Mars | CURIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

When Milton was writing Paradise Lost, he was, biographers tell us, quite unable to see. His light was “spent,” to use his own description from his nineteenth sonnet: he simply could not see. He could not perceive faces, or shapes or colors. With remarkable skill and precision, he dictated his magnum opus to two scribes. He could no longer see the vivid images of this world. He had receded into permanent physical nightfall, the black quietude of total darkness. He no longer knew colors firsthand.

Colors are remarkable things. To my mind, colors are perhaps the most amazing things in the universe, or at least the universe as I know it. Now I admit, that the strange fish that pop up from time to time are also remarkable.

Rare fish caught at Pamban. Photo: L. Balachandar. The Hindu (5.4.2014)

They are, often, surpassing strange, marvelous in their own right, if a quite terrifying right. I once had an alligator gar pass right by me when I was swimming in a lake. Startling.

But to return to colors. Colors can be explosive.

Fish themselves, even the not very weird ones, can be the bearers of those colors, and spectacularly at that. And so can human beings, particularly their eyes.

Gazing into someone’s eye (not, as one does on Valentine’s day, into someone’s eyes but rather into someone’s eye, quite literally) reveals not only the receptacle, as it were, of the colors, but also a world of colors per se, all dancing on a quivering, gentle and vulnerable stage.

The eye and the colors it both houses and receives cry out something even more special than a perfect sunset, which offers a moment of beauty, but one that is quite far away. They eye offers its luster close at hand. Yet, like the sunset, that beauty is untouchable, for one cannot and should not, of course, touch another person’s eye. Its beauty, its colors, are preserved in a special space, close at hand but strangely afar as well. And of that beauty, the most amazing part is the variegated color, the shifting moments of dark, light, blues, browns, and greens.

Color then is suggestive, to my mind, of a kind of unnecessary bonus for humankind. One could make the same argument for honey or chocolate or even coffee or hummus, but hummus, tasty as it is, is a human construct, made of natural ingredients, but nonetheless confected by human hands. Honey, purer, of course, and sweet as it is still requires some kind of harvesting. Coffee requires picking and roasting. Chocolate, say such as is in a dark chocolate dove bar, must undergo some true preparation by chocolatiers, of whom I know but one. Her name is Susan, and she was, she told me once, when she lived in California quite a good chocolatier. Now she is a student of literature.

But these treats, tasty as they are to ponder, are all delights that we human beings have harvested for ourselves. Colors are not. They are true gifts that, save to the blind or the colorblind, are here for all to see and admire, and to ponder. Yes, to ponder, for they need not have ever been there. We could easily have been born into a world without color (or honey, for that matter). And the world would have been, of course, far less sweet for the loss of both.

But how did colors come into being? Science answers that question in the form of a dissertation about refracted light. But the question of why there is color at all, why we do not live in a colorless world or colorless universe—indeed, we can even at the great distance of 48,678,219 miles (as compared to the Moon, which is a mere 238,900) see that Mars is the “red” planet—that question seems to me to be within the purview of philosophers or theologians. I can only say, from my limited vantage point, that colors make me think of a Creator of color, a great Artist of the universe,[1] who, not satisfied with a merely monochrome world decided to add color—to create color, and then to splash it upon all things. While I know we owe much to Isaac Newton’s analysis of how color comes into being through the refraction of light, still there is something beyond mere refraction that I am alluding to. I am alluding to why in the world (or rather, out of this world) refraction exists. Why, even though it does, the human eye can detect it at all. After all, so I am told, dogs can see only a touch of color. But we can more, many more, and to me the capacity to see that beauty suggest both that there was an Artist who rendered it and that that Artist wanted an audience to enjoy it. But I wax theological, so I leave that aside.

Rather, I would like to return to the issue of color as it manifests itself in today’s world, at least in my part of it, which is the United States. It seems to me that people think about color here either not enough or far too much. Either they fail to ponder what I just fleshed out above, not linking color with beauty or the Artist who created all beauty, or they ponder too well that things are different colors or, rather, that people are. Elaine Jakes, after whose Curious Autobiography this website is named, taught me a very long time ago not to see color, not to notice. She wasn’t politically correct, and indeed despised political correctness. But she was—or rather she chose to be—racially unbiased. (If you don’t believe me, read the opening pages of chapter 4 of that book.)

Bias, you see, is a choice—it is always a choice. It is never a matter of, “poor fellow, he grew up in a bigoted family. Perhaps he is simply suffering from a case of ‘affluenza.’” Yet at some point one decides to appropriate for one’s own or reject the values or biases or even favorite athletic teams one inherits from one’s parents.

