136. The wine-in-itself

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Salesforce Tower...

 ...is rising ever closer to its final height.

View from below my apartment.

View from above my apartment a few weeks later.

The location of the tower was determined by the placement of the Transbay Terminal from the 1930s -- the cost of replacing which, Salesforce is helping to cover. So I'm certain no one "planned" on how wonderfully the new tower is working as a downtown orientation marker. It seems to appear prominently from any number of major streets because of how the various street grids mesh. The view down Columbus from North Beach would have been significantly better if the tower were a block further east, but it still works from one sidewalk at least. I was at Land's End the other day and it now dominates the skyline from that perspective as well -- with hawks soaring about for decoration.

Here's what puzzles me about this: My architecture education is very limited, I only took a few survey classes, yet I clearly recall the lessons on how focal points like this were crucial to urban design in Rome and London and Paris in the 19th century. I can still see the slides... though now, I suppose, I'm only seeing some re-imagining of those slides (sorry, that's coming up in the next chapter when we get to Proust.)

So if I remember this from school, why does it seem that actual city planners don't? Here I'm thinking about what should be a similar focal point in Mission Bay at the end of 4th street -- a wasted opportunity. They get it right by accident and where they could have done it on purpose there's nothing.

Anniversaries gone wild

A while back I wrote about all the 30 year anniversaries coming up having to do with my transition from bookstore clerk to computer coder. And recently I wrote about my 20 year illness cycle. This morning it occurred to me that 40 years ago was both another of those colds but also when I moved here to SF. And 50 years ago was when my family moved from the San Fernando Valley to Central Arizona. Now I'm wondering if anything happened in 2007, and if not, why not? (My move to SF was actually in 1976, but rather than a break in the pattern, I see this as extra credit for getting out of Arizona a year early.) Now I think of it, 2007 should have been about when I started my greening work.

And 1957 was peak (or near enough) of American car design, to my eyes,

Auguste Escoffier cont.

A Sense of Subjectivity
p67 ... When we bind or parse our sensations, what we are really doing is making judgments about what we think we are sensing. This unconscious act of interpretation is largely driven by contextual cues. If you encounter... the smell of demi-glace in a McDonald's -- your brain secretly begins altering its sensory verdict... The fancy scent of veal stock becomes a Quarter Pounder.

p68 Our sense of smell is particularly vulnerable to this sort of outside influence. Since many odors differ only in their molecular details -- and we long ago traded away nasal acuity for better color vision -- the brain is often forced to decipher smells based upon non-olfactory information. Parmesan cheese and vomit, for example, are both full of butyric acid, which has a pungent top note and a sweetish linger. As a result, blindfolded subjects in experiments will often confuse the two stimuli. In real life, however, such sensory mistakes are extremely rare. Common sense overrules our actual senses.

...Although Escoffier spent eighteen hours a day behind a hot stove, crafting his collection of sauces, he realized that what we taste is ultimately an idea, and that our sensations are strongly influenced by their context...
...
This is where we come to the clever wine tests that the "experts" all failed.

p70 What these wine experiments illuminate is the omnipresence of subjectivity. When we take a sip of wine, we don't taste the wine first and the cheapness or redness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of this-wine-is-red, or this-wine-is-expensive... 

...what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when sensations are interpreted by the subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires. [Footnote: ...Escoffier always believed that a steak seared at high temperature is juicier, for the seared crust "seals in the meat's natural juices." This is completely false... a steak cooked at high temperature contains less of its own juices, as that alluring sizzling noise is actually the sound of the meat's own liquid evaporating... Nevertheless... even if a well-seared steak is literally drier, it still tastes juicier... it makes us drool in anticipation... what we are actually sensing is our own saliva, which the brain induced the salivary glands to release. Our personal decision to drool warps the sensory experience of the steak.] As the philosopher Donald Davidson argued, it is ultimately impossible to distinguish between a subjective contribution to knowledge that comes from our selves (what he calls our "scheme") and an objective contribution that comes from the outside world ("the content"). [Now I see why Lehrer brought up solipsism in a passage I haven't quoted.] In Davidson's influential epistemology, the "organizing system and something waiting to be organized" are hopelessly interdependent. Without our subjectivity we could never decipher our sensations, and without our sensations we would have nothing about which to be subjective. Before you can taste the wine you have to judge it. 

And we're back to phenomenology and the thing-in-itself again. Here we are crushing Descartes's assertion, that we can trust our God given senses to reveal the world as it truly is, under yet another level of stones. Our reality is never objective.

p71 But even if we could -- by some miracle of Robert Parkeresque objectivity -- taste the wine as it is (without the distortions of scheming subjectivity), we would still all experience a different wine. Science has long known that our sensitivity to certain smells and tastes varies by as much as 1,000 percent between individuals. On a cellular level, this is because the human olfactory cortex, the part of the brain that interprets information from the tongue and nose, is extremely plastic, free to arrange itself around the content of our individual experiences. Long after our other senses have settled down, our sense of taste and smell remain in total neural flux. Nature designed us this way: the olfactory bulb is full of new neurons. Fresh cells are constantly being born, and the survival of these cells depends upon their activity. Only cells that respond to the smells and tastes we are actually exposed to survive. Everything else withers away. The end result is that our brains begin to reflect what we eat.
...

p72 ... every time a customer devoured one of Escoffier's dishes, choosing the fillet over the rouget, the sensations of that person's tongue were altered. When Escoffier was working at the Savoy in London... he had faith that he could educate even the palates of the British. At first, Escoffier was horrified by how his new patrons defied his carefully arranged menu. (He refused to learn English out of fear, he later said, that he would come to cook like the English.)... He invented the chef's tasting menu as an educational tool, for he was confident that people could learn how to eat. Over time, the English could become more French. He was right: because the sense of taste is extremely plastic, it can be remodeled by new experiences. It's never too late to become a gourmet.

