The catch is that if you’re coming, you have to write (and sing) a Passover-themed song parody. So, yeah, I made this for you. I’m really sorry. On the off chance that you have somehow avoided the original…here you go.

Let Us Go, Maybe?

So I was talking to El
Said life in Egypt was hell
Need somewhere else we can dwell,
But Pharaoh’s in our way!

He says he’ll give us a hand,
He says he’s got it all planned
He says there’s a promised land,
And Pharaoh says “Okay!”

Pharaoh’s heart was hardened
He withdrew his pardon.
“Make bricks. Weed the garden”
What happened to our bargain, baby?

They’ll call it chutzpah,
Say “This is crazy”,
‘Cause you’re the Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

You change your mind like
Changing a baby,
‘Cause you’re the Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

They’ll call it chutzpah,
Say “This is crazy”,
‘Cause you’re the Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

And all the other kings,
Try to enslave me,
But you’re my Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

You took your time being good,
God took no time with the blood
You let us down with a thud,
Now frogs are in your way.

He’s sending lice, flu, and flies
He’s only done the first five.
He’ll take the first born kids’ lives,
‘Cause you’ve pissed off Yahweh.

Pharaoh’s heart was hardened
He withdrew his pardon.
“Make bricks. Weed the garden”
What happened to our bargain, baby?

They’ll call it chutzpah,
Say “this is crazy”,
‘Cause you’re the Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

You change your mind like
Changing a baby,
‘Cause you’re the Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

They’ll call it chutzpah,
Say “this is crazy”,
‘Cause you’re the Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

And all the other kings,
Try to enslave me,
But you’re my Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

Before you got out of my life
You worked us so hard
You worked us so hard
You worked us so, so hard
Before you got out of my life
You worked us so hard
We won’t forget that
You worked us so, so hard.

You change your mind like
Changing a baby,
‘Cause you’re the Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

They’ll call it chutzpah,
Say “this is crazy”,
‘Cause you’re the Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

And all the other kings,
Try to enslave me,
But you’re my Pharaoh,
Let us go, maybe?

Before you got out of my life
You worked us so hard
You worked us so hard
You worked us so, so hard
Before you got out of my life
You worked us so hard
We won’t forget that
Let us go maybe?

Part of the reason I got so annoyed was that I grew up in the Unitarian Universalist church, one of whose central theories is that “revelation is not sealed.” In other words, human knowledge continues to grow and develop over the centuries, revealing new truths that need to be incorporated into our understanding of the workings of the universe.

The past twenty-four hours have been a pretty good example of why that’s a pretty good theory to hang onto–whether it’s relation to science, or theology, or any other kind of human knowledge.

Atlantis has been the stuff of science fiction and fantasy since Plato’s Critias, where he wrote:

Let me begin by observing first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and all who dwelt within them; this war I am going to describe. Of the combatants on the one side, the city of Athens was reported to have been the leader and to have fought out the war; the combatants on the other side were commanded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as was saying, was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and when afterwards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.

But, you know, everybody mostly thought it was goofy. I mean, Aquaman lived there. And his superpower was the ability to talk to fish? Come on.

Well, yesterday, they pretty much FOUND ATLANTIS. Well, sort of. They found evidence of a lost underwater continent, anyway. It’s enough to get me flying high on a combination of scientific/philosophical/science fictional geekery that’s liable to last for weeks.

And as if that weren’t enough, because finding lost continents mentioned by Plato might not be enough for some people, there’s even more “fiction” coming to life! In their astonishing novel The Unincorporated Man, Dani and Eytan Kollin imagine a future earth where everyone becomes a legal corporation at birth, with outside investors funding their educations, living expenses, and so on by purchasing stock. As you succeed or fail in your crowdfunded career, you can buy back stock in yourself over time. When a cryogenically frozen 21st century man is found and reawakened  he is the only unincorporated man on the planet. Things get…complicated.

The book is well worth reading, especially because it’s happening. Right. Now.

And, while we’re at it, they found Machiavelli’s arrest warrant. And King Richard III’s body.

