Don't Look Now

But sources say that scientists connected with Google, of all places, have just made a profound discovery.

Quantum mechanics holds, of course, that at the tiniest levels, wave and particle are both accurate descriptions of the phenomena before us.  Before observation, we can only say that a wave function predicts the probability of a particle having a particular location; it is only upon observation, however, that the wave resolves to a particle at a particular spot.

This by itself is highly mysterious; why should it be so?  It seems to be too anthropocentric for the modern world, rather a throwback to the times before Galileo when we were assumed to be at the center of all things.

I do not understand quantum computing.  I guess that quantum concepts can be exploited to create computers that are vastly quicker and more efficient than ones that rely on conventional computation.  To date, though, quantum computers are said to have been plagued with little errors, inherent in the nature of how they work, that have been a big barrier to commercial development.

Now, though, comes a system developed by Google that promises to break the big barrier.  It does this by melding the work of the physical quantum machine with a particular and novel form of Artificial Intelligence that is able to predict and adjust for the effect of these errors before they happen!  The machine and the AI talk to each other in real time, and the machine improves its operations by learning, continuously, from the AI component!  Let us call this breakthrough technology, for now, GoogleQ.

Even before all of this, it was fair to ask, apropos of quantum mechanical theory in general, whether the gaze of an orangutan counts as "observation" sufficient to fix the location of a particle.  And beyond that, could the gaze of a perfect android do the same?  If so, the theory would no longer be anthropocentric, but we would be faced with a different but no less profound ontological shock -- a merging of man and machine "in the eyes of the universe" as it were!

Well, it seems that we are here.  The people running GoogleQ need a break once in a while as we all do.  As I understand it, they could all lock the doors of the lab with the machine and the AI running over this coming Memorial Day weekend, and the observer-induced wave collapses would continue to occur!

Some have called the Google breakthrough "a philosophical earthquake" that buttresses the idea that consciousness, not matter, is fundamental.  It would seem as well to drive a stake through the heart of pancomputationalism, the view that all the world is a computer, because if it were, and computers can "observe" in a quantum sense, then there would be nothing that is not observed!

And indeed, what exactly is "unobserved" after GoogleQ?  

Wind the clock back to 1965.  We are in a state-of-the-art (for 1965) pencil factory in Dubuque.  At one point in the assembly line, there are hundreds of two-foot-long lengths of wood and graphite, proceeding apace.  A cutting machine is employed to cut them into uniform lengths of six inches.  But the machine is not perfect.  It sometimes errs, but always on the side of making the pencils too big! Accordingly, further down the line there is a little ruler against which each pencil is laid.  If it is too long, another blade automatically comes down and trims it to six inches exactly.

Certainly this machine, without human intervention, can be said to have "measured" the pencils.  Did it need to "observe" them in a quantum sense to measure them?  Isn't GoogleQ doing something very similar to what the assembly line did in more primitive fashion?

It seems that we are on the verge of teasing out the relationship between information technology and consciousness itself.  This is something that Jacques Vallee, the brilliant computer scientist and ufologist, has long predicted, raising quizzical looks as he did.  It makes me wish that I had another 20 years before me in this life, just to "see what happens."

 

My Academic Apex, and the Girl Who Was Not There

It was a warm spring day.  It may have been in the spring of 1972, more likely the spring of 1973, which was my last term at Cornell.

I was studying philosophy, with a particular focus on philosophy of mind and language.  (This, I thought, was the secret to everything.)  And I had discovered within that field a man -- Ludwig Wittgenstein -- whom I found to be utterly compelling in both his philosophy and his person.  As luck would have it, Wittgenstein's closest American friend was Norman Malcolm, an eccentric son of the prairie who had sat in on Wittgenstein's famed lectures at Cambridge in the early 1930s.  Forty years later, with Wittgenstein at the peak of his power in the academic world (he had died the year I was born -- 1951), I was assigned Professor Norman Malcolm as my academic advisor.

By this time I had exhausted the undergraduate course catalog when it came to my narrow field of concentration.  I had developed another love, for Russian language, that more than filled my plate, but I also wandered into existentialism and ethics, without much passion for either.  Further, as a natural complement to all this, I took introductory and intermediate courses in linguistics.

In the early 1970s, linguistics was undergoing a revolution (there were many others).  On the wane was descriptive linguistics, which arose out of anthropology.  It featured what purported to be a universal "script" that told you how to pronounce words in virtually any language.  (I forget how, or whether, it really dealt with tonal languages like Chinese.)  And it provided and fleshed out the standard taxonomy of tongues, grouping them into familiar families and sub-families, and tracing back their histories where that was possible.  ("Old Church Slavonic" was to Modern Russian perhaps as Middle English was to Modern, but don't hold me to that.)

On the rise was something entirely different.   A young radical at M.I.T. of all places, whose name was Noam Chomsky, had puzzled over the fact that any random child of two or three could be plunked into a community anywhere in the world, and in short order and with relative ease that child would master the language of his or her community.  This could only be possible if there was a common core underlying every language, and only if every child maintained within his/her brain some sort of template upon which disparate languages could be mapped.  Chomsky called this core "deep structure."  Having mapped, say, Swahili onto this deep structure, the child, in fact if not on any conscious level, had plotted out a series of "transformations" that strictly, rigorously brought one from the common deep structure to the "surface structure" of Swahili, which is to say actual Swahili sentences spoken by actual human beings (hence the term "transformational grammar," used to describe the new linguistics that was to displace the old.)  Chomsky and his minions could actually plot out on paper what these transformations looked like, which was largely like trees, with branchings most but not all of which were binary-- male/female, statement/interrogation, but also past/present/future.

