Nondefinition #31

Solipsism. Are “you” Happy? Do you “want” to be Happy? Then you need to “know” about JOHN TEMPLE, the “One” you’ve been waiting for! In 1998 JOHN TEMPLE made discovery while reading Philosophy of “only” completely TRUE religion Solipsism. JOHN TEMPLE discovers that himself, JOHN TEMPLE, is Only “Real” Being in “Universe”! Since then JOHN TEMPLE has made 100’s of people “happy” just by “thinking” about them and making them “real”. Being real is “only” TRUE HAPPINESS. You too can be “happy”!! Just send name and picture to JOHN TEMPLE and he will make you “happy” by thinking about YOU for FIVE MINUTES!! Only $20 for five minutes of “HAPPINESS”! You too can be “happy”!! JOHN TEMPLE – IS THE “TEMPLE” OF HAPPINESS!

Nondefinition #30

Moral paradox. “Can I talk to you a minute? The cops say you were the last guy to see my brother – I mean, he was my brother, you were up there on the bridge with him. Did he, like, say anything to you? I wish I knew what he was thinking. I mean, everybody knew he was depressed – ever since the infection he just kept putting on weight, his glands don’t work right – but he said he was OK with the operation, we thought there was some hope finally. I just don’t get it. Right in front of the trolley. Do you think – somebody said to me maybe he thought he could stop the trolley – no, never mind. That’s stupid. I mean, he was an engineer – he would have known, tons of metal, the trolley would go right through him and hit the other people anyway. Oh, I’m sorry, man, I’m rambling, you had to see that, all those people, I get it, you can’t talk right now. Thanks for listening. Look, let me give you my number. If you ever need to talk, I’m here for you. OK, we’ll talk later. Thanks. You’re a great guy.”

Society as a Contract

Sociality defines human beings in a different way than it defines other social animals. In other animals the individual encapsulates the species. Even if it is a specialized form – even if it is a sterile drone – still its genes record what it cannot embody or propagate. The societies of insects are all in the genes. What matters is not the hive but the queen; the hive itself is pure unfolding.

But the society of human beings, though genetically driven, is not genetically predictable. There is historical variation in how a society forms, as there is epigenetic variation in an individual. A single human being contains the certainty of a society, but not the form of that society.

We cannot establish society on a rational basis because society exists to serve a need that is prior to reason. Society begins not in contract, but in instinct. But all instinct can do for society is to establish it in one of its basic forms; what is built on top of that, is built with contracts.

What are these basic forms? There are only two: rule by the old, or rule by the young.

Rule by the old suits small populations. Thus we find tribes and villages with elders, and the most ancient city-states constituted with Senates. Paradoxically, while it is by far the more stable of the two forms, it is not the ground state. When it fails, government by the old collapses into government by the young; but it is so hard for a large population to attain government by the old that it usually arrives there by way of government by the young.

Neither rulers nor ruled are immortal. This fact is not without political significance. People age: this is the advantage of rule by the old over rule by the young. Those who attain power old cannot expect to keep it long, so they tolerate the division of responsibilities requisite to a smooth succession.

But those who attain power young can never risk losing it. In rule by the young the rulers are not usually themselves young. The difference is that in rule by the old, age is the title to power; while in rule by the young, it is youth, and the deeds and quality of youth.

Rule by the old is the model of the kinds of societies we call tribes, and of ancient republics; rule by the young is the model of societies we call feudal, and of crime we call organized. At the top of such pyramidal systems the king or boss is probably much older than his vassals or boys at the bottom; but his authority derives from how well he understands and can sway the youth of his comitatus (or his posse).

Rule by the young is perishable; it lasts only as long as it takes to grow old in power. Of course growing old in power is the trick. Rule by the old, left alone, lasts forever; some extant specimens are older than history. But few societies are left alone forever.

It is in competition with other societies that the rule of the old shows it weakness; and war is the ultimate competition. Where the young rule, there is never any difficulty in finding and empowering a competent military commander. Ability trumps respect. But where the old rule, authority and ability are opposites, because authority is reserved for those least able to abuse it.

Accordingly we see that when a militant rule by the young arises, in its aftermath, even when it loses, all the governments involved go over to the young. It is like rabies: those who try to restrain the first victim get bitten; then they all go mad.

This, of course, applies only to civilized countries: there is no difference in authority and ability where there is no such thing as tactics. But consider that the humiliation of Carthage brought about the rule of youth that set Hannibal in command; and how that Rome was forced to answer with Scipio was the beginning of the end of the Republic, once his glory set him above the law.

The same competition that appears in war also appears, more subtly, in commerce, culture, and discovery.

