A Manual of Detection: How to Stop Time

"In one of the best tales of the Arabian Nights, Maruf the Cobbler found himself daydreaming his own fabulous caravan of riches.  Destitute and almost friendless in an alien land, Maruf at first mentally conceived--and then described--an unbelievably valuable cargo on its way to him. 

Instead of leading to exposure and disgrace, this idea was the foundation of his eventual success. The imagined caravan took shape, became real for a time--and arrived.

May your caravan of dreams, too, find its way to you."

--Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams

Buster Keaton studies to be Sherlock Holmes Jr.

At the beginning of Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection, Unwin is bicycling through the rain to the Central Station, in a mad dash to be in place in time to watch a lovely young stranger wait for the train at 7:26 AM, as he has every day since he first saw her eight days prior. Every day she waits, but whoever she is waiting for does not arrive, and he follows her out of the station and goes about his day. On the day the book opens, he is following her out, and something changes:

“Unwin willed with all the power in his lanky soul that time, like the train at the end of its track, would stop. 

This morning it did. The woman in the plaid coat dropped her umbrella. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes--he had never seen them so close--were the clouded silver of old mirrors. The numbered panels on the arrival and departure boards froze. The station announcements ceased. The four second hands on the four faces of the clock trembled between numbers. The insides of Unwin’s ever-wound wristwatch seized.”

Kafka says that “by believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is that which we have not sufficiently desired.”  Our desire must be such that we are, ultimately, able to believe in the impossible. This suggests more than mere wishing. Giving desire muscle means rediscovering our lives, the world, possibility. The oft-cited example of the mother who lifts a car off her child to save his life is instructive--it is an act which shows how much further we can reach into ourselves given the proper motivation. In that example, however, the muscle her desire required was easily determined. The fact that it was, until that moment, impossible for her to call on such strength meant nothing once the moment came. She desired it sufficiently. So it happened. 

Of course, it isn’t always so clear which steps must be taken in order to attain that which is so desired. Without the car sitting on top of your child, how do you know what needs to be done? You, after all, are facing this question from the position of a normal day--hopefully--without the impetus of such an emergency that removes all question of what must be done.

Bound as it is to its ultimate goal of revealing the previously nonexistent, genuine desire requires removal, distance, a new perspective. It always requires a shift and it is always disruptive. It brings you into the realm of the impossible, the realm of its ultimate fulfillment by wrenching you from that which you considered the limits of the possible.

So, you must step outside of your perspective. And here we find instruction from history's greatest detective. In Mastermind: How to Think like Sherlock Holmes, Maria Konnikova notes that one of the striking things about Holmes’ intensely focused personality is that it still allows him to walk away from something, briefly, once continuing to work on it will no longer get him anywhere. When he’s waiting on information, he turns to something else, seemingly forgetting entirely about the problem at hand. What does this achieve?:

“Psychologist Yaacov Trope argues that psychological distance may be one of the single most important steps you can take to improve thinking and decision making. It can come in many forms: temporal, or distance in time (both future and past); spatial, or distance in space (how physically close or far you are from something); social, or distance between people (how someone else sees it); and hypothetical, or distance from reality (how things might have happened). But whatever the form, all of these distances have something in common: they all require you to transcend the immediate moment in your mind. They all require you to take a step back. 

Trope posits that the further we move in distance, the more general and abstract our perspective and our interpretation become; and the further we move from our own perspective, the wider the picture we are able to consider....the closer we remain to our egocentric view, the smaller and more limited the picture that confronts us.”

She gives several examples of Holmes doing this: he wanders into the next room to work on his monograph about music; he leaves the building (his ‘office’) and goes elsewhere to do something unrelated; and, in The Valley of Fear, he decides to spend the night--alone--in the room where the murder took place:

“Holmes doesn’t actually think that he can re-create events by being in the room where they took place...He wants to trigger a change of perspective by a literal change of location, in this case a very specific location and a very specific perspective, that of the people involved in the crime at hand. In doing so, he frees up his imagination to take not the path of his own experiences, memories, and connections, but that of the people involved in the events themselves. What associations might the room have triggered for them? What might it have inspired?”

Changing Perspective: Sherlock Holmes Explores Femininity

Holmes uses these techniques to examine what has already occurred, and especially to decipher crime scenes. But their utility is not so limited. These methods can be used effectively in many other situations. Specifically, you can use them to drastically change the universe you inhabit: to pick up the car. These methods of perspective change are steps toward locating an angle of looking at the universe from which your imagination is stimulated to see a new path. A path that is already there, just unused. Impossible. Invisible.

