The Ruricolist

Artificial intelligence

2008-07-25T12:22:00.001-05:00

[I have sometimes tried, and failed, to make this argument in person. If I fail again here, I have at least cast it on the water; perhaps 50 years downriver it wil be clearer—either common sense or patent nonsense.]

I.

A computer with the speed of a human brain would no more feel love and hate, fear death, or make art, than a computer with the speed of a dog's brain would bark and mark its territory. Human behavior as such requires the means of the computational capacity of the human brain; but the use of human behaviors is in the physiological and glandular environment where the brain lies. It is wrong to vaunt that all our purposes are but the shadows of inherited drives and reducible to their combinations; yet the faculty of desire is a faculty of the flesh.

II.

I expect that to the scholars of the next century the dissonance of the disciplines of neurology and artificial intelligence will provide a curious case study in the history of scientific consensus. They cannot both be right. Either the brain creates emotion, and emotions serve some need of the brain; or the brain serves emotion, and emotions have created the brain to ease their uses. One could suppose a mutuality of feedback; and everyone has sometimes overruled their emotions, and sometimes been overwhelmed by them; but one or the other, neuron or hormone (loosely speaking), must have primacy—must set the wheel in motion, must provide the power that keeps it going.

I don't know whether anyone has attempted to calculate the information-bearing complexity of the endocrine system, or of the loops which it forms with the genes, the immune system, epigenetics, &c. The operation is clearly very complex; but we don't even know how the body represents itself to itself within the system of hormones—or whether that representation is compressible—or whether there is any such representation at all. But even if this system is in itself very simple, its interaction with the brain sets a much higher target for an artificial mind than just reproducing the complexity of the neurons—and it may not be simple at all.

III.

We have never encountered another sentient species. (Though I half-expect that, having done so, we would find them so diverse that we would retroactively number dolphins among them.) We might discover that some principle of convergence makes all creatures past a certain point of intelligence much alike—but that would be little comfort, given that within our own species there is room for both Hitler and Saint Francis. But we properly doubt the aliens presented to us by science fiction—like us, only more so—as belonging with the foxes and lions of Aesop, not Darwin. But this is what we expect of artificial intelligence—like us, only more so—digital minds floating through cyberspace in the dispassionate contemplation of truth, like discorporate angels or saints in Scholasticism.

That satisfied Aquinas; but Milton found that to do anything, even an angel would have to have appetites. Could we do for programming what Milton did for literature? Create an economy of artificial instincts? It is not unthinkable; but why do so?

We have developed systems of formality, in every culture, with the deliberate object of not having to indulge the presumptuous sympathies of strangers. Foolish as it is to reveal ourselves to strangers who can spread our weaknesses through gossip and backbiting—how much more so, to reveal ourselves to a machine? Already hackers can violate us with the exposure of our exterior activities; we would be giving them the chance to pry into the variations of our moods: to steal the memory, as it were, of a trusted companion. Such companions might still be no less trustworthy than human beings; but they would have new ways to betray us.

The question, of course, is: are emotions all or nothing, or can we impart only the ones we choose? There are some good reasons to think the latter. Brain lesions can extinguish specific emotions; and some mental illnesses comprise only the absence of certain emotions—depression, for example, the absence of pleasure and delight. But these phenomena do not answer the question: is there an array of emotions which can each be switched off and on independently, or is there a system of emotions which is sometimes thrown off-balance or distorted? If the latter, then to say that because we can cut off specific emotions, we can create them independently, were as if one said that because we can cut off tree limbs, we can build our own, without the tree.

Suppose that emotions are such a system. We are humanized by human limitations; why would we impose them on computers? We neuter pets and draft animals; we breed them to be docile, obedient, unobtrusive; we blinker horses. We must deprive them of their drives and instincts, and of the occassions for those behaviors, to make them useful to us. Why would we do the opposite to computers? There is the story of a battle during the Crusades that turned to a farce because the Crusader stallions caught the scent of the Saracen mares—the mares were in heat. Emoting computers hold out similar dangers: a depressed or panicky stock market, an angry weapons system, a jealous desktop, a pushy laptop. A machine, to be capable of useful empathy, would be susceptible to pride and pique; and while we might program a computer to be respectful of people, it would be harder to make people reciprocate.

IV.

The discipline of artificial intelligence seems to view itself as being in the service of an evolutionary imperative. Our intelligence has made us human beings powerful; surely more intelligence means more power. But, if so, why has evolution not made us smarter? It would, to all appearances, be easy to do. The existence of autism and of savants suggests that not much evolutionary pressure would be required to provide us with higher-functioning brains. If the next step in evolution is a better computer than we, why has evolution not made us better computers, when it has had the chance?

There are answers which favor the project of artificial intelligence. The brain is hungry, so food sources set a limit. Equals cooperate best, so too much disparity endangers society. Too big a head couldn't fit through the birth canal.

But I find none of these answers convincing. I cannot refute them now, but it may become possible. Physics could provide the proof. If we are able to arrive at a final theory, if we can find out, comprehend, and apply a set of fundamental laws adequate to all the various phenomena of the universe, that would suggest that we are quite smart enough for this universe, and that greater intelligence would be wasted on it—that while there might be faster thoughts than ours, there cannot be better ones.

This is, I concede, a distasteful thought. Something in us longs to belong to a hierarchy that culminates above us. If we can't look up to gods or angels, it's natural in us to want to make them. (Even granting God, no theologian would say that God's knowledge and judgement are by way of anything like thought). But I think that in the futurity of Moore's Law we are awaited by a cruel lesson: that even making something smarter than us will not allow us to turn over our responsibilities to it.

Nondefinition #11

2008-07-22T13:32:00.001-05:00

Accountancy. One of our most popular courses. In the periods (18th–21st centuries) when the profession existed, it was one of the most efficient conversation deflectors, comparable only with undertaking, but much less likely to serve as a conversation-ender and thus dilute the overall quality of the experience. In fact, accountancy is our recommendation for all time travelers targeting that period who do not require geographically specialized training.

Hiking

2008-07-18T11:43:00.001-05:00

[Being the Ruricolist, I try to touch on a rural subject at least once a year. The last was A house in the country.]

Often, where I have been accustomed to walk, other people hike. I—a mere walker—don't dare speak to them, so determinedly professional and businesslike do they seem. But I have been able, from time to time, to distinguish a few of the principles which elevate this art of science of the hike above the common walk of walks. In order that others may benefit, though indirectly, from their wisdom, conscience compels me to share those observations.

The hike, for instance, is a group project. One hikes in groups, from pairs to parties; and thus one talks. This has two consequences. First, talking, hikers are loud; they laugh and shout. I infer that hikers are unusually polite: they wish, wherever they go, to announce and introduce themselves. It is laudibly urbane. Second, talking to each other, hikers look at each other; again, very polite—they would not want a speaking human being to feel ignored for the sake of wordless nature. Hikers are true members of the vanguard of the modern spirit—they form ambulatory social networks; and such is their mastery of collaboration, that even their castles in the air are open-source.

Too, the hike is planned. One does not spontaneously take a hike—even, I have found by experiment, when told to. Days, weeks of effort go into establishing the rendezvous. I hypothesize that this is one of those echoes of military life which passed to civilians after WWII. Surely, in hikers' pouring over maps arranging of their timetables, and in the logistics implied by their man-high piles of equipment, more is in common with the meetings of a committee of the General Staff than a careless gathering of naïve nature lovers who don't know that even in loving nature, one must work at the relationship.

