No Prior Experience

Do you realise 
that babies 
are being born 
every second
with no
prior 
experience? 

That's why you get all this crying 
and digestive malfunction 
going on for 
years!

Just think
if we could find a way
to get babies born 
with a reasonable grounding 
in the mechanics 
and philosophy 
of being a person. 

Wouldn't that be 
fantastic?!

Just think of it!

Executive babies!!!

The Good, the Bad and the Inefficient

"All good writers have some bad in them." -- Philip Larkin

I believe he's right because, if you want to make art, you have to really believe 'This thing should exist' and 'It has to be like this', but nobody can be so self-oriented only when they make art; they must be that kind of person all the time.

My next point will broaden the stage of this intrapersonal story quite dramatically, so to speak.

I think there is too great a concern with being good and being perfectly good. I think it's okay to be bad. The universe is fundamentally good (take 'good' to mean something like 'unified' if the word 'good' is losing its meaning at this point). The goodness or unity in the universe is strong enough to carry the weight of badness or disunity, and that may even be what it's for.

Let us take the politician as a case apart from artists. All politicians are at least partly bad because they all want to control the monopoly on violence. They all desire the right to apply force, to compel their fellow citizens to do things they would not otherwise do. (Authority in my view is a form of disunity or 'badness' because the only people who can represent that people is that same people themselves).

But, for one, this 'badness' of political actors may in the end achieve some good, suggesting that their badness may have been part of a goodness so great that it was difficult to perceive.

(As an analogy here, consider the inefficient but surviving business. It is inefficient because some of its activities do not convert investment into profit as efficiently as possible. But some of that inefficiency may yield an insight that increases the business's profitably. In that case, what was thought to be inefficiency was in fact an efficiency that could not be identified using the available methods. So it is with the good and the bad.)

And secondly, the necessary badness of individual politicians is tolerable because there is enough good to carry it.

But what if there is not? Shouldn't we say 'Badness is okay *as long as* there is enough good to carry it'? Let's try it. If a government becomes so subsumed by badness that its goodness collapses under the weight, much more suffering will radiate outwards from it to the rest of the people. But those people, being largely good, will carry the weight until a better time and better decisions. And if they are not, and they destroy themselves, humanity will live on around them to that better time. And if humanity is destroyed, the considerable remainder of the world will live on. And if the world is destroyed? The galaxy? The universe? Ah, the universe cannot be destroyed. There cannot be no universe. As long as the potential for existence exists, there will be.

And so, it is not necessary to say 'as long as' because there will always be enough good to carry the bad. It is just that there may not be enough good to carry the bad within a given identified container.

Having established this, we can now work backwards. If Earth doesn't need to be ripped apart as part of some powerful disunity (or some greater good so large it looks like tragedy to the human eye), it shouldn't be. The nation, the community, the individual should not be consumed by badness if there is an alternative.

I think identity exists so that we will struggle for it, but we have innumerable concentric identities: self, family, profession, sex, class, background, political outlook, society, nation, continent, planet, galaxy. A person who could align all of their identities and struggle towards unity in all of them would be the most powerfully good person. But because we cannot do that - none is sufficiently strong - and so each of us is necessarily somewhat bad, somewhat disunified.

As Plato had Socrates say in the Protagoras, "No one errs willingly". They who know right will do right. But knowing, for example, that it is right to give food to a person who is starving is not enough. We would also have to align our identities sufficiently to understand that we and the suffering person are of the same kind. Then we would automatically help them.

When we know how to preserve, how to be the good and carry the bad, we do so. And when we don't know how to be good, we must necessarily be bad and be carried.

This provides no assurance against personal destruction or that of our kind but, because the greatest reality is indestructible, even if our collective badness leads to the end of any good we recognise, some small part of us will live on until the end.

English Grammar and the Phantom Reality Explosion

Today, I learned more about the third (or past unreal) conditional, a grammatical structure I used to teach as of more than ten years ago. It goes like this:

If I hadn't come to Ecuador, I would never have tried encebollado.

This is a counterfactual statement which tells us that a) I did come to Ecuador, b) I did try encebollado and c) my trying encebollado was contingent on my coming to Ecuador.