Interesting to note that he was also a contemporary of George Gissing and published his cookbook only a few years after Gissing published The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft with those curious passages about English cuisine.

p73 ...Escoffier's culinary inventions have gone on to modify untold numbers of olfactory cortices, noses, and tongues... This is the power of good cooking: it invents a new kind of desire... He led us to expect food to taste like its essence...

How many times have we been here? Starting with Proust talking about how artists have to create -- through education and exposure -- the audience for their work. He was talking about painting but we've extended this to music (and in particular Jazz dissonance). It should be no surprise that it also extends to food.

...[Escoffier] knew that deliciousness was deeply personal, and that any analysis of taste must begin with the first-person perspective. Like Ikeda, he listened not to the science of his time, which treated the tongue like a stranger, but to the diversity of our cravings and the whims of our wants... 

Of course, the individuality of our experiences is what science will never be able to solve. The fact is, each of us literally inhabits a different brain, tuned to the tenor of our private desires. These desires have been molded -- at the level of our neurons -- by a lifetime of eating... The individuality of taste, which is, in a way, the only aspect of taste that really matters, cannot be explained by science. The subjective experience is irreducible. Cooking is a science and an art....


The next chapter is the one about Proust, but I can't imagine it can be better than this one. Who would have guessed?

Next - 137. Proust!

135. August Escoffier

Previous - 134. Neural plasticity

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August Escoffier - From Proust Was...

I'm going to take this from the top later, but I have to record this first impression,

p70 ...Our human brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that prejudices feel like facts, opinions are indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think a wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a Grand Cru, then we will taste a Grand Cru... our expectations of what the wine will taste like "can be much more powerful in determining how you taste a wine than the actual physical qualities of the wine itself."

I had to note this passage because of its obvious political and sociological implications, but the wine aspect is also interesting. What I left out is the experiment in which wine experts were unable to notice that what was served as a red wine was actually a white with food coloring, or that what was served to them as a Grand Cru and a vin du table, was in fact the same wine. 

Because I know I don't have any taste when it comes to wine, I tend to order either the house wine or the cheapest wine on the list, just to see if it's drinkable. Often I find the cheapest wine is the one I like best (not always). So, is that because I'm determined to find it a hidden gem, or simply because I have no taste when it comes to wine? 

When I realized this chapter was about the origin of "modern" French cooking (and isn't it interesting that Escoffier was publishing his works at the same time Einstein was publishing his works on Relativity? I would have thought this kind of cooking went back much further than Special and General Relativity) I thought this was something I could probably skim since I can't even eat any of this food. Instead, it was amazingly interesting and the neurological aspects of smell are a great extension of other things about the brain I've learned in the past year. Now to resume at the beginning,

p53 At the heart of Escoffier's insight... was his use of stock. He put in it everything. He reduced it to gelatinous jelly, made it the base of pureed soups, and enriched it with butter and booze for sauces... "Indeed, stock is everything in cooking. Without it, nothing can be done. If one's stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory meal." What every other chef was throwing away -- the scraps of tendon and oxtail,the tops of celery, the ends of onion, and the irregular corners of carrot -- Escoffier was simmering into sublimity.
...

p54 Escoffier's emphasis on the tongue was the source of his culinary revolution. In his kitchen, a proper cook was a man of exquisite sensitivity, "carefully studying the trifling details of each separate flavor before he sends his masterpiece of culinary art before his patrons." Escoffier's cookbook warns again and again that the experience of the dish -- what it actually tastes like -- is the only thing that matters...

p55 Deglazing was the secret of Escoffier's success. The process itself is extremely simple: a piece of meat is cooked at a very high temperature -- to produce a nice seared Maillard crust, a cross-linking and caramelizing of amino acids -- and then a liquid, such as a rich veal stock, is added. As the liquid evaporates, it loosens the fronde, the burned bits of protein stuck to the bottom of the pan... The dissolved fronde is what gives Escoffier's sauces their divine depth...

The Secret of Deliciousness
This is the story of Kikunae Ikeda and the discovery of "umami" and MSG. In short, despite the prevailing wisdom that the human tongue can only taste sweet, salty, bitter, and sour, Ikeda was convinced there must be something else, which turns out to be umami -- Japanese for delicious. 

p56 ... To be precise, umami is actually the taste of L-glutamate (C5H9NO4), the dominant amino acid in the composition of life. L-glutamate is released from life-forms by proteolysis (a shy scientific word for death, rot, and the cooking process)... [Escoffier's] genius was getting as much L-glutamate on the plate as possible. The emulsified butter didn't hurt either.
...

p57 Glutamic acid is itself tasteless. Only when the protein is broken down by cooking, fermentation, or a little ripening in the sun does the molecule degenerate into L-glutamate, an amino acid that the tongue can taste....
...

p59 Everything from aged cheese to ketchup was rich in this magic little amino acid... (Salted, slightly rotting anchovies are like glutamate speedballs. They are pure umami.)... Umami even explains... Marmite... (Marmite has... a higher concentration of glutamate than any other manufactured product.)
...

p60 And of course, umami also explains Escoffier's genius. The burned bits of meat in the bottom of a pan are unraveled protein, rich in L-glutamate. Dissolved in the stock, which is little more than umami water, these browned scraps fill your mouth with a deep sense of deliciousness, the profound taste of life in a state of decay.
...

p62 ...We love the flavor of denatured protein because, being protein and water ourselves, we need it. Our human body produces more than forty grams of glutamate a day, so we constantly crave an amino acid refill...

