Seeking the opinions of others

1

If you believe in evolution, you must also believe that significant genetic variety within the human species. (Evolution proceeds by individual mutation followed by breeding competition: every species subject to evolution is full of competing mutations).

2

And if you accept that changes in brain structure lead to changes in intellectual capacity (e.g. dogs and humans differ in intellectual capacity because their brains differ); and that the human brain has evolved and is subject to further evolution; then it follows that there must exist a plurality of different human brain mutations with different intellectual capacities: in short, different kinds of minds. (And since most of these mutations will have been around for a while and have had time to breed, we should expect that some individual mutations exist within very large numbers of brains; ergo, while the eye sees such doubtful categories as Poles and Portuguese, blacks and whites, men and women, we could perhaps with some justice speak of different brain populations; which probably do not overlap with any of the former categories).

3

This has two important and seemingly contradictory consequences regarding how we should treat the opinions of others.

4

In cases of objective knowledge – is buying GM stock a good move? -- we are well advised to consult the opinion of others because their brains may see something – some important clues or some subtle causal relations between clues and facts – which ours do not. In such cases, it is most useful to consult those with brains as different from ours as possible because we are hoping to look at a particular problem from a different vantage point in the hope of discovering something previously invisible. We are trying to borrow their cognitive system to look at the outside world.

5

In cases of subjective knowledge consulting with others is not entirely useless, because we do not have perfect introspective vision (i.e. we do not always know how we feel or why); in such instances learning about the feelings of others who find themselves in our circumstances can shed important light on our own problems. (This includes matters of taste: observing how others furnish their living rooms, for example, can be a rich source of good ideas).

But in such instances, we need to consult with those whose brains are as similar to ours as we can find because the question how a totally different brain might work in our particular circumstances, while amusing, is, practically speaking, useless.

That living the life of the mind is a kind of trail-blazing

The Waldzell chapter of Glasperlenspiel contrasts Castalia (i.e the academia), in the person of Joseph Knecht, with the outside ("real") world, in the person of his friend Plinio.

In doing so it addresses a problem which often occupies the academics -- namely, the notion that their life, insulated as it is from the problems of the real world, is, by virtue of its irrelevance to the world, also somehow irrelevant per se.

This seems to be the major theme of GPS.

(It's worth noting, I suppose, that the real world does not really have a problem with academia's irrelevance and is happy to let it exist, irrelevant or not; the problem lies really in academia's mind. It is academics who are sometimes unhappy to be left alone to their doings; and who want these doings to be not just fun but also important; and it is they who imagine that the chief obstacle to its importance lies in its irrelevance).

The standard defense of academia against this (suicidal) attack proposes that academia is in fact useful to the outside world because basic research is needed to lay foundations for specific solutions to specific problems, educating large bodies of men is bound to produce at least some who are socially useful, etc.

Laudably, Hesse does not attempt this defense: such defense is self-defeating because it starts out by conceding that the life of the mind is only useful to the extent that it serves practical applications. It thereby automatically sets the life of the mind in a subservient position.

Hesse's intuition is like mine: that sooner or later all of humanity's immediate problems -- health, poverty, injustice, prejudice -- will be solved. And when they are solved, well, what then shall we do? We could decide to play computer games, of course; spit and catch; make love till we drop; or we could decide to dedicate ourselves to the pursuit if high-brow culture. A person who does so today is not really wasting his time, therefore: he is showing the way.

Now, I have solved all of my problems -- health, poverty, injustice have no more hold on me; I am therefore like that happy man of the future whose problems will all have been solved by the social activists of today. What I do with my time -- cultivate my mind -- is what that happy man of the future might choose to do with his: I read books, watch opera, visit museums, digest what I consume, think. To me this seems a life worth living.

But my life is not merely my life: considered and described, it represents a kind of roadmap for others. Just the sort of roadmap I so much wish others had left me.

Sexo em Portugal

said the program title. It arrested. After Italy and Morocco where very daring eye-contact flourishes and people dress to seduce, Portugal seems such a tame, sexless place. People dress conservatively, there is no eye contact between genders, and girls, though they do their best to project a feminine image, have long hair, skirts (and breasts!), strike one as -- er -- no one has told them about their purpose in life.

