New Leaves

Fourth Impressions of Toronto: Inscrutable Grates and Giant Snowballs. Uncut, Unedited, and Imperfectly Spell-checked!

2008-01-05T17:48:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone, nippers and scholars and hardy pensioners and handsome middle-aged people,

I write from my little bit of warmth in the fridge of Toronto. As of fourteen minutes ago, it was three degrees celsius at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, according to a reputable-looking website (ie. one without those insane flickering ads that have led to many psychedelic deaths among the epileptic and the elderly, and much psychedelic cursing among everyone else). Not very impressive, I know. But mark! Three days ago the said source said that, at the said location, it was -11 degrees celsius, excluding the wind-chill, which was -16! Mark! This is only two degrees higher than the safe temperature of your average home freezer, according to HRDS recommendations! What's this like to live in? Well, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed. Walking around in that weather* is not really that much more punishing than biking to the University of Canterbury on a frosty Christchurch morning in June, or climbing Mount Roy on a cool day in Wanaka .*

Notwithstanding all of the above and more besides, it is easy to be caught out by freezer-weather, which is why I have barely left my room for the last two days, suffering as I am from three different kinds of head-cold and an internal thermostat that is broken but still very lively, making sudden shifts and spasms every so often. This is not helped at all by the temperature in my room, which is governed by the Inscrutable Grate in the Ceiling. The Inscrutable Grate is a very fickle Grate, by turns breathing fire and breathing nothing. If only it would average itself out, then I would be perfectly cosy and fine. But it is Inscrutable, you see, and no amount of love or persuasion will change its ways. As it is, the changes in room temperature are perfectly modulated so as to set up a kind of resonance pattern with my internal temperature, so that the superposition of the two is more vicious and variable than you would imagine, if you took each one on its own.

However, I have company. I have a snowdrift of tissues, Schubert in my laptop, and a book called Trilby by someone called du Maurier. The first thing is good for resting upon, the second is restful, and the third is also restful, but in a charming and invigorating way. (It's all about love and artists, and has just the right amount of levity for those topics – not so much as to demean them, but not so little as to take the fun out of them). Trilby is partly for fun, but partly for scholarship. (By contrast, Silas Marner was entirely for scholarship). You see, I have this thing called a semester. It starts on Monday and inside it there's a whole bunch of "papers." One of them is called "The Victorian Unconscious", and du Maurier is on the reading list. This may seem a weird course for a student of the History and Philosophy of Science. But it is perfectly normal for a weird student of History and Philosophy of Science, so everything's OK. My positive reason for going into this subject (yes, there were negative ones as well) was that I intended to "engage, broadly speaking, in an investigation of the connections between science and literature" (paraphrased from my statement of purpose, written almost exactly a year ago – ah, those innocent, broadly-speaking days!). And what better way of approaching this topic than through a study of Victorian ideas about the unconscious mind, as articulated in the novels of the time? Is that a rhetorical question? Does it matter? Regress threatens. Was that meant to be funny? QED?

Believe it or not, graduate studies are designed to train the student in the clear articulation of complex ideas, and I was asked to do some of that last semester. However, much of my training was in other skills. In History of Physics, I worked on my ability to skim-read enormous and complicated books and try to review them in a way that was not only succinct but also did not betray my superficial understanding of the subject-matter (hint: when you're stuck, try paraphrasing the introduction of the book). In this course I also made inroads towards a competence in a) improvising answers to difficult questions by twisting the question so that it was relevant to things that I could talk about without embarrassment b) developing a proper reverence for the work of historians of physics (such precision, such clarity, such mastery of two difficult and widely parted disciplines!). In History of Psychology I learnt a bit about how to write academic articles. I also learnt a bit about giving an oral presentation without boring everyone (hint: be a facilitator ie. let the others do the thinking and talking, and listen to them in a posture of earnest puzzlement – even if they find it boring, they've only got themselves to blame, clearly). In Philosophy of Science I transferred my earnest puzzlement to another area of academia where that posture gets you a long way. What else did I learn in Philosophy of Science? Um. That I'll never make a career out of the subject, and maybe not even a hobby. Does that count? Probably not, if it's based on a single course in the topic.

My main impression of last semester was one of permanent tiredness. Not weariness, you understand; not apathy, not dreary insomnia. But tiredness all the same – lots to do and not much time for bed.** And at the end of it, a fever of drop-boxes and footnotes and printers that don't print and bad undergraduate essays about the "it could be 10 000 to 100 0000 years in Darwin's only Diagram in the origin of geology, it does'nt matter", and bits of refill with badly-written notes on them (mine). A scholar's paradise! I will remember it as the semester that I discovered procrastination. Have you tried it? I find that it works best with a fast internet connection and a relatively up-to-date graphics card, in which case Youtube is only a couple of clicks away, and Fry and Laurie are not much further. I found that if you watch this skit enough times in a three-day period, it actually ceases to be funny! (But I just discovered that this remarkable effect tends to disappear after a week or so. "hey sesame, the cigar is intact! Now explain that!" Good work Dr. House! It's almost as amusing as a Masters student trying to say something new and perceptive about the logic of scientific discovery).

I also spent long hours gazing out the window of our third-floor common room, admiring the snow. In Toronto, you can tell a New Zealander or a Jamaican by the way they actually enjoy the snow; indeed, by the way they become increasingly sappy and childish in proportion to the growing anger and bitterness and grumpiness and tendency-towards-muttered-imprecations of the local people. But I stopped doing this after one day I stared for an especially long time and the next day there was a large sculpted penis in the courtyard below Victoria College, made entirely of snow (yes, it really existed – I checked with others). However, this did not stop me from contemplating the snowy vista in my long-cultivated attitude of profound idiocy. And the day after that, the large penis had been replaced by its female equivalent. So I stopped gazing after that, afraid of what might happen next.

But the snow! In December we got the biggest fall since 1990, and it really was an impressive dump. It fell like a dream on the sleeping earth! (I'm pretty sure someone has said that before, but but.) They are good at getting rid of it over here. If the same thing happened in Christchurch then I think the city would be paralyzed for a week. In Toronto they start clearing the roads pretty much as soon as it stops falling, and they're clear by the next morning. There's still big piles of the stuff on the side walks, though, which is insanely fun. And the parks are all white as well, pristine and wet-looking and just crying out to be run across in tramping boots (thanks dad).

Other things I've done are. Going to nightclubs and dancing (the cold does strange things to your head). Met up with a couple of New Zealanders (Uschi and Kyi Kyi, no less). Tried to have fun at TRANZAC, the Toronto Australian and New Zealand Club (for a while I called it the TNZC, but I relented when people starting make rude remarks about my spittle). This club is on a street just off the main drag in Toronto (called Bloor Street, for some reason). But when you go and look at the place it might as well be just off SH6, somewhere between Hokitika and Houhou.* Uschi and I agreed that it looks like a rural RSA, but we couldn't say whether this effect was deliberate or not. Unfortunately it was 4:30, and it opened at 5 o'clock, and there are many more evenings in which to explore the bars and tables and floors of this place, sticky with beer and home-sickness. So we hung a left off Highway Six and ended up in the Annex, whose unique hue and flavour is instantly recognizable by the signs on the lamp-posts, which say "The Annex."

More things are. I saw "I Am Legend," which is a bad advertisement for all sorts of things, including religion, Bob Marley, zombie movies, and (of course) Will Smith. The only virtue of this dreary film is that it shows how lucky we were to get "28 Days Later." I saw various other memorable movies, which I've forgotten. I looked forward to the arrival in cinemas of "I'm Not Here," the film where Kate Blanchett plays Bob Dyan and where the trailer makes rash statements about Dylan's abilities and historical importance. But it hasn't turned up yet, despite various sources suggesting otherwise. Is this just Toronto cinemas being behind the times? Or is the whole "movie" just a huge ironic joke devised by a few newspaper reviewers, cinema owners, Dylan publicists, and youtube whizzes? Is this the true significance of the "film's" title? Mysteries abound. Expect updates.

In other news, I bookmarked "The Press", in the hope that I would learn about more earth-shaking events in New Zealand. I was instantly rewarded when I found a lead article featuring Simon Power and the Corrections Department, in which the former expressed deep concern about the worrying tendency of the latter to dress up as famous inmates at office parties. In my remote opinion, there's only one thing worse than the phrase "political correctness gone mad," and it is the readiness of political leaders to pursue spurious political gains by putting out pointless press statements that rely for their success on nothing more than the righteousness and gullibility of a outspoken minority, and are of interest to no-one except the ardent supporters of the said political leader, who rally around this tiny ignorant cause, and the ardent opponents of the said political leader, who rally around a cause that is just as tiny and ignorant, namely the opposite cause, and to neutral commentators, who decry this fresh outbreak of "political correctness gone mad," and to Murray Deaker (is he still alive, by the way? I miss him, in a strange, insane sort of way.)

But that's bye the bye, and to be fair I have only looked at The Press on one occasion since I got up my dinky bookmark. Well that's all for now methinks. Did I miss anything? A few bits, let's be honest, but nothing that won't come to light in Amnesty International's upcoming report on the subject. Enjoy the footnotes, such as they are.****

Michael.

in six thermal layers and scarf (a scarf? Yes, lads and gents, I have worn a scarf. I have charmed the woolly snake. I have enveloped my virgin neck. Yes, I have sucked the warm fluff! Well, it seemed quite important to me – I used to think that they were worn only by females and Art Garfunkel (but wait, what's that on the cover of Blonde on Blonde? A woolly tie?)

in short shorts and a wind-jacket.

I've always wanted to do that – but it's more time-consuming than it looks, and I promise not to do it again. PS. look out for the hidden treasures of the full-stop.

**[censored]

*Yes, you're right, I cheated on the place names. But who needs local knowledge when you've got Google Maps?

That's all I've got time for, and I suspect that you were thinking the same thing. I hope you had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And if you didn't, I'm glad it's over for you.

***These emails are mass emails, but they try not to be spam emails. Let me know if you do not want to receive these mass emails in the future. It's easy! Just click on the following link! www.biggermember.com

More Pus and Decadence

2008-01-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

Nothing Like the Sun is as an autobiography of William Shakespeare, framed as a lecture given by Anthony Burgess (who is the author of the book). And the prose is just as you would expect from a collaboration between Shakespeare and Burgess:dense, witty, powerful, oozing with pus and legs and decadent prose. The easiest way into the book is through the plot, which tells the story of WS's rise to prominence and the loves and troubles he comes across along the way.

There is, firstly, his early gift and thrill with words. “’Water hath a trick of drowning and, at best, is a wetter.’ And then the jingle ruled him, already a word-boy. ‘Water wetter water wetter water wetter.’” Then, his unusual appetite for love, or at least his unusual skill in rendering it. “He heard above the beating of his blood the rustling of linen, a gentle panting at the restraining fingers of tapes and laces that yielded all too slowly...” This is the young domesticated WS, writing a youthful sonnet in the middle of a house-hold night, the slops and greasy broth and father calling for work, a bickering sister.

“And, childish, I am put to school of night
For to seek light beyond the reach of light.”

His father is sympathetic. “I have somewhere a piece of fine parchment. Copy the poem fair.” But the dark women is all bundled up with someone else. WS runs on fire from the happy rogering may-pole pagans, their “buttocks moon-besilvered,” and gets well drunk on sixpence of beer and the brimming talk of country rogues. A gap in the memory, a naked surprise in the morning, an accidental child and an accidental wife.

How doth WS the married man? Well, “he had but half of that bed now, and the familiar rest he sought, in so great need, so worn, was less than one quarter what it had formerly been.” WS the married man goes not very well at all, and with not much hope of getting better. “For one line of verse,” he says to his new wife, “I would trade thirty such scolds as you.”

Off he goes to teach words to little boys, and is fired for making lewd advances on his students. He leaves with his future all broken up, but his word-sense in tact, as ever. “I am going,” said WS. “I feel defiled.” (A good phrase, he saw that: a field defiled.)’ Back to the railing wife and her belly double-pumped with babies.

Things really get going, the WS we know starts to really take over the plot, when he falls in with the Queens Men, who arrive in Stratford just as an old herbalist, “cat-queen, cartomancer”, is driven up the street by a mad cruel mob with their heads full of witchy jeers. There is more madness and cruelty in the book, of nature and of humans; but more on that later.

In WS's adult career there are, on Burgess's account, a few key turning points. One is WS’s response to an attack from a fellow actor, an attack upon his talent and good-will. He is conceited, he is told, an upstart; indeed, he is an “upstart crow.” WS will not stand for this. He has always fancied words. With something to prove, fancy hardens into ambition. He will not sniffle along as a mediocrity, a “play-botcher, an excitor of groundlings, a poor stumbling actor. The time was come to show he was a poet.”

Titus Andronichus is another key, because it starts a friendship that shapes the life and mind of WS. The play piques an audience of nobles, who call the playwright to dine. Wits parry, eyes discover. WS is commissioned by Essex to write a poem, Southhampton quips and glitters. WS is beguiled, and he knows this in a way you might expect, through speech: “the triple chime of his name’s homonym from that lordly and desirable mouth…the lip’s pout, the red tounge’s lifting lazily.” It is a short step to the beginning of a lush, difficult friendship, one that moves from infatuation to love, teacher to equal, affection to tension to bitterness and split. The career of the friendship helps to define the course of the book and of WS's creative life. WS goes passive and old as his boy-lord grows grows restless and clever, setting one eye on advancement and another on treason. And this is the friendship that inspires the bulk of WS's sonnets: the marriage sonnets come first; later, when the clever Southhampton sees through them, the sonnets of the revival of love; the sonnets of ill-fated lust, when WS's lust turns ill-fated.

There is another turning point when Southhampton takes WS to the public execution of three Spaniards. Here is blood and slaughter in the middle of cushions and fair coaches, and WS is shocked, especially by the response of his noble friend, who is callous and smiling. The hangman’s knife going straight from heart to groin, the fat on the heart, the small girl who leaps and claps when the entrails come out. It is the start of WSs separation from Southampton, but also of his tiredness, his growing age.

Age, however, does not enfeeble his appetites for too long. “Let me take a breath, let me take a swig, for, my heart, she is coming”: separation from Harry coincides with the arrival of a new intimacy, a glittering Negro who revives a “boyhood’s timid lust for the wealth of endragoned seas and spice-islands.” It is a rich union, lush and violent, more so when her infidelity is found out. “To her to rail, beat, near-kill. I rip her bodice, tear, wrench, gnash, chew.” After this, WS goes despondent, withdraws into verse.

We do not hear a whole lot about the writing of WSs great works, or the playing of them; we get the context instead, their worldly inspiration and deployment. WS wooes S with his Venus and Adonis. The young nobles “swoon at its rich conceits,” as they do with The Rape of Lucrece. This is sweet Master Shakespeare at his sugary best, and the Inns of the toffs, and the University darlings, lick it up and go dizzy with epithets – “oh, the commodious conceits, the mellifluous facetiousness.” We see the intrigue behind the marriage sonnets the scenes of filth behind Troilus and Cressida. We witness a short sketching-out of a “warring family play”, with a Montague coming into it, and the next we know of Romeo and Juliet is as a finished play, “ravishing the inns.” Here is boss Dick Burbage saying a play is needed for a wedding in three weeks, here is a stanza from Chaucer, here a name (“And then came the name Bottom…”), and a title forked straight out of real life: “Yet with my fire made up I sweated as midsummer, and lo I got my title.” We witness WS turning away from the poems that ravished his noble patrons. They are something, but not enough. He cannot go on “living in a filigree cage, fed on marchpane, turning out jewelled stanzas for the delectation of lords, a very superior glover.” His sees “verse of a very different order.”

Up goes the Globe Theatre, and up goes the rod again of WS, and away he goes again on a lusty marathon. The narrator recounts one particular night with his black beauty. In the plot of the book, more things go on after this event: WS goes into decline, breaking out into pussy gruesomeness and weary sores; he speaks his dying words, he dies. But on this particular night he goes out into the London night and walks along with his dark friend, and as he does so the grim city turns, on an edge of love and fancy, into a lovely place where lovers walk. This transmuting act, played out in dirt and filth for the sake of love or art or some other high thing, has the feel of a climax. The beggars are heroes, the kites are cleansers:

“London, the defiled city, became a sweet bower for their love’s wandering, even in the August heat. The kites that hovered or, perched, picked at the flesh of traitor’s skulls became good cleansing birds, bright of eye and feather, part of the bestiary of the myth that enthralled them as they made it. The torn and screaming bears and dogs and apes in the pits of Paris Garden were martyrs who rose at once into gold heraldic zoomorphs to support the scutcheon of their static and sempiternal love. The wretches that lolled in chains on the lapping edge of the Thames, third tide washed over, noseless, lipless, eye-eaten, joined the swinging hanged at Tyburn and the rotting in the jails to be made heros of a classical hell that, turned into music by Vergil, was sweet and pretty schoolday innocence.”

*****

Themes? There is a lot of madness and a lot of cruelty, of nature and of people. The witch-hunters, the plague and all it caused, the sunny horror of a public execution, prison-riots and money-riots, cracking heads and sticky blood in the afternoon, pus-bulging syphilis, the rats in the tower. Shit heaves. Rats run.

“The flesher shooes flies off with both hands before chopping his stinking beef.”

“The city grew a head, glowing over limbs of towers and houses in the at-scurrying night, and its face was drawn, its eyes sunken, it vomited living matter down to ooze over the cobbles, in its delirium it cried Jesus Jesus.”

More than once WS sees the city as himself.

“In my delirium the City was mine own body – fighting broke out in ulcers on left thigh, both armpits, in the spongy and corrupt groin…the image of the falling city, pre-figured in the prodigies of a night, was drawn from my own body – the bloody holes, the burning hand.”

Some of the best descriptions of physical filth are used as reports of other kinds of corruption:

“Limping about Bread Street and Milk Streer, inhaling Fleet Ditch, I was drawn to searching out my fellows in disease, gloating on a nose-sore like a raspberry, a lip glistening soft, wet, huge, coal-shiny, a naked arm that was yellow streaks and rose pustules, a stone mined with worms. Then I reeled at my discovery of what I should have long known – that the fistulas and imposthumes, bent bones, swellings, corrupt sores, fetor were of no different order that the venality and treachery and injustice and cold laughing murder of the Court. And yet none of these leprous and stinking wretches had willed their rottenness. The foul wrong lay then beyond man’s own purposing; there was somewhere, outside time’s very beginning, an infinite well of putridity from which body and mind alike were driven, by some force unseen and uncontrollable, to drink...the fruitful triangle of stealing friend, stolen mistress, WS. Well, what was the agitation in the city of mine own soul but that? A finger-dip into butter-smooth pleasure and the armies and rioters trample through my veins, crying Kill kill.”

Kites are omnipresent. They wheel above the story like page-numbers, marking time and happenings. They signal the arrival of the plague, “announced in tender swelling buboes.” They share in the slaughter at Tyburn, where three Spaniards, shackled for treason, are rope-dangled, stretched, and opened up by a hangman’s axe. They hang around the rise of WS, around the soft and witty lords in their gold float; and around the decline of WS, his flesh-eating ruin. They are connected to WS's wife, whose name they screech as WS travels home to find said wife with child; they are part of the dark romance in the later pages; as mentioned, they are cleaners in WS's romantic vision of London.

The book is full of bodies, and human fleshiness gives rise to the most lovely notions and the most appalling. It is full of sweet and golden love, spicetrees and fresh thighs; but it is full of ugliness too. This is Shakespeare’s time, when people lived close to their bodies and to the bodies of others, to dirt and sun and indelicate nature. There are no planes but there are kites. There are no buses or fridges or self-cleaning toilets. Nature is the opposite of whiteware. It is profuse and lusty and runs away in the distance, changing out of sight, and thereby it fits perfectly the prose of WS. At the end of the book there is a sense of massive sickness and massive termination, a mad ending that is too sick and violent for reason; it makes reason soft and naïve and senseless, and leaves poetry as the only sane thing, because poetry is madly full of words and it rows over the horrible mess and casts it on a clean mirror. “Die in dust but live in filth. Well, if we are to live with it we must somehow ennoble it.”

Nothing Like The Sun: Pus and Decadence

2008-01-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

The next post was meant to be a review of Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun, but really it is just an excuse to quote Anthony Burgess as he imitates Shakespeare. Here are some of the juicy bits, unspoiled by my ramblings:

Was it, he wondered then, to be the way of the adventurer, mythical raker of carbuncles and diamonds from beneath the spicetrees, but first and last the hold’s stink and the foul water after the weeviled biscuit, men rent and filthy and reechy like their shirts of the hogo of earwax, the hap of wrack and piracy or, at best, spewing among rude and rough rascals made roaring lustful with salt beef and, a mere week at sea, cursing and raging in their fights over the ravaging of the soft white body of a boy, a boy refined and gentled with snippets of Ovid and maxims out of Seneca. A dark excitement came that guilt once pounced on in a rearing wave to wash away. Yet the names fired: America, Selenetide, Zanzibar, Terra Florida, Canaria, Palme Forro…

Reechy! Hogo! Selenetide, Canaria! Mounched! (Mounched?) Frotting, spirochaete! Croshabell, oaklings, footsticks, cinques, moxibustion, dittany!

He sat at the table on a three-legged stool, moving a greasy wash-clout from it first; the cheesy smell of curds rose at him like a small grey spirit. She mounched away at nothing, bringing cards. He knew these cards, though not the manner of telling them. Cartomancy. He thrilled at the word. These were not for an innocent game of trump or ruff; they were antique pictures, of towers crumbling to brick in a lightening-flash; of pope and empress; the moon all blood; Adam and Eve; the rising of the dead, sleepy and naked, at doomsday’s trumpet.

Sail-trimmers at their work on the waist between poop and forecastle, where too were stowed pinnance and skiff. The gravel-ballast and cable tiers; the outboard-thrusting beakhead that cracked the seas as the ship plunged. The hold below the orlop where the rotten beer and crawling cheese were stored. Foresail and foretop sail on the foremast; square course and topsail on the mainmast; the mizen mast with its lanteen or mizen yard; the bonaventure mizen; drabler and bonnet. Calivers and arquebuses, the gunner with his linstock, the aft and forward slueing of the carriage, the quoin.

Drink, then. Down it among the titbrained molligolliards of country copulatives, of a beastly sort, all, their browned pickers a-clutch of their spilliwilly potkins, filthy from the handling of spade and harrow, cheesy from udder new-milked, slashed mouths agape at some merry tale from that rogue with rat-skins around his middle, coneyskin cap on’s sconce. Robustious rothers in rural rivo rhapsodic. Swill thou among them, O London Will-to-be, gentleman-in-waiting, scrike thine ale’s laughter with Hodge and Tom and Dick and Blakc Jack the outlander from Long Compton…Hast a privy for a god, then, with the shit in’t. Sayest? Not one fart do I give, nay, for all thy great tally. Wouldst test it, then? Thou wouldst not, for thou art but a hulking snivelling codardo. I have been in the wars and do speak the tongues of the Low Countries. Ik om England soldado. U gif me to trinken. Who saith a liar? I will make his gnashers be all bloody. I will give him a fair crack, aye. You are but country cledge, all, that have seen naught of this world, and this one here, who is but new-wiped, he is a dizard. Thou yearling, thou, had I my hanger I would deal thee a great flankard. But I have my nief and I will mash thy fleering bubbibubkin lips withal…

It was no wise congrued with her lying near-bare against him nor with that horrible steaming-out, some few minutes past, of a mouthful apter for a growling leching collier pumping his foul water into some giggling alley-mort up by the darkling wall of a stinking alehouse privy.

Towards a Coherence Theory of Silliness

2007-12-28T16:03:00.000-08:00

Introduction:

A number of recent papers have made considerable progress towards giving a full account of silliness. The concept of silliness is a sorely neglected topic in the history of philosophy, and none of the major philosophers have so far written treatises on the matter. Some people look back to Hegel and Jacques Derrida, whose collected works may be regarded as extended meditations on the topic, as pioneers in the field. But most people view it as unfair to regard these writers as “philosophers”; and there is some dispute, even among leading writers on silliness, about whether or not the writings of such people as Hegel and Derrida really do fall under the category of “silliness”; with some commentators regarding the related concepts of “artful nonsense” and “gibberish” as more appropriate in those cases.

The merit of those views, however, is not the subject of this paper, and nor are any of the other new and interesting questions relating to the history of silliness in philosophical writings. Rather, I am concerned here with the concept of “silliness”, aloof from any historical considerations. In particular, I will elaborate upon a particular account of silliness, which I will call the “coherence theory of silliness,” and which I have mentioned briefly in an earlier paper. The core of the coherentist view is that the coherence of a potential silliness-set is a necessary condition for that silliness set to be an actual silliness set. This view may be contrasted with, and has been attacked by proponents of, the “cohesion” theory of silliness. This view holds that coherence is not a necessary condition for silliness, and proposes its own necessary condition in the place of coherence. The key difference between the replacement condition (“cohesion”), and the “coherence” condition, is that the former emphasises the intrinsic relations between silliness scenarios, while the former emphasises the extrinsic relations between silliness scenarios. In this paper I will first respond to some objections to this view that have been put forward by Jones (2006) and Andrews (2006); and will then use my comments upon those objections to motivate some refinements to my own view, which will include a distinction between local and global silliness.

Silliness Sets and Silliness Scenarios

It is almost unanimously agreed that the most useful unit of analysis for the concept of silliness is the “silliness scenario.” The canonical definition of the “silliness scenario” was given by Jones in his pioneering 2005 paper. Later papers have made some refinements upon Jones’ account, but they are of a highly technical nature, and the essence remains the same. For Jones, an event E is a silliness scenario if and only if the following conditions hold:

(1)Interaction: E must be apprehended by at least two humans agents if the perpetrator of the scenario was a human; and at least one human if the perpetrator of the scenario was not a human. (Discussion about this condition has centred mainly around the problem of zombie perpetrators, solitary silliness, and delayed apprehension. All of these issues warrant further investigation, but they do not pose any real problems for the interaction condition).

(2)Non-Cognition: the agents must apprehend the silliness of E without any cognitive engagement in that event. The agents may, of course, be engaged cognitively with aspects of E that do not actually give rise to any silliness; the agent may, for example, apprehend cognitively some of the intellectually involved parts of a joke, but still apprehend the silly parts without using the cognitive faculty. (This has proven to be the most troublesome condition. There has been considerable discussion about the kind of “cognitive engagement” that is appropriate to this condition, with some advising an abandonment of “cognition” altogether, and settling for a more mild condition; most of these accounts make some use of Davis’ notion of “cognitive relaxation.” Some more recent accounts have investigated the notion of “cognitive tension”, asserting (rightly, I think) that the distinctive features of silliness, which Jone’s (2) gestures towards, is not the absence of cognition, but the tension between what is apprehended using the higher cognitive function, and what is appreciated in the silliness event. If there is some disagreement, however, about just what (2) is gesturing towards, all writers agree that it is gesturing towards something, and that (2) or some variant of (2) is essential to any account of silliness.)

(3)Inconsequence: E must be “detached” from any non-silly event. This condition is designed to capture the thought that an event is not usually regarded as silly if it has any genuine real-life consequences (except whatever immediate emotional responses it might elicit from the apprehending agents [see condition (4)]). The silly event must be absurd, free-standing, trivial. As with (2), there is not much doubt that (3) points towards a distinctive feature of silliness; but, as with (2), there is some debate about how to work out the details. In particular, there is debate about what sort of “detachment” is required (logical, topical, psychological, or a combination of those three); and about just how strict the “non-silly” requirement should be. With regards to the second point, some writers prefer to relax the “non-silly” requirement, and replace it with a requirement that is based on “non-funny” events, or even on “non-fun” events.)

(4)Funniness. Clearly the silly event must be amusing: it must elicit a light-hearted response from the agents. The main point of contention surrounding this condition is to do with the relationship between it and the other three conditions; in particular, whether or not this condition is independent of those conditions. Most writers agree that the silly event elicits a different emotional response from the funny event (or else there would no real basis for distinguishing between the two kinds of event). But some hold that this difference should be attributed to the different sort of funniness that inheres in the event; while others hold that that silly events and funny events share the same sort of funniness, and that the difference resides only in the other properties of the silly event (inconsequence, non-cognition etc.) that are absent in funny events. Others (including myself) hold that the debate between these two positions is meaningless.

These, then, are widely accepted as necessary and sufficient conditions for an event to constitute a silly scenario. These conditions may seem irrelevant in this paper, since this paper is concerned with the notion of a silliness set, rather than that of a silliness scenario. But some of those conditions are relevant to the objections that have been levelled against the coherence theory of silliness, and also to my response to those objections. I will move onto those objections, and my response, after outlining the notion of a “silliness set”, and briefly considering the “cohesionist” approach to silliness sets.

Silliness scenarios need not occur in isolation. According to condition (3), silliness scenarios must be detached from any non-silly events; but of course any particular silliness scenario does not need to be detached from other silliness scenarios. In fact, some of the richest and most interesting silly phenomena emerge only out of silly scenarios when they are considered together, and not when each one is considered on its own. Of course, not any collection of silliness scenarios will do. We must consider silliness sets to be collections of scenarios that are related to each other in some substantive way; and the disagreement between coherentists and cohesionists is over just what sort of relation must hold between a collection of silliness scenarios, before that collection can rightly be considered as a silliness set.

Coherence and Cohesion of Silly Sets

On the cohesionist view, the right relation is one that holds between the parts of each scenario in the set, and not the whole scenarios. To work out, from some collection of silly scenarios, which ones constitute a silliness set, each scenario must first be divided into a number of “silly elements”, and then the silly elements from all of the scenarios in the collection of candidate scenarios must then be brought together into a “silly group.” The elements in the silly group are then considered together, irrespective of the silly scenarios from which they were derived. Precisely, they are considered in respect of the richness if the relations that hold between them; this gives rise to a “cluster” of silly elements, all of which enjoy many connections with one another. A scenario belongs to the “silliness set” if and only if all of its silly elements belong to the silly cluster.

The cohesionist view may be contrasted with the coherentist view, according to which the relations to be considered are the relations that hold between the silly scenarios as wholes. There is some temptation to think that the coherentist and the cohesionist views are not in competition at all, but rather that they are equivalent. But this is not the case. That is, there is a genuine question about which of these views gives the right necessary condition for status as a silly set.

To see this, one might consider the analogy of sets of novels (it does not matter if they are silly novels or not). One might take a coherentist view on the criterion for set membership of novels: one consider each novel as a whole (the theme, say), and then determine set membership on the basis of similarities between the themes of the candidate novels. Or, one could adopt the cohesionist view, and hold that the basis for set membership should be the topics of the chapters in the novels: the novels that get into a set should be ones whose chapters are closely related. Now, it is clear in this example that a collection of entities may satisfy the coherentist criterion for set status, without satisfying the cohesionist criterion. This would be the case if the “theme” was an emergent property: one which does not manifest itself in each chapter taken individually, but only when they are considered together. In such a case, it seems likely that the themes of a group of novels may be very similar, but the chapters of each have no special connections between them. A similar situation could plausibly give rise to a set of novels that satisfy the cohesionist criterion, without satisfying the coherentist criterion: the set of novels may have chapters that are very closely related, but which give rise to themes that have no special connection between them. Hence, the choice between the coherence criterion and the cohesion criterion is a genuine choice: one will end up regarding different silly collections as silly sets, if one chooses one of these criteria over the other.

The Cohesionist Attack:

Jones (2005) asks us to consider the following “sillygism”, which he claims to be sound. (In Jone’s terminology, which I will adopt here, a “sillygism” is a list of silly scenarios that have been put forward as a candidate for a silly set. If the collection does indeed turn out to be a silly, the list represents a “sound” sillygism; if not, it is an “unsound” sillygism. If one or more of the scenarios in the silly set are not in fact “silly”, but the scenarios nevertheless satisfy some criterion for set-hood, then the sillygism is “valid” but not “sound.”) Consider the following set of three sillyness scenarios:

1)A man, M2, walks into a bar, B, with a bucket of water, BW in his hand, H. M1 takes B and throws it onto another man, M2, who is sitting at a table talking to a penguin, P1. M2 looks down at his shoes, smiles and utters the statement S1:

S1: “If you do that again I’ll eat your shoelace.”

2)M2 walks into another bar with an Irishman, I, an Englishman, E, and an elephant, EL. EL sees P1 sitting on the bar drinking vodka. E goes up to the bar and orders a Guiness. E goes up to the bar and orders a bar-maid. P1 utters the statement S2

S2: “Throw me a bone, Jim, there’s a shoelace on my soup.”

3)EL walks into a corner dairy, CD, and asks for a penguin. The shop-keeper, S, responds with S3:

S3: “I’m sorry, we’ve run out of penguins. But yesterday the bar-maid delivered a new batch of shoelaces. Will a shoe-lace be sufficient?”

EL replies with S4:

S4: “That should do the trick. Thanks.”

Now, Jone’s claim is that this sillygism, if sound, is a counter-example to the coherentist criterion for silliness sets. For, Jones claims that the coherentist cannot account for the soundness of SA. He claims, that is, that SA fails to satisfy the coherentist criterion. Morevoer, he argues that SA is one of a much larger class of syllogisms that, though sound, do not satisfy the coherentist criterion. If Jones is right, the coherentist account is in serious trouble.

It is hard to deny that SA is a sound syllogism. Some (Pritchard, 2006) have raised some doubts about its soundness, pointing for example to the introduction of the vodka and the Guinness in 2), and the shop-keeper in 3). Some have gone so far as to question the validity of the set, pointing in particular at the “funniness” condition for silliness. In Pritchard (2006) we find the claim (for example) that “while SA3 might raise a giggle for some people, SA2 is pretty lame. And SA1 is scandalous. Quite simply, SA is not funny.” But Pritchard’s intuitions about silliness have been shown to be deviant in other cases; and most philosophers, including a number of logicians, agree that SA is funny.

The novel part of Jone’s argument (and the part I wish to attack here) is his claim that the coherentist criterion cannot account for the soundness of SA. Before giving my response to Jone’s claims here, I will rehearse his argument briefly.

To be continued, given further inspiration. In the meantime, consider this silliness scenario (especially the sub-scenario in the 30-60second range).

Martin Amis, "The Information"

2007-12-24T22:12:00.000-08:00

Here's the first page of The Information, by Martin Amis.

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Women – and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses – will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, “what is it?” And the men say, “Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.”

