Auxiliary Memory

The Last Bruce Springsteen Song I Ever Loved

This is not a review of Wrecking Ball, the new Bruce Springsteen album, but I’m listening to it as I write this. Nothing in this essay is a about Mr. Springsteen, this story is about me. At one time I was passionately in love with Bruce Springsteen songs but I haven’t felt that passion since Darkness on the Edge of Town in 1978. All of Springsteen’s most successful albums were after that, so it’s me and not him. What I want to know is why did his music and my life intersect in 1975-1978 so well, but hasn’t since?

Romantics love to believe that love is eternal – but is that ever the case? Many will question my comparison of love for songs to being in love with people, but I wonder if love is love, and any passion we feel is based on the same laws of attractions. Buddhism shows us that desire is the cause of all suffering. But isn’t that just another description of lost love?

When we meet people with the right characteristics that set fire to our passions, we are driven to keep those passions burning as long as possible. Love is a drug with a painful withdrawal. Whether we fall in love with the girl next door or a new song on the radio all we can think about is how to keep pushing those buttons.

In 1975 I don’t know how many times I played Born to Run. I first heard the album while living in Dallas, but I moved back to Memphis to catch Springsteen in concert in a small auditorium, and it was like being in a hurricane of rock and roll. Of course I bought his two earlier albums, and in the years after that, before seeing him again for the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour, I got into buying all the Springsteen bootlegs I could find. I couldn’t get enough of his music. It was around this time I gave up getting high with drugs, and music was a positive addiction I used to fight the craving of a negative addiction. In 1977 I met my wife and we got married in 1978, so this was a very intense time for me, and Springsteen’s music provided the soundtrack.

I also loved Darkness on the Edge of Town with the same passion I did for Born to Run but something happen after that. When The River came out in 1980 my romance with Springsteen’s music was over. I kept buying Springsteen albums but the magic was gone. Except for a couple live albums that returned to the 75-78 years, I don’t think I ever played them more than once. The passion was over. Why?

That’s what I want to know, why doesn’t love last? I’ve been married for 34 years and love my wife Susan dearly, but we’ve changed, and things now aren’t like when we had to spend every day with each other. I think long-term love is a different kind of love. It’s almost as if the long-term love isn’t about pushing buttons but learning to live with the life between the button presses.

And that explains our modern world. We spend our lives always looking for new highs or trying to find our way back to old ones. And there are exceptions. Some thrills do last. Some songs keep firing those synapses and take us back in time. That’s the difference between human lovers and artistic loves. Art is static, people change. With art we’re constantly time traveling to the past to recapture an old feeling. We want to do that with the people we love, but we grow and change and it just doesn’t work. We can’t ever become young again.

I wished I kept a diary so I could chronicle all the things that turned me on during those years 1975-1978. Those were hard, lonely years for me. I had left the friends I had made during the 1971-1974 behind, to break away from drugs. I dated a series of girls that didn’t work out. I was making friends with a New Age crowd and trying to become religious without any success. I worked a bunch of different jobs, none of which I stuck with for more than a few months. I was still getting high but struggled to quit, and I read tons of books looking for answers. Music made me feel great. Springsteen’s songs weren’t the only ones pushing my buttons, I bought hundreds of albums during those years, but I think his music was the music I loved best then.

I’ve had two peak music times in my life, 1965-1968 and 1975-1978. I don’t understand the symmetry. Each peak involved a passion for dozens of groups and artists, but each peak had a central figure. In the 60s it was Bob Dylan, and in the 70s it was Springsteen. And yes, both of those peaks were during very stressed out years. I needed music during those years to survive. Maybe I’ve never been as passionate about music since because I gave up drugs, got a job, got married, finished college and settled down to a happy life.

Because I loved Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen songs so strongly during those troubled years you’d think the words meant something to me, but they don’t. I admired the words, but it was the music that ignited my passions. It was the music that made me play the songs over and over again. It was the music that made me feel alive.