Which all only emphasizes the looks-problem: Portuguese are not ugly -- but they are rather plain. Finding oneself in their crowd is a little like walking through an agreeable forest (it is a mono-culture, too; one look predominates): it is a pleasant experience, but I would not characterize it as gonad-stimulating.

The arresting event in question was one of those panel discussions with guests on Portuguese satellite TV. The sexologists who participated were middle aged, with indifferent haircuts and boxy suits; they looked wholly sexless. The volume was off, so I didn't know what they were saying, but looking at them it was easy to imagine that they were saying that sex once a month for the sake of good health is alright as long as it does not interfere with one's cafe schedule. Around them, on harshly lit, hygienic benches a few men and women sat in gender-segregated groups, evenly spaced out, with very much daylight between them.

It was a very unexciting affair.

Then, suddenly, a subtitle ran under the screen. It read: Porque ainda e tabu? I gasped. Ainda? What could ainda be? I let my imagination fly. Surely, you don't say?... I whispered to myself. Have I been mistaken? Is the sexless exterior all a pretense, a lie? Do these people in fact get into all sorts of weird and kinky stuff undercover? And then discuss it at depth with bored expressions on tv?

I mean funky, wild-side stuff like ainda for example?

I rushed back home to consult my dictionary. Alas, I was to be disappointed in my hopes: ainda, it said, did not stand for either ... or ... or ... Ainda simply means "still." It is sex itself that is still taboo here; not some kind of nefarious cranny of it, as the more perverse minds of middle aged men inured to Italies and Moroccos might imagine it.

Gad, I miss Tangier.

Another one

All men are aware of tragedy in life. But tragedy as a form of drama is not universal. Oriental art knows violence, grief, and the stroke of natural or contrived disaster; the Japanese theater is full of ferocity and ceremonial death. But that representation of personal suffering and heroism which we call tragic drama is distinctive of the western tradition. It has become so much a part of our sense of the possibilities of human conduct, the Oresteia, Hamlet and Phedre are so ingrained in our habits of spirit, that we forget what a strange and complex idea to reenact private anguish on public stage. The idea and the vision of the man which it implies are Greek.

What to do with a book which begins like this? Throw it out without advancing beyond page three? After all, how right can can be the rest of a book which starts out this wrong?

This is George Steiner speaking, the book is what made his enormous reputation (The Death of Tragedy) and the paragraph is unalloyed, 24-carat, pure-water nonsense. What do they do in Bali every day for a month during the Denpassar festival but enact private drama on public stage? Or in all the small towns up and down the Kerala coast in December where weekly all-night performances of Kathakali are given in temple courtyards? And if Sonezaki Shinju is not private suffering on public stage, then, obviously, neither is Hamlet nor Phedre.

Whence comes this urge of western scholars to define the West, us, Europe (whatever) by making a fantastic grand-sweeping and utterly false generalization about The Other? (What is The Other anyway?) How comes it that grand scholars should think it's OK to spew this sort of bullshit? And how comes it that no one stands up and screams in objection to this kind of ignorant, arrogant crap?

Regarding the opinions of others

1

If you believe in evolution, you must also believe that significant genetic variety within the human species. (Evolution proceeds by individual mutation followed by breeding competition: every species subject to evolution is full of competing mutations).

2

And if you accept that changes in brain structure lead to changes in intellectual capacity (e.g. dogs and humans differ in intellectual capacity because their brains differ); and that the human brain has evolved and is subject to further evolution; then it follows that there must exist a plurality of different human brain mutations with different intellectual capacities: in short, different kinds of minds. (And since most of these mutations will have been around for a while and have had time to breed, we should expect that some individual mutations exist within very large numbers of brains; ergo, while the eye sees such doubtful categories as Poles and Portuguese, blacks and whites, men and women, we could perhaps with some justice speak of different brain populations; which probably do not overlap with any of the former categories).

3

This has two important and seemingly contradictory consequences regarding how we should treat the opinions of others.

