153. Violation

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[Here's an interesting look at Tisdale and this collection. Edits and additional matterial from 4/29/17 in red.]

Violation

p155 Stephanie, gawky and disheveled, is easily the best writer in the class [Tisdale is teaching at a university]. After a few weeks I realize I'm half in love with her, with her scary ideas, her absolute fearlessness, and I come to class hungry and ashamed, wanting to hear her read, wanting her to ask me for advice. She is only dimly aware of her talent. She's not a writer, she tells me one day. She's a painter. She likes big canvases with solid blocks of color, and writes only "for fun." Her wild stories, her willingness to say anything, anything at all, are the blessings of not being a writer, of having nothing to lose. The other students, the rule-bound ones who want to be writers very much, are startled into attention.

This is from "Big Ideas," an essay about writing.

A few essays later, about the middle of the collection, we come to the title essay -- which I have been anticipating. This one is also about writing and specifically about writing memoir, which is Tisdale's specialty, it seems. She refers back to an earlier essay called "The Basement" which is about a family visit to her grandmother's when Sallie was a child. In particular, she refers to this passage where she describes her sister, "Susan, barely a year younger than me, isn't brave at all. She's squeamish, chubby, pale, and black haired -- she's the one left out, the baby." Reading this, I wondered if there might have been hurt feelings about this description. I know in my family the "baby" (my aunt who died a couple years ago at 94, still aggrieved by some slights from her youth) was not amused by accounts of her early lack of status in the family. And it turns out Susan was, in fact, offended and this essay is about truth and the writer's need to tell the truth. It is also about the subjective and ephemeral nature of truth.

Before admitting that her truth was not the whole truth, and possibly not the truth at all, except to her at the time, Tisdale insists the memoirist must not make stuff up or tell anything but the truth. That non-fiction must be factual. I'm not sure I agree with this. 

Mostly I'm thinking of the non-fiction of humorists like Calvin Trillin and Bill Bryson, who I expect to elaborate a bit. I can imagine James Thurber's grandfather reading Thurber's hilarious accounts of family life in Columbus, Ohio, waving his stick around and insisting that no such thing ever happened. And I would find that just as funny as the original story. 

Did Alice Trillin actually originate all the sayings or hold all the positions Calvin assigned to her? Maybe. Maybe not. But the "Theory of Compensatory Cash-flow" (that if you think you are going to spend $X on something and then don't, you now have $X you are free to spend on something else) or of "Enough" (that past a certain figure $1 million? $10 million? 100% of a wealthy person's income should be taxed, because it's just obscene for anyone to make that much money) derive a common sense quality from their association with Alice and not Calvin.

My point is that I'm willing to give a writer some leeway if it's going to payoff in the end.

But here's the thing, in "The Basement" this description of her little sister doesn't payoff. We see her as Sallie saw her, but the story is about Sallie's experience and perception of that experience and Susan barely appears. The description is true to the author's truth, but isn't crucial to the writer's aim in telling this story. 

Now if, after that description, Susan and led the way into the dark basement and fallen into a large heater vent left open by mistake -- as actually happened to my aunt when she was little -- you would have to include both the description and the pratfall. But in this case, I think Susan has a point.

But then we get to truth in general. What do we remember and how close are those memories to what actually happened? Everyone in the story holds different information about what is happening and what other people are dealing with, plus none of them see the same things from the same perspective.

Truth (and I think I may have said this before) is like spacetime: never absolute, always relative.


"Second Chair"

Another good essay. This is about growing up in a small town where you attend the school where both your parents work, so that the teachers are also people you know as your parent's friends. And it's about being in the school band, constantly challenging the first chair but never winning.

It's about a great deal else as well.

But what resonated with me was the knowing teachers -- in my case, professors -- outside school; and also band. I was lucky, I could completely avoid the department that my mother worked for, so I rarely bumped into professors I knew through my mother, though they were demystified for me which is why I probably socialized more with my own professors than most students did.

The band connection is more interesting. I, too, was second chair, though in the trumpet section instead of base clarinet. But while Tisdale continued to challenge the girl who held the first chair even past the point where she knew she would never win, I don't recall ever challenging. I knew the guy ahead of me was much better and I had no desire to replace him. I think someone once challenged me, and I was happy to hold my chair, but I didn't care in the way Tisdale seems to have cared. Also the third chair adored Donovan, who I loathed, so there was that.

Where we were most alike was in how we turned our backs on band and so much else when we transitioned into high school. In my case I can point to another round of disgust at having to leave another place behind and start over anew (and in Scottsdale of all God forsaken places), and later to the bad crowd I ran into working at YMCA camp, and the new drug culture of the time. But if it wasn't those things wouldn't it have been something else? Does anyone get through those adolescent years unashamed? Or at least without regrets? And if you do, is that really anything to be proud of? 

And, with "Violation" in mind, I can read a bit between the lines and guess at some of the alcoholic-father things she doesn't mention because they are boring and petty to repeat and -- like those wounds you sometimes read about that much later re-open and finally kill the apparent survivor -- you don't want to take a chance bringing that stuff to the surface again. Still, having spoken about truth and telling everything, it's a little surprising how much she leaves out here.