“Our vision is highly selective as is--the retina normally captures about ten billion bits per second of visual information, but only ten thousand bits actually make it to the first layer of the visual cortex, and, to top it off, only ten percent of the area’s synapses is dedicated to incoming visual information at all....What that basically means is that we ‘see’ precious little of what’s around us, and what we think of as objective seeing would better be termed selective filtering--and our state of mind, our mood, our thoughts at any given moment, our motivation, and our goals can make it even more picky than it normally is.” (Note that she goes into fascinating details about this, priming--details worth the entire book just in themselves. You will never smell hot chocolate the same again.)

All this is important because what you want is a matter of detail. Don’t think that what you are trying to do is create something that isn’t there. It’s there; you just don’t normally see it. It’s not within your perspective. So if you alter your perspective, you can see, suddenly, the straight path to that thing you thought wasn’t even there.

Back to our Unwin: he is a Clerk for a Detective at the Agency, and he is well-known for his meticulous and exacting work. He allows nothing into his reports which is not relevant to the solution of the case at hand--no stray detail, no stray comment or musing from the Detective himself, no mention of an emotional response, or any tangent which the thoughts of the case invoked but which did not help to solve it ever makes it into his files. He is complimented for this throughout; indeed, it is what makes him such a stellar Clerk, a top Clerk, perhaps the Top Clerk. 

But as he travels underground, with no real idea what he is doing, or why, or how to make it stop, he begins to think that this meticulousness has not been an asset after all:

“Miss Burgrave had been right about him: he left matters where no doubt could touch them. But that had been his flaw, to bind mystery so tightly, to obscure his detective’s missteps with perfect files. Somehow Unwin had made false things true.”

How? That which is definitive is untrue. There are always secret passageways, alternative perspective points... By keeping everything so clean, without flaws or unresolved questions, or useless emotions, ideas and thoughts, all those other possible solutions were erased from anyone’s view. But they were still there. And someone still saw them--namely, the criminal element. 

At this point in the novel, his methods begin to change. He learns new methods, and those involve, amazingly, a secret strategy for entering into the dreams of others and having a look around at the structure of their minds--especially the dark corners and shut closets. Right here, as he’s realizing what the rigidness of his perspective has done to “the world,” he begins to learn how to see through the eyes of others. 

To get to this point, he has traveled where the rules forbid him to travel, taken a drink with someone he’s forbidden to talk to, and descended into a hole to travel through dark underground passageways, all the while fleeing both agents of the law as well as the bad guys. Crossing the line into a completely new paradigm is no picnic. But here’s where he comes to the goods:

“At last his hands found something solid. He felt around the wall, found there the cool roundness of a doorknob and beneath it the gap of a keyhole. He knelt and peered through.

At the center of a vast, dark room were two velvet chairs set on a round blue rug. A blue-shaded floor lamp was set between them, and in its light a phonograph was playing. The music was all drowsy strings and horns, and then a woman began to sing. 

He knew the melody.

It may be a crime,

But I’m sure that you’re mine

In my dream of your dream of me.

The doorknob turned in his hand, and Unwin entered the third archive of the Agency offices.

...

A distance of perhaps fifty paces separated him from the chairs, one pink, the other pale green. Unwin felt drawn to the warmth of the electric light, to the languid music playing there, to the voice that could only have been Miss Greenwood’s. ...It looked to him as though a cozy parlor had been set down in the middle of a cavern. He went toward it, feeling alone and insubstantial. He could not see his arms or his legs, could not see his own shoes. All he could see were the chairs, the lamp, and the phonograph. All he could hear was the music.

...

He stopped at the edge of the blue rug and stood very still. Here was a boundary between worlds. In the one were chairs, and music, and light. In the other there were none of those things, nor even the words for chair, or music, or light.”

He also learns, here, what the real conflict between the Agency (the detectives) and the Carnival (run by the criminal at large) is: Law and Order versus Chaos. And that’s what your perspective is for, too, to keep you balanced between order and chaos. But once you become rigid in a perspective, you grow old and die. To stop time, to begin fresh, to not be a walking habit, you must be willing to venture into chaos, briefly, grab something new, and refashion it as a part of solid reality. You must be willing to walk paths that meander, to lose control on occasion. To go off on tangents. Fall in love.

Now, back to sufficient desire: to your motivation, versus that acceptance, which is our standard brain “setting,” of what’s in front of us as the only way.  You have to be truly motivated--you have to, as Kafka points out, really want the thing you’re attempting to make real. That means that you must be able to step away from what already is long enough to allow a new path to appear. Ten minutes of focus on what’s in your own mind; on your own imagination, your own ideas; even just on the scenery around you, including smells and sounds and the texture of the air--ten minutes is a small thing. And yet, how many of us take that ten minutes? The difference, Konnikova points out, between Scotland Yard’s Lestrade and Holmes, is sometimes simply that Lestrade refuses to stop and think. He wants to act, to be constantly moving towards the goal--to be able to demonstrate that he is working. But if the real work must be done first inside your mind, in order that you are able to realize what your caravan of dreams looks like, so you may recognize it when it comes rolling in, then really-- you’re not doing anything, yet.

