Say-So

This entry speaks of forking paths. More specifically The Garden of Forking Paths. Crossroads, but more accurately the kind that is a bifurcation, where two diverging directions surface ahead, while turning back on your heels is an impossibility. I found a volume of Jorge Luis Borges’ stories on my desk at work one day. I knew whom it was from. Men wanting to step over from casual friendship to courting, dip their toes by bringing by books and stories, interviews and poems. They learn words in my native tongue to surprise me as if to say: “I care about who you are, here, look at these books and see who I am”. By now, so predictable is this behavior that I suspect the existence of a lost manual of which pages were randomly scattered. Or, is it I who dismiss and walk around oblivious to any other cues, or men, except those who cause me to raise a brow.

In the short story, Dr. Yu Tsun shoots Stephen Albert. Presumably it is one of many possible outcomes. As professor Albert explains to Yu Tsun minutes before his death:

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pen conceived it. In contrast to Newton or Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one other for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist and not I; in others I and not you; in others both of us. In the present one, which the favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.”

The Garden of Forking Paths Wikipedia page cleverly observed:

This idea is remarkably similar to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was not proposed until over a decade after the writing of this story.

Borges was a writer, a mind, ahead of his times. The biographical story studded with graceful readings of his poetry appears in the documentary Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Jorge Luis was my husband before I had blossomed. On a balmy island of Oahu wanting to calm my mind after an argument, I scanned titles and authors’ names in a bookstore, searching, meandering, needing, lacking. I was pacified at last while leafing through the pages of the Spanish publication of Seven Nights as if the inspired transcribed lectures were capable of transferring some of the author’s insights to his incidental namesake.

A literary antonym of Borges is possibly Pablo Neruda. Contemporaries, born in neighboring countries, their backgrounds differ. One born to an educated middle class family in Buenos Aires, the other a son of a railway worker having grown up in a remote town south of Santiago. Their life stories involve travel and prolonged periods of living abroad, Borges as a youngster, Neruda in his early adulthood, a fact which influenced both their writings respectively. Borges wrote short stories, essays and poems depicting richly layered internal world where reality and fiction interwove. In his concise style not a word may be missed since each is deliberate or carries a cross-cultural reference. Neruda - a poet by birth by his own account, whose lingering compositions are often as elaborate as short stories, had a facility for words. His profuse stream of consciousness, some critics argue, may have produced a few lesser poems. The five volume Obras Completas contains 6000 pages.

An Argentine, in many ways uncannily like the postmodernist master, with his frequent use of “conjecture”, his anxiety about the “infinite”, superior intelligence and a reluctance to pair bond, came to me as I sat on a grassy knoll newly arrived to sunny California, reading Isabelle Allende’s Daughter of Fortune in its French edition. He asked whether I read the book in French because of the Latin, lingual proximity to Spanish (original version) and what I thought of the book. I answered, my heart unsuspecting and complacent, that the novel was exceedingly melodramatic and French was just one of the languages I wanted to brush up on.

One pertinent difference between Neruda and Borges is not stylistic but temperamental. While J.L. Borges retreated from the outside world, lived in semi seclusion and spoke of constant underlying melancholy, Pablo Neruda though shy and introspect in his youth, interacted and engaged. His wonder and poetic expression encompassed everything from salt, artichoke and lemon, the smallest of things, to the drama of human existence and the tragedy of men’s actions. He used his writing unabashedly to serve his political convictions and to propagate his vision of justice. Pablo Neruda: The Poet’s Calling is an independent documentary in the works, crafted in California and narrated in Spanish by Isabel Allende. A couple of clips are available online here and here along with a few select interviews .

Neruda dripped into my inbox, trickled, flowed and floated me. Revolutionary hoarse whisper brimmed my bath tub. San Francisco’s streets came alive with people, buildings and hotels housing personal biographies, insignificant, except to those whose lives they described.

The universality of Neruda’s love poetry is sensually palpable to all men and women of flesh across the divides of geography and culture.

In You the Earth is a favorite among favorites in Captain’s Verses.

