sociology of high energy physics

   Sharon Traweek, "Beamtimes and Lifetimes", page 78:

    "There is, its seems to me, a cluster of subliminal messages in
    these picture captions; that science is the product of
    individual great men; that this product is independent of all
    social or political contexts; that all knowledge is dependent
    upon or derivative from physics; that only a very few
    physicists will be invited into the community of particle
    physics; and that the boundaries of particle physics are
    rigidly defined."

Hana Memorial

The Nash family came to Petrolia every summer from around 1982 to 1992 to spend two weeks of vacation enjoying our time together as a family, away from work for Peter and Judy, and school and also our other parent’s house for the rest of us kids.

            We would load up our huge white suburban van from our house on Granite Creek road in Santa Cruz, 5 bikes attached to the back, and full to the brim with clothes, art supplies and whatever else we needed for our trip.  We spent the night at the White Deer Motel near Willets and finished our journey the next day, stopping at Murishe’s in Redway to stock up on food for the lunches and dinners Judy would make, and our sugar cereals for the mornings- Captain Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms.

            We spent days on the Mattole river, swimming, making mudball tracks, skipping rocks.  At this cabin here on Evergreen way, we climbed this great Maple tree in the front yard, played Tiddly Winks, Monopoly, Poker.

            I particularly remember spending time with Hana, those summers.  Her creative energy was abundant with writing and art work, and organizing Rocky (then known as Elijah) and I in theater productions, which we performed for Petrolia neighbors, here in our cabin.

            Growing up with Hana in Santa Cruz, I was probably the brother who was closest to her.  Her spark and curiosity about people opened up the world of people’s inner lives in such an engaging way.  I studied math and physics, and though Hana did not engage in the same technical abstraction as I did, her questions and interest in my work could bring back my own love for the subjects.  Many times, when my enthusiasm for physics was flagging, Hana’s engaging interest could remind me of my early and true motivations. 

            Our conversations about our family were equally stimulating, ranging from how the trauma of the Armenian genocide had been passed down through the generations to how the quest of Herman Bernstein (my great grandfather) to understand the origins of war and honor the Jewish people weighed on us today.  Talking to Hana, life felt big and important.

            Hana and I grew apart over the years as she tried to find her place in the world as a sensitive artist and I pursued my own views and work in academics and science.  I worked with complex, ambiguous views of the world and our family, and Hana maintained a more childlike purity and certainty in her convictions.  I searched for a balanced picture where all the various parts of my family could coexist, and she focussed on the purity of those moments of togetherness and support where her creativity thrived, and she felt direct connection to the spirit of life.  I was in the process of mending together for myself the disparate pieces from the two sides of my family.  Hana was sympathetic, but following her own path.

            Even when we hadn’t been in touch for many months, Hana would be on my mind almost every day for the past ten years or so.  I often pictured her here in this cabin on Evergreen way, even years before she moved to Petrolia.  Sometimes, when I was off in New York, or in France, and my origins seemed so far away, I would picture returning to this cabin , where Hana would be there to offer me something that would be the key to reclaiming some lost part of myself.

            When Hana actually moved into this cabin, however, a few years back, it was very hard for me to accept.  I knew she was struggling, not finding the collaboration and respect she yearned for, and some slow process of mental illness was taking its course through her in both hidden and overt ways.  She claimed this cabin as her own, without giving reasons I could understand, and getting angry if questioned on this.  She needed a home and felt entitled to one.  I decided I would accept her living here, but withdraw my interest.  This would be Hana’s home, and not a home for me: the family concept I was working with: Nash/Hammer/Kamian/Silbert/Bernstein,  I would keep seeking elsewhere for the tenuous sense of extended family I had started to consolidate in my life.

            Spending time here in this cabin, a few months ago after Hana had disappeared, however, I felt that I rediscovered Hana’s perspective and her spirit.  Hana’s intesity of caring, aesthetic sense, and conviction was compelling and softened my heart.  I discovered the tape in the player next to her bed with her interview of her grandparents, Pares and Seto, looked through her books on Armenian culture and history, and other causes of social justice such as justice for the native Americans and African Americans.  I read some of her recent journal writing on restorative justice.

            I found the sense that the world is big enough for many different stories, and I finally felt ready to start exploring the meaning of our stories, mine and Hana’s with their points of commonality and their divergences, that of the Jews and the Armenians, American stories of immigration, settling in a new world, and being given the permission and encouragement to dream of a new world.  Sadly, though I am now ready to share again on this adventure with Hana, she is no longer here.

            I am grateful to Hana for the years we spent dreaming together.  And now that she is gone, I can only attempt to respect and love her spirit and her dreams and use that inspiration to help work for the creation of a more just world.

            I was talking with an old friend of mine, Josh Chang recently about his mom’s death, and he said that its sometimes appropriate to don rose-colored glasses in remembering loved ones who have died.  His mom, Jancy, was also an amazing creative soul, who descended into dementia at the end of her life.  I can understand this sentiment, but I’ve never been one for rose-colored glasses.  I’m a firm believer in looking into the depths, with its beauty together with its ugliness and challenges.  This is a slow process that takes energy and patience- finding a balanced view within a complex, fraught situation.

            Finding this balance in perspective and emotion with respect to Hana, who played such a large role in my life, will be an ongoing task for the rest of my life.  For today, I am grateful to gather together with family and friends from Petrolia to start this process together, as sad and confusing as it may be for all of us.

Textual analysis

I've been going to Saturday morning Shabbat services, and one of the many aspects I appreciate is the respect given to text- particularly the Torah and the Siddur (prayer service). There was a long time when I thought that the bible was not very interesting and problematic in many ways, and the focus on this particular text is a bit arbitrary. But the traditions and interpretations that build up around texts are valuable and represent important loci of knowledge of how communities can stick together and support each other. 