The hike is equipped, and even the equipment is itself equipped. The hiker is equipped with a water bottle, the water bottle is equipped with a holster, the holster is equipped with a harness, and the harness is equipped with a hiker. And this equipment is very specific—designed around the needs of hikers. The hiking pole, for example, is distinguished from the cane in being too long to lean on, and from the staff in being too short to lean from. Or hiking shoes, which combine the advantages of shoes and boots: they are as heavy as boots, and as receptive to an accumulation of instant-souvenir dirt, stones, sand and sticks as shoes. But few pieces of equipment are so easily identifiable by outsiders. Only the initiates of the freemasonry of hiking truly understand the use, and the symbolical meaning, of each of the pieces of equipment with which they set out girded.

Most of all, the hike is a microcosmic recapitulation of the natural world it moves in. Consider the ingenuity of the hiker's miniature, plasticized water cycle. First, the hiker is wrapped in plastic clothes to induce sweat; then these plastic clothes (candles of dehydration!) wick the sweat away; and last, and water from plastic bottles refuels the hiker to begin the cycle again.

What could shame a mere walker more than to come upon a resting party of disciplined hikers, disburdening themselves enough to sit, consulting their watches to measure their rest time, panting, rubbing their backs where packs have dug into them, rubbing their legs where their equipment has beaten them?

I feel so amateurish when I pass them.

Nondefinition #10

2008-07-15T15:37:00.000-05:00

Lawns. Lawns and hair show an obvious resemblance, and many of the tools used for one have equivalents used for the other. There could be an opportunity here for entrepreneurs: where is lawn dye? Mix pigment with fertilizer to drape the cities in technicolor suburban quilts and diversify golf courses (black grass shows up the ball, but hides the terrain; white grass lets you play by moonlight). And what of verbs? If we can scalp our enemies, why not lawn properties—gleefully tear up pampered, insatiable grass—"Yes, I was the one, I lawned that house—the one just up the hill, where the wildflowers are growing."

Bookstores

2008-07-11T11:21:00.001-05:00

I wish I could preach bookstores. Everyone should read: reading is, for most ends, both the best and easiest form of thinking—a conjunction which makes it one of life's kindnesses, not to be scorned. But most readers do not need bookstores: a library card and the occassional mail order suffice those who only read a little.

But those of us who read much are drawn to bookstores. Theirs is a different allure from that of a library; a different temptation from that of simply buying books (even secondhand). I go to bookstores to be surprised, which is not an indulgence. More books are worth reading than life has time to read. I could try to prioritize; but how to judge? My tastes are individual enough that I cannot rely on others' rankings. My solution is the simplest possible: I leave much of my reading to chance. Of books that appeal to me, some I go out of my way for; but more I resign myself to read only should I come across them in person. And of books I read, most are books I chose in advance, but many are books that took me by surprise. Lovers of music, of movies, of food, of any other art form or humane delight, are proud of this kind of openness, and love to recount their discoveries; but some perversity (a holdover from school, perhaps) drives readers to planning out reading lists. Such a list, if it relies only on recommendation or reputation, can comprise only the famous and the new—and how many good books are neither famous nor new?

Libraries and recommendation engines cannot be relied on for these surprises. They aim for order; but a bookstore should be the paradigm of artful disorder. That is, if I want a particular book, I should be able to find it; but I should pick up a few books by mistake along the way. And if I do not, at least once, innocently pick up a book I would be embarrassed to be seen with, and have to glance shiftily before I slip it back onto the shelf; then I must despair, for neither shall I find a book which, not having known to look for, I should be embarrassed never to have heard of.

It would be extreme to consider 20 personal or 100 automatic recommendations in a day. But in an hour in a bookstore a thousand books may pass under my eyes—books judged not by their covers, but by the company they keep: as recognizing a friend among strangers makes the others less than strangers. Libraries sometimes afford such meetings, but that is not their purpose. I have been in large libraries so well organized that they made me restless: where, unable to wander with my eyes, I had to wander on foot. I cannot object to that in a library, but I encourage bookstores to avoid it. Large gardens need planning, lest they seem wilderness; but plants in small gardens must be allowed their wildness, or them seem decorations—to claim the space, they must overgrow and mix a little.

I implied at the start that I could not persuade anyone of the appeal of bookstores, but that is not because I have no good reasons; rather, someone who does not love bookstores is likely to be so different from me that I do not see what we could have to say to each other.

Certainly, there are people who love bookstores more than I do. I have never made a bookstore my haunt (as I read that city people do); I have never made a friend in or through a bookstore (which some seem to take for their purpose). But I remember, I think, every bookstore I have ever been in: little blond-wood, shiny-cover chain bookshops; carpeted, café-harboring shelf-mazes; a cement-floored, steel-rack paperback warehouse; an amphitheatrically rising by levels university bookstore; overstuffed, impossibly narrow bookstores in the French Quarter with wood floors creaking and squeaking like untuned instruments; a shadowy book-laden mansion in North Carolina; and others, and more. As an adult, my dreams are inflexible; long familiarity and deep feeling, are not enough to bring new places into them—my dreams are always recombining old places remembered through childhood; but bookstores have a way to slip through that barrier, a shift to enter dreams. Willing or not, I return to them all.

Nondefinition #9

2008-07-08T10:59:00.001-05:00

Side effects. Diseases due to cures. The progress of medicine, as it delivers us each newer, more powerful cure, also seems to delivers newer, more powerful side effects. Perhaps the notion of cures is outdated; perhaps the right a patient ought to be asking for is the right of disease choice. "You have disease X? Wouldn't you rather have disease Y or Z?" Trade your disease for another; get tired of it; trade it for yet another. And if the maxim of the greener grass holds, the final achievement of medicine will be to allow one half of humanity to trade its diseases with the other.

Fable of the Candle

2008-07-04T11:09:00.002-05:00

Once there was a dark land, without light or lamp. There an old sage made a candle that could not burn out; and this candle was the first and only light in the dark land.

The sage had a young disciple, whom he taught—slowly, slowly—how to look at the light and how to see by it.

The people of the dark land hated the sage and his light. Now and then men climbed by twos or three out of the dark town below, up to the cabin where the candle burned, to try to put it out. Then the young disciple would fight them off.

But this time, one townsman got inside; before he could be dragged out, he knocked the frail sage down—killing him. Then there was wailing from the cabin: and when it was heard below, the town answered with cheers.

The young man buried the old sage. The men of the dark town were more daring now. It seemed that they were always creeping up, trying to get in to put out the candle. So the young man set his chair in the doorway, and with his back to the candle listened to the dark outside. When he heard voice or movement, he stood and charged shouting; and once it was gone, he sat and listened again. He listened long, listened and chased until he was weary and past weary, until he had learned to listen half-awake and to chase without anger. How long that went on—too long.

In time the men of the dark town began to lose interest. Soon there were silences when no men came at all. Then the young man, with joy, re-entered the cabin to see the light again. But he had been too long from light: and he looking so suddenly upon it, the candle burned his eyes, the light blinded him forever.

Moral: Do not turn your Back to the Light to protect it.

Nondefinition #8

2008-07-01T13:21:00.000-05:00

Fences. "Good fences make good neighbors" is the famous quotation, and would have made a good motto for a New England confederacy, had they chosen to secede. But the principle has many other extensions, for fences determine neighbors. Barbed wire makes neighbors prickly, tense—even wiry. Wrought iron gives neighbors easily overwrought; cast iron, neighbors who are often overcast or downcast—sometimes even cast out or cast-off; and both, neighbors prone to irony. Stones, of course, are unpredictable: sometimes, they cause stony taciturnity and stone-coldness; sometimes they give you neighbors who rock; but most of the time, stones attract stoners. (Fortunately, concrete attracts them as well; if you must build a stone fence, try to make sure of an abandoned building between you and any population center). You can never be sure what to expect from a wood fence. Such neighbors (especially if they have not been pressure-treated) are known to split, flake off, come loose, snap, rot out—even catch fire. Vinyl fences are very reliable: they draw neighbors who are low-maintenance, low-interest, and of uniform color. And predictably, people who grow their own fences put down roots. Now, though fence analysis is a young science, it is a very exciting one. If you'd like to help, the new Endower Institute Center for Fensive Studies is ready to accept your donations.

