How do you go there,
Hands gloved in latex,
Face masked
Dripping sanitizer?
I did not see you descend
But now I see you rising
Dare you breathe?
Dare you touch the seat?
Dare you drink from the plastic glass?
I have not been recognized,
But I myself have recognized
How do you ride
From plane to house?
Is the driver sick or safe?
Is the rented room clean?
All things which are composed
Shall be decomposed
On earth and in heaven.*
from The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Jean-Yves Leloup
Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini is a very LONG book about a fascinating woman, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. I’m finally close to the conclusion, having experienced visceral reactions to Ada’s mother’s rigid parenting, her husband’s alignment with said mother Lady Byron, and the Victorian ideas about the weakness of the female body and brain.
I’ve been trying to remember where I encountered Ada before, because the main events of her life were vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was actually a film? In any case, here’s a brief biography:
Ada Lovelace (born Augusta Ada Byron; December 10, 1815- November 27, 1852) was an English mathematician who has been called the first computer programmer for writing an algorithm, or a set of operating instructions, for the early computing machine built by Charles Babbage in 1821. As the daughter of the famed English Romantic poet Lord Byron, her life has been characterized as a constant inner-struggle between logic, emotion, poetry, and mathematics during periods of failing health, obsessive gambling, and bursts of boundless energy.
All citations from: –https://www.thoughtco.com/ada-lovelace-biography-5113321
My overall impression of Ada from Chiaverini’s book is of a supremely intelligent woman entrapped by Victorian social mores. It didn’t take me long to start cursing her mother for all the cruel restrictions she imposed on her one daughter. Of course, later on we learn of the very large skeleton in the Byron family’s closet that may explain some of the mother’s behavior.
Ada Lovelace’s childhood was far different from that of most aristocratic young women in the mid-1800s. Determined that her daughter not be influenced by her literary rockstar father’s promiscuous lifestyle and moody temperament, Lady Byron forbad Ada from reading poetry, allowing her instead to be tutored strictly in mathematics and science. Believing it would help her develop the self-control needed for deep analytic thought, Lady Byron would force young Ada to lie still for hours at a time.
For a woman of her time, though, Ada had more freedom than many others, being from a wealthy, aristocratic family and the daughter of the era’s most famous poet. She was able to pursue her passion for mathematics and did produce an original invention.
In 1842, Babbage asked Lovelace to translate from French into English a scholarly article on his calculating machine written by Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea. Ada not only translated the article, but she also supplemented it with an elaborate analytical section she simply titled “Notes,” comprised of Note A to Note G. Lovelace’s seven notes, now revered as a milestone in the history of computers, contained what many consider to have been the first computer program—a structured set of instructions to be carried out by a machine. In her Note G, Lovelace describes an algorithm that would instruct Babbage’s Analytical Engine to accurately compute Bernoulli numbers. Today it is considered to have been the first algorithm specifically created to be implemented on a computer, and the reason Lovelace is often called the first computer programmer. Since Babbage never completed his Analytical Engine, Lovelace’s program was never tested. However, her process for having a machine repeat a series of instructions, called “looping,” remains a staple of computer programming today.
I wouldn’t say Enchantress of Numbers was a fabulous read, but I did finish the book. It is satisfying that Lovelace’s contribution to science is recognized.
another poem for my sister, who is doing better, blessed be God
Meanwhile the rain keeps raining
Though she can’t see me
And I can’t see her.
Meanwhile, as the squirrel leaps
Onto the wheel of peanuts,
The nurse says
She’s not going to crash anytime soon.
Meanwhile, though the snow is almost gone,
The wind is up
And the driveway is mud puddles,
The air around her is stale and antiseptic.
Meanwhile the cars whoosh
Along our road
The machines around her
Swish and tick and hum
Breathing for her.
How this book fell into my hands, I don’t recall now. It made a strong impression on me several years ago, memorable enough to be read again recently.
I have long been drawn to the Divine Feminine. She comes in so many guises, as Sophia, Shechinah, Mother God, and the Virgin Mary. In India, she has multiple aspects in the goddesses Shakti, Kali, Sarasvati, Lakshmi, and Durga. Greek mythology offers us Hera, Demeter, Aphrodite, and Athena. We have Kwan Yin and the White Tara.
