Quirkiness at the Edge

"What does Interesting mean to me? It means that it seems to have sprung from a genuine artistic impulse, and has the sense of somebody really and truly wanting to communicate something through the medium. This being different from simply trying to make a series popular, visually spectacular, emotionally evocative, intellectually complex, or even just dedicating yourself to making a series 'good.' This is why the accusation that the art style was "a mess" at that time doesn't bother me; it was a transition state, but some roughness of execution does not condemn something that has this genuine core (and a fine finish certainly cannot compensate for its lack).

Now, being able to judge Interesting is, of course, not some simple deductive process. Art criticism never is. All I can say is that in my experience there is a certain cohesiveness to them, like you can tell there are more threads tying it together than are readily apparent. There is also often a type of individuality, where the conclusion, the moral, the story, the execution... it is somehow quirky. Not necessarily radically novel but not quite what you would expect either, with some of the interpretation being clear and others parts requiring further thought . You can't just fall back on the common patterns ('tropes') to easily figure out what is being said, but it is not random; just at the edge of intelligibility. And ultimately, there has to be some quality to the insight being conveyed; the topic can be completely mundane and still be compelling, but if coming from an utterly banal mind it's going to be dim."

Above is a reply I made in a short discussion concerning why I valued anime of the early 2000s rather than of the last decade.  That topic itself isn't of particular interest to expand on here, but what is interesting is Interesting.  

I'm always on the lookout for things that are Interesting.  I guess it's just my own way of saying I'm looking for things I think contain genuine artistic quality, although I try to avoid those words themselves because people tend to feel they know what they already mean and have firm views on them (or their non-existence).  Capitalizing an innocuous word seems to do well; it's like inventing a new term, but is less taxing on the reader while still preventing old views from leaping in immediately.  It also makes it a proper noun, and a subtle emphasis on how important I view it to be.

But beyond the above, I wanted to jot down a side thought I had after writing it.  Why would Interesting things be a little quirky?  Is it just because they are genuine expressions of individuality, and therefore necessarily different?  I think that's part of it, but I also have a guess that perhaps it also involves the nature of art.

If art is to communicate anything, it has to speak a language, as it were.  The more shared that language is the easier it is to reach a wider audience, and indeed that's what cultural traditions help supply: a structure that helps artists frame their ideas and patrons appreciate them.  However, the problem is also that languages are by their nature limited, and while artistic languages may have the power to convey more than semantic content can, they too will only be able to do so much.

What it seems inevitable to me, then, is that anybody really seeing to express something will discover that they have to wrestle with their chosen medium and its languages to find out how to "translate" themselves a little.  If a work is entirely derivative it can be adequately expressed by the common language; no struggles or modifications are required.  On the other hand, a made-up personal language may be supremely expressive... but is largely indecipherable; maybe it's art for the artist, but for the rest of us it's scribbling.  There's a fine line in there where the necessity of trying to find the right way to express something as a unique individual with a worldview worthy of expression forces the work to be just a bit quirky.  

This is assuredly not a new idea out there, but I have yet to read it so I can claim it as my own for now, and leave on looking for things that are Interesting.

Impossibility of Recreating Greek Tragedy

"Remoteness from the immediate here and now, required by tragedy and guaranteed by legendary material, is here [in Aeschylus' "The Persians"] to a great extent achieved by placing the scene in the heart of Persia, so far away and guarded from Greeks that to the audience it might have seemed almost as legendary as the Troy of Hector or the Thebes of Oedipus."

The above is from Richmond Lattimore's introduction to the Oresteia, my latest reading in my Greek Project, and it has me thinking about why we've never been able to quite recapitulate Greek tragedy in modern form.  

I wonder if part of the issue is what Lattimore alludes to above: tragedy must in some sense be enacted by beings that stand at some distance from us in either time or space.  In that way the characters can take on a stature that familiarity cannot find contempt with, despite their often flawed and human nature.  That's the balance, after all, that these larger-than-life personalities must maintain - enough greatness to be archetypal, enough humanness to be relevant.  And even if myth, yet still somewhat believed in.

But our modern world doesn't have any corners left.  Physically we've covered it all, mapped it, seen it clearly from space.  There is no longer any far off land that can be left to the imagination.  The same is also true of time.  We know too much about our own history now; the legends of the past are either validated by fact or dismissed as only myth.  The same is true of the people, where we are all too aware that they were only human too, and it is with a betrayed vindictiveness that we eviscerate the character of all our previous heroes.  As such, there's nowhere for an Agamemnon or a Clytemnestra to hide from critical archeology and its accompanying psychoanalytic dismemberment.

The other idea that also came earlier today is related.  I was reading Middlemarch and came across this line:

"Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life - a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them?  But there was nothing to strike others as sublime about Mr. Casaubon, and Lydgate, who had some contempt at hand for futile scholarship, felt a little amusement mingling with his pity.  He was at present too ill acquainted with disaster to enter into the pathos of a lot where everything is below the level of tragedy except the passionate egoism of the sufferer."

I recall reading once about the Greek concept of pathos in an art book: "...means suffering, but particularly suffering conveyed with nobility and restraint so that it touches rather than horrifies us" (Jansen's History of Art for Young People).  I also recall reading, I do not recall where from, that Aristotle stated suffering is made heroic because it leads to some insight.  Suffering without wisdom is just pathetic (in the modern sense of the word).  

Since the nineteenth century a focus on people as a whole, rather than only a nobility or an elite, has become increasingly the norm.  We have to account for the experience of the commoner's life as well as the hero's, and the truth is that most of our lives fall far below the level required for heroic tragedy.  I wonder if part of the problem is that the Greeks simply... cannot conceive of writing a play about meaningless suffering.  It is almost as though by definition anybody who was crushed under their suffering was not a noteworthy or valuable person; the fact they did not rise to greatness under the pressure demonstrates this.  The sense that the lost and downtrodden are valuable awaits for a later, more Christian era.  Yet this freedom from charity would perhaps also allow for a purity of expression; no nagging doubts that great people are anything other than great by simple demonstration of their acts.  They can be written on with total conviction that they are superior to the average person while retaining their personhood.  

As I close this little post, I wonder if the two theories above are related in some way.  It is all a type of removing remoteness, that we can no longer see the relevance in something that did not happen (unless it is long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away or in the previous era of Middle Earth, both of which as remote as Persia) or if it does not somehow represent all of us, the link with the archetypal somehow having been severed.  I am unsure; something to continue to think on.

On Taste

Lying in bed the other day I thought on how physical taste was a remarkably useful metaphor (and perhaps not entirely a metaphor) for artistic taste.

In the beginning, as children, what seems to us the acme of good food?  Simple: foods that stimulate us the most.  Extremely sweet sugary confections, very sour candies, and strong salty-fat foods such as french fries.  In order to put all the focus on these experiences, though, these foods by necessity must also consist of only one or a few basic flavors.  If what you want is sweet, then the other aspects must either be very minor (it tastes sort of like raspberry) or separate (perhaps a sour center to a sweet jawbreaker); it's just the inevitable reality of trying to make an experience bold for its own sake.

