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monday july 26th, 2010

Science & Philosophy (1120 words)

I have always liked the concept, true until the end of the 19th century, that the sciences existed to support philosophy. In the 18th century, Newton's time, the sciences were referred to as 'natural philosophy'. In the 19th, even some extraordinary minds like Tolstoy’s could afford to disdain the sciences as a kind of trivial pursuit to explain details that couldn’t possibly help fathom the big picture as philosophy could.

In the 20th century, often as per Tolstoy’s criticism, branches of science did explain highly specialized details which, though fascinating, didn’t in themselves affect (or effect for that matter) understanding of the big questions. At other times science really did tackle a big one as the General Theory of Relativity did for our understanding of the universe we live in.

But scientists continued to doggedly dedicate entire careers to understanding the first third of a second after the Big Bang, the make-up of mitochondrial DNA or the purpose of a single Drosophila gene. Over the duration of the century though, the details added up & became big & surprising bodies of knowledge. Today, after such a short time relative to man’s history, anyone can get a map of his own genetic code for a fee, an image of the instructions responsible for his appearance &, largely, his behaviour, & possibly even his expiration date.

Philosophy, like history, became a pedant’s game, a bookish interest for old men lost in the inconsequential past. It shed light on none of the important truths as science now did. I have even heard 20th century philosophers say that there are only semantic questions still open to their field, all the big questions having been thoroughly treated by three thousand years of pondering; just as the late 19th century scientists expressed sorrow for future generations of scientists since the 19th century had already dealt with all the big answers.

The old philosophers sometimes inform man’s cultures so inherently we think of them as discovered truths rather than invented doctrine. Confucius in the East, the Bhagavad Gita on the Indian sub-continent, the ancient Greeks in the occident, all imbue culture with such basic tenets that we never question them.

Pinker explains that it wasn’t until artificial intelligence engineers began trying to program robots with the most basic common sense (like the bomb-fighting robot programmed to remove a bomb from a building & decides to do so by throwing it out a window thereby killing the multitudes below) that scientists realized just how mysterious the concept of common sense is though the great philosophers took it so for granted they never thought it worthy of consideration.

When the bomb-fighting robot is programmed to consider the consequences of different courses of action it becomes paralysed by the study of literally infinite possibilities. A human knows ‘automatically’ that he needn’t consider the importance of the death of a bird flying by the window when the bomb goes off but a robot cannot know until it ‘thinks about it’. How does common sense work? How can a man divide relevant & irrelevant categories without considering their content piecemeal?    

When Aristotle said: all men are mortal; Aristotle is a man & therefore: Aristotle is mortal; his system of logic was not an organization of the natural structure of thought but rather the imposing of an artificial structure on instinct (& logic is indubitably the most reliable way to extract cogent inference devised so far.) Some people think that having a brain means they have an involuntary ability to think, when in fact thinking is something which is learned, or not.

And now, it seems to me, it has come full circle: science begins not only to take an interest in philosophy but also to contribute philosophical speculation based on physical research.

Physicists don’t have to try very hard as theories of matter made of energy, multiverses or quantum mechanical processes naturally brush questions of philosophy & even metaphysics. Now that neuroscience is explaining so many of the workings of the brain, science is realizing that certain thoughts or understandings, self evident in themselves, appear physically inexplicable. Concepts like the meaning we extrapolate from knowledge, free will or the most fundamental & defining facet of humanity: sentience; our sense of self.

What is ‘self’ after all? A combination of experience & knowledge? The behaviour of the individual? The experiential sense of one’s own existence? The agglomeration of its beliefs? Of its neural patterns? But all of these things are in constant flux & the self has different reactions to the same circumstances at different times. The same thing that might make the self happy one day can make it angry or sad the next, like the company of a friend who betrays. The self cannot even find evidence of its own existence, if it wishes to it can decide to believe it is a hallucination or part of another’s dream.

Among his examples, the contemporary philosopher Colin McGinn points out that we can understand numerals insofar as if you add the quantity: 1, to any number, it will become larger by 1. And so we can conceive & understand any sum but are nonetheless still incapable of understanding infinity-- except in theory-- because our brains, like our other organs & parts, came to their evolutive design as tools for successful survival & procreation which do not require it to deal with great or tiny distances or innumerable quantities.

Abstract thought is to the mind what painting is to the hands, an application as by-product of tools meant for other, more urgent, necessities.

Since the invention of agriculture, which ended a long nomadic history & increased the size of communities to such an extent & complexity that we now need a minimum of eighteen years, a full quarter of a natural lifetime, to learn enough about the world, forms of communication, protocols, to successfully collaborate & compete within the extended clan, tribe, state... global community.

Pinker, the cognitive neuroscientist, reminds us that the brain is an organ like any other & just as we do not wallow in dejection because our eyes cannot see x-rays (a proven part of reality), the brain also has its specific duties which do not include seeking or understanding definitive truths but rather surviving as hunter-gatherers which is how we have managed during most of our 15 million year hominid history.

And so, while science removes the reasons for theology & metaphysics, it may turn out that philosophy’s only answers to the eschatological questions that have haunted man’s understanding of his own existence throughout his history, are not something either science or philosophy can provide but are simply answers we are not physically equipped to understand.

wednesday july 7th, 2010

Happiness & Theory of the Mind (1030 words)

Among the theoreticians of happiness I discuss below, there is one consideration I have heard little mention of: companionship. I don’t mean that of a mate or the loyalties that belong to friendships, which they do talk about, but the social circle, the circle that informs our conversation & our inner musings.

If you are surrounded by people who think like you, who appreciate, express & reason in similar fashion, regardless of whether their conclusions or opinions are different to yours, certain consequences for the self manifest.

A conversation can inspire, bore, enlighten, beguile or frustrate. One of the things we can devote a great deal of our cognitive resources to as a consequence of conversation is theory of the mind, born of the basic need to judge whether or not we are being deceived.

In this, its simplest iteration, it can be important to a bird to be able to reliably determine that if it responds to an appeal by a neighbouring bird to remove the parasites on its head, those it cannot reach itself, that his neighbour will in turn do the same for him after he is parasite-free.

We humans rely far more heavily on judgements far more complex than: will he return the favour? Aside from predicting other’s behaviour, an important function of theory of the mind, we, being sentient: self-aware, also use it to try to construct an interior representation of ourselves inside the interior representation we have of the person being considered. To think as others think about how we think about them, in other words: we try to imagine how we appear to another person from his point of view, how they might predict our behaviour (e.g. do I appear trustworthy to him?) or how well he appreciates our ‘self’. Just to give an example of the myriad uses we put the mental energy to, sometimes with good reason & at others as disastrous waste of cognitive resources.

All of this might seem plain & self-evident to someone who hasn't stopped to consider it, & why would one? Thinking about each other's thoughts is not the type of thinking one must learn to do, it is one of the cognitive tools hard-wired by our genes, just as reciprocal altruism is, in order that we may collaborate as a species. Indeed, it is difficult to fathom life without this ability & curiosity about each other's thoughts; & the consequent inner picture we construct of each other's inner world. Pinker points out that in fact people suffering certain degrees of autism may well be examples of that. With their self-awareness trapped in a mind unable to recognize other's self-awareness, incapable of imagining the thoughts of others, they would see people simply as scary, lurching, unpredictable, inexplicable & noisy entities.

I have talked of the theory of the mind before & I don’t want to go over it again here, but to consider it instead in light of all this theorizing about happiness. It seems to me that to be in a social circle which does not think like you, not only wastes experiential time but also colours the consequent experience wrought of thoughts about the experience.

I think being in a society that reflects your interior world is of great importance among the factors considered capable of making one’s existence happier. Funnily enough I had these thoughts not while listening to Gilbert expound his theories but while observing his evident satisfaction with his life & himself. I found myself thinking: I bet when he was a young, unknown psychology graduate, though equally brilliant, he couldn’t expect Dawkins, or Dennet or Pinker, to answer an email discussing some question of mutual interest, as he can now.

By being successful in his vocation he has entered a society with whom the conversation is always interesting because it is always the conversation he wants to have. The importance he feels about his own thoughts is shared by others. This must influence his level of happiness a lot.

Considering the essay about happiness below, if it is the remembering self instead of the experiencing one that accounts for our decision-making as well as our general state of satisfaction, & memories are inevitably confused in their substance, subjective in their form & biased in their arrangement, wouldn’t an ability to twist our memories even to the point of delusion be attractive since their enjoyment when recalled would only be greater?

There are plenty of people willing to misrepresent their pasts, to deceive others & perhaps themselves, about who they are. We have all met people willing to misconstrue their experiences in the telling of them to us, people willing to exaggerate their role in a good experience or minimize it in a bad, or even lie altogether about experiences they’ve never had. In general we all have well-trained deception meters & a liar or exaggerator is usually sniffed out soon enough by his society, but usually he is not challenged though his lack of honesty or sincerity is commented about by his circle when he isn’t within earshot.

Often people who lie or exaggerate their roles in life to those around them, seem to become immune to the signs that should tell them they are not convincing. For instance, when the people around them don’t ask questions about something extraordinary they have recounted. A lack of challenge to his lies is probably enough to help enable his ability to begin remembering things as he describes them instead of as they actually were because of the feedback loop he creates.

Even if objective memory is an impossibility, the attempt to keep it as close to objective truth as one is able, is important. Not only is it important to remember things as truthfully as we may, but also not to cover our ears when memories which cause regret, remorse or embarrassment come to us, since they are a legitimate part of who we are now.

I think the reason the people who invent their own experiences never seem happy to us is because inside they know that their invented self-- who lives in the past-- never concords with the present self. Although the remembered self might be improved through self-deceit his bravery, or smarts, or suavity can never be counted on in the present moment.

tuesday july 6th, 2010

Boat races in Sarasota (570 words)

The boat races in Sarasota on July fourth, the anniversary of American independence from the British empire in the 18th century.  Crowds, food smells, beer beginning before noon on a very hot day.  Blaring bands playing old rock & roll on the streets, lots of American flags everywhere from decorating drink stirrers to bandannas around the necks of dogs &, of course, the roaring boats. 

The men were all dressed almost exclusively in combinations of only four clothing items: short-sleeved buttonless shirts often with words written on them that in some small or large way, describes something intimate about the person wearing it, which kind of motorcycle he likes, the music he listens to or which bar he drinks at; short trousers or jeans & baseball caps. 

The women tended more to tight & scant attire revealing more of their suspiciously large breasts than is normally considered civil.  Extremely fat people queuing for extremely fattening foods, including, endearingly, alligator sandwiches alongside the Italian sausages.