The Smell of an Idea
Now we get into how important smell is to the enjoyment of food. And he starts with Marie-Antoine Carême who didn't care what his fancy meals tasted like if they looked spectacular.

p62 ...Before Escoffier began cooking in the new restaurants of the bourgeoisie (unlike his predecessors, he was never a private chef for an aristocrat), fancy cooking was synonymous with ostentation. As long as a dinner looked decadent, its actual taste was pretty irrelevant...

p63 ...While Carême feared heat (his lard sculptures tended to melt), Escoffier conditioned his diners to expect a steaming bowl of soup... "The Customer," Escoffier warned in his cookbook, "finds that the dish is flat and insipid unless it is served absolutely boiling hot."

What Escoffier inadvertently discovered when he started serving food fresh off the stovetop was the importance of our sense of smell. When food is hot, its molecules are volatile and evaporate in the air. A slowly simmering stock or a clove of garlic sauteed in olive oil can fill an entire kitchen with its alluring odor...

p64 ...Escoffier aspired to a level of artistry that the tongue couldn't comprehend. As a result, Escoffier's capacious recipes depend entirely upon the flourishes of flavor that we inhale. In fact... the hint of tarragon in a lobster veloute, the whisper of vanilla in a creme anglaise, the leaf of chervil floating in a carrot soup -- are precisely what the unsubtle tongue can't detect. The taste of most flavors is smell.

Here there is a lengthy description of smell from the neurological perspective, most of which I'm skipping.

p66 ...the demi-glace our nose knows is actually composed of many different aromas. Neurons all over the brain light up, reflecting the hodgepodge of smells simultaneously activating our odor receptors... Within a few milliseconds of being served the demi-glace, the mind must bind together the activity of hundreds of distinct smell receptors into a coherent sensation. This is known as the binding problem.

But wait: it gets worse. The binding problem occurs when we experience a sensation that is actually represented as a network of separate neurons distributed across the brain. In the real world, however, reality doesn't trickle in one smell at a time. The brain is constantly confronted with a pandemonium of different odors. As a result, it not only has to bind together its various sensations, it has to decipher which neurons belong to which sensations. For example, the demi-gace was probably served as a sauce for a tender fillet of beef, with a side of buttery mashed potatoes. This Escoffier-inspired dish instantly fills the nose with a barrage of distinct scents... Faced with such a delicious meal, we can either inhale the odor of the dish as a whole -- experiencing the overlapping smells as a sort of culinary symphony -- or choose to smell each of the items separately. In other words, we can parse our own inputs and, if we so desire, choose to focus on just the smell of potatoes... Although this act of selective attention seems effortless, neuroscience has no clue how it happens. This is known as the parsing problem. [Synesthesia! And autism.]

p67 Parsing and binding are problems because they can't be explained from the bottom up. No matter how detailed our maps of the mind become, the maps still won't explain how a cacophony of cells is bound into the unified perception of a sauce... Neuroscience excels at dissecting the bottom of sensation. What our dinner demonstrates is that the mind needs a top.

I'm going to break here and finish up this chapter in my next post.

Vertigo

I've already quoted (122. Venice) the passage where the guy talks about how, "The audience no longer understand that they are a part of the occasion..." but this is such a huge part of how the world has changed since the introduction of recorded music, then radio, then TV. Life has gone from being a performance to being a media stream. The average person -- by which I mean someone who can't be described as the "talent" -- has left the stage and, at most, occasionally takes a seat in the audience. And this isn't just about "society" as it also includes poor people who used to congregate on stoops and porches -- so we should probably add air conditioning and the automobile to the evils contributing to the new reality. 

In general, today it is only young people eager to mate that take the trouble to venture out onto the stage in this way. And a vestige of "society." I'm as bad as anyone when it comes to staying home and minding my own business. It takes something really special to get me out. And it's not like there aren't things to do here. I'm not even sure I would have been different in the past. I do identify with characters like Mr Bennett in P & P who's content to retreat to his library and has to be dragged to the occasional ball by his wife.

Next - 136. The wine-in-itself

134. Neural plasticity

Previous - 133. Necessitarianism

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Proust was... - George Eliot cont.

The Literary Genome
p44 ...As soon as the Human Genome Project began decoding our substrate, it was forced to question cherished assumptions of molecular biology. The first startling fact... was the dizzying size of our genome. While we technically need only 90 million base pairs of DNA to encode the 100,000 different proteins in the human body, we actually have more than 3 billion base pairs. Most of this excess text is junk. In fact, more than 95 percent of human DNA is made up of what scientists call introns: vast tracts of repetitive, noncoding nonsense. 

How certain can they be of this? How can you determine what is "junk" and what has meaning? And what about our bacteria? No one ever talks about their genomes. And couldn't you say the same thing about In Search of Lost Time if you were thinking of it as a novel driven by a standard plot? 

But by the time the Human Genome Project completed its epic decoding, the dividing line between genes and genetic filler had begun to blur. Biology could no longer even define what a gene was. The lovely simplicity of the Central Dogma collapsed under the complications of our genetic reality, in which genes are spliced, edited, methylated, and sometimes jump chromosomes (these are called epigenetic effects). Science had discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: "all meanings depend on the key of interpretation."

What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human, is not simply the genes that we have buried in our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment (and bacteria?), feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic...

p45 By demonstrating the limits of genetic determinism, the Human Genome Project ended up becoming an ironic affirmation of our individuality. By failing to explain us, the project showed that humanity is not simply a text. It forced molecular biology to focus on how our genes interact with the real world. Our nature, it turns out, is endlessly modified by our nurture. This uncharted area is where the questions get interesting (and inextricably difficult).

