The Challenger...revisited

"Don't fill your mind with science. Fill your heart with love." These words, or words very much like them, are attributed to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, subject of the recent BBC2 film The Challenger starring William Hurt in probably his best-ever character part. I watched it twice.

There was a profile on BBC4 last night. The man who died in Los Angeles in 1988 is reportedly returning to acclaim and popularity; a little film on YouTube, in which he talks about the beauty of understanding how something works, in this case a flower, has been receiving thousands of hits. I have yet to watch it, though I have read sections of the book he did with Ralph Leighton, Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character.

I have yet to read the section on his experiences at Los Alamos during World War II, helping the US military to invent, on behalf of the Allies, the atomic bomb before the Nazis did. Feynman said in the TV profile how much he enjoyed the intensity of the work and how he had watched through a vehicle windscreen the first test explosion in Nevada - "it's only Ultra Violet light that blinds you and Ultra Violet light cannot penetrate glass".

He didn't enjoy the consequences when the Little Boy bomb was exploded above Hiroshima in August, 1945. Perhaps it was that which prompted the thought that there was more to life than the power of death encaspulated in scientific equations. Like the British philosopher Alan Watts, like the American poet John Berryman, Richard Feynman was a serious man unafraid to to strike out on his own against current orthodoxies. William Hurt conveyed this brilliantly in The Challenger.

Until this film I had never heard of Feynman; consequently I had no idea of the part he played in determining and exposing the technical fault that caused hot gases to leak from defective seals on the one of the two liquid hydrogen towers rocketing the Challenger shuttle spacecraft away from earth on the cold morning of January 28, 1986. The subsequent explosion 75 seconds after lift-off killed all seven astronauts on board.

The man from the California Institute of Technology only agreed to take part in the investigation in Washington because he allowed himself to be convinced that there was a problem that only he could resolve. Solving technical problems was one of his lifelong joys. As a kid he gained a reputation for mending faulty radios by thinking - asking himself practical questions and arriving at the probable answer.

So why would a prize-winning man of science say: "Don't fill your mind with science. Fill your heart with love."?  It sounds so Haight Ashbury, so Summer of Love. Little of the very little I know about Richard Feynman, however, suggests that he was an adherent of the flower power politics of San Francisco, or any particular philosophy. In fact he seems to have have been mistrustful of the value of philosophy.

In Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman! there is a section called Is Electricity Fire in which Feynman recounts his experience of trying to understand the language of a possee of professors, invited to meet and discuss the ethics of equality. A stenotypist asked him if he was a professor. Feynman told him he was a professor of physics. "Oh! That must be the reason," he replied. Asked to explain further, the stenotypist said he didn't understand a word when the "other fellas talk. But every time you stand up to say something, I understand exactly what you mean - what the question is, and what you're saying - so I thought you can't be a professor!"

So I'm inclined to think that Richard Feynman believed that you could only truly teach anything, only truly learn anything, if you loved it.

A few years ago in a moment of serendipity I wrote a short poem the third and final verse of which goes:-
I cannot share
what I do not have.
I cannot teach
what I do not love.

That's a proposition I'd stand by.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that," Feynman said.  This sums up, I think, what he was as a scientist and tried to be as a man.
                                          ................................................................

The finale of Richard Feynman's short appendix to the official Challenger Report in 1986 reads:-
Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. 

They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. 

Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. 

I quote this to remind myself once again that the human capacity to learn from mistakes is only outstripped by its readiness to repeat those mistakes with greater expertise. This is especially so of large organisations in which money, power and prestige outweigh any other consideration.

In February 2003 the space shuttle Columbia exploded on re-entering earth's atmosphere. Part of the spacecraft had been damaged by a chunk of protective foam that had ripped away from the underbelly of the fuel tank during flight. Like Challenger, all seven astronauts aboard were killed.

In subsequent years other shuttle flights were damaged by flaws in either design or engineering. Richard Feynman's report and his final adjuration were forgotten.

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Parables

To paraphrase the poet Andrei Voznesensky, worms come through holes, but bold men on parables. He actually said “parabolas”.