The other aspect that guides childish tastes is familiarity.  By our nature, one of the first things we appraise food of is whether it is one we have already eaten, with a natural inclination toward that which we already know but have not rejected.  It's safe, after all: we tried it before and liked it (and in the case of food, it didn't poison us either).  No need to worry about any uncertainty, or the associated effort of scrutinizing, a second time.  By comparison, unfamiliar foods always meet with an initial degree of skepticism; they not only have to prove themselves with no assistance of previous association, they are compared against things that we already have fondness for.  The hurdle has been raised and many dishes that are quite palatable fail simply because they are not what the child has eaten before.

So this is the baseline human state: we like what is highly stimulating with a prejudice toward the familiar.  This can endure for some time, and indeed for some people all their lives.  However, for many there begins to creep in a basic dissatisfaction with the repeated monochrome flavors.  Despite their intensity they become dull.  How do we overcome this?  Simplistically we may try to make them ever sweeter or sourer, but this soon runs into the same limitations, and indeed becomes unpleasant when taken to an extreme.  

The other course is to combine flavors.  If salty and sweet by themselves are not engaging, perhaps together they create a new experience.  It is novel, and we are suspicious of novel, but boredom helps us overcome our trepidation.  What we soon discover, though, is that it is no longer just the intensity of the flavors that matters, it is the relationship.  Too salty or too sweet and the other flavor is eclipsed; they have to exist not only at the right absolute levels to be enjoyable, they must also be the right level relative to the other flavor.  We have the beginnings of the idea the parts must exist in some relation to the whole and that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Now, unlike the relatively limited set of basic flavors, the number of combinations of flavors is exponentially greater, both due to possible pairings as well as their relative contributions.  It's a whole new world of possibilities, and while many may not turn out to be very tasty we nonetheless are exposed to much we wouldn't otherwise.  Also as we explore these combinations we realize that the secondary characteristics that originally were not as important take on greater relevance.  They further differentiate what were once single flavors, and we find that these sub-flavors have great bearing on each other.  Raspberry sweet doesn't make a very good teriyaki sauce.  So not only has our ability to experience a broader array of dishes increased, so too has our ability to differentiate what we once regarded as monolithic flavors.

A side effect of this experimentation is that we discover that while some combinations/dishes are popular with most people, because they really are good, there are some that for us hold a particular place.  This is a natural result of discovering that there are much finer gradations than we previously thought existed.  And in a way, they didn't before - the food was always there but the experience of eating it only occurs when the food reaches a mouth connected to something which can process that information.  Before then it tastes like nothing (or like one hand clapping).  Now that these subtleties are available to us, though, we find that there are some which, for some reason or another, we are particularly sensitive to.  There are flavors that only a few people can discern, and therefore reflect not only the nature of the food but begins to say something of the nature of the taster as well.

Having started down this path, however, there's no saying where it ends.  For instance, perhaps we add a temporal component: the order of the dishes matters, as some are more appropriate for whetting the appetite and others for rounding it out in satiation at the end.  This also serves as contrast, for it is patently obvious by now that too much of one thing in succession causes us to become habituated to it.  Sight and aroma become more important for they can play into the experience through anticipation, which in itself is a significant component of enjoyment.  By now the original categories that one started with, the sweets and the sours, have become all but insufficient to characterize the experience.  What the child perceives and what the connoisseur perceives have become entirely different.

At this point I reach the edge of my culinary knowledge.  I am no gourmet, and while I have used this as an illustration I admit I do not believe that epicurean pursuits are particularly elevating for the soul.  The human olfactory/gustatory system is not all that refined by comparison to our vision and hearing, our primary modes of art, and I suspect are too much tied up with basic needs of satiation.  Nonetheless, even given these limitations I hope that this simpler, more neutral subject is an effective illustration of a progression in artistic understanding:

• An early state ruled by the intense and the familiar
  
• A more developed state that perceives relationships and subtleties and is open to new experiences
• A growing state that internalizes, learning more about the self and in turn more about the subject
• An advanced state where only hints are required to call up associations, the experiencer's own nature having taken on a far greater role than before
  

This is why an expert cannot just explain anything to a beginner - the very vocabulary they use will be incomprehensible.  They can try to guide and offer suggestions, but ultimately an education in this topic works a change in the person that cannot be offered externally.  

Not Getting Fooled Again

Photo copyright by trent_talk2us. 
https://www.flickr.com/photos/9916926@N08/970362599/

"I feel that no one ought to concern himself with the 'Numen ineffabile' who has not already devoted assiduous and serious study to the 'Ratio aeterna'." - Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

Four mornings a week I sit in (online) meditation with a local Zen Buddhist group.  It's a good practice with a good group of people, and it is one of the many ways I am trying to keep up a sort of spiritual momentum that was set in motion in 2017.  Perhaps in time I may even become good at it, but for now I will content myself with a state of perpetual mental tinnitus while on the cushion. 

However, there's a wrinkle in this that comes up now and again that I want to remark on.  Here is a sample of a comment one practicioner made:

"Over this last weekend I took a trip with a scientist friend and we got to talking about the big things.  You know, meaning, life, those sorts of things, and I said, 'Well, everything is one.'  And she turned to me and said that she didn't believe that; that she was an individual and that she didn't think there was any evidence for unity.  It took me by surprise because I'm used to such statements going unchallenged as self-evident within our community."

Or another that was part of a talk by one of the roshis:

"...and then this mathematician walked out of the talk being given by the Zen master realizing that everything she knew didn't really matter."

I paraphrase from memory but I believe I have captured the gist of both.  I have a problem with them.  The issue lies not with their content, which in many ways I agree, but with the framing: there is secular knowledge and there is sacred knowledge, and of the two the former is limited and potentially blinding while the latter is limitless and of ultimate value.  This sentiment is not an uncommon religious one, that things of the world pale by comparison to the things of Heaven, and I think in some ways it has only gained subtle strength as we have discovered that our vast information civilization has not delivered to us the happiness and fulfillment we desire.  Clearly, something is missing.  Yet our attempts to make a rational religion have by and large failed, precisely I believe because ultimate reality is transrational.

A brief aside on the terminology of 'transrational.'  We tend to classify things as rational vs. irrational, as though the two categories were sort of equal complimenting pairs, and that everything in one category is in a crucial sense similar.  However, I believe a better way of viewing it is that there is irrational (a failure to apply rational principles), rational, and then transrational (a realization that rational principles have limits).  Something being irrational is not the same as something being transrational, and to put them together in the same category gives a false sense of similarity.  And in the case of the rationalist, a false sense of superiority.  But as Huston Smith notes:

"However much the rationalist may begrudge the fact, paradox and the transrational are religion’s life blood, and that of art as well."

I have been thinking on this for years.  It's not a view I wanted, as my own nature is analytical, but it is one I have tried to digest as best I can if simply because I myself found the end of the road and realized I could either be stuck forever or strike out in a new direction.  However, there is a worry that comes to me and that is when people try to take either the rational or the transrational and go to extremes.  Either continue the modern habit of attempting to make everything rational, by which the West has now brought upon itself a mental and moral fracture, or to gleefully embrace the existence of the transrational as an excuse to bypass the rational.

