tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3898272688456876602024-03-05T20:26:31.865-05:00Pearls at Random StrungJust a place to jot down my musings.Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.comBlogger203125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-5983104819701140852023-03-07T23:27:00.005-05:002023-03-07T23:31:03.050-05:00Mathematical aptitude as Gift<p><span style="font-family: times;">I recently came across <a href="https://www.youcubed.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/The-Myth-of-the-Gifted-Child-extracts-from-Mathematical-Mindsets.pdf">an article</a> by Jo Boaler which argued against the usage of mathematics as a “gatekeeping” tool for children, and against thinking of children as having an “innate gift” for mathematics for fear that this would contribute to greater inequity among the populations who dive into mathematics as a profession. This article, especially when read in the context of Boaler’s work in reshaping school education in California, has upset a number of people, including parents of children who are seen as “gifted”.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;">As someone who was a math major, who did not pursue formal graduate study of mathematics, whose dissertation drew upon a number of abstract mathematical concepts, who continues to study higher mathematics for pure pleasure, and at least one of whose kids is obsessed with numbers, I have a lot to say on this subject! In case you don’t want to read this long, rambling post, here are a number of positions that I think can all be held simultaneously without fear of self-contradiction:</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">Unsubstantiated conclusions</span></h3><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: times;">There is genuine variation in innate potential for (certain kinds of) mathematical thinking. </span></li><ul><li><span style="font-family: times;">Consequently, there are indeed certain people who possess this potential to a much greater extent than others.</span></li></ul><li><span style="font-family: times;">Practice and perseverance will allow people to maximize their innate mathematical potential (which may be higher than they think).</span></li><ul><li><span style="font-family: times;">Conversely, some people will not fulfill their innate mathematical potential if they don’t put in this work. This could be due to a whole range of factors, including personal choice, disabilities, or environmental factors.</span></li></ul><li><span style="font-family: times;">Mathematical education at the (American) school level is narrowly focused on a small part of the spectrum of mathematical thinking, so that performance at the school level is not a strong predictor for genuine mathematical potential. </span></li><ul><li><span style="font-family: times;">In fact, I would assert even more strongly that doing well in school math is <i>neither necessary</i> <i>nor sufficient</i> to do well in college-level math or higher.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times;">Most people have no real idea of what higher mathematics is actually like, and are quite shocked when they realize that many mathematicians might not actually be great at mental math or other flashy demonstrations of school-level computational performance.</span></li></ul><li><span style="font-family: times;">Mathematical education at the (American) school level is indeed serving a “gatekeeping” function that has deleterious consequences for students.</span></li></ul><div><span style="font-family: times;">As a way to make sense of this complex bundle of thoughts, and in order to connect it to <a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-meditation-on-mathematics-as.html">my previous musings on this blog on mathematics, meditation and Indian philosophy (specifically the school of Mīmāṃsā)</a>, I will posit the following: </span></div><div><blockquote><b><span style="font-family: times;">We must distinguish between mathematical study as an end in itself (<i>kim</i>), mathematical study as a means to some other end (<i>kena</i>), and mathematical study as a process or procedure (<i>katham</i>) to be followed to produce some other end.</span></b></blockquote><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">A biographical interlude</span></h3></div><div><p><span style="font-family: times;">In my undergraduate days, I studied mathematics at one of the most demanding places in the US. In that context, I would rate myself as middle-of-the-road: I did decently, but there were also a number of students who were far ahead. (This was a a humbling lesson for me, and one I very much needed to learn!) I realized that these students could be conveniently classified into two types: </span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: times;">Some students had studied a lot more mathematics than others: their high school math programs had been very intense (often French or Eastern European), or they had had the chance to take a lot of college math while in high school itself. These folks were ahead because they had put in the time and the effort into studying mathematics, and were already familiar with content that was otherwise brand-new to me. To use a commonly-misused term, they were more “mathematically mature”. However, I also noted that some of these students were not necessarily much faster at grasping totally new ideas, or at extrapolating to unusual domains. