The Sea, The Sea

I've begun reading "The Sea, The Sea," by Iris Murdoch.

Murdoch has been known to me chiefly as the author of works on philosophy, generally devoted to the rejuvenation of Platonism. They are intelligently written, despite their failure to cause any veering in my own empirical/pragmatic course.

But "The Sea. The Sea" is a novel, written in the form of a journal kept by one Charles Arrowby, apparently a successful theatrical producer who has retired to a village by the sea. 

The title, "The Sea, The Sea," was presumably inspired by the ending of Anabasis, Xenophon's book on the adventure of 10,000 Greeks who had to escape from behind enemy lines in Persia.  They knew they were safe when they reached the sea -- they were a seafaring people and could get home from there.  Hence that glad shout.  In ancient Greek, that's Thalatta! Thalatta!

So I suppose the title is meant to convey the idea that Arrowby sees his own retirement as a sort of haven or sanctuary after a rough time inland, amongst the warring theatrical tribes.

There is also a platonism connection in the title, although I'll leave that be for now. 

Anyway, early on in this novel, Arrowby is describing his new home for us, and the nearby village of Narrowdean. 

"The old form of the name was Nerodene, and a handsome milestone upon the coast road retains this selling."  That's a nice detail.  Folk etymology has changed many words.  People here a name, infer that it must mean something that sounds similar, and soon that similar-sounding word takes over the first one.  That's how a large knife of the sort once known as a coutelas became a cutlass.  It cuts after all, so that must be what was meant!

Soon, our protagonist is describing the Narrowdean cemetary.  "One stone in particular attracts me.  It bears a beautiful 'foul anchor' and the simple inscription: Dummy 1879 - 1918.   This puzzled me until I realized that 'Dummy' must have been a deaf and dumb sailor who never managed to achieve any other identity."



That is the sort of insignia known as a "foul anchor."  It would certainly tell us of Dummy's occupation.  I don't know whether that gravestone will play any part in the rest of the story, but it is at least a fine observation, part of the stage setting.  

Dorothy Sayers

Dorothy Sayers is well-known for several accomplishments, among them a distinctive translation of the first two canticles of The Divine Comedy (Inferno and Purgatorio) into English.  She did not, alas, live long enough to complete her translation, but Barbara Reynolds carried on, completing work on the Paradiso, and their joint effort become the Penguin Classics' Dante.

In her introduction to Inferno, Sayers addresses the question of why contemporary (by which she meant mid 20th century) readers needed as much apparatus as she had attached -- Notes, Commentaries, Glossary, Appendices. She answered with this example: 

"Let us suppose that an Englishman were to write a contemporary Divine Comedy on Dante's model, and that in it, mixed up with a number of scriptural and mythological characters, we were to find, assigned to various circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise... the following assortment of people -- some referred to by their full names, some by Christian name or surname alone, and some indicated only by a witty or allusive phrase: Chamberlain ("him of the orchid"), Chamberlain ("him of the umbrella", [Stewart Houston] Chamerlain, "Brides-in-the-Bath" Smith, "Galloper" Smith, Horatio Bottomsley, Horatio [Lord Nelson], Fox [Charles or George to be inferred from the context], the Man who picked up the Bomb in Jermyn Street, Oscar Wilde, Oscar Slater, Oscar Browning, Spencer, Spenser, Lord Castlereagh, Lord Castlerosse, Lawrence [of Arabia], [D.H.] Lawrence, "Butcher" Heydrich, W.G. Grace, Grace Darling, the Captain of the Jarvis Bay, the Sisters of Haworth, the Woodcutter of Hawarden, the Ladies of Llangollen, the Lady with the Lamp, the Lady-with-the-Lampshade-made-of-Human-Skin, Titus Oakes, Captain Oates, Quisling, the Owner of 'Hermit', the French Bluebeard, Bacon, Roger Bacon, Roger Fry, the Claimant, the Bishop of Zanzibar, Clarence Hatry, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Brown and Kennedy, the Dean of St Patrick's, the Dean of St Paul's, Dean Farrar, Fred Archer, Mrs Dyer, Lord George Sanger, Lord George Gordon, General Gordon, Ouida, William Joyce, James Joyce, "the Officer in the Tower", Peter the Painter, Jenkins 'of the Ear', Dick Sheppard, Jack Sheppard, and 'the Widow at Windsor'.  Let us further suppose the writer holds strong views on Trade Unionism, the constitution of the UNO, the 'theology of crisis', Freudian psychology, Einsteinian astronomy, and the art of Mr Jacob Epstein.  Let us then suppose that the book is to be read, six hundred years hence, by an intelligeng Portuguese with no particular knowledge of English social history.  Would he not require a few notes...?"