So far so good, here's what I added to this today courtesy of the philosophy of Luis de Molina, a 16th century Spanish Jesuit priest, jurist, economist and theologian:

In producing any counterfactual statement, we admit the possibility of other hypothetical realities.  In the case above, these are the realities in which I did not come to Ecuador. The number of these realities must be infinite due to the limitless number of possible lives I could have lived outside of Ecuador. 

In the statement, what we are saying is that, in no one of these hypothetical realities, did or do I try encebollado. This is patently untrue. There are any number ways to eat encebollado without coming to Ecuador, and if the number of realities where I do not come to Ecuador is infinite, I must have found some way to eat encebollado in at least one of them.

(And due to the natures of permutations and variations, if in one, then in many, most likely an infinite number, albeit a subset of the aforementioned infinite set.)

Therefore, what I must mean in making the above statement is that, of the admitted infinite number of hypothetical realities in which I did not come to Ecuador, of those which are most like the one we are experiencing, except for the stated counterfactual condition, I did or do not try encebollado.

(And, I can't help wondering, is there a line drawn between the realities sufficiently like ours to count and those which are not and, if so, where? Or is it more of a gradient of similitude, and even if so, where is it?!)

In conclusion, we have a sentence which implicitly refers to an infinite number of hypothetical realities with one specific difference from the existent one, implicitly ring-fences a group of these which otherwise resemble the existent reality, and then states something which could not happen in that reality but did in this one, or vice versa.

I think it is quite amazing that a humble 12-word sentence can make phantom realities rill out as far as the internal eye can see, only to pack them all away before we reach the full stop. It is elegant, it is tidy, and I approve of it.

On the Naming of Port Moresby

Ever since I realised that the protagonist in Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky is named for the capital of Papua New Guinea: Port Moresby, I've had a bee in my hat about it. In the following text, I will recount the common interpretation of this choice, my own uneasiness with it and finally reconcile myself with the author's choices in order to allow the bee to flee. Whether it does so or rather clings more deeply into my hair remains to be seen. This text contains spoilers.

Port identifies as a traveller, not a tourist, and - at the beginning of the novel - is in search of a place unspoiled by civilisation, an authentic and anonymous experience. Unfortunately for this wanderer, he possesses the name of a distant established place. On the surface, this looks like a joke. Or perhaps it is an admission from the writer that, yes, he is the puppet master and that he is determined to show his authority over the text, albeit capriciously. Most apparently take this as an irony. He wishes to wander aimlessly in the desert to find himself but his name is pinned to the map. And that may well be the fact of it.

However, I wondered if the symbolism went deeper than this. Readers of the Sheltering Sky will know that Mr. Moresby is ill-fated. He will get sick; his marriage will fail when his wife refuses to care for his disease-ravaged body, and then he will submit to death itself. Thus, does having a name which is 'on the map' imply that his end is also destined, that he will always have been travelling to this distant established place, a port indeed, an entry to another world? In that case, this novel, which was published in 1950, seven years before On The Road, will carry a similar message to its better-known cousin: that the search for meaning, although it can be seen as a kind of adventure story, does not inherently anticipate success. Indeed, gambling the coin of self-meaning in the casino of universal indifference may be an excellent way to ensure one's stake is not returned. (Kerouac, put your pen down!)

Well, this is all very well, very deep and very satisfying, but! -- this whole interpretation rests upon the eemis stane of nominative determinism. This is a school of thought whose most famous early exploration was by Plato in his dialogue Cratylus. The rolling 'r' sound of rho, ρ, is well suited to words signifying motion or flow, while plosives like 'd' and 't', which stop the tongue, are appropriate for words describing the end of motion, and so on, and so on. The reasoning that supports the link between the phonic item and its meaning rests in introspection, a feeling about a sound, which is to say - not an empirical observation, not a result found in a repeatable experiment. Try using the reasoning in the Cratylus on translations of the Cratylus itself! It therefore belongs in the group of intellectual activities that also contains numerology and astrology, often labelled 'pseudosciences' (for non-arbitrary reasons).

So what do we have now? A man with a funny name and a nasty conclusion. So far, so ignorable. But they remain together for the duration of the novel, like two words in a sentence. Bowles himself does not explicitly engage in any deterministic or other magical thinking (other than some elements of magical realism perhaps), but he leaves the reader in the company of the two, knowing - I presume - that 'This is a quirk' is not a result that will satisfy the reader of such a profound work. Coincidence places us in a dark room with two poles and allows us to connect them unobserved. It is rather insidious.