The racing boats are 60 & 70 foot long, that’s more than 20 meters, with covered cockpits that seat two pilots.  They cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars & are carted from race to race on trucks that cost nearly as much.  Now, I am not saying I have anything against the boats themselves really, we have cigarette boats in Spain too but we don’t use them for racing there.  We put them to practical use instead transporting contraband, namely: cigarettes [from Gibraltar] or to dash back & forth to shore from ships carrying hash from Morocco.

The boats & the races are flashy affairs, with plenty of noise, colour, speed & above all, power.  Not only the power of 2000 horses of engine but the power to pursue interest in such ludicrously expensive & extravagantly useless machines.

All I see when I look at the excited crowds, the festivities, the races, is gross consumption.  A sense of Roman gluttony & excess.  Unlike sailing regattas, here the demand is top-down, people come to see these boats race because these boats race, where sailing for example, whether as sport, hobby or even lifestyle, is undertaken for its own pleasures & subsequently organized into races.  A sailboat’s speed is entirely dependant on human astuteness & physical effort rather than the largest sum paid for the most powerful engines.  Money creating money with multitudes ready to spend it.  Large amounts of fuel for racing & transportation, plus the chemical & sound pollution, the latter, a large part of the draw.

It is true I am indifferent to sports in general but, is this a sport? It must take some skills I am ignorant of to pilot such boats but they do, after all, just race in a straight line on a clear day as fast as they can trying to beat a clock (unlike the cigarette boats in Spain whose more challenging skills are honed by evading coast guards at night & as often as not, in bad weather.) 

I think that though the audience may not be consciously wishing for a dramatic accident: boat upturned by excessive wind resistance due to its speed, ripped to shreds in the air, explosions, flames, death; it is the images of such crashes in the minds of those who watch, that attract them to watching.  If it isn’t that I just can’t think what it might be.

monday july 5th, 2010

Would you kill yourself to go on living? (360 words)

Suppose it were possible to make another you.  Exactly like you in every way but stronger, disease-resistant, more symmetrical, in other words a you that was exactly like you in every way but: optimized. This new you would also hold precisely the same memories & neurological patterns you do.

After the new you is made you become sick & are facing a long, painful & inevitable death. In order to go on living as you did before the illness, all you would have to do is kill yourself since you would already be alive & in good shape in the new you.

It is an interesting conundrum which had an impact on me when I read a narrative version of the dilemma by one of the more philosophical science fiction writers I used to read when I was a young adolescent. A Polish author whose name I don’t remember.

The sense of ego & individuality would make it difficult for most of us to plunge the knife into our collective chest. A religious man might make the argument that all souls are unique & since he is sure his own resides in him, the other him, though indistinguishable in every way, can only be a cheap, soulless facsimile & not really him.

Of course, if the two ‘you-s’ are given enough time for separate & different experience, they gradually become less strictly interchangeable. If it were possible to make sure all sensorial input were exactly the same for each of a pair of monozygotic twins, would they not be exactly the same as one another not only in body but in every memory & thought?

To someone like me who believes the mind is a consequence of the brain & the body is no more than its precise & unique agglomeration of atoms, the two ‘me-s’ are in every way me, with only the odd circumstance that I now occupy two places in space at the same time [made of two sets of atoms each undifferentiated individually or collectively from the other]. But it would still be difficult for me to plunge the knife.

wednesday june 30th, 2010

More Happiness (2930 words)

I learned something today that made me think about its implications: in psychology three seconds is used as a practical measure of a person’s experience of his own present. 

I only recently discovered Steven Pinker, the cognitive neuroscientist & Darwinian psychologist. I knew nothing about Dennet’s computational model of the brain or the polemics between it & the behavioural model.  I bought Pinker’s How the Mind Works & it has led me through the discovery of various scientists, professors, linguists, philosophers, neuroscientists & the like, each referenced by the others & consequently searched out by me. 

All the new information about studies & experiments & the subsequent thought which is novel to me, has brought me back to the philosophical questions habitually interesting to me to see how they look in the light of this new knowledge.

And so, I find myself again examining ideas about happiness & man’s subjective experience of it, but illumined now by Gilbert, Kahneman & others working in this branch of psychology & neuroscience.

When I am learning something new I have become aware that paying attention to a lucid explanation, spoken or written, is enough to understand it, but it is not enough to be able to rely on the information still being there when trying to recall it later.  And so, I have learned to do this exercise: by composing in written words a recapitulation of my new knowledge I can commit it to memory even if I never again go back to read what I wrote.  In this manner I consolidate a memory so as to be able to reliably reconsolidate it in the future for the purposes of say, referencing it in light of some new understanding not yet attained, or to be able to explain it to a friend as part of a conversation on the subject.

The reason I am telling you this is because that is what this essay actually is though I decided it was interesting enough to publish for the pleasure of sharing its thought provoking qualities with you.  Who knows? They might be memes gathered by me which, given your shared interest & previous ignorance, be passed to you & be capable of soldiering on in both spatial & temporal dimensions, with even a chance, however remote, of leaving the earth aboard a ship, in the form of radio waves or a Trekkie tachyon beam, to settle on worlds far from our own (!)

I calculated how many of these three second present moments make up an average lifetime & it worked out to approximately 735 million units of perceived ‘presents’ for the experiencing self.  The remembering self, on the other hand, might, in a lifetime, only spend time remembering some thousands of them.  No one, however much they dwell in the past, will spend anywhere near two weeks remembering a two week holiday even if it comprised the best two weeks of their entire lives.  Most three second present units make no memories at all.

Although we may think the present moment is the most important since it is the one we are perpetually living; as much as we may enjoy our memories, we can no longer taste the ice cream that has been swallowed but only remember that it was good.  In fact it is not the experiencing self who makes the decisions, it is instead the remembering self.  I thought Kahneman’s definition of thoughts of the future as ‘anticipatory memories’, very telling indeed. 

In a simple thought experiment he suggests imagining a luxury holiday in Hawaii (as an example of something generally considered desirable), do you go for the experience, or the memory of the experience? There is a simple way to decide: what if you are offered the holiday on the condition you take an amnesia-inducing pill afterwards? There you have the experience without the memory & clearly its attractiveness pales.

Personally, I decided while still young that the best purpose life can be put to is collecting memories.  It is not only all we have, i.e. the memories of our lives, but also who we are.  Anyone experiencing a moment of regret or remorse feels this keenly, the past mistake diminishes his life & his sense of self.  But can it really be reasonable to sacrifice the life of the experiencing self who lives every moment of your life to that of the remembering self who only recalls occasional moments, often badly & out of context?

I suppose the question would have to come to rest on a choice between satisfaction & happiness.  The experiencing self is the one who feels happy, or not, while the remembering self draws the conclusions about whether or not the experiences satisfy him as a whole.  If the effects of doing something directed by the remembering self in spite of the experiencing self were cumulative over a lifetime; in other words: if doing that thing makes you increasingly satisfied with your life despite the experiencing self, then I suppose it is worthwhile.

I have also talked in earlier essays of meditation as representative of living in the moment compared to the normal rat-race existence where pleasures are often assigned an imagined future while sacrificing the present to them.  Time seems to slow for the person meditating, the one living his present, while the rush of the competitor in the rat race compresses time so it seems to pass all too quickly.  But when considering the memories each have of his life, the one who meditates finds he has only made one memory while the rat has a rich tapestry to choose from. Time as inversely relative.

When I think of the approximately 30,000 meals I have eaten in my life I can recall very few indeed.  Maybe a few dozen where the food, the company, the event, the place or something else, made it extraordinary enough to remember.  I seem to have learned a tendency to choose the thousand dollar night out, the one that makes the memory, over the thousand dollar vacuum cleaner I might need more, will serve me longer, will do me more good, but is so banal as to enrich my memories not at all.

It is the remembering self that makes me realize also that though my experiencing self might be improvident enough to casually throw 4000 units of present moments at watching random television, my remembering self reminds me that it is more unlikely to make memories, create greater satisfaction, than doing something else instead.

So which is more important to happiness? Experience or the memory of experience? In another example Kahneman uses a study done with colonoscopies, something which can generally be counted on to make a bad memory but, how bad? People undergoing the procedure were tested for pain levels throughout.  I imagine them turning a dial or pushing a lever back & forth to match the level of pain in real time thus creating a graph that describes, in a sense, the experience’s actual ‘badness’. 

Some time afterwards the same patients were asked about the experience.  Surprisingly some of those for whom the procedure took twice as long described it as less bad than the others.  It turned out that the deciding factor was how the procedure ended, if it ended at a high level of pain it was remembered more badly. 

If the people who suffered the procedure for half the time had a second colonoscopy where after the procedure ended painfully, the doctor left the apparatus inside but didn’t move it around for a couple of minutes; meaning that despite the discomfort, the pain level was low, then, if the patient had to choose between doctors for a third colonoscopy he would choose the one that ended the procedure with less pain regardless of the amount of time it took or level of pain while it lasted.
 
Plato said that what distance is to scale time is to value.  In other words: the further something is from us in space the smaller it looks, just as the further something is from us in time the lower is its value.  This is the fundamental problem we have in judging the things & events that will make us happy when compared with those which actually do.  The 70 year old man might erase his first, youthful, sexual encounter in exchange of ten more years of life while the 17 year old boy would give ten years of his life for his first sexual encounter. The value of everything is relative to its context.  We wouldn’t dream of paying $25 for a Big Mac in a McDonald’s but would consider it a tantalising offer if we were lost on a desert isle & dying of hunger with $25 in our pockets.

The same is true in the devaluing sense for someone who smokes cigarettes, he can ignore the statistics that tell him that the 365,000 cigarettes he smokes over a lifetime will give him a long, painful & premature death, & concentrate instead on the improbability the cigarette he lights in this moment will be the one that causes the cancer to start.

Gilbert offers a neat thought experiment.  He used a twenty dollar bill in his example but when I tried it myself with a few people around me, their answers went against Gilbert’s results until I raised the stake to $100.  This showed me that when considering it conceptually they were not answering the question according to its stated criteria but rather in function of how little they cared about a twenty dollar bill.  It goes like this: say you go to the theatre with a ticket that cost you $100 as well as a $100 bill in your pocket.  When you arrive you reach in your pocket & find you have lost your admission but not the $100 bill.  Do you spend the hundred dollars replacing the ticket you lost? Or do you change your mind about going to the theatre because you have lost your ticket?