Also, thanks to this essay, I now see Tisdale as one of those bold high school girls who infested our shared apartment after we graduated from high school. Was that a quirk of the times? An aftereffect of the Summer of Love and all the related social quakes? Or is that just how some girls are at that age? I would guess that grandparents, raising their grandchildren, are disappointed to discover that all the lessons they thought they learned with their own children have been rendered moot by the changes of the times. They are probably just as lost and even further removed from the children they are trying to care for.

Land-poor

It turns out that one of the cons of owning an SF BMR (Below Market Rate) condo is that there is no way of accessing your equity short of selling the property. Reverse mortgages are generally considered to be a bad idea, but it would have been nice to have had the option. It would have at least bought me some time to stay in my unit if my finances fall apart. Now, a big part of my Plan C will be finding a new place to live. Mind you, I’m just doing worst-case financial planning here, but still.

(This is not the dictionary definition of “land-poor” but it comes down to the same thing. Your wealth is situated so as to do you no good. In my case, I don’t even own any actual “land” to speak of. What I own is the space inside the walls of a building. That part I’m not complaining about, having grown up in suburbia, owning yards and fences and driveways was never a goal of mine. How many people, I wonder, who long for a home with a white picket fence have built or even painted such a thing?)

Accessing your equity seems to be hard regardless. I know that in France (at least at one time) you could sell your place and continue to live in it until you died. If that’s an option at all here, it wouldn’t be an option for me because of the BMR restrictions.


Still, I’m better off than a friend who is poor while sitting on over a half million dollars in equity. Now that would be frustrating. 

Next - 154. The Sutra...

152. 420

Previous - 151. CBF and Sisters

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420

Tomorrow we're Greening the 420 (cannabis) celebration in Golden Gate Park's Sharon Meadow for the first time. Not sure what to expect but wouldn't be surprised if it was a shit-show. Today a crew set-up and the day after tomorrow another crew is scheduled to do the final clean-up. I'll just be there for the main event which should be similar to any number of other free concerts we've worked at Sharon Meadow. But we will see.

Sallie Tisdale

Yesterday I started reading Violation, a collection of essays by Sallie Tisdale.  I love Tisdale both for her prose and for her eye -- she and Annie Dillard are very good at seeing nature for what it is.

I'm four essays and the introduction in and haven't taken a single note. Which is a good thing since I procrastinated starting the book and don't have that much time before our club meeting. But I can't really explain why I both enjoy this and feel no need to write anything down. 

After 420

I wasn't wrong about it being a shit-show. The report I heard on the radio this morning claimed the crowd was around 15,000, but it felt larger than that to me. There was great footage of what it looked like from a helicopter, but I can't find it now. (I had everything ready to publish last night when Blogger let me down and ate everything I had done that day. Not even the Cloud can stop this from happening on occasion.)

The morning news also reported that the park looked strikingly clean at dawn -- for years they had been reporting on what a disaster it was the day after. In fact, the park looked great by the time I left at 7:30pm and there were still teams picking up trash and bringing it to our crew to sort. That process was to continue the following day. 

We didn't collect that much waste during the event. I probably collected, and hauled to the compost dumpster, 20 bags of compost plus some cardboard. I also pulled a half dozen bags of sorted landfill and even a couple bags of recycling. The majority of the waste was left behind at the very end when the "celebrants" finally were convinced to go home. 

This event does not go into my list of favorite events to work, but it was very satisfying to finally be able to Green it. I would be willing to grit my teeth and do it again.

What made the event hard to work was also the most interesting aspect of the event for me. We and everyone else were told there would be no glass allowed in the park (no bottles or bongs) and people would not be allowed to sell water and the like as often happens at large gatherings like this. That's what we were told. Instead, free enterprise found a way and the main, paved, cart path that I usually use to haul heavy toters full of waste to the dumpsters, was almost impassable because of all the commerce that lined and crowded the little path. People were selling water and other beverages, food, bottles of beer, weed, "edibles," and even the forbidden glass bongs. And they positioned themselves and their wares where the foot traffic was best, as this was where one of the main entrances emptied onto the meadow. 

I finally gave up on the path and hauled my toter over the gopher pocked lawn. 

There was one sad (for me) aspect of the day. One of my favorite crew members, who I rarely see as it is, has finished her nursing classes and is leaving Green Mary to start her new career as a psychiatric nurse. I joked that this event would be a good transition. She should be very good at her new job. I hope I run into her when I finally lose my mind.

 

When is it too long?

I'm talking about essays... what did you think I meant? You're disgusting.

I finally have something to say about Sallie Tisdale. Most of her essays are reasonably short, but the one on elephants went on and on. It was no surprise when I finally reached the end and discovered it was written for The New Yorker. I recall reading a series of New Yorker essays on rice, wheat, and corn (if memory serves) that were wonderful, and this one is also great. I don't know that I would want to cut anything out. Still, I had to read it in two sessions and I don't think that was the intention. It should have been divided into more manageable sections, except that an essay is supposed to be all of a piece.

Anyway, I know a lot more about Asian elephants than before I read this. She makes the point that we never really know what elephants are thinking. We tend to think they are like us when we have no real idea what is going on in their heads. But isn't this nearly as true when it comes to other people? I may think I know what life is like for women or people of color, but I'm just assuming that their reality is the same as mine with a few superficial differences. Which is nonsense. 