...the mouse brain contains roughly the same number of genes as the human brain... scientists have found that there is little correlation between genome size and brain complexity. (Several species of amoeba have much larger genomes than humans.) This strongly suggests that the human brain does not develop in accordance with a strict genetic program that specifies its design. 

...our plastic neurons are designed to adapt to our experiences. Like the immune system, which alters itself in response to the pathogens it actually encounters... the brain is constantly adapting to the particular conditions of life. This is why blind people can use their visual cortex to read Braille...

p46 ...The invention of neural plasticity, which is encoded by the genome, lets each of us transcend our genome... 

The best metaphor for our DNA is literature. Like all classic literary texts, our genome is defined not by the certainty of its meaning, but by its linguistic instability, its ability to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations. What makes a novel or poem immortal is its innate complexity, the way every reader discovers in the same words a different story...

The Blessing of Chaos
p47 ... Molecular biology, confronted with the unruliness of life, is also forced to accept chaos. Just as physics discovered the indeterminate quantum world [that's as close as we get] -- a discovery that erased classical notions about the fixed reality of time and space -- so biology is uncovering the unknown mess at its core. Life is built on an edifice of randomness.

p48 ... According to [Motoo] Kimura's calculations, the average genome was changing at a hundred times the rate predicted by the equations of evolution. In fact, DNA was changing so much that there was no possible way natural selection could account for all of these so-called adaptations.

... Pure chance. The dice of mutation and the poker of genetic drift [was driving this evolution of our genes according to Kimura]... Your genome is a record of random mistakes.

p49 ...Neuroscientist Fred Gage has found that retrotransposons -- junk genes that randomly jump around the human genome -- are present at unusually high numbers in neurons. In fact, these trouble making scraps of DNA insert themselves into almost 80 percent of our brain cells, arbitrarily altering their genetic program... Gage... realized that all these genetic interruptions created a population of perfectly unique minds... In other words, chaos creates individuality. Gage's new hypothesis is that all this mental anarchy is adaptive, as it allows genes to generate minds of almost infinite diversity.

p50 ...As Darwin observed in On the Origin of Species, "The more diversified the descendents from any one species become in structure, constitution and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature."...

Like the discovery of neurogenesis and neural plasticity, the discovery that biology thrives on disorder is paradigm-shifting... Chaos is everywhere. As Karl Popper once said, life is not a clock, it is a cloud. Like a cloud, life is "highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable." ...

p51 ...What we need now is a new view of life, one that reflects our indeterminacy. We are neither fully free not fully determined. The world is full of constraints, but we are able to make our own way.

This is the complicated existence that Eliot believed in... her novels... are ultimately celebrations of self-determination. 

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133. Necessitarianism

Previous - 132. George Eliot

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George Eliot (and George Henry Lewes)

p33 [Eliot's words, but Lehrer seems to think they express Lewes ideas] ...insisted that the brain would always be a mystery, "for too complex is its unity." Positivists may proselytize their bleak vision, Lewes wrote, but "not thinking man will imagine anything is explained by this. Life and being remain as inaccessible as ever." If nothing else, freedom is a necessary result of our ignorance.

..."Necessitarianism," [Footnote: a synonym for determinism... the theory holds that human actions are "necessitated" by antecedent causes over which we have no control.] Eliot wrote, "I hate the ugly word." Eliot had read Maxwell on molecules... and she knew that nothing in life could be perfectly predicted. To make her point, Eliot began Daniel Deronda with a depiction of human beings as imagined by Laplace. The setting is a hazy and dark casino full of sullen people... These gamblers are totally powerless, dependent on the dealer to mete out their random hands. They passively accept whichever cards they are dealt. Their fortune is determined by the callous laws of statistics.

p34 ...As soon as Eliot introduces this mechanical view of life, she begins deconstructing its silly simplicities... "Like dice in mid-air," Gwendolen is an unknown. Her mysteriousness immediately steals Daniel's attention; she transcends the depressing atmosphere of the casino. Unlike the gamblers, who do nothing but wait for chance to shape their fate, Gwendolen seems free...

Eliot creates Gwendolen to remind us that human freedom is innate, for we are the equation without a set answer. We solve ourselves. [Footnote: ...being free also makes us accountable for our behavior. One of Eliot's main problems with social physics was that it denied humanity moral agency... If social physics made us callus, then art might make us compassionate.]

Before we get into Darwin, I have to reflect on "Necessitarianism." I think there's a difference between a social physics that lets you calculate and predict the behavior of individuals, and the lack of cause and effect in our behavior. It's interesting that Eliot used a casino as a setting, as games of chance are one place where there is a kind of freedom. If you make your life decisions on the basis of flipping coins or rolling dice, then they would be free -- though you would not be, except insofar as you occasionally refused to follow the decisions of random chance.

Otherwise, your decisions are based on who you are and can't be other than what they are. You must make the decisions that are natural for you. What sense does it make to insist that you are free to make decisions that are not the decisions necessitated by your character? 

I've now read ahead, and, sad to say, this chapter does not go to the quantum uncertainty place I was hoping for. You know what that means... One could view decisions as existing in superposition. Up until the instant you decide, a multitude of decisions exist as possibilities. You can either stay on the train, looking at Verona, or get off and experience Verona directly. The probability waveform (nonsense but it sounds interesting) only collapses when the train rolls out of the station. And yet there's a reason you stayed in your seat. Still (to reassert the position that Maxwell represents in this chapter and that Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation represents in quantum mechanics), even though there's a "reason" for Sebald staying in his seat, you could only have described the probability of his staying on or getting off the train, no matter how much information you had. 

