The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence

[sovay]

Happy Bloomsday! I have no computer.

There are a couple of reasons that yesterday was outright awful until the evening, when rushthatspeaks and I went to see Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) at the Harvard Film Archive (it is one of the best black-and-white films I have ever seen, meaning that it could not have been made in color; and the ghosts are uncanny, but Deborah Kerr is terrifying), but one of them was the way my laptop failed to boot for over an hour in the morning and only came back, slowly and waveringly, sometime after dark. This morning, it wouldn't come back at all.

I do not really feel like recounting the details of a day spent at the Apple Store, except that at one point I texted derspatchel, "I am the only person with a book in this entire store. Everyone else around me waits staring into their phones or the air. I'm reading ethnography from 1912, but I feel like I'm conducting it a hundred years later." I had thought the problem might be that one of the fans in the computer had died, leading to overheating, but when the utilikilt-wearing employee at the Genius Bar (whose logo is a sort of stylized Bohr model of the atom; I am amused that the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics) popped the back off, it transpired that my machine only has one fan, which was not in the specs. I may have to name it either George VI or Owen Pugh. In any case, there were tests run, the hard drive appeared to be fine, it was decided that the problem was software corruption and the machine was taken off into the back room to have its operating system razed and reinstalled.

The operation was a success and the patient died: the hard drive failed during reinstallation. The good news is, a replacement is actually covered by the insurance I bought three years ago August. (For once, paranoia rewards. I cannot, cannot afford to buy a new computer. I am not sure I could have afforded a new hard drive.) The bad news is, I am unlikely to get the machine back before Monday, and until such time I have really no access to my e-mail and no ability to do my job. I guess this month is my exercise in unplugged weekends. But at least I could write about the last one without resorting to pencil and paper. I just don't write that fast by hand.

Comments

[selidor]

Thank goodness for backups. Thank goodness for valid backups.
/me anxiously looks at digital copies of thesis, adds a couple more on various extra continents for certainty...

the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics

Which I've always found a little odd in that the Bohr model got thrown out nearly a hundred years ago. It's like so many modern symbols: steam train is a railroad crossing, telephones are comfortingly clunky Bakelite prisms. (And yet, there was never a decent symbol for 'fax').
And as you quote, Einstein as the myth-symbol of 'scientist': yet the image is the shaggy-haired dreamer, more shaman than skeptic, trying to unite quantum theory and his own gravitational descriptions of the warp and weft of the universe. Not the clear-eyed bright young thing of the 1900s' Nobel-work and teasing out time's fabric. Perhaps we can't tolerate our legends to have been young, unless they die that way.

[sovay]

Thank goodness for backups. Thank goodness for valid backups.

I haven't tested all applications yet, but it seems all my files have come back in more or less the condition I left them: I am very glad of this. If I can just fix the prohibitive internet connectivity problems that prevailed before the crash (because my job is online and so are my preferred forms of communication with some people), I'll be a very happy inhabitant of the twenty-first century, for limited values of twenty-first.

Which I've always found a little odd in that the Bohr model got thrown out nearly a hundred years ago. It's like so many modern symbols: steam train is a railroad crossing, telephones are comfortingly clunky Bakelite prisms. (And yet, there was never a decent symbol for 'fax').

Maybe it's still too recent, or it went by too quickly and without resonating enough in the culture to become anything more than a symbol of its very specific time. I was reminded of the preface to David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937):

One other thing. It is not easy in considering a trench-mortar barrage to give praise for the action proper to chemicals—full though it may be of beauty. We feel a rubicon has been passed between striking with a hand weapon as men used to do and loosing poison from the sky as we do ourselves. We doubt the decency of our own inventions, and are certainly in terror of their possibilities. That our culture has accelerated every line of advance into the territory of physical science is well appreciated—but not so well understood are the unforeseen, subsidiary effects of this achievement . . . We who are of the same world of sense with hairy ass and furry wolf and who presume to other and more radiant affinities, are finding it difficult, as yet, to recognise these creatures of chemicals as true extensions of ourselves, that we may feel for them a native affection, which alone can make them magical for us. It would be interesting to know how we shall ennoble our new media as we have already ennobled and made significant our old—candle-light, fire-light, Cups, Wands and Swords, to choose at random.

Of course, by now the trenches of World War I have become as powerfully symbolic as the Tarot; so have gas and barbed wire. The atomic bomb was instantly iconic. I don't know off the top of my head what makes the difference between universal shorthand and temporal marker, but I would like to think that wars aren't a ncessary component.

Perhaps we can't tolerate our legends to have been young, unless they die that way.