I’ve often wondered if being fanatic over a song is like being a vampire, an emotional vampire. That the high we get listening to music comes from the emotion the artist felt achieving success and fame, and those powerful emotions come through the music, with fans living off their transmitted feelings. I’ve always felt the songs with the most emotional power are those when the artists are rocketing up with success. Born to Run is an ecstatic album. It’s the album that took Springsteen into orbit. Springsteen matured for Darkness on the Edge of Town, but he was still aiming at the Moon. To me, The River was like a master at work but the excitement of success was over.

The same is true with Dylan. Dylan feels like he had the world by the tail on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and then on John Wesley Harding, he’s painting his masterpiece with a new kind of maturity. I can like and admire the mature artist, but it’s the clawing to the top artist whose songs I want to feed off like a musical vampire.

The last Bruce Springsteen song I ever loved was “The Fever” which was recorded before Born to Run, but I didn’t hear until after Darkness on the Edge of Town, on a bootleg. It was officially released in 1998 on 18 Tracks. “The Fever” is the only Springsteen song I still play often. I never tire of it. It’s the Springsteen song I live with. Thematically, I wished it had been the last song on the Darkness on the Edge of Town album.

JWH – 3/12/12

Should We Preach Science to the Faithful?

Now there are two ways to interpret my question: Should we preach science to the faithful? First, the religious right in America already believe atheists are trying to convert them through liberal education, so the question becomes: Should we not teach science to protect people’s faith? The second way to look at that question is to assume the faithful have a war on science which turns the question into: Should we teach science so everyone will understand that faith is fantasy?

Evangelical America already knows secular American has declared war on them. Liberals say, “Oh no, not us,” but I think they are avoiding the issue. Most liberals are not atheists, or even agnostics, and cling to bits of religion, mysticism and theism. They want to be modern, educated and embrace science, but deep down they want God and heaven to exist. They want everything science can give them, like brain surgery, GPS, television, computers, cell phones, antibiotics, and so on, but they don’t want to let go of God. The conservative religious right have always known deep down that science invalidates religion. That’s why they want to do away with The Department of Education, change goals for higher education and rewrite K-12 textbooks.

For decades liberals have embraced the idea that all we need to do is embrace the separation of church and state and the religious will be protected and the liberals can keep science and education. They see this as fair, ethical, legal and most of all high minded. Sadly, this is completely clueless as to what the faithful want. They want America to be a Christian nation. Liberals have no idea what this means, or what it implies.

It would be fantastic if religion was a personal belief that was never political and always personal, but that’s not the case. For decades the religious have wanted to take over politics to get what they want. They are pushing their agenda so I’m asking should liberals push back? Of course, the faithful will claim we’ve been pushing them for decades and they are only defending themselves. It’s a complicated issue.

Nevertheless, we have to ask: How hard should we teach science, skeptical thinking, and evidence based reasoning? Essentially, the faithful are saying, “God says things are like this…” and we’re saying “There’s no God, but science tells us this….” As much as some people want to believe that God and Science can coexist that’s just not true. Early humans embraced metaphysical fantasies long ago and it’s taken millennia for some people to break out of those fantasies. Our choice is accept the fantasies or accept the truth about reality – there is no sitting on the fence.

I’ve never liked proselytizing. I’ve always thought the idea of missionaries traveling to other cultures to convert those people away from their own religion as offensive. I’ve always been a skeptic, an unbeliever, an atheist, and I’ve never wanted to go convert the faithful to my way of thinking – until now. What’s the harm in letting people believe in God, or believing they will go to heaven and meet all their old relatives and friends. It’s a wonderful dream to dream. What harm could there be in leaving people alone to believe in religion and all the things religion promises them?

But the Republicans are forcing me to make a choice. They have made their religious goals political. They have put education and science in their gun sights. They have essentially made the two political parties Democrats=Science and Republicans=Religion.

