Hazard Yet Forward

 

 

Seton arms, originally only the tressured crescents, is here quartered to include alliances through marriage

 

     I have little enthusiasm for tracing genealogy.  Back four or five generations, the research becomes ever more challenging, yet the rewards shrink since the findings have little discernable relation to one’s own life.  Our ancestors multiply by the factor of two (that is, doubling) every generation.  Everyone has heard the story first told in the thirteenth century by Ibn Khallikan of how the inventor of chess asked as his reward to be given one grain of rice for the first square on the game board, two for the second, four for the third, then eight and so on, resulting, to the king’s surprise in a greater quantity than the entire world produces. 

     The same mathematics, of course, apply to everyone’s number of direct ancestors.  This means that, were one to look a thousand years in the past, estimating three generations per century, we each are descended from a number of people that can be calculated by raising two to the thirtieth power, a number over a billion, over a  thousand times the earth’s population at the time.  Now, this number is not in fact accurate due to the fact that people have very often, particularly in the past, married first cousins with shared grandparents, thereby obliging some individuals to fill multiple slots in the family tree, but the general point is clear.   Tracing only direct patrilineal descent simplifies the matter immensely, though, of course, one is equally closely related to the great crowds of their spouses and their spouses’ families. 

     I have several relatives intrigued by family history who have told me that people with my surname have passed in and out of Scots history for centuries some of whom were given a tartan and a coat of arms.  Now I know that a few generations back, my patrilineal ancestors were homesteaders and I rather suspect that the Seatons (or Setons, Seytons, Seetons) who came to America in the seventeenth century left more memories of want than castles behind in the old country.  There can be little doubt that, going back several hundred years, most everyone’s forebears were for the most part peasants or farm laborers. 

     Yet I rather like the doughty fire-spouting wyvern that tops the ducal coronet on the Seton arms and I find the slogan attached to the coat of arms suggestive and appealing.  “Hazard yet forward,” though certainly a war cry in origin, and likely originally meant to indicate enthusiastic support for the king, expresses a sentiment sufficiently general to provide buoyant encouragement in many settings more pleasant than the battlefield.  I like the airy sound of it, the spirit willingly accepting an uncertain outcome, the progress into an uncharted future, the greeny optimism.  It reminds me of the Yiddish paper, the Forward, and of the use of “Adelante!” in Cuba and other Latin countries. 

     In these cases the anticipated future is a positive change, but of course we hazard yet forward every day without the pleasant expectation of likely progress in the long term.  After all, we are all riding time’s conveyor belt, though for us the end is not manufacture but instead deterioration and eventual disassembly.  This fact cannot be changed, only one’s attitude is in part voluntary.  So, if a wistful feeling of regret at the transitory character of things of this world is unavoidable, it is fruitless (and seems in fact ridiculous when not pitiful) to lament the universal limits of human life.  Every morning when a person rises, it is to “hazard yet forward,” and a failure of this spirit is what the medieval church condemned as acedia, condemned by Aquinas as a flight from God.  Today it would be labeled depression, the psychiatric epidemic of our time.   

     The word hazard, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was originally used in Spain and may well have Arabic antecedents.  It was the name of a game played with dice which has survived into modern times but was first recorded in English in 1300.  Within a hundred years the meaning had expanded to apply to any risk or chance, and by the time of the Renaissance the word implied a negative outcome: “risk of loss or harm, peril, jeopardy.”    

     Shakespeare regularly employs the word hazard in the second of these senses, referring not to a danger but to any chance, a meaning that now sounds slightly literary, perhaps its most dramatic use leans toward the third.  Richard III, when he sees he is doomed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, yet remains resolute, declaring to Catesby, “Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,/ And I will stand the hazard of the die.”

     “Hazard yet forward” as the motto of evolution reverts to more positive expectations both within and beyond the human sphere.  While evolution need not move toward greater complexity, it always serves to better equip an organism for survival and reproduction.  Always striving to pursue incremental improvements seems the habit of our DNA.  Random variation through natural selection is responsible for the magnificent perfection of all organisms, including humanity.  One present product of this immense and fabulously complex process is, of course, our present speculations, these words materializing on my screen. 

     Even more fundamentally, there is chance in all things, even, as the quantum physicists tell us, at the very base of material existence.   Without this unpredictability, we would inhabit an entirely mechanistic universe in which all of history was implied by circumstances at the time of the Big Bang.  When Einstein wrote to Max Born that “the Old One” does not play at dice, he did not consider the possibility that God is dice, that his nature is a wide-open roll, realized and refigured as every instant passes.  Indeed, dice have been used by people since prehistoric times and their first use was not gambling and recreation but divination, like other chance operations: the flight of birds, the cracking of a tortoise shell, the reading of entrails, the I Ching and the Ifa oracle. 

     Perhaps we might all become devotees of a neo-pagan cult of Tyche (Τύχη), called Fortuna by the Romans, the goddess of chance.  In his description of Argos Pausanias notes a temple of Fortuna in which he says Palamedes dedicated the dice he had invented.  Originally associated chiefly with good luck, Tyche was depicted with a cornucopia and often a gubernaculum or ship’s rudder, which might suggest either a hope for safety in sea voyages or perhaps simply the steering of events.  By Hellenistic times her governance had spread to all events, both welcome and feared, and Polybius at the outset of his histories concedes control of all men’s affairs to her.  In spite of his sympathy for Christianity, Constantine built a temple to Tyche (which Julian later spurned) in Constantinople.  Have we today any better understanding of our destiny?  Any better way to predict the future?  Her rule, it seems, continues.

     We cannot foresee a single day, but, whatever our experiences, we are each likely to find ourselves eventually in the position of Byrhtwold in “The Battle of Maldon,” aware of a bitter doom that cannot be dodged.  May we at that time be as unbowed as that antique hero who declared, “the mind must be tougher, keener the heart, the spirit stronger, as our strength fades.”  When only self-possession remains, fortitude is the sole dignity left us, a final challenge to hazard yet forward. 

 

 

The family history research has been conducted by my sister Mary Frances Wallner and my cousin Carol  Ann Seaton. 

The passage from Pausanias is found his Description of Greece (or Traveling Around Greece, Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις) 2.20.3.

Polybius’ comment is found in his Histories (Ἱστορίαι) 1.4.

In the original Old English the quotation from the ”Battle of Maldon” reads "Hiġe sceal þē heardra,     heorte þē cēnre,/  mōd sceal þē māre     þē ūre mæġen lȳtlað.”