News Blog

The Perils of Political Ambivalence

November 10th, 2024

America reels after Trump’s shocking election. What does it mean and what will the future bring?, people ask.

Half the people say: “It’s the end of the world! This will be Hell on Earth!”

And the other half say: “This is a glorious beginning. Soon we’ll have Heaven on Earth.”

I don’t believe either one. What to do?

Out here in the tiny bark of my ambivalent political opinions, I have been greatly buffeted by the much stronger and more forceful energies of those on either side. I am blasted from the left, frozen from the right, and rejected as wanting by both. Some think the path lies one way, some another; some think there’s no path at all.

First off, this last is false. There is always a path, even if you’ve been busted down to electrons. And since choosing between extremes, right or left, A or B, is impossible (because it leaves the entirety of the other side out), we need another way to choose.

Here’s an idea: imagine the American electorate as a Venn diagram. Now imagine that the best path lies between the extremes of A and B at the point where the two intersect.

In our competitive, winner-take-all society, politics is regarded as a battle, and the goal of government is to “push through” policy changes, regardless of how many or how few people actually want them. But perhaps this isn’t the role of a democratic government after all. For instance, what would happen if instead of enacting policies that half the country despises, we were to legislate only that on which we can agree? Would that be wrong? We’ll likely never know.

Meanwhile, pity the poor non-partisan, for truly they have nowhere to lay their head where it won’t get bashed by one of their politically-aligned fellows!

One Human Minute, or the Futuristic Essays of Stanislaw Lem

November 7th, 2024

I enjoyed One Human Minute by Stanislaw Lem, but not excessively. It’s written in Polish, translated into English, with just a slightly halting gait as a result. And although the book is chock full of intriguing ideas, so is it with $5 words and concepts, making it a bit of a slog at times. That said, it’s a thought provoking little book and not unreadable.

The title essay, “One Human Minute,” is Borgesian in that it is a review of a fictional — that is, non-existent— book, and hence is itself a work of fiction in non-fictional form. As the title implies, the ‘book’ of the same title is an account, in actuarial style, of everything that happens on earth in one minute’s time. It is quite horrific, according to Lem. When you see man’s acts, collective, counted, and reported, they do not make a pretty picture. But that isn’t even the point. The real point is that people who can be identified and sorted into buckets by type, can also be predicted by those who do the sorting.

“Dostoevsky believed that we were threatened by scientifically proven determinism, which would toss the sovereignty of the individual—with its free will—onto the garbage heap when science was capable of predicting every decision and emotion like the movements of a mechanical switch.”

– Lem, “One Human Minute”, p. 19

According to Lem, Dostoevsky saw madness as the only avenue of escape, sort of like Jack Nicholson’s character in Catch 22.

In fact, Lem thought 19^th century determinism was dead, but unfortunately, he was wrong; that future is already here. Big tech, and social media in particular, have used behavioral science (Pavlov’s dog) to both condition and predict our behavior. We have no sovereignty, no personal freedom, we do and think as we’re told and enforce the same on our fellows. It’s the modern, socially-required mode of life. It seems so natural to us, we don’t even think to question it or know it’s there. But it is and it has extinguished even the desire for free will. Like the Little Green Men (LGMs) in Toy Story, we can’t function without the Unimind. “The Claw!”

Back in Lem’s book, we move on to modern weapons systems in “The Upside Down Evolution.” Here Lem talks about smart and self-guided (even self-targeting) missiles and other weaponry that will dominate warfare in the present future until there’s no more point to having wars, or we destroy ourselves, whichever comes first. Lem doesn’t actually say that but it appears to be the dominant subtext, although the matter-of-factness of his tone might cause you to think otherwise.

“…There is no way of testing a system designed to wage global nuclear war, a system made up of surface, submarine, air-launched, and satellite missiles, antimissiles, and multiple centers of command and communications, ready to loose gigantic destructive forces in wave on wave of reciprocal atomic strikes.”

– “The Upside Down Evolution,” p.44

Given the above conundrum, Lem’s future humans create a slew of slightly less deadly but still insidious weaponry — micro-weapons for instance, or search and destroy missiles that operate autonomously forever. As he proceeds with his litany of horrible inventions, some of which probably exist now, we are left with the impression, no doubt intended, that war is absurd, not to mention barbaric and wasteful, and there is no reason for intelligent people in a modern society to wage it.

