Experiment, Part 2
Hey folks. I've been kind of out of commission, but now I'm back, ready to pick up and see if anybody other than Noir actually read the Chesterton story. (Tangentially, in the meantime I read
Corelli's Mandolin, and it was great. Highly recommended, especially as a study in human and humane moral ambiguities. Nobody is precisely evil, though many do terrible things; no one is precisely good, though we are nonetheless compelled to sympathize with a few main characters. Obviously, this contrasts distinctly with the Chesterton piece.)
On to Chesterton. I really like
Thursday, both the straight adventure/detective story and because of the surreal twists at the end. Surely the chase scene must win some sort of award, too: foot to steed to car to fire engine, elephant, and hot air balloon... what more could one desire?
Oh, you desire questions, too, and attendant thoughts? It's your lucky day.
The Questions1. Is this a book about the superiority of order over anarchy? Or is it a book about the
unity of order and anarchy?
My first impression was the former; Zq's was the latter. Both seem plausible to me. To be sure, all of the heroes idealize order and are fighting against chaos in the world in this book; indeed it is just this struggle that is going on when the book opens and Gregory and Syme are facing off about the nature of poetry. If Syme is the hero and Gregory the villain, then perhaps we should say with Syme that "the rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.... Every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos." This is Syme's battle, and Syme is Chesterton's hero.
But there is a compelling counterargument which points out that it is evil and chaos in the world that make order a possible choice for Syme. If Syme is a hero because he makes right choices, then surely there is some great value in the chaos that he tries to eschew (and, despite that fact, in which he constantly finds himself embroiled). Most importantly, the seeming chaos in Syme's world is not random; it is in fact a carefully controlled anarchy that leads Syme inexorably to his preordained place at the end of the book. If it is chaotic, it is also both predicted and ordered. Perhaps, then, we should say that, on a human scale at least, Chesterton is arguing for a kind of unity of the passions.
But to me,
Thursday just doesn't seem to be drawing the necessary sort of equivalence between anarchy and order. It seems instead to be an apologetics for evil in the world, and it asks us to equate evil with anarchism. Perhaps Chesterton is indeed saying that most evil is illusory, or that it is necessary that even good people surrounded by uniformly good people should feel themselves alone and embattled--but this is because they have right opinions about real evil (even if that real evil is, well, unrealized), not because there is no real evil. It does seem to me that we are meant to take a passion for true chaos to be the great evil in the world, and quite distinct from a love of order and right and goodness.
2. What does it mean that the book is subtitled "A Nightmare?"
Of course this suggests the dreamlike, surreal, and unbelievable ending to what began as a well-grounded and recognizable thriller. But it also seems to suggest that Syme's world is undesirable. This seems nonobvious to me. Can we tell from this book what would be more desirable? Perhaps a world in which there is no struggle between good and bad? Or a world in which nobody has a predisposition towards anarchy?
Or perhaps this book is nightmarish simply because nothing is as it seems. Everybody goes around in disguise; good people fight against other good people; the biggest bad guy is also the greatest moral force in the world. I don't know.
3. Do you think the book has any real implications for earthly governance?
Thursday is, of course, allegorical, but on its face it is also about anarchy and government in our world. Must Chesterton think--well, anything coherent at all--about governance here on this earth, in order to maintain a consistency with his allegory or his theology?
The obvious claim, I think, is that privileging predictability over revolt and order over anarchy would argue always against revolution. There some big differences, however, between trying to overthrow God and trying to overthrow one's government (not the least of which are 1. God is definitionally good, and 2. It is possible to successfully overthrow one's government). So much of the dialogue is political argument, though, that I wonder if there are any real political opinions being expressed.
