LAST WORDS

 

I can prove Gaius Caligula was, if not the most depraved then certainly the most imbecilic emperor Rome ever had.  According to Tacitus, who was never wrong, in 41 A.D., after having been stabbed by his own bodyguards, the lunatic’s last words were, “I am still alive!” Playing opossum never seems to have occurred to him. 

 Listen, if you are already half dead and bleeding out from two or three near fatal stab wounds, what could be the harm keeping your big mouth shut, instead of alerting your killers to come back and finish the job?  Last words such as those are self defining; you are dead because you had to get the last word.

Consider Billy the Kid’s last words, as he walked into a darkened room, in which Sheriff Pat Garritt, was waiting with his finger on the trigger of a loaded shotgun. Said Billy, “Who’s there?” He should have asked that before he entered the room.

There is a school of thought that last words reveal some insight into character. I’m referring to the   utterances of those who knew they are facing an imminent death; as in 1790 when French Reign of Terror victim Thomas de Mahay, the Marquis de Favras, actually spent his last moments on earth reading his own death warrant as he climbed the steps of to the guillotine. 

He might have been searching for a legal loophole. Instead his last words were addressed to the clerk, there to check him off the execution list, Thomas handed the clerk his death warrant while pointing out, "I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.” That might have been a helpful remark if he was looking to delay the proceedings, but it also insulted the last guy who might have slowed things down.  What an arrogant putz.

Or consider the final words of the clever, acid tongued Lady Nancy Whitcher Langhorne Astor (above, center), the first female member the English Parliament (above), who awoke from a coma to discover her family had gathered around her bedside.

From her own deathbed she asked, “Am I dying or is this my birthday?” She then promptly answered her own question by dying. Unfortunately, the family’s response was not recorded, and I am the kind of person who wonders what they might have replied to a question like that.  Happy birthday, Grandma?

I have also wondered about the last words of Margaretha Geertfuida Zella, the little Dutch girl better known by her stage name, Mata Hari. She was a abandoned house wife who became a dancer who became a stripper because, as she admitted, “I could never dance very well.” During the First World War she became a famous spy because she was so bad at it.  It is not clear even today who she was spying for, if anybody.

But at 5:00 A.M. on 15 October, 1917, as she stood in front of the French firing squad, Margaretha was asked if she had any last words. Her reply was, “It is unbelievable.” And then the idiots shot her without asking what she meant by that.  What was unbelievable, unbelievable to whom? I would like to know.

There is a similar story told about the last words of painter and poet Pietro Arentino, (above) the father of modern pornography, and thus one of my personal heroes. Pietro was known as the "Scourge of Princes", because he slept with so many other men's wives, but also a good friend of the painter Titian. And it was helping out his friend that got Pietro killed. 

See, in 1556 Guidobaldo Il della Rovere (above), the Duke of Urbino, hired Titian to paint a portrait of his wife, Giulia da Varno. Titian needed the money, as usual, but the problem was that Giulia was not only rich, she was also “vain and ugly”, making her a dangerous combination for any artist trying to capture her in canvas.  If the portrait didn’t look like her she might be offended. If it looked too much like her, she would be offended. Luckily for Titian, Pietro came up with the solution.

At Pietro’s suggestion, Titian (above) hired his favorite prostitute from a local brothel, and had her pose for the painting of the body. But in place of the prostitute’s head he painted a glamorized portrait of Giulia, based on flattering paintings done of her as a young bride wanna-be. 

It sounds like a bad joke but in the hands of a genius like Titian such absurdity can become great art. , i.e. his painting the Venus Urbino (above). The Duke was thrilled with the finished product. When he  saw the painting he confided, wistfully, to both Titian and Pietro, “If I could have had that girl’s body, even with my wife’s head, I would have been a happier man.” 

Pietro laughed so hard he had a stroke. They carried him to a room out of the way and when it became clear that he was not likely to recover the Duke called for a priest to administer extreme unction. 

First the priest prayed for Pietro, and then offered to hear his last confession. But since Pietro was still unconscious, the priest continued, anointing Pietro with holy oil on his eyelids, ears, nostrils, lips, hands and feet, each time repeating the chant, “By this holy unction and his own most gracious mercy, may the Lord pardon you whatever sin you have committed.”  In Latin of course.

As the priest finished the last prayer, Pietro’s eyes opened and he said clearly and distinctly, “Now that I’m oiled. Keep me from the rats.” And then he died. There was no doubt about what he meant, and that in effect he had died laughing.

And then there are last words for which no explanation is required because the act of dying is the explanation; such as when the great amateur botanist Luther Burbank delivered his last words on earth; “I don’t feel so good”. 

