A Memoir (World War II)

 Planes glide through the air like fish

     Before I knew why airplanes stayed up, I thought they glided through the air like fish through water. Later I found out it wasn’t like that at all, a fish can’t fall to the bottom of the lake because it has a pocket of air inside it, but a plane stays up because it moves. Sharks don’t have a pocket of air, they must keep moving or they will fall to the bottom like an airplane falling from the sky.
     We lived by a lake, whose clear water revealed the bottom six or more feet down. The fish were dark slashes against the grey green silt, or a swift gleam of silver as they turned. In the mornings and evenings, the fishers went out on the lake to set and fetch their nets.
     The fishers stood up in a long flat bottomed boat, leaning and straightening as they pumped the square-bladed oar, he tall and stooped in the stern, she short and round in the bow. They’re shovelling water, I thought, I didn’t understand how that could move the boat forward. The fishers stuck the small fish onto pine splints which they ranged in the smoke house chimney. The smoked fish tasted salt and sweet at the same time when one gnawed them off the wood.
     I watched the fishers mend nets, watched their hands and fingers move out and back with a twist as they fed and knotted the line with a flat, narrow piece of wood. I didn’t see how the line could make a knot with only one end free. The nets hung on frames made of pine poles, moving in the wind like waves on the water, bleached white and soft by the sun.
     Many years later, in another country, I learned Bernoulli’s equations and Boyle’s law, and understood how air moving over the wing made the wing lift the plane. For a few weeks I understood the equations that defined drag and turbulence, too. Now I understand only their meaning, a lovely interplay of velocity, pressure and viscosity, with which the airplane designer and pilot co-operate.
     I learned a lot of other things too, I understood the engineer’s and metal worker’s craft, their exquisite skill lavished on the bombers that glided through the sky, making death beautiful and distant.
     The bombers looked like fish against the sky, gleaming silver, but not like fish, sliding across the blue air, steady and inexorable, and making a sound you felt in your bones, a sound that struck across the sky and flowed into the earth and came up through your feet and made your teeth buzz. Then black flowers bloomed on the horizon where the railway junction was. Many years later I saw pictures of black chrysanthemums, they bloomed like smoke against a blue sky. My friend’s mother died among the roots of one of those flowers, but that was before he was my friend, before we even knew of each other’s existence.
     One day a plane came in low over our house, and fell into the lake, trailing a black and orange flag that stretched out behind it, longer and longer as the plane fell towards the water. My mother said my brother could see the pilot’s face, I must have seen it too as I stood next to my brother, but he can remember it and I can’t, I wonder if that’s why he hides his melancholy. I hide mine too, but not in the same way, he bursts out in sudden attacks of craziness, roaring like a monster, pretending to be Grendel, or the giant that ate an Englishman and ground his bones for bread. My Grandpa read us that story, I loved the bits where Jack steals the gold and the hen and the harp, and runs to the beanstalk along the winding cloudy road. The harp betrayed the thief, an early lesson on the deviousness of artists.
     I tell people I’m fine, when they ask. I ask them, too, and they tell me they are fine. We tell each other we are fine, making up a fine story about how fine the world is, and what a fine time we are having this fine afternoon, while we eat a fine meal made on a fine barbecue in a fine garden owned by a fine neighbourly neighbour.
     For several weeks, I understood the equations that explained airplanes, then we wrote a test and I forgot them. I didn’t forget what they explained. Whenever I look at a plane I see the air flow over its wings, faster on top and slower underneath, holding up the plane, a plane that weighs more than the largest steam locomotive ever built, and as the jet climbs into the sky like a man going up a flight of stairs, I know that if the air peels off the wings in unseen swirls and whirlpools, the plane will crash, but we won’t make a white splash in the water because there’s no lake under us, just grass and asphalt. A black and orange flower will bloom in the field at the end of the runway.
     When the fishers pump the oar, eddies and swirls peel off it and press against the blade, and that presses the boat forward. What brings down the plane moves the boat. Nature has her ways, if you work with her, she rewards you with flying planes and gliding boats.
     My cousin and I used to go into the park next to our house. The oaks and beeches and maples and pines and firs and sycamores made it a quiet place, the only sounds the rustle of the leaves high above us and the scuff of our feet in the duff. We thought of it as a secret place, known only to us, a source of treasure, a landscape of adventure. Once we saw the wreck of an airplane caught high in the branches of the trees. We took one of the transformers that had come loose and fallen to the ground, and for a long time after we had fine copper wire to play with, varnished a rich mahogany red. My cousin told me we could make snares and catch fish, or make electrical stuff, if we wanted. Just thinking about the possibilities hidden in the coils of fine, dark red wire was enough, it made us happy. We hid the transformer in the gazebo and took it out to relish the technical perfection of its windings, fine as hair.
     A day or two after we found the transformer we were forbidden to go into the park, a prohibition we could not understand until we heard talk among the grownups about the dead pilot of the airplane hanging in the branches of the sycamore tree. We waited for our chance and crept back into the park but the wreck had been removed. As usual, the grownups had spoiled our fun, but we were used to it, and went about our business.
     When it rained, the snails came out of the underbrush, their shells banded yellow and black and sometimes orange. The shells gleamed in the wet. I gathered up the snails and set them on the pine-log railing of the gazebo and waited for them to race each other. The snails came out from their shells, waving their antennae, testing the air for danger. They crawled over the curve of the railing and fell into the grass and disappeared.
     One day the sirens moaned while I was building forts and jetties with the rocks at the edge of the water. I ran up the slope to the road, a cyclist rushing home knocked me over. The wheels of his bike scraped my bare belly, there was no other injury. My mother dressed us in two layers of underwear, and two layers of overcoats, the topmost one made from a bright red blanket. We must have looked like little red snowmen. The woollen vest itched, I cried with vexation in the cellar. We heard the bombers fly over, they seemed closer this time, perhaps the cellar magnified their sound, it came out of the ceiling and the floor and the walls. When the bombs hit the railway yards, we felt the thump, and a small cloud of dust drifted down from the ceiling. The lights flickered and went out. One of the grownups lit a candle, the light made a boundary around us like a wall. We huddled up next to Mother, and felt secure. But the vest still itched.
     When I hear sirens in a war movie these days, something grabs my throat and squeezes tears from my eyes.
     I visited the lake again recently. The mountains that stood on the opposite shore still stand there, self-sufficient and silent. High above them, a con trail divides the sky. I can’t see the plane, but I know it glides through the air like a fish glides through water.

