Up Against The Wall

Reading a truly excellent science popularization, Stephen S. Hall’s Mapping the Next Millennium, made me aware of developments in astronomy of which the first, the discovery of The Great Wall, had first alerted me in the early 1990s that major changes were afoot.

Back in the 1950s, theories about the universe as a whole had a pleasingly simple duality. The universe had but one ultimate fate: it would end in total heat death after continuous expansion until all energy had been exhausted—or the universe would begin contracting at some point, the galaxies converging again, until it all ended in the Big Crunch. In this view what mattered was the velocity of the expansion. If the velocity of the expanding universe was less than “escape velocity”—meaning that gravity would prevail over the outward impulse—expansion would halt and then reverse. Observations then (of the universe’s mass, of the velocity) were not precise enough to determine which was more likely—but the ratios of mass to velocity were close enough so that it could go either way. The out-in, out-in sequence appealed to me then. You know: Vishnu breathing.

Both models, to be sure, crucially depended on observations, credited to Edwin Hubble, that the universe, now, was definitely expanding—and had done so ever since the Bang. Indeed the Big Bang theory was the consequence of Hubble’s observations. If the universe is expanding now, that expansion had to have a start, and reading the observations backward—after all galaxies were moving away from every other galaxy in a uniform pattern—then in the beginning there must have been a great explosion from a mere point.

News of the first problem with that theory were published in 1989 by astronomers Margaret Geller and John Huchra, she a theorist, he an observer. A survey (or map) of the Nordic sky produced the first image of The Great Wall, usually and more humbly called Cf2A. That stands for the (Harvard-Smithsonian) Center for Astrophysics; the 2 stands for “second survey.” The great wall is a very massive, thick clustering of galaxies, thus a great structure. It challenges the theory of a uniform distribution of matter in the universe. The formation of such a wall also takes a huge amount of time—far more time than would seem to have elapsed since the Big Bang, thus approximately 14 billion years ago. Then, in succession others, in essence replicating the work of Geller and Huchra, discovered a number of other walls in turn, the largest of all being the Sloan Great Wall, named after the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Half a dozen such walls have now been mapped.

At around that same time (1986), but based on work conducted in the 1970s, seven astronomers, known as the Seven Samurai†, discovered that the Milky Way itself, along with all 39 galaxies of our Local Cluster (prominent in that list ourselves, Andromeda, and Triangulum), were themselves in uniform motion toward a distant spot. Other surveys later followed showing other galactic clusters also heading towards an enormously dense region (difficult to see because it is shadowed by our own galaxy’s clouds). That region is itself part of one of these walls. It was named The Great Attractor by one of the Samurai, Alan Dressler. After that arose the prediction that if one attractor has been found, others may exist as well. And the work goes on.

What are we to conclude? One conclusion may be that galactic expansion has already stopped—and what we see out there is in a much more distant past. The cosmos may already be in process of gathering its errant sheep—and that that gathering is very, very ancient. Those wall are very old, and yet still in formation. Pondering such discoveries not only enlarges my understanding of the cosmos but also of the nature of science. Young tendrils of it are exposing new knowledge—while the orthodoxy grimly clings to exciting news a hundred years old.

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†David Burstein, Roger Davies, Alan Dressler, Sandra Faber, Donald Lynden-Bell, Roberto J. Terlevich, and Gary Wegner.

The first image, from Wikipedia (link), shows some of the walls, including the largest, the Sloan Great Wall. In astronomical terminology, these are called filaments. And it turns out that the universe is quite thick with them—as shown in the second image (link), taken from a YouTube film produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico.

Staunchly Materialistic?

Once or twice every year (early for the first time this year), one particular aspect of modern culture makes me smile. We are so staunchly materialistic, yet we do not pay a whole lot of attention to the material dimension when our greed for insubstantial money comes in conflict with substantial materiality. The trigger today was an article Brigitte had left me overnight entitled “The Great Oil Swindle: Scaling the Peak of Fossil Fuel Scarcity,” by Nafeez Masaddeq Ahmed (link, it’s slow to load). Much of it concerns shale oil and gas, and, at the end describes looming problems there. That in turn reminded me of a post on LaMarotte where I had looked at the physical problems of shale. After writing that post, which makes one somewhat dubious about the supposed great bonanza of shale, I have been enduring a torrent of hopeful, indeed triumphant articles based on the boom mentality. Forget your troubles, baby, never mind that has-been, Peak Oil. All will be well as, for the next eternity or two, the U.S. of A. becomes the Saudi Arabia of Shale. Every now and then comes a contrarian drop in this downpour, and the article I cite is one such.

