I get uncomfortable every time the syllable god pops into a conversation.  I just don’t find it to be a very useful word.  What does it mean?

I spent the early part of my life marinated in the unchallengeable mysteries of Godthefather, the guy with the beard, a capital-G, and surveillance cameras under the wings of birds and in the vapor of the air, the god who keeps track of your shortcomings so you can pay for them with suffering.  Eventually I asked the disobedient question:  Is this the best system that the smartest and most loving being in the universe could come up with?  The repercussions made his g-o-d name turned to poison, and then sawdust on my lips.  But other people use the word all the time.   It’s their god-given right.

A lot of folks have dropped the god-word but have left the punitive institutions in place with a loose use of the word karma.  Good karma and bad.  Karmic circumstances.  Karmic accounting.  You better be good, ‘cause whatever you dish out is coming back.  You better be better or you’ll get sent back as a toad.  It’s like god-the-judge put the system on autopilot and slipped out to smoke.

Some say it’s a patriarchy thing, god-the-gigantic, the guy-in-the-sky.  It’s the entirely wrong image.  Goddess is her real name.  She is kind.  Thank Goddess.  Goddess willing.  Goddess knows.  Ye Goddess!  I think that’s godthefather in a princess suit.

Theologian and philosopher Mary Daly says, yes, do depose the smiting lord, the jealous and angry old man of patriarchy, but just-say-no to the Goddess as well.  She’s not radical enough.  Not accurate enough.  The absurdities of the patriarchal god won’t just go away if you rebrand him.  God needs more than a gender change, says Daly, god is the wrong part of speech.

In Beyond God the Father and Pure Lust, the foundational works of her Elemental Feminist Philosophy, Daly tries to retrieve concepts and sensibilities lost to humans in the cancerous overrun of patriarchy.  One of the tools she uses to do this is language.  She explores with words, inventing and re-inventing them as a way to turn ideas sideways and see what other kinds of light might come through them.  The problem with god, says Daly—the lord, the old one, the wise one, the almighty—they’re all nouns.  A noun is a fixed thing, a glop, static, with boundaries and the potential to be doornail dead.  A god so limited and boring as to be noun is of little use in this glorious world, says Daly.  But ahh, god the verb, now there’s something useful and believable. And to keep you from confusing the verb with the guy in the grandpa suit, she coins a new word:  Be-ing.  Hyphenated.  Capital B, “the constantly unfolding verb of verbs” she calls it.  There’s nothing to follow or obey.  Just Be-ing.  What you can do is participate.

I can go a ways with that.  Even though I really don’t see Be-ing settling unobtrusively into my vocabulary, I like the way the world feels when everything in it is a verb.  How the birds have been birding out there all day.  Wrenning wrens nesting.  Ravening ravens, parenting, childrening, branch bouncing.  And the garden gardening away all afternoon without me while I’ve been over here, aliving.

Last night I settled myself in with a book called Rez Life:  An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life, by David Treuer.  I hadn’t turned very many pages before it became clear that this was no simple voyeur’s ride through the lives and relationships of some interesting people with values perspectives different from mine.

If I was going to read this book, I was going to have to pay attention.  Because I would be getting myself an education in the written down relationship between entities of the US government and Native American tribes and how that relationship was playing out in communities and the courts.  I asked myself, Am I up for this?  The more interesting question is:  Why wouldn’t I be?

Because it’s a wash of new dates and details, and I’ve heard so much of it before—duplicitous promises, boarding schools, allotments.  Another shameful plod through yet another part of the world where US corporate politics has long been screwing innocent thumbs to the wall and ruining everything.   That reason for not wanting to read the book, that particular dismissal is called American exceptionalism. That’s when you reason from the principle that the US of A holds all the aces.  You can’t start from there and engage in critical thinking.

But terrible, unfair and wrong things have happened, and the more I learn about this stuff, the more dismal and powerless I feel, and, well, doesn’t that just make it all about me.

It is a tangle, though.  Like Treuer says, the weapons of the fight are no longer rifles and arrows.  The new warrior files motions and drafts legal briefs.  All that arcane conflicting legal positioning isn’t something the average person can hold in their head all at once and follow.  A lot of lawyers might make a lot of money, but nobody is ever going to give Minnesota back.  Once you achieve that level of cynicism, you show you’ve internalized the Indian solution that isn’t spoken aloud anymore—assimilate or die.