In his final essay, “The World as Cataclysm,” Lem asserts that it is only through catastrophe that material progress is made. From a naked arm of the Milky Way to our Solar System, and from dinosaurs to man, it took catastrophes in each case to bring on the transition. In the case of our solar system, it was a rogue supernova, while in the case of Homo sapiens, it took a meteor the size of Cincinnati to kill off the dinosaurs and leave room for tiny mammals to evolve.

In other words, says Lem, “…the world is a group of random catastrophes governed by precise laws.”

In that this creative destruction is both catastrophic and random, there isn’t much more to say. And so, given that it is two days after Election Day 2024, we will leave it at that. Isn’t futurism fun?

Photo credit: Nick / from United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

DeLillo’s Great Jones Street Then and Now

October 29th, 2024

When I opened up Great Jones Street, the 1973 novel by then barely known Don DeLillo, my first thought was, “This is going to be dated.” Naturally I was wrong. Suffused with the gritty, absurdist ethos and aesthetics of punk rock combined with a noir-esque approach to dialogue and story development, DeLillo feels ahead of his time, not behind, and in a strange way, almost timeless. The novel is the story of a rock star named Bucky Wunderlick, who one day walks out of his life as an international phenom and goes to live in a grubby apartment on Great Jones Street^⁠1 in the East Village of New York City. The reasons for this dereliction of duty are vague at first, but it seems to have something to do with fame.

“Fame requires every kind of excess,” Wunderlick tells us in the opening sentence.

The book is written in the first person from the point of view of Bucky. He tells us about his famous life, so famous that when there is no news about him for more than a day or two, fans just make it up. These inventions are then reported by the media as “rumored to be.” As a musician, Wunderlick’s role is to alter the minds of his audience, to blast them into another dimension and fill their emptiness with the new thing, whatever it is. It is always necessary that there be a new thing to give the fans the fresh stimulation they crave. It becomes obvious after a while that the fans have no means to provide stimulation for themselves.

Wunderlick is in hiding, but not all that successfully. People continually pay him visits. His manager, the manager’s message boy, random druggies off the street, Opel the ex-girlfriend (one pictures a young Shelly Duvall). There’s the writer upstairs, the mythical drug expert, Dr. Pepper, and representatives from the Happy Valley Commune and drug cartel. A news team even stops in, but Bucky won’t talk to them, as he does with most of his visitors. He’s not an outgoing guy, which is why it’s actually a good thing that all these people come to call. Otherwise, the novel would consist of Wunderlick sitting silently in a chair, Wunderlick staring out the window, Wunderlick talking to himself. And even with all the visitors, there’s still a fair amount of Wunderlick talking to himself.

This too is ok — Wunderlick is a post-modern character (which means literally that he is “post-Now” if that means anything—he’s in the future, man). And as a man of the future, he is obsessed with nothing except the fervent desire to escape the sick emptiness of the modern world, a world so empty that it needs famous avatars like Wunderlick to give it life and meaning, something the fans cannot generate for themselves, something the fans will pay to get. As his manager Globke points out, it doesn’t matter what he does as long as he does something — something that can be commodified and sold.

“I believe in death-in-life,” said Hanes.

Everyone in DeLillo’s novel talks like a character in a Raymond Chandler novel, if they were, at the same time, part-time philosophers and marketing genii. Which, in a way, they are.

“The tour represents a survival all its own, Bucky, and I know you perceive that truth. They’re waiting out there… It’s America. The whole big thing. Popcorn and killer drugs. You can’t just sit here.” Says Globke.

Globke is Wunderlick’s manager. He and Hanes work for Transparanoia, Wunderlick’s rock star holding company. It exists solely to use up the cash generated by the rock star and his band, making Bucky the owner and chief exploitee. The corporation needs one thing above all else — cash flow. Why? So it can keep on doing whatever it’s doing, even if that mission is unknown even to its owner. Only Globke knows all. Never mind that modernity is nothing but darkness cloaked in glitz and banality. It sells, or it can sell, and that’s all that matters.

As types, DeLillo’s characters exist to sketch an outline and convey information that our hero and the reader need to know. Our hero is a philosopher. He thinks about things. Oddly enough, most of his many visitors are also philosophers — his ex-girlfriend, the Transparanoia lackey, the freelance writer upstairs. They can render advice, tell him how the world works, warn him of consequences.

Speaking of the world, it is not a pretty one, the world of Great Jones Street. The apartment is kept in the condition of a junkie’s flop, although our hero does no drugs. Nothing works except the telephone; there’s no coffee, no food, only a grim view out the window, a bubble chair, and a bed. That’s why it almost makes sense that he is chosen by the shadowy drug people who meander through this novel as the perfect person to leave their brick of experimental drugs with.