Some of those values are eternal, for example, “Love thy neighbor as thyself”—or at least they should be. Others, not so much: put your napkin on your lap—okay, maybe that one ought to make the cut, too. But what about “text your parents daily when you’re off at college.” That might be appropriate for some folks, but not for others. That final example of a family rule, while far from a bias, is nonetheless one that can be changed and adapted to fit the circumstance. In other words, it’s a choice.

And so are crappy “values” or “biases” that you know are crappy and have no demonstrable foundation and should be done away with: they are choices. Looking askance at someone because of skin color or background or gender or social caste is precisely this. Which brings me to the idea that some see colors too well. Those who do, notice skin tone, and judge based on it. They themselves can be of any race. They themselves judge other groups inferior to their own. They themselves see that kind of color too well, and probably fail to see the color of the eye, or even of a spectacular sunset.

All colors matter, all are beautiful. At the same time, color does not matter, and it does not precisely because all human beings matter, and all are beautiful. I hope that you and I both see and not see colors this week, that we enjoy the colors that matter, not those that do not. Choose wisely, choose colorfully. May you choose to see the beauty of color.

[1]So Ovid once wrote, “God and better nature redeemed this strife, for He separated the land from Heaven and the waters from the lands… .” (hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit / nam caelo terras et terris abscidit undas)—Met. 1.21f.

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Anyone who has ever been outside in a severe and bitingly cold wind knows what wind can do to your face, if you have not wrapped yourself with a scarf. It can dry out your face, crack your lips, and shiver every timber of your being. It can, in short, almost take your face away, if you don’t protect it.

Even on Mars, apparently, there have been such winds, no doubt colder and more severe than even the bitterest of such winds on this planet. Solar winds (gusts supercharged by particles from the sun) have recently been determined—thanks to the interestingly acronymed “MAVEN” observatory spacecraft—to have taken away Mars’ atmosphere.[1] These same wind-driven particles would sweep ruinously over our own planet, too—and do touch down here, but only at the poles, creating our spectacular northern lights

—if it were not for our robust atmosphere, an atmosphere held in place simply because of our planet’s fiercely abiding magnetic field. In other words, when Mars lost its sense of north and south, its compass as it were, Mars surrendered its atmosphere to the winds. This did not happen all at once, scientists believe; it happened slowly over time until finally the winds dominated the atmosphere that had once protected and have entirely reshaped the landscape.

Even the dust that covers its surface is foreign to Mars. What appears to us to be, and has long been called the red planet, was once not red at all. It was once a fecund place, or at least had the possibility to be so. It might have looked a bit like earth. It might have been able to sustain life, even if not that of Matt Damon, at least some kind of life. Yet when Mars lost its atmosphere, it lost its capacity to do so. Oceans, rivers, everything that could have produced agriculture, and culture, were gone.

My great-grandfather died before I was born, as most do. (His story is recorded in the Curious Autobiography [pp. 169–73], where he is correctly portrayed as a chef for Welsh miners.) He brought his cultural identity—French, in his case—as a contribution to his existing family culture, of which at that time was predominantly Welsh. I was thinking about him (and Mars) recently because, even as I write this, I am in France attending a colloquium. (The colloquium is on philology, not the most poultry area of study these days. If you wish to know more about this “p” word, I commend the fine book along with the series based on it: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith. )

Aside from the obvious, such as being in France, sipping coffee in a delightful cafe or the occasional glass of Bordeaux, and superb French dining (from one dish of which I affix a recipe below, one that I understand from family lore my great-grandfather prepared, though what you will see below is not his recipe precisely, but my own recollection of what I ate just a few days ago), one interesting facet of such a conference is the opportunity for rich dinner-time or happy-hour conversations. Such conversations usually are held in numerous “scholarly” languages: German, English, Italian and, of course, French. (It was lamented by at least one Italian philologist that the Spaniards are so sorely underrepresented.) Nonetheless, in case you’re wondering, Mars was not discussed, so I will not yet tell you why I opened with that semi-scientific ramble. Instead, as is often the case with my European friends and acquaintances, topics that come up rather naturally are food (a tasteful subject, of course), life’s difficulties (particularly fiscal problems and taxes), politics, and sex (though chiefly only insofar as sex relates to political issues such as population growth or how impractical having children is, which of course it is for philologists). The first two of these—that is the incongruous coupling of food with worries about the economy—normally dominate the discussion, though I prefer the last of these topics, because I, in fact, like children. Yet at this philological “colloque” (to use the French appropriately), a rich discussion arose about cultural identity. So again, as I said above, I thought of my French great-grandfather, James Jacques, who bore in his person the family name that would later be spelled Jakes and would itself incongruously represent a culturally Welsh family.