If subjectivity is the basis of modernity in a post-quantum world where complete objectivity is a discarded notion, then we have to give up the idea that we can know what is going on in anyone's head -- human as well as animal, Just as we can only talk about probabilities when it comes to fundamental particles.

Death

I'm thinking there are basically three kinds of deaths: A. Sudden/surprise -- where you die in your sleep or just keel over or get hit by a bus; 
B. Quick, but with notice -- where you probably suffer more but have time to sort your affairs and say your goodbyes; and 
C. Protracted -- where time and suffering are a major aspect of the event.

I would like to ask people frequently involved with the deaths of others (doctors, nurses, hospice workers, priests) if they think there are advantages to B. and especially to C. I haven't seen advantages (for the person dying) in these cases myself, but perhaps my sample size is just too small. And, of course, people are different so even if A. or B. are best for most people, C. might be better for some.

Next - 153. Violation

151. CBF and Sisters

Previous - 150. Original sin

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Vertigo

"Il ritorno in patria"

p193-194 The elaboration here of the furniture and necessary accouterments of the German petite bourgeois makes me wonder how these habits started. Why did the narrator's parents have a bone china tea service they never used? Why do I have my family's silver and silver plate and china that is very rarely used -- like the suburban living rooms that we all had and that I only recall my family using on the day after my father died. (And I imagine we sat there then because it lacked associations with my father.) 

I do know, or at least I have a working theory, why we have the silver spoons and cups given to bourgeois infants -- silver has natural antibacterial characteristics and should have been safer than other materials for children with developing immune systems. (I may even be right, see here.) What I don't know -- because I never thought to ask -- is if these items were actually used. Some of the little cups are pretty battered, which would argue for use, but perhaps they were only played with and not used for eating and drinking. Does anyone still do this? I can't imagine it. 

This is the part of the book where the narrator's -- Sebald's -- memory is most on display. His memory of his childhood in W., and of all the details of W., is quite wonderful, though I can't say it leaves Proust or even James Thurber behind. 

Here's an interesting passage where the narrator finally calls on someone, from his youth, still living in the village,

p210 ...He had seen me coming out of the Engelwirt [inn where he is staying] several times, he told me straight away, but although I had somehow seemed familiar, he had not quite been able to place me, perhaps because I reminded him not so much of the child I once was as of my grandfather who had the same gait and, whenever he stepped out of the house, would pause for a moment to peer up into the sky to see what the weather was doing, just as I always did. I felt my visit pleased Lukas, for after working as a tin-roofer until his fiftieth year he had been forced into retirement by the arthritis that was gradually crippling him... He would never have believed, he observed, how long the days, and time, and life itself could be when one had been shunted aside... He particularly agreed when I said that over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, [about his past in W.] but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.... [Reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist wouldn't have made Sebald feel any better.]

Cherry Blossom Festival

My weekend didn't turn out the way I had expected. I was supposed to work another day around the food court (a block of Webster Street) at CBF and then switch to Sisters in the Park (Golden Gate) on Sunday. I did start the day in Hellman Hollow, but it was raining -- not hard but steadily -- and almost no one showed up. Instead of 10,000 people we had a hundred or so and most of them seemed to be Sisters (of Perpetual Indulgence). 

I really hate just standing around, and standing around in the rain is even worse. One of my favorites was crew chiefing this event, so I suggested she check with the crew chief at CBF to see how they were doing. It seems two people didn't show up for their shifts so I was sent back to Japantown (by car service, more on this in a moment.)

So I got the mid-day shift I prefer and I still got to close out CBF, which I like to do every year. We were a little wet, it's true, but it wasn't that bad and there were no bags left to sort when I left. That's success in this business. But back to Golden Gate Park for a moment. 

I hadn't been to Hellman Hollow (formerly Speedway Meadow) since Hardly Strictly Bluegrass last October. The park is stunning at any time, but by the end of summer it looks like California -- brown except where people water. At least that's true at ground level, the trees stay green. Jump ahead almost half a year now near the end of a very wet rainy season and the park, like California in general, is lush. Green is the color of this season just as brown is the color of the dry season.

The last time I stood in that meadow (in the daylight) it was filled with a hundred thousand people and there was dust and dry undergrowth under the trees. And it was hot. On Sunday it was green and wet and cool and most of the crowd were Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in full drag. (Not real Sisters, I'm bound to say, since they, the originals in normal nun's habits, usually roller skates, mostly died in the AIDS epidemic.)

I hope we work another event here before October, but if not I tried to capture the place as it is in April so I can call that image up in October when it's in the 90sF and I'm ready to kill the vendors and concert goers. I'm almost a Buddha.

When I was reassigned to CBF, my first thought was to take the bus over, which is how I had come to Golden Gate Park, but the crew chief suggested the car service and, being aware of how what should take 30 minutes can turn into far longer with Muni, especially on a Sunday, I agreed. It was some ride sharing service that pools riders. I was the first pickup, but he picked up two more people and dropped off one before dropping me off. It wasn't a big time saver, (over 30 minutes) but then again I was sitting inside a nice car instead of waiting (in the rain) for buses and then riding in those buses. (And the 38 line is one of the most crowded in the system.) 