Richard Tull was crying in his sleep. The woman beside him, his wife Gina, woke and turned. She moved up on him from behind and laid hands on his pale and straining shoulders. There was a professionalism in her blinks and frowns and whispers: like the person at the poolside, trained in first-aid; like the figure surging in on the blood-smeared macadam, a striding Christ of mouth-to-mouth. She was a woman. She knew so much more about tears than he did. She didn't know about Swifts Juvenilia, or Wordsworth's senilia, or how Cressida had variously fared at the hands of Boccaccio, of Chaucer, of Robert Henryson, of Shakespeare; she didn't know Proust. But she knew tears. Gina had tears cold.

Richard raised a bent arm to his brow. The sniff he gave was complicated, orchestral. And when he sighed you could hear the distant seagulls falling through his lungs.

“Nothing. It isn't anything. Just sad dreams.”

Forget the mild, straight-faced sexism, or the fact that women cry at night as well (let's not argue about all that) or the imprecise unhappiness that runs through the whole novel, and gets tiresome after while; forget the references to the outer universe, the frailty of a novelist who ventures into the details of phsyics, and the foolhardiness of anyone who does so with the aim of asking the tired question of “what are we in the eyes of the universe?”

Forget the forgettable bits. But remember the bits that get stuck in the mind because they are strung with hooks of great prose. “Swing low on your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob-probes, and you will mark.” That line would look good, I think, at the start of a poem, let alone a novel. And the “distant seaguls falling through his lungs.” Where does this come from, and how does this strange image do its meaning-work? I don't know, but it works all right: empty sea, emptying sky. The striding Christ is superfluous, isn't it, as far as meaning goes? If anything it goes too far and upsets the solemnity of the occasion. But it doesn't matter, because it is a boastful, playful flourish, full of the joy of writing.

For hunters of metaphors, Amis is a teeming plain.

“Now in the dawn, through the window and through the rain, the streets of London looked like the insides of an old plug. Richard contemplated his sons, their motive bodies reluctantly arrested in their sleep, and reef-knotted in their bedware, and he thought, as an artist might: but the young sleep in another country, at once very dangerous and out of harm's way, perennially humid with innocuous libido – there are neutral eagles on the windowsill, waiting, offering protection and threat.”

“Now came the boys – in what you would call a flurry if it didn't go on so long and involve so much inanely grooved detail, with Richard like the venerable though tacitly alcoholic pilot in the cockpit of the frayed shuttle...by the time he rounded the final half-landing the front door was opening – was closing – and with a whip of its tail the flurry of their life was gone.”

But perhaps there is more to analysing a book than listing metaphors. Well.... perhaps. In a limited sense, on some days. I have to admit that there's a plot in The Information, something about sex and a well-read hitman and literary jealousy. There are themes as well. Ageing, the vastness of the physical universe, the power of art and the pushiness of life, sons and fathers, the search for the “universal.”

But I'ld say that these galvanising agents do not do as much to unite the novel as does the mood of the thing. The book has a sad, tired mood, bitter but impotent. This is the mood of the main character, who is the emotional centre of the book. We see the others through the smog of Richard's unhappiness. In this atmosphere, Gwyn's bright visions of a better earth, laid out peacefully in his best-selling novel, are depressingly fake. Richard's wife is an obsession he fails to satisfy, and her coldness towards his art is another example of her distance, the obscurity of her “private cosmogony.” America is a deafening mystery that Richard can observe but not absorb. He returns to England to the safety of its past, the place where students spend “three years in twelfth century universities with Paradise Lost on their knees.” But the past of England is also absent. England is an old baron, comically senile; a shambling mansion; the success of fake novelists; dead children on the muddy paths of Dogshit Park.

If we wanted to sum up Richard in one word, the word would be “isolation.” In the fog he hears his sons play in the park, but he cannot see them and he cannot understand their sounds. His best friend is a man he despises. His wife is part of the flurry of life, and Richard is standing on the stairs. To the men in the local pub he is a knowledge-freak, an impressive man but an outsider. Arguably, the person with whom he is most intimate is Scozzy, the well-read hitman. And Scozzy, arguably the most confident character in the book, is an irreversible misanthrope.

The Information was written in 1995, in a pre-internet age (the writer predicts that postmen will be superseded by the fax). This may be related to the fact that, in this book, “information” is not treated as a false thing, mere data, something to be contrasted with “knowledge” or “understanding.” For Richard, information is desirable, something contrasted favourably with the silence or gibberish of family members, and with the short platitudes, endlessly repeated, of publicists and sham novelists. Richard has a radio interview that is meant to be twenty minutes long but ends up at two minutes. He is determined not to label himself with a slogan, but he ends up saying nothing about his writing:

“But what is it saying?”
“It's saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn't put it in any other way.”
“Richard Tull? Thank you very much.”

Richard wants to be incompressible but ends up being invisible. Perhaps the problem of his wife is similar: in wanting to say everything he ends up saying nothing. Certainly this is a problem at other times. Extraordinarily, Richard gives a passionate speech (“You don't think that's extraordinary? Oh, but it is”). Predictably, he loses a job. Richard may want information, but not everyone does.

Is there any success or salvation in this book, any productive exchange of information, any victories of expression that are not just a retreats into obscure art or private clarity? We'll see. In the meantime, mark the prose. I can open the book at random and reliably come across a piece of writing that matches the rhythm and vividness of the first page. Perhaps it would take a long time and groping to get the message of the whole book: at that level, information is not easy to come by. But the transmission of mood and speech and image, at the level of sentence and paragraph, is as clear and informative as you could want. Does that constitute an overall message? Look for meaning in the fridge or the Friday morning, not in the stars? Look for pixels, not pictures? Whether it is or not, I think it works well as a novelists' mantra, this anti-message message. But this is too broad: if Amis has something to say here, it must be more specific than that. And whether he has anything to say or not, he has a lot to give to anyone who reads authors for their verbal gifts, their non-prosaic prose.

Signpost [last number] +1

2007-10-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

There are many different kinds of charm, more than I have described below.

The charm of Lolita is aloof, childish, sarcastic. It is full of mockery and hard-to-reach places. It also has a sort of breathless resignation to the pleasures of adulthood.

The charm of Catherine Moorland is quiet and prudent. It is unthreatening but it also provocative, and it has hard questions for older people.

Elizabeth Bennet has a similar charm, in my opinion. But it is more penetrating and more intelligent and it is capable of anger. I could not imagine Catherine Moorland being really angry.

Dora Copperfield has a different kind of charm altogether. She is all candyfloss and icing. You need to be gentle with her or she will break apart, but in return she will give you pleasures of the gentlest kind.

Imagine each of these charms separately. Then imagine them all together, combined in one person. This person will be sensual and puzzling. She will be sharp and full of youth and full of an intense girlish vexing energy.

And imagine the kind of response this person would get when they took their vexing youthful affection and bestowed it on another person. I venture that the response would be strong and erratic. By turns the person would be calm, complacent, condescending, aloof, suspicious, guarded, amused, surprised, alarmed, affronted, insecure, defensive, thoughtful, warm, admiring, tender, tantalised, wary, adventurous, calm.

These responses would not follow each other in a graded sequence. They would jump around a lot, start again from scratch, repeat themselves. After a while they will settle down into a wary excitement, but even then they will be prone to sudden changes.

All of this may explain why I have not written much on this blog recently. Another explanation is that I have been reading a lot of History of Science; but that explanation is not very interesting. I don't know what I will write on this blog in the upcoming weeks, but I hope it is something.

Hey My Droogs and Little Malchikiwicks

2007-10-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

Well well for your Michael Trevor yes the time's been going fastly, O my far-away friends, and many sunny happenings have been going on over this-here little point of action, no mistaking that my friends.

I went to Ottawa. Yes! I went to Ottawa my mates and I was tolchocked on the groodies, yes I was, by the goodness growing there, the goodness and the multi-pleasurableness of this fun-sponging place. The trees were bleeding all over the city, o the ruby-water flowed and the leaves were dead on the ground and it was just like old times, o my foreign droogies in your happy summer full of oily skin and little lambs being carried off in trucks, o yes. And the things that they have built there, in Ottawa! So much building, you must see it some time before somone knocks you over, yes you mustly very soonish or there will be sorry things to say about it, notwithstanding. Buildings made of rock and buildings made of glass, all in glass, you could make a thousand knives if your inclinations lay that way my pleasing droogies, from these buildings.

And a parliament, a parliament just like the jolly big thing in London-city, all brown and spiky like a very serious fence, very serious indeed. And there were happy sunny houses in the happy suburbs, with the leaves lying sunny on the ground like money. And so much richness in these places there was, so much leafy money, that there were no footpaths at all, yes they had been killed off long ago my friends, quite some time ago when you were just a little droog with jelly fingers, o yes. And the cars went past like shiny bullets, very big and not see-through at all, not a little look-see even once.

And I went also to another place of much delight and belly-tumbling too. This was Quebec, not so far from Ottawa as you may know from school or some such thing. And there was as much leafiness and tree-falling sussuration and so forth as I had ever seen or ever wanted or needed to see in my short hooray. And the hills were all dressed up in it, o my comrades, in the heigth of Roman fashion so they say. And I scurried up a hill on my little scuttlers and I saw a little way ahead, where the hills were going bloody all the way along, poor things. And that was all. I just went down after that and was carried past the shiny lakes and people swimming and drowning happily all along the shore, like little babies fat with little arms ha ha. O yes, it was not too bad really, and me only two months from home.

And the journey then, o my droogs! A big bus with bolshy big windows black and wrapped around like darkened glasses, not unlike the road-machines back home I venture. It was not bad at all, not so bad at all I say. I say it was not so bad as you might think, and I say you catch my little meaning here and so I journey on.

And all this and many more besides, o my readers in your ugly chairs! Glad enough I was, I say, to catch a game of batter-ball. So much in the happening, and so little to see! A game of batter-ball, with all the pyjama-panted players and so much happy throwing and a little teeny bit of hitting it was not enough for me I think. Not a thing to recommend to a friend, though a foe is something different, except you may say if the friend has a beautiful companion, or some such thing, to make the time go past with greater snappishness, o my droogs.

All that to one side and the rest to another, I should say I found a friend or two while working round my itty way the city. And all are nicely set in place o my well-proportioned people, as is in the nature of things so to say. One for tennis and tennis on the table and under the table and other sizzling racquet-sports ha ha. Another then for other things, like study-work and such. And then some more for lighter times, for eating jugs of briny browny bubble-juice. But mostly study-work I think, o Michael Trevor knows the inside-outs of this and that when study-work is raised. And not all well-companioned, I should say. Not a social thing is study-work. But never mind. There's always juice or tennis on the table, so to speak.

And study-work is not so bad, though long. The History of the Physical Sciences and the History of Pschologicology and the Philosophical Parts of Science are the things I am reading and hearing about, and writing too. And there's a lot to do and no mistake. A book a week for each of these, they say that's not too much. And that is much. But very jolly study-mates I have, and not too bad are those who speak to us in class and know so much of this and that. So study-work is working just as well as one could hope, I think.

And so I go along with this and that to do and not a lot to say. I did go shopping for a thing or two. I took a lusty wallet with me, needed to, and found a place to find a windows tool or screen or pelvis-sitter, what they said it was I do not know and many grazny numbers on it too, all Niggerhertz and RAM and so on and heretofore and so they say. And other things as well. A grazny mouse or finger-lover. A set of speaking boxes which is very good for playing lovely Beet and Franz and other lovely gorgeousness, too bad about the room-mate sleeping ha ha ha. And a big sack to hold it all, of course.

I saw a film that had the right amount of dying. It started out with an unfortunate happening in a barbers shop, which left one man with a very sore neck, a very sore neck indeed, and not much means to speak about it ha ha. And so it went like that for some time, but got a little soft in the centre so to say. But mostly it was men with veins in their arms, and one or two sore ladies ha ha. Viggo Mortgensseon was there, I saw. And someone else who did famous things that noone told me about. Anyway, it was all a good time and someone gave me popping-corn, so not too bad, not too bad at all my droogs. I see you dripping at the mouth right now, o yes.

Wink wink my friends, I must away. The grazny time is timing all my typing. Not too long to go, I think. Not too long at all, now even less. O yes my droogs, I hope very much that nothing bad happens to you in the next day or so, and good things happen instead and every little thing is sizzling fast, if you like it that way, or something else if you don't. No doubt there's more to say. Your Michael Trevor o my droogs is not a one to slouch around in hats, so more to come I say. But not right now.

Mapping out Science and Literature

2007-09-05T10:13:00.000-07:00

I want to study the intersection of science and literature. But what does this mean? There are a few basic divisions to make here, and they help to map out this odd and interesting field of study. Some of the following divisions are interdependent (it would be nice to get rid of this interdependency; in the meantime, richness takes priority over clarity).

Method and matter
What happens when scientists apply the scientific method* to the phenomenon of literature, and vice versa? Scientists, especially psychologists, can study the cognitive processes that go on in an poet's head. Less interestingly, they can analyse handwriting and manuscripts as physical phenomena (eg. to date old scrolls). Likewise, there are novels about science and its social etc. implications (though usually about the implications of science, not science itself. I don't know any works of laboratory fiction, expect perhaps the writings of some sociologists).
*Here I've interpreted "method" broadly, to span discovery, justification and method of presentation (ie. language).
A study of the above kind will provide "weak" answers to the question of how each discipline contributes the other. I say "weak" because the answers do not tell us whether or not literature types are doing the same sort of things as science types. Science can give us insights into the workings of the literary mind; but it can also give us insights into the workings of the solar system. "Strong" questions about science and literature will reveal similarities and differences between the scientific and literary methods. For example, some people think that imagination is the link between physics and poetry: is it really, and what do we mean by "imagination"? And where do metaphors fit into all of this?

Parallel cases and the rest
A good way to examine the respective methods of science and literature is to look at cases where they are applied to the same subject matter. For example, large parts of psychology are not relevant to the method of science or of literature. But these parts of psychology are part of the subject matter of both disciplines. Finding this sort of common ground helps to eliminate unwanted variables, giving better grounds for comparison.

Foreground and background questions
We can think of science and literature as consisting in their respective subject matter and their respective methods of inquiry and expression. A naive view would clearly separate these spheres from the rest of the world. But an awful lot happens outside of these two spheres, and a lot of it is relevant to the spheres themselves. People possess values and make statements about those values; they have social lives and form political parties. They have rich psychological lives. In a lot of cases these happenings will be effected by what goes on in the two spheres; in some cases (certainly in the realm of literature) the causal arrow will run in the other direction. One way to illuminate the connection between science and literature is to look at how they interact in the background world of daydreams and social lives and politics.

Historical and philosophical questions
This division is more straightforward for some people than for others. The problem is that some philosophers of science reckon they need historical examples to verify their claims about ideal scientific methods (eg. Popper can't be right, because that's not how Newton did it). And some historians reckon they need the philosophy of science to decide whether or not they are studying science (as opposed to superstition or popular rubbish).

Still, there are some straightforward mistakes that one can make in this area. To avoid controversy, perhaps it is better to talk about general questions, about all known science, and questions about specific historical fields. It is known, for example, that the Roman poet Lucretius wrote a poem that theorised about the natural world, putting forward an early version of atomism; and that this poem was influential in the development of science. But it would be wrong to conclude that all known science is necessarily poetic in origin.

It is interesting and valuable to learn about particular epochs and particular figures in known science (what were the literary influences of Peracelsus? What, if anything, did the nineteenth century discover about the role of the unconscious mind in literary composition?) But this is quite different from making broad hypotheses about all the science that has ever been done.

Some info. on my blogging

2007-09-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

Below is a bit of information about the topics I favour on this blog. (There is also a general welcome lying around somewhere).

The idea is to say why I find these topics interesting and what I will do with them. If the summaries below are not enough to persuade you of the overwhelming value of any particular topic, try the linked posts in the sub-heading. If they do nothing else, these linked posts (I like to call them "Introductions") will bore you intoagreement.

Travel (as literature; as philosophy)
Writing is not just a way of expressing the world, but also of sensing the world. Travel-writing is easier than creative writing, because it places fewer demands on the imagination. It is easier than philosophy because you don't have to think too much. When I am traveling, this suits me. Frequently when I am not traveling it also suits me.

Metaphor
I would like to think that metaphor is the one true link between the crafts of the intellect and the arts of the imagination, the fibre in the knot that binds the threads of science and poetry. There is a faint possibility that this view is a bit fanciful. But I like metaphors anyway. I also like to collect them - here's a sample. I deny that this hobby makes me in any way odd, obsessive or eccentric.

Education
I would like to say that I am deeply enthusiastic about education. But really I am deeply enthusiastic about the idea of education. I like to say that good education is rich and empowering and full of wit and wisdom, that good education is key to human flourishing, that we should all become school teachers. I probably should think about these claims a little more. I should also admit that I am not really as keen as I might be on the idea of being a school-teacher. I wrote a series of three essays on education; it is called "Education as an Ideal."

Philosophy (and here and here)
In the first of the linked posts I wrote: "I do not have the will or the ability to live a life of philosophy, but I do wish to life a philosophical life." On reflection, this is really just a way of saying that I'm a pretty amateur philosopher. The things I do write on this topic are just as likely to be stimulated by a book or an abstracted idea, as by a real-life event. I am not equipped to say anything really interesting about ethics, education, politics, aesthetics or science; and I am not equipped to say anything at all about logic, metaphysics or semantics. But I like to exercise my mind and I like to reward my curiosity. I aspire to asking interesting questions. Failing that, I hope to make some interesting errors.

Creative
Everyone likes a good yarn. A lot of people also like words. Some people like writing books. Some people like writing poems. Some people like sticking a bunch of words together to see what happens. A poem is a good way of decorating a thought that would otherwise be uninteresting. It is also a good excuse for bad arguments. I like writing poems that rhyme, especially sonnets.

Diablog
There are lots of good-sounding reasons for people to write dialogues. However, it is easier to write about writing dialogues than to write dialogues. Watch this space (intermittently).

Books
Does this need an introduction?
People read books, and then they write about them. I write about them because it enriches the experience of reading. Reviews can be long and ponderous or little more than a quote. Often they are just a way of making one's blog look better by including the prose of people who get published.

Miscellany

Stories About Cows

Signpost 4: More Odds and Ends

2007-09-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

[Update: by the looks of things, graduate life is a constant scramble to meet yesterday's deadlines. Probably I will not have much time over the next few months to post on this blog, except on topics directly related to my studies.]

Subject-wise, the writing on this blog over the next little while will be the same as it has been over the last little while ie. odds and ends. Style-wise, it may change: I'll make an effort towards brevity. Or rather, I will yield to the temptation of failing to spend hours writing long and ponderous essays on obscure topics.

This is not as easy a decision as it looks; but nor is it very hard. On the one hand, I quite like the idea of being an earnest long-winded scholar who shuns worldly delights in service of the wordy exposition of minutiae. On other hand, I would like people to read this blog. (And worldly delights are, after all, delightful).

My first act of popularist summarizing is to condense all of my bloated introductions into a single easy-to-read no-nonsense pocket of information. And here it is.

The jury is out on the merit, readership-wise, of writing odds and ends. I've heard that success in blogging is impossible without a fairly narrow and consistent subject matter. But surely there is something to gain from appealing to a wide audience. At any rate, I'll give top priority to what appeals to me. Thanks to the people who have left comments behind so far.

"It's What Makes Us Human"

2007-08-30T17:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when one person is gaily expounding the virtues of her chosen course of life or study, or two people are hotly expounding the shortcomings of eachothers', someone will reach for the "it's what makes us human" defense. The idea seems to be that there is an intrinsic value in doing the things that make humans distinctive. This kind of argument is especially common with respect to cognition: we should value thought, the argument runs, because it is what separates us from mere beasts.

Sometimes the word "human" is meant to pick out a set of stand-alone goods (eg. a rich emotional life; concern for others), and the speaker furnishes independent grounds for thinking that these really are goods. But sometimes the claim really seems to be that a trait possesses value solely in virtue of it making humans different from other species.* Is this claim reasonable?
*And sometimes people will exploit the ambiguity for rhetorical effect, trying to benefit both from the validity of the first claim, and advantage of the second claim (which consists in not obviously requiring any additional justification).

At first glance it looks a bit fishy. Suppose that a highly intelligent race landed on the moon and started interacting with us. Surely the presence of this race would not persuade us that cognitive excellence was no longer important, and that we should aim for the newly-distinctive trait of cognitive mediocrity. It seems odd that the presence or otherwise of another race could impact on our value system in this way.

However, of there is fishiness here I don't think it is a very solid fishiness. Most of us can appreciate the reasonableness of a country taking pride in its distinctiveness. Distinctiveness means standing out; it is a step away from anonymity. People value their "sense of identity."

Sure, distinctive national traits (superb cuisine, great landscapes etc.) are valued in themselves, because they guarantee citizens a good meal in that country, or a great view. And it would be easy to conflate this kind of value with the value of distinctiveness. But people are not just proud of their national excellences. They are also proud of their national quirks, their eccentricities, things that are hard to see as excellencies in themselves.

For example, in New Zealand we are proud of the Kiwi, a small flightless bird with a silly beak. If we found out that some other country also had a kiwi, we would feel uncomfortable. And if someone were to come along and kill off all our Kiwi, we would feel this to be a crime not just against Kiwis but also against New Zealanders.
Is this a reasonable feeling? For the sake of argument, let's say that it is. But it would be great to hear anyone else's thoughts on this.

The situation is more complicated than the above paragraph suggests. After all, a "sense of national identity" would not mean much if it were held by only one person. Our instinct to form groups is just as strong as our instinct to demonstrate the uniqueness of our own group. But it remains true that distinctiveness is a strong impulse. If the instinct is reasonable, then distinctiveness can constitute a reason for a country to favour a trait. Whether or not, in the final weigh-up, the value of distinctiveness overrides the value of togetherness, is something to work out carefully in particular cases.

But why should the same lines of argument carry over to the case of an entire race of people? Well, why not? They arguments seem to apply as well to the case of a family as to the case of a nation. In this case, I think, the onus is on the skeptic to show that there is a salient difference between countries and races, such that the blithe assumption of continuity is unwarranted.

In saying that, it's worth emphasising the relative weakness of the "distinctiveness" consideration. As noted above, one can't say in general whether distinctiveness or togetherness will carry greater weight. And the intrinsic value (or intrinsic disvalue) of a trait can easily override either of those considerations (cf. the case of cognition). In summary, it's OK to draw on the "it makes us human" defense, but it should be seen in context; it is not very convincing on its own.

The Good Hedonist

2007-08-30T15:47:00.000-07:00

Imagine the life of a moral hedonist: one who performs good acts because they are good, but for purely selfish reasons. His greatest pleasure is performing good acts for others, but he couldn't care less about the people he helps. For the moral hedonist, charity is orgasmic. He strolls down the street joyously handing out money to beggars. He sends bulging food parcels to the local mission, he volunteers for UNICEF on weekends, he spends his evenings plotting the good health of his neighbour. And this gives him a very great thrill. But when his neighbour comes down with cancer or chilblains, his only regret is that there was never any chance for him to perform the good deed of saving the victim.

How do we assess this person morally, and how should we assess him? My suspicion is that society is disposed to be unfairly harsh on the moral hedonist. We tend to be more forgiving to the conventional hedonist (sex and chocolate, etc.) than the person who takes a selfish pleasure in helping others. (Possibly I am wrong here, and it's just me who is unfair. But there's nothing wrong with self-correction. And possibly the error is rather leniancy towards the conventional hedonist than harshness towards the moral hedonist. But possibly not...) So here are three small points in favour of the character just described.

1) Helpful deeds are (in general) still helpful when they are done selfishly. The beggar doesn't care if you don't care: he's got something to eat when he had nothing before. In many cases, the benefactor of a good act will not be in a position even to know whether we care or not. This is pretty clear in the UNICEF case. It's less clear in the beggar's case, but probably still true. At any rate, the true moral hedonist will make every attempt to suppress any signs of insincerity that might hurt the benefactor.

Granted, this strategy is unlikely to work for long in the case of a close friendship. In principle, I'm not sure that the perfectly skilled and dedicated moral hedonist would ever give himself away (we would need a situation in which revealing the deceit would not hurt the feelings of the so-called-friend). But in practice, the skill and dedication would have to be superhuman to have the right effect in the long-term. (And perhaps the imperfectly skilled moral hedonist would not form any friendships at all, given the hurt that the inevitable exposure would cause).

Nevertheless, it is still true that the moral hedonist can do an awful lot of good. If we think otherwise, it may be because intuitions tell us that an uncaring person is a nuisance. And of course this is true in the case of those misanthropes who take no selfish pleasure in doing good to others. But clearly the moral hedonist is a different kettle of fish.

2) The moral hedonist is not (necessarily) a hypocrite. Sure, if he sincerely professes to act selflessly, then the moral hedonist is certainly mistaken. But this is primarily an epistemic mistake, not a moral one. There need not be any deliberate duplicity involved.

This is important because our (unwarranted) harshness towards the moral hedonist (if it exists) is probably due to our (warranted) harshness towards genuine hypocrites. We routinely despise people who profess that their good deeds spring from selfless intentions, when the opposite is the case. And often this judgment is justified. Perhaps the judgment is directed at the charitable politician who has both eyes on winning votes. Perhaps it's the rockstar who promotes third-world welfare just because it makes him or her more famous; or the businessman who puts money into the same third-world country to get a better chance of exploiting that country in the future.

These people necessarily deserve our contempt (because their selfish habits will have harmful consequences.) But the moral hedonist does not. The differences between the two cases have already been covered. In most cases the actions of the moral hedonist will "track the good"; and he need not be deliberately dishonest about his motives (indeed, he may publicly pronounce the truth about those motives).

3) As with religious "hypocrites," we may be phsychologically biased against the moral hedonist. People get terribly prickly about heaven-seeking righteousness. "What fools, what contemptible fools! These people act rightly just because they're scared of being roasted when they die." And we tend to express our disgust by grouping these people alongside the duplicitous politicians and rockstars I described above (which is not quite fair, assuming the moral teaching of religions are not seriously misguided. Well, I did say not quite fair.)

My suggestion is that this prickliness is partly due to a kind of moral jealousy. We value the moral high-ground very much, and get hot under the collar when other people cheat their way to the top. Perhaps this attitude is beneficial in the long run, by protecting society against moral "false positives." But in individual cases it will lead to an unjust assessment of the moral worth of the hedonist.

I mean this point to apply to the case of the moral hedonist who is not deliberately dishonest about his motives, but who does not actively promote his true motives. We see this person go about their good deeds, and are anxious to point out that they are really not so selfless as one might think. And in the case where we assume erroneously that the moral hedonist is necessarily a true hypocrite, our prickliness compounds the error.

Conclusion: Of course, the uncaring person is less worthy than the person who acts in the same way for purer motives. But the two cases may be closer than we think. At the very least, I reserve the right to be unashamed when I derive a selfish pleasure from giving money to beggars.

Diablogging

2007-08-29T17:58:00.000-07:00

There are many good reasons to write dialogues. They let an author pursue a topic easily when she is in two minds about it. They encourage a reader to "see both sides of the story." The let an author distance himself from his opinions, which is useful when the opinions are tentative, embarrassing or invidious. They train a writer in the tough art of imitating human speech.

Most importantly, though, dialogues put thought in context, showing how it interacts with social and political and emotional factors. Sometimes this contextuality can a bit of a drag (arguments can be complex enough without being messed up by human emotions). But often it is a virtue: besides being entertaining, it can instruct us on the purpose, duties and difficulties of real-life discussion. Arguments always seem more urgent when they are presented by real-life actor (rather than the aloof and anonymous voice of, say, an academic). And when putting together an essay, it is easy (even obligatory) to polish away all the dead-ends and confusions that went into the final product; on the other hand, a good dialogue will "show its construction lines", giving a running lesson in the art of inquiry.

So dialogues are both performative and a performance. They are also an interesting point of contact between philosophy and literature. Interesting, because these two forms of inquiry tend to use dialogues as a means to quite different ends. For philosophy, dialogues help to balance out the life of the mind with the life of ordinary human activities. For literature, dialogue helps to balance out the life of ordinary activity with the life of conscious thought; the latter gains expression through dialogue.

The point of all this is to introduce a new category of writing on this blog. Or at least, to introduce the idea of a new category: for I have not done any diablogging so far. But I hope to do some soon, and I will aim to bring out the good and wholesome qualities that are inherent in dialogues, and to make my negligible but enthusiastic contribution to the world of the dialogue, a world that has a past and a present that is of course too lustrous and huge for any sub-servant of the genre to contemplate without embarrassment.

Second Impressions of Toronto

2007-08-28T17:53:00.000-07:00

I had some first impressions but they didn’t last. I only managed to recover one or two of them, and I put them up over here just in case they were interesting. But now they’re outdated by at least a week, and useless except for research purposes.

The first of my second impressions was of getting out of bed in my hostel and discovering a) the lounge smelt more like a cheese-factory than ever b) the fridge was luke-warm inside and had done strange things to my milk c) there were no spoons in the kitchen and d) I would not stay sane for much longer if I did not leave this soap-forsaken place and do something fresh.

I went to St. Lawrence Market. There was a buskers’ festival on. It was a glorious day filled with ice-cream and sweat. Small children chased birds around the water-fountain. A small child chased a bird into the water-fountain, whereupon the bird flew away, chuckling to himself.

A man stood on top of a twelve-foot pole and juggled five meat cleavers while balancing on his nose a double-edged meat cleaver that span around on a small stick. At the end he said “Over at the Scotiabank tent you can nominate your favourite busker. I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, it’s up to you. But my name’s Al….” And he said: “I do this for a living: if you don’t know how much to give, I’ll help you out. And for the Americans in the audience, the five-dollar bill is the big pink one.”

Another man juggled five balls while moving around in circles doing the splits on two skateboards with metal spikes all around their edges. He jumped through a flaming star on his skateboard, and then he said: “Over at the Scotiabank tent you can nominate your favourite busker. I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, it’s up to you. But my name’s Sam, and you’ve been watching the Flaming Skating Phenomenon..” And he said: “I do this for a living: if you don’t know how much to give, I’ll help you out. And for the Americans in the audience, the five-dollar bill is the big pink one.”

To be fair. he also said, “I love children – couldn’t eat a whole one though,” and “I’ve the heart of a child – at home in a jar.” The whole audience laughed like children.

I went down to the waterfront, but it smelt like old bread and so I left.

A band played at the market. It was a rock band with a lead man who played the electric violin. He played so that he shaved hairs off his bow, and by the end of the gig his bow was trailing a whole mane of hair, and he threw it into the crowd. He was very thin and moved like a whip. When he played he scrunched up his face in ecstasy and went bright red.

The songs were big, operatic songs. The main idea was to start off slow and surprise the audience by rising to a thrilling climax, and then to repeat the process. After a while the audience was not surprised any more, but they were thrilled the whole time.

In the evening I went home through the business district, where the streets are clean and the glass buildings rise up like glaciers.

I had a long interview with a homeless person. She doesn’t do too badly. She said: “the lawyers who come down the street are not too bad. They give me a bit of this, a bit of that, some food.” Sounding immensely pleased, she said: “They give me loads and loads of chalk!” She had been off crack for six months, she said, and hadn’t touch alcohol for eight months. I said I’ld bring her some blankets and socks, but have not done so yet.

Further up the street there were tables piled up with books, and boxes filled with books piled up between the houses. Prices were 25cents for soft-copies and a dollar for hard. A guy had a go-cart and he was piling it up with books. In general there was a whole lot of piling going on, so I piled some books into a pile and went off down the street, feeling pleased with myself and strutting like a man with piles.

When I reached the hostel there was a band in the street, drumming away like mad, and people dancing in the warm evening. The street was cordoned off, and the street was filled with people dancing slowly.

My roommates are two people who call themselves proud Canadians. One is Sri-Lankan and the other is Taiwanese. Together we went to see Dracula (the film) set to Radiohead (the music). This took place in the living room of a small flat, with two guys in deckchairs collecting money on the front steps.

Dracula and Radiohead are a perfect match. The film was brown and grainy. It looked lonely, with all its sound taken away. Like all good vampires, Dracula was thin and stiff, with a high collar. Kid A came first, eerie and sad. OK Computer came next, with “Airbag” kicking in just as Dracula set out for England. The music was strange and mournful and ghostly, and everyone was so sad when the sun came up and Dracula died and the film ended.

We stopped briefly at a bar down the street, or at least that was the intention. (In Canada they sell three-pint jugs.) The Sri Lankan sang the Canadian national anthem and the Taiwanese joined in. I sang the first verse of the New Zealand national anthem and then hummed the rest. I surrendered to a state of drowsy intoxication, so much so that I enjoyed the dancing.

In the end we walked out of the bar, though not without paper bags. It is not possible that I failed to go through the hostel kitchen on my way to bed, but I did not notice it.

With the Sri Lankan I ate Chinese takeaways on the balcony and fell into discussion. He professed a deep confidence in the value of human freedom. I ventured one or two objections to this thesis. He relented, though not without substantive qualifications. I spilt fried rice on the ground. He said: “I belong to no groups except the group of people who vow never to belong, namely Canadians.” He said: “The reason suicide bombers should not be allowed to do whatever they want is because they stop other people from doing whatever they want.” Things got fuzzy.

In other news, I now have a bank account and a confirmed flat. Also, I discovered this week that my confirmed flat is right next to the largest cemetery in Toronto. This week I also went to a Graduate Conference in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, which was interesting enough.

Listening Closely to Small Sounds

2007-08-28T08:09:00.000-07:00

Big ups to writers who describe highly dramatic events in a highly un-dramatic manner.

Here is a passage from Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist.

Suddenly, Roberta cried out, and was sitting on the pavement, cradling a bloody mess that, Alice reasoned, could only be Faye. Yes, she could see an arm, white, pretty, whole, with a tangle of coloured bandages on the wrist.

Faye is one of the novel’s key characters, and the bomb blast that kills her is the climax of the novel. What a temptation it must have been to write this event as a climax, to puff it up with paragraphs of lush description. And what a joy it is for the reader to read it as a climax, to witness this narrative blast without seeing the author strain towards it with unnecessary words. (Words that would give a false account of the event anyway, since they would swell an abrupt experience into a slow-motion contemplation.)

Here are some other passages in the same style:

Faye lay on her back. Propped slightly up on embroidered and frilled cushions, ghastly pale, her mouth slightly open, and her cut wrists rested on her thighs. Blood soaked everything.
Alice stood screaming.