Mice in the Beer (Ward, 1960)

 Norman Ward. Mice In the Beer (1960. Reprinted 1986) Ward, like Stephen Leacock, was an economics and political science professor, Leacock at McGill, and Ward at U of Saskatchewan. Like Leacock’s, Ward’s humour is witty and sly. Like Leacock, he cultivates an naive avuncular persona, so one lets down one’s guard. Then they slide in the rapier and skewer the target. For example:
     I have no particular reason to be prejudiced against goats and monkeys, for my first hand contacts with them have been limited to those in a life limited spent largely among politicians and university  professors...
     You can see, I hope, why Ward is my kind of humourist. My copy, a Christmas gift some years ago, is a reprint by the Western Producer, a weekly published in Saskatchewan to provide information, instruction and amusement to farmers and their families. Sometime in the 1970s or 80s, they began a program of reprinting books relevant to the Western Provinces. Ward received the Leacock Medal for Humour in 1961.

      About the title: Ward was delivering empty bottles to the local bottle depot. The gentleman who received his offerings mentioned that he found a lot of mice in the empty beer bottles. It seems they crawled in to enjoy the leftover dribbles left  They avoided wine, however, perhaps because stale wine sours.

     Recommended. ****

Losers that Win: Morley Callghan Stores

 Morley Callaghan. The Lost and Found Stories (1985) A conversation between Morley Callaghan and his son Barry led to the discovery of a box of manuscripts “up there with the bills.” Callaghan apparently dumped all his bills into a box. I don’t know how he settled his debts. Barry sorted through the manuscripts and selected 26. My copy is a reprint.
I enjoyed these tales in an often gloomy kind of way. Callaghan worked as a reporter, so he saw a lot of losers. Most news is about someone messing up. I think this enabled him to imagine stories about ordinary people.
     The characters in these stories achieve at least a kind of insight, and often slightly larger victories, such as mended relationships, or escapes from the life-destroying consequences of a more or less unwittingly bad decision. Callaghan writes a plain style, reporting rather than telling the tale. Only his assumption of omniscience raises these tales above news reports. Not that any of them would qualify as printable news. The fates of ordinary people facing everyday dilemmas aren’t exciting enough for newsprint.
     It’s Callaghan’s insight into how people feel and think that makes these stories worth reading. That, and Callaghan’s generally amiably charitable attitude towards the failings of his fellow humans. Underneath that attitude there’s what I now think is a typically Canadian ruthlessness of observation. Like Munro, Govier and others, Callaghan doesn’t try to make his characters nice people.
     Recommended. ***

Visual and other illusions

 

 Visual illusions vary. Some can be controlled. For example, I find that once I’ve seen both images in a dual-image illusion, I can see either one at will. The two faces vs vase is an example. Of course, I can’t see both images at once: The brain computes the image either as a white one on a black ground, or a black one on a white ground. Hence the illusion.

Others are a trickier, for example the Necker cube illusion. I can trigger the flip, but not entirely at will. I have to blink, so that the brain sees a new input, which will usually be computed the way I want it.

