tropez

The summer sun scorched this scene into my skull the second my shoes sank into the sands of St. Tropez. Stepping over the sunning bunnies, ascending the stairs into the narrow alleys of Rue Saint-Pierre and Rue Saint-Jean, I made my way to #7 Rue du Four.

Knock-knock.
Qui est là?
Madame Frys, would you like your horoscope read?
The door opened. Dire quoi?
I wrote it down, Votre neveu, Cyrille, dit que vous aimeriez lire votre horoscope.
Mon Dieu! Tu es mon messager de la mort?

I could not understand what she was saying, nor she me, but she wanted to know more about Cyrille; so she took my hand, and led me down another alley to a lady friend who spoke English. There I explained that her nephew Cyrille, a Vanderbilt economics student who years later retired from investment banking, had given me her address. He thought she might like a visit from an itinerant astrologer, and I thought I might like a day in St. Tropez. As it happened, Madame Anne Marie Frys was very religious and superstitious — is that a redundancy — and she loved having her horoscope read by me and our interpreter. Consequently, I got two nights and two days in St. Tropez.

  • 610-rue1

    Up the cobbled way

  • 610-rue2

    At the corner of Rue Saint-Jean and Rue du Four

  • 610-rue3

    Where is #7?

  • 610-rue4

    I am lost in a maze



Astrologie Apologia

But how can Pluto, the former planet, have any effect on me? Answer: it doesn't. The world of cause and effect evaporates when it comes to astrology and quantum worlds. A mechanical universe of linear time and spatial distance cannot make sense of an organic universe which is all one inseparable entity. Without separations, there can be no distances; without distances, no causes and their effects. Common sense tells us that cause, effect, and motion are real because we can measure them. Science, based on common sense, cannot relate to a Parmenides cosmos where there is nothing to measure.

The universe is not a clock. It's a big bowl of jello. When one side jiggles all sides jiggle in sync. Planetary orbits jiggle and we along with them. Schrödinger had a word for it — Entanglement. Einstein, who thought of the idea in 1935, also thought it was extremely silly because it countered common sense. Einstein's famous quote, Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen, just proves that he, like the rest of us, was susceptible to common sense. Most physicists, however, would agree with Einstein that entanglement is science fiction at the cosmic level. But, without a math formula, what do they know? Welcome to the wonderful world of whales and dolphins.