You'll see that I used ellipses to shorten the explanatory mater before and after the list, but I used no ellipses in the list of allusions itself, because I wanted you to get the full over-the-top nature of the example. 

I suspect I am intelligent by most metrics for such things. I am also a raving Anglophile, whose knowledge of "English social history" is probably superior to that of most early 21st century Americans.  I first read the above passage in the 1970s, a lot closer to the date of its construction than our hypothetical Portuguese reader would be.  And yet ... and yet ... I would definitely need notes to understand that hypothetical book.  So she made her poiint, but she also posed me a challenge.

I get the significance of the initials "UNO," even though the "O" has been dropped off over time.  I get the "theology of crisis," i.e. the theology of Karl Barth and others of that ilk.  I recognize the names of the two Fox'. 

But some of these allusions are confusing, and it isn't even very clear now, with the creation of this wonderful internet thing, how one would go about searching.  What did Sayers have in mind by "the Claimant"?  And "Peter the Painter"? Surely she isn't referring to the Ian Dury song, wouldn't that have required psychic powers on Sayers' part?

Soap Suds Again

I wrote a blog entry here some time ago about the "metaphysics of soap suds."

For those of you who don't want to follow links around, here is the story in brief.  A fellow asked a question in Yahoo!Answers about whether some famous philosopher had copmpared huiman thoughts to soap bubles in the wash basin of nothingness. 

I tried to help him, and found a similar quote, but it was actually describing certain intellectual hypotheses as soap bubbles, it wasn't speaking generally of human life.

More recent, I have heard, via my facebook page, from Dave Natas, who informed me that he is the guy who originally asked about that quote, and that now he has found his answer. 

He had been thinking about a quote in a book by Henry Thomas, and Thomas was describing not his own views, but his understanding of the views of David Hume.

"Subtract all the forms and colours of our so called 'certain' beliefs, and what remains? A heap of empty, random sensations whirling around endlessly like unsubstantial soap bubbles in the washbowl of nothingness."

A birthday

Today, September 24, was the birthday -- in 1896 -- of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In his memory then, I'll simply reproduce here the opening of The Great Gatsby.

-----------------

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Another Rogue Trader

In the tradition of Jerome Kerviel, Nick Leeson, and Yasuo Hamanaka, here comes the latest rogue trader to force us to contemplate what the heck the "risk managers" at large banks actually do for a living: world, meet Kweku Adoboli. Mr Adoboli, meet world.  Oh, you two are already acquainted?

Let me backtrack and explain those other names, then. Nick Leeson was the Singapore-based derivatives broker whose trading losses of $1.4 billion caused the demise of a centuries-old bank, Barings, in 1995.  Leeson is my personal favorite member of the group, for reasons I won't try to explain.

Hamanaka was a Japanese copper trader who at one time controlled 5% of the world's copper supply. In June 1996, though, Sumitomo Corporation had to admit to a loss of $1.8 billion on Hamanaka's trades. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, served seven.

Jerome Kerviel, the biggest loser of the bunch, in the employ of giant French bank Société Générale, lost 4.9 billion euros, or roughly $7 billion in what Americans call money, in January 2008.  It was an early sign that this was going to be a very rough year.

