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