The smell on this floor was strong. It came from upstairs. More slowly they went up generously wide stairs, and confronted a stench which made Jasper briefly retch. Alice’s face was stern and proud. She flung open a door on to a scene of plastic buckets, topped with shit. But this room had been deemed sufficiently full, and the one next to it had started. Ten or so red, yellow and orange buckets stood in a group, waiting.

Here it is not the revelation itself but the events surrounding it that give force to the former. Drama is indicated by its effects, like the smell of shit diffusing through the house.

Gigantic Consumption of Empty Whimsies

2007-08-28T08:04:00.000-07:00

Below, a future historian looks back on the popular culture of (presumably) the early-mid twentieth century. (From The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse, first published 1943)

We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather “chatted” about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly those manufactured articles do indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood until the key is found again. The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of “writer,” but a great many of them seemed to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors.
Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore titles such as “Friedrich Nietzsche and Women’s Fashion of 1870,” or “the Composer Rossini’s Favourite Dishes,” or “the Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of the Great Courtisans,” and so on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as “The Dream of Casting Gold Through the Centuries,” or “Physico-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather,” and hundreds of similar subjects. When we look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been such people who devoured such chit-chat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and decent education should have helped to “service” this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, “service” was the expression used; it was also the word donating the relationship of man to the machine at that time.

I wonder what Herman Hesse would have thought of blogging.

Interestingly, the titles quoted in the passage look a lot like the articles published by the scholarly elite of the historian’s time (which is supposedly a apex of intellectual skill and purity). Eg. “The Pronunciation of Latin in the Universities of southern Italy toward the End of the Twelfth Century”.

Political Correctness Gone Mad

2007-08-23T15:13:00.001-07:00

As a member of Amnesty International, I clench my stomach in annoyance whenever someone writes off this organisation (or any similar organisation) as "politically correct." There is some truth in this kind of dismissal, but there is so much error that it is not at all misleading to ignore the truth completely and concentrate on the mistake. And the mistake here is not just a factual mistake (thought it is often that). These dismissals have their root in a broader and more dangerous mistake, one that we should cut out of our thought before it does too much damage.

Writing off AI etc. as "politically correct" is a double insult. It suggests that the cause is inauthentic, that it serves no worthy end. But it also suggests that the members of the organisation are motivated by desires that are unadmirable, even blameworthy. "Politically correct" brings to mind groups of well-meaning but mean-minded beaurocrats, all getting smugly together in the spirit of middle-class righteousness. The conclusion is that these are not the sort of organisations you should connect with, or even what you would want to associate with.

Now it just so happens that AI and many other organisations like it do contain many people who do worthwhile work for the best possible motives. Even if this were not the case, however, the source of the "politically correct" mistake would be worth talking about. In general, the mistake is to have an emaciated conceptual and explanatory life, and hence to apply the most fashionable phrases in the most unsuitable contexts.

In this particular case, the mistake is to call AI etc."politically correct" not because one knows it to be so, but because one knows it to bear an accidental resemblance to pursuits that are "politically correct" (insofar as the phrase has a clear meaning). The mistake is also to attribute "politically correct" motives to AI members not because they evidently possess such motives, but because people who possessed such motives would act similarly.

Occasionally these fashionable phrases will result in true statements. But this hardly gets around the problem: for those statements are likely to have such indeterminate meanings that they cause more confusion than otherwise; and the speaker is likely to use them without thinking, which is not a good habit to get into. At any rate, the consequence of applying "politically correct" falsely are enough to urge caution in all cases. The consequence is the denigration of causes that society would be well-advised to support, and which have little enough support as it is (what with complacency, ignorance, etc.) without adding intellectual carelessness to the list of deterrents.

Sometimes the problem seems not only that phrases like "PC" are applied vaguely and unthinkingly. It is also that "political correctness" is regarded with such loathing that there is (somehow) no need to do anything more that apply the label to a person or practice. Simply calling a thing "politically correct", without actually showing that it fits this description, is enough to discredit the thing. (I seem to remember that mere accusations of "witchcraft" were enough to blot forever the reputation of a member of certain past societies, regardless of any evidence for or against the accusation. Accusations of "political correctness" seem to have a similar power to them, and a similar absurdity).

Moreover, the vagueness of the term tends to disarm any objections to its use. How does a person respond to a statement that carries a strong tone of disgust but no clear meaning? One response is to differentiate the various meanings of the term, and ask the speaker to say which one they meant to use. Perhaps a more effective response would be to ask the speaker what they really mean to say - and if they can't say it, then there's nothing more to say.

How do these problems arise, and how can we avoid them? They arise partly because certain phrases become popular (which is understandable enough), to the extent that other phrases, which would otherwise offer more accurate shades of meaning, are no longer used (which is dumb). But the other part of the confusion is the vagueness of these phrases: with frequent use they grow meaning like new limbs, until they are as clumsy and hard-to-handle as a baby with five arms.

Hence, one sense of "politically correct" is just "pursuant of healthy social causes." But another is "foolishly self-righteous about minor social causes." And because these senses are not spelt out and differentiated, a cause that answers to the first description is automatically hit with the second. Moreover, the senses are so strangely mixed in the speaker's mind that the association goes unquestioned: it's as if a group who pursues healthy social causes must do so, necessarily, in a foolishly self-righteous manner.

I'm not sure if there is any more precise antidote to this sort of confusion than general intellectual carefulness. Faced with a mis-used word or phrase or explanatory pattern, a community does have a number of options. They could do away with the item altogether, and start anew. Or they could retain the item, but take care when using it to clarify its meaning when misunderstanding is likely.

Either of these routes would send us in the right direction, I think. The former would have the advantage of forcing people to find new ways of expressing the old ideas, and this practice would hopefully lead to a more fine-grained language. But it would mean doing away with terms that may actually be useful when used in the right way. The latter would keep what was valuable in the old items; but it would risk a slippage back into the former, undesirable, usage.

Perhaps there is a middle way, where the offending term is retained, but pared back to a single clear meaning (with members of the community encouraged to fill in the gaps with new, more nuanced terms). But the main problem here is not deciding which route to take, but ensuring that it is taken. It is notoriously difficult to control popular thought and popular language usage: one can legislate, but one cannot very easily enforce (and in many cases there will be ethical objections to the latter). Perhaps the best that any individual can do is to avoid these fashionable errors in their own work, and point them out when they appear in the work of others. Hopefully, writing about them explicitly will help out as well.

Why Must Scientists Be Poor?

2007-08-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

[Update: The University of Toronto has increased the profitability of working with the institution to bring inventions into the marketplace. Clearly this blog has some high-powered readers.]

According to a talk I heard at a recent conference, it is the view of orthodox scholarship that scientific discoveries should not be eligible for patents. (By “patent” I mean an agreement by which the discoverer is entitled to a financial reward from those who make use of the discovery).

This seems odd to me. Is there any good reason to deny scientists (and academic researchers in general) to benefit financially from lucrative applications of their work? A few reasons jump to mind, but they don’t seem very convincing. I wonder if I am missing something here, or if scientists (and academic researchers in general) oppose patenting just on the grounds of scholarly purity.

The first temptation is to reach for the “discovery”/”invention” distinction. How can a person claim ownership of some pre-existing thing that they just happen to stumble upon, like a wallet in the street? Quite easily, I should think, if the thing in question is not already owned by someone else, and if the process of discovery was long and difficult.

Why would we think otherwise, except by relying on the misleading analogy with found physical objects, like wallets? Certainly we have no problem with the practice of rewarding people for their discoveries (Nobel Prize, anyone?) Why should we baulk at making this reward financial?

Perhaps we have a problem with rewarding ideas, as opposed to objects or practices. But is this distinction tenable? Patents for ideas would only ever apply to ideas that have been somehow realized in practice, in which case they are objects and practices. In this case, surely at least some of the credit should go towards the author of the idea, without whom the objects or practices could not have existed. It seems inconsistent to reward a person who designs and builds a particular kind of fridge, but not the person who formulated the theories of thermodynamics that the designer relied upon.

Of course, it would be a tiny bit impracticable to patent the laws of thermodynamics(so many different uses, with such a complex and sometimes distant relationship with the original laws). But surely not all scientific discoveries are of such a general kind.

(It is possible that the distinction between ideas and objects/practices is sometimes conflated with the distinction between thoughts and statements, or between notions and thoughts. Of course one cannot patent an unexpressed idea. And it would be hard to justify the patenting of a vague idea or notion, as opposed to a clearly formulated idea. But obviously a scientific discovery can take the form of a clearly formulated statement.)

What about the “communal effort” objection? Granted, scientific discoveries are the result of many people’s work, stretching back for many decades. But so are new drugs, and new tennis racquet designs. And if it’s impossible to grant a patent to an individual scientist, why not try the research team who did the important work on a particular discovery?

This pretty much exhausts the plausible objections to scientific patents, as least that I can think of. Am I wrong to think that scientists are currently denied the right to patenting their work? Or are scientists that concerned about the integrity of their work that they are unwilling to accept direct financial rewards (or perhaps their employers are unwilling to let them)?

First Impressions of Toronto

2007-08-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

It's big. Flying over the city at night it was bigger than Lake Ontario, all red and orange and sequined.

The traffic lights have yellow backgrounds (not black, as from where I come from). The lights switches are upside down. The toilets are permanently flooded. Driving down the road is like cutting your own hair in a mirror.

In the main street there are stalls and beggars and men with blind sticks playing the flute. There are bits of cabbage in the gutters and the footpath suffers from a measles of bubblegum. In the windows of Asian eateries there are animal carcasses strung up for display. They are red and sunburnt and shiny with sweat, and the chickens have floppy necks.

In the hostel where I stay there are no teatowels in the kitchen. The hall smells like a fish-and-chip shop and the lounge like a butcher's. The air-conditioning works, but the air comes in from a back-alley filled with the smell of ancient grease. In the entrance there is a sign on the wall saying "No soliciting."

The hostel is in a place called Kensington. Kensignton is cramped and shabby and leans on a funny angle. The shabbiness is partly a fashion statement and partly a sign of poverty and neglect, but it is hard to know which is which.

Bills grow like bark on the lampposts. Some of the graffiti is neat and colourful, bordered with thick black lines. The rest of it is black and jagged and suggestive of social problems. Men with limps walk down the street talking to themselves. A thin man puts up small yellow posters and makes loud barking noises. I go up to one of the yellow posters: it is an advertisement for the Kensington community centre family weekend.

In the evening there are tramps in the shadows and shiny new Beetles in the street. Walk ten metres off the main street and you see a respectable neighbourhood with new cars rolling down the road and squirrels playing in the trees. It is strange that a city so big can be so compressed.

I have never thought of Universities as decadent places: all that studiousness is disarming. But compared to its surrounds, the University of Toronto is luxurious. It has wide green spaces. It has a football field with clean black gates and grass as bright as new beans. It has ivy and red bricks and spires. It has buildings with signs outside featuring short biographies of the architect. It is clean.

Historians: Working Towards a Better Past

2007-08-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

In two days I go to Canada to study the History and Philosophy of Science (many thanks to Toronto University.) So now is a good time to say something about History.

Below is an excerpt from a History book. The passage was written by a Maori man called Horeta Te Taniwha, and it is about the arrival of the first Europeans on New Zealand soil. (These were not the first Europeans to find the country. Abel Tasman discovered New Zealand about a century earlier. But natives killed three of his men and he went home).

I quote this passage because it illustrates some things I like about historical writing.

There is the overall sense of nostalgia, of looking back on a rich and vital time from the past, a time that might have been more cruel and uncertain than our own, but which was at least as interesting as anything else we know. Historians are good at picking out the juicy bits from the past, and there are a lot of very juicy bits. Some people say that Historians make History. Mostly they are wrong. But Historians are witnesses to the making of History, and it’s a fine thing to witness.

There is the sense also of getting only a partial account of something. So much from the past is lost. But everything that has been found is a gesture towards what has not been found. The importance of the things described starts to raise images into symbols (the kumara, the stick of charcoal). What completes the job is the incompleteness of the account: written History is filled with the meaning of undocumented events, like old photos.

Then there are all the strange meetings. They are strange because they take place between people who come from different worlds. The story below is the story of two bubbles coming together and trembling. Philosophers of History write a lot about the strange things that happen when people from different backgrounds come together. Often they overbalance (usually by emphasising the problems, moral and epistemic, that accompany these meetings). But following passage sets them right: it strikes a wonderful balance between difference and likeness, confusion and understanding, awe and familiarity.

There is the misunderstanding over the European “goblins.” The “knocking together of stones” (which goes unexplained in the end, even to the reader). The “hissing” tongue of Captain Cook, the “eyes in the back of the head.” These details, casting strange shadows on familiar things, are balanced by evidence of commonality between the two groups of people. The implied syllogism (“Goblins do not eat kumara and cockles; these men are eating kumara and cockles; therefore these men are not goblins.”) – this shows how the two peoples, oceans apart, share a common reason. They share an appreciation for food, too; and also a keen instinct for human kindness (note the attitude towards Captain Cook).

Of all the symbols in the passage, the one I like best is that of the two peoples talking to eachother in their two languages, not understanding eachother in the least, but both of them laughing. My next favourite is the final scene, where communication begins.

The passage is from a book called “Two Worlds: The First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans.” Not all History is the meeting of two worlds from the past. But all History is the meeting of two worlds, the world of the past and the world of the historian. And participating in the latter relation is as strange and rewarding as observing the former relation.

On top of the above, there is the method of History. All that tiny detail (dates, the spellings of foreign names); the clutter of a thousand events in a thousand places. The Historian has less reason than the philosopher or the poet or the scientist to feel confident about making sense of all that fractured motion (the philosopher is not concerned about time past, but the timeless; the poet is not obliged to tell it all exactly; and the scientist has her laws.) But this means that the historian has more reason to feel proud when she does make sense of her subject matter.

And in making sense of it, there is as much need for an empathetic, imaginative approach to events as there is for rigorous checking of sources. So I am going to Toronto to witness the making of history, to discover new symbols, to watch civilisations tremble like bubbles, to make sense out of chaos and to make a match out of separate disciplines. What could be better? (Answer: to study philosophy at the same time.)

Now, I give you….

The account of Horeta Te Taniwha (a child when Cook arrived on Endeavour in Whitianga, 1769).

In the days long past, when I was a very little boy, a vessel came to Whitianga (Mercury Bay). Our tribe was living there at that time. We did not live there as our permanent home, but were there according to our custom of living for some time in each of our blocks of land, to keep our claim to each, and that our fire might be kept alight on each block, so that it might not be taken from us by some other tribe.

We lived in Whitianga, and a vessel came there, and when our old men saw the ship they said it was an atua, a god, and the people on board were tupua, strange beings or ‘goblins.’ The ship came to anchor, and the boats pulled on shore. As our old men looked at the manner in which they came on shore, the rowers pulling with their backs to the bows of the boat, the old people said, ‘Yes, it is so: these people are goblins; their eyes at the back of their heads; they pull on shore with their backs to the land to which they are going.’ When these goblins came on shore we (the children and women) took notice of them, but we ran away from them into the forest, and the warriors stayed alone in the presence of these goblins; but, as the goblins stayed some time, and did not do evil to our braves, we came back one by one, and gazed at them, and we stroked their garments with our hands, and we were pleased with the whiteness of their skins and the blue eyes of some of them.

These goblins began to gather oysters, and we gave some kumara, fish, and fern-root to them. These they accepted, and we (the women and children) began to roast cockles for them; and as we saw that these goblins were eating kumara, fish and cockles, we were startled, and said, ‘Perhaps they are not goblins like the Maori goblins.’ These goblins went into the forest, and also climbed up the hill to our pa (fort) at Whitianga (Mercury Bay). They collected grasses from the cliffs, and kept knocking at the stones on the beach, and we said, ‘Why are these acts done by these goblins?’ We and the women gathered stones and grass of all sorts, and gave to these goblins. Some of the stones they liked, and put them into their bags, the rest they threw away; and when we gave them the grass and branches of trees they stood and talked to us, or they uttered words of their language. Perhaps they were asking questions, and, as we did not know their language, we laughed, and these goblins laughed, so we were pleased.

…There was one supreme man on that ship. We knew that he was the lord of the whole by his perfect gentlemanly and noble demeanour. He seldom spoke, but some of the goblins spoke much. But this man did not utter many words: all that he did was to handle our mats and hold our mere, spears, and waha-ika, and touch the hair of our heads. He was a very good man, and came to us-the children, and patted our cheeks, and gently touched our heads. His language was a hissing sound, and the words he spoke were not understood by us in the least. We had not been long on the ship when this lord of the goblins made a speech, and took some charcoal and made some marks on the deck of the ship, and pointed to the shore and looked at our warriors. One of our aged men said to out people, ‘He is asking for an outline of the land,’ and the old man stood up, took the charcoal, and marked the outline of the Ika-a-maui (the North Island of New Zealand).

Originally appeared in: John White, 1887, The Ancient History of the Maori: Tainui, Vol V, Wellington, Government Printer, pp.121-24. Reprinted in: Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642-1772, Viking, 1991.

Music and Poetry in English

2007-08-12T00:21:00.000-07:00

If I ever get around to teaching English at secondary level, I will make sure that I exploit the analogies between music and literature. I think the analogy is quite illuminating, with regards to the distinction between “form” and “content” and the relationship between them. More importantly, it is likely to interest students more than a lesson that stuck solely to poetry or prose. Most school students have musical interests of some kind, and with a bit of prodding most should recognise that the appeal of a piece of music is bound up closely with the relationship between its form and its content.

In a song, of course, the relationship holds between the lyrical part of the work and the instrumental part. The distinction between form and content, when made out in this way, is easier to grasp than the same distinction as it is manifested in poetry. It is easy and natural to make a separation, even a physical separation, between the words and the music in a song; whereas it is not so easy to make the separation between the “message” of a poem and its “delivery” (Partly because a student needs to know about things like rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, metaphor etc., before they can give a full account of the distinction; and partly because the distinction is problematic in poetry anyway).

As well as this pedagogically convenient difference between music and poetry, there are pedagogically convenient similarities. Much of the “form” of a poem comes from its sonic effects. Also, at least one thinker (Walter Pater) has held that it is the mark of a good poem that it gets close to the condition of music; and some interesting poetry has been written on the basis of this idea (eg. Gertrude Stein).

Many of the ideas about the form-content distinction that one needs to learn in the poetry case, can be straightforwardly carried over to the music case. Here are some examples:

That a good piece of art should achieve a match between form and content; and also that there may be some exceptions to this rule.

That the same content, given a different form, can be given quite a different meaning.

That form and content can match up in different respects: they might match in their mood, their tone, their pace, their degree of order and regularity.
That the work can vary in these respects, and the artist take steps to ensure that form and content vary concurrently.

That some elements of form are (for various reasons) quite rigid and non-negotiable, while others are easier to manipulate.

That it is tempting to relax the more rigid elements to give the artist more “freedom of expression” (Radiohead, Walt Whitman); but that this relaxation can have its downfalls as well as its advantages.

One of the dangers of doing this sort of thing, apart from annoying the class next door, is that students might resent this intrusion of school life upon their music life. Putting Nirvana in a classroom might “take all the fun out of it.” But I should think it more likely that a student would welcome the opportunity to discuss and explore their out-of-school interests during class time. And the idea that excessive analysis can destroy an artwork, or at least fail to illuminate its appeal, is an idea worthy exploring; and another of the useful analogies between music and literature.

System, O My Darling

2007-08-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

Following on from this little thing about method and matter, here is a little thing about system. A fine thing, system, and worth talking about. From one direction, it looks like the value of system is unique to matter: system is all about taking objects and arranging them neatly. But it is important to method as well. Methods are not just processes, but systematic processes. And the best part about teaching matter is ontology, the part where students learn how a subject is made up of a system of parts. System is not a bangle on the wrist of learning, but the fibre in her cloth, the leather in her shoes. Praise her!

Anyway, system makes things easier to remember, for the same reason that it is easier to remember Pascal’s triangle than phone numbers. But it also confers understanding. Indeed, arguably the pursuit of understanding just is the attempt to bring more system to our awareness of the world.

I guess some disciplines are more amenable than others to a systematic approach to teaching. Mathematics, that powerhouse of systematicity, should surely be taught so as to bring its neatness to the fore. Currently students are taught two different ways of solving simultaneous equations (substitution and elimination) when really they are the same thing. Subtraction is analogous to division, but you would not know it from text books. A lot school-level of algebra is based on a handful of basic rules (associative, distributive, commutative etc.), but this tends to get lost. Rediscover this, and school maths would look more like University maths. And maths in general would at once become easier and more interesting.

One senses that English might not work so well under a systematic tutor. Is there really a method for writing a poem? And would we want one? But still there are parts of that subject that make more sense when put in an ordered way. Like any other subject, it contains concepts and statements that can be illuminated by their interrelations. A simile is not something completely different from a metaphor, and pedagogy usually reflects this. A symbol is not completely different from a metaphor either, nor from an epitome or an image. And the following words all mean much the same thing: trait, characteristic, feature, quality, attribute. Pedagogy should reflect these things too.

A plausible objection to all this system is that it makes everything too rigid. It would be to deny the variety of mathematics, the way in which there are often many different paths to the right answer. And it would suck all the creativity out of the study of literature.

But there is no need for system to suppress the profuseness of mathematics. For most students the choice is usually between using a consistent and transparent method, and using either the wrong method or no method at all. And for those students who can see a variety of right methods, there is value in showing them how these are connected (eg. how geometric and algebraic methods are analogous to one-another). There is value, too, in showing them how some methods are better than others, in the sense of being more elegant or simple, or using less extraneous information (as in the case of simultaneous equations, mentioned above).

It is also wrong to conflate system with over-authoritative teaching, at least in mathematics. The fact that different aspects of any subject are richly interlinked would surely make it easier for the teacher to take a passive, guiding role in the learning process. They can point out connections and leave the student to follow them up, extrapolating from prior knowledge. How might you extend this formula to the 3D case? How might you solve a system of three equations rather than 2? Look for other ways in which negation is analogous to division. All of these are good exercises, and they rely for their success on the system that is just sitting there in all mathematics, waiting for teachers to grab it.

Almost certainly, an over-emphasis on system would indeed suck the creativity of literature. I expect it is easy to do it badly. But this is no reason not to use the system in the parts of the subject where it does exist. And it is still worth pursuing a kind of systematicity in more unruly parts of the subject. We want students to draw comparisons between different texts, to set characters alongside one another and see what we find, to look for repeated images. All of this is a move towards a more organised view of a novel or poem or whatever. (It’s just that we look along different lines in the English case: we look for similarities in respect of personality, manner, mood, instead of shape or angle).

It’s all very well going on about how system is the greatest thing since Dewey. It’s another thing to give some examples of how it could be achieved in practice. Given the right proportions of time, energy and brown bread, I will try to do this in some later posts.

Method and Matter

2007-08-11T23:07:00.000-07:00

One complaint about current education is that it puts skills before facts. The nub of this distinction, as I see it, is the distinction between processes and results. Another way to express the complaint is to distinguish between method and matter. Here the underlying distinction is broader, since it is between processes and objects, where the latter includes results but other things as well.

Both distinctions make good sense. But the first one can be misleading because it is narrow. Clearly there is a virtue in teaching students to master a systematic processes for reaching conclusions, rather than teaching them to memorise conclusions that others have reached. But there are things that are not skills or facts, and which are also valuable.

I trust that the term “matter” has quite a lot of intuitive content. Think “subject-matter” and you are close enough. Roughly, it is the stuff that students apply their methods to. Only once the method has been fully applied will results appear – call this resulting stuff the end matter.

Here are some reasons why students should be taught matter, so defined, as well as method.

Methods are usually only applicable to certain classes of matter. Knowing these classes, and knowing how to match them up with the right methods, is an important part of the learning process. The methods of solving simultaneous equations are not much use for solving differential equations.

Is this a trivial thing, this process of using knowledge of matter to make methods work? Once we have learnt the methods for solving simultaneous and differential equations, do we really need an extra lesson to tell us how to apply them to the right sort of matter? Sort of. I guess knowledge of matter tends to be smuggled in with knowledge of method. Because of this, it would be hard to neglect matter even if we never thought about teaching it. But it is worth making the point, in case of situations (which I can’t think of right now) where the marriage between the two kinds of learning is not so tight.

End matter can also be useful as an examplar. One way to learn how to do something is to look at the end result and work backwards. This works partly because it is not always clear at the start what one wants to achieve (what does it mean to “solve this equation for x”? Showing a solution is a good way to answer this question). It works also because the end result usually contains information about its genesis (look closely at a finished building and you can get some idea of how they built).

I don’t recommend that students check the answers to every maths question before solving them. As a general method, this is close to useless. But as a method for learning how and why the right method works, it is quite useful.

Learning matter includes learning about the basic constituents of a subject, and how they differ from the basic constituents of another subject. In philosophy, questions about what is are at least as important as questions about how we know. Why not think the same of education?

One reason why not is that ontology is not very useful. If we know how to get the right results, and we know why our method works, what’s the use in learning more about the things we applied our method to? Well, perhaps there is not much use, in an instrumental sense. But if this kind of usefulness is our aim, why not forget about justification as well? The reason one would teach students why a method works (and not just how to apply it) is to enrich their understanding. This seems like a good reason to teach ontology as well.

Lastly, methods would not act at all if there were nothing to act upon. Sure, it is important for a History student to learn the general skill of writing essays. But they can’t write an essays at all without first learning something about History. Methods cannot be applied in every direction all at once from the beginning (one can’t expect a fourteen-year old to learn everything about an historical period from primary sources; some facts need to be taken on trust).

Of course, often it will be appropriate to teach matter in a methodical way. We don’t want just to tell students that maths is made up of such-and-such a collection of basic parts. We want to illuminate the process by which we came to possess this information, as for any other bit of information. But recognising that matter is worth knowing about is also an important step.

Envy, Part I

2007-08-11T21:27:00.000-07:00

CLIMBER: My friend, today we saw a flame ascend.
No, not that. No-one would, I think, offend
A sense or taste, to say they saw not one
But more, a whole sun of flames, a flaming sun,
Go burning round a solar ring tonight.
What skill! Unearthly skill, unearthly bright!
Hot eloquence and wit, and humour too,
A brave unswerving urge to say what’s true,
Deeply true and truly deep. And so clear!
A standard orbit stays in higher air:
Strange to enter depths as well, sending lights.
But what is this? For all the lofty heights
I saw today, my spirits are not lifted.
The heights of others bring me low. Gifted,
That’s the thing to be, brilliant. Enough
Is said of jealousy and greed, enough
To make my sickness plain. But what’s the cure?
How can one who knows, and knows for sure,
That every job his mind can slowly do
Is done with greater pace, in fewer moves,
By someone else – how happy can he be?
(The plight of normal minds, redundancy,
Is double-edged. A deficit of skill:
A surplus to demand. If books could kill..)
A mind like syrup, slow-poured and dense.
A lack of speed, but quite enough to sense
Its own slowness. It’s worse to know than have
A love of wisdom, but an arid love
Unfed by streams of running wit,
But earnestness and pride, mud and grit.
Dark sights, and these are what the suns reveal:
High lights, highlighting fog. But this appeal
Is not an aimless thing. I train my ills
On you, my friend, to claim whatever pills
You give and know or own, to lift my pain.

RAMBLER: Well, well. A fine speech, well-declaimed,
As lurid in the lows as in the peaks.
(And a strange speech indeed, from one who speaks
So well.) Now listen well, and soon you’ll find
More syrup in your words than in your mind...

to be continued…

Short, Sharp and Shallow

2007-08-11T20:01:00.000-07:00

The main lesson of working life is that there is no room for polish. There is never time to make a masterpiece instead of a sketch, and no-one would notice the difference anyway.

Conclusions need only be as fine-grained as the choices that depend on them: if the choice is between walking and running, let’s not labour the difference between strolling and ambling. And because certainty will elude even the most prolonged and earnest study, let’s not quibble about justification: a few short reasons will do. The most profound investigation will only ever be useful in summary form. Profound investigations never get finished anyway: better a complete draft than a disjointed final.

It is interesting to apply the same lessons to philosophy. At the very least, it frees up more time to write about stupidity and cows. More, it is good training in brevity. So here is a short Q&A on some philosophical topics that have been on my mind recently.

What distinguishes excellence from mere prowess? A person who can tie their shoelaces very fast does, in one sense, excel at a task. But we would not say they have achieved the kind of excellence that a brilliant physicist achieves, or even a brilliant athlete. What’s the difference?

Not very interesting, this one. Excellence requires prowess in a valued practice. The general question of where values come from is more interesting, but it is much too deep for this post.

To what extent must the pursuit of excellence compromise a person’s relationships with other people? There is something selfish about pursuing excellence for its own sake. How bad is this form of selfishness?

In general, the answer to the first question is “a moderate amount.” Excellence takes a lot of time, leaving less time to get involved with other people. Excellence leads to strong relationships with the few people who share our chosen excellence. But it weakens relationships with the large number of people who don’t. Particular forms of excellence may, however, make us more skilled at caring for other people (eg. excellence in social work).

“Not too bad” is the answer to the other question. Reclusiveness does not harm other people, except those who long to know one better (this harm is heavily case-dependent). Excellence in a field creates problems for everyone else who wants to be the best in the field. But arguably people should not measure their success in relative terms. And excellence helps a person’s colleagues insofar as it inspires and instructs them to do better.

Given that rationality causes everyone to think the same thing, how can rationality make us more autonomous?

Rationality on its own gives us one kind of autonomy, the kind that comes from the deliberate pursuit of an excellence. Philosophers have this kind of autonomy, but so do mathematicians and bakers. Moral autonomy is a different thing. Rationality only gives us moral autonomy insofar as we apply general principles to the facts of our individual lives. Sometimes the facts are obvious, and the principles are the hard thing to know. Other times it is the other way round. In the latter cases, philosophy is not much use.

There is value in living an examined life, and it has something to do with autonomy. But how much of this value can be gotten through philosophy?

Not all of it. If autonomy is to mean anything at all, it must require autonomy of action as well as thought. And thought does not become action without strength of will. Autonomy also means acting in according with the facts of one’s own situation (see previous Q). Which requires knowledge one’s own desires, interests and abilities. This knowledge usually comes about through cognitive work, but sometimes it is more like the work of the historian, the journalist or the poet than that of the philosopher.

Not all of it, you say. But how much? And isn’t that an empirical question, and one that philosophers qua philosophers are not equipped to answer?

I don’t know how much. Perhaps it depends on the individual. Don’t ask awkward questions.

Clearly it is best for people to be sensitive to the “facts of their own situation”, as you put it. Best to satisfy one’s own values, rather than someone else’s. But is self-expression valuable for its own sake?

For some people more than others. A good painter will have a style different from other good painters. This is not just because the painter is particularly good at that style, or because he valued that style before he began painting, and has finally achieved it. He will value that style simply because it is his own. It is him. Self-expression looks bad because it is used as a cheap marketing ploy by hundreds of clothes shops. And it seems to be more highly valued in the arts than the sciences. And it is suspect because it looks so easy: what could be more uninspired than merely being oneself? But talk to the painter who has “found his style” and you will see that self-expression is both difficult and highly prized.

What can we really learn from art?

Art teaches by presenting dry topics in an entertaining form (eg. the dialogues of Plato). It also teaches by acting powerfully on our psychology (the baddies have ugly skin so we try to be good). But art only teaches in these ways because people are epistemically flawed. This makes art useful, but not very impressive. Art also works on the emotions, uplifting and depressing and making us content or restless or happy. In this way art changes our moods, but not our beliefs.

Well…? Consider the ideal philosopher (who loves even the driest wisdom and cares not for moods). Would that person have any use for art?

Art excels in particulars. And particulars lead us, in various ways, to a better grasp of general principles. Most simply, particulars suggest problems. They can also help to solve problems. But this is not terribly helpful. The question you should ask next is how the particulars in art (which are often quite different from experiments in science and thought experiments in philosophy) can help to solve scientific and philosophical problems.

How can the particulars in art (which are often quite different from experiments in science and thought experiments in philosophy) help to solve scientific and philosophical problems?

Good question. Part of the answer is that art deals in particulars relating to ordinary human experience (love, ageing, death, etc.). Another part is that art embeds those particulars in a rich context. For the rest of the answer, you’ll have to go somewhere else. Thanks for asking.

A large part of our moral reasoning consists in “weighing up” different considerations, and this is a form of quantitative reasoning. What does this tell us about the scope of moral philosophy, given that philosophy is usually regarded as a form of qualitative reasoning?

It is true that philosophy does not usually use numbers in its reasoning (except in an elementary form). But we do not usually use numbers in the “weighing-up” process you just described. And insofar as we do use numbers, it’s a matter of basic arithmetic. The real work comes in when we a) work out which considerations are just red herrings, having no weight at all b) work out which considerations we have missed out so far c) work out how to interpret those considerations so as to form an easy numerical problem and/or d) use qualitative techniques (eg. analogy) to solve the problem, when it resists an easy numerical interpretation. The ethicist is well-equipped for all these tasks.

Loose Relation

2007-08-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

“The poems stand in some such loose relation as a ring of flushed girls who have just stopped dancing and let go hands.”
From The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen. More over here.

Praise the Lord for all the Middle Pleasures

2007-07-31T02:13:00.000-07:00

Praise the Lord for all the middle pleasures,
Work and play in one, pleasing sense and taste.
Rounding off the wealth of other treasures,
Often hidden, sometimes lost, never waste.
An easy joy it is to rut and feed,
But dumb, unaimed: better free than fatter.
Appeasing sense, the middle joys repair the need
To stuff the beasty holes with meaty matter.
And yet to feed the soul, the limbs, the mind,
With dryer food alone, is not much fun.
The middle meal, with bread and sweets combined,
Entreats the self to savour what it’s won.
Proud pleasures, raising both the high and low,
Where can these be found? Praise to those who know!

Lake Waikaremoana

2007-07-19T06:01:00.000-07:00

There is not much to say about Lake Waikaremoana, in the North Island of New Zealand. This is not because there is not much to the Lake. Rather, the place is so beautiful that it is hard to say anything that will succeed in being about the Lake, rather than about some lesser place.

How can one say, for example, how the hills rise up straight out of the lake and run away into the distance for miles and miles, and how they are all covered in thick bush? The guide-book says that the hills “roll north in a seemingly endless procession, mantled in a lush carpet of emerald-green foliage.” This author tries hard to say what the hills are like, but there is something missing, and it is not just that the physical reality of the hills are missing from a piece of writing. The picture they put in the reader’s mind is also inferior to the real thing.