I may be having my cake and eating it too, but I think this position supports cause and effect (which tends to lead to Determinism) while leaving a quantum of freedom. Though maybe not "freewill."

...while positivists believed that the chaos of life was only a facade, that beneath everything lay the foundation of physical order, Darwinism said that randomness was a fact of nature. In many ways, randomness was the fact of nature... [Footnote: Darwin acknowledged the deep chanciness at the heart of natural selection... Darwin constantly asserts that variations are "undirected" and "occur in no determinate way."] Life progressed because of disorder, not despite it. The theologian's problem -- the question of why nature contained so much suffering and contingency -- became Darwin's solution. [So Voltaire wasn't a Darwinian.]

p35 The bracing embrace of chance was what attracted Eliot to Darwin. Here was a narrative that was itself unknowable, since it was guided by random variation... Unlike Herbert Spencer, who believed that Darwin's theory of evolution could solve every biological mystery (natural selection was the new social physics), Eliot believed that Darwin only deepened the mystery... Because evolution has no purpose or plan -- it is merely the sum of its accumulated mistakes -- our biology remains impenetrable...
...

p37 In her intricate plots, Eliot wanted to demonstrate how the outside and the inside, our will and our fate, are in fact inextricably entangled. "Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending," Eliot confesses in Middlemarch. Our situation provides the raw material out of which we make our way, and while it is important "never to beat and bruise one's wings against the inevitable," it is always possible "to throw the whole force of one's soul towards the achievement of some possible better." You can always change your life.
...

p42 ...The mind is never beyond redemption, for no environment can extinguish neurogenesis. As long as we are alive, important parts of the brain are dividing. The brain is not marble, it is clay, and our clay never hardens.
...

p43 ...while freedom remains an abstract idea, neurogenesis is celular evidence that we evolved to never stop evolving. Eliot was right; to be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning. As she wrote in Middlemarch, the "mind [is] as active as phosphorus." Since we each start every day with a slightly new brain, neurogenesis ensures that we are never done with our changes. In the constant turmoil of our cells -- in the irrepressible plasticity of our brains -- we find our freedom.

Voltaire - more English visitors to Ferney

John Moore and Douglas Hamilton (Eighth Duke of Hamilton), July 1772

The Duke, Mr. Mallet, and I am to sup and stay all night sometime this week with Voltaire, his vivacity and spirit is amazing; he is writing and publishing every day; and I do believe he is not without hopes that the Christian religion will die before him'.
...

The most piercing eyes I ever beheld are those of Voltaire, now in his eightieth year. His whole countenance is expressive of genius, observation, and extreme sensibility.

In the morning he has a look of anxiety and discontent; but this gradually wears off, and after dinner he seems cheerful...

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132. George Eliot

Previous - 131. Walt Whitman

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Spring

With all the rain and cold, I had missed the stealthy approach of spring. In recent days, though, I've noticed that the Japanese maple out my kitchen window is mostly green, and the poor tree in the pot in our alley -- the one that was shifted about all last year and suffered an abusive, radical pruning of its few branches, now has sprouted a few new leaves from what few branches remain. (Curiously, I'd advocated pruning the tree in the past only to be ignored by the woman who "takes care" of the garden. Fate has given the tree a more severe pruning than I would have.) 

The dark obverse of spring's sticky young leaves (I think that was Ivan K's phrase) is pollen. My allergies, surprisingly in abeyance so far this year, have finally kicked in.

George Eliot - From Proust Was a Neuroscientist

p27 ... Inspired by Isaac Newton's theory of gravity, which divined the cause  of the elliptical motions found in the heavens, the positivists struggled to uncover a parallel order behind the motions of humans. [Footnote: Newton himself wasn't so naive: "I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies," he wrote, "but not the madness of people."] According to their depressing philosophy, we were nothing but life-size puppets pulled by invisible strings.

The founder of this "science of humanity" was Pierre-Simon Laplace... Laplace didn't need God [for his cosmic laws] because he believed that probability theory, his peculiar invention, would solve every question worth asking, including the ancient mystery of human freedom.
...

p28 ...Since everything was merely matter, and matter obeyed a short list of cosmic laws (like gravity and inertia), knowing the laws meant knowing everything about everything. All you had to do was crank the equations and decipher the results. Man would finally see himself for "the automaton that he is." Free will, like God, would become an illusion, and we would see that our lives are really as predictable as the planetary orbits. As Laplace wrote, "We must . . . imagine the present state of the universe as the effect of its prior state and as the cause of he state that will follow it. Freedom has no place here."

I'm doing something I rarely do, write notes on a first reading, so I don't know where this is heading. But if this doesn't end up with quantum uncertainty I will be shocked and disappointed.
...

p29 James Clerk Maxwell... realized that Laplace's omniscient demon [from a thought experiment] actually violated the laws of physics. Since disorder [entropy] was real (it was even increasing), science had fundamental limits. After all, pure entropy couldn't be solved. No demon could know everything.