A prayer

2008-06-27T11:15:00.002-05:00

[This is true.]

Sojourning just outside New Orleans, I often walked on the levée by Lake Pontchartrain. Beside the way, near the Causeway, there was a mass of debris washed up from the lake and jumbled together like a carpet. As I remember, driving south into New Orleans you could see it to your left.

One day, in 2002, I decided to comb the debris for any sculptural pieces of driftwood—an old New Jersey habit. These I found. And with them, I found a prayer.

It was a small wooden board, less than a foot long, and an inch and a half thick. There were holes in it as if it had been nailed to something. If it had nails still in it, I removed them. It was an ordinary pine board. Most likely, it was once a piece of building scrap.

On one side was written—marked or incised:

GOD SAVE US FROM THE STORM

This object fascinated me. Where had it come from? How had it come here? The nail holes showed that it had not been ritually thrown onto the waters; it must have been mounted to something—a dock? A boat? And a storm, a slip of the hand, a contemptuous heir had given it to the lake; and the lake had discarded it here.

Whether I took it with me, I do not now remember. Perhaps I felt that it would be wrong to take it; perhaps, having taken it, I felt that I had done something wrong, and brought it back. I walked around with it for some time, looking for a place for it. At length, landward of the levée, I lay it face-down beside a locked tool shed that I had never seen open.

It stayed there for a long time. Who took it; whether they threw it away, or kept it for themselves, or returned it to the lake—I do not know.

I tried.

Nondefinition #7

2008-06-24T11:51:00.001-05:00

Obnoxious. Adj. Persistently or incorrigibly annoying after the manner of an obnox. The obnox (from German oppnochs) is an extinct species of Bovidae. Obnoxen were quite small (the size of a small pony or large dog), and had horns which pointed, neither to the sides like modern cows, nor forwards like the aurochs, but backwards. Some scientist speculate that obnoxen originally evolved to live in tropical swamps: their size made them efficient radiators of heat, and their horns were well-adapted for backscratching and fly-swatting; but by the beginning of history they were only found in Europe. Furthermore, obnoxen were congenitally afflicted with bad eyesight. Accordingly, the defensive strategy of the obnox was an unusual one. Rather than violently charging, the obnox who detected a violation of his territory (that is, once he had been struck) emitted a series of alternating low and high-pitched moos to summon any other obnoxen in the area. It should be noted that this gathering would take some time—the soft feet of the obnox, well adapted to muddy marshes, limited them to extremely slow speeds on dry ground. Once assembled, the obnoxen would surround the intruder and begin the counterattack. As they were small, incapable of sure footing, and weaponless—even their teeth were incurved and could not take hold—the attack was limited to a soft, repeated, mass nudging, carried on in absolute silence and accompanied by a relentless cow-eyed stare. By all accounts, no animal, however fierce, having been once been attacked by obnoxen, would ever go near them again. Indeed, the original use of the word oppnochsisch was to describe, not likeness to the animals' behavior, but the glassy stares and melancholy reveries that victims of obnox attacks were thereafter wont to fall into. The obnox was systematically exterminated during the wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries—for the appearance of a herd of obnoxen in the midst of a battle was known to set even the most hardened warriors to flight.

Memetics

2008-06-20T11:00:00.007-05:00

[Some of these arguments echo those in Evolutionary psychology.]

Memetics is the idea (intended to evoke a science) that concepts, systems, religions, cultures, art forms, &c.—all known as memes—live and spread through populations as do viruses and parasites; making the history of human ideas the record of a kind of natural selection.

Memes and viruses are not understood to be perfectly analogous. While bodies have immune systems to defend against viruses, the only immunity to be had against one meme is prior infection with another, stronger one—so that the mind hosting a meme is not precisely infected with it (though it is infectious, for the meme is already ready to reproduce), but rather hosts it with a kind of maternal subservience.

Memetics analogizes the meme very awkwardly—the meme in the mind is at once like the fetus in the womb, the bear in its cave, a virus in a cell (or a computer), and a fire in a burning house—but that awkwardness, though doubtful, does not disprove it. Powerful analogies are often awkward when new: how is the moon like an apple? or a cannonball? or a dancer?

The appeal of the idea of memetics, as a prospective science, is threefold.

1. Unlike all other systems of psychology—psychoanalysis, neo-phrenology, or evolutionary psychology—memetics smoothly bootstraps itself. Other psychologies must present themselves, at least implicitly, as angelic interpositions of reason into the human sphere of sublunary irrationality; so that the only idea a person may have which is not determined by the unconscious is the idea of the unconscious, or not serving instinct, the awareness of instinct. But memetics is proud to be a meme. It provides easily for—it demands—the co-existence in the mind of rational and irrational patterns of thought.

2. Memetics offers hope. The ideas of memetics might be taken as our final doom to unreason; but they are generally taken so as to revive old hopes for the perfectibility of man. The psychology of the Enlightenment was powerless before the twentieth century. No one could scoff at the battlefields or at the camps, blame them on bad education or persistent superstition. They seemed failures of reason itself. But memetics restores the old hope: it is an idea powerful enough to account for mass insanity, and for true evil, without surrender before them; an epidemiology promising cures or inoculation against the vectors of unreason, or at least a pyrology directing backfires and firebreaks.

3. Memetics explains everything. This is a point of appeal, but also a weakness. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 may be analyzed as a meme, one which drove out old memes about theodicy; but why should it have had that effect? We may say, because it was true—the earthquake happened, when it should not have. Then why the success of the meme of, say, Spiritualism? We may only say, because it is not true—because it is agreeable and convenient. But why should truth win because it is hard to bear, then lose because it is hard to bear? These kinds of paradoxes are basic to human nature; but they make it difficult to to establish a consistent standard of fitness against which survival could lead to selection.

I think that memes, of a sort, exist. Whether the mind is only a computer, it is enough like a computer that it may plausibly host viruses. (Against, the analogy is not precise.) And some phenomena cannot otherwise be gracefully explained.

(Here is a very simple, anecdotal example. I did not grow up using "like" as a particle; and I despised those who did so. But one day in my early teens, I realized I had—involuntarily, without every once consciously using it—caught the meme. Suddenly every other sentence broke out buboed with "then, like"s, and "that's, like"s and "was like"s. I had to quarantine the word for several years—substituting "resembling" or "similar to"—in order to expunge it.)

Granting, then, that elementary memes exist: are all, or even most, ideas analyzable as hypertrophies or complexes of these elements?

1. It is astonishing how forcefully, how suddenly a new idea can impress itself on a person, or a whole age; how throughly and quickly it can be adopted. This is familiar from science, where a new idea—a new principle, new technique, new approach—sets a generation of scientists casting around for new ways to apply it. Consider natural selection misapplied to sociology and history, resulting in Social Darwinism; or the sudden-onset obsession of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with mathematical axiomatization.

Note that both ideas snapped from overextension. Evolution was parted decisively from progress; and Gödel pointed out the cliff ahead of mathematics. Memetics can explain the fire; but not the dryness of the wood—catching quickly, and quickly burned out. Now, nothing requires that a meme be viable in the long term; but in these cases the meme burned out, while the idea survived it. Contrast the early nineteenth century attempt to reduce the world to so many fluids—aetheric, magnetic, electric, caloric—where the idea died with the meme. There is a necessary distinction here.

