pinker’s fallacy

Something’s been bothering me about the line of reasoning in Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, but it took me awhile. It seemed fairly clear that the book wasn’t pragmatically useful, since it advances a complacent thesis, but I couldn’t see how that made it actually wrong. Then I remembered the book that made such a splash recently: Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan.

Taleb’s thesis, which has been reprinted all over the place, is that most predictive models fail to adequately account for rare, extreme variations. These “outlier” possibilities, though extremely unlikely by themselves, are not at all rare when you compound them. For example, in Northern California, school is canceled when there are downed electrical wires, damage to the school, snow, or certain other conditions. None of these things happen often, but I could be fairly certain that I’d get at least two unanticipated holidays every year, and sometimes more.

Pinker’s argument is that, because of technological and ideological progress, we are attacking each other on a vastly reduced scale. In all likelihood, if you derive a simple “violence rate” by dividing Incidents/Population, he is right. But there are certain scenarios, such as a global nuclear war, that would fly in the face of any previous trend. The correct approach to the Holocaust is not only counting the number of deaths, but also considering the event’s implications. In addition to the obvious, negative significance of genocide, it was quite easy for one empire, acting mostly unilaterally, to commit mass murder with industrial technology.

We know all this instinctively. If somebody offers you a deal where 999 out of 1000 times you win $200, but 1 out of 1000 times you lose every dollar in the bank, you will decline. The fact that you probably just passed on $200 won’t even bother you much. Even if, when you lose, you only lose $180,000 — making the offer a good deal statistically — you will still decline, because you couldn’t survive getting unlucky.

That’s why Pinker’s argument doesn’t sit right. If there is a “perfect storm” scenario that threatens most of humanity, then that’s reason enough to be vigilant. Whether or not it happens is irrelevant; hopefully it doesn’t. When it comes to industrialized possibilities for violence, one black swan matters more than a hundred predictable, humane years.

calmedy central

The New York Times is ratcheting up its onslaught. As of the first week of January, the paper was featuring not one, but two articles about escaping our noisy modern world, simultaneously. They’re still bouncing around Facebook and Twitter. Pico Iyer contributed “The Joy of Quiet,” and Nick Bilton resolved to “Enjoy The View Without Help From An iPhone” in 2012.

These are, ultimately, ethical arguments, but they don’t do any ethical work. They don’t influence people’s behavior, other than maybe convincing East Coast readers to vacation in California. Dealing with sensory overload is the cost of doing business for both men. They’re journalists, and they have to keep up with plenty of information streams. Neither article suggests the author is going to change careers; Pico Iyer may appreciate the company of monks, but writing political analyses of Asia Minor suits him just fine. So, on one level, these authors are just arguing that it’s useful to take short daily breaks, and to go on vacation, which nobody would dispute.

Since “searching for quiet” is a standard topic, you have to dig a layer deeper to see what is new(-ish) here. Iyer’s article, quite honestly, begins with the fact that “quiet” is now a focus for marketers. He just doesn’t realize that his column is helping their sales pitch. It ends with Iyer talking to an exec from MTV, who is also on vacation; Iyer never addresses the obvious hypocrisy. If both guys are so keen on quietness, why work for MTV? Isn’t that contributing to our national overstimulation? Iyer talks about resorts where there’s no Internet, no cell reception. He doesn’t realize that the appeal has nothing to do with guests who lack discipline, and everything to do with self-selection. The guests come in order to enjoy a “retreat” with other people as rich and exhausted as themselves.

Bilton is promoting a new book on creativity, which suggests taking time each day for daydreams. In isolation, this is a harmless piece of advice. But if you take it seriously, that means you now have to schedule daydreaming into your already busy day. Since nobody is going to do this, unless they were, like, really leaning in that direction already, the “take away” is self-justification. If you’re daydreaming, you’re being mentally healthy. If not, then of course you often feel creatively blocked and inauthentic.

There’s a price to pay, long-term. These articles make readers feel good in the moment, because they seem to share values like balance, creativity, and relaxation. In the long-term, though, they create a sense that the modern world is destroying us, and that there’s nothing most of us can do about it. They make us even more anxious. One of the only practical solutions Iyer brings up, practicing yoga, was the subject (not two weeks later) of “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body,” in the same newspaper! Again, short-term, this article flatters the reader. If you hate yoga, no worries! You’ve avoided wrecking your body! If you love it, you can identify with the “real” yogis who know what they’re doing, as opposed to the stupid yuppies. Long-term, it plays right into our feelings of vague contempt for all those other idiots — other Americans — who either do or do not yoga, or who don’t yoga correctly.

***

Naturally, Iyer brags about staying away from Twitter and Facebook, on the theory that if you happen not to have a hobby, the least you can do is brag about it. (I’ve often boasted of my lack of interest in stamps.) When I ask myself why I like to check up on Twitter, the answer has everything to do with the “joy of quiet.” Looking through today’s Twitter feed:

Cupcakes can suck my dick. I want a full cake. Fuck cupcakes & the people who make them. (@robdelaney)
Sang “Hello, My Baby” in my garage today. Took a series of elaborate bows. Pulled a muscle in my arm. Goodnight. (@KaseyAnderson)

There’s no avoiding these topics. Cupcakes are in. Karaoke is, so often, a litmus test for being a “fun” person. These jokes help us survive the daily tsunami of lifestyle recommendations. Essentially, by making a joke about karaoke, the tweeter is saying, “Who cares about karaoke?” Not only is this good if you don’t like to sing, it’s good if you do. It lightens up a low-stakes decision about how to spend Friday night. Notice that Anderson doesn’t say “I don’t do karaoke.” He says he does do it, and under the most ridiculous conditions. Iyer would probably brag that he never sings; Bilton would argue that we need karaoke to be creatively alive.