I may type out the remainder of Frayling on Einstein for you. His argument is not so much that we can't picture our legends as anything other than venerable (although Darwin got it too: my favorite photograph of him is the one with his son where he looks like Bob Cratchit, but you don't see it very often), but that youthful Einstein with the dark moustache and desk job of his breakthrough days really doesn't fit the popular idea of the scientist, whereas by the time he has that time-warping myth around him and looks as though he's taken style tips on his hair from C.A. Rotwang, he is recognizable; so the image sticks.

It's a very enjoyable and a very well-written book; I don't even disagree with most of what Frayling says about the depiction of science and scientists onscreen. I just keep thinking I should write about the factor he seems to overlook: the persistence of certain archetypes not just because they are persuasive to people who don't gravitate toward the intellectual, but because they are appealing to people who do. You may know quite well that being a scientist doesn't mean being a crazy kind of alchemist with a fifty percent chance of turning into a fly or accidentally ending the world, but that character is still the smartest person in the room and much more sympathetic than the sober handwringers who tidy everything back into the status quo, muttering about things man was not meant to meddle with—I mean, given the choice, I know which one I'd rather be.

[selidor]

the preface to David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937)

And beautifully put. Especially poignant ahead of that Second war.

by now the trenches of World War I have become as powerfully symbolic as the Tarot

Oh, there's a cruel poem. Butter for starvation and want, Beach for endless obstacle, Donkey for hope? But as you say, it shouldn't need war: we stray close to the realm of user-interface designer to find the ones that can be shorthand; and that becomes deeply cultural. (vis, icon).

although Darwin got it too

Which is an adorable photo; I just watched the entertaining if slightly flawed The Pirates: In An Adventure with Scientists (2012; not the US title), which does capture that heavy-browed face quite nicely in claymation. (Also, the Darwin and wife relationship was done rather well in Creation (2009)).

really doesn't fit the popular idea of the scientist

Which is a fascinating concept in itself. We seem okay with the young go-getter engineer, as forex every Iron Man depiction at present, the Edison-imago, but not for a scientist? I think you should write it: that endless play of evolving archetypes has strange attractors, and one can't play with loci until they are mapped and spun out to gold.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I think you should write it

I agree.

re: engineer v. scientist, do you think maybe it's a matter of applied v. theoretical?

[selidor]

do you think maybe it's a matter of applied v. theoretical?

Ok, I have dug out from under this week enough for serious thought again.

An interesting point. I will argue from background; my homeland reveres (to the point of having him on the $100 note) the physicist Ernest Rutherford. His great knack was to know what to built to be able to test ideas. These days in-field he'd be called an instrumentation expert, or experimentalist. But that reverence is partly because his skill fits perfectly with another aspect of nation-myth, the fix-anything-with-nearly-nothing "No. 8 Wire mentality", where a scrap of standard-gauge fencing wire can fix anything; including the secrets of the universe. So it may well depend if there's an allied niche into which one's hero-concept can helpfully slot and round-out, since these are culture-heroes being archetyped here after all.

(That he was a grand supervisor, with I think four of his students going on to win Nobels of their own, is kinda overlooked. Again with the selective-aspects).

[sovay]

So it may well depend if there's an allied niche into which one's hero-concept can helpfully slot and round-out, since these are culture-heroes being archetyped here after all.

Agreed. The British boffin archetype flourishes during and after the war: a little funny, a little fussy, but the boys in the back room still pull through with the rest of the national eccentrics.

(That he was a grand supervisor, with I think four of his students going on to win Nobels of their own, is kinda overlooked. Again with the selective-aspects).

That's still pretty awesome, though.

[sovay]

So it may well depend if there's an allied niche into which one's hero-concept can helpfully slot and round-out, since these are culture-heroes being archetyped here after all.

You were saying:

He is the great exemplar of a kind of native genius – detached yet driven, unselfconscious yet fully aware of his intelligence, quirkily unpredictable yet steadfast. In other words: he is a very British kind of hero.

[selidor]

Quotable proof indeed!

[sovay]

Especially poignant ahead of that Second war.

He had been writing it since the First. Jones is one of my favorite and one of the least-known of the war poets, possibly because he survived. In Parenthesis draws on his own experiences of 1915–1918 with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Battle of the Somme (especially Mametz Wood) combined with the Battle of the Trees and the Preiddeu Annwn; I think it is most often compared to The Waste Land or Ulysses, but it is much more like Alan Garner, where the myth is always breaking out from under the terrible everyday surface of things. There is realistic memoir, shell-shock, exhaustion, boredom, adrenaline whiteout and the proper way to clean a gun; there are boasts and catalogues of mythical battles. I have posted him for May Day, he writes the wood so well. Also for Armistice Day. The Anathémata (1952) is even harder to describe: it is something like the Matter of Britain written by an Alexandrian poet, so densely allusive, the words themselves become archaeology; it has also to do with colonialism, which tends to confuse people. He was an engraver as well as a writer and illustrated his own works. I wish more people knew about him.