2. We adopt, even if we do not understand it, every new idea we encounter that we do not explicitly deny. This is only obvious to those who speak, write, or make in enough quantity to have a real-time sense of their own intellectual processes; but it happens to everyone. The bringing out of the contradictions between these ideas is an action which consciousness must undertake. If memes are not competing, they are not being selected; but what competition there is among ideas, is not inevitable (some lazy people simply hold contradictory ideas), not universal (some people can tolerate combinations of ideas which others could not), and not continuous (one can adopt an idea with the intent of examining it later). Insofar as there is an ecosystem of ideas, it is one which exists only by conscious human will. Even granting that a single transmissible meme could viably contain contradictory ideas, it is still unclear what pressure would drive meaningful selection.

3. It is nearly impossible—sometimes, it is not possible—to expunge an idea once it has been accepted. In this way the analogy between a meme and a living thing is strong for ephemera, but weak for ideas. A complex living thing is hard to make, but easy to kill. Advertisers know this about memes—how hard it is to start fashions, and how quickly they die. But the effort required to cry down an idea in another, or to overcome it in yourself, is disproportionate by an order of magnitude to the effort required to spread or adopt it. True, infections and infestations are not easy to deal with; but their resistance is because of their simplicity—being simple, they are easily copied, and have leeway to mutate. But something which is both complex and difficult to destroy is unprecedented in life as such; and again, the idea of selection is not obviously applicable.

If we wish to see what a society that had become the vehicle of an idea would look like, we will not find it anywhere in civilized history—even in the ancient theocracies of Egypt or Persia. These regimes contained the ideas which, mixing and developing freely in Greece, would return with Alexander to destroy them.

We should look, rather, to conservative tribal societies. Anthropologists have freed themselves enough from the ideas of the nineteenth century to cease to regard such societies as primitive; but it is also the nineteenth century which gives us the notion that the societies ancestral to ours were anything like these. The colonial ethnologists looked for occupants for the lowest rung on the ladder which Europe had surmounted; they found them in these societies, exhibiting conservatism across millennia. But there is a patent flaw in that reasoning—those societies do not change; the ones that gave rise to ours did so by changing. Now, we know that conservative cultures can be coradical with civilizations—the same groups of people who were at some remove ancestors of the Amazon Indians were also ancestors of the Maya, the Inca, and the Anasazi. But were the ancestors of both more like the former, or the latter? It is only romanticism which makes us suppose that the uncertainties and anxieties of civilized life must be the degenerate offspring of a tribal life Edenically serene. It is equally possible that the oldest, nomadic societies were dynamic and changeful. Some, settling under relatively easy conditions, carried on that dynamism into the first cities (and it is a curiously underappreciated discovery of archaeology that the first cities, like Jericho, predate agriculture). Others, settling under circumstances which turned against them, or settling under hard circumstances because they had lost their best lands to settlers, under the pressures of survival, consigned their ideas to memes.

Memetics has not been successful, either as an idea or as a meme. As an idea, its applications savor of adolescent facility in reduction; as a meme, its appeal has been too narrow, the explanations it provides too pointed and mocking, to transcend the perspective which originated it. I stoop to kick it while down only because I think it should be woken up. Memetics is not adequate to all that has been asked of it; but though inadequate, it is not incoherent; and given what we know of the brain, difficult as it would be to explain how memes work, it would be still more difficult to explain their absence.

Nondefinition #6

2008-06-17T10:48:00.000-05:00

Mangel-wurzel. (Not to be confused with the Wurzel mangle, formerly a kind of laundry machine, or manglewurz, the condition in workers now and then emerged from the Wurzel mangle.) A kind of gigantic beet, resembling a turnip, formerly much used for livestock feed. As watermelons to bullets, so mangel-wurzels once were to swords: a vegetable stand-in for a human enemy. And as the watermelon blown to bits is a promise to our enemies, so the mangel-wurzel neatly sliced in two by a stroke (or draw cut) of the saber was (some of) our ancestors' promise to their own enemies. Which raises three questions. One: do all warlike peoples have their particular enemy fruit or vegetable? Did the Romans learn their ferocity in the fight against cabbage? Was the battle of Waterloo won in the pumpkin fields of Surrey? Two: are these fruits merely convenient objects, or do we have some inborn fear of them to work out—were our ancestors the victims of shambling, formless, boneless things—is every watermelon we execute an instinctual way of exorcising the memory of Shoggoths? Three: does every fruit have its associated weapon? Does the tomato sleep on the shelf through nightmares of the day when the raygun will find its fated victim?

Four definitions of wisdom

2008-06-13T11:20:00.001-05:00

I.

The brilliant general Hannibal was beaten by the more brilliant general Scipio; but he was defeated first by the wise general Fabius, called Cunctator, the Delayer. Fabius could never have beaten Hannibal in battle—that was for Scipio—but he defeated Hannibal in war, simply by never giving battle. Hannibal provoked him; the Senate pressured him; but Fabius never fought Hannibal, only haunted him, the ghost of the Romans dead at Cannae, an omen of bad fortune, denying him allies, denying him provisions, receding from his challenges like water before Tantalus. Fabius became a great general simply by never making a mistake. Carthage had Hannibal's brilliance; Rome had Fabius's wisdom; and though Scipio won the war for Rome, Fabius lost the war for Carthage. Therefore: wisdom is restraint.

II.

Consider Solomon, the two women, and the disputed child. Granting its truth: where is the wisdom in this story? As told, it is clever, but not wise. We must guess at the wisdom in it. We must suppose that when he heard of this problem, he did not plan to solve it with a sword. Indeed, for a king, solving problems without resort to the sword is the proof of wisdom. And it was neither a repeatable solution, nor a convincing one. Courts today do not offer to cut disputed children physically in half—and when they offer to halve a child's time, both sides usually accept.

If Solomon was really wise, he would have known, before he brought out a sword, which woman he wanted to take the child. Perhaps he had observed that one was furious, and the other mild. Then the sword was a prop for a kind of rough equity—the furious woman might have supporters who believed the child was rightfully hers; but even they would have to see that he could not give the woman a child that she was ready to see dead for spite. Thus Solomon in the story was subtle enough to feign trickery to dissemble wisdom. But that is not to say that wisdom is subtlety, because that would be a circular definition—what was formerly called subtlety being the wisdom of the enemy; what is now called subtlety being the indirect or insignificant, to be avoided by wisdom. What is admirable in Solomon's judgment is his imagination—the imagination to cover a difficult judgment with an easy story. Therefore: wisdom is imagination.

III.

The possibility of a mistake always increases with the belief in its impossibility. Doubt to thought is as air to life; and the danger of over-anxiety no more forbids doubting yourself, than the danger of hyperventilation forbids breathing. A mistake is most condemnable when it is made despite warning. This is worth dwelling on: how the same mistake, with the same consequences, is worse if it has been warned against than if it happens unexpectedly; how there is more shame in failing to heed warning, than in failing to see ahead. What makes tragedy of Caesar's death is not the death itself—it is, "Beware the Ides of March." Emperors would die by worse betrayals; but those were unexpected. Caesar was warned.

Even vague warnings seem prescient after disaster; and that makes tragedy. Thus attention to warnings seems more important than foresight. In life as in weather, a clear horizon is not to be counted on; and for a fresh illustration, note that it is thought better to say "no one knew the levees could break"—admitting blindness to danger—that to say that, knowing it could happen, no one got around to acting on it. It is the same for other disasters, and if lack of foresight is always excusable mischance, but failing to heed warnings is always hubris, therefore: wisdom is humility.

IV.