The majority answer: no, they would not replace the lost ticket.  Their reasoning is a value judgement based on comparison: “the ticket is worth one hundred dollars, I will not pay two hundred for it.” Or “If it had cost $200 originally instead of 100, I would not have bought it.”

Gilbert then goes on to ask: “What if you reach the theatre & find that instead of losing the ticket you have lost the hundred dollar bill, do you still go to see the show? Here everybody answers: yes.  What does losing the money have to do with the question of going or not to the show? But as you can see, the results of replacing the lost ticket or going to the show despite having lost the currency, are exactly the same, you enter the theatre with nothing in your pockets either way.

Why are we so bad at judging value? We are ill-equipped because we are genetically constructed for a world where choices are few, life is short, there is little we control & our only desires are for food & copulation. But we live in a world where all of nature is under our control, we are frequently called on to make a decision from among infinite choices, we have food aplenty, options more attractive than sex & we live much longer than our biological purpose: the sexual cycle, requires.

One more: when people were offered 50 dollars now, or 60 in thirty days, the majority chose the 50 in the moment.  When people were offered 50 dollars in 12 months or 60 in 13, the majority chose to wait the full 13 months.  However, as the twelfth month approached they regretted their decision & wanted the 50 instead. 

Interestingly Gilbert illustrates Plato’s comparison of scale & time in a literal way, he shows us two figures on a screen one of whom is much taller than the other.  He then makes them recede into the distance & we see how, though their relative heights never change, as they become smaller (in visual terms: more distant) the difference in their height appears to diminish. In his work with blind people given sight later in life, Sinha shows us that the image of the world reflected on our retinas is a two-dimensional patchwork of tone & colour, it is the brain that extrapolates & organizes a three-dimensional representation from the raw data. This is our brain summarizing images, deciding that at that distance the relative difference no longer matters.

We can see by this that what we've always been told about our sight is untrue; it is not that my eye, like a camera, sees every detail within my visual range but cannot recall it later because the brain has 'dumped' information irrelevant to my interests. It is rather (or, in addition to) that between lens & cognition-- not after-- the brain is already censuring data before presenting the inner eye with a representation of the reality before it.

The inability to value things or events at a distance makes us mistake which are the objectives worth pursuing.

I once calculated the chances of winning a lottery with a friend who mentioned wanting to buy one, by calling each ticket sold a second.  Multiplied by the chances, it turned out to be a question of having to choose the single second of a specific hour & day, out of 36 days plus some hours & minutes. (The big lotteries which offer 100 million+ can have odds rounding 150 million to one or the equivalent of choosing the specific second inside of 4 years & ten months, i.e. your chances of winning are more or less the same whether you buy a ticket or not!)  

When Gilbert made the same point with a different analogy (also involving time), someone stood up in the audience & said: “I have interviewed more than a thousand lottery buyers in a psychological study I conducted which showed us that in fact people do not buy lottery tickets for the remote chance of winning the prize but rather for the anticipatory illusion inherent in the purchase.  Although that may be true, or, as Gilbert pointed out: despite the odds, they do believe there is a chance of winning, “someone, after all, has to.”  It seems to me, however, that in order to maintain the illusion he is actually paying for, one must believe he might win the prize, which means he must make the miscalculation of risk Gilbert refers to in the first instance.

Another example was of a lottery made up of 10 tickets at 2 dollars each with a prize of 10 dollars.  The cost of the ticket is one fifth the value of the prize & one tenth the cost of all the tickets; a fair lottery: ten people each with a one in ten chance of winning, which it turns out, most people will play.  But if you are offered one of the ten tickets at two dollars & know that I own all of the other nine, you become more reluctant because though the odds have not changed, it becomes clearer how much likelier it is one of my tickets will win.

When people spout the cliché: “money doesn’t buy happiness” I usually retort: “the question of whether or not money buys happiness is debatable but there can be no doubt whatever that poverty buys only misery.”  It is normally good for a chuckle, but I felt vindicated when Kahneman backed me up with science.  Apparently here in the United States, people with incomes below $60,000 a year are less happy than those who earn more, but the surprising thing is that of those above the 60,000 dollar line, it didn’t matter how much they earned, whether it were 60,000 or 600,000, they showed a perfectly flat graph line of happiness.  In other words, riches of all levels brought similar grades of happiness but the impecunious, who have difficulty paying for the essentials, are all miserable according to just how poor they are.

We are all familiar with the studies that have shown that the rare lottery winners, skyrocketed from ordinary circumstance to fabulous wealth, find that within a year they have settled back into their customary ratio of happiness & sadness despite the circumstantial changes.  The same is true for tragic change, a car crash victim who is turned paraplegic also shows the same levels of happiness a year after the accident.

Despite the obvious advantages of winning a multi-million dollar lottery over living the rest of your life in a wheelchair, it seems that we pursue happiness pointlessly since, in the end, we are neither capable of choosing which things or events are worth striving for, nor do we experience more happiness than our natures allow regardless of whether we achieve what we pursue or its opposite.

Since I am interested in happiness the same way I am interested in religions, for philosophic reasons rather than wanting to learn how to get more; I think it is quite right we dedicate our experiencing selves to our remembering ones if for no other reason than that the experiencing self only feels happiness in lieu of unhappiness, whereas the remembering self can make happy memories of both. Just as a self-made man cherishes memories of his wretched origins, life is not made successful by a successful pursuit of happiness, by a filling of its time with happy experiential moments, but by structuring a satisfying whole informed by much besides happiness.

friday june 25th, 2010

Theo Jansen talks about his kinetic sculpture. In the second half of the video he explains some of the fascinating (& surprisingly simple) mechanisms that account for his sculptures' extraordinary behaviour.

thursday june 24th, 2010

e-books & writers (1240 words)

Kindle has been on the market for two years now. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, measures sales of the ebook reader in “the millions” & claims that for every 5 sales of a particular title on paper, 3 people will download the same book to their Kindle. Its appearance on the market is largely credited for Amazon’s 32% increase in profits since its launch.

Although the iPad has only been out three months it has sold 3 million units already & will undoubtedly open a new market segment to people willing to read books on the iPad but not the Kindle or, lagging way behind: the Sony reader. Although the iPad costs nearly double, beginning at $500 compared to Kindle’s $259 (recently marked down to $189), the fact most people buy the iPad for its functions other than the book application means that many people who have been unwilling to try the switch from paper to screen will be converted by-the-way.

It is still early days, only 3-5% of book sales are accounted for by their digital versions. As the percentages rise I will be among the people who will miss the book as friend, as beautiful object or decorative one; what, after all, can make a room more appealing than book-lined shelves?

But, in the end, the excuse we once used, that we weren’t comfortable reading at our computer screens, is now moot. We have no choice but to get used to the greater convenience. I, for one, will not miss the weight of paper books when travelling, for instance.

Here is a rough breakdown of comparative costs to publishers for traditional printing & digital publishing (source: New York Times, Feb 28, 2010):

There are some expenses reflected in this chart that seem suspect to me, for instance, instead of counting the ebook as essentially storage-free, publishers include in the expenses of selling ebooks the storage of all the paper books they distribute divided by the digital books that need no warehouses. Also, 50 cents per book is counted for the digitalizing of printed books though any book produced in the last twenty years began its life in digital form. Besides, Google is set to get into the market selling cheap digitalized versions of older books to publishers. Regardless of these caveats it is not bad that publishers are willing to admit a price slash of fifty percent from the get-go.

We can see what the digital book revolution means to publishers, scared early on by Kindle’s $9.99 ebooks, when they calculate their own costs at $12.99. But though their own margins might shrink in a future price war, the growing strength of the market will make it more interesting nonetheless. The infrastructure for publishing will be reduced from printing, warehousing, distribution & promotion costs (& the administrative teams necessary for the logistics) to an office large enough to fit a few editors & a computer.

Just as we see with self-published books for sale now on Amazon, when digital sales begin to account for greater percentages of the whole, the negligible cost of publishing will mean even more books by people who mistakenly think they are good writers. Which is why, in time, we will come to rely on publishers just as we do now as filters who can be relied on for professional proofreading, editing & taste.

Among the sea of words will rise the talented on whom paper-print publishers would not risk the large investment. And instead of counting on New York Times book reviews or expensive New Yorker advertisements to help us in our choices, the Web will offer us genuine feedback from other readers like ourselves. Furthermore, the ease & low comparative cost of purchasing books will make us more willing to try new writers who turn out disappointing.

If you go to the iPad applications store you will find user comments, honestly pro or con, directly below the item for sale. We have gotten used to this interactivity among consumers but it wasn't long ago that outside a ring of acquaintances such feedback was unthinkable.

Ebooks already offer automatic book-marking, note-taking & search functions. Integrated dictionaries, text to voice option, zoom & background music while you read, as well as many pre 1923 [uncopyrighted] titles for free. Other options like direct to-&-from footnote travel, highlighting or annotation, will surely appear soon.

I think there can be no doubt that though the big publishers are doing everything they can to slow the conversion, it will only take a market share still in the minority-- of people accustomed to reading the new way-- to make publishers see the light, & the profits within a new infrastructure. It isn’t as if the old structure weren’t corrupt, writers can no longer even speak to publishers of books without the intermediary independent agent & most books spell a financial loss for their publishers.

So we get to the most important consideration: how will it affect writers, without whom the whole question becomes irrelevant. I think there can be no incertitude: it will be a boon, right? We have already seen how the Internet has made user opinion & word-of-mouth recommendation more powerful than conventional advertising or movie trailers that are better than the films they advertise. Publishers will be more accessible to writers & writers to readers.

Although we may miss concrete libraries & physical bookstores or books we can hold in our hands, the old industries will close & a new, better way to read will revitalize a market waning in the face of digital competition i.e. people do their reading on the Internet instead of turning paper leaves.

The writer, as the only person in the chain of earnings between the $3.90 paid to him in royalties & the $26 charged to the reader for the book (half of which goes to the retail bookseller), for whom the costs are the same regardless of the form his product takes on the market, he could continue to earn the same royalties per book & rightfully become the biggest earner in the chain even if readers are paying a quarter of what they are used to for printed books.

When you can look at a half dozen reviews in half a dozen newspapers in a few minutes, or simply take a recommendation from a Facebook news feed, click to go to a virtual store, purchase for a few bucks & be reading your new book shortly after; all while riding in the back-seat of a car or on an airplane, there is simply no reason why not. This is the future of books. All we have to do is get used to the idea. I think the iPad is going to take us a step closer to that inevitability. It will not be the end of the physical book but their buyers will become collectors instead of simple readers.

The author Anne Rice said. “The only thing I think is a mistake is people trying to hold back e-books or Kindle and trying to head off this revolution by building a dam. It’s not going to work.”

