Category Archives: Epistemology

Math and Philosophy Series

Skiff DescriptionJesse Abbot kicks off the first of a three part series of talks in the history and philosophy of math and science with Peter Skiff of Bard College. Meet us just off from the Cyber Cafe at 1PM tomorrow at the college.

This should be a wonderful kick-off to an interesting series of events that will extend into the Spring, including “Calculus in India Before Newton and Leibniz” by Kimberly Plofker of Union College and “The Anthropic Principle: Its Ethical and Philosophical Implications” by our own Vladimir Gromov.

On Commonplacing and Hyperext

Susan Gibb persists into the text and into the analysis:

The idea finally hit, in the middle of making chicken’n’dumplings for dinner tonight: The Writing Space that’s held me hostage has now officially given me two endings for story #1. As mentioned before, that involves the “special link” in Storyspace of ?(n) — in this case, (n) being 2, or every other time it’s read. I was going to leave a loop and text-link one of the endings, but hey, what’s better than a couple readers arguing about how it ended when only you know that they read two different things? Hee-hee.

What’s interesting here is the implication for Story 1 that it has two endings and not one. But how can this be so? And boy do we love the concept of guard fields.

Well, why not? We may think about endings as being something important to talk about and to “prove.” Consider Lear and its problematic ending. Which one?

A better question may be why multiple paths, not alternative endings (which assumes a primary and secondary set), may be called for a given story. In fiction, endings may be “the start.” Where the story begins assumes that the ending has already been drafted given diagesis. A good example of this is Carver’s Cathedral, where the story has already ended and thus can be told by “Bub.” But enough about that.

I can think of three “important endings.” The first is Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, the second, John Porcellino’s Perfect Example, and Alice Munro’s, Walker Brother’s Cowboy. Solitude‘s ending bangs everything home with a literal whirl of provocative energy. Porcellino’s is a closing that is the very reason why we need story to remember and live (No, I don’t want to explain what I mean by that: the proof is in the work). And Munro is about as true as it gets because the reader is left on the inside to lick the edges of her world.

For Susan, it’s “the writing space” that gives. I know what she means, and it’s in such a description that Storyspace becomes organic, a natural environment where characters take different shape. She writes: “The last text box is never automatically the last. And never necessarily remains where it is within the story.” Like a wonderfully balanced router, the tool fits a given tale. This is nothing that needs proving. The tale will bear it out somehow.

I’m reading through Paths at the moment. I also have the Word version. This is fun.

The Silva Rerum, the Weblog, and the Journal

In many of my courses, I have students keep journals where they log their reading and keep notes. Looking back at my description of the journal reminds me of the ancient practice of commonplacing. Weblogs, Tinderbox, and other tools are methods of commonplacing, which plays a role, I would have to say, in the history of hypertext, hypertextuality, and the concept of the memex, since readers, such as Locke or Milton would read, reread, and recall and collect ideas based the numerous works they might have been reading at any given time.

The “silva rerum” refers to a forest of things. The commonplace book has been referred to as a reflective journal, where, in practice, sections of work would be written down by the reader and commented on in a notebook, now, of course, in a weblog or a note tool.

In the first dialogue exchange between Satan and Beelzebub in Paradise Lost, we have Milton employing dramatic language, either self-directed or to his comrade. It goes like this:

If thou beest he; But O how fall’n! how chang’d
From him, who in the happy Realms of Light
Cloth’d with transcendent brightnes didst outshine
Myriads though bright: If he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope,
And hazard in the Glorious Enterprize,
Joynd with me once, now misery hath joynd
In equal ruin: into what Pit thou seest
From what highth fal’n, so much the stronger provd
He with his Thunder: and till then who knew
The force of those dire Arms? (84-94)

The first words uttered are significant because they expose the magnitude of change that has occurred after the war in heaven. Just those few lines, spoken slowly, and in amazement (to suggest the kind of utterance it actually is) are key to the relationship the reader may have with Paradise Lost. “If thou beest he; But O how fall’n” can be read in all kinds of interesting ways, numerous affects, speeds, and expressivity, given the readers take on the situation.