Others are impossible avoid, for example the staggered tiles illusion. The only way to see the horizontal lines as truly horizontal is to cover all expect the top row of tiles. There is no way to control this illusion.

Many more visual illusions have been discovered in the last 50 years or so, when neurologists began to wonder why and how they happened. One of the most startling is that colour is always perceived as an illusion. The range of colours in a scene, the distribution of light and shadow, the colours in the light source, the colours of neighbouring regions, all these determine what the brain will compute as the “real” colours.

It’s now known that we suffer illusions in all our senses. The general principle is that the brain computes our perceptions from the limited data provided by our sensory systems. Some of these computations produce illusions: false or mistaken perceptions. We cannot escape them. At best we can question them. By comparing the inputs from different senses, we can usually recognise hallucinations. Memories can also help do this, but are less reliable. 

Knowledge (gleaned from observation and experiment critiqued and organised with reason) can reveal the reality that the brain miscalculates or fails to perceive at all. But this process is not easy, and above all, it’s slow. It takes patience, experience, and understanding of sometimes opaque methodologies to apprehend the reality beyond the illusion. That reality cannot be perceived, but usually there are procedures to calculate perceivable effects. When these are confirmed by observation, we say that we are now a step closer to the “underlying reality.” The name for the knowledge thus generated is “theories”. 

What’s true of the senses is also true of conceptualisation. A concept is a pattern. We suffer from conceptual illusions just as we suffer visual ones. I think the most pervasive one is that these abstract patterns we call theories are closer to the “underlying reality” that our senses so inconveniently misrepresent or hide from us.

New Blog: Kirkwood Tales

I've created a new blog for my stories etc. It's called Kirkwood Tales  The Page Stories  and Other Fictions on this blog will be transferred to the new blog.

New Blog: Meditations

I've decided to move all my sermons to a new blog. Its name is Kirkwood-Meditations. I hope it will be helpful and interesting.

Four ordinary people: Quartet in Atumn (Barbara Pym)

Barbara Pym. Quartet in Autumn (1977) Pym seems to be a nice lady who tells stories of nice and not so nice people of little consequence. That niceness hides a sharp and ruthless intelligence that sees and understands how people fail to live as fully as they may wish. Here, three of four single people who work together realise they may have rather more consequential ties than they have believed. The catalyst for this insight is the death by self-starvation of Marcia, one of the two women who’ve retired. Letty’s the other one. Norman and Edwin remain behind and when they retire, their department will cease to exist.

     The tone is calm and low-key. The four people’s characters emerge slowly from the apparently unimportant details of their apparently unimportant lives. Their links to the larger world threaten to break, but remain because of events they don’t and couldn’t control.

     It’s Pym’s strength that she makes you wonder and eventually care for these people who’ve worked all their lives at tasks (never described) whose importance to the company has long since been forgotten. Pym’s calm and matter-of-fact tone disguises a sharp insight into the unintentional cruelties inflicted on harmless people both by their circumstances and by each other. These are people who’ve let life pass them by. In the end, they’ve endured. That may be as close to a victory as they are capable of achieving.

     The questions is, have we, the readers, any better claim to success in our lives? Pym manages to insinuate at least the nagging ghost of that unwelcome question. 

     Recommended. ***

I'm an old man now (A poem)

 A Poem

I’m an old man now.
The weight of my memories
bears down on my days.
The truck there carries freight,
I carry my thoughts.
They pool like a lake.
The wind fractures the past.

The news showed a broken building
sliding into the street like water.
Gravity pulls the water over the edge;
a missile nudged the wall into silence.

I don’t hear much these days, cunning devices
in my ears catch the sound as it passes,
add and subtract. The words gleam
like crystals. But it’s not the light
of insight that dazzles.
The years have carried me
past too much indifference.

I’m granted nonsense,
cool and joyful, foam on the lake,
nudged by the wind
towards the silent stony shore.

I hold the coffee cup
and gaze at the garden.
Daylilies gleam like words.
They will fade before nightfall.
They will not know the dark.

2023-06-23 & 08-04/2024-03-21

 © W. Kirchmeir

The Cure For All Diseases (Reginald Hill, 2008)

 Reginald Hill. The Cure For All Diseases. (2008) Dalziel is recuperating at Sandytown from a near-lethal injury. The local patroness of the healing arts has teamed up with the local promoter of holistic healing to create a health-spa that will rejuvenate the town’s economy and add a considerable chunk to the patroness’s not inconsiderable fortune. She’s had two husbands, and is working on acquiring a third. Unfortunately, she’s murdered and rather grotesquely encaged in a contraption designed to roast the pig that’s the center piece of a commemoration of her first husband’s source of wealth. That’s not the only grotesquerie, but you’ll have to read the book yourself to find out who dun what to whom and what for.
      Another nicely plotted, wonderfully convoluted and narrated police procedural. Hill has taken Austen as his inspiration this time, labelling the book’s sections as “volumes”, and basing the cast loosely on Austen’s Sanditon. Pascoe is in charge while his boss recuperates, Wield steadies his new boss as skilfully as he’s steadied Dalziel. An assortment of Yorkshire eccentrics (are there any other kind?) tangle and untangle their relationships and the skein of clues that eventually lead to a satisfying solution. Recommended. ****

There's No History Here (poem)

There’s No History Here
Above Kama Bay

This country has no history,
they say.