Of the two forms, I would rather live under the rule of the old; I would rather rule by the rule of the young. So ruled, I could plan for the future; so ruling, I could decide it.

Rule by the old is the default form of government, the one adopted when there is no basis for choice; rule by the young is the ground state, the one that comes into effect when no government at all seems possible.

(Thus I regard anarchists and libertarians as being on the side of the young; they call what they aim for free trade or cooperation, but what they mean is freedom of action for the young, from a government that they despise as belonging to the old. But freedom of action is the same thing as government. If I can hurt you, and you cannot do anything about it, then I rule you.)

Can there be government that is both stable and active? If rule by the old correlates to aristocracy, and rule by the young correlates to monarchy, the answer after all this fuss is obvious: democracy.

Note, however, that these two forms of rule are not classes to one or the other of which all governments must belong. They are elemental forms of government. In classification they serve as poles, to one or the other of which a real government sometimes draws nearer; in analysis they are recapitulated and combined at different levels. Any real government – certainly any modern government, on a national scale – is really a hierarchy and network of governments, in which governments both fit inside and parallel other governments.

I want to resist as strongly as I can the notion that there is some simple nosology of government. The threefold division we blame on Aristotle – monarchy, aristocracy, isonomy (democracy) – what use is it? Even if we assign each form its evil twin – tyranny, oligarchy, democracy (ochlocracy) – what does the choice mean, except approval or disapproval? What structural features are different between each twin?

When Aristotle speaks of democracy, he means election by lottery; when he speaks of aristocracy, he means nearly what we mean by meritocracy; what he means by a monarch is more like what we would call a political boss, than the throne-sitters the word king calls up. And this is the best classification we have!

A constitution does more than fix power relations between classes. A constitution – even one that does not work as its written prospectus suggests – is a piece of social machinery. Once people have the leisure to propose them, an artistic diversity of forms of government can be designed and practiced. People can govern themselves by as many schemes of constitutional machinery as they can invent; they may make decisions according to the will of the king or the voice of the people; they can consult the innards of ravens, the shapes of clouds, the pips of dice, the whisperings of prophetesses, the papers of economists. As long as everyone believes in it, as long as nothing unexpected challenges it, if it works, it works. This is the first kind of society-as-contract: like a corporate charter, it defines how things work while things work.

But sometimes things stop working. Plague strikes, you lose the war, rivals outspend you, your markets attempt suicide. When no procedure answers to the problem, then the old and the young are heard from. Either the old among the powerful combine to keep things from going wrong; or things go wrong, and the young find themselves making decisions.

Here we find the second kind of society-as-contract. It has only three possible forms.

The first is the contract between old and young, while both have power. The old agree not to seize power from the constitutional forms, and the young agree not to accept power when the mob offers it to them, except in the name of the constituted government as a whole.

The second is the contract between the old and young, after the old take power; promising that when the elite needs renewal, they shall be the ones coopted.

The third is the contract that the young offer the old when power falls to them: to retain them for their advice, and not to let the mob blame and destroy them.

Consider the French Revolution, when all three contracts were offered but fell through. The first, when Louis fled, and the Jacobins and Girondins accepted the loyalty of the mob and the bourgeois, respectively; the second, when the Girondins tried to exclude the Jacobins; the third, when the Jacobins recruited the mob into the Terror.

It is very easy to write a constitution that works; any lawyer can do it. But it is very hard to write a constitution that fails gracefully. Fortunately, there is a quick test: the longer the written form of the constitution, the more untrustworthy it is. The English constitution, at zero words, has lasted almost a millennium; the American, at ≅4500 words, has lasted over two centuries. The Soviet constitution came in, by the end, at ≅13,300 words – a work of fiction of nearly novel length. The Chinese at ≅14,000 strikes me as dubious. The length of the recently defeated EU constitution – about 150,000 words (can that be right?) – is perverse.¹

Consider any common business contract: the longer it is, the more detailed the terms, the more ways the contract can bend without breaking, and the less it should be trusted. The longer the contract, the less relevant – witness unreadable software EULAs, whose terms are less unenforceable than incomprehensible. When nothing is certain, the only contract that holds is the handshake.

Hippocrates taught that medicine has two parts: diagnosis and prognosis. Prognosis is the showmanlike part. The purpose of giving a disease a name and predicting to the patient its future course is not to inform the doctor, but to impress the patient. Diagnosis is the subtle and difficult part: the ability to trace the course of the disease so far, to discover and remove its causes, to recognize and avoid its dangers. Diagnosis is how the doctor finds a cure; prognosis is what makes the patient agree to submit to the cure. Most political and sociological thinking is prognostic. I am trying to see how a diagnostic approach might work.

