John Updike’s Rabbit, Run is, said my once-friend once, the quintessential American novel. What he meant was not its novelness but its Americanness. This is how it is with us: people matter to us. Then stop mattering.
Well. So it is with us, too, is it not? Everything passes. Once, I meant the world to you. And now… meh, où sont les neiges d’antan?
Dictes-moy où, n’en quel pays, Est Flora, la belle Romaine ; Archipiada, ne Thaïs, Qui fut sa cousine germaine ; Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine Dessus rivière ou sus estan, Qui beauté eut trop plus qu’humaine ? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan !
Rebecca Goldstein is living proof how sexy older ladies can be. The dress is cunningly unfashionable, in the blue stocking way, as are the frumpy shoes: all kinds of messages: intellect, naivte, pretty ankle, and, of course, the cleavage. At which charming Livio, who thinks God may be a mathematician, steals that very Italian surreptitious, lightening-speed peek. He is so smooth, anyone but an expert observer would miss it.
And Marvyn Minsky is just totally cute.
But… is it possible that none of these people have read Karl Popper’s “Why are the Calculi of Logic and Arithmetic Applicable to Reality?”
The point is really very simple: the universe is not mathematical. It is the human intellect, which, acting judiciously, can discover instances when mathematical tools apply. If you put two rabbits in an enclosure and come back in 3 weeks time, you may well discover that 1+1 = 7. Or, if you drop two drops of water into a dry test-tube, and give it a good shake, you may well discover that 1+1 = 1. Human intellect, not mathematics, will tell you why this is so. Likewise, human intellect will tell you why the Cretan Liar paradox isn’t. Closed systems fail, per Goedel, yes. But they can be useful when applied… judiciously. Like Rebecca’s frumpy but oh so sexy shoes.
Rebecca’s novel about late-summer (i.e. aging) lady philosopher’s love affair with her 20 years old student can’t be found in electronic format and the EU now charges EUR10 to import a book. Which is just as well: I am not ready to find how how ordinary Platonist philosophers are, especially when in love. Especially with Holocaust/slavery/child abuse in the background. Yawn.
And Platonist? Really? The guy who thought the ideal society should imitate Sparta, because men there walked barefoot and eschewed everything but violence of war? And have a secret council, which, for the good of the community, would decide to put inconvenient men to death? And who thought Socrates had a daemon which warned him against taking a particular street as there may be pigs there? Really? Plato?
A breakdown. A fall – on the knees, on the face. The soul — inwardly — sobbing and shaking even as one sits prosaically, sheepishly, helplessly, motionless, arms hanging purposeless by one’s sides, lost for words to apologize for it, some way to appear rational.
The same now as it was then. 42 years. So much life. So much art. And yet here it is again, the same as it was then.
The pang of incongruity: the put on manliness of the singers; or their helpless homeliness — none of it matters, stands in any relation at all to what comes out of their mouths. And only serves to point out how transcendental the sound is, how otherworldly. How easy to believe that in that moment the artists are possessed, channeling some higher force.
How impossible to explain; or in any way share. Who could possibly understand what this does?
I had returned from an expedition to somewhere (Assam?) to my new home, in Athens, where I now lived. I now rented a wing of a seaside hotel for some kind of celebration and while settling in and still waiting for first guests to arrive, I went out to swim in the sea, and found you sun bathing naked on the beach. You had come, uninvited and unexpected, for the duration of the event, and you were early. I recognized you by…. the shape of your bum… I called your name in disbelief. Called, you turned around, and, yes, it was you. We swam naked in the sea and sun.
Then, over the next 48 hours, guests started turning up, singly, and in groups, all ages, people from my past, friends and associates, teachers, bosses, students. There were long outings, outdoor games, board-games and role-playing games at night at a long table. An elderly aunt had turned up among others with some documents she wanted me to hide, incriminating a person in power, documents which would be looked for by police and crooks – a kind of spy thriller action developed in the midst of this large social event. And each night you and I sneaked out alone to the empty dark beach and swam naked in the cool, black sea under the stars.
Seventeenth-century Ottoman learned circles narrated dreams to present their views on debated issues of their period. If we could have accompanied a biographer like ‘Ata’i on one of his sojourns in Istanbul, we would have listened to accounts of dreams shared among friends at garden parties, students in medrese rooms, family members at homes and Sufis in their lodges. The significance of dreams for Sufi orders and their acceptance among Islamic scholars must have contributed to this dream exchange. Not all dreams were trusted but those considered as divine messages were cherished and circulated in various genres, including first-person narratives , chronicles and poetry. Biographers participated in this milieu and included dreams in their works .
They referred to dreams as mirrors that reflected the divine world that was hidden from ordinary eyes. By paying attention to the dreams that biographers chose to include in their works, we can begin to see what they thought were hidden aspectsof life but needed to be revealed.
