The City of Architects

Up on the plateau there lies a city 
Bursting with felicity, bustling without pity, 
Where architects give life to a forest of spires 
That rise over tires that roll, never tired. 
They reach for the skies like trees 
Steady as freezing masts in the breeze, 
Vertical temples inspiring a trapeze dream 
Of flight between beams in the seams. 
The designers are safe in their quarters, 
Drawing up their mind's every desire- 
Their drafting requires what's soon to transpire, 
Imminent fingers o'er the basin of Earth. 
Each Babel the builders unravel, 
Setting to grasp the fire over her navel, 
Unable to label what the workers admire, 
Glory forever to those who reach higher. 

Selected Poems, Rabindranath Tagore

Books of poetry are the most difficult rate. Not only are poems more abstract than stories and novels, but they are shorter, so you can fit more of them into a single volume, causing a conflict of interest when comparing higher-quality poems to lesser ones. There's also the problem of translation: poems translated into English are often written better in their original language, which should be no surprise to anyone. 

These poems of Tagore were originally written in Bengali. I have no doubt the book would get five stars if I'd read it without the corruption of a translation. That's no fault of Tagore's or the translator, just an unfair necessity when rating a book of foreign poetry. Two of the best poems in this volume were Unending Love and Earth, probably because there were no identifiable rhyme schemes. Both poems are sufficient enough to make one realize that Tagore was an incredible poet, even if some of what he tried to say was lost in translation. 

Stray Birds, Rabindranath Tagore

“Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.” 

 

Your thoughts did come, Mr. Tagore, and I am like a star that has seen the afterglow of your sunset. Stray Birds is a fine collection of single sentence musings, most of which relate nature and love to human experience. They are like proverbs that read as minimalist poems, containing dense amounts of wisdom hidden between the lines. I found myself reading many of them several times over, just to grasp all the hidden threads of meaning implied by Tagore's vastness of form. He says a lot with such few words, something a lot of us would do well to emulate. 

Individualism Needs Collectivism

 An individualist utopia sounds like a great idea, right?  It would be the pinnacle of progress in a world where collectivism suffocates liberality.  But unfortunately, the great tragedy of life is that progress cannot be attained without the individual succumbing to the tenets of a community.  History has repeatedly shown that collectivism is ultimately what changes things, not the individual.  Even when individuals without a leader or a social hierarchy get together, very rarely can they cause any social change.  Many men and women have tried and failed to bring their utopias to the world, out of a false belief that liberality only depends on the individual, that individuality is the only thing that can transcend the traditions of the community to which they are bound.  Freedom however cannot be won by individuals; society will remain static as long as individuals are acting alone.  Though an individual may break free from the bonds of society, it can only be temporary because he or she cannot permanently change it without having any followers. 

In order to really change society, an individual only has the power to rise above the ranks of the community and stand for something greater than their self.  They can lead their followers to greener pastures, so long as the bonds of their community remain tight.  A slackening of the mythologies, legends, and traditions that keep a brotherhood strong causes individuality to poison the structure of ideas that the community had built.  Peripheral liberties that defy convention allow each individual to drift from the cause, because each individual has their own version of the cause they'd like to see fit.  Their version taints any collectivism created by bringing the group together in the first place. 

Back in the 1840s, before the spread of communism in Europe, utopian socialism was experimented on in several communities of the United States, including Fruitlands, Brook Farm, Oneida, and New Harmony.  Each of them failed in their own bizarre way, but what links them all together seems to be a lack of cohesion sponsored either by a lack of rules, or rules that were too strict for the community to function.  In essence, too much individuality was given to several of these communities while too little of it was given to others.  It's unrealistic to expect a community to thrive without using animal products (as was the case in Fruitlands), and equally unrealistic by allowing complex marriages to thrive (marriages where members of the community can have sex with anyone they please, as practiced at Oneida).  The most famous utopian community, Brook Farm, which was a haven for the transcendentalists, suffered from a combination of both.  They had a rule that young people had to perform harder jobs, which caused a lot of dissent.  Yet they had no rule that would protect the most important buildings in the community in the event of a fire, ultimately leading to its demise. 

A recent comparison can be made with the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, and why it was so short-lived.  Its power rose dramatically in a short period of time, yet it seemingly left the spotlight as soon as it hit its peak.  The reason for this downfall is that there was no leadership whatsoever; the movement was entirely based on individual desires and ideas.  Nothing was called for collectively and therefore nothing got done.  The only purpose it served was to intimidate bankers on Wall Street, which would ideally force politicians to recognize the threat of rising unemployment.  Unemployment soon fell after the movement, which undoubtedly had an effect on its demise, but if the movement had any semblance of being organized it would have made a lot more noise, and might still be around today. 

Make no mistake, I am not disavowing individualism with these statements.  Communities also fail when there is too little of it (not to mention entire nation-states, like the Soviet Union).  I am only saying that an excess of individuality can be just as disastrous as too little of it.  The organizers of those socialist utopias thought they were creating strong communities by getting everyone involved, but any rule they made which contrasted sharply with the nation surrounding it seemed to accelerate its demise.  It seems that no community or movement should ever expect to succeed if its influence can't spread abroad.  The individualists of communities like these only become choked by their own isolation, never realizing that the society they'd rejected might have already been the most ideal, considering the nature of humans and all their habits.  The world will never be perfect; sometimes we have just have to accept the things we don't like about it.  There are moments when challenging the social order should definitely be called into question, but they won't be successful unless a majority of the nation is capable of being transformed by the reform group.  The reform group must organize itself in such a way that only minor changes can be made, one step at a time.  Too much change at once tends to radicalize the opposition. 

Martian Geology

The Geological Society of America published an article in June that implies Mars had an early climate that involved "widespread precipitation and runoff".  This was catalyzed by high-resolution photographs released by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which revealed fossilized rivers in the Arabia Terra region.  Below is a topographic image of the Martian surface, with Arabia Terra near the center.  That large green region of runoff is cited as being roughly the size of Brazil.  Its western border appears to be a curvy cut of blue, indicating the now dry canyon of Valles Marineris, a canyon more than eight times deeper than the Grand Canyon. 

 

Image credit: NASA/JPL/MOLA Science Team. 

 

Valles Marineris starts at the foot of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the solar system (no coincidence then that Valles Marineris is also its deepest canyon).  Four billion years ago, when Mars' climate was vastly different, the eastern side of Olympus Mons must have been a huge precipitation zone, collecting so much snow that the warming of the planet caused Valles Marineris to erode at tremendous rates.  Prior to the melting, there must have been an oceanic wind current that brought storms to this bay of the Southern Highlands, where it was continuously blocked off by the mighty facade of the 88,000-foot mountain.  It's not a stretch to presume that the entire northern hemisphere of Mars used to have an ocean, while the southern hemisphere was a single continent.