Footnotes:

¹

Figures for the US and Chinese constitutions include amendments. The figure for the EU constitution derives from an automatic conversion (pdftotext | wc -w) and may be inaccurate.

Creativity

Can technology perform what has been promised of it – can it make everyone creative? To my surprise, I conclude that it can, if by creative we understand something as distinct from creation as active is distinct from action.

Technology allows us to be active without acting, decouples action from activity both in frustrating our determination by an infinite multiplication of stakeholders and infinite attenuation of authority, and in excusing our indecision with an infinite regress of prerequisites, preparations, and precautions. While the year’s planning of a royal feast becomes the labor of an hour’s trip to the grocery store, the hour’s action of a king and counselor becomes the decades’ activity of a movement of tens of millions.

Technology can likewise democratize creativity by decoupling it from creation, after empowering it with resources cheapened through economies of scale. This decoupling takes place at two points: in preventing the concealment of sources, and in preventing the discrimination of influences.

Our popular writers defend oversimplifications with caricatures. You will read, for example, that creativity now stands revealed as inherently collaborative and social, over against an outdated and misguided nineteenth century – no, Victorian – no, Romantic (they are interchangeable for the purpose) idea of Genius inexplicably and mystically inspired with utterly irreducible, unaccountable, and unanswerable Originality.

You will hear quoted: “Creativity is the art of concealing sources.” This sounds awful to our ears; it stimulates our reflexes: concealment – hypocrisy! Expose it! And so we embrace a doctrine of synthetic, social creativity defined only as the opposite to a something that no one ever really believed.

Of course creativity is synthetic. With knowledge as with gravity, mass has force. The more knowledge is accumulated, the more it is all alive; by concentration and fermentation is becomes fertile. And it is true that creativity cannot be independent. Every act of creation is fed by a thousand buried mingling rivers. Even the springs of the desert rise by distant rainfalls. Mere self-expression cannot be original because nothing we can create for ourselves can be as meaningful to us as the things that we have experienced, that have shaped us. New and awkward is just awkward; old but well done is just well done. For a human being there should be a pleasure in seeing anything done well, with gravity and devotion: whittling or whistling, playing a toccata, laying out a garden, writing a program, spinning a yo-yo, engineering an industrial process, writing a constitution, inventing a language. The value of originality does not occur independently.

The caricature is absurd, but not new. Consider Swift, who maligned early Romanticism by comparing its writers to the spider, spinning flimsy pale cobwebs from her own substance, over against the bee, who patiently collects nectar from a hundred flowers and distills it to thick golden honey. Our idea of social creativity matches this caricature – only we take the part of the beehive, instead of the bee. But this is not viable. The vomit of bees and the spinneret-slurry of spiders are alike products of digestion; one happens to be more pleasant to observe than the other. But I have seen golden spiders spin golden webs.

The spider conceals its sources; from the look of its web you cannot tell what wings she has turned to silk. The bee flavors her honey according to the kind of flower she feeds from. But compare their work. The bee turns something pleasant in one way into something pleasant in another way; the spider turns something harmful into something useful, even something beautiful – those golden webs in the morning sun shine like bells.

But enough analogy. The architecture of social and participatory creativity is defined in its legal instruments – the GPL, Creative Commons, and others – as one based in the preservation of attribution. More than a legal reality, this becomes a moral principle. Young people, at least, regard themselves as being at liberty to use any kind of created material – pictures, songs, characters – where and as they please, as long as attribution is preserved, expecting that their makers, even if they disapprove of the particular expression, will approve of the idea of reuse as a form of promotion to their ultimate financial benefit. So it might be: but note the postulate that attribution is all the control a maker deserves over their work. (And note that even where materials are drawn from the public domain and no legal necessity operates, attribution as a moral principle holds.)

But attribution is more than courtesy: to have one’s attributions in order is the passport of good work, the condition of its admittance to critical consideration.

The drawbacks of this system are two: it excludes personal experience; and it narrows the range of influences it is wise to receive to the range of influences it is wise to admit to. The difficulty in using personal experience is that the reaction that a criticism of originality most prizes – “Where do you get your ideas?” – is the reaction that a criticism of attribution most deprecates, because it requires that question to be answered before criticism can begin. When the naming of influences becomes a public act, the choice of influences obeys the necessities of signaling that all public acts entail – some are in fashion, some are out of fashion, some are pedantic, some are pretentious, some are contemptible. Before the work even begins the selection of influences becomes the first move in the tactics of presenting the work. Because you must expect your work to be tasted with the intent of discerning its influences you must collect them out in the open, under the sunlight. What moves in the close and the dark is off-limits.