Materialistic humanity is always falling for mirages. The tulip mania comes to mind. It peaked in February 1637 in Holland. In that year some single tulip bulbs, Wikipedia informs me, “sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.” Okay. Let’s translate that. Let’s put the annual income of a skilled craftsman today at $65,000. A tulip bulb for $650,000? Why not? Anything is possible when you are a Shale Sheik.

Feedback and Convergence

E.F. Schumacher, in A Guide for the Perplexed, contrasts two kinds of problems: convergent and divergent. The first category includes those where people find it easy to solve a problem because they are agreed upon the goal. Technological problems are of this nature; it is the better mousetrap problem. There is no disagreement on the values involved: no part of the team working on the project represents mice or holds that a household filled with them is better.

Divergent problems are those where at least two camps are present and the problem concerns values. Divergent problems are ideological in character. To solve them requires not to find a better mechanism, physical or social, but transcending the conflict by appeal to a value higher than each side holds. Finding those transcending values is very difficult. Hence divergent problems are always with us.

One difference between these two is that convergent problems lend themselves more easily to isolation in experimental settings—and to experimentation. Therefore feedback can be rapid and its results can be recursively introduced into a modified draft solution. If the man leaping from the top floor of a 30-story building dies, maybe his arms—or maybe his wings—weren’t strong enough. Back to the drawing board—after the funeral. Experimenting with value systems is much, much more difficult. Entire communities must be isolated, its members cooperating willingly. And how do we know that the experimental community was large enough to be representative? Did it have an urban as well as a rural component? Did it have industry as well as agriculture? And did it have enough of each currently valued ethnicity? And what about the duration of the experiment? And how do we measure its success? By economics? Reproduction? Education? Crime rates? Some want more, some less of any or all of these. And is there a single matrix measuring happiness that could be applied, a matrix each side would accept?

Testing value systems by feedback throws some light on the problem I touched upon in my recent post on “Virtue and Time”—and on my stoic comment about the slow grind of God’s mills. Virtue is an assertion of value by action. But it is a value—finding its expression to a large extent in a society. Its long-term consequences are almost infinitely complex—whereas Boeing 787’s electrical system problems will be nailed quite soon. If virtue or lack of it could be measured rapidly—never mind its legal expressions, which never capture the whole phenomenon—we would rapidly begin to converge on that seemingly unreachable Good Society. 

Let Us Ponder Stars

Few of us have the time or inclination to ponder the nature of stars, where they form and how they come to be, which if nothing else reflects an impoverished curiosity about our own atomic genealogy. Every atom in our bodies, every atom shaping an unforgettable face or reddening an infected hangnail, every atom of every thread of DNA in each of the 100 trillion cells we trundle about each day—every one of those atoms save hydrogen was exhaled at some earlier point in the history of the universe by an exploding star. And if that ancestry fails to move us, we might at least remember that our fragile and privileged ecological niche in an extremely vast and inhospitably frigid cosmos depends on the proximity of one particular star, the sun, which is gentle enough to warm an orchid yet variable enough to touch off ice ages, distant enough to spare us the roar and force of its inferno, dependable enough that we can set our circadian clocks against it and get up each day to ponder such mysteries as the origin of stars. Stars do not just happen. They result from complex astrophysical processes; they are milky accretions of dust and gas that ignite into luminous beacons of light, light conceived in a manner as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a pearl, and the evolution of these cosmological jewels occurs only in special birthing places, and only under the right conditions. Any effort to identify those birthing grounds, often referred to as “stellar nurseries,” sends astronomers down a path of celestial cartography, and it is a path that has been traveled with singular success by radio astronomy in the post-World War II era.

   [Stephen S. Hall, Mapping the Next Millennium, Vintage, 1993, p. 308]

This paragraph is part of an introduction to a chapter in Hall’s book on mapping stellar nebulae—rather than on the subject of how elements came into existence. Hence it does not get into the greater mysteries of that subject, among them that, in order even to have genealogies ourselves, three different stars had to come into being. Of those the first two had to have lived out their lives and sent their products into space—there to form stars or planets. And the third sun gives us life. An earlier post on that subject, “Bodies Made of Diamonds” (link) provides a summary.

Virtue and Time

There are these temporary nexus where things run together and produce a single feeling, but giving it expression is tough. I saw Barney Frank, the just retired Congressman on MSNBC’s Hardball producing in a couple of minutes all sorts of very coherent comments and prescriptions (link). Earlier, on the car radio, I’d heard a report about a woman who is literally “fixing” a series of bankrupt cities in Michigan very competently—but, of course, emergency management laws give her the necessary powers. Last night Brigitte and I watched about three minutes of two different movies on disk, jerking them out, one after the other, because of their gross implementation of stories that sounded all right on the cover. Then later came a telephone conversation; I heard a report, from the field itself, on the mad ways in which teachers are now being evaluated. That call had been triggered by my last post on “teaching to the test.” Add to these my by now stoic reactions. The right acts needed to correct, the positive unraveling, of so many different messes will not take place in what little time is left to us here. The mills of God grind slowly.