Wisdom is a kind of thinking; but everyone thinks, and not everyone is wise. Even those who think well are not thereby wise. The difference is that, confronted with a problem, most only think harder; but a wise person both thinks hard, and thinks over their thinking. Most people, of ordinary intelligence, know how to exhaust a line of thought; fewer know how to conduct several at once, holding them in tension. This is most obvious in the misapplication of sound principles—how a good idea can be carried too far, if it is not applied to itself—as it is sometimes good and sometimes bad (when little is at risk) to be prudent. Wisdom in that case is prudence about prudence. Such iterative virtues often have names: loving to love is benevolence, fearing to fear is courage, daring to dare is audacity. And these can be applied to themselves as well: benevolence in benevolence makes philanthropy, courage in courage makes discretion, audacity in audacity makes enterprise. Therefore: wisdom is iteration.

Nondefinition #5

2008-06-10T15:40:00.000-05:00

Clouds. Going south from the land of the Yankees, the first thing you notice (if you look up) is that the clouds are growing. Even the smallest southern clouds, on the clearest days, are piled up like northern stormheads. Near the Gulf, there is a constant traffic of mountains overhead. Majestic as these are, they make me worry for children and lovers. They are big, but dumb—mute—I cannot see anything at all in them.

The Black Taj

2008-06-06T11:14:00.004-05:00

The student sat down across from his professor. They were in the professor's small apartment. There was a small white box on the table. It shone in the light from the fixture above them.

"So what is this I have to see?" the student asked.

The professor only smiled, and lifted what was not a box, but a cover. Beneath was a small, red, round carving. When the student leaned a little closer he could see it was a stylized carving of a turtle. There were black and white spots on its back. "What does this have to do with architecture?"

"Tell me what you see."

"I see a turtle."

"That's all?" The professor sighed. "Nothing else?"

He thought it over. "It's Chinese. I've seen Chinese carvings that looked like that. Made of that—whatever it is—same stuff."

"And that stuff is?"

"How would I know."

"Cinnabar. It's cinnabar, do you know cinnabar?"

"As in cookies?"

The professor looked pained. "No, it's an ore. Mercury ore. It's very important—cinnabar means a great deal to some. As does mercury. And the spots. Do they mean anything to you?"

"Black and white. Some sort of yin-yang thing, maybe?"

"Black and white, yes. Slate and shell if you look closer. The pattern—a double quincunx. Five and five make eight." He stared across the table.

"What? I don't get it! I'm just an architecture student—why would I know any of this? You said this would help me. You said I had to know this. How is a Chinese figurine going to make me a better architect?"

The professor flipped the turtle over. As it rocked back and forth light flashed over the smooth black that covered it's underside.

"What is that?"

"It's a lens."

The student looked closer. "But it's opaque. It's obsidian?"

"Yes. You need the right kind of light. What do you know about the Taj Mahal?"

"A lot, I've been there."

"Good! Then you've heard of the Black Taj?"

"I've heard of it. I didn't believe it. It's for the tourists."

"And weren't you a tourist?"

The student snorted. "Not that kind of tourist."

"Do you know how the story began?" He waited, but the student did not answer. "A traveler's letters. He told how Shah Jahan would have built a Black Taj for himself; but he was overthrown, and his son abandoned the project."

"There never was a Black Taj. They've checked. No foundation, no black marble lying around."

"There is another version of the story." He gestured at the dim bookcase behind him. "I found it in a manuscript by a Sufi poet of the era. Though he wrote Hindu poems as well. A wise poet. And thus little-known."

"And this has something to do the Taj Mahal?" The student pointed at the turtle.

"It does." The professor turned it back over. "Would you like to hear that story?"

"If there's a point. . . ."

"I'll say. I'll tell." He leaned forward.

Why am I thinking of Sunday School? the student thought.

"The story goes," the professor began, "that Shah Jahan had promised Mumtaz Mahal two tombs. One for each of them. He was desperate to build the second. But the first had taken so long, and been so expensive, and his son would not promise to finish the second. He agonized. Sleepless nights. Pacing the hall. He threw tantrums. Finally he decided that what he needed was a consultant."

"What?"

"A consultant. Someone from outside. Someone who could speed things up, get things does. He interviewed many. Wise men, roving worthies. Indian mystics. Europeans with blueprints. But the one he chose came from China. A Chinese sorcerer. He for one did not only promise to build it faster. He promised to hide it."

"How do you hide a Taj Mahal?"

"Inside another Taj Mahal, of course. He promised that the White Taj would enfold the Black as sound folds silence. In the poet's phrase."

The student kept silent.

"For years," the professor picked up, "black marble was brought to the Taj by night, and the sorcerer's servants—some of them fellow Chinese who never spoke to strangers by daylight, and some that were never seen by daylight at all—bore the black marble through the doors of the Taj. When they were done, when it was finished, the sorcerer gave Shah Jahan the only way to see the Black Taj: a black lens, a dark mirror, that would show the hidden tomb inside the beheld one. Beyond the reach of his son's greed, the Shah could be buried at the same time in his own tomb, and buried beside his beloved in her tomb."

The student looked away, then back. "OK," he said. "I like that. That's cool. Stretching my mind, right? A new perspective? So I should think about buildings inside buildings. Like multiple uses, right? Like, an office tower is one building for the executives, and one for the janitors, and they have to fit inside each other. That's a—"

"Shut up. Just listen. This isn't an object lesson I cooked up for you." He put his hand over the turtle. "This isn't something somebody knocked together for me. This is real. I hocked my life savings for this and put myself so far in debt there's no way out. Even then I could only afford it because nobody else knows about it."

"I—"

"Just listen! The sorcerer made the mirror for the Black Taj. Shah Jahan used it, he was satisfied, so he had the sorcerer and his servants killed so nobody else would know. He wanted the mirror buried beside him. But that much his son could prevent. After the overthrow, he kept it. And the poet he brought to court and showed it to found out that it doesn't just work on the Taj. It's doesn't work on every building but it works on a lot of them—the best ones—the ones with souls. Every building that has a soul, has for its soul another building, which is a Black Taj. Some other building that stood in the same spot. Some earlier state of the building—before a renovation or reconstruction, or a flood or a fire or a collapse. Sometimes even another building altogether, the one that could or should have been built but wasn't—the one the architect intended or another architect came up with and people didn't want, or whatever—just one that's better."

The student blinked and worked his jaw for a moment. "So. . . how? How come you had to pay so much for the mirror, if nobody else knew what it was?"

"What? You care about that?"

"I'm trying to get my head around this." I trusted him.

"All right. We'll take this slowly."

"You mean there's more."

"A lot more." He held the turtle out, mirror-up. "You can see the mirror's round, yes? And the cinnabar holds it in. It goes under the edge here, see? Now this is one piece of cinnabar. And the mirror's in one piece. So how'd it get in there?"

"There's some trick. Like, I've seen it done with quarters and blocks of wood. You drill a hole and stick it in and let the wood grow back over it."

"That's right. Good. But cinnabar doesn't grow."

"So it's impossible."

"I wouldn't say impossible. It's Chinese."

"So, you look through this and you see imaginary buildings?"

"Secret buildings. And it does more than that. Have you ever thought about why a good God lets bad things happen?"

"I'm an atheist."

"I'm talking about your god, not somebody else's. Think about ants. If everything were good for people but ants still had to suffer—say, if people stepped on them—would that be wrong?"

"It depends. I guess not."

"Right. So keep going. God is good, we suffer, so—"

"So what?"

"So we're ants. Something else is above us. And what's above us?" He looked around. "Buildings are above us. Buildings are real. Realer than we are. We make them, but only like cells make us. Buildings are the real inhabitants of God's universe. And least, they're closer to it than we are. They're real images of God. The real angels and devils—the real gods. They rule our lives. They hold us in their bellies."

"And the mirror. . . ?"

"The mirror shows them for what they are."