This whole process was, of course, innate.  You couldn't ask little Billy which subliminal path he had taken from the common core to get to "Momma! Daniel bit me on the nose!"  In this sense, in old philosophical terms, it was very much in the tradition of Cartesian idealism, which counseled us to look inside ourselves for the ideal truth (Descartes himself grounded in this respect in Platonism). 

And here is where Chomsky bumped up against Wittgenstein, among whose most famous aphorisms was "nothing is hidden."  Wittgenstein saw language as intertwined with life and culture.  One of the collections of his thoughts, gathered by his acolytes and published after his death, was called "Remarks on Colour."  If memory serves, it was especially in these remarks that he attacked the idea that, to recognize a fire engine as red, we somehow compare the color of the engine to a perfect template of red that we maintain ... anywhere, it matters not whether we situate it in it mind, subconscious or brain.  For how were we to know that the template itself was red!?  Were we comparing it to a further, deeper red template and, if so, did that process go on ad infinitum?  Did we have a little homunculus within our heads that was doing all of the real thinking for us, just subliminally? 

I had a further problem with Chomsky and his minions that went to their academic integrity.  All of their work, all of their boring little tree structures, purported to explain syntax -- the rules for combining words into phrases or sentences.  But it should go without saying that the purpose of language is to convey meaning.  Accordingly, no account of language can be complete without accounting not only for syntax but also for semantics.  Here, Chomsky and the troops posited that something very similar to what his syntactical rules were doing was happening in the world of meaning as well.  Atomic elements of meaning at the deep level bubbled up into atomic expressions of meaning at the surface level.  (By "atomic" I mean that there are sharp edges to all of these semantic components, even in actual spoken languages.)  But when asked to describe these transformations, Chomsky and his pals pulled a carnival trick, in effect saying "those beautiful little beans are under that other walnut shell over there!"  And the beans would never be revealed; rather, the revolutionaries made reference to what amounted to a mere dictionary, and then tried to dress it up as the Holy Grail of Meaning. These moves were not only misguided, they were dishonest.

I should say that this latter criticism was largely of my own making, with echoes, no doubt, from an essay or two, in counterpoint to the great Chomsky, that was included in our readings in Linguistics 204.  I had no friends or even acquaintances among my colleagues in the faculties of philosophy or linguistics with whom I could discuss such things, and I never took advantage of the opportunity to engage, one on one, with my professors, except for two or three mandatory sessions in the chambers of Professor Malcolm.  I was intensely shy, and I considered my very presence at Cornell to have been a gift that I was to take in hand and thereafter just do the work and keep my mouth shut.  "Domine, non sum dignus ..." we used to say before the host was put on the tongue.

And so in that spring, with the special dispensation of Malcolm, I had been allowed to take the only graduate-level course I ever took at Cornell, Philosophy 40X, which was called something like "Advanced Studies in Wittgenstein."  I recall that the class was small, maybe fifteen students, and I have a mental picture only of one of the students, a young woman with short-cropped blondish hair and a hippie mien.  Hardly anyone spoke in the class except for Malcolm himself unless Malcolm invited it; the overall mood, as in many of my philosophy courses, was oddly sullen!  And I myself could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in my entire career up to that point when I had volunteered to say something in a philosophy class.

It is sometimes said that Wittgenstein was such a powerful personality that some of his teaching eccentricities, like stopping mid-sentence for two or three minutes with a grimace, demanding, it seemed, further inspiration from the gods before completing the sentence, rubbed off on his disciples, and it was also said that Malcolm was among them.

So here we are.  On that day and in that class, Malcolm got around, eventually, to the heart of the course as he saw it.  He gave his own short explanation of the Chomsky revolution.  (Even though this was a graduate course, I might have been better schooled in the subject than most of the Ph.D candidates in the room, who would have seen this subject as a detour from some esoteric thing that they would address, as no one had ever quite done before, in a brilliant dissertation.)  

Malcolm paused.  "What," he asked, "would Wittgenstein have said about Chomsky?"  After a little pause, on sudden impulse, I raised my hand.  "Yes, Donovan."  (It was a vestige of his Oxbridge days for Malcolm to refer to students by their last names, with no honorific "Mr." or, at the time, "Miss.")  With uncharacteristic confidence I replied -- "Wittgenstein would say that Chomsky's entire enterprise is itself in need of interpretation; it is not self-interpreting."

Malcolm just kept lecturing, as if the question had not been asked, let alone answered.  But after five, maybe seven, minutes, he circled back.  "As Donovan said ..."  My reaction to this was inner elation.  Here was a very profound question that required some authentic understanding of perhaps the greatest thinker of the 20th century and also of the upstart who would dominate linguistics (and, of course, leftist political theory) for the remainder of my life, and I had answered it correctly, even elegantly perhaps, notwithstanding the fact that Wittgenstein died before Chomsky's linguistic revolution, and Chomsky, so far as I know, never directly confronted Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and meaning.

But after class, walking back toward my dubious Collegetown digs on the south side of campus, my elation gave way to something else.  With whom would I share this little triumph?  There was no one.  It would be impossible to provide the context for it in my letters home, to siblings or to my mom and dad, both of them high school graduates only.  I had good friends at Cornell, but they were struggling with engineering, the pre-med curriculum, or economics; they did not have even a theoretical interest in what I was studying.  And I knew that I had no need even to credential myself in philosophy, to build a reputation among the faculty, because I would go to law school, not to graduate school.  So this would just be an ephemeral little bauble that I could clench in my palm for a bit.