It is possible that that is it, that we, the readers, are simply the butts of the writer's dark joke. However, I will attempt a more optimistic conclusion. As can be seen by the inclusion of astrology in the group of pseudosciences, these carefully reasoned intellectual activities lean in the direction of mysticism, a system of religious belief which holds that there exists knowledge not accessible to the intellect. This is consonant with philosophical scepticism, a school of thought which, although secular, holds the same in a somewhat inverted manner, namely that true knowledge may exist but anyway is not available to us.

So, what if we employ this scepticism in our interpretation of Bowles' naming of his central character? Then it remains that the man is doomed to a miserable end and that, while his name may exist as a signpost to that destruction, the reasons forwhy Mr Moresby is star-crossed simply cannot be known. He just is, and it is his seemingly capricious naming, founded in the logically insubstantial practice of nominative determinism, by which the author communicates this impossibility.

This final interpretation may miss outright optimism. In fairness to the writer of his essay, I am looking for hope in a tragedy, but I believe I have found something resembling it. By this last effort at explication, Port Moresby's naming is neither caprice nor a joke on the reader but a meaning whose logic is seated deeply in the text and one in whose making we can be complicit with the author.

Hopefully that will be sufficient to release the bee!

The Frontier and the Farmstead

We knew each other by the light of the eyes. In fact, before we'd even had a chance to observe such an intimate element of expression, we could have told each other by pace, posture, even direction. I walked on the road up from Hect to Posst, and she on the road down from Posst to Hect. Inevitably, we passed for it was the same road.

The light in the sky had gone yellow a good long while previously and now eased into medium grey on its way to a full-bodied darkness. The woman and I had seen each other on our respective horizons as dark flecks stretching into speck-silhouettes and gradually becoming figures. It had been a journey of steps, one after the other, just as described in Wisdom: a repeated motion so tedious that the mind drifted above the slave body and let it work, taking its own smooth course via memories intrusive, futures built of hope and assumption, images delineated by clouds painted large upon the sky and the treetops and the birds.

We met without imperative or plan, without even knowing the other's name, outside the small village of Tarn. I looked at her with the gaze of a man who seeks rest and repast. She looked at me with the scorn of a woman who'd keep walking till she wore the leather off the soles of her shoes, but in me she recognised an opportunity, and in her I recognised someone much younger, perhaps by only seven summers, but still much, much younger.

'Excuse me, miss. Do you know of any good hostelries in this village? I have walked all day, and now the sun's molten gold ebbs on the low horizon,' I asked the woman.

'Alas, sir, I do not. Indeed, I had not planned on quitting before the night might have earned the right to call itself so.'

'If you do not know the way, I suggest you repair for the night. Bandits have the advantage from dusk till dawn, and the road is in poor condition once one is east of the great forest.'

'Your words are smooth, young master. I hope they are not searching for anything of their own kind in me.'

'Miss, I seek four small luxuries: nourishment, water, repose and cordiality. Perhaps you would be cordial with me. In return, you will approached less often by rough persons if we join together in fellowship.'

'I have no fear of rough persons!'

'I would not suggest that you did. Nonetheless, the boor can vex an honest soul.'

'And you would gallantly save me such a trial?'

'Gladly.'

'It is a fair trade.'

We went then and found a house from which the low thump and grumble of men met our ears. It was adequately lit, and I thought I spied a house girl through a small, thick square of glass. The door yielded when I put my hand upon it, and we entered. The wind and percussion of the house persisted, but I saw eyes come out from their resting places and go back in again, and I knew that behind some such reciprocations lay contingencies. Thus I escorted the young lady to a well-positioned corner where our fellow travellers might be watched.

'So you have quit the frontier,' whispered my companion once two plates of meat and two cups of ale had been placed between us.

'Just as the rose clouds grow dull in the sky tonight, so sets the sun on my dream of a good life in the badlands.'

'Making good from bad? Sir, I pray you do not put yourself to drawing fresh water from the privy in this house.'

I felt a blush that could have blossomed into fury, but instead I delighted in her boldness. A spirit with no flame cannot set the frontier ablaze, and only fire could purify that place.