The recent Community episode making fun of Glee is a lot like those tweets. The show’s writers are obviously watching Glee: the satire requires it, first of all, but they were probably watching even before that. At the same time, they’re liberating us from the absurd dramatic arc of that show, particularly the big episodes about glee tournaments that nobody’s ever heard of (“regionals,” “sectionals,” all that). We come away feeling a little less crushed by a group of high schoolers who appear to be leading more meaningful lives than us, because they’re winning sectionals.

I realize that a lot of legitimate objections have been made about irony in pop culture; it has its problems and limits, for sure. But anyone who is trying to live deliberately in 2012 is bombarded with all kinds of well-meaning advice, all kinds of criss-crossing, incompatible values. Irony is one way of clearing the space one needs in order to thrive — and clearing it where it counts, in the virtual world of our thoughts. Iyer doesn’t get it. Twitter is a pair of noise-canceling headphones. Like them, it accomplishes quiet with a little bit of noise.

filtering an epidemic

(An homage to this story, which was written by an otherwise excellent journalist and which I’m therefore going to blame on his editor.)

Sure, it’s fun to joke around. But sometimes, here at The Kugelmass Episodes, we feel a little twinge of something called “a responsibility to tell the truth.”

That’s why we all need to help get out the message: there is a real and growing problem on college campuses.

Students are consuming coffee, not because they have a medical need for it, but simply as a study aid or because they want to feel “buzzed.”

“Oh yeah, I’ll drink some coffee, and then I’ll stay up most of the night,” says Thornton B., a student at Bennington College. “Sometimes I’ll have another cup of coffee in the morning before I take the test. I’ll drink the coffee in little sips. If I gulp it, my tongue burns, and I can’t taste a thing for about three days.”

Students who have a whole bag of coffee will often distribute freshly brewed coffee to their friends. “I’ll make like five cups, and I’ll have two, and Jeanne will have one if she didn’t sleep well, and then Herbie will drink whatever’s left,” says NYU student Ally Rawls, who tends to kind of drone on and on about trivial crap like this.

There is also a market for buying and selling coffee, with prices going as high as $6 for a “venti” Frappucino during finals week.

(Never mind that “venti” is considered a dangerously high dose of Frappe, if the buyer hasn’t developed a tolerance for sugar and whipped cream.)

“That’s the way it was in college,” says former college student Bob. “You drank coffee all the time. Your face smelled like coffee. You were constantly peeing. Noises in the early morning sounded overly loud, and you’d re-read emails like ten times, even ones you wrote.”

Robert (as he prefers to be called) has now stopped drinking coffee, and is really getting into white tea, which helps him stay “in the zone” so he can be a “game changer.” He also has started listening to All Things Considered, and yesterday he added the word “spiritual” to his OK Cupid profile.

He speaks slowly and sonorously, evincing none of the jittery, Bukowski-laced babbling I’d come to expect of unredeemed “java hounds.” “Now that I’m off the bean,” he adds, “I’ve realized that a lot of the stuff I used to read is just awful. I literally have no idea what Jean Baudrillard means by, well, by any sentence he’s ever written.” Robert’s friend Harmony, sitting cross-legged nearby, says she “completely lost interest” in the sitcom “Scrubs” after switching from coffee to guarana.

I can see Thornton approaching, waving a large thermos at me. I ask him if he knows that coffee causes delirium.

“Whoa,” is his only answer. Then his pal Victor (who is super-hyped as usual) yells, “Next stop: delirium!”

“You can’t pass French without a French press,” Thornton tells me. He once again resumes frenetically perusing irregular past verbs, hardly even noticing how much I am quietly judging him — not only for drinking coffee, but for slurping it. I mean, this isn’t a coffee tasting. He’s not, I don’t know, filming himself evaluating acidity for YouTube or whatever. This guy. I swear to God.

recap of the south carolina debate

Probably many of you weren’t able to “tune in” for yesterday’s debate between candidates running in the Tea Party primary. So I’m providing a helpful recap.

Note: Candidates A, B, etc. are not specific individuals. “Candidate A” is whoever spoke first on a given issue.

1. Health Care

A: We should make sure that private health care providers can do what they do best without government interference.

B: We should make sure that people can’t receive daily injections of pure heroin, which is currently happening under ObamaCare.

C: Get the government out of Medicaid! Get the government out of Social Security! Get the government out of my recycling bin! Get the government out of this top hat! Get the government out of the White House!

2. Corporations

A: Apple Computer is a pretty good company that employs people both here and in China.

B: In order to get Apple computer to come back, I will cut their tax rate to zero.

C: I will cut their tax rate to zero and make unions illegal.

D: I will cut their tax rate to zero, make unions illegal, and allow them to claim Siri as a dependent!

3. Immigration

A: We should make it more difficult to immigrate illegally to the United States. Legal immigrants are OK.

B: We should build a giant wall around everything: our borders, our houses…even the small houses that contain our dogs. One legal immigrant per year can come to our shores. The other people can give us money and put their names on a list. We will keep the list in a safe place.

C: We should have no immigration, legal or illegal. If somebody comes here legally, we should tell them that we were just kidding, and then arrest them. After we build the wall, we should build one passageway through it. On our side, there will be caryatids with lasers in their eyes. Then, somebody walks through the passageway from Mexico, and BOOM! CARYATIDS, MOTHERFUCKER!