I use to believe it was important to let people believe whatever they wanted until I realized the faithful had begun an anti-Education campaign. Conservatives believe liberals are pushing education as a way of destroying their religious beliefs. Many liberals disagree with this, and even I don’t think it’s a conscious agenda, but I do think a good education tends to dispel religious beliefs. It’s natural for the faithful to fear higher education and to want to control the K-12 curriculum. I think liberals are being disingenuous not to recognize that a good education does erode religious belief.

But I think the faithful and conservatives need to realize that attacking the Department of Education, Higher Education, and the money we spend on K-12 schools is equal to the idea of liberals wanting to do away with Churches. The educational system is essentially the secular church of liberal beliefs. Now fundamentalists know this and that’s why they are attacking the educational system. Liberals have their heads in the sand if they don’t see this. Atheists believe in science and education, it’s not a religion, but it a belief system.

I know conservatives can’t understand this, but liberals and most atheists are very big believers in the freedom of religion, and they don’t want to challenge religious thinking directly, and especially not politically. But conservatives don’t see that, and they have decided to attack the educational system.

The faithful feel its their duty to spread the word of their faith and to attack evil where they see it. Of course, Muslims and Mormons believe this too, and they are growing faster than Christianity. All the aggressive faiths are in a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of Earth. My question is: Should atheists, skeptics, free thinkers, and other non-believers get in on the action by converting new recruits? Among the religious the war for souls is really a battle for who describes God best. Even though most Christians and Muslims hate each other, they do share the concept of God.

If atheists become missionaries for science, it will become a battle for God versus Science, and that could lead all religions to band together, and they’d have a big majority. Lucky for believers in science the faithful don’t get along. However, does that mean we need to make scientific converts to win the battle for scientific thinking?

When you think about it though, isn’t that what’s already happened around the world? Fundamentalism is pushing back against the secular all across the globe, in a disunited front? I think the recent rise of atheism is a retaliation to that movement. Maybe it’s time we all put our cards on the table and be honest. There are many Christians out there that want America to be a Christian theocracy. I think they are jealous of Islam innate relationship with politics. I want politics that’s based on reality and science.

On the surface Republican politics appears to be about reducing taxes, especially for the rich. And the rich members of the party see reducing the size of the Federal government as the best method to this goal. Below the surface are the religious members of the Republicans, and they’ve latched on to making a smaller Federal government as their method to undermine liberal education. The reason all candidates fall all over themselves claiming to be the one true conservative and the reason why they fear being called a moderate is because they are united in in their goals even though they want to achieve different outcomes.

For 2012, the question becomes: Are there enough pro small government voters to elect a small government president? Conservative politicians think they represent the majority of Americans but I can’t believe that. We’ll find out in November. Who are you going to vote for – the Party of God or the Party of Science?

JWH – 3/11/12

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt is subtitled “How the World Became Modern” but I don’t think that’s accurate. The Swerve is a history of a book, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, born 99 BCE and died 55 BCE. And On the Nature of Things is about Epicureanism, which is based on the teachings of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher born 341 BCE and died 270 BCE. The Swerve is about the evolution of an idea that’s taken a long time to emerge. I would have subtitled the book, “The Evolution of Atheism” – although that wouldn’t be a perfectly accurate subtitle either. Epicureanism is not atheism, but the roots of atheism lies in Epicureanism. Epicurus and Lucretius figured gods might exist, but they also thought the gods didn’t care about us, and religion was all a bunch of hooey that people used to fight their fear of death.

What The Swerve tries to chronicle is the idea that religion has held a tyrannical grip on mankind for thousands of years and Epicurus and Lucretius were among the first to say, “Hey, religion is all nonsense and reality is much different from what religion says it is.” Lucretius wrote all this up in his book On the Nature of Things, but the Catholic Church suppressed his ideas and the book became forgotten for 1400 years until On the Nature of Things was rediscovered in January 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini. Bracciolini was a humanist scholar and papal secretary, and The Swerve is his story too. Bracciolini made copies of On the Nature of Things that went on to inspire many of the great men of the Renaissance, and many more great thinkers since then. Thus, the subtitle, how the world became modern, or how I would think of it, how atheism took root.