I think books on screen might develop in the same direction people of my generation have seen music develop: to include moving images. With these images will come a whole new reading public, those who were brought up on the internet instead of reading books.

wednesday june 16th, 2010

Engineer & artist Arthur Ganson introduces his beautiful moving sculptures on TEDtalks:

wednesday june 2nd, 2010

My expat friends & long residents of Thailand write or call with long, outraged & detailed accounts & analyses of the regrettable political upheavals in that country. Today I received a summing up in broken English from a Thai friend who cuts to the chase dumping all the superfluous detail for a crystalline clear concision: "About problem in Thailand, now is finished, with ecomomic go down, country broke and city burn, so stupid people!" 

monday may 31st, 2010

I visited the Ringling museum of art today & on its grounds
noticed this stone putto being consumed by a Banyan tree:

tuesday may 18th, 2010

Misanthropy (1230 words)

I see I am still mulling recently touched themes:

We human mammals, to give an example, have retinas made up of three types of photoreceptive cells. On its upper layers, about 20 times the number of rods as cones, which gives us a certain ability to see tone & colour, or: an ability to see certain tones & colours.

Some other mammals have only rods & no photosensitive ganglion so though they see shades of light & dark they don’t know that colour exists. Some complex eyes that belong to mammals give their owners a conception of a visual context for their existence, even less sophisticated than the simple eyes that belong to bees.

While others, like owls, have a hundred times the photoreceptors of humans; imagine how different their visual abstract of the world is to ours. I suppose that a human born sightless must still see something. His visual cortex is still intact though the synaptic intelligence cannot be fed by outside stimuli, just as we see images in our dreams while our eyes are closed by sleep. In other words without the tools for phototransduction, the translation of the stimulus of photons on retinal cells into the mind’s visualisation of them; or one might say: the conversion of light into electrical signal, he cannot base his ‘sights’ on the confirmation offered by direct incitation of reflected photons. It would be as impossible to describe a cloud in visual terms to a blind man as it would be to describe colour to a mammal only equipped to see tone: the quantities of light instead of its quality.

We might look at a dog & think of all it misses in its colourless world but our own ability to perceive light ends within a narrow range & saturation, missing the wide extremes at either side of red & violet. And, of course, if we spoke of the olfactory sense instead, a dog would look at me with his 150 cubic centimetres of sinus chamber & think of my 5 cubic centimetres as akin to blindness. If there were a creature able to see all light, his conception of the same world he & I share, would be far more different to each other’s than mine is to the dog’s. And this is without mentioning the wide range of sensitivity to light & colour between fully sighted humans.

In fact there are an estimated eighty types of eyes in the world, each describing to their owners a very different world.

If we draw back from the chemical reactions between molecules of the photoreceptor cells; the eye as mechanism that houses them or the brain that perceives them, to the mind that collates the two, the person; the ‘I’. We can clearly see that that person, that unique character, is a manifestation of the unimaginable number (at least to the ‘I’) of the precise combination & organization of the atoms that comprise his unique form.

And yet not one of the atoms that make up ‘you’ right now is the same as the ones that made up you sometime in the past. What seems, to someone of our scale, a solid & discreet body when looking at each other, is in fact no more than a moving cloud of loosely & magnetically joined parts which are constantly secreted, excreted, expired, pulled away or repulsed or even just fall off the edges to float among the gases that surround & form a part of each of us. As you read this you may well have breathed through your mouth, your trachea, your bronchioles & alveoli, to be carried in turn through the oxidation of haemoglobin to form a part of your Pancreas, an atom that once belonged to Chaucer’s nose.

And if we consider that atoms are made predominantly of empty space with only a tiny amount of whizzing matter-energy to define that space as an atom, the 'I' clearly becomes a vague & theoretical entity.

Without going so far as the literally, inconceivably miniscule scale of atoms, let’s just consider that of a typical human cell. Its outer wall might be an impenetrable barrier in its own world while in ours it is a mere liquid with the viscosity of light oil. Within its walls the space is too small to be reached by the gravity of our planet while the massing of huge piles of them that are us, are very subject to its pull. We must admit that our conception of ourselves is strictly subjective, prejudiced & meaninglessly distant to any definitive reality.

If we add the equally approximate ideas of reality the rest of our sensory perceptions allow us, we can see how widely diverging our experience & consequent understanding of life & its surroundings must be. Yet each of us, each individual cloud of maniacally vibrating & spinning atoms with their temperamental electrons flying in all directions, garners an inner construct of its outer world it, we, feel quite confident is definite because of its long predictability, rocks are always hard & water is always wet.

A good example is that you understand that when I refer to our shared perception of water being wet, or rocks being hard, it is a simple hyperbole understood to mean the common experience of the material world. Why is it a good example? Because, how is it that we confirm our shared experience with other humans? Aside from observation such as learning that fire is hot by watching someone else burn himself with it, we have language.

A series of sounds within our narrow range of hearing made with our vibrating vocal chords which issue from the acoustic chambers of our mouths & are carried by the air between us to cause the tympanum & small bones to resonate in our listener ’s ear in sympathy. These sounds are, by tacit agreement, translated by our minds from symbols of abstract concepts like: “careful! The fire is hot” to understanding. Or we can go further just as I am doing now & write squiggly little marks translated by a binary code from pressure on keys to digital shape on my, or your, screen. These squiggles are further removed by being symbols of the symbolic sounds which we translate into meaning.

So though someone may make the noises: "I am sad" "I feel love" "I feel pain" his empathic listener has no way of knowing if his definition & experience of sadness, love or pain, is similar to the listener's own or not.

Still, we humans, we of the human community, do feel we share our experiences of life in this way, & indeed, there is no denying that we do. It is only that the extent to which this crude & clumsy system is capable is actually very far from an individual concept-transfer from one vaguely understood ‘I’ to the other, since it must be translated into the language of shared experience to be intelligible at all.

If we could understand each other in a real way we might all be misanthropes & not just because of the unimagined secrets that await us in each other’s minds but simply because of the reflection of our own dark & unexamined machinations. Could our inability to understand each other be an evolutive grace that keeps us in an ignorance just deep enough to let us love one another?

saturday may 15th, 2010

Dying

Someone close to me is dying. Once again I find myself wondering at how a lifetime of loving life & fearing death can turn out in the end,-- whether the end be the interminable seconds that linger outside of time during a car crash, or a dimming illness-- life often fades into death without the question of fear or love ever really coming up.

But I'll tell you one thing, as realistic as television or film might seem, they are so far from real life as to be completely wrong. No matter how good the actors or how much they pile on the make-up, when death is really in the room his presence is conspicuous & unmistakable.

saturday may 8th, 2010

Googling our minds (830 words)

I read the American Scholar article & also the one in the Atlantic that he refers to in the first, about how Google is changing the way we think. I am interested in the concepts they delve into, I read with attention & with hopes they would give me some new ideas to contemplate, but, in the end, I feel they are alarmist & a little hysterical.

Many years ago I used to join a small & informal club gathering of intellectuals in an all-night diner in New York. On a Wednesday night we would sit in a naugahyde booth overdosing on coffee & pieces of bad chocolate cake as we talked excitedly about anything under the sun until the early hours of the morning. We gathered for no other reason than the thrill of exchange between interesting brains, there was no agenda, no objective other than the pleasures in joining our minds through words for the mutual stimulation of networking our thoughts. Like Paris’ Café Philosophique but without the focus, commonality or rigor.

There was one man there who became my standard reference when considering ideas like those discussed in the articles, contemplation, analysis, knowledge warehousing, mind/brain dichotomy, relevance of reference... it was rumoured he had an immeasurable IQ & certainly his store of hard-won data was inhuman. These were the days before Internet & he, on government disability, dedicated his life to gathering data which, because of his powerful brain, meant that what he studied was automatically, largely, stored in the library of his mind thereafter. It seemed no information was bad information to him since his knowledge base scanned with certain depth an apparently infinite range of topics.

I never visited him at home but was told his apartment was barely navigable through narrow aisles between piles of books & sheaves of paper.  He was also, by the way, fat, of unhealthy pallor, dressed poorly & missed a number of teeth.

He was not only a repository of knowledge but was also able to draw on his varied information base with novel association. What I found however, was that he never concluded; he had problems giving succinct answers to concise questions, or formulating personal opinion.  There was simply too much criteria for him to sift through to put it to any consequential use.

The experience of meeting him reinforced an opinion, an observation, I had come to while still a kid: all of history's great men in any field had just one thing in common, they dedicated themselves to just one thing.

I think Google's mission to systemize & store all of the world's knowledge is a noble one; isn't that precisely how we think romantically of the library at Alexandria? If we think of Google, or the Internet in general, as something biological, say: a new lobe that grows on our prefrontal cortex in which all of man's knowledge is stored. Any part of that knowledge can be consolidated but unlike memory it cannot be recalled until it is first accessed.   

Then, instead of being a scary external force that threatens to change the way we think for the worse, it becomes something we would all like to have. The inarguable fact that the Internet’s format scatters attention, requires encapsulation, brevity & summation; which in turn harms contemplation & depth of consideration, is really no different to the information storage in its varying forms that we have always had. Those who write these fearful & foreboding articles are as good examples of those unharmed by the new availability of information as we who read their lengths, cross-reference & ponder their content.

The author of the first article bemoans those ruined by the Net for such cognitive pleasures as reading War & Peace, but the truth is that when books were our best repositories of knowledge the majority of people who could read preferred the topical news & shallow content of newspapers to Tolstoy.

The analysis of all those terabytes of user behaviour data can only tell Google one thing: what the average user wants. And since the average user represents the majority-- the same majority who never read War & Peace-- what he wants will propel the general development of the Web.

My point being: there is nothing wrong with this new technology’s [evolving] format or its new ability to make accessible hitherto undreamed quantities of information, just as there wasn’t in removing the responsibility to remember things in one’s own mind or disseminate them through the telling, was harmed by the invention of the book.

History’s better minds, as I mentioned earlier, will know how to filter out the information which is none of their business. They are not the information-byte addicts who surf links to interesting, superficial & irrelevant knowledge. It has always been in the filtering of the unwanted, the unnecessary, that deeper minds find the discretion, the space & time, to fill themselves with the germane.

wednesday may 5th, 2010

Knowledge transfer (840 words)

An old friend of mine & his assistants have been working hard for several months on a scientific paper recently published in the prestigious Implementation Science journal. As I read it, or more accurately: studied it, it was precisely because of the concentration it took to understand it that my thoughts began a parallel course not on the content of the study but its structure, & I began comparing it in my mind to literature.