I grew up culturally Jewish, if not the child of religiously observant parents. I had negligible familiarity with the New Testament. So when I picked up The Expected One, I started out on a new and wild ride through early Christianity. And I met up with the controversy over Mary Magdalene.
Back in 325 A.D. at the Council of Nicaea, Roman Emperor Constantine I and church bishops chose which gospels and doctrines would be the official documents of the Catholic Church. They rejected some existing gospels, which resulted in a specific viewpoint. The chosen books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John painted Mary Magdalene as a prostitute, a woman possessed by seven demons. One part of the story, though, couldn’t be eliminated: that Mary Magdalene was the first of the apostles to see the resurrected Jesus.
Other ancient documents came to light hundreds of years later. These told a different story, one that challenged the traditional Christian theology. In these writings, Mary Magdalene had a close relationship with Jesus. He chose her to continue his teaching. Joseph of Arimathea brought her safely to Alexandria, and from there, she traveled to southwestern France where she taught The Way. Her followers were known as Cathars, and their descendants live on in that part of France.
That’s one layer of the story. But the region’s folklore goes further, stating that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s wife. They had children, whose descendants can trace their line back to one of the offspring. And this is the story McGowan tells in The Expected One.
This novel offers the fascinating and surprising journey of Maureen Paschal, writer and professor, who gets swept up in a quest for the gospel written by Mary Magdalene. If you choose to read the book, be sure to read the Afterword as well, in which the author includes parts of the Magdalene gospel she couldn’t fit into the novel.
I was so intrigued by this information that I bought The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Jean-Yves Leloup.
Two more books by McGowan that continue the story are The Book of Love and The Poet Prince.
dedicated to all the medical workers, and especially those at Pomona Valley Hospital
Your hands are my hands,
since I can’t be there
to raise the bed,
to bring the pudding
to hold her hand.
Your voice is my voice
since miles muffle mine
to say words of comfort
to speak kindness
to tell hard, compassionate truths.
Your heart is my heart
since I’m so distant
to offer a warm smile
to give a gentle touch
to rest a cool hand
on her precious forehead.
If you believe it, does that make it true?
What is truth, anyway?
This question has come up more than once lately among my friends and writing colleagues. In this age of “fake news,” what have the sages said about truth? I thought I’d take a look.
truth
/tro͞oTH/
noun
That’s from Oxford Dictionaries online. Not much help, is it?
Here are some thought-provoking excerpts from Psychology Today:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201808/what-is-truth
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. –Thoreau
…In Plato’s Cratylus, on the philosophy of language, Socrates says that aletheia (Greek, ‘truth’) is a compression of the phrase ‘a wandering that is divine.’ (I love this phrase) Since Plato, many thinkers have spoken of truth and God in the same breath, and truth has also been linked with concepts such as justice, power, and freedom. According to John the Apostle, Jesus said to the Jews: ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’
…Today, God may be dying, but what about truth? Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, claimed that ‘truth isn’t truth,’ while Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s counselor, presented the public with what she called ‘alternative facts.’ Over in the U.K. in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, Michael Gove, then Minister of Justice and Lord Chancellor, opined that people ‘have had enough of experts.’
… Truth is a property not so much of thoughts and ideas but more properly of beliefs and assertions. But to believe or assert something is not enough to make it true, or else the claim that ‘to believe something makes it true’ would be just as true as the claim that ‘to believe something does not make it true.’ For centuries, philosophers have agreed that thought or language is true if it corresponds to an independent reality. For Aristotle, ‘to say that what is is, and what is not is not, is true.’ For Avicenna, truth is ‘what corresponds in the mind to what is outside it.’ And for Aquinas, it is ‘the adequation of things and the intellect’ (adæquatio rei et intellectus). Unfortunately for this so-called correspondence theory of truth, the mind does not perceive reality as it is, but only as it can, filtering, distorting, and interpreting it.
There’s the crux of the matter: our minds interpret “reality,” (whatever that is) and so we have the premise of the old Rashomon film: one event, multiple interpretations of the situation.