By this morning—a remarkable morning because it was raining in January, and I mean really raining—all this had distilled into a single word, Virtue—because virtue was either present or markedly absent in what I’d experienced before going to bed. It is the foundation of culture and in each one defined in identical ways. The marked feature of virtue is that it is innate and unqualified. It is to do the right thing—but never in the context of a quid pro quo. We are not virtuous in order that—but because we are or it is the right way to act. Therefore the time dimension, which is always present in quid pro quo, is absent in the practice of virtue. Interesting to ponder that vast eras of time are governed by something outside of time. This too shall pass—but virtue remains.

Writing to the Demographic, Teaching to the Test

My contention is that measurement, the very core of the scientific approach, becomes problematical when applied too rigidly to those areas of life where measurement fails to capture the most essential elements. Two such regions among others include the arts and education. How can we capture, in a quantitative net, exactly what a genuinely educated person is? How do we know that this painting here—or that television show—is art? The judgement, in either case, has everything to do with the individuals doing the judging. At best there is a kind of public consensus, more felt than measurable (e.g. as in counting critics or teachers pro and con). Far from all individuals will share the elite consensus, no matter what the individual's status is. In effect, as one ages, one finds oneself disagreeing with some elites while agreeing with others heretofore disdained.

Measurement physicalizes because it averages. It fails to capture individual uniqueness. Testing has its uses—in areas, perhaps, like guiding curriculum reform. As a measurement of a teacher’s performance, it sucks. The ability of a teacher should be judged by another individual—not by a group, and least of all a group of students. That’s a hard requirement. We want to mechanize,  routinize everything, template everything, impose a math-based cookie cutter applied to what we view as a uniform dough. Life is much more demanding than that.

In the entertainment “industry,” measuring by ratings, correlating content to viewership, the content itself classified into categories (sex, violence, relationships, urban culture, paranormal, etc.), each category appropriately weighted, produces the chaos of pop culture, where nothing of a higher sort emerges and the half-life of a series is often one quarter of a season—before it is jerked.

Underneath all this, of course, is Moloch Measuring: the measurement of money—be it investments in a show and calculating its return … or investment of public dollars in education by calculating expenditure per pupil. One could easily produce a neat TV series from this. Call it The Invasion of the Soul Snatchers. Combine art and education by defining the show’s locale as a grade school, a high school, and a University. Projected ratings should be good if sex, violence, relationships, urban culture, and paranormal are properly weighted in the resulting mix.

Press Freedom and Self-control

Are the communications media the sensory organs of the collective? Functionally yes. If the press is the ears and eyes of society—and the press simply reports what it “senses”—a free press is clearly valuable and legitimate. To illustrate, let me view this at the personal level. What I see out there is initially simply—what I see. The images are neutral. The valuation of what I see comes at a slight delay; it is another function. When the press undertakes not only to report but also to value the news, to interpret it, to give it emphasis in various ways, why then it morphs into something else. At present here, where press-freedom is guaranteed, the media have become functionally like a collective consciousness. Continuous coverage of disasters or mass killings literally saturates the public awareness with news packaged to excess: excess horror, excess sentimentality, excess outrage, on and on.

Let’s assume it’s so: the media are the collective consciousness. But then in turn the press should exercise a corresponding self-control. If self-control isn’t exercised, the freedom granted to the press becomes problematical. It begins to constellate other situations—like needlessly yelling fire in a crowded theater. The operant assumption is that the public has self-control. Therefore the press is free to profit from the exploitation of anything that happens.

But the operant assumption is false. When it comes to electronic media, especially television, the public is conditioned by it. TV watching is almost impossible to avoid. News channels have evolved into quasi-entertainment channels. Therefore lack of self-control by the rulers of the press has translated ever more into lack of self-control by the public. Curiously all of us—not least those who commit mass murders—live more in our minds than in our bodies. Hence our coverage of mass killings may well serve as inspiration for yet other marginal people to enjoy a moment of glorious fame.

The Chinese understand the relationships I’ve sketched out here. Their own imposition of self-control on the media is certainly excessive. Our version is the polar opposite. The right way is somewhere in between. A story yesterday reported on the Chinese censoring a paper because it editorialized in favor of a more constitutional government in China. Amusing. Here the Constitution protect press freedom. And things have slid too far down the slope. Therefore it has become virtually impossible for the Federal Communications Commission to clean up our media or impose some semblance of discipline on them. We all own the spectrum. We license some to use it. Most abuse that freedom. And to undo that, we would have to change our Constitution. Good luck with that. But if my last post on enantiodromia is correct, in the future it will happen here. And in China the press will be freed. And therefore I feel for future generations in China while also being more confident about the future of our own.