And how can one give a good picture, an accurate picture, of how the lake looks in the early morning, just after the mist has lifted over the hills and disappeared, and the water is perfectly still? In a little estuary on the lake, the water is like a mirror. It is like a mirror, but of course it is not a mirror. A mirror does not ripple like that, a mirror is set into processed wood, not living trees and tangled foliage, and a mirror reflects people and hallways, not toi-toi and rimu.

Perhaps narrowing the simile down will make it more accurate: let’s say that the reflective qualities of the lake surface, and nothing else about the lake or its environment, are very similar to those of a mirror. But actually we do want to say something about the lake and its environment, so accuracy comes at a high price.

And perhaps accuracy does not even come at all: perhaps we are so used to seeing near-perfect reflection instantiated in a household mirror, that the quality of near-perfect reflection cannot be detached in our minds from the qualities of household mirrors. Perhaps, for this reason, the mirror on the lake surface will always be smudged by the household banalities it carries over from the usual dwelling-place of mirrors.

Perhaps we can improve things by describing how the lake is not a mirror. A mirror does not fail at its edges, and show what is inside it instead of what is outside. You cannot look into the shallow parts of a mirror and see blue-green logs and grasses. And only a liquid could change itself so easily to match the contours of the shore-line, all the little bays and coves and stumpy peninsulas, the streams and the jutting bushes. And the silence! The immense and fragile silence, which is so dense and which you can break with a movement of your foot.

But look at the angle of the struts of the bridge. Perhaps you could specify this angle, put it at, say, 37 degrees from the vertical. But even to a person whose head was full of struts of every different angle this would not be enough, because there is something about the shape of the struts, and the texture of the wood, and the slope of the branch in the foreground, that gives the angle a special quality.

Perhaps one could get closer to the real thing by specifying the relevant qualities of the wood and the branch and the shape of the struts. But noone has a head full of wood and branches and textures of all different kinds. So even if we knew just where the special quality came from we would not be able to get that quality into another person’s head.

And the colours of the sunset? Well, one could say that they are “soft” and “pink”, but just how soft are they, and what sort of pink? They are soft in the sense of being diffuse rather than concentrated, and they are the kind of pink that you never find on the dresses of little girls. But is that really much use? It is something, but it does not really capture the actual delicacy or grandeur of the colours of the sunset, or the peculiar shapes of the clouds.

And I despair of getting across to the reader the precise way in which the water at the lake’s edge creased into a wrinkle, and bent into a little “v”, when it snagged on a stick that was poking up out of the sand. And there was also the soft beating of the sea on the sand, as if of an immense but far-off heart, a beating that seemed to me to be too specific and too rare to be chased down by similes and adjectives.

The toi-toi stood in groups, and their heads were bowed and nodded in the wind. They were a bit like old men in conference, bowing and nodding like that, but they were so much unlike old men in conference, and the source of the unlikeness is so hard for me to grasp, that I can’t say I have really given you the right idea about those toi-tois.

There were many different ripples on the lake, and sheets and bands of water that were distinct from the rest but had no ripples at all. There are many different ways in which the water rearranges the sun. Here the sun is a white glitter on the lake, here it is a wide and glaring plain, here an intense wobbly mass.

Is it breath-taking, the hills and the lake and the sun? When you go along the track and come to a sudden gap in the bush, so that you can see the whole scene spread out, does Lake Waikaremoana take away your breath? No, it does not. I have tried it, and if anything it gave me back my breath, smoothed things up in my throat as if a knot had been untied somewhere in there. But this may have been because I had a rest after a bit of hard walking.

Is it spectacular? One might use that word to describe the lake, but that would place the lake on the same level as rugby tries and economic booms. It is certainly a spectacle, but it is not truly spectacular. It is too quiet, too still, lacks aggression. Is it superb, beautiful, sublime, unique, unparalleled? I do not want to say it is, because the first four of those terms are muddied by incautious usage, and would make the lake sound more ordinary than otherwise. And the fifth is false. The best I can say is that Lake Waikaremoana is worth seeing, and you won't really see it except by going there yourself.

Bell's Falls, Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand

2007-07-15T00:12:00.000-07:00

On the morning of the day I came to a narrow place of rocks and water.

Water came over the rocks because the air was filled with water. Water came over the rocks because the stream was round and running. The water on the trees made the trees thick and green and the water on the rocks made the rocks full of shining.

I came to the narrow place. I felt the thickness of the trees, and the green was full of moss and thick as fallen snow. As I came to the narrow place, full of falling water, shining of the rocks and the water on the run, and the rocks were full of water and I slipped along the rocks with the water and the rain.

And I came to the narrow place, on the morning of the day.

I came upon the narrow place and saw the water falling, from a rock on the walls that were full of water streaming and the water turned to snow as it ran across the rocks and it fell down the wall to a green sea below, and across the sea a spray, a spray of sweaty ghosts came across the filling sea.

In the green sea the water widened. In the sea the waves were green and the peaks were full of snow. And I saw the water falling and the filling of the sea, and the ghosts and the snow and the running of the green. In the narrow place, I saw the rocks and water.

I saw the trees and water, on the morning of the day.

Seven 50 Word Stories

2007-07-14T23:40:00.001-07:00

50 word stories are as addictive in the writing as in the reading. They have the newness of poems without the tedium. They have the mysticism of a number, like haikus. The good ones are story and aphorism in one. The bad ones are over quickly. Read mine. Write yours.

“I am strong and full of longing,” I said. My cat did not answer. Nor did she answer when I picked up a sheet of very white paper and folded it in half four times very neatly and without any wrinkling or overlap, and so I watched the news instead.

“The examined life is not worth living.” That sounded right, so I read seven large books on the topic and dreamt about logical operators. This was worthwhile, in its own way, but when I tried to write things down there was nothing there. The unlived life is not worth examining.

The grey trees were even greyer in the pictures. They were thin and grey and leaned out like hungry ghosts. I tried to remember how they had been when I was small and hungry, but I always came back to the pictures. I hid them in a drawer and forgot.

It was five o’clock before they got any sleep. They had been up all night watching the grass change colour, and it was so exciting that they had sat there talking about it for three hours. It was one of their biggest nights, but they slept soundly in the end.

Once there was a large pond, full of bones and daisies. A man went to see it. He was warned very ardently but he went along anyway, saying: “I lost my bones long ago.” He never came back. There were many more bones in the pond, and three more daisies.

Near the end of my Honours year I spent two hours writing fifty words when I should have been writing two hundred words every ten minutes. “I am full of words,” I thought, “but most of them are badly shaped and hard to get out.” I must be more disciplined.

Making No Difference At All

2007-07-14T23:11:00.000-07:00

We need to stop treating science as if it were a single monolithic entity, a solid kingdom embattled against rival kingdoms. On the one hand, the various sciences differ hugely. Ecology and anthropology are not at all like physics, nor is biology, and this is not disastrous because they do not have to be.

This passage is from a book I am reading about symbols and science, and an elegant and well-written book it is too. But I am suspicious of the line of reasoning evident in the quoted passage, and I think there is a mistake in that line of reasoning that is made quite often. The mistake is to think that, if a group of objects are such that each object differs hugely from each other object, then there is no hope of finding any commonality in that group. Below are three reasons why commonality can exist despite large differences.

First, objects usually differ in respect of one or more qualities; and, since different respects are often independent of one another, a group of objects can differ greatly from eachother in most respects, yet be very alike in other respects. The set of complete sentences varies greatly in respect of length, tone, syntax, and content; but this does not stop them being alike in respect of their basic grammatical structure.

And in the scientific case, ecology and physics may differ greatly in respect of the precision their statements, and in their subject matter, and in their affinity with mathematics, but perhaps they share a common method. Perhaps they do not share a common method, in which case there is some reason to doubt the “monolithic” character of science. But simply saying that different sciences “differ hugely” is not enough to establish the lack of commonality in the sciences.

Another reason is more causal than conceptual. Small variations at a microscopic level can lead to highly divergent behaviors at a macroscopic level; hence a group of objects can appear to differ hugely in their everyday appearance, yet still have very clear structural similarities. The set of all tri-molecules (that is, the set of all molecular substances such that each molecule contains three separate atoms, a group I just made up then), is clearly a quite homogeneous set; yet it contains substances that are as different in appearance and behavior as CO2 and H2O.

The third reason draws on the fact that statements about similarity and difference only really make sense in relation to some standard of comparison. In respect of size, is a plate similar to a table? There is no way of getting a determinate answer to this question, I think, except by bringing in some standard of similarity to compare the plate/table case to. We may not be able to say whether a plate is similar to a table, in respect of size, but we can say whether a plate is more similar to a table than (say) a plate is to house.

This point is relevant because, as soon as one relativises similarity in this way, one universalizes it. If two objects can be similar simply by being more similar than some other two objects, then almost any two objects can be similar. If your scope is broad enough, any two objects in your vision will look close together. It doesn’t matter how much anthropology differs from physics; what matters is how the difference between those two pursuits compares to the differences between those pursuits separately, and non-scientific pursuits (say, English and History). One can bang on all one likes about how different anthropology is from physics. But as long as one has not shown that one of those pursuits is more similar to English (say) than it is to the other of those pursuits, then one has given no reason to question the “monolithic” character of the sciences.

But perhaps I have been a bit unfair here. The standard of comparison I have mentioned is, I think, usually established implicitly, by context. And by demanding that all statements of similarity and difference carry with them an explicit standard of comparison, I am showing a kind of insensitivity to ordinary usage that (some might say) only a philosopher could suffer from. When someone says that the temperature on Tuesday will be “similar” to that on Wednesday, we don’t all put on puzzled expressions and ask the speaker to relativise her statement to some standard. If it turns out that Tuesday’s temperature differs from Wednesday’s by 2.5 degrees, we are not surprised, even though this difference would (in some scientific contexts, for example) be vast. We are aware, in an intuitive sort of way, that the context of everyday weather fixes certain rules about which pairs of temperature are to be considered similar, and which are not.

And perhaps the reader is expected, from the passage above, to intuit some kind of context. And the natural context to use is that of prior expectation. That is, what the author means when she says “physics and anthropology differ hugely” is really “physics and anthropology differ much more than is commonly appreciated.” And the latter statement both makes pretty good sense, and is interesting.

Nevertheless, it is also pretty clear that the latter statement is milder than the claim that the author is trying to make. The claim is that it is somehow impossible to warrant the grouping of physics and anthropology, that they are hopelessly disparate. And, for the three reasons given above (though only the first and third only really apply here) this strong claim does not follow from the milder claim about the inaccuracy of popular beliefs.

A similar pattern of thought is sometimes present in discussions about ethnicity. When discussing the census, for example, commentators sometimes protest (for example) that Korean and Chinese should not be grouped together (eg. under the label of Asian), on the basis that Korean culture is “vastly different” from Chinese culture, or that the two have “very little in common.”

Again, it may be that people do often make genuine mistakes about the closeness of Korean and Chinese culture, and it is worthwhile to counter these mistakes by clarifying the distinctive qualities of each. But the fact that the two cultures are less similar, or similar in fewer respects, than is commonly imagined, does not mean that they should never be grouped together. They may differ greatly, and yet still differ less than what Chinese culture differs from any given European culture. Or in some respects (say, population size) Korea may be more naturally grouped with European countries than with China; and yet in all relevant respects they are enough alike to be put in the same box.

Taking Offense

2007-05-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

Are we ever justified in taking offense? I think the answer is “no”, by which I mean that when people take offense at a remark, they do so partly because of a fault in themselves; and removing this fault would remove the disposition to take offense.

When I talk about “taking offense” in this post, I do not refer to the act of taking offense on someone else’s behalf. Often we use the word in this way, to mean just that we disapprove of the way in which another person is being treated. We are “offended” by the people who attack Jewish graves, though we may not be Jewish. And I do not refer to our response to an “offense”, in the general sense of the word, which we use broadly to mean something like a “transgression,” a failure to follow the rules. Nor am I talking about a slightly narrower sense of the word, which we use to refer to transgressions against ourselves, things that disgust us, as in an “offensive smell.”

What I mean (I think) is the rising anger that we feel when we feel we have been “defamed”: when we come across words or pictures or actions (usually words) that slight our character. In some circumstances, such as when the slight is false and also lowers us in other people’s opinion, it is clear that we are justified in feeling wronged by such an action. But often we (or at least I) take offense at slights that are not like this, of which noone is aware except ourselves and the perpetrator of the insult. We (or at least I) hear or overhear an unflattering remark and immediately become heated by it, as if an infuriating injury has been inflicted on us.

Sometimes there is a good reason to take some offense at a slight like this, even if it does not diminish us in the eyes of any third party. The slight may be evidence of the speaker’s ingratitude, for example. And the fact that there is one party other than ourselves that thinks ill of us, and who does so on weak rounds, might be reason to feel wronged by that person. But usually (again I speak for myself here) the offense taken is disproportionate to the wrong inflicted. If the slight is false, and clearly false, then it does not take much to set the person right. And if the slight is true, then it is hard to see how any sense of wrong-doing is justified.

In either case, at least half the fault lies with the offended person. In the first case, a person who reacts angrily, who “takes offense”, has only his lack of articulateness to blame for that anger: a perfectly articulate and persuasive person would just calmly show the speaker why he or she is wrong. And in the second case (when the slight is false) surely the person who “takes offense” should not blame the speaker for her anger, but her own insecurity or self-hate, which presumably is what causes her to react angrily to a true portrait of herself. The heated feeling that we associate with “taking offense’ is really a sense of frustration at our own inadequacy.

Not being a perfectly articulate or self-secure person, I find it easier to scoff at those who take offense than to avoid offense myself. To speak personally (with the thought in mind that describing my own condition will cast light on others’) in extreme cases I can successfully avoid taking offense, for the reasons just given. An obviously false slight is easy to disprove; an obviously true slight is not worth railing against. It is when the slight is partially true (either because its import is somewhat vague, because it is precise but we lack the conceptual scheme to distinguish the intended slight from other slights, or because our behavior varies with respect to the fault) that I start to feel prickly, and am most likely to raise my voice or sulk. I wonder if this applies to other people: what really nettles is the slight that is just true enough that it is not easy to persuade the speaker that he is wrong, but is false enough that we feel a righteous desire to do so, and hence to clear our name.

By the above I don’t mean to say, in the case of any offensive slight, that the antagonist is completely blameless. If the offender knows that a slight will cause distress that is greater than any likely consequent good, then surely they have done something wrong, even if a weakness in the protagonist is partly responsible for the distress. If we persuade a person to buy a dud car for an exorbitant price, we do not escape blame simply because the person is woefully misinformed about cars.

Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out that part of the blame does lie with the person who suffers the wrong, in the case of the offended person as in the case of the woefully misinformed person.

*******

Supposing all the above is true, what can be taken from it? The lesson, I think, is that an immunity to taking offense is a quality worth aiming for, because in most ordinary people it is a good measure of intellect and self-knowledge. (I say “most ordinary people” because there may be people who are immune to offense, but who are so immune because they simply don’t understand what people say to them, or are too apathetic to care, too lacking in self-esteem to bother with self-defense, or are just extremely mild-mannered.)

To have this sort of immunity means having the confidence and articulateness to show another person why their slight is wrong, when it is wrong. It means recognizing faults when they already exist, and avoiding the temptation to cover up these faults with indignation. And, when a person’s judgment is delicately balanced between truth and falsity, it means being able to make the sort of conceptual distinctions that help one to clarify the meaning of insult, and accordingly to act as one would in the case of a true slight (if it turns out the insult is true) or false slight (if it is not true).

But I think that is a hard ideal to achieve. The lesson for the meantime is that the act of taking offence should not be read as a sign of some wrongdoing on the part of the speaker. Rather it should be read as an indication that, although a fault does lie somewhere in the slighted person, that fault should be looked for in their reaction to the slight rather than in the content of the slight itself.

Wairoa Tearooms

2007-05-18T01:15:00.000-07:00

Here are the Wairoa tearooms on a Sunday afternoon at the end of summer.

Beside the counter there is a board with a bright green background and bird-eye pictures of meals on it. The meals are yellow and brown and reliably greasy. Sellotaped to the counter, and wafting around in the wind, is a piece of white A4 with a list of drinks prices on it. The word “Drinks” is a standard piece of WordArt, the kind of thing filled with un-special effects that you see on mediocre science fair projects: letters warped into an arc, with a shadow dropped back, letters filled in with colour that grades from bright red to bright green.

The furnishings have a thrown-together look, as if they only just moved in and don’t expect to stay for long. The wallpaper looks like it has been done incrementally, each new owner adding another band of colour without much thought to what was already there. The top third of the walls is a faded bright green. The next third is a dull yellow, and the bottom third is an anonymous black-and-green dapple. There are square pillars protruding out of the walls at regular intervals, and on each of these pillars there is, inexplicably, a number. The numbers do not seem to correspond to the tables, and they are gold-coloured on little metal plates, like the numbers on letterboxes.

There has been some attempt to give the shop a theme, and the artwork on the walls is half-heartedly maritime. There are three framed paintings of ships in storms, very conventional paintings that are the ocean-going equivalent of those pastoral paintings of the Sussex Downs that you get on table mats. On the side walls there are three stylised drawings of fish in primary colours. On the front wall, above the entrance, there is a another fish painting, this time a giant painting that looks like it was done by a promising third-form student at the local school. In a recess above the entrance there is a tangle of fishing lines and cray-fish nets. All of these things are about the sea, but they are too widely spaced to really give the shop a theme. Trying to appreciate the theme is like trying to appreciate a melody wherein there is a long delay between each note. Above the entrance there is a green sign saying “Exit”. It is a large sign and it dominates the entrance, as if it is meant as an artistic centre-piece.

At one table, four elderly people sit around and talk about sandflies and the weather. “They’ll get you in the end if they want to, they will,” says one. “They’re right bastards, you’re not wrong there,” says another. One of them, a New Zealander, orders fish-and-chips. This amuses the English couple, who say “Fush and chups! Fush and chups! Are they like fash and chaps? Fush and chups!” They all laugh. The English couple leaves, the fish and chips arrive, and the NZ man tips salt on to his meal and absentmindedly goes through a few practice rounds: “fush end cheeps,” he says. “Fesh and chups. Fosh und chapes.”

At another table there is a young male in his late teens, a Maori-looking lad with a tight t-shirt whose hem is clasped around his upper arm like a bracelet. He eats a packet of fish and chips on his own. He has fat white shoes and his left foot jigs rapidly up and down, as if he needs to go to the toilet.

A little Maori child runs in the shop and hops and waddles around the tables, completely naked. “You’re mum’s out the back, boy,” says the girl at the counter, and the child runs out the back with her fingers all tangled up behind her back.

I have come here to recharge my phone in the wall-socket, and I feel obliged to buy something while I am there. I choose a can of Orange and Lime fizzy drink. The can proudly announces that it’s contents is “5% Real Fruit.” When I’ve finished the can, overwhelmed by real fruityness, I watch a group of young girls arrive at the tearooms. One of them goes to buy a coke. The others sit down on a bench. Someone hands out straws, and they sit there bristling with straws, straws in the mouth, straws in the hand, straws as chopsticks, straws as smokes, straws as drumsticks, as backrubbers. Outside, the sun makes ballbearings of light on a green bike rack, on the frame of a bike, on the grille of a car. A Radiohead song comes on the radio. The girl returns with the coke and her friends pass it around, drinking through their straws like beaks. The finish the bottle and sit around doing little. This, I suppose, is what people do when they “hang out.” I know it is deeply uncool to put “hanging out” in quote-marks, almost as uncool as putting “cool” in quote marks, but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of just hanging out. I wonder if I am hanging out when I sit at a table and watch people move around. I decide that I’m not really hanging out, since I do actually have a practical purpose in coming here. I check my cellphone to prove that I’m not really hanging out.

There are three bars on my phone. While the next bar is under construction I watch a fly do mysterious, random circuits of a chair. It lands on the top of the chair and does its scuttling, hesitant fly-walk, darting along on whirring legs for a few moments and then stopping and scuttling on the spot, getting its bearings, then moving on again and going through the same routine. After a while it goes away, and so do the girls.

The sweaty smell of fish and chips comes from behind the counter and stiffens the air around the tables. A speaker squeezes out “Crazy,” the inescapable song by someoneorother, and competes with the rough hum of a generator, and the sounds of cutlery in the hands of busy people.

Beside the counter there is a board with a bright green background and bird-eye pictures of meals on it. The meals are yellow and brown and reliably greasy. Sellotaped to the counter, and wafting around in the wind, is a piece of white A4 with a list of drinks prices on it. The word “Drinks” is a standard piece of WordArt, the kind of thing filled with un-special effects that you see on mediocre science fair projects: letters warped into an arc, with a shadow dropped back, letters filled in with colour that grades from bright red to bright green.

The furnishings have a thrown-together look, as if they only just moved in and don’t expect to stay for long. The wallpaper looks like it has been done incrementally, each new owner adding another band of colour without much thought to what was already there. The top third of the walls is a faded bright green. The next third is a dull yellow, and the bottom third is an anonymous black-and-green dapple. There are square pillars protruding out of the walls at regular intervals, and on each of these pillars there is, inexplicably, a number. The numbers do not seem to correspond to the tables, and they are gold-coloured on little metal plates, like the numbers on letterboxes.

There has been some attempt to give the shop a theme, and the artwork on the walls is half-heartedly maritime. There are three framed paintings of ships in storms, very conventional paintings that are the ocean-going equivalent of those pastoral paintings of the Sussex Downs that you get on table mats. On the side walls there are three stylised drawings of fish in primary colours. On the front wall, above the entrance, there is a another fish painting, this time a giant painting that looks like it was done by a promising third-form student at the local school. In a recess above the entrance there is a tangle of fishing lines and cray-fish nets. All of these things are about the sea, but they are too widely spaced to really give the shop a theme. Trying to appreciate the theme is like trying to appreciate a melody wherein there is a long delay between each note. Above the entrance there is a green sign saying “Exit”. It is a large sign and it dominates the entrance, as if it is meant as an artistic centre-piece.

At one table, four elderly people sit around and talk about sandflies and the weather. “They’ll get you in the end if they want to, they will,” says one. “They’re right bastards, you’re not wrong there,” says another. One of them, a New Zealander, orders fish-and-chips. This amuses the English couple, who say “Fush and chups! Fush and chups! Are they like fash and chaps? Fush and chups!” They all laugh. The English couple leaves, the fish and chips arrive, and the NZ man tips salt on to his meal and absentmindedly goes through a few practice rounds: “fush end cheeps,” he says. “Fesh and chups. Fosh und chapes.”

At another table there is a young male in his late teens, a Maori-looking lad with a tight t-shirt whose hem is clasped around his upper arm like a bracelet. He eats a packet of fish and chips on his own. He has fat white shoes and his left foot jigs rapidly up and down, as if he needs to go to the toilet.

A little Maori child runs in the shop and hops and waddles around the tables, completely naked. “You’re mum’s out the back, boy,” says the girl at the counter, and the child runs out the back with her fingers all tangled up behind her back.

I have come here to recharge my phone in the wall-socket, and I feel obliged to buy something while I am there. I choose a can of Orange and Lime fizzy drink. The can proudly announces that it’s contents is “5% Real Fruit.” When I’ve finished the can, overwhelmed by real fruityness, I watch a group of young girls arrive at the tearooms. One of them goes to buy a coke. The others sit down on a bench. Someone hands out straws, and they sit there bristling with straws, straws in the mouth, straws in the hand, straws as chopsticks, straws as smokes, straws as drumsticks, as backrubbers. Outside, the sun makes ballbearings of light on a green bike rack, on the frame of a bike, on the grille of a car. A Radiohead song comes on the radio. The girl returns with the coke and her friends pass it around, drinking through their straws like beaks. The finish the bottle and sit around doing little. This, I suppose, is what people do when they “hang out.” I know it is deeply uncool to put “hanging out” in quote-marks, almost as uncool as putting “cool” in quote marks, but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of just hanging out. I wonder if I am hanging out when I sit at a table and watch people move around. I decide that I’m not really hanging out, since I do actually have a practical purpose in coming here. I check my cellphone to prove that I’m not really hanging out.

There are three bars on my phone. While the next bar is under construction I watch a fly do mysterious, random circuits of a chair. It lands on the top of the chair and does its scuttling, hesitant fly-walk, darting along on whirring legs for a few moments and then stopping and scuttling on the spot, getting its bearings, then moving on again and going through the same routine. After a while it goes away, and so do the girls.

The sweaty smell of fish and chips comes from behind the counter and stiffens the air around the tables. A speaker squeezes out “Crazy,” the inescapable song by someoneorother, and competes with the rough hum of a generator, and the sounds of cutlery in the hands of busy people.

The Nut

2007-05-08T21:41:00.000-07:00

Here is a poem about death. It owes too much to John Donne.

If inside that shell
A universe could fit,
And all of stuff, all stories, songs and stars,
All weight and store, all ways, signs, lightness, waste and wars,
Could therein dwell,
While we two sit
Outside, with only you and I
And breath, to wait and wonder why
We were not lost
Inside that nut-bound ever-widening sphere -
Even then, despite its host,
Eternity it could not boast.

But if instead I chose
To wait within those walls,
And near them could, tending ever more close,
Ever stay but near or, closing, all knowledge lose;
Then, though enclosed,
I’ld know no walls.
I’ld no outside perceive
And could with ease believe
That ball to hold
Inside all, and all inside.
Then, your palm feeling that form told,
You might my boundless all enfold.

Thus (knowing none to wait
Beyond) as our live set
Expands in time, our space of days to fill,
We sense each second’s sequence to a timeless null
Converge. Even late,
They’ve never met,
For to pass is to pass all sense
And to meet it is to pass, hence
Our mortal trap
Is all around enshelled in air:
We each within our lifetime’s gap
A tight eternity enwrap.

Applied Anthropology

2007-05-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

If you are a prospective employer who has come across this blog while looking for proof of my credibility, please do not read the following. Otherwise, let me explain.

The following is a work of anthropology, not of smut. Recently, for ten days, I entered a new and interesting cultural environment, and set about trying to absorb and understand and like it. And you can get a good lot of understanding, you see, through participation. So when I was kindly given the short piece of creative prose shown below, I was obliged by the forces of scholarship to reply with something of my own; and if my reply is as unsavoury as the authentic example of the local culture reproduced below, then so much the better for scholarship.

Woodpecker Wood

I stuck my finger in
A woodpeckers hole
The woodpecker cried
God bless my soul.
Stick it in stick it in
Remove it.

Tuatara Lust

Once upon a time
On an island by the sea
I was puffing from a climb
I was holding to a tree

When I saw a lusty lizard
From the corner of my eye
And she hit me like a blizzard
Made me wobble made me sigh

“Come with me” said the lizard
With a tuatara blush
And I’ll flip you like a wizard
In my hole inside the bush

So I came upon her hole
Yes I came to her all right
I got muddy in her hole
And I beat her bush all night.

And she told me she was greedy
And I told her I was too
When we finished I was bleeding
I was tender I was bruised.

Oh I was puffing all the time
I was holding to my tree
Once upon a time
On an island by the sea.

Island Life

2007-05-08T21:28:00.000-07:00

From one point of view, my time on Taranga Island was a tale of misery and degradation. I was woken at 6am by the guy in the next tent calling me a tosser. I was assailed by immature nicknames, and by a Red Hot Chilli Peppers song repeated endlessly for the sole purpose of irritating me. I was forced by peer pressure to down shot after shot of Johnny Walker whisky, drunken out of a shot-glass made up of the sawn-off top of a soft-drink bottle; and having done that I was forced by general merriment to suck up split wine from the lid of a food container that had been a playground for rat-shitting rats the night before. I was mocked for going down the hill too fast (“Can ya smell the lolly bin Mike?”). I was mocked for going down the hill too slowly (“Hurry the fuck up Grandad”). I held onto a cliff face by a slippery root and two flax leaves while my supervisor stood on a ledge above me and laughed and made jokes about risking my life seven times for the sake of three weeds. I tripped over on a root the first day. Immediately this appalling misdemeanor gave rise to huge false guffaws from my travelling companions, as it did for the next ten days. For 10 days I had no dry socks. For ten days I put on a wet shirt in the morning and took a wetter shirt off in the evening, and I came back to camp to wash out of a small blue tub of cold water, an activity that was partly a bath and partly a shower and combined the worst aspects of both. In the evenings I sat and watched people hunched wordlessly over something called the “Brick Game”, an appallingly addictive electronic device that emitted many piercing electronic noises, including a tinny rendition of the famous part of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. I was surrounded by puerility. After a few days my protective reserve had worn away and I cheerfully joined in with the puerility. I composed a “bestiality ballad”, seven verses about an erotic adventure with a tuatara. I noted a brand of chocolate called “Dark Ghana,” and observed that this was a neat little euphemism for excrement, and having made this discovery I took every chance to extend it and explore its many variations. When the sole female on the trip went behind a tarpaulin to shower, and her jerking, rubbing silhouette came through the other side of the tarpaulin, and the others put all sorts of merry construals on the shadowy and naked movements, I joined in. When I went to the long-drop at night I had to whack the sides with a stick to get rid of the rats. And so on.

From one point of view, then, all of these happenings made up a truly unpleasant period of work. From my point of view, however, they were all part of the fun.

Under The Weather

2007-05-08T21:27:00.000-07:00

I am writing the following in the middle of a wet and energetic storm, on an island in the middle of a boiling sea that stretches to Whangerei on one side and to Chile on the other. My tent walls are flapping and heaving in the wind. My sleeping mat is damp at the edges. My toilet bag, the one pair of trousers I brought on this trip, my silk sleeping sheet, and the plastic supermarket bags in which I keep my clothes, are all soaked. Lying on my mat, both of my elbows are dewy with rain. The floor of the kitchen is churned up into a chocolate muddy ruin. Bits of wet dirt are smeared around the floor at the front entrance of my tent. The fly covers the tent imperfectly, leaving gaps at its base that are exposed to the weather, and from the inside of my tent I can see a band of dirty sequins around the base of my little room, where the rain has splattered mud over it. In numerous places the tent and the fly have made contact, so they’ve become stuck together by the wet, and you can see the cross-hatched thread of the fly through the tent walls, like wrinkles through a wet t-shirt.

When we arrived on the island there was a dry gully running up the side of the campsite on the true right. Now it is a brown, frothy torrent, and I can here it rushing away like a battery of waterfalls. The nikau palms are streaming with water. The palms have v-shaped spines that channel water toward the main trunk, whereupon it runs down the trunk in a transparent film. Touch the tree with your finger and you make a streaming parabola of froth.

This is great weather for sliding on tree roots and for leaving slick skid-marks and messy handprints in the mud. It’s good weather for athlete’s foot and for growing mushrooms between your toes and for relandscaping your hands, wrinkling up the skin into tiny pink ridges, and also for lying awake and listening to the sounds of water: water tapping on the roof; water punching on the roof, water pouring over the roof as if from a large bucket and seeping through the gaps, water strafing the corrugated plastic that sits between the food and the flood; the long wet rushing of a river, the thumping and grinding of surf, the tapping of water on leaves.

It’s great weather, too, for getting your jacket drenched on the way from the tent to the toilet, and your singlet drenched on the way back. Good for improvising jackets out of plastic rubbish bags, and for losing your beer down a river that comes up over night. The only dry things I have are my stationary, my sleeping bag, and the insides of my fingernails.

Camping tends to heighten the need for alertness, commonsense, time-saving improvisations. The rain exaggerates this tendency. Scroggin goes inside a plastic bag inside a plastic bag inside a pocket. Cellphones go inside a plastic bag inside a plastic bag inside a thick blue dry-bag that you close by rolling up the top third and securing a clip across the top, which goes inside the inner pocket of a pack. When going outside in the rain, roll up your trousers and the arms of your shirt so that they don’t get too wet. Your skin will get wet, but your skin dries quicker that cotton. Keep a towel (a pile of broad-leaves will do) at the tent door to leave the mud on when you get in. Do not put the head of your bed at the entrance-end of your tent – you want your dirty feet to be at the entrance, which is dirty already; and your want your face to be as far from the dirt as possible. Put your clothes in plastic bag and use those bags as barriers between yourself and the wet sides of your tent. Moving in and out of your tent is awkward, so you want to do these things as little as possible: before leaving, make extra sure you have everything you need for going outside; and do the same when you go back in.

Joe Bennett's "Land of Two Halves": Metaphors

2007-05-08T20:22:00.000-07:00

By “metaphor” I don’t mean just metaphor, but any kind of inventive and striking comparison. Joe Bennett is a prolific manufacturer of metaphors. His writings, including “A Land of Two Halves,” are jumping with them. Most of the time they are good: they are vivid, original, funny, and suiting the rest of his prose in being compact, deft, unlaboured, more witty than eloquent. Even when they are not so good they are worth reading. Here is a selection from “Two Halves.”

Landscapes

Away to the West lie the purple foothills of the Southern Alps, a range of mountains like a dog’s back teeth that form the spine of the island.

..the sky stretches out, as delicately blue as a thrushes’ egg.

…where the land is carpeted in tussock the colour of a lion’s pelt.

Below us in the last of the afternoon sun the lake is crinkled like kitchen foil. A paddle-steamer chugs across it like a toy in a bath. Mountains climb straight out of the water…their jagged tops like the crest on a tuatara’s spine.

Fed further up the valley by waterfalls like straight white pencils, the water gathers here in swirling pools of green translucency, like thick stained glass slowly on the move.

The landscape was green as an ad.

When the whale rose, it rose like an island, a grey-brown hugeness.

I’m standing in shadow but the sky holds tufts of clouds like fading vapour-trails lit pinky-orange from below. The sinking sun has turned the highlands to the north the colour of ginger biscuits, slashed by the deep black shadows of the gulley. Waterfowl of all kinds are swinging across the sky to roost, like packs of slow arrows. The plaintive calling of a pair of paradise ducks carries forever across the stillness. The lake’s a mirror. Ducks tow rippled vee’s across it. And on the far side of the water the lights come on in Te Anau and the town seems dwarfed, puny. Eye-candy comes no sweeter.

A plane offers a view that we probably shouldn’t have, a view we can’t live in. It presents the land like a brochure.