But what interested me was that, years ago, I had imagined a better taxi/shuttle service just like this. It was like seeing an idea realized without having to do any of the work.

The funny thing was that the third person to be picked up was in the other side of the park where my company was working a third event -- Eggstravaganza. This is an Easter event for kids I worked several years ago. It's charming but slow. I prefer the busyness of CBF.

Finally, I kept thinking on Sunday about how I now have an event overlay for so many parts of the City. This is similar to, but not quite the same as, my City-that-was overlay. The latter comes into play when you walk out of a restaurant wondering where the car is parked and someone recalls that we parked in front of Winterland -- a famous music venue that was redeveloped decades ago. What I'm talking about is when we are in the park not for HSB yet refer to locations by what stage is there for HSB. Or when I walk through Japantown on the way to a film and see the eco stations I maintained or the mountain of bags I collected for the last, totally insane, J-Pop Festival held there. Even at Union Square in my neighborhood, every time I walk past I think of all the trash toters I've wheeled around these sidewalks and I can see, as though I had X-ray vision, where the dumpsters are down in the garage and where the restroom is that the public doesn't have access to.

QCD

I've been struggling with gluons this afternoon... I know, who isn't these days? A massless "particle" (what does that even mean) that is confined to a hadron but supposedly travels at c. Previously I had ignored this abomination when puzzling over hadrons thinking it was just a way of talking about the strong force that holds quarks together, but it seems these little nasties participate in the chromatic craziness. 

I wasn't surprised when I jumped to Wiki and noticed that Murray Gell-Mann is the man responsible for gluons. (I can't help smiling every time I run into another Feynman diagram used to illustrate QCD.) 

I so wish Feynman had tackled QCD. I'm sure he could have come up with something better than this chroma metaphor. 

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150. Original sin

Previous - 149. Candide, God, and evil

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Vertigo - the last of Dr. K

As much as I'm enjoying the commentary on Candide, I feel myself more in need of commentary for Vertigo. At the end of a passage about Kafka spending some time at a sanatorium in Riva, we get this tale of "Gracchus the huntsman" arriving in a "barque with masts of an inconceivable height and sails dark and hanging in folds" after an endless voyage. While this -- whatever it is -- is associated with Kafka, the reader who knows the next part of the book will recognize in this passage another huntsman, here we have, "...in the Black Forest, where he was on guard against the wolves which still prowled the hills at that time, he went in pursuit of a chamois -- and is this not one of the strangest items of misinformation in all the tales that have ever been told? -- he went in pursuit of a chamois and fell to his death from the face of a mountain..."

And in the next section is the other story about,

...Hans Schlag the huntsman of whom it was said that he hailed from other parts... that he had managed extensive hunting grounds in the Black Forest... 
...

...Schlag the hunter had been found dead a good hour's walk beyond his hunting ground, on the Tyrolean side of the border, at the bottom of a ravine...

And the narrator, as a child, has the body of this huntsman delivered to him on a sledge instead of a barque. And since we had just had our only sex scene in this book, between Schlag and a blonde barmaid, I suppose that makes her the "chamois."

What this means, I have no idea.
 

Candide 

"Voltaire's Escape from Pascal" by Ernst Cassirer

p167 {"Pascal tormented Voltaire, as Montaigne had tormented Pascal." The epigram is by Raymond Naves (Voltaire l'homme et l'oevre: Paris, 1942...)...

To a remarkable degree... [Montaigne, Pascal, and Voltaire] were preoccupied with a single problem, that is the relation between faith and reason, which is in effect the question of original sin. This had been the crucial controversy between Erasmus and Luther; it would be the theme of conflicts between Calvinists and Arminians on the Protestant side, between Jansenists and Jesuits within the Catholic party. Its importance is obvious. For if man's reason, no less than his will, is fatally corrupted from birth, his only hope of understanding himself or the world lies in supernatural faith. In opposition to this crucial point, all the Enlightenment philosophers united; and Voltaire, perhaps in part because the brother whom he hated was a Jansenist, powerfully impregnated with the doctrine of original sin, focused his criticism of the doctrine on its foremost Jansenist exponent, Blaise Pascal...}

The section that follows, written by Cassirer, is interesting enough, but I don't have the patience to work through the minutia of Christian theology. It's all interpretation of the shadows on cave walls to me. But Dostoevsky would be all over this.

I'm thinking the reason I ignored Dostoevsky for so long is that, while The Brothers Karamazov does a wonderful job of expressing the reality of existentialism, he himself stands outside existentialism in the philosophical tradition delineated above. I don't know (or care) what he thought of the Jansenists, but he would have opted for any of these traditions over Nietzsche. 

That said, "original sin" can be restated as our separation from nature (see also Prometheus) and this is a subject I am interested in. The problem is that it is very hard to tackle this topic from within the web of Christianity. There is always too much of the a priori (as was mentioned in the previous post, I think) which stands in the way. It's like trying to come up with a Christmas season budget with someone who still believes in Santa Claus.

My day 

I'm having a good day. An old friend's son is answering some arcane (inane?) questions about Quantum mechanics (spin, for example) and I'm dodging phone calls from Realtors about the unit for sale in our building. It seems that the Venn diagram for Realtors and People Who Prefer to Chat on the Phone Instead of Writing Emails would be a simple circle. But thanks to call screening, I can bend them to my will.

