130. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Previous - 129. Travelers

Link to Table of Contents

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

115. Crossroads

Previous - 114. The age of Supers

Link to Table of Contents

The Crossroads:

Warfare in the first half of the 20th century.

Yesterday I happened upon an account of a minor infantry engagement in WW2 that is only known to people because of a book and TV mini-series. Thinking about the account later, I realized that it is a wonderful look at how infantry fighting changed in the first half of the 20th century. But let me say right now that much of this is surmise on my part. The accounts of the engagement I've seen haven't given as much detail as I would have liked.

Late in 1944 the German and Allied armies stood on either side of the Rhine near it's mouth, where the land was mostly flat polders and bordered by dikes. The Allied advance since the Normandy breakout had run out of gas (literally in some cases) and the Germans were still trying to recover from the disaster they suffered around Falaise. This stretch of the front was quiet and thinly held on the Allied side of the river. In the particular area we are concerned with, a small road ran from near, but not on, the river back into the rear of the regiment holding the line. To be even more specific, the road ran between the areas covered by two different infantry companies. Neither company had enough men to keep eyes on the entire front, so small patrols were periodically sent out into the gap in between them. 

The Germans, noticing this weakness, decided to attack down that gap so as to penetrate the weak Allied line and create havoc in the rear. With luck, they could hit regimental headquarters before anyone could organize a counter attack. This wasn't the main assault, but intended as a diversion to tie-down Allied regiments while confusing them about where the real attack would come.

But this is 1944, not 1814 or even 1864, so there would be no general on horseback leading a daring charge. Instead, the order for the operation was given to a Waffen SS battalion commander (equivalent in rank to an American Major) who gave the job to two companies of his unit. (This is one of the places where I'm fleshing out the story. I know the companies were SS so they must have belonged to a battalion though the accounts don't mention it.) They had to quietly cross the Rhine, (probably in small boats) make their way to the Allied line, force their way through, place small blocking forces on their new flanks to keep the Allies at bay (a platoon with a few well placed MG 42 machine guns should do the trick) and then race through to do their job. 

This was not an attack that would win a war, but it had every chance of at least limited success. But that's not what happened. As so often happens in warfare, poor training and an excess of stupidity on one side, combined with good training and intelligence on the other side, to produce a surprising outcome.

The evening the Germans started crossing the river, an American patrol ran into their advance force and were mauled. They pulled their wounded back to company headquarters and reported the contact. At this point the Germans were still crossing the river and were not in position to attack. Their advance force should have been lying low and avoiding contact. But let's say the American patrol caught some of them out in the open so they had no alternative but to engage. Once the Americans were driven off, they ought to have concealed themselves -- tried to convince the Americans that two patrols had run into each other by chance, but that that was the end of the story and there was nothing more to see here. Failing that, they should have dug in, taking advantage of the high ground of the dikes and stayed quiet until the remainder of their force was assembled for the attack -- unless they were attacked.

The left side of the gap, when viewed from the Allied perspective, was held by Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Regiment, of the 101st Airborne Division. Captain Winters, commander of Easy, immediately set out with a squad of his men (a small force just a step up from a patrol) to investigate what was happening on his right flank. When they approached the scene of the prior fight they saw one of those splendid German MGs firing down the road -- where there were no troops. Winters positioned his small unit to attack the MG position and they succeeded in taking it out but discovered there were many more Germans on the other side of a dyke (the Germans were still assembling), so Winters pulled back into a covering position and called in the remainder of the 1st platoon, plus some additional light machine guns. 

Now this is where it gets really weird. At first light, the Germans had arrived but were still forming up for the attack and thus in considerable disorder. Still, there were two companies of Waffen SS versus a reinforced platoon of paratroopers. Winters ordered his men to fix bayonets and lead a charge across hundreds of yards of flat terrain (where most all of his men were delayed by wire fences) with his machine guns providing suppressing fire. Because the Germans had no security at all, apparently, the Americans caught them in the open and slaughtered many, captured eleven, and drove the survivors back to the river.  