4

In cases of objective knowledge – is buying GM stock a good move? -- we are well advised to consult the opinion of others because their brains may see something – some important clues or some subtle causal relations between clues and facts – which ours do not. In such cases, it is most useful to consult those with brains as different from ours as possible because we are hoping to look at a particular problem from a different vantage point in the hope of discovering something previously invisible. We are trying to borrow their cognitive system to look at the outside world.

5

In cases of subjective knowledge consulting with others is not entirely useless, because we do not have perfect introspective vision (i.e. we do not always know how we feel or why); in such instances learning about the feelings of others who find themselves in our circumstances can shed important light on our own problems. (This includes matters of taste: observing how others furnish their living rooms, for example, can be a rich source of good ideas).

But in such instances, we need to consult with those whose brains are as similar to ours as we can find because the question how a totally different brain might work in our particular circumstances, while amusing, is, practically speaking, useless.

So far, OK?

Lack of principles at the Catholic church of Portugal

Never got to see Santa Clara's interior in Porto. The opening hours were user unfriendly and observed mainly in the breach; but to crown it all, the church closed for May 1st celebrations. The church celebrating May 1st? If it's not exactly collaborationist, it certainly is corrupt in the extreme. Lack of principles kills a church deader than any bullet.

At the Sao Carlos

At the Sao Carlos one experiences ancient music the way it was played in the days of Mozart, when most orchestra players were moonlighting footmen who got extra two florins a year to blow horns or saw wood. Like in those days, during Sao Carlo concerts the orchestra members whisper to each other, chew Nicorette and sneak out for a quick puff while their instrument is temporarily not needed. The conductor does his utmost to motivate them to a greater effort, by gesticulating and grimacing, but no amount of jumping up and hand-waving seems to raise the strings out of their sexless whining even though, to make the task easier, whole pages of Agrippina are skipped and most arias (being da capo they have the A-B-A structure) are cut to just A. (Except those of the male soprano who likes to hear himself sing). (He and his mother make two). Lady B asks, and she has a point, how one can skip arias or cut them by two thirds. Would it not be better to play something easier? The Nutcracker, say?

The interior of the theater remains loyal to the old days, too: its unadulterated baroque beats the bejeezus out of the bechagalled modernist Opera Garnier.

Why my old blog comments sucked

In the two and a half years during which I ran my public blog I did not receive -- I think this is fair to say -- one good comment. (There were various excellent comments on some of my posts, but they were all written by me under various guises). For a long time I attributed the lack of good comments on my blog to the scant regard it received from readers. Presumably they had better things to read, and, in particular, better blogs to comment on. Only with time did I realize that there were no other blogs with better comments: my commentators commented junk because junk is all they could produce. Quite literally, my commentators did not have anything to say.

I am starting to look like my father

I am now the age I best remember him: about the time I left home. He'd given up by then: he knew there were no more prospects in his professional life, yet he had to slog out with the job on account of wife and kids; he'd been sentenced to hard labor; there were twenty more years of that ahead of him; there would be no romance in his life anymore; worse, he'd stopped reading and thinking and gone into sleeping on the couch, in front of the TV. I think he must have been clinically depressed.

Looking in the mirror I see him: the same progressive broadening of the face, the same baldness. I can try to control my weight through diet; and exercise (a little, so as not to interfere with my reading time too much) to stay fit; but there is nothing I can do about the genetic inheritance: the package that continues to unfold. I am not happy about it. I am gradually assuming the looks of the person I least wish to see.

A special case of Reverse-Dorian-Grey syndrome.

On being culturally frustrated and how Hesse fails to cure the problem

I feel underserved by nearly all the contemporary cultural production I come across. It all seems to fall into one of three categories:

A. Escapist: typically on the “they killed him but he ran away” model. This is often entertaining, sometimes very well done, and certainly has its place in the lives of many people. But it usually fails to keep my interest for long. (I really couldn't care less who done it, and remember nothing whatever of Star Wars, only that my mind began to wonder half way through).