Then what’s that breathing there?

There are no stories told
more than a generation old.

Musty papers in old libraries,
read by odd fellows
who believe they can rebuild the past.

Frail quilts stored on high dusty shelves,
brought out into bright air
and fingered by old women,
as they tell who pieced the patchwork,
who ran the needle through the batt,
made arcs and whorls that hold
the coverlet together.

These tales made up
of memories, misremembered
names and half-remembered facts –
they don’t make a history,
they say.

Nor do those fragments
of a myth the elders tell.

Oral history’s not history,
they say.

Each teller adds his notions
of what was truly done.
Each teller makes a tale
of what she knows must,
not might, have been.

And if these tales are true enough
(for truth in history’s a guess,
a fiction built on facts),
if then these tales are true,
as any history may be,
that doesn’t signify –
a generation or two back
is as far as memory
and memories of memories may reach.

The land seems empty,
the sound of the truck
working up the hill remote, muted
by the space enfolding it.

The ghosts of those who came before us
do not speak in the wind,
their language does not
echo in the water-filled canyons,
their songs have long since faded
into silent distances.

And yet
        and yet.

Something moves behind me,
touches my neck.
Something like a word,
half heard,
catches my ears.

The heat feels loud as a shout,
the pines’ sweetness hangs
in the sun-stilled air –

There is history here.

There was history here.

What’s left of it –
a few flakes struck from stone
the rusty stain of blood
bleached
by indifferent rain and sun.

©WEK:2005-2020

Murder Being Once Done (Rendell, 1972)

Ruth Rendell. Murder Being Once Done. (1972) A re-read. I also vaguely recall the video version. Dr Crocker has ordered Reg to take a break from work, with a complete change of scene. He and Dora visit Reg’s nephew Howard and his wife Denise in London. Dora and Denise get on very well supervising Reg’s diet and exercise, but Reg is bored.
     Howard happens to be a Detective Superintendent.  He avoids talking shop with his uncle, under the impression that it would excite his heart into sudden failure. A corpse turns up in a graveyard in an insalubrious quarter of London. When Howard finds Reg at the crime scene, obviously intent on finding out what he can, he asks Reg to help him. There follows the typical Rendell plot, with red herrings, errors in judgement and interpretation, with-holding of respectability-damaging evidence, and the final revelation that rearranges everything into a psychologically plausible story.
     Rendell understands the dark places of the human heart, and the fears and jealousies that fester there. Here, she also sketches the cruel effects of pleasure-denying religionism. Recommended. ***½

Remember Me (Weldon 1976)

 Fay Weldon. Remember Me (1976) Madeleine, Jarvis’s ex-wife, wants revenge. She’s obsesses about him and his new wife Lily, who is a self-centred horror. Their circle includes Philip, a doctor (somewhat of a cold fish) and Margot his wife, who once many years ago made love with Jarvis, on the coats stacked in the spare bedroom during a party when Madeleine was still married to him. That’s the setup. Weldon tells their interlaced stories with a mix of universal and character points of view. About halfway through the story, Madeleine dies in car crash, and her ghost hangs around making trouble. Eventually loose ends are nicely knotted, some poetic justice dishes appropriate retribution, loves are rekindled, and ghostly Madeleine rests in peace.

     IOW, this is a romance, but with sharp elbows. Weldon is very good at skewering moral failings, and acute in observing how people avoid painful but healing insights. An enjoyable read that raises questions that most of us need to ask about ourselves and our relationships.
     Recommended. ***

The Present is the Child of the Past: Elizabeth George, A Banquet of Consequences (2015)