Here are the advantages of communicating by email (texting is similar):

Because it's asynchronous, both parties do not have to be free at the same time.

There is a paper trail you can refer back to when anyone gets confused about what was said.

You can easily dispatch the same information (answers to questions) to other interested parties.

It takes less time, as you don't get bogged down in pleasantries.


On the other hand, (Re: My Day) I discovered the doctor I'd been seeing before I was covered by San Francisco's single-payer health plan, doesn't accept Medicare insurance. But this is mitigated by the fact that he is also retiring this summer. This wasn't a complete surprise -- I'm also worried about losing our electrician and even the painter we liked so much, before we need them again. I suppose it would be considered discrimination if you specified you wanted to be seen by younger health care professionals so you don't outlive their careers.

Next - 151. CBF and Sisters

149. Candide, God, and Evil

Previous - 148. Kafka and memory

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A new year

I survived the first weekend of Cherry Blossom Festival. Aside from my allergies, it was no problem. And everyone on our crew had experience from last year, so things went smoother than normal. And we didn't get rained on this year -- like last year -- so that was a plus. 

The good thing about double dosing myself with antihistamines was that I felt less homicidal when it came to attendees and vendors not following the sorting rules. Perhaps I'm also growing as a person. Ha. 

It was my intention starting out to be as mellow as possible, but at the end of the day when the "fuck you" bags start coming in from the vendor -- the ones where they don't even pretend to follow any of the rules, throw everything into one black bag and then bury it in a random bin -- the antihistamines might have helped. The vendors even wait until the last minute, right before their trucks pull away to play this, their final card of the day.

Next week I'm only working CBF Saturday and I picked up an event in Golden Gate Park for Sunday. That was a ploy to get my usual middle of the day shift for CBF, but it hasn't worked as yet. I don't have any objection to spending Sunday in lovely Hellman Hollow. 

Your tax dollars at play

I believe I've mentioned the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit scheme now under construction here. This was years in the planning (I stopped attending meetings years ago because I thought it was stupid) and now it seems that they failed to anticipate birds nesting in the spring. So now they are having to work around trees with nests. 

This means that the same crews, that have now cleared most of the median, will have to return in the future to clear the little islands of green they had to leave behind. 

Looking north from Sutter where the median has been excised.

Looking south from Sutter, island of green mid-block.

And while I'm showing the ever changing face of SF, here's Salesforce Tower, now topped out and just waiting to be fully enveloped in steel and glass.

Salesforce Tower topped out from the street above mine.

And, just because it was in my camera, here's a shot up the street showing that I have a thing for old lighting fixtures,

Powell @ Washington.

Candide

"The Quality of Candide" by J. G. Weightman
...

p156 ...Voltaire was never at any time fair-minded, and there seems every reason to believe that he did not bother to reread, or even read, Leibniz's Theodice before writing his satire. As both [Andre] Morize and [W.H.] Barber point out, he mixes up the two main forms of the theory of optimism: the belief that evil is an effect of the human angle of vision, and the belief that evil is a necessary part of creation... Leibniz neither denied the existence of evil nor held the simple finalistic views which Voltaire attributes to Pangloss. Also, as Barber shows, Leibniz was an activist whose purpose was to encourage men to virtuous initiative withing the all-embracing framework of God's will, and as such he was, in a sense, on Voltaire's side...
...

The Angel Jesrad in Zadig, which comes before Candide, is on the whole Leibnizian in his statement that a world without evil would be another kind of world... In other works of his later years... Voltaire contradicts himself, saying in one place that God is obviously limited and repeating in another that evil exists only from the human point of view and must be unknown to God in His perfection. 

...Here was a man who... gradually came to be obsessed with the scandal of the presence of evil in the universe. At the same time, with his clear and vigorous brain he could only suppose that God was an immeasurably greater Voltaire who had organized the universe on rational lines and was not, ultimately, responsible for evil. How could God have willed evil since Voltaire, like any decent person, found it intolerable? Yet evil existed, and God must be good. But how could a good God . . . etc... The lesson of Candide is the permanent one that there is no... intellectual solution to the problem of evil, but that we go on living even so, and even when we think we have no faith.

p157 ...He himself [Voltaire] is Pangloss, just as he is Candide, Martin, and Pococurante. The book is a transposition of his inner debate... To the question: 'Why, if God is good (and we must suppose that He is), does evil exist?' there is no articulate answer which is not a juggling with words. Book VII of St Augustine's Confessions is quite elaborate, but are its logical fallacies not obvious? Chapter VII of Book III of St Thomas's Summa Contra Gentiles seems no less purely verbal. And when we open Leibniz to see how Voltaire misunderstood him, we find this sort of argument:

For God sees from the beginning of time that there will be a certain Judas... in general one can say that since God found it proper that he should exist in spite of the sin He foresaw, it must be that this evil will be repaid with interest somewhere else in the universe, that God will derive a greater good from it, and in short it will be found that the sequence of events which includes the existence of this sinner is the most perfect of all those which is possible. But to explain... the admirable economy of a particular choice, that cannot be done while we inhabit this transitory sphere; it suffices to know it without understanding it. 