But how hard it is to step back and trust that something which doesn’t “exist” yet will emerge from the shadows! How hard it is, in this multi-tasking society, to take the time to really focus on just one thing. Konnikova gives us yet another trick, though, in the description of the visualization methods of electrical engineer Jacob Rabinow, a prolific inventor with 230 U.S. patents to his name:

“...whenever a task proves difficult or takes time or doesn’t have an obvious answer, ‘I pretend I’m in jail. If I’m in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it’ll take a week. What else have I got to do? I’m going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, ‘My God, it’s not working,’ and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence.’”

You focus your will, you focus your intention, you focus your mental energy, and the world cracks open.

And ALL this comes back to the event that started this little tangent: not the only--probably, to most, not even the most significant-- important event bringing together the ending of this Manual of Detection, but still a spoiler, so make your decision now (I recommend going and reading the *amazing* book, then coming back for these three silly sentences): Unwin feels forced by circumstance to walk away from the girl who dropped her umbrella, despite his desperate wish to talk to her,  in order to tackle the most difficult problem of his life. He twists his whole world around, focuses deeply on that problem, gets farther and farther away from his own routines, though always in an attempt to return his life to its previous, regular state, and then, as he comes back via train to the city, in his own way successful--though not in the way he set out to be!--he makes a startling discovery:

She’s been waiting for him all this time. 

And how Berry pulls that off is magic, indeed.

Footnote:

**Examples quoted from How Stuff Works:

“In 2006 in Tucson, Ariz., Tim Boyle watched as a Chevrolet Camaro hit 18-year-old Kyle Holtrust. The car pinned Holtrust, still alive, underneath. Boyle ran to the scene of the accident and lifted the Camaro off the teenager, while the driver of the car pulled him to safety.

In 1982, in Lawrenceville, Ga., Angela Cavallo lifted a 1964 Chevrolet Impala from her son, Tony, after it fell off the jacks that had held it up while he worked underneath the car. Mrs. Cavallo lifted the car high enough and long enough for two neighbors to replace the jacks and pull Tony from beneath the car.”

...

“Some theorize that we normally use only a small percentage of our muscles' capabilities. When we are confronted with danger, we transcend the limitations of our muscles and simply act. The rush of adrenaline, which accounts for a sudden increase in strength, helps to facilitate a person lifting a car. In other words, when confronted with extreme stress, we involuntarily use our muscles beyond the limitations of their normal voluntary use.

This theory is supported by what happens when a person is electrocuted. Someone who is shocked can be thrown a notable distance from where the shock took place. But this is not due to the electric shock. Instead, it's a sudden and violent contraction of the person's muscles as a result of the electrical charge flowing through the body. This demonstrates a potential for muscle contraction that isn't utilized under normal circumstances. In much the same way that people can't throw themselves across the room, they also can't normally lift a car -- the resources aren't available without the threat.” [Of course, I’m arguing that there are ways around that initial threat...]

More Than Human

This photo, and all others in this post, by Tim Flach.

I discovered a wonderful website today, that of photographer Tim Flach. The entrance page is fantastic, and makes me jealous :)

Please visit the site, as the photos are not large enough here to do them any kind of justice. Also, I'm having a hard time picking which ones to show here... Please click on them for better resolution, at least.

His page is loaded with high-quality images of wondrous portraits of animals--portraits in the sense that each image is loaded with character, shows the artistic eye of the photographer, and displays the grand majesty of the particular emissary of the animal kingdom who is his subject. Details, poses, expressions will all surprise you. And there's a new book from these images, More Than Human, as well as two other of his books, one focusing on dogs and the other on horses.

In an interview with John Parker for the Economist (Summer 2010), Tim Flach stated, “I like to use photography as a way of extending people’s experiences;" he uses a glass floor, the method we see on the entrance page to his website, or x-ray photos of gestating horses, or underwater photos in order to shift our perspective, and he often focuses very tightly on a detail like the neck, the feet, a rush of hair or fur, or as below, an eye:

About the above photo, John Parker notes: "“If you look closely above the Shar-Pei’s right eye, threading finely through the heavy folds of the eyebrow is a tiny white stitch. It is there because the thick bristled skin, bred into this fighting dog as a defence against opponents’ bites, would otherwise push the eyelid inward, scraping the eyelashes over the cornea and producing an infection called entropion. The picture is both an abstract conception and a stark image of what humans do to their pets.”