I’m an atheist, so this is a thrilling history for me. If you are a theist, and among the faithful, The Swerve might be more challenging to your faith than The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, even though it’s not about atheism and skepticism. I’ve always found studying the history of the Church to be more undermining of its ideas than attacking its cherish beliefs directly. The Catholic Church does not come off well in this story, and Greenblatt isn’t even trying to be critical.

Just the stories of Hypatia (d. 415), who was murdered by a Christian mob, and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who the Inquisition burned at the stake is enough to make me judge the Church harshly, but the stories on several of the Popes and practices at the Papal Count are downright damning. And the history of Catholic Church destroying libraries, burning books and suppressing ideas are acts of evil against humanity in my mind.

Most people think of early Christians as those meek folk eaten by lions in the Roman coliseum. The reason the Romans persecuted Christians was because those early Christians refused to coexist with other religions and demanded their religion be the only true one. And for the first four centuries of the Christian era, it was about one group of Christians stomping out other Christians in a survival-of-the-fittest theological free-for-all. The orthodox Christianity we know today exists because of it’s aggressive tactics on fighting heretical Christian sects. Not only did they use book burning, but they also used forgery, smear tactics and killing to get rid of the ideas and thinkers they didn’t like.

In terms of thought control, the Catholic Church makes Communist regimes look like children at play. And I don’t want people think I’m attacking just the Catholic Church, but it was the only church during this time period. The Catholic Church inspired violent fanaticism like we see in Islamic countries today. The mob that attacked Hypatia acted just like the Islamic mob in Afghanistan recently when they went on a rampage after the Koran was burned.

It’s a miracle that a copy of On the Nature of Things survived 1400 years of the Catholic Church, and when it was rediscovered that it wasn’t immediately destroyed and all the people who had read it killed. If the church leaders at the time had known what it really meant they would have done that. However, it was seen as a ancient poem from Classical Rome that reflected Greek philosophy. After Islam was pushed out of Spain, Greek philosophy was rediscovered by the Catholics and re-interpreted for Christian philosophy. Stephen Greenblatt does cover how some of the faithful tried to re-interpret On the Nature of Things to make it Christian, but it took them awhile to realize what an explosive book they had to deal with, and they failed.

A good portion of the narrative in The Swerve is about Bracciolini’s book hunting, and about the rise of humanism in the early days of the Renaissance. Smaller portions of the book deal with Rome at the time of Lucretius and how On the Nature of Things influenced people after its rediscovery. One of the more fascinating parts of the book deals with the Villa of the Papyri library at Herculaneum.

This kind of book history is delicious reading for me, and I wouldn’t have minded if the The Swerve’s 263 pages had run to a 1,000. Greenblatt provides almost 70 pages of notes and bibliography for those who want to read deeper into this history, and I do. This is one of those books I wish PBS would make into a 10 part series.

The Ideas of Epicurus and Lucretius

It is hard to separate the ideas in On the Nature of Things from originating with Lucretius or belonging to his philosophical hero Epicurus. And it will hard for me to separate the details I learned from reading The Swerve and the actual details in On the Nature of Things. I bought an audio edition of On the Nature of Things to listen to, but I haven’t heard it yet, plus I’m going to listen to an English translation. This is one time where I wished I knew Latin so I could read the original and decide for myself. The concepts Lucretius puts forth are amazingly modern and even prophetic when you realize that science wouldn’t back him up for more than sixteen centuries. His basic beliefs were:

The universe is a physical reality made of atoms and there are no metaphysical worlds
Everything that happens in the physical world have explanations that can be understood – there is no magic
Religion is make believe and a delusional system to sooth people’s fear of death
We are not immortal. We die. The universe is eternal, but not everything in it. There is no heaven.
Everything in the universe is made of atoms and their properties dictate the nature of things
We should accept that we are going to die and learn to appreciate the life we have
Avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure is natural – but he didn’t advocate hedonism.