When you take note of how rapidly Buddhism has grown in popularity in the West, you're forced to ask yourself why it has been more successful at filling the void Christianity left than other religions.  There are likely several reasons, such as its associations with pacifism as well as its "East Asian Wisdom" exoticness that give it great appeal, but I think that among the more thoughtful people who nonetheless wish to be religious it is attractive because of its perceived status as pro-science while being non-doctrinaire.  

Whenever I think about the modern mind, the title of The Who song, We Won't Get Fooled Again comes to mind.  Christianity's fall has thoroughly disillusioned the intelligentsia of the West with the result that we don't want to put our faith in anything that would ask us to believe in the falsifiable.  We've seen what happens when that falls through.  Here then Buddhism, and especially Zen Buddhism, seems to be an answer; while it certainly has its doctrines, in the end it seems like all you have to do is engage in a practice while assenting to none of the theology.  The ultimate truths are ones that are transrational and therefore safely beyond the grasp of science to disrupt.  In this way the believer is safe once again, at peace with the knowledge that they've got The Answer (I suspect this is why "don't know mind" must be emphasized again and again by the teachers; it is so easy to have confidence in your knowledge of not knowing and fail to recognize the irony).

That said, this doesn't prevent people from feeling bolstered when they hear that modern physics or neuroscience has made statements which back Buddhist beliefs.  A conversation from my previous zendo comes to mind, where somebody had brought up how a popular science article had likened the brain to a pilotless plane: we can't find the center and our sense of self is likely a construct.  The implication of this tidbit to the speaker being that it was nice for science to finally catch up to what Buddhism has known for millennia.  Despite relying on the transrational, we just can't help looking for reinforcement; science is so dominant a cultural force that it really is comforting when it convinces us of what we already believed.

But things aren't always as they seem, either, and I would like to take a moment to illustrate this.

Impermanent Pleasure (The Hypnotized Never Lie)

"Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing." - Shakespeare

Spend any time with Buddhism and it won't be long before you run into impermanence.  The world is impermanent.  All composite things are impermanent.  And of course, pleasure is impermanent.  It's the natural followup; once we understand this one great principle we grasp this particular instance as well: our futile grasping to keep pleasure continuing is one of the causes of our own suffering due to our failure to align with the nature of the world (which is in large part what my recent freedom essays have been circling around).

Science in the last few decades has made great inroads on the topic of pleasure as well.  It ends up that the dopamine reward system that activates whenever we do pleasurable things is perhaps not really a reward system, at least in the implication that it gives us a reward at the end.  It is perhaps better seen as a seeking system, and an evolutionary solution to a crucial problem: how is it possible to keep an organism which is capable of only living in the moment engaged in a beneficial, but protracted, and hence delayed benefit, behavior?  Let us use eating as an example.

We all know that eating is pleasurable.  That makes perfect evolutionary sense: eating keeps us alive, is generally a beneficial behavior, and hence something that we ought to be prompted to do by our nervous system.  But what about before you get to eat?  You have to go looking for something to eat.  As humans it seems no mystery that we can imagine that at the end of our search there will be food, and that that is what maintains our interest.  However, this is us just fooling ourselves with our consciousness-centric view, and to see why we need to go down the evolutionary ladder a little.

Imagine a cat hunting for its food.  Unlike us, it cannot imagine a future in which it has a mouse in its paws; it exists almost exclusively as a creature of the present moment (speaking of Zen...).  As a result it can do little but make rudimentary connections between present behaviors and future rewards.  That is, if it sees a mouse it will react.  Or, as anybody who has owned a cat knows, it can learn to meow until it is fed because it has learned through trial and error that brushing up against you and meowing makes food appear within minutes.  But this linkage is very short-lived.  In order for most organisms to learn the connection between a behavior and its results it can only be separated by a few minutes at most; beyond that it will be unable to bridge the gap.  And returning to the wild, leaving the den and searching for food takes far longer than a few minutes, and you probably want to do it before starvation prompts you to do so.  The cat might not be hungry now, but it will be hungry in a few hours by the time it's gotten something and it might not want to wait like that.  So what is evolution to do?  The answer is to make hunting itself pleasurable.  Of course, not as pleasurable as eating or else it would only want to hunt and not eat, but give it a steady enough trickle of dopamine to signal it that it is doing right and then end with a burst when the task is accomplished to ensure it isn't prolonged.  Problem solved.

Returning to humans, then, this is the same system that operates in us, and we demonstrate a similar tendency to being unable to connect actions and rewards if they are too separate in time.  It's a weakness of the criminal justice system that in an organism which relies primarily on swift and certain reinforcement that we make it protracted and debatable (not that I'm advocating we start hanging everybody at the drop of a hat).  It takes real practice and often a strong will to bring our actions into alignment with rationally forecast results, and those who can do so reliably are really quite extraordinary.  The rest of us get by being cats.

Now, this seeking system explains two aspects of pleasure in the human experience:

First is that working toward something is more rewarding than the thing itself.  Our conscious experience of our unconscious workings causes us to fixate on the burst at the end, but despite that being the highest peak of pleasure it is not the bulk of it.  That comes from the seeking.  Yet of course we are seduced by instant gratification even as it short-changes us.  It makes me wonder if this is why cooking for yourself you tend to eat less; whenever we just take something out of the microwave and gobble it up, only to still be hungry, perhaps we are trying to make up for the loss of anticipatory pleasure.  This is why I'm hardly alone in my dislike of consumer capitalism as it thrives on monetizing people's misery-producing self-misunderstanding, and why the recent rise of binge-watching seems to me particularly unhealthy.

The second issue is that pleasure of the reward never lasts long.  This would make no evolutionary sense either.  If an organism ate once and was sated for the rest of its life, the rest of its life wouldn't be all that long.  The system has to forcibly reset itself, and usually reset fairly quickly, because it needs us to keep doing new things.  As Jonathan Haidt observed well, we're evolved to survive, not be happy, and a contented organism doing nothing is generally best not staying that way for long.  As such, while we can imagine feeling pleasure forever the system is wired to keep that from happening.  Pleasure is programmably transient (I'm aware I'm conflating pleasure, happiness, contentment, etc. here; I just don't have space to delinate things for now).

At this point it may seem that I've just reinforced the conclusions that I derived above: science is just finally giving us a mechanistic underpinning to what the Buddha (and Shakespeare) already knew.  But look closely and you'll notice something quite crucial in the explanation above: the transience of pleasure has nothing to do with the transience of composite things.  Yes, perhaps in an ultimate sense we as a whole organism are transient, but there is no cosmic principle which dictates against pleasure extending from the first moment after birth to the last moment before death.  It is only our quirky evolutionary wiring which prevents this, and that is only one of many possible solutions to the issue of survival.