4. What the hell is going on with the notes during the chase scene?
I mean this most sincerely. I just don't get it. Here I'm talking about the notes that Sunday leaves for Our Heroes the Days of the Week as they chase him around: "The word, I fancy, should be 'pink'" and "Your beauty has not left me indifferent.--From LITTLE SNOWDROP" and "What about Martin Tupper
now." Are these just random? It seems so unlikely. Beautifully, Chesterton's book is tightly ordered from the start (much as it claims all things ought to be, if you buy what I'm saying under question # 1). This is allegory, and from the beginning each secret agent somehow embodies the day of Creation that he represents. Having finished the book, if one goes back to the beginning and restarts it one finds right away that Chesterton is giving away the game to anybody who is paying attention. (The obvious fact that the police commissioner is the same fellow as Sunday only reconfirms this consistency from the start.) The story develops in unexpected ways, but it is anything but random. (In fact, this might itself be another remove of allegory: just as Syme's story is carefully crafted by Sunday, but seems chaotic, desperate, and uncertain to him,
The Man Who Was Thursday has been similarly organized and pored over, despite the fact that it seems to us to be moving swiftly and wildly towards the absurd.) As a result, I feel like there should be some satisfying interpretation of these notes that Sunday sends to the members of the Council. But what could it be?
5. Doesn't
Thursday imply that human suffering imparts moral force?
Chesterton seems to be answering the "Why is there suffering in the world?" question not by the (perpetually unsatisfying) appeal to free will, but rather by saying that the suffering of his heroes provides an answer to Gregory's otherwise-valid sense of moral superiority. This seems at first to be a much better answer than saying, "Well, we must have suffering in order to have free choice." By making his agents know loneliness, fear, faithlessness, and battle, Sunday negates Gregory's ability to take the moral high ground when he stands alone against a much greater power. No longer can Gregory portray his anarchism as a noble struggle against those who are perfect and who, consequently, have never have known any sort of suffering at all; we all know that it is precisely playing into the hands of Chesterton's God when Gregory expounds, "The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme.... You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I...." Of course the "seven angels" have come down from their thrones, have suffered real agony, and are therefore entirely unconvinced (as are we, the readers).
But what kind of world is it where suffering imparts moral force? We can see that Gregory's monologue is deliciously misguided, but taking a step back from the literary, I just don't see why it is
necessary to have good people suffer real agonies just to deflate his victories. Is it such a great good, after all, that the good folks should, by virtue of their own harships, be able to ignore the sufferings of the bad people? If Gregory's stance appeared noble, is it less so because of what another, unrelated person has experienced? And if it is actually ignoble, is that affected by what Bull or Syme or the Professor has been through? Surely not. Yet Chesterton does seem to require this reading. Gregory's anarchism is base because one can suffer nobly for a good cause just as well as for a bad one.
How odd. And how undesirable in a world.
Perhaps that's why the book is a nightmare?
Life, Love, and Death at the Operahouse
Zyl and I went to the opera tonight. Regular readers of this blog already know about my predeliction for opera and they're good enough not to be too harsh about my lack of modern cultural literacy (I don't even own a TV, for goodness's sake, but I do like to go hear the Verdi), so I'll spare you the full-blown account of tonight's awesomeness. Suffice it to say that Hei-Kyung Hong was uncomfortable on the high notes; Wookyung Kim was a very, very solid Alfredo; Charles Taylor made a fantastic Germont with an easy, rich, well-developed baritone; the set was as impressive as ever at the Met; and somehow Zyl managed to score us seats in the
center of the front row of the balcony at a Metropolitan Opera production of
La Triviata. Surely these were the best seats in the house.
There is a fine line between being so brilliant that people don't understand what you're saying and being so crazy that they don't believe you even when they do understand. Most of the time, I think, Fred Ahl finds himself on the more desirable side of this line (though he certainly has his wacky moments). Operas tend to end in ways that are rather melodramatic--and rather depressing. There are exceptions, of course (
The Magic Flute comes to mind), but even when circumstances turn out exactly as one would hope, the main characters tend unnecessarily to die and to do so in dramatic fashion. This is especially true in
Triviata, where Verdi manages to stretch a death scene into a whole act, and where about seven times you are convinced that our heroine is well, is cured, is feeling better, is renewed by having the love of her life back in her life, etc., only to suddenly see her collapse once again and then finally die with her repentant lover by her side. It could have been such a happy ending! And the give and take, the "now-I'm-feeling-better-and-I-shall-go-out, oh-wait-now-I'm-feeling-ill-again-and-I'm-sure-I-shall-die" literally made me laugh aloud at the operahouse. Verdi must have had a grand time watching his first audience react: "Oh no! She'll die!" "No, wait, she's well again!" "No, she's deathly pale!" "Yes!" "No!" "How will it all end?" The whole thing is very silly.
