Off we go, into the wild blue yonder... (from the US Air Force anthem)

It’s easy to get an airplane off the ground once you get used to steering with your feet and working the gas with your hand. The hard part is getting the plane back onto the ground. Most student pilots do their first solo after 15-20 hours of flying, but I knew a guy who never soloed,  and I didn’t want to do it either, but my reasoning went as follows: (1) I can probably get this plane back onto the ground without killing myself and without too much damage to the plane. (2) If I refuse to solo, I will be a coward, and I will be disrespecting my instructor’s judgment of my readiness. (3) I have no choice but to solo. (As I prepared to taxi onto the runway alone for the first time, Peggy came running over and asked for my car keys because she had left hers at home, and wanted to be prepared in case mine ended up in a tree somewhere.)

Twice, during my brief flying career, the engine quit, and I had to make on-field emergency landings. Another time, I smelled smoke from an electrical short, and had to make another on-field emergency landing. On a third occasion, I accidentally put myself into a spin while I was doing something that my instructor had warned me against doing alone—practicing approach stalls. Back then, at least, most VFR pilots (the lowest level of pilot; Visual Flight Rules as opposed to Instrument Flight Rules) weren’t taught spin recovery, so when the plane’s nose instantly went from pointing 20° upward to 85° downward and the ground started spinning up at me, I got busy trying to remember what I had read on the subject. If I had been a poor student, I might have died, and I never got over that fact, although I kept flying. Indeed, the first thing I did after I got myself out of that spin was to regain altitude and do another approach stall. After I recovered from it, I flew back to the airport, made a bad landing, and found that I was having a little trouble walking.

I now feel stupid for having done that last stall, but most young men live by rigid rules regarding courage, and can torture themselves for years if they break one of them. This means that it sometimes seems easier to a man to get out of a bad situation by risking death than by playing it safe and having to live with doubts about his courage—and therefore his manhood. (This naturally raises questions about what constitutes courage. After all, if one man charges into machine gun fire because he fears censure more than death, while another feigns a mental collapse because he fears death more than censure; who is really braver?)

After I logged about 200 hours, I sold my one-sixth interest in a Cessna 150 because I was preparing to move. By then, I had learned three things about flying that kept me from going back to it. One, if you live in the American South and you fly a small plane VFR, you can never count on making it back home in a timely manner if you travel very far because the area is so prone to overcast, scattered thundershowers, and 250 mile long thunderstorm fronts (These fronts are too high to fly over, and no one in his right mind would fly a small plane within thirty miles of one because of the likelihood of being hurled 35,000 feet into the air, having his wings snapped off, and then being slammed into the ground). Two, it costs a hell of lot to fly even if you share expenses, not so much because of the original investment in a share of some old and tiny airplane, as because of maintenance costs. The sad truth is that airplane labor and parts cost more than the same do for cars, plus the government requires frequent inspections and lots of periodic maintenance (like a motor rebuild every 2000 flight hours). Third, you’re a danger to yourself and others if you only fly occasionally, and this means that, to be a safe pilot, a person has to spend a lot of time in the air when he had rather be doing something else.

Looking back, I’m glad I flew a little, and I’m glad I survived because as dangerous as it looks, I found it to be even more dangerous for someone of my limited experience who was flying a raggedy-ass old plane. Of course, it could be that my various close calls scared me more than was reasonable, but maybe that was for the better. You wouldn’t think that adding an up and down dimension to the usual left, right, and forward, would make much difference, but it wasn’t just the up and down that was disconcerting, it was that I was moving through an unstable element. In case you haven’t been in an 1,100 hundred pound plane with a 34-foot wingspan, I should mention that small planes bounce all over the place, and the moment the pilot gets them adjusted in response to one air movement, another wind, updraft, or downdraft hits, and they have to be adjusted all over again to forces that can neither be seen nor anticipated.

