What time is it?

 

Who among you is a Keeper of Time, Keeper of Records? Some people still work at jobs where they use time clocks – you know, punch the clock – and I’ll bet there’s a woman employee of indeterminate middle age who has it down to a science. Every such company has one. Gotta calculate that fifteen minute give or take. I never could figure it out. Then there’s the guy who says he’s got to make a dollar more an hour so he can “live like white folks.” I can just smell the ink and solvent, the grease for the gears. For twenty five years I worked in print shops. The guy gets really pissed off when they change the clocks so he loses an hour of sleep. Or the price of gas goes up, so he blames somebody. Anybody will do – oil companies, the Arabs, the government. Anybody who has a dollar more than he does is his enemy. Yes, I have no Keepers of Time in my life at the moment, Keepers of Records. But I remember them. They could always be counted on to tell you what time it is.

 

The ex-wife’s chili is doing what chili does. That woman makes some fine chili. And children. She makes some fine children too. One of those people who benefits from having a few beers – or that is, everybody around her can relax a bit.

 

I went into a shopping mall yesterday. (Farewell happy fields where joy forever dwells; Hail horrors, Hail!) I do that maybe twice a year. There are people who enjoy it. I went with my son. He said, “Dad you’re like a palm tree in a snowstorm in here.” I was busily dressing the young girls with my eyes, which is funny because I’m almost sort of kind of a naturist. All I could think was they were all my daughters. There were other parents in there with me. We saw each other – nod, nod, nod – like the angels in “Wings of Desire.” In a store called Hot Topic I bought my boy a Soulfly tee shirt and a jacket decorated with gas masks and a hood that zips up all the way with two eye holes in the front to see out of.

 

When I was his age I wasn’t interested in clothing. Women have dressed me – many more than have undressed me. Elizabeth, the White Tornado, will have me in blue jeans now that winter’s coming, says they bring out my “best side.” She invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at her family’s place. I know that the turkey will have been alive that morning. I’ve never much cared for turkey, but it’s better wild. My wife would never have had me in blue jeans. She was such an uptown girl. If we ever got north of Scarsdale she would start to holler that psychokillers who looked like ZZ Top were lurking behind every tree. I was always dressed, jacket and tie, hair greased back.

 

I clean up good.

 

The other night the WT was trying to tie a bloody big box spring mattress onto the roof of her little blue car. I’ve got a big house clean-out to do. She gets to picks out whatever may be salvageable. I offered to tie it on the roof of my car which has a proper roof rack, and I had to insist because she was concerned about scratching the Boss man’s paint. Her whole fandamily was there. “John’s going to go hillbilly with us!” she exclaimed, bouncing. Bouncing? Yes, she was bouncing.

 

My son wants The Squabbler to be his substitute teacher for a day. He imagines the announcement that there will be a sub, then Squabs having to duck in to get through the door. What would he teach them? The mind appalls. They’d be wondering what was under his cloak, what his face looked like, if he even had one? – stuff like that there. By the time he got done answering all their questions the day would be over.

 

Of course we got lost. There are some truly beautiful buildings on Genessee Street – I mean, they take my breath away. My favorite is this huge Victorian pile of an apartment building. The Dakota’s got nothing on this place. It’s absolutely gorgeous. No pictures. I need a camera. It’s on the list.

 

 

Getting home is much easier. I know which way is South and I drive towards the nearest hill. In the hills all roads lead me home.

 

So we hatched up a story idea about a little town in the hills that you can only find by going down a certain road at a certain time, but it is never the same road at the same time. Once you’ve reached the town you find that every road you take leads back to the town. The people who live there are very curious when new people show up how exactly they came to be there, and could they possibly remember it in reverse order? That was my son’s idea. My idea was that the people who lived there were perfectly content, as I would be, to live there forever without ever having to worry about the larger world and all its horrors. Well, he correctly pointed out that would be Rhubarb Valley and that story’s already written. And so it is.