The best poems have the force of parables: they tell a story that contains a lesson. Likewise fairy stories and fables.  The best poems do more than merely describe circumstantial behaviour – got up this morning, had a good day, changed in the evening, had a bad night. The story may be true or made up. Its value lies in its universality. Good poems, parables and fables are applicable to all. Caravaggio’s great religious paintings are visual dramatised parables.

If I knew the Bible better than I do, I would be familiar with its many story forms of which the parable is but one. There are also lamentations, judgements, psalms, proverbs, prophecies, commandments and miracles. Parables are not aphorisms such as Oscar Wilde’s “A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”; but they may have the impact of the aphoristic as in Dr Johnson’s “If you be solitary, be not idle; if you be idle, be not solitary.” Their purpose is to reveal and conceal. Figuratively, to give sight to the blind and confound the conceited in their wisdom/hubris.

The parable as a form of cautionary tale is attributed principally to Christ through the gospels of the evangelists Matthew, Mark and Luke. There are no parables in John’s gospel. In the Old Testament there are at least 11 examples of parable in the books of Samuel, Kings, Isaiah and Ezekiel. When the prophet Nathan tells King David the story about the rich man, the poor man and the ewe he is telling the King he was wrong to kill Uriah the Hittite because he coveted his wife Bathsheba. Similarly, Elijah tells the story of Naboth’s Vineyard to assure King Ahab that the murder he committed will be forgiven by God, but the kindred of his wife Jezebel will be wiped out. Elsewhere, Ezekiel says the sins of the father shall no longer be visited upon the son.

Scholars have identified at least three variations of parable:-

. Similitude. The story based on real everyday events. The purpose is to bring the kingdom of God closer to people. Thus heaven’s joy in a repentant sinner is likened to a woman finding a coin she thought lost. The tenacious fruitfulness of the kingdom of God is likened to the scattering of seed that grows of its own accord. There are 12 of these parables in the New Testament.

. The fictitious ‘once upon a time’ story on the lines of ‘There was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman’. There are 16 of these.

. And the exemplary story. There are only four of these, but they include one of the most powerful of the parables – The Good Samaritan. The purpose of this form of story-telling is illustrative. Thus the Good Samaritan illustrates the commandment to love your neighbour.

There are parables of the kingdom of heaven – hearing, seeking, growing: the Mustard Seed, the Sower, the Talents.

There are parables of loss and redemption – The Lost Coin, the Prodigal Son, the Lost Sheep.

There are parables about love and forgiveness – The Good Samaritan, the Unforgiving Servant.

There are parables about death – The Barren Fig Tree.

Scholars say there are at least 41 examples of parable in the first three gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke do not ‘agree’ on the Crucifixion or the role of the two thieves. Similarly, they do not agree on the parables attributed to Christ. Only eight of the 36 parables listed by Wikipedia, for example, are shared by all three:- the Lamp Under the Bushel; New Wine in Old Wineskins; the Strong Man; the Sower; the Mustard Seed; the Wicked Husbandman; the Budding Fig Tree; the Faithful Servant. The Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and the Barren Fig Tree are found only in Luke. The parable of the Talents is in both Matthew and Luke.

Parables also occur in the non-canonical Gnostic gospels excluded from the authorised Bible.

Proverbs are a form of telling whereas parables are usually a form of showing.

 

Ola, Ola, Ola...

The penultimate poem in Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal begins in Spain and ends in Barcelona in December 1938.

The Spanish Civil War is only ever a backdrop to MacNeice's soul-searching quest for connection between the personal life and the larger life of a people, a nation. 

I re-read all 24 poems in the book while holidaying in Roses, a coastal resort in Catalonia which earns a living from fishing and tourism. On an inside cover I wrote out the 12th century oath of allegiance made by the citizens of Catalonia to the Spanish monarch. 

I think it's apposite in these times of revolt against the political class that, foolishly, seems to believe itself immune from the deep discontentment of ordinary people.

We who areas good as you swear to you who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws; but if not, not.

Don't you admire especially the last four words. 

There was a May Day demonstration in Barcelona while I was there; but the march bisecting the Ramblas by people calling for jobs and opportunities was obliterated by the confident baying of Bayern Munich supporters, taking their beery ease in the afternoon sunshine before the evening's demolition of Barcelona FC in the semi-final of the European Champions' League. To look at them you wouldn't think there were political demonstrations in Germany too against the prevailing status quo.