Enantiodromia?

Back in early 2011 (link) I wrote as follows in a post: “Long ago and far away it genuinely pleased me to encounter the word enantiodromia, a coinage by Carl Jung, derived from Heraclitus, meaning “counter-running” and used by Jung to indicate the tendency in nature, certainly in society, of things to morph into their opposites: growth becomes decline, decline eventually transforms into growth.”

Out shopping a few days ago and listening to the radio, it startled me to learn from Science Friday (1) that physicists in Germany had produced gases at temperatures lower than 0° Kelvin, thus absolute zero and (2) that anything at minus-Kelvin temperatures is actually hot.

The lead scientists are Dr. Ulrich Schneider and Dr. Immanuel Bloch. Both are active at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching (just north of Munich); Schneider is also at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Their potentially dramatic discovery is discussed on a page of the Max-Planck Society (link). Another take is presented by Science Recorder (here). To quote from the last source:

The team in Munich cleverly leap-frogged this barrier by cooling about 100,000 atoms of quantum potassium gas inside a vacuum to a few nanokelvin above absolute zero, then reversing the magnetic field surrounding it.

Tweaking the field “suddenly shifts the atoms from their most stable, lowest-energy state to the highest possible energy state, before they can react,” said physicist Ulrich Schneider, one of the project leads. “It’s like walking through a valley, then instantly finding yourself on the mountain peak.”

At normal (positive) temperatures atoms tend to occupy low energy states, while at an infinite temperature they would be equally likely to occupy all energy states. At the newly achieved negative temperatures atoms are more likely to occupy high-energy states–potentially opening the doors for new types of matter.

As so often happens in the reporting of strange discoveries, my questions are not effectively answered. Was the result achieved a consequence of measurement only? Thus due to the nature of the scales used? Or could you, to the contrary, actually boil a kettle full of water using the extraordinarily hot gases existing at “a few billionths of a Kelvin” below absolute zero? In other words, is that “heat” physical, real?

Enantiodromia certainly comes to mind. If you get ever closer to absolute anything, sooner or later it will change into its absolute opposite. One implication of this recent discovery is that at negative Kelvin entropy is reversed and therefore, burning brightly at negative temperature, the universe becomes more orderly. We haven’t by any means heard the last of this. It has all sorts of radiations, to use a pun. Dark energy may be negative. And I’m reminded here, also, of Bohm’s enfolded order, over against the unfolded order which is our visible cosmos.

A Tendril of Inca Influence

In a recent post (link) I mentioned a communist uprising in Uruguay called the Tupamaros. The movement began in the 1960s in labor disputes relating to sugarcane workers and the spread. It was a bottom-up struggle between the have-nothings and oligarchies of agriculture and industry that ultimately led to a military dictatorship. I began looking into that name, Tupamaros, at Brigitte’s suggestion. We know so little about Latin American history despite occasional harrowing forays—which began when Monique was an exchange student in Bolivia. And this vacuum produces an itch. In a sense Latin American history is one history, covering a vast geographical area. But the conflicts that riddle it are subdivided into nations formed of two closely-related European countries, Portugal and Spain, and the never quite forgotten Inca civilization and independent tribes the Incas did not quite control. Herewith an illustration.

The last Inca emperor, resident at today’s Cusco in Peru, was Túpac Amaru (1545-1572). At the end of a last if brief war between the Spanish and the Incas in 1572, Amaru was executed and the Inca empire expired. But by a curious route, the extension of a cultural network still active on that subcontinent, and by way of another rebel, he gave his name to a Marxist uprising in Uruguay.

The second figure in this transition was a man christened José Gabriel Condorcanqui (1742-1781). His father was Spanish, his mother Incan, but through her he traced his ancestry back to Túpac Amaru. He was born in Tinta, near Cusco. He was educated by the Jesuits, was a man of wealth, indeed, in Spanish eyes an aristocrat. He came into conflict with the Spanish rulers of Peru defending the powerless natives; in due time this led to an armed rebellion. By that time Condorcanqui had changed his name to Túpac Amaru II. His rebellion eventually failed. The Spanish used four horses to pull his body apart. Vivid stuff, Latin American history.

Now the distance between Cusco, Peru and Montevideo, Uruguay is 2,400 miles by highway. The time distance between 1781 and 1960 is 179 years or, back to 1572, 388. Cultural memory does not require a functioning Internet. It runs deep. Therefore the two Amarus are far from forgotten and Inca memories are up there, like a stratosphere, above more recent memories of conflicts between the great and the small tribes of humanity.

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Image courtesy of Wikipedia (link).