Sounds like Pangloss to me.
...

p158 ...As Barber says:

Leibniz . . . never really abandons a priori argument. He bases his knowledge of God's nature on a priori rational considerations . . . and once God's infinite goodness and wisdom have thus been established, all else follows deductively... To all [Pierre] Bayle's paradoxes he [Leibniz] has... only one reply... the world as it is is God's creation, therefore no better would is possible.

Why am I going on and on about this? Mostly because it's fun to see other people supporting positions I've held since my undergraduate days. I always found this a priori reasoning about God infuriating. 

On the other hand, reading about 18th century philosophy is similar to reading about 18th century chemistry, in that there are still other shoes left to drop. I have the feeling Voltaire, while rejecting so much, still clings to some remnant of a belief in moral phlogiston.

...Candide is not... a message of hope, or at least not exactly in the way suggested by some critics who take a favorable view of it. Morize, Barber and René Pomeau, the author of La Religion de Voltaire, all seem to me to underestimate the virulence of the work. Morize writes:

The world is in shambles, blood flows, Jesuits and Molinists rage, innocents are slaughtered and dupes exploited; but there are in the world delicious asylums, where life remains possible, joyous, and sweet: let us cultivate our garden.

This suggests an ability to shut out the spectacle of the world which Voltaire never possessed... According to Barber:

p159 The practical philosophy to which Candide finally attains is the application to the limited field of personal activity of that esperance {hope} which Voltaire had offered to humanity on a transcendental level in the conclusion of the Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne.

In rejecting the doctrines of Pangloss and his like . . . he is seeking . . . a safe foundation in an insecure world for that profound belief in the value of activity which is characteristic of European man and was particularly strong in him. 

Am I mistaken in reading a bit of Faust into that?

... There is no evidence in Candide, and very little in his biography, that he [Voltaire] had a profound belief in the value of activity. He believed in man's need for activity and he himself had a tremendous urge to be active... Would it not be more plausible to suppose that his feverish busyness was the only relief he could find for his acute awareness of evil? Pomeau speaks of the "epicurean motive for action which is the last word of the tale" and says that Voltaire "will make a philosophy of activity . . . A lesson revolutionary in its banality." No doubt, Voltaire borrowed the image of the garden from Epicurus, [Footnote: "Epicurus, the classical philosopher who made pleasure the supreme goal of life, had a famous garden where he lived an impressively moderate and contemplative existence {Editor}. Well put.] but he has no trace of Epicurean serenity or moderation. 

I have to pause here... Faust and Goethe and Epicurus are shouting in my ear. Epicurus's garden was an alternative to the life of action, of seeking wealth and power and status. It was also a statement about the times in which he lived and reminds me of a quote from Confucius, "...When the Way does not prevail in your land, then count it a disgrace to be rich and honored." And this was exactly what Lucullus was doing when he returned from Asia -- though he dropped the moderation. Voltaire, at his estates around Geneva, does seem to have been living in this tradition, though more like Lucullus, with his theater and large dinner parties, and with a striving to transform the world through his writing that almost suggests Faust.
...

Only one critic appears to have stressed unequivocally the strength of the dark side of Voltaire's temperament, which is so obvious in Candide and in the correspondence. This is Andre Delattre, in his stimulating little book, Voltaire l'impetueux, where we read:

p160 It is only when, in Candide, he accepts certain perspectives of Pascal's, it is only when he ceases to strain against a dark and healthy pessimism, and ceases to hold open the empty sack of his optimism, that he finally creates, after his sixtieth year, his real masterpiece.

...Candide is not just a clever, unfair satire on optimism which concludes with the bracing recommendation that we should do what we can to improve matters in our immediate vicinity. It is a work in which an unappeasable sense of the mystery and horror of life is accompanied, at every step, by an instinctive animal resilience... [This sounds like The Brothers K] Voltaire has a faith, but it is not a political faith nor an easily defined religious one. It is the sort of faith that keeps the severed fractions of a worm still wriggling...
...

p162 ...Candide has, of course, a clear literary ancestry; he is adapted from the hero of the picaresque novel of adventurer... More immediately, he is Voltaire himself, who was declasse {a social outcast} like the picaresque hero, had been beaten and snubbed... {"trembled like a philosopher"} and had been frequently on the move. But he is also a symbol of the central part of the human soul which never loses its original innocence and, as Simone Weil says, always goes on expecting that good will be done to it rather than evil... he is {the outsider}, a fatherless bastard whose cozy sense of belonging to a coherent society and a comprehensible universe is a childhood illusion, soon to be shattered at the onset of puberty. Cunegonde is at first Eve who tempts him, with the result that he is driven out of the early paradise by the irate master of his little world. Then Conegonde becomes the symbol of a lost happiness which will be recoverable in the future, when the world falls again into some pattern reminiscent of the patriarchal social cell which preceded adulthood. But gradually it becomes clear that the world has no pattern... and the best Candide can do is to reconstitute the battered Westphalian society of his childhood as a refugee colony on the borders of barbarism, with himself as its disillusioned head... The second half [following the stay in El Dorado] is... different from the first in two important respects. Candide is no longer an underdog; he has acquired money and he sees the world from a new angle... The hero has mastered life to some small extent... but this... leaves him freer to contemplate the sufferings of others. ...Candide has become a spectator, but it is psychologically true... that adulthood involves awareness of general evil.