Now we come back to Kweku Adoboli. He lost the equivalent of $2.3 billion dollars working for UBS in their London office.  But he makes an odd addition to this already-odd-enough pantheon. First, he was an ETF specialist.  ETFs are boring.  They're supposed to be boring, that is their charm.

Second, he seems to be the first rogue trader of the "social media" era. He kept a Facebook page, and as things turned against him, at a moment when he must have understood his UBS superiors were closing in, he updated his FB status to read, "I need a miracle."

Third, his life story is, up until now, the stuff of inspirational movies.  To  read of his family and his life and only then to consider his crimes is like -- well, it's a little like watching :"The Miracle Worker" in a special edition with a new tacked-on ending where Anne Sullivan embezzles money from the Keller family.

Fourth, though, it's good to see that the London law firm of Kingsley Napley is still with us.  They represented Nick Leeson.  He went to the recognized experts in rogue trader defense for counsel.

Emmy, Alec, and Rupert

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave out its Emmy awards last weekend. I don't especially care, what is interesting is that the show aired on Fox (the entertainment-oriented Fox network, not Fox News) and that this helped lead to a minor dust-up over a joke.

If you, dear reader, share my interest, you can follow this link.  I'm afraid I have no value to add today.

http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/09/18/alec-baldwin-emmys-fox-joke/

That Jamesian Expression

I often quote William James as saying “to think is the only moral act.”  I’d like to try to explain what it meant to James, and abstract for now from the additional question of the resonance it has for me.  The fuller context is: “to sustain a representation, to think, in short, is the only moral act, for the impulsive and the obstructed, for sane and lunatics alike.”

What does it mean to sustain a representation? It means to remain attentive to some specific fact or possibility, to refuse to allow myself to be diverted therefrom. If I have a boring project due at work, I must nonetheless continue to focus on it in order to get it done -- or, I could just let my attention drift and wind up writing on a blog.

Of course that is my example, not one of his.

This matter of sustaining representation (the key form of thought in this sentence, and in James' psychology of the will generally) plays into the dichotomy, also present in the above quotation, between the "impulsive" and the "obstructed." The impulsive fellow acts too quickly, plucking the tempting apple without wondering whose tree this is and what might be the consequences. There are various representations that he might be well advised to keep in his mind -- of arrest for trespassing, of an angry orchard-owner chasing him with a shotgun, of the extra pounds he may add to his waist by such impulsive eating.  The obstructed fellow on the other hand can only see the reasons that block action, and cannot keep his attention on those that require it.

Thus, to think, by which we mean here to focus one's attention, to choose among the consequences of an act the key ones and to keep one's focus there, is the moral act. "The whole drama is a mental drama."

The apple orchard example is mine, too.  Let's consider a couple of James at last. One involves an exhausted sailor on a ship, working the pumps to get the water safely off the ship and keep her afloat. The physiology of exhaustion weighs down upon the sailor and obstructs him in his work. What keeps him going?  Thought!  -- alertness, enforced perhaps by the image of the “hungry sea engulfing him.” Thus, thought overcomes the obstruction in his activity.

Another of James’ examples here is of a man or woman lying in bed. Perhaps it is a freezing morning, and the comfort of one’s position under the covers, combined with the thought of the aggravation that will be involved in getting up, gathering wood (this the late 19^th century) starting the fire, etc.  – all this keeps us in bed.  Until perhaps a “fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs,” you stop thinking of the warmth of the blanket etc. and your mind turns instead to something important that must be done or is expected that day.   At some “lucky instant” the idea of getting up and getting on with the day will “awaken no contradictory or paralyzing suggesting,” and will produce automatically the “appropriate motor effects.”

In the case of the alertness of the sailor, and the arising of the lazy-bones, we see the connection between thought and morality.  Thought is that which makes us moral agents at all, both when through focused attention we stick to a task and when through a different sort of focus we change the course of our (in)activity.

"The idea to be consented to must be kept from flickering and going out."