“The Rashomon effect describes how parties describe an event in a different and contradictory manner, which reflects their subjective interpretation and self-interested advocacy, rather than an objective truth.”— www.enwikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect
My quest for an answer quickly lands me in theology:
https://www.gty.org/library/Articles/A379/What-Is-Truth (John McArthur)
Here’s a simple definition drawn from what the Bible teaches: Truth is that which is consistent with the mind, will, character, glory, and being of God. Even more to the point: Truth is the self-expression of God. That is the biblical meaning of truth. Because the definition of truth flows from God, truth is theological.
Truth is also ontological—which is a fancy way of saying it is the way things really are. Reality is what it is because God declared it so and made it so. Therefore God is the author, source, determiner, governor, arbiter, ultimate standard, and final judge of all truth.
OK, but if we go with this, then who relays God’s truth to us? Trump? The Pope? Is anyone out there getting the word directly from God? The author of this article claims that truth is found in nature and in Scripture. He continues:
… Truth is not subjective, it is not a consensual cultural construct, and it is not an invalid, outdated, irrelevant concept. Truth is the self-expression of God. Truth is thus theological; it is the reality God has created and defined, and over which He rules. Truth is therefore a moral issue for every human being.
I can accept that truth and morality are closely connected. Onward!
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, we find a gathering of many thinkers on truth.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/ (Michael Glanzberg)
The problem of truth is in a way easy to state: what truths are, and what (if anything) makes them true. But this simple statement masks a great deal of controversy. Whether there is a metaphysical problem of truth at all, and if there is, what kind of theory might address it, are all standing issues in the theory of truth .* (for the complete outline, see below)
The coherence theory:
I don’t know about you, but this hasn’t gotten me much closer to the meaning of “truth.”
It is, as the Oxford Dictionary points out, easier to say what truth isn’t.
And that’s the truth.
*
for Jan
In the container of arugula,
past its sell-by date,
I pick through
the serrated leaves,
toss out the yellow pieces,
the slimy green bits
In the container of your abdomen
people in green scrubs
pick through your sad intestines
(long past the sell-by date)
all stuck together,
threatening rot.
Chop out the bad bits,
sew the good bits back together.
It’s easy with the arugula,
just toss it in
with some romaine (chopped)
a few cherry tomatoes
maybe some sunflower seeds
or leftover green peas.
The salad is ready
no time at all.
For you, though,
your skin tubes and tunnels must be reimagined,
reconfigured,
cleared of obstruction
for your digestion to proceed
according to precedent
for time to heal
for salad
to pass safely through.
The Karakesh Chronicles
Available from
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http://www.tangledmind.blog – for caregivers
Welcome again to everyone following my Tangledmagic.blog!
A bouquet of thanks to all my readers from Kim
Bimi Lightfoot’s faerie mother gave him away when he was a baby. But who is his father? Someday, Bimi promises himself, he’ll seek out both his parents. That day comes sooner than Bimi expects, when his faerie cousin, Liri Flare, sweeps him into the sky on a mission to steal a horse. Once away from his adoptive family, Bimi sets out to find his mother and learn the truth about his father. He gets help from some of the magical folk of Karakesh, but other encounters are downright life-threatening. Does Bimi find what he seeks on his quest?
Look for Growing Magic (I’ll let you know the launch date) and the other Karakesh Chronicles at
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Today I glue strips of colored fabric
on a round cheese box
to hold my bobbins
I think of your small intestine
glued together by scar tissue
As I spread Elmer’s glue
with a brush
your friend rushes you
to the emergency room
Strips of speckled blue cloth
along the edge of thin wood
strips of scar tissue
form adhesions
a blockage in a pink tube
Green ribbon shot with gold
orange flowers on pink
in a fan pattern
You in your blue cotton gown
tubes in your nostrils
turn the glue bottle upside down
waiting for the drip
while far away
the IV drips glucose into your veins
No solid food for you.
I squeeze the plastic bottle,
air wheezes back in
The tubes in your abdomen
suck the material away
I slide my brush over woven material
squares and rectangles of blue
and green hospital walls
I have a little cheese box covered with bright cloth.
I cannot cover the distance between us.
Written February 28, for my sister having surgery
The Karakesh Chronicles
Available from
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Tangled Magic 