Category: Lit

Subtitle: Every Chink in Our Understanding of the Universe is Undeniable Proof of the Monad

Beyond Biocentrism takes a few mysteries of modern physics — like quantum superposition, and its staggering dependence on the experimenter’s observation to determine reality — and expounds them into a theory that all creation exists as a product of mind: that our conscious observation of a thing is all that creates it, that mind itself is the stuff of the universe.

Time, the book states, is not real. Since relativity, we’ve known that different observers experience time differently depending on their relative speed and the force of gravity acting on them. Time moves measurably faster in the mountains that at sea level. Intuitively, we might suppose that time merely vacillates intermittently around some objective yardstick — that there is a “real” time somewhere unifying all its observers. But no such yardstick exists. Without an objective measure, time itself doesn’t properly exist.

Space is a bit dodgy as well. Since the discovery of quantum entanglement — spooky action at a distance between quantum particles — we’ve had to revisit the basic presumption that objects can only interact when they are proximate. But with quantum entanglement unifying the behavior of particles light years apart, we must revisit our assumptions about what space itself is.

Causality is a bit suspect as well. Since the presence of the observer itself can completely alter how quantum particles behave, we have to conclude that something about consciousness is messing with the basic gears of reality.

A tantalizing entree. What is the main course? Why, the pat assertion that obviously, the only conclusion left in the face of such doubts is that the universe is entirely a fabrication of one infinite, timeless consciousness. Thank you. We would talk about how to better prove this model in the future, but the future does not properly exist.

Beyond Biocentrism takes a few of the ineffable mysteries of modern physics and uses them, with ample latitude and disappointing self-assurance, to justify that the stuff of the universe is mind itself. There’s a kernel of an idea in there that’s quite offputtingly gilded.

One Thing I Learned: Moonwalking with Einstein

Josh Foer’s investi-memoir about the world memory circuit, Moonwalking with Einstein, offers a few intriguing insights into how the mind works into its quick tour – a year in the life of a journalist who decides to give mental athletics a try, and surprises himself at how practical the mechanics of extreme memory are – and raises a few more possibilities that linger with me.

The core insight of the book is that memory is a function of how sticky an idea is to our human brains, or how sticky we make it. This might mean that if we want to recall something that the brain is naturally poor at – numbers, e.g. – we might try to associate that information with something the brain is uncannily good at – spatial recall being the biggest classic example. Hence, the “memory palace” is a physical space that one might mentally revisit, and try to code other information into what the brain already finds sticky in spatial terms. One mentally fills the rooms of one’s childhood home with those things that we don’t want to forget, and upon revisiting that space mentally, we find that the associations we’ve made between the childhood bedroom and the data in question is much stickier than the data in question would be on its own. Likewise, if we can manipulate the data, or code it, to resemble something much stickier to the mammalian brain – arrange that string of digits into some kind of lewd sex act, e.g. – we find that, however absurdly constructed the association is, it returns to us.

[The second principle on which memory arts functions is chunking – that is, creatively assembling several pieces of data into a single datum, allowing us to store more and more inside what feels like a small number of things to remember. If, e.g., I ask you to remember the digit string 7-1-0-2, you can probably do that with some small attention. If I reverse those digits, though, and tell you to remember the year 2017, it’s a much simpler task.]

There is a recurrent theme about synaesthesia in the text that I find fascinating and unfathomed. A number of famous natural mnemonists describe their synaesthetic experiences – intuitively associating one sense with another, drawing relations between numbers and colors, colors and smells, smells and time. Those associations, in principle, starkly resemble what the trained mnemonist tries to manufacture – laboriously constructing associations between places and things, sounds and images, personages and concepts – so that the desired information has a web of mental associations constructed around it that would allow the multipolar mind to grasp it in some sixteen different ways.

This, to me, seems to resemble how all intelligence functions: by a thick bedding of associations, we integrate every dimension of a thing, some of which dimensions are just sticky enough for us to remember, and which lead eventually to the whole network. It is a rich attention that finds thirty different intuitive associations with the Habsburg monarchy, even if several of them are poetic nonsense. It is the densification of associative logic that allows one to reach insights across disciplines. The more interconnected our concepts, the more creatively we can deploy them.

Which brings me to generative AI, seeing as that’s on everyone’s minds these days. Like many, I’ve tinkered with the newest toys from OpenAI trying to find how they’re useful or threatening. And like many writers, it’s become apparent to me that generative AI is not currently in the running to be even a poor fiction writer. That might be intuitive when we consider how generative AI is constructed: it functions on algorithms that are trained to find the most probable construction of language and ideas in any context. That is, it takes gajillions of pieces of training data, and sifting between them, finds the most well-tread, overdone, tiresome path leading out of any possible prompt. It should be no surprise that generative AI is not yet capable of writing prose that entertains, because entertaining prose is not very probable. In response to any series of prompts, the chatbot still returns the most technically proficient, wooden, tiring recitation possible, by design. Its imagination is blinkered at every turn by what seems likelier: the prosaic or the magical.