 

I keep writing it. I write it every day so I can live it. Heaven is a moment on the road there, with no road going elsewhere. It is an endless moment in which the corn is still small and there’s nothing but promise ahead. There are no Keepers of Time in my Heaven, Keepers of Records. There’s only the road and the forever moment of promise. Fulfillment is nothing more than being filled with a wonderful expectation which can never be fulfilled. The kiss never ends because the kiss never begins, but it is eternally just about to begin.

 

Science is all about examining visible and invisible pieces of Matter in a very particular way. The whole mind is engaged in this process, the imagination certainly. But I am reminded this morning of the cure for loneliness. There is a scientific one. Since the feeling of loneliness is a mental condition – one which exists within the mind without regard for conditions outside of it – the cure must be a mental one, or more precisely, a change in thinking, a change in the mental state. What this has to do with Matter may seem oblique, but this is The White Lodge; everything matters.

 

We inhabit a world made of stuff. We have many words to describe the stuff but it is really all the same stuff held together, however lightly, by creative intellect. That is, Thought is what holds particles of Matter together in whatever particular patterns to form whatever particular shapes. We call those shapes ‘things.’ There are things both visible and invisible – “All That is Seen and Unseen” – and there are things microscopic, macroscopic, and every imaginable in between. The air that fills our lungs is stuff; our lungs themselves made of the same stuff as the air. We know from our Book that stuff is real but without substance. This means it is the created, not the Creator. And that is precisely why it changes. Matter is always changing.

 

The world never stays the same. The climate never stays the same. The body never stays the same. All things move towards their end – whatever that might be – because the stuff that things are made of is without substance. Things Fall Apart; it’s scientific.

 

We are able to understand what God is only by looking at the stuff God created. A pagan worships the stuff itself, as if the stuff were substantial. Our Book tells us rather clearly that this is an error. We know that we are made to worship because we are made and not the Maker. To grasp the concept of a spiritual rather than material God requires every ‘ounce’ of our intellect, and we still can never get it quite right. But only God is Substance. We know the verb ‘to be’ is an equal sign: God = Substance. The world of molecules, atoms - particles if you will – is created. Nothing created the Creator. By looking at all that is created, therefore, we must be able to observe the signature, the mark, the sign, the image of the Creator. God is in all Things, including ourselves, and there cannot be a single particle of created Matter that does not bear a likeness of its Creator.

 

Simple.

 

Of course, there’s more to it. Although we are made of stuff, just as a tree is, or a rock is, or a dog, or a cloud, or a horse, we are not any of these things. In reality, we are not a thing at all. We are children of the Creator. Just as my children have my blood in their veins, we may say that we have God’s blood in ours. Of course that’s metaphorical. What it means is that we are like God in a way that nothing else is. We have the God like power to create – to turn Matter into different shapes with our thoughts. Some of these shapes have proven very useful. I’m sure we can all think of a few examples.

 

When I was a kid my mother told me “God is Everywhere.” That’s what she meant. She may not have known that’s what she meant, but that’s what she meant because that’s what it means. In every particle of stuff, in every thought, in every feeling, in every creature there is God. He is above us, below us, beside us, around us, and in us at all times, whether we are aware of Him or not.

 

Knowing that, how in the hell could a person possibly be lonesome?

 

Ooh – there’s a word: Hell. It is because of Hell that we can be lonesome. The physical location of Hell – The Black Lodge – is not far from here. I used to live there.

 

To overcome the mental state called loneliness we normally try first to change something about our environment, or outer condition. For instance, we can pick up the phone and call a friend. This may alleviate the negative mental state for a time, or it might eliminate it entirely because it has allowed us to change our thinking. Sometimes we suffer from something which seems like loneliness but is really discontent, which is an indication that something wants changing. By making the change we are able to overcome the discontent. Sometimes a brisk walk ‘round the block does wonders.

 

But oftentimes this procedure doesn’t work on real loneliness. No matter what we do to change the outer condition the loneliness remains. That’s the story of my life – up until the moment I moved here. If all that I wrote at the beginning of this post rings any bells of intellectual clarity in part or in whole then you must know – and take comfort – in the knowledge that the willful turning of the mind towards an immediate awareness of the presence of God is a sure-fire - and completely scientific - cure for loneliness.