I’m going to read this book.  Rez Life.  Pay attention.  Learn a thing or two.  Or ten.  There’s a lot of reasons I want to.  Here’s one of them:

For all my back-to-the-land determination, the chicken and the eggs, gentle-on-the-earth, chop wood, Nancy Nice, there’s still a puzzle in the heart of fairness when my situation sits right in the middle of a situation stolen from somebody else.   One way to relate to that puzzle is to not think about it.  But I’m ready for a dive into a bigger pile of information.  Just think how much I would understand about the fabric of history, politics, and daily life for Native Americans on and off the reservation if I logged as much time learning about it, as I’ve already logged watching F Troop and Davey Crockett.

If you’re American and female, it’s likely you’ve been acculturated in the notion that clarity emerges after an emotional meltdown.  We say, It’s okay to cry, and Get it all out.  Sometimes the crying and the comforting are even a rite of bonding.

Haitians aren’t like that.  At least not the ones I know.

On my first visit to the island LaGonave, after a few weeks of pretending to absorb my culture shock with grace, which is to say, making like I didn’t mind feeling small and stupid all the time, I tried to confide how lost I felt to a woman who was becoming a good friend.  When the tears welled up and my voice broke, she said, Stop that.  Which is what people say when you start to cry.  Stop that. 

I made up a theory that if the people around me cried over the things I considered worth crying about, there would be so much crying going on that nothing would get done.  It’s not that Haitians don’t cry.  Crying is acceptable at funerals, where sometimes it seems to me that the loss of a loved one connects a person to every anguish they have experienced and the funeral is the context where that can be expressed.

At funerals I have seen people howl with grief while friends support them on both sides, ease them to the ground, and protect them from rocks and dust as they wail and thrash.  For as long as it takes.  They help them sit up.  Have a cloth for their face.  Help them to their feet when they are ready.  The rest of the time, as far as I can tell, crying is taboo.

I cried at Richason’s funeral.  He was in his eighties, one of the gaunt old men who whiled the afternoons in the shade of a certain tree by the road watching the life of the community pass by.  In his last year, he didn’t leave the courtyard of his house, which was just down the hill from mine.  His cousin helped him from his bed to a blanket outdoors and I’d visit him in the mornings, bring him a little food.  Then one afternoon I came home and they were washing his body.

The church was stifling inside, so I stood on a rock and watched the funeral service through a window.  His biography was short.  He was a travaillè tè.  He worked the earth.  I thought about the tall, muscular young man he was, the full-body swing of the broad hoe, again and again against the rocky mountainsides, day after day.  Before I was even born.  How people say, If you don’t pay attention and do well in school, you’ll end up to be nothing but a travaillè tè.  And the tears started leaking out of me.

What’s this about? I ask myself, and I think I’m crying for everyone who has died in the year I was away.  Gnarly, sarcastic Eliane with her grasshopper body and corncob pipe who sold kerosene and rum from her house on the corner.  Madan Wala, who was young, and—oh no—this was in March 2010.  Who has died since I was here last?  About a quarter million people in an earthquake.  The son of a woman in the next town who’d run away to Port-au-Prince to find work the week before  and was never seen again.  A woman with 9 children whose husband disappeared.   They told me about the day when four coffins were delivered to the courtyard of a single family, how people could hardly comfort that mother, because it stank so much you couldn’t stand to be anywhere near.

I put my cheek on the pebbly cement windowsill and sobbed.  Kids came by to stare and laugh.  A woman I’ve always found grumpy and difficult faced them off and snarled at them to disperse.  He was her friend, she hissed.  She’s sad.

I didn’t think my tears would quit.  But they did.  Before the service ended.  I stepped away from the window, went to sit with some others in the shade of a rock where people always congregate, sopped up my snotty eyes, blew my nose.  The conversation went on around me, and soon I was joining in.

When I took physics in high school, I learned how nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants work. I learned how quantum theory says all the tiny particle pieces of everything are clouds of probabilities that stretch to infinity and look nothing like the textbook pictures of atoms and molecules. I learned that the universe was expanding, black holes were likely to exist, and nothing could go faster than the speed of light, along with E=mc².  A pretty serviceable cosmological view.  Even though it dates from back when Richard Nixon was president.