p163 ...Each [character] is killed once or more but bobs up again with heartening inconsequentiality. Voltaire expresses the strength of man's unconquerable soul by making Pangloss and the Baron... step out of the galley and begin at once behaving with characteristic  foolishness... A minority of human beings are, like... [Candide], decent and well-meaning, the majority are selfish and stupid, but the implication is that all are involved in evil in more or less the same way. In this respect, Candide is both fiercely critical of human nature and curiously tolerant.
... 

p166 ...it is remarkable that, in Candide, the distinction between evil which is an act of God (and therefore from the human point of view gratuitous) and evil which is an effect of human wickedness or stupidity, is not clearly maintained... [I have a problem with this distinction since I don't recognize the "evil" that derives from "acts" of God. For me, the significant thing here is that Voltaire is opposed to "the Church" and not a true atheist. Which point is made even more clearly if Pennsylvania is substituted for El Dorado.] It seems almost as if Voltaire were unwilling to come out into the open and accuse God... That happy country [El Dorado], where the inhabitants never quarrel and worship God without a church, does not provide a fair contrast with the ordinary world; how would the people of El Dorado retain their serenity if their capital were shattered by an earthquake? [There are any number of religions and philosophies that handle disasters of this sort well by subtracting the element of "evil" from them by denying God or through the fiction of a wrathful God.] The only way to justify the El Dorado chapters is to suppose that they are really a conscious or unconscious criticism of God. They occur as a sunny interlude... to show how happy and pious we might have been, had God not given us our ungovernable natures and put us into a world containing inexplicable evil... Voltaire, like Diderot, had not made up his mind about free-will, because the determinism/free-will dilemma is just another formulation of the God/no-God issue... 

I don't see that at all -- though it might well have been true for them. What I do see is that no-God implies no-Evil, just as Dostoevsky feared.
...

p167 ...in this short tale... [Voltaire] managed to hold fundamental opposites in suspense and so produced, from the heart of a century that wished to deny evil, an allegorical prose poem about evil which is still perfectly apt... two hundred years later. 

But only if you believe in God.

Next - 150. Original sin

148. Kafka and memory

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Link to Table of Contents

Candide

"Voltaire and Candide" by I.O. Wade 1959
...

p151 Candide is thus in its substance not wholly optimistic, or pessimistic, or skeptical, or cynical: it is all of these things at the same time. Since every created thing resembles its creator and the moment of its creation, it is precisely what Voltaire and his time were: optimistic, pessimistic, skeptical, and cynical, a veritable "moment de la crise" {moment of crisis}. Facts had produced ideas, it is true, but ideas had not yet produced ideals, and no one knew what to do.
...

...The world had become a paradox and Voltaire responded with a revolt.

p152 It is imperative to understand the nature of this revolt, since the whole eighteenth century and subsequent centuries have derived from it. Voltaire's response was born of both anger and despair. He was "fâché" {angry with kings}... with earthquakes... with God...

Voltaire's attitude toward Providence must be considered very carefully if we are to grasp the meaning of Candide...

If to be specific, Voltaire felt that Pope's arguments no longer "justified the ways of God to man," and Leibniz's were equally deficient, did he thing that he had better ones, or that he could find better ones elsewhere? In other words, was his quarrel with the optimists whose arguments could not justify Gods ways or with God whose way could not be rationally justified? ... It is undoubtedly true that his act was not a critique but a revolt, a titanic revolt [that's nice as it is a revolt against the Gods] brought about by a breakdown in the power of critique... he could only attack the irrationality, the ambiguity of the universe by annihilating rationally all rationality. In that respect his wit is a spiritual, not a rational, instrument for assailing the ambiguity, the clandestinity of a universe which refuses to make itself known. 

This would make him de Sade's precursor.

p153 This state of things explains why one never knows in reading Candide whether to laugh with Voltaire or at him, whether to laugh with the philosophers or at them, whether indeed to laugh with or at Providence... 

Vertigo

Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva

I assumed this was Kafka, but it's hard to find anything about him being in Italy through an online search. I did find this interesting (to anyone obsessed with The Magic Mountain) quote in Wiki,

Around 1915 Kafka received his draft notice for military service in World War I, but his employers at the insurance institute arranged for a deferment because his work was considered essential government service. Later he attempted to join the military but was prevented from doing so by medical problems associated with tuberculosis,^[54] with which he was diagnosed in 1917.^[55] In 1918 the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute put Kafka on a pension due to his illness, for which there was no cure at the time, and he spent most of the rest of his life in sanatoriums.^[5]

One can almost imagine a novel in which Hans Castorp's place at the Berghof is taken by Kafka when Hans rushes off to the war.

On the cover of my copy of this book is the following quote, "Think of W.G. Sebald as memory's Einstein." -Richard Eder, The New York Times". Yes, I'm procrastinating getting back into this book, but what can he mean by that. What would a General Theory of the Relativity of Memory be? What is "space" to "time" here? 

The Proust chapter in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, did establish the relativity of memory in that what we recall is not absolute or unchanging. Perhaps it's "time" and "memory" that combine, at least in Lehrer's view. But Sebald -- at least some of the time -- is imagining the memories of other people. 