Writing about anything else but the crisis in southern Lebanon these days is trivial and superficial. Half a million displaced. Countless wounded, how many dead? And yet, here I am. Finding myself unexpectedly with spare time on my hands I spent time over two documentaries this weekend. One is The Human Face narrated by John Cleese and Elizabeth Hurley which I realized would be a second viewing, and the other a Charles Bukowski reading at Bellevue.
Alligators have no facial expressions or facial muscles because they are solitary animals. Humans have 90. We are optimized to communicate, and we are social creatures. That is why, John Cleese reminds me, solitary confinement is an acute form of punishment.
Charles Bukowski’s name was netted within my peripheral vision when browsing Bound Together, on Height street in San Francisco. Easily remembered due to recognizably Polish last name I didn’t hurry to discover his work first hand, having read that he was controversial, a misanthrope, disputably a poet. Being appreciative of spoken word and literary readings, the documentary seemed promising as performance and for the opportunity to observe the author in person enunciating his own work.
Prejudiced by earlier criticism, I was initially put off by the disinterested, monotonous tone. It seemed disingenuous. Then I listened in…
Of course! How else would one seethe insulting epithets.
The images are painterly Caravaggio-like, discordant.
I enjoyed “My father was…” and “I think of the Little Men”. Here is “Another Day”:

having the low down blues and going
into a restraunt to eat.
you sit at a table.
the waitress smiles at you.
she’s dumpy. her ass is too big.
she radiates kindess and symphaty….

… more here

I was smiling. Instead of attending Laughter Clubs a dosage of rasp, micro depiction of humanity, of myself, the things I touch, the thoughts running through my head daily, is what I’ll take.

Introspection catalyzes artistic expression as in this solitary confinement art example. Interaction brings about laughter at best.

Malcolm Gladwell’s article Million Dollar Murray reverberates across the web in multitudes of blogs. Homelessness has been quantified, a new distribution curve has been found, a scientific approach may help solve a deep social problem with which modern cities have been struggling with for decades. Based on a research by Dennis Culhane Ph. D. , the power law as applied to homelessness suggests that roughly 10% of the dispossessed are chronically so, and they are the ones straining the resources of health care and social services. Those very few can cost the system hundred thousands of dollars a person per year. In medical terms here is a typical scenario as described by James Dunford, the city of San Diego’s emergency medical director:

“If it’s a medical admission, it’s likely to be the guys with the really complex pneumonia. They are drunk and they aspirate and get vomit in their lungs and develop a lung abscess, and they get hypothermia on top of that, because they’re out in the rain. They end up in the intensive-care unit with these very complicated medical infections. These are the guys who typically get hit by cars and buses and trucks. They often have a neurosurgical catastrophe as well. So they are very prone to just falling down and cracking their head and getting a subdural hematoma, which, if not drained, could kill them… . Meanwhile, they are going through alcoholic withdrawal and have devastating liver disease that only adds to their inability to fight infections.”

In a radical program to end homelessness advocated by the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness Philip Mangano folks like these and the titular persona of the article - Murray Barr, are handed keys to their very own rented apartments. In exchange they are required to comply to the monitoring of case workers who are in touch with them every couple of days. They expectation is that as soon as the participants stabilize and find work they can start covering their rent in portions incremental to their overall progress.
As shocking as the description of those hard case homeless beneficiaries whose mental state allows for such profound disregard to their very own wellbeing is, the solution appears abysmally inappropriate. It isn’t a problem of the undeserving being treated to comfort, or the fact that this solution is meant to save the system 2/3 of presently incurred costs and sweep the homeless out of the view of the average american, it simply is a question of feasibility and common sense. Before the Murray Barrs are assigned their homes and are expected to rehabilitate they need to be placed under psychiatric care and possibly on lifelong medication which in turn would inflate the cost of their care, not decrease it. Malcolm Gladwell, muddies the homeless issue and the proposed solution with other power law conforming examples in his trademark sexy panoptic style. He invokes cases like the Rodney King beating and the subsequent Christopher Commission report and a mobile smog emission testing proposed by Donald Stedman, a chemist and automobile-emissions specialist at the University of Denver which is meant to replace the current comprehensive smog test. The only thing the three examples thrown into the article’s mix have in common is the pattern of their distribution, it should not be implied that a simple solution to decrease overhead on smog testing by targeting and policing the most serious offenders is also an applicable working model to end homelessness. In his book “The Tipping Point”, Mr. Gladwell produces an example of the Broken Windows theory which states that dilapidated environment invites crime, the solution to which among others is “quick replacement of broken windows “. It comes in a chapter about “the power of context” in which he also relates a Princeton University Good Samaritan study. The study concludes that even seminarians thinking of the biblical story of a good samaritan, under certain circumstances such as pressure of time, will act against their predisposition. This example is meant to prove that human behavior is malleable by the surrounding context. Drawing on this train of thought the author seems to suggest in the Million-Dollar Murray article, that simply giving homes to chronically homeless and placing them in an environment free of “broken windows” and signs of decay, will be enough to rehabilitate them. It is erroneous, ignoring the fact that it is the hard case homeless people themselves who are “broken”, in need of psychiatric care. Simply placing them in a new context will do very little to cure the self destructive streak which lands them in emergency rooms and intensive care time and time again.

