detour, my housemaster regarded me with pity, and, if not as being hopelessly mistaken, as being disappointing. But me? I pitied both the student body and the housemaster. They were not as high and mighty as I, the poet, was.

This brings me back to where I began, which was, in case you have forgotten, the high and mighty attitude a seventeen-year-old poet has, even when he is in desperately need of discipline, not only from his teachers, but also from his peers. Fifty years later I am thankful for the advice I received from both sides of the duality, but at the time I only saw I was getting shit from both sides.

Neither side really cared for what I cared for, which was poetry. The next question should be, “But what is poetry”? Oddly, neither side wanted to face what mattered so much to me. My housemaster might rave about Shakespeare, and the student body might rave about the Beatles, but in my eyes they did so on a superficial level, and not on the deep level I felt I did. I wanted to be the next Shakespeare, or the next Beatle, and wished to blow the brains of mankind with the power of dazzling beauty. (Such aspirations are quite possible, when you are seventeen).

While I was outrageously arrogant, I was often unaware I was outrageous, for instead I felt misunderstood. Neither side of the teacher-student duality understood me, and I sought understanding by plunging into poetry. A blank page was sort of like a mystical crystal ball I looked into; I didn’t see blankness, but rather shapes which required expression. And the more misunderstood I felt the more prolific I became, until I think I must have been annoying to my housemaster. I was like a person who is too talkative and won’t stop yammering. He didn’t want me handing in damn poem after damn poem all the time, when I was suppose to be studying Milton’s “Samson Agoniste“. At some point he had to crack the whip and discipline me into doing the work required, if I was going to pass my A-level exam.

Of course, no English teacher is entirely comfortable with crushing the aspirations of a young writer; it just doesn’t sit well and pricks their conscience; they’ve read too many tales of bankers bloating while poets went unfed, too many tragic tales of poets dying young. They become a little uneasy when they are the one crushing the poet, even if the little punk deserves it.

While my housemaster was no Audley Bine, and likely felt the last thing I needed was any encouragement, he did make a little space for me and my damn poems. For example, he created a ten week poetry contest, which I promptly won because I was the only student who contributed every week. (The contest surprised me because I was unaware any of the other boys wrote poetry). But I suspected the contest might be an activity contrived to keep us boys out of trouble in our spare time, which there was precious little of, at that school (and we did enjoy our trouble). Most of our time was not spare, and was focused on the thing called “An A-level”, which, as an American, I’d never heard of before, and which therefore seemed quite meaningless.

Also the overworked man somehow found the time to produce a literary magazine, which I suspected made the struggling school look more prestigious. I wasn’t inclined to submit anything to it, as correcting my spelling sounded too much like extra work. However one day my housemaster came up to me and said, “I hope you won’t very much mind that I restructured one of your poems. It is too long when you only have one or two words a line. I think it scans as well with eight words a line.” I actually did mind, and explained I wrote it the way I wrote it so people would know how to read it, and he responded “Readers are not as slow as you assume,” and then handed me the magazine, opened to my poem:

Sunrise comes softly from somewhere below
To the land that the moonlight was keeping;
A coolness in the stillness where the thinking is slow
In the land where the children are sleeping.

Oh how I wish the fog would go
And how I wish a wind would blow
Away the mist and blinding snow
That keeps me here alone.

Sometimes I hear waters stretching away
Beyond what I see through the mist,
And in dreams as the blackness grows into gray
I remember the color it kissed.

Oh how I wish the sky would clear
And how I wish she would appear
To sweep away my muddled smear
That keeps me here alone.

I’m dreaming of sunrises gilded in gold,
An in-between lavender sheen,
And I know I won’t find it if I do what I’m told
For harmony’s never been seen

And sunrises cannot be sold.

I blushed with pleasure, seeing my writing in actual print, with all my misspellings corrected, but also felt a vague sense of alarm, wondering why my housemaster chose a song that said so clearly, “I know I won’t find it if I do what I’m told.” It seemed a sort of standing challenge to all teachers: “I will not obey.”

If God ever grants me the time to write in detail about that school, a major focus will be the escapades of the boys. “Skiving” worked hand in hand with the discipline in a way difficult to describe, involving the tug-of-war principle I mentioned before. The discipline alone would have been too dry, and the boyishness alone too irresponsible, but together they created maturity, although when I first arrived and first looked at what was going on, both sides seemed utterly mad.

For example, when I first arrived at the school I had a fierce will to “get back in shape”, which involved exercising, eating, and quitting tobacco and amphetamines. (Oddly, I didn’t see marijuana as a problem). Amphetamines were easy to quit, for beyond strong tea there simply weren’t any available, (nor was there any marijuana), but quitting tobacco wasn’t so easy. Though I cut back on my consumption of tobacco from fifty cigarettes a day to three, at one point my diary mentions, “I haven’t quit entirely; it seems to be a social necessity at this school”.

Tobacco was forbidden at the school, but, my very first morning at the school, the student who was in charge of orienting me led me astray. There was a period of roughly fifteen minutes after we were dismissed from breakfast before the bell rang for the first class, allotted for collecting books and papers, but my guide turned out to be a “skiver”, and rather than showing me where to store my books and papers he took me down a bewildering maze of alleys and passages, down in the dungeons of the old castle, past black furnaces and dripping pipes, with everything dimly lit by dirty thirty-watt-bulbs and draped in spider webs, to an obscure back entry where the garbage was picked up, and where a group of roughly twelve young addicts desperately puffed at their “fags.”

The “skivers” seemed to very much like taking an ignorant American like myself under their wings and showing me how to break the rigid discipline, but my point is that every single cigarette was in some ways an escapade. And the skivers wanted to pack every day with escapades. When we were sent off to run four miles cross country, the route took us out of the eyesight of teachers, and stuff happened. But, if I digress into the wonderful topic of youthful escapades I’ll get lost and forget what my point is; my point being that there was a tension between teachers and students to begin with, even without whatever it was my poetry involved.

At this point I’ll skip ahead six months, from the growing gloom of the autumnal solstice to the blinding brilliance of spring’s. I am skipping all the hilarity and pathos of the ups and downs created by the tension between teachers and “skivers”, and arriving at a sort of high point.

Last chapter I described how becoming “straight” nearly led to my suicide. Getting “in shape” physically and mentally was not enough. One must also face a side of life neither physical nor mental, and get “in shape” spiritually, but this is hard to do, if you are an Atheist. As an Atheist it is hard to see anything can exist beyond the physical and mental. Your logic bars the door. However the process of poetry is a battering ram that can break down such doors.

One does not have to believe in spirituality to get in better “shape” spiritually. I know this because I have yellowing diaries and books of old poems, and can see that, even as I became somewhat ruthless with my logic, and more and more of a hard-bitten Atheist, I was becoming more spiritual. Eventually this culminated in a wonderful ecstasy.

I need to stress this high point, because it is followed by a confession, admitting a downfall. However a downfall needs to have some high place one is falling down from. Too many confessions are poisoned bouquets of blame, pointing away at other people and smearing them as being causes of the downfall. Too seldom is credit given to the processes and people who uplifted one to the high and mighty stance, which they later down-fell from.

As one’s physical “shape” improves one gives credit where credit is due, and hopefully thanks one’s coach or drill sergeant. As one’s mental “shape” improves one hopefully gives credit to their teacher’s. But who does one thank as their spiritual “shape” improves?

If one has the good fortune to have a priest or pastor who is helpful rather than harmful, that person will refuse to take credit, and instead will point at the sky and say, “To God goes the glory.” But such talk, as I passed my eighteenth birthday, made me want to puke. I sneered at believing in some Santa Claus superstition. I believed in Truth.

Fifty years later, I have come to the conclusion God doesn’t care what the hell you call Him, and that an Atheist who honestly seeks Truth may accidentally be more worshipful of God than the pretenses of a hypocritical priest can ever manage. Therefore an honest Atheist may get blessed even as a priest prays in vain. That is honestly the only explanation I can come up with, for the ecstasy I was blessed with.

If I bored you with the pile of poems I produced beforehand, showing the work which led up to ecstasy, you would see little respect for God, and nothing short of contempt for religion. Because I had grown up in a wealthy town I was well aware of the misery associated with money, and was disgusted with people who would do cruel things to gain such misery, and cling to such misery, and prefer such misery. I stated, (without any idea of how to get there), that an alternative to misery must exist. And my process for seeking the alternative was “poetry”, which, as I defined it, was to not seek money and to not prefer money, and rather to seek Truth, Love and Understanding.

