random thoughts 3: classics

by cindy jane walker

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a curious but little known book that i chanced upon one day is “william shakespeare” by victor hugo. it concerns shakespeare to some extent but consists largely of hugo’s windy pronouncements about “genius” and “men of genius”. in the second chapter of the book hugo gives us a list of fourteen “men of genius” - in effect, his list of favorite authors. the book was published in 1864, when the author was 62 yeas old. the fourteen are: 2 greeks: homer and aeschylus 5 authors of books of the bible: the author of the book of job, the prophets ezekiel and isaiah, st paul, and “st john” (the author of the book of revelations) 3 romans: lucretius, tacitus, and juvenal dante, rabelais, cervantes and shakespeare round out the list. why he chose these particular authors over others - aeschylus rather than euripides, lucretius rather than vergil or ovid, rabelais instead of chaucer or ariosto, he does not say. the interesting thing to me is the ages of the books/authors relative to hugo’s own time, and the way he discusses them. the book of job is impossible to date. 9 of the remaining 13 date from 1700 to 2600 years before hugo’s life, and the other 4 between 250 and 600 years. but he writes about them very much the way a mid 20th century man of letters - somebody like auden or lionel trilling - might write about 18th and 19th century writers - goethe, balzac, tolstoi, henry james. to hugo in 1864 his “men of genius” from 2000 or so years ago were still living literature in the same way that melville or jane austen or dostoevski would be living literature to a writer or critic or literary minded reader in the mid 20th century. obviously, things have changed, and changed even more since the mid twentieth century - the last fading days of “serious” literature. when giants like hemingway and faulkner and beckett still walked the earth, when a writer like norman mailer enjoyed the same type of fame that movie directors like martin scorsese or quentin tarantino enjoy today, and the beat writers could provoke genuine outrage in the long vanished “literary establishment”. one obvious reason is the decline and virtual elimination of “classical education” - i e, teaching latin and greek to schoolboys - in the western world. i do not know if hugo read the old testament in the “original” hebrew ( he might have!) but he almost surely read the greek and roman authors in greek and latin, and maybe the new testament in greek too. he probably read shakespeare in english. did he read dante in italian, cervantes in spanish? maybe. again, the point is that it was all “living literature” to him, about a century and a half ago. in 1864, the industrial revolution had been in full flower and full blast for at least a century. empires had risen and fallen for millennia in a “cyclical” pattern, without “the world” changing much. empires - like the british empire, the soviet union, and the united states - would still rise and fall, but now the world really was changed, at least as it had not been since the agricultural revolution. but it was not that obvious, not only not to “the man in the street”*, but to classically educated literary gentlemen like hugo, who saw themselves as walking the same earth as aeschylus and juvenal. if history had progressed, to hugo, it was because of a belief in “liberty” (championed by “men of genius” like himself ) rather than from technology. now consider the 21st century. how many people, except literary scholars, really read anything, anything at all, from before the 19th century, from before the industrial revolution? in 2013, the bbc issued a list of “100 books to read before you die” unless i missed something, it included only two books from before the 19th century - the works of shakespeare , and the bible, i e, the king james bible written in english. my quick count showed 89 books in english, 6 in french, 3 in russian, and 2 in spanish. i have seen similar lists on line - i think this one is pretty typical. maybe a little extreme - most lists of this type would at least include homer and dante and cervantes.. as the technological/information revolution progresses, and assuming that “literature” survives at all in the immediate future, this trend will surely increase. i think it it is a natural development from technological change. technology has changed what it means to be human. the “humans” of the 21st century are not the humans of the 19th century., let alone the humans of pre-industrial times. in any time or place, there may be revered “classics” that almost nobody really reads, any more than they stop and look at statues in public parks or squares. but for something to be actually read it has to have something contemporary readers can identify with. well, that is enough on the classics, for now. *who was himself the product of the new age, as he at least “read the news” by the new electric light, instead of living completely outside of history, like the peasant telling time-honored tales in his hut, when the sun went down. (to be continued)