Religion demands respect. No opinion on other topics has me tip toeing around the speaker with same care. After all, believers of all faiths base their daily and seasonal routines and often their entire lives around “dos” and “don’ts”. They curtail their experiences limiting their range of foods and activities to fit within the constraints of their chosen dogma. Attempting to debunk the existence of God with a theist is an assault on their philosophy threatening to subvert their entire life. How did it come to be? How did a cosmology based on a compilation of self contradicting ancient oral traditions (bible) gain such high degree of respect? This question surfaced for me once again recently while reading a superficial and lighthearted “Marx for Beginners” which fell into my hands as a result of a conversation with a friend. While the book does very little to significantly summarize the Marxist theory, it is a fun, quick, illustrated overview of the western man’s history, from the cavernous times to to the industrial age and society which was a fertile ground for the rise of communism. The simplified format presents the human thought in stark light and brute manner but with fascinating clarity. Religion has been with man since since the beginning of conscious thought. Rius writes:

In the beginning, ignorance and fear predominated. Because they didn’t know the meaning of things, early peoples were afraid of everything which moved, and their first thought was about the supernatural: Who made the noise of thunder? Who moved the earth? Who made it rain? … To provide some kind of explanation of natural events mankind created the gods: the god of rain, of fire, of earth, of sun, the goddess of fertility, the god of hunting… Out of this came the magicians and sorcerers, who exploited the idea of divinity for their own benefit. By using all kinds of cheap tricks they passed themselves off as special delegates of the gods with fantastic powers… This is the way gradually an upper class was formed - or the ruling class, and a lower - or ruled class… As time went on - and profits rose - the ruling class perfected its religion and added more gods, more myths, more rites and ceremonies, temples were built in which gods an goddesses were worshipped, which usually meant donations of money or other things had to be paid up to attract divine favors… At the same time, a divine cast set itself apart. Witch doctors had elevated themselves to priesthood. Their power was so great that together with kings and pharaohs, they created huge empires of faithful slaves “by the will of the supreme gods.”

With the advent of philosophy, logical thought and dialectic exchange gained prominence over the mythical view of the universe yet it seems that the more the idea of god was debated, the more strongly rooted it became in the human psyche. Whether is was Xenophanes who refuted the anthropomorphic gods in favor of “incorporeal eternal being”, or Thales who presumed water to be the primary element in nature and not gods yet believed in “soul (which) was the cause of motion, permeating and enlivening the entire cosmos” or Heraclitus described by some as atheist, who hinted at a presence of element of the “divine” in the world’s order. Since the pre-Socratic times till today, the idea of god has undergone innumerable permutations. It continues to be debated, its essence is attempted to be captured and defined by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche , and Heidegger and so many more. Admittedly, by now “god” must be the most universally recognizable term yet one that is, despite the eternal length of debate surrounding it, most poorly defined. It is, and here by throwing in my 2 cents I join in with the millions adding to gods superfluous credence, a “carte blanche”, an ace, a joker in the making of our own custom flavored reality, in our own image, according to our very personal tastes.

Is it tasty as a piece of raclette on a fresh baguette, is it refreshing and comforting as vanilla ice cream, is it warm as the sun on my back - why does The Paris Review bring me so much joy? I am barely a quarter into it and I know it will be read back to back. Not only does it allow me to explore and discover my personal likes of poetry, introduces me to names in fiction I am not acquainted with, it also describes the creative process and exposes the person behind the pen in a way of interviews with poets and writers. One such I read, is an interview with Les Murray . As much as the sample of his two poems did not trigger in me a harmonious response, I thoroughly enjoyed reading his personal narrative, I might add: to my surprise.
Having read the biographical introduction to the interview, I was biased by the note that Les Murray was admitted to the Catholic Church in 1964 and has prefaced several of his books with a dedication “To the Glory of God”. An artist following a dogma, is an unambiguous paradox in my mind. There is nothing more thwarting for creativity than a blind acceptance of any doctrine, and yet - Les Murray has proven to be very liekable, and witty and thoughtful and perceptive and a… non conformist.
Here is why. Asked about religion, I was impressed that it was Not the absolute truth which appealed to Murray but the ideology:

Many folk assume I came in because of Valerie, who was and is a Catholic. But not a bit of it - I came in because it is the best and only reliable Big Poem (…) Catholicism was something of a bulwark against the Nazism of sex that I’d observed everywhere in the society already (…) worship of youth and beauty; ruthless relegation of the dowdy, the unhandsome and the shy.”