This would be a commonplace entry, involving reflections on the theme of reading, drama, and performance. Typically of the commonplace is its organization. It’s not just meant to collect thoughts, but those thoughts are meant to be found, revised, and rethought. Why collect otherwise; why should we write notes at all unless those notes serve some larger purpose?

Oppositions are important to Milton, to religion, and to polemic. Hell, for example, as place, state, and staging ground will rear back at the end of the text after Adam and Eve are removed from the place, state, and staging ground of Paradise. For Satan, hell is both a place to fall into, physically, sensually, and a state of mind or frame of reference. Satan will not repent. He says:

. . . Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (249-254)

Satan possess hell and refers to the mind as a “place,” habitable, motile: the state argument.

On his decent to Paradise, Satan observes the beauty he will never have back, this in Book 3. The idea of hell as mind follows the action. Thought follows Satan and all the torture that can bring with it:

Satan from hence now on the lower stair
That scal’d by steps of Gold to Heav’n Gate
Looks down with wonder at the sudden view
Of all this World at once. As when a Scout
Through dark and desart wayes with peril gone
All night; at last by break of chearful dawne
Obtains the brow of some high-climbing Hill,
Which to his eye discovers unaware
The goodly prospect of some forein land
First-seen, or some renownd Metropolis
With glistering Spires and Pinnacles adornd,
Which now the Rising Sun guilds with his beams. (3.540-51)

Satan’s wonder is like a scouts, who, tapping a hill sees a new landscape. This passage, much like the expression to Beelzebub, recalls that sense of observed change and surprise.
In Book 4 we read doubt in Satan and identify the surfacing of regret:

Yet not rejoycing in his speed, though bold,
Far off and fearless, nor with cause to boast,
Begins his dire attempt, which nigh the birth
Now rowling, boiles in his tumultuous brest,
And like a devillish Engine back recoiles
Upon himself; horror and doubt distract
His troubl’d thoughts, and from the bottom stirr
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more then from himself can fly
By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair
That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue. (4.13-26)

The commonplace observation should reveal the structures of the work. This last passage closes the state argument, at least for now and in this section. “The Hell within him” is an echo of “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Satan carries “himself” with him no matter the place.

Hypertext and Thinking

At Hypercompendia, Susan Gibb describes an interesting process:

Just when you think you know these people you find something out and you click open a writing space and you tell everyone else about it. Its free association at its finest and Ill read and reread until I know all there is to know about what they’ve been hiding from me.

I’m not sure about “free association” (which may be a correct descriptor), but I do know that the tool is promoting thinking in different ways than the linear environment. In terms of writing character, Neil Gaiman has mentioned the knowledge character’s feed the writer, an idea that is difficult to convey outside of the influence of the muse. Numerous fiction writers have written about the phenomenon.

In another sense, “writing” as a descriptive action is a generalization. Thinking is a better generalizer. Good writing on many levels is good thinking. In this sense writing is simile.

On Interpretation

A wonderful examination of the “question” of riddles in the Exeter Book by Adam Roberts at The Valve (links/blockquotes in original). Here’s a nice snip:

So let’s take it as a single, one-line riddle. Here it is, followed by Kevin Crossley-Holland’s concise translation

Wundor wearð on wege: wæter wearð to bane.

On the way, a miracle: water becomes bone.

Scholars agree that answer to this riddle is: ice. Scholars don’t always agree on the answer to any given riddle. For example, various OE riddle experts have looked at Riddle 74 (‘I was once a young woman,/a glorious warrior, a grey-haired queen./I soared with birds, stepped on the earth,/swam in the sea—dived under the waves, languid amongst fishes. I had a living spirit’) and variously suggested cuttlefish, water, siren and swan as the answer. By comparison, and remembering that the answers to these riddles are nowhere written down or ‘officially’ tabulated, ‘on the way, a miracle: water becomes bone … ice’ looks relatively straightforward. It’s a nicely satisfying and poetic image, too.