For some last words, location is everything - as when the poet Hart Crane (above) delivered his last words, “Good-bye, everybody". He was standing on the railing of the Steamship Orizaba,  heading back to New York City. Immediately after those words he jumped into the Gulf of Mexico. What more explanation could you require?

But I retain my deepest affection for the actor, comic, poet, playwright and historian, Ergon Friedell. In 1933 he described the newly triumphant Nazi Party as "...a bunch of debased menials".  One of his last public performances in 1939 was a comic parody of a speech by Adolph Hitler. 

On the night of 16 March, 1939 two Nazi thugs arrived to "arrest" Egron. While his housekeeper delayed them at the front door, Ergon climbed onto his bedroom window ledge and before he jumped to his death spoke his last words that revealed a sweet and gentle heart, to go with the quick, funny and facile mind he had exhibited his entire life.  Teetering on the ledge he warned those who might be on the sidewalk beneath him in the dark, “Watch out, please,” he said. Only then did he jump. God bless, him.

                                           - 30 -

Small Brain, Big Brain

 

I believe we will create a better world, – eventually. Maybe.  Call me a “depressed optimist”.  Case in point;  researchers of the 3 inch fossil Fuxianhuia protensa, (above) - English pronunciation "Fuk-swe-on-wea-pro-ten-sant" -  suggest that half a billion years ago these little buggies suffered a glitch during sexual reproduction, and begot a double genetic pairing in their proto-brains. This “double dose” of mental DNA strands gave rise to higher brain functions.  Evidently, it also gave rise to crazy.

As one Brainiac involved in this study put it, “The price of higher intelligence and more complex behaviors is more mental illness.” What this implies is that whether you are studying religion or astronomy, Descartes or Deuteronomy, you are ingesting a degree of irrationality right along with any logic you acquire. 

The ability to use fire allowed us to break down meat proteins, but that also bestows the ability to burn down the house you live in. And we do it all the time – ask any Trump devotee.  Music or mythology, Einstein or astrology, nothing that humans have ever invented could not also be used to destroy humanity. Why should the Internet be any different?

A decade or so ago, some idiots exploited a “hole” in the Java software system, putting, according to the United States Department of Homeland Security, one billion computers at risk.   In other words, the $8 trillion World Wide Web could be destroyed because somebody found out a way to make 50 cents of profit by blowing up the WWW.

My question is, what kind of idiot would try to make a profit from destroying all future profits?  But the answer is obvious. The same kind of idiots who blew up the world wide economic system in 1929 and again in 2007, and are trying to do it again right now. Bitcoin anyone? The same kind of idiots who are currently running the National Rifle Association, seemingly determined to convince the vast majority of Americans that the terms “gun owner” and “gun nut” are synonymous. As a famous fictional American once said, “Stupid is as stupid does”.

On the plus side, I also recently came across research from South Africa and Sweden, which reveals that the average dung beetle uses GPS in rolling up and rolling away their poop balls. But the G in this GPS does not stand for global, but for galactic. 

I should pause here long enough to thank the lowly dung beetles for their dedication, for it is through their tireless efforts at removing billions of tons of herbivore waste from the surface of the earth that you and I can walk without sinking up to our knees in cow, bison, pig, sheep and moose shit. They bury their carefully gathered and formed poop balls just after laying their eggs in them, to ensure that future generations of dung beetles have a hearty first meal to start their lives. 

We've always known that once the lady beetle gets a nice juicy ball of dung together, they climb on top and do a little dance. Entomologists assumed, that just like the money hungry billionaires, this was a dung beetle's way of saying to the universe “This ball of crap is mine!” 

But now it seems they are actually seeking to orientate themselves so they can find their way back to the burrow they have dug for their balls.  If the sun is up, they use the sun. At night they use the moon. And on moonless nights they use the Milky Way, that smear of billions of stars that runs across the night sky, which nobody thought till now that a dung beetle was even vaguely aware of.

According to Professor Marcus Bryne, from Wits University in Johannesburg, “The dung beetles don't care which direction they're going in; they just need to get away from the big fight with the other beetles at the poo pile (above).”   Don't we all.

And, you know, there appears to be a lesson here, on the relationship between Newtonian and Quantum physics. The beetles can use the Milky Way to define a straight line back to their burrows, because they are so small, and the Milky Way is so far away. 

However, a moth, using the same basic methodology, circles a porch light because they are bigger and closer to the light source. The moths think they are flying in a straight line, as long as they keep the light at an equal distance.  Sort of like Trump cult members and Red Sox fans.  Or bundles of energy we call neutrons locked in a shell around a nucleus.     