To get myself updated, I read The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene this year.   There were some new things.  For instance, I’d been feeling pretty settled in the notion that the universe is composed of dots-that-can-also-be-waves—photons, quarks, neutrons, neutrinos, and that there’d been new discoveries in particle accelerators that added new ones now and again.  Old idea, says Greene.  Think instead of basic ingredients that are minimicroscopic  lines and loops.  They’re called strings and they bend around in ten dimensions.  Hard to imagine, but the math bears it out.  Other equations indicate that we have yet to detect about 70 percent of the matter of the universe.  Not because it’s far away, but because it’s undetectable.  Dark matter, they call it.  70 percent.  It could be anywhere.

Even though all this is not exactly intuitive, the equations bear it out.  That’s been a catch phrase of physics since the beginning of the 20^th century.  Physicists became adept at probing the unknown with the mathematics they generated from the numbers that come from the measuring instruments. The mathematics makes suggestions for new measurements.  Measurements inspire further developments in the math. The theories are coherent, but human perception lags behind.  The average mind can’t wrap itself around it all –yet.  But since I can’t follow the math myself, should I say that I know things about dark matter and strings, or only that I believe them?

About two thirds of the way through The Fabric of the Cosmos I started to get annoyed by how much work it was to keep trying to visualize so many unvisualizable theoretical things—warps and dimensions, entangled particles, odd interactions of odd structures, all demanded by the math.  What math?  The math is so hard to follow it’s left out of the book.  Yet as my visualizing mind was tired, I started feeling really pushed around by this math.  What math?  The math that’s not in the book.  Not to worry they did the math, just try to visualize this.  Read the book.

To rebel, I started seeing into the situation sideways.  Note that the only human perceptions science can consider are the perceptions that can be recorded by machines and calibrated in numbers.  Numbers that are massaged in the black boxes of mathematics and reduced to the kinds of sense that mathematics can make.  But what about the sense that our perceiving selves can make?  What happens to our perceptive capabilities when we train ourselves to discount any perception that cannot also be delivered as numbers by a mechanical instrument?

Take those 6 extra dimensions in string theory.  The math keeps them curled up in unreachable places where they are not a nuisance in our daily lives.  Modern physics tells us not to plan to know anything about them until they can build the right kind of gravity signaling device.  Likewise, we can count on all the matter and energy that’s “dark” to stay that way until there’s an instrument that can see it and a theory to tell us what it looks like.  So physics deals in theories of the invisible that ask us to strain our perceptions in certain directions. In that sense, science is like religion.

But science is not religion.  Science and religion are two different things.  Like mangoes and coconuts.  Like church and state.  Like democracy and tribalism.  You can believe whatever you want to believe.  But if you want to find out, follow the money.

A day of work enclosed in the garden is pretty hard to top.  Everything you’re working with is alive—the soil, the plants, the bugs and all the invisibles moving in the ground and the in the air.  I’m alive, too. 

When you first walk out there, it doesn’t always start so great.

My initial take on spring mudflat this year was more daunting than inspiring.  Soggy clay and mats of dead stuff flattened from snow.  The mental image of how the garden looks in July—riotous, overflowing—just made me tired. It was like the universe before the big bang.   Who was going to do all that work?  Turn over the ground, repair the fence and the irrigation, add the manure, plant what where.  I’m not getting any younger you know.

For a half-hearted start, I grabbed a fork and stuck it in at the edge of a bed and pulled back.  Not enough to turn the ground over, just a little fluff.   Did it again and again, and before I was cold, or tired, or bored, a dotted  line of fork jabs marked the edges of where the raised beds belong.  Gone was the mudflat.  Inside the bounds of all those rectangles, the garden promised to occur.  When each bed announces itself as a framed canvas, it doesn’t say work, work, work, it exhales its potential, asks for just a few more brushstrokes so it can continue its time-lapse artwork of bounty.  You work on the garden an hour or so.  It works on itself 24/7.  Alive things do that.  They’re always different tomorrow.  You want to see it again.  And while you’re there, real quick, you might plant a few peas.