…billiard table bush…

…knitting needle bush…

The spur-winged plover, a sort of lap-wing, with jowls as yellow as lemon-peel…and they take off into the night making a noise like train brakes.

It’s crown is an asymmetric mess, like an inverted root system. I lean against it, give it a slap. It’s like slapping a building.

A pair of ostriches with necks like vacuum cleaner hoses.

…feta, goats cheese in brine, huge waxed bowling balls of Gouda, Parmesan that crumbles like weather-worn sandstone.

I can understand the appeal of a steamtrain rattling along beside a lake…the gleaming beams of steel that link the wheels to the engine and circle like elbows.

Weather

The West side of each marquee is concave. The east side balloons like a pregnancy. Any unsecured corner of the canvas slaps like staccato applause. Guy-ropes thrum like the strings on a double bass.

Sudden full-blooded rain sweeps in from the Tasman sea, hitting the roof like flung gravel.

People

Unmatching Formica tables, unemptied ashtrays, a carpet like a disease, a drunk woman with three kids in need of a slap…

Their stereos thrum with bass, like heartbeats heard through a stethoscope.

His every movement is laboured and deliberate. He chews as if making a series of conscious, disconnected decisions to move his jaws.

They lean like a picket fence, their backs to the bar, their elbows on it, watching a Super 12 game between the Wellington hurricanes and an Australian team.

As he runs the whole pub stands on tiptoes and purses, tenses, clenches fists as if trying to hold back an orgasm.

The crows groans and oohs and cheers as one and surges like a school of fish.

His van looks like he’s deliberately pelted it with rocks.

Unkind

A lone woman strides the bank in three-quarter leisure-wear, power walking to the next cappuccino, and fiercely swinging her arms as if into the balls of an assailant.

She’s got the arse of a shire horse, a mighty thing ballooning on either side of the chair like two taught bags of cement.

Grim

The beach is stark. Waves the colour of dishwater pound the sand, receding to leave a scum of soiled froth that gasps and subsides like a spent fish.

Walking its streets feels like touring a cemetery that is not quite historic enough to be interesting. [Greymouth]

[motel rooms] resembled temporary porn studios, and probably some of them were – though rarely while I was in them.

A ceiling of stippled plaster, each stipple minutely tipped with dirt like a smoker’s tooth. Every guest has left a molecule of self…The air is like gravy.

Clouds weigh down like a press.

Most of the pokie players are over forty. Their faces are the faces of cattle in the rain.

Amusing

Sleek as bullets, they [pukekos] step high over the wetlands on their huge splayed feet as if studiously avoiding dogshit.

The penguins waddled along, like waiters with piles.

…and a lot more convincing than the concrete moa, which looks at first glance to have been surprised by a proctologist. And at the second glance, it still does.

In fifth-form Physics I learned that if you filled a matchbox with nuclei and then dropped it, it would sink thirty feet into the ground. New Zealand pies are similar.

By far the most vigorous thing on show is a fibreglass salmon, thirty feet tall and sculpted in the act of leaping, perhaps because of the telegaph pole stuck up its arse.

Each mussel is the size of a dighy..and has a frilly fringe of flesh attached to it, like a pensioners gumline.

Unexpected

Pukeko corpses are a common sight on the verge…their sleekness gone, like wrecked umbrellas.

Clouds mass out to sea like grey-black cauliflowers.

The foresters drop me in sunshine that feels brittle, like elderly sellotape.

Queenstown squats beneath the mountains like a whore in a palace. But she’s a rich whore, and a pretty one. The prices in the real-estate windows have strings of zeros in them like the wheels on the Kingston Flier.

Boys Debating Nicely

2007-05-08T20:07:00.000-07:00

Note: This post originally appeared as a guest post over on Philosophy Etcetera.

I note that there has been an upsurge of interest in all-male schools in New Zealand, and that part of the reason for this is, reportedly, the "feminising" of coededucational schools (no references, sorry: it was some time ago). According to one principal, coed schools are becoming increasingly unsuitable for boys because they do not cater for the "masculine" needs of boys; in particular, coed schools tend to emphasise "group discussion and deliberation," rather than more combative, aggressive activities of the kind that are attractive to young males.

Reports like this bring out a problem in school education thathas been suggested to me by a small amount of anecdotal evidence and a slightly larger (but still fairly small) amount of personal experience: namely, that the tendency among school-age males towards combative activities, and away from cooperative activities, looks to be at odds with some of the intellectual values that school is supposed to inculcate in students. Let us suppose for a moment that school-age males do favour combative over cooperative pursuits, including those in the domain of critical thinking. What kind of problem does this present, and how can it be mitigated or overcome? Is the problem exaggerated?

This question is interesting to me partly because intellectual values in question here are of a kind that is especially pertinent to Philosophy. One of the skills that study in Philosophy is meant to develop is the ability to argue nicely: to take other people’s views seriously, and to respond to them with charity and sensitivity; to be open to the possibility that one might be wrong, and to revise one’s beliefs when one discovers that one is wrong; to avoid simplistic dichotomies between right and wrong; to regard the pursuit of truth as an inherently valuable activity, and not to sacrifice this end for the sake of other ends, such as that of beating a long-time rival, winning personal glory, or avoiding the embarrassment of public error. This may not be a comprehensive list, or an entirely accurate one, but you get the idea. And it is natural to think that the intellectual and social qualities in this list cannot be introduced unless the combative spirit of young lads is somehow softened or removed. What I want to argue here is that that the situation is quite so bad as one might think, given this brief analysis of the problem. Male combativeness is a real problem here, but it might also be part of the solution; and insofar as it is a problem, it is only partially a problem.

I do not mean to say anything daringly post-modern here. I mean to say that many claims are too vague or complex to be straightforwardly true or false; and that the best way to arrive at a truth about such statements is to replace it with a set of more precise claims, whose truth-values may differ from eachother.

The first point to note is that arguing nicely is not the only end of communal discussion. We also want students to argue rigorously, and one way to promote this value is to encourage students to subject any beliefs or arguments to severe scrutiny. To be sure, an overly combative person is likely to bestow such scrutiny primarily upon the ideas of his opponent; and to ignore or obfuscate the errors in his own thinking. But at least this is a start. One might also object that a combative person is more likely than a cooperative one to be dishonest in his scrutiny: to exaggerate the flaws of their opponents' thinking by the use of deviant dialectical tactics, of rhetorical rather than philosophical forms of persuasion. But it looks to me as if that sort of dishonesty is more a function of the intellectual powers of the disputant, rather than their attitude to the debate. If all members of a dispute are good at distinguishing rhetorical tactics from philosophical ones, then it looks as if this problem would at least partly disappear. For, if one is really intent upon proving one’s opponent wrong, and everyone involved is aware of what constitutes a genuine proof; then any deviant tactics are likely to be counter-productive to one’s competitive aims. So one way to cope with a combative spirit, and to turn it towards worthwhile intellectual ends, is to improve the rational powers of students.

Of course, such rational improvement is not sufficient to guarantee a good discussion. Social and other intellectual skills are also important. But again, it is a good start.

Another point is that arguing nicely is something that one can be combative about. There is no difficulty, at least in principle, of getting a few groups of people together to compete against eachother with regard to their facility for dignified, honest, cooperative deliberation. Of course, there is some difficulty, in principle, in having groups compete against eachother with regards to the sincerity of their commitment to arguing nicely. If a student sees the worth of arguing nicely only when such a practice allows him to compete viciously with rival groups, then clearly that student is missing something important. But a facility for arguing nicely is, I think, at least as valuable as a desire to argue nicely for its own sake; it is certainly a good start.

Perhaps it is a little unrealistic, though, to think that combatively-minded young lads will be as enthusiastic about competing over something like communal inquiry, as over things like romance or wrestling. But if this is the case, then the problem may lie not with the combative nature of young lads but with their disinterest in formal learning: they turn away from communal inquiry not because it does not allow them to indulge their combative instincts, but because it is an intellectual rather than a sporting activity. This is still a problem, of course, but it is a problem for another day.

And, insofar as communal inquiry does fail to satisfy the combative instincts of energetic young lads, something can still be salvaged (conceptually at least) by clarifying the notion of "combativeness." So far I have used the notion of "combative" in a fairly loose sense. Now I want to distinguish a few senses of the word, because I think there are some kinds of combativeness that are more compatible with cooperative debate than others. It is possible to distinguish conceptually between these senses of the word; distinguishing between them in practice (ie. by separating out one sort of combative behaviour from other sorts) is probably a lot more difficult, and eliminating the undesirable forms of combativeness is probably more difficult again. But the conceptual distinction is a good place to begin. So here are three kinds of combativeness:

Antagonism. To say that males are antagonistic is to say that they enjoy situations where two or more people are not only fiercely engaged in some competition or another, but that they compete spitefully or maliciously. They genuinely wish to cause eachother personal harm, either physically or emotionally or socially; and if they cannot do it themselves they like to watch it happen.

Competitiveness. The trait of relishing any chance to set one's own abilities against those of another. Fierce competition need not mean antagonistic competition: one can "play hard but play fair."

Ambition. I use "ambition" to refer to a desire to excel, though not necessarily at the expense of others. A merely ambitious person will wish only to perform as well as they possibly can, enjoying the strain and excitement of a difficult challenge. The challenge need not be posed by another person, and the strain need not be against another person.

Now, clearly antagonistic people are going to be ill-suited to good communal discussion. Not only are they likely to see the activity as an effort of self-aggrandisement, but that self-aggrandisement will take the form of petty personal abuse. They are unlikely even to engage their opponent in genuine debate, except about his height or facial features or the habits of his mother. Competitive people will be more successful, since they will compete over the matter under debate (ethics, politics, religion, the quality of some work of art, etc.) rather than irrelevant personal details. And people who are merely ambitious, without being competitive (in the sense just defined), will be even more successful in arguing nicely: they will not only seek truth themselves, but also encourage the efforts of others to seek the truth, since by doing the latter they enhance their own chances of achieving that end. So ambition is not only compatible with arguing nicely, but also conducive to it: far from being removed or softened, it should be encouraged.

Just how these three different traits are manifested in the average male school student (ie. in what kind of interrelation and in what proportion), is something for phsycologists and sociologists and teachers to work out, I think. It is empirical question (though of course not a merely empirical question). But it would be hard to answer the empirical question without having the conceptual distinction already in place.

I have written all of this without ever having tried to engage young males in good communal discussion, and I would be interested to hear from anyone who has had practical experience in this matter. Is it as difficult a task as it is sometimes made out to be? And are there any other traits within the broad notion of "combativeness" that I have missed out, or that are especially prevalent in school-age males? Comments appreciated, as usual.

Education as an Ideal

2007-05-08T19:58:00.000-07:00

Over here is a part one of my introduction to my interest in Education. The other two parts were posted over on Philosophy Etcetera, which kindly let me post as a "guest blogger" for a few days. So here are Education as an Ideal Part 2 and Education as an Ideal Part 3.

Signpost 3: Odds and Ends

2007-05-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

After a prolonged bout of too-much-to-do, a short but debilitating attack of can’t-be-bothered, and a few days of sore-head, I have decided to add some more things to this blog. What sort of things? This and that and the other thing, plus some odds-and-ends, some miscellany and perhaps one or two boondoggles as well. Over the next few weeks on this blog there will be more of the same.

Class Misrules

2007-03-24T20:49:00.000-07:00

I wonder if it would be wise for a school teacher to hand out “class rules” of the following kind ie. with plausible-seeming objections attached. The idea is that they are highly likely to provoke students into thought, because they hold out the possibility of real gains (ie. a change to the rules) for anyone who thinks carefully about them.

Perhaps a student would not really consider this possibility as genuine, since a teacher who gives out rules like this (the student might reason) must be pretty confident that the counter-arguments are flawed. But even in that case it is surely healthy for a teacher to show that he or she is willing to at least consider the counter-arguments, rather than just presenting students with the sheet of unjustified rules that they have seen hundreds of times before. And the student’s suspicions about the teacher might be outweighed by the apparent force of those counter-arguments, causing the student to genuinely believe that there is something to gain by taking them up with the teacher. Or perhaps they might have no doubt that the teacher considers the arguments to be flawed; but still take them up with the teacher, or think about them themselves, to find out just how they are flawed.

I think the rules and the counter-arguments should be such that some of the former do require modification in light of the latter. It would lessen the value of the exercise if students went out of it with no sense that they could actually change things by producing good arguments in favour of their own view.

What would other teachers think? Would they be enraged to find that some idiot of a teacher had handed out a bunch of excuses and smart-alec replies to students, which those students will use against their long-suffering teachers at every opportunity? Hopefully they would not be enraged. But even if they were, one could hand out a sheet of counter-counter-arguments, to rip out at its roots the anarchic impulse to think

“The class rules are in bold. If noone comes up with good reasons to change those rules, then they stand. Otherwise, they won’t.

Arrive in class on time (this rule seems a bit fishy. Why should students come to class on time? If they can do this without disrupting anyone else, are they doing anyone any harm? You might say that they are doing a harm to themselves. But surely the best judge of that is the student, not the teacher. What does the teacher know about the many trials and temptations that draw a student away from class, and thwart their earnest attempts at punctuality? But this may not be a good reason after all, so the rule stands).

Wear a tidy uniform (but this seems a bit fishy as well. What does a person’s dress sense have to do with their school work? A school is a place for education, not for cosmetics. And students can become educated, and very well educated at that, without having the least regard for their clothing. Socrates was notorious for his bad dress sense. Perhaps this rule has something to do with giving off a good “public image,” at cafes and bus stops and places like that; the school wants to be judged well by the public. But why should we submit to being judged on our clothing? We keep hearing that it is shallow and materialistic to judge a person by what they wear: why shouldn’t this apply to schools as well as to individuals?)

Avoid profanities (But suppose that everyone used profanities all the time. Wouldn’t the profanities then lose all of their meaning, like any words that are used all the time, so that they would no longer really be swear words any more? So if everyone were allowed to swear, there would be no more swear words. So why should we ban them? If we ban them, we’re loosing a good chance to perform a public service.)

Do what the teacher says (But is it not true that people learn best when they do so on their own initiative? And teachers are always saying things like “use your initiative” and “take control of your own learning.” So wouldn’t it be best if students were left to learn independently of the teacher’s commands?)

Don’t be a smart alec (But isn’t it one of the aims of education to produce people who are witty and intelligent, who can think on their feet and are able to defend themselves? If that is the case, then wouldn’t it be better if students were allowed to practice these skills on the teacher?)

Always do the best that you can do (Well, that sounds like a nice little saying, but it is obviously wrong. Clearly it is not right for a person to “do the best they can” to become a thief or a liar. So this little saying gives people no good reason to do their best at school: perhaps school is a bad thing, like lying or burglary. One reason you might think school is a good thing is that if the student does well they will have a better chance of getting a good job. But that reason doesn’t work, because a person who does an average amount of work can get the same mark as a person who does a lot of work, even if they have the same natural capabilities. The marking scheme is so crude that often it can’t distinguish between those two people. So why not just do an average amount of work and leave yourself more free time to do other worthwhile things? You might say that is “shirking” or something, but isn’t it just good time management?)

Never talk while the teacher is talking (But the teacher talks while the students are talking. So why the double standard? You might say “because the teacher is giving out important information that everyone needs to hear.” But….but…well, see the next one)

Don’t disrupt other people’s learning with violence, excessive talking, etc. (But when the teacher says “you ought not to disrupt other people’s learning,” isn’t that a moral claim? And hasn’t the twentieth century taught us that moral claims are always relative, so that what is morally wrong for one person may be morally right for another person? Some African tribes think that it is morally right for young children to be forced into marriage at the age of fifteen. In New Zealand we think this practice wrong, but we tolerate it because we know that the African people have a different moral scheme to our own. Why don’t teachers take such an enlightened attitude towards their more talkative students?)

Students will be treated as adults unless they act like children. If they act like children, they will be treated like children (But if a person gets sick and goes to hospital, everyone says “just treat them normally, as if they are quite well; that way they will get better more quickly.” And if a person starts acting like a dog, it would be foolish to start treating him like a dog: if you do that, he’ll just become more and more convinced that he is a dog, so he’ll keep acting like it. If you treat him like a dog, you have made things worse, not better. And if you agree to that, you would be inconsistent if you treated people like children as soon as they started acting like children.)

Make sure you can back up your actions with good reasons (That’s a bit fishy as well. Suppose Jack thought that your idea of what counts as a “reason” is wrong. Then you would have to back up your idea of what a “reason” is. But what kind of things would you use to back it up? You would have to use “reasons,” of course; but what sort of things will count as “reasons”? You would have to use your own idea of what a “reason” is. But of course Jack will not be convinced, because you have assumed as true the very thing that you were trying to convince him about. It’s as if you were to say to Jack “The moon is made of cheese,” and then try to convince him by saying: “the moon is made of cheese; therefore the moon is yellow and has holes in it and is made from cows milk; therefore it must be made of cheese.” Which is clearly a bad argument. So noone can give any good reasons to believe that their idea of “reasons” is the right one. So every reason is as good as any other reason. So as far as reasons are concerned, any action is just as good as any other action. Isn’t it?)”

Two Halves: Hitching Excerpts

2007-03-21T03:18:00.000-07:00

Joe Bennett’s book A Land of Two Halves is about hitchhiking around New Zealand, and it is such a good read that one day I may even get around to reviewing it. In the mean time, here are some of Bennett’s remarks about hitchhiking, extracted from the book.

There’s a book to be written about the psychology of hitch-hiking, and this may turn out to be it, but for now let me observe only that the business is a matter of demeanour and that a large part of that demeanor is expressed in the thumb. It is possible to proffer a thumb demandingly, imploringly, jauntily, shyly, limply, apologetically or listlessly. My thumb is limp and embarrassed. (8-9)

The driver of the first car gestures that he’s turning off to the right. He probably isn’t, but that acknowledgement that I am here, that I exist and am doing what I am doing, brings a gust of what I want from this trip, a sense of being solitary, free, and somehow small. It’s a feeling I remember from my youth. I like it. (9)

And it [the feeling of being solitary etc.] comes with an abundance of random detail and the time to absorb it. (9)

Now that it’s over, the lift from Rick gives me a tingle of retrospective pleasure. I’ve no desire to meet Rick again, but I liked him and enjoyed his honesty and felt sorry for him. He also provided the sort of thing that makes hitching what it is. It let me step briefly into the mess of his life. And it did us both good. I must have been the first person he’d spoken to since the bitterness of his row that morning. Before he picked me up he must have been stewing, grinding his teeth, clenching the wheel. My presence let him unburden himself of some of that. And I relished the details vicariously. They reminded me that the world is wide and full of differences. And then I was able to step back out of that life, unwounded, uninvolved, almost untouched. (are page numbers really necessary?)

The propaganda against hitching has grown in recent times and you see fewer and fewer people doing it. But it’s not as dangerous as the propagandists make out. Never once have I been physically threatened by a driver. I’ve met nutters but they’ve been harmless nutters. And on the two occasions when I have been propositioned, both the propositioners, though big men and spectacularly ugly ones, were oblique in their propositioning, and they accepted the rebuff without demur.

Indeed my experiences of hitching have affirmed human nature far more often than they have damned it. For one thing, every lift begins with an act of generosity. And once inside the vehicle I have met infinitely more vulnerability and honesty than I have met aggression, perhaps because the fleeting nature of a lift invites intimacy. Both parties are staring ahead through the windscreen, so that words can be spoken as if to air. The best lifts are like confessionals on wheels, like psychiatric couches barrelling through the landscape. Hundreds of drivers have told me things that they have never told their partners, their parents or their children. I like all that. Indeed hitching is the only form of travel that makes the actual shifting of one’s flesh from one place to another something of interest, rather than a chore to be endured for the reward of arrival. Furthermore, the intimacy is temporary and carries none of the consequences of intimacy, which suits me just fine. Never once, anywhere, have I met any of my drivers a second time. So when Rick drives out of the main street of Geraldine he is driving out of my life for good. (no, I don't think they are)

Twenty-five years ago I got a lift from Dieppe to Rouen with a middle-aged English couple in a big Rover. The husband asked me if I was married. I said no.
‘Take my advice, son,’ he said, ‘and stay that way.’
I could think of nothing to say. I didn’t have to. The man had tapped a pent seam of his own venom and discharged it in a stream of invective against married life about traps and womanhood and money and handcuffs that took us half way to Rouen. His wife sat with a map on her lap and said nothing at all. (what a relief)

…And then, just as I was about to put my thumb out, I chose not to. The car slowed a little. It would have stopped. But I looked away and let it pass. Why? Why was simple. It was the sky and the land and the bubbling sense of little me as a speck upon it, tiny, trivial but utterly free. That’s all. Big sky, little man, the essential human comedy. As if for a moment I was suspended above myself, looking down and seeing this vain and self-preoccupied figure all alone on this big white land. That’s all. Call it perspective, if you like, call it Zen, call it a pound of parsnips and eat it with butter for all I care. It felt exhilarating.

Three backpackers are struggling along the main street against the wind. Each is toting both a backpack and a front-pack. A sniper would despair of wounding them fatally. One even carries a third bag in her hand, from which protrudes the corner of a kitchen sink. Time was when you could just push backpackers over and watch them writhe like flipped beetles. Today you have to trip them at the top of an incline so that they roll unstoppably down it in their casing of possessions. Or else you can do as I do now, and give an ironic middle-aged tut before passing by on the other side of the road.

The mist is thinning. Buildings have ghosted out of it and become solid. Over the course of an hour I watch the ironed sheet of a lake appear, shifting by imperceptible gradations from grey to black, from clack to steel, from steel to pine green. Folded mountains emerge as hints of themselves, then gather bulk. Above the sharply defined tree-line, some low vegetation, then what looks to be tussock, then bare rock and slides of scree and pockets of snow and then snow, all of it sharp in the sun. It is good to watch it happen. And there is no other form of travelling in which one would watch it happen. Hitching enforces immobility.

‘That the lion’s share of happiness is found by couples,’ wrote [the poet Philip] Larkin, sheer inaccuracy as far as I’m concerned’ – and as far as I’m concerned, too, at least when travelling. I have tried travelling in company and it has rarely worked. I once went down to France with a University friend. By the time we reached the Spanish border I thought I hated him. I didn’t. What I hated was having to compromise, to discuss, to reach decisions together, to agree on the next move. But more significantly I hated showing my timidity on the road, exposing so much of my weakness.

Philosophy: Why I Do It

2007-03-21T03:04:00.000-07:00

Here I have put down some thoughts on what sort of philosophical content I will have on this blog. Now it is time to do what I am meant primarily to do in these introductions, which is to answer the very reasonable question of why I bother with all this antisocial and time-consuming literary and mental work, work that many people would find dull, excessively abstract, solipsistic and, at best, a noble-minded folly.

So why do I bother with philosophy? I bother for the same reason that other people bother with Lazy Boys and beachfront scenery: because it is a form of relaxation, a way of soothing the mind. The mechanism is a little different in the philosophy case than the two cases just mentioned, but the result is similar: it gives a sense of calmness and order, or relief from chaos. Some might say that it is an antidote to the frenetic pace of modern life. I do not really want to say that, partly because other people say it and partly because I am not sure that modern life is as frenetic, in relation to earlier kinds of life, as it is sometimes cracked up to be. But I do say that philosophy is an antidote to the mindlessness of modern life.

Being mindful of things, in the way that philosophy is mindful, is soothing, but it is also difficult. I don’t count this as a deterrent, at least not usually. I bother with philosophy, despite its difficulty, for the same reasons that other people bother with poetry and triathlons, despite their difficulty: because difficulty in a pursuit asks for effort from the pursuer, and because effort has two rewards: the reliable but rather thin reward that comes merely from putting a lot of honest work into something; and the less reliable but richer reward that comes from getting closer to some form of excellence. The first of these rewards does not need any further explanation. The second does need further explanation, because one might reasonably ask the question: why pursue the excellence of philosophy over other kinds of excellence? And, perhaps it is not entirely silly to ask the question: why regard the excellence of philosophy as possessing any value at all, never mind an excellence that is so great as to shove most other excellencies out of the way?

One answer is that a quick and insightful mind makes it easier to advance in the world: it gets you a job, and it helps you to do useful practical things such as haggling and persuading others to support your pet projects. I do not think that this is a very good answer. For one thing, it is not especially philosophical to do philosophy in order to secure a high-paying job (though I do think there is something to be said for “active epistemology”, which I have described very roughly somewhere in here). For another thing, philosophy (in my experience) tends to interfere destructively with many practical tasks, rather than give an extra edge to my execution of them. Some time in the sixth or seventh century BC (or thereabouts) Thales fell into a well because he was too busy looking at the stars; and ever since then philosophers have had a reputation for looking to keenly at what seems to be a long way off and too dimly at what is at their feet.

I can give a better answer by trying to describe the things I admire about people who do philosophy well. And I can do that by trying to describe briefly the nature of philosophical learning. Acquiring a facility for philosophy, I think, is like acquiring a fairly powerful microscope. It gives you access to a who new domain of objects and relations and patterns, a domain that has a richness and variety that you could not have imagined existed if you looked at things just with your naked eye.

It is a very seductive toy, this microscope. You want to keep looking further into all those strange rock-like things and those knobbly little green things, and more closely at the eccentric patterns you see just on the edge of your scope. You feel like you could discover some amazing things down there, things people have never known about before. At the same time, however, you can very easily get completely lost, and end up discovering only trivialities or boring details or things that people have already discovered, and which they have discovered by a much less tortuous route than you have. A good philosopher is enticed by the detail without being seduced by it. A good philosopher, I think, is also well aware that all of this detail is not worth observing unless it can be linked up somehow with what you can observe with the naked eye. A bad philosopher will interpret the details carelessly, and end up saying something laughable about the world of the naked eye, and all that microscopic effort will go to waste. A good philosopher keeps one eye on the lens and one eye on the window, and out of both eyes still has a good sense of perspective.

A good philosopher is also admirable for the way he or she presents the results of his or her inquiry. All that tiny detail is so complex, and so foreign to our ordinary objects of vision, that it is easy to get confused when reporting about it, and to confuse readers as well; and so philosophy, like microscopy, calls for an especially clear and careful manner of expression.

I like this manner of expression. I like its honesty and its precision and its lack of tinsel, the firmness of its syntax (all those short sentences, structured according to their logic) and the way in which it refuses to be carried away by sentiment, whether moral or aesthetic. Here, for example, is the start of the introduction to Philosophy As It Is, an anthology of philosophical exemplars.

The best introduction to philosophy is philosophy itself. This is not an original thought, but it is not common for it to be taken as literally and as seriously as we have taken it in bringing together this volume of essays and introductions.

Good philosophy is rigorous, and has been since Socrates and before. The quality of rigorousness is not preserved in dilution. Reflection on philosophy (by which we mean attempts to introduce it or describe it or survey it or explain its nature), as distinct from attempts to do it, may be more or less instructive. Some books on philosophy, as contrasted with books of philosophy, are excellent. At its best, however, this sort of thing still lacks an its essential quality of its subject matter….

This sort of writing is poetry to me. Look at that introductory statement: it is clean as you can get, and uncompromising. Look at the honesty of the first clause in the second sentence, and the nice clarification that follows from it, and look too at those words “seriously” and “literally”, each doing their own job and doing it without fuss. Look at that italicization, true as a well-timed punch. Look too at the next sentence. Just look at that sentence: “The quality of rigorousness is not preserved in dilution.” What economy! What clarity! What a deft little metaphor, weighted precisely so as to express the point but not to strain it! It is comparable, for its expressive qualities, to something like this:

And nothing ‘gainst time’s scythe can make defense,
Save breath to brave him when he takes thee hence.

And then there is the explication in brackets, extending meaning but not excessively so, and the perfectly simple expression, in a neat parallelism, of a distinction that could one could so easily labour over in two or three sentences, and the measured tone of the whole, a tone that is not at all deliberately cultivated, but is a consequence of the main purpose of the prose, which is to present the truth clearly and persuasively. It is informal when it can be (“that sort of thing”), and it is does not tangle itself up with verbose diction; but at important moments in a sentence or a paragraph, when clarity and persuasiveness are most needed, it tightens up its language and fixes meaning in place. I could go on.

In this brief survey of the attractions of philosophy, I should also make mention of two other important qualities of the discipline: its necessity, and its generality. In general, philosophical truths bear more resemblance to the truths of mathematics than the truths of history: the sense in which philosophical truths could have failed to be truths is a very weak sense. Just what is meant by necessity, and what kind of necessity obtains in the case of philosophical truths, is of course a terribly large question, and I do not know much about the question, let alone the answer. All I want to say here is that philosophical truths have a kind of security about them that does not obtain in some other disciplines (like History), and that this security is attractive.

By the generality of philosophy I mean its applicability to a wide range of problems and interests. My metaphor of the microscope tends to obscure this point, suggesting as it does that philosophy is concerned mainly with the minutiae of life, and perhaps that it is only concerned with one or two sub-sections of life. On the contrary, philosophy is one of the broadest intellectual disciplines, and its subject matter stretches right across from aesthetics to mathematics, taking in History and Education and Science and Politics, and of course Ethics, along the way. Just what sort of priority enjoys over the other standard intellectual disciplines is another large question. I may have a go at answering this at some later date; for now it is enough to say that philosophy can make substantive contributions to our understanding of all of the disciplines just mentioned, and that its method is also well-adapted to solving, or at least assuaging, some of the problems of life.

And perhaps this last point is the most important point. What makes philosophy such an attractive pastime is that it is such a natural pastime, one that arises almost inadvertently when one begins trying to ask and answer questions about the world and the people in it. Everyone, I think, feels an urge to ask and answer such questions. And if one is going to do philosophy naturally, one might as well do it properly.

Philosophy: What I Do With It

2007-03-21T02:52:00.000-07:00

Over here you can find a pretty oblique answer to the questions: what kind of thing does this blog mean by “philosophy”? and why do I think that it worth blogging about? The linked post is really an essay on Plato, and it is quite long. Hopefully the thoughts on this and the next post give a more direct and readable answer to the questions just stated, and function better as an introduction to the philosophical content of this blog.

I do not have the will or the ability to live a life of philosophy, but I do wish to life a philosophical life. The style, standard, frequency, duration and subject matter of my attempts to write philosophy, are hard for me to describe in advance: indeed, part of my motivation for making these attempts is that they might reveal to me just what that style, standard etc. really is. But the first sentence in this introduction will probably turn out to be a good guide to the nature of that philosophical content of this blog.

By that first sentence I mean that I do not have the time, enthusiasm, or the natural ability to pursue the discipline of philosophy as fully as one does so when one becomes an academic philosopher or a popular philosopher or any other person who makes a living out of writing philosophy. I am full of admiration for the small number of people who do possess the time etc. to make such a living, but I am one of the large number of people who do not. Nevertheless, I am also one of the people (who are also pretty large in number, I suspect) who wish to engage in philosophical reflection for its own sake and who (more characteristically) wish to engage philosophically with the non-philosophical activities that fill up the large part of the life of this group. Voting, writing, enjoying literature, working, socialising, and (to some extent) falling in love: all of these activities can, I think, be informed and enriched by philosophy, and I am one of those people who would like the activities of everyday life to be magnified in this way by reasoned contemplation.

For me, and perhaps for others, this approach to philosophy has two main consequences for the philosophy thus generated. Firstly, the subject matter of that philosophy is unlikely to coincide with that of standard philosophy (by which I mean the work done in orthodox Western philosophy departments). Unless the urge to do philosophy for its own sake is especially strong, then one is likely to miss out some of the more abstract and technical topics; hence this blog is unlikely to contain any thoughts on high-level metaphysics or on formal logic. And I will make unusual additions to the standard philosophical subject matter, as well as unusual exclusions. For example, over here I have placed under the label of “philosophy” a piece of writing that deals mainly with travel. As far as I know, this is a pioneering effort in the philosophy of travel; I doubt, however, that any professors of philosophy would, upon reading a piece like that one, make excited moves to add their own contributions to this ground-breaking field of study. Travel is just not the sort of thing that you worry about as a philosopher. As a person who lives, however, you are likely to travel at some point or another, and if you are going to worry about it you might as well do so philosophically. Of course, I do not want to include just anything under the label of philosophy. I do not want to disgrace the label on my blog, or render it meaningless through inappropriate use. But I do want to apply the philosophical method to a wider range of topics than is usual.

The second major feature of my approach to philosophy is that it will probably lead to a greater than usual amount of reflection upon the nature of the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophical activities such as work, writing, etc. It is an orthodox philosophical urge, I think, this urge to reflect upon one’s own forms of reflection; because my forms of reflection are unorthodox, however, my reflections upon those forms are likely to be unorthodox as well, in their subject matter and also in their methods of inquiry and presentation. So, for example, the piece on travel here is an attempt to illuminate the relationship between philosophy and travel. And probably I will write one or two more pieces in the same spirit: the spirit of questioning and clarifying the connection between philosophical reflection and everything else, where “everything else” means practical activities like work and play, but also non-philosophical forms of reflection, such as literature. Worse, I will probably include under the “philosophy” label even those bits of writing that have only a thematic, and not a methodological, connection with standard philosophy: on this blog, a poem about philosophy counts as “philosophy.” This may seem like a failure to take philosophy seriously. However, I prefer to think of it as something quite different, as a consequence of a serious desire to work out what philosophy amounts to, and hence a desire to deploy any medium I can in the attempt.

My peculiar approach to philosophy, and also some interests that are independent of philosophy, lead me to take a particular interest in two branches of the discipline: philosophy of literature, and philosophy of education. I enjoy writing creatively, and I have aspirations to teach, and these interests would exist even if I did not know philosophy from scatology. But my approach to these branches of philosophy will probably be guided by my approach to philosophy as a whole. So, firstly, I am especially interested in the relation between literature and philosophy; if pressed to give details, I would say that I am interested in the extent to which literature, novels in particular, can be a legitimate source of ethical insight. Another aspect of the philosophy of literature that I might pursue is that of metaphor; but that aspect does not have quite so intimate a connexion with my desire to study the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy, as the ethical-epistemic aspect.

In the field of education, I am interested in questions surrounding how philosophy might be incoorporated into school education. One such question is what sort of philosophy should be taught in schools, if philosophy does find its way into that domain. One answer, which I favour, is that it should be that kind of philosophy that enables students to live a philosophical life, though not necessarily a life of philosophy. Hopefully my peculiar approach to philosophy on this blog will help me to clarify this notion of a “philosophical life,” and to discover how it might be compared and contrasted with a “life of philosophy.”