One of the oldest habits in human thinking is to relate our structure to the cosmic order.  The Godhead has three parts, therefore man has three parts.  There are four fundamental substances and four humors that correspond to them (also four directions).  There are seven celestial bodies and they of course represent an endless constellation of traits.  I'm sure there are plenty more, and should anybody ever read this some day and know of some particularly interesting correlations please let me know.  

Now, as we read these above we shake our heads at the simplemindedness of such equations.  It's so obvious that this is just brittle anthropomorphization.  That what we had desperately wanted to do was link ourselves to the order of the cosmos, using our supposed understanding of ourselves to interpret the universe.  I would say that the two halves of the transience equation have better grounding (I agree that all composite things are transitory and that much suffering comes from wishing pleasure were not transitory are true), but the linkage between them I do not feel is any more substantial than the examples above.  We can't blame cosmic principles for not enjoying our evening meal for the rest of our lives, let alone any more substantial achievement.  Yet this linkage would never have been challenged otherwise, continuing to be passed off as a self-evident moral observation that failure to align one's self with Reality results in suffering (which, again, I don't debate; it's the ethical precept being derived from the cosmic one that I do).

This is the kernel that inspired this freeform essay.  It's not that I'm personally insulted by thinking I am being "talked down to" as a scientist, but the fear that in the end people are sitting complacent in the transrational and so skipping a study of the rational which ultimately informs us in important ways.  Even if it is a hypothetically pro-science position, in truth it is more a science-tolerant one, and it doesn't look too closely because it already has the answer.

I am of the absolute belief that any viable religion of the future will have to be based on the science of today.  Not totally circumscribed by it, for as I noted above I think that rational religion fails for good reasons, but it must actively engage with it.  It's what religion has always done in the past, where as new scientific discoveries updated our view of the world from three-level-dome to globe-with-spheres our interpretation of religion had to change with this (but TASFAD, and an important one).  Trying to skip to the back of the book for the answers using an old religion with no updates is moribund.

Wrapping this up, I want to reaffirm something I just mentioned before in my Religious Freedom thoughts: I think that temporal and the spiritual need each other in some paradoxical way.  I don't know exactly why or how, except that it seems whenever one becomes too dominant the human spirit suffers as a result, too obsessed with or too dismissive of the experience of being human (another TASFAD).  This is why I believe the Otto quote at the top has it right: try to use rationality to grasp things as best we can, but acknowledge both.

Religious Freedom pt.2

This thought since yesterday won't leave me and I'm going to use this blog as a bit of a public attempt to work it out, since imagining I'm explaining it to somebody else seems to help.

The more I think on it, the more I am enamored to the idea that freedom is not multiplicity of choices but right will.  It dovetails nicely with the struggle I have had in reconciling in part the issue of our own limited nature, that we in fact do not have all choices open to us at all times but instead may only be able to pursue a subset of them given our own constitution.  I simply do not see how else we can get around the fact that the more we know about ourselves as organism the more we see that we cannot pretend the body is merely a puppet animated by the spirit.  What the full suite of possibilities for us is we cannot be sure, hence the default stance of believing change is possible in people while knowing that it may not be for everybody.

Furthermore, it makes me realize that choice in a way is strange.  If there are better and worse options why would we want to choose the worse?  And if all the options are the same, like that aisle in the supermarket full of dozens of variations of peanut butter, why is freedom anything other than trivial?  So it seems to me like what we really want is: a) The ability (wisdom?) to ascertain what the best choice is, b) The right will to pursue it.  It is only our mistake in everyday experience, that how we experience freedom is rather its lack, when we are prevented from a course of action, that makes us think that it's about having options to choose from.

It makes me contemplate the circumstantial element of ethics that I have so often struggled with, that of simply doing what is best given the situation, and I realize that society must by definition play a large role in this.  I read somewhere recently, I do not recall where, on this point that we can only be as virtuous as our society allows us.  Now, this is a phrase apt to be misunderstood, but it makes sense of the historical evolution of ethics.  In the primitive world killing each other was par for the course; if you didn't, they did.  Now, of course later religions address this by saying that it is better to be the victim of evil than to commit it, something that I can feel is profoundly true... but as I ended my last essay on, we cannot ignore the practical, mundane element of this all.  If people had not stuck it out, and if some people had tried to be as good as they could given the circumstances rather than hew to an absolute moral scheme, then we never would have gotten anywhere. 

This brings me to a problem I've rolled around on my tongue in the past: mendicants.  Reflecting on above, I can see why that path is so popular in the religious history.  If you have to keep doing the things society requires you to do in order to be a member of it, and these obligations may often prevent you from pursuing the most direct and powerful spiritual path, then the only response is to shuck them.  After all, even the Buddha abandoned his wife and child while Jesus refused to give any special acknowledgement to his mother and family.  Even monasticism, the halfway step, requires that you get along with people in a way that may force deviations from a path.  But mendicants of course have a crucial problem: we can't all be mendicants.  If we were, there'd be nobody to beg from and we'd all die.  The most extreme spiritual seekers are dependent on the fact that others are less so; what an odd state of affairs.

Now, to put this in a more positive light, it also means that the better societies are those that hinder less and/or support more this freedom to choose the best path, this being in direct contradiction to the contemporary concept of maximizing choice-options for individuals in a society.  To be sure ensuring that the options are there is important, and also to be sure since nobody can know everything we should take a tolerant attitude of providing an arena in which to pursue that good, but it strikes me as missing something crucial when we remove from the equation the idea that there is a goal beyond providing these choices for their own sake.  We become atoms bouncing around in a box at that point.  Meaningless.

To lump something else in here, reading A Concise History of Buddhism by Andrew Skilton this morning, I noticed that among the original Buddhist vows was sexual abstinence.  I think it's a habit to associate such puritanism with Christianity alone, but it seems to me that it comes up everywhere.  I wonder, though, if we've conflated two issues: 1) That promiscuity in the social realm leads to friction, 2) That by being such a powerful impulse it often removes our freedom to do what we believe is best.  The former is why sexual morals exist universally in cultures; we simply cannot ignore the issue and have a functional society.  Again, a case where I think the total hands-off attitude of the modern world may be doing us harm (not that the opposite extreme hasn't also been a mess).  However, I think it is the second that characters like Augustine so firmly opposed.  It's not that sexuality is opposed to spirituality, but that untrammeled impulse is and of all the impulses in us, it's among the most powerful.  

Returning to the main theme again, then, I feel like I'm circling around an issue that hits on several of the key issues that plague me right now: how to unite valuing here with hereafter, the nature of ethics, free will, why societies succeed or fail, and ultimately how I can be a good person.  I haven't solved anything yet, but this idea of freedom seems to be prying open a door a little to addressing these together as a unified issue.

p.s. A metaphor that perhaps seems apt in all this is being on the freeway.  You have options in whether you speed up or slow down, change lanes, etc. but underlying this is a goal: you're trying to get somewhere and all of these options are subordinate to that.  Having the choice to get into an accident is not really something we covet.  Likewise, our options are constrained by what everybody else around us is doing, whether they're following certain rules, etc.  They can make it harder or easier, as can we on them, and ultimately none of us are independent of the circumstances we find ourselves in.  I still feel like I'm being banal in my statements, but I have something by the tail.