4. Abortion

A: I will vote according to my conscience. My conscience is pro-life.

B: We will get Roe v. Wade overturned by having states vote on abortion. I don’t know what a “Federal judiciary” system is, and I also don’t care what it is.

C: So China has this one-child maximum? Here’s my plan: a two child MINIMUM! DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK!

the stinkbug and the imagist

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,
They kill us for their sport.
–William Shakespeare, King Lear

(Warning: this post contains a graphic image.)

If you grow up in a redwood forest, as I did, you live with the daily knowledge that your home is under attack. Some of these attacks take relatively acceptable forms, such as the dissolved acids that eat away at the water pipes, or the skunk that gets trapped in the garbage can. But the house is also invaded daily by large black creatures that look like this:

Faced with a threat of this nature, you might, if you were seven years old, suddenly hit upon the idea of picking up the stinkbug, pulling off one of its legs, and then setting it down facing the open door. From there, presumably, the bug could wander back outside, telling all the other stinkbugs a cautionary tale about what horrible experiences await them in “The House.”

That is not what happened. What happened, first, is that the stinkbug — very slowly and carefully — lifted its abdomen temporarily off the ground, apparently to see if such a thing was still possible. It stayed upright on its remaining legs for about half a second before collapsing. Then, again very slowly, it started turning itself around 180 degrees. Its abdomen dragged on the ground, and the wound oozed a white paste. Then, once the stinkbug was again facing the fathomless interiors of The House, it began to crawl again, in precisely the same direction as before. Its body would rise and crash, rise and crash again, as though it was galloping in slow motion. Eventually I had to just pick it up and carry it outside, myself.

What strikes me now about this incident, other than what a terrible little dude I was that day, is how self-evident its course of action was to the stinkbug. It had never read Camus. It was not filled with a sense of existential purpose. Yet if I had pulled off another leg, it would still have kept going. Leg or no leg, something wonderful was awaiting it deeper in The House, and it was going to get there or die trying. Even if you have never seen this yourself, I am sure you have seen the dry carcasses of flies and bees beside a windowpane, against which they charged senselessly, fully expecting open air, until the last calories stored in their small bodies were exhausted.

People are not so terribly different. We do not live in a world inhabited by billions of existentialists, all of whom actively refuse, every day, the consolations of suicide. In fact, Camus was wrong. Suicide is not the “only” philosophical problem. Yes, seeking death is a radical act, but many decisions lead us into uncharted territory. Like any human project, you may not even succeed, in which case you are right back where you started: a part of the world. The only philosophical problem is still the question, “What is the good?” Whatever you think the answer is, that is where you will tend, even if you must hobble there, or feel your way forward in darkness. You can decide to embrace new ideals, but having an ethos of some kind is not a choice. (Yes, Walter overestimated those nihilists.)

In essence, this is how I’d begin to respond to Nicholas Bourbaki’s fantastic travesty of The Book of Job, which I posted here on Saturday. The wager with Satan isn’t really a wager God can lose. No matter how many detours present themselves, we still make our way, however slowly, toward our own idea of paradise.

But most of what Bourbaki says about the story is true. Some of it, such as his disgust with Job’s friends, is important in the original narrative. Not only is Bourbaki disgusted with the friends, but so is God, who forces them at the end to make sacrifices in Job’s name.

When the friends talk to Job, they are of course interested in getting him to confess to something. From their point of view, if Job’s bad luck can’t be connected to Job’s sins, then the same fate could befall anyone: Job might be contagious. To ward off the threat of blasphemy, each of the men gives a speech on divine justice, and each of them uses metaphor as a way of enlisting the world on behalf of God’s morality.

So, for example, good ol’ Eliphaz (you remember, the Termanite) calls forth oceans of justice:

You cheated your dearest friends, stripped your debtors naked, stole food from the hungry, let the destitute starve, spat on widow and orphan, laughed in the beggar’s face. That is why pain surrounds you and sudden terror has struck you. Light is turned to darkness, and the waves close over your head. Since God is far up in heaven, higher than the highest stars, you thought, “What does he know? Can he see through the thicket of clouds? How can he judge my actions, as he walks on the rim of the sky?” Why do you keep on sinning, as the wicked have always done? They were cut off before their time; they were swept away in a flood.

This does nothing for Job, and it’s a bore. It’s pointless to remind Job of the Flood, since Job read that story the same way everyone does, as a story about how great Noah was, and how nicely God treated Noah in return.

On the other hand, here’s what God says to Job (here I’m using the Robert Alter rather than the Stephen Mitchell translation, since Mitchell screws this part up royally):

Look, pray: Behemoth, whom I made with you, grass like cattle he eats. Look, pray: the power in his loins, the virile strength in his belly’s muscles [...] Look, he swallows a river at his ease, untroubled while Jordan pours into his mouth. Could one take him with one’s eyes, with barbs pierce his nose? Could you draw Leviathan with a hook, and with a cord press down his tongue?

The word that keeps recurring here is “look.” These are not merely a bunch of rhetorical questions; they are an invitation to look at something incredible. For the reader, after the suffocating didacticism of the Termanite and his cronies, this blows open the text’s dusty shutters and lets all manner of Spring rush in. Not only is Job confronted by a talking whirlwind, which would be pretty exciting all by itself, but there’s a plunge immediately afterward into the trackless, unreckoned depths of the sea, where monsters hold court in the indigo.