You can read the poem here at Gutenberg, but it takes effort. Here is a sample of the English translation.

                            Whilst human kind
     Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed
     Before all eyes beneath Religion—who
     Would show her head along the region skies,
     Glowering on mortals with her hideous face—
     A Greek it was who first opposing dared
     Raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand,
     Whom nor the fame of Gods nor lightning's stroke
     Nor threatening thunder of the ominous sky
     Abashed; but rather chafed to angry zest
     His dauntless heart to be the first to rend
     The crossbars at the gates of Nature old.
     And thus his will and hardy wisdom won;
     And forward thus he fared afar, beyond
     The flaming ramparts of the world, until
     He wandered the unmeasurable All.
     Whence he to us, a conqueror, reports
     What things can rise to being, what cannot,
     And by what law to each its scope prescribed,
     Its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.
     Wherefore Religion now is under foot,
     And us his victory now exalts to heaven.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice summary of Lucretius and his ideas from On the Nature of Things, and how the book is structured.

Alternate History

What would life be like in the 21st century, if Lucretius’ ideas had caught on 2,000 years ago instead of Christianity? That instead of getting caught up in a heaven craving fantasy we all started studying reality to see how it works. What if the age of science had begun sixteen centuries earlier? Greenblatt wants to subtitle his book “How the World Became Modern” but we’re not all Epicureans yet. Religion still controls the minds of the majority of the human minds on Earth. It keeps the faithful from seeing reality. For example, global warming. We’re on a self-destructive path, but the faithful refuse to see that because they are still blinded by reality distortion field of religion. People who believe like Lucretius are a minority. But what if they were the majority?

JWH – 3/10/12

What If I Only Bought Books Just Before I Read Them?

I’ve always bought books far faster than I could ever read them. That’s always been true for physical books, and it’s even truer for audio books and ebooks. I just can’t pass up a bargain, like Audible.com’s recent sale that priced hundreds of audio books at $4.95 each. I bought 10 and I’m thinking about buying more, even though I have 60-80 audio books I haven’t listened to yet because of previous sales. Now my Kindle is filling up full of ebooks waiting to be read.

Amazon has been offering 100 ebooks each month for $3.99 or less. Plus Books on the Knob keeps me informed of a constant stream of free ebooks and ebooks at bargain prices. And SFSignal announces almost daily free SF/F/H ebooks to try. There are so many free ebooks deals out there, and not just crappy books, but books worth reading, that it would be possible to never buy another book again.

I already own more books than I have time to read even if I lived to be 100. I’m a book addict.

I know why writers and publishers give away ebooks. They want exposure. New writers wants readers. I’ve read blogs by new writers who say when they price their books free hundreds and even thousands of them get downloaded. Of course, they also say, when the put a price back on the books, the downloads slow to a trickle, but that trickle is more sales than they got before they offered their books for free for a few days. Even established writers offer some of their books for free hoping to get attention for their other books.

I’ve yet to read any of the free ebooks I’ve collected. And I’ve only read a handful of the bargain priced ebooks. And I wonder if I’m typical? Does free ebooks just inspire a kind of hoarding and not reading?

If I was practical I’d only buy a book just before I was ready to start reading it. Now this is like believing I’m only going to eat food that’s good for me, but it is quite logical. Even if books were $50 each I would save a tremendous amount of money if I only bought books I actually read.

What if all readers actually followed through on this practically plan of book buying? What percentage of book sales go to unread books? What percentage free books get read?

Maybe I just like shopping for books. Maybe I just like reading book reviews. Maybe I could find a way to collect books I want to read but probably won’t, without buying them. I’m in a book club and I made up a list of potential books to read and found that very enjoyable. I even like rereading the list. I could build a virtual library of the books I think I want to read. Growing up I wanted to own a bookstore. Maybe that’s why I hoard books. I also worked in a library for years – that could also explain my instinct to collect books.