Flach notes that his study on dogs was an exercise in metaphor, "how we engage with nature." And he went all over the world to follow human interactions with dogs, following sled teams and dog shows and learning about how eye-contact between canines and humans has changed through domesticity, about plastic surgeries that pets are often subjected to, and about the ideas that guide cloning and breeding. He learned through the studies of neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach what may have guided breeders in their selections for lapdogs; Kringelbach feels we are "hard-wired to respond to round faces with big eyes and snub noses," because of the similarity of those shapes to the faces of our own infants; Flach's own lapdog portraits often zoom in on that face to trigger the effect:

Bichon Frise Lapdog (Tim Flach, photographer)

(Below) Form and Function: The peculiar clip poodles wear, which exposes the legs, face and most of the body, dates back to their days as swimming retrievers. They were shaved for ease of swimming, but pompoms were left to protect the chest and extremities. The above pose amongst topiaries seems ideal...

Flach says, “I don’t think making a pretty picture is enough...My interest has moved from just the aesthetic to this idea that photography is a form of evidence, a way of raising questions. What is the significance? What is the context? I’m fascinated by how understanding can transform the meaning. I think you’ve got to be interested in a lot of potential meanings that come from an image.”

“If I take the subject matter of my bats, the series where the image is turned upside down, then I think people are surprised to find how easily they engage with a perceived ‘personality’ in the bat through the turned-around image. At one level it is a simple trick, but it transforms the experience.”

He wants to build on the idea expressed by Bill Brandt: “It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveller who enters a strange country.” He clearly succeeds.

Discovered via BrainPickings.

Chesterton, Borges, and Your Innate Natural Magic

"Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time." (Napoleon of Notting Hill)

Cathedral of Commerce, by Rob Gonsalves 

(Note: All artwork in this post by Rob Gonsalves or M.C. Escher.)

I have written here before about Borges’ Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, one of my all-time favorite stories.  In it, he describes the gradual and bloodless takeover of the Earth by a non-existent alien population, managed in an astonishing manner by various authors, artists, and all sorts of philosophers. What is particularly interesting about this takeover, other than the key fact that it is bloodless, is that there is no despot, no ruling party which then has all the power and control; no one steps up to impose their perceptions of good and evil onto the population. What happens, instead, is that the population is gradually introduced to an idea, here via language:

“The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say "moon," but rather "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky" or any other such combination. In the example selected the mass of adjectives refers to a real object, but this is purely fortuitous. The literature of this hemisphere (like Meinong's subsistent world) abounds in ideal objects, which are convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic needs. At times they are determined by mere simultaneity. There are objects composed of two terms, one of visual and another of auditory character: the color of the rising sun and the faraway cry of a bird. There are objects of many terms: the sun and the water on a swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep. These second-degree objects can be combined with others; through the use of certain abbreviations, the process is practically infinite. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word. This word forms a poetic object created by the author. The fact that no one believes in the reality of nouns paradoxically causes their number to be unending. The languages of Tlön's northern hemisphere contain all the nouns of the Indo-European languages - and many others as well.” (Translation from the linked Title).

The idea here is this: Re-formulate your metaphors. Rethink your language-object associations. Re-see what is in front of you, by naming it, describing it differently. Out of this new way of seeing and describing comes a whole culture, with its own architecture--the molding of shapes and ways of living in that new space--, which then of course can lead to an archeology--an inspired history of how the architecture developed over time. New sciences emerge which make sense from that point of view. These new sciences and maths and cultural histories and literatures then gradually overtake the ones that were previously taught, the ones which had been called Earth cultures and sciences and maths, etc.

In Napoleon of Notting Hill, G.K. Chesterton, one of Borges’ literary inspirations, travels along a similar path, albeit one with large amounts of blood-spilling swashbuckling (although this is somehow rendered with the distance of mythic history even as it is happening in the novel). The opening quote (above) occurs as three clerks make their routine morning walk to work together, one of them--for no clear reason--choosing to walk behind them today, instead of abreast. This is not his only change in habit for the day, by the end of which a whole new world will begin its emergence, with much fanfare and bluster:

“So the short Government official looked at the coat-tails of the tall Government officials, and through street after street, and round corner after corner, saw only coat-tails, coat-tails, and again coat-tails--when, he did not in the least know why, something happened to his eyes.Two black dragons were walking backwards in front of him. Two black dragons were looking at him with evil eyes. The dragons were walking backwards it was true, but they kept their eyes fixed on him none the less. The eyes which he saw were, in truth, only the two buttons at the back of a frock-coat: perhaps some traditional memory of their meaningless character gave this half-witted prominence to their gaze. The slit between the tails was the nos-line of the monster: whenever the tails flapped in the winter wind the dragons licked their lips...” (8)

