A lisboan discovery

While visiting one of those boarded up buildings in Chiado (the owner -- an offshore corporation owned by a major Portuguese bank -- want 1.5 million for what is 1,500 square meters in pretty bad shape), I discovered hiding within it -- in the midst of a scene of destruction and desolation -- chained doors, walled up windows and doorways, a dim, half-collapsed staircase lit by a chain of Christmas lights running along the floor -- a hortus conclusus, a walled-in paradise, an island of piece and prosperity: 250 meters of airy, sunlit space at its top, the only apartment occupied in the building, dwelt in by three kings -- an American and two Canadians, all of them illegal. The discovery was delightful: high ceilings and two panel doors, loggias in all directions, views of the bay and the São Carlos, sun rays, breezes; it was like stepping into a vampire novel: this could have been Cathrine Deneuve's hide out in the middle of the city.

And somewhere in that apartment, holding up a short table-leg there was an old book. Wishing to keep it, I stole it. (I didn't think any of the occupants of the apartment would miss it).

Its title page read:

Leite Bastos

As Tragedias de Lisboa

Ediçao Illustrada

VOLUME IV

Lisboa 1879

I have been reading it-- breathlessly -- ever since.

Now, don't go rushing out to get your own copy.

The book is by one Francisco Leite Bastos, whom research shows to have been a Portuguese journalist and crime-writer, 1846-1881. Leite Bastos is not sufficiently highly regarded to earn a mention in the Portuguese wikipedia. Nor can I say that he deserves it. For all I know, it's just pretty standard Conan Doyle knock off -- cool furniture (colonial gentlemen, purloined letters, rabid dogs); odd puzzles(usually with rather disappointing solutions); a mild thrill of danger. Millions -- quite literally -- like it.

The truth is that the book's main attraction to me lies in the fact that... I do not read Portuguese -- only French and Italian (and neither all too well). I am therefore unable to follow all of the book's inanities. I cannot be disappointed by the solution to its puzzles, for example, since I do not quite grasp the puzzles in the first place.

I understand a little, enough to enjoy the odd furtniture: for example, that O Club Dos Gravatas Lavadas -- the club of the laundered ties -- is a crime organization based on the masonic model; that viscount of Saint Crispin is a ruined Bohemian nobleman who nevertheless manages to keep a balcão in São Carlos, a horse, and a pack of hounds, and to socialize with everybody who is anybody; that in the course of the action a corpse is dug up; and that some of the action takes place among the Africans of the city, an off-limits, forbidden ground. (1)

All of these are excellent building blocks with which to toy; to imagine what the book could possibly be about. But what it is about, I do not know -- and that is just great. Having read dozens of similar books before, I positively know I do not want to know.

Unable to know it, I am free to believe it mysterious; and to fool myself into thinking that there is more to it than there is likely to be.

But I am repeating myself.

***

(1) I find no mention of the Rua do Poço dos Negros, named after an unholy burial ground for the unbaptised blacks which had once existed here -- "Poço" is the Venetian pozzo, well, here meaning a hole in the ground where the dead were buried).

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.