Religion failed to further such a search, in my teenaged opinion. While I didn’t call religion “the opiate of the masses”, I did come right out and say the rich could not remain rich if the poor rioted, and it was the business of priests to keep the poor from rioting. Therefore priests were part of the process that misguided the poor, turning the poor into mere cogs in a machine that kept the rich sleek and comfortable. Priests were part of that exploitation, and sought money and preferred money, and priests therefore preferred misery. I preferred poetry, and joy, and human happiness. To me such idealism seemed an obviously preferable and superior goal, a “Truth”, and anyone else, who preferred cold gold instead, was a nincompoop. A priest was suppose to aim mankind towards sainthood, not turn people into cogs.

The problem with such radical ideas is that there are plenty of ordinary people who don’t have the slightest desire to riot. They just want to do a day’s work and receive a day’s pay, and raise happy families in humble homes. As long as they are left alone, they could care less about the miserable debauchery the rich invite into their mansions. If the rich want to suffer, that is their business. This complacency, on the part of the humble, struck me as in some ways being a problem, yet in other ways struck me as wisdom.

It’s surprising how many things in life can seem like both a problem, and a wisdom. As my young mind attempted to grapple with such issues it created symbols in poems which argued and swirled and fenced and danced, in a dream-like and perhaps sometimes psychotic way, as I attempted to see what the Truth was.

Fifty years later, I see such scribbling as the footprints of a spiritual search. Young poets may superficially dream of being published, and crave fame and acclaim, but in my opinion the deeper and realer reward they get is that they get in “shape”, spiritually. And the sign of such an attainment is sometimes ecstasy.

My personal ecstasy hit me on a sunny and windy Sunday just before Easter break. I’d done well on a series of exams, and that filled me with a sense of well being. Not that the the discipline of relentless cramming ever truly ceased, but it did let up a little just after exams, and “a little” felt like a lot at that school. In fact I have never gotten as much from “free time” as I did at that school, where there was so very little of it.

Sundays began with the same blasted hand-bell jangling down the hallway, rung by a teacher who was a kindhearted choir director, but a sadist when it came to that bell. We got to sleep a little longer on Sundays, a half hour or perhaps a whole hour, but I never felt it was any later. I’d learned to do a lot without truly waking up: Use the bathroom, wash my face, comb what little hair I had, dress in the damn uniform, make my bed, and trudge down stairways and along hallways to breakfast, where I actually awoke.

By spring I had contrived to upgrade my amphetamine addiction from tea to coffee, and, while consuming as much food as was available (never enough, though I put on weight) the coffee stirred my creativity, which included my sense of mischief.

The “skivers” were always plotting their greatest coups during Sunday breakfasts, planning to ask teachers for permission-slips to spend their afternoon free-time studying species of lichen on mountain heights off school grounds, when in fact they planned to go visit a pub. I derived great pleasure from hearing of such plots, even when I was not invited, and was honored that I was trusted and not deemed a “snitch”. However before such debauchery was possible we had to go to chapel and pretend we were saints.

I was in the choir against my will, for the supply of talent was very limited, and I had made the mistake of singing in the shower, when I first arrived in September. Most everyone else was in the choir against their will as well, and I think that included the choir director. He was a man who appreciated music greatly, but knew he himself was not gifted, yet was forced to pound away at a piano while attempting to discipline mutinous schoolboys into producing some semblance of holy hymns. Often the result was such a cacophony of discord that I couldn’t help myself, and dissolved into helpless laughter. What made it all the funnier was that the choir director, whose piano-playing was dubious to begin with, could be counted upon totally disintegrating when things went wrong, and to pound out five or six very-wrong chords in a row. Of course the “skivers”, rather than helping the poor man avoid such embarrassment, would try to provoke such breakdowns. Usually this involved substituting a rude word which happened to rhyme with a holy word, in a holy hymn.

On this particular morning the choir did well belting out our first hymn, which most of the boys liked. For an Atheist, I was strangely stirred by certain hymns, and this one had a fine bass part, and let one express joy, in a sense bellowing, “I feel good this morning!” It was the old hymn that begins, “Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God Almighty! Early in the morning I sing my song to you!”

The next hymn, however, was a complete shambles. It was a hymn where one or two boys could be depended upon to substitute the word “fart” for the word “heart”, but for some reason spring put mischief into the choir, and it sounded like I was the lone “suck” who actually sung the word “heart”. The entire rest of the choir were “skivers”, and sung out the word “fart” in four part harmony. The choir director then set a new record for the number of mangled chords he could clash in a row, and I had to sit down, flushed and streaming tears of shaking, silent laughter.

Sometimes laughing got me in trouble, and even once got me punished with a “caveat”, but laughter always seemed good for me and to improve my mental health. As an Atheist I even found it a little disconcerting that church could heal me and make me feel so much better, even if the healing was by unorthodox means.

On this particular morning I went unpunished for laughing, but did have to go to the locker room after chapel and put on my rugger shorts and then run around a fountain in the castle gardens for a half-hour, paying my debt to society, for a half-caveat I’d earned for some other infraction. (I can’t recall what that crime was.)

Jogging on a spring morning was not bad, and actually I enjoyed it, running backwards and shadow-boxing and generally turning the punishment into play, which was easy to do when you only had a half-caveat, and far harder for the truly dedicated skivers, who had to run around that fountain for hours.

After jogging I took a shower, which was blissfully long, compared to the hurried washes of weekdays, and then I heard the great news, as I got dressed: The British Postal Strike had ended, and all the mail from old friends in America, going back to the dark days of January, arrived all at once. I got quite a heap of envelopes, and ripped them all open without reading any, for I had the selfish hope someone had smuggled me a marijuana cigarette, but I was bitterly disappointed. Only then did I face the letter I’d saved for last, which was from a girlfriend I hadn’t heard from since October. She was not verbal, preferring to express herself with paint, and what she had sent was a hand-made card with a drawing.

My girlfriend and I had pragmatically agreed that a year was a long time to spend apart, and that we could remain friends even while dating interesting people, if we happened to meet any. In October she mentioned a fellow I knew named Dave. This caused me a paroxysm of jealous despair, as I figured Dave was richer, smarter, and better looking than I, and I was therefore “dead meat and history”. In November I was equally honest, and mentioned a red headed girl I was failing to seduce in the nearby town. I sent a few more letters, but had received none, and then the silence of the Postal Strike descended. I figured things were over between us, and we’d become that bankruptcy former-lovers call “friendship”, however, in the world of my poetry, the fifteen-year-old girl took on a symbolic, epic stature, and strode about like a goddess. But now an element of reality had crept in, for the goddess had sent me a card. It was a magic-marker picture of a tree with our initials carved in it within a heart, and a girl looking at the carving and smiling, and the single word, “Remember?”

I walked to lunch all warm and fuzzy, and was less interested than usual in the plots and planning which skivers were hatching for the afternoon. I was unusually disinterested in excitement, because I was unusually interested in serenity. For all my talk about Peace, Love and Understanding, I felt this was the first bit of true Peace I’d ever seen in my entire, fucking life.

After lunch I walked down to the ocean, walking in an odd way. I swung my arms, but they didn’t alternate. Both arms swung forward and then both arms swung back, and then I’d gambol a bit, like goats and sheep do in a pasture the first warm day of spring. My good mood was getting out of hand, but I went with it, rather than attempting to discipline it out of existence. My hiking became a sort of dancing, and, as easily as a schoolboy whistles while walking barefoot on a summer road, a song came to me, and required words. Here are the words, without the song:

Sunshine’s shining
When a wild wind’s whining.
They madly mix me
By baffled beauty.
Big, bad billows
Of blue sky pillows
Spin my head around;
I fall to the ground.
I see through the window
But cannot get in.

Tree top’s talking
The forest’s walking
Quick to and fro,
As they’re in the know.
Great glad gusting
I find I’m trusting
The infinite sky.
I do not ask why.
I see the wind blow
But cannot get on.

Do you ever try to try try try
Grab a bolt of wind and fly…
Why…?
Wind! Wind! Wind!
Whooosh!

Sunshine arrows
Blow laughing sparrows
Like leaves in the sky.
I do not ask why.
My knees are laughin’
Like a new born calf in
Green by cow who lies;
The calf only tries.
I see the answer
The question is gone.