Miami is a Holdout

The Online Etymology Dictionary tells me that the expression lifestyle or life-style had its origin in the writings of the psychologist Alfred Adler (1870-1937) but that its current usage dates from 1961. My own memories more or less resonate with that. When I still labored in the economy, I didn’t watch the culture except now and then. Distracted. But the sixties left a definite mark. At some point along the way after that era, style freed itself of life- and began to have a life of its own as (for Brigitte and me) a synonym for decadence across the board. Today being Sunday, the New York Times’ Sunday Styles section (the paper also has a Thursday Styles section) again reminded me of this interesting emergence.

Style is rooted in the Greek stylos, pillar. You can see it, of course, a kind of big, thick, rounded stick. In Latin usage it became stilus, a stake, a writing instrument, hence a mode of writing. All of us budding writers in the 1950s hoped that we’d develop a style uniquely our own. As the baby boom exploded it became every kind of individualized mode of anything, lifestyle. Then it shouldered aside fashion, came to mean clothing worn for ego-boo, and now embraces everything so long as it is sufficiently decadent.

I made a quick check to see if the NYT was alone. No—but with variants. The Washington Post has Style. Looking to the other coast, I see that the San Francisco Chronicle is right in line. Style section. The Los Angeles Times has a section it calls Image, but it features the same content, and in its magazine it has LA Style. Looking north I see that the Minneapolis Star and Tribute has a Lifestyle section and a Style subsection. In the middle, the Chicago Tribune is conformist but the Kansas City Star is a step behind; it only has a Lifestyle section. Looking south, I see the Houston Chronicle holding up the style-flag too. The holdout is the Miami Herald. It staunchly maintains an old-fashioned subsection called Fashion & Beauty; signs of infection, however, are present. Within that section the paper maintains a Style Calendar where it tracks how fashions change.

Just shy of a year ago we got to know Florida and learned that it was really something else. Much like California, it is a genuine country with vastly different regions. And if you are just a person in a car, trying to get through Miami, you get the full sense of that vast city’s overwhelm. It is not so easily moved with the times—especially when you need to ask directions in a neighborhood where nobody seems to speak English. But I had once coped in Spain, and therefore I coped in South Miami too.

A Man Who Lived Two Years at the Bottom of a Well

Among the countries of the globe, Uruguay ranks 135th in population (3.3 million). Connecticut (3.5 million) is bigger, but Uruguay has 12 times more territory. You might call it an empty land with but 18 people per square mile—over against Connecticut’s 739.

The president of Uruguay is 78-year old José Mujica  (1935-). As a young man he joined the Tupamaros, a communist liberation movement that sprang up in Uruguay in the 1960s. He spent his youth fighting a civil war, in and out of prisons. In 1973, at age 38, he went into a military prison and spent 14 years in confinement; in the course of that imprisonment he spent more than two years in solitary confinement at the bottom of a well. He was 50 when he was at last released in 1985 after the return of constitutional democracy and a general amnesty. Then began his career in politics.

I know of this because Mujica lives very modestly on a farm where he and his wife, Lucia Topolansky, raise chrysanthemums for sale to the public. He gives most of his salary away and refuses to live in the Presidential Palace in Montevideo which awaits him with 42 servants on the payroll. And Mujica is also an advocate of legalizing marijuana. Such a profile qualifies him for sainthood under the dispensations of modernity, hence the press coverage. But never mind the cultural ethos that leads to publicity.

What left an impression on me, reading a story in the New York Times, was the almost infinite variety of lives lived on this globe—that and those two years spent at the bottom of a well. That, surely, will do something to a person. The mind, will, and the soul will change all in proportion to the innate character of the person who undergoes the ordeal.

My image, showing Mujica at 74, is from El Diario (link).

Ochlocracy and Other Gems

I got here because, the other day, Brigitte used Pöbel, a German word that refers to the uncultured masses (to put it mildly). We often use German words in our conversation when they have a sharper, more appropriate meaning than the English equivalent. Then, as is her wont, she wondered where that word might be rooted. We both assumed that its roots are the same as that of people, thus by way of French, peuple, where its first meaning is “people, nation” but les gens du peuple has that German flavor, meaning “the lower classes” or “the crowd.” We were right. But the French comes from the Latin populus, which, it turns out, comes from the Etruscan.

In seeking the German etymology of Pöbel, I encountered a, for me, brand new gem, ochlocracy. You might say that it is the rule of the Pöbel. Sure enough okhlos in Greek means “mob, populace,” and the Greek itself carries the sense of a mass in motion. This sense is captured in the derogatory Latin phrase mobile vulgus, literally “moving mass” or “moving people,” usually rendered as “the fickle crowd.”  Now, amusingly, for me—who’d always assumed that “mob” was a stalwart Old English word—it turns out that mobile vulgus is the root of “mob,” only the first three letters of the Latin phrase having been retained—and the whole meaning. And when we capitalize it as in The Mob, or talk about mob-rule, we are talking about ochlocracy.

