Holy Cyclops

My nephews just saw the new Get Smart movie.  Apparently, there is an entrance form that Maxwell Smart has to fill out at some point, and one question on it has something to do with existentialism.  Intrepid Agent Eighty-Six leaves that particular answer space blank, and is later complimented on his answer—the best answer they’ve ever gotten, apparently.

My older nephew M. later asked me about that, while we were at Dairy Queen getting ice cream.  He wanted to know why it was funny.  And I laughed and then told him that while I got the joke, I wasn’t sure how to explain it.  Eventually, I told him a bit about Jean-Paul Sartre’s title Being and Nothingness, and about how some existentialists seem to concern themselves with nothing and nothingness (a mistake, I explained, since nothing or nothingness is not a thing but is simply the lack of anything and the word “nothing” does not denote an object but is simply a word meaning, “not anything”), but it wasn’t until my sister C.—the converted-to-Islam mother of my nephews—mentioned something about nihilism that I realized that the joke probably had to do with the attitude of despair that, in the popular mind, characterizes existentialism—the attitude that life is pointless and worthless and has no meaning.  And then I explained to him the following extremely important point:  Existentialism says that life has no intrinsic meaning and the universe has no intrinsic purpose, not that an individual person can find no meaning in the living of his life or that an individual person can find no purpose in the world around him.  For those who, like me, spent years searching for Ultimate Truth, such a realization—that there is no Meaning of Life or Cosmic Purpose to be found by introspection or by sitting around saying om over and over or in any other way—is initially discouraging.  But when one further realizes that meaning is always meaning to someone, and that purpose is always purpose to someone, so that one creates his own meaning and chooses his own purposes in living his life, then the existential realization is liberating—it is freeing. 

So, Maxwell Smart’s blank space was appropriate just to the extent that it expressed the realization that there was no intrinsic meaning or purpose to life; but if it was meant to express the popular despair of thinking that there was no meaning or purpose at all in life, then it went too far.  But it was funny.

What I didn’t say, though, was that the mistake some religious people make is in thinking that we should all ascribe what they think are God’s purposes to ourselves.  (Notice that one might easily think that it isn’t really a mistake for people to adopt religious purposes for themselves; we all choose our own meanings and purposes, and if those are the ones they want to adopt, well, why not?  I do wonder if it matters whether our meanings and purposes are chosen on the basis of justified beliefs about reality or not.  I’m inclined to think it does, but that might be my high valuation of truth showing, or perhaps my high valuation of reasons.)  First, why should someone else’s meanings or purposes be ours, even if that someone else is God?  God might find it meaningful to have people worship him, but why should people find it meaningful to worship God?  Meaningfulness to God shouldn’t be mistaken for intrinsic meaningfulness.  The reply would presumably be that one shouldn’t have God’s purpose, but rather the purpose that God thought best for him—he, being vastly knowing, ought to know better than anyone else what purpose would best suit a person, so one should listen to him when he tells him what that purpose is.  But, second—and, I think, rather devastatingly—how can one know what purpose God thinks is best for him?  If a holy book is then cited, how can it be known that the holy book is reliably relaying God’s thoughts on the matter?  I don’t see how it’s possible to know.

On the walk home from chess club is a stretch of road next to which is a marsh. Red-winged blackbirds like marshes, and I often see them when I walk to the club. Occasionally, I see a deer near there, too; tonight, on my way home from chess club, I did, in fact, see a deer. But that wasn’t what caught my eye tonight. Instead, what I noticed were this summer’s lightning bugs. Fireflies were out tonight in great number, flashing rhythmically, outdoing the early fireworks people were setting off for Independence Day. Flashing on and off, they reminded me of myriad miniature pulsars—a phrase I’m sure I’ll use in a poem sometime.

My father has Alzeimer’s disease, and my Mother’s Day present to my mother is to spend some time visiting them at their retirement community so that I can care for him while she does other things for a few days.  I did this once before, for a week, when she visited my brother in Florida, and I didn’t find it nearly as hard as my mother had led me to believe it would be.  In fact, it was easy.  My father is at the stage where he asks a question, and you answer it, and two minutes later he asks the same question, and you answer it again, and two minutes later, he asks the same question.  But I’m patient, and I just answer the question each time it’s asked.  And it does seem to me that information sinks in; it just takes lots of repetition for it to do so.  I remember once in the car he asked my mother what they were doing that day, and she told him they were going to see the doctor (for what purpose, I don’t remember, but she included that information in her answer to his question).  Two minutes later, he again asked what they were doing that day, and again she told him they were going to see the doctor and why.  Two minutes later he asked her not what they were going to do that day, but rather why they were going to see the doctor.  And he doesn’t ask the same question over and over all day long; he asks it two or three times. 