When I was younger, a friend of mine became deeply and severely depressed, so much so that he was forced to stay at home. He was not Job; the only thing he’d really lost was peace of mind. However, to a depressed person, everything turns to sand. He was unable to work, and felt incapable of socializing. Friends and family seemed to be making fun of him. He couldn’t focus on anything intellectual, and considered himself permanently mentally debilitated. Arguing with him about any of this was pointless.

The only thing he could stand was watching nature documentaries. He was insatiable; he could watch an entire Richard Attenborough series in a single day. Sometimes I would join him in watching them, although I hated to do it, because I already knew the factoids included in the narration. I wish now, recalling how much peace it brought him, that I had been more patient. I remember very clearly an afternoon we spent watching a special about whales, with which he was totally obsessed.

You have to see this! he yelled from the living room, when we were coming up on a particularly rare piece of footage, showing an entire pod of whales protecting its calves.

His eyes were all alight. Look!

murakami’s eye talks to freud’s ghost

If you have, at any point, been forced to read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature,” then you have certainly encountered and been repulsed by Emerson’s image of Nature as a gigantic, omniscient, transparent eyeball. It’s a terrible attempt to represent Nature, and even worse as a stand-in for God. I didn’t think having read “Nature” would ever do me the least bit of good.

That is, until the day when I was approached by a gigantic, semi-omniscient, transparent eyeball. My life has not been the same since. Of course, since this meeting occurred yesterday, a skeptic may feel that the jury is still out.

“Hello,” said The Eye. “I am Haruki Murakami, author of 1Q84.”

Naturally, I was pretty excited to hear this. A chance to speak directly with Haruki Murakami! After all, in addition to 1Q84 he is the author of such famous books as Norwegian Wood (original title: Schizophrenic Baby, You Can Drive My Car) and The Brothers Karamazaki.

“Haruki! It’s such a pleasure to meet you in person. But I’m a little worried about your body. Is it missing?”

“I completely understand,” said the Eye. “For a long time, I worried about that too. But then, as I was floating around, I happened to spy my body jogging contentedly down a suburban road. I watched my body for quite a long time, actually, but it only did three things: jogging, writing about jogging, and eating food in order to jog some more. Eventually I ceased worrying about it, keeping in mind that jogging is quite healthy.”

“What a relief!” I cried. “That makes complete sense. Nothing is better for an author than jogging.”

“Exactly. Jogging also enables me to write increasingly long books. My next book will be over twenty thousand pages long.”

I nodded, and then, seizing my chance, I asked the Eye to explain what inspired his most recent book.

“You are not the first person to ask me that. I cannot tell you where the book comes from, but I can tell you another story, if you prefer. It is about Freud’s ghost.”

“Please go ahead,” I replied. “If there’s one thing I love, it is pointless stories-within-stories that completely sidetrack the narrative.”

“I thought so,” said the Eye. “That’s what drew us together in the first place.” With that, he began.

***

For many years, I floated around, listening to jazz albums and reading my way through the Western Canon. It would be inaccurate to say that I loved a certain book, or a certain vista, as I went drifting along — rather, I merely did what I was made to do, which is look dispassionately at whatever is in front of me. There were almost no sounds, smells, or tactile sensations in my world, although I did listen to a lot of music with headphones.

There is no limit to the strange things you see when you have nothing to do but observe; eventually, as I was busy compiling my endless film of the world, I bumped into Freud’s ghost. He was smoking a cheap spectral cigar, and his skin and beard were the same color as the smoke.

What are you up to? I asked myself. Yet, despite my slightly aqueous transparency, Freud’s ghost also noticed me, which is a rare occurrence.

“I am tremendously glad you are here, Mr. Murakami,” said Freud. “Obviously, this is a situation that requires immediate treatment.”

“I know why I am here — I am a famous living Japanese author,” I said. “But why on earth are you here?”

“Because of folks like you, actually. People have been believing in me so fervently that I’ve started walking around and smoking these cigars, which taste like musty sepulchres.”

“Like who?”

“Like Christopher Nolan. Have you seen Inception? But lots of other people, too. The creators of The Sopranos. Stephanie Meyer. Harry Potter, if he existed.”

“OK. But what does this have to do with me? I’m just a floating eyeball. Why are you so concerned about me?”

“Because, Mr. Murakami, you are like all eyeballs. You have a blind spot. This blind spot is ‘yourself.’ And let me tell you, yourself is a mess. You have all kinds of primal traumas, unresolved sexual preoccupations, and lingering neuroses.”

With that, Freud’s ghost produced a large vellum scroll, dried and cracking around the edges, and unrolled it on the large, blue, Viennese table before us.

I looked on in astonishment. In all my travels, I’d never seen anything so wonderful! There were huge blotches of color, which apparently represented the “moods” certain songs evoked in me. There were obscene, pornographic drawings, most of which had to do with breasts, and there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. There was a single word, “EINSTEIN,” and then a bunch of snaky arrows leading to pictures of clocks acting strangely. A mostly finished graphic novel, representing my childhood, was there, along with an embedded silent cartoon called “Infancy.”

What’s more, Freud was an absolutely wonderful guide to all these things. With infinite patience, he walked me through every redundant fantasy, every compulsion that I had to repeat a certain word, such as “inexplicable.” He created simplified models and drew even more arrows, connecting everything to everything else. Sometimes he would ask me a question, such as “What kind of spy thriller do you consider damn sexy?” and my answers helped us fill in the less densely mapped areas.