It’s all added up to a pretty good reminder that whatever we’re certain about today might be overturned tomorrow. As the great philosopher Phoebe Buffay once reminded us all, “Up until like what, 50 years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing until you split it open and this, like, whole mess of crap came out.”

Revelation is not sealed. Believe six impossible things before breakfast. The times? They are a-changing.

So here, I made you this instead.

The Carol of the Economists

Hark! Here’s the gist:
Economists
All seem to say:
“Trade every day.
Markets are here
With goods and cheer
For young and old
Meek and the bold.

Peaceful exchange
At short or long range!
Goods changing hands!
Supply and demand!
Prices emerge
As they converge.
With trade, of course,
there’s no need for force.

With common law
And virtue (bourgeois)
We’ll do just fine
without design.
Spontaneous
orders for us!
Let’s give a cheer
Markets are here!
Merry merry merry Adam Smithmas!
Merry merry merry Adam Smithmas!

On, on, we shout
Tariffs are out.
Regulation
Helps out no-one.

Peace. Ful. Ex. Change.

In an earlier post I went a little nuts over the way that Galileo’s discoveries influenced Milton’s depiction of the universe in Paradise Lost. Galileo made available to anyone would could read the wonders of a universe too large to imagine.

In much the same way, the publication of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia allowed ordinary people–like Samuel Pepys who called it “the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life”–to examine the microscopic wonders of a world that had been too small to see.  Hooke’s painstaking drawings of fleas and razor blades and different kinds of cloth, and just about anything he could fit under the lens must have been almost unimaginably astonishing when first seen. Certainly, writers from Margaret Cavendish to Jonathan Swift seized on the excitement of sudden explosions and diminutions in size. Cavendish wrote an entire book of “Atomic Poems” about the invisible world lurking beneath our ordinary one. And Gulliver’s visits to Lilliput and Brobdingnag (not to mention Laputa) are surely influenced by the 17th century’s wild changes in perspective.

Hooke's Observations of Snowflakes

One of the fun things about knowing that Pepys owned and read and loved Micrographia is knowing what else he was doing while he was reading it. This kind of knowledge–like the telescope and the microscope–gives those of us who study the period our own new and exciting way of seeing things.  So, we know that on January 20th, 1665, Pepys bought Micrographia and took it home…and there’s your early modern man of science, Fellow of the Royal Society for you! Off getting the latest knowledge and newest discoveries! Truly, this is the dawning of the modern era.

Except you know what else this man of science was bringing home on that same day? A bunny. You know why?

So homeward, in my way buying a hare and taking it home, which arose upon my discourse to-day with Mr. Batten, in Westminster Hall, who showed me my mistake that my hare’s foote hath not the joynt to it; and assures me he never had his cholique since he carried it about him: and it is a strange thing how fancy works, for I no sooner almost handled his foote but my belly began to be loose and to break wind, and whereas I was in some pain yesterday and t’other day and in fear of more to-day, I became very well, and so continue.

Yep. The modern man of science brought home Micrographia. And a rabbit. So he could cut its foot off at a particular specified point on the leg because ONLY THEN would it fix his indigestion.

That’s the early modern era for you, right there. And that’s why I love it.

Hooke's Observation of a Bee Sting

Micrographia is now available online, electronically, for free. I don’t think we can ever recapture the wonder that kept Samuel Pepys up all night.  But I do plan to try.

Because it is both an interesting question, and a question that remains unanswered, AND a question about drinking, a particularly delicious query to ponder while gazing into one’s wine glass during the hours between midnight and the arrival of rosy fingered dawn is the question of exactly what Homer meant when he referred to “the wine dark sea.”

Scholars have suggested a wide range of theories–nicely summarized here. Maybe the alkaline ground water of the area produced wine that looked more like Romulan ale than a nice chianti. Maybe the ancient Greeks lacked a word for blue. Maybe colorblindness was overwhelmingly common in the ancient world. Maybe the way the sunset reflected off the sea and the dust in the air changed the color of the water. Maybe it’s not a good idea to take a blind poet’s use of color language seriously. Maybe there was the kind of red tide that kills off shellfish and sends tourists to the ER.