The obverse of this problem of narrowed influences is the impossibility of choosing among influences. Once what is permissible has been agreed upon, to ignore some part of that range seems capricious and arrogant. You must take it all seriously.

In education, conversation, and manners, it is a virtue to try to take everyone and everything seriously. The more you overcome the instinct to scoff at what is unfamiliar or distasteful, the more you become more a thinking individual and less an accident of genes and community. And if your ambitions are essayistic or critical, you can stop there.

But when you sit down to create something – art, music, literature, science – then you must choose: whom do you take seriously? If you cannot choose, you cannot act. You cannot have Leonardo and Warhol, Bach and Glass, Homer and Joyce, Cantor and Kronecker. You may reject without disrespect: but you must choose.

Where one is old and one is new, one must be obsolete, and one modern, or one humane, the other a fad or disease. When both are old one is classic, one is dated or irrelevant. When both are new, one is avant-garde, and one is bourgeois; or one is navel-gazing, the other is world-engaging.

You do not have to always make the same choice: but you must always choose. If you fail to choose, if you cultivate eclecticism to the point of indecision and deference to the point of impotence, you condemn yourself to the fate of Buridan’s ass, which in the thought experiment starves because it cannot choose between two identical piles of hay. I love an army of writers for their particular excellences, and will defend them in their entirety for the sake of those excellences. But when I sit down to write there are a half-dozen writers whom I can take seriously; everyone else seems ridiculous. I only demur that six is probably too many.

Consider the “mash-up.” It is, defying the dictionary’s opposition of creativity and criticism, a creative criticism; juxtapositions are not random, but either analogical or contrastive. If two analogical things are comparable, they supply understanding of each other exactly as a written analogy would. If contrastive they heighten the contrast either to absurdity or poignancy. As an art form the mash-up is not a uncalculating jeux d’esprit, not an afterthought or diversion; it is tendentious and didactic. It is a popular pastime as politics are: it gives people a chance to opine, and lends to the opinion the glamour of the underlying subject, as including Democracy or Justice in an assertion lends it weight.

Mash-ups are not nearly as unpredictable as they should be, if they are primarily creative. Nothing technically prevents mixing parts of a dozen or a hundred songs and movies, but more than two of each would be out of order, because if it were done well the parts used would meld and the critical tension would be absent.

The people most likely to disagree with this are not the makers of mash-ups but academics with the odd, pseudo-ethnographic habit of taking Internet communities and fads far more seriously than they take themselves, of concentrating on the extremes and the fringes and ignoring the consensus within those communities. They are also given to confounding creativity with informality – you will hear dialects, for instance, praised as “creative,” as if Grimm’s Law were an expression of the creativity of the speakers of Germanic languages. Dialects require creativity in the sense that they might have been otherwise; but they are not themselves creations because they had to be something and might just as easily have been something else. What was inevitable is not a creation.

This division between creativity and creation is, in its effects and its attractions, not unlike the division between sex and reproduction. Creativity, as such, is delightful, relaxing, and consoling. But when it results in creations, these attractions disappear. Your creation preoccupies and distracts you, disrupts your sleep, fills you with doubts. Like any offspring it warps you in its gestation, enslaves you in its infancy, and grows by the life it takes from you. To nourish and raise it takes strength and time to spare. Creativity is a disposition, a faculty, a gift; creation is a vocation, a devotion, a discipline. It is limitless and torturous. One creation does not easily follow another, and too many in succession, or at once, can break a constitution and unmake a home. Even once it has some substance and independence you remain weighted with interminable responsibility for it, to find the right place and the right friends for it, to see it sent out into the world. And even once you have sent it out into the world, you are left exhausted, restless, and anxious.

You can always grow, but you cannot always bear fruit, at least not of the same kind. Even the mind needs cover crops, needs seasons to thicken its sap and sink its roots. This is not to condemn those who seeks the pleasure without the responsibility; only to observe that one who, by being creative, presumes to know what it takes to create something, is a fool.

The Middle Distance

Between the present and the past is more of the past. This submerged past is the difference between history and hindsight. History raises it; hindsight floats over it. History, plodding, myopic, keeps its eyes on the ground, watches every step. Hindsight, hyperopic, stumbles over a fuzzy path to a past in clear focus. History is a discipline, attained by few; hindsight is a faculty, born with all.

It is easier to sympathize with the young dead than the old living of the same generation. Death is a return to youth. The stories of the dead are stories of what they did with their strength; the rest is epilogue and aftermath. But we cannot help seeing the living, not for what they have done, but for what they have become.