What made this paper stand out to me among others of its class were two aspects: first, though it refer to a concrete application, it was purely conceptual, with nothing even as real to grab onto as the surreal energy flow between theoretical, elemental particles or other unimaginable phenomena studied by science, but only pure, stark, abstract idea. There are no unexplained esoteric terms or any words in it not familiar to us laymen; it is strictly the concepts that are difficult to grapple with.

The second aspect is my friend, Joe’s, supra-human mastery of concise language: accurately & exactly defined words in precisely chosen combinations. And yet, though Joe’s rare ability to explain himself lucidly at all times, informs the paper, it took months of refining, with outside help & revision, to make sure it was as perfectly explained as possible before submitting it for publication. The result is some 9,000 words of which if any were removed, changed or another added, the paper’s clarity would be less good.

He does allow an analogy between the states of matter & the three basic stages of development he describes, to run through the paper but it is not a literary pretension, just something that helps us gel his ideas in our minds.

My more metaphorical mind thought of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game but if the game represents abstract thought; where the magister ludi in the book played with game-pieces which, though evocative, were mysterious & undefined; here, Joe, played the same thought-experiment with very real game-pieces: words.

If Hesse’s immense literary talents, as opposed to his explicative powers, are able to draw us in to our own thoughts while still guiding us to his abstract point, then Joe, as player of the game Hesse describes, must-- by the rules-- use only his explicative instead of invocative powers.

Since both are basically information transfer I think the main differences between literature & precise scientific jargon of conceptual purity, lie in only a few distinctions in formatting. Aside from any lyrical-literary devices, the stylistic difference is essentially that the scientist talking to his peers must not recur to example, emphasis or generalization.

Joe’s purpose is an unmistakeably clean & unchanged transfer of knowledge from his mind to the reader’s & any deviation from pure, succinct & concise exposition, risks this objective. He cannot inspire his readers with enthusiasm or personality but only ideas.

I also thought of something Feynman said about language as communication, where most people think of it as information transfer it was in fact, in his opinion, more a question of translation from one personal framework to another.

The literary author, the story-teller, the poet, provoke the reader’s mind with artistic license, subjective focus, words chosen for their inherent beauty & poetic combinations, while the scientist’s challenge is to avoid provoking the reader’s mind to, instead, place within it an idea like a brittle crystal sphere, made of words so pristine, the reader cannot help but translate its concepts into his own framework as the writer intended.

If you read the paper by clicking on the link above you’ll see the study's content also deals with knowledge transfer in a specific context.

It is interesting, I think, that though it seems we all share a universe, the belief relies only on language & observation of each other's actions. We might all be moved to similar degree emotionally by Romeo & Juliet's tragic plight, while each of us has a widely varying experience or understanding of love*. Shakespeare can poke & prod us with his emotive words to more than empathic response, reaching even experiential ones, since the feelings his words invoke are our own. But if it weren't for all the uncertain & approximate knowledge we share, Shakespeare's poignant tale of dashed love would hold no meaning whatever.

If we had to explain the play to someone without similar experience, say an asexual creature, alien to our planet & with whom we only share definitions of words, we would be forced to use Joe's language to attempt the impossible task of explaining, among other things, the depth & fire of adolescent ardor & why it is tragic Romeo & Juliet should die for it.

In fact when we say to the human standing next to us: "look at that green tree." We don't really have any idea, nor either does he, whether he sees a pink tree instead, though in his personal universe pink is green. John Donne was wrong: language is a crude, slovenly means of communication at best, & every man is an island.

footnote:
* In the Confucian orient, for instance, the play runs into all kinds of problems with its audience, not least of which is the shocking & intolerable disobedience Romeo & Juliet show their parents. Return

Sunday May 2nd, 2010

Stephen Wolfram's presentation of Mathematica was irresistible & once there, as usual, I couldn't tear myself away from the fantastic TEDTalks Site for several hours. I spent a couple of them charmed by Richard Feynman's simple passion for understanding how & why things are, his metaphors always precise & evocative. When asked about his famous intelligence he answered: Why not ask a centipede which foot comes next?

But it was a bon mot by Richard Dawkins that led me to write this short entry; talking of how atheists are generally perceived by society: We are all of us atheists in the eyes of most religions, it is just that some of us go that one God more (paraphrased)

Saturday April 24th, 2010

Viggo Mortensen (420 words)

Viggo Mortensen is an interesting man. Everyone knows he is a an able actor (even if it took the badly written role in those god-awful Lord of the Ring films to make him popular-- in the scene where he rallies his troops I couldn't help thinking he kept turning his horse's ass to the camera out of embarrassment at the thought of Olivier or Branagh at the gates of Harfleur) & we all know how photogenically handsome he is. The results of a combination of genetic good luck plus talent & hard work. What is less known about him however, is how atypical he is in Hollywood: he considers his acting career a means to the end of his more serious work: artistic photography, poetry, short story writing & painting.

In fact if it weren't for his extraordinary good looks & consummate success I'd say we have a lot in common: our multi-cultural backgrounds, attitudes & interests.

One of the things he has done with his Hollywood money was found, & now run, Perceval Press, a publishing house that specializes in books of art, critical writing, and poetry for those who might otherwise go unnoticed.

One of his languages is a faultless & fine Argentinean Spanish whose charming formality is largely archaic in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. Today I stopped at a book store for a foamless latte & pastry. I picked up a Spanish magazine from the shelf because it had Viggo's photo on the cover. I flipped to the interview precisely because I had been so happily surprised by others with him before. Instead of hollywood-speak about what a pleasure it was to work with the latest co-star or plugging his most recent film, he roamed his interests from the subject of life, where he quotes Robert Louis Stevenson's ''To travel hopefully" to express his attitude, to death, when he reminds the interviewer that the suit he wears to his grave will need no pockets.

Of his death-fear he says life will teach him how to deal with it when it is time & with dry Scandinavian irony adds: "surely in fifty years I will have gotten over it"

With the press quoting any unintelligent nonsense the likes of J Lo or Tom Cruise care to utter, it is refreshing to hear a Hollywood actor close an interview with: "You could ask me a thousand questions & never learn who I am, but then, you don't need to know... & neither do I"

Saturday April 24th, 2010

From Sir Kenneth Clark's treatise: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form

The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word "nude," on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders [of the UK] that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art. ...in the greatest age of painting, the nude inspired the greatest works; and even when it ceased to be a compulsive subject it held its position as an academic exercise and a demonstration of mastery.

Monday April 19th, 2010

Fables (340 words)

Before [re] writing the story of the Ant & the Grasshopper, below, I did some research to be sure my idea was indeed original.

I read many versions old & new, including La Fontaine who made Aesop popular again in the 17th century & whose packaging of the fable has come down to us. When I discovered Disney's 1934 version I was momentarily stymied until I realised that though Disney's genius recognised the moral ambiguity that needed addressing (two & a half millennia later), his solution was still a condescending charity offered by the correct to the incorrect; the smart to the stupid; the righteous to the degraded, i.e. in the end the grasshopper's attitude is brought into line with that of the ant's.

The most brutal versions belong, of course, to the religious. Like the unforgiving children's tales of the Germans, the Catholics use Aesop as Aquinas used Aristotle: to impose their doctrine, to instil a fear of God. The Spanish version has the Grasshopper offering the ant his immortal soul as collateral to the loan of food he promises to repay with usurious interest. But the ant, who has plenty, rejoinders flippantly: "You sang all summer now you can dance for your food all winter" & closes the door leaving the grasshopper to die.

Aesop, like Epictectus, was a slave. In the end I think all fables, all folk wisdom, is tedious with fears.  The same fears brutish peasant farmers, subject to the weather’s whim & their own lack of education, survive season to season with; just like the ant.

I can think of three morals that are different in my version to that about sloth that belongs to the original: a philosophical one, a sociological one & a cultural one. The first is the most obvious: pride, which both the ant & the grasshopper regret before the end of the story. The second: prejudice against those who are different; the inability to put ourselves in each other's shoes. And finally: the need industry or science has of art, just as art must rely on those who haven't the time for such abstract pursuit.

Monday April 13th, 2010

The Ant and the Grasshopper (1300 words), a story with a moral by Paul & Aesop, illustrations by Steve Morrison

Finally he dragged himself to the door of the ant’s home and shamefaced, knocked. He could hear noises from within but it felt like an eternity before the ant pushed her heavy door open against the snows that had gathered across it, and put her head around its corner. The grasshopper felt a wave of warm air emanating from within and noticed how plump and healthy the ant looked. He opened his mouth to speak but his jaw shivered with the cold and though he moved his lips the words were frozen on his tongue.

I took pleasure in the proof I had been right, but do you know what happened to my gloating, my pleasure, grasshopper? Well, as I sat in my warm, dark hole, surrounded by my food and my pride I had time to reflect: 'I will do nothing but sleep and wake in order to eat, before I return to sleep again, and so on until the end of winter. I asked myself: for what? And the answer came to me: to wait for next summer’s long labour to repeat and so on till I die.' 

You, at least, were brave enough to have lived one summer though it be your last. I have yet to do so much though I have survived many winters. Are my mind and heart worth nought, that I dedicate their desires and curiosities to nothing more than the survival and comfort of my body?

And I heard again in my inner ear the sad melody you played that summer's day, but this time it accompanied tears of remorse.

Oh yes, I have thought of you grasshopper, I thought of your carefree charm which can only grow in the soils of passion, your violent love and the dulcet strains of your song, and I wished-- oh how I wished-- that you would come and seek me out. So come in my brother and welcome. We shall each have to eat less than our fill but your music will satiate our hearts and each other’s pleasant company will occupy our minds, an ant cannot live, after all, on grain alone. 

I rejoice that you spent the summer perfecting your art, now let me help you with your violin before you drop it! And do come in to warm yourself while I fix us something to eat dear grasshopper: I haven't much variety but your company will give it new flavour.

Thursday April 8th, 2010

Conceptual art (750 words)

This brings to mind the controversy surrounding the story of the cleaning lady who threw out the rancid lard that was part of a Joseph Beuys installation (whether apocryphal or not this, though probably inadvertent, was as pure, succinct and definitive an act of art criticism as I can think of). There was much discussion whether replacing the original lard would make the work inauthentic. Is it any wonder that with this kind of parochial navel-gazing the art world is not taken seriously by the world at large?