If we were comparing: the novel is a satire but not like Candide, a philosophical novel but not like Dostoevsky, a noir private detective novel without the detective. Our hero is uninterested in anything anyone says to him, and we’re unsure if we should be either, although we are.

Enveloping the novel like a cold fog, there’s a gritty sci-fi ambience reminiscent of Bladerunner/Philip K. Dick. But in the end, it’s really a twisted amalgamation of all these things, and also an excuse to talk about fame and privacy, pop culture and its effect on people, people and their desire to be dictated to by pop culture, creativity and language and their increasing irrelevance, in short, the death of the artist, who does not die but may as well have.

And that is far from all that one could say about Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo. Read it and it will haunt you in strange ways, like an unsettling dream about real life as played by characters from a Raymond Chandler novel on existential dope.

_+_

¹A street in No-Ho, Manhattan. The area of 3rd St. between Broadway and the Bowery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Jones_Street

Photo credit: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Unscheduled Bliss

August 19th, 2024

I had just gotten dressed and was preparing to go downstairs for toast and coffee when the power went out. Oops, there went my morning plan for breakfast and work. Feeling unhinged from the surprise disruption, I initiated a drive to the local farm stand where we bought coffee and some kind of scone. This helped considerably.

Sitting in the car watching the play of light on the flowers and vegetables outside, it suddenly occurred to me how beautiful it all was, and how I wouldn’t be having this midweek morning bliss if the power hadn’t gone out. Inconvenient as such things are, it’s hard to turn down unscheduled bliss.

The coffee wasn’t bad either.

Photo credit: Rick Obst from Eugene, United States, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Memos to Self

July 25th, 2024

Thomas Stothard Memoranda-Yale Center for British Art

Recently, I cleared out my pockets for pieces of paper scribbled on by me, and sorted through them with the intention of removing intellectual clutter from my life. What was so important, I wondered, about these thoughts, that I wrote them down and carried them around, possibly for weeks, even after I could no longer remember what any of them were. So I pulled them out and read them — a mixed bag of random pensées*, of no particular importance except perhaps to record what I was thinking about in the month of June 2024.

“Language and thought—a country needs to speak the same language to have unity.”

My thinking here was that if the language we speak reflects how we think, and how we think reflects who we are as a people, then a country in which people speak one or several different languages without sharing any one language in common is going to have trouble getting along. This failure to get along arises from our inability to understand each other in the most literal sense—what you say to me sounds like gibberish, and vice versa. If you expand this to the figurative sense, forget about it. We’re lost.

“Is it propaganda if it’s true?”

Modern people are much more savvy to the idea of propaganda than we used to be. Maybe the Internet opened our eyes. But what if a known source of propaganda puts out a story designed to support a particular viewpoint, and let’s say also that the story turns out to be true. Is it still propaganda? I’m going to say yes, because propaganda is at least partially defined by intent. If the intention is to deceive or manipulate, then it’s propaganda, pure and simple. Its trueness doesn’t change the fact that the wielder of the story did so with dishonest intent. Nor however does the fact that it’s propaganda make it false. This is an important distinction.

“Geopolitically speaking, all the places where we got the borders wrong are going to get fixed.”

Around the world, European powers have redrawn borders and created nations, often with little regard for the custom or desires of the local inhabitants. Eastern Europe has a particularly rich history of shifting borders, first as the long borderland between Russia and Europe, later as individual territories under the various empires that once ruled that part of the world. They’ve undergone a great many changes over the centuries, so many that one wonders if a region so much in contest and in flux can ever be stable.

Nevertheless, there are borders that are still being fixed to this day. This is not going to stop happening until all the people who speak the same languages live in the same countries. See “language and thought” above.

“America’s goal is global hegemony. It accomplishes this goal by means of regime change. The name of this game is ‘Let’s You and Him Fight**.’”

America’s method of obtaining regime change is by proxy, or to put it another way, by provoking war between America’s target and a convenient antagonist willing to fight a war in America’s stead. And while this methodology doesn’t produce much in the way of stable democracies, it’s ace at achieving regime change, which is really all we care about — as long as a “friendly” government is installed in its place.

“Good people are obliged to show they care; worrying is an obligation.”

I don’t agree with this position. It’s a huge waste of emotional energy and accomplishes nothing. But from a social standpoint, it’s considered bad form not to worry about the things that others worry about. And so we wrap ourselves in worry in order to fit in.

“If nothing matters, then there’s nothing to worry about.”