The dead cannot refuse our sympathy and admiration. We can bestow it freely, without fear of rejection. But the living can still refuse us, still embarrass us. This makes for a strange blind spot. Not seeing the immediate supports of history – not seeing the wires that hold us up – we see history as if we floated free from it, as if may choose whatever antecedent we like, whichever lessons we want to hear; part of hindsight’s audience, not history’s procession.

The past we can quote, the past we would restore, the past we may yet repeat – these are the pasts of hindsight. The past, like wood, must dry out to be useful. Green, wet history is easiest to shape – consider how many shapes the legacy of, say, a living former President can be carved into, and how fast the changes can be made – but as it dries it warps, cracks, and splits. Memoir and journalism are hothouse arts, coercing early and transient blooms. Lasting work can only be done in dry wood, once the life has left it.

Remember with Bacon that it is we (we much more than he) who are the ancients, not those who lived innocently in the youth of the world. We have had a long time to learn. It is not enough to quote Confucius, Jesus, Muhammad without being able to say how present evils came to be despite the Sage Emperors and the Apostles and the Best Generations.

We are nearsighted when we look forward, farsighted when we look backward. Renovators and restorers always favor one past over another. The fans of old music and old movies are fans of the music and movies of their grandfathers’ day, not their fathers’. Anglospherically, to the Victorians the Regency was more remote than the Elizabethans; to the Gilded Age the Civil War was more remote than the Revolution; to the Elizabethans and Founders alike, the true past was Roman. Shakespeare is less remote to me than Samuel Johnson; but to see Shakespeare quoted in Johnson’s dictionary opens a chasm under my feet.

The past is easier for us to understand than the present, not because the past was simpler than the present, but because we do not have to convince ourselves that it is worth living in. We can face nakedly what was unbearable in it. Only someone uncommonly cruel can judge a life wasted before it is over; and so true historical judgment is reserved until what it studies is over, not just in its events, but in its needful illusions.

Hindsight and history both connect the present and the past; only history connects the past with the past. The past held the seeds of the present; but it also held the seeds of what was yet the future, having become our past. The Germany of the Bundesrepublik was implicit in the Germany of Goethe; but it was there beside the Germany of the last Kaiser, and the Germany of Weimar, and the Germany of the last Reichskanzler. All the doors were open, and no one knew which ones opened on dead ends. We have shut these doors with such great effort that it seems almost sacrilegious to imagine them open. But that is the difference between history and hindsight.

Sorrow’s Eye

He rose from the bed, the beloved was dead.
He sank down stairs to an empty street.
He leaned against a bowing post.
He hid beneath a drooping eave.
The door behind he left ajar
In hope that someone passing by
Would see it gape and call for help,
And climbing find her silent, still,
And finding, care, and maybe weep.
His head was full of masking noise,
He spoke aloud to hear himself:
“What now, what now, what’s left is lost,
The world has changed, the world is less,
What is this place, what’s left to see,
And who could live in such a husk?
The world is dead, its heart is stopped,
Its breath is choked, its eyes are dull,
And we who live are left as worms,
Worms in the world, we pierce and gnaw.
We feed in the dark, and worse than worms
We know just what and who we eat.
The world is dead, I will not live.
Not here, like this, not one of those
Who drink to wash their gory mouths,
Who watch to dream the world that was.
I beg whoever has the strength
To pluck me up and crush me now
To take me from this heedless world
Or else remake the world anew,
Reborn in sorrow, tears for blood.
I will not live to lose the pain
She left behind for me to keep.
If I go on in this dark place
In time I cannot but forget.
I won’t forget, so end me now,
Or make the world her monument.”

What heard him then, what had no name
Was more than man and less than god,
With power and pity, and listening.
It knew these words, it knew them well,
It lived their pith, it had its place
To check their strength to save the world.
So many griefs like this denied,
But not this time. It stayed its strength
To let this grief flow over, flow
And sink the world, and make it new.
O is that the sun that flickers so,
Are those the clouds, they’re made of glass,
They drop a rain of grit and shards.
What walls are these, they have no doors.
What streets are these, they go nowhere.
Was this a church that is her tomb,
She has so many tombs, and we
We need them all, where we may shed
Our burning tears on stone, and trap
Their heat in wicks, and keep them near
To keep us warm, who sit in pews
In silent ranks, with burned-out eyes,
And wait for sleep that never comes.

O You who bind the strength of grief
O leave us here, we know her now
 We love her too.