We’re not the ones who run away a way.
They make up rules and cannot play…
Hey….
Wind! Wind! Wind!
Whooosh!

See the sea gull;
It climbs clear cloud walls
And hear the wild cry
And do not ask why.
I know what the wind knows:
Some day I’ll be gone.

Gone…

As a young Atheist I possessed all the equipment I needed to cynically dismiss the above ecstasy as merely a “good mood”. Back in those days the word “bipolar” hadn’t been concocted, and instead the now-scientifically-discredited concept of “manic-depression” was all the rage. So I could sneer at my own joy as merely being “manic”, as if I was mentally ill, (in which case illness is something to die for).

If I’d been religious it might have made sense that, when I smiled at God, then God smiled back at me. However my Atheism made things far more difficult and abstract, yet the simple fact of the matter was that when I sung to the sky the sky sung back to me, and when I sung to the trees the trees sung back to me, and so on and so forth until I was drunk without whiskey, stoned without marijuana, and tripping without LSD. Just as a jogger, after fighting against pain, is rewarded with a “second wind” that makes running remarkably easy, and just as a scholar, after all the agony of cramming, is rewarded by facing a test with every answer easily at hand, so too is a spiritual seeker rewarded with an ecstasy.

Some might complain ecstasy is not lasting and fades away, and isn’t like gold you can hoard in a miser’s vault. But it is more lasting than gold, which robbers can steal, for it cannot be stolen. Nor can it be lost in the way we forget other things we crave.

I have a good appetite, and have craved thousands of meals, but do I remember many? For that matter, I have been lustful, and have had quite a number of orgasms, but I remember few, and for the most part all I remember about lust is that I want to do it again. Ecstasy is different, for you cannot forget it, even when it never happens again.

Ecstasy is a sort of milestone, marking a certain progress you have made on the spiritual path. A milestone does not say what the road ahead will hold. In my case the road ahead held a downfall, but I don’t want to spoil this chapter by going into details of that valley of the shadow. Let it suffice to say I had arrived at a very high place.

How high was it? Well, I am ordinarily shy, and reclusive, and when I sing I am most comfortable in a shower when no one is home. However for months after I experienced my ecstasy I was quite comfortable singing in public, and while walking between classes I’d burst into song.

How high was it? Well, where some need guns to battle the world, or gold, or political power, or lipstick, I reached into the arsenal of poetry and prepared to battle the world with sheer joy.

SPRING SNOW SONNET

Is this some sort of joke? The world is white
Out my window as I greet the morning,
Blushing pink in the warm, rosy light
Of April dawn, as the heedless birds sing.
Blush on, you preposterous, crazed snowfall!
I’d blush too, if I fell in your soft shoes.
You are fleeting, less lasting than the call
Of a far crow, whose harsh song sings the blues
I heard sixty years ago as a boy
Standing in the spring, in a sweet dawn
Enchanted by the ever-freshness of joy.
You are fleeting; by noon you’ll be gone,
Brief as my chimney’s last puff of smoke,
But though you are brief, you’re a beautiful joke.

PUNKY WOOD –Part 7–Saved By The Ghost–

A swarm of brake lights on the highway ahead snapped my thinking from September 1970 to the present tense of January, 1975. As I slowed I sighed, for the traffic was coming to a crawl. Obviously there had been some sort of accident up ahead; the traffic was never heavy heading south into Massachusetts on a Saturday night; it must be a drunk driver, or a truck roll-over, or maybe both. The traffic slowed to a halt, and I saw I’d be bumper to bumper, just edging forward, for a long time. The accident was so far ahead I could see no flashing blue lights of a police car, nor the flashing red of an ambulance.

I drummed the steering wheel impatiently and lit a cigarette, wishing I’d brought a thermos of coffee, and tried to think of what sort of fuss might be causing the so-called “crisis” at Audley’s commune, but I knew whatever it was, it was likely lame and uninteresting. All the issues that brought things to a halt increasingly seemed like much ado about nothing, to me. I’d rather think about things which interested me, even if they didn’t interest anyone else.

So instead I tried to think about the characters Siegfried and Heinrich in my poem-in-progress, “Armor”, but that too seemed lame and uninteresting. My writer’s block was as bad in my car as it was at my desk.

Inevitably my mind drifted back to September, 1970, when my life in some ways was put on hold, or got stuck in a traffic jam, for ten months. Or that is how it felt to me, though I went through some major changes.

I knew I had to shape up, as my wild senior-summer had left me very scrawny and haggard, but I figured improvement was a matter of merely sucking in my gut and mustering some will power. There was not much awareness of withdrawal symptoms, back in those days, and the words “detox” and “rehab” hadn’t been invented. Also, I didn’t want people to know I’d done anything illegal, and, with the exceptions of cigarettes and coffee, all the things I was withdrawing from were illegal. Lastly, I had a great fear of being incarcerated in a nuthouse against my will like my father had been, and so, when I became shaky, I was very good at inventing excuses, such as “eyestrain”. When a sort of “battlefield flashback” (which afflicts users of hallucinogens) occurred, called “re-occurrences”, I just kept quiet about it, and was a bit like Audley Bine was when he managed to function despite hallucinating mummies, though my hallucinations were never so gross or graphic, and tended to involve firm objects shivering or melting a little, and white walls appearing blotched by faint hues of yellow and pink. In any case I was dealing with strange, psychotic stuff which people outside my skull were oblivious to, and I was glad people didn’t know me better. At the same time I felt very alone, and yearned to be better understood.

I suppose it is typical for teenagers to feel misunderstood, and to seek and find a sort of understanding, not by talking with anyone in particular, but rather by listening to the music of an artist who seems to speak what they themselves can’t find the words for. In my case the artist was Jimi Hendrix, and no sooner did I arrive in Britain when he drowned in his own vomit on the outskirts of London on September 18. Some stated the CIA and Mafia had killed him, but I felt misunderstanding had killed him. When Janis Joplin died of an overdose, three weeks later, I felt the same: Misunderstanding killed her. However I also had a strong sense I should be very serious about getting off drugs, or I’d end up like they did. It didn’t matter if it was the drugs or the misunderstanding that killed you; dead was dead. To be honest, on some level I became very scared.

It seemed the strangest thing to me that the very drugs that seemed to increase my understanding should increase my sense of being misunderstood, even to the degree where the loneliness threatened to kill me. I felt great empathy for Van Gogh’s crazed drama, when he so wanted to be heard he cut off his ear. I trudged about at times so moved by the violins of my own self-pity it is a wonder I didn’t walk into a tree, yet at the same time a far saner voice in my head told me to shape up and stop whining and to do ten push-ups. It made for some interesting entries on the now-yellowing pages of a diary, and for interesting poems as well.

To some degree poetry replaced hallucinogens. Despite the fact there was no longer any enthusiastic Audley Bine who wanted to see my poems, I wrote poetry far more than seems possible, considering the rigorous schedule of the school.

I felt like I had joined the marines. There were non-stop classes and exercises. You were never allowed to laze in bed, not even on Sunday mornings, and in a military manner you had to have your bed made and be on time for breakfast or you’d be punished with a “caveat”, which meant you ran around a circle during the one half-day of free time you actually were allowed, after Chapel on Sundays. You had to account for work you did even during study halls and “preps”, which led to some false accounting on my part, for when I jotted down that I had spent time reading assigned books I actually had written poems.

As a spoiled American from the permissive school system of a wealthy suburb, getting smashed into such a disciplined system was a shock, a boot-camp’s nervous breakdown, which involved withdrawal symptoms all its own. But one rather nice thing about the fierce discipline was that I had my nose pushed into the grindstone of British poetry. At first I was offended, but soon I began to understand the punishment was actually pleasurable. I was like an alcoholic plunged into a vat of cold champagne. I stopped struggling fairly swiftly, when forced to read Shakespeare and fifteen other British poets.

(Two things, which puzzled me about the old-school, stiff-upper-lip Englishmen of that time, were the facts that, despite seeming emotionless and macho, they all seemed fond of flower gardens, and poetry.)

Not that they seemed the slightest bit interested in discussing hippy topics like Peace, Love and Understanding. The teachers didn’t even show much apparent interest in lust, fame and greed (though they probably were interested, on the sly.) All that seemed to matter to them was passing tests called O-levels (which were the equivalent of a partial American high school diploma) and A-levels, (which were the equivalent of a partial American college diploma.) A teacher’s worth, his sense of self-esteem, was twined with getting recalcitrant boys to pass such tests, and there was greater glory in getting a teenager to pass an A-level than an O-level. After only six weeks at the school I was moved from an O-level curriculum to an A-level one, which hugely increased my work-load, as I had to learn in two terms what usually takes six, but also plunged me into poetry, poetry, poetry.