On a somewhat related point, I recently read about this incident where law professor Josh Blackman was invited to give a talk on the legal side of free speech at CUNY law school. A protest was organized and he was heckled and called a racist and oppressor and students attempted to intimidate him and prevent him from speaking. In the end, he stayed and engaged with the few students who wanted to hear him speak. He maintains an "originalist" interpretation of the US constitution, and is a member of the federalist society.

Now, both the Torah and US constitution have material that one may object to, but I'm getting more sympathetic to the view that one should take the original documents very seriously, and then work with how they have been interpreted over the years. Its too easy to just throw the whole thing away and think you can do a better job. Is this viewpoint making me a conservative? Perhaps. I like to think this is the basic perspective of an intellectual- someone who takes texts and ideas seriously and has some respect for traditions of interpretation.

Of course, some of the most repressive regimes arise out of taking texts to be immutable and implementing a rigid interpretation of their strictures. The important point to not lose is that there are different traditions of interpretation, and this is where one can push towards different outcomes. Tying these discussions to texts and referencing past interpretations gives one the wisdom of time to see how different textual interpretations have coexisted within communities or societies and what kinds of outcomes resulted.

Kaddish, poem by Dorothy Nash 1977

Kaddish

David is dead.

David my brother is dead.

    Yis gadal, v’yis kadash…

I was my brother’s keeper.

For a few short years

I was my brother’s keeper.

But time did change the roles

And he became my strength, my rock.

Now he is dead.

——-

From inherited memories of Russian pogroms,

From the sweatshops of New York,

From the hills of Massachussetts

To the cities of the world,

An urban and an urbane man

Whose clarion voice was ever heard

Against hypocrisy and cant;

He wandered

And stopped awhile

And traveled on again

Until he came to Susqeuhanna country.

Standing at his window,

Looking at the broad lawn sloping to the river:

Susquehanna and Chenango

And, from his childhood,

The Housatonic, too.

What wonderful river names

The old, sweet-sounding Indian names.

What wonderful country

The green and rolling hills,

The wild flowers of this land,

Goldenrod in golden waves,

And Queen Anne’s Lace

And purple mallow.

Now here at last he found his home,

His work, his friends, his people.

Susquehanna country.

——-

Can I say

That he is gone?

And must I cry forever?

For this I know

Beyond the tears,

Beyond the thrusting pain:

     All that he was

    Remains as long as memory remains.

—Dorothy Nash, (197?)

Portion of letter from Tel Aviv by my father

October 28, 1959
    
     Life on a kubbutz is a wondrous thing.  I could gladly spend my life here.  The people... every single one of them an idealist.  They are strong, they are smiling, they are beautiful.  There is much laughter and song here.  There is much togetherness:  as a community we eat and work, sing and play.  But often we can be alone to read, to listen to music, to wander along the beach.  There is complete freedom here.  One works with, not under.  There is no director, no boss.  Each person is an equal individual.

     Today as I was standing, pitch fork in hand, on a huge pile of green silage, I was exultant.  I was exultant looking first upon the many bales of golden hay, the neat houses with well-trimmed lawns, the barns, the cattle, the white waving wheat, the dark citrus groves, the deep blue sea, and then, all around us, grinning in defeat, the dry waterless desert.  There are still jackals on the sands, howling at night.  Here is something one can truly feel for.

     From nothing was this land conceived.  It is one of the driest, most sterile, rockiest places I have ever seen.  But Israel blooms.  There are green fields and cool orchards, gleaming white cities, immense irrigation projects.  And there are people!  People who have been persecuted for five thousand years.  Jews from Iraq and Morocco, Jews from Germany and Yemen.  And on their faces is not only the dream of a hundred generations, but the spirit of Israel today.  I have never felt so alive and aware as I am now.  I have never been so proud as I am now.  And I have never believed in anything so strongly as I believe in Israel.

Letter from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, 1963

Dear Mom and Dad,
     There are two fights here, and not one: the negro insisting upon his rights often takes second place to the internecine strife between the "Uncle Toms" who want to go slowly and take things easy, and the liberals who push and push-- sometimes so hard that they push themselves out of any Negro backing.  There are resignations and counter charges: the Pine Bluff Youth Movement becomes the Pine Bluff Progressive Movement and a new faction takes over.
     Seven months ago the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee sent a white field representative to Pine Bluff.  Bill Hansen is 24, dedicated, lives and dreams civil liberties.  He has had a very difficult time getting accepted by the Negro community(46% of the total population of Pine Bluff), but now is accepted wholeheartedly by the liberal faction and has been complained about to SNCC headquarters by the conservative Negro faction.  They want him out since one of his ideas is to fill up the jails.  His idea--which I subscribe to entirely-- is that once a kid gets sent to jail for freedom he is more than ever committed to the movement.
     I am living at Freedom House, the headquarters of the Pine Bluff movement.  There is another white boy from California.  What I do is difficult to say.  They won't allow us to picket or demonstrate or sit-in.  White agitators-- "nigger lovers"-- are the quickest means of starting violence.  Therefore, anything that we do must be circumspect.
     This afternoon, Governor Faubus spoke at the dedication of a new building at the Negro College.  Since yesterday, when I got here, I have been making posters for the kids to carry, such as
                                            Governer Faubus--
                                              Would you send Your children
                                                       HERE?
                                       ----------------------------------

                                        New Buildings Don't Teach--
                                        They only salve consciences.
                                       ----------------------------------