Murray is also a strong believer in the importance of poetry readings and engages in the “readings over the heads of the elite” bringing poetry to nonacademic audiences. The compassion for the “dowdy, the unhandsome and the shy” as well as the affection towards the uneducated, has everything to do with Murray’s own background and trials of growing up.
On poetry he is quoted to have said that a “thought” is the worst thing to try to write a poem with.

We have three minds, I reckon, one of which is the body, while the other two are forms of mentation: daylight consciousness and dreaming consciousness. (…) Thinking in a fusion of our three minds is how humans do naturally think, at any level above the trivial.

On prose:

Plots are too akin to fates, but even cheaper and nastier, being human attempts to manufacture fate, to stimulate it. It’s a tormenting of mental slaves.

All of the above have brought a smile to my face in understanding or in acknowledgment. “The story” is often exceedingly glorified in the film industry which I am peripherally part of. I personally derive most pleasure from semi formal, surprising assemblies of words or images. Colloquially: I totally get Les Murray.

In old Arabic poetry love, song, blood, and travel appear as four basic desires of the human heart and the only effective means against our fear of death. Thus travel is elevated to the dignity of the elementary needs of humankind. “To sail is necessary, to live is not” (Navigare est necessare, vivere non est necesse) - these words were, according to Plutarch, pronounced by a Roman before the departure of a ship in tempestuous weather. Whatever practical reasons push people out of their homes to seek adventure, travel undoubtedly removes us from familiar sights and from everyday routine. It offers to us a pristine world seen for the first time and is a powerful means of inducing wonder. And since poetry is an expressions of wondering at things, landscapes, people, their habits and mores, poetry and travel are allied.

From “A Book of Luminous Things” by Czeslaw Milosz.

Upon turning the last page of The Wisdom of Crowds I find myself wanting to remember key motifs about human behavior as an individual vs. that of a person when part of a group. They differ. People alter their actions, temperament, even beliefs when surrounded by others. More so, the degree and the type of action is fully determined by the constitution of the group within which one operates. For example depending of whether and how many “radicals” a group contains, is decisive in pushing the crowd over the threshold towards violence. James Surowiecki’s study enumerates conditions under which a crowd is at it’s best, creating the right balance and moral force for the individuals within it. It is also a manual on how to harness the positive group dynamic and turn it into a powerful and constructive decision making instrument. There is one observation which lingers with me however, tapering my excitement about this new societal power plant. It is the indisputable fact that learning is a “social process”. Herbert Simon is quoted saying:

A man does not live for months or years in a particular position in an organization, exposed to some streams of communication, shielded from others, without the most profound effects upon what he knows, believes, attends to, hopes, wishes, emphasizes, fears and proposes.

I very much agree and like to say that: we are all “victims” of our circumstance. Victims, because we are forever bound to experience a singular reality at one time, and usually lack the perspective and insight to all others which we are not part of. Surowiecki argues that:

… the more influence a group’s members exert on each other, and the more personal contact they have with each other, the more likely it is that we will believe the same things and make the same mistakes. That means it’s possible that we could become individually smarter but collectively dumber.

He lists Independence, specifically independence of thought as a critical factor for collectively wise decisions. When averagely informed members do not consult, their personal errors are odd and random and therefore don’t accumulate in the final aggregation of the group’s decision. When however, members of the group communicate and their judgment is a consensus or a co-informed decision, the margin of error is much greater. Imitation and interaction with Others is the way humans learn and develop personally. Ironically, it is exactly what is undesired for a collective intelligence.