 

Now, this is the daffiest thing I’ve ever written, but it is precisely ponderings of this sort that makes this a good day.

• 1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
• 2. Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
• 3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions.
• 4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results.
• 5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.

When consistency is obtained the hypothesis becomes a theory and provides a coherent set of propositions which explain a class of phenomena. A theory is then a framework within which observations are explained and predictions are made.

The above is an explanation of The Scientific Method from a Middle School web site. My son is learning this right now. I remember helping his older brother prepare for the “big test.” There’s always a bloody big test, isn’t there?

I submit it in order that you may glean an understanding of the definition of the word Science that I am using whenever I use the word. Basically, Science is a way of looking at something. In human history it is a relatively recent idea to look at ‘somethings’ in precisely this way. If one were to create a timeline of human history and put a mark in that line to indicate the point in time at which people began using The Scientific Method there would be a very short distance between that mark and the present day, and a very long distance preceding that mark. How short and how long I don’t know exactly, but I can tell you there is substantially more than one thousand times the distance preceding the mark than there is coming after it. I suppose it would depend on the scale of the timeline.

Physical Science is the examination of the material world which employs the above method. The method itself is a tool – a tool as a hammer is a tool, or a screwdriver. As such, The Scientific Method is amoral just as a hammer or screwdriver is amoral. One may imagine hammers and screwdrivers being put to moral purposes or to immoral purposes. You can stab somebody with a screwdriver, I suppose, though it is not consistent with the manufacturer’s recommendations and might invalidate the warranty.

Science is not Philosophy. Never was, never will be. Science is not Religion. Never was, never will be. There is no answer to the question “Do you believe in Evolution?” because Evolution offers absolutely nothing to believe in. It is a meaningless question. A scientific Theory – any scientific Theory – as explained in the above summary of The Scientific Method “provides a coherent set of propositions which explain a class of phenomena.” Theories are either perfectly true, or they are perfectly false. A single flaw in an otherwise coherent theory completely destroys the validity of the theory. If the same could be said of Philosophy or Religion we wouldn’t have either Philosophy or Religion, and since Science is an invention of the latter we wouldn’t therefore have any Science.

By definition Faith does not require empirical proof, though empirical evidence supporting Faith may be readily discovered by anybody who has it. The explanation for that is simple: the Faith comes first. Faith is an a priori fact of one’s experience rather than a philosophical context, or ‘platform,’ from which he perceives experience, the latter constantly subject to revision – like Science is. From the point of view of the faith-filled person, therefore, every discovery of scientists somehow rebounds to the glory of God from Whom all the natural things being discovered originate. Like the Method scientists use to make their discoveries their application may be either moral or immoral, but the discovery in and of itself is amoral.

What Chesterton was saying in my previous post - (one of the things he was saying) – is so obvious that one would think it would scarcely need to be said. A non-believer will look at Science differently than a believer. A non-believer will look at everything differently one might suppose. But Science is not a philosophy of non-belief, nor is it a philosophy at all. There is nothing in the examination of the material world according to a scientific methodology which can dispute the truths of the transcendent. Chesterton is bewildered that his contemporary religious scholars don’t seem to grasp that obvious fact. 

That article was written in 1910. It’s been a few years. Not long at all. What has happened in the meantime is that philosophies of non-belief, and those people espousing them, have successfully ‘claimed’ Science, suggesting it is something belonging to non-belief in breathtaking ignorance of history. There is a banner ad at the top of this very page advertising a religious web site which claims to answer questions about the “age-old battle between Science and Religion,” two things which do not even exist on the same plane of existence, much less battle each other. The battle is between Religion and Atheist philosophy. Science has absolutely nothing to do with it.