     Who carries these signs?  Who has sat in or lain in or stopped buying at certain stores?  Who has gone to jail repeatedly?  A bunch of negro kids whose average age is 15!  Many 13 and 14 year old girls.  There are a few older boys of 17 or 18.
     There is a terrific spirit here in the 15-year-olds.  Unfortunately, this age group is the only communication with SNCC though they have tried the high school and "college" ages with little success.
     Yesterday we arrived an hour or so before 25 kids were released after 3 days in jail for sitting in the public library and demanding that they be issued library cards.  It was amazing to see how sophisticated in the ways of non-violence they were and also how backwards they were in most of their education.  Adamant about civil rights and ambitions no higher than the army or being a bootlegger.  But to hear them talk!  How they walked into the paddy wagon with their heads up and singing freedom songs; how they insisted that their names be spelled correctly when booked-- that their parent's name have a Mrs. or a Mr. in front of it.  How they sang for 3 days in jail with only 1 meal all that time, with very little water in cells that were 120-130 Fahrenheit.  (It is 2 in the morning now and the temperature in this cool house with a big fan is about 85 degrees.)  How they had no mattresses and slept on the stinking, filthy floors, eaten by roaches and fleas.  How they sang until they were hoarse.  Many of these were kids who had just finished taking part in a sit-in where they were locked in a part of a restaurant, hundreds of whites were jeering outside and the owner threw in large Dixie cups of ammonia and acid after thoughtfully turning the heat up full blast in the middle of the day.  When some of the kids got sick and passed out, the other sit-inners panicked and tried to get out.  After someone was knocked through a plate glass window the rest got out and by some miracle only a few were hurt by the white mob outside.
     So these were many of the same kids who just got out of jail and yet they all picketed Faubus.  We couldn't go because we would be white agitators.  Therefore we strolled up to the college which was swarming with police and troopers.  We passed the first cordon of them-- just going to hear Faubus and nowhere in sight of a picket line--when a policeman stopped us and motioned us into his car because we "looked funny".  After all, not too many whites ever step on the premises of a negro college.  Then we were driven downtown and locked safely up in the city jail.  A short time later we were released.
     This evening we went to a mass meeting where there were spirituals sung, and the preachers exhorted the negroes to stand up, to fight, to register, to vote.

     All this in two days.  How much I can do is doubtful.  But we are working on some sort of education plan that perhaps can be of some service in.

     Do not worry.  We do not want to get into any violence or go to jail since we are told this only hurts the civil rights movement.
                                                       Love,
                                                       Peter

My dad travels to Iceland

August 1, 1965
Reykjavik, Iceland

Dear Dad,
     It is cold here in Iceland and the wind blows at almost all times, but always in the back of the wind.  Surrounding one wherever one goes is the silence of an island somehow removed from the rest of the world in time and space.  I walk along deserted roads that lead nowhere, through meadows filled with flowers blowing furiously in the wind and shining in the clear northern light that only goes out for about one hour every 24.
     After the South, with its hot, humid violent days, Iceland is just the place to be.  Nothing to do, few people to talk to and a chance to get to know myself as well as nature.  I walk a great deal: 7,8,9,10 hours a day along the great, deep fjords, from one tiny village to another, through the streets of Reykjavik.  My body feels hard and healthy.  I can respond well to the quiet beauty of Iceland.  It is eerie here the wild ponies running through the green meadows, the forbidding clouds, the ruins of a 1000 year old civilization, the days that never end, the nights that never come, the boiling springs, the glaciers.  Iceland is a place that exists in dreams, in old books.  I feel that I have stepped into another age.
     This is all vague -- no facts, just musings, just wanderings.  But for this month I shall continue to lead a vague wandering life that has no relation to my life at home or in school but maybe closer to me that my usual life.
     In the evenings, I read French poetry -- by day I walk.  Now-- this is all that I desire.
                                               Love,
                                               Peter

Letter from my father to his parents during the civil rights movement in 1965

                        Tuesday morning, July 12  (1965, Bogalusa, Louisiana)

Dear Mom and Dad,

            As usual, no one in the Civil Rights movement knows what will happen in advance.  You may have heard that the Voter’s League rejected the 30 day moratorium on marches and demonstrations suggested by the Governor.  Therefore we will probably march this afternoon without a permit, probably cross the river to the court house and there may be mass arrests.  I will march at the end as usual in my white coat but I will not get arrested if I can help it.  I’m more useful now out of jail.

            Marching is an amazing experience; one is reminded of the Roman prisoners being paraded back in Rome.  Shouts and curses by the onlookers, there are confederate flags waving everywhere and gangs of teen age boys walk along taunting us.  As a white and as an obviously medical personnel I am often singled out: white trash, they jeer and their favorite epithet: Nigger Ben Casey!

            Along side of us and separating us from the white Bogalusa populace are long lines of blue shirted state troopers carrying pistols, rifles, machine guns, billy clubs.  We are followed by a bevy of police cars, some canine corps filled with barking German shepherds and a school bus (to pick up the demonstrators and take them to jail) flying a confederate flag.  With all the police we are presumably safe.  So far, only one shooting incident has occurred.

            The Medical Committee is housed with a Negro family- the Smiths.  He works in the Crown-Zellerback corporation, is a deacon and carries a gun wherever he goes.  His wife is a deaconess.  When the Klan rides at night, all lights go out in the Negro community and men and women sit up on their rocking chairs talking and cradling their shot guns.

            The spirit here in Bogalusa among the Negros is very high.  Mass meetings are well attended.  Last night I heard Lomax speak: poetry, as well as a gift of $15,000 for the Bogalusa Voter’s league.

            It seems like a very long time that I have been down here in the South!  I suppose this is partly because each moment is made important by the fact that one cannot take anything for granted.  At night we are not supposed to drive except with an armed armed deacon.  Like the front lines of a war, there are things we can do, things we cannot.  We do not know what to expect.  Therefore the present becomes of much greater import.