I heard about Ukip's local election success while in Spain. Having voted for them in the 2010 local and General Elections - it was either that or a spoiled ballot - I felt pleased that our rather smug political class had an unpleasent suprise. It's not going to go away either, no matter what the squabbling and internal wrangling. The internal morale of this country has been neglected for far too long. Public distrust is sadly vindicated by the accusations of criminal activity piled up against one public figure after another. 

With Eduardo Niebla's lovely guitar music from Lights From the Inner Side playing - and with the happy prospect of Bradford City going back to Wembley on May 18 - I don't feel inclined today to moralise or sermonise. Instead I'll conclude with an extract from that 23rd poem of Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal:-

May God, if there is one, send
As much courage again and greater vision
And resolve the antinomies in which we live
Where man must be either safe because he is negative
Or free on the edge of a razor.
Give those who are gentle strength,
Give those who are strong a generous imagination,
And make their half-truth true and let the crooked
Footpath find its parent road at length.   

Thatcherism...

On March 23, 1989, just short of two years before Margaret Thatcher followed the potentates of the Warsaw Pact and toppled from power, I wrote a centre-spread for the paper looking at the changes to the social fabric of this country during the ten years she was Prime Minister. Here is a small piece of it:-

"Thatcherism, the Thatcherite will tell you, stands for freedom of the individual, for independence and choice.

No other 'ism' has done as much to determine the lives of so many, from what they eat first thing in the morning to who they go to bed with at night.

The very term 'Thatcherism' , had no currency in 1979. But like the £1 coin and the 20p piece it is now part of everyday life.

Under Thatcherism you expect to be told what is good for you, from how long to boil your breakfast egg to how to practice safe sex. The Maggie State has replaced the so-called nanny State of Clement Attlee's post-war Labour Government...

Unlike 'Churchillian', the word may pass into oblivion when its namesake finally leaves 10 Downing Street. Will Thatcherism turn out to have been a mere brand-name?...

The Thatcher decade has its own nomenclature: AIDS, yuppies, lager-louts, loadsmoney, yomping, Roseland, bonking, Big Bang, spycatcher, Docklands, privatise, gotcha, safe sex, enterprise culture, gizza job, crack, Wapping, family silver, dependency culture and insider dealing.

Things not in evidence in the UK before May 4, 1979, include Wogan, videos, satellite TV and cable TV, diet Coke, cordless telephones, Zimbabwe, The Mail on Sunday, fax machines, plastic football pitches, Channel 4, mugging, all day drinking in pubs, solvent abuse, EastEnders, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, unleaded petrol, adverts on heroin addiction, Sunday Sport, Star Birds, the GCSE, test-tube babies, the Simod Cup, Teletext and Oracle, leg-warmers, Perrier water in cans, acid house, the SDP, Brookside, the Ford Sierra, Spitting Image, Today, the Independent, filofaxes, the union of Democratic Mineworkers, digital watches, the Humber Bridge, American football alcohol-free lager, break-dancing, the Sinclair C5, MacDonalds, City Technology colleges, the M25, Compact Discs, the Community Charge, Neighbours, Trident, the Thames Barrier, cash points, the Channel Tunnel, Punks... not to mention...YOPS, YTS, the end of the Greater London Council, the deregulation of buses..."

The following year I did another centre-spread, a look back at her years as Prime Minister. Because I worked on this two weeks in advance of rapidly changing events, it went in the later editions of the paper on the same day that she resigned from office. Not bad for a provincial evening paper, but those days were different to these days. Here is some of it:-

"Like Gorbachev, the decline of her popularity at home contrasted with the huge regard in which she was held by the Soviet Union's unwilling vassals throughout the Eastern bloc. She might shut the shipyard at Sunderland and close scores of collieries in Yorkshire and Wales, but she went down a treat in Gdansk, Budapest, Prague and Moscow.

This daughter of a Lincolnshire grocer grew up in an atmosphere of God and broken biscuits. Alfred Roberts, her father, was a strict Methodist, a conscientious, uncorrupt local councillor - and a tightwad. For the first 20 years of her life Margaret Hilda bathed in a tin tub until Alf Roberts at last invested in some indoor plumbing.