Since I was a melancholic, and never more so than in those days, during that walk I thought about an alternative life, one in which there was a pretty girl waiting for me in my crummy Collegetown apartment.  In her arms, in post-coital pillow talk, I would lay all of this out for her.  She would be proud of me.  Perhaps she would reciprocate with a story of having won some classroom debate about whether Dickens was essentially British and whether Proust was essentially French.  I would be equally proud of her!  And our little bubble would insulate us from the prevailing Ithaca loneliness.

 

Terminal Advice, from the Sage of Warwick, Rhode Island

"We should not attempt to understand the world," said Harald Malmgren, about three weeks before his passing on February 13 of this year.  "It just is."

And yet Harald had an indefatigable moral compass.  He sinned, no doubt, many times, but it mattered to him that he sinned.  He belied the old maxim that "a good man cannot be a great man."

 

The Journey from Youth to Old Age

... is a journey from joie de vivre to cris de coeur.

 

At Cross Purposes

On the one hand, I have an urge to discard all of my unneeded factoids, like a bomber crew frantically tossing stuff overboard because a fuel leak otherwise may leave the plane crippled, short of its goal.

What factoids?  Oh, for example, in the heat of summer, the clarity of the water inside the burst tar bubbles that lined the very edge of the road where I grew up.  The myth, or reality, of the head of Ted Williams sitting in a frozen vault.  But at least 100,000 more. And "Everything Must Go!"

Without the factoids, does anything of me remain?  Perhaps that's the point.  Let it all become confetti.

And yet, when an artist labors to create meaning from a blank canvas, the meaning is built up from the meaningless.  Consider, for example, this first paragraph of a Leonid Rankov story, with its details almost all of which could be otherwise, as he leads us towards things of more importance -- dolphins, idiots savants, the diaspora:

Already a light rain had begun to fall.  It was the first October rain, always unexpected after the close humidity of summer days.  It mixed in with the smell of asphalt and the swollen blades of grass in the lawns, spotted the windshields with beads, hung in the air from the grey clouds to the very earth.  

"Speak, Memory!"

 

Renaissance in Three Acts

It's said that when a theoretical physicist or a grandmaster turns 30, the greatest personal triumphs of the person's career will be, even then, in the rear-view mirror.

Not so for the giants of popular music, or at least for some of them very roughly of my generation.  They produced what I would consider their best work in their forties and fifties, after having made a big splash in late twenties/early thirties and fallen fallow, at least for a time.

I speak of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen.  Early on, each fell into the category that the Soviets used to call "bards" -- simple songsters with no more elaborate accompaniment for their voices than a humble guitar.  (Joni rather famously had hers "open tuned," because childhood polio left her not very dexterous (sorry) with the left hand.)  A man named Bulat Okudzhava was the king of the hill among Soviet bards of the high Cold War era.

My thesis here, to which I adhere with very little confidence, and mainly for the sake of having a thesis, is that in each of these three cases an ambitious and captivating musical branching out in middle age propelled more personal power and passion on the poetic side of the ledger than had shown itself in the earlier years.

The consensus view is that Blue, released when Joni Mitchell was in her late twenties, is her best album and, indeed, one of the greatest popular albums ever recorded.  To me, Night Ride Home, released when she was in her late forties, has it beat.  Her voice by 1991 had sunk from a piercing soprano to contralto (all to the good).  She was no longer a bard per se, rather venturing into jazz/syth/fusion territory.  (The very first thing one hears in the title track is a pulsing simulacrum of crickets that carries one all the way home on the magical and very Hawaiian Fourth of July that inspires the song.):

Round the curve, and a big dark horse with tail lights on his hide

Is keeping right alongside, rev for stride ...

And elsewhere on the album her lyrics move far beyond her old themes of broken romances and general self-absorption to more broadly spiritual and philosophical palettes.  "Passion Play" has me completely drawn in from its opening, perfect metaphor -- "Magdalene's trembling like a washing on a line ..."  And then:

All around the marketplace

The buzzing of the flies

The buzzing and the stinging.

Divinely barren and wickedly wise

The killer nails are ringing ...

Tragedy ... now you tell me

Who ya gonna get to do the dirty work

When all the slaves are free?

And Joni tops it off with a faithful yet free reworking of Yeats' "Second Coming" in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," the apocalyptic verses punctuated by synthetic sirens and a booming, explosive timpani on the fade out.

Simon's rebirth can be sourced to his gravitation to so-called World Music when he was in his forties.  About 20 years before, with Art Garfunkel, he had had the top-selling album of all time, at the time, in Bridge Over Troubled Water.  That album had its strengths and its beauties but, let's face it, it sank into sappiness from time to time, as in the title cut, which seemed impossible to escape in 1970 if the car radio was on.

But the flowing musical freedom of South Africa (Graceland) and Brazil (Rhythm of the Saints) seemed to liberate Simon lyrically just as jazz fusion catapulted Joni to a more exalted lyrical space.  As proof I will cite not "Proof," which is on the same album, but rather "Further to Fly," because in my view it is among the most unsung masterpieces of popular music of all time, both rhythmically and lyrically:

And maybe you'll find a love

That you discover accidentally

That falls against you gently

As a pickpocket brushes your thigh,

Further to fly ...

There may come a time when I will lose you,

Lose you as I lose my sight

Days falling backward into velvet night.

The Open Palm of Desire,

The Rose of Jericho,

The soil as soft as summer,

The strength to let you go.

Leonard Cohen, in his youth, was almost a caricature of the bard.  A soft and hesitant voice and just a few chords -- "Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river ..."  But his lyrics were phenomenal even in the earlier days --

The Sisters of Mercy they are not departed or gone.