Anyway, I’m patient, and it doesn’t particularly bother me to have to repeat my answers, or to ask him a couple of times if he has enough shampoo while he’s showering (so as to jog his memory and make sure he uses the shampoo).  But then, he’s not my spouse of over fifty years.

I’ve brought along a few books I’m reading:  an Erma Bombeck book I bought my mother for her upcoming birthday and want to finish before giving to her; the philosopher Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge:  Against Relativism and Constructivism, which I’ll be commenting on in the philosophy section of this blog; Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which I recently stumbled upon in the local library; and The Encyclopedia of Chess Middlegames:  Combinations, a great book filled with chess problems and solutions.  I didn’t bring The Poincaré Conjecture, about the shape of the universe, or the Samuel Reshevsky chess book I just bought but whose title I forget. I hope to get some reading done while I’m here, but there’s a computer here, and I tend to lose a lot of time reading and writing online!

Thursday night, as usual, was my night for going to chess club.  I played a slightly weaker player, but, with Black, I got a really bad position out of the opening.  He should probably have crushed me.  But I defended, and he missed his best moves, and I wound up a piece and three pawns ahead in material before doing something I only rarely do these days:  Blundered away a piece.  It was in time pressure, so I have some small excuse, but still—leaving a knight where it can be taken for nothing is not good.

But sometimes it’s better to be lucky than to be good, and after blundering away the piece, I was still up three pawns, with a killer central passed pawn.  Once I got through time pressure, the win was easy.

Back on my Web site, I’ve been adding color to my chess diagrams.  (I’ve also fixed a little bad analysis in my Playing for the Endgame “little lesson.”)  It looks great!  And I discovered that I can print out those diagrams after all—I had thought that although the diagrams displayed well, the bits of HTML code that call the program that makes them display as diagrams would just show up as gibberish when I printed the page.  But no—they print beautifully.  (But my printer needs new cartridges, both color and black-and-white, and my sister’s printer now needs a new black-and-white cartridge, so I’m temporarily not printing anything—an inconvenience, since I wrote a poem for tonight’s “poetry slam” that I’m now going to have to copy by hand in order to take with me.)

My nephews decided that they wanted to play a little baseball today, so we went out and played with a plastic ball and plastic bats.  One of them had drawn home plate and three other bases, along with baselines and a pitching rubber, on the driveway, in chalk.  I pitched what was essentially batting practice to them, but when they hit fair balls they ran around the bases.  They seem to really enjoy it.

My younger nephew and I went for one of our frequent bike rides today, and we spotted a red squirrel!  We first saw one around here two summers ago—it was, in fact, the first time in my life that I had seen a red squirrel—and saw them throughout that summer, in the trees and on the fence lining our driveway and also in the trees and on the fence lining one side of the local park, where we shoot baskets.  But we didn’t see any last year, and I was afraid they were gone from this area. 

Riding our bicycles today, however, we saw one, again running along a fence and climbing a tree, next to a farmlike property with a pair of horses and, recently, some Canada geese (I counted seven today).  I’ve enjoyed seeing the purple tulips around the neighborhood, but seeing the red squirrel was the high point of our ride! 

new beginnings

(© 2006)

The saying goes, “April showers bring May flowers,” but we not only haven’t had a lot of April showers; we also haven’t had to wait until May for an explosion of flowers!  Our daffodils bloomed early and then wilted, but I’ve seen other people’s still in bloom while riding around the neighborhood with my younger nephew.  I only remember solid yellow daffodils from my childhood, but now there seem to be lots of white ones with orange trumpets (well, what’s the proper name for the middle part of a daffodil?).  Tulips are in bloom—we have a few red ones in back of our house, but elsewhere I’ve seen not only red ones but also white ones and yellow ones and reddish-pink ones and purple ones!  Every time I see purple tulips, I’m pleased.  I like purple.

We have azaleas blooming on a couple of bushes out front—red.  We have violets blooming.  We have lovely five-petaled lavender blooms, with red dots on one of the five petals, all over another bush out front.  I’ve tried to identify it, but the closest I could find online was some sort of hibiscus, which it doesn’t really seem to be.  Some people are growing yellow pansies and purple pansies.  And how could I forget my childhood favorites, which many people dislike but which I have always loved:  Dandelions!  (Speaking of dandelions:  If you ever get the chance, read Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.  It’s unlike his other writing, and very good.)  I like their yellow against the green grass—the Green Bay Packers wear green and gold uniforms, and I’ve always rooted for them—and I like their scent.  Maybe it’s a remembered-boy thing.