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: times;">And there were others who were just … <i>different</i>. They too had studied a lot more mathematics than others, but you could sense that this was just natural to them. Mathematical facts were <i>obvious</i> to them that were inscrutable to us after hours of bashing our heads against a page of symbols. Where we struggled in the foothills of abstraction, they frolicked freely in the heights, like Sherpas who grew up amidst Himalayan peaks. </span></li></ol><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times;">Seeing people with a real mathematical gift was humbling, liberating, but also (in retrospect) constricting for myself. For someone who had always done well in mathematics in school to realize there were people who effectively operated on a different (and yes, non-intersecting) mathematical plane than mine was not easy initially. Once I absorbed that lesson, though, I felt liberated: I didn't need to compete with them! I could do math at my own level, at my own pace, and I could derive pleasure from it. This sense of liberation has allowed me to continue to study math for my own edification, long after departing the hallowed halls of academia. This allows me to enjoy the <i>mysterium tremendum </i>of mathematics: a near-religious sense of <i>awe, marvel, and humility</i> in the face of mathematical structures of immense beauty—which would likely not have been possible had I been trying to grok them to crunch a problem set under time pressure. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;">At the same time, in retrospect, I can also see that my recognition of the gift of mathematics kept me from pursuing mathematical study in graduate school. I thought to myself that graduate education in mathematics must surely be the preserve only of those who were truly gifted, with no place for ordinary folks like myself. This, however, was an act of self-limitation, and not necessarily true. </span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">On an innate Gift for mathematics</span></h3><h4 style="text-align: left;"><div style="font-weight: 400;"></div><div><p style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-family: times;">It is transparent to me that there is natural variation in people’s affinity for mathematics, and that this often manifests in its extreme forms at very young ages. Consider, as examples of outliers, the extraordinary feats of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss">Carl Friedrich Gauss</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao">Terence Tao</a> in their childhood. Closer to home and a lot more down to earth, I see my son playing day and night with numbers, delighting in their combinations and patterns. (This may perhaps be the <i>mysterium fascinans</i> aspect of mathematics!) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">I want to zero in on this sense of play, for I think it is critical to understanding how real mathematics often operates: </span>It is an autonomous domain, with its own objects and rules, where the only goal of the game is to continue playing the game.<span style="font-weight: 400;"> (In describing mathematics this way, <a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-meditation-on-mathematics-as.html">I do not intend to support either a Platonic or a formalist philosophy of mathematics;</a> I'm merely trying to capture the phenomenology of doing mathematics in a state of flow.) This, as I have said above, has a strongly aesthetic flavor to it: it is enchantingly beautiful to a few humans, baffling to most, and repulsive to some. </span></span></p><p style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-family: times;">Incidentally, this autonomy of mathematics also poses a danger to those who most love it, in that it might entirely devour a person’s passion, energy and even sanity, if they do not retain a strong tie to the world of concreta. This is why I have called it a “Gift” with a capital ‘G’: to evoke the German word <i>Gift</i> which means “poison”, although it is a cognate of the English <i>gift</i> as well.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span>Mathematics as <i>kim</i></span><i>, </i><span><i>kena </i>and <i>katham</i></span></span></h3><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The experience of the truly mathematically gifted thus clearly involves treating mathematics as an end in itself, as a source of joy pursued for its own sake. In the language of Mīmāṃsā, this is a <i>kim</i></span><i style="font-weight: 400;">, </i><span style="font-weight: 400;">an end-goal in itself. Note that this might actually be a real challenge in following the standard school curriculum, where joy is not typically listed as a learning objective! For such students, self-paced self-study may in fact be the right answer.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">But there are many who, talented though they may be in mathematics, are interested not in mathematics as an end but in mathematics as a </span><i style="font-weight: 400;">means</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, as an </span><i style="font-weight: 400;">instrument</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for some other goal. Scientists, engineers, data scientists, financial analysts, accountants: all of these professionals acquire fluency in some domains of mathematics and apply it to some other problems, creating value for the world and revenue for their bosses and a home with a view for themselves. (Even professional mathematicians who may be doing math as a way to pay the bills would fall into this category.) In the language of Mīmāṃsā, this is the use of mathematics as a </span><i style="font-weight: 400;">kena</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> or as a </span><i style="font-weight: 400;">sādhana</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, an instrument for realizing a different end-goal. For many (though not all) such students, the structure of math education in school actually works, with its emphasis on procedure and algorithm and its de-emphasis of seemingly unnecessary tools like proofs. This divide often persists through college as well, where courses like calculus, linear algebra and differential equations might be taught both in mathematics departments as well as in engineering departments in wildly different ways.