They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on.

And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.

I hope you run into them, you who've been traveling so long ...

If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn

They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

Yes, taking the entire body of work, it is Leonard and not Bob Dylan who should have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  And it is a sin and a bit of a scandal that he is known to most in the 21st century only as the writer of "Hallelujah," not least of all a scandal because those who take the song as a religious anthem, which is to say nearly everybody, have never bothered to understand it.  They think it is some kind of more sophisticated, more hip version of "Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life," when it embodies one of Cohen's most recurrent themes -- romantic, sexual passion as a flawed and futile window into what we are really after, which is merger with the Divine -- 

They say there is a God above

But all I ever learned from love

Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya.  (Hallelujah)

It's bitter, but amen to that.

My main point about Cohen, though, is that he hit his artistic peak only in his mid- to late-fifties, with I'm Your Man and The Future, and that the catalyst for those brilliant albums was his embrace of synthetic enhancements to his music and also of seldom-heard and exotic natural instruments, such as the Middle Eastern oud, which we minstrels might call a form of lute.

"Hallelujah" is a fine song, but some of the tunes on these two albums leave it in the dust, frankly, and far more deserve to define what Leonard was up to:

A man never got a woman back

Not by begging on his knees,

Or I'd crawl to you baby and I'd fall at your feet

I'd howl at your beauty like a dog in heat

I'd claw at your heart;

I'd tear at your sheet;

I'd say "PLEEZE!!"

(I'm your man.)

And of course the title tune on The Future, seemingly inspired by Cormac McCarthy:

When they said "Repent! Repent!"

I wonder what they meant...

And now the Wheels of Heaven stop

You feel the Devil's riding crop

Get ready for the Future

It is murder...

There'll be the breaking of the Ancient Western Code.

Your private life will suddenly explode.

They'll be phantoms, they'll be fires on the road

And a white man dancin.'

You'll see your woman hanging upside down,

Her features covered by her fallen gown,

And all the lousy little poets comin' round

Tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson.

(And the white man dancin.')

Which of these great voices will still be heard 50 years from now?  From whence came their inspiration, and will it come again?

 

In the Place of God's Own Loneliness

Zoltan Bathory is a Hungarian-born heavy metallist and martial artist.  He is also what you might call a part-time shaman.  His particular shamanic magic carpet is DMT, sometimes called "the spirit molecule."  Bathory has inhaled it many hundreds of times.  Where he goes on the carpet depends on multiple variables -- how much he takes of course, his state of mental preparation, and also, it seems, the whims of the Others that he sometimes meets in his travels, in alternative "consensus realities," each as valid as our own.  Sometimes, for example, the Others ask him what is the purpose of his visit, and they don't take kindly to the answer "Just passing through!"

How deep can one go on DMT?  According to Zoltan, in the ultimate journey there is complete ego death.  The Pure Light is not so much experienced; one merges with it and there is nothing else; there is no experiencer.

Perhaps more interesting than this, though, because Bathory thinks that it explains the life mission of all creatures, is an intermediate place that one can reach on DMT, where one experiences a loneliness that is God's own.  It is the pre-creation environment of God.  It is magnificent, but the sense of isolation is overwhelming, devastating to the ego.  (Even Robinson Crusoe could talk to a sand crab from time to time.)

In Bathory's telling, God Him/Herself felt this same isolation in this same space, and it was to escape it that (S)he created all creatures great and small in a vast and variegated cosmos.

In the here and now, and at every moment, we are tied, subliminally, to the Source that is God.  As if via transmission of a computer code, we feed back to the Source everything that we experience.  In this way, it is never lost.  Our immortality lies in the infinitesimal contribution that we make in our communication with the Source.  (Intimations of Carl Jung here.)

I have difficulty with this cosmology.  I have difficulty with the idea that there was a Before and After for God, but more fundamentally with the idea that things were set up seemingly incorrectly, at first, for a God who is assumed to be perfect.  But it should go without saying that I know precisely nothing.

 

A Question Answered

"Why in the world would you read The New Criterion?"

Two sentences, intended to explain the relationship between Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon and the wife of Anthony Eden, and Pamela Digby Harriman, the wife of Averill Harriman -- "The woman who became Pamela Harriman, and la plus grande des grandes horizontales, died after taking a swim in the pool at the Ritz in Paris, where she was serving as the American ambassador ... Lady Avon could not resist observing that Harriman 'died staring at the ceiling of the Ritz: as so often in life.'"

 

That's All, Folks!

In Japan they sell more diapers for seniors than for babies.  In South Korea, the birth rate is so low that the population is expected to shrink by 90% in the next three generations.  For reasons that are difficult to explain, once these trends take hold, it is said that they almost never reverse.

Jim Morrison, who cheated the gods by dying at 27, raised his fist in defiance --  "Before you slip into unconsciousness, I'd like to have another kiss, another flashing chance at bliss, another kiss, another kiss..."

 

As If Through a Kaleidoscope

It is said that in a near-death experience or NDE, one reviews every moment of one's life.  The same is assumed to be true of the actual death experience.  This is impossible, of course, if the time constraints of ordinary life are not suspended.  It is also true that one's "life" for this purpose must end before the NDE, or else we would get an infinite regress; we would spend eternity reviewing our reviews.  (Only Gloria Swanson can do that.)

If true, my own life review will include a very hot night in 1962.  I sat in the back seat of the family Buick with my three siblings.  The windows were open.  We were all six of us very tired, having come from my cousins' house where we kids played all day and our parents raised teasing and alcohol-infused banter from folding aluminum chairs.