At the same time I was plunged into a society of roughly 120 schoolboys between the age of thirteen and eighteen who didn’t care about Truth, Love and Understanding, but also didn’t care about O-levels and A-levels and especially poetry. They were a counter-culture different from the hippy counter-culture, for neither sex nor drugs were available and rebellion had to take different forms. They had a jargon all their own. (If you did your work you were a “suck”, and the art of escaping punishment while avoiding work was “skiving.”) Getting slammed into this all-boy culture forced me to rethink many hippy concepts, for their ridicule was merciless, and having to deal with them also made me long for a woman. Not that I didn’t come to love my comrades, but I think even the most flagrant homosexual might have second thoughts if he had to put up with nothing but men, men, men; day after day, week after week, month after month.

It would take another book to describe the agony and ecstasy of that schooling, and the antics of my classmates. The two hundred poems I wrote would be a distraction, in this work. The three hundred escapades I was involved with would also be a distraction. Let it suffice to say that I did some hard thinking outside of the scope of the O-level and A-level exams. Much involved how the Scots differed from the English, how the upper class differed from the lower class, how teachers differed from students, and what made the American ideology of that time different from the English Empire’s fading glory.

To be honest, I would have avoided much of this hard thinking, if I could have. After two months I was ready to head home. I’d quit drugs, even cigarettes, and weighed more than I ever weighed before (or since.) I was back in shape, and eager to return to the fray. I lived for the letters I received from friends back in the States, which seemed too few and too far between, yet which gave me a sense that there was a sort of societal madness occurring in America, which I wanted to return to and fight.

Not only had Hendix and Joplin died, but the Beatles had broken up. No new albums would brighten horizons like dawn. However George Harrison had arisen from the ashes of the Beatles to write a hit song called “My Sweet Lord.” Also many hippies were joining a movement called “The Jesus Freaks.” At age seventeen this development, to me, seemed very much like a sign people had abandoned rational thought, and had stopped trusting first-hand experience. Where I would not trust any hallucination, they seemed to be trusting stuff without even a hallucination to back it up. Their so-called “faith” was, in my eyes, merely an abdication of responsibility. They needed to think harder, but preferred the sightlessness of blind faith. But I insisted upon seeing.

This involved me in a strange hypocrisy, for, though I knew I needed poetry like an oasis in the desert of life, I also deemed it a sort of mirage. Poetry was a hallucination, which rational thought might note, but also would disregard as “only a dream”. In a sense I was intellectually biting the hand that fed me.

My girlfriend turned out to be very bad, when it came to writing letters. She wrote a single letter in the fall, and sent me a card in the spring, despite the fact I wrote her a long letter every few weeks. Meanwhile my best friend wrote all the time, but wrote while high on LSD, so his letters held little that was comprehensible, and sometimes were a just smear of watercolors with no words. However a few other friends wrote scattered letters which mentioned things that piqued my interest, one of which was that Audley Bine had started a commune. I heard that “My Sweet Lord” was played on the commune’s stereo non-stop. I felt like I had missed something; obviously Audley hadn’t lasted long as a teacher at a boarding school in New Hampshire, but I received no answers to the letters I sent across the sea inquiring, and Audley himself never wrote me.

In a strange sense feeling so cut off from the people I had known turned them into dreams. My girl friend stropped being real and became a poetic image. I actually had vivid dreams about her and other old friends, and wondered a little if there was some sort of transatlantic psychic contact, but then I’d give myself a sort of slap and tell myself to get real. But what was real, if the people who meant so much could just melt away?

When I first arrived at the school the days were still a bit longer than the nights, but one thing that astounded me about that northern latitude was how swiftly the days grew shorter. If I’d been scientific I’d have noted that, where each day was three minutes shorter in New England, each day was six minutes shorter in northern Scotland, but rather than scientific I was poetic, and was struck by a sense of swiftly deepening darkness and growing gloom. Before I knew it I felt like I was fighting for my life, simply staying sane. The sun seemed to barely start rising in the sky before it gave up and went back down again, when you could see the sun at all, and it didn’t just rain. Some days were just a brief time when the blackness turned deep purple. Then, to truly test me, in the midst of this darkness the English postal workers went on strike, and week after week passed without any mail at all, from January to March.

Surviving the winter changed me. For one thing, I entered it seventeen years old and exited it eighteen, and eighteen seemed very old to me. I felt it was high time to stop being juvenile, and to grow up and be grim. But a problem with that northern latitude was the days grew longer with the same astonishing speed they’d grown shorter, and the increasing floods of intoxicating daylight made it hard to be grim and serious. I was given to manic moods and bouts of irresponsible behavior, which seemed less than mature to me, as my poetic inclinations warred with my newfound discipline.

I actually had achieved a lot, not merely in terms of becoming physically fit, but in terms of absorbing an amazing amount of intellectual stuff, (perhaps knowledge or perhaps trivia). While American schooling taught more, in those days, when it came to justifying thought (and coming up with excuses) American schools dropped the ball in terms of exposing one to other’s minds. Consequently I could write as if I was an expert on Mark Twain when I had read nothing but part of Huckleberry Finn, primarily focusing on my own thoughts, responses and opinions. The British schooling required far more actual reading, and I read more in a month at the boarding school than I had read in four years at an American high school. After an initial period of disdain, when I scorned being exposed to “old fashioned” writers, I suddenly became a sort of human sponge, completely absorbed in meeting a cast of witty characters who seemed strangely alive even when they’d been dead for centuries. My American teachers would have been astonished to see me work so hard, but the thing of it was: It often didn’t seem like work, any more than it seems like work to head off to a pub and hear an old sailor tell a good tale. It became obvious that, besides getting myself in physical shape, I was in good shape when it came to passing my A-levels in English, (and also Economics). However it was at this point that becoming sane came very close to killing me.

The weirder parts of my thinking had faded away with the winter darkness, and I’d climbed beyond the various withdrawal symptoms I’d suffered, and my thinking had become very “straight”. Not that I didn’t still venture off into poetic landscapes, but I knew poetry was just a form of dreaming-while-awake, and to some degree I belittled it as something that was less than “real”. I was increasingly a realist, and, until I could see some sort of proof beyond hallucinations, I was increasingly an Atheist.

One test to my atheism involved the castle ghost. Of course, you can’t believe in ghosts if you are a true Atheist, but a number of boys claimed to have seen the ghost, and I was not about to exclude myself from such fascinating discussions over some piffling technicality. Anyway, I could contribute to the discussion, though I called the ghost a hallucination, when I saw it.

The boys talked with great authority about the ghost, though they tended to disagree a lot about major details, and even about whether there was one ghost or several different ghosts.

The majority opinion was that the ghost was named Margaret, and that she was the daughter of a Duke who ruled back in the 1600’s. Margaret wanted to marry her true love, but the Duke wanted her to marry some person she did not love. He locked her in the top of the castle, but she planned to elope with her true love. As she started to escape, descending out the window on a rope, her father barged in and caught her, and she was faced with a choice of being hauled up and captured and forced to marry someone she didn’t love, or letting go of the rope. She chose death, but didn’t get to go to heaven, and instead had to hang around the castle trying to live out the rest of her life without a body to do the living with. She’d been at it three hundred years, and apparently still had more disembodied living to do. The boys claimed they saw her ghosting about the upper floors of the castle. Some boys said she cried out for her lover, and others said she moaned because she’d realized suicide was a bad choice, and that a couple decades married to a jerk was preferable to centuries stuck upstairs in a castle.

When I had my own hallucination I told no one about it, for I figured I’d just get put in a straitjacket if I did so. It was only months later, when I knew the boys better, that I entertained them with my tale, and was promptly mocked and derided, because they insisted no self-respecting ghost would ever haunt in the manner I described.