To my new European friends, the problem was clear: the bitter chill of a wind of a new cultural identity has begun sweeping across the continent. This chilling wind was not, in the eyes of the person who was speaking to me with a low voice—low not out of shame or embarassment but out of, it seemed to me, grief or desperation—welcome. When I say “in the eyes of” this well-educated, middle-aged Italian professoressa (as such female educators are there known), I speak not of her opinion, but of the clear sense of sadness that I could see in those eyes.

“Italy’s borders are porous,” she said, “there is sea everywhere . . . Tanti musselmani vengono. So many Muslims keep coming in. Have you been to Genova?” She asked me. I nodded. “The culture there—the Italian culture is overrun. It is the same in France. Have you been to Marseilles lately?” she added. “We in Italy are losing our cultural identity. We are losing our food, our country, our heritage.”

Impolitically I added, “Some of that you sadly gave up when churches became mere museum pieces and when you gave your lire up for the Euro.”

“It’s terrible,” another added despondently, “the loss of the lire, I mean.”

As the conversation ran its course, it became clearer and clearer to me that the professoressa (or any of the Italians present) was not “islamophobic.” She was not a hater of anything new or different. They all had high regard for religion and the shared moral code—what C.S. Lewis calls the “Tao,”[2]—that religions can offer. She was merely stating, as gently as she could, the difference from the old days and the way cultural acceptance is nowadays mandated in a politically correct world. She was affirming but lamenting the obvious: now, instead of the immigrant trying, but ultimately failing, to hold on perfectly to his heritage, he expects society (and society tells him to expect) to accommodate his every wish. He expects full inclusiveness, so that if an author were to be foolish enough to write “he” instead of “he or she” or “he/she” or, now I have also read, “zhe” (for which many a German is secretly rejoicing), or viley to use “they” as if it were the singular pronoun, they would no doubt be pilloried, mocked, or at least corrected.

Yet as I am not politically correct (though I do try to be polite), I not only did not rebuke her, but agreed that the immigrant needs to adapt to the culture, not the other way round. “But we are losing our culture, and I am not sure what can be done about it,” she said raising her voice the way one might at the end of a sentence with a question.

At this point I want to be clear: this fine person was not saying that Italy and Europe should not have a heart for the poor and disenfranchised. Rather, she was saying that in her view solar-charged winds are blowing, winds capable of wiping out a culture. And she is right. “When I was in Paris,” one of the other interlocutors said, “I heard the subway announcements in French and Arabic.”

And then I thought again about Mars, and my great-grandfather. Mars was overrun by winds that destroyed its atmosphere. That happened because it lost its magnetic field. It lost its sense of north and south.

“Europe has lost its moral compass,” another added. “I remember when my grandparents would eat their dinner—even in a restaurant like this one, they would cross themselves and say a blessing—every time! Now, well, nothing, just ‘Buon appetito!’”

And then I thought, yet again, of Mars. It lost its atmosphere because it lost, as it were, its compass. That compass, for Europe had long been not some new, insufficient and intolerant form of impolitical political correctness. It has been, rather, for lack of a better word, the Church. “Now no one crosses himself,” she added, a few seconds later, despondently.

So I close this blog not with an answer, not the answer Elaine Jakes at the close of her autobiography espouses I once gave to a dour presbyter in Wales (Curious Autobiography, p. 253) but with a question. Has America lost its moral compass? Are we more concerned about accommodating others, so worried about ensuring the privileges of a few that we actually harm and debunk the rights of all? My French great-grandfather cooked in the French manner, but what he offered was a contribution to a preexisting society; he did not make demands of it. Even the predominant ethnic group learned the language of Pennsylvania, English. I have learned to speak Texan (as best I can). I would not expect Texans to adopt my predominently Phillyesque accent. Or cook me cheessteak at a barbecue. But I ask again, are we so worried about the privileges of a few that we could actually harm the rights of everyone? If we bow to the demands of a politically correct world, could we soon wind up in the position that Europe now finds itself?

You ponder that one. I will return to my delightful French food. I recommend the potato dish, below. I just had it in Claremont-Ferrond, a city so nice they named it twice.

Tartiflette [1] CNN news (11/5/2015).