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Finally, we find yet another (mis)use of mathematics, this time as a process and not an outcome, with some other goal in mind (Mīmāṃsā would call this </span><i style="font-weight: 400;">katham</i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, a “how”). Thus, the education system seeks some kind of restriction on student outcomes, whether by design or by accident, and must accomplish this goal through some means of gatekeeping. The process may end up being a sequence of math instructions that feel more like a robotic algorithm, or perhaps like an obstacle course, where students must jump through the hoop of Algebra and across the moat of Geometry and scale the wall of Pre-calculus … all of this just to get into a good college where they in fact plan to study Old Norse sagas. This sort of gatekeeping can and no doubt does damage some students’ self-confidence and motivation to learn. For those who have the potential to utilize mathematics as a tool, such self-limitation and external gatekeeping may well keep them out of potentially rewarding occupations. For others, who may privately enjoy the free play of beautiful mathematics, it may poison the well and damage their associations with this source of great joy.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">To me, the use of the Mīmāṃsā framework helps narrow down the problem quite specifically: </span>It is the fetishization of mathematical performance and its misuse as a gatekeeping tool that is the real issue, not the existence of mathematical gifts in some fraction of the population.<span style="font-weight: 400;"> But it may not be clear <i>why</i> mathematics as gatekeeping is problematic, because modern society has come to privilege performance in mathematics so much.</span></span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">An analogy to classical music</span></h3><p style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-family: times;">When I read the article, my first thought was immediately Paul Lockhart’s <a href="https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf">“A Mathematician’s Lament”</a>, in which he describes the current state of K12 math education by constructing a parallel universe in which writing down sheet music is similarly treated as a gatekeeping tool, without regard to the aesthetic experience of actually listening to, performing, or composing music. I think this analogy is actually a very powerful one and can serve to illuminate the issue at hand.</span></p><p style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-family: times;">Because music does not act as a gatekeeping tool in our society, we are much more comfortable with acknowledging that musical genius exists, whether it be as a composer or as a performer. Nevertheless, it is also true that most people can learn to perform some level of music, if taught properly, even if they will never grace Carnegie Hall or feed their families with this skill. (We forget that, for most of human history, when recording and playback devices did not exist, people would have had to sing or hum for themselves if they wanted to hear something musical while walking down the street!)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The analogy to music opens up yet another dimension which is underemphasized in mathematical pedagogy: </span>cultivating taste and developing an aesthetic sense.<span style="font-weight: 400;"> We cannot all be stage performers; we might not even want to perform any kind of music ourselves; but we may learn to appreciate music and derive deep satisfaction from it. It might not be the same delight that a practitioner enjoys, and it certainly will not be a source of income, but it can be a source of joy. As someone who is neither a professional mathematician nor a professional musician, but who derives comfort and delight and, yes, a sense of proximity to the Divine Infinitude from the consumption of mathematical ideas and musical performances alike, I wish we encouraged all our children and all humans to take the idea of play more seriously and to cultivate a deeper sense of aesthetics. As the </span><i style="font-weight: 400;">Taittirīya Upaniṣad</i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> says:</span></span></p><p style="font-weight: 400; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;">|| <i>raso vai saḥ</i> || </span></p><p style="font-weight: 400; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;">The Divine truly is aesthetic savoring.</span></p><blockquote style="font-weight: 400;"><p><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="font-weight: 400;"><p><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></p></blockquote></div></h4><p></p><ul></ul></div><p></p>Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-83498169871583365982016-12-16T22:14:00.000-05:002017-01-14T20:21:08.449-05:00Information and Sāṅkhya<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Alfred Borgmann’s <i>Holding On To Reality</i> <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/066258.html">opens</a> with the provocative words:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Information can illuminate, transform, or displace reality. When failing health or a power failure deprives you of information, the world closes in on you; it becomes dark and oppressive. Without information about reality, without reports and records, the reach of experience quickly trails off into the shadows of ignorance and forgetfulness.