lightning strike

He took the girl and turned her into glass

A lightning strike upon the sand, a kiss

And walking in the rain, hand in hand

Down stony steps, where giants had their footsteps once.

Fragile here, so delicate and broken easily in places

Other places, solid as the earth and glistening

I have been glass before.

Before, I was a mass of protons churning

And I have been a star, carbons fusing, burning

And I have been a hundred elements decaying one by one until this

Flesh and bone, spirit, love and agony and joy

Then earth to earth, dust to sand

And then, a lightning strike. 

Return to Cameroon

I'm here again. This place has haunted me more than any other country in Africa. I dream about it sometimes. It is a strange remembrance, though, because I feel everything I have ever felt here, instead of thinking of the individual images or discrete events. I feel the hot early-morning run on Palm Sunday years ago, on the hard packed red dirt road in Limbe, and I feel the onslaught of rain that followed, chasing us back to the ship. I remember the sound of the churchgoers singing, their voices echoing through the hills and the banana and palm farms. I remember a little girl in a pink dress, holding a palm frond over her head to protect her from the rain and the splashes she made in the widening puddles. I remember walking on the chocolate colored beach with Daniel, and working on my laptop while he slept on a bench, his cap set across his face, and the lizards that stopped by to say hello to us, running along the hot cement walls.
Last year, I remember the fish market, and eating fresh Barracuda with my fingers the way that Ombala showed me. I remember Ombala telling me that he would have a daughter and give her to me to raise. I still wonder whether he was serious or not. Will I have a beautiful little girl to raise someday? I remember driving the dangerous road between Douala and Yaounde where the timber companies extract more old-growth timber than my mind can fathom and where the timber trucks kill busloads of people all the time (as they did last week). I remember that Clement told me about his girlfriend, that he was saving money to marry her - saving enough so he could buy a cow. It would take him five more years.
Through all of these experiences, there was always Hans, waiting for me, waiting to hear my stories, waiting for me to come back safely and kiss him. In Cameroon, before, I always felt Hans.
And this year, I am in Cameroon, the country that has stolen my heart, and I find that the heart I share with it is a broken one. I am more broken than I have ever been. I am more alone than I have ever been.
Today, I learned that some of the locals bury their loved ones in front of their homes; when the time is right, they exhume the skulls and bring them indoors. They have conversations with the skull, ask it for advice. I feel that I understand this now. The memory of someone beloved is better than nothing at all.

The God of Improbability

To own the truth: I was a little afraid of reading Dawkin's "The God Delusion". I still hold some glimmer of faith in my agnostic soul. I secretly feared that reading a good, well-reasoned argument against the existence of god would snuff the frail thing out. But the bizarre thing is: his arguments are weak. Not all of them, of course. He has some very valid things to say about the false priveledge that religion holds in influencing politics, the veneration we give religious scholars, and the hateful role religion plays in history. I believe that organized religion is, for the most part, an evil institution. But his refutation against god is by arguing in the improbability of the existence of god. This argument absolutely cannot convince me. 

As a physicist who is constantly in awe of the things I can't possibly understand, who is confronted with half a dozen equally probable but mutually exclusive "grand unified theories" of the universe and hardly any experimental means to judge between them, I cannot, in the depths of my soul, believe this argument. Dawkins ridicules the concept of miracles because they require that some deity change the immutable nature of stuff...such as making chemicals ignite at temperatures below their ignition temperatures, or modifying other "proven" physical properties. But he is discussing empirical physical properties, not fundamental ones. We have empirical evidence that water has a particular set freezing and boiling points. But, when you get to the world of the very very small: quantum mechanics small or even smaller (say, anything less than the Planck length - which we cannot measure, no matter how clever we are), or even very large, the strange thing is: things are mutable by nature. And they may choose improbable paths.  Electrons can choose where they want to go, or they may simply tunnel through a solid object. Time and space can expand or contract. There may not be 3 spatial dimensions as we have always thought, but, if one form of string theory is right: 26. What happens in those other dimensions? 