Me being an atheist and all, you might be wondering if I was ever scared enough to pray. The answer is that I was plenty scared, but if you truly don’t believe, you don’t believe, so you’re unlikely to pray no matter how scared you get. I won’t say that no atheist ever prayed in a dire situation, but I’ve never known of any. Of course, it was also true that I never had something go wrong in an airplane that left me with enough leisure to pray. It’s a wonderfully focusing moment when you suspect that the only things between you and death are luck and experience, and you can’t control the former, and you have little of the latter.

How I missed the war

I get a lot more done when Peggy is away because her presence is a distraction. During this absence, I’ve been roofing our new deck during the day and making crackers and soups at night. When I’m working in the kitchen, I watch films one after the other. Tonight, I watched two war documentaries. The first was The Corporal’s Diary, which was about an American soldier who died in Iraq, and the second was Heroes of Iwo Jima. In a few minutes, I’ll go to bed and continue my nightly reading of a newly-released book entitled Survivor: Auschwitz, the Death March, and My Fight for Freedom, which is surely the last first-person account of a Nazi death camp that the world will ever see.

When I was younger, I sometimes experienced regret that I had never gone to war because I saw it as a rite of passage like no other, and because it enables men to bond closely with other men. Yet, I went to great lengths to avoid the only war I had a chance at. I’m not sure whether I did this because I thought that only suckers voluntarily went to Vietnam, or because I had no stomach for any war. I suspect the former because, unlike World War II, which made at least a little sense to me, and during which those who didn’t fight were viewed with suspicion, I never felt the least inner desire or societal pressure to go to Vietnam, although I felt a lot of pressure from the draft board, which was forever eliminating my latest exemption in what seemed like a cat and mouse game with me being the mouse. When it seemed as if the cat finally had me cornered, my doctor wrote to the draft board saying that I had passed several kidney stones, so I was reclassified from 1A (kiss your ass goodbye) to 4F (we wouldn’t draft a worthless fucker like you no matter what) for a year, and by the time that year ended, the war was winding down. I was surprised to learn that I had suffered from kidney stones, but I wasn’t about to argue.

Tonight, as I cried my way through Heroes of Iwo Jima, I glanced over at Brewsky and was startled to discover that he was watching me with an expression of consternation unlike any I had ever seen in him, and I knew it was because he didn’t understand my tears. I very much wanted to tell him what was going on for me, but how does one describe feelings about war to a cat? Not very well, I shouldn’t think. When the war films were over, I watched another documentary, The Cruise, which was about a NYC tour bus guide. This guy had depth, honesty, creativity, sensitivity, eloquence, and a unique world-view, which is to say that he was everything I would like to be when I’m around people but am not. Of course, it’s a lot harder to be all those things given that I mostly avoid people. Like this morning, I got to feeling lonely, what with Peggy being gone, so, it being Sunday, I thought about either visiting the new Unitarian Church or calling someone about getting together, but I decided against either because they seemed like too much work. That decision being out of the way, my friend Cliff called to ask if he could come over, but I didn't answer the phone. About an hour later, I called him back, and we took a walk. It was good, but there’s such a wide gap between myself and others that I sometimes think about seeing people in the same way I think about taking medicine. I know it’s good for me, but it’s not altogether pleasant, although it can sometimes be very pleasant indeed, which is another parallel between people and drugs.

They will be like the morning mist, like dew in the morning sun, like chaff blown by the wind, like smoke from a chimney. Hosea 13:3

I saw life as predictable and everlasting because time moved so slowly that I couldn’t imagine myself growing up. Days were alike except for weekends and holidays, which seemed so far apart that I once tried to hurry Christmas by pulling leaves from September trees. I knew that real change would someday come, but the time seemed so far away that thinking about it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I lacked the words to say so, but I regarded change as theoretical rather than actual in the same sense that the earth someday being obliterated now seems theoretical rather than actual, although it will certainly happen.

