Man is what he hides

« Pour l'essentiel, l'homme est ce qu'il cache ... Un miserable petit tas de secrets. » - André Malraux, Les Noyers de l'Altenburg.

"Fundamentally, man is what he hides ... A wretched little pile of secrets."

So it is up to the historian, the psychiatrist or the detective biographer to piece together the story.

Maths - the branch of physics where the experiments are cheap

With news of NASA cancelling LISA only a few months after FermiLab announced it will be turning off the Tevatron, one is tempted to feel a new Dark Ages may be approaching. But perhaps a renaissance of mathematics will be dawning. The mathematician Vladimir Arnold once said "Математика — часть физика — экспериментальчая, естественная наука, частьестествознания. Математика — это та часть физики, в которой эксперименты дешевы."

Translated, this reads "Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap."

Too much food ?

«'On cite souvent, pour en rire, Schopenhauer qui faisait l'éloge du sui- cide devant une table bien garnie.» - Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942)

"Schopenhauer is often cited as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table."

«В сущности же, эта моя любовь была произведением, с одной стороны, деятельности мамаши и портних, с другой - избытка поглощавшейся мной пищи при праздной жизни» - Lev Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata.

"In actual fact, this love of mine was the product of on the one hand, the efforts of the girl's mother and dress-makers, and on the other, of the excessive quantities of food I had consumed during a life of idleness"

The Lord's Tokens

I notice that in the section of the Java Language Specification devoted to tokens the following line's from Love's Labour's Lost are quoted.

These lords are visited; you are not free,
For the Lord's tokens on you do I see.

The quotation seems a bit weird and obscure in isolation, particularly if one doesn't realize that the "Lord's tokens" referred to the black coin-shaped patches on the skin that signalled infection with the plague.

Yet I have a trick
Of the old rage: bear with me, I am sick;
I'll leave it by degrees. Soft, let us see:
Write, 'Lord have mercy on us' on those three;
They are infected; in their hearts it lies;
They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes;
These lords are visited; you are not free,
For the Lord's tokens on you do I see.

The word "token" derives from the Old English tæcean, to show, from which we more directly get the word "teach".

In a recent London Review of Books article, James Shapiro points out "It’s hard to decide what’s more disturbing about the exchange: the casual joking about spotting ‘the Lord’s tokens’ on her skin – as close to a death warrant as you could get – or the joke about inscribing the warning ‘Lord have mercy on me’ on the infected."

Starting with the shape

I've started reading Hilary Menos's début collection Berg and the first line of the first poem struck me.

I want to write you a small square poem

I think this captures something fundamental about artistic creation ... the initial impetus for a new poem or a new piece of music might be simply some vague notion of the form or shape you want to create ... a sonnet, an unrhymed epigram, a piano sonata, a waltz, or an étude.

Cheated out of our understandings

Ward Farnsworth gives as one of his examples of conduplicatio this extract from Webster's Senate speech against President Andrew Jackson's removal of the deposits from the Bank of the United States: "Sir, I pronounce the author of such sentiments to be guilty of attempting a detestable fraud on the community; a double fraud; a fraud which is to cheat men out of their property, and out of the earnings of their labor, by first cheating them out of their understandings."

The corporate world seems often to operate on the basis of this species of fraud, and the principal tool employed to cheat managers and governance committees of their understandings is the Powerpoint presentation, and the major culprit is the mode of thought engendered by bullet points. Richard Feynman noticed this when he participated in the investigation of the Challenger space shuttle accident.

"Then we learned about “bullets” – little black circles in front of phrases that were supposed to summarize things. There was one after another of these little goddamn bullets in our briefing books and on the slides."

Webster went on express his faith that his fellow citizens would never sink to being deluded by abominable frauds and so far cease to be men ... "Sir, it shall not be till the last moment of my existence - it shall be only when I am drawn to the verge of oblivion - hen I shall cease to have respect or affection for any thing on earth - that I will believe the people of the United States capable of being effectually deluded, cajoled, and driven about in herds, by such abominable frauds as this. If they shall sink to that point - if they so far cease to be men - thinking men, intelligent men - as to yield to such pretences and such clamour, they will be slaves already; slaves to their own passions - slaves to the fraud and knavery of pretended friends. They will deserve to be blotted out of all the records of freedom; they ought not to dishonour the cause of republican liberty, if they are capable of being the victims of artifices so shallow - of tricks so stale, so threadbare, so often practised, so much worn out, on serfs and slaves."

And yet the shallow artifices seem to flourish and thrive, and what is more: generate substantial revenue.

Moreau exhibition

I've just been to the Moreau exhibition at NGV. Parallels with Cavafy struck me: a somewhat reclusive person who had a deep fascination with sexuality, and who found a way to express the personal relevance of classical stories through distinctive reworkings. The Symbolist common ground with Vrubel was immediately apparent. The blurred violence of one picture of a decpaitated John the Baptist looked like something from Francis Bacon.