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Jul. 20th, 2003 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynHome, awake, alone, relaxed, and pondering lunch; that's me just now. I got home last night and got to sleep somewhere after 2:30 AM. A telemarketer's call awakened me around 11- at least I assume it was such, since I picked up the phone and got a recording saying 'please hold for an important message'. Here's a clue, folks: if your message is important, you can spare a human being to make the call. My father has gone off to Appalachia to work with his parish's poverty relief trip for a week, and my mother and sister are off to visit my grandmother on Long Island - yes, the one of yesterday's many journeys and travails. I slept well, I have little tension today, and after the time I spent reading and praying and thinking in a local park, all seems to have come around and become well. Well, except for my stomach, as my guts are currently unhappy with something they cannot quite place, save that they want to be rid of it- but otherwise all is well.
Yesterday's driving did have its good points. I prefer the train for the most part, because then I do not have to drive. I can knit, read, sleep, eat, or do what I like. Yes, I am not in control - but being in control means being responsible, and that requires dedication to your task. Sometimes I would rather let go of that so as to be free while I travel. Yesterday's driving, however, gave me a few shining moments, all circled around the same theme: engineers... see, I took the Pulaski Skyway from interstate 78 to Hoboken, rather than the Jersey Turnpike. I didn't much want to deal with tollbooths, and the Skyway speed limit, while lower than the Turnpike's, is still entirely reasonable. The Skyway is also a U.S. highway, and I have always trusted those more than interstates for some reason. So, as I have done more than a few times of late, I drove along the Skyway through northern industrial NJ.
They call it the Skyway for a reason. I'm not sure I've ever seen a highway lifted that far off the ground. You can see the Skyway's form for miles from other roads or from buildings - it runs through all kinds of territory before depositing the people aboard onto the ground again. It's high, it's two lanes in either direction, it's carefully fenced with concrete and steel. It features several bridge spans with all kinds of structural struts and arches, and yesterday it suddenly struck me that it was possibly the most magnificent thing I had yet seen that day. Somewhere in the past there was an engineer, or two or five or ten or a hundred, who had designed the thing. Somewhere in years gone by men (and possibly women - I do not know how old the Skyway is, it may date from 2oth century times when women were not called on much for engineering skills) sat around tables and worked out diagrams, worked out numbers, and said 'these will do'. There were equations, forces, constants, material stresses, strengths, weaknesses, surveys, soundings of the ground; a hundred thousand things checked and rechecked and designed over and over again before being put into place. Somewhere in the past there lay people who had brought into being this long, vast, high thing that no one had ever seen in that place before - that none of the land's original inhabitants might ever have imagined. The road they built ran through the air so high that only birds and wildfire might ever have reached so high, once. It stood up to time and rain and forces, and though it might have shaken now and again it did not break or fall. There were people who understood numbers and people who understood metal and people who understood stone and people who understood hard, hard work, and together they built the thing and made it possible to ride through the air without so much as ever leaving the ground.
A similar thought occurred to me when I crossed into Queens - for some reason I did not think on the engineers when I entered the Holland Tunnel. That may have been due to the incredible traffic back-up. When it came to the Manhattan Bridge, though, that was something else again... that's a suspension bridge, built with multiple roadways and with space allocated for subway trains. Imagine the minds it must have taken to put together the numbers needed to form those cables! People all over the world had seen those numbers, had made things of them - suspension bridges in the Inca lands being some of the earliest. Here, now, there was a bridge and an old one at that, one that was sunk on piles in the bed of a river and held in the air by great cables bolted at one end and anchored at the other. The arcs of the main cables and the straight drops of the lesser ones were any teacher's answer to 'why do I need math in the real world, anyway?'. It stood and it held, and though it was under repair in places it still stood and held. That bridge, the Triborough Bridge on which my own great-grandfather labored, the George Washington Bridge, Throgs Neck and Whitestone - any of them, all of them, were magnificent beyond belief, numbers and metals and hard human labor all spun out of human minds in a world that made sense once you delved down far enough, once you found the equations and understood the forces.
And for all of that, for all of its humanism, I consider such revelations to be religious experiences. I believe that there is a God; I was raised a Catholic and at times I still am so. I could not call myself that in full honesty, since it implies a certain measure of belief and loyalty to the very human structure of the Church, but that is where my roots lie. What may have made a difference is that I was reared in a parish named after St. Francis of Assissi, the patron of animals. Francis was said to have preached a sermon to the birds and to have concluded a treaty with a wolf, and spoke early and often of the wonder of God made manifest in the natural world. The bridges and highways that I crossed yesterday are no less part of that than the sparrows to which Francis spoke. It all spins out of the same event, all comes out of the same beginning; when the tiny point of nothing at all exploded at the beginning of all things, it was the God I believe in who saw to it that there were laws, equations, rules, bones of the Universe that was being laid down all about. When I first read about quantum theory and observer effect I realised that the God I believed in did not muck about with people's minds or destinies. No, there was free will enough; the God I believed in might have known all things, but being more than time and space, knew all things by perceiving them all at once, as a human being might perceive a beach ball. And in all of that there were rules that had been laid down, so that gas might spin into stars and dust clouds into dust clumps into rocks into planets, so that bubbling compounds might come together and replicate and turn into life. That life might take shape, one, many; those shapes would be as they might be, depending on all around them, on how they were influenced and touched upon by their world. And they would make sense, if only one knew how far down to dig, where to look. The God of the nuclear explosion at the beginning of all things was the same one who set down the rules of creation such that chitin might be strong, that spiders might be able to walk, that silk spun from a spider's spinnerets might be a fiber stronger than any other its size. The quantum observer watched every particle of the smallest of all and by that watching sent them spinning in the direction that would eventually yield a world, and that world might have laws that made sense for the very big, and the very big might one day understand.
