The Mystery of Joan of Arc

I have been reading Mark Twain’s book (a free online version) about Joan of Arc. As in Connecticut Yankee, Twain presented Joan of Arc as an eyewitness account. According to the legend, Jeanne d’Arc was a sweet and holy little girl in Domremy in eastern France. She seemed to be utterly perfect, as well as beautiful, like Mary Poppins only very humble. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, she became a military heroine. Nobody who knew her, friends or family, could understand why this happened. She claimed that several saints, and the archangel Michael, had told her that she was the one to rescue France from English rule and to crown the Dauphin, the prince, to be the king of France. And somehow, despite numerous setbacks, she got even her opponents to believe and support her and follow her as she went to see the Dauphin. She had no military training, had never killed anything or anyone with a sword or spear. Like most country children, she could ride a horse. She claimed she would, personally, lead the French army to victory over the English.

This photo is from a church in Strasbourg, France.

At that time, the French army was totally demoralized, and simply accepted the English rulership that had been imposed since the battle of Agincourt. To oppose the English would be suicidal, they thought. But Joan convinced them God would support the French victory.

And the French won against the English army that was gathered at Orleans. Joan was only seventeen years old when the Dauphin, now king, made her the general of the French armies. Almost immediately afterwards, her church enemies had her burned at the stake on what the church now considers trumped-up charges. Almost immediately after this, her case was reconsidered and she was sanctified. She is now one of the great legends of history.

Great uncertainty will always remain about what really happened. Alternative interpretations of the Joan of Arc legend have been presented. Some have claimed that she was mentally unstable, which means she imagined the little voices in her head, or that she had Menière’s disease (an affliction of the inner ear) which means she actually heard sounds but they were not voices. James Phillips and colleagues say that all claims of medical or psychiatric disorders of St. Joan are unconvincing. The claim that she was actually not a simple country girl but was a bastard daughter of the previous king does not explain how she could have, despite weakness and youth, led armies to victory. If indeed she did convince the Dauphin that she was his bastard sister, why would he have let her lead the army instead of doing it himself? The claim that she was a witch substitutes one incredible explanation for another.

Maybe she was crazy, and this made her able to speak her message with utter sincerity and without hesitation. The disillusioned French might have been waiting for just such a person to appear on the scene. The human mind is not a logic machine. Under the right conditions—and nobody can predict exactly what these might be—even the best human minds can believe anything. Among the right conditions are that the human brain’s built in bullshit-detector has to get fooled, something that only a truly and sincerely crazy person can do.

I, like thousands of others, will make my pilgrimage to her birthplace Domremy-la-Pucelle (pucelle means virgin) and walk in the garden where she is supposed to have had her first visions. I will wander and wonder. Domremy is only a two and a half hour drive from where I now live, much closer than Paris. I will wait until my grandchildren are a little older and can appreciate history a little better. If I have any new insights at that time, I will let you know.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all—and one I have not heard reported before—is that this story, of the seventeen-year-old girl leading an army to victory, has happened at least twice and possibly three times or more in history. I will complete this thought in a subsequent essay.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 1. When Pigs Fly

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection. But his fiction usually contains a lot of thought-provoking religion.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly (reviewed here); The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth; The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

The first story, When Pigs Fly, is about an American woman (Wendy) who wandered away from her Muslim heritage (she was Wafa before). Then one day, God appeared in the sky. Only, unlike Rice’s novel Glass Cathedral, it was Al-lah, not the Christian God. God said he was going to kill reprobate former Muslims, but He was going to give Wafa an extra chance, since, He said, He just likes her. His only rule is to stay away from pork and pork products.

Wafa rejoins the mosque in which she grew up, in Oklahoma, and thinks she is obeying Al-lah. She has even dedicated her life to making the world better, by getting a college degree in biology. But in her biotechnology class she discovers that pig genes have been sliced into the DNA of almost all crop plants, and that she and all her fellow Muslims have been eating pork without realizing it. So, God killed all of them.

My science blog readers will be interested in the biotechnology by which pig genes are inserted into vegetables. But the question for my religious readers (this blog) is, would God ever do anything like this? Of course not, although a lot of religious people do not realize it. A relationship with God is different for each person, and is a whole life history, rather than a mindless following of one or a few rules. Christians, and Muslims, need to understand this.

Plantation Odyssey, a Short Novel by Stan Rice, part three. Payback Time!