My concept of life as more or less a status quo affair lingered into my fifties because, while many changes had by then happened around me, I stayed constant within myself. Then, my health changed in ways that left me with pain and limitations, and once a person can’t trust himself to stay right, and other people can’t make him right, life becomes more serious. Now, when I look back upon all the people and events that I once knew and experienced—and are gone forever even though it once seemed that they would continue forever—I become panicky and nauseous because I know that the people and events that are currently a part of my life will also cease to exist, and that the time before it happens no longer seems like looking through the wrong end of a telescope but through the right end of a microscope.

I have an 87-year-old friend who says to me every time I see him: “Growing old isn’t for sissies.” He says this with a solemn voice and baleful eye as if it’s his own original and profound discovery even though he’s been saying it for years, as have millions of other people. He says it this way because it is his own discovery and it is original and profound, although the bromidic words with which he expresses himself can’t begin to impart his private realization that life can and will go horribly wrong no matter what we do, and that, all too soon, everything will be lost. All the work, all the years in school, all the relationships, and a million little things, will soon disappear in the same way that light disappears when the bulb blows.

In late adolescence, I began to think of life as the product of how one looked at it, which meant that if I looked at it as a game, I could avoid suffering. Yet, even then I knew what it was to step on a nail, to fall ill with strep throat, and to bend double from food poisoning, and I would guess that no one ever said that life was a game while he had a nail sticking out of his foot, or was having diarrhea in a toilet while throwing-up in a trashcan. There are even books that promote the view that life is a game, but I very much doubt that any of them were written in Palestine or Darfur or by people who were in intractable pain. The irony of life is that the same brevity and powerlessness that make it meaningless also make it profound. Indeed, when I was able (on my better days) to view life as a game, I had yet to understand that life is more akin to a gasp that bursts from the eternal blackness of the void only to be sucked back into it. Once that thought reached my core, life became a tragedy. As my IOOF ritual put it:

“I have seen the rose in its beauty spread its leaves to the morning sun. I returned and it was dying upon the stalk; its grace and form were gone; its loveliness was vanished away; its leaves were scattered to the ground, and no one gathered them together again. I have seen man in the pride of his strength. He walked; he ran; he leaped; he rejoiced in that he was more excellent than the rose. I returned, and life was departed from him, and the breath from out of his nostrils.”

All but one of the nine men who used to stand around a coffin with me as we performed that ritual are dead. “Death is in the world,” they said; “All who are born must die,” they said, and so they died, leaving only my 87-year-old friend and me.

Given such a reality, I can understand why people turn to religion and spirituality, and even today, I wish that they could be true. Yet, from adolescence, I viewed their content as so fanciful that I could but cling to them desperately in order to enjoy even the fleeting illusion of a permanent hold. I asked the darkness around my bed why, if there really exists an Eternal Beneficence that reaches out to us as eagerly as we reach out to it, doesn’t that Beneficence reveal itself equally and undeniably to everyone rather than leave us to interpret the words of dead men in contradictory ways, all of which promote hatred in the name of a thousand different Gods of Love. Finally, I couldn’t go on believing in God anymore than I could go on believing in Santa Claus, there being so few things that make life bearable that the rest must of necessity fall away. What could possibly make life bearable for an atheist, some might ask. Kindness, integrity, intimacy, art, music, literature, good health, simple pleasures, adequate resources, writing, reflecting, studying, time in the woods, and, most of all, truth. Given that there are so few, none can be relinquished without the loss outweighing the gain, and religion and spirituality required that I relinquish truth as I believe it to be within my deepest self.

The truth of which I speak is that the existence of certain persistent questions regarding the possibility that our lives possess an ultimate purpose, doesn’t suggest the existence of answers, but rather a need that there be answers, and so it is that answers are invented—both by religion and philosophy—not to satisfy a truth need, but rather a psychological need. Some people are satisfied with these answers; others appear to have been born with a lack of interest in the questions; and still others are left with the questions despite the absence of any hope that there be answers. They are left to feel that religion, spirituality, and philosophy have all failed to satisfy their needs and, indeed, that their needs are unsatisfiable short of death. Wittgenstein expressed philosophy’s failure as follows. Religion and spirituality are unable to address their own limitations so humorously.