 Elizabeth George. A Banquet of Consequences (2015). DS Havers misbehaved in a prior case, and is under threat of transfer to Berwick on Tweed. DCI Lynley has promised to keep her inside the lines. She goes to a lecture by Clare Abbot, a famous feminist who later turns up dead of sodium azide poisoning. An appallingly dysfunctional family swirling around Abbot’s assistant Caroline Goldacres, and the usual bystanders keeping secrets, add to the strain of keeping strictly to the rules, but Havers, Lynley and DS Winston eventually solve the case. Arlo, a charming Personal Aid Dog supplies some sentimental relief. A fairly clued but nevertheless surprising twist at the end upends expectations, but you’ll have to read the book to find out, ‘cuz I’m not telling.
     I borrowed this book from our library after watching the first two episodes in the DCI Lynley TV series. It’s the 19th Lynley book. And it looks like George’s reputation has persuaded her publishers to let her write as much as she wants. The result is a book that’s too long as a crime mystery, and undefined in focus.
     We read dated chapters and sub-headed segments or scenes. Any one of them works very well as character or plot development, but there are simply too many of them. George is excellent at showing self-delusion, and deliberate or unwitting evil. The dialogue is nearly flawless. She understands the conundrums of human relationships, especially when people are unable or unwilling to express unspoken or unadmitted desires and fears. She knows how to use the trivial detail to shift our perceptions of character, to control ambience, and to lay a trail of clues. The book is a pleasure to read.
     This is a novel about a crime, about how it originated and how it affects everyone touched by it. We also learn more about the private and professional lives of Havers and Lynley. The cumulative effect is that of a soap opera, whose characters just happen to caught up in a crime.
     Do I like this book? Well, I’d prefer a more swiftly told tale. On the other hand, the characters are memorable. George can make you care even about the monsters she creates. Every character is damaged in some way. They differ only in their ability to heal from the hurts inflicted on them. Most achieve a resolution of their immediate problems, but they don’t escape into a romantic happy-ever-after fantasy.
     Intriguing enough to make me borrow another Lynley book. As a police procedural, ** As a novel of character, ***

Mini-mysteries: bet you can't read just one (!00 Malicious Little Mystreies, Asimove et al, 1981)

 Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander. 100 Malicious Little Mysteries (1981) A re-read, and just as much fun as the first time. For one thing, I’d forgotten most of the stories, so they felt new. The few that I recognised provided the pleasure of observing how the plot was sprung on the unsuspecting reader. A short-short story works like a joke: it directs attention in one direction, then shows that another direction makes perfect sense. The joke trades on absurdity, the mini-mystery on poetic justice, reversal, and reinterpretation. Asimov’s introduction calls these tales “snacks”, and the trouble with snacks is that it’s hard to stop with just one.

     One of the tales solves the puzzle of Jack the Ripper. Several deal out poetic justice. Several others make a nice distinction between the moral and the criminal law. A good wide range of motifs and themes.

     Recommended. I was thinking about donating my copy to the food bank yard sale, but I’ve decided it’s a keeper. *** to ****

A Disappearance but No Body: Pictures of Perfection (R Hill, 1994)

Reginald Hill. Pictures of Perfection. (1994) A young cop, assigned to the small village of Enscombe to have his officiousness rubbed off, goes missing a few days before the Day of Reckoning, once the day the tenants paid their rents and now an excuse for a party. Ancient traditions crumble, new and old relationships weaken or strengthen as the case may be, people admit secrets to themselves and others, a couple of villains get their poetic comeuppance, and in general there’s a major rearrangement of the village’s social life. Because of the missing PC, Dalziel, Pasco, and Wield are sent to into this vortex of all too human lives. The PC turns up and resigns from the force, and all the other loose ends are nicely tied up. For the moment, it looks like a happily ever after state has been achieved by everyone in the village, but we know it won’t last. Hill didn’t write a follow-up book, so we’ll never know.
     A good read, with Hill experimenting in multiple points of view, including excerpts from several memoirs. Recommended. ***½

Dangerous Rails: Murder on the Railways (Haining, 1996)

  Peter Haining. Murder On The Railways. (1996) An anthology in four themed parts, making a fat book that’s ergonomically awkward. The contents make the bother worthwhile. Haining provides a potted publishing bio for each author, including references to film and video adaptations. Very useful.
     The selections are all very good or better. Railways from the beginning were a romantic as well as a convenient way to travel. A long-distance sleeper train provides a closed setting, a limited cast of suspects, and a limited time to solve the crime. Just right for a detective story.
Trains are also targets for crime. The largest heist ever was a train robbery in the UK in 1963. The thieves took £2.61 million, about £45 million ($77 million) in today’s money.
     Section one deals with crime on the express trains. Section two introduces railway detectives. Section three shows that crime on subways forms a subgenre. The last section extends suburban, mostly domestic, crime to the commuter trains. All in all, a good spread of goodies
     Recommended. *** to ****

Reporter or influencer? (Hillerman, The Fly on the Wall, 1971)