Religious Freedom

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, Huang Gongwang, 1350

"Love God and do as you will." - Augustine

Freedom, as we usually understand it, is a state wherein there are multiple possibilities and one has some ability to affect the outcome.  To choose.  One of the commonly stated goals and described outcomes of the spiritual path is a sense of freedom, that having sense shed impediments by becoming in greater alignment with the deepest principle of Reality we are free.

It has struck me of late that this is a strange loan of a word from the mundane sphere.  How is the word "free" appropriate when the ultimate goal is not to do mine own will but thine?  Even outside the Christian framework it is the same: that having become enlightened one perceives what is and what must be done and does it.  In a way it is actually a diminishing of choice, because if the goal is to perceive what is correct as well as to always act in accordance with this perception then there is, in some sense, no real choice there. 

To be clear, I am not questioning either the aspiration or the experience.  I am simply asking myself: what is it about the word "free" that approximates this state?  On reflecting on it this morning I realized that perhaps although we nominally describe freedom in positive terms as above, it is practically experienced in negative terms.  That is, we know when something outside of us prevents us acting in the way that we would wish, as we cannot truly experience the hypotheticals.

This wraps around to the thought I often have, and that is that we have far less freedom in the first sense than we presume.  It's just a reality that we are shaped by our biological composition, our personal history, and so forth in a way that not only dictates what we can do, but even what we can want.  We can ask for freedom to choose among options but we can't choose the criteria by which we make that choice.  Or if we do aspire to that it becomes an infinite regress, since now we wish to choose among the criteria with which we make choices, which itself can be hypothetically chosen, so on and so forth.  Whenever I see a rabbit hole like this, it hints to me that something has gone crucially wrong with the thought process in the first place, and that rather than uncovering some mystery of the universe it is merely my operational definitions that are at fault.

Returning to the main point, then, I wonder if the spiritual experience of freedom isn't a better guide to what freedom perhaps means: freedom is doing what you will unopposed, no matter whether you chose to or not.  And since the world is most commonly set up to oppose what we want from an egocentric view the only way to experience unmitigated freedom is to be in alignment with Reality.  This is, of course, the Augustine quote up top.  It is not that we can do anything, just that we no longer wish to do anything other than we can, and no longer wish to be anything other than what we are.  

Bah, I'm falling into a trap.  I can tell that I'm not writing well enough this morning to get the point across.  The last few sentences just add the same confusion they always did before, since like "freedom" they appropriate words that mean something different in this new context.  There is some idea in here I am trying to get to but have not yet figured out how to express in a more lucid way.  This all ended up being banal.

Seeing Monet's Colors

 

Path Through the Wheat Fields at Pourville, Monet 1882

There is a sense I sometimes get when reading art history books that Monet is considered ever so slightly jejune nowadays.  Great tracts are devoted to Manet's pictorial rebellions and Cezanne's classical abstractions, but it is as though Monet is only worth mentioning but not expounding on at length.  He's just very pretty and appallingly popular.  It reminds me in an oblique way of the criticism Western academies leveled at landscape paintings: that pictures which lack intellectual or moral content are inferior, and that Monet, despite his contributions, was stuck at such a level all his days as the sole holdout of the original Impressionist approach.  Now, perhaps I admit my own level here, but I still favor him of all the original Impressionists, and I wish to speak somewhat on that point.

A couple of weekends ago I was wandering around Denver and decided to make the art museum my destination.  In mind I had an exhibit which I had already seen but which nonetheless drew me, an ongoing display of the museum's collection of 1800s art; to go again would be a treat, and makes me reflect that I ought to purchase an annual pass.  Among those on display, Monet's Path Through the Wheat Fields at Pourville (1882) had particularly drawn me.  I'm not one for artistic thrills but it held me in quiet appreciation for some time, and on leaving previously I had sought in vain for a decent-sized print to accent my apartment.  

However, this second visit was thwarted by COVID restrictions on the number of occupants, and I was about to leave when I had the impulse to wander into the gift shop.  I think I retained the somewhat silly notion that a print of Monet's Path would have emerged in the intervening weeks.  To nobody's surprise it had not.  After spending some time using the gift shop as a surrogate for an actual gallery, and reading enough of a book on landscape art (hence the reference above) to feel guilty enough that I ought to buy it, I was preparing to leave when I encountered the puzzles.  And there, in the middle of the offerings, was my picture in 1000-piece form.  Impulse won and it was purchased, the result being that my dining table has since been occupied enough to force me to eat around the edges.  A happily acceptable cost.  As of this writing I have sunk many hours into its assembly, but cannot brag of more than assembling the outline and middle strip, where the features of land and plant encircle the central sea.

When you stare at a painting, even a real one, you can only do so for so long.  I'm reminded of Clark's quip that he can only be enraptured by a painting about as long as he can enjoy the smell of a fresh orange - or about a couple of minutes.  After that the mind has to do something; it has to find some technique to examine, some historical detail with which to lend it context, just some intellectual program that is deeper than wallowing in sensation alone.  Part of my self-justification for purchasing the puzzle was that my efforts might have the same benefit, giving me something to do while tirelessly keeping my attention fixated on the image.  And there is a certain joy in discovering the mottled subtleties of color that differentiate one area from another, where the mind learns to recognize this thatched azure is not the same as that wispy cerulean.  It is remarkable how I often find myself reaching for a piece before I can say why, only to discover that it is indeed of the fit of some locale I had given upon working on some minutes before.  

If this were all, though, I would have considered my original half-formulated rationalization fulfilled.  But I have also got something I did not expect.  Previously I had noticed that after spending time with Impressionists the world looked somehow prettier.  It was a vague sense, but it was there.  Now, though, after some intensive effort with just this painting I had the most curious experience: stepping out onto my balcony after a few days of this I saw the clouds.  

Shot from my balcony (though not the one I saw that day)

 

 

 

I am an avid patronizer of clouds.  I step outside on more days than not to appreciate them, especially the effect the sunset has over the Rockies as the plains clouds encounter the uplifted terrain.  It is nothing new for me to go look at them in happiness.  But this was a bit different.  This was seeing them with proper attention, all the gradations and mixtures of color that had previously been lumped into one now expanded to read.  I found the same applied to the trees and hills as I drove on the highway, the individual yellows, grays, purples, and greens detaching themselves and each commanding attention.  It is as though my brain is looking for the pieces that would match those patches as well, except having learned that task for a menial purpose has discovered in it a far more rewarding utility.

I am reminded with some humor of my naive, and negative, reaction to Impressionism originally: it was abstract.  This wasn't what the world looked like, especially not what Monet painted.  The world was made up of things, and these jotty strokes were just too fanciful.  I've only learned later that my attitude ironically recapitulated the original reaction, and hence the name given in scorn to the movement.  But of course this name is the truth: it is the result of somebody who has not abstracted yet, who is painting things but is yet only in pursuit of their immediate visual impact.  It reminds me of this video on vision reconstruction and the curious similarity between the reconstructions and works by Turner.  There is a certain genius that was called forth in the 1800s by their intense need to cut through illusions and perceive what the world is really like, and Monet looked.  