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is a very interesting and provocative passage, but I picked it up because of its uncanny resemblance to a famous verse from Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s <i>Sāṃkhyakārikā</i>s:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>prīty-aprīti-viṣādâtmakāḥ prakāśa-pravṛtti-niyamârthāḥ</i> |</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>anyônyâ-’bhibhavâ-’’śraya-janana-mithuna-vṛttayaś ca guṇāḥ </i>||</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">“The three <i>guṇa</i>s [which constitute all non-sentient reality] have the respective natures of joy, non-joy, and sorrow; they act to illuminate, transform, and restrain, respectively; and they have the capacity to ground, produce, combine, and suppress one another.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I need to bone up on my Sāṃkhya and my Borgmann further before I stretch this analogy, but at least at first glance, it appears as if there is something potentially illuminating lurking in the shadows here. (One thing that strikes me: the three <i>guṇa</i>s of Sāṅkhya are regarded as entirely distinct from the individual persons, <i>puruṣa</i>s, who alone are conscious observers and actors. This suggests that information itself isn’t enough: it presupposes the existence of conscious observers who can recognize something <i>as being</i> information.)</span></div>
Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-46129849507430523452016-10-02T18:33:00.000-04:002016-10-02T18:33:55.560-04:00Open-source software vs open-source religion<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It struck me today that there is a duality between the way in which open-source programmers work and the way in which philosophy and theology was done in classical India. (This might seem like a strange duality to bring up, but I do it because people frequently make misleading analogies between computer programming and Sanskrit grammar and other Indian disciplines. Also, because it’s my blog, so there!)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The point of open-source programming is that <i>everyone can edit the source code</i>. You fork a Github repository, make your changes, push them, and perhaps they might get accepted into the main code repository itself. Of course, it’s important that you (broadly) use the same sort of compiler/interpreter that the project is intended to work with, otherwise your code may not quite work the same way on others’ machines. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In short, for open-source software, the rule is:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>change the source, keep the </i><i>interpreter ( / </i><i>compiler / whathaveyou).</i></span></blockquote>
<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></i>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The structure of classical Indian thought is the precise opposite of this. Most of the oldest philosophical texts were written in laconic, even ambiguous, <i>sūtra</i>s. Later philosophers then came to write commentaries on these texts, while their disciples wrote super-commentaries on the commentaries, while <i>their</i> disciples wrote super-super-commentaries on the super-commentaries on the commentaries on the <i>sūtra</i>s, and so on.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">(Lest you think I am joking, here are just two examples:</span><br />
<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">The foundational text of the Nyāya tradition is the <i>Nyāya-sūtra</i> of Gautama. This gathered the following tower of commentaries:</span></li>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Vātsyāyana’s <i>Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya</i></span></li>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Uddyotakara’s <i>Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya-vārttika</i></span></li>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Vācaspati Miśra’s <i>Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya-vārttika-tātparya-ṭīkā</i></span></li>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Udayana’s <i>Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya-vārttika-tātparya-ṭīkā-pariśuddhi</i></span></li>
</ul>
</ul>
</ul>
</ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">The foundational text of all Vedāntic schools is the <i>Brahma-sūtra</i> or <i>Vedānta-sūtra</i> of Bādarāyaṇa, sometimes also called Vyāsa. If we look just at one branch of commentaries on this foundational text, the Advaita branch, we get the following picture:</span></li>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Śaṅkara’s Advaita <i>Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya</i></span></li>
</ul>
<ol><ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Vācaspati Miśra’s <i>Bhāmatī</i></span></li>
</ul>
<ol><ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Amalānanda’s <i>Vedānta-kalpa-taru</i></span></li>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Appayya Dīkṣita’s <i>Vedānta-kalpa-taru-parimala</i></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Lakṣmīnṛsiṃha’s <i>Ābhoga</i></span></li>
</ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Akhaṇḍānanda’s <i>Ṛju-prakāśikā</i></span></li>
</ul>
</ol>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Padmapada’s <i>Pañcapādikā</i></span></li>
</ul>
<ol><ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Prakāśātman’s <i>Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa</i></span></li>
</ul>
<ol><ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Citsukha’s <i>Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa-tātparya-dīpikā</i></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Nṛsiṃhāśrama’s <i>Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa-prakāśikā</i></span></li>
</ul>
</ol>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Nṛsiṃhāśrama’s <i>Vedānta-ratnakośa</i>)</span></li>