Interestingly, a probability calculation requires a set of assumptions and conditions. It isn't wrong to try to put this together as Dawkins does, but then he must also concede that the quality of the output is only as good as the quality of his input. Is it reasonable to accurately create the equation for the probability of god's existence when we lack enough evidence to calculate the probability of one theory of the universe's behavior over another? if god does exist, then he or she is certainly more complex and grand than any of these physical phenomena. 

Dawkins goes on to discuss all of the scientists and educated people in the world who are Atheist, as though peer pressure would be enough to convince me that the improbability argument was on sound footing. What strikes me is this: if the every wise person in the world deemed the existence of god to be completely and utterly improbable, well, then I would believe in her/him even more because the god of improbability makes sense with everything I have learned about love.

Love itself is completely irrational. Mutual affection or tribal affiliation serves our own selfish purposes. But genuine love, altrusitic godlike love, short-circuits the most powerful instinct we have for survival.  It is the irrational god who can actually love me. It is the improbable god who forms patterns and creates universes.

Of course, the damning religiousity that rules the world bears no resemblance to the god that I pray to.  

Resources

Today, I began to take stock of the list of resources I have, in case I ever need to draw from them.
I think of these things because it's easier to consider a course of action than to realize that I'm completely helpless in the one area of my life that matters the most to me. It's awful to know that there are certain things I can't influence, regardless of how much I ache, and how desperately I want to act. So, instead, I imagine scenarios where I have some ability to affect the outcome.
I consider a case where the man I love needs rescuing in some foreign place. A gender-reversal, I realize. But it gives me comfort to do something, even if I'm confined to the space between my ears.
What do I know? What do I have? What action would I take? Somehow, if I do things right, I convince myself that I can create an alternate reality and have what I long for.
So, listing my skills, I realize how pathetic they are: 1) Analytical capability, 2) Ability to stay calm in a crisis, 3) Decent understanding of how processes and people work, 4) Ability to talk my way out of things. I suppose that's the sum total of my special skills. Not Laura Croft, by any means. Not remotely in the realm of superhero. When I add them up like this, they look pitiful. How did I get to this age and not learn how to street-fight? In the immortal words of Napoleon Dynamite: "You know, there's like a boat-load of gangs at this school. This one gang keeps wanting me to join because I'm pretty good with a bow staff."
Maybe, after all, it's a good thing that my future happiness doesn't rely on my skills with a bow staff. Not in my list of resources.

Images of the Feminine

Something strikes me about Michelangelo’s Madonna. She is different. So different from every other Madonna that came before. She is muscular. Active. She has bare, sculpted arms and an intense expression. There are nude figures in the background. Seeing this made me realize something about every Madonna that has ever been painted. They are docile. They are enigmatic, unreachable. There is not one woman I could ever relate to or be friends with. They are some perversion of the feminine – in the same way that you pervert a wild animal to become a pet. There are so few real women in art. How can I reach out to any collaborative feminine past if I can’t understand them?

 But they are all painted by men.

Could I trust any man I have ever known to reconstruct an accurate image of me? 

Experiencing beauty

Last weekend I took the train to Florence. I learned long ago that, to combat depression, I have to behave the same way I would if I was able to feel happy. I try to tempt my former self into being, the person who is thrilled at new experiences and who finds life worth living. I try to remember the way I felt when I wasn't dulled by this numbing darkness. I remembered my first trip to Rome, how it made me burst with joy! I rode on the top of one of those double-decker touring buses. In December. In the rain. I was drenched and the wind broke my cheap umbrella. It was fantastic. The ennui that depression causes is a cheat and a liar. 
For some reason I can't explain, this made me think about what it is like to live for hundreds of years - a mythological person like a vampire or Tolkien's Elves. What depression and boredom eternal existence must bring! I think that the possibility of experiencing beauty is inversely proportional to time. It is the fleeting nature of beauty that moves us. Michelangelo was 29 when he sculpted his David. This makes his masterpiece with its technical brilliance and humanistic insight all the more remarkable. The need for learning and leaving a mark is so intense so early because we have no guarantees for tomorrow. If we could last indefinitely, would we enjoy beauty so much?