When Odysseus returned to his mansion on the island of Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey, he found it besieged by the leading men of Ithaca, each of whom wanted Penelope to choose him as her husband. Penelope, besides being disgusted by them, still believed Odysseus would return. Then he did. Then what? Just what you would expect from a two-thousand year old story: Odysseus kills all of the men and reunites with Penelope.And this is what happens in Stan Rice’s novel Plantation Odyssey as well.

 

The local plantation owners (or former owners, as the Union army had displaced them) who lived around the plantation where Penelope (Penny) and Ulysses had been slaves insisted that Penny would choose one of them as her husband and therefore as the owner of the estate. They thought she would choose the one with the best barbecue. Then Ulysses returns disguised as her former servant Minerva (Minnie). It is so difficult for Ulysses to keep his disguise as Minnie a secret. Minnie just happens to know as much botany as the lost Ulysses did. S/he and Penny put poisonous mushrooms in the barbecue. While the men are sick from toadstool poison, Minnie (who has turned back into Ulysses) kills all of them, including the one decent white man, whom they offered a chance to live but he stayed with his social peers.

Rice’s motivation in this short novel is very clear. He is fantasizing about payback for oppression. Rice is not Black, but (as indicated by his science book Forgotten Landscapes, he is Cherokee, and his science book reflects a clear anger at what whites have done to Native Americans. He apparently identifies with Blacks as well in this novel.

Rice seems to encourage people of color to be resentful of whites. While some readers might think this is not helpful, in this time in which racial tensions are flaring, I agree with the author that the resentment of people of color against white suppression throughout history and even today is justified and has a place in modern literature. We need to hold the white race accountable for what we have done in the past. Donald Trump’s blasts against Juneteenth and Harriet Tubman show that conservatives would still like to suppress white America’s admission of slavery in our history.

I very much doubt that Rice’s novel, even though it celebrates violence against slave owners in the Civil War, will lead to any violence, or even protests, on the part of Blacks which would not have occurred anyway.

Parasol or umbrella?

 

We usually call them umbrellas, without thinking that the word umbrella means “little shade.” When parasols became fashionable among women in the nineteenth century, it was about the only way that they could find any shade. And that is because the nineteenth century was the time in which westerners cut down as many trees as possible, as if they were enemies or impediments created by God just to vex us.

Of course, trees are perhaps the ultimate blessing of creation. The photosynthesis of their leaves puts oxygen into the air, removes carbon dioxide from the air, and create cool shade. The trunks transported massive amounts of water from the soil into the air, creating clouds. The roots held the soil in place. Trees created new soil; their shed leaves were mulch, which held moisture in the soil. You can read all about it in my book Green Planet.

We take parks for granted. Of course every town has at least one. But this is a new way of thinking that westerners did not have until late in the nineteenth century, when Frederick Law Olmsted created the concept and oversaw the creation of municipal parks, starting with Central Park in New York but extending all over America. Europe did it too. As a result, it was not as important to have a parasol as it had been before; to get out of the sun, just duck into the shade of a tree. The new concept created by Olmsted has transformed our world. Think about this next time you park or walk in the shade.

Plantation Odyssey, A Short Novel by Stan Rice, part two. Timeless Adventures

This novel by Stan Rice, about the adventures of a slave boy named Ulysses, shows the hellish unfairness of black slavery in what became the Confederacy.

But Plantation Odyssey is closely modeled after Homer’s Odyssey. If you know nothing about Homer’s epic poem, you will be lost in reading this novel. Here is a parallel list of the events in the original and new Odyssey.

• As the Greek Odysseus went home, he first fell among the drug-addled Lotus Eaters. The slave Ulysses stayed with a dirty man who ate only cattails from a swamp.
• Both Odysseus and Ulysses encountered a Cyclops, a monster with one eye, who raised sheep and ate humans.
• Odysseus encountered the enchantingly beautiful Circe, beloved of birds and animals. Ulysses encountered Sissy and romped with her on her bed of moss. Rice combines Circe with the country song Wolverton Mountain.
• Odysseus visits hell, where he talks with dead heroes including Achilles. He has to offer them a bowl of blood before they will talk. Ulysses the slave visits hell, which is a gigantic fleshpot of endless struggle, where he meets his former owners who are now dead. After Ulysses offers them whiskey (which would you rather have, whiskey or blood?), they tell him how to find the path back to the plantation.
• Both Odysseus and Ulysses are trapped by a sex goddess named Calypso until they convince her they are serious about going home to their old wives.
• Odysseus is enchanted by the irresistible singing of the Sirens, then is shipwrecked, and rescued by women, including Nausicäa. Ulysses hears the beautiful singing of a chorus of Cherokees hidden in a swamp.
• Odysseus and Ulysses are both transformed into forms that can be recognized only by close observation: Odysseus into an old man and Ulysses into a Black woman.