Paul: I think it is interesting to consider one of my favourite pieces by Picasso in this context, his bull's head. It is in an entirely different category to Duchamp's found art, since it is a sculpture made of found objects. Even if it is so simple that he might have found its two parts lying together on the floor of his garage & thought: hey! That handlebar & bicycle seat look like a bull's head! It is a piece no-one can doubt his right to sign as his own.

*footnote: if you clicked on the link above taking you to the article about Duchamp's urinal mentioned by Bobby (Economist March 24th) note the comments people made. All outrage & indignation though not one of the 21 understood Duchamp's intention nor that, for better or worse, he introduced a lasting concept that has influenced the art world ever since. 

The art world does not suffer for its inclusion of conceptual art as category (even if Bobby & I don't like what is produced under its flag!), it suffers instead from the lack of education of those who deem themselves judges. Indeed, the greater phenomenon of the evolution of art in the last century is not Duchamp's subversion but the new & widely-held belief that anyone has a right to judge whether a urinal is art though they wouldn't presume to judge its plumbing without some training first. Return

Sunday March 21st, 2010

The importance of punctuation

Tueday February 2nd, 2010

California, first impressions (1320 words)

California is sooo organised compared to anywhere in Europe, & we won't even mention the orient. Robot tills at the supermarket do away with queues & the shopping carts have electronically operated wheels that lock if you try to pass the boundaries of the continental parking lot with them.

Upon arriving at the Getty museum for a wonderful, well lit, informative exhibit of Rembrandt etchings, it was raining. As little as it rains here they were never-the-less prepared: getting out of the shuttle monorail from the parking lot there were museum guards handing out white umbrellas lest their guests get damp on the 100 metre walk to the main entrance. Entering the rooms dedicated to the show one wished he thought to bring a magnifying lens to study the etchings better, & what does he find? Magnifying lenses thoughtfully hanging on the wall for his use.

Other good things? Iridescent hummingbirds more like large insects than small birds. Brilliant emerald green hovering over colourful flowers & then the sun catches its head & it turns bright crimson red, magical. Their miniature hearts beat 400 times a minute & one I watched drew nectar from what seemed 100 tiny flowers on a rosemary bush in just seconds, I wonder if we humans, move in slow motion in its eyes the way the Sloth does in ours.

People have an easy & open friendliness with those they don't know. Men more than women invent interesting looks for themselves (I'll have to take some photographs) without inspiring overt prejudice. Individualism is respected.

Compared to other parts of the world the overall affluence is striking. It is not the cars that cost more than some homes, they can be found also in uncomfortable & badly organised cities anywhere. It is the public services, the cleanliness & security, the sense at all times that someone has thought of the citizen's comfort. With this comes a phenomenon I have noticed in Scandinavia where some people drive their 6-airbag Volvos with helmets on; a sense that if one is just careful enough he will live forever.

When what most of the rest of the world consider luxuries are here birthright, I think one can tend to concentrate on smaller & smaller risks. The anti-bacterial towelletes offered free at the entrances of supermarkets to cleanse the previous user's germs from the shopping cart handle, is probably supremely sensible & yet, psychologically, I think it reduces life's concerns to trivial risk.

It is only the questionable avoidance of the risk of catching an occasional three-day flu which, by the way, makes opportunity for your body to create defences against it which last as long as you live. Considering the fact the number of bacteria that live only on the surfaces of our bodies are equivalent to 1500 times the number of people on earth (the overwhelming majority of them good for us) I think traditional soapy cleanliness quite enough. The more one avoids trivial risks, the more he believes they aren't trivial at all. What will seem reasonable next? Gas masks to avoid breathing each other's unfiltered exhalations?

It seems everyone here has allergies & other hyper-sensitivities to their environment though it be more sterilised than places where allergies are practically unheard of. And though I have never seen such beautiful & HUGE health food supermarkets with anything you can think of grown, cared for & processed organically, the Californian is not sick less & he falls second in longevity to the Frenchman who enjoys his food for its flavour instead of its healthfulness.

More observations? People here laugh easily though it be more as social lubricant than in appreciation of humour, this sometimes makes for a somewhat hysterical tone to a dialogue for those unused to it. But where the stony silence a serious German or dour Scot might give your failed attempt to make him laugh might be uncomfortable, the confidence with which one can expect a laugh here has degenerated the level of wit & even the category which qualifies a witticism.

If I decide to take a short walk to the nearest of the ubiquitous malls (on average, larger than some villages I have lived in) because the day is fine, the pavements wide & clean; & the cars so polite they stop long before the pedestrian reaches an intersection he must cross. Bounteous in their generosity, I suppose, because of the rarity of its demand & yet I can feel the driver's eyes on me idly curious: did his car break down? Is he one of the homeless? Or maybe just Mexican...

In the park where I walk my dog there are metal dispensers on the trees that offer plastic 'doggie bags' which a master is meant to fill with his dog's excrement. The world-wide club of dog owners whose only requirement for membership is ownership of a dog (& any member is allowed to address any other) is present & friendly. Unlike other chapters of the club however, here, the first question I'm asked is of which breed my dog is. When I answer: "I don't know, she's just a dog" I feel I should stick a finger up my nose to complete the image. Sometimes the other dog owner's confusion will be followed by disdain &, I'd swear, even a glimmer of reproach as if to say I am not responsible enough to be a dog owner if I haven't even taken the trouble to delve into my bastard bitch's genealogy. Even their own inbred, overfed & over-pampered dogs seem to raise their noses at my country bumpkin who believes all the world loves her just as she loves all the world.

I suppose we have all been exposed to California English on television but it is not clever scriptwriting meant to make us laugh, they really do speak like that. Magniloquent, figurative & euphemistic, sprinkled with just a few overused adjectives such as: ‘awesome’ & ‘amazing’. As if these adjectives weren’t already overstated they are, as often as not, backed up by other adjectives like: ‘intense’ or ‘profound’. The favourite however is the adverb ‘really’, often used as substitute for ‘very’, as if the veracity of what one said needed confirming when what is actually meant is ‘more than a little’.

And since no one takes the time or trouble to find the appropriate word, the word, ‘like’ is injected at the beginning to warn the listener the forthcoming description will be approximate: “Like, wow! You know?”

The words 'love' & 'hate' are used more easily than 'like' & 'dislike' & 'total' no longer means 'the sum of all the parts' but rather: 'I agree with your sentiment'. So if a southern Californian says: "I really love dolphins; they're so awesome" they will consider it appropriate if you reply: "oh, totally"

Platitudes & pat phrases abound. It is good to know for instance, that they do not mean incapacitated by tension when they say: ‘stressed out’ nor are they exhibiting irrational behaviour & loss of emotional control due to an extreme shock when they declare: ‘I’m freaking out’, or he ‘freaked’, as in: “He freaked out when I told him how really, reeeally amazing the painting of Bathsheba by Rembrandt was, you know?” the ‘you know’ being synonymous with the east end of London’s rhetorical ‘innit?’ whose true meaning is: you agree, of course; & whose purpose is a faux involvement of the speaker's interlocutor. Just as 'tell me about it' means: don't tell me about it because I suffer from the same problem, as in: "It takes me four hours to drive to work on the freeway" "tell me about it."

 First impressions; an outsider's impressions... we'll see how I assimilate; how my opinion evolves; perhaps in six months I too will grow a huge bum & think the greatest manifestation of me is my car...

Sunday January 24th, 2010

India

Well, here it is as promised, the 'special page' (too long to insert as article on this page) with photos of India & a rather random travel journal.

Conspiracy theories (1190 words)

Happy New Year! I haven't updated this, my Mental Workshop, in just over three months because I've been travelling, but more on that later. I am preparing a special new page to add to these nine, written on my travels. It will probably be a week or two before it is ready to upload & I hope to see you back for it. In the meantime:

Below, a letter I just wrote to my mother after a telephone call & in response to what I am realizing is becoming a consuming concern: they are boggling her mind with stupid reality shows & crazy conspiracy theorists albeit as she describes: "well documented". She asked me to watch some of the same shows & give her my opinion of their veracity.

When she spoke of the Mayan calendar I asked: End of the world again? She laughed & I added: I don't need forewarning; if it comes I will surely notice. The Mayans, by the way, hadn't invented the wheel & were wiped out by a handful of Spanish soldiers because they fought steel & shot with sticks & stones.

(My mother is also a painter)

...because if Plato was right, & he usually was, when he said: truth, justice & beauty are the only pursuits worthy of man, then yours are neither truth nor justice, but beauty.  What's more, beauty is the easiest! I have learned that living with only a single responsibility as priority: making the next painting better than the last, never fails to satisfy.

I also learned long ago that despite my keen curiosity, no man can know everything.  And today even more than the time when I learned it, it is more true: ALL the information is now available to every man.  And you know what else? It is ALL important. There are some who will kill or even die over a collectable postage stamp, it is ALL important... to... somebody...

BUT NOT YOU- HOORAY! All the bad people who do things that scandalize you, all the big bad corporations, blood-leeching Kings, failed democracies or perhaps more to the point: successful ones, who might harm you with their conspiracies; winking corruption that poisons your waters, or assassin squads (hypnotised or otherwise!) which you will do nothing to change, are simply & unmitigatedly neither your business nor your responsibility.  Phew, what a relief, hu?

If you feel badly about battered wives; sexually exploited children; the tradition of clitoral amputation; those people just a few miles from where I sit who will kill for a rock of crack; all those who are killed unjustly in lawless countries or who die of famine- guess what? You're not going to believe it when I tell you; are you ready? THEY DON'T MATTER, not in the general scheme of things of course, they do after all matter to themselves, BUT NOT TO YOU!

We are pack animals like dogs, we have genes set to socialize. When combined with higher intelligence (above motor control & instinct, i.e. abstract reason) these genetic instructions are valuable & can be spread thin to include even a community of as many as 5000 people.  Five thousand people: a self sufficient agrarian society of cooperating individuals all of whom can be genuinely moved by the misfortune of any of its members... beyond that (at least if you are one of us: the beauty pursuers) you are simply caring more than your capacity, instead of directing the energy (intellectual & emotional) at what's important to you & those of your circle. If we all focused on caring for our own circle, we would all be better off than when each of us is concerned with too many.

If everybody were really, really good, so good that each & every one of them cared about each & every other, human society would become immediately paralyzed & the human species would become extinct within a dozen years or so. It is just those brainless little pack-animal genes telling you that now that you are exposed on your own territory to samples of the entire planetary pack, you should care about them too. World be damned! What did it ever do for you after all?