random thoughts 2: advanced civilization

by cindy jane walker

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the ideas of "civilization " and "advanced" exist in human perception. there could be all sorts of things "out there" or even "here" on earth that are beyond human perception and/or whose own perceptions do not register the existence of humans. take one example: some scientists studying dogs have concluded that dogs have a sense of smell "at least a trillion times" as strong as humans. not a hundred, not a thousand, but a trillion. i don't know what that indicates to you, but to me it indicates that the dog is living in a different universe than the human. or insects - ants or bees or termites or whatever. to human perceptions as registered in human language they are "mindless" and only "act on instinct" but what does that mean, except to humans? "aliens" in science fiction are always basically human - human enough for the humans to comprehend and communicate with at least - and to compete with on basically even terms (or else there would be no suspenseful science-fiction story). and if they are not basically human they can only be perceived as "dumb" or "blind". the science fiction idea of the "advanced" alien civilization is usually based on the vague ideas humans have of a utopia where all conflict has been abolished and where everybody lives more or less "forever" (another human concept) but these utopias remain very vague and unfocussed even in the human mind. (what is not so vague or unfocussed is the idea of the evil ones who stand in the way of the utopia and must be heroically fought and resisted). even if the aliens are out there and do not contact humans , it might be not because they are horrified by the "stupidity" and "savagery" of the humans (concepts which might mean nothing to them) or because the humans still tolerate the likes of donald trump or the koch brothers but because the humans are of absolutely no interest to them and do not even register on their advanced consciousness. finally, the idea of the advanced aliens contacting humans assumes that the advanced ones will have discovered interstellar travel or communication, which humans themselves have failed to master only because they are not "advanced" enough, rather than that it might be an impossibility in a human-perceived universe. random thoughts 3 - classics

random thoughts 1: censorship

by cindy jane walker

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humans, at least humans in the urban regions of the united states and “the west”, are taught as children that “censorship” is bad and that “book burning” is the worst thing that can be imagined, because “freedom of expression” is sacred. of course nobody really believes this. every human society takes for granted that certain things - many things - are beyond the pale and are not to be thought of, let alone expressed. well meaning librarians and teachers, whose goal it is to interest children in reading , promote things like “banned books week”, in which completely harmless or salutary (from their point of view) books like “the catcher in the rye” or “to kill a mockingbird”, or the harry potter books, which have occasionally run afoul of school boards in the christian fundamentalist wilds of kansas or mississippi, are held up as examples of books which have triumphed over the evils of “censorship” and “book burning” and survived to spread their light over a happy world. probably the best known expression of this attitude is ray bradbury’s novel fahrenheit 451, itself a book which is considered highly suitable for adolescent consumption, and continually reprinted. it is one of those books that “everybody knows” the basic idea of, even if they have never read it. if you read bradbury’s book today, it might not be quite what you expect. it was published in 1953. it presents a future in which books are burned, not in order to censor particular ideas or words, but because they present a threat to a soulless dystopia by offering a “human” alternative to movies and television, which are represented as being by their nature dehumanizing.. in 1953 television had been in widespread use for less than ten years, and talking pictures for less than thirty. now the human race was doomed because it was watching jackie gleason and dragnet instead of reading middlemarch and moby dick. so the book does not quite track with the modern idea of “banned books”. but it does embody two ideas. that “books” by their nature, are good, and spread good thoughts and attitudes, and that the evil heartless persons who rule, or aspire to rule, the earth, are against them and seek to suppress, if not literally burn them. and that books, especially well known or “classic” books, are permanent objects, which will last more or less forever unless they are deliberately destroyed. books are some of the most perishable objects on earth. they are made of words, and what is more perishable than words? humans spill forth trillions of words into the air every day. books are written in particular languages, and languages are continually mutating and dying out. books that are held up as having lasted for an appreciable amount of time must be continually annotated and edited (and their spelling and punctuation modernized) even in their original language. books that are held up as having lasted for really long periods, “last” only by being continually retranslated - into dozens or hundreds of languages - some of them, such as the iliad and the odyssey, seemingly every year. all of which is to say that there is nothing permanent or sacrosanct about any book - any book at all. not the bible, or any other ”sacred book” , or the works of shakespeare, or any other author. if you are killed or thrown in jail for writing something, that can fairly be called “censorship”. otherwise it can be said that all written and spoken language is subject to the great lottery of time and fate, in which 99.9999999999999999999999999 … percent of everything vanishes moments after it comes into being. random thoughts 2 - advanced civilization