Now that's a wine dark sea!

An article in The Prospect is what has me thinking about this topic again this morning, when I am (alas) neither drinking nor hanging out with classicists. (And where have I gone wrong, that this should be my fate?) Philip Ball nicely summarizes the long-posited and much-debated philological theory about the order in which humans create words for color.

[The] hypothesis has since fallen in and out of favour, and certainly there are exceptions to the scheme they proposed. But the fundamental colour hierarchy, at least in the early stages (black/white, red, yellow/green, blue) remains generally accepted. The problem is that no one could explain why this ordering of colour exists. Why, for example, does the blue of sky and sea, or the green of foliage, not occur as a word before the far less common red?

We don’t know why. But it increasingly seems that red comes first. Maybe that’s because of our endless preoccupation, as human creatures, with blood. (And now I wonder what color Homer thought blood was.) Maybe there’s something to the theory that the ancients didn’t as yet have a word for–or a conception of–the color blue.

Or maybe Homer’s description of the sea is a question of paying attention to a different aspect of color. If we looked at the wine and the sea of the ancient world in gray-scale, would they look the same? They might. Wine-dark might not be a question of hue, but of value or of intensity.

It’s a great question to think about over a glass of wine, looking out at the sea. It’s a question that’s about great poetry and ancient stories, but that’s also about modern science, philosophy, and the simple and terrifying fact that we do not, in fact, see even the simplest things in the same way.

There’s a nice piece in the WSJ today by Gordon Crovitz called “Who Really Invented the Internet?” that puts paid to the notion that the Internet is a government invention, and that gives a lot of the credit to private enterprise in the form of Xerox.

That’s very cool. And it’s certainly part of the story of the Internet.

But my children, I am here to remind you of the early days of the Internet, back in the dark ages of the 1990s, when we sent email through VAX accounts. Or the early 2000s when online gaming looked like this:

Now *that* looks like fun!

Kids, if you wanted to hang out with people on the Internet  you used to use things called BBS or Usenet. There weren’t any pretty pictures. If you wanted to look at hot chicks on the Internet, you got ‘em in ASCII:

Yeah, baby.

The technology was there. The underpinnings of the Internet were there. The loom on which we have woven the glorious, weird, prickly, and occasionally sticky tapestry that we now call the Internet was there. But the Internet? That concatenation of news and Lolcats, of social media and commerce, of porn sites and Scrabble clubs? That Internet.

You built that.

Don’t let anybody tell you that you didn’t.

Superman (Born that way)

Milton was still thinking about that meeting years later. We know, because first of all, how could he possibly not still be thinking of that meeting? Would you be able to forget it? But we also know because when he describes Satan’s shield in Paradise Lost he writes that it is made of:

Ethereal temper, massy, large and round,
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe.

“The Tuscan artist” is Galileo.

Batman (Built his own tech)

It happens again and again. One of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets begins with the most astonishing juxtaposition of the new scientific learning and the old poetic traditions that I can think of. He writes:

At the round earth’s imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise

We all know, says Donne, that the earth is round. We all know it doesn’t have any corners and never did. However, I shall still ask the angels (perhaps also imagined) to blow their hypothetical trumpets at the worlds metaphorical corners.

Poets are troubled and entranced by scientific advances. Even Donne–one of whose greatest love poems turns on the precisely delineated image of a compass–worries elsewhere that “The new philosophy calls all in doubt,” and Wordsworth famously kvetched that too much knowledge of the workings of the world separate us from myth and from magic:

Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

I confess that I used to feel like Wordsworth, but that was before I started hanging out with physicists when I was in grad school. (They had better parties.) Hang out with physicists enough and you get introduced to things like the Fibonacci Series, a mathematical series that appears everywhere in nature, has had a poetic form created in its honor, and is poetic in itself. Spend enough time with them and you end up writing poems on things like the cosmological constant, and wanting to write one on quantum entanglement, which is the most romantic thing I have ever read about in my life.

All of this is simply the long way around to saying that the inimitable Vi Hart has written a sonnet on the Higgs Boson. Rejoice. Write a few of your own.