If I bought books only just before I read them would I feel the need to collect them afterwards? If I become just a reader can I divorce myself from my collecting instincts?

Also, if I bought books just before I read them how would that change my life? I’d have more money and time, but what about the subtle changes? I spend a lot of time shopping for books, reading reviews, looking for bargains. There’s a table at my work we’ve designated as the free book table and people bring in books they want to give away and leave them on the table. I’m all the time looking through those books, often taking many, but seldom reading them. My public library has a used bookstore within the library that I like to visit too. I guess if I spent less time shopping for books I could actually read more. And I’d spend less time pouring over online sales and book catalogs.

All of this sounds very practical and positive, but I don’t know if I can give up my book hoarding addiction.

JWH – 3/10/12

Rush Limbaugh v. Women

The focus of the recent Rush Limbaugh scandal has been his personal attack on Sandra Fluke, which showed Limbaugh to be a crude, repulsive individual. Even more offensive than calling an obviously intelligent, successful and well mannered young woman a slut, a young woman who would make any parent proud to have her as a daughter, was the fact that Limbaugh was making a major assault on women in general. Normally I think women should write about women’s issues, but I’m not seeing the massive feminist counter attack that Limbaugh deserves. Why?

Slut v. Stud

Slut is a word no one should use anymore. It should be categorized with the N-word. It’s extremely prejudiced against women. If a guy has sex with 100 women, he’s a stud, and society admires him, if a woman has sex with a 100 men, she’s a slut and society looks down on her. That’s condemning half the human race to a double standard that destroys their freedom. Limbaugh is a big windbag that often talks about freedom but he seems to know so little about it. The Pill has freed women from hundreds of thousands of years of sexual tyranny.

From the first day The Pill went on the market it should have been free to any woman who wanted it. The males of the human race owe the females that much. Before the advent of birth control it was common for men to literally fuck their wives to death by forcing them to go through constant pregnancies. Because of our double-standards towards sexuality, women have been condemned to millennia of indentured servitude at best, and constant rape at worse.

Once The Pill came on the market woman could pursue ambitions outside of the home, and become equal with men in the workplace. The Pill is literally a pill for liberation and freedom. People who are against women using the pill are actually advocating the enslavement of women. This puts any religion against contraception on the wrong side of morality. But then religion has always lagged far behind the forefront of justice, ethics and morality.

Free and Freedom

Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke because he doesn’t want The Pill to be free. He doesn’t want society to pay for it. That stance is far more offensive and repugnant than any words he used against Sandra Fluke personally. He is saying women do not deserve to be free. He is saying woman are not equal to men. He is saying women should be owned. He is saying sexual expression for women is wrong. Women deserve the same sexual freedoms as men. If a working prostitute had gotten up in front of congress and said she needed free access to the pill there should have not have been one moral judgment made against of her.

This issue of free birth control provided by healthcare should never have come up. The Pill should have always been free. Mr. Limbaugh, I think you owe all women a huge apology, and the only sincere one that I can think of is if you wrote an insanely large check to Planned Parenthood.

America is the land of the free, and Rush Limbaugh just became its biggest anti-freedom fighter.

Defies Logic

What’s amusing is how illogical Limbaugh’s selfish stance is. He wants to pay less taxes. He doesn’t want to pay to help other people. Giving The Pill away will reduce health costs. It will mean less unwanted children, especially ones that will use the entitlement programs he so dearly hates. It will mean less abortions.

If women were given proper sex education and birth control so they only had babies when they were ready, healthcare costs would go way down, and so would infant mortality statistics. You want to stop abortions – provide free birth control and sex education. All of this would lower your taxes Mr. Limbaugh, and that’s what you really want, isn’t it?

JWH – 3/7/12