the clown

by cindy jane walker

illustrations by palomine studios

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all right, that is enough about ancestors - for now. we might come back to them later, because the subject interests me. if it doesn’t interest you, i am sorry. there i go again, writing like somebody is actually going to read this. anyway, back to describing things “one at a time”. on the first day of school, regina had delivered me a clear message. i was a clown. a clown to her and her group, who for practical purposes were the center of the universe. i don't mean a scary “funny” clown with a big green nose like they probably don’t even have in the circuses any more. are there even circuses any more? anyway, i use the term “clown” as used in a book that is not as well known as it should be and that i heartily recommend (can you recommend anything unheartily?) -archetypes and their applications by maria pomfret-fludd. ms pomfret-fludd’s theory is that all human brains are the same and perceive their fellow humans in seven basic archetypes, which she names knights, companions, dragons, damsels, clowns, martyrs, and demons. the categories apply within individual brains, so that a given person can be a clown to one person and a demon to others. in fact, the categories would not apply if everyone agreed. only a handful of mostly famous people belong to the first four categories. most people are clowns, martyrs, or demons - to other people. from page 89 of ms pomfret-fludd’s book: ted, tad, and tod are triplets. they dress alike, usually in red or blue blazers with peppermint striped shirts and green or orange bow ties. they work from their childhood home - which they now share only with each other after their mother’s death and their older sister’s marriage - as telemarketers. on saturdays they go on a picnic together, and on sundays they go to the mall. each of them has conceived a secret passion for a person employed at one of the shops at the mall. ted is enamored of rose, a young single mother of two children who works as a hostess at ruby tuesday’s. he records his romantic dreams of rose in a secret diary he keeps regularly. tad is desperately in love with roger, a college basketball player who works part time at the army and navy store. tad writes poems about roger which he does not show to anybody. and tod has a hopeless passion for mickey, the assistant manager at dunkin donuts. tod has obtained the address of mickey’s apartment and writes him two or three anonymous letters a week in which he outlines his fantasies in explicit form. it might seem to some people that there are similarities between ted, tad, and tod. but to others, especially most educated people in the modern world, they are creatures from three different universes. ted is a geek - a legitimate figure of fun and contempt for even the most compassionate and enlightened. tad is a gay man - the cynosure of all enlightened human sympathy. and tod is a stalker - a loathsome creature for whom no fate who could be too gruesome or too richly deserved. ted is a clown, tad is a martyr, and tod is a demon. clowns are the people we feel good about ourselves for laughing at and feeling superior to. martyrs are the people we feel good about ourselves for sympathizing with. and demons are the people we feel good about ourselves for hating and fearing. anyway, i have found ms pomfret-fluid’s categories kind of useful, except that i would add one sub-category. sad clowns - clowns that are not worth laughing at. that is, most of the human race. from day one at school, i was a clown to regina and her coterie. and a sad clown to everybody else, including the teachers. i was not a martyr to anybody, and it would be many years before i would be a demon to anybody. my first day at school was my first day of clowndom. not that i had any concept of such a thing - or any concept of anything. except regina. and her overwhelming reginaness, that i wanted to be absorbed into like one steamy little white bubble in the big marshmallow of regina. but i think, checking over my notes, that i have already gone on about my feelings for regina sufficiently for now, and do not have anything to add until developments develop. so, back to one thing at a time. i already told you how cooley, or maybe some other of regina’s loyal subjects, had knocked me down into the mud puddle. because i was the richest kid in town, even though i really was no such thing. when i got up i made my next mistake - trying to defend myself. fool that i was, i thought they had knocked me down for the reason they gave - that i was the richest kid in town - not realizing that they had done it for one of the only two reasons anybody does anything - because they are forced to or because they wanted to. and nobody was forcing them to. naturally, when i got home that afternoon, the first thing my mom saw was my muddy dress. she was not pleased. “what, you think we can afford to buy you a new dress every day - or send one to the cleaners - because you decide you like to play in the mud?” i explained it was not my fault, that “some kids” - naturally, i would not name or blame my beloved regina - had knocked me into the mud. “they must have had a reason. you must have done something to provoke them.” “i did not! but they thought i was the richest kid in town.” “that’s no reason to knock somebody into a mud puddle. people respect wealth, unless they are morons or communists. you must have done something else, something you’re not telling.” “i didn’t! they just thought i was rich!” “they must be communists. next time just tell them you are not rich, that you’re a communist too.” she went back to reading her book about jacqueline onassis. i went into the kitchen and made myself a peanut butter sandwich. i came back with my sandwich and asked if i could turn on the television. “i’ll keep it low,” i promised. “no, i have a headache.” she looked at my sandwich. “how can you eat it like that, without any jelly or marshmallow? bleaah! you have no taste, no class. no wonder nobody likes you.” i didn’t bother to tell her that there wasn’t any jelly or marshmallow. i was learning. random thoughts 1 - censorship