B. Engaged art: this sets out to publicize the plight of various disadvantaged. (Most Scandinavian film and drama falls in this category). It is often worthy and sometimes also well done but if one is not so disadvantaged himself, the whole business fails to speak to him personally. (Take The Elephantman, for instance: how tragic to suffer from elephantiasis! -- but what does it have to do with me?)

C. Dummy Realism: This “tells it like it is”, but it almost always takes as its topic the very ordinary – lower-middle-brain, to employ sociological terminology -- criminals, bakers, undertakers, working girls, frustrated suburban housewives, advertising canvassers walking aimlessly about Dublin while talking to themselves, etc. The reason for this is perhaps that writers are not, by and large, a brilliant lot (what possible incentive can there be for writing this stuff for hours and hours each day?); and it is impossible to write convincingly about people more intelligent than oneself. So writers, wisely, write "down". (As in "girls marry up, boys marry down"). And that's alright, but why do I have to read down?

This is why I enjoy reading Hesse: his heroes -- like Knecht of The Glass Bead Game -- are upper-middle brain and neither disadvantaged nor politically engaged; they are thus free to direct all of their considerable brain power to the pure task of cultivation of that brain power; which is a life-style anyone with a brain and the freedom to pursue it well might. It is, in other words, a life we all could live if we only could live it; perhaps even the life we will all live one day, all our disadvantages have been removed and all our brains powered-up by way of a special chip. The project is not without its problems -- but they are not explored in art; and that is too bad because, certainly, to me at least, such art would be a lot more interesting than A-C above.

But while I praise Hesse's gumption to go after a good topic, I praise his execution less enthusiastically. His description of the sculptor's creative process in Goldmund and Narcissus is a pious fabrication; his description of meditation in Glasperlenspiel, also. Perhaps Hesse, too, was too busy writing books to find out properly about the things he was writing about.

The old dictum regarding pornography comes to mind: the reason why it is so bad is because those doing it have no time to write it, and those writing it have never done it. Good literature has the odds stacked up against it.

Think about it

In a certain science fiction novel a space ship is described which is powered by an engine based on a technology which no one can understand. Only its creator could but - he is dead.

The Hunting Carpet of Pius XI

I do not know know why the Hunting Carpet of Pius XI bears the name it does. Its recorded history starts with the last queen of Italy discovering, in the early years of last century, seven fragments of a signed and dated 16th century carpet and ordering some weavers to reconstruct the whole thing; it continues with someone buying a fragment of a carpet in a Christie's auction in the 1980's and discovering that it represented a previously unknown piece of the border of the same carpet, upon which it has now been sewn on. The fragment's pattern is more detailed and more precise and its colors still more vivid than the 20th century Italian restoration.

That Europeans turn stupid after midnight

Mezzo can be quite ambitious; last night for example Prokof P3 (Janis, RTF), Shostak S6 (Berstein, Vienna), and Prokof P3 again (Rabinowitz, Israel) -- wham-bam-bam -- one damn thing after another. And, cool. The P3 repeat is the really nice touch here: it's a measure of the hardness of the programming's core -- about 9.5 on my sclerometer -- we don't get bored with this stuff, eh?

But then, hit 12 AM, cinderellas turn into pumpkins and Mezzo audience -- stupid. And not just Mezzo. All Europe does. The universal rule of European cultural programming is -- Sundays we pray; and at night we mellow with

Jazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

(Geeeeeeeeeeeeeez).

Who makes this a rule? Is it - Biblical or something?

You've read Tschaikovsky?

Nahedeh expresses her helplessness at conversation with me by guessing (correctly) the sort of cutting remarks I might make about her recent cultural adventures (which are really quite alright as far as intelectual adventures go: Travels with Charlie, Moll Flanders, even if I might indeed make cutting remarks about them).

Nahdeh's problem ("you might not like what I am reading") reminds me of an old Russian joke about a sexual education course in which men are encouraged to talk to their wives first. Vanya is much impressed. He returns home and says to Natasha: You read Pushkin? Yes, she answers. Nu ladno, he continues. And you heard Tschaikovski? Yes, she answers. Nu, tak rozdyevaysa, he says. ("Well, in that case, strip").