Her mother's parents were a railway cloakroom attendant and a factory machinist. Critics would say that these two facts go a long way to explaining Margaret Thatcher's antipathy for the railways and manufacturing industry for most of her time at Number Ten. Thatcherites gained the reputation of favouring the city (tight policies on public spending) against manufacturing (high interest rates).

Margaret Thatcher's entry in Who's Who does not mention her mother. In 1987 she candidly told The Guardian: "I loved my mother dearly but after I was 15 we had nothing more to say to each other.

Women do not figure much in her life. She has rarely, if at all, talked about her sister Muriel or the two eminent women (one a Nobel prize winner) who tutored her at Somerville College, Oxford. I believe I'm right in saying not a single woman was chosen to serve in any of her 15 Cabinets from May 1979 to July 1990.

In 1952 she wrote in The Daily Graphic that women should not feel obliged to stay at home; they should have careers and be free to aspire to high public office. In the autumn of this year she said the reverse on American TV: women should stay at home and raise the children.

Denis Thatcher's money allowed her to raise the Thatcher twins, Mark and Carol, with the help of a nanny. The young Iron Maiden had no objection to that sort of nanny state."

Upon Finishing Lincoln: Team of Rivals...

This morning being Easter Monday I read the final pages of Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Abraham Lincoln. The President was shot by John Wilkes Booth on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, and died the following morning in a hotel across the street from Ford's Theatre in Washington.

I had no idea that Booth was one of a trio of would-be assassins who planned to kill Secretary of State William Seward, Vice-President Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln, all on the same night, at 10.15pm. One of the three dropped out. The other, a man named Powell, gained entry to Seward's Washington residence and with pistol and Bowie knife attacked and attempted to kill five people.

Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband Richard lived with the compiling and composition of this historical biography - 754 pages of text, two-and-a-half pages of acknowledgements, 121 pages of notes plus an index - for ten years. If like me, you had only the sketchiest notion of Lincoln's life and times, this book will give you the opportunity of widening your knowledge and deepening your understanding. It will also whet your appetite to know more the course of the Civil War, which began and ended in the month of April, 1861 to 1865, and the birth of the Republican Party in 1855 - the party of abolition. If you had fondly imagined that Republicans were nasty Tories and Democrats freedom-loving liberals, you really should read this book. Hopefully the surprise won't be too unpleasant. Also, how much more difficult was reconciliation between North and South made by Lincoln's murder? He was but a month or so into his second term when John Wilkes Booth shot him dead. 

Steven Spielberg's excellent film centres on the last five months of Lincoln's life and brings together in fiction two strands of hiostorical reality that were separate: the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress and the Confederacy's peace initiative. In the film Lincoln has knowledge of the arrival of the three peace commissioners in the North but doesn't meet them. In reality he met and talked with them for a couple of days, insisting that peace was only possible if the South accepted the Union and all that that would mean for those 13 rebel states fighting to defend slave ownership. In the film dramatic tension is built up brilliantly by confronting Lincoln with a dilemma: if the peace intiative succeeds and the war is concluded before the passage of the 13th Amendment, some state legislatures will fight shy of abolishing slavery. Abolition was a tricky constititional issue, capable of dividing men and parties as well as bringing them together. I was disappointed that Spielberg's central drama, played out in the House of Representatives on March 4, 1865, takes only a few pages in the book.

Fifty pages short of the end, I found an historical reconstruction of the Battle of Gettysburg on Youtube. This three day running fight, July 1-3, 1863, came close to being the end of the Union Army. Military strategy, tactics and weaponry are incidentals in the book because Doris Kearns Goodwin's book is not a military history, chronicling the details of battlefield events; it is the effect of such events on her quartet of Cabinet rivals - Lincoln, Seward, Chase and Bates, and their friends, associates and familes, that is her main concern. So it was the film that explained the terrible physical  repercussions inflicted by the 'miniball' musket bullet, a hollow-ended, partly rifled projectile that splintered bone like a wrecking ball and caused wounds to turn gangrenous. Lincoln rode through the sites of battlefields and often visited hospitals to talk to maimed and injured soldiers. He went south to visit Ulysses S Grant after the siege of Petersburg and the abandonment of the Confederate capital of Richmond. In short, Lincoln was a brave man who gazed upon the physical consequences of policy and did not turn his sad eyes away.