Yesterday I was transplanting broccoli starts and imagining what it’s like to be a broccoli start.  It’s a little crowded in that flat, roots cramped like feet in too-small shoes, ever-growing leaves jostling and competing with the neighbors for sunlight.  But they are the neighbors.  Been together since birth.  Whatever it is you are, that’s what they are, too.  And then suddenly and for no reason you’re ripped apart, jostled, maybe even turned upside down with your roots flailing in the air and then plopped in a vast, lonely space and given a good drenching.  A terrible shock.  But wait, not bad.  There’s food and water down by the feet, which have lost the confines of those too-tight shoes.  Leaves can spread wide, as well as tall.  Makes for a little shifting and unkinking in the shoulders.  It’s like having an earthquake that improves everything.  By morning, all the plants have a different stature.  More settled.  More adult.  They no longer say, “I am a little living thing, figuring out how to be alive.”  They say, “I am broccoli.”

You say plants don’t talk.  I say, the beauty of the garden is that it lets you think whatever you’re going to think, and yesterday, even though I was certainly thinking about broccoli, and beans, I was thinking about that North Carolina preacher I heard on the radio the other morning.  The one who said that the thing to do with all those  lezz-be-inns, queers, and homosexuals, too was to round them all up and stick ‘em inside a big electric fence and drop food to them from airplanes until they die out.  He said it a couple of times, just to make sure he wouldn’t be misunderstood, and each time, the congregation gave him a laugh.

I kept thinking about the fence.  Fencing in, fencing out.  Mr. Preacher himself is fenced onto this planet by gravity and I wonder, in his theory, after his program is complete and all of those lezz-be-inns, queers, and homosexuals have died out  at his hand, how his fence is gonna protect him from the wrath of all those bones.

A friend of mine  was once swept off the rocks by a wave and tumbled under the water long enough that she didn’t think she was going to come up alive told.  She said, “Your whole life really does pass before your eyes…  Not in the way you might think—like a movie or something—but it does…”

I can see that.  Sort of.  When you are wobbling around inside of your life, it could be anything.  It’s open-ended, changing  around.  Life is a verb while it’s going on, and when it ends, it becomes a  noun.   A completed thing.  Easier to hold in the imagination, turn and view.  Easier to see it in its own context.

Don’t we hope to get at least a glimpse, as it ends, of the coherence inside the experience we had?  And if we do, we hope not to smack our palm square against our metaphorical forehead and say, “Oh” in that tone that you use on yourself when you are in the grocery line and realize that your wallet is sitting on the dresser.  We want to leave this world with grace and understanding.  How sad to think that after all this living, the last moments could drip with regret.

What are the things I would regret?  What might I say as I smack myself on the forehead?

Dang, I should have scurried more.  Or  maybe… why didn’t I focus up and take better minutes when I was on that committee?

Will I suddenly know that all along I’d been smelling the wrong roses, eating the wrong food?  Will I say, I knew I shoulda worn more purple.    Just think of all the times I could have stuck around and taken more abuse.  Or applied myself and gotten more recognition.

What about the  unfinished socks?  My skanky coffee cup.  Thistle and morning glory in the garden.  Everything that shoulda been picked up and put down somewhere else.

I shoulda known I wouldn’t be here forever.

Maybe when we go we’re received into warm golden light and see our loved ones again.  Maybe we simply get absorbed into oneness of an all-knowing glow.  Maybe we just dissipate away.  The one thing that is certain is that we’ll lose all of the perceptions that only a person in a body can have.

Like birdchirp carried in on the first breath of morning air.

The way laughing throbs in your torso.

Who else will ever know the heaving of your diaphragm pumping oxygen pedaling you and your bicycle through the colors of dawn, and the way your legs are rubbery and alive when you get off.

The stink of the dog and the cottonwoods.  A sudden conversation rippling through the trees.

That first rich leaf of summer lettuce crimpling against your tongue.

Where else will you ever know the sound of your feet on pavement, gravel, grass, and the kitchen floor.?

The sting of sleet.  The brace of sudden wind.  A backlit mountain of cloud.

This is the miracle of hail.  This is the weight of bedclothes.  This is the cat nestling its spindly bones against my ribs.

Note to self:  sight, sound, taste, smell, touch and possible others as well.