Chesterton goes on to develop the effects of this bizarre flipping of the rear-clerk’s vision in a truly fabulous language in style, the whole of which reminds me of the characters passing through Borges' Yellow Emperor's mirror, an act which will allow them to stop moving mechanically and start living--another sort of revolution, which in that case is prophesied to be heralded with the glinting, curving line of a fish in the glass-- no longer an automaton limited to the breathing of dry air, but rather a creature who can take on any atmosphere:

“But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles--they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know--that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like a song. He had scarcely noticed the weather before, but with the four dead eyes glaring at him he looked round and realised the strange dead day.
The morning was wintry and dim, not misty, but darkened with that shadow of cloud or snow which steeps everything in a green or copper twilight. The light there is on such a day seems not so much to come from the clear heavens as to be a phosphorescence clinging to the shapes themselves. The load of heaven and the clouds is like a load of waters, and the men move like fishes, feeling that they are on the floor of a sea. Everything in a London street completes the fantasy; the carriages and cabs themselves resemble deep-sea creatures with eyes of flame. He had been startled at first to meet two dragons. Now he found he was among deep-sea dragons possessing the deep sea.”

by Rob Gonsalves: Note the appearance of the line of ships as well as the posts changing to women or vice versa. 

"They crawled on past the lamp-posts; their mien was so immovable that a fanciful description might almost say, that the lamp-posts crawled past the men, as in a dream." --Napoleon of Notting Hill

In his guide to hyper-lucid dreaming, Frederick Dodson suggests that a person pay particular attention to his/her attention as often as possible. Am I dreaming now? (Yes). He also points out that one of the reasons people so desire to dream lucidly, besides the sense of agency it allows them, is because, in a lucid dream, things seem more real than real. There is a vividness, in every sense, which does not regularly exist when we are awake--unless, of course, we are mystics. Dodgson suggests that “f you can think of or visualize places of beauty and strangeness while falling asleep you change your own energy frequency to a state that is more attuned to lucid dreaming. Also try putting your attention to places you have never been before. To the waking-life-mind lucidity appears beautiful and strange. The idea of this exercise is to "lucid dream" before you lucid dream, that is, to create the state yourself rather than waiting for a lucid dream to deliver results. And as you create the desired state from your own power and initiative, it will be many times magnified in the actual lucid dream. "

By Rob Gonsalves

But the point is to have the feeling that the world you are facing is amazing, and that--and even more amazing--you do have agency in it.



Chesterton suggests an amazingly fantastic example of this in another novel of his, The Man who Was Thursday, a Nightmare. In this scene, Mr. Lucian Gregory, an “anarchic poet” living in the fabulously described Saffron Park is faced with Mr. Gabriel Syme, who we quickly find is an undercover police agent, out looking for anarchists (though, to be specific, he is looking for dangerous anarchists, and he does not seem too concerned with our poet). They have a little language duel, in which Lucian declares that all poets are anarchists, that it is their duty to abolish things, if only for the singularly “poetic” moment of the blaze, the delight of chaos. Otherwise, he says, the Underground Railway would be the height of poetry, with its dull and plodding regularity, its guarantee of sticking to plan. Gabriel says: it is.

“The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it... Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Baghdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!’…‘I tell you,’ went on Syme with passion, ‘that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape.’” (4)

So, to note that you have done something immense and magical by defeating all odds to actually arrive in Victoria at the allotted time--and what's more, by way of some strange vehicle which whips around under and over ground at great speeds and with strange noises--well, suddenly, you realize, what power I have! And how much better is this realization than the one we more typically put our energies into: my god, I woke up this morning 15 minutes late, forgot to brush my teeth so my breath tastes like I spent all night gnawing on old bones, and the first thing I did when I stepped outside was drench myself in a puddle. We will go around repeating this all day, to everyone we see, with mounting, poetic exasperation. What is that? It's a litany of the opposite of miracles. We are amazed by how badly things go--no bars on the phone, the text wasn't instant, it took several minutes--but not by how regularly well they go, starting with the fact that you *woke up this morning*. This is something I noticed in school, this fascination with litanies of terribleness. We study war after war, treachery after treachery, disease after disease. The very idea of a class which is centered on lists of the impossibly miraculous--of placebos and fantastic occurrences unrepeatable in double-blind studies-- would meet with scorn, where a class on the particular terrors and daily incidents of human nastiness and failure that occurred during the whole of the existence of Nazi camps, or the particular details of the tortures of the impoverished (or simply opinionated) of Chile under Pinochet--these are intellectual exercises which will somehow grant great understanding and knowledge.

So, it comes as no surprise that most of us feel no agency in our lives.

