Dr. Metablog

When I Lost Respect for Authority (Another Episode)

We were playing punchball on the PS 217 "big court." It must have been during school hours because Mrs. McGowan (a fifth grade teacher) was the umpire and the players included the entire population of the class, not just the regulars. Michael Lurie, the least athletic student in the grade, and perhaps in the entire borough, was told  to play third base, and obviously unfamiliar with the game and with Billy Cox, stationed both feet directly on the white-painted base. Someone hit (punched) the spaldeen toward him and he froze, but the ball landed precisely in his crotch, and lodged, and after a bit he found it there and held it up. We all knew that the batter was out, but Mrs. McGowan, as ignorant as Michael Lurie, shouted, "he caught it illegally" and awarded first base to the batter. I remember that several of us protested, but Mrs. Mc Gowan was adamant.
 
It was a miscarriage of justice. A violation of the rules. The umpire was incompetent. How could I ever trust authority again? 

Why Mike Gave Up Religion

My friend Mike, who is pushing eighty very hard, told me this story. "In the 1940s we lived in Sarasota, where the Red Sox held spring training. I had had rheumatic fever and my mother over-reacted and kept me in bed for years. Nevertheless, I was an altar boy and I also would get out of the house whenever I could to watch the Red Sox play -- Johnny Pesky, Johnny Doerr, Rudy York, Vern Stephens, Dom DiMaggio, and of course Ted Williams. One day I talked to Ted Williams and asked him for an autograph. He said he would bring me a signed picture. He did, but I wasn't at home. Ted Williams came to my house and I wasn't there!!  My mother said, 'a very tall man came by and gave me this for you. I told him you were at church.' I thought, how can I trust a religion that would let me be at church rather than at home when Ted Williams called. That's when I stopped believing."  It's a great story and I've recorded it exactly as he told it. 

Nobody Cares

There's a brief sentence in The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth that continues to move me no matter how frequently I return to it. I's a passage that resonates in my latter-day soul. 

Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet (whose name, obviously, indicates her profession) are old acquaintances and old rivals who are evermore at odds. "They never meet but they fall to discord."  They seem to delight in exchanging insults. To Doll, Falstaff is a "muddy conger," "a huge full hogshead," "a poor ape," and even, when she is more affectionate, "a whoreson little tidy Bartholemew boar-pig".  Falstaff is equally abusive. But at one point in the play, there is a magical moment when Shakespeare allows Doll to propose a truce. 

"Come," she says, "I'll be friends with thee, Jack, thou art going to the wars, and whether I shall ever see thee again or no there is nobody cares." 

I think that what electrifies me is the last phrase, "there is nobody cares. "  A less imaginative, less empathetic writer than Shakespeare would have ended the sentence more predictably: he would have written, "nobody knows" and would have therefore repeated the commonplace that the future is unknowable. But Shakespeare raises the ante -- as he so often does. "Nobody cares" is demotic shorthand for "nobody else but we two care"-- which I take to suggest that Doll reflects not that the universe is dicey but rather that we are each of us isolated and unimportant except as we are valued by our nearest friends and the people with whom we have gone through life.  

The sentence is nostalgic in the best sense. It is not sentimental;  Doll does not romanticize hers or Falstaff's past. Instead she faces the aleatory universe bravely. You are at risk, it could turn out badly, let's be friends now, all that matters is the moment. The sentence is valedictory and at the same time extremely warm. 

Perhaps I'm projecting my own feelings onto Doll Tearsheet. I'm at the point in my life in which I value (perhaps even treasure) the people whom I've worked with, or argued with, liked or loved.  (I have even come to value some whom I've not loved.) They're all part of the fabric of my life and they are all disappearing, one by one -- going to the wars, we might say. And nobody cares. Except us. 

Like

Waiting for the train at the White River Junction railroad station, I met a young lady, a graduate student at Dartmouth. We engaged in a brief conversation. I asked about her ambition and plans. She said, "I want to be, like, a college professor." Like yikes. Like double yikes. 

Six-Leggedness

I read Planet of the Bugs (Chicago, 2014) by Scott Richard Shaw, a Wyoming entomologist. It's a good book on a great topic -- the evolution of insects. In the acknowledgements, Shaw thanks his editor for helping him to "shape a bulky manuscript into a sleeker book," but I think I would have much preferred the fatter unpublished version, which I imagine would have been heavier on curious, fascinating and sometimes lurid detail. I think that Shaw's editor may have misunderestimated his potential enthusiastic readership.

Shaw loves his insects and writes the evolution of life bug-centrically. Instead of the conventional telling, where everything leads ineluctably to majestic us, homines sapientes, Shaw inscribes the triumph of the six-legged kind. For example, Shaw disparages our (I mean mankind's) walking and running. "Two-legged bipedal locomotiion is so unstable and difficult to master that it seems highly improbable and almost pointless." He has a point there. A child takes a year to learn to walk, and even after he does so, he staggers like a drunken sailor for several months. No other creature on earth is so ungainly at the outset.

Moreover, Shaw adds, six-leggedness optimizes balance and stability and has the potential for rapid motion. "Six legged form is sublime. Fifty million insect species can't possibly be wrong."

If I understand it correctly, most insect species propel themselves by alternately moving one of their two leg tripods -- and tripods are inherently stable.  It's a great system. 

Now that I've achieved the "golden years," I spend much too much time worrying about that I'm about to crash to the ground and break a wrist or a hip -- all too comon afflictions among the two-legged kind.  No one has ever seen a beetle trip, or an ant sprawl embarrassingly on the sidewalk. 

Too bad we don't have six legs. Or even four (the other two having evolved into arms). We'd be better off. We'd need two pairs of hips, of course, and copulation would be more complicated, but it would be worth it. Speed, stability, grace. Four legs would definitely be sublime.

On the other hand, I'm glad that we evolved an internal skeleton, which the insects never did. I wouldn't want to bother with an exoskeleton or carapace. It would be ungainly, troublesome. And probably accompanied by all sorts of emotional displays. "Don't pay any attention to him. He's moulting."