Life Imitating Art

A photo recently taken through a rain covered window by a Greek acquaintance, V.M., in Minneapolis. It reminds me of an impressionistic landscape painting.

The Jabberwocky chortled...

I have recently been traveling which, as any veteran traveler knows, necessitates the reading of at least one good book on the various trains, planes, and buses which move one about the landscape. During my reading on this particular trip I discovered that one of my favorite English words -- chortle -- was invented by Lewis Carroll in his nonsense poem "JABBERWOCKY" written sometime before 1871. Some thoughts and questions follow. However, for ease of reading, I will first reproduce the poem here along with some interesting comments taken from Martin Gardner (a well known logician, philosopher, and educator). Quoting from "The Annotated Alice":

JABBERWOCKY

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought--
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicher-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgabe.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is an obvious similarity between nonsense verse of this sort and an abstract painting. The realistic artist is forced to copy nature, imposing on the copy as much as he can in the way of pleasing forms and colors; but the abstract artist is free to romp with the paint as much as he pleases. In similar fashion the nonsense poet does not have to search for ingenious ways of combining pattern and sense; he simply ... takes care of the sounds and allows the sense to take care of itself. The words he uses may suggest vague meanings, like an eye here and a foot there in a Picasso abstraction, or they may have no meaning at all -- just a play of pleasant sounds like the play of non-objectives colors on a canvas.

Carroll was not, of course, the first to use this technique of double-talk in humorous verse. Has was preceded by Edward Lear ... Since the time of Lear and Carroll there have been attempts to produce a more serious poetry of this sort -- poems by the Dadaists, the Italian futurists, and Gertrude Stein, for example -- but somehow when the technique is taken too seriously the results seem tiresome...

Jabberwocky was a favorite of the British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington and is alluded to several times in his writings. In New Pathways in Science he likens the abstract syntactical structure of the poem to that modern branch of mathematics known as group theory. In The Nature of the Physical World he points out that the physicist's description of an elementary particle is really a kind of Jabberwocky; words applied to "something unknown" that is "doing we don't know what." Because the description contains numbers, science is able to impose a certain amount of order on the phenomena and to make successful predictions about them.

"By contemplating eight circulating electrons in one atom and seven circulating electrons in another," Eddington writes, "we begin to realize the difference between oxygen and nitrogen. Eight slithy toves gyre and gimble in the oxygen wabe; seven in nitrogen. By admitting a few numbers even "Jabberwocky" may become scientific. We can now venture on a prediction; if one of its toves escapes, oxygen will be masquerading in a garb properly belonging to nitrogen. In the stars and nebulae we do find such wolves in sheep's clothing which might otherwise have startled us. It would be a bad reminder of the essential unknownness of the fundamental entities of physics to translate it into "Jabberwocky"; provided all numbers -- all metrical attributes -- are unchanged, it does not suffer in the least."

Jabberwock has been translated skillfully into several languages...

I found Jabberwocky particularly interesting on this trip for two reasons. First, I am in the process of very slowly learning a second language at a somewhat advanced age (by language learning standards, at least). Reading Jabberwocky reminded me of trying to understand conversation in my too-be second language. That is, attempting to decipher a series of mysterious sounds linked together by a few known words, gestures, and contextual evidence about what was probably being discussed. Many of the words in Jabberwocky -- including chortle -- have essentially been defined by analyzing the poem in a fashion similar to my attempting to understand a funny story in my future-tongue. If my memory serves me correctly, this experience is also similar to learning to read for the first time. Learning new words during reading is, it seems to me, a inductive science based on the evidence of the general story arc together with the immediately surrounding known words. Given Carroll's interest in children, is it possible he was consciously attempting to reproduce the experience of a child reading through his nonsense verse?