...While Laplace believed that you could easily apply statistical laws to specific problems, Maxwell's work with gasses had taught him otherwise. While the temperature of a gas was wholly determined by the velocity of its atoms [this is anachronistic I think unless you substitute "molecule" for "atom"] -- the faster they fly, the hotter the gas -- Maxwell realized that velocity was nothing but a statistical average. At any given instant, the individual atoms were actually moving at different speeds. In other words, all physical laws are only approximations. They cannot be applied with any real precision to particulars. This, of course, directly contradicted Laplace's social physics... 
...

p32 In many ways, [George Henry] Lewes was [Herbert] Spencer's opposite [Spencer has just rejected Eliot]. Spencer began his career as an ardent positivist, futilely searching for a theory of everything. After positivism faded away, Spencer became a committed social Darwinist, and he enjoyed explaining all of existence -- from worms to civilization -- in terms of natural selection. Lewes, on the other hand, was an intellectual renowned for his versatility; he wrote essays on poetry and physics, psychology and philosophy... 
...

p32 ...He wanted to be a "poet in science." She wanted to be "a scientific poet."

p33 ...A stubborn skeptic, Lewes first became famous in 1855 with his Life of Goethe, a sympathetic biography that interwove Goethe's criticisms of the scientific method with his romantic poetry. In Goethe, Lewes found a figure who resisted the mechanistic theories of positivism, trusting instead in the "concrete phenomena of experience." And while Lewes eagerly admitted that a properly experimental psychology could offer an "objective insight into our thinking organ," he believed that "art and Literature" were no less truthful, for they described the "psychological world." In an age of ambitious experiments, Lewes remained a pluralist.

Candide

"English Visitors to Ferney: A Sampling"

Edward Gibbon, August 1763
p113 ...After a life passed in courts and Capitals, the Great Voltaire is not a meer country Gentleman, and even (for the honor of the profession) sometimes a farmer. He says he never enjoyed so much true happiness... 

The play they acted was my favorite Orphan of China. Voltaire himself acted Gengis and Madame Denys Idame... Perhaps... I was too much struck with the ridiculous figure of Voltaire at seventy acting a Tarter Conqueror with a hollow broken voice, and making love to a very ugly niece of about fifty... [Did he not understand her position in the household?] The whole Company was asked to stay and set Down about twelve to a very elegant supper of a hundred Covers... The supper ended about two, the company danced til four, when we broke up, got into our Coaches and came back to Geneva, just as the Gates were opened. Shew me in history or fable, a famous poet of Seventy who has acted his own plays, and has closed the scene with a supper and ball for a hundred people. I think the last is the more extraordinary of the two.

Next - 133. Necessitarianism

131. Walt Whitman

Previous - 130. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

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Sunday in SF

My favorite kind of Sunday, I got something done (laundry) then went out for brunch at the Pork Store -- the Vegan Delight was even better than usual, more garlic. Then I strolled down Haight to Amoeba and actually found two of the things I was looking for (a DVD and a CD). Now I'm back downtown at my (most) usual Peet's. 

A fairly dressed-up man with a camera with a massive lens seems to be soliciting portraits on the sidewalk outside my window. You'd think that would be like carrying coals to Newcastle, but he seems to be doing some trade. It's a great business model, when you think about it. He takes a shot and then, I'm guessing, downloads the file to their phone. Your only cost is your capital investment in the equipment and the battery charge. You don't have to create prints, and the transaction is complete in a minute or two.


My Buffy online community is having a competition called Writing Idol, where people submit bits of competitive fiction. I've never played before, but the board has been too quiet lately so I thought I would participate in the interest of keeping the forum going.

The first theme is "telescoping;" which turns out to have many meanings to play with. I started out by reading what the OED had to say (smart move!) Thinking about what was in the OED I came up with a first paragraph that included a bunch of different meanings and that gave birth to the plot. Fine. But that was all I'd planned so I was delighted when the final paragraph wrote itself, as it were, without much thought and was itself a form of "telescoping" I hadn't anticipated. 

Why are the "Mozart" moments so much more satisfying than the "Salieri" moments?

Walt Whitman - from Proust Was a Neuroscientist

p1 For Walt Whitman, the Civil War was about the body. The crime of the confederacy, Whitman believed, was treating blacks as nothing but flesh, selling them and buying them like pieces of meat. Whitman's revelation, which he had for the first time at a New Orleans slave auction, was that body and mind are inseparable. To whip a man's body was to whip a man's soul.

This is Whitman's central poetic idea. We do not have a body, we are a body. Although our feelings feel immaterial, they actually begin in the flesh...

Whitman's fusion of body and soul was a revolutionary idea, as radical in concept as his free-verse form. At the time, scientists believed that our feelings came from the brain and that the body was just a lump of inert matter. But Whitman believed that our mind depended upon the flesh. He was determined to write poems about our "form complete."
...

p2 Neuroscience now knows that Whitman's poetry spoke the truth: emotions are generated by the body. Ephemeral as they seem, our feelings are actually rooted in the movements of our muscles and the palpitations of our insides. Furthermore, these material feelings are an essential element of our thinking process. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio notes, "The mind is embodied . . . not just embrained."
...

p3 The story of the brain's separation from the body begins with Rene Descartes... [who] divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism [mind-body dualism], Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs. [You could tie the Church's disapproval of pleasure in "this" life to this schism, except that the Church's attitude preceded Descartes.]
...

p5 ...Whitman believed that his existence could be "comprehended at no time by its parts, at all times by its unity." This is the moral of Whitman's poetic sprawl: the human being is an irreducible whole. Body and soul are emulsified into each other...

Emerson
Whitman's faith in the transcendental body was strongly influenced by the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson... A lapsed Unitarian preacher, Emerson was more interested in the mystery of his own mind than in the preachings of some aloof God. He disliked organized religion because it relegated the spiritual to a place in the sky instead of seeing the spirit among "the common, low and familiar."

Without Emerson's mysticism, it is hard to imagine Whitman's poetry. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman once said, "and Emerson brought me to a boil." 
...