In the next essay, what happens when Ulysses returns to the plantation!

Plantation Odyssey, a Short Novel by Stan Rice, part one

This novel by Stan Rice, about the adventures of a slave boy named Ulysses, shows the hellish unfairness of black slavery in what became the Confederacy. So many depressing things can be and have been written about slavery. But Rice’s novel is very specific: slavery prevented slaves, as humans, from using their talents, even to the benefit of their owners. This is a theme that frequently shows up, as in Horse and March, in novels by Geraldine Brooks.

 

In exploring this theme, Rice is able to use a lot of humor. The delightful framework is about Frank Hicks, a white man, and Alberta Hicks (Bert; a black woman) who were lovers in rural Oklahoma in the early twentieth century, a time and place where interracial love was kept secret when it happened at all.

The main character in Plantation Odyssey is a slave, Ulysses, who was very smart, and trained himself to be a botanist (an image inspired, no doubt, by George Washington Carver, who lived later). Ulysses got a lot of help from the old white woman who owned the plantation, something that perhaps never actually happened. She wants Ulysses to use his botanical knowledge to increase yields on the plantation. Penelope is also a slave on the plantation, but she is seven-eighths white. Of course, she and Ulysses fall in love.

But the Heir Apparent (the old woman’s son) is not at all pleased that his mother has chosen Penelope, not his own white daughter, to inherit the plantation. But Penelope is also his daughter. But because she has a drop of black blood, she is ineligible to be an heiress in the Old South. The Heir Apparent plans to not only kill Penelope and Ulysses but even his own wayward brother, who has connections to the North. The Heir Apparent kidnapped Penelope as she fled with Ulysses. Ulysses escaped to the North to work with the very real, abolitionist Harvard botanist Asa Gray.

For a young Black botanist in the middle of the nineteenth century, there could hardly be anything better than working with Asa Gray. But, like Odysseus (Ulysses) in Homer’s Odyssey after winning the Trojan War, there was no place like home. He wanted to go back to his loving wife named, of course, Penelope. I would not recommend reading this novel if you have no idea what happens in Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. Also, please don’t get it mixed up with James Joyce’s Ulysses. Both Ulysseses want to go home even though both Penelopes were getting old and both Ulysseses had almost boundless sexual opportunities by not going home. What a story! No wonder it has persisted two thousand years! Epic stories have contributed to the social evolution of our species; humanity is inconceivable without them.

In the next essay, I will tell about how the slave Ulysses, just like the Greek hero Odysseus, encountered an enchanted path of danger and promise as they went home.

Blood Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, Story 9. Fresh Air

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible (see his author website here). Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

 

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat (all reviewed earlier), Doghouse (reviewed in my science blog), and Fresh Air.

This final story, Fresh Air, is the chemistry class you wish you had, the world (the whole world) as told from the viewpoint of an oxygen atom named Gould. Gould, who resembles a white man, is inherently selfish. He has a hunger to grab and keep every electron from every other atom that he can. He doesn’t feel good about his selfish nature, but he can’t do anything about it. When you get two oxygen atoms together, forming oxygen gas (O₂), they become almost criminal in their ruthlessness. Gould does not want this to happen.

Gould is bonded to a black carbon atom named Chedd, who is calm and loving. Chedd likes to form bonds, networks of atoms, even giant molecules. But right now Gould, Chedd, and Elsie (another oxygen atom, whom Gould loves even though he cannot see or touch her) form a molecule of carbon dioxide (CO₂). Get ready for the carbon dioxide molecule to get sucked into the process of photosynthesis and end up in the wood of a tree, hidden in the dark until one day the wood gets chopped by a human poet named Cosmo. Gould ends up in a fire.

The only way an oxygen atom in carbon dioxide can be freed from the carbon cycle is by becoming an oxygen radical and joining to an oxygen molecule, making ozone. This is what happens to Gould. The story ends when Gould, inside an ozone molecule, is floating high in the air protecting the planet from ultraviolet radiation.

There are, as in most Rice novels and stories, undercurrents of important issues. In this case, the oxygen atoms are white and greedy, while the carbon atoms are black and nice.