That, then, is a rough account of what I expect to post in the way of philosophy. It is a rough account because I do not really know what will be the standard, style, frequency, duration and subject matter of my attempts to do philosophy on this blog. The only certain thing is that, with time, I will know.

Shade

2007-03-21T02:48:00.000-07:00

Here is a poem from long ago.

Shadows are loyal as the sun
And as lone: low slabs, the chance
Uncoloured quiet of things, down-cast.

Lengthening as the day declines,
Short as it looms, shy
At noon and blind at night,

Fat behind hills, and fast
Fluttering over footpaths,
Fleeing endlessly under cars,

Calm, they come and leave
As objects do. They move
As movement does. To lose,

To lose them leaves the desert or the night.
To choose them dims the bright,
Leaving shade, the dark that proves the light.

Travel and Literature

2007-03-21T02:42:00.000-07:00

Here you can find a long, loping discussion of the relationship between travel and philosophy, and in that discussion you can also find some thoughts about why I think travel is a worthwhile thing to do. In this post I want to go for a short sprint through some thoughts about travel and literature. My hope is that this post will be more readable than my previous one, and convey the spirit of my travel writings more clearly; though I can’t promise that this one will be as detailed or as earnest as the former.

For a person who wants to write descriptively about people and the world, in plays or in novels or in poems, travel looks like a very worthwhile thing indeed. What writers thrive upon, one might think, are new and interesting forms of life: people who are peculiar enough and vivid enough to be turned into characters; events that are dramatic and instructive enough to be turned into stories; objects and actions that have the bulk and breadth to make it as symbols; cultures and landscapes that are rich enough, full enough with the strange and the engaging, to function as settings. And one consequence of travel, one might think, is that a person is brought into contact with all these new and interesting forms of life. Hence travel looks to be just the sort of thing that a writer would want to do.

The subjunctive padding in the last paragraph is placed there to protect me from people who will immediately point out that a number of great writers have written great books about their own town or their own city, apparently without doing any travelling at all. Look at Dickens, with his London masterpieces; at Jane Austen, with her beautifully turned engravings of a highly localised culture; if you are a New Zealander, look at Frank Sargeson sitting in his shack on Takapuna beach, almost as well-hidden as Descartes in his oven. And looking at these books and these writers, what can one do with the theory outlined in the above paragraph, except paint it purple and call it a turnip?

Well, I think one can do a bit more than that. To be sure, the theory is defective. But it also has its merits, and even its defects can shed a little bit of light on the nature of travel and of writing. I will leave the merits to last. In the meantime, let me do what the previous paragraph invites me to do, and explain why the theory is defective, which means identifying its faulty assumptions. It assumes, firstly, that new and interesting forms of life can only be found through travelling. This is false, since they can be found in the mind as well, in the perpetual adventure of the imagination. Imagination does not render travel redundant, but it does make it less urgently necessary. The theory assumes, secondly, that the key to good novels, and the key to good novel-writing, is to uncover new and interesting forms of life. This is false with regards to good novels, since we often value novels for their ability to uncover something that is new and interesting about our ordinary, local forms of life. And it is false with regards to good novel-writing, since this uncovering of the new in the familiar requires a certain kind of sensitivity to the world; and this sensitivity is best cultivated, one might think, not by making it easy for oneself and letting oneself be assaulted by exotic species of nature and of humankind, but by making it hard for oneself, and looking with care and discipline for signs of the exotic in the quiet habits of ordinary life.

Now I see that this subjunctive buffer has again crept in between my prose and my beliefs. But I think that, in the final sentence of the previous paragraph, the buffer is justified. For I do not think that it is quite correct to say that, in order to cultivate the required sensitivity, it is best to make things hard for oneself. When we start to cultivate an ear for French, we make things easier for ourselves. We get people to speak slowly, so we can learn to catch the rhythms and the patterns in their speech that we must catch in their normal, skittering conversation, if we are to understand them properly. Likewise, we start writing by describing things that present their distinctive characteristics very clearly to the ear and eye and touch: we write about wonderfully high mountains and exotic plants and eccentric people. And, once we have caught the rhythm of the world in this way, when it is played very loudly to us, we can more easily catch that rhythm when it is played more softly; and when we have followed it into the soft sounds of ordinary life, so soft that they are inaudible to most people, then we can say that we have understood properly the language of the world.

Furthermore, this way of proceeding, from the easy to the hard, is likely to stimulate the will just as well as it stimulates the other faculties. We are less likely to become disheartened by a discipline if we do not find things horribly difficult at first; and we are more likely to be excited by a discipline if it brings us into contact with things that are, on the surface at least, much more new and interesting than our ordinary life.

And, to finish things off, I should observe that a knowledge of the local cannot be very easily attained without some knowledge of the foreign. For, a knowledge of the local does not really deserve that name unless it involves some knowledge of how the local is distinctive from everything else; and that knowledge is surely easier to come by when one has some knowledge of everything else. I cannot say that I know myself if I know only that I have ten fingers and toes, one heart, and any other attribute of body or mind that applies equally well to all other human beings as it does to myself; and a good way to extend my knowledge beyond this anonymous state, is to learn something more about other people. And as with knowledge of self, so with knowledge of country and of town and of family.

This point about self-knowledge is less apt to my travel writings than are the points about starting easy and about getting excited. Most of my travel writings are cluttered, excited, and somewhat lavish descriptions of the places and people that I come across as I go along my way. At least, this is how my travel writings have gone up to this point, and that seems like a good reason to assume that they will carry on in the same fashion. I could go on to discuss my reasons for choosing to report on my travels at all, and my reasons for choosing the written word as my medium of reportage (rather than photography, say) but this time I will spare the reader any more ponderousness, and invite them, if they are suitably inclined, to read the things I write about my travels.

Travel and Philosophy

2007-03-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

A philosophy of pure thought is for an existing individual a chimera, if the truth that is sought is something to exist in. To exist under the guidance of pure thought is like travelling in Denmark with the help of a small map of Europe, on which Denmark shows no larger than a steel pen-point - Aye, it is still more impossible. --Kirkegaard.

PHAEDRUS: …you don't go away from the city out over the border, and it seems to me you don't go outside the walls at all.

SOCRATES: Forgive me, my dear friend. You see, I am fond of learning. Now the country places and the trees won't teach me anything, and the people in the city do. But you seem to have found the charm to bring me out. For as people lead hungry animals by shaking in front of them a branch of leaves or some fruit, just so, I think, you, by holding before me discourses in books, will lead me all over Attica and wherever else you please. --Phaedrus

I’m not sure that travel broadens the mind. But it does underline the narrowness of experience. -–Joe Bennett

To a philosopher, travel is unnecessary. To a philosopher, travel is also insufficient; and it may also be undesirable. Nevertheless, there is practice (I will it “active philosophy”) which resembles philosophy, and which is considerably advanced by the practice of travel. In the following I will discuss the relationship between philosophy and travel, and between standard philosophy and “active philosophy”, and in doing so I hope to shed a bit of light on all of those practices, and especially upon my reasons for doing a bit a travel here and there. Unfortunately, I will also find it necessary to rush across great areas of philosophical interest with a very hasty and weak sort of light. Hopefully, however, the overall effect is that I do more to illuminate these topics than to darken them.

The independence of philosophy and travel, as described in the first two sentences of this essay, seems to me to be true historically. My small knowledge of the history of philosophy suggests to me that philosophers qua philosophers feel no great need to stick their thumb out, so to speak, and wait to be driven over the horizon. One thinks of Plato, who seems disinclined to leave the city, at least in the above quote, unless he is tempted out of there by learned discourses. One thinks of Kant, shut up in Konigsberg; and of Descartes, huddled in his oven to write his Meditations. All of them embody a view of the philosopher as above or outside the world of travellers, or otherwise detached from it.

Descartes does offer a counterpoint to the general rule, because he seems to have benefited philosophically from his journeyings through Europe. But this is a weak counterpoint, because Descartes benefited from observing the thinking habits of other people, which is only one part of what travellers usually do; because Descartes observations on his travels surely played only a small part in his writings, acting as an initial stimulus to those writings rather than a thorough-going determinant of their nature; and because in the present-day world the travels of Descartes’ kind are redundant, since the kind of thoughts that Descartes found instructive to observe on his travels can probably be found today in any well-stocked library or well-stocked philosophy department.

Wittgenstein offers another weak counterpoint. He found it useful to travel to Norway and Ireland to produce some of his work. But one would not want to say that these movements through space had much effect on his current of thought. Those movements probably ensured that the current ran as swiftly and smoothly as possible, but I doubt that they had any effect on the direction in which it ran. I expect they were less like the movements of an archeologist, who goes to Africa to study the rocks there; and more like the movements of a mathematician, who goes from one room to another because he is sickened or distracted by the noise in the first room. So philosophers do travel for their philosophy, but they do so to find more stimulating colleagues or a more salubrious environment, and not much more.

Of course, one can make the same point without hiking through the pages of history. What can we learn about the nature of Substance, or the status of the a priori, by spending a week in Southern France? What can we learn about the is-ought gap in the Himalayas, that we cannot learn at a desk? What does the scenery of New Zealand have to tell us about Gettier cases and the corroboration of scientific theories? Very little, except in the sense of offering us a comfortable setting in which to think (and perhaps not even that). Just why this is the case is of course a matter for philosophical discussion, and an empiricist is likely to give a different answer than a Platonist, and both of those answers will probably differ from this one. Here it is enough to note that it is the case: philosophers don’t need to travel, and even if they did need to it would not be much help.

It may even be a hindrance. That is, a philosopher might regard travel as undesirable, especially if she is a Platonist. In that case she would ask: what would Plato have thought of the modern traveller, leaving home for the sake of spectacle and sensual enrichment, for craggy peaks and clear lakes and lying-back-in-the-sun-drinking-cocktails: passive, fat, delighting in pseudo-indigenous pageantry, travelling by pamphlet, facing the world through shaded glass. And she would answer in the obvious way. In answering that way she would probably point me towards one of the problems with talking generally about the activity of travel. For of course not all travellers resemble the person just described, and the more well-informed or adventurous or long-term traveller probably has a different relation with philosophy than all the other sorts of travellers. To save time, however, I won’t bother differentiating different kinds of travellers, and just use “traveller” to refer to someone who sits in between the tiki-tourist and the earnest cultural adventurer.

Despite all of the above, there is of course considerable value in travel, and I do think that some of that value is of a roughly philosophical kind. By this I mean that there is an activity, a domain of thought and action, that is similar but not identical to philosophy, and which is advanced by travel, and is perhaps advanced to its fullest extent only through travel of some kind or another. For want of a better label, I will call this domain “active philosophy.” By contrast, “standard philosophy” is my label for the academic philosophy practiced in orthodox Western university departments). I propose that for each of the main branches of standard philosophy, there is a corresponding branch of active philosophy; and that although the correspondence is pretty rough, it would be misleading to ignore it.

One main branch of philosophy is epistemology. As mentioned above, for an epistemologist there is not much to gain by travelling the world. But for a person who is interested in acquiring knowledge of a practical kind quickly and independently and reliably, it is surely quite a good idea to spend a few months making one’s way about the world, especially about the more challenging parts of the world. Planning, haggling, negotiating, deciding here and now what to do here and now: all of these activities call forth the thinking faculty, and all of them are called forth by travel. Travel cultivates the faculty of practical awareness, of being alert to things in the immediate vicinity, of being alive to the world. This faculty has little to do with epistemology as usually practiced, in subject matter or in method, and a person who is competent at active epistemology is unlikely, by virtue of that competence, to be good at real epistemology. Nevertheless, epistemology is reflection upon knowledge; and one who has mastered this the practical faculty just described, has mastered one kind of knowledge. (Even this is a pretty weak connection. Fortunately, however, it is the weakest of the three that I will discuss)

And what about metaphysics? Do travellers gain a kind of awareness that corresponds to the kind of awareness that a metaphysician is looking for? I think they do gain such an awareness, though again the correspondence with scholarly metaphysics is loose. Scholarly metaphysics, I am told, is the study of the “fundamental nature of reality.” And although the “reality” to the traveller investigates is a bit different to that which the metaphysician investigates, I do think that the former, by virtue of their travel, achieves a kind of ontological insight. It is a less grand sort of insight than that phrase suggests, but it is insight nonetheless. It is insight concerning what human lives basically consists in. One stays at home, and becomes preoccupied by a particular set of problems and interests, whether they are personal or financial or philosophical. One goes abroad, and discovers that a lot of other people are preoccupied by problems and concerns of a completely different kind. One already knows this when one is at home, in a vague and impersonal sort of way: one only needs to look at a good atlas to see, say, that 57% or the world work in factories and the rest do not; or that 54% of the worlds population practices a religion. But one knows this sort of thing in a different way, a more intense and personal way, when one goes abroad. I won’t try to say what this different kind of “knowing” consists in, and how it differs from ordinary knowing; I’ll just say that, in my current opinion, it is an advance upon the good-atlas way of knowing about the basic constituents of human life.

The insight I have just mentioned can come in two forms, I think: the objective and the subjective. Objectively, one discovers something about what the majority of people do in their lives. Objectively, one also get a more precise awareness of how diverse the world is, how much those different ways of living vary; often, I suspect, the traveler, having gotten this more precise awareness, places the emphasis upon the difference. “I was reminded that the world is wide and full of difference,” writes Joe Bennett of one of his hitch-hiking experiences. And in being so reminded, he has gained renewed awareness of a state of affairs that may, without too much strain, be regarded as “fundamental” to the reality of the human world.

Subjectively, the traveler discovers something about which way of living is best suited to himself. One could think of this as an ontological discovery, since it concerns fundamentals: it concerns the basic units of one’s life around which the rest will be organized, whether the basic units are Work and Family, or Writing, or Other People. But probably it is better to think of it as an ethical discovery, since it concerns what one values most highly. And as an ethical discovery, it belongs in the next paragraph.

Ethics is concerned with evaluating competing courses of action. Travel both causes a person to discover courses of action that were previously hidden from him, and to discover new reasons for favoring courses of action that were previously unappealing to him. One discovers new ways of living, as mentioned above; one also discovers new manners of being, new ways of holding oneself or behaving oneself or new ways of interacting with others. One discovers personality types that had never occurred to one as possibilities (not that one would have denied their possibility, if someone had asked about them; just that one did not have the experience or the imagination to conceive of them, and to ask the question of oneself). Perhaps one has always tended to favour introverts, not having known any appealing extroverts; and then one travels, and begins to see how certain shades of extroversion, which were previously clouded in one’s mind by the unattractive shades of this characteristic, are actually attractive. Perhaps one has always thought of religious people as rather foolish and confused, and their claims to spiritual superiority as just so much folly and confusion; and then one travels, and discovers that certain people do possess a kind of calmness, an honest, well-grounded, desirable sort of calm, that seems to be a result of their religious sort of life. Discoveries of this kind are certainly aided by travel. They may also be aided by detached philosophical reflection, but I do not think that they can be fully discovered solely in that abstract manner, since they have a large empirical component to them: to know them, we need to know something about our responses to certain kinds of person or activity. These discoveries are beyond abstract thought in a way that resembles the way in which our attitude towards vanilla icecream is beyond abstract thought.

The above paragraph is concerned with ethics insofar as ethics is a matter of deciding between competing courses of action. But ethics might also be a matter of acting in accordance with those decisions. I say “might” because success in ethics, in the scholarly version of that discipline, is by-and-large independent of a persons success in acting ethically; and I avoid saying “is not” because it is plausible to think that this independence of thought and action represents a failure to be properly philosophical. That debate is irrelevant to the claim I want to make here, however, which is that active ethics (by which I mean the practice of acting in accordance with ethically sound beliefs) is a practice which is, firstly, closely related to scholarly ethics, and secondly, that is advanced by travel. I take it that the first claim is obvious (though precisely what is the nature of close relation between ethics and active ethics, is not so obvious. I will discuss that relation a bit later on). The second claim is supported by the fact that travel can furnish us with practical skills that enable us to act ethically. One such practical skill is intellectual, and has already been discussed (under the label of active epistemology). Other practical skills are social. Through travel we learn to communicate with other people, tolerate their eccentricities, appreciate their virtues, and generally to be agreeable to them; and without these skills, our chances of living a fully moral life are lessened. (Though I am not sure just what sort of moral negligence would be involved, if someone failed to cultivate these skills. Are we morally obliged to be charismatic? I think I’ll discuss that kind of question in another post.) And practical skills, of the kind that are developed through travel, can influence our ability to live well in other ways. If we want to devote our lives to some sort grand, ethically driven program of reform, whether in politics or in education or in science, usually we will need a greater amount than usual of eloquence and charm and facility with people; and surely travel can help to cultivate these qualities as well.

At this point I should acknowledge that nothing I have said here is new or surprising. Indeed, the practices that I have grouped under the label of “active philosophy” are so well-known as to be easily summarized by cliches. What I mean by a facility in “active epistemology” is really just what people mean when they talk about being able to “think on one’s feet” and “keep your wits about you.” And what I mean by a facility for “active metaphysics” is really just what people mean by “having a sense of perspective,” or a “strong sense of identity.” Perhaps “active ethics” is less easily summarised in commonplace terms. But even there one does not have to grope around for too long to find an everyday approximation to my newly-invented term: being an active ethicist is more-or-less the same as being a good bloke. Nevertheless, I think there is some genuine value in doing what I have just done: there is value, that is, in trying to clarify and re-describe concepts that we usually treat, lighthandedly, as cliches.

There is also value in trying to describe the relationship between standard philosophy and the main elements, just described, of active philosophy. One could interpret Kirkegaard as trying, in the quote given at the start of this post, to give such a description. This might be a faulty interpretation: it may be wrong, for example, to think that Kirkegaard’s “philosophy to exist in” is my “active philosophy.” My purposes here are not to accurately describe the thoughts of a past philosopher, however, so any misreading of Kirkegaard I commit is beside the point. The point of presenting Kirkegaard’s metaphor is to suggest one way of describing the relation between active philosophy and standard philosophy. The suggestion is that standard philosophy is useless when it comes to succeeding at active philosophy; and the reason for this is the coarseness of the information that standard philosophy gives us about the best way to think and to behave in the world. Standard philosophy is good for certain kinds of large-scale navigation, perhaps, but it is useless in any practical situation.

It would be nice if I could now go on to give a detailed, reasoned account of my attitude towards this view. However, I cannot do that. For one thing, the question of how active philosophy stands in relation to standard philosophy is complicated by the vagueness with which both of those relata are defined, and the fact that the relation may vary over the different branches of each. For another thing, the question about the relation between these two kinds of activity is one version of the question: what is the relation between philosophy and life? And that is the sort of question that you answer over a lifetime, not over a few paragraphs.

The best I can do here is to say that I disagree with Kirkegaard’s view, and to discuss very briefly what thoughts motivate this disagreement. For what it is worth, I propose that Kirkegaard’s metaphor can be improved by just a little tweaking: by replacing the map of Europe with a large-scale map of Denmark; and adding in a particular sort of map to represent the kind of guidance that is given by active philosophy: that particular sort of map is, I think, a map of the natural terrain of Denmark, a topological map perhaps. This is an improvement on Kirkegaard’s view because it does justice to the guiding role that standard philosophy can play for active philosophy; and because it recognizes that the two kinds of philosophy really are of different kinds. I will discuss these points a bit more in the paragraphs below.

The first point that standard philosophy can play a “guiding role” in active philosophy. By “guiding role” I mean the role of giving course-grained but widely applicable recommendations about how a person should pursue their active philosophy. Standard philosophy can play such a guiding role, I think, at least in relation to some of the branches of active philosophy. In ethics, for example, our actions can be guided in an obvious way by our philosophizing: by philosophizing, we reach conclusion about how to act, and then act in accordance with those conclusions. And this guiding influence is not just present in this or that region of active philosophy. Rather, it is present in all regions: we are guided by our philosophising (at least potentially) in our long-term projects, our short-term projects, our social actions, out political and our intellectual actions. This is not to say, of course, that standard philosophy is omniscient, that it leaves no room for “play,” no extra work for active philosophy to do. Its influence is general, but it is also course-grained: our philosophising may give us the concepts of “introversion” and “extraversion”, and it may help us to recognize and evaluate the lessons that active philosophy puts forward for us; but it is not in the power of philosophising to encounter those lessons, to come across the attractive extrovert or to live for a while with the inspiring devotee of religion (it may be in the power of the imagination to come across these things; but that is another story).

My second point is that the content of active philosophy differs from that of standard philosophy. The former is made up primarily of a set of clearly articulated beliefs and inferences. Although it refers to the world of action and of things, the procedures of standard philosophy take place entirely in the minds of the philosopher, in such a way, ideally, that its products can be entirely represented in words. Active philosophy, on the other hand, is made up primarily of a set of practical skills: the procedures by which active philosophers pursue their discipline, and the products that come out at the end of those procedures, are actions and sensations rather than thoughts and sentences. One becomes a good active epistemologist mainly by getting practice at “thinking on the spot”; and one shows that one is a good active epistemologist by putting this practice to use in real situations. Similarly with the practical skills that are the domain of the active ethicist. Even active metaphysics, as mentioned above, produces a kind of knowledge that is (in some way that I have not clarified) “different” from ordinary philosophical knowledge. This difference in kind, between active philosophy and standard philosophy, invites us to tweak Kirkegaard’s image in the way I have suggested above: to imagine standard philosophy as a large-scale map of Denmark’s roads, and active philosophy as a map of the country’s natural landscape. The former is one kind of thing, a system of objects whose natures and interconnections can be clearly delineated; and the latter is another kind of thing, a less orderly but more detailed kind of thing than the former. And if we want to go widely and safely through the terrain of life, we need maps of both kinds.

In summary, I have described an activity called “active philosophy.” This activity can be described in correspondence with the activity referred to here as “standard philosophy”; and I have outlined the correspondence as it applies to the three main branches of philosophy. My main purpose here was to say that the orthodox philosopher cannot gain any real benefit from travel; but that the active philosopher can do so. My secondary purpose was to try to say something sensible (though of course not comprehensive) the relation between active and standard philosophy, and I used Kirkegaard’s metaphor to help me in this attempt.

Now, these two purposes have taken up far more time and far more space than I intended them to take up, and as a result my overarching purpose may have been lost: that is, I may not have given a very clear account of my interest in travel, and my reasons for writing about it. (For one thing, I have not given an exhaustive account of my reasons for travelling: I have only given an account of why a philosophically inclined person might have reasons to travel). I have three excuses for my wobbliness of subject-matter and long-windedness of expression. First, there’s some value discussing the relation between travel and philosophy, and about active philosophy, even if this discussion leads one into one or two sidetracks. Second, I do intend to write a shorter and more palatable post about my travels, which I hope will fill in the gaps that are left by this one. (For example, it will give an account of why a literature-inclined person might have reasons to travel.) Thirdly, I did not force you to read this (but thank-you very much if you have, and I wait enthusiastically for your comments, however minor they might be).

Cats (and Mountains)

2007-03-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

This poem is to celebrate the first comment on this blog. The connexion between the poem and the comment is loose, but perceptible.

A cat is always a cat.
Every moment a pose,
Every movement its own,
Lithe, clean, unclothed.

A cat is always alone.
It is unbothered by this.
It is its own centre,
Unclaimed and comfortably lost,

So there is a stillness
Peculiar to cats: a steady,
A steadying sway,
That starts in their eyes.

There is a kind of silence, too,
Unique in a cat. It does not
Make noise, but brings out
The noises in other things,

And he wanders through
Wanders round and through,
Through a room, unstilling things,
A patch of wandering gravity.

He does not speak. His mouth,
His inside-out triangle,
Is closed. His tail moves.
It moves slowly, making strange smiles.

Signpost 2.1

2007-03-20T21:56:00.000-07:00

It strikes me that Signpost 2, as it stands, does not do what Signpost 2 set out to do, which is to give a thorough summary of the current state of my blogging. Here are two necessary additions.

First, visitors. Clearly my blog is not sagging with comments, and unless there are hundreds of avid but deeply shy readers out there, it follows that my blog is not overflowing with readers. I said at the start that I hoped to be able to justify the continued existence of this blog irrespective of the size of its readership. This remains true, but it is also true that a few more readers would be a pleasant addition. I realise now that I have been thinking of a new blog as if it is a new shop, and with a shop you can be guaranteed a certain amount of custom just be being physically placed in an area with people in it. But of course a new blog is more like a new phone-number, or any other new site in the electronic world. In the electronic world you cannot attract people through sheer physical proximity because physical proximity has no meaning in that world.

From now on I hope to attract readers through electronic proximity, by commenting, linking, etc. I should also update my blogroll, which at the moment stands as an insult to all the blogs that I read and consider as worthwhile but which are not Defect Perfection.

I should mention, however, that this blog has received more than zero comments. The first comment came from a person called Scarlet PervyGirl, and here is a poem to celebrate the occasion.

Second, travel. Here and here I have posted introductions to my travel writing in general. But I should also say where I am travelling at the moment. I am travelling around New Zealand, a country that swirls around the ankles of the globe and is generally regarded, by those who know, as an all-right place to travel. I travel by thumb and I sleep in Backpacker hostels (these hostels, by the way, are of quite a high standard in New Zealand, and almost match the method of hitch-hiking for friendliness, comprehensiveness, and ease of use). Here is a map of New Zealand. Here are the places I have visited and written about:

Kaikoura (on the way from Christchurch to Wellington)
Wellington (and again. The capital city, located at the foot of the North Island)
Paraparaumu Beach (on the West Coast of the North Island)
Otaki Gorge (inland from Paraparaumu beach)
Wanganui (on the Western armpit of the island)
Mt. Taranaki (on the rounded piece of land that juts out of the mainland half-way up the west coast of the North Island)
Tongariro National Park (and again. In the middle of the North Island, just below the big lake)

I hope to update this list as I go along.

Signpost 2

2007-03-06T14:48:00.000-08:00

It is over a month since I started this blog and it is time for another signpost. So far, progress has been pleasing in some areas, less pleasing in others. I have written quite a bit of stuff about my travels, and have written one or two introductions to the different kinds of material that I intend to put in this blog. However, I have not written as many introductions as I would have liked (Reviews, Travel, Diablog, Borax and History are still ungrounded by any introductory foundation); I have not written much Philosophy at all (despite having a few draft notions and one or two Good Starts On Paper, my blog writings in this area are, at the moment, a tapestry of loose ends); and I have not yet finished that thing I started about a month ago, and which I called, pompously and optimistically, “Education as an Ideal: Part I” (as if it was the first installment of a comprehensive ten-part series, to be published, perhaps, in three leather-bound volumes).

Where I have neglected some topics, this neglect is due partly to a lack of time and partly to a lack of interest. One thing that I have discovered in the last few months, and which I will no doubt discover more keenly in the next few years, is that it is quite hard for a person to sustain a habit of substantial intellectual reflection and imaginative activity, if he or she is not fortunate enough to have made that habit into a job or a subject of full-time study. Jotting down one or two Philosophical thoughts (for example) a day, and discoursing at length on the subject once or twice a week, might not actually be easy for a person doing Philosophy at University, say. But I expect that it is easier, more natural, for such a person to maintain such a habit, than a person who spends their day at an accounting firm, or doing mathematics. And even people who spends their day travelling, if they want to do the things that travellers do, has to make a big effort of the mind and the will, if they also want to do some of the things that philosophers do. Travelling is a full-time job, though an unusually pleasant one. If you’re tramping, for example, you get up at 7am and spend the morning eating and preparing your pack; walk until 2 or 3pm; unpack, prepare a meal, lie down, make yourself agreeable to your hut companions, think about preparing another meal; make yourself more agreeable to your hut companions; eat your meal. At the end of it all there may be enough time to jot down a few thoughts on the people and the scenery, as I have been doing. But there’s not much time left for other forays of the mind; and not much energy left either (in my experience, physical exercise comes very easily after a period of wearying mental work; but I don’t think it works so well the other way around. Physical fatigue seems to seep into the mind in a way that mental fatigue does not seep into the body. Perhaps, then, it would be a good idea to do any mental work early in the day).

As I say, neglect of those other forays of the mind is also due to lack of interest. And to explain myself here I am going to enter into a little semi-philosophical discussion of these things we call Interests.

I am frequently surprised and alarmed by the extent to which my level of interest in this or that activity correlates with seemingly unsubstantial factors ie. factors that should not, from a rational standpoint, have much effect upon my evaluation of the activity which engages my attention. Such a factor, for example, is the level of involvement in the activity: almost without fail, my evaluation of the worth of the activity X alters in direct proportion to the amount of time I spend engaged in that activity. Now that I have written that down, it strikes me as a psychologically natural pattern of behaviour, and not something to be alarmed about. Our interest in a novel increases the more time we spend with its scenery and its characters, the more richly it congeals around us; and our interest in the novel declines when we have spent time away from it, when the places and people in it are scattered and half-hidden and do not cohere properly. And if the interests of humans work in this way in novels, it is unsurprising if they work this way in life.

Nevertheless, it would indeed be alarming if this rule both held all the time, and held for one’s intellectual evaluation of a novel as well as one’s psychological interest in the novel. This would be alarming because one’s evaluation of a novel would then be constantly and easily changed. Such re-evaluations, in small amounts, may not be a cause for alarm: human fallibility means that our first judgement, or even our hundredth judgement, may be in need of refinement. But if one’s re-evaluations occur at such a rate, as they could occur if evaluation of novel X varies proportionately to time-recently-spent with novel X; then there is indeed cause for alarm. There is cause (I suppose) to doubt the validity of any of those evaluations, for the reason (I suppose) that each one is highly unstable.

(Now I see, belatedly, that one might arrive at this conclusion by a much shorter route, by making the non-daring assumption that the correlation here indicates a dominant cause ie. if we assume that the dominant determining factor of one’s evaluation of X is time-recently-spent reading X. Now, clearly this factor should not be dominant. If it is dominant, then one’s evaluation will neglect factors that should be highly influential, such as the quality of the characterisation in the book and the fluidity of the prose.)

And so it goes with activities in life. There is indeed cause for alarm if my evaluation of activity X is highly unstable, and it will be highly unstable if that evaluation correlates with time-recently-spent engaged in activity X. This state of affairs is alarming because I want to settle on an activity that is somehow best for me, and to make sure I settle on the right activity I need to evaluate the candidate activities in a sound way.

Perhaps I can find my way out of this problem with the help of the distinction made earlier, between an intellectual evaluation and a psychological interest. Perhaps it is only the latter that behaves in the alarming, unstable way, while the former is stable and unalarming. So, when I complain that my interest in writing amateur Philosophy, which I thought had some substance to it, seems to disappear simply because I spent some time away from that activity, perhaps what I really mean is something much more innocent. I do not mean that my prior interest in Philosophy has turned out to be completely illusory and fickle. I just mean that at the present moment I do not have that sense of immediate enthusiasm for the activity, which you get when you have been immersed in it for some time; a sense which is analogous, perhaps, to the visceral, unreflective sort of excitement that one feels when immersed in a plot, whether it is a well-written plot or not. My interest has not dried up; it has just fallen into a state of surface calm.

The problem with this is that in real life it is quite hard to disentangle one of those attitudes from another. What counts as an intellectual evaluation and what counts as a psychological interest? How do you recognise them? And in making an evaluation, one needs to consider one’s impulses, one’s psychological hunches about an activity. But how does one distinguish between the psychological hunches that arise merely from a time-dependant interest, and those which arise because of more stable properties of oneself and the activity one is evaluating? This may be possible in principle, but it must be quite hard in practice.

One could go on, I suppose, to wonder whether or not there is any point in trying to settle upon one practice just by thinking about it. Perhaps there is, for each person, a large group of activities that have about the same worth, and no amount of earnest contemplation could separate one from the rest. And it is almost never the case that a person is asked to choose one activity at the complete exclusion of the others. And, although time-spent-doing X should not correlate with value-placed-on X, it probably does correlate with degree-of-certainty-in-evaluating-X: so anyone who wants to ascertain soundly the relative worth of his options should spent a goodly amount of time pursuing each of them, as a kind of trial. And even if one might lose something by failing to settle upon some most-highly-valued activity, perhaps there is something to gain, a sense of freedom perhaps, from settling on nothing very quickly.

All of that could, I am sure, be spelt out more thoroughly, and with more skill, by other people. Here it is enough to repeat that I have not only lost the time to engage in the activity of Philosophising, but also, in one sense or another, lost interest in that activity. I do intend, in the next few weeks, to make some effort to rediscover both some interest and some time for that activity. However, it is likely that the results will not amount to much: where I do post on Philosophical topics, those posts will probably just be brushed-up versions of things I have already written, or filled-out versions of things that I have half-finished.

Apart from those Philosophical odds and ends, I hope in the next month or so to continue writing short descriptive pieces about the places I encounter in my travels. I also want to write pieces about the people I meet, as I have not done much of that so far. On top of that, I hope to supply introductions for the categories that are not yet so supplied, so that visitors can see more easily what I am going to place in those categories, and why on earth I would want to devote large parts of my spare time to doing so. If there is any time left over, I will post some extracts from, and reviews of, some books that I have been reading while traveling, or thinking about reading, or wondering if I should bother thinking about reading. These are:

A Land of Two Halves (Joe Bennett hitching around NZ and writing about it.)
All Visitors Ashore (CK Stead’s novel about love and politics and Rangitoto Island, set in the 1950s.)
Philosophy As It Is (An introduction to the subject that I purchased from a Wellington second-hand bookstore; and which I may dip into every now and then).
The Penguin History of New Zealand (Michael King, perhaps NZs most well-known and most-admired historian, summarises the birth and adolescence of his country. Whether or not that country has reached adulthood yet is something that the book will shed light on, I hope).

Stupidity: A Sonnet

2007-03-06T01:51:00.000-08:00

Stupidity, the least poetic vice,
Is grey, heavy grey. Golden lust, black hate,
Crimson rage: all excite, if not entice.
(Consider, too, the incompletely chaste.)
But simple lack of sense? Dull, dull. No sheen,
No blazing devil’s hue, no tempting shade.
Before, no wicked strategem; and then,
No passion or despair, just dumb dismay.
He who, having looked a fool, belabours grief,
Betrays a spirit absent as his mind;
And if the spirit finds itself, and speaks:
“I missed a step. So what? Why mope? With time
I’ll ease the sore with verse, erase the fault.”
Mind replies: “Don’t be so obtuse, you dolt."