This is the first time that "seeing the world in a new way" has held true for me in painting.  As a result of Monet's acuity I have been able to add something to my own faculties as well, something which is more than a passing appreciation of his paintings alone.  For that I am grateful, and now both vehemently agree and disagree with the statements I began with up top: Monet's paintings at their best do indeed contain some emptiness.

Fractals rhyme

From medium.com

One of my pastime thoughts is that if I ever learn enough to warrant it, I would want to teach a "Science for Art Majors" and an "Art for Science Majors" pair of classes, as I think that the separation of the two cultures has largely had an enervating effect on our society.  Science drives our worldview, but our artists being ignorant of it are unable to search for expression in a human fashion.  By comparison, our scientists continue with a course that is unaware of how much of the human experience must be accounted for - let alone the benefits that a liberal education bring, and the fact that scientists are increasingly called upon to act as advisors.

In any case, what follows is something of a fragmentary discussion I had with myself earlier, and would perhaps be a partial lecture or idea in one or both of such classes.  

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.”

The famous Walter Pater quote.  Now paired with Rutherford:

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

I would like people to think about these two for a second, for even if one disagrees with the statements I believe they point toward something key in both endeavors.  

What is it that art is after?  Obviously asking such a sweeping question is perhaps presumptuous, and to offer an answer even more so.  However, I am going to try in order to frame the issue as I understand it.  In the end, art to me seems to be the human outlet for expression of experience, an outlet which by and large is able to bypass words because they are too limited.  It is one of those habits we fall into easily, that we think that our words are our ideas, and that our ideas are our experience or Reality (and when I say "idea" I mean it in the broadest sense of concept or symbol).  It is an error I believe even more reinforced by the ascendance of science, that if something cannot be put into words then it does not exist.  

Artists, then, are in the business of annealing these transitions.  For either giving us an insight into their ideas in a way that mere words could not, and, most aspirationally, seeking to perhaps even elevate us to a glimpse of that experience ourselves.  In this long struggle for expression, two trends appear (at least in the West, I cannot speak for elsewhere), which can be broadly termed the Classical and the Romantic.  The former favors form, clarity, and often immortality; the latter the particular, the obscure, and the fleeting.  It is a back and forth, where one approach is ascendant, then the other, and either taken to extremes is moribund.  Ultimately, though, it is about content of experience and finding a way to bring it out.

This, to me, is how I then understand Pater above.  Music is unsymbolic, and while symbols act as convenient vessels for experience (giving it form), ultimately they are all handmaidens (they cannot be the content).  

Scientists aspire in some sense to achieve the exact opposite.  If you read a scientific paper you will notice that the first person is never used and that often references to the researchers entirely omitted; it is as though the experiment ran itself, and that it does not matter who was there.  If art aspires to the state of music, science aspires to the state of physics, which in turn aspires to the state of math (or logic) wherein it is all form and no content.  It does not matter what is in the A's, B's, and C's of a syllogism, and it does not matter whether the object falling from the tower is a cannonball, a rock, or a person so long as one has one or two basic characterizing measurements of them (obviously I simplify the situation; perhaps I should say falling on the moon).  

Last semester I had the opportunity to read several papers about the growing field of "Systems Biology."  It is a curious thing, for as far as I can tell it is yet another sallying forth of the physics mindset into biology.  Its main proponents are indeed the chemists, the biophysicists, and the computer scientists.  It is their goal to find the essential qualities of the biological systems and interpret them as circuit diagrams, much in the same way that once one has figured out the functions of resistor, capacitor, and so forth the details about their composition do not matter, just their given values.  In this way, they believe, at long last biology can be brought into the realm of a proper, predictive science.

What I find particularly telling (and admittedly a bit humorous) is that it has a real hostility to being conflated with molecular biology, which has essentially pursued the same dream its entire history.  It's the vanity of small differences, that with the previous program of molecular biology failing to account for all of life and reduce it to a few pieces we can grasp, a new group has "broken off" and must differentiate itself while essentially doing the same thing, although setting its sights more broadly.

Now, I don't mock this endeavor, but I find it extremely interesting because in my experience biology lies at the tipping point of science.  Science wants to be the ultimate Classical endeavor, and in order to do so the universal must always be able to account for the particular.  Biology as a discipline has clearly yielded a sense of order, with some fields such as population genetics being both amenable to and incredibly informative with such approaches.  

Yet there are always the naturalists, the ecologists, the people who simply like being out in the field and appreciating each species for itself.  It's not that they despise theory or cannot understand it, but like some puff of Romantic spirit that finds itself in expression, they take umbrage with the idea that the diversity they relish is merely noise.  Also with the presumptuousness of people who sit behind desks all day dictating what it is the people in the field must be seeing. 

As such, biology has never quite submitted to the physics paradigm while not yet garnering the scorn that psychology and the social sciences have for their yet greater chaos.  We seem to at least be able to point to something.  So the question in biology goes unanswered: will we know everything when we learn all the principles or study all the organisms?  Is our knowledge to be found in the universal or the particular?  This is obviously somewhat a false dichotomy in practice, as indeed it is always a false dichotomy in practice, since we always need both to make sense of anything in a mysterious epistemological quandary.  But nonetheless, I find its expression in biology particularly illuminating, as both sides manage to be so compelling at once.

It reminds me of history in a way.  Grand theories of history have come and gone, most of them coming to rather swift ruin.  It has happened so much that nowadays it seems to me that historians have resigned themselves to a degree of stamp collecting, of studying only their particular system of events with little hope of applying it to another.  Yet despite it all, I can't help but think Twain has a point:

"History never repeats itself but it rhymes."

Nobody who takes time to study history can miss the immediate similarity of many circumstances to others, especially to one's own.  That is one of its great values is to learn from it; if everything was particular and nothing general, then history by definition would be a science without application.  So how to reconcile this with history's general inability to predict the future?  I don't have an answer, but I have a metaphor.

Fractals Rhyme

I think that everybody who gets a college education, or wants to be educated at least, ought to spend time learning about chaos and fractals.  I believe they offer a sort of avenue out of our conundrum, if we can somehow figure out how, because fractals rhyme too.

Looking at the image above, its self-similarity is self-evident.  You can't miss it.  Yet no part is identically that of any other; zooming in and in and in the same motifs repeat, but none of them are exact copies of any other.  It is the same with the the strange attractors, those multi-dimensional structures which confine the possibilities but due to sensitivity are useless for predicting its precise state long into the future.

I feel there is something here, a version of looking at the world that acknowledges order but admits sensitivity on the particulars.  That there are other forms of order other than the simple symmetry we easily recognize, the simple repetition we easily notice.  I haven't gotten the idea there yet, but just this piece has been enough to tantalize me since I first read about the subject years ago.

In any case, I end this essay with the same inconclusiveness so many others end with, feeling I have somehow said nothing with all my words.  There has to be a way to put the world back together.