So, a couple of very very funny women have made a very very funny video over at Funny or Die called Republicans, Get in My Vagina, the central theme of which is nicely outlined by the following bit of the script:

I don’t want government in my banks. I don’t want government in my classrooms. Where do I want government? In my vagina! Way way deep, up up there in my vagina. In my mother’s vagina. In my daughter’s vagina. In my great-grandmother’s vagina.

The video goes on to outline the ways in which Republicans are seeking to get into our vaginas (or the vaginas belonging to those you love) during this heated political season. The implication, of course is that Democrats are planning to leave my vagina entirely alone. (My vagina and I know *that’s* not true, of course. The Democrats just have differently invasive plans for us, like retraining. Like in France.) The deeper (heh) implication is that my vagina and I have to choose one or the other.

Well, my vagina and I haven’t felt so sought after in ages. Apparently, there are two completely dreamy boys who are just dying to get their hands all over us! And just like every heroine in every TV series or novel, the only important question anyone has for me is, “Gee, Sarah, which dreamy boy will you choose?”

(Did you see this by the way? Because it’s a pretty darn good explanation of why approaching stuff like The Hunger Games as a teen romance novel is wrong and stupid, and a fine demonstration of the problem with reducing everything to the “which dreamy boy” question. I digress.)

Guess what, dreamy boys? I’m washing my hair that night. For the rest of forever. Just because I don’t let the Republicans into my vagina doesn’t mean that I’ve invited the Democrats in. We don’t actually need either of you to help us make “intimate personal care decisions.” My vagina and I have a really nice doctor for that, and we don’t need government bureaucrats peering over her shoulder while we’re in the stirrups. We don’t actually need either of you to make us be responsible about our health care or our choices. We’re smarter than you are and, trust me, we know more about vaginas than you do. We don’t actually need either of you to help us pursue happiness. We do that just fine already, thankyouverymuch.

We’ll make you a deal, dreamy boys, my vagina and I.

You guys stay the fuck out of my…voting booth.

And I’ll stay out of yours.

While I deeply appreciate the sophisticated use of the nested Oxford commas there, you’re going to have to forgive me if I decline to proclaim my loyalty and if, in truth, the whole notion of doing so makes me distinctly queasy.

A brief tutorial on the Oxford comma. You're welcome.

The time and place that I study–early modern England–is rife with loyalty oaths, and oaths of allegiance, and homilies on obedience.

Henry VIII started a vogue for Oaths of Supremacy when he established himself as the head of the Church of England. Of course, he also made it high treason to imagine the death of the King, so he clearly had a few issues.  Homilies on obedience were sermons that were issued by the government and required to be given from the pulpits of the Church of England on specific days–often the anniversaries of rebellions, uprisings, or plots. They tended to sound a lot like this:

[W]hat a perilous thing were it to commit unto the subjects the judgment, which prince is wise and godly, and his government good, and which is otherwise ; as though the foot must judge of the head : an enterprise very heinous, and must needs breed rebellion. For who else be they that are most inclined to rebellion, but such haughty spirits? From whom springeth such foul ruin of realms ? Is not rebellion the greatest of all mischiefs ? And who are most ready to the greatest mischiefs, but the worst men ? Rebels therefore the worst of all subjects are most ready to rebellion, as being the worst of all vices, and farthest from the duty of a good subject : as, on the contrary part, the best subjects are most firm and constant in obedience, as in the especial and peculiar virtue of good subjects. (1570, in response to the 1569  rebellion in favor of Mary, Queen of Scots)

And they tended to argue that, as monarchs were given to a nation by God, there was no proper course but to obey the given monarch–good or ill–as if he or she were God. If you got a crappy monarch, you just obeyed and hoped your obedience would persuade God to remove said monarch.

What’s fun about homilies on obedience and oaths of supremacy, allegiance, and loyalty is that they show up most often when things are slipping. Henry VIII, for example, and that 1569 rebellion. They aren’t a sign that all is well and that everyone loves the monarch. Because if things were going swimmingly, no one would need to require people to state their loyalty. After Guy Fawkes and his friends tried to blow up Parliament in 1605, James I and VI came up with the Oath of Allegiance  which required all English subjects to declare loyalty to the King, and to reject the Pope’s powers.  What’s great about James I and VI is that when he gets rolling he makes Henry VIII’s claim that one’s personal imaginings could be high treason look like child’s play. Here he is in 1610, in a speech to Parliament.