 Tony Hillerman. The Fly On The Wall (1971) My copy is a well-read 1979 paperback reissue of this novel, reprinted about 1982, when The Dark Wind (No. 5 in the Navajo Police series) was published. The hero is John Cotton, political reporter for the afternoon Tribune in Capitol City. MacDaniels, a colleague elated that he’s uncovered a story that will cap his career, dies a few minutes after telling Cotton he‘s looking for his notebook. Cotton finds the notebook (of course), and begins to decipher a story of political corruption. He nearly becomes a murder victim himself, pieces the story together, and goes to see Korolenko, a former State Governor, to tell him what he’s found.
     But if the story is published, a corrupt opportunist will win the next election. Should Cotton withhold the story? Should he publish? Is he really the fly on the wall, seeing all, feeling nothing, utterly objective? Read the book to find out.
     By bibliography dating, this is Hillerman’s second novel. In style and pacing not up to his later standard, it’s still a very good read. The descriptions of political shenanigans and calculations show that politics hasn’t changed much since the 1970s. It’s maybe more openly vicious than it was back then. As a story about journalism, it’s become a historical novel with the ring of truth. Hillerman was a reporter for several years before he became an academic and a novelist. It took me a while to read this book. It’s a must for the Hillerman fan, a good read for anyone who likes crime stories, and a nostalgia-inducing experience for anyone who remembers when newspapers mattered more than any other medium.
     Recommended ***

Unusual Brains: Thomson's Unthinkable (2018)

 Helen Thomson. Unthinkable. (2018) Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat showed that suitably edited case histories could help people understand the effects of stroke and other insults to the brain. His sensitive descriptions, his reports of interviews, his attempts to translate his patients’ accounts into accessible narratives, these and more have inspired generations of readers. One of them was Helen Thomson, who cherishes her interview with him a couple of years or so before he died. This book is in part a result of her admiration for Sacks, coupled with a wide-ranging curiosity, and enough neuroscience background (she has a B.Sc) to make sense of the topic of this book: how people with unusual brains manage to survive and thrive.
     Thomson tells the stories of nine people with congenital or acquired brain oddities. There’s Bob, who never forgets a moment. Or Tommy, whose personality changed utterly when he suffered an aneurysm. Or Sharon, whose sense of location is so bad that she has trouble navigating around her house. Thomson interviewed them all, as well as similar ones that she found along the way, and the scientists and psychiatrists who worked with these extraordinary outliers. The result is a reminder that we are our brains. When our brains don’t function as expected, we become different people. That’s the reason we are afraid of dementia, I think. Dementia shows us that what we think of as the most reliable component of our experience, our sense of self, is in fact the most fragile.
     The book confirms my belief that the brain constructs a simulation of reality with the Self, the “I”, not only at its centre but as the essential component, the part that holds it all together. Our “I” knows itself to be “here”, at the centre (the pathological version of this knowledge we call narcissism). If the connection between Self and some component of the simulation is broken or compromised, then not only the awareness of what’s “out there” is altered, but so is the Self.
     I believe that all brains, human and animal, construct such simulations, every one of them good enough to ensure that most members of a species will live long enough to produce offspring. But all of them incomplete and distorted in some way. The outliers that Thomson describes show the common features of the human simulation of reality. They also show how far from the norm any given simulation can be and still function as a human Self. So in the limited sense of the stable Self thereby implied, the Self is what makes each of us a person.
     Footnote: The Christian creeds assert the “resurrection of the body”, which suggests that one of the innovations of the Christian faith was the insight that a Self without a body is impossible. The Incarnation may be understood as another version of this insight. This insight has been slighted or ignored ever since the notion of a disembodied soul was introduced by Augustine and others..
     Recommended. ****

Math History: The Secret Lives of Numbers (Kitagawa & Revell)

Kate Kitagawa & Timothy Revell. The Secret Lives of Numbers (2003) A history of mathematics taking all currently known mathematical texts into account. The Eurocentric view of mathematical development is shown to be egregiously wrong-headed. Miscellaneous theorems (and some proofs) were discovered or invented in many different places at many different times well before Euclid’s demonstration of the logical coherence of all mathematics. Algorithms for solving trade and other complicated problems ditto. The notation that freed European mathematicians to discover number theory was invented in India, and brought to Europe by Arabs. The need to plan planting and seed-time prompted the study of astronomy, which was perhaps the first science to be mathematised. Either it, or geometry, needed for land surveys. Formal mathematics is at least as old as writing.
     The history of mathematics is not even a winding road; it’s a maze of paths leading in all directions with surprising shortcuts, connections in unexpected places, and backtracking. What’s constant is that whenever possible mathematicians exchanged ideas and knowledge. Powerful rulers recognised the value of mathematics and other knowledge, and sponsored the collection of texts, and their study and collation by the best minds they could attract. And ever and again, barbarians with limited insight into anything beyond their immediate goals of getting treasure and women destroyed those collections. We owe a great debt to the scholars who preserved what knowledge they could and taught their students to do likewise.
     I think that Kitagawa and Revell deprecate Euclid’s achievement. True, pretty well every theorem he proved in his books, and many of the proofs themselves, were known before him. Compilations of all known mathematics were made centuries before him. But he seems to have been the first one to organise all known mathematics into a logical system, in which rules of inference applied to a handful of axioms, carefully defined, would connect all theorems. It is the critique and emulation of his methods that has led to new mathematics.
     I also think that Kitagawa and Revell don’t examine the source of mathematics in ordinary language. As far as I know, it’s possible to express distance, time, size, weight, quantity, similarity and difference, direction, etc, in all human languages. The only variation seems to be in emphasis and detail. Mathematics is the more or less systematic formalisation of these concepts when people found it necessary to do so for some practical purposes involving trade and taxes. (Aside: Where I grew up, distance was expressed as time. A certain relative lived one hour away, for example. That’s an hour’s walk. This may be one reason why I find it easy to accept Einstein’s proposal of a space-time continuum, even though I can’t do the relevant math.)
     A keeper, worth an occasional reread. Breezy style, often cliched, which makes it seem easier to understand the math than it really is. The title is a teaser, possibly intended to attract the unnerdy.***