Nahedeh imagines that I judge her intellectual achievement by the sort of stuff she consumes; while the point is not what she consumes but what she has to say about it from herself. One reads something, then digests it, then uses it as a spring-board for his own ideas. Conversation about the life of the mind cannot be just a recitation of what we are reading; or its contents; it must be about how we respond to these things. Is it possible that Nahedeh, having read Moll Flanders, can only say "I like it" or "I don't like it"? Is saying "I have read Moll Flanders lately", then perhaps adding quickly, "but I have not liked it moralizing tone" all she can manage?

No wonder she feels helpless trying to converse with me. She knows she doesn't measure up, but does not realize how or why. (It is a terrible feeling; I often have it when playing bridge).

I tried to explain to her that I do not feel lonely. That I can perfectly well dumb down my talk to the level of my interlocutors, and be liked for it, but that this does nothing to assuage the great hunger of for a challenging intellectual companionship. I do not think I have managed to get the idea across to her.

I should add than Nahedeh is not stupid. She speaks five languages indifferently and holds an advanced degree in engineering. Yet, her conversation skills are near zero; and, quite possibly the underlying apparatus necessary for an interesting conversation is lacking. The ability to master five languages is not in any way related to the skills necessary to think independently and to dress the said thoughts in interesting garb.

Regarding Classics

Somewhere in his Lapidaria Kapuscinski describes dropping in on an airport bookstore and finding in it not a single classic; all the books in it were by contemporary authors, authors he has never heard of; they were, he felt, all flash-in-the-pan: here today, gone tomorrow; destined to be pulped at the end of the season and replaced by another crop of identical perfectly forgettable annuals. Kapuscinski’s reaction to this was a species of disbelief: the endless cycle of writing, publishing, pulping, forgetting and writing something else again (only to be soon pulped and forgotten again) seemed to him preposterous.

Somehow, Kapuscinski’s reaction resonates strongly with me; but I cannot say why. When I stop to think about it, my emotional reaction appears to me illogical. To Kapuscinski’s mind, I suppose, one either writes for eternity; or one writes for nothing: a kind of non-omnis moriar. But this cannot be true: though it may not seem to him this way at the moment of writing, once an author dies he becomes wholly indifferent as to whether anyone still reads his work.

And the corollary of the above, the claim that one either reads the eternal or one reads nothing, cannot be true, either. Having read much classics and a little contemporary fiction, I am not sure that the classics really are better. Is Madame Bovary, or Il Purgatorio, really better than, say, The Difference Engine? I can’t see how.

Or perhaps the preference for the lasting is a kind of longing to participate – read what others read as if that were more relevant somehow than reading what no one else seems to read?
Then there is the reverence for the past. Portugal is a good illustration. Camões begins the Canto Primeiro of his Lusiades:

As armas e os barões assinalados,
Que da ocidental praia Lusitana,
Por mares nunca de antes navegados,
Passaram ainda além da Taprobana,
Em perigos e guerras esforçados,
Mais do que prometia a força humana,
E entre gente remota edificaram
Novo Reino, que tanto sublimaram;

Joao V built an expensive (and useless) aqueduct to bring in freshwater from Monsanto. Libson’s rooftops bristle with Roman pine cones, urns and cypresses.

It was always so. When in 379 B.C. Theban plotters set out from Athens over the Kithairon to overthrown the pro-Spartan tyrannical regime, they noted that there were only six of them and, out of reverence for the past (and the great epic of Seven Against Thebes), added a seventh.

The past resonates with us and an artful appeal to it can add grand significance to the humdrum present. If we didn't have classics, what would we appeal to?

53 Stations of the Tokaido

This picture belongs to the instantly recognizable series of 53 Stations of the Tokaido, published in 1832, which made Hiroshige Ando famous (and, eventually, immortal). These woodcuts are horizontally oriented, dramatic landscapes with brief inscriptions, in the style of Chinese literati landscapes. Hiroshige apparently also made a vertical series, referred to as Upright Tokaido, (published in 1855). The style is the same:


The author of this website has set out to visit, sketch and woodcut all the 55 locations of the series as they appear now. (And to try soba noodles at each location while he is at it). The contrasts between now and then serves well to illustrates the postwar Japanese enthusiasm for reinforced concrete. It is quite sobering.