</ul>
</ol>
</ol>
</ol>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The thing to keep in mind is that each of these commentators took the <i>exact wording</i> of his predecessors <i>extremely seriously</i>. And yet we obtain these complex forking interpretations of these texts, often at loggerheads with each other. The purpose of a commentary was ostensibly to elucidate the meaning of the base-text it commented on—but more often than not, it was to show that the base-text could be read to yield the conclusion you knew it had to yield.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In short, for classical Indian intellectuals, the rule is:</span><br />
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">keep the source, change the interpreter.</span></i></blockquote>
</div>
<div>
<i><br /></i></div>
</div>
Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-52771381364881963772015-06-24T10:51:00.000-04:002015-06-24T11:07:26.305-04:00Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar, epilogue<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This is the epilogue to a three-part series of posts, titled “Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar”, interpreting the movie </i>Jurassic World<i>. The whole series of posts in order is the following:</i></span><br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla.html">An extended look at the role played by clothing</a> in depicting personal transformation in the movie.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_23.html">An expansion of our analysis</a>, from clothing through enclosures to social relations structured by power, understanding, and survival.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_24.html">An examination of survival, evolution, rationality</a>, and the (non-)distinction between the real and the virtual.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_75.html">An epilogue</a> defending my choice of title, and offering some final thoughts.</span></i></li>
</ol>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I realize now that I did not explain at all why I picked the title for this series of posts on <i>Jurassic World</i>. It is of course meant to call to mind Edmund Burke’s classic critique of the French Revolution, which has the much more elaborate title <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflections_on_the_Revolution_in_France">Reflections on the Revolution in France, And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris</a></i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Burke is sometimes caricatured as being an arch-conservative and stick-in-the-mud, but it is important to realize that in the context of his society, he was actually rather on the progressive wing. Burke was a supporter of the American freedom struggle, a champion of the rights of the Irish (he was of Irish descent himself), and vehemently opposed to the East India Company’s depredations in India. And yet, he was fundamentally opposed to the French Revolution, because he saw in it the release of forces deeper and more dangerous than those unleashed by any other revolution: rationalism, utterly convinced of its own correctness and of the total mistakenness of all other positions, willing to overthrow everything that came before it in the name of a new world order founded on pure reason unencumbered by primitive inherited idiocies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">What happens on Isla Nublar is a revolution in that sense: a full overturning of the existing order (a <i>re-volvo</i>) and the institution of a new system based on different principles.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There are important contrasts, however, between the French Revolution and the Indomitable Revolution: the order being overthrown in Isla Nublar is one based on rationalism, bureaucracy, and control; what replaces it is the law of the jungle, literally. And as happens with any revolution, there is a great deal of gratuitous slaughter of the innocents, which proceeds until the spearhead of the revolution, the <i>Indominus rex</i>, is torn down and a new tyrant, the <i>Tyrannosaurus rex</i>, installed in its place. Tradition—of a sort, at least—wins out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">How is the <i>Indominus rex</i> taken down? Not by a single force alone, but by the <i>T. rex</i> working in concert with the velociraptors. (And note that the “hero”, Chris Pratt, does not actually do anything more than keep the boys safe, while the “damsel-in-distress”, Bryce Dallas Howard, is the one who actually releases the <i>T. rex</i> and thus arranges for the final battle. For all sorts of reasons she is the real hero of the story, in human terms, but really, humans are <i>passé</i> on Isla Nublar by this point.) These “small platoons” do not coordinate their efforts by communicating and strategizing, but through the emergent structure of the law of the jungle. But even so, none of these creatures manage to kill the <i>Indominus rex</i>: it is swallowed up in the chthonic all-devouring maw of the mosasaur when it breaks the enclosure of the lagoon. Even revolutions have their limits, beyond which lies the true darkness of pure, unrestricted violence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The structured violence of the jungle under <i>T. rex</i> is thus fundamentally different from the rampant, random violence inflicted by <i>Indominus rex</i>. We thus have two, mutually complementary, views on revolution:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Burke: the desire for a purely rational, efficient order running on universal principles will inevitably degenerate into a bloody all-annihilating chaos.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>T. rex</i>: bloody chaos, once it devours itself, will lead to the emergence of multiple domains, each with its own hierarchy of power.</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This may seem more like Hobbes than Burke, but in some ways it is in line with Burke’s views of society running at different layers with different rules and power arrangements for each layer. Even the <i>T. rex</i>, alpha though it may be on land, has no dominion over the air or the water.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As we have seen in earlier installments of this series, the law of the jungle when it runs stably is not so different from the law of the free market. The monopolistic, rationalist top-down corporation is taken down by chaotic violence, which in turn is replaced by the free market of power.</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Fin.</span></i></div>