My dad was negotiating the often-chaotic rotary known as Wellington Circle.  For a few brief moments this spot afforded me a glimpse, from perhaps a half-mile away, of the twin screens of the Wellington Drive-In, the size of postage stamps and bathed in technicolor.  Always I tried to spy them in hopes of seeing a half-naked Sophia Loren doing the hoochi coochi before King Herod in some half-baked biblical epic.  (The hormones were even then kicking in.)  But all I saw on this particular evening was a single screen -- Lee Marvin grinning a greasy and sinister grin beneath a giant yellow sombrero, the only Mexican no doubt for miles around.  I sank back into my seat, and the car was silent of conversation until we reached home.

 

Why Should I Care?

About the fate of S.S. United States that is?  She lies as I write this astride a dock in Mobile, Alabama, awaiting a final scouring of environmental hazards before she is towed to a spot off the coast of Florida where she will be sunk, with due ceremony and fanfare, her demise no doubt to lead the "evening news," except that there is no longer such a thing as the evening news. 

At just shy of 1000 feet in length, the United States will be the largest artificial reef in the world.  Those responsible for her fate, who tried in vain for decades to secure for her a more dignified retirement, like that of Cunard's Queen Mary, which is now a first-class dockside hotel in Long Beach, California, spin her nestling into the grave as a fine thing, relative to all other financially-viable alternatives that is.  But to me it is as if Jim Thorpe, washed up as an athlete at age 40, were offered a painless suicide so that the taxidermists could prepare to display his magnificent form at the Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC.

In 1969, the United States was withdrawn permanently from passenger service, rather abruptly, by her owner/operator, which was U.S. Lines.  Competition from jet aircraft had erased her viability, and U.S. Lines was facing other financial challenges.  The principal business of the company was not the transportation of passengers but the transportation of freight.  It owned a large fleet of old-school freighters, all of them called either "Pioneer X" or "American Y."  They themselves were losing their viability, as it became apparent that the future lay in large container ships because of their efficiency and also the protection that the containers themselves offered against pilferage.

In the winter of 1966-67, I was a high school sophomore living in Winthrop and schooling under the tutelage of the Salesian Brothers in adjacent East Boston.  On a cold evening in March of that year (perhaps as cold as the first few days of this March of 2025), S.S. American Ranger might be passing through President Roads with a Boston Pilot aboard to guide her through the islands and the shoals that dot the outer harbor, just as U.S.S. Constitution passed through President Roads after her triumphs in the War of 1812.  Someone at U.S. Lines just then might have picked up his rotary-dial telephone and dialed 846-3102, my home number in Winthrop that is.  The message for my dad would have been simple -- "Four and one in the morning."  Four common dockworkers and a foreman to oversee them, all to appear at 7AM at shipside, Pier One East Boston.  (The outline of the massive warehouse at Pier One can still be seen in aerial photos of the city, although the surrounding neighborhood is finally giving up its Italian and Latino roots to gentrification -- high rises with spectacular views of the city within two subway stops of Boston's Financial District.)

My dad's job was to supply not only the muscle but also the paraphernalia to facilitate the loading and unloading of cargo at Pier One, as well as the Boston Navy Yard -- lumber, barrels filled with ten-penny nails, rope, wire and huge turnbuckles.  He was also the man whose expertise was needed to ensure that the "shoring" of the cargo was safely executed.  But it seemed that much of his time on the job, in a little shack just adjacent to Pier One, was spent making payroll and keeping the books for The Marine Company, the contractor principally to U.S. Lines that was founded by his father and owned in the '60s by his older brother, my Uncle Connie.

And so, when in 1968 or so U.S. Lines, facing those same financial straits, decided to shut down its freight operations in Boston, The Marine Company was doomed.  My dad, fast approaching 50 with four kids and only a high-school education, had to re-invent himself.  After many months he managed to do so, taking on a job as a file clerk for an insurance company in Quincy, Massachusetts.  He made about the same amount of money at the new job as at the old one, which wasn't much, but after a time he got his dignity and his good humor back.

The same forces that mothballed S.S. United States, I mean to say, knocked my dad off the docks as well and soured all of our spirits at 66 Cottage Park Road in Winthrop.  If he were alive and alert today at age 105, Alpheus Donovan would be following the last voyage of the United States with great passion and a keen sense of her special place in nautical history.

 

Bidding Adieu to America's Ghost Ship

As the S.S. United States, the most beautiful and the fastest of all of the 20th century ocean liners, makes her way under a long, single tow line, with no one aboard, down the East Coast and around the Florida peninsula to Alabama, where she will be fitted for her transition to the world's largest artificial reef, I dream of her.

In my dream, she speeds through crowded New York and New Jersey waters with abandon.  Her bow is made of wood and it is splintering at the water line.  At flank speed she shudders and shakes.  All aboard fear that she will founder mid-Atlantic.

All of this is nonsense of course.  From 1952 until 1969, she made the transatlantic passage every five days or so with elegance and ease.  My dream reflects a general angst and sorrow at her fate, at the pictures we will soon see of her iconic funnels, vibrant in her heyday but now a very faded red, white and blue, sinking beneath the waves.

 

The Direction of Time

Physicists tell us that there is no reason in principle why time should not run backwards.  Yet they also tell us that the overall entropy of the system is destined to increase until we live in a universe of maximum disorder.  The movement towards disorder is a way that we mark the progress, forward, of time.

Like Pigpen in the "Peanuts" comic strip, I leave behind me a dense trail of dirt and dust.  In principle, my entire life history could be reconstituted from the dirt and the dust.