'It must seem that a mild man speaks to you in this candlelight, but I assure you I was hard as leather and quick as a whip. I meant to rule that lawless land and always assumed I would win.'

'What stayed your hand?' she asked, chin resting on fist, eyes aglow.

'What stayed my hand? It was Wisdom that failed me.'

'What wisdom can you mean? I had not thought to find wisdom amid the snakes and scorpions of the borderlands.'

I had thought so long of the Wisdom of the Extraordinary that it took me aback to find my young companion knew nothing of the world inside my soul.

'What they tell you when you mean to let your own blood to purify the festering hearts of others. Colatus wasn't built in a summer. Many a skeck makes a skondle.'

'Do you mean to tell me that these trite words put a cap on your flame?'

'No words assured or diverted my course, but there is something in a word that is not a word.'

'A breath,' reflected she.

'Aye, in the old tongue, a pneuma. And that is what you reach for when your ears are hungry for Wisdom. You add the breath of others to your own wind. They say, "Forge your own fortune", "Set sight upon the stars, and fall no lower than the mountains." and you gather it all up and send it blowing through you.'

'Do you tell me that the winds of wisdom failed you?'

'Some winds are gyres, and some Wisdom chases only its own hind.'

I did not speak of the dens of greedy men serving a smaller number of even greedier men. I did not speak of how one must meet the demands of the greediest of men to even spend a moment with a girl. I did not tell her how my spirit was caught on the beauty of one such youth, and how I sought and sought to free her, but she did want for freedom and, in the end, I put my silver into the hard hands that knew the key to her cage, and that is where the Wisdom of the Extraordinary carried me, to that low, dark vale.

'It is my own story in its way,' she offered.

I almost retched to think of this good heart in any manner associated with the night when corruption took hold of me.

'What in the blazes do you mean?'

'Well, sir. I do not mean to impose my worthless reflections upon you.'

'No, I apologise. Please continue.'

'Very well. I meant to recount that where I come from, a gyre is a blessing for it is a cycle like a day or a year. Those winds that cross the cycle bring - I mean brought us itinerants who stayed the summer, worked for broth and bread and slept in the barn until those same winds blew them on to other farmsteads, other townships. We neither respect nor trust those whose pneuma doesn't bring them back around as the cycle of the year lifts the frost and ripens the crop.'

'I was raised and lived all my life in a town before I went to the edge. I have never lived in such rural idylls. What of the Wisdom in a land of pleasant cycles?'

'Not so pleasant, sir. Not for one like me. But all the same, the wisdom in such lands is a repeating music with such verses as "Scope before you spring", "Better intact than in tragedy."'

'Ah, they are beautious!'

'They are wretched!' she scowled, '"Mend the rail, and save the fence," "An egg in the pot is worth ten in the nest!"'

She spat out these words which I found so lovely with such contempt that I could hear the untold tale of a wildflower stretching up from seed and opening its flower in the hedgerow of a distant pasture. I felt I could see a spirit that so naturally soared toward the horizon that being forced to walk around in circles made it stumble over its own boots. I imagined an escape from a high window at midnight. I envisioned beatings meant to tame a wild spirit but only rinsing it with sorrow briefly. The Wisdom of the Ordinary, which made my eyes soft and my lips part in longing, to her was a pleasant childhood song so oft repeated that it hardened into the walls of a prison. I could not know really without her telling me, but I was sure hers was such a story, if not in its details then of that ilk.

'And so now you go on to the badlands.'

'I do,' she affirmed, and in the grate of the hostelry, coals were turned to show their white hot cores, but I felt the heat of them from much nearer.

'Then I will do two things for you. First, take my sword. You will need it, and I will not as I have silver enough for a ploughshare.'

'That is very kind, but I can accept no gifts, so I trade my key for your sword. It is the key to my cottage named Windflower in the village of Sop, a half day's walk from Posst.'

'Very well. It is a good trade.'

'And the second thing.'

'I offer you no wisdom, not a shred of advice, only my hope that you succeed where I failed.'

'I offer you the same and wish the same for you,' she replied.

The following morning we broke our fasts early and left the hostelry together. She felt the weight of the sword and looked at the sky, and I felt the shape of the key and murmured 'Windflower' over and over in my heart. And then we parted. She walked on the road from Posst to Hect, and I walked on the road from Hect to Posst, and we sighted one another never again for it was the same road.