</div>
Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-48032049587377989282015-06-24T01:01:00.000-04:002015-06-24T11:07:17.756-04:00Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar, part three<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This is the third of a three-part series of posts, titled “Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar”, interpreting the movie </i>Jurassic World<i>. The whole series of posts in order is the following:</i></span><br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla.html">An extended look at the role played by clothing</a> in depicting personal transformation in the movie.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_23.html">An expansion of our analysis</a>, from clothing through enclosures to social relations structured by power, understanding, and survival.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_24.html">An examination of survival, evolution, rationality</a>, and the (non-)distinction between the real and the virtual.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_75.html">An epilogue</a> defending my choice of title, and offering some final thoughts.</span></i></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In the previous installations of this series, <a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla.html">I first wrote about the hugely significant role clothing</a> plays in understanding the transformations of individuals in <i>Jurassic World</i>. <a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_23.html">I then expanded on the idea</a> of clothing to enclosures in general, which led naturally to relations of power and dominance, which were then contrasted with relations of trust and understanding (familial relations) and with relations of unification for survival (conjugal relations). It is now time to naturally move from conjugal relations to the theme of evolution, which of course underpins the entire <i>Jurassic Park</i> franchise.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">6. Nature, Evolution, and Nurture</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The whole <i>Jurassic Park</i> franchise is full of talk about evolution and natural selection and genes and whatnot. The root cause of all this is a hubristic zillionaire called John Hammond who has a vision to bring dinosaurs back from extinction using dino-DNA from their blood trapped in mosquitoes fossilized in amber. This, of course, should be old hat to anyone who knows anything about the franchise.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There is also a lot of scientifically incorrect talk about evolution somehow perfecting dinosaurs for killing, so that velociraptors can be militarized and be sent off—like a pack of über-wolves—hunting terrorists. Again, it is important to recognize that evolution does not perfect anything; to look at evolution teleologically is to miss its random luck-of-the-draw nature. Velociraptors were presumably very well adapted to their environments, but that does not in itself make them the perfect killing machine. If anything, it is humans who can kill on a scale far greater than any creature, and who have found ways to kill in environments far beyond anything imaginable to prior generations of humans. Thus, the desire to control raptors and turn them into hunter-killers is in itself an illustration of why humans are such dangerous killers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But in all this talk of evolution and perfection, one important point is often overlooked: there is in fact no way to bring back dinosaurs. They are dead and gone and they’re not coming back—and the characters in the movie understand this. Instead, the dinosaurs in the parks are actually created in the lab by splicing together genes from other creatures found on earth today (cuttlefish and tree frogs being two examples cited in the movie). The <i>Indominus rex</i> is an exception only in the sense that there were no original fossils from which its DNA was extracted; in other ways, though, it was designed and raised just as every other dinosaur genus in the park was. What is monstrous here is not the <i>Indominus rex</i>, but the human hubris in attempting a task as brazen as Prometheus’s stealing fire from the gods—we stole the right to design creatures from nature.