In principle.

 

A Classic Case of Hubris

It has been seven years now.  I thought that, using my own powers of discernment and focus, I could ride the bus towards "Big-D" disclosure of what is behind the veil.  But the veil frustrates all such attempts.  The closer one gets to it, the faster it seems to recede.

Moses did not make it to the Promised Land.  Magellan did not complete the circumnavigation.  J.D. Madden's concept of the "hyperobject" comes into play. 

Picture the monolith of Kubrick's Space Odyssey, but on a scale like that of the Great Wall of China.  The perfect blackness, the perfect flatness, do communicate something to us, but what they communicate is impenetrability.  We can touch it.  Indeed, touching it can change us, perhaps change the trajectory of humankind.  But we can't know it.

 

Flights of Fancy (Things That Is)

No one who knows me well would ever accuse me of being either nimble or physically courageous.  I did not sky dive.  I did not zipline.  Unlike some friends and classmates, I did not leap from a promontory into the still waters of the Quincy granite quarry to impress the girls.

I have been mostly inert, and downright bookish.  But from time to time, like a 17-year cicada, I have arisen from my torpor to take flights of fancy facilitated mostly by wonderfully wrought machines that I have known and loved.  And thus I have been able to live in the moment, for a moment, viz. --

• Track Day at the Mid-Ohio race course in my blue Mini Cooper S.
• Upside down in a Soviet-era Yak military trainer.
• Flying "chandelles" in a Waco open-cockpit biplane from Martha's Vineyard, with a beautiful girl behind me at the controls.
• Galloping under the Newport Bridge in Weatherly in 15 kts of wind, she who defended the America's Cup in the same waters in 1962.
• A short sprint down from Plymouth Harbor to the mouth of the Cape Cod Canal in the stately and venerable gentleman's fishing schooner known as Roseway.
• Reaching down from Portsmouth to Ipswich (are there two more resonant nautical names than those?) in my own modest sloop with a small pod of dolphins for company.
• Breaking 100 mph in Skowhegan, ME in my little 1.5 litre Honda CRX coupe, because why not?

Perhaps, when my time comes, a chevron of P-51 Mustangs will fly low over my Sandy Point grave, and one will pull up and out of the chevron to execute a final salute -- the "Missing Mensch Formation!"

 

Your Fate Is Sealed

"Ignorance of the law is no excuse."  This is not just a folk aphorism.  It is a correct statement of the common law.  If you drive to Kentucky and find yourself in a town where the speed limit is 15 mph unless otherwise posted, you can get bagged even though you think, reasonably, that the default limit must be 25 or 30 mph.

On the other hand, you cannot be convicted of a crime if the statute books don't put you on notice as to what conduct is prohibited.  If the governor of Kentucky signed a law imposing a fine of up to $5000 for behavior that is deemed to be "unseemly," any conviction under such statute would be overturned as violative of the Due Process Clause of the US Constitution.

At St. Ignatius School in Columbus in the 1960s, my cousin Angela instinctively appreciated this due process constraint even though she had never heard of it!  One day, in fifth grade, her teacher Sister Agatha was explaining, for the umpteenth time, the difference between mortal and venial sin, and the difference between the punishments inflicted for each.  She raised her hand, tentatively.  She asked the good sister to give an example of a mortal and of a venial sin, and, specifically, to pick examples that were as close as possible to each other, so that Angela could better understand exactly where that line was situated in order especially to conform her behavior to the prohibition against mortal sin.

Sister Agatha's first impulse after hearing her question was to chastise Angela in front of her friends and classmates for insolence.  But she held her breath and her tongue, reminding herself that Angela was a good and serious girl, and also noticing that the other children in the class seemed very sympathetic to the question.  She fell back instead on the line that only God, in His Perfection, could know precisely where the line was, and that it was presumptuous of us to try to know His mind in that respect or any other.  Rather, we had to trust Him completely and without question.  It was "fitting indeed and just, right and proper for salvation" so to trust Him.

In the moment, Angela accepted this explanation, but over time she came to see it as nonsense.

Twenty-three years later, Angela submitted her dissertation in anthropology for review at Kent State University.  It was called "Reason and Responsibility Among the Ituapu of the Peruvian Lowlands."  She had spent six months the year before embedded with the Ituapu tribe together with a close colleague, Dr. Gustavo Mendez of Peru.  Angela acquired a serviceable ability to speak the Ituapu language; Gustavo was nearly fluent in it, and to a certain extent culturally fluent as well, to a much greater extent at least than Angela was.

The primary source for Angela and Gustavo in the village where they were living was the village shaman, whose name was Tekapuro.  They asked him and others many questions designed to unearth the moral, spiritual and cultural rules governing the people of the village.  And of course as anthropologists they tried to infer such rules simply by observation of the behavior of the villagers.

Tekapuro told them that if you eat the heart of a warrior/victim, you will absorb his courage into your being.  He said that if a person wanders alone into the rain forest at night, the Spirit of the Jaguar, which rules the forest, will often steal him or her away, for good.  He said that barren women can be transformed into a certain kind of tree by the Spirits, but that there are herbal potions that can protect against that outcome.

What he did not say was how to live one's life in order to be right with the Gods.  One day, acting on impulse, Angela asked him what he thought would happen to him when he died.  At that Tekapuro broke into hysterical laughter.  He walked a few yards to a large, porous-looking mound.  He grabbed a stick and fractured the crown of the mound.  Hundreds, maybe thousands, of panicked fire ants poured out of it.  Tekapuro laughed again.