For one thing, my hallucination didn’t take the form of a young woman, and rather just was a black shape. It occurred in the fall, when the days were still getting drastically darker and a wind was roaring off the North Sea and beating against the windows of my dorm. The dorm had originally been a single, vast, guest-bedroom for the wealthy, but now had five, small metal beds scattered about, with foot lockers at the bottom of each bed. My four roommates were breathing the soft serenity of sleep, but I was tossing and turning in some private agony, yearning for sleep to come spare me. I flopped over and glowered out through the open door into the yellow-lit hallway, and then noticed a small, black sphere just hanging in the air by the door. I thought it must be some mote in my eye, and blinked to make it go away, but rather than going away it assumed the shape of a small, black, blunt comet, spiraling around and growing larger, speeding up, and then rocketing away down the hall. I swallowed, decided screaming would do no good, and flopped back over to my other side, and yearned even more desperately for the oblivion of sleep, and was granted my wish.

The other boys especially disliked my dismissive attitude. Somewhere I had read that people saw black shapes just before a migraine headache, and even though I hadn’t had a headache, I decided the black shape was one of those.

The subject of ghosts and suicide came up again one mild spring evening, when there was suddenly daylight after first prep and before dinner. We had a tiny bit of free time then, fifteen minutes when we were suppose to put books needed for first prep away, and take out the books needed for second prep, but actually was a time the boys used to hurry away into the castle grounds, just past the view of teachers, for a cigarette. I had fallen off the wagon, in terms of tobacco, and joined a group as it slouched down a groomed path through budding rhododendrons, puffing small, silver clouds of smoke that hung in the calm, until we paused by a small graveyard for the past’s various dukes and duchesses, noticing a relatively new grave just outside the wrought iron fence that marked the consecrated ground. Apparently a teen aged child of the current duchess had taken his life while away at boarding school, and apparently suicides weren’t allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. The boys were discussing their theories about why this rule existed, when one boy became exasperated.

It was Peter, a short young man with red curls, amazing freckles, big ears, bright blue eyes, and an amazing wit. He was an adept “skiver” who seemed to dislike study, but to be very smart, and to enjoy holding the most unlikely opinions. If there was a new way of looking at an ordinary thing, he’d go out of his way to find it, as if he found life boring and was trying to spice it up a bit. His dorm was on a different level of the castle, and I never had gotten to know him very well because he avoided all sports, the same way he avoided all study, and also because he hung out with a different group of friends, but the little time I spent with him was always rewarding.

Peter had spent five long years at the school, and I assumed he had never seen the ghost Margaret whom others talked about. If he had, it was inconvenient for the stance he chose to take at that moment, which was a stance of fierce Atheism. He spread his palms and shook his head and loudly wondered how his fellows could be so unscientific. Then he insisted at length that science had never grasped a ghost with calipers nor noted a change in temperature in haunted places, but instead had proven without doubt that life was only a coincidental concentration of electricity within a complex chemical reaction. When we died we just reverted to the chemicals we’d come from, and then, to prove his point, he nimbly pranced to the side and stood on the green grave of the suicide, stooped over, plucked a blade of grass, and claimed, “This grass is chemically no different from any other grass, and this doesn’t make me a cannibal”, and then he chewed the grass. The other boys exploded into exclamations over how disgusting and gross Peter was, as he laughed in delight, and I strode to his side and called the other boys cowards, stooped, and chewed my own blade of grass. Then we heard the distant bell ringing, snubbed our cigarettes, and hurried off to dinner.

After my initial delight over Peter’s antics faded away, I was struck by a profound wonder over how utterly meaningless life was. I shared a cramped study in a small turret with two other older boys, but for some reason both boys were away, and I was alone there, doing my studying, when the wonder overwhelmed me. I looked out the window at a beautiful view of green springtime by a benign, azure sea, aware I’d triumphed over the darkness of winter and the impossible work-load necessary to pass my A-levels, and it all seemed completely worthless. What did it matter, if in the end I’d just die and turn into chemicals feeding green grass? Success or failure, victory or loss, it all came to the same end; in the end it amounted to nothing. So why was I putting it off?

I smacked down my pen, stood up, and walked down the halls past the deserted dorms to a dorm with a window that overlooked a three story drop to a stone terrace. Why was I putting it off? Far away I could hear a house senior yelling at the rowdy boys in a second prep classroom, shouting that he’d give them all caveats if they didn’t pipe down and study. Was there some sort of caveat given for suicide? Through my brain drifted Hamlet’s soliloquy.

“…….To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause…….”

Must give us pause? Why must it “give us pause”? Was the “pausing” not all due to superstition? There wasn’t a shred of scientific evidence to back up the taboo against suicide. It was just an inbred fear of death, some biological advantage that kept chemical reactions going and breeding and continuing to put off what was inevitable: Death. But why put it off? Why wait fifty years for what could be done now?

My poetic side had no answer. My pragmatic side, which had helped me survive all the symptoms as I went through drug withdrawals, had achieved a total victory, and I had become a complete Atheist. All poetic thought was dismissed as mere hallucination, all spirituality was swept into a dustbin made for all things irrational and unreal.

I leaned further out the window and dared myself to just do it. Why be such a chicken? Just do it. Why wait fifty years? It will all be over in just a second.

Just then, as I teetered on the brink, a black shape came through the wall at ground level and hurtled up at me. Startled, I fell back from the window. Then I hurried back to my study and went to work as if nothing had happened. It was only after five minutes that my stunned brains were able to wonder, “What the fuck was that?”

My pragmatic side immediately went to work explaining it away. I decided fear-of-death is a powerful instinct, a product of countless millennium’s worth of survival-of-the-fittest, evolved into a power ingrained into human biology and chemistry that defies rational thought. If you try to push against it it pushes back in a powerful way. What I had seen was that power manifesting as a striking hallucination, for I had felt no physical wind as the blackness hurtled up towards me.

But in a schizoid manner my poetic side was utterly unscientific, and mused, “I wonder if that was Margaret? She would know suicide is not an escape, I suppose. Maybe that was her way of advising me against it.”

Thirty years later, during a school reunion, I returned to that window, looked down, and shuddered. I alone know what a close call it was. The odd part is that there was nothing particularly wrong with my life at that time. There was no reason except that I had no reason.

At the time I still thought of myself as an Atheist, but the experience was a wrench in the works of my pragmatic certainty. A flaw existed in the diamond of my “straightness”, a fatigue in the metal of my will. It shows up in my poetry with the appearance of illogical things, like ghosts. It reappeared in my life as the desire to find some good marijuana, and to go back to error, seeking a window to another world.

THE FAR SIDE SONNET

At the far side of winter, winter wind
Rollicks with summer sun, and bright snowflakes
Swing down sunbeams through oaks. What’s this? I’ve grinned
Against my will, although my old back aches
At the planting I must do. The children
Play so lost in make-believe they don’t see
What really is, and that is: That all men
Are created blessed by Love’s fantasy;
A dream realer than squandered time dreaming
Of fame, wealth, power, and all that stuff
Grown-ups make-believe is real. Cease scheming,
And benevolence comes to smooth what is rough.
In April we see it; feel the releasing;
Yet Love is all year; eternal; unceasing.

MY GRANDFATHER’S HORSE SONNET

What’s the big deal about newfangled cars
That steer by themselves? My grandfather’s horse
Could do that, and I thank my lucky stars
That horse beat computers by years. Of course,
It didn’t get puffed up about being smart
And put on airs. It just wished to plod home,
And let my grandfather turn to his heart
And my grandmother, (and his hands would roam
I think, though grandmother never once said
He did such a thing; it was simply that
Each time she mentioned the horse he’d turn red.)
Self-steering is fine, if you don’t get a flat.
One’s freed to make a new generation,
And without children you lose your nation.

ARCTIC SEA ICE –Barneo Put On Ice–

The Corona Virus has taken another victim, as around March 15 the yearly Barneo polar-tourism event was cancelled.  Though the cancellation was necessary, it is a pity, for I enjoy the Russian’s attitude concerning sea-ice. They have about a million times the experience of the shallower Alarmists, who merely parrot the “settled science” which they have been gullible enough to accept as a talking-points. Where Alarmists have but dogmas, the Russians have actual experience. After all, the Russians have been landing aircraft on sea-ice since the 1930’s, and built their first Barneo-like base by the North Pole in 1937.

We are talking 72 years worth of experience, largely ignored by Alarmists, (and also are describing a great improvement in the sort of aircraft that the Russians land on the sea-ice with).