Lincoln and other members of his Cabinet took both pleasure and solace from poetry. For them it was not an affectation of culture but something as central to their lives as scripture. The idea that Lincoln knew and talked with Walt Whitman, who worked in military hospitals in Washington, was exciting to contemplate, to me anyway, because it is a natural reflex for me to make connections between disparate events and draw them together. So Whitman's Mississippi of a poem, Leaves of Grass, Robert Lowell's 20th century poem For the Union Dead and Allen Ginsberg's splendid poem about Walt Whitman, A Supermarket in California, came to mind as I read about the battlefield horrors of the Civil War. Though I have finished the book, I suspect that the book has not yet finished with me. That is how it should be.
  

Reading Lincoln...

Sometimes films are not as good as the books that inspired them. Dr Zhivago, for instance, Anna Karenina. Sometimes books are surpassed by the achievement of films. Schindler's List, to my mind, is a greater piece of work than Schindler's Ark. But sometimes the film and the book complement one another.

Having seen Steven Spielberg's Lincoln I am currently making my way through the early part of the large biography that inspired it: Lincoln: Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a book I knew nothing about until the film made me aware of it, and the artistry of all concerned in the writing, acting and filming of it excited me to buy the book and look at it for a week or so while I was reading Laurent Binet's HhhH. Monday I started reading it. 

What a big slow pleasure it is, and what a surprise to my ignorance to learn that in the mid-1840s the burgeoning Republican Party, the Whigs, was the anti-slavery party and that it was Southern Democrats who wanted to retain slaves as property. The portraits of the four candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 - Lincoln, the outsider; William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase and Judge Edward Bates - are built up turn and turn about, giving the early chapters symmetry and solidity. Seward's lifelong mentor was newspaper proprietor Thurlow Weed - a "classic example of a self-made man". Here is a passage describing how he trained his memory:-

He spent fifteen minutes every night telling his wife, Catherine, everything that had happened to him that day, everyone he had met, the exact words spoken. The nightly mnenomics worked, for Weed soon became known as the man with the phenomonal recall. Gifted with abundant energy, shrewd intelligence, and a warm personality, he managed to carve out a brilliant career as printer, editor, writer, publisher, and, eventually, as powerful political boss, familiarly known as 'the dictator'.

Seward, described as energetic, courageous and exhilarating, nonetheless deferred to Weed, recognising a superior strategic prudence and experience. Lincoln and Salmon Chase - who hated his name - were both sorely afflicted by the death of family and loved ones. Before Lincoln married Mary Todd his abiding doubt about the match made him hesitate and then withdraw for more than 18 months. A young man with an old head on his shoulders, he was finding out about love. "It is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me," he told a close friend, "to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realise." 

I want to read through as much of this book as my particular time and circumstance allow. I already have my eye on another, Simon Sebag Montefiore's historical biography Jerusalem. Oddly enough, both Spielberg's film and Doris Kearns Goodwin's book makes reference to Lincoln's expressed desire to visit Jerusalem and walk in the footsteps of David, Solomon and Christ.   

Out in the Cold - For the Time Being

I wasn't going to say anything about our erstwhile Climate Change supremo Chris Huhne being sent down for eight months for perverting the course of justice; but BBC Television's Ten O' Clock News changed my mind.

The sentencing of Huhne and his ex-wife Vicky Pryce was the top story. Included in the coverage was a public mea culpa from the man himself, turned three-quarters to camera, filmed against a background of books. The top button of his shirt was undone - King Lear in extremis - his suit was dark. How are the mighty fallen. Here was a fundamentally good man who had made an error of judgement and was prepared to pay for it. Judge not lest ye be judged. Selah!  

Huhne's rehabilitation was underway. He was doing what he needed to do to pave the way for his return to public life after a year or two out in the cold, doing good works among the halt and lame or those overcome with heat-stroke as the western world gets ever warmer.

Over on Newsnight three people were lined up for Kirsty Skwark to discuss Huhne in prison, Huhne's reputation, the way forward and the way back. By the time I turned it off none of them had said a word about Vicky Pryce, the wife whom self-important Huhne had bullied into taking the rap to save his political career. 

A few months in chokey and Huhne will be out, perhaps by July or August, hopefully during an early morning snow storm.