Fred Ahl (remember him?) introduced me to the very clever notion that Frenchmen and Italians are far more likely to think of love and death as ready compliments, while ourselves and the Germans are wont to find this notion a bit odd. This is for the simple reason that "l'amour" is nicely alliterative with "la mort" (as is "l'amore" with "la morte") while "love" and "life" (and "liebe" and "leben") are natural poetic partners in our more Germanic, less Latinate language. This has snowball effects: we might not remember Marlowe's
Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields...
But his turn of speech has made it down through the years and is
engrained in popular culture. Indeed, we hear resonances of the same idea all the time when we urge others to "love life" and even when we talk about our "love lives." Love and life are very close things in our language.
Not so for those who speak romance languages. For them, rather, the poetry of the ages is more "L'amour et la mort" (a real poem by 19th-century poetess Louise Ackermann) than "Live with me and be my love." This darker love-and-death set of associations has also entered
popular culture, even yielding entire academic subcultures focused on
the natural polarity of love and death.
I myself have nothing brilliant to add to this (I'm no Fred Ahl), but perhaps it does give some insight into the French and Italian operatic obsession with killing off all the main characters just before the curtain falls.
Oh, and if you want an example of good thinking taken just across the borders of craziness, feel free to check out Fred's (very interesting, very clever, and, ahem,
rather overly bold)
Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self Conviction.
An Experiment
I think it was Guy Noir who suggested a while back that we all read something together. Well, I'm going to propose now that we do this, with absolutely no idea whether or not it will take. We shall see, I guess.
Zq read a book: G.K. Chesterton's
The Man Who Was Thursday. He then gifted me this book, which I've read. In the meantime, V, Al, and Q (none of whom check this blog, so I guess they won't be participating in our little conversation) picked it up, because I was talking about it. Well, that seems promising. And the book does have many merits that make it particularly well-suited to an experiment of this sort, namely:
- It's short.
- It's out of copyright, so you can get it for free on the internet if you like that sort of thing.
- It's an easy read, kind of detective story-meets-adventure thriller-meets-philosophical and theological playground. You could imagine a joke: A detective, an anarchist, and God walk into a bar...
- There are parts of the thing that I just don't understand, even though I really like it. It would be cool if somebody else could jump in and offer ideas (serious or wacky--whatever).
I have the beginnings of a robust reading of this book--some already put into well-formed email discussion, even--but I'll spare you for the time being and just let you read it yourself. I'll post again on this sometime next week, okay y'all? Maybe you'll join me?
***
Now for the other side of this post, which has to do with the relative virtues of the Book Club. I've never been a member of such a thing. On the one hand, I can see that sharing literature--or, for that matter, nonfictional texts--tends to make it richer, because it allows you to add other peoples' insights and enthusiasms to your own. But the flip side of this is the inability to sustain a lengthy train of thought when conversing amicably. Friendly discussion is not the place for extended monologues; devising strong readings of rich texts may well be best done by exploring an idea rigorously, however.
I think people might jump on me for antisocial tendencies if I suggest that I might rather work through literature alone than with the help of others. To forfend that possibility, I'm going to use an analogy. Let's say you've got a calculus problem in front of you, along with the solution. You have some desire to understand that problem. Well, it makes sense for you to sit down with it and to go through the solution step by step, making sure you really wrap your head around each of the elements that are going into it. It also makes sense for you to sit down with a tutor or an advisor or a friend who understands these things and whose goal is to help you understand them, too. But, I propose to you, you're not going to get nearly as much out of a group of people in a similar situation as yourself, who are all trying to understand the problem for themselves, and who are proposing various ways to solve it and starting here and there and talking about this and that possibility without really knowing what is going on. After an hour of this, you might have some ideas as to what the significance of the problem is and why the solution works. But an hour following the solution step-by-step surely would have gotten you much farther.