Lichen, Moss, Shrubs, Trees

2007-03-06T01:37:00.000-08:00

There is a place in New Zealand (never mind where) you can go up high and see the steam coming out of cracks in the earth. Go to that place, walk downhill for half an hour or so, then follow the track for two days. Do this and you come across a lot of natural stuff that is rich and varied and worth writing about.

High up there are great curving dunes of shingle, dotted with weird rocks and clumps of earth with moss and small bushes covering them. The rocks are gray, flat-faced; the moss is varied, and the small shrubs are low and stiff. There are one or two tussocks and one or two mountain daisies, little explosions of rigid leaves.

There is lichen up high, too. Go into the mountains and look around and you start to appreciate the hardiness but also the scaly beauty of these little spreading growths. They grow on the peaks of mountains, feeding on the rocks like rust and spreading about in dots and in patches. It grows in bright green beds, minutely mottled. It grows also in frosty white patches, and in little flaky black flowerings.

Here is moss. Here is a white growth, greenish at the edges, that spreads over the plain in soft, rounded cushions. It is white in the sun like lumps of spring snow. From a distance these lumps look smooth and homogenous, but up close you can see that they are made up of thousands of little starry heads, each one no wider than a sandfly and all massed together to make a soft smooth pin-cushion hump.

There are other small things close to the ground. Some are all starry like biddids. One is white and dense and clumped together in tight little constellations. Down here is something also made of tiny heads, but each head is less like a star and more like a little tussock, a finely furred little tuft.

The rocks are little forests of life. Lichen in layers, like the blemishes on elderly skin; velvety moss in dark crimson, almost black; small shrubs; tiny, delicate, bell-shaped flowers, with white petals minutely veined and centres yellow as buttercups.

Shrubs, shrubs, shrubs. Here is a shrub which, from afar, is a mass of up-going fingers, all densely fractalled so that you have fingers growing out of fingers growing out of fingers, and all as vertical as cacti. Up close you notice that each one of those fingers is decorated with minute, overlapping leaves, all tightly arranged to give the appearance of scales. The leaves are all neatly stacked so that all the way down each of those scaly fingers you get the same cross-section, a stubby, four-pointed star.

Over there is another shrub of the same form, only the fingers are thinner and the scales finer; perhaps it is a younger version of the other shrub, or a different shrub altogether. And over there is another plant, with tighter scales. Here the leaves are slightly opened, the tips displaced slightly from the stem, to make a cylindrical pinecone.

And next to it is something else, with the scales are almost fully open. Here the leaves are not flat and wide, as on the other plants, but thin and sharp, with a faint line down their centre like the slim grooved paddles on a racing kayak. And over there, on another mini forest of greenery, the scales are round, round as dinner plates but no bigger than your pupils, and they are fully opened now. The leaves are imperfectly aligned, so if you were very small those leaves would function as an staircase, and you could wind your way up the stem going from one leathery plate to the next in a green spiral.

There are other shrubs too, ones with tiny tiny spikes for leaves, and little green bracken-like things with tidy no-nonsense leaves in a tidy no-nonsense green, and with the tidy fronds overlapping in different directions to make a tidy green thatched canopy two inches off the ground. Daisies with stiff green leaves aggressively spiked and a yellow-green flame at each base. Tussock stems elegantly bowed, bending under the weight of the white pointy leaves at their tips.

And the colours? Christmas-tree green, olive, yellow-green, orange-green, red-green. Pale green seasoned with yellow. Traffic-light green tinged with orange. Green stems tipped with white, so that a tree of these stems looks like a tree on a frosty morning in winter. Green-yellow stems tipped with a brighter green-yellow, so that even at midday a tree of these stems looks as if it is catching the evening sun. Overall, the colour very blended and varied, mixed and layered and dappled, with no smooth gradings and no sharp edges. Complex, richly patterned, life-like.

After the tussock and the low stiff shrubs there is the beech forest. Beech leaves are small and round, no larger than your little fingernail. They grow in numbers in horizontal sheets on the many-fingered branches that extend horizontally out from the trunks, giving the forest its distinctive tiered look. When you look up to the canopy and see the sun or the sky coming through, the sun or the sky appears in a million layered circles and semi-circles and thwarted arcs, all winking and shifting like city lights in the evening.

Every tree, even the small ones, are striped and dappled by lichen. It is luxuriously textured stuff. Here it is stuck fast to the tree like a patch of dry skin; on the tree just there, leaning over slightly, it is blistered and peeling like hot paint; in this trunk, a dead trunk with wrinkles under its limbs as under an armpit, the lichen has a tubular structure, like coral. Sometimes the tubes open outwards in little round crates with white rims.

Through it all is a white, loosely bunched thing that consists in tiny filaments branching off eachother and branching again and again. It gets thinner at each branch, like the network of veins and capillaries that you see in diagrams of the human lungs. This veinous white stuff, tinged with pale green, is in the tangled hair of the trees, on the trunks, and on the top of the wooden poles that mark the track on the walk.

When I walked through all this flora, the small shrubs in the open area and the dark green and mottled beech forest, it was wet and raining slightly. Little globes of rain bowed the tussocks into semi-circles, and spider-webs into drooping hammocks. In one place the web was so fine that all you knew of it was the collection of tiny but precisely reflective drops that threaded themselves onto its invisible wires, and the drops were suspended in the air like a system of glass planets. The rain made the green of the leaves a richer and deeper green, and the trees were stained black.

Rocks, Tongariro Crossing, Rocks

2007-03-06T01:29:00.000-08:00

The other day I did the Tongariro Crossing, and because of the fine blue weather I could well see that it is a rock-filled place up there, a crumbling Stonehenge of a place. There are rocks like teeth, all kinds of teeth. There are bared teeth, dull white with gums of moss and black lines marking the gaps between the long white slabs. There are broken teeth, chipped and rotted with moss and gnashing upwards from the sides of hills. There are breathing mouths, mouths with no teeth but great steamy breaths instead, curling over the edges of cliffs and dissolving round the woollen socks of walkers; and there is a pair of open jaws as well, black inside and black teeth sticking down from a black cavern splattered with white as if with blood and yawning out of the crater-wall at the top of Ngaurohoe.Rocks like truffles on the flats, deep black and multifariously lumped. Rocks like coal, flat-faced, many-faced, sharp-edged, dully shining, and black too, the kind of black that looks as if it will make a charcoal mess on your hands if you so much as breath on it. Great heaps of truffles and coal gather on the hillsides like moss and gathering moss on their dark faces themselves. Rocks coloured like chalk, a rich colour as if the pigment goes all the way down, and arranged in mosaics on the sides of mountains, unmoving mandalas laid down so carelessly by the chemical rain of volcanos. A mosaic of red rocks, rusty on the mountain side like a great lichen dappling on the surface of the mountainside. Rocks with lichen dappling on their surface. Ordinary rocks. Ordinary, dusty-dirty rocks, cut-your-bare-feet toe-stubbers, slightly orange slightly yellow and good for crushing into shingle and holding down tents in the wind and not much else I should think. Rocks sliced in two, one slice missing and the other slice with a sharp-edged crater like half of a split marble. Rocks red as a red desert. Rocks white as bird-shit, black as flies, and the red-desert rock stains a rock-face with a bashed gramophone horn of smoke, with a layer of black-fly rock above it in the same shape, only more bashed, and bird-shit rock splattering the face under the red-desert gramophone as if the bottom line of the gramophone were leaking, with a line of white on the lower edge. From far away the whole thing, smoky bashed old desert, with a big tube in the hillside opened up like a windpipe with a gray crust on the outside and the red dust dripping round the inside and some stones falling out the lower edge, from far away the whole thing like an open wound, bright and free and weeping in the high air, and a crust of skin on either side untouching. On a plane as flat as a lake, rocks. Big rocks widely spaced, preoccupied as a herd of cows. Rocks like human faeces, elongated, rudely clumped, messy as a skinned sausage. Rocks like rabbit faeces, light brown in neat circles. Rocks like cattle faeces even, great cow-pats of lava folding down the slopes in great cow-pat layers, not so fresh as once before and cracking at the edges, cracking and splitting at the edges into little fiords. Layered rocks. Layers you can touch from the track, long and narrow and round at the edges like a pile of surfboards. Layers sweeping up in proud angles up on top of hills, prows and visors, and layers making terraces on the sides of other hills, greenish on the top faces and long low cliffs where one terrace drops down to the next. Layers in the rocks with orange lines in between, orange lines like cobwebs on the rock-face. Rivers of rocks. Thin creeks, widely spaced, fiddling down in clay lines from the tops of long ridges to the bottom where they disappear. Wide rivers of rock, orange rock and rock ground to black sand, sweeping down the hills in great highways of rock, widening quickly from a point like a highway seen from a low angle, and also stringy, tangled rivers of rock and mud, tangled hairs of light rock and gray rock running across the plane in dry rivers. Rocks like cemeteries. Black rocks the size of golfballs. White rocks the size of golfballs, seasoning the plain. Black rocks on the hills in shingle clusters. Rocks like wrecked cars up close, and shrinking to full-stops from a distance. Rocks really pebbles that line the green lakes, chemical-green lakes, with the rocks around the edges making a minute frill around the edges and the rocks in the border shallows showing up yellow-green and the shores of gray rocks on the beach like the dull crust around a precious stone you’ve found inside a dull rock and split the rock into ringed steaks. Large rocks on a hill like an old old building, a temple or fort that’s crumbled down now and left its founding stones broken on the top and the crumbs all scattered down the slopes, smaller the further down you go. Black rocks like an old old battleground, all charred limbs and heads and spotted with mossy blood and dripping too. Rocks light as wood, black volcano rocks that file down your boots and rasp away your shins. Rocks that stab your heel on their wheeling way down the mountain, a high mountain and conical and slightly concave and high, high so that from the top everything else looks flat, even the stretch we climbed up earlier and tore our lungs on the steep rocks there. Rocks that fill your pack so that you have a hard time sitting down and a harder time getting up, and rocks that push your pack into your head into the rock on the ground when you’re on a steep bit on all fours. Rocks that make their way into your knees and clash at awkward angles, grinding away down there and jolting out your legs at strange angles every now and then. Rocks from the sun that fall down in rays and deliver headaches from on high. Rocks in your legs and chest, so when you stop and undo your chest-strap there is a great release, an expansion and relaxation, as if you’ve undone your chest altogether and all your sweaty innards have slid out, relieved. Rocks in your pack so that when you take it off you are much too light, and your walk feels strangely out of time, too easy like peddling with the chain off. Rocks that fill your head with rocks. Rocks, rocks, rocks. I went and did the Crossing the other day, and it’s a rock-filled place up there, a crumbling Stonehenge of a place.

Mt. Taranaki Undresses

2007-03-06T01:23:00.000-08:00

Mt. Taranaki is beautiful but coy. It is one of the worlds most well-formed cones, second only to Mt. Fuji for the shape and symmetry of its figure. And, as for a lot of mountains and as for other well-formed things, such as cats and horses, every pose that Mt. Taranaki strikes seems to be archetypal: every pose seems to be just the sort of pose that you would expect a mountain to strike. There is, for example, the pose that you see on a fine day if you drive up to New Plymouth from Harewa, cutting (roughly) down the diameter of the (roughly) circular abutment on the West Coast of the North Island of New Zealand, the West fin on Maui’s fish. If you do that you will see that shape and symmetry in full display, the small, tidy peak and the long slightly concave flanks running onto the plain in an immense ramp. Then there is the snow-capped pose, seen from the side, where the top quarter of the mountain is white as a night moon and shines wetly in the sun; the snow line is the same all the way round, but it is not a smooth line, and where the sides are too steep or too nicely aligned to the sun (or something) to carry snow, the mountain juts upwards in long peninsulas of rock. The same mountain, viewed from above, has a puddle of snow that fully covers the rock in the centre and then splashes outwards, like a many-fingered snow-flake.

There are a number of obscured poses as well, where the mountain is partly hidden. Hidden by a foreground hill, the mountain shows only its tidy peak and the curve of one slope, which is usually steeper than the slope of the hill and so curves elegantly out of sight. Hidden by a turban of cloud, only the long flanks show. In the morning or evening sun those flanks can be seen in clear relief, and they have a chiselled, muscular look, starting out very wide and tapering into thin ridges as they go higher. When the sun does not reach those flanks they are softer, not so aggressively three-dimensional, and you notice more the long, slow, curve of the outer slopes, dark against the cloud and smooth except for one or two tiny imperfections, little dents and gashes and wrinkles that show up against the light background.

Most of the time when I was in a position to view the mountain it assumed one or other of its hidden poses. Mostly it was obscured by cloud, thin and ghostly cloud that you can see moving along the ground in slow whorls, or thick grey cloud that makes everything go noticeably darker. Usually there is enough cloud to entice the viewer; too much to satisfy entirely. Standing on the neighbouring Pouakai range, we peered through the cloud and waited like boys peering through the steam at a naked woman in a sauna. Here the cloud whorls away slightly, only to replaced by another confounding whorl. Here it thins, and an outline can be made out in the haze, but it thickens again and the outline is smudged away. You wait an hour and all you get is a dim view of an upper flank, a hazy nipple, an outline of a leg but no detail, the suggestion of an eyebrow. It is not much, but it is enough to hold you there and leave you waiting for a bit longer, stubbornly optimistic.

When the mountain finally revealed herself to us it was late evening, dark and getting darker. On the coast the lights of New Plymouth blinked and jostled. There was a range of low peaks to the South West of us and it was black black black against the pale clear sky. The silhouettes were perfect: precise edges; flat, featureless bodies. It is plausible to describe these silhouettes as bits of black paper stuck onto the sky, but it is not entirely satisfactory, and doesn’t quite do them justice. To grasp their great blackness I find it better to invert the paper cut-out image and imagine that the sky has been cut away rather than added to, that a hill-shaped area of the pale blue sky has been sliced away, and what you see in that sliced-away area is the blackness of space, the blankness of space: a blackness with depth, blackness hiding blackness.

Since it was roughly to the East of where we were standing, Mt. Taranaki was not silhouetted in this way. It was hazy and pale, and we could only just make out the skirt of bush that spreads out from her waist and folds into pleats on the lower stretches, folds into great gullies where the water has worn through the soft volcanic rock, gullies we walked through sweatily the next day.

The moon was silver. Or rather, silver is the best approximation one can find to the colour that the moon was on that evening. For a long time people believed that the moon and everything above it were made of a higher substance, a substance that could not be compared to anything that you could find on earth. Looking at the moon on an evening like this you can see why people might believe such a thing. The strange thing is that, in a place like this, it is easy to imagine that it is not only the moon and the stars and planets that are made out of this lofty matter, the quintessence, but the hills and the mountains as well. Even the bushes and rocks that we sit on and brush against along the track: even these look uncanny, holy.

And the silence is another uncanny thing, another thing that causes a describer to reach for religious imagery in order to capture it properly. It is strange that a landscape as large and powerful as this can be so quiet as this, and so still. There is a short track that leads down to the Pouakai hut from the ridge, and I sit on this track as it gets dark and listen to the landscape. There is nothing to listen too out there, however, so I end up listening to myself listening to the landscape. When I blink my eyes they make a soft clicking sound, and this sound is far louder than anything around me. I feel the blood thumping in my fingertips.

I sit on the track to wait for my tramping companion, Sytze, to come down from the ridge. I expect him to be about five minutes, but he takes about twenty. “It is very touching,” he says when he arrives. Although there is noone around but us, he says it in a whisper, as if in a church. “It is so… perfect.” I don’t say anything, and we pick our way down to the hut in the light of my torch, tripping on roots because the torch is weak.

Frank Sargeson's "More Than Enough": Review

2007-03-06T00:45:00.000-08:00

Frank Sargeson’s prose style is efficient, direct and self-effacing, and it is well-suited to the man. I have gleaned this from the second book in his autobiographical writings, which is called “More Then Enough”, was written between 1971 and 1973, and chronicles his life and work from the early 30s to the 1970s (or thereabouts), during which time he worked and lived primarily at his borrowed bach on the Auckland’s North Shore. Having approached this book after a sustained bout of Dickens reading, I was particularly struck by the plainness of Sargeson’s style. He tends to avoid punctuation, sometimes in a manner that would invite disapproval from English teachers, and as well as being long his sentences are swift and unmannered, like this one:

It is perhaps remarkable that despite the stream of rejection slips I became accustomed to, and despite my applying a rigorous self-scrutiny to every page of the stories I wrote and finding all of them without any exception falling short of the standards I had set for myself, I never over at least four years doubted that if I would if I persisted at last succeed in writing something which would be clearly marked by a quality special to myself.

If Dickens were to express the same information in a single sentence, it would probably run something more like this:

It is perhaps remarkable, that despite the stream of rejection slips I had become accustomed to; and despite my applying a rigorous self-scrutiny to every page of the stories I wrote; and despite finding that all of those pages, without any exception, fell short of the standards I set myself: I never at once doubted, over at least four years, that if I persisted I would at last succeed in writing something, which would be clearly marked by a quality that was special to myself.

To say that Sargeson’s writing is swift and unmannered is not to say, of course, that it is careless and crude. I imagine that it is pretty hard to find a writing style that allows one to write a hundred and fifty pages of narrative prose without boring or irritating the reader: it would need, for a start, to be even without being monotonous, and varied without being erratic. And to my admittedly untrained ear, it looks as if Sargeson’s style achieves both of those goals while at the same time causing the reader to concentrate rather on the things that he writes than the way in which he writes them. His rhythm, like other distinctive rhythms, is such that after spending a reasonable amount of time in its company the reader starts to discover that rhythm in other writing she reads, whether it be in letters to the editor or other novels: it is as if the reading faculty has been so clearly impressed by this particular mood and pace and style that the imprint has struck down into a deeper tissue than usual, and so that mood and pace and style is still present and active when one goes and reads something else, in a kind of literary after-image. And so in that sense it is a striking style of writing; but for some reason this does not make it an intrusive style. Rather the reverse is true: something in the swiftness of Sargeson’s prose means that he is able to convey a lot of matter clearly and directly and without any interference from the manner of its presentation. At one point Sargeson hints that this directness was an ideal to which he consciously aimed. He writes about one particular afternoon that is very heavily impressed on his memory, for the reason that it brought him a kind of epiphany of style, a discovery that one particular style, which appeared seemingly by accident in a prose piece he was writing that afternoon, was the one for him:

For the time being I was done with elaboration and complexity, with involved and decorated prose which I had hoped would express what I had to say, and by its very complication prove to the reader that what I had to say was valuable. What especially delighted me was that despite the simplicity of my sentences, they could in a page-long sketch achieve an unexpected totality not to be compared with the meagre sum of parts. I remember exactly my day of discovery, a Saturday afternoon when, with speed and sureness never before known to me I wrote the five hundred or so words required for ‘Conversation with my Uncle.’ (51)
Of course it was not quite as easy and immediate as all that. It looks as if Sargeson continued to ask and answer questions about the proper style to adopt well into his writing career, as I suppose most writers do, and it seems like it was a long time before this perfectionist settled upon a style that he could comfortably regard, if not as perfect, at least as satisfactory.

Was language merely the tool the novelist worked with, or was it part of the raw material of life he worked upon? Or was it a complex and difficult combination of both? If language was only a tool then the less attention it attracted to itself the better, and all fine writing and delight in words for their own sake had better be done without. But things of that kind might very well be permitted if language was part of the raw material…And there was no end to the number of questions, all so difficult and complicated I felt I must collapse under their burden. (94)

And other, more specific questions were also in need of answers, one related to the questions about place and identity that Sargeson (as anyone, I am sure) was interested in, and which I want to write about later on: “It made me uncomfortable to remember that I had myself aimed at a kind of Galsworthian prose style. [Does anyone know Galsworth?] So the question became inevitable: whether their might not be an appropriate language to deal with the material of New Zealand life?” (93)

The style that Sargeson finally settled upon (at least as it appears in this book) is distinctive not only for the structure of his sentences; and perhaps his unerring directness might be more easily traced to his language rather than his syntax. Sargeson repeatedly mentions his great admiration for poets, and his even greater admiration for Poets, and considers that, in light of the relative lack of renown enjoyed by this fine species, it might be a good idea if prose writers put more poetry into their writing, so that society in general was properly imbued with their subtle and fragrant art. If he takes up is own advice, however, he does so with enough subtlety that it is hard to find passages that are poetic in any obvious way. His diction is spare, as his use of the more recognisable poetic devices. As far as I can tell this is not, however, a fault, and the absence of any “delight in words for the sake of it”, or metaphor for the sake of it, means both that the “raw material” of his writing comes more directly to the reader, and that the poetic passages are more striking and effective when they do arrive. On the seventeenth page of the book he writes about his response to the news that he most probably should leave his uncle’s farm, saying that he “experienced a kind of shattering.” The figure would be innocuous and uninteresting if it were not that the previous seventeen pages had been written without aid from such devices: his discipline generates a poetry of its own.

The discipline of the prose has its counterpart in the discipline of the man, who had not only to bear the trials that face anyone who wishes to write fiction books prolifically and well, but also the various extra hardships that face an ill person who wished to pursue that vocation in New Zealand in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Only a person who has made a sustained attempt to write good novels will know what are the difficulties involved in such a task, but Sargeson does well to convey them to the normal reader.

This is the true core and essence of the matter: nothing on the paper to begin with, and within a couple of hours, or three or four…there must be words made into sentences, everything scrawled, corrected, deleted, interlined, word kites flying in the margins; yet all with life breathed in, with the heat of energy manifest as wit and humour, pain and tragedy, comedy and laughter, maybe just plain narrative line – all hanging together, fitted to the pattern of what has already appeared upon a hundred pages of two hundred yesterdays, and will appear upon another hundred of many more tomorrows. (77)

…but I knew well that the sort of writing I was attempting could be achieved only by the exercise of a rigorous discipline; that there must be the daily facing up to a blank sheet of paper, on which after so many hours there would be words and sentences – which any intelligent person of good-will might find interesting to read. (31)

Writing too was a mighty consumer of energy, besides a task one often went to with reluctance-not solely on account of its difficulty, but because every problem had to be wrestled with in solitude. (22)

To keep all of this up day after day required not only a great love for literature and a strong hope of eventually succeeding artistically and perhaps also critically, but also a great resolve. Even Sargeson, successful though he eventually became, had times when his interest in writing and his self-belief became frayed, and needed either outside help or mulish resolve to stop them from falling apart altogether. He was told at one point by Denis Glover (New Zealand poet, printer and soldier) that he and his writing were “pre-war”, and that accordingly he should forget about ever getting anything decent published (113); he was, as any writer must be, dismayed and overawed by the genius of past artists (95), and despaired of ever achieving what they had; his work was frequently rejected by his London publishers. And Sargeson’s need to work hard was heightened, at least in his own eyes, by his perceived lack of any great natural talent. He affirms quite blandly and openly that he really was not overly gifted at all, and hence that “everything over many years had to be learned.” And learning meant forcing oneself to learn, especially when disillusion or hardship made learning an unnatural process: at such times “there could be no room for excuses, for any elasticity of discipline, and even a touch of brutality might well be an advantage.” (131) Success requires hard work: somehow I think that has been said before, but it is worth repeating, and Sargesons’ case is interesting not only for the resistance he received from his human limitations (however large they really were), but from the environment in which he lived.

Sargeson’s environment was New Zealand in the middle years of the twentieth century. His relationship with this environment is complex and interesting, and the various shades and changes of that relationship may be regarded as one of the main themes of the book, as I expect they are a theme of Sargeson’s fiction. At its best, Sargeson’s connection with the New Zealand of his time is deep and innate, an aspect of the relationship that is clearest in his devotion to his uncle and his work on a farm somewhere in New Zealand (I don’t think a place-name is given). He writes feelingly about life on the land:

…it was a profound satisfaction to be exhausted at the end of a long day: the work had been its own sufficient reward, and I am sure it was the same with my uncle quite regardless of repetition year after year. Nothing, I told myself, could be more attractive than full stretch of wits and body followed by rest renewal repetition – in other words the prolongation of human life from day to day at a level which kept one right in touch with the commonest elements of human history and experiences. (14)

He writes just as feelingly of his uncle, who like Sargeson lives a life devoted to doing the kind of work in which “every problem encountered had to be wrestled with in solitude” (22), and who was to Sargeson a man of such fine quality that he (Sargeson) hesitated to represent him in fiction, afraid that his art could not do justice to the original.

Unfortunately, and despite this love for the land and for some of the people on it, Sargeson discovered many fellow citizens who were much more likely to fail in doing justice to Sargeson’s art, rather than the other way around. This is not to say that the locals were hostile or indifferent to Sargeson’s particular kind of literature, and that Sargeson resented their criticism; rather, that they were either hostile or indifferent to any kind of literature at all. He is not infrequently nagged by his parents to go and do something useful (law, for example, in which Sargeosn had a qualification and professional experience), instead of “wasting his time” with his literary work. He fields many suggestions, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, sometimes amiable and sometimes not, that his literary work is not really work at all, but a rather frivolous kind of holiday. He is very grateful for the company of Rex Fairburn, partly because the poet and lobbyist was a genuinely witty and learned person, and he gave “conversation which could be as fruitful as it was various as it was always possible”; but also because this intellectual vitality was, in Sargeson’s experience, “a rare kind of thing to encounter in my own country.” (49) When the German poet and scholar Karl Wolfskehl (I do not know this person) arrived in New Zealand, venerable in body and mind, and apparently named by Thomas Mann as “the last European man” (105), Sargeson often found cause to feel pained and embarrassed by how the Auckland response to his presence compared so unflatteringly to the response, say, of Venice; and at such times he “blushed for my country and its inhabitants.” (107) Even Rex Fairburn sometimes dismays Sargeson by setting his clumsy antipodean boot among the subtleties of European cultural life. And, overcome by his “momentous literary discovery” on that unforgettable Saturday afternoon, Sargeson did not expect that the significance of the event would be appreciated by his living companion, a “moderately literate” former sailor who responds to Sargesons’ excitement (“I had just discovered a new way of writing”) by clearing his throat and rustling his paper and doing not much else: and Sargeson writes resignedly that this man was “as good an index as any to the public reception I must expect from the environment I inhabited.” (51) Sargeson’s position is mirrored in that of another of his literary companions, Walter D’Arcy Cresswell; who, despite giving radio talks and readings that Sargeson describes as unsurpassed in New Zealand broadcasting, is deeply in debt with the green-grocer and is frequently in a state of uncertainty (more so than Sargeson) as to the source of his next meal. Meanwhile, Sargeson relies for the material for his weekly radio commentaries on snatches of broadcasts that he overhears while standing in shops or loitering in the evenings outside other people’s homes. (83)

So Sargeson found his own country a source of difficulty and doubt, especially when he compared its cultural achievements with those of England and Europe. But he also doubted his own capacities for the same reason. In the presence of Wolfskehl he is sometimes “weighed down by all that civilisation,” as he was when he walked the streets of England and the continent. For Sargeson, however, this awkwardness is as much an affirmation of his identity as it is a criticism, a reminder that he had in Europe “discovered myself to be truly a New Zealander, with my most truly spiritual place my uncle’s farm.” (111) It is worth looking at two more instances in the book in which Sargeson shows himself to be “truly a New Zealander,” before this essay comes to its belated conclusion: firstly, his garden; next, a man called Harry. These are interesting for their New-Zealandness, but also for other reasons.

For a long time Sargeson’s garden is for him not only a healthy-minded pastime but also one of his primary sources of physical nourishment. Wolfskehl regards this as a mark of his nationality: not only is this fellow able to write books, but he can also “grow his cabbage with his own hand.” (109) Sargeson’s garden is one of the more reticent characters in the book, but it is also one of the most important. As mentioned, it is a continuation of the earthy labour that he carried out at his uncle’s farm. And, as a very time-consuming task that is necessitated partly by his lack of money, it is a symbol of the lowly status in their own society of literary people, and the extra discipline that was required to sustain a writer’s life. But it is representative of the writing process itself, and although Sargeson does not make explicit the resemblance between his writing and his gardening (his style is too spare), the two activities make good companions. They both require some sort of raw matter before their important products can spring into growth. One of the things that I find astounding about anyone who writes fiction prolifically, is where they get their ideas from. To be sure, their material is the thoughts and doings of human beings, and those thoughts and doings are all around us; but one needs so many thoughts and doings to fill up a novel, and many more to fill up a life of novels, and surely such an abundance of output makes the amount of readily available input seem small and inadequate to the task. By way of comparison, arguments are all around us in the same way that thoughts and doings are: but how much more argumentation one must need, how much raw material one must have to collect, before one can write a book on philosophy, and how much more to fill up a lifetime of philosophising. Sargeson’s case is especially interesting, because he seems to have lived in such an isolated manner, detached from the thoughts and doings that he would seem to need in order to form a good base for literature. At times he had qualms about this sort of thing: he reports at one point becoming distressed by the “monstrous” need to question himself about “what exactly was this material of life.” (94)

Most of the time, however, Sargeson seems to have been quite well equipped with this raw stuff, the compost of literature, and perhaps he gained possession of it in much the same way he gained possession of the dead leaves, vegetable waste and manure (left by the horses and carts on his street) that he used as a base for his garden, a necessary grounding and a useful stimulant for the rich and varied produce that, like writing, comes forth in its best and fullest form only after years and years of “arduous and exacting compost-making.” (70) And, as with his compost, so with his writing: the trick, if you want to get enough raw stuff to spawn a novel or a garden, is to pick up the stuff that other people ignore or dislike or miss through the lack of effort. Sargeson loitered out on the road in the hope of some passing horse-shit much as he loitered outside other people’s houses so that (as well as getting his weekly radio broadcasts) he could gather up the manners and habits and phrases and symbols which those people let drop without knowing, and which they would not want to know about even if they could. A collector of other people’s waste does not look like a very salubrious individual: there is something eccentric and anti-social about collecting other people’s horse-shit, and there is the same unhealthy look about someone who makes living out of collecting other people’s habits and vices. But the other trick, to writing as to gardening, is to discover what is rich and healthy and pungent in the dropped waste of others, and to let those virtues feed a growth that will in the end be more palatable and enriching to the people who would not have the mind or the time to discover the same qualities in the original matter: and so Sargeson takes a conversation with an uncle and turns it into a symbol or a lesson, a parable of some kind; and so also writes about the “conforming people” who were “more or less the rule in my environment,” but does so in such a way as to bring forth what is healthy about their way of life, to “show them in their common humanity despite their occupational and household trappings.” (132)

One who benefits from Sargeson’s diligent collection and application of manure, is a man called Harry. Harry has a great fondness for horses, but he has through an underhand manoeuvre from the authorities been banned from the racecourse, and is left to find other work for himself where he can. He lives at Sargeson’s bach for a good thirty years, impressing the writer with a devotion to reading the racing pages that is as steady and unflinching as Sargeson’s devotion to writing his pages of fiction. Sargeson admires Harry for a number of reasons, but most relevant here is his affinity with horses, an affinity that recalls the close link between Sargeson’s uncle and his farm. He writes:

When however I for the first time saw him on the horse, my revision of all previous notions about possible relationships between human beings and horseflesh was instant. I think I reacted much as the American Indians are said to have when they first saw a mounted Spaniard, and supposed that man and beast were blended into a non-divisible entity never before known to him. (66)

Harry’s horse dies, unfortunately, and because of the horseman’s reticence Sargeson is left to imagine how things transpired, an activity that of course was, along with his discipline and his constant collecting of local detail, a vital part of his novel-writing process: a writer, like a gardener, has not only to collect more raw matter than the normal person, but also to work on that matter with a special skill and intensity, so that as much as possible of its natural richness is used to the advantage of its products, and Sargeson’s evocative gifts ensured that he drew as much life as he could out of the seeds he was given: “Great areas of his life and character remained inscrutable to me, but for that very reason he was constantly stimulating my imagination. (71)” And of course there was also his profound interest in the lives of human beings, his “insatiable curiosity about every manifestation of natural life which has never in a life-time deserted me.” (57)

Harry was not a deeply learned German poet, but Sargeson found him both personally attractive and imaginatively fertile; and perhaps this is a sign of his fondness for his own country, and his willingness to call it his own. Of his relationship with Harry Sargeson writes:

Never when I had found myself moved by sympathy and compassion for the universal individual universally caught in the universal fate had I become involved to the point of saturation: that is to say some part of myself remained detached, resting in a state of reticence and reserve. Now I was to know what it was to be totally committed to another person.

Perhaps More Than Enough can be regarded as the story of Sargeson developing a broader commitment of a similar kind, a commitment to his own country. If not, it may without injustice be regarded as the story of his growing commitment to writing; and in that story one can find an account of the universal writer universally caught in the universal fate. One can find his struggles with his work, not only in his search for the right style and the right material, but also in his occasional questioning of his very desire to spend his life writing a page of creative literature a day, and of his ability to succeed at such an undertaking. And in the hostility and indifference of many of the people around him one can find the struggles that occurred between his chosen work and his environment, an environment which he did not choose but which he came to an intimate relation with, in fiction and in life.

Frank Sargeson's "More Than Enough": Excerpts

2007-03-06T00:26:00.001-08:00

Here are some excerpts from Frank Sargeson's autobiographical work, More Than Enough. First, here are some of his thoughts on the activity of writing.