Nevertheless, Angela told me later that she had learned more about "reason and responsibility" from the Ituapu than she had from the nuns at St. Ignatius.  I asked her how so.  She said "your fate is sealed, for example, but by that I don't mean that it is predetermined and immutable, but rather that it is hidden from you and from everyone else, by design."

 

Under the Big Top

All eyes are fixed on the Big Barker as he doffs his top hat and points with his silver eagle-handled cane.  And then, as directed, they shift hard left, to an intensely spot-lit mound of sawdust that marks the portal from whence the elephants will come, if ever they should choose to come.

The skeptics demand clear visual evidence, and the people, wary of misinformation, follow them in this.  They demand radar and infrared.  They demand metallurgical analysis of the bits that have fallen from the sky.  They demand eyewitness, not second-hand, testimony, from credible witnesses.  They demand admissions from senior government officials that other senior government officials have been gaslighting them "until the memory of man knows not to the contrary."

All of these boxes have been checked.  No one gives a flying fuck.  No one has really wanted any evidence.  They just wanted the lights to go down, and the calliope to steam up, so that they could stare in peace and wonder at the sawdust.

 

The Poetic Imagination and the Brain

I want to return to an old subject, one that is a bit of a fixation for me.  It is the difficulty of reconciling a physicalist account of the mind with the power and the origin of metaphor, in poetry and in everyday life.

But we know now, you say, that computers can hold linguistic structures and connections within them that already rival our own and, it goes without saying, these are held in physical form, in complex binaries that, even if they are said to reside in the cloud, actually reside in a server somewhere.  So this physical "anchor" for such structures proves that our physical brains can do the same.

Yes, whatever resides in a computer resides there physically, but the "semantic component" of our language, as Chomsky described it, isn't really replicated in computers; rather, they use pattern recognition to mimic what the human mind has created through other means.  If, for example, you ask ChatGPT to explain the anatomical differences between a leopard and a jaguar, the program will search hundreds of millions of texts and spit back at you the consensus view that has been expressed by others, others with brains!

But, in humans, the semantic component must reside in the brain, you say.  Where else could it be?!

In examining our poetic capacities that militate against the physicalist paradigm (according to me at least), we can walk along a spectrum, from less impressive to more so.  Let's do it.

The Russian word for "work" is «работа» -- "rabota."  I would say that the two words occupy the same conceptual space; I can't think of any significant way in which the meaning of one departs from the meaning of the other.  And so, if you, an English speaker, decide to study Russian and encounter the Russian word, you can just map it onto something you already know -- "work," and the job is done.  This is easy to conceptualize in computer terms.  Whatever the meaning of "work" is, it is replicated, with a little superscript "r" attached to distinguish it as the Russian equivalent.  And so it is, you say, in our brains.

Now consider the word "license."  Its primary meaning is something like "permission."  You can't fish for small-mouthed bass in Maine without permission from the authorities, without a "license to fish."  But, once having secured permission, via the local tackle shop in Grand Lake Stream, how do you ensure that you can prove that you have such permission?  The store owner gives you a piece of paper which is headed, in bold letters, "Maine License to Fish."  The piece of paper is not the permission; it is the physical proof that you have secured permission.  The first person to call this piece of paper a "license" made a conceptual jump from the abstract to the tangible (usually it seems to operate in reverse!).  But this strikes us as a minor jump and one easy to imagine somehow replicated in the brain.

"Rank and file."  The original meaning of the expression comes from a military formation that looks like a box of men, ten across, say, and ten deep.  When we view the formation from slightly above and in front of it, each horizontal line of men is a "rank," and each vertical line is a "file."  (If the command drill sergeant gives the command "Right Face!," the rank will become the file and vice versa.)  But, through someone's poetic imagination, "rank and file" came to mean the common, lowest order of things as opposed to those in charge -- "The Republican leadership may not be able to establish order among the rank and file."  This is a bigger conceptual leap.  Who was the first to make it, and how is it that he was understood?  What does it look like in the mapping of the brain?

At a critical moment in the movie "A Complete Unknown," Johnny Cash leans in to his friend Bob Dylan and says "Track some mud on the carpet Big D!"  What was this carpet, and what was this mud?  What filaments within the brains of our heroes allowed one to invent it, and the other to "grok" it?

The writer and editor David Samuels, spurred on by the same film, said this week that Dylan's music revealed "a bullet-proof intelligence that twists and turns like a fish in order to avoid being caught."  How is a wriggling fish mapped onto the concept of "intelligence?"  And yet the metaphor is a very fine one.

You may call it magical thinking, but what I might propose is the possibility that our whole conceptual structure lies outside of ourselves, with the "tapping in" facilitated by our brains.  This model looks more like the visions of Carl Jung, and it may be more compatible with various "spooky" phenomena, including the fact, or theory, that, all things being equal, people doing the New York Times crossword puzzle at 3PM do better than people who do the puzzle at 5AM (coffee or no coffee), because the first cohort will benefit somehow from the learning of everyone else in the collective unconsciousness who has already done it that day.

So I don't think that our physicalist models have really come to terms with the elasticity, the fluidity, that is inherent in our thinking.  And, by the way, how did we come to stretch the very concrete and tangible concepts represented by an "elastic" band and a molten, "fluid" metal, so far into the realm of the abstract? 

The "roar" of the Napoleons at Waterloo.  The "bleating" of the trumpet of Miles Davis.  The "murmuring" pines and the hemlocks in the forest primeval!

Metaphors are everywhere.

 

"Megalophobia"

It's a new word to me as well, new in the last few weeks.  It means "fear of large things."  Instagram illustrates the concept beautifully with a short clip of an Airbus A380 -- the largest commercial airliner now in service -- emerging out of a dense fog for a near-zero-visibility landing directly over the videographer's head.  It does indeed inspire a frisson of fear.