Drunk or High? (Lapham's Quarterly 06-1, Intoxication)

 LQ 06-1: Intoxication (2013) Not only about alcohol and drugs (though they figure prominently) but also about poisons. For all of our known history, we humans have taken (usually mild) poisons in small doses because they messed up our brains, thus creating an “altered state of consciousness.”  We aren’t the only animals that seek this experience: not only mammals but insects and birds have been observed slurping fermented fruit.
     A wide-ranging selection of first-person reports on the joys of getting drunk or high, praises of the grape and other intoxicants, scoldings for over-indulgence, severe frowning on any kind of intoxicant, etc. But the one question that I would like to see some answer to is hardly touched on: Why do we do it? The evidence suggests that we mostly seek the pleasure drugs provide, and some seek what they believe are transcendental visions of ultimate reality. The hangover or withdrawal are accepted as a (relatively) small price to pay for these treasures.
     Intoxication I think touches on the question of consciousness. The drugs’ effects show that our experience of reality is constructed by the brain. Deflect the brain from normal functioning, and that experience changes. Drugs and alcohol aren’t the only means of doing this, but they are the most reliable. That’s why we seek them out. That’s also why moralists of all stripes condemn them: the easy alteration of the brain’s function shows that the sense of self, the “I”, is a construction of the brain. That implies no independent Self or Soul to transcend this mortal life. It also makes nonsense of the belief that the Self can be somehow “uploaded” into an abiological, possibly electronic, but potentially immortal body (as envisioned by Ray Kurzweil among others).
     The Matrix is real: it resides in three pounds of jelly encased in a bony shell that protects it, mostly. We can mess with the program, and we like doing that. That’s what this collection demonstrates. I’ve been drunk twice in my life, and don’t want to repeat the experience. It’s enough to get a mild buzz, which I can also get without ingesting chemicals. Knowing that my experience of the world around me is not an exact replica is strangely comforting.
     Recommended. ****

Existential Physics (Hossenfelder 2022)

     Sabine Hossenfelder. Existential Physics (2022) Hossenfelder has made a YouTube reputation as a disturber and explainer. Search for her videos; they’re fun and enlightening. She believes that modern physics is in crisis because it claims more insight and understanding than is warranted by experiment and observation, especially when it comes to dark matter and energy. The theories, the sets of interlocking equations, describe what’s measured, but for consistency’s sake, theorists have added entities that haven’t been observed to interact with the entities that we know about. In her Warning, she says, “Science has limits, and yet humanity has always sought meaning beyond those limits.” Quite so.
     Then Hossenfelder goes on to show how science can inform some of the answers to the questions that exceed the limits of science. Science can clarify and disambiguate some of those questions. For example, do we have free will? The scientific answer (summarised) is: “No, if by free will you mean the ability to choose without being subject to the laws of physics.”

     For choosing is a brain-function, and brains function according the laws of physics. This fact has funked recent philosophers, who see no way out of the answer. But there is one: when we deliberately choose we figure alternatives, and weigh their desirability. We may choose differently than we chose in the past or will choose in the future. We will often choose differently than others choose. Thus, while our choices may not be freely willed, neither are they automatic. We aren’t automatons; we are agents. But we can’t choose without preferring one alternative to the others. Since our preferences are shaped by our genetics and our experience, in that sense, the choice is not “free”. However, we can choose to change our preferences. Odd, that. Is the choice to change our preference free or not? At the neurological level, I think no. At the psychological level, I think yes. And then there's  the spoiler question: How would you distinguish between free and determined choice?
     Hossenfelder does fall into what I think is the common philosophical error of physicists: She believes that physics reveals reality as it really is. Or at least that it is closer to doing so than the messier, less abstract sciences such as chemistry, biology, psychology, and so on. She reminds us that every "emergent property" that biology describes can be explained by chemistry and physics, and that everything that chemistry describes can be explained by physics. Neurology is solving some of the puzzles of psychology by showing how brain function varies with different behaviours, and emotions. Or at least suggesting how to reframe the puzzles.
     In short, she says, no so-called “emergent” phenomenon has (so far) been found to be inexplicable by the lower level from it which supposedly emerged. AFAIK, she’s right. But since the more abstract theories are derived from and explain the less abstract ones, that’s not, I think, a surprise.
     As I see it, physics describes the structure of reality. Einstein’s space-time makes this absolutely clear: What we observe depends on where in space-time we are relative to other entities, and how we are moving relative to other entities. General relativity (GR) describes how one observer’s worldview (measurements) is precisely transformable into another observer’s worldview: a clock runs fast from one POV, runs slow from another, and we can calculate exactly how much the measurements differ. (These calculations are necessary for GPS systems to function.)
     Quantum mechanics (QM) shows that what we observe depends on the event’s context: Electrons behave like particles in some contexts, and like waves in others. Or better, wave equations describe some electron behaviours, and particle equations describe others. None describe electrons. And those equations are the best descriptions we have, so far. There are probably better ones “out there”, and maybe they’ll be discovered. But not in my lifetime, I think. Bummer.