The Anatomy of Emotion
p15 Whitman's faith in the flesh... had a profound impact on the thought of his time. His free-verse odes, which so erotically fused the body and the soul, actually precipitated a parallel discovery within psychology. An avid Whitman enthusiast, William James was the first scientist to realize that Whitman's poetry was literally true: the body was the source of feelings. The flesh was not a part of what we felt, it was what we felt. As Whitman had prophetically chanted, "Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul."
...

p16 ...William James inherited the philosophical tradition of Emerson. Pragmatism, the uniquely American philosophy James invented, was in part a systematization of Emerson's skeptical mysticism. Like Emerson and Whitman, James always enjoyed puncturing the pretensions of nineteenth-century science. He thought that people should stop thinking of scientific theories as mirrors of nature, what he called "the copy version of truth." Instead, they should see its facts as tools, which "help us get into a satisfactory relation with experience." [?] The truth of an idea, James wrote, is the use of an idea, its "cash-value." [Now that does sound uniquely American.] Thus, according to pragmatists, a practical poet could be just as truthful as an accurate experiment. All that mattered was the "concrete difference" an idea produced in our actual lives. [Is it just me or is this language as puzzling as the German Idealism it was inspired by?]

p17 [About the physics-inspired psychology of the day] James also wasn't very good at this new type of psychology. "It is a sort of work which appeals to patient and exact mind," he wrote in his masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology, and James realized that his mind was neither patient nor particularly exact. He loved questions more than answers, the uncertainty of faith more than the conviction of reason... James was drawn to the phenomena that this mental reductionism ignored. What parts of the mind cannot be measured?

Searching for the immeasurable led James directly to the question of feeling. Our subjective emotions, he said, were the "unscientific half of existence." ...
...

p18 ...When James introspected, he realized that Whitman's poetry revealed an essential truth: our feelings emerge from the interactions of the brain and the body, not from any single place in either one. This psychological theory, first described in the 1884 article "What Is an Emotion?" is Whitman, pure and simple. Like Whitman, James concluded that if consciousness was severed from the body, "there would be nothing left behind, no 'mind-stuff' out of which the emotion can be constituted." ...

...James believed that our emotions emerged from the constant interaction of the body and the brain. Just as fear cannot be abstracted from its carnal manifestation, it also cannot be separated from the mind, which endows the body'd flesh with meaning. [This would mean that animals that are so motivated by fear must also share in "mind," I would think] As a result, science cannot define feelings without also taking consciousness -- what the feeling is about -- into account. "Let not this view be called materialistic," James warns his reader. "Our emotions must always be inwardly what they are, whatever be the physiological ground of their apparition. If they are deep, pure, spiritual facts they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensation theory, They carry their own inner measure of worth with them."

The Body Electric
p19 Modern neuroscience is now discovering the anatomy underlying Whitman's poetry... 

p20 One of Damasio's most surprising discoveries is that the feelings generated by the body are an essential element of rational thought. [We've been over this before. He describes the gambling experiment.] 
...

p21 ...What Damasio found was that after drawing only ten cards, the hand of the experimental subject got "nervous" whenever it reached for one of the negative decks. While the brain had yet to completely understand the game (and wouldn't for another forty cards), the subject's hand "knew" what deck to draw from. Furthermore, as the hand grew increasingly electric, the subject started drawing more and more frequently from the advantageous decks. The unconscious feelings generated by the body preceded the conscious decision. The hand led the mind.
...

p22 ... The moral of Whitman's verse was that the body wasn't merely a body. Just as leaves of grass grow out of dirt, feelings grow out of the flesh...
...

Feelings from flesh? Soul from body? Body from soul? our existence makes no sense. We live inside a contradiction. Whitman exposes this truth, and then, in the very next sentence, accepts it. His only answer is that there is no answer. "I and this mystery, here we stand," Whitman once said, and that pretty much says it all. 

..."Now I see it is true, what I guess'd at," Whitman wrote in "Song of Myself." What he guessed at, of course, is that the soul is made of flesh.
...

p24 [After a bleak description of the decayed state of his body at the time of his death] What could Whitman have been thinking as he felt his flesh -- his trusted muse -- slowly abandon him? He began his last Leaves of Grass [the "Death-Bed" edition] with a new epigraph, written in death's shadow:

     Come, said my soul,
     Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one).

...We are the poem, his poem says, that emerges from the unity of the body and the mind. That fragile unity -- this brief parenthesis of being -- is all we have. Celebrate it.

And here I'm reminded of the mystical bliss that Dostoevsky writes about as his The Brothers Karamazov characters near death. (Though not the Karamazovs themselves.) If we grant that Dostoevsky wasn't just making this up -- and I think I've run into other instances of the same thing, but I can't recall where just now (Anne Lamott) -- is it so unlikely that a soul in conversation, as it were, with a diseased body would find a new song to sing?

Next - 132. George Eliot

130. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Previous - 129. Travelers

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Call me Nostradamus...

Yes, I am sore today. Putting on and taking off my jacket now comes with sound effects. 

I compounded Having finally made it to the gym; Being sore the day after the gym; and Discovering that the local (Chinatown) branch library isn't open until 1pm on Fridays (noticed when I tried to open the door at Noon) to excuse my ignoring both my budget and diet for lunch. Since I needed to hang around for about an hour, I went to my usual North Beach haunt (Caffe Puccini) for something different (their eggplant sandwich) and a glass of red. Now I'm worried about the place as it was empty at the lunch hour.

Proust Was a Neuoscientist

By Jonah Lehrer - Houton Mifflin Company 2007

My reason for going to the library was to pick up a copy of our next book club book. I would have been happy if the book had only been about Proust, but in fact Proust is just one of the artists sampled for their contributions to neuroscience.

From the Prelude
The author writes about his days as a lab technician,

pix It was simple manual labor, but the work felt profound. Mysteries were distilled into minor questions, and if my experiments didn't fail, I ended up with an answer. The truth seemed to slowly accumulate, like dust.

