The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I feel compelled to write about a book that I have been reading now for four months.  I read it first very slowly, a few pages a day, and now I am reading it again.  I think the word 'ineffable' might well describe this book.  Often I break down weeping, and wonder that once again, the author has penetrated deeply.  At those times, I don't know if I am weeping out of sadness, or pain, or joy, or a sense of loss.  However, on whatever pathway, the author has somehow managed to find the tendrils deep into my psyche.  Here is an example:

"Snowflakes falling inside the globe.  Before memory's eyes, on Mademoiselle's desk...is the little glass globe.  When we were good pupils we were allowed to turn it upside down and hold it in the palm of our hand until the very last snowflake had fallen at the foot ... of the Eiffel Tower.  I was not yet seven years old, but I already knew that the measured drift of little cottony particles foreshadowed what the heart would feel in moments of great joy.  Time slowing, expanding, a lingering graceful ballet, and when the last snowflake has come to rest, we know we have experienced a suspension of time that is the sign of a great illumination.  As a child, I wondered whether I would be allowed to live such moments -- to inhabit the slow, majestic ballet of the snowflakes, to be released at last from the dreary frenzy of time....  Monsieur Ozu's invitation has made me feel completely naked, soul naked, each glistening snowflake alighting on my heart with a delicious burning tingle.  I look at him.  And throw myself into the deep, dark, icy, exquisite waters beyond time."  (p 178)

Perhaps it is because I am in an altered state, climbing everyday out of a very dark place.  Perhaps when I am once again myself (whatever that is), I will not be so moved by these ideas.  But there is also a good possibility that this author, Muriel Barbery, has written a book that is really, really important.  There seems to be something sublime on every page.  I wish that I could capture such exquisite thoughts in words.

Thank you, Muriel Barbery.

Adventure Games

H. P. Lovecraft

The past few months have been crazy.  I am going through a separation with my wife, my daughter has gone off to university, I have moved out of my home, and I am taking a stress leave from work.  However, there have been many opportunities for growth for me during this period.

I am very pleased to have gotten back in touch with friends that I thought I would never hear from again.  One is Kent Haryett.  Kent and I met at the University of Alberta in the early 1980's, and spent a lot of time together socially.  Kent convinced me that I should do a Master's degree in England, and we both ended up going to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.  I finished my Master's, and Kent convinced me to continue to do a PhD.  I did.  Kent went back to Edmonton, completed a law degree, went into private practice, and now has several lawyers working for him in a very successful firm.  

Kent had a kind of magic about him.  One of the things that we did in Newcastle was to play adventure games, like ‘The Call of Cthulu’, a game based generally on the horror stories of the author H.P. Lovecraft. One member of the group is the 'Master', and leads the group through the adventure.  Each player has at least one character with a number of different skills and strengths.

One evening, four of us in our group needed to know whether one of the characters had had his brain eaten by an anthropologist who believed that such behaviour could enhance one's prescience.  It was necessary for us to dig up the grave (this is all done virtually), and exhume the body.  Sure enough, the skull had been stitched, and the brain had been removed.  

That marked the end of that evening's adventure (some of the adventures lasted six months).  I got onto my bicycle and began to ride to the other side of town.  The quickest way back was along Elswick Road, and the very old Gothic era cemetery.  At one point, a fish and chip wrapper flew over the wall of the cemetery and hit my front wheel spokes and went 'Whack!, Whack!, Whack!.  

I nearly jumped out of my skin. It is certainly the most frightening event in my life. 