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But even if we had somehow managed to bring dinosaurs back exactly as they were, Jurassic Park would still have had a problem on its hands: the environment in which they were housed was far from the environment in which dinosaurs themselves had evolved. Thus, even if velociraptors were perfected killing machines, they were perfected for killing in the late Cretaceous period in the region that is now Inner Mongolia. That does not automatically make them perfected killers in our times on a tropical island—or in the mountains of Afghanistan, where the military wanted to take them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The climactic battle between the <i>T. rex</i> and the <i>Indominus rex</i> is thus not a battle between nature and nurture at all: both creatures are a product of complex genetic splicing, and the difference between them is one of degree, not of kind. (There was never any dinosaur that looked like <i>Indominus rex</i>, but while there was a dinosaur that looked like the park’s <i>T. rex</i>, it was genetically and socially substantially different from it.) The difference between the two creatures, and presumably the reason we should cheer for the <i>T. rex</i> over the <i>Indominus rex</i>, is that it knows its place and has been properly socialized.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">7. The Real and the Virtual</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Insofar as every creature on the island is a product of crazy-complicated genetic engineering, we would be tempted to describe them all as fake, or as non-real in some sense. This intuition is partially correct: what these creatures are, properly speaking, is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation"><i>simulacra </i>in the sense of Baudrillard</a>: they are physically existent creatures that are not dinosaurs brought back to life but entirely new orders of creation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This applies to the park as a whole as well: stegosaurs did not wander the plains along with pachycephalosaurs and triceratops. Indeed, the stegosaur is more distant in time from the triceratops than we are from the triceratops! Jurassic Park thus collapses a huge range of geological time (180-odd million years) and a huge span of geographic space (the whole world over 180-odd million years) into one tiny island at the same point of time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And even within such a park we come across further simulacra: the dinosaur holograms which people are able to walk through, such as the hologram of the dilophosaur that scares off a rampaging velociraptor for a few seconds. Here we have one simulacrum engaging in combat with the simulation of yet another simulacrum: it is enough to drive us crazy!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But simulacra or not, the dinosaurs in the park are real: if you prick them (with an armor-piercing bullet of large enough caliber), do they not bleed? If you poison them, do they not die? And if you set an <i>Indominus rex</i> wild among them, do they not get slaughtered like real creatures? The dinosaurs feed and breed like all other living creatures, because they <i>are</i> living creatures, just not long-extinct dinosaurs. There are four ways, however, in which their living nature is disregarded by different individuals:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">For BDH at the beginning of the movie, the dinosaurs are financial assets, no different from a roller-coaster ride at a different theme park. Each takes a certain amount of capital to finance, each draws a certain revenue stream into the park, and the value of a dino-asset is determined entirely by its net present value. Her conversion—or metamorphosis, keeping in mind the clothing and enclosure metaphors—begins when she touches a dying sauropod and realizes that it is a living creature, not an asset.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">For the control-room, each dinosaur is a point on the map, nothing more, nothing less. They can see its physical location in the park and its biosigns, and that’s really all that they are interested in. (Indeed, for the control-room, this is true for the containment units as well! Each of them has a camera so the control-room can see through their perspective, and we also get a live update on their biosigns. There isn’t a huge distinction in their eyes between the dinosaurs and the containment units. Note also the enclosure metaphor in the name of the containment units.)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">For Vincent d'Onofrio, each dinosaur is a potential combat unit. This is exaggerated to an almost comical extent: he doesn’t recognize the velociraptors’ names, and doesn’t know anything about their biology or behavior. All he can see is that they can be trained to obey human commands.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">For the <i>Indominus rex</i>, each dinosaur is something that needs to be physically dominated: those that obey, survive; those that either disobey or refuse to engage, die. But note that this is not actually all that different from the control-room’s perspective on the dinosaurs!</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So although all these dinosaurs are simulacra and Jurassic Park a mere simulation of a pseudo-Mesozoic environment, all of these things are real. But there are also things which are fake in the movie—<i>dissimulations</i>, if you will.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Chief among these is the <i>Indominus rex</i> itself. It demonstrates a capacity for indirection that allows it to escape from its enclosure by creating a distraction. Its powers of camouflage and of thermal regulation allow it to become invisible to human eyes. And when it cuts out its own implant, it effectively drops off the control room’s radar. From the financial perspective and from the control perspective, it has ceased to exist—and that is exactly when it begins to live life on its own distorted terms.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The cell-phone screens and video cameras also provide us with a new perspective on enclosures. An enclosure seals off direct contact from the individuals inside that domain, so that any other interactions have to be <i>mediated</i> through some channel. Tools like video cameras allow the control-room to gain mediated access to individuals inside the enclosure.