Thoughts at the End of a Day - Photography and Fourier Transforms

From: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Four-Fourier-transforms-and-the-links-between-them-In-the-tempered-distributions-sense_fig1_328163000

A day spent reading produced a few thoughts, sketched here and perhaps expanded in the future.  But mostly just for myself so I don't immediately forget them.

The Rise of Photography

"It is tempting to think [Manet] was impelled to create the new style by the challenge of photography.  The 'pencil of nature,' then known for a quarter of a century, had demonstrated the objective truth of Renaissance perspective, but it established a standard of representational accuracy that no handmade image could hope to rival.  Painting needed to be rescued from competition with the camera.  This Manet accomplished by insisting that a painted canvas is, above all, a material surface covered with pigments - that we must look at it, not through it." - p383, History of Art for Young People, 4th Edition

Reading this today it had me thinking about the effect of photography on painting, and I had this strange thought that it was the same issue that scientific report bore to mythology.  When it comes to establishing the world "as it is" the former in both cases cannot be defeated.  We have mastered, or come close to it, creating precise representations of the world.  The goal of the Renaissance in this respect has been fulfilled.  And it has left us curiously empty, as though something is not quite as fulfilled in these forms.  I feel like until we can properly answer what is missing in a way that isn't just something like "the human touch" we're going to keep passing it by.  

Fourier Transforms and Logic

I've been taking a class on mathematical data analysis and so models and parameter fitting have been on my mind.  For some reason the idea suddenly linked up with what I had known for a while about Fourier Transforms, that any wave can be decomposed into a set of sine waves.  The more complicated the wave, the more sine waves needed to describe it... but also the more particular it becomes as a class.  It felt like an equivalent of overparameterization, that it's always possible to get any model to fit the data, the question is whether it can be done in an elegant enough way to be generalizable. 

Utility.  That seems to lie at the heart of so much of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus.  That we cannot ask so much of the world often whether something is true, only whether it is a good way of representing it.  That somehow rationality and logic are the rules of the average, and that 

There is an idea tickling the back of my mind as well, something from Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert, that:

• All quantum objects have a proxy wave
• All waves can be decomposed into members of any family of waves (Fourier transform generalized)
• Each wave family corresponds with some mechanical attribute (energy/time, position/momentum)
• So using a "prism" of your choice you decompose the proxy wave into a given family, which will come out as a set of individual waves.  These waves, when squared, give the probability of their particular related outcome occurring
• Finally, since waveform families come in pairs, attributes come in pairs, limiting what can be measured by any given device (it takes more unrelated waveforms, more possibilities, to construct a wave)

This has something to do with all of it too, I think.  That the nature of reality is to split into opposites on being measured, and there are more and less efficient choices to do so.  If something looks like a sine wave you're better off using sine waves to decompose it rather than impulse waves, but ultimately there's no fully right or fully wrong answer.  Just more or less effective ones.  This simultaneously anchors and undermines truth, and again it seems like this is just a problem yet to be solved.

Adam Bede's Insufficient Sample Size

 

Thoughts on Adam Bede by George Eliot

"...the voices of the Methodists reached him, rising and falling in that strange blending of exultation and sadness which belongs to the cadence of a hymn." - Chapter 2

As somebody who has received scientific training first and artistic... well, not training, but exploration... second, I can't help but fall back on old patterns.  When you read a scientific paper the basic question is always: do the methods and results sufficiently support the conclusion?  Do I buy their thesis in light of the data they have shown me?  My experience in Adam Bede is, "No, but I think I mostly agree anyway."

From cursory notes in the introduction, as well as what is obvious in the book itself, George Eliot wants to prove the reality of morality and the edifying/sanctifying power of suffering.  In the first case she creates characters who may appear virtuous outwardly but possessing great flaws, such as Arthur Donnithorne, or those who may not fit our ideal but are nonetheless quite good, such as Rector Irwine.  Then of course there is Adam Bede himself, through whom Eliot expresses much of what she sees as the qualities of a good man - temperance, self-control, and an internal dedication to his own standards as exhibited by an outward dedication to his craft regardless of pay or importance.  Indeed, this yielded a series of my favorite quotes (in order of character):

"There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason - that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right." - on Arthur, Chapter 29

"[Mr. Irwine was of] sufficiently subtle moral fibre to have an unwearing tenderness for obscure and monotonous suffering." - Chapter 5

"My back's broad and strong enough; I should be no better than a coward to go away and leave the troubles to be borne by them as aren't half so able.  'They that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of those that are weak, and not to please themselves.' There's a text want no candle to show 'it: it shines by its own light.  It's plain enough you get into the wrong road i' this life if you run after this and that only for the sake o' making things easy and pleasant to yourself." - Adam Bede, Chapter 4

However, none of these characters hold a candle to Dinah, who is easily the most inspiring figure of the book.  Eliot had a falling away from Christianity, but nobody who reads her portrayal of Dinah can mistake her for an abject, nihilistic atheist.  It was perhaps a strange problem for me to contemplate that while I always wanted more of Dinah in the book, I can see how hard it would be to keep such a thing interesting; what is so powerful is Dinah's true dedication, and a chronicle of such a character would lack that tension which motivates novels.  But I digress.

But it is really the second point that sticks: the centrality of suffering in the human experience, even to the point of its spiritual necessity.  The modern world has fully entered a mindset of William James' "once born" spirituality: that evil, while it may be observed to exist, somehow does not play an essential role in the scheme of things.  It is an aberration, an accident, and soon through science, social reform, and general progress we will reduce it to nothing.  I think Eliot saw that coming and was revolted at it and revolted against it.  That it was a step backward from what Christianity had reached.

 

The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c1435

Religious Insight

"Infinite Love is suffering too - yea, in the fulness of knowledge it suffers, it yearns, it mourns; and that is a blind self-seeking which wants to be freed from the sorrow wherewith the whole creation groaneth and travaileth.  Surely it is not true blessedness to be free from sorrow, while there is sorrow and sin in the world: sorrow is then a part of love, and love does not seek to throw it off." - Dinah, chapter 30

Yet another aside: nowadays Buddhism gets all the credit and Christianity all the blame, it seems.  I think Buddhism appeals to the modern West, at least in its stripped-down version.  It started as a personal philosophy rather than a historically-burdened apocalyptic proclamation, which allows us to skim off the top and avoid its doctrines in favor of its practices.  Also in this form it appeals to our once-born sense and modern hunger for ideological simplicity: once can escape suffering simply by reframing life.  That's it.  We can get to the end goal and we don't have to worry about anything else.  Detachment wins.  Add in the East's syncretic tendencies which, on a surface level, appear an appealing multi-culturalism versus a monothesim's exclusionary nature and a general ignorance of its own strange history, and Buddhism seems like the clear winner over poor, misguided Christianity.

