A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is an example of ‘painting with light’. Astronomers use the separated colours produced by oxygen and hydrogen to investigate star-forming processes in the nebula NGC 2080. The colours explain much about the nature of such nebulae.
–from the European Space Agency
Ideas, on CBC Radio is running a five part series on Simone Weil. It features one episode on her life and then four on her political and mystical thought.
Weil was a French Jew who became a Christian mystic and died in 1943. She was an anarchist, and her writings were championed by the likes of Andre Gide, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot, George Grant and Czeslaw Milosz. She wrote on affliction, suffering, sanctity, theology and philospophy. She identified with the working class, and styled herself as a slave.
On sanctity she wrote:
Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent� . A new type of sanctity � is almost equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and of human destiny� . More genius is needed [to invent it] than was needed by Archimedes to invent mechanics and physics. A new saintliness is a still more marvellous invention.
Many people argued for her sainthood after she died, but she died having never been baptized and so this was impossible. Not everyone held this opinion of her however, and some commentators have questioned the portryal of her as a saint
She exhibited a few blemishes but perhaps the most damning was a streak of anti-Semitism that resulted in her thinking being regarded paradoxically by some writers. For instance in this great biographical sketch in New Criterion, Jillian Becker writes:
Let us consider this. Here was a well-provided-for, well-educated young woman who freely chose to regard herself as a slave and to starve herself to death while war raged, hungry children helplessly wasted away in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto, the living skeletons of actual slaves dropped into the dust at Bergen-Belsen, and human bodies were consumed night and day in the ovens of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The young woman in question was a thinker and writer respected even in her own time by intellectuals and leaders of opinion, but she said nothing about these atrocities. She let herself die in 1943 when millions of her fellow Jews were being murdered in the name of the �final solution of the Jewish question,� and she who claimed to feel a deep sympathy with the afflicted and even a longing to bear their suffering for them protested only against being classed as one of them. If Fiedler is right that Simone Weil epitomizes the moral ideals of our time, then we are morally adrift in an era of darkness.
More on Simone Weil later.
The completion of satellite missions is something that is marked like the death of an old friend among space techs.
The Galileo probe, which has travelled around Jupiter for more than ten years and contributed huge amounts of knowledge about the planet is about to be sent plunging into Jupiter’s atmosphere.
THis itself isn’t news perhaps, but what really caught my eye about this story was the consideration and planning that went into HOW to destroy Galileo. As quoted in
this article, NASA has decided to burn up Galileo to protect life that may exist on one of it’s moons:
The three-ton spacecraft is sailing through the outbound leg of its 35th and final orbit of Jupiter. It will crash into Jupiter on Sept. 21, a deliberate plunge into the dark side of the planet — out of view from Earth — at 108,000 mph.
The robotic suicide is designed to eliminate any chance that a hardy microbe, possibly alive in the radiation-shielded bowels of the spacecraft, could contaminate one of Jupiter’s moons, where subsurface oceans may harbor life.
This is such a generous act, full of reverence for life that may not even exist. It is an act that is the golden rule embodied, bringing to mind, as is happening in outer space, the Star Trek Prime Directive:
As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes the introduction of superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation.
Am I alone in thinking that this is the first human action in outer space that conforms consciously to this directive?
I’ve been suffering from a tension headache over the last few days. Headaches are not something I usually get, so it’s been a little unusual to have one.
In searching out some of the causes of headache pain, I discovered that human beings seems to take great pleasure in representing headaches visually. There is a whole sub-genre of visual art produced by migraine sufferers that is some of the most harrowing and despair filled imagery you will see anywhere.
How headaches are represented is fascinating. Headache art and graphics combine a number of elements to give one the sense of what having a headache is all about. These include:
When we describe problems as “a headache” several of these images come into play. Sitting in a meeting, with a seemingly unresolvable problem at your feet, described as a headache, people take on these stances; hands rub eyes, eyes close, fingers touching head, frustration captured in clenched teeth, a feeling that we are alone at this moment, unable to see a way out. The problem is focussed in the moment, and the world has collapsed into a small universe, exploding within the cranium. Darkness moves in, hope leaves. Attention shifts to sensations, to coping with the immediate pain of the problem, with no focus on the way out.
Painful as it is, the headache takes the sufferer into an immediate place of total connection with one’s interior. Out of that comes such eloquent expressions or art as migrane paintings, and poems, perhaps the best known of which was Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which was composed on opium with a raging headache.
Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan is an amazing place. It is natural shortgrass prairie and home to all kinds of interesting plants and animals. Over the course of three days there in 1994, we saw badgers, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, burrowing owls, ferringous hawks, black tailed prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and red foxes. We saw teepee rings on the top of bald buttes, unused for maybe 100 years, but each stone cast off the bottom of a skin teepee and gently placed in a ring for another time. We saw buffalo stones; huge erratic boulders rubbed smooth by centuries of buffalo who scratched themselves against the cool stone.
But initially, it wasn’t easy to see all this. Grasslands is wide open and one can travel anywhere on foot. We decided that we would visit every tree that we could see in the park (4 in all). During the first evening of looking around we saw none of the wildlife we expected. The next morning we spotted a coyote trail and decided to follow it.
Suddenly the world revealed itself to us, The trail took us past deer beds and badger dens, prairie dog colonies and owl burrows. Past a bleached skeleton of an antelope and down to the muddy Frenchman River, the northern most reach of the Mississippi River Basin.
And the trail wound on, almost aimlessly, yet connecting each of these living places like a songline. I got to wondering how long that trail had been there…200 years? 1000 years? How long had the coyotes been patrolling the valley, checking on every possible chance for a meal?
I soon became convinced that these trails had no beginning and no end. To follow them you simply hop aboard, like a depression era drifter riding freights, and see where they carry you. Other trails join, and sometimes the path splits in two. But there is no beginning and no end. In theory, the continent is laced with these paths, the original story of the land etched gingerly into the natural surface of the earth. In most places these paths have been covered over, but I am sure that the acquired energy of thousands of years of animals walking has left an imprint. If one was sensitive enough, one might even be able to feel the trail humming beneath concrete or blacktop, honouring only the topography and natural contour of the land.
We can find these stories again. We have to dig beneath the layers that have grown over the trails like grime. But the story is there. It reveals itself the same way a dirt path emerges across a grassy urban park, in complete defiance of the paved plan . There are natural ways to navigate within space. By honouring them, the real story emerges, and the living places reveal themselves to us.