"So what do you want from me?"

"I want to show you the truth. I want you to understand your calling, your place. You are not a shelterer of ants. You are a creator of gods. You're my best student. The best student I ever had. You're better than me, and you could be one of the best. You're good enough for the mirror. I've been waiting for someone like you ever since I figured things out. Someone who could make the kinds of gods we need."

The student stood up. His lips curled. "I looked up to you. I thought you were a god. But you're nuts." He stood still, fingers not quite fists, eyes not quite crying.

The professor stood as well, turning his back, opening the door out onto the balcony. It was a warm night. The smell of exhaust rose from far below. He stood in front of the skyline. He spoke softly; the student could hardly hear him. "So that's what you'll tell them. That's I'm nuts." He put his foot on the railing.

"Fuck you, you old man!" the student shouted, running toward him, hauling him back. "You're not doing that to me!"

The professor raised the mirror to the student's face. Beyond was the skyline.

When he took the mirror from the student's hands it was morning. The student knelt on numb legs, rocking back and forth.

"I'm sorry," the professor said. "I had to take it. You were getting hysterical, you could have broken it. You can see it again tonight. It doesn't work the same during the day. Here, stand up." He pulled the student up, supported him to a chair. "Drink?" The student nodded, twisting in his chair to look back out through the balcony door. The professor poured him something strong that burned. When the student at last relaxed and settled his eyes on the table, the professor said: "Do you remember your last assignment?"

He tried to speak, coughed. "Yeah. Design a, um. . . ."

"Yes. That's it. Now, I have a computer right here." He lifted a laptop from a bag on the floor, laid it on the table. "I'll go get us some coffee. Until then, why don't you work for a while? It'll calm you down."

The student drew the laptop toward him, opened it, stared at the screen as it lit up. "I could work for a while. Yes. I have some ideas."

Nondefinition #4

2008-06-03T12:00:00.000-05:00

Mandarin. A kind of orange. In Imperial China these oranges, planted at the proper time of year, under special conditions including a constant supply of cool dry, air and the absence of sunlight, were used to grow bureaucrats. Within a week of proper planting the orange splits open to reveal a small, correctly proportioned man (a trade was carried on in "figurines" of this kind), with roots growing from the soles of his feet. Mandarin farms would allow the bureaucrat to reach an approximately human size before cutting it free. Bureaucrats grown in this way have an affinity for conditions resembling those they were grown under. Apparently the Portuguese who used the same name for the oranges and the bureaucrats had heard some hint of this; otherwise, it was a well-kept secret, until acquired by other European invaders. This technique is still in extensive use around the world. The roots remain tender; beware bureaucrats in sensible shoes, and never try to reason with one who seems to be having foot trouble.

Criticism

2008-05-30T10:23:00.006-05:00

[Despite appearances, this was not intended as an attempt to weigh in on the discussions of criticism ongoing at The Valve and Note Bene Books. They are discussing the possibility and value of what they find it necessary to distinguish as evaluative criticism; I am concerned with the methods of evaluation. (Actually, this essay was not intended at all; I set out write something completely different, and wrote this more or less by accident.)]

There are only two possible bases on which to build a science of criticism: a criticism of perfection or a criticism of excellence. The criticism of perfection judges a work by its fulfillment of a system of rules, or by its resemblance to some postulated masterpiece. The criticism of excellence, being unsystematic, is harder to define; but to earn approval and applause this way, a work must surprise its critics.

I confine my examples to literary criticism as the paradigmatic kind, but I address all criticism.

Many systems for assaying perfection have been proposed; and many groups of critics have tried becomes the arbiters of excellence. The usefulness of this distinction is not positive. To know that a work has been found perfect is not to know why it is perfect; and to know that a work has been found excellent is not to know why it is excellent. Rather, each kind of criticism has its own vices, which appear whenever some standard or group wins out.

The vices of the criticism of perfection are familiar. This method is so far out of favor that it is harder to imagine how it could ever have worked, than what could have gone wrong. The few efforts which have been made in this direction have either fallen flat, or had to shelter downwind of science. This is, after all, the kind of criticism we are taught forms of in school. It takes things apart, it anatomizes to give names to each dead part: theme, plot, symbol, character. Mastery of this method allows the quick-witted to turn a story into an essay so fast and so thoroughly that one is only left to wonder why authors bother. Why do they not simply save time, and write the essays themselves? But this is fishmonger criticism: it fillets the story. The expectation is that the hard, essayistic and the soft, esthetic parts can be later reconciled; but that works out no better for the story than it does for the fish.

This method was not always decadent. In the French critics of the late Renaissance, for example, we find, not a vital impulse for drama constrained by revenant rules, but rediscovered laws calling dramatic art back into being. Before the professionalization of literature, the criticism of perfection was the only kind of criticism possible: the aspiring writer could present no credential of the mastery of the form, except the evident fulfillment of the form.

Shakespeare, to make a joke like Pyramus and Thisbe, to hammer at the fourth wall with The Mousetrap, had to enclose them in larger plays; to play with nonsense and nonsequiturs, had to put them in the mouths of fools and madmen. But were he alive today, he could do these things directly. It might be better for his career. Would a modern Shakespeare more easily stage The Tempest or Pearls That Were His Eyes? Titus Andronicus or A Dinner Fit for an Emperor? Macbeth, or The Porter Equivocates?

Despite its dangers, of the two kinds of criticism, the criticism of perfection is the more open, the more honest, and the more consistent. It is the default form of criticism: it was the first; it is almost inextinguishable, absent only where literature is absent; and it is resistant to debunking. Where the tools can all be seen, it is hard to call their users impostors.

But what could be more absurd than to practice literature for the benefit of those hostile to literature?

The vices of the criticism of excellence are unfamiliar. After all, it saves books. How many great books, not written for the public at large, would have oblivion had not the criticism of excellence brought together a voluntary public willing to meet them halfway? How many great books that came in the first instance before the wrong public, had only the criticism of excellence where to make their appeal?

The vice here, though unfamiliar, is really very simple: the criticism of excellence is based on an absurdity. By definition, the majority of anything cannot be excellent. Or put another way: all books cannot be above average. The criticism of excellence, by valuing only the excellent, destroys what it loves: like the gardener who, to make room for more flowers, plucks off all the leaves.

Worse, the criticism of excellence is necessarily cliquish. To be fit to recognize excellence with certainty—to know a work for the best of its kind or the first of a new kind—you must know (or believe that you know) everything. The result is that a body of critics of excellence form a kind of priesthood or freemasonry; they speak shorthand, they write secret handshakes. This is doubly problematic. First, it makes literature inaccessible from the outside—it is not enough to read the words if you are not in on the joke; and second, it makes literature inaccessible from the inside. If you have not shared their experiences, you can no more join a body of critics than you can join an organization of war veterans if you are not one. It is not a question of adopting the mindset created originally by certain experiences: rather the mindset comprises the experiences; the experiences constitute the mindset. Thus every few decades a new body of critics comes up, and drives out the old ones. Unless you belong to the rising body of critics—unless you belonged to it before its coup, which must be in large part a matter of geography and luck—you have no chance for a voice.

If neither approach to criticism is workable, then there are only two possibilities. Either criticism does not exist; or criticism is not a science. And, in practice, many writers behave as if there were no such thing as criticism. Whom, after all, should they trust? An older writer who has outlived cycles of praise and abuse, ceases to care about their recurrence. And if a young writer need to keep an ideal audience in mind, let it be anything but a critic.