Is it in our future? Well, it’s making inroads; it is moving. One indicator of our current situation is that we use the phrase pop culture with positive connotations (unless we are a ways past fifty). The family lineage of pop is very similar to peuple in French and okhlos in Greek. But the whole phrase is still in transition. It is something we cultivate even if, it seems, it is aiming at -kratia instead, the Greek modifier to signify “rule.” And sometimes, turning on the TV, even news shows, popocracy already seems to be comfortably in the saddle.

Cultural Indicators Revisited

The indicator I have in mind today is the pocketbook—more generally the pocketbook distributed, thus where you could casually find it, more specifically yet pocketbooks holding the culture’s treasured literature.

There was a time when I would visit drug stores to buy books. Drug stores in those days had names like Rexall, Katz, Thrift, and SupeRx. They devoted quite a bit of space to books, arranged on rotating racks, and what you could find in these places was quite astonishing. Novels, of course. Science fiction? Yes. But also literary novels, books of philosophy, history. And all modestly priced, just sitting on racks, humbly, much like boxed spaghetti at the grocers. Up to the 1960s and mid-1970s, I routinely bought very valuable paperbacks at such stores and at airports. And the situation was much the same in Europe; in Germany RoRoRo ruled, but there were lots of others. We were refugees in Germany and immigrants to the United States. We had at best modest means. But not only the publishing world but even retailers like drug stores brought us cultural riches at affordable prices.

Click to enlarge

The first ever present that Brigitte gave me, for Christmas 1959, was a pocketbook holding selections of Jakob Boehme’s writings. I still have it and show its image. It’s 7 x 4.5 inches in size, published by Goldmanns Yellow Pocketbooks, a RoRoRo competitor. That was still the world of manual typewriters. In that same year Xerox introduced its first copier to the world. Computers in those days were still at the maturing ENIAC stage. That little book fully retains its utility today; indeed it’s featured here because it happened to be laying next to me on the computer desk having been consulted about a week ago. Meanwhile electronic goods purchased much, much later, not least music records, diskettes, and recording devices have lost all of their utility (although they still clutter up the archaeological digs of this house).

Pocketbooks like the one I’m showing have essentially disappeared, replaced by trade paperbacks of larger size and much higher prices. Is the content still available? Yes. Indeed more so. There are books, e-books, Google books readable online, and much else. But not at the drug store. Chance encounters with classics while finding something to read on the plane? Gone. I still continue to check—a kind of animal reflex. What CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens have to offer is, in the context of the 1950s, 1960s too pathetic even to mention. In the 1950s drug stores still served readers at every cultural/intellectual level; now they serve only the lowest layer. And, indeed, most of the time, visiting Barnes and Noble for instance (Borders having crossed the border into Bookseller’s Paradise), B&N almost never has the book I’ve come to buy. But they can get it for me online. Thanks. I can do that too, and cheaper.

I’d emphasize, here, the structural differences. Looking at the situation around 1959, a substantial market for upscale literature at modest pricing existed. Many providers competed. Many channels delivered the goods down to every neighborhood. Today a vastly expanded content is available but based on what is, ultimately, a centralized (and hence vulnerable) electronic medium, itself requiring expensive tooling to use, tooling that rapidly obsoletes itself. The readers seem to have vanished. And as the age of fossil fuels reaches its end—which should be visible in another fifty-three years from now, this system may not survive it. But in those years, my little book, echoing the voice of a sixteenth century mystic, may still be around somewhere, still readable by someone who knows German. And along with it my many dictionaries.

Yes. And I would also emphasize the economics here. Cultural wealth was once accessible easily to those with modest means. Modest means, yes, but equipped with a sound education which made them look at books at the drug store. And opened vistas no longer visible to those thumbing tiny screens.

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The text on the shown book translated: On Divine Revelation/Jakob Böhme/The Silesian Mystic/Introduction and Selection by Charles Waldemar/Goldmanns Yellow Pocketbooks. The book was also published in 1959.

World Day of Peace

Pope Benedict XVI’s annual message, World Day of Peace 2013 (link), the forty-sixth such papal message, got echoed a great deal in the mainstream media for putting “unregulated financial capitalism” into perspective. It contained, in addition, other valuations of modern life certain to cause the heathen to rage. Benedict XVI delivered the message yesterday and also quoted brief parts of it in his homily (link) during mass at St. Peter’s Basilica on New Years Day, the official World Day of Peace. There is a secular version of it too, called International Day of Peace, the creation of the United Nations, celebrated first in 1981 and always on September 21st.