Dead Actors

Surely there are more dead actors on film than live ones. If this is not yet true, it will be. How strange this is is hard to feel. Watching dead actors feels no different than watching live ones; watching old movies is no more demanding than watching new ones – yet there is something there, something worthy of awe.

These dead are not resurrected, they do not return as ghosts, yet they are more with us than the worshiped ancestors. We do not have the duty of commemorating them, we need not summon or disturb them, yet they return to us, appearing generously, in kind brief undemanding visits. Though their business is finished, they come when called.

While they move they live. They borrow life without need and return it without jealousy. While they have it, it is life more than life: in the sustained dreaming attention of a theater full of people is more life than each audient human beings has in themselves. Remembrance has always given life to the dead we knew; but film lets it give life to those we never knew – to those who never were.

Beside the public miracle is a private necromancy. Film always invites importunities of feeling. Wherever it pleases, it seduces with the form of a relationship. Whatever you feel, whatever shows on your face, whatever you are moved to profess, however much attention you pay, the characters are never offended, they never fail to appear, they are always blithe and comfortable. They do not reject. No stare discomforts them, no smile troubles them, no words repel them, and by such slight expressions, compounded over time, the sentiments of a relationship grow without the reality.

This is strange enough where the living are concerned; with the dead it is unprecedented. Time has always been transparent to the mind, but here it yields to the body. Faust needed a devil’s help to to bring dead Helen lively to his bed; one need only a computer to visit the embraces of dead generations, to visit with slow deliberate melancholy lust what was made for quick distraction as whorehouse lead-ins and nameless theater matinees – to know in the most intimate way a human being who, most likely, has been forgotten in name, thought, word and deed.

But lust is not the limit. You may hear of a young man (it would be a young man) who comes to know an actress, dead before he was born, old before she was dead, so well and in her youth that, lover-like, in a crowd he could recognize her by the way she stands still. You may hear of a young woman (it would be a young woman) who takes such an impression of an actor, portraying the ideal manliness of a generation long since unmanned by old age, that she would decide her life by judging living men, raised to other ideals and purposes, as unworthy of her in their very strengths, worthy only in their failings. (You may hear of other combinations, but these are harder for me to understand.)

Dead actors become their characters. Live actors can always surprise us; dead actors can never prove us wrong. Live actors fear being typecast; but all actors, in the end, are typecast as themselves, however various those selves may have been. To posterity even versatility and unpredictability become roles. To speak of dead actors is to speak of their characters; to speak of the characters is to speak of their dead. The IMDB and TCM pollute this phenomenon, but do not overcome it. Movies, it is true, were more potently self-standing when context and commentary were out of reach; but to watch them, if done properly, is still to be alone with them and at their mercy.

Dead singers, dead writers, dead artists, have their living consequences; but though their works are of themselves, though their works contain and preserve them, their works are abstractions, translations, traces. Only for actors is the person the art; only for actors does the art absorb and convey, not just the skill of the person, not just what is unique and potent in them, but the whole of the person, what is best, what is worst, what is common, weak, awkward, shared.

My great-grandmother was a silent film actress, under the name Eva Pavey. (I implore any silent film buff who recognizes the name to write to me; all I know of her career is that she was one of the young women whom Marie Dressler encouraged.) Most silent film, I know, is lost; but I cannot help hoping that somewhere one of her movies still exists. If I could see it I would meet her younger, stronger, and happier than her daughter my grandmother or her grand-daughter my mother ever knew her – meet her, and for the first time, as she was before any of the decisions and compromises to which I owe my existence. Time travel is that easy.

Would that Keats had seen a movie! An urn was only the best object he could find for a thought whose true object had yet to be invented, where lovers reach and kiss, want and have, yet never fade and never doubt – a human motion made cool, distant, certain and serene as the cycles of the planets, here before us, here after us.

The Poisoned King

The kingdom was full of poisoners. The young king had executed a hundred poisoners to celebrate his coronation – feckless younger sons and elegant silk ladies, young herblore widows and filthy wild-eyed droppers into wells. But a hundred more soon took their places.

The king’s doctors were the best in the world. They had means and mastery, and being pledged to die when the king died, they had motive to keep him well. They kept busy stocking the palace with antidotes and performing autopsies on the king’s food tasters.

Yet when the king was poisoned at last, they were helpless. All their specifics and tonics, all their elixirs, panaceas, theriacs – all were worthless. In his bed the dying king sweated and burned and cried out.

The doctors had one hope left, for the king and for themselves. Their hope, a man, had been doctor to the king’s grandfather, had left to study with the master poisoners of the eastern mountains, and had returned to save the king’s grandfather when all other hopes were lost. The old king, grateful, had released the doctor from service. Ever since he had lived in the caves outside the palace, refusing to teach his secrets.

