Another fall photo and the quiz answer

Here’s another view of the tree in the previous post. This looks across the Androscoggin River from the Swinging Bridge park in Topsham. In the background is what the locals call “the black bridge.” It’s an almost-never-used railroad bridge with a single-lane bed for auto traffic under the railroad tracks. Many Topshamites use the auto portion as a shortcut from and to Highway 1/Mill Street in Brunswick.

 

Here’s the quiz from the previous post:

And finally the quiz. (The image above has only a tenuous connection with autumn.) What’s the most accurate title for this image in its original form?

A. Shingles

B. Windows

C. Handles

D. Tiles

E. Weapons

F. Ice crystals

 

 

Here’s the original photo. The best answer is “Handles,” but “Shingles” is certainly a reasonable alternative. The cedar shingles are a traditional choice for house siding in these parts. Often they are left unstained and allowed to weather to a grayish-black color over the years. These are on a shed on the grounds of the Topsham library.

 

Autumn is Coming at You

Fall is on the move in midcoast Maine.

A tree farther along than her sisters overlooks the Androscoggin River near the Topsham end of the swinging bridge. This stretch of shoreline is fondly known locally as the Swett Street Riviera.

A couple of different views of the same tree.

And finally the quiz. (The image above has only a tenuous connection with autumn.) What’s the most accurate title for this image in its original form?

A. Shingles

B. Windows

C. Handles

D. Tiles

E. Weapons

F. Ice crystals

Church of Christ Without Christ

The title of this post is taken from the novel Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor. Her protagonist, in rejecting Christian theology, proposes a “Church Without Christ.” His general concept is stolen by a charlatan preacher who starts a rival “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.”

Here is an interesting progression of artistic arguments for the unnecessariness of Christian dogma and institutions in the pursuit of right living. In each case the writer assumes the reader is a member of a culture where the tenets and history of Christianity are not only widely known, but also widely accepted.

The first argument is from the beginning of the 19th century. I found a copy of John Ciardi’s 1959 college poetry text book at a library book sale.

The book contains Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” one of my favorites. At the end of the poem the mariner admonishes his listener by stating the moral of his tale:

“”Farewell, farewell! but this I tell

To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

“He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.”

Then we go to the end of the 19th century, when – at least among educated people in western Europe and the United States – Christianity had been roiled by the ideas of Darwin, the proliferation of interesting sects, and many debates and schisms about liturgy and polity within mainstream Protestant churches.

I read Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh for the first time recently. It is on The Manchester Guardian’s list of 1,000 novels everyone should read. The Guardian called it “The most savagely intelligent critique of Victorian ideology to be found in Victorian fiction.”

The narrator (and we can assume he pretty much speaks for Mr. Butler) doesn’t think much of traditional religion, especially as practiced by the Church of England.

Here he speaks in the omniscient third person voice about the conclusions his young protagonist has reached about the Christian church:

“He knew he had been humbugged, and he knew also that the greater part of the ills which had afflicted him were due, indirectly, in chief measure to the influence of Christian teaching; still, if the mischief had ended with himself, he should have thought little about it, but there was his sister, and his brother Joey, and the hundreds and thousand of young people throughout England whose lives were being blighted through the lies told them by people whose business it was to know better.”

The people telling the lies are the clergy. So how does one avoid this blight? Here is the narrator commenting on the protagonist’s realization that he must break away from the influence of his clergyman father and his pious mother, who is blind to her husband’s egregious hypocrisy:

“I mean that he was trying to give up father and mother for Christ’s sake. He would have said he was giving them up because he thought they hindered him in the pursuit of his truest and most lasting happiness. Granted, but what is this if it is not Christ? What is Christ if He is not this? He who takes the highest and most self-respecting view of his own welfare which it is in his power to conceive, and adheres to it in spite of conventionality, is a Christian whether he knows it and calls himself one, or whether he does not. A rose is not the less a rose because it does not know its own name.”

So we have been from “The best way to be a Christian is to be good to all God’s creatures” to “The best way to be a Christian is seek your own best welfare.”