            Dad—I am looking forward to your description of your trip, especially when you were in Hungary.  Mother, you should be leaving soon and therefore Bon Voyage.  Don’t worry—things are fine.  I’m looking forward to my trip to Iceland.

                                                            Love,

                                                            Peter

Stereotypes

     I was shopping at Trader Joe's this evening and as I finished putting my purchases on the counter, the cashier asked me in an oh so casual way how my day was going.   It took me aback.  I didn’t know how to answer.  He was approaching me like an old friend with good understanding of me, as if asking me how the whole scenario of US relocation was going.  But he had only known me for 30 seconds.

     As I sit at my computer, reflecting on this, the first frame that comes to mind is reverse culture shock.  I start to write from this perspective.  I start to contrast this experience in Trader Joe's to how I felt shopping in France, following a familiar storyline based around a simple binary between public warmth in the US and public coldness in France.

     On reflection, two thoughts emerge that complicate this story.  The first is that if I think back in more detail to my French shopping interactions, it is not a sense of rudeness that comes to mind (at least not in the majority of cases).  I actually remember how sweet the employees at Franprix were that I shopped at weekly in Grenoble.  No, they didn't ask me a lot of questions and get to know me personally, but they were certainly warm and welcoming to me.   It strikes me that they would not deign to intrude on my private life.  They would not assume familiarity with someone they have spent such a small time getting to know.  While it is certainly a more formal approach, it also leaves a lot of room for mutual respect, and a sense that one can navigate substantial personal difference within the frame of this respect. How do we deal with real difference if we start with this assumption that everyone is just like us?

     The second thought that occurs to me is that the way I felt taken aback by the employee at Trader Joes and other businesses in America is similar to the feeling I experienced with respect to the homeless people on the street in Grenoble.  They were sharp and impeccably friendly and polite and invasive of personal space.  These encounters actually really disturbed me because I felt like this person shouldn’t be on the street if they have the psychological accuity to peg me and my mood in 10 seconds and try to draw me in to a friendly conversation.  Why don’t they use these reserves of mental health and psychological strength to earn money in a more productive fashion? In contrast to many American beggars who often strike me as truly destitute and on the edge of health and sanity, I was not motivated to give money to many of the French beggars.

     In any case, I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from these reflections on public formality versus familiarity and similarities between customer service in the US and homeless beggars in France.  But it does remind me to pause and think for a moment before spouting off stereotypes.

Roots

As I prepare to leave Grenoble and start up a new life in Boulder, Colorado, I think about the moving process and also about what it means to have roots.

We often think of having roots in a country or in a region as meaning that we have a history there.  Our parents and grandparents and perhaps even many generations further back may have lived in this region.  This is an important definition of roots, and a powerful basis for a sense of belonging and embeddedness in one's life.

I want to consider a different definition of roots which is more directly related to the biological notion of plant roots.  Roots are a network that allows the plant to be nourished.  From this perspective, we can think of creating new roots in a more directed fashion.  In some ways, this is what I have attempted during my time in France.  For example, learning French is part of developing roots because it leads to such an array of connectedness and ability to communicate for practical needs, emotional connection, and general cultural belonging.  Knowing which grocery stores to go to, how to apply for a carte de sejour, and reading train and bus schedules is also a form of roots.

This line of thought also allows us to think about which kinds of environments may be suitable for us to live.  Some city or region may have many resources available to those who live there, but without the appropriately developed roots, one won't be able to take advantage of them and be nourished by them.

Of course, people aren't plants, but we all need nourishment, in so many different ways.  I think it is a valuable pursuit to start to make our roots in the world more visible!

Community?

Seeking community here.  The fog of language.  The separations.  “Les associations sont très figés,” I offer the group of Baha’i organizers who try to enthuse me about their vision of service and community growth at Achene's house in Fontaine.

            This is offered in response to a statement about how it is difficult to interface with the French associations.

            I try to develop my own sense of what positive work is in the development of community.  I log onto networked social software platforms like Twitter and Facebook, creating casual connections with people spread geographically.  Many I knew from before and I feel closeness and kinship.  But what is the common ground of life now?  An illusion of community is created.  It is illusory because we don’t actually have shared responsibility; or not by default, at least.

            The Baha’i group impresses me with its effectiveness, but as always, I wonder about that which is not said.  Only successes are shown.  They seem to have such a confidence in their rightness of approach.  But that approach is not up for discussion.  The answers lie in the writings of Bahá'u'lláh, their interpretations by Abdul Baha and translations by Shogi Effendi.  Why choose this body of writings to found a new society?  And why the reluctance to attempt to convince via the ideas and coherence and rightness of the vision?  Instead I see the flexibility of a group that wants to govern, and its principles will adjust to the circumstance.

            Wendall Berry writes about the value of community, and its role in protection of some human values.  He always insisted community be tied to a geographical particularity, a piece of land.  Only the ties and care for a particular piece of land is adeauate to create the shared identity and responsibility that fulfills the full sense of the word community.

            The Transcendental Meditation organization also seeks a new government, a new organization of world society, here based on the writings and person of the ellusive guru who called himself the Maharishi.  Here, the outreach is achieved by meditation and a highly unlikely link made to quantum field theory.

            But with TM, the inward turn is encouraged.  Indeed, through this turning inward, the benefits to society are assumed to flow.

            How do we form a local community when so many have origins elsewhere?  I look to my own family history, Jews dispersing from a misty Eastern Europe of my imagination.  Shtetls in Ukraine and Moldova, complex political background in the Lithuanian city of Vladislovov on the German-Russian border.  My step-mother’s Armenian relatives fleeing a hostile Turkey, marching through desserts to Lebanon and Syria.