Yet criticism does exist. Its more workmanlike forms are increasingly difficult to avoid; and if the workman exists, then so must the master. But if criticism is not a science, then what is it? How should it be done? If neither the criticism of perfection nor the criticism of excellence suffices, then is there some third, artistic way; or some synthesis to achieve; or some prior unity to return to? Rather, there is no criticism; there are only critics; for those who practice criticism according to some criticism of criticism are thus secondary critics; and even where shared ideals bring reader to critic, the reader gives not assent, but trust. Criticism must end somewhere. Be you tireless as a dog, lithe as a cat, still you cannot catch your own tail.

Nondefinition #3

2008-05-27T14:14:00.000-05:00

Doors. Devices which, on all civilized planets, remove themselves from the path of people moving from one room to another. Some swish aside, some rush up and down, some dilate, some simply disengage. There are still, alas, backward planets where people must employ their manipulatory appendages to open doors. Such primitive doors, being dangerous disease vectors and traffic choke-points, and reinforcing inequities with elaborate conventions of who opens for whom, hold back planetary economic and cultural development. When we find such a planet, tragically barred from further progress by its knobs, then it is our clear duty to invade and conquer, in order to civilize them.

Tourism

2008-05-23T11:44:00.000-05:00

Expanding the mind is as easy as reading; but enlarging the mind—not supplying it with new facts, or the fact of other perspectives, but opening it out to span them—is a demanding task, best and most easily done by travel, including tourism. Even shepherded tourists gain new perspective on themselves; gain the precious stirrings of what the ancients called cosmopolis—the membership of civilized human beings in, and their first loyalty due to, the community and continuity of civilization and the principle called civility or humanity. Even if a tourist does nothing but add to pictures and names known already all that smell, hearing, touch can carry; even if the tourist only comes away with nothing to remember but a sort of deepened postcard; then even that is well. For what is more bitter, than Browning's on Venice, "I was never out of England; it's as though I'd seen it all?" What is more high-handed and uncompassionate than to condemn those who hope at last to meet what they have long admired? There is nothing wrong with being a tourist, or even with being just a tourist.

A nation of tourists is a healthy and a vigorous nation. Every tourist is improved by each tour; and each community returned to is similarly enlarged, by the presence of a human connection to what before was but a source of pictures and objects. It is not logical; but it is a human truth that these are different things: to know, for example, that Japan exists; to know someone who has been there; and to have been there yourself. Each is an ascent in awareness and belief. For Japan lives in the mind beside Ruritania or Middle Earth until some human proof of it is made; for even in the most credulous there exists a deep doubt that something could exist whole and right yet different—a doubt which we must take dramatic steps to beat down, and can never fully overcome.

Tourism does impose a homogeneity of a sort, a floating country of hotels and restaurants; but its contribution to the world's homogenization, is slight and indirect. Tourists have no vices which business travelers do not cast into shadow. It is one of the only forces—in many places it is the only force—giving value to and protecting not just the particular instantiations, but the general concept, of the individuality of place. What must we think of those who encourage tourism—as if it were rainfall to be channeled—to save this natural wonder, this artificial curiosity, while they avoid disdainfully anything for themselves which might be convicted of the vulgarity of Tourism?

Consider that cities as beautiful as Venice or Prague or New Orleans have not been preserved to us by the pride or taste of their peoples; rather, each is frozen for us at the moment of the collapse of its prosperity. One may fairly suppose that cities just as beautiful as these have been torn down by their own peoples to make way, first for the brick of Progress, then for the glass of Modernity. Now that these cities have in a degree recovered their prosperity, it is their value in tourist dollars, not their people's sentiment or sensibility, that preserves them. For democracies are unsentimental; business is business; and unless sentimental wealth pays better to preserve than to tear down, the man with the sledgehammer sees only so many stones. Tourists with feet and wallets vote for the preservation of the places they visit. They may do, in aggregate, a wearing-down and polluting damage; but in the meantime they hold off ruin.

Rome died, not quickly at the hands of barbarians, but slowly at the hands of Romans. It was Romans who tore down the marble city of Augustus, breaking up pillars to wall their fields, breaking up statues to burn in their lime-kilns. Locals whine about tourists; but of all people, locals care least about their cities and environs. Such is the baseness of our kind that the same people in childhood haunted and inspired by the wonders of a place, in adulthood take a special delight in spurning and spiting them; and when you hear a slogan from an architect it is likely to translate to: "Come, the nest is ours now, let us foul it." It takes tourists—badly dressed, out of shape, gawking, dumbstruck, craning, pointing, peering, murmuring, muttering, exclaiming, picture-snapping tourists—to save the cities from themselves.

Nondefinition #2

2008-05-20T12:17:00.000-05:00

Lachrymatory. In the Victorian period, a small glass bottle used to catch and preserve tears of mourning. Today, tear bottles are made of plastic, pre-filled to be dropped in dry eyes (as of contact wearers), and manufactured in the third world (presumably under third-world conditions). How they fill these bottles, it were better not to ask.

The Pine Barrens

2008-05-16T11:12:00.007-05:00

[This is a poem in dactylic hexameter. Poe held that true dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, is impossible in English. He was probably right. Still, I regard the hexameter which Coleridge introduced ("all my hexameters gallop like horses") and Longfellow practiced as worthwhile in itself, especially if it is not too strict in distinguishing spondees (rare in English) from strong trochees. I have committed some further irregularities. Google tells me I can claim Matthew Arnold's authority for substituting an amphibrach in the first foot; but the sequence of amphimacers in line 14 is my own responsibility.

Those who are aware of southern New Jersey only as Parkway-wide may wish to look into the Pine Barrens and the legend of the Jersey Devil.]

   Forests have gods of their own which they suckled and shelter, the old gods,
   Left there by peoples who vanished or died in their hollows and deer paths.
   Always defeated, they whisper and slink through the shivering shadows.
   But we have a god, a devil, a shrieking and wandering devil,
   You hear him hunting and howling: he hunts in the night and the daytime,
   You see the marks of his hooves in the snow on your lawns and your rooftops.
   You know the devilish son, thirteenth son of Mother Leeds—cursed son.
   Twelve mortal children had fit in her womb by turns and had suckled.
   Loose as it hung from her, skin could not hold in her bitterness—maddened,
   Weeping, she prayed that this one be a devil. Darkness had filled her,
   Darkness to cover the sun like a storm cloud, night without morning,
   Sticky and crying he lay in his crib while she died on her bedsheets.
   Lying alone in his crib, how he grew, like the wave in the ocean,
   Last child of Mother Leeds, thirteenth child, winged child, sharp-toothed child, cursed child,
   Fearing his father's kind, leaving the towns behind, flying he found us.
   Devils thirst for blood but we gave him pine sap to suckle,
   We fed him pine sap and bear flesh. He needed no shelter from danger,
   Men were in flight from their towns in the woods by the banks of the red bogs,
   Bogs full of iron for forges and hammers to beat into weapons.
   Free of their blades and their shovels we covered their roads and their clearings,
   Rotted and broke through their fences and shrouded their markers and signposts,
   Scattered young acorns to grow in the cracks of the walls and the rooftops,
   (Driving their roots in as wedges to throw down the walls and the roof beams),
   Scraped off their roofs and broke in their windows with wind-swaying branches,
   Heaved up foundations. We jumbled and heaped up their stables and workshops,
   Churches and schoolrooms and houses, so mice could make nests in their bedsheets.
   Nothing is sweeter for forests than violently taking their own back,
   Nothing like claiming the ruins. We watch all your cities and highways,
   All of your wire-strung poles and your towns while they glow in the night-time,
   Ready and hungry we plan their destruction. We wait for your weakness,
   Sending our acorns to test your defenses. The day that you falter,
   Our god will walk out among you clearing the way for us,
   Violently clearing the way for the oaks and the pines that adore him.
   Empty, your sky-scraping towers will rust out, buckle and falter.
   Kneaded and twisted by roots even concrete will crack up and shatter.
   Trees will soon grow in your roads, in your lawns and your cellars and playgrounds,
   Vines will soon pull down your wires and smother the masted antennas,
   Spiders will seal up your houses and mice will make nests in your bedsheets.