Oh, there's a cruel poem. Butter for starvation and want, Beach for endless obstacle, Donkey for hope?

Great. Flip a coin to see who gets to be depressed enough to write it?

I just watched the entertaining if slightly flawed The Pirates: In An Adventure with Scientists (2012; not the US title), which does capture that heavy-browed face quite nicely in claymation.

I'm glad to hear a recommendation! It's Aardman, so I'd really been hoping. (And yes, here it's The Pirates! Band of Misfits, because there is nothing less likely to interest the great American moviegoer than an adventure with scientists. See the conversation this one is perpetually circling.)

(Also, the Darwin and wife relationship was done rather well in Creation (2009)).

Also useful to know. I like Paul Bettany (I discovered him as Stephen Maturin. It was guaranteed), but I couldn't tell from reviews how good the film had been at depicting the ideas of the story as opposed to just Victorian familial angst.

Which is a fascinating concept in itself. We seem okay with the young go-getter engineer, as forex every Iron Man depiction at present, the Edison-imago, but not for a scientist? I think you should write it: that endless play of evolving archetypes has strange attractors, and one can't play with loci until they are mapped and spun out to gold.

Once I've recovered from this last week, I shall see what I can do. It's a set of archetypes I've been thinking about for years.

[selidor]

something like the Matter of Britain written by an Alexandrian poet [...] it has also to do with colonialism

See, at this point in the paragraph my most focussed response became eee MOAR NOW. Fortunately, there's a uni library available and a weekend approaching.

(I'm unsure how Down Under ended up without WWI poets; we normally nick all the UK ones - possibly due to the country-mentality at the time. Either that or all the poets of the time were too busy dealing with forging a national identity, which became a nigh-on obsessive theme for a good thirty years about then).

Great. Flip a coin to see who gets to be depressed enough to write it?

Heh. It does seem that way! There's the boned edges of its structure in sight, but I'd need to know more about the Tarot to cast any poem that way.

It's a set of archetypes I've been thinking about for years.

Shiny poem-territory...
(I just came back from a function at Parliament to have MPs talk to women in science. My current impression of scientific archetypes is a roomful of women of all ages from mine to elderly, dressed for their own comfort & happiness rather than anyone's gaze, talking to each other animatedly at a great rate of knots. Archetypes party hard.)

[sovay]

Fortunately, there's a uni library available and a weekend approaching.

Thanks to a sudden access of paranoia (double-checking a statement I was about to make about the availability of Jones' poems), I have discovered that since I tracked down my copy of In Parenthesis, The Anathémata has also come back into print, which really cheers me up. I see also several other titles by Jones that I hadn't known existed and will have to look into. Maybe he's finally being noticed after all.

I'm unsure how Down Under ended up without WWI poets; we normally nick all the UK ones - possibly due to the country-mentality at the time.

Wikipedia thinks there is at least one notable one, but I do not know very much about him.

My current impression of scientific archetypes is a roomful of women of all ages from mine to elderly, dressed for their own comfort & happiness rather than anyone's gaze, talking to each other animatedly at a great rate of knots. Archetypes party hard.

I like the sound of those archetypes.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The quote from In Parenthesis (and your follow-up remark) are great.

As for the image of the venerable scientist, I'm reminded of the story from The Foundling--actually, the titular story--the collection of pre-Prydain Chronicles stories, of Dalben getting the Book of Three. He started out a young man, but having fallen asleep reading it (IIRC), he awakes the ancient wizard we know him. It's experience/wisdom = age, literally.

the persistence of certain archetypes not just because they are persuasive to people who don't gravitate toward the intellectual, but because they are appealing to people who do. --Yes.

[sovay]

He started out a young man, but having fallen asleep reading it (IIRC), he awakes the ancient wizard we know him. It's experience/wisdom = age, literally.

Yes. And Frayling makes the point that much of the scientist-archetype is taken directly from the language of magic. (You've seen The Prestige (2006)? "Oh, no. This wasn't built by a magician. This was built by a wizard." The character is speaking of probably the most famous exponent of mad science in real-life history: Nikola Tesla.)

[edit] I know I've been making notes to myself for years, but I seem to have been having the conversation in bits and pieces for the same amount of time: I was looking for something else and found this exchange. I didn't remember I'd gotten Jack Parsons from ap_aelfwine. And with the recent shift of emphasis in popular science from mechanics and physics to biotech, we may be circling back around to alchemy again . . .

--Yes.

Right; I'll put it on the list.