Trees’ flowers are blooming, too.  And, of course, leaves are unfurling.  My nephew noticed today the beginnings of mulberries, although it will presumably be a little while before they’re ready to be picked.  My brother used to like my mother’s raspberry pies and blackberry pies so much that he used to brave the thorns of the woods out back to pick them, coming back with arms covered with scratches.  He lives in Florida now, but my nephew and I picked lots of mulberries last year, to be baked in mulberry-and-rhubarb pies.  We discovered that picked mulberries quickly grow moldy—even when refrigerated!  They have to be frozen.  But when my brother visited for the Fourth of July last year, he got to eat pies he liked.

But for now, they’re just beginning.  The flowers, on the other hand, are in bloom. 

Tonight was chess club night.  After helping the older of my two nephews with his mathematics homework—it was on percentages, using taxes and commissions as exemplars—I walked into West Chester, bought some pizza (and breadsticks to bring home for my younger nephew), and proceeded to the club.  We meet in the basement of a church, and I stopped to smell a red tulip in its small flowerbed.  Tulips have been blooming all around, although ours—the ones at home, I mean—have been a little slow opening up.  (It’s funny; our daffodils bloomed early!  And wilted early.  I’m reminded of the T.S. Eliot line from The Waste Land:  “April is the cruellest month”; the daffodils’ joyous blooms last only briefly.)  Red, pinkish-red, purple, yellow, white—varicolored tulips are blooming everywhere, it seems.  And I stop to smell them.  One should enjoy the little things in life.

It was the third round of our current four-round USCF-rated tournament tonight, and I played M.R., who is rated about the same as I am.  I had White, and I must say, I was very happy with my game.  It was one of those games where you feel like you’re in control the whole way—a very gratifying sort of game to play.  The moves were 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 Bc5 4 O-O d6 5 h3 a6 6 Bxc6+ …  (I wonder if I should have done this on move five?)  6 … bxc6 7 d4 exd4 8 Nxd4 Bd7 9 c3 Qf6 10 Be3 Qg6 11 Qf3 Nf6 12 Nd2 O-O 13 Nf5! …  (White threatens Ne7+, and if Black plays 13 … Bxf5, White will reply with 14 exf5 Qh5 15 Qxh5 Nxh5 16 Bxc5 dxc5, isolating and tripling Black’s c-pawn) 13 … Rfe8 14 Bxc5 dxc5  (Black’s c-pawn is isolated and tripled anyway) 15 Ng3 h5 16 Qf4 …  (attacking c7 isn’t the point; preventing … h4 is) 16 … Re7 17 Rfe1 Rae8 18 Re3 …  (preparing 19 Rae1, 20 Nf5, and 21 Rg3, when 20 … Bxf5 couldn’t be played because of 21 Rxe7) 18 … Bxh3? (hopeless, but it’s hard to find a good move for Black, who miscalculated here; he saw 19 gxh3 Nxe4 20 Nxe4 Rxe4 21 Rxe4 Rxe4, followed by 22 … h4, but he missed 22 Qxe4, when 22 … Qxe4 unpins the g6-knight and allows 23 Nxe4)  19 gxh3 Re5 20 Kh2 Rg5? 21 Nf3 … (now, with the rook trapped, my opponent tries something desperate) 21 … Rg4 22 hxg4 Nxg4+ 23 Kg2 Nxe3+ 24 Qxe3 Qg4 25 Rh1 f5 26 Rh4, Black resigns. 

I didn’t do anything brilliant, although my sixth, seventh, and thirteenth moves were good.  Black just got stuck with nothing to do.  Anyway, I now have 2 1/2 out of 3 in this tournament; I’ll play the club’s master next week.  With Black.  Wish me luck!

Today was the twenty-third birthday of the son of one of my brother-in-law’s Pakistani friends, and we visited their family—mother, father, brother, daughter—and took along an ice-cream birthday cake.  We also watched the 76ers beat the Pistons, astonishingly enough, 90-86, in game one of their first-round NBA playoff series.  We had biryani—I hope I’m spelling that right—which is not one of my favorite foods; it contains rice and a little chicken and various spices that make it hot.  It’s not its hotness that I mind, really; I just don’t particularly like how it tastes.  Oh, well; the ice-cream cake was good!

Out of all of us, it seems I’m the only one favoring Hillary Clinton in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania Democratic primary; the six others of voting age all favored Barack Obama.  Oh, well, at least they’re Democrats!  Since I care most about universal health insurance, and since Senator Clinton has a long history of being committed to it and of working for it, I favor her over Senator Obama.  (I confess that I’m also afraid that Sen. Obama hasn’t received enough scrutiny, and that something damaging will transpire when it’s too late, handing the election to Sen. McCain.)   

Both the son and the daughter are studying to become lawyers, but when we visit, they’re just more people for the kids to play with.  The daughter, especially, seems to enjoy playing with both of my nephews.