A book is interesting; it is analogous both to the problem and the solution. Novels contain within themselves their own answers. (I suppose the "question" of a text is not much more or less than, "What does this mean, is it interesting, and is it beautiful?") I find it immensely satisfying to sit down with a book or poem and to try to work through its richness, to come up with some strong reading of the thing. This is helped by the teacher or friend who says, "Here is what I think this book is about and the way I think these elements come together; why don't you build on that?" It isn't helped as much, at least, by the peers who are as muddle-headed as I am. It's not that I dislike spoken exchange, but that it moves too fast for me; I haven't yet explored notion # 1 to my own satisfaction before notions # 2-12 have been put on the table, tweaked, and summarily dismissed.
There's something satisfying about the written exchange, though. After all, one does get quite a lot out of sharing ideas; it's good to have others to help clear up one's muddle-headedness, if only they can do so at a pace which isn't cloying (and this is what a teacher in an ideal world does). Writing controls the flow, and lets one go at one's own speed, following this or that notion as far as one likes before accepting it--or giving up on it.
This blog thing might just be the perfect medium for group discussion of that sort. Maybe Noir is on to something.
Zeroes and the Infinite
I recently read a book about the history of 0 (that is, the number, zero) and its place in the development of mathematics. The author talks about ancient Greek math towards the beginning of the work, and he suggests that the reason the Greeks had no zero was that they were fundamentally geometers who thought about numbers primarily as measures and mathematics primarily as a study of relative proportions. Ratios don't make much sense when you start to stick zeroes in there; the length of my big toe might be 3/2 as long as your big toe, but it's nonsense to say that anybody's toes could be 4/0 the size of somebody else's (and surely there's no need to compare two things if I've only got one of them, which is essentially what one is doing when one says that the ratio of apples to oranges is 0 to 52--I mean, there just aren't any apples to be dealt with in the first place).
The most interesting part of this account is not the math and it's not the history, either (both of which are really quite rudimentary here). Rather, it's the passing mention of the fact that the Greek word for "ratio" is logos. This struck me; I've always taken logos to mean something like "word" or "discourse" or even "reason"--all with very verbal connotations. The reason I was so taken with logos as a mathematical term is because I know it primarily through John 1:1.
en arch hn o logoV, kai o logoV hn proV ton qeon, kai qeoV hn o logoV.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
See? Even in its more philosophical uses, logos has clear cultural, Biblical connotations as a word to do with words. This it is; it is much more, as well.
Q offers a good historical account of where the above (KJV) translation came from--namely, the Latin Vulgate, which we presume to have used verbum in the place of logos. That sounds plausible to me, and is the sort of thing that Q would know.
But come on! Why on earth, given all the salient possibilities to do with rationality (in both the logical and the mathematical senses), would you think that the best translation of this little bit of the Gospel--the translation most likely to highlight God's inherent reason, order, and place in nature--is the one where we use the word "word" (or, for that matter, the relatively boring Latin "verbum")? Doesn't it make more sense if you say, "In the beginning was reason and mathematical truth, and these things were with God, and they were God?" That seems far more compelling to me.
Or does this just highlight that I don't really understand the compulsions of religion?
Corpo Desko
My favorite cartoon currently in syndication is the politically incorrect, occasionally dark, sometimes self-referential, and often pun-filled
Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis. I love the wordplay of the strip; I love the sheer idiocy of many of its various characters; I love the cowboys who settle their disputes by discussing their feelings, the vikings who like to watch Oprah, and the nonsequitorial misadventures of the ill-fated Angry Bob.
This is why, for Christmas (or Hannukah, or New Year's Day--it's not entirely clear to me), a friend gave me the 2006 Pearls Before Swine desk calendar.
This is how I know I'm a grown-up now.
The corporate desk calendar was always the domain of my father. Round about December 20th, my brother and I used to coordinate closely in order to make sure that my dad received one, and only one, desk calender at Christmas. (This has dropped off now, but it certainly used to be
de rigeur.) I find it a bit odd, to say the least, that such a gift has now become practical and appropriate to give to
me.
The trappings of adulthood are interesting. How is it that flying off to Ireland on my own, hosting dinner parties for friends, and reading serious history books don't appear to me to identify myself as particularly grown-up, but the possession of a calendar full of amusing comic strips
does?