The doctors went to the king together to tell him of this last hope. The king, his voice choked to a bubble and a whistle, only nodded his yes. Strong men hoisted the king’s litter onto their shoulders and followed the doctors to the caves.

There they found the master doctor, at home in a cave where thick dry dead branches were planted in the floor, hung with bundles and bags full of dry or drying plants, a cave where holes in the wall had been hollowed out and filled bottle by bottle with all the colors the earth yields, powders from clay and stone and gem. There the master doctor dwelled; there the king was brought to meet him.

The master heard out all that the king’s doctors had to say. Then he knelt beside the king’s litter and whispered: “My lord, I have no art to heal or cure. What I learned from the master poisoners was only the art by which one incurable poison may drive out another. The reward your grandfather gave me was not for saving his life, but for substituting the death of a month for the death of an hour – for giving him time to pass the kingdom to your father in peace.”

“Do this for me,” the king whispered, “for I have no heir and must choose another.”

Then the master went deep into his cave, plucking dry flowers from dead trees and palming bright earths to mingle in a dry bowl hung from a cold tripod. “There is wood in the next cave,” he told the king’s doctors. “Build a fire outside. Do not speak.” When the fire was ready he placed the tripod and bowl over it, then filled the bowl with rainwater. He stirred the water until it was an even yellow, then built the fire until steam rose from the bowl. He sat still, watching, as the liquid inside thickened and darkened. At some secret sign he rushed to the bowl and dipped a coarse cloth into the liquid. Knife in hand he lay the cloth on the ground and scraped a golden paste from it. He carried the paste to the king on the side of his knife. With a finger he spread the poison of the golden paste over the king’s lips. “Take him back to the palace. Tomorrow he will wake as healthy as before. In one month, he will fall asleep and never wake.”

Awed into silence, the king’s doctors attended him back to the palace and left him in his bed. The whole court assembled for his levee; but when the king woke, he scorned ceremony and ordered scribes to attend him. His doctors he released from their pledge, and sent from his presence.

To his scribes he gave orders. Their orders were to scan all the rolls of honor and to command every man whom the king and the king’s father had recognized for merit to be brought to the court, there to be assayed for the qualities of kingship.

But the kingdom was full of poisoners, and merit draws their attention. Most of the men on the rolls were already dead; and though the command to attend the court reached the rest, not one survived the journey.

For the whole month of his reprieve the king searched every corner of his kingdom; but all the men whom the king found were either wretches or poisoners.

The king’s month ran out, but he did not sleep. For three night he stayed awake, refusing fatal sleep, working and hoping for some chance. None came; so the king, alone, visited the master doctor in his cave.

“I need more time,” the king declared. “If I die now war and poison will claim the kingdom.”

The master said: “I can preserve life to your body, but I cannot preserve you. Men will curse what you become.”

“Let them curse,” said the king.

So the king stood and watched while the master moved and worked. He finished with a green powder piled on his open palm. “Open your mouth,” he told the king. The master raised his palm between their faces and blew the powder down the king’s throat. The king gasped, doubled over, coughed. “You may rest now, my lord. You have another month.”

The king, never gentle, grew cruel. His judgments quick and final. He ordered his governors to seek and send men of quality, fit to be kings, or themselves be executed. Many were sent; but the poisoners along the way were many, and none came before the king alive.

After only a week the king returned to the master doctor’s cave. “You must poison me again.”

“You still have time,” the master said.

“You must poison me again.”

“It will make you mad.”

“I, too, am a doctor,” the king said, “and I have long failed to heal this kingdom. I see the cure now. You must poison me again. Do it or I will have you killed. The order is already written and delivered. If I do not live to countermand it, you will die.”

So the master gathered and labored, and returned with a blue liquid. “Lie down and close your eyes.” The doctor pinched up each of the king’s eyelids and dripped counted drops of blue liquid onto the white backs of the king’s eyes.

When the king returned he ordered his soldiers into the streets of the capital and the roads of the countryside to bring him all the firstborn sons of the kingdom. Among them one would be his heir. There was some resistance; but mostly the kingdom let its sons go in peace, each mother and father hoping for the name of mother and father to the king, and the life of the palace.

Once the sons of the kingdom were all gathered in the palace the king went to the master doctor and said: “Poison me again.”

“I will not,” the master said. “My life is not worth it.”

“Did I say I would have you killed? I meant that I would throw you down a dark little stone hole with no name but that of a mouth to feed.”

So the doctor made a silver pellet of poison and placed it under the king’s tongue.