Oddly, although everyone else in their family has gained U.S. citizenship, the father, for some obscure reason (or possibly for no reason), has not.  I’ve read disturbing things about the INS and the legal citizenship process, so I have to hope that he won’t have any real problems as a result of his attempt to become a U.S. citizen.

I’m afraid it’s easy for me to let this blog slide, so now I want to do a little catching up.

Thursday night (the eighteenth) was chess club night.  The West Chester Chess Club was co-founded by two of my old friends way back when I was still in high school, and it has always been a friendly little club.  We only have one master, and our expert doesn’t usually show up; at about 1815 USCF, I’m the third-highest-rated regularly attending player.  (If you don’t know what “1815 USCF” means:  By playing in tournaments sanctioned by the United States Chess Federation [USCF], a player gets a rating, based on his results, that gives a rough idea of his playing strength relative to other USCF tournament players.  1815 is low Class A, and is somewhere around the seventy-fifth or eightieth percentile of all tournament players.  Good, but not really  good.)  Anyway, I played a considerably lower-rated player on Thursday night—we play USCF-rated games most Thursday nights—and managed to win, but it was a tough game, as usual against that particular opponent.  I took what looked like a possibly-poisoned b2-pawn in a line of the Pirc Defense’s Austrian Attack that turned into something close to an f4 Sicilian Defense after trading pawns on d4, and then defended too passively and got into trouble.  (”b2,” “f4,” “d4,” and so on, refer to squares on the chessboard, using the algebraic system of notation.  See, for example, http://www.uschess.org/beginners/read/ .)  The game became really tough, and I thought I was done for, but I managed to make a good move when he threatened to trap my queen that won another pawn, and I survived very  severe time pressure to win the game.

The last few days have been very warm—in the 80’s Fahrenheit—and my nephews and I have gone to the park, a five-minute walk from here, to shoot baskets.  My younger, ten-year-old nephew, who is a little on the short side, finally learned how to keep himself going on a swing—I observed his technique and then corrected it, telling him that he had to sit up and pull his legs back just at the highest point in his forward swing, and then sit back and point his legs forward just at the highest point in his backswing.  It worked!  He still needs a push from me to get started, but he can keep going now; he was happy.

On the way to the park, we saw a butterfly (or, possibly, moth) depositing eggs with its ovidepositor on a branch.  It had the ragged wings and light yellowish stripe around the edge of the undersides of its wings that a mourning cloak has—mourning cloaks are really gorgeous butterflies—but it had its wings folded, so I couldn’t tell what the tops of its wings looked like.  And while we were at the park, we saw a pair of hawks soaring overhead, riding the thermals.  We didn’t used to see hawks often at all, but last summer we saw them often, and now we’re seeing them again this summer.

Alas, one thing we’re not seeing are red squirrels.  A couple of summers ago, we saw several of them; it was a thrill, as I had never before seen them.  But last summer, we didn’t see them at all, and we haven’t seen them yet this year.

Later, my younger nephew and I went for bicycle rides.  He loves going for bike rides, and he likes having me go along.  (His mother requires that an adult go with him, anyway.)  On Friday, we left out Heartbreak Hill, but on Saturday, he was ready for it.  (”Heartbreak Hill” refers, naturally enough, to a long hill that steepens toward the top and is difficult to climb all at once.  I got the name from the Boston Marathon’s Heartbreak Hill.)  Both nephews and I tossed around a baseball, and on Saturday, their father and I took turns pitching, fielding, and batting with my younger nephew.  (My younger nephew has more desire to get out and do things.  My older nephew, who is thirteen years old, has Asberger’s syndrome, and he tends to keep to himself.  He does seem to be becoming more sociable than he used to be, though.) 

My younger nephew also woke up in the wee hours of Saturday morning with a sore arm.  He was very upset, and was crying.  I reassured him and, after asking a few questions about what sort of pain it was, told him that he had probably just slept on it wrongly, and that although it might hurt for a while, he’d be fine.  Then we read one of his Magic Tree House books.  (He loves the Magic Tree House series.  The characters of Jack and Annie, a pair of kids, go on adventures to different times and places, and the books are actually educational—but it’s their entertainment value that is the reason my nephew likes them!  Mary Pope Osborne writes them, and Sal Murdocca illustrates them.  The fortieth book in the series will be available this September.  See, for example, http://www.marypopeosborne.com .)  After that, he went back to sleep.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how to put advertising on my Web page and on my blog, and how to customize my blog’s display page; I installed the blog using Fantastico, via HostMonster.com, but it’s version 2.3.3, and I’m not sure how I can update to version 2.5 when the blog’s files are on HostMonster instead of on my computer.  The same problem—that the files are on HostMonster instead of on my computer—is making it difficult for me to customize this blog’s display page.  I might just uninstall this blog and then go to the WordPress Web site and set it up there.  We’ll see.  If I do that, I’ll have to save these posts!