I picked up again, a book I bought, started reading and put away. It is “The Wisdom of Crowds” by a New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki. It initially caught my attention because I believe the very ideas it tries to dispel. Surowiecki brings those up right away in the very first chapter, the Introduction. He quotes philosophers and historians who uphold the notion that crowds are incapable of wise judgment. Henry David Thoreau, an American author and philosopher is quoted: ” The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.”Friedriech Nietzshe is quoted: “Madness is the exception in individual but the rule in groups”. But my favorite quote is by Thomas Carlyle an English author and historian of the 18th century: “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance”. And he is right, mathematically it doesn’t add up…So as James Surowiecki makes his case for the wisdom of crowds, putting forth example after example of point on, smart, collective judgments, I will place the Thomas Carlyle quote on my bookmark at the head of every page, to remind myself to read and assimilate critically. This practice is even more so necessary, because James Surowiecki is very convincing. His book is very well structured and balanced, studded with examples from a broad range of disciplines such as sociological studies, investment markets, political polls, gambling and historical anecdotes. It is easy to be swept away into a sort of religious awe at the “miracle” of average “bondedly rational” (term by Herbert Simon) folk arriving at an accurate prediction. The truth is, and James Surowiecki makes it an important point of his hypothesis, there are a few criteria which a crowd needs to meet in order to become wise. They are: “diversity, independence and particular kind of decentralization.”
It makes one wonder, the democratic election process encompasses the entire population of a country. Taking the United States as an example, the voting group is definitely diverse and decentralized, but is it independent? I suspect it isn’t independent of thought, due to the mass media messages and broadcasts which are sponsored by corporations with specific political agendas. The fact that GW Bush is being inaugurated tonight as President for a second term, ranks as one of the lower scores for the wisdom of crowds. However, Mr. Surowiecki emphasizes that group decisions pertaining to “matters of general interest will, Over Time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual.” So, there is hope for the Democratic process as it is sure, Over Time, to correct its course. I’ll end with a quote from the book, which I firmly believe is true and can be extrapolated to encompass many areas of human interaction:

“Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.”

Regardless of a problem at hand, the best way, the only way, is to fight it out.

A few days ago I finally shelved a book which in many respects was an undercurrent in my personal life for the past 2 years.
The title: “The Mating Mind” by Geoffrey Miller. The glossary section at the end of the book defines terms such as “assortative mating”, “fitness indicator”, “extended phenotype”, it also lists - “death”. Death is defined as “A misfortune that precludes further courtship or reproduction”. The meaning of life, according to Sexual Selection Theory promoted by this book, can be inferred
from that definition.
It is a tremendous leap to understand how the biological reproductive differences between genders, expressed through social behavior, altered by evolution over a couple of million years, have amounted to our modern society where we all share in the pool of “millions of acts of courtship, in which we are neither the producer nor the intended receiver”. Humans as species, have been pre-selecting creativity, fantasy and flare as exciting courtship models, conditioning our minds to produce most amazing works of art and fiction. Yet these are the same qualities which make us fallible to “forms of ideological display:
(such as) armchair speculation, entertaining narratives, comforting ideas and memorable anecdotes”, making it easy to deviate from logical scientific reasoning and analysis. I will quote this witty and insightful paragraph, which sums up the point:
“Imagine some young hominids huddling around a Pleistocene campfire, enjoying their newly evolved language ability. Two males get into an argument about the nature of the world, and start holding forth displaying their ideologies. The hominid named Carl proposes:
‘We are mortal, fallible primates who survive on this fickle savanna only because we cluster in these jealousy-ridden groups. Everywhere we have ever traveled is just a tiny, random corner of a vast continent on an unimaginably huge sphere spinning in a vacuum. The sphere has traveled billions and billions of times around a flaming ball of gas, which will eventually blow up to incinerate our empty, fossilized skulls. I have discovered several compelling lines of evidence in support of these hypotheses…’. The hominid named Candide interrupts:
‘No, I believe we are immortal spirits gifted with these beautiful bodies because the great god Wug chose us as his favorite creatures. Wug blessed us with this fertile paradise that provides just enough challenges to keep things interesting. Behind the moon, mystic nightingales sing our praises, some of us more than others. Above the azure dome of the sky the smiling sun warms our hearts. After we grow old and enjoy the babbling of our grandchildren, Wug will lift us from these bodies to join our friends to eat roasted gazelle and dance eternally. I know these things because Wug picked me to receive this special wisdom in a dream last night.’ ”
Needless to say, Eve and Candide got together and went on to produce many children and great, great, great grand children. And so we are today, still believing in the ancient bed time story made up by our great grand father - Candide.
Thank You, Juan.