In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Borges gives an example of a strange taxonomy, claimed to have been culled from some ancient Chinese encyclopedia, and in this taxonomy, he delicately displays “the arbitrariness (and cultural specificity) of any attempt to categorize the world.” (Wiki). The taxonomy divides all animals into the following categories:

“Those that belong to the emperor
Embalmed ones
Those that are trained
Suckling pigs
Mermaids (or Sirens)
Fabulous ones
Stray dogs
Those that are included in this classification
Those that tremble as if they were mad
Innumerable ones
Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
Et cetera
Those that have just broken the flower vase
Those that, at a distance, resemble flies”

by M.C. Escher, who said: "I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful 

and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it 

sometimes appears. My subjects are also often playful: I cannot refrain from 

demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties."

Order IS the miracle. Even though all ordering is arbitrary, even though there are a million gorillas passing that you don't see, and a million atoms shivering that you can't perceive; even though you can't hear most of the sounds of the universe, because they don't fall into the small range of hearing that humans possess, *somehow*, we have decided on a shareable image of the world. We have decided that in that world is this city, and through the city will run a train, thus, and it will arrive at each destination at particular times, thus, and that if I get on it now, I will arrive at the place I plan to, thus, and you can meet me there. How is that not a miracle? How, if you think about the chaos of molecules surrounding you and filling your "body,"--how, if you think about the fact that you're all water and bacteria, and some distant memory of a fantasy of your great-great grandmother’s dreams, given flesh--how does any of this happen?
So, it's arbitrary, meaning--you could categorize things in an utterly different way. And yet we don't. And yet, some things fall into those categories, and we see them. The fact that we miss gorillas is astonishing, but so is the fact that we manage to agree to see anything at all.



All of us do this: when you say to someone: I am going to catch the train to Victoria, meet me there at 2pm, and then it happens, that is a miracle. You are a magician. Take a moment and taste this, feel how bizarre and magical it is, and then apply that new knowledge of your own abilities to something you've been convincing yourself can't happen.

Please list miracles below in the comments.

By Rob Gonsalves

Now, back to Napoleon of Notting Hill. After our trailing clerk has begun to see all these odd things about the world around him he generally hasn’t noticed, he tries something else: standing on his head. He does so at the top of a hill, where all sorts of respectable people will see him, thus embarrassing the gentlemen who dared him to do so. As he is standing on his head, ignoring the pleas of his two companions, some officials arrive to announce that he, Mr. Quin, has been chosen--by lottery--as the new king.

He stands on his head, and becomes--not because he stands on his head, surely?--the new king. It is a little blue ship moment, where the fool becomes king, where the rule of the universe is turned upside down, where a change in perspective is everything. Were those gentlemen really already planning to approach him with this news all this time that they have been walking, on this utterly normal day? Or is it because he saw two dragons, went outside at the restaurant in the middle of a very serious discussion to have a laugh about its ridiculousness, and then proceeded to stand on his head, in front of everyone? Is it from that perspective of the world--the one where he’s breathing underwater and upside-down--that he becomes king? And then even gets to enjoy the fact while standing upright?

In fact, Chesterton himself--well, Auberon Quin--states this quite plainly. He speaks of the ritual (all religion has ritual, yes? All magic has ritual? Artists have rituals, and some of them even consider play to be their ritual, which would put them at the *height* of majesty) that he would like to enjoy as a result of his establishment as king. He wants a ceremony upon his entrance into the city, and when the others look embarrassed (at him, not at themselves), and note that there aren’t ceremonies anymore, not in their society, he says,

“‘All ceremony...consists in the reversal of the obvious. Thus men, when they wish to be priests or judges, dress up like women. Kindly help me on with this coat.’ And he held it out. ‘But your Majesty,’ said the officer, after a moment’s bewilderment and manipulation, ‘you’re putting it on with the tails in front.’‘The reversal of the obvious,’ said the King, calmly, ‘is as near as we can come to ritual with our imperfect apparatus. Lead on.’ (24)

As he steps into office, he begins to change everything. He wants the whole world standing on ceremony. At this point, the world has been described to us as being very different from how we see it today: The whole world has been ‘unified’. There are no countries, there are no politicians, and therefore there is no pride of place, special flags or colors, and no arguing over policy. The world is free of war. It is led by one man, a despot, a King, who is chosen at random, by lottery. He makes the decisions, and everyone simply follows them.