But here’s another answer to the riddle:

Climbing Cooper’s Hill, and looking back at the curve of the Thames in the bright, cloudy light: the afternoon sun polishing away all grey or blue from the water until it is white, its edges sharpened by the angle of illumination, looking like nothing so much as a mighty rib-bone gleaming, set in the flesh of the land … and I thought to myself yes, water becomes bone.

The answer ice identifies two points of similarity (hardness, colour) with bone; but this vision of the Thames identifies three (colour, shape, setting). Does that make it a ‘better’ answer to the Exeter Book riddle?

TV’s Metaphors (or allegory)

TV’s metaphors are interesting and scary.

The Visa commercial is the image of America (brain) on Debt (drugs) (and human as conformer).

Desperate Housewives has nothing to do with housewives but has a lot to say about suburban blight.

We’re back on Babylon 5 again. Years 2 and 3 are now more relevant than ever. Yikes.

Hypertext and the Edge

Wonderful conversation with Susan Gibb about story, hypertext, and edge. Hypertext is the form, but story is still king. We also talked about knowledge as it pertains to thinking about story and all the things that wriers would not have known if they did not write. There are some things a person would never have known if it weren’t for the writing.

For example, without the word “giggling” we never would have known about a man and woman who speak to each other via bridges. These two people are that we need to know. But then we need to see what happens in the face of change, the arbitrary, deep water.

Secular Prophesy

This post points back to a considerable amount of discussion on McCarthy’s novel The Road including some in the comment space here.

Nevertheless, my reading of the novel goes to vulnerability and implacable loss (the institutions that sustain moral and ethical codes are gone). One of the running ideas that crosses McCarthy’s work is the notion of the boundary and the irrevocable crossing of them. It’s great for fiction writers to think about these boundaries and to cross them in the act of writing. I often refer to edge and this is what I mean: what boundaries are crossed or is the writer playing it safe hence inhibiting their own creative power. We should strive to write works tha are smarter than we are.

In The Road, the environmental border has been crossed. The ambiguous and banal war is over; there’s nothing left to do. That’s one point I tried to make in this post here.

The novel works because the father and son are familiar and unfamiliar to us.

As a work of secular prophesy, The Road portends a possible future. The power of the warning is in the power of the imagery. That’s why I think that the boy is important as a foil to the father. But, these days, prophesies can be deemed naive, especially in the context of geopolitical reactionism and how people respond to facts.

The Road is too logical for our irrational present.

Sitting with the Next President

My wife had a wonderful if question a few weeks back, something simple yet elegant.

What if we had to vote on candidates via radio only?

How would we decide based solely on the aural sense? We were talking about variants of the essay. What if all the candidates had to write their way into the office? I find the radio more intriguing. Kucinich strikes an odd look, especially when posing with his wife. The image rules. In the image we lose the power of the speaking voice. Or am I wrong about that?

I want anyone claiming to speak or act for me to come to my house and tell me what’s really on their mind. I’ll give them a nice cup of coffee and space to think, either party, whatever. At the moment, we never really know much about anyone given that the screen is a moment made to look like a mile of space, and relying on news is even worse given that you can only conclude so much within the edited frame. The illusion of the TV moment and its strange arcs of reality are vividly dangerous for decision making or as a serious tool for argument and consensus building, as we’ve seen. For most people, all they will know of this or that person is as a TV image.

We meet Sir Gawain head on at the end of the tale when he learns what we’ve suspected all along. The audience knows far less from the first person. Storytelling and media are consequential to each other. The political season–which appears now to be perpetual (a mark of a failure in the system?), like war–and its stories are expressed on a rehearsed stage as far away from reality as is possible, but this is so known now that it’s become cliched. We should stop buying that soap and shampoo, I think. It’s always on sale.

Isn’t it important that we think about how we know, distinguish, and conclude?