I have been reading a book about translation.  It’s by David Bellos, the director of a program at Princeton University whose graduates might get work in international legal firms, as interpreters at the UN, or translating blockbuster novels.  Bellos’s book is called Is that a Fish in Your Ear? –referring to the Babel-fish of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which people could stick in their ear and be able to understand language spoken by anyone.

In college I learned that a machine like a Babel-fish could only exist in science-fiction because linguists and mathematicians had shown how it’s impossible to encode all the rules of a language in a way that can be made available to the machine.  The broad rules are easy enough, and you can list special nit-picks to account for the fact that you can say both “The pen is in the box,” and “The box in is the pen.” But the nit-picks don’t ever mesh perfectly together, and sooner or later—probably sooner—the machine makes a blooper that is so ridiculous that the whole translation isn’t credible.  That’s how the whole idea of machine translation which held great promise in the 50s and 60s fell by the wayside.  You just can’t write a computer program for turning English into Japanese.

Are you thinking perhaps that someone forgot to tell Google that?  Or that Google is so arrogant that they don’t treat theoretical impossibility as a limitation?  Maybe Google technicians are so hip and smart that they did figure out how to stick the full grammar of a language into a machine.  None of the above.  Bellos explains that Google Translate works because it relies on what Google does best—searching.

When you write something in English—or any other language—it won’t be English if it’s made out of linguistic units that have never been used iin English before.  So, to translate, Google mines already-translated internet documents looking for linguistic units contained in the original and matches them with how they have been translated into the target languages.  This wouldn’t have worked in 1962, when there wasn’t an internet to speak of and the science of digital archiving was embryonic.  Today, at a bare minimum, Google can access all of the documents of the European Union, which exist in 24 languages.  They can search everything written by the UN and its agencies which is out there in 6 languages, along with corporate reports, legal proceedings, literature and anything else individuals, groups, agencies and organizations have put up in more than one language.  Processed through Google’s proprietary statistical methods, the translations Google makes out of phrase-matchings are better than not-bad.

Bellos says, Wait a minute.  Think harder.  What if an Icelandic person wants to read something written in Farsi?  Google won’t be able to find enough already-translated documents to put side-by-side in Farsi in Icelandic to make anew translation.  Not a problem.  Google will rely on what’s called a pivot language, which could be English, although other globabally popular pivot languages include German, Arabic, and Russian.  At any rate, to translate from Farsi to Icelandic, Google Translate will look at documents that exist English, which have also been translated into both Farsi and Icelandic and then make the translation in two steps.  And what kind of documents might those be that exist in English, Farsi, and Icelandic?  Stuff from the UN of course, but that’s not going to help much with street slang or pillow talk.  Not to worry.  Think of all the detective novels, romances, and fantasy whose book jackets tout the number of languages they have been translated into.  Plenty of them exist in English, Icelandic, and Farsi—even if they were originally written in Swedish.

So when a Brazillian student writes to a penpal in China, or a Senegalese manufacturer researches potential markets in Indonesia, that communication could be taking place on the backs of John Grisham, Danielle Steele, and Harry Potter.

There were three Nancys in my grade school class, though neither of the others seemed very much like me.  Nor the mousketeer on TV.  Nancy Drew was in a league of her own.  There was no Saint Nancy.  Not much of a name, I always thought.  Wish they’d given me a better one.  Good thing I never got around to changing it.  Because of the thing about Nancys…

Among the Nancys in my orbit you’d find a midwife, a first-grade teacher, an artist, a businesswoman, a farmer, and the mayor.  With enough experience as a Nancy, you understand the essential Nancyness of Nancys, a current of resolve and fun.  Nancys are mighty.

Nancy Taylor was the first Nancy I met in this area when I moved here.  It was back when a laser printer was such an exotic object you could only find one in a climate-controlled computer room and you needed signatures to get something printed.  When I arrived with my floppy disk, wanting to print a single page, a woman was examining the sheets of her masters thesis—something about clothes—spread all over the counter.

Word processing in those days was more akin to computer programming than typing.  Getting a long document with images and footnotes to print out with everything lined up and the page numbers right was like trying to get a dummy to ride a unicycle across a tightrope.  The woman and the technician were going to be all afternoon at this.

Do you suppose, I asked, that you could let me in to print off this one page?  The technician looked willing.

