Ever since I was a child, my literary tastes have bounced back and forth between stories of fantasy and escape and stories of people’s lives in the real world. This push-pull may have been prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s, which happened when I was in grammar school and too young to understand the implications of the news. A much talked about issue in my hometown was which families were building bomb shelters, and if it was a smart or a stupid thing to do. The household where my Brownie troop meetings were held had climbed on the bandwagon, but my parents pooh-poohed the idea. From a child’s perspective, the subject was impossible to contemplate. Even the idea of it made everything in my world suddenly not make sense. Where would we go if the unthinkable happened and an atom bomb landed in our midst?

Diverse cultural and religious traditions from around the globe include stories of a green paradise emerging from the ruins of an apocalyptic ending to all life on earth. It’s possible to imagine mystics and visionaries from the distant past casting their sight as far out into the future as they could possibly conceive. Some of them foresaw a time when the world would be wracked by powerful forces that threatened to destroy everything. It is our good fortune that some of the tales they told have been carried down through the ages.

The Völuspá, also known as the Seeress’s (or Wise Woman’s) Prophecy, opens the Poetic Edda, a compilation of mythological and heroic poems from Iceland that dates back to sometime around the year 1000 A.D., a time when the old pagan gods were fading away under the spreading influence of the Christian religion. It is the oldest surviving source material for Norse myth and legend.

In the poem, a volva, or wise woman, has been summoned by Odin, chief of the gods, to advise him about what the future holds in store. In a magnificent sweep of events, she tells of the creation of the world and its inhabitants, roots her chronicle in present-day happenings, reveals just enough of Odin’s secret doings to establish the power of her visionary skill, and then tells of a far distant time when the gods will fall to their doom and the world will be destroyed, only to have a fresh, new, green earth arise to take its place. The Völuspá is a primary source for accounts of the Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods in Norse mythology. It is considered to be one of the finest poems in all of Germanic literature.

The Eddas (both the Poetic version and its later counterpart, the Prose Edda) were well known to J.R.R. Tolkien, who mined them for source material to use in his imaginative writings. The names of Gandalf and most of the Dwarves who appear in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings originate in several stanzas of the Völuspá known as the “Catalogue of Dwarfs.”

The Völuspá is available to us today due to a fortuitous combination of human ingenuity and twists of fate. Some unknown individual a thousand years ago (give or take a century or two) imagined and articulated the seeress’s grand vision. At a later date, someone wrote down the prophecy in poetic form, in keeping with the literary customs of the day. Quite some time after that, another person copied it in a compilation of poems, placing it first in the manuscript. The Völuspá then passed through many hands before reaching modern times, where the skills of translators and interpreters have turned its distilled wisdom into a form that can easily be found online. Among other things, it’s an antidote to Twitter.

The question that intrigues me is, what if the wise woman’s prophecy was based on a real vision of the future? What would that mean for our lives today, a thousand years later? Read more…

N.B. In January of 1977, the state of Utah executed a man named Gary Gilmore for murder. He was the first person executed in the United States after the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty in 1976. While in jail during the interim between when he was sentenced to die and the judgment being carried out, he twice attempted suicide. I was the Editorials Editor of the UC Santa Barbara Daily Nexus at the time, and my editorial on the subject struck a nerve in the campus community.

Wednesday, January 19, 1977 — Well, they finally went through with it. Gary Gilmore was executed early Monday morning in Utah, almost immediately after a last-minute stay of execution was lifted.

The grotesqueness of the whole situation has pointed out some very disconcerting things about the society in which we live. Whether or not Gilmore deserved to die is really not the main issue. The issue on which to focus is how we as citizens will deal with the degree of ridicule to which our system of “justice” has been brought. Read more…

Through brute nature upward rising,
Seed up-striving to the light,
Revelations still surprising,
My inwardness is grown insight.
Still I slight not those first stages,
Dark but God-directed Ages;
In my nature leonine
Labored & learned a Soul divine;
Put forth an aspect Chaste, Serene,
Of nature virgin mother queen;
Assumes at last the destined wings,
Earth & heaven together brings;
While its own form the riddle tells
That baffled all the wizard spells
Drawn from intellectual wells,
Cold waters where truth never dwells:
—It was fable told you so—
Seek her in common daylight’s glow.

– Margaret Fuller, (1810-1850)

I’m part of a demographic for whom the Nobel Peace Prize has been tainted goods ever since it was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1974 for belatedly taking steps to end an obscene conflict he had worked for years to prolong and escalate. From an anti-war perspective, that event seemed to epitomize everything that was wrong about the mainstream Establishment: namely, that it was more interested in symbol than substance.

My generation was raised on narrative accounts praising the heroic individuals throughout American history who had stood up to forces of deceit and tyranny in order to uphold principles such as honesty, integrity and justice. But, during the Vietnam era, when we tried to apply the lessons of history to contemporary events, we too often found that authority figures didn’t universally welcome our insights, regardless of the merits of our arguments.

I think we are incredibly lucky that Barack Obama came along and was willing and able to slug and cajole his way into the presidency. I got caught off guard by our system’s ability to change course so quickly after the fiasco of George W. Bush’s presidency. Bush, to me, represented the nadir of what the Baby Boom had to offer: a spoiled frat boy who took it as his due that family money and connections would buy his way into whatever perks he wanted and out of whatever messes he made. With the election of Obama, we have shown the world that the American ideal of a meritocracy is alive and well. This doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that Obama can do no wrong. He’s a fallible human being just like the rest of us, but he’s also a decent, smart, and gifted man. I fully believe he has the humility to understand this. It’s one of his great strengths.

Awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize at this stage of the game, though, doesn’t do him any favors. It seems more a manifestation of a wholesale cheapening and erosion of institutions and awards that has been underway for a long time. Nepotism, patronage, faddishness and such are not hallmarks of quality and endurance. Obama the man has substance and integrity, and I believe he has the potential to accomplish great things. But he has inherited a system that has been badly damaged by years of abuse and neglect, with problems that are deeply entrenched, and he’s not a miracle worker. Obama the symbol is apparently in vogue around the world, which is what this award represents. But, given the complexities of the global situation, having what supposedly is a major, prestigious award tout the idea of one man as a heroic savior is troublingly simplistic in this day and age. Particularly when that award has a less than stellar history of holding individuals to account for the totality of their actions over time.