Now let’s go to the end of the twentieth century. Between Samuel Butler’s time and our own, we’ve had horrific wars and genocides, often carried out with religious justification (or at least with the complicity of the religious establishment); we’ve had flower power; we’ve had theologians steeped in Christian scholarship challenging or rejecting the most basic tenets of their religion (while still considering themselves Christian theologians). It’s not surprising that a thoughtful artist in this era would find her profoundest religious experience in the beauty of inarticulate natural phenomena. In her most famous poem “Wild Geese,” Mary Oliver rejects Christian practice and even traditional notions of conscious moral behavior. Here are the opening lines:

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves . . . .”

What’s a bureaucrat to do?

The August 2009 issue of Down East magazine contains an article about watching whales off the Maine coast. (Interestingly, a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine also had a big article about whale/human interactions).

Some of the Down East material was written by Bret Gilliam, and all the photographs, which are very good, were taken by him. Mr. Gilliam included an analysis of an interaction between some federal officials and the captain and crew of a whale watching boat.

Engine # 3, Brunswick Fire Department.

A Portland, Maine, landmark with an icon of Maine – the “Open” flag, which waves by every roadside souvenir shop, antique emporium, and diner.

Speaking of diners, here’s A Portland waterfront landmark.

Here’s an analogous example from my own experience of how a “bureaucracy” works to carry out the responsibilities the country has assigned to it, while achieving a reasonable outcome.

No whales here.

There is no more relentlessly rigid bureaucracy than the military. In the Army, there are rules all over the place. Why are there so many rules? To save lives and keep soldiers safe, healthy, and relatively happy. Is it wrong to enforce rules that have such a sound purpose? Sure, if you’re unreasonable about it. But assuming the intelligence, common sense, and reasonableness of most soldiers in leadership positions, it’s not such a bad thing to follow the rules.

A long time ago, I worked in the Awards and Decorations office of a large Army training post. For a year and a half, I handled the paperwork for just about every medal that the fort’s various units proposed to award to their outstanding soldiers. One case had an unusual background. Prior to recommending that a certain soldier be awarded a medal for a commendable action, the officers of the sergeant’s unit had begun court martial proceedings against him – for the very same act! Is that any way to run a railroad – or a bureaucracy? As a matter of fact it is.

The soldier being recommended for a medal was a sergeant in a basic training company. Basic training at that time included instruction and practice in throwing hand grenades. Most of the practice consisted of throwing dummy grenades at a pretend enemy bunker. But the training culminated with each young soldier throwing one real, live hand grenade – under very tightly controlled circumstances. With a sergeant personally coaching

On the waterfront.

and helping, each recruit pulled the pin and threw a live grenade over a thick concrete wall. Assuming everything went well, you could hear, but never see, the explosion on the other side of the high wall. If you weren’t throwing, you were safely waiting your turn in a concrete bunker off to the side. If things went really wrong, and the grenade fell on your side of the wall, there was a smaller wall to cower behind for protection. And the sergeant was right there to make sure that you were cowering as safely as possible. (When I had done the same exercise during my basic training, I lived up to my reputation as a nonathlete, and my grenade toss was puny indeed. The grenade made it over the wall, but the sergeant had me crouch down alongside himself, saying, “Well, we’ll probably feel a little dirt on that one.” Sure enough, a handful of dirt clumps rained down on us from the other side of the big wall.”

Back to the story: The sergeant who was to receive a medal had been helping a recruit who apparently had an even worse throwing arm than mine. The young man’s grenade hit the big wall and fell back into the area he and the sergeant were standing in. The sergeant grabbed the trainee, threw him behind the short safety wall, and then threw himself on top of the young man. The

Cundy’s Harbor lawn ornament.

grenade exploded with no harm done, except perhaps some stained underwear. The elaborate safety system had worked just the way it was supposed to, albeit with the quick action of an alert and agile trainer.

One of the sergeant’s main jobs on the grenade range was not just to prevent injury or death, but to prevent any incident that could lead to possible injury or death. The bureaucracy had worked long and hard to devise and carry out a system that would prevent such incidents. It delegated the authority for managing

Cundy’s Harbor: Low Tide revery.

the system to front line trainers like our sergeant. On the face of it, the sergeant had failed in his responsibility because such an incident had occurred. Of course the bureaucracy must investigate such a failure! Lives were at risk. If the sergeant had indeed been negligent in some way, he deserved a court martial. If he was not negligent, then maybe something could be learned from the incident to make the system better and prevent future mishaps. The bureaucrats involved (the sergeant’s military superiors) would, in fact, have been grossly negligent had they not investigated thoroughly. Admittedly, they used the negative framework of preliminary court martial proceedings to do that investigation. But that was the tool they had.