I had discarded, and I thought finally, all my notions of ‘copying’ which had long tended to hamper me. In the past I had as it were taken a backward look, trying to show on paper what the lives of people I knew had formerly been (perhaps as some explanation for their present appearances). And I thought the more facts I knew about people the better. Now I told myself I wanted only the hint which would trigger off the evoking imagination. Let the evocative words be got down on paper one day, and let them the next be revised and re-arranged with many fresh and lively touches of invention. Let there be patience, but also let there be discipline whereby one thing could be shown to lead inevitably to another. And let it all be done hour by hour and day upon day until there at last was the job well done, a story, a book, a work of the imagination. (32)

My writing activities were often described as a hobby, but greatly encouraged by Cresswell’s example despite my troubling doubts whenever I turned to the poetry he had so far written, I never thought of my dealings with literature in that sense: for me, too, what I had set out to do must be the central aim and purpose of my life: like the child with the mud-pie I had an engagement with my own particular brand of creation, and everything else must be secondary. I re-affirmed that I must continue to live as I could, paying attention to the daily necessities only when much pressed by their urgency. After all, the shifts I would always be put to would enrich my experience of living, hence the work I was engaged on. After a decade of trial and error I felt that my life would be stripped bare of meaning if I abandoned my writing. (96)

I am prompted to question the reader, Is this sort of thing Life or Living?
I don’t pretend to know the reader’s answer, but in these late years I think I know my own. For me there is no contradiction. Life and work are one. To live has been to write. And I have lived besides in the work of other writers, and more especially the poets. (77)

Sometimes I have thought that without a good deal of ‘natural’ ability nobody should attempt to write. And I had myself no such ability and everything over many years had to be learned. Then again, hearing stage people speak sometimes of an actor as “natural” I have felt depressed. I have felt no better about writers the same way described: often their fluency (actual, not an illusion designed to serve the purposes of a work of art), has appalled me: it has made them even more unrewarding than they might have been if they had lacked any writing talent whatsoever. I discovered in time my own remedies for lack of natural ability; and perhaps I may be excused if I often suppose there is no talent so deceiving and dangerous as fluency. (75)

…novelists would often hesitate to draw from certain people they knew out of fear of falling short: novelists might often be conceited about their abilities, but a good novelist would always recognise his own limitations, and know he might perhaps have to live and learn a long time before he understood there could be people in the world of too big a quality to handle. After all, it was the novelist’s business to enhance and heighten, to make much out of real-life merely suggested: and to be confronted by rarities who in real-life were already of a superb stature in the way of quality-well, it could be a dismaying experience. (139)

It had never occurred to me and I don’t know why, but I felt an acute need for a suitable hero: at the same time I found myself wishing to avoid any suggestion that the author was himself the hero. (95)

And while I wondered whether my doubts about a hero were a shortcoming of my own, or a thinness in the material of New Zealand life which I was so determined to deal with, I found myself asking another unsuspected question. What was the European doing in this faraway Pacific ocean country anyway? Had he the right to be here? What were the ideas and ways of life he had brought with him and how had they developed? Was a community being built which could continue to flourish, or was the European occupation a kind of tenancy which would eventually be terminated? Did I personally agree with the prevailing sentiments about these matters? (95)

On working as a reviewer:

I can think of nothing more damaging to a writer who has his own work to do, more likely to efface even a semblance of integrity, than that he should be required to drudge out comments upon books which he would never of his own volition have chosen to read: and all his work worry and doubt be rooted in the knowledge that no matter how good his intentions, neither he nor anybody can ever be sure about the justice of a pretence to judge contemporary work. (125)

On other writers:

…what was I to say for myself when I read Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm; or rather should I say re-rea? For as a younger man I had read the novel when egotism and frustration had blinded me to its wonderful genius. (95)

I had discovered much in the Russian novelists: I was indebted to Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mark Rutherford and George Gissing; for a time I was much devoted to Edward Carpenter. (53)

On society:

From the time of adolescent awakening I had been much aware of the general misery of the human condition. I remember it had occurred to me that some such notion was surely at the root of Marx’s work: I remember too that I had understood and been greatly moved by Wilde’s wit and perception when he said that for anyone who knows the facts human brotherhood is no poet’s dream, a hopeless ideal; instead a depressing and humiliating reality. (53)

I was confirmed once again in my belief that no man who functions within the framework of the social order can expect to be ‘free’ except upon the condition of being very, very rich or extremely poor; and everything in between is at best constriction, at worst, slavery. (117)

A Few Travels

2007-02-24T15:07:00.000-08:00

I went to the village of Ankoh, on the NorthWestern tip of the Sahara, where it is so hot and dry that they no longer worship a God but a liquid instead. When they go to church on Sundays they drink water from the cup; and when they watch the sun rise over the lake at the end of the week they cover their eyes, so as to shield themselves from the image of their Lord. They have a shrine on the edge of the village, near the church, where they lay down offerings of water, in cups and bowls of all shapes and colours, some cracked and some clean and whole, and all laid out in a shining clutter. Once in their lives they make a pilgrimage to the sea.

From Ankoh I flew to Africa, and saw (among other things) the Stone-Chiefs of Mozambique. The Stone-Chiefs cover themselves in lichen and moss and grey pigments drawn from the stone-berry, and crouch down in the middle of a vast bowl in the earth. The bowl was dug many centuries ago, but it must be continuously repaired, and the loose dirt cast out, so as the retain the shape and dimensions that were decreed by the first Stone-Chief, Makaroth, whose great-great-great-great grandson I saw crouching in the sun, perfectly still and covered in lichen and moss and grey pigments drawn from the stone berry. There is a death-sentence for anyone who disturbs the Stone-Chiefs of Mozambique: no villager has yet suffered this fate (although there are frequent near misses, as in the recent case of the man who inadvertently stepped on a poisonous Minkoh, and let out a loud cry that caused one or two stone-chiefs to shuffle about in an irritated manner.)

I saw the red bulls of outer Ghana, and the ten-fingered plant of the Ivory coast. I went to Nepal and heard stories from the people there about the people who climb the mountains and the extraordinary heights to which they climb. “Baramu my brother was one of the greatest of our climbers,” one of the men told me, “and he used to climb so far that he would break through sky and see the stars on the other side, even during the day. There is no protection up there from the sun, and if you do not wear proper clothing then cancers break out on your arms like freckles.”

I went from hot to cold then back again, and found myself in the fruit fields of Italy, where the trees are so full of fruit that the branches snap off in mid-summer, and the pickers have to move very quickly so as to rescue the fruit from under the wood, where they can easily become squashed and rotten. Because of the damage to the trees, there is only one harvest every five years; but the tress in each harvest are so heavily laden that the people never run out. I was told by a villager that the traditional preserving techniques are unmatched by modern science. “We keep fruit like we keep wine, in barrels that are kept in the ground and covered in the sap of the sickle-berry tree; we leave them there to age and mature, our plums and apricots, and we do not take them out until they are properly done.” She took me into her house in the village (a small stone cottage, with windows in the roof) and gave me a nectarine that she had harvested in 1973. It was a deep orange colour, almost brown, and tasted faintly of mint.

You cannot leave the fruit fields of Italy without passing down the Valley of Hives, and this journey was one of the highlights of my trip. “There are over a hundred thousand hives in the valley,” my guide informed me, “and a hundred million bees. Every hive has been given a name, and we care for them like they are our children.” I heard the Valley of Hives and straight-away I thought of a great choir; I saw the Valley of Hives and straight-away I thought of a great carpet, because the bees were matched in numbers by the flowers, which grow there as if none of them ever die.

I took a boat out of Italy and sailed for weeks and weeks until I came to the end of ocean-rivers. The ocean-rivers are great currents that begin at the coast, where the rivers emerge from the continent, and end for no reason whatsoever. You anchor down at a certain point in the ocean: you look to the North, and the sea is highway of streams and white rapids; you look to the South, and it is just a quiet normal sea, with one or two salmon swimming round and looking lost.

It was all very exciting, and I hope to do it all again very soon, in other exotic and dangerous parts of the world; but first I have to have eat a proper meal and get a good night’s sleep.

Death and Beauty in Otaki Gorge

2007-02-24T15:02:00.000-08:00

The degree of settler progress into Otaki Gorge is marked, I suppose, by the landscape, the bush in particular. And, even if it is not so marked, this is an agreeable conceit, and one which lends itself to a jaunty and knowledgeable account of the different kinds of treelife that make their home on the outer slopes of this section of the Tararua Forest Park. Unfortunately I could only sound knowledgable if I lied, and so I’ll just aim for jaunty.

First there are the pines, angular and homogenous, with a serrated skyline and lego-tree neatness. I am sure that there are some places in the world where pines-in-bulk is an attractive landscaping feature, but I do not think NZ is the place. Pinues radiata was chosen as a prime crop, so I am told, because in colonial days a number of rich Europeans enjoyed themselves by competing for the most thorough and immaculate collection of pine trees. He who could grow all 73 varieties of pine in his backyard, and keep them in good condition, would stand to earn a small silver trophy, a certificate congratulating him on his hard-work and pomposity, and bitter neighbours. These competitions doubled, fortuitously but fortunately, as experiments in comparative arboreology (meaning the study of relative merits of tree species, if the reader has not heard this phrase before, or if indeed the phrase does not acutally exist); and these experiments led timber merchants to conclude that Pinus Radiata was the most fast-growing variety, and produced pretty good timber, so the merchants (or rather their moustache-wearing, meat-handed, hard-working labourers) proceeded to grow these trees, hack them down, strip them naked and turn them into houses. Pinus Radiata were introduced by new immigrants for economic reasons: when found in large quantities, these trees still have a look of foreignness and artificiality about them.

Further down the valley the bush is more native and natural in appearance, but it still shows the impact of a troubled past. It is green all right, and the hillsides are alive with nikau palms and tree ferns, but it is young bush, patchy and thin. On the river terraces it gives way completely to yellowish-white grasses, knee-high and dense as wheat. And occasionally these grasses themselves give way, to form the walking tracks that I’ve walked along twice a day for the last week, tracks that wind through paddocks of grass and stop at the river beds, like botched crop-circles.

The loggers troubled the bush, but the bush also troubled the loggers. The logging company whose artefacts I have come here (along with a dozen other volunteers) to recover, flourished in the 1930s, during the depression years. Deep poverty and unemployment during this time meant that people were happy enough to get work, without the work being the sort of work where one had a high chance of retiring with all body parts in tact. Men who worked on the railways, at the sawmill and at the logging face, were in danger of breaking limbs and faces and bodies, and they did. A hearty, knowledgeable bloke gave a talk on the history of bush tramways, and a prominent theme was the perilousness of the work, and the injuries that resulted from it. Floors were slippery, rails were steep, hours long and logs big. New technology sometimes eliminated the really dangerous jobs, but it usually created one or two new ones. When logs were hauled over the ground by rope, for example, one guy pushed his luck and scared his mother by working the rope that did the hauling. This rope was passed through pulleys, so that the logs could be passed around corners; unfortunaely, the log could not pass through the pulleys, so the rope-man had to unhitch the rope from the pulleys when the logs came past. The log was dragged p to the pulley, the rope unhitched, and the log jerked past. The thing that did the jerking was an astonishing machine called a log-hauler; the man who controlled the jerking stood at the log-hauler; and the man who told the log-hauler man when to do the jerking was the rope-man. Most of the time, the system worked: the log stopped and started when it was supposed to, the rope was properly unhitched, and the body of the rope-man was not burst under a log like a possum under a car. Other times, the system did not work.

Because of the times when the system failed, and for reasons of speed and economy, a new system was created. Now the logs were swung above the terrain on a wire that was strung between tree-high poles, like a single telephone wire across telegraph poles. The rope-men swore at their bloody pulleys for the last time, got smashed at the pub, and moved on to a job less likely to kill them. All, that is, except those who became pole-men. The pole-men were charged with climbing the tree-high poles so that they could create and maintain the bits of machinery that supported the wire and the flying logs. Cranes and helicopters were in short supply in those days, and so the pole-man got to the top using ten planks of wood, one axe, and a lot of muscle. The axe made notches in the pole at about chest-height. The planks went in the notches. To make the first notch, the pole-man stood on the ground. To make the other notches, he stood on the planks. To get from one plank to another he used a lot of muscle. If the plank, stuck into the pole like a loose tooth, did not break or slip out of its little cavity, and if the pole-man, strung over the wooden tooth like a piece of last night’s roast, kept his grip and his nerve; then he would head pretty smartly onto the plank and move onto the next one. If not, he would head pretty smartly towards the ground and move onto the next world.

Anyway, back to the bush. At the place where the log-hauler hauled the logs and the rope-man tried not to die, the bush is similar in species to the bush further down the gorge. It differs from the other bush mainly in its thickness. It is dense and moist and green as moss: nikau palms and tree ferns lean out from the hillside and spread their palms benevolently over the vegetation beneath them, like motherly arms. Fern fronds are beautiful things. Tapered, green, fractalled, they splay about like peaceful spears, intricately carved. It is no surprise that the silver fern, with its surprising underside, is a national emblem. It features on one of the flag designs that has been proposed by forward-looking people to replace the British-looking thing that we have at the moment; you can see it on the helmets of NZ cricket players; and when All Blacks get sentimental they talk about “wearing the silver fern” on their jerseys. The Department of Conservation (the organisation that runs the volunteer week I have just completed, and many other things besides) also uses the fern as a logo, this time in its youthful, furled version, with one curling stalk, wound inwards like a seahorse tail; and with all the other curling parts that will eventually unfurl to produce the elegant pattern, hierarchically repeated, of the open frond. The stalks of the fern are brownish black and covered in dark hairs, like the legs of spiders.

Toitois hem the bush at the edge of the creek that runs through the gully. Toitois have straw-coloured stalks that lean out from the bush, a blast in stasis, and they curve slightly from the weight of the flower at the end, a drooping pennant of fluff. The stalks seem to be made up of concentric cylinders, and the outer layers dry up, stiffen and detach from the stalk. These discarded skins are crunchy underfoot, and they collect in and around the toitoi bushes, dry and curled like wood-shavings from a very long plank.

The creek chatters and tumbles in the way that streams do when they are shallow and stone-filled. The water is wonderfully clear. There is not much difference between viewing the stones directly, and viewing them through the water. The latter are darkened by moisture, browned by a layer of slime that makes river-crossing such a refreshing activity, and distorted by the swirling wrinkles that texture the surface of the water, squeezing the rocks into corresponding wrinkles and, on sunny days, casting a wobbly net of light onto the creek bottom. Otherwise, the water in this place is as transparent as the air, and on good days it looks as if the creek is empty except for a thin layer of molten glass sliding over the rocks on a river of air. In some places the illusion is broken by eddies and waterfalls. In one place, a pair of large rocks create a minor damn. They back the water up then spill it out, and at the foot of the rocks the water plunges down deep then bubbles up in a champagne froth, pale-green and ceaseless.

Paraparaumu Beach

2007-02-24T15:00:00.000-08:00

One plausible guide to the current distribution of ethnic groups in NZ is the distribution of Maori place names in the country. This is a pretty rough guide, since those names were assigned quite some time ago, when populations may have been quite different from what they are now; and a large Maori or Pacific population does not always constitutute a powerful population, the kind of population that has the clout to decide the official names of town and cities. But general knowledge tells me that people of color are less well-represented in the South than in the North. And when I look down the map of the South Island I see names like Endeavour Inlet, Portage, Mt. Pleasant and Grovetown, with a smattering of names like Taumarina and Hapuku. When I look up the North Island I see names like Te Horo, Paekakariki, Paraparaumu, Waikanae, Waikawa Beach, full of warm vowels and heritage, with a smattering of names like Plimmerton and Gladstone.

Paraparaumo, where I stayed for two nights and a day, certainly has the warm vowels. I do not know about its heritage, but I do know about its beach, which is beautiful, popular and long. The lenght means that, despite the popularity, it is possible to enjoy the beach almost uninterrupted by the sounds of barbequeues and dogs and small children: on a recent sunny Sunday in February I stood on the beach and saw eight or nine seagulls in the vicinity, and they outnumbered the people. The beach has the feel of being hugged by two long arms of land. To the South, there are the hills around Wellington. To the North, there is Kapiti Island, an arm that is severed from the body of land just behind me, but which gives an impression of hugging nonetheless. Kapiti is long and hilly and covered in dark trees, like an enormous upturned canoe that has been left to rot and gather moss. During the day it is green and majestic; during the night it is black and mysterious.

I arrive on Paraparaumu beach on a perfect evening. There are enough clouds over the horizon to kindle the sun into a pink and orange fire; few enough to show the vast tarpaulin of the sky, with its graded, untextured purity and its gaseuous intermingling of blue and yellow, the latter rising up off the horizon in a golden steam. On the horizon there is a long, shallow cloud that looks like a distant mass of land, another New Zealand, and as the light goes it changes from the colour of sand, to wet sand, to charcoal, to black.

I have an evening swim in the Tasman sea. Perhaps because the beach is in the lee of Kapiti Island, or for some other reason, the waves do not rise up and pound into the sand: they move into the beach in layered sheets, and fold into themselves when they run out of steam. The look is that of a wide body in a perpetual state of dressing and undressing: the larger waves froth about like white tutus, the lesser ones have frilly hems and foamy lacework, and a film of translucent underwear slips out from under the skirts at the end of every dressing, preceded by a narrow but pretty hemline; and when this watery undergarment slips back down the beach the undressing has begun, with the skirts and pleats and jostling ribbons drawn back and tucked away, then ironed out and cleaned so they are ready to be donned and tossed about all over again. The underwear (the one with the narrow but pretty hem) leaves behind streaks of dampness in the sand, and along these streaks the sand is reflective, metallic-looking, like wet skin. When you step on these areas of wetness the disturbance spreads out in a disc of bruised sand, which collapses into a footprint when you lift your leg. The movement of water of the sand pushes the sand into corrugations, in much the same way, I suspect, that the wind in the Sahara drives the sand into long wrinkles. In some places the disturbed sand is less like a corrogation and more like a network of plaids, layered and criss-crossed and inter-threaded. When a film of sea comes over these plaided areas of sand, it looks as if the water is seething with eels.

I do not see any driftwood coming in on the waves, but I must have come at the wrong time, because the beach has piles of the stuff. It is smooth as paper and almost as white, and it makes good fires. It gathers at the top of the beach in a long band, white and bony like a ship-wrecked Noah’s Ark and the remains of its cargo.

I drink some bear and say one or two things to one or two people. Talking is not a high priority here, however. It is socially acceptable to stop mid-sentence and look out to the sea and the island and the sky, and those elements are of a kind and quality that usually causes people to fall silent.

Charming Centre, Crumbling Suburbs

2007-02-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

I am no architect, and perhaps not an aesthete either, but the architecture of Wellington seems to me to be one of its most attractive features. The whole city, like the museum, is in a state of agreeable disorder. In the central city, architectural features fit together without fitting into any obvious pattern. Beside the Art Gallery in a square lined with steel palms there is a café. Next to the café is a glass wall with white bands between the panels. The bands are arranged diagonally, and at variable angles, so that each door is an irregular trapezium. This is all very nice, but the thing I want to note is that, although there is no wall made in the same style anywhere in the vicinity (at least, that I could see), or even anything approaching that style, the slanting wall seems to fit in very nicely, and not be awkward or pretentious. Go around the corner and there is something altogether different, a shady area filled with traditional-looking flower beds, neatly symmetric and made of red brick. Go around another corner, and in another bed there is a set of weird, modern-looking cairns, like enormous, tapering piles of stone pikelets. One of the piles is inverted, so that the smaller pikelets are on the bottom.

Architectural curiosities abound in the central city, and mostly they are charming and arty. (This state of affairs my be contrasted with Christchurch, where there are also a few architectural oddities. In the southern city these features aim for the same look as the Wellington ones, but in my experience and opinion they just end up being arty.) The steel nikaus, palms opening very beautifully into a ring of metal arcs, are distinctive and popular; and so is the silver hanging ball, suspended two stories up from invisible wires, hollow and enclosed by curving native leaves. You can look up through it and see blue sky through the gaps in the leaves, as through the gaps in a forest canopy. In Plimmers alley there is the bronze man with a bronze jumping dog stuck to his left knee. A miniature cable car, set upon a pole, points the way to the somewhat larger cable-car that runs up past a botanic gardens and a cricket field. There are the giant bowling balls, the pinpong ball lamps, the fabulous wooden sculpture on the bridge, runnelled and vigorously angular. In one entrance to Cuba Mall there is a colourful, insectile object on top of a pole. In another place there are two large flat rectangles of silver metal sticking out of the ground. They are interesting because they are covered in large metal hemispheres, and look like a model of a skin disease, or a giant piece of Braille.

And of course there is the bucket sculpture in Cuba Mall. This may not be a spectacular sculpture, but it is charming and it was there when I was young and so I am going to describe it in more detail. Imagine a giant pear, just like a normal pear except giant and hollow and made of metal. Paint it in a primary colour of your choice. Then cut it in half, so you have two primary-coloured things that can hold water. Get five pears of the same kind, paint them in other primary colors then cut them in half as well. Attach all of these primary-colored pear-buckets to a black metal structure, so that when any one bucket is filled up sufficiently with water, it tips over and dumps the water out the thin end, the stalk-end if we’re still thinking pears. Get some hoses put in at the top of the structure, so that water goes into the top bucket. Arrange things so that all the other buckets share around the water that is dumped from the top bucket, and so you get an odd, fascinating, arrhythmic cascade of water, with periods of calm build-up where no water changes bucket, periods of short splashes, and periods of splashing, dunking chaos where all the buckets flip and roll and groan on their axles and mesmerized tourists stand around getting wet. This is the bucket-fountain on Cuba Street. It may not be quite as spectacular as it sounds, but it is a good idea and it’s been there for a while.

After you’ve drenched yourself in Cuba Mall, go to the cable car and slide up a hill in a quaint red carriage. Get out at Kelburn and walk around. If you’re like me, you’ll start at one place, go in what appears to be the right direction, get lost, retrace your steps in the wrong direction, and generally go around in what appears to be a circle while arriving at a place three blocks from where you started. The confusion here is due partly to my own dodderiness. But I think I am justified in laying some of the blame on the suburban architecture of Wellington, which can in turn be blamed on the hills, great humps that twist streets and confound vehicles in a way that would have pleased MC Escher, and generally conduct a happy revolt against rectangular neatness. The suburbs of Wellington look as if they are being constantly tossed about, and it is a miracle that anything stays in the same place. This may be compared instructively to the suburbs of Christchurch, which look as if they are being constantly steamrolled, and it’s a miracle that anything changes place. Grass curbs are a microcosm of the greater differences between the cities. In Christchurch, curbs are easy to maintain, and usually they are maintained, often in immaculate condition. The typical kerb is homogenous and green and well-shorn, and dull as billiard cloth. In Wellington, in the hill suburbs, it is impossible to keep an immaculate curb. The roads are too narrow, and there are too many funny angles. Instead of the staid rectangles of grass that you might find in Fendalton or Burnside, in the hill suburbs of Wellington you find overgrown lozenges, banks made of concrete, banks made of some kind of shingly conglomerate, or banks made of earth too steep to cultivate and overrun by grasses, flax, forgetmetnots, ivy. Odd bits of brick poke out in various places; loose stones crumble away from footpaths; here is an old concrete wall embedded in clay, and there are two or three bricks, chipped and still hemmed by cement. Steps twist up between houses, with strips of white painted on their edges so that midnight drunks and bag-laden housewives can get to the front door without multiple fractures. Here is a driveway pushed into the hill at a dislocated angle, with cement lathered on like icing and with moss pushing up from underneath and making systems of cracks, little rivulets of green. There are one-lane streets where parked cars take up one lane and moving cars do what they can with the rest. There are houses from all perspectives: from above you can see barbequeues and swimmingpools, and potted cacti at the front doors; from below you see a lot less, a garage and a few steps and the red or green border of a corrugated roof. It is all quaint and pleasant and suburbian, filled with casual prosperity, ramshackle without being rundown.

I quite like Wellington.

Round the Bays for a Root

2007-02-24T14:14:00.000-08:00

It is 2 o’clock in Wellington and windy. It is a generic sort of day in the capital city of New Zealand, too many clouds to be summery, too few to be wintery, and a morose, stippled ocean. Te Papa, the national museum, stands to my right, and it slopes to the sea in a way that may be an imitation of a whale, possible of a ship, perhaps of the warehouses and skyscrapers that fill the skyline with their clutter of vertices, perhaps of the bank of rocks that fill, with their gray sides and random edges, the gap between sea and promenade; or even the houses that jostle for position on the hills of Island Bay or Kelburn. It is hard to say: in Wellington, everything slopes towards the sea. I am most attracted, however, to the whale option: the museum, with its hooded green eye and broad flanks, squints out to sea like something you would find in Kaikoura.

To my left are street lamps made of giant ping-pong balls. These may be designed to match the giant silver bowling balls that sit in a row behind me, on the wooden planks of the wharf. Over the water towards Oriental Bay there is a nest of yachts, white and naked without their sails and squinting out to sea like Te Papa, their cabin windows catching the sun. To my left there are ships, cranes and containers, and a wharf jutting out into the harbour, its struts round and closely spaced, like the tops of sunken collonades. Loud music comes up from somewhere, and it give the place a communal feel, as if the whole waterfront is someone’s backyard during an afternoon party. A young man sits on the plank next to me and starts reading a book. After a while he goes away again. After another while I go away as well.

I go around the bays. Oriental, Evans, Kau, Mahanga, Karaka, Worser, Breaker, Lyall, Houghton, Island. The road wobbles around the coast, and cyclists wobble around the road. All around the coast, dark brown rocks crumble into the sea like bits of loose shingle. These rocks are and ribbed and pooled and pitted, and you won’t get across them very fast in bare feet. If you do get across them, you can see dark brown seaweed, the same colour as the rocks, swishing around in the surf and sliming up the rocks. In Oriental Bay, people with good bodies play volley-ball and sit in vans and generally don’t do a whole lot of swimming. In Worser Bay, people with less good bodies paddle in the opal sea and look out for jelly fish. The beaches are small and embraced by peninsulas of rock. There are one or two snorkelers, and one or two upturned dingies with white peeling paint and names with stories behind them: Martha, Slingshot, Seahorse.

One of these bays is home. It is strange to go home, like coming back from the dead. Everything is spectral and strange, not because it is ghostly but because I am. It is strange to see that everything has moved to 2007 in the same way that I have. I feel that if I just peeled back a layer or two of this place then I would find that really, under the present-day surface, it is just how it was when I was there, its true self. But I know that there would be nothing like that at all. It’s all been peeled away or forgotten or taken down, like the old wallpaper; or been taken somewhere else and changed in the normal way, like me. For example, everything is smaller than I remember it. When I was here last, the walnut tree was a great, tangled, swooping thing, something in which you could get lost and giddy. Now it is a modest sort of bush, not much taller than I am. It feels as if somewhere in the present, just behind the surface of the present world but present nonetheless, is a little boy climbing an enormous walnut tree. But the only place where that scene exists is in myself, and I am tall and the tree is not much taller. This is not an unhappy thing to know, just strange: I have come back from the dead to find that everything I knew is as dead as I am.

There are places, however, that are strange because of their familiarity. There is a park near the house. In the park there is a large pine tree with a root that curls out of a bank and makes a circle that is perfectly sized so that a boy can sit on the edge, wriggle down into it, sit there for a while with the root around his waist like a lifebuouy, and then find that he can’t get out. One day, I couldn’t get out, and I wet my pants. The circular root is still there. I visit this root, touch the bark on it for a bit, look around at the trees for a while, hum a tune, then walk away.

Kaikoura and Beyond

2007-02-20T21:49:00.000-08:00

Kaikoura is a small town on the East Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, famous among tourists for its whales - great grey beasts, submarines with tails – and among UC Philosophy students for its lodge, which affords an excellent view of an ocean that ends in Chile, and an excellent chance to undertake philosophical activities such as drinking beer, which usually ends in sillygism. When I went through this town on my way up to Wellington for the GREs the hills rose out of a skirt of clouds, like dwarf Everests, and there was a patch of dirty foam stuck in one place, just offshore. At 9 0’clock in the morning the town has a general appearance of greyness. It also has the vacant, modest look of a place designed to admit outsiders rather than cultivate insiders, a place whose main visible occupants are tourists and seagulls. The seagulls have the alert, inquisitive look of beings who have just dropped in for a few minutes and intend to leave very soon. The tourists look much the same. The tourists look at the seagulls with cameras; seagulls look back through their orange rims. The sea drops heavily against the sand, but it has no effect on the dirty foam, which stays stuck.

The bus is large and white with black windows and a sleek, rectangular look about it, like a fridge wearing dark glasses. The driver also wears dark glasses, and he is also large, but he is certainly not sleek. His face has the crumpled, bulldog look that Maori faces often have when they are depicted in cartoons. In the cartoons they are often equipped with large bellies, and the driver has one of them as well. The guy in the bus mimics the cartoons, then; but a few seats from the front there is the guy who inspired them: small eyes, heavy drooping nose, skin like bark, thick neck, multiple pregnancy. There are metal bars on the seats that I believe are called armrests: the living caricature uses both of them as bumrests. He does have a kind of stern grace about him, like a whale’s grace, and he would be a fearsome sight paddling a waka, and a friendly, fatherly sight collecting pipis. Sitting on his armrests, however, in his tourist jeans and striped shirt and red golf visor, he is the satirists’ dream.

When the driver says “Kaikoura”, he pronounces the last two syllables with the deft accent that newsreaders try to imitate but which they usually turn into an awkward stab or a bloated collection of vowels.

There is not much to see or hear out of Kaikoura, unless you’re keen on wide, slapping oceans and shimmering wheatfields and paddocks full of grass and drooping cattle. I was probably keen on that sort of thing on the first five times I made this trip. This time I am entertained by the two young kids in the next seat and the fence posts blurring past the window on the right-hand side of the road. In front of the fenceposts there are metal road markers. At the base of one of them there is a piece of orange peel, looking very peeled and very orange. Halfway between two of those markers there is a fist-sized rock with a band of bright yellow paint on it. “The sea is a big puddle,” says one of the kids, a girl. She says it in the triumphant, uncompromising way that children sometimes have, as if they are telling someone off and enjoying it. “A big, big puddle.”

In one place the grass on the edge of the road has been peeled away like skin, and rolled up against the fenceposts. A yellow roller turns a pile of shingle into a cricket-pitch.

“I can’t see,” says the girl. “I can’t see anything.” She has the window-curtain wrapped around her face and is peering through it. The mother has to say something, and might as well make it educational. “Yes dear, it looks as if you can’t. Do you know why you can’t see anything?” The girl quibbles. “I can see some things. I just can’t see them very well.” There is a pattern that seems to be quite popular among manufacturers of bus seat covers. It is made up of think black lines and primary colors, with a grey background. It looks like a shattered stained-glass window, and it would be quite attractive it were not so intimately associated with boredom and mild nausea. If you look straight out of the window of a bus and keep your eyes fixed in place, you will see the fence posts as one long stutter of wood. However, if you flick your eyes from side to side in the right way you can see each post free of any blurring; except during the brief time it takes to flick your eyes away from the post that is disappearing out the back of your window, and towards the new posts that are emerging out of the front of the window. Just inside the shoulder of the road there is a smooth, shiny patch that looks like black ice but is not black ice. A red truck goes past.

“Are we nearly there yet?” This is the girl again. “Are we almost nearly there yet? Are we almost nearly almost there yet? Are we almost nearly, almost…” but she stops short, hooks a finger between her bottom gum and lip, and looks puzzled. The young woman sitting on the seat in front of mine has a barbed-wire tattoo on her upper arm. I can see this because there is a gap between the window and the seat. It just so happens that I can see the reflection of the driver’s head in the window ahead of me. I see him itch is ear once, then get tired of waiting for him to indiscreetly pick his nose. The kids start making noises. They are good at this. They make tiny booming noises, duck noises, nail-on-blackboard noises, high multi-tone rasps, electric-saw squeals. They play with their voices like drunken thespians. They are not imitating the noises of animals or machinery: they just make noises and come across the familiar ones by accident. Everyone in the bus listens to them. Three white cars go past. A tractor comes down the next hill with seven cars behind it, and it looks as if the tractor is towing all these cars along on its own steam. The kids make a noise that sounds like “buying” but which is not. They make it again, in a slightly different pitch and timbre. This game is fun, and they keep playing. I remember that I will need to courier something up to Wellington because I left it behind. A moment later I see a red courier van go past. Now the word is less like “buying” and more like “beating,” and with every repetition the “b” is sliding further into a “v.” The kids have an orange toy in the shape of a laptop, and when they press a certain key the laptop makes a noise that is cross between a siren and snorting elephant. I note that when this noise is repeated at the right frequency it sounds very much like the TARDIS when it takes off, at least when it takes off in the new TV series of Dr. Who.

We arrive in Picton and the little boy points his arm in that wobbly infant way, with the elbow and pointing finger imperfectly extended and the fist imperfectly closed, and makes a noise that could mean anything from “wader” to “beaver.” I get off and enjoy the view that visitors get when they arrive at the Picton waterfront on a fine day, a view that I am keen on despite frequent viewings. If you want to know what that view is like, you’ll have to go there yourself.

Apricots in Clyde

2007-02-20T21:42:00.001-08:00

Like the sky, the surface of water changes constantly under the guidance of the sun, the rain and the wind. There are clouds in a lake, streaky thin clouds and pale dumps of fluff, and there are great areas of blankness and calm.

The water is in different states in different times and in different places. Here it is dark and lazy, like oil; there it is just liquid, clear and easy-moving. Now it is textured in the way paint is textured when it is layered up roughly; and now it is pure, unlined, a blue gas coming up out of nothing. There is electricity in the water, and when the sun is right and the waves are right you can see it flash across the surface in sheets of low lightening; and because there is lightening there must be stars as well, and you can see those stars if you look closely enough: the water glitters with them, at certain times and certain places, and looking down at the water is like looking down on a city during a night of fireworks.

Here on the rock the sun is hot and the water is deep, sore-feet hot and yellow-green deep. One or two tussocks spike out of the rocks. They are yellow and green and have one or two grey hairs. You can throw an apricot stone into the lake and watch it go down, twinkling like a flake of gold. After a while it breaks up into liquid blobs and then disappears altogether.

Everyone can see that the water is wavy on the surface, but you need to look carefully to see how many different waves there are, waves of different speeds and sizes and directions of travel. Often they are not really waves at all, but depressions in the water, smooth around the edges like dimples. A moderate wind turns them into wrinkles, where the rising peaks look to have too much water in them and not enough speed so they collapse as they go over like a piece of loose skin. A little more wind and they slap down with a little explosion of froth.

When the wind gets up a bit more the whole surface starts to heave, and a set of wide, low ripples moves the smaller ripples up and down, and it is like something has moved under the water and not just above it. There is a stick on the lake and this stick feels as you or I would feel if we discovered that the hill we were riding on was not a hill at all but a great beast who had just woken up. There are tiny waves as well, concentric threads of water that ripple outwards and ride the bigger waves. They are made by tiny stones and the wings of drowning flies.

All of this can be observed from the dam-end of Lake Clyde, in the South Island of New Zealand, where I went in January 2007. The township of Clyde is a pleasant enough place. It takes a while to get away from the generic suburban garageland, but it is worth it when you do, as the town centre (or what looked to be the centre; it is small enough to be a minor offshoot) is made up of old-seeming buildings, with early-settler facades. One of those facades has a plastic sign outside reading “Cybernet Central” in highlighter-green type. Two young children sold me 20 apricots for 3 dollars.