After several months of working closely together — during which time Freud became less and less spectral, even appearing visibly flushed one Thursday afternoon — we reached the point where I could lie back in Freud’s fantastic “human hand chair,” and he could recite my whole story, from my birth, to the growth and detachment of my eyeball, to the very day we’d first met in the course of my travels.

When, at last, Freud said we’d reached “the end,” he stood up and began rolling the crinkly scroll carefully back up.

“What are you doing? Stop that!” I yelled.

“I’m putting your complexes away, of course,” he said, staring me down. His beard quivered sternly. “We’ve reached the end of them. It must be obvious to you, as a perfectly rational floating eye, that they are quite silly and senseless. This is your catharsis. From now on, you will be able to just go about your life, free of all neuroses.”

“On the contrary!” I sputtered. “What you say is true. Some of the stuff on here is a bit silly. But it’s all I’ve got! For years I’ve just been floating around, looking at this and that. I haven’t felt particularly close to anything! Now we’ve finally gotten around to something that I can call ‘myself.’ I know I’m almost as ghostly as you, but I like following these little arrows around from one neurosis to the next. They deserve my attention. They even deserve love.”

“I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood me,” said Freud. “These complexes are just a simple way of describing what’s going on in your head, so that we can get you to your catharsis before it’s too late. If we were to continue talking, for example, about why you like Janacek’s ‘Sinfonietta,’ you’d realize that the Janacek is just a symbol of something else.”

“But the solution is so simple!” I retorted. “I don’t want to go on analyzing things with you forever, begging your pardon. It’s been simply terrific, but the patient ought to get some say in these things too, and I am quite sure that we’ve reached a good stopping point.”

“So you don’t care why you like the Janacek, after all?”

“Of course not! I have a few whys, and that’s more than enough. I’m not interested in why I like the Janacek any longer; I’m only interested in the fact that I like it. From now on, I can simply say that there is something too deep for words about the ‘Sinfonietta,’ and that this something moves me profoundly.”

At this, Freud rolled up the vellum scroll and stormed out of the room. It was too late, though; I remembered every detail.

***

“But my dear Haruki,” I said, “aren’t you worried that your readers will lose interest in your books? If they keep getting longer, and more obsessed with your own fetishes?”

“Not in the least!” said the Eye. “Did people ever get tired of the sex and strange clocks in Milan Kundera? No, they didn’t. Like him, I throw in some very serious political issues. Cults, for example.”

“Interesting…what is your theory about cults?”

“I think people join them because a lot of people are dumb and sheep-like.”

“You must be right,” I admitted. “After all, that was exactly what Kundera always said about Communism. And I, myself, have often thought that people are dumb.”

“But there’s more,” said the Eye. “My books warn people against thinking too deeply, especially when it comes to art, while at same time warning them against the shallow modern world. Whenever I don’t want my readers to think about something, I just use a lot of vague language, which allows them to project whatever they want onto the text. When you get right down to it, I’m very generous in that way.”

I have to say, this impressed me deeply. It was as though a strange, inexplicable something had taken hold of my brain, like a dream, or perhaps like “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, if you’ve heard that disturbing and unique record. I looked forward to unrolling my own inner vellum. Somewhere, in the far distance, Freud’s ghost became ever more tangible, though it had also begun to writhe in ceaseless agony. Murakami’s Eye said a polite goodbye. It looked fine, I thought. Perhaps a little bloodshot, but still primarily transparent. Many other eyes must look the same.

eugenides does the portrait in different voices

According to [Eve] Sedgwick, performative utterances can be ‘transformative’ performatives, which create an instant change of personal or environmental status, or ‘promisory’ performatives, which describe the world as it might be in the future. These categories are not exclusive, so an utterance may well have both qualities. As Sedgwick observes, performative utterances can be revoked, either by the person who uttered them (“I take back my promise”), or by some other party not immediately involved, like the state (for example, gay marriage vows).
-Wikipedia

You’ve decided to love me for eternity
I’m still deciding who I want to be today
-Ani Difranco, “Light of Some Kind”

Sedgwick comes pretty close to getting this exactly right; she makes the crucial distinction between promises and transformations. I would only object that these two forms cannot mix. When I make a promise, I do so because I will ultimately decide whether or not to follow through. Depending on the promise, I may have to follow through once, or every day for the rest of my life. A transformation, on the other hand, is either involuntary or becomes so after a certain point. It is not something one keeps; rather, it is what one has become.

In the world of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot, neither type of utterance is worth much. Marriage, which has changed from a transformation (joining souls) into a promise, is not irrevocable. That reality permeates everything. Before Leonard Bankhead ever proposes marriage to Madeleine Hanna, he’s imagined divorcing her by saying “I divorce thee” three times. (According to him, this is the Islamic divorce procedure. He’s not a Muslim, but no matter.) There is no way to know whether he would have proposed, in the first place, if the stakes were higher.

As it turns out, the underlying issue is that the site of transformation has moved from the soul to the brain. At earlier points in history, the abstraction of the soul produced real transformations: baptism, marriage, conversion, karma, excommunication. If your soul was severed from God’s kingdom by excommunication, that was it — you couldn’t wake up the next day and make a fresh start. In The Marriage Plot, the one legitimate transformation involves Leonard’s lithium, which he takes to manage being bipolar. When he “goes off his meds,” as we say, the result is quite interesting psychologically: he essentially invites another person to possess his body and make his decisions. This person has some good qualities and some bad ones, but above all, it is not him. (Or, if you prefer, Leonard transforms when he begins taking the lithium, in which case “going off the meds” is the exorcism.) As a novelist, Eugenides doesn’t have to bother reassuring Leonard that he’ll be his same old self. Not only is this not true because of the effects of lithium, it is not true because the diagnosis forces Leonard to continually think of himself in the third person, as bipolar.