This is true, but most good people won’t agree that nothing matters. In fact, we’re expected to believe that everything matters greatly, which necessitates worry. See above.

“Express yourself through writing. Write for the future.”

Once interpersonal communication becomes impossible, you have only one resort if you need to express your thoughts — and let’s face it, we all need to express ourselves from time to time. That last resort is writing. As for your intended audience, it’s clearly not your contemporaries. They wouldn’t understand, and for all you know, you might be tossed into a dungeon somewhere for expressing unsanctioned views. Your audience is now limited to either yourself or some future reader who isn’t obsessed with who’s going to win the presidency. You are nevertheless assisted by the fact that having no living audience to please, you can say whatever you want — provided it’s true to you. You may feel lonely writing anonymously for no one, but remember that Voltaire spent the better part of his life in exile, and we still remember him today. (He did not give up writing or society, however. Maybe Voltaire is a bad example…)

That’s it for the latest crop of notes. I’m now able to throw out a half dozen small sheets of paper and the semi-cryptic notes they contain, while the thoughts themselves are preserved and extended, if not into eternity, at least for the near future, which is ample for my purposes. As for the one sheet of notes I did not include, it was a rambling two paragraphs on AI, the topic de jour for sure. Not that it matters. I’ll have plenty of time to think about that in the future, although by then, AI will no doubt have rendered thinking obsolete.

* One of the sheets of paper contains a sketched arrangement of three pansies, under which is written the word, Pansies. I hereby dedicate it to André Breton.

** “Let’s You And Him Fight” is actually one of the “games people play” from the 1964 book of the same name by psychiatrist Eric Berne. Giving snappy names to his games is part of the reason the book was so popular.

Can’t We Just Get Along? A Lesson the Past

July 17th, 2024

Henri of Navarre - Jacob Bunel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the more fascinating personages of times past was Henry of Navarre, a ne’er-do-well and free thinker who became king of the French during the religious wars of the 1500s. It was right after the Reformation, and society was rather tense, as seemed always to be the case when religious reformation broke out. The Protestants hated the Catholics. The Catholics hated the Protestants. This was nothing new, but in France, the hatred was so intense that people killed each other by the thousands for over 30 years.

It should be noted that, religion aside, everyone involved was French, everyone spoke the French language, everyone ate baguettes, but if you believed in the wrong number of sacraments or had ornaments in your churches, you were bad, pure and simple — so bad, in fact, that you needed to be tortured and killed.

Henry of Navarre was a Protestant. For a while, then he became a Catholic. For another while, then he got excommunicated twice and became a Protestant again. And finally, just to put the proverbial icing on the cake, he converted back to Catholicism. He called his last conversion a small price to pay to keep Catholic Paris happy in the new tolerant France that he intended to govern.

All this was accomplished, albeit slowly, through the enacting of the Treaty of Nantes, which flawed though it was, did permit Protestants some degree of religious freedom in France. With this feat, decades of assault and battery, murder and bloodshed, came more or less to an end. And while the former combatants never got to peaceful coexistence, they were able to manage in a segregated fashion which was as good as could be expected in 16th century France.

There may be ideas worth dying for, but Henry didn’t think religion was one of them. Which is why it’s rather ironic that he met his end at the hands of someone who did. In 1610, some dozen years after establishing peace in the realm, he was fatally stabbed by a Catholic monk who was angry with Henry for not being sufficiently intolerant of Huguenots.

And so it goes. More than 400 years later, our mutual hatred is just as great, although now it’s for political rather than purely religious reasons. If there is any lesson to be learned it is this: beware of ideology. It can never be appeased.

Image credit: Jacob Bunel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

STEM and Real Life Kids, or, Can You Legislate STEM Aptitude?

May 21st, 2024

We modern Americans believe that anything we can say can be so. In other words, if we can think of something, we can make it happen. But is this always true?

Of course not, else I wouldn’t be writing this sentence. Just because you want something to happen and try really hard to make it happen, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. A case in point is legislating STEM in education — the hyper emphasis on the information modalities of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We think we can make more of this if we just teach it hard enough to enough children.

If this were true, it would stand to reason that kids would get better and better scores on standardized tests, particularly math scores. But they don’t. (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/13158/chapter/3) Surprise, surprise, right? But crazy as this sounds, many people actually are surprised when kids “score poorly” on standardized tests, not taking into account the fact that we’re testing them for skills that many of them cannot fully learn because — their talents lie elsewhere.