Transcendent Man

Ray Kurzweil, author of 'The Singularity'

The other day Aidan and I watched the film 'Transcendent Man', and I continue to ponder many of the ideas.  There are several premises that underlie the film.  One is that life on this planet is continually evolving.  Two billion years ago, there were single celled organisms.  Six hundred million years ago multi-celled organisms arose and radiated throughout the oceans and seas.  By the Permian, 230 million years ago, amphibians began climbing onto land.  The Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous saw the domination, at least on land, of dinosaurs, with little mammals trying to keep from getting crushed.  About 65 million years ago, a comet hit the earth, and the resulting drop in temperatures wiped out the extremely specialized dinosaurs, and mammals proliferated.  About 55 million years ago, the first primates emerge, living at the top of forest canopies, eating fruits and insects.  About 34 million years ago, an ape ancestor was living mostly on the forest floor.  Twenty two million years ago there was an ape that looked quite a bit like a modern chimp.  About 10 million years ago, our ancestors deviated from chimps, gorillas, and orangutans.  Between 5 and 6 million years ago, our ancestors began to stand uprightly, and moved out of the forest onto the savannah.  The freeing up of the hands eventually allowed the development of tool-making about 2.5 million years ago.  About 2 million years ago, humans walked out of Africa, 1.5 million years ago harnessed fire, and sometime after that began to communicate with verbal language.  It is most likely that about 100,000 years ago, our direct ancestors left Africa again and replaced the various human-like species of the Old World.  About 60,000 years ago humans made it to Australia, and perhaps about 15000 years ago, humans crossed over to and populated the Americas.  About 10,000 years ago, humans began producing their own food.  In the late 18th Century, our ancestors began to harness machines in a way that had not done before, and since then, our technology has been increasing in complexity and the speed of change geometrically.  And so, the technological changes that we see now can be considered part of a greater evolution beginning 2 billion years ago.

The second premise of the film is that the speed and complexity of technological change will bring about a 'Singularity'.  This means the point at which nano technology (the use of machines the size of a human blood cell) and human beings will come together into one being: we will not be human, and we will not be a machine.  Singularity will occur around 2029.  Diseases will be eradicated by these millions of machines, and we will say goodbye to death.

What is more, nano technology will allow the capture of the sun's rays in a way that we cannot really imagine today, and will be so efficient that fossil fuels will no longer be necessary to fuel everything.

This film is very different to the gloom and doom story about the imminent collapse of everything very soon. This film shows us passing from Vitruvian Man towards a Transcendent Man.  Perhaps there is room for hope after all.  Cool beans.

Khadaffi falls

The Colonel Khadaffi

Over the Christmas of 1980, my sister Maggie and I boarded a plane for Libya to visit my father and his wife.  We stopped in Amsterdam along the way, and the city was in full party mode.  We went from club to club, and everywhere people were playing the song ‘The War is Over’ by John Lennon, who had been shot just a few days previously. 

Libya was a strange and wonderful place.  We stayed in my dad's house, which was palatial.  It had been designed to house several servants, and both of us got our own huge bedrooms.  Because supplies to Libya were inconsistent, the home's chest freezer was packed with food stock-piled over many months.  Having survived my first term at university on so little food, it was as if I had entered into paradise.  And it wasn’t just us.   Maggie and I were invited to parties every evening by similar 'dependents' coming ‘home’ for Christmas, many of whom were from the UK.  This was my first real taste of England, even though it was in Libya.  I loved the accent, the ease with which people spoke the language, the clever turns of phrase. We spent New Year’s Eve in Libya, and then went back home.  The holiday had been magical. 

As a 'dependent', I was granted two trips per year to see my father in Libya, and with this in mind, I decided to ‘stop-over’ on my summer trip to Libya and go on an archaeological dig in Italy.  The problem was that I was not able to get a flight with the rest of the dig crew, and Italy in those days was notorious for train worker strikes.  I landed in Rome, not knowing a single word of Italian, and took a train, bus, train and bus to the dig site. 

The dig was spectacular.  The scenery featured lush, beautiful, rolling hills, dotted with villages made of local stone.  The students stayed in a boarding house with a big supper every night.  Into our lives descended two perfect English girls.  One was named Tamsyn, and the other Caroline.  They were both very posh: Tamsyn had finished her first year at Oxford, and was helping with the archaeological survey of the area.  Caroline was the daughter of a country doctor in the Cotswolds of England.  She was shyer, had a wonderful sense of humour, and a perfect turned up nose and blonde hair.  And so, I was there digging a site that was contemporary with the march of Hannibal, who had probably passed with his elephants close by, I was reading the histories in the original Latin, was digging a site that was packed with splendid artifacts, and was head over heels in love.  