And the system worked. The “bureaucracy” did the job we Americans had hired it to do. After determining that the sergeant had not been negligent, they turned around and proposed that he be recognized as something of a hero. Not only was a common-sense result achieved, but – by doing the “necessary paperwork” – the bureaucracy guaranteed that the sergeant’s award of honor would be untainted by any suspicion of cover-up or organizational incompetence.

A thought for the day from Scattergood

Here’s a thought for the day from Clarence Buddington Kelland via one of the heroes he created, Scattergood Baines. The thought is nestled among some fun images.

“The reason folks seldom find things is that they say, ‘Nothin’ there’ before they’ve half

looked . . . .”

In case you’re curious, the whirly kaleidoscope was made from the photo below.

Some pictures to get back into the swing

Here are some photos from the last couple of days. Once again, let me recommend Windows Live Writer as a great way to prepare your blog posts.

A foggy morning along the Androscoggin:

 

Spider web on the swinging bridge:

 

 

The statue of film director John Ford at the intersection of Commercial Street and Center Street in Portland, Maine. Ford was a member of the Class of 1914 of Portland High School. 

 

Lobster is relatively inexpensive now, not only here on the Portland Fish Pier, but everywhere in Maine.

 

A scene on the Fish Pier. The town of South Portland is across the water.

More on photos in Live Writer

We are preparing to leave for Minnesota and Wisconsin tomorrow. Just outside of Luck, Wisconsin, we will continue an over three-decade-long tradition of attending the West Denmark Family Camp.

My biggest task today is taking  Rusty to his “seaside resort,” the dog kennel where he will board. It is located off  Pinkham Point Road on Great Island in Harpswell. The kennel is a family operation, and the dogs stay in an addition built on to the family home. It happened that the address was in one of the blocks we were responsible for in our recent job of canvassing for the upcoming 2010 U.S. Census. After we had confirmed the address on our handheld computer in the database, we took the opportunity to make Rusty’s reservation for the next ten days or so. As soon as we said that it was Rusty we were making the reservation for, the owner remembered him with fondness. ( He had not remembered us at all.) He claimed to remember Rusty with pleasure, so maybe his (Rusty’s) behavior as a tenant has improved since that black day in 2007when he was expelled from Doggie Daycare.

With Rusty out of the way, we should have no problem embarking nice and early (0615 hours, if we can) for the Concord bus terminal in Portland, where we will take the very comfortable two-hour bus ride directly to Logan Airport. From there we have a non-stop three-hour flight to Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Arriving there at the satellite Humphrey Terminal, we hop on the Minneapolis light-rail line for a brief ride to the large VA hospital at the southeastern tip of Minneapolis, near Fort Snelling on the bluff overlooking the mouth of the Minnesota River where it flows into the Mississippi.

We catch our breaths hanging around the spacious VA Hospital lobby for a little while until my cousin and his wife finish work for the day, and then we will ride with them up to Luck, where they lives on the farm our great-grandparents and their children immigrated to in the 1880s.

This post is being “prepared” using Windows Live Writer. As the title indicates, I wanted to practice inserting photos. So far, so great! This is wonderful and simple, assuming things look as they do now after I upload to the actual blog. The photos were taken yesterday at the huge used book sale put on every year by the Friends of Curtis Memorial Library to raise money for the library. Notice the color difference? My camera lets me manipulate the “white balance,” which is actually determines the colors of the colors in a photo. In the first picture, I chose the setting for “incandescent” light, which is what I figured was being used in this school gymnasium. As I took more photos, and played around with other camera settings, I somehow inadvertently changed the white balance setting to “cloudy,” which is what many experienced photographers use for all their outdoor shots, even under sunny shooting conditions. Obviously it wasn’t a good choice for a big indoor space under old-fashioned lighting, but it does prove that  choosing the correct white balance setting can make a tremendous difference in the quality of one’s digital photos. By the way, neither of these shots used flash.