No way, said the woman.  Go do something else and come back in a few hours.  Not unkind so much as a statement about the way the world is.  My one page could be enough to throw her job off further, she’d be stuck that much longer trying to get her thesis printed off.

That’s the way Nancy Taylor was.  Get out of my way.  I’ve got stuff to do.  And speaking of stuff to do, why are you just sitting there?

Years went by.  Other Nancys came into view, and while I was pondering how cool it would be to round up all the Nancys for a group shot and raise our arms high about how we were a force in the universe, Nancy Taylor got sick and died.

What?  How can you gather up the perfect set of local Nancys if you’re not going to have Nancy Taylor in it?  It was like she had wandered out of the play and away while the set was still being assembled.

It wasn’t much of a leap from the perfect set of Nancys to the perfect set friends who grok your troubles and patch you up, get your jokes, and never slight you or laugh at you when you don’t think it’s funny.   The perfect club and, oh, how you want to be in it.

The very idea gets Nancy Taylor pounding on some etheric table and pulling on her hair.

You think you are holding auditions for who gets to be in your life?  Look at the people ]\[[around you.  This isn’t a casting call.  This is the cast.  The curtain is up and it’s live.

Somehow Nancy knew her appearance was going to be short.  Let’s be mighty, she said.  Hurry up or move over.  Then she slipped off the stage and out of the wings and while we’re here milling around, looking into our empty hands, saying what? saying, I just don’t believe it,  Nancy’s echo is still booming.

Everybody’s standing around being in their own way.  Don’t they have stuff to DO?

At the Hotel Infinity, there are infinitely many rooms.  No matter how many guests are already in the hotel—even if it’s full—you can always shift everyone down one room to fit an arriving guest.  The guests might not like the shifting, but that’s how you fit everybody in.

If you talk too much about the Hotel Infinity, sooner or later you have to deal with the practicalities.  How big of a lot would the building sit on?  How many stories high will it turn out to be?  If the hotel was full and there was a fire, would there be room for everyone to stand outside?  Perhaps it’s continuously under construction, with an invisible army of carpenters and electricians scurrying day and night at the periphery of the known hallways, cobbling on rooms as fast as people come to occupy them.

Philosopher Brian Rotman would call those workers ghosts.  He wrote a book with two subtitles called Ad Infinitum.   The first of the subtitles is The Ghost in Turing’s Machine and the other is Taking God out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In.

Invisible agents, says Rotman.  Anytime we say or write or think, 1,2,3…, we dispatch an invisible agent, a ghost, to take up the dot-dot-dot and count off into the great forever on our behalf, reciting the room numbers at the Hotel Infinity.  Invisible agents and ghosts are gods, he says, and to be rigorous mathematics has to expunge them.

The fact that you’re not going to find any Hotel Infinity out there overlooking a nine-gazillion nine hundred eighteenety-eight hole golf course makes Rotman conclude that numbers as we know them—based on counting, assuming infinity—can’t exist in the real world.  How can this be?  When we depend on them so much.

It’s like geometry, says Rotman.  A lot of what you can determine about lines and points and angles—information an engineer might use in designing a bridge—depends on the assumption that parallel lines go off into infinity and never meet.  That is an immutable statement of Euclidean geometry.  It holds for bridges, but not necessarily inside particle accelerators or at distances stretching across clusters of galaxies.  Physicists began applying non-Euclidean geometries to the very large and the very small.  Using geometries that allow parallel lines to meet, some of the anomalies ironed out.

In Ad Infinitum, Rotman argues that mathematicians need to work harder at inventing non-Euclidean numbers.  Numbers that don’t stretch to infinity.  Finite numbers to model a finite world.  Devices that engineers design from numerical models of the world need to operate accurately.  Decisions made from numerical models of the world should be reasonable.

It doesn’t matter so much when the numbers are little—for the same reasons that a surveryor can mark off your property boundaries using flat-earth geometry.  Electronic devices, however, deal in huge numbers.  How many more carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere today?  How many transactions does JP Morgan Chase perform in a second?  What does goes on inside a smartphone?

Numbers are supposed to be reliable and safe.  With plenty more where the last ones came from.  Instead of getting too big to fail, numbers can get so big that they are bound to fail.

Otherwise, you could book a room at the Hotel Infinity.