Imagine being an insect that has only its instincts & no brain at all, flying around a light bulb because it is hard-wired to guide itself by the light of the moon. For 100 million years this has worked very well for his genus' survival but he hasn't the wherewithal to understand that electricity has been invented (or at least: discovered & tamed). It might, likewise, take another 40,000 years for human genes to understand that the people on television are not really in our territory but just images of people far away & none of our business.

Have you noticed how many of our contemporary television series are about knowing the unknowable? Supernatural & psychic powers, or amazing feats of deduction by mathematicians, forensic scientists, facial gesticulation experts etc. The conspiracy theory shows you watch are just buying-in to the trend.  Did you know there was never a recorded claim of a UFO sighting before the fashion for films about aliens in the 1950?

When the first telegraph lines were being strung across the United States just after the Civil war many complained, they said if the news happened so far away that it could only reach them by telegraph, it wasn't important enough not to wait for. 

James Stewart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis is good television time, reality TV is like video games: mind-numbing & stupid, but mostly, just plain useless. 

If the consequences of newly acquired knowledge can be firstly, just plain bad & you can't do anything about it, or secondly bad but if you do something you can make it better, or thirdly it is just plain good; take for instance: health, you go to see your doctor & he tells you your nose is going to fall off unless you stop breathing, or your nose is going to fall off whatever you do or, finally: your nose is not going to fall off if you continue breathing. Then the rule is: if it is 1- good, it changes nothing; if it is 2- bad & beyond your control, then you suffer vainly in the knowledge & 3- since you will not stop breathing even if it does make your nose fall off, you have two possible negatives & one indifferent, by which you can deduce: it is better not to acquire the knowledge.

Somerset Maugham wrote of an English aristocrat living in the south pacific as diplomat, governor or maybe banana plantation lord I can't remember, whose London Times was delivered irregularly although always months after its printing. He followed the news assiduously & was, for example, very interested in the progress of the Boer War, but rather than receive his news haphazardly or worry in anticipation for the next issue, he simply had his manservant iron the paper before breakfast & leave it laid out along with his boiled eggs on its exact date but a year later.

In the end, what difference did it make to him?

Sunday October 11th, 2009

I love you; thanks’; you’re welcome. (970 words)

Sometimes pat phrases take on a legitimate meaning of their own regardless, or even in spite of, the meaning of the words that compose them & yet their roots, the reason a linguistic custom is taken on, is telling.

In Spanish, for instance, there is no equivalent to the English: you’re welcome. The most common response to a ‘thank you’ is: de nada, which, like the French ‘du rien’, literally means: ‘of nothing’ but comes from ‘it was nothing’ or by extrapolation: ‘think nothing of it’. A gallant enough response to a declaration of gratitude but it does not allow the inference a ‘you’re welcome’ does, i.e. “it was not nothing, but you are welcome to this sacrifice on my part because I did it for you gladly.”

The same is true for the phrase ‘I love you’ which translates literally to ‘te amo’ in Spanish. It is more common, however, for people here in Spain to say: te quiero instead, which means: “I want you”. The Japanese, on the other hand, tell their beloved: taisetsu, which is the simple statement: ‘you are precious’.

Typical of Japanese delicateness, the general statement of value avoids, with Confucian modesty, the declaration by one ego for another. However, in common usage it expresses a more appropriative if unsaid: “you are precious to me” which likens it to the Spanish expression of desire: I want you, with, presumably, the underlying innuendo: because I love you.

While it is often true we think the person we love is precious & furthermore want to possess him/her, true love does not necessarily imply either. In fact some purists claim pity is love at its closest to an altruistic ideal.

If we refer strictly to romantic love we all have a fairly firm grasp of when what we feel is love & yet not only are hard-put to define the feeling precisely in words but can be confused, even when old & experienced, by the line that separates it from infatuation which is based more strictly on desire than love.

An argument might be made that the only reason for long-term monogamous love after the practicalities of predictable companionship, comfortably reliable promises of future love, the strength of collaboration or the responsibilities of rearing the young, is the need of a witness. A witness who provides a sense of continuity to our existence in the face of the pile of individual moments whose very chronology, duration or verisimilitude even we ourselves are often unable to recall.

I have been looking up the word love to see if the scholars, both linguistic & otherwise, have managed to pin its significance down to a quantifiable definition only to find they are as challenged by the task as the rest of us. The phrase: “tender solicitude” reappears in various official attempts but is buried among some of the longest entries in both dictionaries & encyclopaedias that meander through interminable etymologies that include the seeds of chivalric love in Medieval French poetry to its influence on the English version, until it becomes a concept so vague that love’s longing is restricted to a high ideology whose true expression precludes consummation or possession & is only represented in its purity when chastely directed at a virgin or another man’s untouchable wife. The sacrifice of self-interest becomes an integral part of true love’s definition.

It is intriguing to ponder the fact our loosely shared sense of romantic or chivalric love in the west arises during the dark ages instead of either the later artistic flowering & book-printing of the Renaissance or of the earlier ancient Greeks (whose roots lie in the Orient not the Occident) who famously won the war with the Romans by losing it & being sold into a slavery that included tutoring young Romans or counselling architects & politicians; thereby winning brutish Rome with philosophy to their culture from the inside-out, & eventually passing it down to us.

It was during the centuries of Europe’s chaos, a quarter of its population decimated by the black death, its history lost, Rome’s empire buried by the Barbarians; travel restricted by crumbling roads & lack of policing. A world where the privileged were grandly swathed in golden tapestries, had surplus food & shat indoors, but were otherwise relegated to the same mean & meagre life as their serfs; it was a time that wallowed in a stagnant economy limited by lack of trade, where even kings might be illiterate, that love’s ideal takes root to flower even into our time.

A few nameless poets wrote Europe’s sentiment on frail paper during these dark years, its striving for a return to civilisation, & their few surviving fragments have coloured our sense of romance ever since.

The defining love poem of northern Europe tells of an affair between the king’s brother & his own fiancé which relies on an irresistible love potion Tristan & Isolde of the white hands, are tricked into drinking. It seems that in the cold climes of Scandinavia love is a demon that 'possesses' while the southerner’s possessive passion 'expresses' instead. Might the difference derive from Spain’s hot immersion in an impetuous, Bedouin-proud, horseman-warrior, woman-robbing, Moorish past?

In Italy the pat phrase which has come to mean the same as ‘I love you’ is: “Ti voglio bene”, but in its literal root it actually means: “I want good for you”. If Germans are Europe's thinkers, the English, guardians of its poetry & Italians of its sentiment, this wanting good for the beloved seems a subtle improvement on Spain’s sweaty: “I want you!”

Tuesday September 22nd, 2009

A graffito on a wall in Granada: ERRATUM ERGO SUM

Wednesday September 16th, 2009

Fear (500 words)

Despite writing this Blog, albeit pretentiously redubbed Mental Workshop, I seldom find time to spend on the few gems shining amid the vast wastes of blogdom’s mud myself.

While researching something else I did never-the-less, stumble upon one by a young lady still at university whose introduction touched me- I will reproduce it below verbatim, spelling mistakes included.

Its uncontrived syntax positively oozes a sincere despair & repressed passion. Its terrors are palpable & the unscalable walls that limit her choices are clearly built by her instead of imposed by life’s circumstances as she believes, & therein lay the tragedy:

Life is speeding past me. Nothing is happening the way I pictured it would, and more and more everyday its seems there is nothing I can do to 'get back on track'.

I am seriously considering moving somewhere foreign, like Italy or Syria, or Montenegro. Somewhere beautiful, and different in all aspects. I imagine I would enjoy "Culture Shock". More like a clean slate to start fresh from; a rebirthing almost.

I could very well do it. I would do it, but something holds me back. And that something, being strong enough to hold me back, intrigues me beyond belief.

That “something” that intrigues her while “holding her back” is fear; fear of the unknown, fear her decision-- being different to those around her-- will be a mistake. Fear of the unimaginable consequences of putting herself in an unknown environment; fear of making a bad decision when required to make decisions outside her sphere of understanding i.e. decisions that rely on criteria she is not yet in possession of.

I recently saw Up, Pixar’s latest &, as usual, great animation. After the show my friend & I discussed the film & when we touched on the guilt the old man felt after his wife’s death at not having provided her the adventure of life she had hoped for, my friend commented: “He had no choice, there were regular disasters that they had to attend, like when the tree falls on their house, they had to spend their travel money repairing the roof.”

I, however, disagree. At the end when the old man finally lets the house that had come to symbolize his wife to him, go, he says to the boy: “It is only a house after all”, he might have said the same when the tree broke its roof. These are life’s choices & the protagonist of Up chose a life of material security & predictable comfort over pressing the boundaries of its experience of itself.

I wish the young lady of the Blog strength in her struggle with the same faulty reasoning & if she asked I would tell her: The most important part of life is living. Trust yourself; if you make the right decision now then know you will know what to do in the future & under other circumstances also.

Monday September 7th, 2009

Egon & the other animals (1940 words)

My dog Egon is a natural-born killer. I did not teach her the textbook pointer’s stance, body all atremble in anticipation as she waits for an unwary rabbit to distance itself so far from the protective briar, or warren, that it hasn’t time to get back before she outruns it.

When she was still young she chased rabbits with more enthusiasm than technique, once even following a rabbit into its cover of cacti. We arrived back home before I noticed she had about fifteen two inch thorns stuck deep all over her body including one to the hilt in her nose; indeed, the last I pulled from her was so profoundly plunged into a leg that I didn’t notice it until a couple of days later when she yelped at my touch & I wondered: “Is she retarded?!” but no, the first time was also the last, I guess it just took fifteen to teach her where they came from, until then her little walnut-brain must have been thinking simply: “Ouch, it sure is sharp out today.”

Nor did I teach her to jump like a Gazelle at every third galloping stride when running through a grassy field. At first I couldn't figure out why she did it, it was only when I noticed she runs at a normal, ground-hugging gallop when there is no grass, that I realised she did it in order to spy her prey at greater distance.

I have always had dogs & have studied different training methods & dog psychology so as to avoid anthropomorphising their reality but there is no question that where she’s lacking lips to smile with, there is a definite childish glee in her eyes & ears after she drops a rabbit at my feet & looks at me waiting, I suppose, for me to raise my ears in delight at the gift of the half-killed animal. Instead I tell her: “Thanks’ but you go ahead & eat it yourself” to which she answers: “No, hombre, I insist, today dinner's on me!” & I am forced to carry the bloody thing home & dispose of it later so as not to hurt her feelings, ehem.