ancestors - a digression

by cindy jane walker

illustrations by palomine studios

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ancestors. everybody has ancestors. lots of them. some people are more interested in them than others. dad was kind of interested, interested enough to talk about them sometimes. so i got kind of interested. but what interested me was not the recent ancestors, the walkers who founded walkerville and all that. it was how many ancestors i had, how many the average person has, and how many i had compared to the average person. i was just curious. i went to the library but i didn’t find much to help me out. so i tried to figure it out myself. the math is easy but not helpful. everybody has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc. lets say four generations per century - average age of parents 25 - that is about 80 generations back to the time of christ. that is 2 to the 80th power, which is about 1.2 septillion - 1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. but there were only about 300,000,000 people at the time of christ. the books i got from the library mostly went in one of two directions - pointing out that being “directly descended” from jesus christ or mary magdalen or whoever did not amount to much. or pointing out that there are really no “races” and that racism was wrong. in one book the author mentioned on almost every page that racism was bad. i already knew racism was bad - can we move on please? one thing i noticed - this is just in the books i read - there seemed to be no terminology to describe what i was interested in. call yourself g0. your parents are g1, your grandparents g2… thirty generations back is g30, 200 generations back is g200… and so forth. every g has units of descent - g1 has 2 units, g2 four units etc. when you get back to 80 generations, you don’t have 1.2 septillion individual ancestors but you have 1.2 septillion units of ancestry. call the percentage of units in any g pgx. so if jesus christ was one of your ancestors in g80 his pg80 (percentage of units of ancestry in g80) might be 1 in 1.2 septillion (very unlikely if you are descended from him at all) - or it would be something much higher. back to “units of ancestry” as opposed to numbers of ancestors . everybody has a father and a mother - each would have a pg1 of 50 percent. if they are not brother and sister then you have four grandparents who each have a pg2 pf 25 percent. suppose your mother and father were half-siblings - had the same father but separate mothers. you would have three grandparents but still have four “units of ancestry" - the one grandfather would have a pg2 of 50 and the two grandmothers a pg2 of 25 each. go back ten generations - to g10 - you have 1,024 units of ancestry but it is unlikely that you actually have 1024 different ancestors in that generation. you might have about 400 (?) but their pg10 would vary widely. some would actually have a pg10 of 1/1024 - .097. others would be much higher. my question is - as you go further back, how high might any individual’s gpx be? in theory it could be very high - suppose 1500 years ago, one man and one woman establish themselves in a little valley and they multiply through 50 generations, with no outsiders entering the valley. inhabitants of the valley today would have 2 ancestors in g50 with pg50 each. an unlikely scenario. but how high might one individual’s gpx - in relation to yourself - be, 60 or 80 or 100 generations be? one recurring idea in the books and articles i read - “if a person lived 2000 years ago, either they have no descendants or virtually everybody on the planet is probably descended from them”. this makes sense, but does not take into account the way the percentage of ancestry would vary. note that i am only talking about descent itself - not genes or acquired characteristics or “race”. these things can be subject to considerable uncertainty, but it is a fact that you have ancestors. of course in practice it quickly becomes impossible to actually determine who they were. dear reader (if any) i am sorry if i am boring you - or not making any sense. i just find this stuff interesting. here is something else to consider and then i am done. every person has direct male ancestors and direct female ancestors going back into the “mists of time”… this is a fact, even if you can never ascertain the details. call these direct ancestors f1, f2, f3… and m1,m2, m3… your father is f1, your paternal grandfather is f2, your mother is m1, her mother is m2… somewhere in the world , probably around the time of plato or king david, your f100 existed… and somewhere else, probably quite some distance away was your m100 or maybe your m95 or m105… go back even further and your f2000 and your m2000 were walking the earth. somewhere. you do not know who they were, but they really existed. maybe robin hood or king arthur never existed, but they did. and even further back than that, climbing a tree or cracking clams at the waters edge… i just think that is kind of interesting. * next: the clown