            And now I’ve gone back across the Atlantic, following abstraction, mathematics and science, trying to settle in a mountain surrounded cuvette of Grenoble.  Does it do my own life justice to imagine there will be a complete stopping of this generational motion?  Will I integrate into an old community, adding my spice and flavor to the mix?

            The loose ties on the digital, social networks can drain meaning from attempts at coherent social organization.  But they also create new possibilities, hinting at new stabilities.

On moving beyond messes and swamps

I've often conceived of various topics that I pour huge energies into as 'messes'.  Perhaps a 'swamp' is another way of conceiving it.  It is slow moving, and one may sink and be lost if not careful.

I suppose everyone must have their messes and swamps in life.

If I have approached mine in a slightly more intelligent way than others might, perhaps it is in that I try to recognize what I am doing as early as possible.  When one knows that one is working on a mess, one doesn't have overly grand expectations to come out of the work with something clean and easilly presentable.

Lately I've felt a bit lost again, like I took on one too many messes and truly lost my way this time.

What are some of these messes?  Family history has been one for me, although I feel like this is less of a mess now than it used to be.

Non-linear dynamics in accelerator physics has been another one of these messes.  I also feel like this is less of a mess.

But in both the case of family history, and non-linear dynamics for accelerator physics, I feel a kind of disappointment.  I feel like now that I can see things a bit more clearly, what I see is not beautiful enough to have justified the amount of torment these topics caused me.

I suppose the issue is that in both cases there has been a kind of trauma hiding there that obscured the topic.  It made it look like the topic was about one thing, when that was really just a very small part of the topic.  In the case of non-linear dynamics, that topic was normal form theory.  In the case of my family history, it was the story of the Armenian genocicde.  Not that both these topics aren't important in their own right, but due to a story of trauma, they have magnified themselves out of proportion until they sat in conceptual and emotional territory that did not belong to them.

In some way, the life of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is still doing that for me.  He was someone who should not have been such a big man, but through self-aggrandizement, took up more space than he deserved.  Reading his writings and debating his legacy thus becomes a kind of mess that I continue to fall in.

It can be hard to give up on something when one realizes that it isn't as great as one initially thought.  One is left with a lot of disappointment and with the job of seeing that one has a lot less than one thought.

History through family history

I continue with the story of my granparents, Dorothy and Acatius, following through my grandfather's finishing his medical thesis at the University of Geneva in 1933 and then moving to New York.  My father was born in 1938 in Astoria.  Several years later, they moved to Los Angeles, living in Los Feliz, near Hollywood.  We then get into more familiar territory, where I have heard a few stories from my dad about his childhood.  This puts him pre-baby boomer.  I know from some of his poems some of the stories as well.  And I know some of his friends that shared this time with him.

I write out of a need to fill in gaps.  I uncover a fact with a date and I polish it and use it to illuminate its surroundings and act as a tack on which to pin a quilt that creates a fabric that holds.
Today I add a tack for Los Angeles, 1950.  Now I just to fill in the time between then and 2014.
Or perhaps it will be 2020 before this happens.

LA, 1950 is a satisfying tack to place.  It includes my mother who was also living in LA at that time, born in 1943.

The gap includes the civil rights movement (1954-68).  It includes the 60's and the Vietnam War and the hippie movement that developed to some extent in opposition to the war.  There was also the Diggers of 1968 in San Francisco. And I suppose this is the time I was really born out of.

The story of my paternal grandparents

I continue trying to put together pieces of family history.  On my father's side, I try to understand his parents, how they met, and something of the history.  I have three years of letters written between my grandparents, written mostly in French.  I have been trying to learn what I can from these letters.

My father's mother Dorothy was born in 1907 in New York.  Her father was the journalist, diplomat, and Jewish activist Herman Bernstein who imigrated to America around 1895, originally from current day Lithuania.  In 1929, Dorothy and her sister Violette took a trip abroad to France to study French  at the Institut de Touraine in Tours.  There, Dorothy met a Hungarian medical student, Akos Nasch.  They started a relationship, but several months later, Dorothy and Violette moved to Grenoble to continue studying French, and Akos remained in Tours.

Dorothy and Akos continued to write letters to each other even after Dorothy returned to the US- to New York and to Sheffield, Massechussetts.  Later, in 1930, Dorothy returned to Europe again, and met Akos in Oradea and they were married in September.  A second wedding was performed a month later in Tirana, Albania, where Herman was the US embassador under King Zog.

Akos had some trouble with medical school in France, and continued on in Geneva.  Dorothy lived with him sometimes in Geneva, and sometimes with her parents in Tirana.  In 1933, Akos finished his medical school (his thesis title was "Ostéomyélite des Adolescents: Considérations à propos de deux cas d'ostéomyélite du radius", and a Google book reference is here.)  After completing the thesis, Akos moved to New York to meet Dorothy who was already living there.  He worked at the Beth Israel hospital, Dorothy's father having helped get him the post.

My father was born in Astoria in 1938.  There are certainly many more details to tell, but some of it is still murky to me.  I would like to understand more about Akos' Hungarian family.  It is complicated by the fact that where they lived switched between Hungarian to Romanian territory following the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. I understand that Akos' father was a prisoner of war by the Russians during WWI.  Surviving this experience, he vowed to become a devout Jew.  I still have relatives today in Oradea.  Akos and Dorothy were able to help many of Akos' relatives imigrate to the US before WWII, but still many were sent to die in the concentration camps.

trip to midwest US

In the Spring, 2014, I will go to visit my mom and step-dad in Iowa. They live in Fairfield at the Maharishi University of Management. I've gotten used to the idea that they will live there the rest of their lives, so yearly visits will be a part of my life.  Its a distance of 6,500 miles from Grenoble to Iowa and is a 7 hours time difference.