And, to reference the chapters in that book on music and painting, what engages me about this book is that, as with Stravinsky's music or a canvas by Cezanne, I struggle to make sense of what the author is doing and it's that struggle that attracts me.


Perhaps I should have my head looked at, I now see that Part II, All'estero is the account of the author gathering the material for Part III, Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva. This is amusing as Part III is so much shorter than either Part II or Part IV. The author travels (twice) through central Europe and northern Italy to research an extremely un-dramatic episode in the life of Kafka, and then pads his tale with a much longer account of his own un-dramatic travels, and only slightly more dramatic childhood.  
 

Almost Easter so time for a resurrection of my blog

I'm going to keep this one short as the next will be quite long.

Next - 149. Candide, God, and evil

147. Certifiably a geezer

Previous - 146. Virginia Woolf

Birthday

It has occurred to me that I should be celebrating today -- the last day I'm 64 -- rather than tomorrow, when I'm definitively a senior citizen. 

TV

Growing up, my mother (the mystery reader) could always figure the killer early in the show, and I almost never could. Partly this is because I like to be told a story -- taken along for the ride. (The same reason I don't like to see "making of" and "behind the scenes of" features.) But now I could probably beat her in guessing the killer, though not because I'm better at solving mysteries. I just look for the most recognizable face around the murder. They usually give the juiciest part to the most experienced or talented actor, and that person has usually been around. 

I think I've even written about this before, but I'm finishing the 7th season of Castle and it keeps happening. The good thing about this is that I can pay attention to the murderer throughout the show and don't have to re-watch to see how she played the earlier scenes. It does feel like cheating though.
 

Birthday

You can't say I don't know how to celebrate a birthday, for lunch I had my favorite Vietnamese tofu sandwich, then I walked up Market to my usual Peet's were I ordered both my usual iced tea and a cookie. And now I'm reviewing an Advanced Health Care Directive a friend gave me. (No coupons for adult diapers, I checked.)

I hate these things. They are like a test with no right answers. Plus, selecting an "agent" to represent you is a nightmare. Who would you trust to do this? Who is likely to be around (or still be alive) when you need to surrender your agency? I have the same problem picking an executor for a will.

3. Life would no longer be worth living if I were not able to: Well, I can't really know that in advance, can I? I would like to say, "Survive a migration across the Serengeti with basic survival supplies." But I have reason to believe I could adapt to living in a less robust state. I even have reason to believe that I could learn something by living in that state.

I could drop down a gear to, "Use the bathroom without assistance." But, again, who can know for sure what I would be willing to put up with if I were in a blissed-out, semi-mystical, near-death state? 

How about, "Put me down if I need a bone-marrow transplant or the services of a Burn Treatment Center." But then, they can't do that.

Even the CPR question is a stumper. I still have problems with a minor rib injury from the early '80s, so CPR sounds like it would almost certainly be a bad idea, but I can imagine strange situations where -- nothing else major being wrong with me -- it might be worth the risk. This would be easier to answer in another 20 years. By that time I expect my answer to all these questions will be, "Just run me over with the ambulance."

My thoughts and feelings about where I would prefer to die: I put, "In my sleep... Probably." Again, who knows? This is contingent on what death is like. Would I rather die in the middle of a particularly irritating dream or while normally conscious? Don't know? Can't know. 

One answer to this is, "At home." But even that is not necessarily true. "At hospice or a good hotel," could be a better option for me.

I want my loved ones to know that if I am nearing my death, I would appreciate the following for comfort and support (prayers, rituals, music, etc.) "Strippers!" was the first thought that came to me, so maybe I should go with that. Would "rituals" include human sacrifice? Asking for a friend.

Religious or spiritual affiliation: "It's complicated." Chanting Tibetan monks might be a delight to have around while you're dying... or not. 

There is no conclusion here, at least not now. I don't even know if I would choose death by complete surprise (like being blind-sided by a bus) to a contemplative death in my own bed -- or a bed in a nice hotel. If given a choice, I would have to go with "surprise me," though quick bus death sounds like a lot less work.  


And now I've cleaned out my webmail folders for March. All ready for my next year of life.

Day after

Wrapped up my birthday last night at my favorite Burmese restaurant. We had all our favorite dishes. There are even a few left-overs for tonight. 

Today I went to the SFMTA office to get my Senior Clipper card so I get the senior discount when riding public transit... this is my big payoff for being a geezer. Turned into the ultimate MUNI experience. It was like taking the worst aspects of riding their buses and putting them indoors. 

I walked in and was assigned a number. As I was sitting down the number before mine was called so I figured this would go quickly. A half hour later I was still waiting. Here's what I think happened: I was not waiting for any window, but for window 10 which apparently was the only one dealing with my issue. The person before me took quite a long time to resolve their business. When they finally left I was poised to jump up and respond to my number being called... but it never was. Either the woman at 10 took a break, or she simply forgot to inform the system that she was free. After a half hour I went back to the guy who assigned me the number, who said my number was still in the cue and he didn't know why it hadn't been called. I finally just walked over to window 10 to see what was happening and the woman was doing something on her phone. When I said I'd been waiting 30 minutes she said my number had been called (no). We completed our business in a minute or two. So MUNI.

Next - 148. Kafka and memory