Eventually, I made my way to Libya.  During the previous Christmas period, Maggie and I had been met at the Tripoli airport in Libya by Esso employees who guided us all the way to the town in which my father lived.  However, my telex to my dad with the times of my arrival had not gotten to him, and so when I landed in Tripoli, there was no-one there to meet me.  I arrived in the airport around 10:00 AM, and waited.  The restaurant never did open, and so I ate Danish butter cookies from the gift shop.  That evening, I fell asleep on a marble bench in the airport, and was awakened by the muzzle of a gun.  A guard wanted to know why I was there and to see my passport.  I spoke no Arabic, and could only shrug my shoulders and apologize.  In the morning, I hoisted on my back-pack, and headed out the door into blazing heat.  I walked what seemed miles to the ‘Esso’ hangar, and knocked on the door.  The person who answered was astonished to see me, looked both ways, and then pulled me inside.  I told him my story and he said that a plane was leaving for Marc-el-Brega that afternoon.  Once on the plane, I met a man who spoke very good English, and he was concerned that I did not have ‘landing’ papers.  He instructed me to simply skirt around the guards at the airport while he asked them about their families.  It worked, and I went to the my dad's house, only to find it completely deserted.  I went around back, lifted up the heavy ‘sandstorm’ blinds, and entered.  I managed to make contact with my dad over the phone, and he came home out of the desert the next day. 

Sometime just before, or perhaps during my stay in Libya, Ronald Reagan had decided to send the American Sixth Fleet into what Colonel Quadaffi considered Libyan waters (south of a line between Tripoli and Benghazi).  Quadaffi sent out four fighters, and the Americans on the USS Nimitz shot them down just after takeoff.  My dad told me that I was to be officially ‘evacuated’ as the dependent of an employee of an American company.  I flew to London with the rest of the dependents, and the company put us up in a nice hotel for two weeks.  I went to museums, plays, concerts, all on the company’s dime.  

What I remember about Libya is that everything seemed to be regulated by the government.  A 'grocery store' would have perhaps 20 employees, most of whom were simply standing around.  Khadaffi's face was everywhere, and in 1980, he still seemed to be liked by everyone.  Beginning a few months ago, the tribes of eastern Libya, the ancient area of Cyrenaica, rose up against the tribes of the west, those of ancient 'Tripolitania'.  The eastern rebels found an airforce in Nato, and the town where my dad lived became a fulcrum of the civil war, changing hands many times.  Khadaffi had become a dictator, he had not been able to satisfy the tribes of the eastern part of Libya, and Nato stepped in.  The other day Khadaffi was found dead in a culvert.  Tunisia, Egypt, and now Libya.  Who will be next?

The Chalcolithic and Digital Ages

My Sansui Amplifier

The other day my friend Russ Adams called me on the phone.  He has been calling me about every second day since I was hospitalized this summer.  The conversations are light and witty, and Russ has been a fountain of support throughout this difficult time. 

Somewhere in our conversation, I mentioned that on that day I had bought an amplifier at a thrift store for $45 for my and Aidan's new apartment.  It is a Sansui analogue amplifier, without anything even remotely 'digital' about it. 

To me it is a gem, and represents the very height of sound engineering before that particular world embraced the digital age.  My Sansui receives composite jacks on two sides, and has four channels; it then amplifies the sound beautifully through our speakers. 

Chalcolithic period mace-head

Our conversation then led to the Chalcolithic.  This was the period at the end of the Neolithic and while people were using raw copper to make ornaments and some tools and weapons.  Copper by itself is very soft, and so these copper implements did not completely replace the stone tools and weapons.  The height of stone age manufacture in the Near East was in fact during the Chalcolithic. 

And there it is: the Sansui amplifier was made in a time when other things, like computers, had gone digital, and represent the very best of the analogue amplifier world.  My Sansui analogue amplifier is a Chalcolithic stone tool. 

Thanks, Russ!