Pope Paul VI ( r. 1963-1978) began this Catholic tradition but, not being a close follower of church events, I became aware of it for the first time ever late last night, when Brigitte handed me a printout—and I saw the controversy that Benedict’s message was causing in the media a mere handful of hours later. Ironic, in one sense—not in another. While peace is the aim, the process of getting there is both turbulent and seemingly everlasting.

Missing Anchor

Today is an official holiday but lacking a traditional anchor. It doesn’t mark a great event or the turn of a season fixed by our planet’s motion around the sun. An essentially arbitrary calendar simply rolls over. In the context of this blog the change is more interesting, in a mild sort of sense, than usually, what with our fascination with “thirteen” (link). But, as holidays tend to do, today reminds me of our need for absolute markers in the continuous flux of time. Such days are meant for collective reflection on the transcending meaning of our existence. This New Years Day, however, is more of a reminder of another sort. It brings to mind just how far, as a collective, we’ve drifted into flux. Just as the day began, the Senate voted to avert an arbitrarily created disaster. Later today the House will vote to avert the same again. The Senate has celebrated its secular version of the Midnight Mass, the House will gather to observe a holy secular None.

Well, never mind. One of the demands of such times is a sage withdrawal from the reigning collective. Invisibly beneath its roar a new culture is being fashioned. And for those still in the work force, a day off is nice.

Crossing the Chain Bridge

If two out of three years makes a tradition, it is tradition on this blog to mark the passage from one year to the next with images of gates. Passage from 12 to 13, however, calls for something a little more massive, hence I bring today a landmark of my birthplace, Budapest, known as the Chain Bridge or, formally, Széchenyí Lánchíd. The bridge spans the Danube and connects high-lying Buda with low-lying Pest. The daylight view is from Buda. Parliament is on the Pest side to the north (left). The spires visible are those of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. I was born just up-river of here, on Margaret Island, between the two parts of the city (also to the left but invisible).

The perspective here is distorted by the current viewpoint (often is, come to think of it). The bridge is much wider than it looks, and the cathedral lies beyond a river-side park and then four long city-blocks inland. Another view, by night, corrects for that. Here is the same bridge ceremonially lit:

This image is taken from the Pest side, and the domed structure across the river is part of the Buda Castle.

For eastern parts of Europe, the technology always came from the West. The leadership that caused the building of this bridge came from a very famous politician and nobleman, István Széchenyí—who also founded the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The bridge was built by a Scot, Adam Clark, after a design by the Englishman William Tierney Clark (no relation). The first square the Chain Bridge touches on the Buda side is called Adam Clark Square.

So let us cross the bridge tonight and enter a new time. Will it be from the flat, industrialized Pest to the medieval  sharply rising, old-fashioned Buda—or the other way around? Time will tell. Time sometimes reverses its course.
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Picture credit: Hungarian Wikipedia (link).

Tracing Dubstep

The last Sunday of the year comes just one day ahead of The End, ideal for those who wish to review the year just past—culture-wise. We’re living in such “happening” times that missing like three days of the year before writing their retrospectives, the authors are sure to miss a brand new trend likely to “re-define” pop for years. So here is hoping that nothing much happens tomorrow, as in “virality.”

Herewith a quote from the New York Times that provides the context:

For pop 2012 was a year of rewired consensus. A year in which Taylor Swift finally accepted her pop-star birthright, waved casually at country and then bravely entered dubstep. A year in which the critic-consensus R&B star was Frank Ocean, who spent most of the year spilling out feelings and then averting his eyes. A year in which Carly Rae Jepsen suffocated the mainstream and then evaporated. A year in which Psy, a B-list Korean pop star, unleashed a video (and song) that became the first to surpass one billion views on YouTube, redefining virality in pop along the way.

     Jon Pareles, Ben Ratliff, and Jon Caramanica, “Mad Science and Pop Hits,” New York Times, today.

Now in that, for me, totally obscure paragraph, one word was even more opaque than the others: dubstep. Having accepted her birthright, Ms. Swift entered that word. Now was that a place? In today’s culture, where lower-casing everything is de rigeur if you are young, as writing vatican or queeny liz, it might be a place, another country (after all she was leaving “country”), a state of some kind of grace, or even, possibly, a new word for her nineteenth year. I thought I’d better look it up.

Lo and behold, dubstep is dance music. It is only 12 years old, born in South London, and has an illustrious heritage. It’s sibling is grime, music that came from East London. East meets South. Dubstep is described (by the Allmusic website) as “tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals.” Alas. Pop music described in words is as weird as classical music rendered into writing. Dubstep’s precursor is 2-step garage, itself the child of UK garage (mid-1990s). Now UK garage is a sub-genre of deep house, deep house a sub-genre of house, and house finally gets us back to the United States. It was born in Chicago (early 1980s). House is ultimately traceable to disco.

One more elucidation before my confession. That “garage” in 2-step and in UK comes from a New York City discotheque by the name of Paradise Garage, once located at 84 King Street.

