Ruth Ann and a Lifetime of Teaching

          Three months ago I heard from a student I taught thirty years ago, Ruth Ann Peters, who sits today at the very edges of my memory, her features blurry after a lifetime of classes and students.  Dredging faces up from the muddy past is asking too much of a memory that weakens rather than sharpens as the years roll by.  That's the curse of a long career in the classroom.  But Ruth Ann is different, for even though I no longer have a firm memory of her features, I do have a firm and warm sense that we had a good connection all those many years ago, that we in fact liked each other.  That, of course, is not unusual, for over the years there were many to like—it’s the best part of the job, even if their images fade irretrievably.

            Ruth Ann saw I was registered on Facebook and sent me a note late in December 2012, hoping to "reconnect."  I replied politely of course, and then she wrote something back that I will always treasure:  “My favorite Cifelli memory,” she wrote, “is that you once gave me an A- on a paper and a comment that read, ‘This grade has more to do with your intelligence than your diligence.’  It has stuck with me till today reminding me that good is not good enough if I know I can do better!”  Imagine that a single seed sewn three decades ago rooted itself and still thrives in the life of a student I barely remember.  I couldn’t be more thrilled.  
          Teachers realize early on that happy classroom memories generally dissolve into cool, thin air as the years march along.  Holding onto them is as difficult as grabbing mercury--and then Miss Ruth Ann suddenly appears with a wonderful moment from 1983, a moment guaranteed to warm a January day thirty years later.  What a wonderful surprise.  And to Ruth Ann, thank you my dear, it means a lot.

The Pope's Resignation Mystery

Tampa Bay Times, Letter to the Editor, Feb. 18

Pope's unorthodox move raises many questions. . .

          Here's what seems odd about the pope's resignation: Every really old pope over the past 600 years, since the last resignation, has probably grown too intellectually and physically feeble to do the job well. It's a lifetime position, and often lifetimes drag on beyond the point when anyone can do a good job. Which leads to the conclusion that over the last 600 years deputies have stepped in quietly to continue the work until the doddering old pope finally dies.

          So what makes this pope's condition different from any of the other old popes before him? Why aren't there papal helpers who can step in under the radar and take care of business for his last few years? Or is he being pushed out under the weight of pedophile priest and Vatican bank scandals? That's an unpleasant thought, but it makes more sense than that no Vatican staffers could be found to step up and silently help the pope through his last faltering months and years.

Edward Cifelli, Dade City

Fabiola Gianotti, Person of the Year

          Time magazine (Dec. 31) has named Fabiola Gianotti one of its five Persons of the Year for her work in discovering the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).  This is the boson that has been called the "God particle" because it explains the origin of matter in the universe.  Gianotti and her physicist colleague, Joe Incandela, have, as Time puts it, "nailed the particle that gives other fundamental particles their mass."
          Apparently proof of the Higgs boson's existence is quite a relief for several reasons.  First, basic particles do not necessarily have mass; the photon, for example, which is the basic quantum of light, has no mass.  So physicists can breathe easier now that they have confirmed in the lab what they (and everyone else) can see quite clearly but hadn't been able to exactly explain until now.  Mass exists—and now we know why—or rather how—matter was and is created.
          Physicists are relieved too because now they don't have to explain the absence of mass.  That condition would have been hard to square with what we can see in the real world.  If there had been a universe without mass, quantum mechanics would have been forced to explain how something (a universe) could be made of nothing (particles without mass).  That's a tough one. 
          Finally, the Higgs boson has provided the last piece of the puzzle known as the "standard model," which is an even trickier concept than the business of creating mass.  Time puts it this way:  "The so-called standard model of physics, [is] the grand framework that ties together the universe's three great forces--the strong force, the weak force and electromagnetism--and governs the behavior of sub-atomic particles."  By confirming the standard model, the Higgs boson has shown that the last fifty years spent looking for it have not been a stroll down a dead end street.  
          Persons of the year aside, it's absolutely breathtaking to contemplate everything that is going on within every atom every minute of every day, stretching back in time to the origin of the universe some 13.5 billion years ago.  It's astonishing there can even be something called "the behavior of sub-atomic particles."  And we have Fabiola Gianotti (and Joe Incandela) to thank for proving the Higgs boson actually does exist, thereby showing not only how particles get their mass, but also confirming one of the predictions of the so-called “standard model” originally posited in the 1960s.  Everything is now locked neatly into place.  
           Unless or until, that is, Ms. Gianotti looks even deeper into atoms to discover new facts that create new mysteries that will launch the next generation of quantum mechanics in a new direction that will take another century or so to examine and re-examine before a new theory emerges that will in turn launch new investigations with new problems to resolve.   Which the next generation after them will address.  It’s the way of science, the way of the world, the way of homo sapiens:  rational man.  It's humankind at its very best.