The website also contains very interesting discussion of each of Hiroshige's paintings (from the horizontal series) showing how Hiroshige intentionally misinterpreted the views in his pictures -- made some angles appear steeper, or some heights higher than they were in reality, in order to add drama to the resulting picture.

Eventually, many different editions of the 53 stations of the Tokaido were created, by many different authors. The woodcuts assembled at the Gulbenkian exposition in Lisbon (which you can view here), though the introduction ascribes them to Hiroshige, are an entirely different kettle of fish:

Look at this picture:


Name of the Station is given as "Akasaka" (No. 37, in Owari); the print's title is "The appearance of the goddess of water to the famous biwa player Fujiwara no Moronaga as a sign of appreciation of his genius".

This series is sometimes referred to in English as "The 53 Parallels for the Tokaido Road" and is reported as being mixed work of Kunisada, Kuniyoshi, and Hiroshige and published around 1845 by different printers (!). The prints are not landscapes. Instead, they bear resemblance to the modern American knowledge cards (e.g. baseball cards). At the upper right corner of each is the title of the series ("53 stations of the Tokaido"). To the left is the name of the particular stop and the particular local lore represented in the print. Below is an illustration of the story. The lore consists of various stories from mythology, history, and literature as well as information concerning famous local "products" (embroidery, courtesans, etc.) It represents a kind of encyclopedia, or dictionary, arranged not according to the order of the alphabet, but to the order of the places along the famous road.

It reminds me of Pausanias who described his travels across Greece in the second century A.D. and at each point stopped to tell the ancient lore of the place.

Modern Japanese don't seem to know any of the stories.

Polish nineteenth century propaganda at work

This is how Matejko presented King Jan Kazimierz.

This is basically in keeping with the Sienkiewicz image of the saintly wimp who helplessly flees his enemies and can at most manage a few whispers about the tormented motherland. The fact that he abdicated the throne helped to cement the loser picture. It also depends much on the King's image in French clothing: he is westernized, therefore spoiled, effeminate and over-gentle.

But this is how Jan Kazimierz liked to present himself:



Manly, brave, Turkish rather than French; the hero of the Thirty Years' War (in which he fought as a mercenary) and of the battle of Beresteczko where he personally led the charge.

In fact, there was altogether too much of fearless man of action about Jan Kazimierz. His military idea of virtue as attacking the enemy frontally and never yielding an inch did not lend itself well to management of a constitutional parliamentary monarchy. Unable to compromise, the king occasioned a series of constitutional crisis; until, in the end, the only way out of the last one was -- abdication.

He was defeated, yes. But he was not a wimp.

On odds, choose the past

Then again, statistically speaking, the production of the past is bound to look better than contemporary production; all ages probably produce plentiful dross, with, here and there, a masterpiece; but overtime the dross falls by the wayside and only the masterpieces remain; this creates the ocular illusion that the past was much more exciting than it really was; certainly much more exciting than the present. But, when over the centuries, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of masterpieces have accumulated, the very richness of the offerings of the past, their number and quality, means that the modern consumer faced with a choice between a random masterpiece of the past and a random contemporary work on odds alone chooses the past.

We are then -- so to speak -- crushed by our cultural inheritance.

The end of art

The ever more furious search for new idiom, new artistic language, new style evident in art since the beginning of the nineteenth century reflects perhaps the fact that so much excellent art created in the past survives that it is ever harder to create works which are genuinely novel which yet match their predecessors in excellence. The audience, with their limited time, stand before a choice: should we listen to an entirely new opera by this new up-and-coming star, or should we listen to the old tried and true Incoronazzione di Poppea all over again? Somehow, increasingly, the answer seems the latter. Perhaps we have come to the end of art? Perhaps we have said everything that can be said? That is Hesse's suggestion in The Glass Bead Game: that we should stop trying to make new works and just juggle various pieces of the past.

Paris vaut bien une messe

Oh my god! Now it all makes sense - just look at his impish smirk! So the man was not being cynical, he was -- as they say in America -- being cute!