The character who actually seems ripe for a transformation of the soul, the poorly named Mitchell Grammaticus, finds out that performing charity is pretty much like eating lunch. If you eat lunch on Monday, that doesn’t mean you’ll eat it again on Tuesday, or that you’ll eat the same thing if you do. Mitchell tries to create the conditions for self-transformation, but to no avail. The closest thing to a “divine voice” that he hears is the voice of class origins, which tells him to get out of India and to find a reasonable, secular job. He literally “hears” this near the end of the novel.

It’s a bit surprising that, after fleeing his post at Mother Teresa’s hospital, Mitchell doesn’t spend more time doing drugs in Goa. He has a marijuana shake right away, but that’s all. On the other hand, it’s not too surprising — an extended “lost weekend” probably wouldn’t transform him permanently either. This is the saddest thing about Leonard’s highs and lows; they are real transformations, but they don’t last. The prescribed dosage doesn’t last because he can’t bear the side effects, and the unmedicated state doesn’t last because it turns Leonard into a public nuisance.

For all three main characters, books and vacations do produce brief swerves of character, but class and family always come roaring back again. (The Swerve: How The World Became Modern.) It’s haunting to watch Madeleine becoming increasingly good at Victorian criticism as her actual experiences diverge, more and more, from those of her idols.

Eugenides considers his novel to be a critique of deconstruction. He’s made that point in interviews, and he beats it to death in the actual book, which spends its first half attending a lot of college seminars. Meanwhile, what he actually wrote is a deconstructed version of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, with Leonard as Osmond, Madeleine as Isabel, and Mitchell as Caspar Goodwood. The problem is that Osmond is no longer responsible for his swings, being bipolar, and Goodwood can’t get away with imposing his will on a troubled young woman. In James’s novel, at least, it is possible to lose one’s chance; failure and disillusionment are permanent transformations. The decline of the novel — if, indeed, it is in decline — is not a result of divorce. It comes from a more general loss of the ability to make meaningful choices with lasting consequences. In this novel, such choices are made for you before you’re born, or get handed down by someone with authority: a professor, a psychiatrist. Even failure doesn’t last. Leonard doesn’t destroy Madeleine, and Madeleine doesn’t leave Mitchell especially heartbroken.

Roland Barthes never intended to spare Madeleine the pangs of love. He was only warning that she can’t stop her love from guttering out, almost as soon as it catches fire, or from appearing trite whenever she looks back on its fragile joys.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

Bourbaki v. Job

So, like, right now for example. The Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all, “What about the strain on our resources?” Well, it’s like when I had this garden party for my father’s birthday, right? I put R.S.V.P. ’cause it was a sit-down dinner. But some people came that, like, did not R.S.V.P. I was, like, totally buggin.’ I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food and squish in extra place settings. But by the end of the day it was, like, the more the merrier. And so if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion, may I please remind you it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. Thank you very much.
–from Clueless

As promised, a guest post! You guys must have thought I was crazy, putting up the prelude on Friday with “more to come later in the week.” But that’s really how slowly the time passes in Sacramento. It’s like zero-gravity, only, you know, chronological.

Our guest is my good friend Nicholas Bourbaki, who just reread The Book of Job, and was surprised to find it really lame. He sent me his travesty of it, which I’m posting, and to which I’ll respond to more completely soon. To begin with, though, he reminded me how much I hated Siddhartha when I first read it — especially since my own relative, Doris, had to endure the company of a mystic who liked contemplating rivers almost as much as Hesse’s protagonist.

Some of the problems with Job have occurred to everyone, and there are orthodox ways of “answering” these “questions” about it. For someone like myself, who is not religious but studies religious texts, it is very tempting to recite such catechisms in a show of learning. Despite this, I don’t find such “answers” useful, especially compared to honest provocation.