Everything Changes, Except. . .

         One of the boring truisms observed by everyone at one point or another is that everything changes.  The only thing you can be certain of is that nothing stays the same.  When the thought first hits us, we feel we've struck upon one of the great liberating truths of the ages, but we soon figure out that all we have stumbled upon is another cliché.  Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
          When you look at the number of variables that go into any presidential election, for example, like the one just past where Pres. Barack Obama ran against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, you might recall the unknown quantities:  the Christian right vote; the black vote, the women vote, the Latino vote, the white male vote, the young vote, the old vote, the Mormon vote, and probably a dozen others.  It was a handicapper's nightmare.
          Then there were the issues:  the economy, the wars, Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, taxes, the real estate collapse, the loss of jobs to China and other countries.  Who was "right" or "righter" and how often?  The entire mix of variables that make up the present and that will combine into an unpredictable future that will in turn become a future present (and so on dizzyingly ad infinitum)--all somehow sort themselves out through time, and, in this case, on November 6, 2012, Pres. Obama handily defeated Gov. Romney.
          And suddenly, just like that, the shimmering, never-certain future becomes part of the solid, never-changing past.  What's more, the constancy of history is a blessed relief after long and tiresome question marks about the future.  One of the ways this has been expressed, the best way in my reading, was by the Roman poet Horace (first-century BCE), who wrote "Happy the Man":

                    Happy he, and happy he alone,
                    is the man who can call today his own,
                    the man who, secure within, can say:
                    Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

                    Whether fair or foul or rain or shine,
                    all my days, in spite of fate, are mine.
                    Not even Heaven upon the past has power:
                    What has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Those last two lines are magnificent, proud and humble and brave all at the same time, "I have had my hour."  Nothing will ever change that--or the implied obligation to use each one wisely.

Symmetry

           I like order.  Not excessively or all the time, but on balance, I like to see orderliness whenever it shows itself.  I admire form.  I am pleased by the firmness of structure.
          Now, having said that, I must also say that there isn't as much of that firm structure in my life to suit me.  I tend to be excessive about most things, never moderate or balanced.  I notice order in my life more by its absence than its presence.
          And then, to annoy me further, there is Werner Heisenberg's 1927 "uncertainty principle," which has taught us that order is an illusion, both in quantum mechanics and cosmology, the largest and smallest of scientific investigations.  Whatever order we once thought we observed in nature and hoped to duplicate in our lives is, in cold brutal fact, little more than wishful thinking.
          Which is one reason we like art and music and poetry so much.  Poetry, Robert Frost once remarked, is a "momentary stay against confusion."  That's what we like about it.  It imposes order on chaos.  For the time you spend in a Robert Frost poem (though clearly not in all poems) you can look forward to the blessed relief of a sturdy substructure holding the whole thing up.  No wonder he and all the formalists will never go out of style; they're like classic tweeds or pearls with a black dress.  Elegant. 
          All this old-fashioned, formalist thinking came to mind on page 49 of the September 2012 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine, where there is a poem by Amit Majmudar called, "Pattern and Snarl."  It's an Italian sonnet (invented by Petrarch 800 years ago), one of the most rock-ribbed (not to say rigid) of poetic forms, and one that the New Formalists love to spin out just to prove that old forms can fit nicely with new realities, if you want them to, and if you're poet enough to pull it off.
          Majmudar's sonnet is not about a person or about love or about death, but it's about the idea of orderliness itself.  The opening eight lines set up the problem:  "Life likes a little mess.  All patterns need a snarl."  He thinks about that idea for the opening eight lines that set things up, and then he resolves the problem in the six-line conclusion:

                     What is it about order that we love? This sense,
                            Maybe, that a secret informs the pattern?

                                Is it a toddler's joy in doing things again?
                         Is it the entropy in us that warms to pattern?

               I never intended this line to rhyme on again again.
        Then again sometimes it's the snarl that adorns the pattern.

          The joy of this poem is in its reminder that life likes a "little mess," a "snarl that adorns the pattern," which all by itself is an insight worth having, but Majmudar delivers it in a tight pattern that is itself slightly snarled, thus duplicating the message in the form, which raises the achievement tenfold.  The poem explodes into a gorgeous but miniature fireworks display.
           In the end, we get an irresistible poem about the dual realities of loving patterns and living with snarls.  My problem exactly.   

         

Spielberg, Day-Lewis, and "Lincoln": My (Re)View

          Steven Spielberg's just-opened treatment of the Lincoln myth stars Daniel Day-Lewis.  Both director and star are given to excess, so it may come as a surprise that this marriage is not a strained struggle of over-sized egos.  Instead, Lincoln is an important film that covers the political maneuverings that led to the passage of the 13th amendment outlawing slavery and takes place in about a thirty-day period in early 1865.  More, it is an eerily photographic treatment that seems taken out of the pages of Civil War photojournalism. 
          However, if Lincoln is an important and beautiful film, it isn't nearly as good as a movie.
          The chief reason for this is its unrelenting barrage of talk.  Tony Kushner's first version of the screenplay ran to an unheard-of 500 pages, which he whittled down to about 130 pages that unreel in two and a half hours.  The length would not have been a problem had it not been for a serious imbalance between talk and action:  there isn't much motion in this motion picture.
          Making matters worse for the audience is that the characters, although based on real people , are mostly unknown today.  We do not automatically know what their political positions were, what the congressional alliances looked like, or even why all the northerners did not have similar thoughts about a constitutional  amendment to outlaw slavery.  Nor are we in on the political dialogue or even the vocabulary of the time; the very words “Republican” and “Democrat,” and the parties they represent, are roughly opposite to their modern counterparts.  

           Lincoln's own political and moral positions are also hard to pin down because the film doesn't show how he had morphed from a Colonizationist (in favor of relocating slaves back to Africa) to the author of the Emancipation Proclamation and the engineer of the 13th Amendment.
           Not all of Kushner's words are political, however.  Just to break things up, there are occasional passages between Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln in marital strife--words about her madness, their dead son Willy, and their relationship.  The Abraham vs. Mary drama is loud, but not character-revealing.  One would have to go into the movie theater with knowledge of Mary Lincoln's fragile mental health and her conniving, free-spending excesses to make sense of it all.  And it is in one single scene, where the Lincoln marriage is shown at its worst, that we get Daniel Day-Lewis, who in the rest of the film is Oscar-good, resorting to the screaming school of overacting that mars his worst work, as for example in Gangs of New York.
          In short, Lincoln is too long, too wordy, too politically indecipherable, and it is hurt rather than helped by the beautiful photographic stills that don't take enough advantage of the cinema as a motion picture art form. The film may be personally inspiring, morally uplifting, historically accurate, and beautifully shot, but as a movie, it's too talky and preachy.  Amazingly, Spielberg has managed to make Lincoln the man and Lincoln the movie both tiresome and boring.