God has power to create, or destroy, make, or unmake at his pleasure…and the like power have kings: they make and unmake their subjects; they have power of raising and casting down, of life and of death; judges over all their subjects and in all cases…They have power to exalt low things and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the chess: a pawn to take a bishop or a knight…

After about six straight years of reading this kind of thing  you start cheering when you get to read pamphlets with titles like Killing Noe Murder in defense of the right of the people to resist tyranny, even to the point of regicide. And way before that, you feel really grateful to be living in the 21st century, in America, where oaths of loyalty have never been our kind of thing.

Right?

Academic conferences are a mystery to those who’ve never been. Happily, a benevolent universe has given us David Lodge, who described them hilariously and accurately in Small World, which if you haven’t read, go get it and take it to your next conference. Anyway, Lodge says:

The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed–the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to the papers of others. But with this excuse you journey to new and interesting places, meet new and interesting people, and form new and interesting relationships with them; exchange gossip and confidences (for your well-worn stories are fresh to them, and vice versa); eat, drink, and make merry in their company every evening; and yet, at the end of it all, return home with an enhanced reputation for seriousness of mind.

Last week, I was running one such conference. One of the readings was Robert Molesworth’s An Account of Denmark (1694). And while Molesworth’s primary purpose is to talk to his English readers about the three day revolution that turned Denmark from a free society into one with an absolutist monarch, the preface to his Account is all about the benefits of travel.

MolesWORTH. Not Moleman.

Unlike Lodge, who sees academic travel as an exercise in cloaking self-indulgence in the guise of intellectual endeavor, Molesworth sees travel as an intellectual endeavor in itself.  It is the way to learn, not just about the customs and cultures of other places, but about the excellencies of our own. As an 18th century Englishman, Moleworth was justifiably proud of the comparatively free society from which he came, and he thought nothing was more important than for the English to “easily and cheaply grow sensible of the true value of Liberty by Travelling into such Countries for a Season as do not enjoy it.”

Moleworth also encourages travel because it is something that free people do. And we know it is something that free people do because enslaved people, people under authoritarian governments, are not permitted to do it.

To the end that the People may be kept in the requisite Temper of Obedience, none are permitted to Travel upon pain of Death, except such as have special License, which are exceeding few; neither are any Gentlemen of those Countries to be met with abroad, but publick Ministers and their Retinue: The Cause of this severe Prohibition is, lest such Travellers should see the Liberty of other Nations, and be tempted to covet the like for themselves at home, which might occasion Innovations in the State. The same reason which induces Tyrants to prohibit Travelling, should encourage the People of free Countries to practice it, in order to learn the Methods of preserving that which once lost is very difficultly recover’d; for Tyranny usually steals upon a State by degrees, and is (as a wise Man said) like a hectick Fever, which at first is easie to be cured, but hardly can be known; after ’tis thoroughly known it becomes almost incurable. Now travel best of all other Methods discovers (at least expense) the Symptoms of this pernicious Disease, as well as its dismal Effects when grown to a head; and ’tis certainly of greater Importance to understand how to preserve a sound Constitution, than how to repair a crazed one, though this also be a beneficial piece of Knowledge.

Reading Molesworth this past week–amid all my travel, and with the evils of the TSA at the forefront of my mind–is making me think a little differently about traveling. I’ve always enjoyed it, of course, but maybe I need to take it more seriously, not only as a way to get to the places where I do my work, but also as a part of the work that I do.

What would happen if those of us who travel a lot decide to travel not just to get places, but to  travel to learn what we have and share it with other people, to see what they have and learn how to attain it, to exercise our liberty and learn how to keep it?

Where are you going this Spring?

N.B. For full disclosure for them as cares about this kind of thing. The company I work for publishes the Molesworth book and has provided me with a free copy.