Nondefinition #1

2008-05-13T13:05:00.004-05:00

[I have said that I want to post more often; but I don't want to overburden the blog with too much substance. Thus I am trying out a light feature to be run each week besides the Friday post: a short Tuesday "nondefinition".]

Brain. An appliance invented by nineteenth-century German philosophers to remove the drudgery from thought experiments. Pity the situation of the old Arabic philosophers who had ask God to specially create a flying man—separated from all his parts, falling forever through lightless infinity—merely in order to raise the problems which any modern philosopher can confront by borrowing a mad scientist's brain in a vat.

(Journal of Bloglandia)

2008-05-12T11:45:00.003-05:00

[One of my essays—On Essays—leads in the first issue of the new Journal of Bloglandia. I wrote up the following to explain why I think that something like this is to be encouraged, and to take the opportunity to treat of blogs in general.]

Some blogs are more bloglike than others. At one extreme, the most bloglike of blogs are the original kind, web logs or linklogs. At the other extreme, the least bloglike of blogs are those which comprise newspaper or magazine copy reset in blog form. But these should not be thought of as interlopers. What else were web loggers linking to all along?

A little farther from each extreme we find the second kind of blog to arise, the public journal—and blogs written for pay, whether for ventures of print entities, or for natives entities of the net.

Between these, in the middle, is what may be called Bloglandia.

The more bloglike are public journals where the fitful deposition of notices of deeds, travels, and emotional precessions are replaced with longer posts exhibiting some internal narrative development and organizations—and weblogs, where the link's function is not to lead visitors out, but to set off a chain of explosive associations.

The less bloglike are blogs which have traditional literary forms, but which are unsuited—sometimes wholly, sometimes only in the first instance—to appear in print. The least bloglike of these are reviews, or political commentaries, from the unknown or uncredentialed. These shade into those which are, whatever their author's prominence, simply too strongly pointed, or too personal, for print. A little farther fall those bloggers, like myself—who employ traditional forms which are out of favor, or have distinct styles that are hard to harness to house-style teams, or spread our interests too broadly to suit any particular print audience. A little more bloglike than these are the semi-professional blogs, which at once serve as professional grapevines, water coolers, and napkin-backs, and undertake popularization and political apologetics.

The Journal of Bloglandia is not a representative sampling of this country. It offers a wide view, but it misses much: the conservative blogs, the lit-blogs, the science blogs, &c.

But in the analogy of its title is the defense of its method. The task of someone who selects blog posts to put in print is not like that of an anthologist from print to print. It is much more like the task of introducing a foreign literature, where the object cannot to compass diversity, but only to demonstrate vitality.

What we should see from an expedition into a wilderness such as this are not labeled artifacts, but question-raising curiosities. What we should hear guiding us is not the voice of the docent, but the shouts of the barker. The Journal of Bloglandia should be read; but it should be read, not like a guidebook, but like some old pamphlet passed out among weary and hopeless European villagers to say to them: "There is a new world, free, spacious. The fare is cheap, the land is yours if you can work it. See what strange things live and grow there! Will you come and see? You have a place there. Will you not take it?"

Specialization

2008-05-09T10:57:00.001-05:00

It seems wise to warn that the constant fission, branching, and cross-breeding of specializations, in both the sciences and the humanities, must in time, by depriving us of humanistic perspective, doom us to servile narrow-mindedness. But this should have happened already. Certainly, there are some specialists who are such live caricatures; but they are not all so. The danger may be in narrow and direct training, but it cannot be in the filling of a narrow responsibility alone.

Deprecators of specialization allude to some era when to be a thinker was to be a generalist, universalist, polymath, omnifarium doctus, a Renaissance man (whether or not the Renaissance be under discussion). Defenders of specialization suppose that because we know vastly more than our predecessors, we are doomed to specialize—that knowledge has become too complex for generalists to exist.

But both these positions are based on false comparison.

Between modern and premodern science, we err to compare the most difficult problems we can solve, and projects we can undertake, with the most difficult problems and projects possible to our forebears. If we compare their methods with ours in the same applications, we find that (for example) the Scholastic philosopher, weaving new Aristotelian riddles to account for every problem a modern physicist dispatches with a fillip of calculus, lived in a vastly more complicated universe than we do. The diversity of our specializations and the complexity of our investigations are possible only because the leading ideas of science are now simpler than they have ever been before—subtler rather than easier, but simpler, because entities are fewer. Newton uniting the celestial and the sublunary, Dalton reducing a handbook of elemental behaviors to a calculus of atomic weights, Darwin tracing back the origin of species, Einstein folding space into time and time into space, Faraday's fields, Shannons's bits, Noether's symmetries, Feynman's diagrams, all bear witness. The scientific endeavors of the present are the most complex ever, because they are the least burdened with overhead.

The same movement, though by different means, is present in the humanities. Consider the half-facetious "Godwin's Law": "If you are the first to mention the Nazis, you lose the argument." But the warning of Nazism really does prune our thinking, mostly before we even speak. Knowing that certain ways of thinking can only end in horror saves us time wasted in toying with them, and effort wasted in arguing ourselves or others out of them. Much of our highest thinking takes place in this kind of shorthand. Philosophy, for example, would be impossible without the ability to reference positions by the names of their originators—even Plato did it, with Parmenides, Empedocles, Heraclitus, &c. If we had to begin every discussion with a clean slate, it would be impossible to think at a philosophical level. And each such new name, each such new word, in any of the humanities, really does accomplish simplicity, because even where it introduces some novelty, that is as the seed of a crystal which draws and fixes portably together certain floating notions and inchoate ideas that were not so much inaccessible before, as too much trouble to chase down.

Look at the modern orchestra. Hundreds of instruments, each with players who have given much of their lives for mastery. Then look at a chamber ensemble from two or three centures before. Compare an orchestral score with a piece of chamber music. What has changed? Has music theory become so complex that an orchestra full of instrumentalists is now required to instantiate it?

To the contrary: music theory has become simpler. Composers use chords instead of counterpoint; but more importantly, tuning has been simplified. The system of tuning now in almost universal use—equal temperament—is the simplest ever: divide the octave into 12 exactly equal parts. Every other, every more natural system of temperament—Pythagorean, meantone, well—is a dizzying, wolf-infested business of ratios and commas. Tuning an instrument in equal temperament is a simple matter of A=440; tuning by any more natural system makes every instrument its own problem to be solved. Indeed, it could never be done with precision; thus the chamber ensemble had to be small enough that each player could hear, and adjust to, the deviations of others. It is the very simplicity of equal temperament that allows for masses of instruments to play together without discrepant dissonance—that allows for the complexity of the orchestra.

The very subtlety of our specializations, the very complexity of our problems and projects, testify that our intellectual progress has been due to the deepening, sharpening, and winnowing of our ideas. It is because we increasingly speak the same language that we are free to develop dialects.

If we follow through with the analogy of the orchestra, we come to the question: what of composers and conductors? What of generalists? Otherwise, whatever our tuning, we have no melodies. That does sometimes happen—the war of department against department. But that it does not always happen implies that though they are not salaried, there are still generalists around, though informally and in varying degrees. If so, then their position in our society (I do not know if it only happens to be this way, or if it has to be) is like that of homemakers: so indispensable that they go unnoticed, so invaluable that they are not valued.

(At the Valve)

2008-05-07T18:45:00.006-05:00

A comment of mine has elicited an interesting post at The Valve on the distinction of content and style.