What do I do around there? Fairfield has around 10,000 people, many, but not all are part of the Transcendental meditation organization. Some nearby towns include Mt. Pleasant and Ottumwa. Lake Darling State park is nearby. Its not far from the Mississippi river. I can visit Hannibal Missouri, and the house of Mark Twain, or Bentonsport. Near Hannibal is the Meredosia Wildlife refuge.  I could visit the Meskwaki Settlement of native Americans not so far away. They lived along the Saint Lawrence river. They were allowed to purchase land in 1851. They are similar to the Sac and Fox nation centered in Shawnee Oklahoma.

Some larger cities in Iowa are Iowa City and Dubuque.  Dubuque is along the Mississippi.  The University of Iowa is in Iowa City.

I can fly to Chicago OHare airport, and spend some time in Chicago. I can visit the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright. There's good deep dish pizza in Chicago.   Fairfield is 231 miles from Chicago.

Regarding TM itself, I try to appreciate it as a religion. I've been reading the book by Lola Williamson about TM as a Hindu inspired Meditation Movement. I appreciate seeing it as a part of a larger whole, within religious development. She emphasizes how Hindu elements have been combined with American elements, such as the American idea of freedom of religion, and combining some of Emerson's transcendentalism. She also suggests that Maharishi may have engaged secretly in Tantric practices which he may have partially learned from Shankaracharya Saraswati.

What is data? A few reflections

I recently finished reading “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot.  It tells the stories of the woman behind the HeLa cell line.  The cells coming from Lacks’ cervical cancer take on a life of their own after her death.  Henrietta, the woman, dies, and HeLa, the cell-line is born.

As Skloot tracks down Henrietta’s family and tries to uncover the personal stories of the past and present, one feels that the human side of Henrietta is given some life again.  A poignant scene occurs when Skloot accompanies Henrietta’s daughter Deborah and son Zakariyya to a cell biology laboratory at Johns Hopkins, and is given a glimpse of her mother’s still living cells:  (p. 265-266)

Deborah and Zakariyya stared at the screen like they’d gone into a trance, mouths open, cheeks sagging.  It was the closest they’d come to seeing their mother alive since they were babies.

After a long silence, Zakariyya spoke.

"If those our mother’s cells," he said, "how come they ain’t black even though she was black?" "Under a microscope, cells don’t have a color," Christoph told him. "They all look the same—they’re just clear until we put color on them with a dye.  You can’t tell what color a person is from their cells."  He motioned for Zakariyya to come closer.  "Would you like to look at them through the microscope?  They look better there."

Christoph taught Deborah and Zakariyya how to use the microscope, saying, “Look through like this…take your glasses off…now turn this knob to focus.”  Finally the cells popped into view for Deborah.  And through that microscope, for that moment, all she could see was an ocean of her mother’s cells, stained an ethereal fluorescent green.

"They’re beautiful,” she whispered, then went back to staring at the slide in silence.  Eventually, without looking away from the cells, she said, “God, I never though I’d see my mother under a microscope— I never dreamed this day would ever come.”

This book got me thinking about the question of the relationship between science and people.   What does it mean to look at something in a scientific way?  Is it necessarily dehumanizing?  I think an important element in looking at this question surrounds the topic of “data”.  What is data?

I’m used to thinking of data in the context of my life as a scientist.  Data is the result of a measurement.  Data are attached to well defined scientific constructs such as temperature, pressure, lengths, times, densities, etc.  In the narrow context of my own field of electron beam dynamics, a measurement typically involves the beam current, its time dependence, the size and shape of this electron bunch distribution, the spectrum of x-rays emitted, etc.  Using measuring devices, we determine the values of these different quantities.  The results are considered data, sometimes good, sometimes not so good.

I find the question of what is data to be relatively straight forward and uncontroversial in this context.  But when I consider data in a broader context it seems as though its meaning is both less clear, and more important to clarify.  Consider experiments done on the HeLa cells, on Henrietta’s cells.  One may think in a concrete scientific context about these cells.  How big are they? What is the genomic structure?  How frequently do they replicate? etc.  These questions may be thought to produce data.  But what sets the facts about the answers to these questions apart from the many other facts about the living or dead body of this woman, Henrietta Lacks?  Is it being couched in scientific terms that turns a fact into data?

I had a realization about this question yesterday as I was reading through some letters I have which date from 1929 and are written between my grandparents on my father’s side.  My grandfather, Acatius, or Akos, was born in Poklostelek, Hungary in 1908, and in 1929 was attending medical school in Tours, France.  My grandmother, Dorothy was born in New York in 1907, and in 1929 was also in Tours, France with her sister Violet studying French.  These letters give a window into the beginning of their relationship at this time.

I realized that because I know so little about the facts of my grandparents lives, that I was thinking about these letters in terms of data.  Each letter could provide some clue that would allow me to test hypotheses about who my grandparents were.  I was building an inner model, and I could check it for consistency as I read more letters.  Was my grandfather a thoughtful person?  Was he kind?  How did he see the world?  I realized that it is in the framework of asking these questions that I can view the letters my grandparents wrote to each other as data.   Without the associated imaginative task, the letters are not data.  I turned them into data by my asking specific questions about them.

This reminds me of this fascinating post on The Frailest Thing entitled “From Memory Scarcity to Memory Abundance” in which Sacasas reflects on the meaning of increased use of recording technologies and on Barthes’ veneration of a single photograph of his mother.  From a perspective of data, we can mainly look on the lack of more photographs as a tragedy.  There’s just not enough data for Barthes to build a proper model of his mother.  But once stated, we realize the potential absurdity of this.  Barthes knew his mother.  He was not trying to uncover something unknown in the process of viewing this photograph.  The relationship was not one of a scientist to data, but one of a son towards his mother.  