Winters then called in a second platoon from a neighboring company (Fox) and followed the Germans to the river where they fought an indecisive engagement, but convinced the Germans that this was not the best place for their attack. The Waffen battalion commander was probably happy to get any of his men back across the river in safety.

Easy company is best known for their textbook attack on a German artillery position behind Omaha Beach during the Normandy Invasion. But this engagement, known as The Crossroads, is, from my perspective, even more outstanding and characteristic of post -Somme infantry warfare. Winters did everything right. (Though the bayonet charge was a huge risk.) Most of the casualties suffered on the American side were in the initial patrol ambush and when the platoons were pulling back from the river and were caught at the crossroads by German artillery. Even then they only lost one KIA. 

The Germans, on the other hand, did almost everything wrong. On paper, this operation works every time, but that's assuming officers and men know their jobs and actually perform them. Back in 1814 or 1864 a commander of a company would only have been required to hold his position within the regiment. And if he had screwed up there would have been regimental and possibly divisional staff on hand to set him right. Winters was independently engaging enemy forces maybe six times larger than his own (though he didn't know that, and this doesn't count the rest of his company that didn't take part in the engagement.)

Here are some clips from the mini-series. Unfortunately, they simplified and altered and added some explosions for the sake of TV. They still give you some idea of what happened. I can't show them here but I'll give you the links,

The night battle

The morning charge

Candide

Chapter 18. Something Voltaire didn't know, and couldn't imagine, was that the Americas didn't have wheeled transport before the Conquest. There would have been no carriages in Eldorado. 

P.S. This assumes the people of Elderado are supposed to be Native Americans, which would seem to be true except that I've also heard that Elderado was actually based on the Pennsylvania colony.

Vertigo

p117 We finally learn our hero's name, Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, historian, of Landeck, Tyrol. Here's the Wiki entry on the actual person with this name. And that's where I found this, quote from Fallmerayer, 

For nearly eighteen aeons [Äonen], all history has been the result of the struggle between two basic elements, split apart by a divine power from the very beginning: a flexible life-process on the one side, and a formless, undeveloped stasis on the other. The symbol of the former is eternal Rome, with the entire Occident lying behind her; the symbol of the latter is Constantinople, with the ossified Orient.... That the Slavs might be one of the two world-factors, or if one prefers, the shadow of the shining image of European humanity, and therefore that the constitution of the earth might not admit philosophical reconstruction without their assent, is the great scholarly heresy of our time.^[15]

Doesn't that suggest Settembreni's position? Here's something else from Wiki "...in November 1850, the Munich Professor Johann Nepomuk von Ringseis delivered an 'explosive' lecture at a public session of the Bavarian Academy, where he denounced the arrival in Bavaria of a 'philosophical Left' [Fallmerayer], marked by liberalism and irreligiosity, that viewed all religion as a 'pathological condition....'"

Later we are told that,

He is remembered as "a co-founder of Byzantine studies, as discoverer of the divisive Greek theory, as a prophet of the world-historical opposition between Occident and Orient, and finally as a brilliant essayist."^[40]

Fallmerayer's account of the split between "Occident" and "Orient" hinged on his interpretation of the Russian Empire, which he perceived as a powerful blend of Slavic ethnic characteristics, Byzantine political philosophy, and Orthodox theology. Although he initially perceived this constellation with admiration, and viewed Russia as the potential savior of Europe from Napoleon, his view changed in the mid-1840s, perhaps as a result of his encounter with Fyodor Tyutchev, and he soon came to see Russia as the major threat to Western Europe. By the late 1840s he was convinced that Russia would conquer Constantinople and the Balkans, and perhaps further the Slavic lands of the Habsburg and Prussian Empires. In the mid-1850s he was overjoyed by the success of the European/Ottoman coalition in the Crimean War.^[56]

Alas, our hero is clearly established in the 20th rather than the 19th century. Confusion grows.

Slight delay

I would have posted this earlier but I've had a cold (or something) and decided to put it off a couple days. I'll say this for my cold, it is fast moving. The first night I had a very sore throat so I bought sorbet the next day. By evening my throat was not particularly sore. The sorbet is good though.

Next - 116. Abusing QCD & synesthesia