I must appear to dislike modern streamlining and other improvements, when I confess I sort of liked the old Russian bombers, which could carry their own fighter-bombers tucked like chicks under each wing:

The Russians had their own way of doing things, and it is interesting how their paratroopers exited their old bombers:

Although these ungainly-looking bombers look odd to us now, back in the day they set records for climbing to various altitudes lugging various weights, and also set the record (for that time) in terms of the duration of a flight, able to fly roughly eighteen hours without refueling (likely with additional fuel tanks). This allowed them to keep their bombers at airports a safe distance behind the battle-lines, as Hitler’s surprise attack sent the Russians reeling in retreat, and yet to still shock Hitler by bombing  Berlin at night as early as 1941. Although very vulnerable in daylight, these ungainly bombers helped Russia withstand the German onslaught, able to even move tanks if need be.

Russia had to know a lot about arctic conditions in order to be resupplied during World War Two, both by the British via convoys through Barents Sea, and by Americans via airlifts up through Canada, Alaska and then along the entire Siberian coastline. One character who stands out, in terms of such arctic knowledge, was Mark Shevelev, a pilot who somehow managed to skate through Stalin’s paranoid reign without winding up purged, (despite having Jewish parents), eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant-general and passing away in 1991 at the ripe old age of 86. He likely possessed more knowledge about sea-ice in his little finger than Greenpeace holds in its entire collection of thick skulls.

By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.or/w/index.php?curid=62460887

Unfortunately much of this knowledge is not easily accessible.

Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 Russia created a total of 31 bases drifting on sea-ice, each one gathering data, and each one having a beginning and end, and a path across the arctic, but the only actual drift-map I have found is from the first one in 1937:

A list of the bases, (including the Russian post-Soviet-Union bases which restarted such such exploration, after a fifteen year pause), can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drifting_ice_station

One of the main reasons such bases were funded (the United States had a few, the chief being “Fletcher’s Ice Island” [“T-3”]), was because the two sides wanted to keep an eye on each other’s submarines during the Cold War, and consequently they also kept an eye one each other’s ice-floe bases, with much of the information kept top secret. There are all sorts of tales of submarines playing hide and seek under the ice, and one of the coolest tales to come out of that time (1962) was “Operation Coldfeet”, wherein a Russian sea-ice-base failed to disintegrate after it was abandoned, and Americans parachuted down to the sea-ice to investigate the abandoned base. This presented the investigators with a bit of a problem: How the heck to retrieve the men (and evidence) when there was no flat ice nearby large enough to land a plane upon. The answer was to snatch the men up from the ground using a moving plane, and this adventure was the first time “Sky Hook” was used.

I’m surprised that the people being rescued were not killed by whiplash, but perhaps the arrangement had some give, like a bungee cord. In any case the intelligence-gathering was a tremendous success, and a great deal was learned about the Russian’s ability to acoustically gather information about American submarines. (The fact a tremendous amount was also learned about sea-ice, during all these spy-vs-spy shenanigans, seems to have been a sort of side effect.)

My point is that we (and especially the Russians) are perfectly able to counter Alarmist contentions that the sea-ice is now at dreadfully low levels, “unprecedented” in human history. The Russians have data going back which allows them to see a decrease in sea-ice into the early 1950’s (which was fortuitous because winter convoys  through a conveniently ice-free Barents Sea kept Russia from perishing during the darkest days of World War Two) followed by an increase in sea-ice until around 1979, followed by the cycle decreasing again until now.

If one wonders why the Russians don’t counter the Alarmists with loud rebuttals, the answer may well be, “Never interrupt your rival when they are making a mistake.” The Russians want to take the lead in developing their arctic resources, (which Greenpeace frowns-at and calls “exploitation”),  and therefore Russia sees no great advantage in correcting the errors of their competitors. If others insist upon being politically-correct and scientifically-stupid, Russia will not be so rude as to interfere.

I personally prefer the Truth, and have posted all sorts of examples from history of open water at the Pole, even in March and May when sea-ice extents are high.

It is amazing how much obvious history Alarmists chose to be blind to, when they cling to their idea that we have never before seen sea-ice as thin as we now see at the Pole. For example, here is a newsreel from 1934 describing a schooner blithely sailing through an area where more modern-yachts were turned back, when attempting the Northwest passage, last summer.

Eventually one concludes (if one is me) that some Alarmists just don’t like history. When their psychiatrists ask them to remember their childhoods they likely respond, “What childhood?” This explains why they seem unable to resolve their psychological difficulties, chief of which is that they deny they have a problem and instead call me the “denier”. Theirs is a terrible state to be trapped in, and we actually should feel pity for these unfortunate people,  for all knowledge is based upon the foundation of those who came before us and who discovered things which they handed forward through the mists of time to us, but these poor Alarmists resent the past, blame it for every possible challenge the present presents us with, and think the best thing to do is to purge all history from all books and start from scratch, as if amnesia is intelligence. (End rant.)

In other words, on one hand data is suppressed due to the spy-vs.-spy skullduggery of political and industrial espionage, and on the other hand data is denied by the blind faith of political dogma (which often replaces the blind faith of religious belief, when priests have too obviously been greedy and lustful and have broken people’s religious faith.)

And then there is deplorable me. All I want is the data, so I can watch the sea-ice and wonder, and perhaps glimpse a pattern which perhaps repeats.

There is no particular magic involved in the forecasts which spring from observations. A child can do it. Just as when the sky gets dark and one hear grumbles of thunder, one becomes wary of a storm, one watches the sea-ice for certain indicators. And just as, when one hears grumbles of thunder, the storm may pass to the north or the south and not hit you, uncertainty is involved in sea-ice forecasts, but uncertainty shouldn’t lead to despair and the abandonment of all observations.

As the Corona Virus is forcing us to self-isolate, I think this might be a good time to do some digging, and see if we can learn more about the Soviet Union’s sea-ice bases. Although I grew up deeming Russians “the bad guys”, one has to admit some amazing men achieved some amazing things in the arctic, and a lot we know about the arctic came from their research. (For example, they discovered the submerged mountain range running across the bottom of the Arctic Sea.)

One thing which could be better understood through the examination of the Russian sea-ice bases is the drift of the sea-ice. Usually it is described as two main features, the Transpolar Drift and the Beaufort Gyre.

In actual fact the two features may swing through cycles where first one and then the other predominates. The Russian descriptions I have been able to find seem to suggest their sea-ice bases traveled one of two routes, one of which flushed the base down through Fram Strait, and the other which cycled the base around the Pole.

Just looking at the list of Russian bases I gave earlier, I note sometimes bases were abandoned surprisingly close to where they began, despite the passage of long periods of time, suggesting the Beaufort Gyre was displaced far from the Beaufort Sea, and the base described a circle on the Siberian side of the Pole. (Some bases were abandoned not because the sea-ice became untenable, but rather because they drifted too far from Russia and too close to Canada, which created resupply problems, if not political ones.)

One base of particular interest is Base NP 22, which drifted around for eight and a half years, from September 13, 1972 to April 8, 1981. This base lasted longer than any other base, and also was operational when sea-ice levels peaked in 1979. It would be interesting to learn what the sea-ice and the sea-ice-drift was like, at that time. Therefore, if you are stuck in a period of “self quarantine” or “social isolation” and would like to be helpful, search about the web and see if you can find anything about this expedition for me.

Even when things can’t be found in official histories, on official news sites, or on government search engines, it is amazing what people post on there personal sites or in places like Facebook. Some of the old-timers who were on those Russian NP bases are likely now old and garrulous geezers like I am, and perhaps they wrote memoirs. In any case, I’m  curious.

A few years back a Jet suffered a collapsed landing gear at the Barneo site and could not be repaired, and the usual suspects were accusing the Russians of polluting the Pristine Arctic by allowing the jet to just sink, when the sea-ice melted. The Russians responded in their usual manner; they do not dignify such accusations by even behaving as if they heard them. But I was curious, and started poking about, and found photographs which suggested the engines (at least) were valuable enough to save.

https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/arctic-sea-ice-barneo-2016-the-mystery-of-the-missing-jet/

The humorous thing is that the images were not found in any official government disclaimer, but rather in the chatter of employees on Facebook pages. The Russian government could have defended itself, but seemed to feel that becoming defensive would be lowering itself.

Perhaps a certain element of egotism is involved. Governments have their dignity, and at times they refuse to stoop to answer inane questions. This seems especially true when the questions are nasty and accusatory.  At times “Fake News” is as much in the questions as it is in the answers, (which is something that formerly was not as apparent as President Trump has made it become). But attack-dog questioning  was always obvious to me, in the realm of arctic sea-ice, especially when the Russians faced questions by people who were known “activists”, such as Greenpeace. The very word “activist” is suggestive that a thing beyond mere curiosity is “active”, behind a reporter’s grilling.