dad

by cindy jane walker

illustrations by palomine studios

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all right, that gives you some idea of what my mom was like. now for my dad. that sounds like he is just something to get out of the way and move on, doesn’t it? i can’t help that, i am going to take one thing at a time in my sincere effort to tell my story. “one at a time is good fishing, doctor.” i heard that on an old black and white movie i saw on tv at around four o’clock in the morning and it stuck in my brain. i never remembered anything else about the movie, but years later i discovered it was “the black sleep” with basil rathbone and bela lugosi, if you are interested. basil rathbone is the mad scientist and he says the line. back to dad. poor dad. i wouldn’t say people wanted to get him out of the way, when he was around, but they didn’t pay much attention to him either. like i said, we were “walkers” and we lived in walkerville, but that was not something i ever thought of much until i went to school, and regina and her crew started pointing it out to me. but even then it was not that big a deal, because they thought i was rich and i was not, so i put it away in the same part of my brain. william hadley martin walker founded the town of walkerville in 1823. isn’t that interesting? no, i never thought so either. william married petunia carson and they had fourteen children, twelve of whom lived past childhood. that was a lot of walkers. pretty soon there were walkers everywhere. “they own this town.” i wonder if anybody ever actually said that except in a movie or a tv show. and then after some time there were not so many walkers any more. that is the way it goes. there used to be a lot of “ancient egyptians”. and then after a while there were no more “ancient egyptians.” there used to be a lot of “ancient romans”. and then after a while there were no more “ancient romans.” the same with the walkers. nobody really cares. and why should they? nothing ever changes. there are people like mom - spending their whole lives wanting to be someone else. there are people like regina molesworth - who light up the world. the people that people like mom want to be. there are people like cooley - who get admitted to the circle of regina molesworth’s brilliance and serve them faithfully. there are people like me, who stand outside the circle with trembling lashes and softly beating hearts. and there are people like dad, who just sit around and wait to get life over with. i was trying to think of one word to describe dad and i came up with “ineffectual”. then i thought about it. it is not much of a word. is anybody really “effectual”? even the regina molesworths? have you ever heard someone described as “effectual’? like, “she’s a very effectual person. we all can’t wait for her effects”? so it seems unfair to single out poor dad as “ineffectual’, if you get my drift. if i come up with a better word i will get back to you. it seems kind of harsh to describe anybody with just one word anyway, don’t you think? all right. let’s not get too philosophical here - not yet anyway. back to day to day existence. we were so poor we only had one television - in america! mom watched what she wanted to watch. it was just nature’s way. she was the strongest of the three of us (for a while, the four of us - i will get to that later). so if dad or i didn’t want to watch what mom wanted to watch - while we were digesting our hamburger patties or hot dogs or tuna casseroles or western omelets - we had no choice but to amuse ourselves, by staring into space or playing solitaire (dad) or playing with matches (me) or as a last resort reading books. the books we had were dad’s - mystery novels mostly by erle stanley gardner or agatha christie or john dickson carr. i should not be too hard on these books, as they formed my mimd. (especially john dickson carr). in looking over my notes i see i wrote that dad “hated” me because he “hated the whole human race”. i think now maybe that is a bit extreme - it is hard to say he hated anything or anybody because he hardly existed. sometimes after mom went to bed - either to sleep or to read one of her books about audrey hepburn or grace kelly - dad and i would sit and watch the tv. never saying anything. we watched what i wanted - remember we didn’t have cable so the choices were limited - because he absolutely did not care what he watched. my great regret is that we didn’t have more snacks. we could hardly afford one bag of wise potato chips for a whole week! sometimes i would try to make popcorn but i was not very good at it. so we would watch the talk shows and if we - or i - stayed up later i would watch old black and white movies. and these movies, along with playing with matches and reading john dickson carr novels and wishing regina molesworth liked me, formed my mind. that is enough for now. i see i did not actually say much about dad. maybe i will try again next time. next: ancestors - a digression