This is true for the majority of people, whose aptitudes may include language, logic, history, education, communication, psychology, music, art, writing, and much more. They are the 90%.

Taken together, the percentage of the population achieving high performance in STEM fields is less than 10%, mostly male. Let’s make a crashingly huge assumption that a measly ten percent of people have a basic aptitude for the subject areas in which all of our children are expected to excel. If you consider that only 30% or so of students meet national proficiency standards (a lower bar than excellence), it becomes clear that most kids are probably not cut out for careers in STEM. Promoters of STEM like to say that kids can be made to score well in STEM whether they have an aptitude for those subjects or not, but that has not actually been proven true in the real world.

Consequently, today’s curriculum priorities give kids with skills other than STEM about a 10% chance of success in our education system, because unless they happen to be one of the 10% of kids with strong math skills as well, they’re going to fail by the standards our society is testing for.

Never mind that a student has broad interests, writes well, has excellent reading comprehension, understands basic psychological principles, and is able to understand and communicate information to others, just for instance. Those skills are not in demand — only science, technology, engineering, and math really matter, or so the latest propaganda would have us believe.

Thus, if you’ve been wondering why STEM makes you uneasy when you think about education policy — assuming that sometimes you think about education policy — then here is your potential answer: the same rough number of students who were good at STEM subjects before STEM education will be good at STEM after all students are forced to study STEM. Increasing excellence in STEM is possible but only by a tiny incremental amount. Most people will continue to have, at best, a passing understanding of STEM, while losing out on the positive side of education, which is learning subjects you’re interested in and have an aptitude for. Meanwhile, you risk giving low self esteem to a whole generation of people, who have the misfortune to be good at the wrong things according to early 21st century standards.

What should we do then? The short answer is, rethink STEM, which is an admirable set of disciplines, but not for everyone, pure and simple. Nor are STEM subjects best just because fewer people excel at them. All areas of knowledge are valuable and should be valued.

With that in mind, we could create more educational tracks, instead of just one. For instance, there should be a language/humanities track. There’s STEM light, for kids who aren’t going to go on to research science or engineering. There’s your arts program. And there’s your hands-on program for trades and business. You might want more programs in your imaginary education curriculum, but the basic take-away from all this is that people are diverse and have diverse skill sets. Our public school curriculum needs to acknowledge this for the good of our students and our society as a whole.

Oh, and one more thing — when they show images of girls joyously playing STEM games, constructing complicated LEGO contraptions, and looking like cute, smart, little scientists, that’s mostly just propaganda. In all my years as a girl, in the company of other girls, including girls who were “good at math,” we didn’t do much STEM stuff in our free time. Among my friends, we were much more likely to play a game (tag, dodgeball) or hang around talking, than to engage in science. Some of my friends who were good at math even played with dolls. In my case, I liked to make things (arts, crafts) and I liked to study nature (rocks and minerals, insects, butterflies and moths, pond life….) None of these subjects get much play in today’s STEM programs. They aren’t techie enough.

So there you are, a ramble through STEM education and the real children on which it is inflicted. Bottom line: we are what we are. We can pretend otherwise, but that wouldn’t be very scientific of us, would it?

Originally written: Nov 2023

Photo credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad Runge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The One-A-Day Art Vitamin

May 18th, 2024

Almost none of us get enough art in our daily diet. That’s why we need to start taking art vitamins. I recommend the One-A-Day Art Vitamin which comes in whichever form of art you happen to prefer.

Do you like to sing, dance, or play a musical instrument? Spend half an hour doing one of those things. Even listening to recorded music can qualify.

Perhaps you enjoy the visual arts? Drawing, painting, coloring, collage — all are easy to do in short bursts.

You might prefer another activity from woodwork to knitting to gardening. Go for it!

And if words are your tool of choice, you can always read, write, versify, or journal.

Before social media insinuates itself into your unthinking brain and puts all kinds of inhibiting ideas in it, tell yourself quite plainly that you’re taking art vitamins for your artistic health and not for the entertainment of others.

And then get started. Creativity is not a luxury and nor is self-expression a frill. Believe it or now, we need both to get through life as happy, well-adjusted human beings. So don’t delay! Take a One-A-Day Art Vitamin today.

Photo credit: Aw1792300, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Truth and The Text: Taking Borges Out of Turn

July 1st, 2023

Jorge Luis Borges, 1965 - Adolf Hoffmeister

I read Borges’ story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” but not in chronological fashion. I’m tempted to say “not in the fashion the author intended,” but there’s no way to know that. But I can say, unequivocally, that I “read around” in it before reading it properly, and spent the majority of my time on page 53 of the Grove Press edition^⁠1, in which Borges quotes Cervantes and Menard as follows:

“…truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.”