Which leads me to an interesting query: if we want to train the next generative AI to be truly creative, should we not be systematically strengthening its associations between unlike concepts, disparate disciplines, the weird and the prosaic? And if we were to do so with deliberate intent over many probably nonsensical intermediate versions of the beast, might it not just learn to mimic a human imagination, but suggest to us things that we would tire long before imagining?

Though this technology, seemingly for now, rests in the hands of a technocratic class trying to maximize its profit potential, it would be very, very timely for artists to start trying to understand how they might lend their understanding of imaginative processes – the types of associations it thrives on and how they are selected for – to its development.

There’s this beautiful turn, about 80% through Nabokov’s Ada, where the lovers are separated, after coming tantalizingly close to reunion. This time, it will take them 17 years to find each other again. They will be past fifty. They will have lost many of their qualities. In the meanwhile, one of them will write a treatise on the texture of time.

Time compresses beautifully in Ada – the first snatches of love at 12 and 14 occupy whole chapters. As the mind ages, time speeds up. One’s thirties pass in a single section. The last few decades go in as many pages.

That turn, though, just after the lovers withdraw again, is so lovely and dense with avoidance. We launch into our protagonist’s treatise. We contemplate the fabric of time for pages on end, and whether and how it is bound up in space, and infer backwards from what it does to what it is made of. When we open our eyes again, seventeen years are gone. The loved one is returned, a little less than what she was.

The metaphysical questions give the human heart its weight, Ada insists to me. The pain of absence is more than a person’s qualia – the absence itself is probative of some mystery of the human condition. I love you, by which I mean to say, you are a marker that fathoms the depth of my own mortality. Or: I stitch my heart to yours to ascertain something about the heart itself — whether it is one or many. And all our little dramas are different shadows of a larger question, standing between us and the sun. When a character becomes conscious of what their drama means, they grow a little divine.

Some thoughts on Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching –

Oyeyemi, as a stylist, is rich and restrained in fine balance. She lets, it appears to me, each emotion of the book take a metaphorical shape, become a surprising object, motion, surrealist spasm. Her prose is otherwise confident and restrained. There’s shy humor and wit, especially about growing up. There’s an exciting willingness to play with perspectives.

Oyeyemi, as a structuralist, is doing things that I’m surprised she was able to get past a publisher. The antagonistic force that drives the novel (Ghost(s)? Curse(s)? Historical trauma? Racism?) is perceived differently by different characters, including the voice of the family home itself, which speaks to fill in the history past our other characters’  memory. With multiple contradictory and incomplete accounts, further muddied by the poetics of the style, the book challenges the reader to piece together a version of the story that explains the evil that haunts its protagonist, without ever truly resolving it. The book begins with a series of questions and conflicting responses. It ends in refrain.

Which means that Witching, as a story, is a little too incoherent for my tastes. I am certainly allured by the style and the structural gambit. But my investment in the core conflict of the story is hobbled by not knowing what the core conflict is. It’s not until halfway through the text that I resolve that there will not be a discrete conflict that I can invest with emotional force. At that point, I can have a little more fun reading between the lines to pick at the theories Oyeyemi is setting up for us – it could be a malignancy brought out by an ancient witch and/or how that malignancy bent future generations of women to commit haunting crimes and/or something inherent in the property itself and/or the racist attitudes of certain ancestors but none of them suffice for really defining the stakes of the story. I am left ultimately ambivalent. I am not entirely unsure that wasn’t the goal.

A good surrealist/magical conflict can pit two moral forces against each other that couldn’t otherwise collide in a literalist world. A discrete past trauma haunts the present in Beloved, e.g. But our engagement in the story requires us to buy in to what those moral forces are – what is really represented by the haunting/cursing/sickness/etc. Without that clarity, the conflict is hollow.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the gambit. But I think it’s the kind of book you might enjoy better on a second reading than a first, knowing that your reading depends on you deconstructing the text and making something of it.

Although (obviously) white middle aged American writer protagonists with a fetish for Shakespeare should be a red flag that I’m being pandered to, I have to admit that Arthur Phillips’ The Tragedy of Arthur is the book I’ve inhaled the most defenselessly this year.

The premise of the text is simple: A lost work of Shakespeare has been discovered. The book in your hands is the first publication of the play. The introduction to the play (all 200-some pages of it, contractually obliged) is the confessional family story of the man who sold it to the publisher, and who now (for reasons endemic to the story) believes it to be a forgery by his long-time grifter father.