In a better world we wouldn’t ask questions in the manner of a lawyer who is paid to arrive at a certain verdict. Rather we would ask questions because we wanted answers to things we didn’t understand. Sadly some seem to think they already know everything, and that “the science is settled”. When they raise their hands at a press conference it is like a proud child in a classroom, eager to show off an answer they already know, but not really interested in learning anything new. Rather than knowledgeable they look like know-it-alls, rather than conceiving they are blinded by preconception.

For example, imagine the conclusion an Alarmist would jump to, looking at the below picture of a prefab house at the Russian N.P.  36 base.

If you were an Alarmist you would take one look and, because everything is seen through the filter of Global Warming, (just as things look rosy to one wearing rose-colored glasses), everything looks alarming to an Alarmist. Some version of “Look how bad the melting is!” would be the first, and somewhat involuntary, utterance.

In actual fact those who live in wintry landscapes know that, even when the sun is low in December, one can find less harsh conditions out of the wind at the face of a south-facing cliff. The snow melts first at the base of a barn’s south wall (which is where farmers prefer to work, if they must work outside), but at the Pole in July every wall is south-facing, and rather than set the sun rolls around and around the horizon. Therefore every object sitting on the arctic snow has a tendency to wind up on a pedestal like a statue. For example, the DC-3 that crashed on Fletcher’s Ice Island was originally at the level of the snow:

But years later was elevated:

Simply by wandering from site to site, seeing as much of the Pole as I could from my armchair, I found my views of the Pole were altered, especially concerning what conditions are like during the height of summer. There is no “cool of the evening” because it never is evening, and the temperature seldom drops below freezing. (The slush on and around Fletcher’s Ice Island could be so deep the men stationed there wore hip-waders, back in the 1950’s). Consequently I’ve become less alarmed than Alarmists are, by signs of melting at the Pole in July.

In fact, I originally was drawn into the tussle with Alarmists due to a melt-water pool that appeared at the Pole in July, 2013:

This resulted in quite a hubbub among Alarmists. One article began, “If the image above doesn’t scare you about the effects of global warming, you must have ice water in your veins. That’s the North Pole — or at least that’s where the camera started its mission. It’s now a lake.” I attempted to soothe the above writer by pointing out it was just a melt-water pool, and would likely drain down through the ice when it found a crack, which was exactly what happened.

The sad thing was that before I was proved correct my comment was deleted from the Alarmist site for being that of a “denier”. However here at this site I went from my usual 40 views a day to 700. That was my introduction to the wonderful world of sea-ice politics:

https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/lake-north-pole-vanishes/

When I reread the above post from July, 2013, I am struck by my own ignorance. I’ve learned a lot since then, simply following the principle of “curious minds want to know.” But back at the time what I was struck by was the fact that Alarmists didn’t even know melt-water pools would drain down through the sea-ice, but still could look down their noses at me as if I was the ignorant one.

Sad. But the fact some put appearing knowledgeable over actually knowing shouldn’t be allowed to stop us from learning a little more, and here’s what I’m curious about:

The Russians talked about two distinct flows in the arctic, one flushing sea-ice down through Fram Strait and one cycling sea-ice around the Pole. This past winter seems like a flusher. The Polarstern, holding the MOSAiC expedition, (and its associated buoys) has been making good progress down towards Fram Strait.

I notice this path is similar to the route shown taken by the first Russian N.P. expedition in 1937. The men on that expedition were picked up by icebreakers in Fram Strait, and delivered back to Russia aboard the icebreaker Yermak, built in 1898.

Russia still picks up its sea-ice expedition crews using icebreakers. Here are the crew of N.P. 36 being retrieved:

So who do you suppose we should go to, to learn about icebreakers, or about sea-ice? Greenpeace, or the Russians? Not that I’d be inclined to go to the Russians for advice on other topics, but in terms of sea-ice, the Russians rule and Greenpeace drools.

If I could, I’d go to them hat in hand and be very respectful, asking for more information about the past. I have my hunches that the discharge of ice into the Atlantic may have something to do with how the AMO switches from its “warm” phase to its “cold” phase, which has implications for farmers and fishermen further south, but that will have to wait until a future post, (if the Corona Virus doesn’t get me first).

Stay tuned.

CRISIS’S ICE-CREAM SONNETS

The ‘flu’s laws can’t keep country folk indoors,
And they drive aimless, or go out and stand
On their front lawn. Our stout leader implores
We not spread germs, but that caring command
Means we have time on our hands. On their lawns
People stand as they haven’t stood in years
(For their past vacations hurried). Midst yawns
People watch dawns that bloomed unseen midst blears
Workweek after workweek, and think that thought
We are bound to think: “What’s all of this for?”
“Ice-cream”, states my grandchild. And if I’ve caught
The ‘flu, it’s because I walked out the door
Wearing a mask with my grandchild and wife
Seeking a drive-through’s sweet purpose for life

Driving down the town hill with my grandchild
After getting ice-cream, I looked out across
The evening village, and saw the years piled
Like a treasure of taxes, a wistful loss
As one more day went where all days go…
…I’d like to go there someday, to when cows
And not houses filled these fields that now grow
Grass that feeds no one. I’d happily browse
Like a librarian or perhaps God must do
Through the volumes of years, through the tall stacks
Of all that time’s created; see the True
Beyond lies; watch deceits fade; face the facts;
And, through looking back, not remain dead,
But gather the wisdom to see what’s ahead.

LOCAL VIEW –Eat The Grass–

Despite the quarantine, our Childcare remains open. Nurses and doctors on the front-line need Childcare, (though some have withdrawn their children because they figure doctors and nurses are exposed to the virus, and therefore their children might carry the virus, and they don’t want to infect our Childcare…….Talk about Class!)

Just to make things more miserable, a big storm stalled out to sea. It made yesterday’s forecast incorrect by “going out to sea”, and though it was cold and dank all day we got none of the expected rain, until evening when a nasty, cold rain mixed with sleet fell, at which point I looked skywards and wondered, “What the…???”

A quick check informed me that the storm had decided not go out to sea after all, and was looping back. It was only teasing, when it “went out to sea”, and, unsatisfied with screwing up one forecast, came back to screw up another, and rather than a drizzly dawn followed by clearing, today we got a drenching dawn with gusty winds, and cold rain all day long.

It was quite the storm, even developing an eye like a hurricane:

And of course this presented me with a problem, as a “childcare provider”, because we can’t really hang around indoors because that increases the likelihood of transmitting the virus. Instead we have to hike around outside in gusty wind and drenching rain. The whining is hard to endure. (I’m not talking about the kids; I’m talking about myself, as I get up and go to work.) I have to make sure everyone is dressed in rain gear, but hardest is putting a good face upon hiking in a rainstorm. I try to think of places to go that might interest the children, and a “curriculum” that might engross them, and then take a deep breath and off we go, into the rain, with my dog trotting ahead and leading the way.

Today’s curriculum was “edible spring greens”, because during our last sunny-day hike the goats followed us, nosing through the dead winter weeds and looking for purpled bramble leaves, and the first green shoots of spring. At one point the goats found a southern exposure which held a bit of green grass, and the boys noticed that not only the goats ate that grass, but the dog as well.

Their boyish curiosity seemed a perfect lead-in to all sorts of wisdom I could impart regarding certain herbs, and how vegetables in general, are good for you. I daydreamed about how the kids would listen eagerly, and soak up what I taught like small sponges.

After all, people couldn’t always get un-withered apples in April, fresh from New Zealand, around here. When my grandparents were small children in the 1890’s Lent was a time for fasting because there was little left in the larder, and Saint Patrick’s Day featured corn-beef and cabbage boiled with carrots and potatoes because the pantry held nothing else. By the end of March people were suffering from a deficiency of many vitamins, and people who were sensitive and observant (often mothers) noticed that simple things had huge benefits. They didn’t know that B vitamins were in spring greens, or that sunshine on skin creates enormous amounts of vitamin D, but they had a scientific streak, in that they knew what was good for you, and, as I remembered my grandparents, I had a good time envisioning the curriculum I’d teach.