Chess Master, by Rob Gonsalves

This King, Mr. Quin, decides to flip all of that on its head. He makes grand speeches, dressed ceremoniously, declaring that we should recall with pride the particular histories of our particular neighborhoods. If we forget, for a moment, what those histories might be, we need only look to the names of the neighborhoods. And then he proceeds to make up some histories, to help people along:

“So long as Hammersmith is called Hammersmith, its people will live in the shadow of that primal hero, the Blacksmith, who led the democracy of the Broadway into battle till he drove the chivalry of Kensington before him and overthrew them at that place which in honour of the best blood of the defeated aristocracy is still called Kensington Gore. Men of Hammersmith will not fail to remember that the very name of Kensington originated from the lips of their hero. For at the great banquet of reconciliation held after the war, when the disdainful oligarchs declined to join in the songs of the men of the Broadway...the great Republican leader, with his rough humour, said the words which are written in gold upon his monument, ‘Little birds that can sing and won’t sing, must be made to sing.’ So that the Eastern Knights were called Cansings or Kensings ever afterwards.” (31)

He then specifies that he only selected these examples because he has personal associations with them, and therefore happens to know about them, not because they are any “more glorious” than any of the other histories out there. He suggests that those of Notting Hill will have to tell us whether their name derives from Nutting Hill, alluding to a history of wooded territory no longer extant, or from some sort of “corruption” of “Nothing-ill, referring to its reputation among the ancients as an Earthly Paradise.”


He suggests that his people (all people) make up new stories and histories which they are proud of, and then protect them as property. He is saying that all boundaries are arbitrary, and that all such stories are a matter of some mixture of perception and embellished, selective memory and creativity anyway, but that what’s most important is that we’re aware that we’re doing it. That we take part in the process. That we not only write those histories ourselves (we do anyway!), but that we pay attention to the fact that we’re writing them. (I read a quote the other day from someone who had been reading eyewitness testimonies in car accident cases who said that after seeing two or three different stories about the same accident--from uninvolved, uninvested parties--he had real reservations about trusting anything called ‘history’.) He’s also pointing out that, yes, we’re making it up, and that the process of making it up and making it real and celebrating its reality matters, but you can’t, simultaneously, take any of it too seriously.

Go forth, and enjoy the next city’s festivities.



PART II Atmosphere

Later in the story, King Quin confides to another:
“I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence.” (81) That ability to see something upside down, as he did the day he became king, that is a powerful ability. It is an ability to be cultivated. Another way of cultivating it, besides cheering when your train arrives where it should, when you end up exactly where you planned to, when you tie your shoes properly, is to create. To draw what you want to see, to write the conversations you want to have, to create the characters you wish to interact with, and then interact with them. At a certain point in the story, this game that the King started for laughs becomes oddly serious, and an economic enterprise we often see in the world around us--a desire to build a big, useful road-- is stymied by a particular neighborhood leader who refuses, at any price, and despite the agreement of all other neighborhoods to be razed in this effort, to give up his hill (yes, Notting Hill).  And so that thing, that unthinkable thing which never happens anymore is happening: war.

It is to be a ridiculous war, waged by the many against a few. The neighborhood leader, Adam Wayne, goes out to drum up support amongst his neighbors for his cause, calling on them to take pride in what they do--toy store owner, pharmacist, grocer--he declares lines of poetry describing the magic and ritual and necessity of all that they do. He meets with blank gazes. They encourage him to buy something and leave. When he visits the toy-store owner, however, he gets a big surprise, which I won’t go into here.

The many and the powerful attack with more soldiers than they feel they could possibly need, so that simply seeing them march up the hill, the Nottinghammers will submit, and there will be little or no need for bloodshed, which no one wants. But the unthinkable happens. They are routed.

The situation has now gone from being Quin’s unthinkable to being Wayne’s unthinkable.

By M.C.Escher: "Talent and all that are really for the most part just baloney. 

Any schoolboy with a little aptitude can perhaps draw better than I; but what he 

lacks in most cases is that tenacious desire to make it reality, that obstinate 

gnashing of teeth and saying, "Although I know it can't be done, I want to do it anyway".

The leader of the action goes back to one of his business associates in the project in disbelief, describing the event in terms of a dream:

“But though the little streets were all deserted (which got a trifle on my nerves), as we got deeper and deeper into them, a thing began to happen that I couldn’t understand. Sometimes a long way ahead--three turns or corners ahead, as it were--there broke suddenly a sort of noise, clattering, and confused cries, and then stopped. Then, when it happened, something, I can’t describe it--a kind of shake or stagger went down the line, as if the line were a live thing, whose head had been struck, or had been an electric cord. None of us knew why we were moving, but we moved and jostled. Then we recovered, and went on through the little dirty streets, round corners, and up twisted ways. The little crooked streets began to give me a feeling I can’t explain--as if it were a dream. I felt as if things had lost their reason, and we should never get out of the maze...”

Then, he is suddenly picking himself off the ground, where he has been thrown by a blow, and he is in the midst of it. And he says:

“...when you have had that experience, as Walt Whitman says, ‘you re-examine philosophies and religions.” (86)

But his associate, Buck, is unimpressed. He sees where this occurred on the map, and he sees how they managed to be defeated. He sees, therefore, how it can all be rectified, by a second battle. He brushes off the sensation of the dream as hogwash. He says, it’s not a dream, it’s atmosphere--Adam Wayne’s atmosphere. He says, stay out of that atmosphere, and stick to the facts. It’s all logic. Look at the map. Plan the next attack.