Jim

The Pursuit of Happiness

Kira and Aidan, Giza, 2010

I thank all of my friends and family who have given me so much support during these last two months, and especially when I was at my lowest point, about a month ago. Since then, I have begun to find my way forward, slowly climbing out of despair.

My Uncle Allan has reminded me that we humans live a long time.  Even though I am going through some really hard times right now, when put into context of, perhaps, 80 or 90 years in my lifetime and perhaps 40 more to come, these months of tribulation represent a blip. 

My friend Phyllis said that 'everything comes together for good', and another remarked that I had always seemed 'emasculated' in my marriage, and that the break-up of my marriage is an opportunity for me to live a happier life. 

My father-in-law Tom reminded me recently that the ancients thought much about how one might be happy.  To Socrates/Plato, it meant being a good person, which meant being virtuous, and for Aristotle virtue meant finding the mean between opposites.

I have this term off, and my goal is to identify those very things that bring me happiness. I know that I enjoy being around my family members, and perhaps never more so than in these last couple of months.  I have great kids, Aidan and Kira, a sister, brother-in-law Dean, dad, mother-in-law, mom, and father-in-law Tom.  In other times of my life, I have enjoyed going out to pubs with friends and simply hanging out, chatting, lauging, drinking fine beer.  At other times, I have played in Ultimate Frisbee and soccer leagues.  I really like managing and watching my son's soccer team, and although I have recently stepped down as Manager, I have been told that I can return when I am ready to do so.  I love the work that I do, and look forward to getting back into the classroom when I am fit.  Perhaps most of all, I want to find someone to love as much as I have loved my soon-to-be former wife.

And so, I have the intention of becoming a more social human being, a better family man, frisbee player, manager of my son's team, and professor.  I also want to find a partner and to love her completely. 

My goal is to be well on the road to a happier life by the time I turn 50, on January 5th, 2012.

Mubarak falls

Mubarak, the icon

As I write, people across Egypt are taking down (if they haven't already) the ubiquitous portrait of Mubarak found in and outside almost every public building in Egypt. I know his face very well. It was there in the post offices and police stations when I first visited Egypt in 1989, and still there in 2004, 2009, and 2010. His face is not so much representative of a human being, but rather an icon that appears ageless, brooding, and somewhat menacing.  Mubarak has been ill the last couple of years and has been convalescing at his various presidential palaces, allowing the management of governement to his inner circle. While the icon has continued to stare down anyone who cares to look its way, Mubarak himself has been the wizard standing behind the curtain. Egypt has decided to turf out both the icon and the old, withered president.

 

During the next few months, Egypt's politics will crystallize into some form of government.  The future might see one of three things: another Mubarak-like secular police state calling itself a democracy, an Islamist state like Iran's, or something new or at least rare for the Middle East.  My hope is as that the army facilitates a free election in September, and that the people will elect a secular government that allows people the freedom to say what they think in public without fear of imprisonment, torture, or death.  Egyptians deserve a government that is more afraid of the people than the people are afraid of the government, and neither a police state nor a theocracy fit that particular bill.

Tahrir Square protests, Cairo

Last Friday morning at 8:00 AM, Aidan and I were watching the BBC world service and coverage of the Tahrir square protests when the screen byline changed from 'Unrest in Egypt' to 'Mubarak resigns'.  We watched as perhaps 1 million people in the square erupted in joy over the news. This morning I read a piece by a reporter for the Economist magazine that captures far better than I could the emotions surrounding that event:

"The surge of overwhelming bliss that has overtaken Egyptians is the rare beautitude of democratic will. The hot blush of liberation, a dazzled sense of infinite possibility swelling millions of happy breasts is a precious thing of terrible, unfathomable beauty, and it won't come to these people again. Whatever the future may hold, this is the happiest many people will ever feel. This is the best day of some peoples' lives. ...  I cannot deny that there is something holy in this feeling, that it is one of few human experiences that justifies life—that satisfies, however briefly, our desperate craving for more intensity, for more meaning, for more life from life. Whatever the future holds, there will be disappointment, at best. But there is always disappointment. Today, there is joy."

Yup.