     The fact that GR and QM cannot (at present) be reconciled should not surprise us either, I think. Both are highly abstract descriptions of what’s common and different in our perceptions of reality. Our experience of reality is a simulation created by our brains. We can compare each other’s perceptions, and note whether we perceive the same differences and similarities. That’s the beginning of science, and it’s already at least one level of abstraction away from the simulation which is our experience of the world around us. But that simulation is itself an abstraction, constructed (computed?) by our brains. It’s sufficiently accurate that we can navigate the world, get our food, find our mates, etc. It must be structurally similar to reality, else we could not survive. It may make sense to say that the topology of our experience (the simulation) must be similar enough to the topology of reality to enable our survival. I don’t know enough about topology or brain function to be able to say. I also haven’t a clue how the brain’s simulation becomes what “I” experience. I suspect it’s because “I” is part of the simulation, probably the essential part, but how would one test that notion?
     I enjoyed this book, because (as the above may show) it prompted rethinking many of my ideas. I will read it again. Hossenfelder is an excellent explainer.
     Recommended. ****

Magic Shows (Lapham's Quartely 05-3 2012)

 LQ 05-3: Magic Shows (2012) Magicians take advantage of the way the brain constructs a simulation of reality. The brain does a good enough job that most of us survive long enough to succeed at whatever ambitions we may have. But the simulation is flawed in fundamental ways, and the magicians know how to exploit those errors to make us believe we see what doesn’t happen while we miss what actually happens.
     There have always been people who believe that magic is real, that the illusions crafted by the magicians aren’t illusions at all. Some scallywags have exploited this desire to believe in mastery of supernatural powers, which has always damaged people’s wallets, and too often their health as well.
     Of course, “magic” has many senses. The common core means something like “actually or apparently breaking the laws that govern reality as we know it.” There’s always the whiff of the supernatural about magic. At one extreme, people may believe that evil entities use magic to mislead or harm. At the other extreme, all apparently inexplicable phenomena are dismissed as fraud or delusion. Superstition and cynicism are close cousins.
     Me, I enjoy a good magic show. I also have more or less serious doubts about the claims for sightings of the Loch Ness monster, or abductions by aliens arriving on Earth in flying saucers. As for spoon bending, while I don’t know how to do this trick, other people do, and psychic energy isn’t part of it.
     Magic is designed to elicit wonder, which makes it close cousin to science and art. It requires skills useful in both. As entertainment, it satisfies. As a reminder that the universe is largely inexplicable, it may rekindle wonder and gratitude at the gift of life, and a brain able to both explain the mystery at the heart of reality, and know where that explanation shades into confabulation.
     Recommended. ****

The Disordered Cosmos (Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 2021)

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. The Disordered Cosmos. (2021) A mix of science, history of science, memoir, sociology, and psychology. Prescod-Weinstein’s thesis is that while Western science has given us unimaginable insight into the structure of the cosmos, it has also ignored, deprecated or suppressed the contributions of women and Indigenous people. Worse, it has often dismissed their contributions as mere superstition.
     I found this book both exhilarating and painful to read. Exhilarating because of her skill in explaining the abstruse and esoteric concepts that are the core of modern physics. Painful because of what it cost her to achieve these insights. She played the academic game, and achieved academic career success. She’s now using her position to try to change the culture of science. I hope she succeeds.
     One thing her book confirms: Modern physics is mostly about how we cannot know what we would like to know. The equations describe mysteries so well that we can predict the interactions we will measure in our experiments and observations. But exactly what the interacting entities are is unknown, and likely unknowable. Given invisible matter and contestable energy, we may never know more than a tiny fraction of the cosmos, and understand less. Perhaps we are limited by our very nature: we are stardust, electromagnetic entities.
     Read this book. ****