***

The Book of Job as I Understand It

I don’t know if anyone else has been reading The Book of Job lately. But let me tell you, the story is fucking nuts.
Basically, one day the Devil comes along, and God’s like: “Hey, have you ever noticed my servant Job? He’s so blameless and upright. He’s the best guy in the whole land of Uz.” And the Devil’s like: “That’s just because you made him so rich with she-asses.”
So, naturally, God turns this into a bet. He’s like: “Okay, you can take away all of Job’s possessions. He still won’t turn against me.”
Let me point out that the Devil didn’t try to start this bet. He didn’t even ask if he could take away all of Job’s stuff. The whole thing is started by God.
So the Devil gets to work. One day a messenger runs up to Job and tells him his sons have been killed and all of his she-asses were taken. And then another messenger runs up and tells him the sky started raining fire and it burned up all of his sheep and some more of his sons. And then a third messenger runs up and says a big house just collapsed on all of Job’s remaining sons and daughters. All of this happens in about thirty seconds.
Oh, and apparently children count as possessions, because God is never like: “Hey, I didn’t say you could kill Job’s children!”
So Job cuts off all his hair, but then he’s like, “You know what? I didn’t have any stuff when I was born. I was fine then, and I’m fine now. Thanks, God.”
So the next time God sees the Devil, he’s like: “See?” God apparently has zero issues with the Devil murdering all of Job’s children.
And the Devil’s like: “This doesn’t prove anything. You wouldn’t even let me touch him. I bet if you let me hurt Job, he’d totally blaspheme you.”
To which God is of course like: “Okay. But you can’t kill him!”
So this time the Devil gives Job a severe skin inflammation. Job ends up spending all his time sitting around and scratching himself with a pot shard. And Job’s wife, who is apparently a horrible person, keeps saying: “Get it over with! Just blaspheme God and die! Seriously.” But Job is like: “Should we accept only good from God and not evil?”
Then Job’s three friends show up and start arguing with him. They’re almost as bad as the wife. They’re like: “What did you do to piss off God, Job?”
And Job is like: “I didn’t to do anything.”
And they’re like: “No, seriously.”
And Job’s like: “No, I swear. Nothing.”
“Okay, okay. So you did something.”
“No I didn’t.”
“You did. Quit your whining. Suck it up. And accept—”
“But I didn’t!”
“—that you deserve your severe skin inflammation.”
They go back and forth for a really long time. The friends are just terrible. All they care about is that maybe God’s going to punish them if Job keeps complaining.
Eventually Job is like: “You know what? I may be complaining about God. But at least I understand that he doesn’t have to play by our rules. You guys are acting like you could take God to court or something. That wouldn’t work.” Which is probably true.
At which point this other character, Elihu, comes up to them. He doesn’t even know these guys, but he’s like: “Hey Job, I heard you think you’re right and God is wrong?!”
“Yeah. So?”
“Look, I’m only fifteen years old or something, and you’re all old men, but I’m going to yell at you!”
And everyone’s like, “Woah, woah. No one cares.”
But Elihu just keeps going. He’s replying to his own arguments, he’s replying to his replies. “In truth,” he says, “my words are not false. A man of sound opinion is before you.” Which has never worked in the history of arguments, I’m pretty sure. It’s like Elihu is operating out of some kind of bad-argument instruction manual. His arguments are like: “If God hates justice, then why did he choose to govern?” I guess that makes sense, because only lovers of justice choose to govern. And so on.
Finally, God shows up in a big tempest, and he’s like: “Hey, Job! Who do you think you are? Where were you when I laid down the pillars that hold up the earth? Can you open up the vaults where snow comes from? And the vaults where I keep all the hail, in case I need a lot of hail one day? Do you know why the sun rises, Job? Because I told it to.”
God just keeps boasting about how powerful he is, like he’s in a rap video. He goes on and on. “Everything under the heavens is mine!” he says. “Mine!” He spends like twenty minutes talking about whales, and how no one is tough enough to take one on, but he created whales. “The sneezings of the whale are like lightning! Who can strip the whale of its skin? Who can penetrate the folds of its jowls?”
It’s like God thinks the best proof of his power isn’t that he created the universe, but that he created a universe with whales in it. He’s totally obsessed with whales.
So finally Job is like: “Okay, okay. You can do anything. I shouldn’t have talked about things I can’t understand.” God is like this insane bully, and the only way to calm him down is by saying how great he is.
Then God turns to Job’s friends. He’s like: “Job really gets me. You guys should really listen to him.” He also promises to give Job twice what he had before. So instead of seven thousand sheep, Job ends up with fourteen thousand. He gets double the she-asses that he had before. He also has seven new sons and three new daughters. These replace the seven sons and three daughters that the Devil murdered.
And you know what? According to the story, Job’s new daughters are even hotter than the old ones.
A hundred and forty years later, Job dies contented.
So, as far as I can tell, the morals of the story are:
If someone enters into a friendly wager that involves infecting you with a plague-like disease, don’t rush to conclusions. Maybe he’ll give you the antidote, and then everything will be even-steven.
Also, children are like commodities. If someone murders your children, but then gives you the same number of children in exchange, consider this: are your new daughters hotter than the old ones? If so, you should be contented—especially if the murderer throws in a few she-asses and sheep.
Finally, one must not question why bad things happen to good people, and good to bad, because the answers to such questions lie beyond our understanding. Who knows why the Lord allows the just to suffer and evil to flourish? Perhaps, in each case, there is a good explanation. For example, perhaps God made a bet with the Devil, and the only way for God to win the bet was by letting the Devil torture you and murder your children.

prelude

In anticipation of a swell guest post later this week, I thought I’d tell, as a prelude, the story of my great-great-aunt, an obscure American named Doris Swinton.

Doris was, during most of her teens and twenties, a prodigiously gifted insurance claims adjuster. In pictures, she is always looking away from the camera, and her mouth, though blurry, is noticeably set. She was left-handed, and her handwriting, which she faithfully did with her right hand, was often as shaky as a child’s.

At the age of 35, bleary and melancholy from loneliness, she bought a house on the far side of the Hullabaloo River. If you haven’t heard of that river, it is in the northern part of Indiana, in relatively good fig country (though later planters would discover quinces do even better). If you haven’t heard of Indiana, that wouldn’t surprise me too much. I have inherited some of Doris’s stoic attitude, after all.

The Hullabaloo is a nicely maintained river, with excellent bridges and affordable ferries. However, on the other side, there are treacherous patches of “Indiana quicksand,” which is similar to regular quicksand. At the time, the locality was not well surveyed, and as Doris made her way to her house, she became trapped in a big patch (the so-called “Gator’s Jaw”), and sunk down to the waist.