Or like a human driving down the interstate highway between Houston and Beaumont, Texas. It feels like an endless straight dull line, and it is. But it's a straight line drawn on a sphere, so it ain't straight if you look at it from far enough away.  Or to put it another way; the closer you get to an individual problem, the easier it is to become blinded  as to the problem you are actually dealing with.

But to get back to my original example, Fuxianhuia protensa - this little proto-bugy has been described as a “missing link”, or more accurately as “a mistaken link”. The problem is the little multi-legged creature, which an average human would have thoughtlessly stepped  on if they spotted it in their closet, might have been the ancestor of all bugs – all crickets, cockroaches, dung beetles, moths and honey bees. But it also might not.  Or to let Professor Nicholas Strausfeld from the University of Virginia explain it. “There has been a very long debate about the origin of insects,” he says. And that, it seems, explains everything.

See, the grand daddy of all buggies was either a crab or a sea monkey (brine shrimp if you are over the age of twelve). Crabs are crustaceans, and sea monkey's are brachiopods. Crabs have better brains than do sea monkeys. So, ancient sea monkeys were once thought to have evolved into insects, while ancient crabs evolved into everybody else. 

But then along comes Fuxianhuia protensa, with a squiggly body and an organized brain, and a dependable dated age of 520 million years old. And that is old enough to have been the great-great-great-etcettera-granddaddy to both lines of evolution – which means that life got smarter and then found it might be more advantageous to get stupid again, just with fewer legs.

I can dig that..  Every human male comes to realize that women often prefer bastards to nice guys, and young women realize that most men prefer easy girls to smart girls.  As your father or mother might have told you at that point, “Life isn't fair”, and he or she may even have asked you, “If you ever figure out the opposite sex, let me know, will you?” 

To put it in a more gender neutral way, most people reach a point when they suspect that their brains are just getting in the way of their hormones making them happy. And it appears that sometime during the Cambrian period, the squiggly crawly things wiggling across the ocean floor first confronted that basic philosophical conundrum: bigger brains or bigger testicals and/or bigger tits? Which way will make me happier.

At that point it now appears that the testicles and tits returned to a simpler brain and instant gratification, while the brains tried the deferred reward path. And the amazing thing is, it appears we both ended up in the same place, standing atop a our own pile of dung and looking to the Milky Way for answers to the Universe and everything or at least the chance to get laid, which is usually the same thing.

It's enough to make anybody a depressed optimist.

                                  - 30 -  

GOING AFTER GALILEO

I make no claims to understand the Byzantine logic of Catholicism, but I do feel empathy for Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. History records that it was Bellarmine who was the instrument of Galileo Galileo’s destruction. But that charge is unfair.  The Cardinal was not a brainless evil little toady like Caccini, or a Machiavellian social tyrant such as Maffeo Barberini (aka Pope Urban VIII), and they both played far larger roles in bringing down the best brain in Europe since Pythagoras. 

And the Cardinal did write, early the fifteenth century,  a revolutionary sentence “…Civil authority is instituted by men; (and that power resides) in the people, unless they bestow it on a Prince.” Such revolutionary thought could almost have been written by Thomas Paine, a century and a half later, and it speaks of a faith that values logic and democracy. It is a brand of Catholicism that at times today feels nostalgic.

Things began to go ugly in the spring of 1615 when the Dominican monk Tommasco Caccini took it upon himself to journey to Rome (above).  Caccini was very suspicious of mathematics, which he did not understand, and his intent was to throw what he saw as “intellectual money changers” out of the Vatican. 

On the surface Caccini (above)  was complaining about Copernican astronomy, but Copernicus was beyond earthy correction, having died in 1543. In fact this “dreadful fool”, as his own brother described Caccini, sought to overturn the dominance of the Jesuit order in the Church. This was an internal Catholic  "cultural war".

Of course the Pope himself, Paul V (above), was a Jesuit, so Caccini aimed at a stand-in instead; Galileo Galilei. Caccini told the Holy See that Galileo had contaminated all of Florence with his heresies about the sun being the center of the solar system, and the moon not being a pristine celestial orb. Worse, Caccini alleged that Galileo was saying in public that God did not perform miracles.

Caccini was indeed  a “turbulent ignoramus”, as Galileo described him, and Pope Paul V might know that his own nose was being tweaked by the Dominican, but Catholic politics did not allow the Vatican to ignore the charges that had been made. And Galileo was no longer an energetic young man, self confident and  able to defend himself.

The pope had originally turned to his most dependable cultural warrior, 73 year old Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (above). It had been the intellectual Bellarmine who had out maneuvered and isolated the clever James I of England over his English translation of the bible, and who had prosecuted the magician Giordano Bruno sixteen years earlier. 