Secondly, I find the nonsense verse interesting for the same reasons alluded to by the last three paragraphs of the preceding quotation. I have known math instructors who tried to break students' confusion over the use of variables in algebra by using smiley faces, Greek letters, or even small pictures in place of the standard unknown variable name 'x'. The point: A '2' by any other name still smells as '1 + 1'. What we call the numerical quantities in equations does not matter in the least as long as our naming convention is consistent. The concept of temporarily using arbitrary names for unknown objects about which we currently only have clues seems to be the real (and possibly only!) difficulty students have in learning algebra. And science?

Possibly students, deep down, do not like algebra due to the fact that it implies their own language is entirely arbitrary. Or, possibly students do not like algebra because they would rather watch TV than do their homework.

My Blog Oath

I feel like a complete hypocrite blogging. Previously, whenever blogging has come up in a conversation, I have likened it to daytime talk shows, where people, feeling magnified into minor gods by mass media, behave like sloppy, self-important, public drunks. I usually also bring up the fact that, since long before the internet existed, acquisition librarians the world over have been employed full time to winnow through mountains of publications, trying to determine what is actually worth saving for posterity. The sheer volume of voices online has made any such equivalent internet endeavor utterly pointless. Aside from controlled access professional databases, the internet’s use as a reliable reference tool is clearly limited.

I realize that the visibility of potentially valuable open access material is now almost entirely up to the collective whim of unqualified end users. As we’ve been told countless times, it’s a bottom-up system, an inductive, even democratic, one. This is inevitably frustrating for anyone trying to use it as a source of definitive, trustworthy information, but I ultimately concede that heterodoxy is evolutionarily superior to orthodoxy, just as biodiversity is undeniably healthier than monoculture. Here’s my single contention regarding placing the onus of estimation upon the end user: I don’t think anyone can truly know how to process and evaluate all the noise unless she has first learned how to sit in silence and have serious, honest, thoughtful conversations with herself.

So, why have I decided to add yet another voice to the cacophony? Because I was asked to. That’s it. I would prefer not to, but I find it less painful to share an occasional thought with complete strangers than to disappoint one of my brothers, one of the “three thinking.” I don’t generally eat meat either, but if I am a guest in another’s home I eat what is offered. I can cook whatever I want in my own home. If, however, my host is interested in knowing what I think of the meal, I will respectfully share my thoughts with him.

To the point: I promise to blog only if I feel I have something useful to share, and I promise to be as brief as my conscience allows. I will try not to be too noisy. I will treat the internet as if it were another’s home in which I am a guest, as if, in fact, it were everyone’s home.

One of Three

An unanswered e-mail to Dan Savage

Hello,

Before I begin I would like to say I am a fan. I enjoy reading your column and, at least most of the time, find your advice spot on.

I am writing on behalf of my brother -- with his disinterested permission -- who is a homosexual with a good professional job living in a small Midwestern city. My main motivation for writing is that my brother is lonely, having trouble finding a long term partner, and that I'm both sick of hearing him complain and would also like him to be happy.

Here is the problem: He is fairly conservative in that he is interested in, essentially, being the equivalent of some other gay guy's 50s housewife. He would like monogamy, stability, romance, and intellectual stimulation -- or at least what passes closely enough to these in the real world -- with another man. And, he claims that it is basically impossible to find a gay man who is interested in these things. According to him, gay men are, on average, even more prone to infidelity, instability, and shallow character traits than the average straight guy (especially the sort of outdoorsy hippy-type straight guys he has a tendency to form highly unrewarding crushes on).

I have two questions: First, is he correct about gay culture generally promoting greater levels of infidelity, etc.? Thinking back to some of the straight locker and bar room conversations concerning women I have listened to over the years, I find the idea that gay guys are even more likely to cheat, etc., than straight guys a bit hard to believe. Second, and more importantly, what, short of moving away from his career to a bigger coastal city, can my brother do to find a wholesome homosexual life partner? The bar and internet dating scenes are apparently not too helpful in this regard...

Thanks,

Brother Whiny, But Nice