“The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.”

In case his words are obscure, I will tell you what I think they mean. The only truthful tack that philosophy can take is to say nothing about that of which it knows nothing. If it does this, its remarks will be limited to natural science, a field unrelated to philosophy. If someone should come into a philosophical circle and make a remark about the existence of a reality that transcends natural science, philosophy can but dismiss his or her remark by breaking it down into its constituent parts and pointing out that they suffer from a lack of clarity and specificity, and are therefore nonsensical. The person who made the remark will not find this approach satisfying, and won’t even understand what it has to do with philosophy, yet those who offer it can take comfort in knowing that they have presented the best that philosophy has to offer.

To put it another way:

“Even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course, there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.” –Ludwig Wittgenstein

Post; the latest.

The Cascade Ranges (sometimes referred to as Eastern and Western, and sometimes as Old and New) have thousands of rock formations that consist of magma which hardened underground and was exposed when the surrounding rock eroded away. Like nearly all of them, Symbol Rock (pictured) sits quietly to itself, for that which would be the centerpiece of a park in most places is commonplace in Oregon. Indeed, Symbol Rock and dozens—if not scores—of similar formations can be found within fifty miles of here, although few people know of them because few people venture into the wilderness.

As was true elsewhere in America, most of Oregon’s indigenous peoples died of European diseases without having ever seen a European, the diseases being introduced by a relatively few pre-settlement explorers, traders, and missionaries. This makes it impossible to know what the original Americans thought of most intrusions, but they generally regarded impressive natural features as possessing healing powers, and they created anthropomorphic myths to explain the origins of such features. I believe that natural features (along with art, music, friendship, literature, placeboes, and various other things) can indeed heal people, but I have no thought that tales of warring spirits or trickster coyotes are relevant to explaining their existence. For this, we must turn to science.

Many western Oregonians would disagree because the region is attractive to those who take a mystical view. Many of them view both science and mythology as nothing more than culturally-based interpretations of nature, with science being inferior to mythology in that its mechanistic outlook, its human centeredness, and its faith in reason and evidence, deny the possibility of a spirit realm and therefore of ordained purpose. My animus toward such people comes from the fact that they take obvious advantage of the fruits of the science that they profess to hate while the fruits of the spirituality that they profess to love remain anything but obvious. Indeed, I think their claim to heightened respect, insight, sensitivity, compassion, and morality, are simply the products of their narcissistic imaginations. Our one area of agreement is that we both view the dominant forms of Western religion as wicked and depraved.

At the one end, in our Western world, there lie the beliefs and practices of those whom I have referred to, people who embrace such titles as pagan, spiritual, and mystical; at the other are those like myself who uphold reason and evidence as humanity’s only shot at objective truth; and between the two, the dominant forms of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; authoritarian religions all that proclaim the earth accursed and treat it accordingly even as they pursue worldly wealth and power. As much as they hate one another, pagan/spiritual/mystical people and mainstream religious people are alike in that they share a contempt for reason and evidence, at least in regard to such things as they themselves believe in the absence of reason or evidence. Truly, once rationality is declared a hindrance to the discovery of “higher truth,” people are free to believe whatever they please without the least embarrassment.

Yet, in the case of the mainstream religions, if two people worship different Gods of love—each of whom demands that he (they are invariably male, you know) alone be worshipped—how are they to resolve their differences in the absence of reason and evidence? They cannot. They can but agree to disagree or, as usually happens when one or both sides thinks it can win, resort to intimidation and violence.

“A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.” –Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921

If Freud was right—and I think he was—there can be no peace among religions; there can only be lulls in the fighting, and never any love.