I don’t know why she refuses to eat the rabbits, snakes, partridges, she kills, I have seen her happy enough to scrounge putrid carrion & even roll gaily in its maggot-filled carcass (why do they do that?). She is not hungry, I never ration my dog’s food but leave a whole bag of dry food open for them whenever they want it & have found that once a dog feels secure about his food source he doesn’t overeat & I don’t take the chance of underfeeding out of misjudgement*.

But I was proudest of her agility one day when a dove swooped to a height above my own & Egon, without missing a stride, jumped like those amazing athletes that get over bars eight feet high in the Olympics &, chomp! -caught it in mid-flight; she landed ugly but did not release the bird.  

I discovered something else watching my dog hunt, what I always accepted was an anomalous behaviour in animals caught in the lights of an oncoming car, freezing instead of running, as being due to the animal’s instincts not being prepared to react to lights at night time; but one day Egon chased a rabbit that ran very close to me in its attempt at escape & it was just then, not a few feet from me, that it knew there was no chance it would make cover before the dog, just a few paces behind, caught him up, & do you know what he did? He froze in mid-gesture just like a deer before a car; I was so close I could see his hurried breathing. And do you know what my genius of a dog then did? She pulled to a Road-Runner, dust-cloud stop, & looked around asking: “Where did it go?”

I was telling a friend of Egon’s exploits & mentioned that though most people think rabbits are innately quiet animals the truth is they are only silent because they are just plain scared most of the time, once in the jaws of a predator they are very vocal indeed & in the last moments make up in decibels for a life-time’s silence. Egon plays with them in cruel delight, breaking a few ribs & then squashing gently & repeatedly but at intervals, to get that jolly squeaky-toy effect.

My friend asked: “Doesn’t it make you feel bad seeing the animals die?” & I had to stop & consider my feelings because though I knew it wasn’t comfortable I had made a decision on a sub-conscious level about letting her kill & about watching, or picking up the still-warm corpse.

It isn’t a question of protecting indigenous rabbits as a species. Since the farmers killed the last foxes & wolves all our birds of prey are fat & there are still so many rabbits that a large proportion of the population dies each year at the end of summer of a terrible disease that slowly inflames their eyes to blindness & turns their tongues blue. In the original ecosystem the population was undoubtedly culled to proportions where the disease wouldn’t spread to start with.

Country folk, those who live nearest nature, have the least empathy for it. It wasn’t long ago & despite the government efforts that the last Spanish wolf & the last Spanish bear were killed by furtive hunters. One of my neighbours opened a conversation with me asking if I had ever eaten the ‘little birds’ (pajaritos). I asked which little birds he referred to knowing it wasn’t sparrows, & he answered more loudly: “The little birds, the birds that are small” holding his hand close to my face with its forefinger & thumb at a short distance from one another, to help me comprehend the concept of ‘not big’.

I made no comment & he went on: “Last Sunday my family & I ate four dozen” & I asked: “Aren’t they a protected species?” Despite the long-standing ban, northern countries have had crop problems for millennia because the Mediterranean countries kill the migrating birds en mass as soon as they hit the European shores from Africa. And Jose Antonio answered with a proud smile: “Of course! They are a luxury.” I asked how he hunted them & he explained they are too much trouble to hunt: “I go out in the morning & paint the branches of the trees with rubber cement & then go back at night & pluck them from the bark like fruit."  

It took a little while but wasn’t that difficult to make Egon understand that ducks, chickens, geese, sheep & goats, were off-limits & she didn’t need to know it is because they belong to neighbouring farmers-- though I had to rescue a bloodied, if not badly hurt, turkey from her very jaws one day when a frenzy of bloodlust made her deaf to my orders. But I might just as easily have taught her all killing was forbidden.

As far as the ethical question of killing for pleasure instead of procuring proteins, if I took pleasure in slowly torturing a rabbit to death & then abandoned it when it was no longer able to gratify me with its desperate death squeaks, it would be unquestionably inhuman of me. And so it is of my dog but since she is not human she is under no obligation to behave humanely.

A sentient being feels an automatic empathy for other living beings, there is a kind of recognition of life by life even in a psychopathic killer, he doesn’t after all, take pleasure in hitting a rock, he must feel something for other life even if only to enjoy ending it.

But though we be sentient beings most of us have removed ourselves far enough from the question that when we see minced meat in the supermarket we think: hamburgers, not: gentle cow with big watery eyes. The same goes for a dog, he isn’t reminded of his own life’s fragility the way we humans are when he sees a live rabbit, he only sees food.

As far as the sense of injustice of being out in a field doing rabbitty things while minding your own business when suddenly a huge dog comes out of nowhere & eats you, I can see that between them, the rabbit & the dog, the rules are clearly understood & the rabbit dies without resentment, it is merely nature in action.

The fact I am happy to order rabbit in the restaurants in town but not willing to clean them before preparing them at home & that my dog also decides not to eat her kill, does not mean they are not eaten. Nature’s living demolition team move in immediately, from crows to ants, & leave naught but bones & fur within three days, it is just that my dog & I except ourselves from the process.

The question still remained of why, when she brings a rabbit to me, do I watch her kill it? I feel squeamish when I do & with each gleeful squeeze of her jaws, there is a voice in my breast that silently implores her to make a finish once & for all. And yet I watch.

I remember a story I read as a child, the reminiscence of boyhood by a man who had been around ten in 1945. His father & he were survivors of one of the nuclear bombs & when they looked out on the vast devastation after the fact, he, the boy, cried uncontrollably & hid his face in his father’s side. His father reached down to his shoulders, lifted him straight, turned him around, held his head level with his hands & ordered him to open his eyes & look.

The story apparently had some little impact on me as I remember it after all these years. Even as a child I had understood the author’s father’s intention, they stood at the edge of the biggest event in their country’s history, their culture’s, their family’s & their own- the child had as much right to his experience as his father had & the cruelty would have been to shield him from it even if he mightn’t fully understand it until adulthood.

In a word: it is cowardly to selectively hide from reality, to choose the milky-smelling puppy & reject the carrion-stinking dog. It is sentimentality in its least attractive form to uhh or ahh at a sunset while refusing to look down at the mud you stand in, pretending only beauty exists or even, that only beauty is beautiful.

Thursday September 3rd, 2009

A note about price:size ratio in paintings (420 words)

If a painter gets so stuck in the routine of painting-making, or becomes so satisfied with his work that he falls into the rut of essentially painting the same painting over & over again limiting himself only to changing the subject but not varying the brushstroke, he can equably price his paintings by the square centimetre because the time, effort & talent it takes him to cover a canvas’ surface can be measured in its own breadth & height.

If, on the other hand, the painter changes his approach to his canvas according to the subject’s exigencies, or uses larger brushes to cover a larger canvas, in the end the amount of detail contained in a painting will be determined by the subject & remain the same within a range of sizes, the pricing therefore becomes largely contingent on ‘finish’ instead of square centimetres.

For example, if you compare the work involved in painting a portrait life-size to one that is one & a half times life size, if the ‘finish’, the level of detail, is the same with the only difference being the size of the head & the canvas it is painted on, it is fundamentally the same amount of work & I, at least, will offer such a range of sizing for the same price. If two people ask me for a portrait of the same proportions on the same size canvas but one wants only a bust while the other wants bust & hands, the latter can be considered twice the work (& in artistic terms: a composition at least twice as complicated & ultimately: expressive) & the price will go up.

Thursday August 27th, 2009

Strange tales (730 words)

Jacob & Leah begat Judah (Yahuda) who founded the Israelite tribe called by his name, which means: to praise (Yahweh) in Hebrew. Judah, his three boys & the popular wife of one of them made a shockingly dysfunctional if very touchy-feely family with uncommonly ambiguous morals.

Judah’s elder boy was called Er (evil when read backwards), & he married Tamar, while Judah’s second son, Onan, remained single & his youngest, Shelah, was still a child. The scriptures are sketchy with the details but some rabbinical authorities interpret the reason for God’s anger with Er as being due to Er intentionally avoiding getting his wife, Tamar, pregnant because he didn’t want her to lose her attractive figure.

God’s ire with Er reaches such a point that he simply kills him & Er isn’t mentioned again. At this point Judah entreats his remaining adult son Onan, to impregnate Tamar in his brother’s stead to insure familial inheritance rights through the patriarchal bloodline into the following generation.

Although Onan takes on the onerous burden of sexual relations with his dead brother’s wife willingly enough, he also is disinclined to inseminate her in order to insure inheritance rights for his own future sons.

Onan uses coitus interruptus as his preferred contraceptive method but when his father finds out he has been spilling his seed anywhere but in Tamar (occasioning the word onanism to eventually become synonymous to masturbation) he gets as angry as God had with Er & with the same consequence: he kills his second son, Onan*.

Judah promises to marry his last son to Tamar as soon as he grows up but is wary of keeping his promise having come to the supremely rational conclusion that with two sons murdered in anger, the fault just must be Tamar’s.

She waits & Shelah ultimately grows to marrying age before Judah breaks his word definitively.

Eventually Judah’s wife dies & he decides to go to Enaim to avail himself of the services of a prostitute but Tamar disguises herself cleverly with a veil & tricks the old man into thinking he is having sex with a stranger instead of his daughter-in-law.

The price was agreed at a single goat & she asks for his staff & seal as guarantee against later payment.

When Judah is told Tamar has become a prostitute (I wonder where she got the idea that her main value was as a receptacle for semen?) he decides to burn her alive as punishment for the shame her immorality brought his family name; but when he sends the goat he owes to the woman of Enaim, it is Tamar who presents him with his ring & he is forced to recognize she is the more righteous of the two. Finally he takes her into his home & honours the twins she later bears with his name. She, for her part, bears no grudge towards those responsible for her double widowhood, her abandonment by the family she married into, her fall from respectable marriageability into becoming so morally soiled by her 'infertility' she has no recourse but harlotry; nor for her father-in-law's plans to execute her or her lack of right to decision as she is passed around by the men who promised her father they would care for her when he handed over her dowry.

Thus she exculpates the sin of not providing inheritors to the men who refused to seed her while Judah finally has his genealogical line assured (perhaps these are the roots of the old adage: if you want something done right do it yourself) & they live happily ever after under the eyes of God. As far as I know they killed & ate the goat without further intercourse.

footnote:

* Not to 'honour & obey thy father' is not a capital sin but is the fourth & fifth commandment according to the the New Testament & Talmud respectively. The Christian tradition follows St Augustine's interpretation which divides the commandments into three for the relationship between man & God, the next five: between man & man while the last two govern personal thought. In Judaism it is the first of the tenets that deal with man's relations to man, the first four dealing with man's relationship to God. Although metaphorically, the son is to the father as the father is to God. Return