I was impressed with this quotation but confused as to how the two seemingly identical quotes differed. I read the Cervantes version again. Then the Menard version. They still seemed the same. Had I missed something? I read them side by side. The same, truly and indisputably identical. And yet I read on the same page that there are “vivid” contrasts in style and content between Menard’s version and Cervantes’.

It wasn’t until I skipped back a page that I found the solution to the puzzle: “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical,” Borges writes, making this a Borgesian joke unlikely to be encountered since most people start at the beginning of a story and read toward the end…

The joke more often encountered is the narrator’s conclusion that the two texts are identical “but the second is infinitely richer.” Ha! this is funny because it’s impossible, we say. But of course, in the world of ficciones, we are wrong.

The meaning of a text changes depending on the context assumed by the reader. If the reader thinks (as Borges suggests) that The Imitation of Christ^⁠2 was written by James Joyce, they are likely to interpret it differently than if the reader thinks it was written by Céline. Borges calls this “a new technique…of reading,” involving “deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions” to create a “renovation” of the original.

Which is more important, then, the truth or the text? Perhaps it depends on the text.

¹Of the collection Ficciones

²In fact, it was written by Thomas á Kempis sometime before 1440.

Photo credit: Adolf Hoffmeister, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Unraveling Ratner’s Star From The Inside Out – quotations and an excerpt

June 29th, 2023

Quotations

“His mind blunted by the cybernating drone in the distance, he leaned toward the console and put his head on his arms just as he’d done so many times first grade during the two-minute rest period every afternoon, nicks in the wooden desk, sleep pulling, chalk trails in the air. From a series of three dreams had evolved a life fulfilled in mathematics and philosophy. The dreams occurred within a single night. The first two concerned the terror of nature not understood and the last of them harbored a poem that pointed a way to the tasks of science. The world was comprehensible, a plane of equations, all knowledge able to be wielded, all nature controllable.”

…

“‘We can discover the truth or falsehood of our own final designs only if we teach ourselves to think as a single planetary mind. This is the purpose of Field Experiment Number One.’”

…

“‘Consider science itself. It used to be thought that the work of science would be completed in the very near future. This was, oh, the seventeenth century. It was just a matter of time before all knowledge was integrated and made available, all the inmost secrets pried open. This notion persisted for well over two hundred years. But the thing continues to expand. It grows and grows…’”

– Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p. 64-65 (Billy and then LoQuadro)

An Excerpt

There are only two characters in the novel Ratner’s Star smarter than Billy and they are both on the far side of the borderland to what we call madness. There be dragons. Endor was the last man tasked to solve the alien message. He fails, and because he failed, he leaves the community of Field Experiment Number One, and moves into a hole of his own creation which he digs by the hour with the hook end of a clothes hanger. He can tell you about science…

Endor hasn’t completely abandoned his scientific roots, but he has started to butt up against things he doesn’t understand. And this fucks up his ability to carry on doing what he has always done, which is to do science, to use science to solve problems, explain things, come to conclusions. The alien transmission evaded his understanding. There was no math he knew that would unpack it. And so he went to live in a hole where he ate insect larva and dug himself deeper and ever deeper into the earth.

We will return to Endor but it is worth noting now that he is a thorough-going materialist. It should also be noted that the primary literary allusion for the name Endor is the biblical Witch of Endor from the Old Testament Book of Samuel. In the book, the king Saul hires the Witch of Endor to summon the dead prophet Samuel to read his future. She does and predicts that he and his three sons will all be killed in a battle with the Phillistines. And so they are, which introduces Philistinism—the quality of having no appreciation or understanding of culture or the arts. Although it’s a cultural reference twice removed, it seems applicable to Endor and the scientific culture that to which he belongs, and indeed , must belong else he loses his very sanity. What does this say about the scientific view of logic that to admit the existence of anything outside of science is to negate the mind itself, the methodology of reason, the rules of logic, and the ability to engage in rational thinking. But science is absolutist, a jealous god that will have no other god before it (nor suffer a witch to live).

Another Quote

“‘Mathematics is the only avant-garde remaining in the whole province of art. It’s pure art, lad. Art and science. Art, science, and language. Art as much as the art we once called art. ‘“

– Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p.85, (Endor)

Use of quotations from DeLillo’s novel Ratner’s Star constitute fair use in this context– the analysis of a work of art.