But the above quote captures something that I think Buddhism has always struggled to incorporate naturally, for when simply (and I suspect wrongly) interpreted, the logic of "Attachment causes suffering" -> "Cease attachment" -> "Cease suffering" leads one into all kinds of questions as to why compassion should be a virtue at all.  Why be attached to others?  And why regard any sort of suffering as anything other than a silly accident of misunderstanding?  I think it's why after developing the original Buddha and Arhat concepts, ideals of beings which had managed to entirely transcend this world by focusing on themselves, Buddhism was forced to invent the Bodhisattva: a being of mercy who chooses to stay behind on the Wheel of Samsara until all sentient beings are saved.  Ironically the less-transcended version strikes us as the more profound one, and while I am far from being a Buddhist scholar, I nonetheless find myself always regarding the Bodhisattva ideal as an awkward addition.  It is the result of greater insight trying to find its place in older doctrine.

But Christianity's God suffered.  Its doctrine of Trinitarianism is one that I have always found nonsensical, and from a logical perspective it is.  Any knowledge of its history immediately reveals it to be a doctrinal cludge, and I have long wished that the Arianism had won and established Jesus merely as a deeply enlightened man rather than God.  But as I get older, I'm no longer quite as sure on that, because what it does is enshrine suffering as part of human experience.  If God suffered then suffering is real, and if His suffering led to greater good then so can ours too.  While Buddhism too contains the recognition that suffering may in fact be ineradicable and that Enlightenment is actually to cease to try to change that, it has no equivalent of Jesus on the cross.  Buddha has a habit of always being on a mountain top or a cloud, offering blessings and merit, but not suffering with us.  And as Eliot observes:

"A patronising disposition always has its meaner side..." - Chapter 27

Not that I think the Buddha was patronizing, but that our very habits of thought as humans, reciprocal social apes that we are, finds something depersonalizing in a being for whom we can do nothing but which does everything for us (and Christianity certainly runs into this problem time and again, only to be saved by its image of human Jesus).  

This was a long place-setting, but with a return to Adam Bede I see Eliot striking at something central which Christianity managed to reach and which the modern world has lost: love involves suffering.  That a true depth of spirituality, which connects one to others, will always inevitably lead to caring about them.  And since they often suffer, whether one things that suffering can be theologically explained away or not, one will also experience a sorrow that they suffer.  But as the quote ends, if suffering is a part of that love, then love will no longer seek to throw it off.  It is deeply moving.

"And poor aged fretful Lisbeth, without grasping any distinct idea, without going through any course of religious emotions, felt a vague sense of goodness and love, and of something right lying beneath and beyond all this sorrowing life.  She couldn't understand the sorrow; but, for these moments, under the subduing influence of Dinah's spirit, she felt that she must be patient and still." - Chapter 10

Yet...the book cannot support such powerful sentiments.  It is simply not good enough a piece of art.  As I learned from some notes included with my edition, Eliot had imagined Hetty's redemption in prison as the centerpiece from the beginning.  That was what motivated her: that in the darkest dungeon, with a hard and lost soul, nonetheless the divine love, as exemplified by Dinah, can pierce through.  The second piece was also her image of Adam and Arthur, their relationship, and how Adam would eventually be deepened from boyish goodness to mannish wisdom through his loss.  So she nailed the two together, and after bestowing on Adam all of the keenness of mind and moral strength that she could she then forced him to fall in love with Hetty against all indications that she was a vain, self-absorbed kitten.  That Eliot even feels the need to aggressively defend this choice seems to me a case of protesting too much; it never worked from the beginning, and drawing on her authority after having demonstrated real psychological acumen she papers it over with a, "Trust me on this, I know better" lecture.

With this foundational unsoundness, Adam's suffering could never really reach the depths she needed it to.  This was to be a soul-shattering experience for this man, where his whole being was turned inside out as a result, and he was reborn anew in that furnace.  Instead it just felt like puppy love that wouldn't give up, and which could have no basis for being mortally distraught at the events (let alone the rabbit-from-a-hat quality of Hetty's pregnancy).  Even if I find Eliot's spiritual inclinations uplifting, so much so that throughout the book I was forced to pause and scribble them down, it was not in light of the surrounding passages that I felt so.  

It was also with a distinct disappointment that I watched the last few chapters unfold.  After Hetty's ordeal was over, the life goes out of the book, and Eliot dismally wraps it up with a series of chapters which are only redeemed by a few beautiful passages:

"It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it - if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness." - Chapter 50

Despite this powerful statement, she cannot help but show Adam much regenerated not a few months after his ordeal.  She must stop and tell us that he is suffering deeply this way, but does not display it.  The same way the final feast has us stop and observe the imperfections of the people at the table, so as to prove that she has not applied a bucolic Romanticism to her poor farmers.  But it is essentially the end of the book, and having neglected it the whole time her ability to address it as the last second is feeble.  

However, my greatest disappointment was centered on Dinah.  Aside from the lukewarm romance that she enters into with Adam as way of giving the characters a Happily Ever After (sorry Seth), Eliot fails to capitalize on one of the greatest conversations of the book: why Dinah won't marry.  If she were to do so, Dinah fears that her attentions to God and serving mankind would be diluted by the requirements of filial devotion.  Adam counters with a haphazard argument that love is love is love, and that therefore expression of love for him or love for her children would not in any way detract from her love of all mankind, and in fact would add to it.

Now, there is a certain logic here I agree with: love of one type can be a gateway to love of another.  We are so natively self-centered that it is often the love of friendship or family or partner which drags us out of ourselves, and for once forces us to value something more than our own wellbeing.  In this I have no objection.  But Dinah was far beyond that; she already exhibited a divine agape toward those around her.  There was no more need to draw her out of herself for she had already progressed far along that path, and the truth is that filial love is by nature exclusive.  

There is an awkward moment in the Bible when Jesus' mother and family are waiting for him, and when somebody tells him this he retorts, "Who is my mother, who are my brothers?"  Now, we take this passage as a sign of his universal love as he goes on to illustrate that he regards all of humanity as his family.  But that is also the point: there is something immiscible, and even inimical, in caring especially for a family and serving all of mankind equally.  That the Buddha also gave up his family seems to me to corroborate this point (although this may be a myth).  Monkish asceticism appears the world over as a spiritual approach, and I cannot help but think it is precisely because one cannot have it all.  

Returning to Dinah, then, I see her final choice to marry Adam as... I cannot say a step backward, but one undertaken with no reflection on Eliot's part.  For we also cannot be it all, and if Dinah truly found the life went out of her without Adam then one could say this was the best compromise.  But emphasis on compromise.  After a book full of the hard reflections of suffering and sacrifice, Eliot seems to lose sight of this and promise us that when it's all said and done, righteousness means we don't have to give anything we truly value up.

So that is my final analysis of the book: a tent with too few poles to hold the canvas up.  It has isolated high points, but the whole does not yet maintain its shape.  Yet in spite of this it is uplifting and thoughtful, demonstrating the quality of mind and sincerity of vision that was behind it.  Eliot just couldn't turn it into a great book yet, and it is with some enthusiasm with which I now eye The Mill on the Floss sitting next to me, intent on following the arc through Silas Marner to Middlemarch and seeing where she ends up by the end.

"It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium." - Chapter 34