At the same time, I began reading Proust. I would often bring my copy of Swann's Way into the lab and read a few pages while waiting for an experiment to finish. All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences. For me, his story about one man's memory was simply that: a story. It was a work of fiction, the opposite of scientific fact.

But... I began to see a surprising convergence. The novelist had predicted my experiments. Proust and neuroscience shared a vision of how our memory works. If you listened closely, they were actually saying the same thing.
...

pxi We now know that Proust was right about memory, Cezanne was uncannily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein anticipated Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of consciousness; modern neuroscience has confirmed these artistic intuitions...

pxii The moral of this book is that we are made of art and science. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff.... 


Walt Whitman
I learned two interesting things reading this first section: The phrase "Leaves of Grass" is a printing term where "leaves" are pages and "grass" is "compositions of little value." The other interesting thing is that Whitman continued to revise both his poems and his book (adding more to it) from 1855 until just before his death in 1891. When his body was examined after his death it was discovered that nearly every organ in his body was ravaged my tuberculosis.

So what I now want to know is how does what he wants to say in 1891 differ from what he wanted to say in 1855, and how much of the change is a result of age and illness? Has anyone published an edition that includes both versions so you can see the young and old poet juxtaposed?

This would be interesting for any writer, but the reason he is included in this book is because he is "a self-described poet of the body..." who argued that "... the soul is made of flesh." To the extent that this is true, the soul -- and thus the poetry -- of a young and healthy man must vary a great deal from the soul of an old and very ill man. How could it be otherwise? 

Vertigo

Have I mentioned how interminable Sebald's paragraphs are? They sometimes go on for pages. And they may cover a number of subjects and include what could be many transitions. You come to a point that should be a good place to stop and resume later, but there is no paragraph break to make it easy to relocate your place. It occurs to me now that I just need a post-it to use to mark where I'm stopping. 

We just came to the point where he finally makes his way to Verona and checks into a hotel under the name of someone from the 19th century, Jakob Philipp Fullmerayer. Fullmerayer was from a town on the other side of the Alps (and Austria) from Sebald's hometown in Bavaria. They certainly have something in common, though I'm not sure what Sebald is getting out here. (As usual.) Fullmerayer is an interesting character but Sebald merely adopts his name for a moment. He doesn't say any more about him.

Candide

P109 ...He [Voltaire] has been inspecting his new estate at Ferney and finding that there is more involved than the cultivation of plants. He has acquired peasants who depend on him. What is the state of the community? Half the land lies fallow, the curé has celebrated no marriages in seven years, the countryside is depopulated as people rush to nearby Geneva. Taxation (especially the salt-tax) destroys those who remain; either the peasants pay and are reduced to abject poverty, of they evade payment and are clapped in jail. ‘It is heartbreaking to witness so many misfortunes. I am buying the Ferney property simply in order to do a little good there. . . . The prince who will be my liege lord should rather help me to drag his subjects out of the abyss of poverty, than profit from his ancient feudal rights....

P110 This is a new voice in Voltaire’s letters. We have seen how many times he had sought to intervene on the social or political scene and been frustrated. Here at last the right opportunity in time and place comes to hand. By acquiring seigneurial rights he is freer, he says, than when he possessed only his home in Lausanne and his ‘country cottage {guinguette}’ in Geneva, where the people were ‘a little arrogant’ and the priest ‘a little dangerous’... Already before he is even installed at Ferney he has taken up the cudgels against the curé of Moens, who is the malefactor extorting money from Voltaire’s peasants and forcing them to sell their own lands...

P111 At the end of 1758, Voltaire tells d’Argental with pride that he has created for himself ‘a rather nice kingdom’ (D7988). At last he has his new principality: he is now both roi and philosophe. His installation at Tournay on Christmas Eve 1758 was of fitting dignity and pomp,with sound of cannon, fife and drum, all the peasants bearing arms and girls presenting flowers to his two diamond-bedecked nieces. ‘M. de Voltaire’, writes a spectator, ‘was very pleased and full of joy . . . He was, believe me, very flattered’... As Candide begins to enjoy, a few weeks later, the success which has never deserted it, so too does Voltaire enter at last into his kingdom. In his sixty-fifth year, François-Marie Arouet has finally realized himself as M. de Voltaire. [Footnote: François-Marie Arouet is the name of an insignificant Paris bourgeois; M. de Voltaire (wherever his name comes from) is a gentleman, a seigneur, a person of European repute.]

So when Candide speaks of cultivating his garden he really does have in mind a good Tory existence. And I suppose Ford Madox Ford’s having Christopher turn his back on Groby is to make his point that, in the bourgeois age of the Great War, there is no longer a place for the seigneur. In the 20th century one can only cultivate a very small, private garden and even then it must be supported by trade (the antique business).


But now I must turn to the other book that shares the name of its protagonist: Faust. You can see Goethe ending his book with Faust also cultivating his garden -- ripped from the sea and funded by piracy. What I haven’t repeated above are the passages about how Voltaire disliked the British Navy because they were interfering with his trade -- capturing and selling either ships he had an interest in or ships carrying cargo he had an interest in. I also skipped the passage about his attack on the slave trade (and the sugar trade) which was inserted in Candide at the last moment. Ferney wasn’t ripped from the sea, but I suspect Voltaire’s wealth (all wealth) came with some unsavory write-offs. Mephisto’s Violent Men always have a hand in these transactions. Still, to give Faust his due, his intention was similar to Voltaire’s. But just as Voltaire was participating in the economic system that would soon lead to the French Revolution, Faust’s efforts caused as much harm as they offered future promise. Faust really is Goethe’s Candide in some ways.

Next - 131. Walt Whitman