The Evolution/Creation argument is a ridiculous exercise in utter futility. No true faith can be dislodged by a scientific theory because Faith is not established on scientific theory. It is the definition of the “apples and oranges” argument. If Science does not find the truth of something it cannot possibly find the truth of it changes nothing about what that truth is. On the other hand, if Religion supposes religious truth is subject to natural laws of Science, rather than the other way ‘round, what the heck kind of religion can it possibly be? Not one to which I would subscribe.

Seriously, when I am not writing this stuff I am saying it aloud. You may ask my boys about that, or my friends. My helper, the inestimable White Tornado, has heard me say all kinds of things. Once recently after one of my ten minute diatribes, I asked her “Do you have any idea what I have been talking about?” She replied, “No, but I enjoy hearing you talk about it.” Until there’s a cure there’s The White Lodge. Please give generously of your comments.

The election returns are announced several times during this 1940 broadcast. There's a joke about the Gallup Poll in here. George Gallup, 1901 - 1984, was a pioneer in the field of public opinion polling. These days polls are used as a form of polemic, as entertainment, and there are literally thousands of public opinion surveys taken. I had forgotten the history of Gallup, who earned notoriety for correctly predicting the 1936 election based on a survey of only 5,000 voters. (It was a landslide for FDR.) In 1948 his polling organization predicted Dewey over Truman by 5 to 15 points. You can't win 'em all.

Roosevelt was running for a controversial third consecutive term. His opponent was Wendell Wilkie. His uncle Teddy had drawn sharp criticism for attempting to seek a non-consecutive third term, breaking an informal two term tradition begun by George Washington when he declined seeking reelection after serving eight years. Ulysses S. Grant also tried it. As we know, FDR would go for a fourth term in 1944 and die in '45. 

Also running for president in 1940 was Gracie Allen. Perhaps I'll put a Burns and Allen program up later this week.

Long have I wondered what on earth so-called learned people have actually learned. Sometimes I am frustrated that what is obvious to me remains occult to so many others who I believe are more intelligent than I am, and who I believe know more than I do. Of course I am speaking of scholars. I have great respect for scholarship. So great is my respect for scholarship that my contempt for educational institutions in which there is apparently no evidence of scholarship taking place knows no bounds. If you have been following The White Lodge for any time you have read my tongue-in-cheek diatribes against institutions of higher learning, and if you are at all perceptive you have recognized that my opinions are the result of intense disappointment.

 

I am not a scholar. I’m just a dude who writes stuff he thinks about, and if you ever confuse that with scholarship then monkeys will fly out of my butt and kill you. I read a lot. I understand about half of what I read. I do not take notes. Whatever I read is absorbed into this piece of wood between my ears which I blithely refer to as my brain and forever inhabits whatever space is not already occupied by the termites.

 

So I love scholarship but I am not a scholar. I love Science but I am not a scientist. I can drive a car without knowing how it works, or how to fix it. I appreciate all the work that has been done in order to put me behind the wheel, but I don’t do any of that work. I enjoy ramifications.

 

I have never understood how Science is supposed to be opposed to Religion. In order for that to be seen as true one must have no idea what Science is, or what Religion is.

 

Here’s an article by G.K. Chesterton in which he admits to suffering from the exact same bewilderment that has forever afflicted me.

 

 

 

G. K. CHESTERTON
SCIENCE AND RELIGION

In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to be scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor in saying that he is our doctor, not our priest, or our wife, or ourself. It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that, obviously, it is for us to judge. Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false. To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. I want my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed. I apologise for stating all these truisms. But the truth is, that I have just been reading a thick pamphlet written by a mass of highly intelligent men who seem never to have heard of any of these truisms in their lives.