Reading Skloot’s narrative of Henrietta Lacks, and about how so much was learned about cell biology, we see that Lacks herself, and her surviving family gained very little directly from this work.  We might say that Lacks’ cells became data.  And they became data precisely because someone was asking certain kinds of questions about them.  In particular, people were trying to understand cell biology, and the HeLa cells provided much data for associated questions and modeling.  We might compare this to today’s so-called “big-data explosion”.   There is a sense in which there is newly created data due to people’s increased use of digital communications which may be perhaps quantified more easily than analog communications.  But I don’t think its the quantification that makes it data.  Yes, we talk in general about data on a hard drive.  But we might also talk about files on a hard drive, or images on a hard drive, or to go in the other direction, we could talk about magnetic domains and regions of varying polarity.  It is only if someone asks questions and tries to build a model that we might consider the scattered computer files, and records of typed comments on social media, and voice recordings through skype and cell phones to be data.

This perspective then allows some push-back in the privacy debate when we are told that we create “data traces” whatever we do.  We can respond by asking about the sense in which the traces are really data.  What are questions being asked?  What are the interpretive models being built?  And from the history of scientific experimentation, we can understand that there ought to be some limitations and framework in place regarding the transformation of elements of our lives into data.

Traditions

I'm looking through my photos, and trying to figure out what to do with them; how I might organize them, and how I might create and find meaning in them.

One set of pictures I'm interested in are the pictures related to my Jewish heritage which was mainly transmitted via my grandparents on my mom's side, and the traditions we celebrated at my dad's house, such as Christmas.  Here is a photo of two photos- the lower one of myself and my older brother during Christmas time at my Dad's house, the upper one of the celebration of my older brother's Bar Mitzvah, with my Grandfather placing the tallis around his shoulders.

In neither case did the tradition itself seem particularly important.  Although we had other Jewish friends, and went to Hebrew school, I don't think any of my brothers ever identified all that strongly with the religion of Judaism.  We were cultural Jews.  The traditions were important to my Mom's parents, and we loved our grandparents.  Being a Jew was mainly associated with our visits to Los Angeles to see our Grandparents on Passover and Hanukkah, and our Bar Mitzvahs in which our Grandparents came to Santa Cruz to visit us.  There were many family members related to my Grandparents, and also my aunt and uncle and cousins on my Mom's side.

For holidays at my Dad's house, we were with our step-brother and sister, and sometimes my step-mother's family as well.  We didn't often see many of my dad's family members such as his brother or cousins.  But Christmas was a fun time with a tree, presents, and good food.

As I start to think about what kinds of traditions I want to develop and continue in my life, I look back to my experience and try to draw together the elements that I appreciated regarding family, culture and religion.  I suppose this will be a long path, and indeed, I've been on it for awhile.  But I continue to walk along it, and putting these pictures together and forming a kind of larger picture that feels healthy and whole is part of this process.

In addition to a tradition being something fun and somewhat consistent from year to year, I think traditions ought to have some kind of meaning.  They should be thought of in a larger context than just the present.  In considering carrying on Jewish traditions, I can draw from my history on my mom's and my dad's side.  Regarding my Dad's side, this is a description of the history and background of my great-great grandfather David Bernstein, written by Hillel Bernstein, my great-grandfather's brother.

My father David was an Eshkenazi, a descendant of the mass of Jews emigrating eastward from Germany, in the 13th century after persecutions there.  These settled in places like Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania (that is, what later became Rumania), Russia.  The majority went to Poland and Russia.  Eshkenazi, as I remember, was the Hebrew word for Germany.  The other great migration was from Spain two centuries later, and these were the Sephardic Jews, most of whom headed south towards the Mediterranean countries, the Levant, etc., and the first Jewish settlers in New York, in 1654, were Sephardic Jews who came from one of their great stopping places after Spain -- Holland.  In the 17th Century my father's forebearers were in East Prussia, in the capital city of Koenigsbert.  That was, of course, before the Prussians took it over in the Partitions of Poland, and it previously had a Polish name which I don't remember.  Anyway, his people had moved from there and my father was born in a town which was on the German-Russian border, both sides of which had originally been Polish, but had been annexed, one side by Germany or Prussia, the other side by Russia.

Within this complex history together with the stories of immigration from my Mom's family, also Jews from Eastern Europe, I can seek some commonality.  We weave a thread ourselves, certainly.  It is not always obviously sitting there to be found.  But one must at least have the material and the context before a solid thread can indeed be woven.

Where we live, our roots, our commitments

I live in Grenoble, France.  I am doing my best to build a life here.
At the same time, I keep up my connections to my friends and family in the US.

I realized that if I stay in France and keep up visits to the US, these visits must involve the west coast, the east coast, and in between as well.  I come from California, and will probably always maintain the strongest sense of belonging there.  At the same time I spent three years in New York, and have relatives and a few friends there, so I will probably maintain a connection and visits to that area as well.  My US driver's license for now is in New York, so I ought to think of myself as at least somewhat connected to the place.  Finally, my mother lives in Fairfield, Iowa, and asks me regularly to visit her more often.  Its not so easy to get to where she lives, multiple flights involved and then some driving at the end.  The biggest city nearby is Chicago, and so I think of Chicago as the place to base visits to my mother out of.

This summer is a trip to California.  Just saying that is not adequate, though because California is such a big state.  My visit will involve three distinct regions: south, central and north.  I'll visit my uncle and other relatives in San Diego and Los Angeles (south).  I visit friends and a few relatives around San Francisco and Santa Cruz area (central), and finally family in Petrolia in Humboldt county (north).