They had been forced to put a wooden clamp on Bruno’s tongue to prevent him from shouting heresies while they burned him at the stake (above), but in the end Bruno was silenced. It is doubtful the Pope wanted Galileo silenced so absolutely, but he expected Bellarmine to remove the Flrointine as an irritant, whatever that demanded.

The problem was that Bellarmine understood enough about mathematics to know that Galileo’s numbers were right. When the old and ill Bellarmine interviewed Galileo, which he did three times, he fell under the genius’s spell. In the end Bellarmine provided the Florentine with a letter that allowed him to "discuss" the idea of a sun centered universe, so long as he did not claim publicly that it was not opinion but fact. 

Despite what Bellarmine and Galileo both knew to be fact, officially, according to the Church, the Earth remained at the center of the universe because several Popes had said it was so.  Robert Bellarmine would die in 1624, and later become a saint. But the saint's letter of instruction for Galileo would prove to be a dead letter.

That letter rose from the dead after Pope Paul V died in 1621. He was followed by the brief and sickly Pope Gregory XV, and in 1623 by the energetic and energetically ignorant Pope Urban VIII, aka Maffeo Barberini (above). How Barberini’s mind worked was revealed in 1624 when he issued a Papal Bull, or pronouncement, making it a sin to smoke tobacco - not because it was unhealthful but because it often caused its users to sneeze, an act which Barberini considered similar to sexual ecstasy - which leaves me wondering about Signor Barberini’s boudoir habits during flu season.So, for the next eight years it was war and not sin which occupied Barberini. If he was not fighting battles to extend the Church’s (and his families') dominions, then he was preparing to fight battles. Barberini turned the Vatican into an arsenal, and built a factory in Tivoli to supply it with weapons. And when the Holy See ran short of cannon Barberini had bronze ripped from the roof of that temple to the Roman Republic, the Pantheon, and melted it into more cannon. As an unknown sage put it at the time, “That which the barbarians did not do, Barberini did” (in Latin – “quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini”).

But finally, in February of 1632, with the printing of Galileo’s newest book, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”,  the prosaic world of ideas captured Barberini’s attention. Seeing criticism of himself in Galileo’s arguments (and, honestly, it seems to have been there) Barberini ordered the book seized and the printer arrested. And he ordered the Inquisition to investigate Galileo.The Church had been at war with dissenters from the moment Christ died on the cross, and by 1542, when Pope Paul III established the “Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition” in Rome, that war had become formalized and institutionalized, replete with all forms of torture, including water boarding, and with all the advantages and disadvantages found in any bureaucracy, even a bureaucracy of torture.

By 1633, when an ailing Galileo was ordered to Rome (he arrived carried in a litter) to face the Dominican Cardinals who had been given responsibility for his inquisition, the machinery of correction had been perfected. To be charged was to be guilty.

Galileo thought his 1616 letter from Cardinal Bellarmine would protect him, but Bellarmine was a decade dead, and instead the Cardinal’s letter would be the clamp used to silence Galileo’s tongue. Galileo was presented with an “official” copy of that letter which included a phrase – “Galileo agrees to neither hold, defend, nor teach the Copernican opinion in any way whatsoever” – that had not been in the original letter, which the old man still had. 

Holding this official forgery Galileo mumbled, “I don’t remember the clause “in any way whatsoever… ”. And then his voice fell silent. He must have understood at that instant that this Pope (and his army of sycophants) was willing to commit the sin of bearing false wittiness to secure Galileo's silence, or his death.

When presented with his false confession the old man signed. To have refused would have been to invite a death by fire. And in the last act of the farce Galileo was required to openly announced his “abiurare”, that he abjured and renounced the idea that the sun was at the center of the solar system. 

Later generations would insist the old man left the court muttering his independence, but that was just wishful thinking. Barbarini used the power of Galileo's imagination, which had once opened the universe to all of humanity, by showing him the instruments of torture, to frighten  him and close that universe. He could imagine the endless pain the Pope could cause him. That is not faith. It is obedience. 

In exchange for his “abiurare” the old man was allowed to return to his home in Florence but he was never allowed to write another word on science. He died in January of 1641, blind and gagged. It was a great victory for Barbarini.

It was not until 31 October, 1992 – Halloween, 350 years later –that Pope John Paul II expressed the Church’s official regret at the way Galileo had been persecuted. John Paul admitted that the Earth does indeed revolve around the sun, once a year. According to John Paul II, “The error of the theologians of the time…was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of sacred scripture.”It seemed, at least for a time, that Catholicism would enter the twenty-first century in peaceful coexistence with science, or, perhaps, even mutually supportive.. Cardinal Bellarmine would have been dis-pleased, but I remain  more than a little wary of the sins the church might commit tomorrow, all in God's name, of course.

                                      -30-