And from that understanding there would one day come the numbers and planning and hard work that would yield pylon, mooring, cable, concrete, bridge...
So despite how long my travels took me, and how unnecessary those delays might have been at the time, in the end I think they were well worth it. Now, if you do not mind, I think I had better go and get myself some lunch.
Yesterday's driving did have its good points. I prefer the train for the most part, because then I do not have to drive. I can knit, read, sleep, eat, or do what I like. Yes, I am not in control - but being in control means being responsible, and that requires dedication to your task. Sometimes I would rather let go of that so as to be free while I travel. Yesterday's driving, however, gave me a few shining moments, all circled around the same theme: engineers... see, I took the Pulaski Skyway from interstate 78 to Hoboken, rather than the Jersey Turnpike. I didn't much want to deal with tollbooths, and the Skyway speed limit, while lower than the Turnpike's, is still entirely reasonable. The Skyway is also a U.S. highway, and I have always trusted those more than interstates for some reason. So, as I have done more than a few times of late, I drove along the Skyway through northern industrial NJ.
They call it the Skyway for a reason. I'm not sure I've ever seen a highway lifted that far off the ground. You can see the Skyway's form for miles from other roads or from buildings - it runs through all kinds of territory before depositing the people aboard onto the ground again. It's high, it's two lanes in either direction, it's carefully fenced with concrete and steel. It features several bridge spans with all kinds of structural struts and arches, and yesterday it suddenly struck me that it was possibly the most magnificent thing I had yet seen that day. Somewhere in the past there was an engineer, or two or five or ten or a hundred, who had designed the thing. Somewhere in years gone by men (and possibly women - I do not know how old the Skyway is, it may date from 2oth century times when women were not called on much for engineering skills) sat around tables and worked out diagrams, worked out numbers, and said 'these will do'. There were equations, forces, constants, material stresses, strengths, weaknesses, surveys, soundings of the ground; a hundred thousand things checked and rechecked and designed over and over again before being put into place. Somewhere in the past there lay people who had brought into being this long, vast, high thing that no one had ever seen in that place before - that none of the land's original inhabitants might ever have imagined. The road they built ran through the air so high that only birds and wildfire might ever have reached so high, once. It stood up to time and rain and forces, and though it might have shaken now and again it did not break or fall. There were people who understood numbers and people who understood metal and people who understood stone and people who understood hard, hard work, and together they built the thing and made it possible to ride through the air without so much as ever leaving the ground.
A similar thought occurred to me when I crossed into Queens - for some reason I did not think on the engineers when I entered the Holland Tunnel. That may have been due to the incredible traffic back-up. When it came to the Manhattan Bridge, though, that was something else again... that's a suspension bridge, built with multiple roadways and with space allocated for subway trains. Imagine the minds it must have taken to put together the numbers needed to form those cables! People all over the world had seen those numbers, had made things of them - suspension bridges in the Inca lands being some of the earliest. Here, now, there was a bridge and an old one at that, one that was sunk on piles in the bed of a river and held in the air by great cables bolted at one end and anchored at the other. The arcs of the main cables and the straight drops of the lesser ones were any teacher's answer to 'why do I need math in the real world, anyway?'. It stood and it held, and though it was under repair in places it still stood and held. That bridge, the Triborough Bridge on which my own great-grandfather labored, the George Washington Bridge, Throgs Neck and Whitestone - any of them, all of them, were magnificent beyond belief, numbers and metals and hard human labor all spun out of human minds in a world that made sense once you delved down far enough, once you found the equations and understood the forces.
And for all of that, for all of its humanism, I consider such revelations to be religious experiences. I believe that there is a God; I was raised a Catholic and at times I still am so. I could not call myself that in full honesty, since it implies a certain measure of belief and loyalty to the very human structure of the Church, but that is where my roots lie. What may have made a difference is that I was reared in a parish named after St. Francis of Assissi, the patron of animals. Francis was said to have preached a sermon to the birds and to have concluded a treaty with a wolf, and spoke early and often of the wonder of God made manifest in the natural world. The bridges and highways that I crossed yesterday are no less part of that than the sparrows to which Francis spoke. It all spins out of the same event, all comes out of the same beginning; when the tiny point of nothing at all exploded at the beginning of all things, it was the God I believe in who saw to it that there were laws, equations, rules, bones of the Universe that was being laid down all about. When I first read about quantum theory and observer effect I realised that the God I believed in did not muck about with people's minds or destinies. No, there was free will enough; the God I believed in might have known all things, but being more than time and space, knew all things by perceiving them all at once, as a human being might perceive a beach ball. And in all of that there were rules that had been laid down, so that gas might spin into stars and dust clouds into dust clumps into rocks into planets, so that bubbling compounds might come together and replicate and turn into life. That life might take shape, one, many; those shapes would be as they might be, depending on all around them, on how they were influenced and touched upon by their world. And they would make sense, if only one knew how far down to dig, where to look. The God of the nuclear explosion at the beginning of all things was the same one who set down the rules of creation such that chitin might be strong, that spiders might be able to walk, that silk spun from a spider's spinnerets might be a fiber stronger than any other its size. The quantum observer watched every particle of the smallest of all and by that watching sent them spinning in the direction that would eventually yield a world, and that world might have laws that made sense for the very big, and the very big might one day understand.
And from that understanding there would one day come the numbers and planning and hard work that would yield pylon, mooring, cable, concrete, bridge...
So despite how long my travels took me, and how unnecessary those delays might have been at the time, in the end I think they were well worth it. Now, if you do not mind, I think I had better go and get myself some lunch.
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Date: 2003-07-20 07:15 pm (UTC)Thanks.
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Date: 2003-07-21 08:55 am (UTC)