When the king returned from the cave he ordered that all the firstborn should be moved from the palace to the dungeon, there to grow tough. And once they were imprisoned, he ordered that all who failed the tests of kingship should be killed.

When news of the king’s madness reached the countryside, the peasants took to arms. They slaughtered the king’s garrisons and seized all the roads. Soon word came to the palace that the rebels had chosen a leader and were marching on the capital.

The king returned to the cave. The master doctor, uninstructed, made a black bowl of poison for the king to eat. Past tasting, the king never slowed.

His courtiers begged the king to rest, but he refused. He took personal command of the army. He overruled his captains, ignored their strategies, ordered incessant fanciful maneuvers and divisions of forces, planned senseless and wasteful skirmishes. Half his captains thought he was mad; half his captains thought he was brilliant. Half were right. The king had three men for every man of the peasant army; but the peasants won and the king was killed. The peasants freed their sons, razed the palace, and sacked the capital for a month. No roof stood.

After that came civil war, long and cruel. So intent did men become on killing the old way, with edge and point, that in the space of a generation the poisoner’s art was lost.

Expectation

Who gets from life what they expect? Who finds in what they expect from life enough to justify it?

Expectation is not the same as hope. They are easy to distinguish by the reactions they bring. What you expect can only be reported or relinquished to you. Only what you only hope for can be given to you, or done for you.

Clear hopes are harmless. True, most hopes are vague; but a hope may become very specific through long handling, yet still be fulfilled by something whose correspondence to that hope is obscure except to the one who hoped.

But expectations become more dangerous as they become more specific. Every part of complex expectation inflicts separate harm when disappointed. And the harm has no scale. Principles and trifles can harm alike – sometimes the trifles absurdly too much; sometimes the principles monstrously too little. The first distortion is familiar. It is easy to understand that the little annoying disappointments point to the great traumas. But the opposite distortion, when great disappointments multiply little ones, when in the wake of trauma life becomes not unbearably painful but unbearably annoying – this distortion, though just as common, goes nameless. The first is moving; the second is disgusting. But both are the same error.

Change and uncertainty always annoy, and mostly dismay me. To find that I have unknowingly repeated myself – thought the same thought, written the same sentence, done the same thing – reassures me. It seems to prove I am not decaying. But, of course, in that I fool myself. The law of entropy is Grow or Die.

For lower life, growth conforms to expectation because the complexity of the pattern expected – the shape of a flower, the anatomy of a flea – is less than the complexity of the apparatus that produces it. The DNA of flower or flea contains (in context) all that there is to each lifeform.

For higher life, for life that learns and feels, the complexity of the product, exponentiated by indices from epigenetics to iterated algorithms and strange loops – this complexity means that expectation can never be adequate, because the complexity of the product is greater than the complexity of its causes. When expectations hold for a human being it is never the instantiation of a subjective pattern, but the dampening of complexity by powerful objective contingencies. The probable effects of these contingencies may be ascertained; and if the contingencies are powerful enough, the probable effects may be expected.

Nothing a human being, as a human being, can do matters if that human being is swimming lost, alone, naked and unbuoyed in the open ocean. The expectation of drowning is a practical certainty. But even in everyday life the certainty of an expectation is not the result of your confidence in it, but of the objective stability of the conditions of your desire: even subjective resolutions are actually objective limitations.

Most lives should arrive at an age after which the rest goes as expected. But for most of us, to be able to expect the rest of life resembles drowning. So much energy is required merely to tread water in the world that you might as well swim forward a little. Even when the riptide gets you, even you cannot swim against it, you can still swim across it.

To say that life does not go as expected is to take the side of experience. To say that life should not go as expected would be to take the side of all the evils that abuse it. So I say no such thing. But faced with two equal goods, only one of which you expect, the better choice may be the unexpected one, for three reasons. First, since it is only hoped for (or unhoped-for) you will receive it more gladly, and love it better. Second, being outside your system of expectations, it rests them, relieves them while they readjust. And third: sometimes it is wise to choice unwisely just to remember that you can choose.

Photostream

[The sonnet’s possibilities for creepiness are too often overlooked.]

My love, it’s true that we have never met
But what is that? I know your every look.
You want my love, and what you want you get.
That photo finish, I know what it took:
Your outfits, how you dress for every shot;
The poses that you plan and practice well;
The mirror where you think up every plot,
The bedroom you have sweetened for your cell
Where diode glow lights up your staring face
Absorbed in silent filters’ midnight work
Until the philtre, glazed with conscious grace
Assumes its place enwrapped in subtle quirk.
 My lily love my eyes are mirrors too
 Sway over me and see me seeing you.