She was never in immediate danger, as it turned out. Her neighbors found her soon after it happened, and they would bring her meals, as well as roasted figs on the holidays. She made a point of moving her legs around in the quicksand, to keep them strong. A lawyer even arrived from the insurance firm, in Cincinnati, to see to her well-being and to manage her assets. (In return, she signed a very forbidding nondisclosure agreement.) Next to her, sitting on perfectly safe and solid ground, was a mystic who was there “to contemplate the river.” She would make fun of him, and the lawyer would laugh, in his cheerful (if bronchial) manner. One time, Doris even threw a small rock at the mystic’s shoulder, near the knot that held the man’s toga in place. The mystic laughed heartily at all of it, along with them; that was a big thing with him.

All the same, being trapped in quicksand was a terrible experience for Doris, particularly since there was no way to get her out of there without leaving her, literally, in pieces. Certain kinds of very advanced vacuum pumps, powered by electricity, had been invented further East, but the lawyer, shaking his head, confirmed that she was only well-off, not rich enough to buy lightning-powered vacuum prototypes. Not for the first time, Doris found herself hating the lawyer, and wondering about the coffee stain on his jacket, which he rarely cleaned and never replaced.

Doris tried various home tools and remedies, such as stirring oatmeal and pine needles into the quicksand, and attempting to vibrate her body minutely, at a very high speed, as though blessed with supernatural powers. She became something of a local advisor and government leader, stuck though she was, but her friends from town had no ability to help. One friend, Allison, brought Doris a bucket, in a well-meaning and futile gesture. As Doris began scooping up quicksand, to show Allison how hopeless it was, she discovered that the sand was actually moving away from her legs. She was able to completely flex one knee for the first time in 16 months. If she was careful, she could lift away the quicksand by the bucketful, without letting more avalanche into place around her.

As this was going on, about forty feet away, a complex jumble of insects were just about done turning an old Douglas Fir tree into a dead, spongy pile of digested tree pulp. The pulp, where it showed, was unnaturally bright, and smelled like a waiting room. Something happened that day — given the state of the tree, it could have been just a squirrel, or a bluejay on break. All it took was the ounce of extra weight, and the tree became a catastrophe, busting apart with one weary thunderclap, and then another. The sound frightened everyone who heard it, and Doris, letting go of the bucket in alarm, recovered her senses only to find that not only had the quicksand resumed flowing around her, but was now higher than before, with a new swampy odor.

Plainly, the bucket was a ridiculous idea. Really! A bucket — to clear a lake of sand! Even Allison was laughing hard enough for tears. All the same, about ten years later, Doris did a very strange thing. The mystic had announced that he was leaving the river, which he said had changed. He called the Hullabaloo “shallow and emotionally withdrawn.” He asked Doris if she wanted anything from town; she’d made him laugh quite a bit over the years, and he owed her the favor. She asked him to purchase a large, sturdy bucket: tin or steel, with a comfortable, fitted handle. She had him set it down on the ground near the Gator’s Jaw, with a laminated sign that read, “THIS MAY WORK.” As she explained, she was not young any more, and no longer had the strength to dig herself out or to move her pale, wrinkled legs. He nodded. Then, in the way of reluctant friends, they sat without speaking, listening to the dragonflies, which darted near the bank, going about their old secret calligraphies in the hot damp of the summer.

the qb test: a response

I thought you folks would enjoy this emailed response; reprinted with permission. The names have been changed to protect the reputation of Sandro Botticelli. I pretty much agree with it all, although I would say she could have picked (b) for #21 (“a slow day at work”).

***

the one that changed for me over time (per your coffee example) was keeping a detailed calendar.

also, i don’t have much wildness or crazy experiences these days. i know you think that to be huge. is yes really the more common answer?

i find your sports explanation gender biased (i.e. accurate for only a small minority of the women i know).

i think the traditional introversion/extroversion questions and analyses to be confusing and contradictory, and they’re the only portion of traditional personality tests to which i’ve given much thought. the central question (for me, about myself) is whether i moved from being an extroverted to an introverted person, or whether only my understanding of the two concepts shifted (probably a combination). the question “does spending time with other people energize you or deplete your energy” seems to me almost completely unrelated to the question “are you outgoing or are you shy?” or something like “do you feel at ease around new people?” i haven’t gotten any shyer or more uncomfortable over time, but i have become someone who craves and cherishes alone time much, much more, and maybe more accepting of the concept that i can enjoy being very social and still find it depleting in a certain way and want to follow it with alone time, or find it exhausting to be “on” for too many hours at once. (maybe your test would deem me an introvert who is skilled at feigning extroversion, though.)

i like your note on concluding a letter to a friend. when i get together (or write to or get on the phone) with one of my close friends, the vast majority of the time is spent talking about her life and my life, and the lives of our loved ones and the issues that specifically affect us, not outside events. (i read your point to be about news and politics and art, but i once went to brunch with a group of people and a friend’s girlfriend announced “this is where i was when i heard about brad and jen’s breakup!” as though it were a major life event FOR HER, and i remember that blew me away).

i have to say, for #21, my day always flies. either i’m being virtuous and getting through my piles of work or being bad and playing on the internet, but every day i say “how did it get to be __ o’clock already?” i had to think back to 2004 to answer this question. i also regularly eat lunch at 4pm.

#28: i usually forget snail mail exists. if (x) didn’t pick it up and leave it out, i would probably go a month without thinking of it and wondering where it was. not only is there no dread or excitement, there is complete lack of thought or emotion on the topic. (when we moved, we both forgot to deal with getting it forwarded for a few weeks.)