Now for my confession. In all of the above I have been cribbing from Wikipedia without, frankly, understanding a word I was reading—but like Katie the Beagle (whom we’re dog-sitting at present) just sniffling the snow with fantastic eagerness to make a kind of fuzzy pattern. In human terms, this is like editing a Russian manuscript using a Chinese Grammar of Russian accessible by way of an English-Chinese and a Chinese-Russian dictionary.

The Two Races

Having mentioned Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychotherapist, yesterday I’ll follow it up with a quote from him:

In Wirklichkeit gibt es aber nur zwei Menschenrassen, nämlich die “Rasse” der anständigen Menschen und die “Rasse” der unanständigen Menschen. Und die “Rassentrennung” verläuft quer durch alle Nationen und innerhalb jeder einzelnen Nation quer durch alle Parteien.

In reality there are only two human races, namely the “race” of the decent people and the “race” of the indecent people. And “racial segregation” runs crosswise through all nations and within each nation crosswise through all parties.

Viktor Frankl, in a speech given on March 10, 1988, in Vienna, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi Annexation of Austria.

That “annexation” is commonly known as Der Anschluß. It took place officially on March 12, 1938. While the Nazis get “all the credit,” this movement predated the Nazis and really began immediately after the Holy Roman Empire disappeared in 1806. Thereafter advocates of a Small Germany and a Great Germany competed, the latter hoping to revive the HRE—which itself had been an attempt to revive the SPQR, the Roman Empire….

Where Statistics are Conspicuous by Absence

It might be very interesting, as a way of assessing cultural trends, if we could get good statistics for a handful of countries—or even just for the United States—on the number of practitioners of psychotherapy by major schools and, of course, over time: say 1900, 1950, and 2000. No such thing. I’ve tried. I’ve arrived here because two such schools came to mind in the last couple of months. One is hypnotherapy, pioneered by the American Milton H. Erikson (1901-1980) and the other logotherapy, the work of the Austrian Viktor Frankl (1905-1997). For me they stand way, way above the rest, but there is a strange commonality between them that I thought I would explore—and report on, most likely on Borderzone—in 2013.

Michelle is now taking a course, sponsored by her hospital, on hypnotherapy. It tickled me pink when I discovered that the course is centered on Milton Erikson’s methods. And as for logotherapy, I’ve known about it since my young adulthood, back when I was marching through the schools: Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, Eriksonian (no relation to Milton H. above), Horneyan, and then, finally Frankl’s. Frankl’s logotherapy is centered on meaning, and having arrived there, I had arrived—at a genuine theory. I didn’t bother much with the explosive growth of all kinds of therapies thereafter except to read a couple of books by B.F. Skinner the behaviorist.

Here I would note that while we avidly collect statistics on everything to do with money and people (the Economic and Population censuses), culture gets short shrift. I’ve long felt that statistics are a lens into the realm of vast numbers. Concerning psychotherapy, I found two numbers on Wikipedia. One lists the number of schools in 1980 (250) and the number in 1996 (450). The references cited are minimal and essentially impossible to trace. And even finding a coherent listing of such schools, they are quite varied, don’t agree, and list the names of broad categories, not actual schools. Fuzz, fog. Absent  the sharp resolution that statistics offer.

Inhalationism

A famous and successful American optimist, Ronal Reagan, put his finger closer to the problem when he suggested there was little limit to what people could accomplish if government would get out of the way.

    [From Daniel Henninger’s column in today’s Wall Street Journal]

The doctor must have hit Mr. Henninger just below the knee with a little hammer because those words, above, are a kind of reflex. The reflex might be called the American Reflex; it produces contradictory statements by members of government. That famous and successful optimist, after all, was a President of the United States, a Governor of California, a labor union leader, and a secret informer employed by the FBI to pinpoint communist sympathizers. Three of these activities of his could be described as “government”; he certainly didn’t “get out of the way.” People who suffer from the American Reflex hunger and thirst for political power when they are out of office, and when in the office pretend to do away with the jobs that they are holding.

Days ago we were once more throwing up our hands over some other, earlier instance of the American Reflex. “Odd, when you think of it,” I said. “America is the only country where this virulent hatred of any kind of collective activity, especially government, is taken for granted.” “Individualism,” Brigitte said.

Got to thinking about that. Individuality is a defining characteristic of humans. Humans only? No. It’s a feature of all living entities. Are the Japanese, Indians, Germans, Tibetans any less individual that we are? Isn’t it peculiar to single out this universal trait, common to all people all over the world as a distinguishing trait, a marker of American Exceptionalism? We all breathe. Then came the title of this post. Wouldn’t it be amusing if we worshipped breathing, instead of individuality? Then inhalationism would not have the ridiculous sound that it has.