Aslı Niyazioğlu, Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul: a Seventeenth-Century Biographers Perspective
I read Cipolla last night and, though it was meant to be funny, I found it a depressing reading because it is true.
The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things by David Robson contains a discussion of the concept of “Dysrationalia“.
Contrary to the wikipedia entry, this is not a matter of “mindware gap” (lack of relevant education or experience) or “contaminated mindware” (socially inculcated wrong beliefs), but something more akin to Dyslexia or Dyscalculia, a literal inability to think straight; like inability to see in congenital blindness.
Stanovich has actually developed a test for rationality (Stanovich, Keith E., Who is rational? Studies in individual differences in reasoning). This is discussed at length in Robert J. Sternberg, Why smart people can be so stupid (2002). Kenneth Kavale notes this is not a learning disability, because it has no direct impact on academic performance.
While I have not made a rigorous study of the matter, I have on occasion involved myself in non-adversarial discussions with people — this usually involved friendly discussions around life decisions, such as whether to buy a car or where to establish one’s tax residence — which gave me an occasion to glimpse the chaos in some people’s heads. This was a really terrifying experience: to realize that there is something fundamentally wrong with the brain.
I have attributed it to two failures: the inability to prioritize and the inability to pursue a course.
Prioritizing involves distinguishing among arguments for and against some course of action according to their relevance. Some reasons are good, others are immaterial. Yet, you often see people become swayed or confused by the immaterial.
Pursuing a course of thought is just that: being able to perform a sustained mental effort in some direction without getting sidetracked or giving up in exasperation at having made no progress.
I do not know whether these are inborn characteristics, i.e. ones hard wired, or whether they could be ameliorated by education.
About 12 percent of older adults are estranged from their adult children. And while some 5 to 6 percent of these parents initiate the break, estrangement is normally set in motion by their adult children. Although more daughters may institute a parting of ways, the estrangement between parents and sons is sometimes longer lasting. Adult children mostly cut off parents because of abuse or neglect, destructive behavior, or feeling uncared for.
When it happened to me — I was fed up, I just got up and walked away. I never meant it to be permanent. I assumed my parents would realize they were in the wrong and reach out. No such thing ever happened. Instead I got letters of abuse and completely made up accusations. They had been talking to each other in their grief, blaming it on the absent one, and reinforcing each other in the cover story that it was I who was in the wrong. That’s how group think happens. Members end up believing the group story.
When it happened to me — I was crushed. I assumed I was the only one to whom this happened. Then I read in Rousseau that his brother left home after one final argument with his father and was never heard form again. Aha, so it does happen to others, I thought. But people keep it a secret; or lie about it. Even I. Where are your parents? Dead.
The deception is programmatic. Damon Galgut reports that when the Grimm brothers collected their fairy tales they were shocked to see how many featured evil, abusive, controlling, heartless birth parents. They changed them all to step-parents.
But I should have known. Half the Hollywood films are about parent/child reconciliations — ergo, the topic must be broadly relevant. So, you’d think, while permanent estrangement affects 12% of all parents, temporary estrangements must be more common.
In films, these reconciliations happen because both sides somehow compromise.
In my case, I saw no reason to compromise. The prize was not worth the price. I was thoroughly fed up with what went before and I was not going to go back to it. And when I called out my family on that, they would not compromise either. They had done nothing wrong, how could they? List of my failures, either laughable or invented followed.
For ten years the feelings of grief and grievance came back periodically to haunt me. But eventually they stopped.
My parents are still alive, I think, but the door is closed. I no longer care.
It’s good that the subject is now talked about more openly. But it’s bad that the condition is often talked about as a catastrophe. For me, it was a liberation.
It is normal for a formerly abusive family member to deny wrongdoing. And reconciliation is a faint hope. Without this acknowledgement of their past actions, a reconciliation is nearly impossible.
There are so many novels and so few of them are worth our time. I searched by topic (wanted something on South East Asia), read reviews, then tried a few each day, searching. Nothing is really badly written these days — kudos to the editing prowess of the industry. But most are shallow. Most are boring. Some are wrong. I could not have written any of them, I would have been too ashamed of myself to write them. I was ashamed reading, ashamed that someone disrespected my intelligence. Poor art offends.
Then this, a clear stand out. Probably one in a million.
Beautiful language revealing the author’s uncommonly sharp mind. Each chapter written like a stand alone jewel, with a beautiful closing sentence which resonates in the silence, makes you put down the book and stare, opens a meditation, like a flower. And the detail: places, foods, architecture, clothing, nick-nacks, mosquitoes: that’s how it feels to be there. This is it.
An interesting feature, whether by choice or accident: front chapters are written in first person by a rum fellow relating in jest the hilarity of his life. The later part in third person, revealing him to be self-centered and cruel and ugly. Not an uncommon experience. One is better off knowing people superficially.