Those who detest the harmless writer of this column are generally reduced (in their final ecstasy of anger) to calling him "brilliant;" which has long ago in our journalism become a mere expression of contempt. But I am afraid that even this disdainful phrase does me too much honour. I am more and more convinced that I suffer, not from a shiny or showy impertinence, but from a simplicity that verges upon imbecility. I think more and more that I must be very dull, and that everybody else in the modern world must be very clever. I have just been reading this important compilation, sent to me in the name of a number of men for whom I have a high respect, and called "New Theology and Applied Religion." And it is literally true that I have read through whole columns of the things without knowing what the people were talking about. Either they must be talking about some black and bestial religion in which they were brought up, and of which I never even heard, or else they must be talking about some blazing and blinding vision of God which they have found, which I have never found, and which by its very splendour confuses their logic and confounds their speech. But the best instance I can quote of the thing is in connection with this matter of the business of physical science on the earth, of which I have just spoken. The following words are written over the signature of a man whose intelligence I respect, and I cannot make head or tail of them -

"When modern science declared that the cosmic process knew nothing of a historical event corresponding to a Fall, but told, on the contrary, the story of an incessant rise in the scale of being, it was quite plain that the Pauline scheme - I mean the argumentative processes of Paul's scheme of salvation - had lost its very foundation; for was not that foundation the total depravity of the human race inherited from their first parents?.... But now there was no Fall; there was no total depravity, or imminent danger of endless doom; and, the basis gone, the superstructure followed."

It is written with earnestness and in excellent English; it must mean something. But what can it mean? How could physical science prove that man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall? What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in themselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, one on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent with everything that we know from physical science. Humanity might have grown morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in no way have contradicted the principle of Evolution. Men of science (not being raving lunatics) never said that there had been "an incessant rise in the scale of being;" for an incessant rise would mean a rise without any relapse or failure; and physical evolution is full of relapse and failure. There were certainly some physical Falls; there may have been any number of moral Falls. So that, as I have said, I am honestly bewildered as to the meaning of such passages as this, in which the advanced person writes that because geologists know nothing about the Fall, therefore any doctrine of depravity is untrue. Because science has not found something which obviously it could not find, therefore something entirely different - the psychological sense of evil - is untrue. You might sum up this writer's argument abruptly, but accurately, in some way like this - "We have not dug up the bones of the Archangel Gabriel, who presumably had none, therefore little boys, left to themselves, will not be selfish." To me it is all wild and whirling; as if a man said - "The plumber can find nothing wrong with our piano; so I suppose that my wife does love me."

I am not going to enter here into the real doctrine of original sin, or into that probably false version of it which the New Theology writer calls the doctrine of depravity. But whatever else the worst doctrine of depravity may have been, it was a product of spiritual conviction; it had nothing to do with remote physical origins. Men thought mankind wicked because they felt wicked themselves. If a man feels wicked, I cannot see why he should suddenly feel good because somebody tells him that his ancestors once had tails. Man's primary purity and innocence may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows. The only thing we all know about that primary purity and innocence is that we have not got it. Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word, more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by the vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing as the human sense of sin. By its nature the evidence of Eden is something that one cannot find. By its nature the evidence of sin is something that one cannot help finding.

Some statements I disagree with; others I do not understand. If a man says, "I think the human race would be better if it abstained totally from fermented liquor," I quite understand what he means, and how his view could be defended. If a man says, "I wish to abolish beer because I am a temperance man," his remark conveys no meaning to my mind. It is like saying, "I wish to abolish roads because I am a moderate walker." If a man says, "I am not a Trinitarian," I understand. But if he says (as a lady once said to me), "I believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense," I go away dazed. In what other sense could one believe in the Holy Ghost? And I am sorry to say that this pamphlet of progressive religious views is full of baffling observations of that kind. What can people mean when they say that science has disturbed their view of sin? What sort of view of sin can they have had before science disturbed it? Did they think that it was something to eat? When people say that science has shaken their faith in immortality, what do they mean? Did they think that immortality was a gas?

Of course the real truth is that science has introduced no new principle into the matter at all. A man can be a Christian to the end of the world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an Atheist from the beginning of it. The materialism of things is on the face of things; it does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of all the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover. My chief objection to these semi-scientific revolutionists is that they are not at all revolutionary. They are the party of platitude. They do not shake religion: rather religion seems to shake them. They can only answer the great paradox by repeating the truism."