As often is the case, my curriculum bombed. Today I had only three boisterous boys in my group, and they were not the slightest bit interested in spring greens. So I was “flexible”, and invented a new curriculum based upon what their young minds seemed interested in. Mostly it was jumping in puddles, and rough-and-tumble in the rain, (with me as a referee), but they did note the brooks and streams were higher, and even that when we passed a rivulet a second time that the waters were rising. (Perhaps one of them will someday become a hydro-engineer.) In their boyish manner they launched into the topics of floods and tornadoes and earthquakes, quite sure life would be better if we had more disasters, and this led to the topic of the Corona Virus and them wondering about germs, and I droned the dogma about washing hands and avoiding crowds, and that we likely would have to soon even avoid rough-and-tumble, and then, to lighten things up a bit, I pretended to be horrified because all three boys had dots on their noses. Were those specks the dreaded virus!? They delighted in informing me the dots were freckles.

In conclusion, I never got around to teaching them a cotton-pickin’ thing about spring greens. They had a great time and got lots of fresh air and exersize (if not much vitamin D from sunshine) but my curriculum went unknown. Therefore…….you will have to put up with listening to it.

It should be obvious there is something very good in spring greens, but as I walked around the in the cold rain today I noticed most were too stunted to be worth gathering. The dandelion crowns could be harvested, if you don’t mind using tweezers. The stinging nettles were even smaller. The chickweed was minuscule. In fact the landscape was greening in a way that, years ago, when we had cows, drove the cows crazy for a couple days, because the deliciously scented greenery was too short; their big teeth couldn’t crop it.

Goats can crop closer to earth, and I’ve noticed that the first thing (besides winter-purpled brambles) that they can find to munch is lowly grass. Not only goats, but cats eat it. Chickens eat it. Dogs eat it. And when I was young, boys ate it. Obviously some primal instinct tells us, “Eat”. What could there possibly be to argue about? Look at it:

Yet this grass has caused problems which strike me as absurd, because the first and best species of grass is called “witch grass,” and the word “witch” makes many get a bit crazy.

Only a few centuries ago, when people got sick, they prayed. They had no antibiotics, no anti-viral drugs. They were helpless, like small children, and turned to “Abba” for help. I actually feel this is a good thing, but that people have to understand some may receive an answer, and the answer might be, “eat the grass.”

There should be no disagreement between the Priests, who say, “Pray when you are sick”, and those who say “eat the grass”, but an eventual dichotomy occurred. Those who were gifted with answers became a sort antithesis to the thesis, “Pray”, and the synthesis of the two sides was forgotten. The people who turned to herbs became called “witches.”

There is nothing ungodly about being gifted in this respect. For example, if people were suffering rickets from Vitamin D deficiency and prayed, they might receive an “answer” which stated, “Stand in the sun with your shirt off”. The answer likely isn’t delivered in a booming baritone, and often is a little light-bulb in the skull, so called “common-sense”, which thinks, “Hmm, people in the sun a lot don’t get rickets.”

In like manner people (largely women) may have noted, “Hmm, when I serve people rose-hip tea (vitamin C) their gums stop bleeding”, and “Hmm, when I serve willow-bark tea (Aspirin) their fever subsides and their headache goes away,” and, “Hmm, there are benefits from eating spring’s first shoots of grass.”

How is this a problem? It is perhaps a small problem if no glory goes to the Creator of sunshine and rose-hips and willow-bark and grass, Who is also the illuminator of the silent light-bulbs in our skulls. (But we all take more credit than we should, while trying to avoid all blame.) A truly holy priest would gently remind a person, if they became too arrogant, but would never burn them at the stake.

Unfortunately some priests felt very threatened when a “witch” could heal when they could not. It did not seem to occur to them that, when they prayed for healing, and a person promptly showed up who could heal, that their prayer was answered. Instead they burned the very person sent to answer their prayer. Vanity makes some people, even people who study scriptures and who try hard to be spiritual, sometimes behave very stupidly. All that some priests could see was that the “right” way of healing was prayer, and the wrong way was herbs, (including spring’s first shoots of grass).

Even more unfortunately, but quite understandably, herbalists (usually women) became disgusted by priests. You can hardly blame them, if they got burned at the stake for healing people, but being treated badly can lead to anger and vengeance and believing two wrongs make a right. Rather than unity and harmony, which is the hope of true spirituality, there was a division between priests (usually men) and herbalists, (usually women.)

What is interesting about this earlier time is that the herbalists were more scientific, which means a group that was usually female was more rational than a group that was usually male. Women were likely the original chemists who figured out mixing ashes with fat made soap, and that letting juice ferment in the open made vinegar which could be used for pickling, and that letting salted cabbage sit made sauerkraut, and numerous other things fundamental to survival. Meanwhile the men, who like to think they are more intellectual than women, (or at least I too often do), were figuring out ways to burn women at the stake.

For this reason I don’t much blame some in the Wicca movement for being in some ways alienated from common sense. In the past the so-called “sane” have behaved so insanely that one feels justified in spelling “magic” as “magick”, (as if that matters a hill of beans,) and taking other steps to draw a line in the sand, and be sadly divisive.

But I believe we shouldn’t merely react, becoming an antithesis to another’s thesis, but should seek the synthesis of Understanding. After all, what is the synthesis of traditional marriage? It is neither male nor female, but what neither side has all alone, called, “Love”.

One interesting thing about the Pilgrims and Puritans arriving in New England four hundred years ago is that they were tired of the so-called “sanity” of an insane world, and thirsty for a saner life. Yet they were plunged into more than two centuries of war with the Native Americans, the French, and finally even their fellow British, and even during brief periods of peace suffered all sorts of societal agonies all their own. And one very odd result was that the women became less scientific as the men became more so.

It must have been odd to be a people who so many other people wanted to see wiped off the face of the earth. Such genocide was stated as a goal by many native American tribes, the French in Canada, and even the fellow Englishmen across the sea (if they were Catholic.) Under this dark duress the Salem Witch Trials occurred, wherein the accusers were not men, and men were among those executed. Not that any were without blame, but one interesting thing to do is to read the writings of those who experienced that madness, and how they agonized afterwards.

It might be nice to rewind the past and get a chance to do better a second time, but we are stuck with the heritage we get, and a century and a half after the witch trials, when New England’s wars with Indians were at long last over, New England went through another bizarre time that makes me shake my head, when the men were scientific as the women were faithful, and neither was very nice to the priests.

On the male side was Oliver Wendal Holmes Sr., who developed the thesis there were invisible physical things called “germs” that caused illness, and that when a woman died after childbirth of Puerperal Fever the blame lay not in her failure to pray, but in the failure of the doctor to wash his hands and boil his instruments.

On the female side was Mary Baker Eddy, whose antithesis idea suggested that failing to believe in Lord Jesus, and instead putting faith in physical things (including “germs”), lay behind all illness and all physical suffering.

Between the two sides were the orthodox Calvinist preachers, who basically wished the two sides would just shut up and sit quietly in their pews until it was time to sing hymns, or to put 10% of their income into the collection tray. Rather than achieving a synthesis between physical reality and spiritual reality, they turned a dichotomy into a sort of trichotomy. And if you don’t think this hubbub is continuing to this day, you aren’t paying attention to the intellectual hubbub caused by the Corona Virus.

At times such hubbub takes on an ugly quality, reminding one of the witch-hunts and witch-burnings of yore, creating divisiveness when we need unity. It can be very hard not to take sides in such quarrels, especially when a hapless person needs a defender, but one needs to keep in mind that taking sides is not the higher Unity most needed. Most elusive is the fact such Unity is not a thing either side owns, but rather exists independently of either side, in the same manner depth perception exists independently of either eye. Just as it would be foolishness for one eye to claim they have depth perception without the other, it is foolishness for one human to claim they have Love and Understanding without the other. But what is perhaps most difficult and perhaps impossible to conceive is that Love and Understanding doesn’t need us. Love and Understanding are/is a Truth which exists even if not a single person on earth enacts such Beauty.

The independent existence of this Truth, Beauty, Love and Understanding is called by some, “God”, and because Infinite Love cannot stand idly by and watch suffering without acting, to this Deity is given the quality of Infinite Power. Therefore, when faced with a time of societal madness, it might be a good thing to turn to this Compassionate Being of Infinite Power and ask for a wee bit of assistance. If you lack Understanding, ask for it. If you lack Love, ask for it. If you lack anything, ask for it. You might not hear a booming baritone, but a little light-bulb might go off in your head.

I have one other suggestion as well. When you are done asking, go out for a walk and then, after looking over either shoulder to make sure no one is watching, eat some grass.