He wins his friend (Barker) around, and they do just that. There is a second attack that very night, which is also routed, and also for a reason clear enough in hindsight. Buck actually took part in that one, and was wounded, and comes back from the doctors furious that there hasn’t already been a third attack, using the hindsight as preparation. Barker tiredly explains to him exactly why not, and suggests that they put the whole thing away. Forget it. Listen to logic yourself, he says: this is costing us, money and lives--more than we had hoped to gain by the venture itself. But Buck won’t let it go. And so Barker turns his own words upon him:

“..you were quite right in what you you said the other day... that we had all got into Adam Wayne’s atmosphere and out of our own. My friend, the whole territorial kingdom of Adam Wayne extends to about nine streets, with barricades at the end of them. But the spiritual kingdom of Adam Wayne extends, God knows where--it extends to this office, at any rate. The red-haired madman whom any two doctors would lock up is filling this room with his roaring, unreasonable soul. And it was the red-haired madman who said the last word you spoke.” (100)

Now, there is a thought: Galvani’s juice, the electricity that gives us life, could be atmosphere, created (undoubtedly) by someone. Who, though? Who provides us with the motions and behaviors we mimic as mirrors? This is not only a question of being bored, this issue of automatism--a question of missing joys and possibilities and magic. It is also a question of destroying yourself, as did all those soldiers. Interestingly, though, this is how the artist has more power than he thinks: an artist creates atmosphere. An author, or a painter, or a movie director or actress draws you in, to live in that atmosphere, to build your memories there. That is how an author can save the world--your world, at least. She gives you a memory you desperately needed, a memory of the time that the lampposts fought to save Notting Hill, a memory of the time they turned into elephants. The “suspension of disbelief” everyone likes to talk about is this: you experience the events of a tale as if you were there. Otherwise, there is no point to reading the book, to gazing into the heart of the painting, to sinking into the seat at the theater. Remember in Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, when he describes epileptic attacks that are triggered by certain types of music? He explains that the music simply being there doesn’t matter. The seizure--the momentary loss of connection to this world experience--results only if the patient feels the music, pays attention to it, sinks into it. Something about that music disconnects them from this reality, and dumps them into another experience, which can be a memory from their own experiences or an experience (often repeated) which has nothing to do with this life at all. The connection, here, is that feeling of sinking in. When you watch a movie, you stay here or you go there. If you “go there,” something happens to your own makeup as a person. You have new, significantly emotional, memories. And even if they aren’t “truly” yours, your brain treats them as if they are. And the more often you sink yourself into those memories, the more they become a part of your personal make-up.

Written Worlds, by Rob Gonsalves

But what experience are you giving yourself to?

After the battles are fought and Nottingham Hill is left alone, everything changes. People, instead of rolling their eyes at the required fanfare the King has implemented, become invested in it. Quin goes to visit the grocer that Wayne had gone to in his initial rounds in search of support, and he finds the man “dressed in a long and richly embroidered robe of blue, brown, and crimson, interwoven with an Eastern complexity of pattern, and covered with obscure symbols and pictures, representing his wares passing from hand to hand and from nation to nation. Round his neck was the chain with the Blue Argosy cut in turquoise, which he wore as Grand Master of the Grocers. The whole shop had the sombre and sumptuous look of its owner. The wares were displayed as prominently as in the old days, but they were now blended and arranged with a sense of tint and grouping, too often neglected by the dim grocers of those forgotten days. The wares were shown plainly, but shown not so much as an old grocer would have shown his stock, but rather as an educated virtuoso would have shown his treasures...” After Quin has eyes all this thoughtfully, he turns to the Grocer himself, who tells him:
“‘I thought nothing of being a grocer then,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that odd enough for anybody? I thought nothing of all the wonderful places that my goods come from, and wonderful ways that they are made. I did not know that I was for all practical purposes a king with slaves spearing fishes near the secret pool, and gathering fruits in the islands under the world. My mind was a blank on the thing. I was as mad as a hatter.’” (120)

Towers of Knowledge, by Rob Gonsalves

Really, who is not a King? NOTHING is logical: the way to make something real  is to invest past sanity in its atmosphere, to insult logic with the amount you invest in it.



“Only those who attempt the absurd...will achieve the impossible. I think ...I think it's in my basement...Let me go upstairs and check.”
- M.C. Escher (1898 – 1972)

For a post more concentrated on the artwork of Rob Gonsalves (and some others), see “Mutual Consent, or Reality, Part II”. (http://zoe-in-wonderland.blogspot.com/search?q=rob+gonsalves)