The narrative voice is charming, self-doubting, furiously introspective and confused enough to serve both plot and character. The family drama unveiled through the “Introduction” is a tensile triangle of love, distrust, hurt, yearning. (And though the ending is a bit weak, I can’t help but read it and think of the narrator earlier apologizing for Shakespeare himself, whose endings were always the weakest parts of his plays).

The play at the end is convincing to a lay eye as a plausible lost work of Shakespeare (I read the whole thing searching for the obvious error, speculated earlier by the doubting narrator, that would give the lie to the whole thing [my best nominee, the word “Dad”? – though it predates the publication of the play in the OED, it appears nowhere else in Shakespeare per my Ctrl+F’ing and would be an obvious poetic device]). Moreover, the debate between footnoters and the resonance of some parts of the play (generously to the careful reader, some parts that even go uncommented on by the commentators) with the family drama that precedes it gives the reader more dimensions to look at the work from. And it’s rare to find such a dimensionality in a popular novel.

The meta-textual engagement, interpreting everything in the story through Shakespeare in order to finally interpret “Shakespeare” back insofar as his imputed work determines their own story – expertly balanced. The trick of the novel – the existence of an unpublished play that may or may not be their father’s forgery – is accomplished with just enough steady aplomb and just enough showy exhibitionism to make you believe alternately that this could really happen – that a man could know everything about the Bard and his time and textual forensics and fool the world (and Arthur Phillips, the novelist, makes a winking case to the reader that it would be him), or else a son could be so convinced of his father’s conniving that he’d be incapable of seeing what the rest of the earth has discovered, a literary miracle. My ambivalence at the end of the text about the authorship question is exactly what the author wants to achieve, I imagine – and I am suggestible, therefore, to all his philosophical questions about the value of authorship itself, insofar as it determines how we relate to a work.

It’s a book I’m sad to have to give back to a library. It’s a book I think I might like to return to for a second reading someday.

Because you can’t critique a memoir for its themes and structures like you can a piece of fiction, I’ll be brief.

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is everything that they say it is – a luxuriant time spent in his always stylistically provocative and dense voice, a beautiful meditation on the act of remembering, an insightful portrait at turns into the collapse of the Russian bourgeois with the rise of Communism, and a handful of bright insights into the writing process, which gather speed as his subject comes to intellectual maturity.

***

A few choice quotes –

On his butterflies:

“And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

And the study of them:

“ … what loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light – translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little world of hushed luminous hues! In later years, I rediscovered the same precise and silent beauty at the radiant bottom of a microscope’s magic shaft. In the glass of the slide, meant for projection, a landscape was reduced, and this fired one’s fancy; under the microscope, an insect’s organ was magnified for cool study. There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.”

On his first literary attempt:

“A moment later my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief – the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say ‘patter’ intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.”

On his chess problems:

“It is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and when the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament. The bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that knight is a level adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise. How often I have struggled to bind the terrible force of White’s queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world) …. ”

***

One note, on suspicious omissions that say more than the author may intend.

Sergey Nabokov, his brother nearest in age, receives two pages in the text (paling beside certain arousing leaves, sunsets, butterflies, or literary critics), which begins with a half-apology (“for various reasons I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother”), a careless excuse about their lack of shared interests growing up, the peculiar anecdote that Sergey was obsessed with Napoleon as a child and took a bust of the French leader to bed with him, followed by a very discreet allusion to his homosexuality (“a page from his diary that … provided a retroactive clarification of certain oddities of behavior on his part”), a factual relation on how they later lived near to each other in Paris, on amiable terms, but how Vladimir did not tell him he was moving to America until he had disappeared, sometime after which Sergey died in a Nazi concentration camp.

It is two pages of such dense avoidance and double-speak that Nabokov could not have designed it better were he writing a character.

It is no wonder that Vladimir’s admirers go on to speculate that Sergey played an outsized role in the writer’s subconscious, attributing an obsessive shame and avoidance of the brother that undergirded Vladimir’s sexual imagination – disputed by Vladimir’s children, argued for the cheap thrill of a Freudian interpretation by scholars (and did you notice how often Nabokov scorns Freud, particularly, in this text? Out of no convenient context? The writer doth protest too much, methinks!), even inspiring a novelization.

The introverted, myopic genius is on full-flowering display, and it seems generous to call it fully self-aware – not just with Sergey, but in the avoidance of any mention of his wife (which absence he only listlessly accounts for in addressing the book to her), who is an assumed figure taking his child for walks or boarding the boat with him for America. Vera herself cries for a voice, which biographers and historians have been trying to give her ever since, too.

It does make one wonder at the depth of voiceless that must be paved over to grant the writer his own.