What historical examples can we conjure up?

• JFK and his crewmates at the moment when they realized that a Japanese destroyer was about to cut Patrol Torpedo Boat No. 109 in half.
• The denizens of Fukushima, Japan and of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, when the entire sea rose to take their towns away.
• German soldiers manning a pillbox overlooking Omaha Beach at dawn on June 6, 1944, when they first looked, with disbelief, at the scale of the armada that had been organized for their destruction.

But a prospect of imminent death is not necessary to this our new equation; it is immensity per se that instills this instinctive fear.  Thus, if we could be transported via spaceship to a spot within, say, 1000 miles of the surface of the sun, with no danger whatsoever in our secure little capsule, we would nonetheless be overcome with megalophobia without doubt.

And sometimes megalophobia can bleed into something that we might call ... what?... "nanophobia"?  That is to say, "fear of very tiny things."  A global-scale attack on our bodies by little viral squiggles might be an example, leaving us in fear of both big and small, and forced to seek shelter in media res.

My current dread of Something Big bears closest resemblance, I think, to that of the pillbox Germans, except that for me it is not the morning of June 6, but the afternoon of June 5.  The killer armada is not in sight, but its immanence can be felt in the bones.

 

The Apocalypse Comes On Little Cat Feet

In Ukraine.  In Syria.  In the working-class towns of England.  In New Jersey.  And in the hills overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway.

Two women, one in Kursk Oblast, Russia, the other in Malibu, USA, weep as they abandon their homes and their personal effects, but for a few photographs stuffed into their respective back packs.  The rest is engulfed in flames.

 

The Collapse of Margaret McGillicuddy

I have been practicing law for almost 50 years now, or so I'm told by the little bar card I keep in my wallet.  For about 40 of those years I have known Margaret McGillicuddy, first as a colleague in the state service, and then as a friendly competitor in the world of state tax defense.  The niche is a narrow one and the community is small and tight knit.  Accordingly, I would see Margaret pretty often at conferences and in the courthouse.  We were friendly, as I say, but certainly not friends.  I have nothing at all bad to say about her, but the truth is that we never really clicked on a personal level.

In a dream that invaded my psyche 'round midnight last night, I had a meeting with Margaret in her office.  Her office was located in a stately old Boston building.  The decor was almost comically old-fashioned; it could have been the office of Perry Mason!  The other noteworthy environmental things about it were that she practiced alone, and that she did not maintain even a single administrative staffer.  So if you met with Margaret, you met with Margaret, alone.

When our meeting was done, I said so long to Margaret and left.  But as I was walking down the hall towards the elevator, I suddenly remembered that I had left my briefcase in her office, by the door.  It had many important papers in it, but more than that I had a sentimental attachment to it.  I certainly did not want to lose it!

When I came back to Margaret's office, her door was just ever slightly ajar.  I would not open it unannounced, of course; she might be indisposed.  I knocked twice, rather hard.  After a pause Margaret said "Just a moment!"  Her tone was very odd, odd enough to cause me some concern.  Clearly she was indisposed in some way.  My mind raced through a number of silly and highly "improbable causes."  Had she cut her leg on something, and was there blood running down her stocking?  Had she just washed off her make-up in the bathroom sink?  Was she, unbeknownst to me, wearing a wig, and had it fallen into the toilet?  Had she taken a couple of swigs from a whiskey bottle that she kept in a drawer?

Shaking off the nonsense scenarios, I said, through the door, "Sorry to disturb you, Margaret, it's just that I think I left my briefcase behind!"  There were a few footsteps.  "Just a second!" she replied again.  And then she opened her door about halfway with her left hand, and offered me my briefcase with her right.  But no sooner did we make sudden eye contact than she threw the door completely open, broke into heaving sobs, and collapsed into my chest.  (The briefcase had fallen to the floor.)  Instinctively I embraced her.

The situation on its face was awkward in the extreme.  But somehow I did not feel uncomfortable.  Rather, my higher moral instinct seemed to have risen to the occasion, and I did my best to comfort her, as a brother or a father might have, even though before this day I had never had any physical contact with her beyond a rather manly handshake.

After perhaps 90 seconds, her sobs began to subside.  I asked her what the matter was, "for goodness' sake!"  She answered me in short, staccato phrases, in many fewer words, in fact, than I need now to recount her tale to you.  It was as if she were speaking to me both in words and in a kind of stress-enabled telepathy!

"The matter" was that she was going blind, and going blind in the moment!  And she was losing her sight in a most peculiar way.  She said that if she concentrated intensely on her dilemma, her sight was fine, but as soon as she let her foot off the gas, as it were, she began to lose it.  So her sight was flickering on and off as she struggled to keep focus.  At the same time, she knew that this was a losing battle, because it was impossible to maintain the required level of concentration.  Like a drowning person who knows that she will soon have to concede defeat, open her mouth and swallow water, Margaret fought but without hope for a happy ending.

And it was worse even than that.  What she told me next was that she realized, for the first time, that her sensory input, taken in the aggregate, was her Self, her Being, her Everything.  Without them there simply was no Margaret.  And so, if her eyesight comprised, say, 30% of her sensory input, then when it flickered off she lost 30% of her Self; she quite literally died, in fact, precisely to that extent.

As I still held her in my embrace, her story told, I felt deep empathy for Margaret in her distress, but I also felt a terror I had never felt before for myself, for I knew that her awful struggle to stay in the light at all costs was a universal one.