I'd like to have been able to build my life out of a smaller geographical base, but this is where life has taken me.  I didn't ask for family and friends to move, although I'm the worst offender of all, having relocated first across the country, and then across an ocean.

There are lots of considerations as for how to build a life out of these places which span three US states and two countries.  There is one's relation to formalized nations and systems of rules of law.  Taxes, for example.  Bank accounts and credit cards.  Driver's license.  Passport.  Residency card.  Belonging to health care systems. 

Then there are ethical and social considerations.  To which nation do I owe my time and allegiance?  If I am this spread out, can I possibly be a responsible citizen, supporting a sustainable lifestyle that doesn't use more resources than the earth can support?

In any case, there are times for expansion in life, and times for consolidation.  I am trying to consolidate and build something with what I have now, rather than doing further expansion.

What helps me in this process is to try to see my life and places I live and visit as a part of a larger whole.  I think back to the movings of my recent ancestors from the Pale of Settlement between Europe and Russia to Europe and Canada, and ultimately the US, mostly during the early 20th century.  Seeing the history of my own relatives in a larger context allows me to feel a part of the big story of human life, change, and development.

From a different perspective, the natural world is a unifying factor for me.  Finding some of the same species of plants in Grenoble and California is satisfying and grounding to me.  The health of an ecosystem and the dynamics of chemistry, biology and ecology working together in different areas around the world is a resting point to come back to and relate oneself to. I feel at home in a forest, wherever it is on the earth.

My Grenoble apartments thus far

I've lived in three different apartments so far in Grenoble.  The first was found by an agency that my work helped me with.  It was in the San Bruno district, on the top floor of the building(4th, I believe, which would be 5th in US).  It was furnished, and not so bad, but it got extremely hot in the summer, and the pipes froze in the winter, leaving me without water for a few days here and there.  Also, the neighborhood was not so great, being regularly checked out to see what drugs I might be interested in.  And notes were placed in the entry corridor requesting people to not dispose of their hypodermic needles in the main garbage area.  I felt isolated there and was not able to meet many people in my apartment building.  So after a year of this place, I decided to try to find a shared apartment (colocation in French).

I responded to an ad for a shared apartment with four renters total, and set up a meeting with the landlord ('propriataire').  The apartment was just north of Villeneuve, on Rue Le Notre. He told me that three women lived there (two French and one Spanish), and after hearing I had a decent salary, accepted me immediately.  I was glad to live with women, and thought that I'd be a decent, respectful flatmate.  At the same time, it seemed strange that the landlord put so little effort into checking with the people living there whether they agreed to have me living with them.  It turned out that at a later time, I would be on the other end of this uncomfortable situation, but I'll have to tell that story another day.  In any case, I lived at this place for another year before getting completely fed up with it, and looking for another place to live.

My second colocation was in a better location, right near the downtown, on the other side of the Isére river, on Rue Saint Laurent.  It is the oldest part of town, and is next the longest line of Italian restaurants I've ever seen anywhere.  This place was convenient because everything was included in the rent, along with someone who would clean the common areas once a week.  It was a little small, though.  70 square meters with four people, even though one was only there a few days a week.

In any case, the time has come to try to find something a little better, and I'm in the process of searching for a new apartment for myself.

One challenge is that rental agencies sometimes require a guarantie of some kind.  If you have family in France, you can have a family member sign for you.  The main rule is just that your monthly salary should be three times the cost of the rental each month.  This is fine for me, but the additional guarantee is not so easy.  (I can get something called LocaPass, though it appears I have to pay a substantial amount for this coverage.  I'm trying to understand this point, and have heard mixed things so far.) This creates an additional uncertainty because I may think I can rent an apartment, give notice to my current apartment, and then be told that I don't have this document, and so they give the apartment to someone else.

So far I've looked at three or so apartments, and I liked one of them a lot.  I have two more to look at before deciding to go with this one.  But this added uncertainty of not knowing if I will get the apartment due to my poor French, or some issue with paperwork makes it more challenging.

learning French, reading material

Since I mostly speak English at work, and I find it rather hard to escape from the French people who want to improve their English, and the English speakers who have little interest in speaking (and reading/writing) French, I have to find my own ways to motivate myself to continue ahead in deepening my French.

One approach is reading.  I picked out some topics of interest, found books that I hoped to not be too difficult, and try to learn all the words in the books.  I have a book of Jewish stories: "Contes Juifs" by Leo Pavlat.  I have "Le Petit Prince" by Antoine de Sainte-Exupery.  I have a book on avalanches: "Avalanches, Connaître et comprendre pour limiter le risque" by François Sivariére (the former director the the synchrotron Pascal Elleaume was killed in an avalanche 2 years ago, and it is in general a relevant topic for this region of the world).  I have "3 Contes D'Afrique" in the series of Père Castor, a book on Californie, "Le Petit Nicolas" by Sempé and Goscinny, "L'homme qui plantait des arbres" by Jean Ciomo, a book on Biodiversite (I. Aublin and M. Boulavant), some comics (BD, or bande designe) such as Tin Tin and Asterix et Obelix, and others.  Also, recently my mom sent me two short stories, "La Derniere Classe" by Alphonse Daudet and "Le grand Michu" by Émile Zola.

I also have a lot of books on grammar, (the series is Grammaire Progressive du Français by CLE International.  I have Niveau intermédiare, with the Corrigés.  Together with this is Communication Progressive du Français and Phonétique Progressive du Français) I have "501 French Verbs" by Barron's, I have a French-French dictionary, (mini Larousse, and a larger one) and a French-English dictionary (also Larousse, "Anglais").  I have a visual dictionary, "Dictionnaire visuel" by Nathan publishers (actually its French, English, German, Spanish and Italien).