In the middle, perhaps an unnecessary longeur, two women decaying unto death, punished by the hero for the sins of one of them. Decay and death described too minutely bore rather than shock.
Looking through her oeuvre, I longed to see more historical Ceylon. I didn’t find it. But I found what seems to be autobiographical “relationship-novel”. I am not a relationship-novel kind of guy, but this one I want to read. I want to know what it is like to be a sensitive, uncommonly intelligent woman in love.
One always hopes, though, sadly, the rare combination of sensitivity and intelligence does not guarantee insight. Insight requires something more on top.
At Sarnath, Buddha preached The Four Noble Truths. 1. There is suffering. 2. Striving is the source of suffering. 3. There is a path out of suffering. 4. The path is the Eightfold Path.
Increasingly i feel i have ended. My life here is gorgeous and peaceful, it will be a good old age and death. But I’m done. If this lasts 20 years, it will be 20 years more of this.
There is a kind of surprise and awe in this complete end of strife. It has a note of regret in it because for a couple decades now my striving has not been for dull stuff like career, status, family, money, fatherland, or Principle (with big P), which is the god awful, dreadful killjoy striving which is the source of all suffering; but I have striven for pleasure – new sights, new foods, new aesthetic raptures, etc. That kind of striving is not a heavy burden. There is no suffering in it, but excitement and anticipation. It’s definitely NOT a source of the “suffering caused by striving”. An important footnote to the sermon in Bodhgaya.
Now suddenly I’m downshifting. I really only miss paintings. It’s a new thing for me, this satiety, this contentment. I’m happy in it, experiencing little euphorias daily, which sneak up on me unawaited. This is all good.
But still i find the lack of striving odd. Disconcerting. I have not yet gotten used to it.
I’m reading a novel set in Istanbul and this is giving me a bit of that frisson of longing – but only a little: it is a joy to imagine myself walking in the streets the book names, or sitting in the parks, or riding the ferry to Kadiköy, tulip tea glass in hand, but I’m not getting up suddenly to plan a trip. Deep down, fundamentally, i know I’d rather be here than there.
It’s just too beautiful here to leave.
And the silence, oh, the silence. On evenings like tonight, when there is no wind, I can hear my own pulse. I have acute hearing, apparently, and this has been source of misery for me all my life. And now I luxuriate in silence.
And how about you, Mrs M? How are you? Silence has fallen from your side. Back to a few short messages once in a blue moon? Must our correspondence be like every other?
I have allowed all others to lapse. Those threads of communication only lasted because I invested in them. I had thoughts and experiences to share, so I shared them. My correspondents responded rarely, perfunctorily, with short messages which could have been sent by their slave bot. Out of their own initiative they had nothing to say. Perhaps because they didn’t care. Or perhaps there was nothing to share. Perhaps they had no internal life. Maybe they were just ghosts, like those in the journey to Ixtlan.
When I stopped making an effort, profound silence fell. Then after many weeks: hihowareyoufinethanks.
He, a Tangier lawyer, having set off on the Hajj, once he got moving, discovered he could not stop until he has ranged the entire dar-al-Islam; and then, having done so, returned home, settled, and never left Tangier again. Truly, you don’t know how to treasure what you have until you have compared.
My place of origin is not a city, but the state of solitary walking. I did a lot of it from ages 12 to 20, until women entered my life and muscled in on my walks; and then, to replace their bother, the dog.
Here is the chief life lesson of my last 40 years: never walk in company.
Not even with a dog. The dog will distract you. He will come close to you, panting loudly and seeking attention just as you become totally absorbed in the movement and sound of aspen leaves fluttering at distant treetops. And he will frighten forest creatures into silence.
Further, when walking, walk quietly — avoid noisy clothes or shoes. By doing so you will discover how much hidden life is about you: rustlings, dartings, flutterings, chirpings, scratchings, whistlings, hissings. All this comes to deathly stillness when a dog comes around. Don’t bring one.
Then there are the myriad sounds of wind, water and weather. Unless you are undistracted, you won’t notice.
Finally, walk slowly. Perhaps because walking fast obliges you to pay attention to your movement, where you place your feet; or perhaps it puts a purpose into your stride: you are going somewhere, there is a goal, a place to reach or a distance to cover; for whatever reason, the way you think changes with the speed of walking. For me, solitary walking is best used for deep, slow thinking. And this requires slow walking.
*
I have let all my correspondence lapse and it has died a natural death. All those lines of communication only existed because I fed them: I had things to say — books, films, paintings, small epiphanies — and when I said them, my saying so elicited a response. Invariably, the response was a come down. Mostly one word (“great!” seemed popular), at best a short phrase to say about as much. Alice Munro’s short stories illustrate why: mostly, there is nothing inside people. Where there is nothing, nothing can be shared.
When I stopped feeding these useless threads, they all fell silent remarkably quickly.
Oltre Mare 