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The trouble with this, of course, is that mediated access is not the same as real access:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Seeing the world through a velociraptor’s eyes is not the same as being a velociraptor. (Cue Wittgenstein: “If a velociraptor could speak, we couldn’t understand him.” Except that CP doesn’t need Blue to speak to understand her, and the control-room can’t understand even other humans who don’t speak bureaucratese!)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Similarly, seeing what their containment units are up to does not help the control room protect them from getting slaughtered in any way.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Once the <i>Indominus rex</i> removes its own implant, it becomes effectively invisible to the control room.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">BDH realizes, when she touches the dying sauropod, that her treating the dinosaurs as financial assets had blinded her to the reality of their being living creatures.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The boys too are blind to the dinosaurs’ true nature: the elder is fixated on his phone, while the younger sees them through the lens of facts and figures. Only when their enclosure is penetrated do they come directly face to face with the reality of the dangerous creatures they have been watching.</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">By blinding individuals to the real nature of other individuals, mediated access also impairs people’s decision-making. The clearest example of this is of course, the creation of the <i>Indominus rex</i> itself. It appears to be a total rational decision to create this new sort of neodinosaur from a financial perspective (it ups the spectacle value), and once this is given the go-ahead, a number of other decisions become rational as well: using cuttlefish DNA to help it grow rapidly, using tree frog DNA to let it adjust to the climate, using velociraptor DNA to make it smart, keeping it isolated and thus protected from harm as it grows up, and so on. Only when the blinders imposed by mediated access are removed (by CP, who sees the creature for what it really is) does the insanity of this entire decision-making process reveal itself.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Factors such as fear can also have a deeply distorting effect on perception, and hence on decisions. This comes out most clearly in the decisions by two people to open doors at different points in the story:</span></div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The obese security guard trapped inside the <i>Indominus rex</i> enclosure manually opens its gate as a way to flee from the creature. Before the control-room can shut it down remotely (another case of mediated access harming decisive action), <i>Indominus rex</i> busts out of its enclosure, with predictably unpleasant consequences for the security guard (and others).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">BDH gets the control-room to open Paddock 9 to release the <i>T. rex</i>, the only creature that might conceivably be able to fight the <i>Indominus rex</i>. She then uses a flare to draw attention to herself, and gets the <i>T. rex</i> to chase her into a confrontation with the <i>Indominus rex</i>.</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Aside from all the structural contrasts (man opens door to flee away from creature while control tries and fails to shut the door; woman convinces control to open door to get creature to flee towards her), the major difference between these two scenarios is the following: the security guard is so concerned with his personal safety that he makes the locally questionable but globally disastrous decision to open the enclosure gate. He is literally unable to see outside his own perspective on the world. BDH, on the other hand, risks her own life in order to get the <i>T. rex</i> to battle the <i>Indominus rex</i> and thus save the lives of her nephews. She, who had earlier screamed over the phone to get the control room to shut the <i>Indominus</i> enclosure gate, now makes the locally foolish but globally pragmatic decision to open the gates. And here, she convinces the control room through her personal connection with Control-Room Guy and her direct unmediated presence before Paddock 9 that her sacrifice will be worth it in the end.</span></div>
</div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Conclusion (sort of)</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I fear I really have gone on for far too long now, but I want to finally tie all these thoughts together, using the insight of the real and the virtual that we have gradually built to. The reason <i>Indominus rex</i> was designed was because people had grown too used to all the other dinosaurs in the park, and so executives wanted to up the ante once again. Notice that the people who show genuine awe at most things in the part are children, who still retain a sense of wonder; adults—and even teenagers—are much too jaded to care. The lesson here is clear: <i>when we grow accustomed to the virtual as real, the real ceases to register to us as anything other than virtual</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And this is the real kicker: <u>this analysis of Jurassic World the theme park can be lifted to a meta-analysis of <i>Jurassic World</i> the movie</u>. We as an audience have grown jaded with dinosaurs on-screen, and want bigger and badder lizards all the time. The <i>alpha</i> creature at this level of analysis is the Hollywood studio system that has metastasized over time, generating one colossal movie after another designed precisely to extract more money from people’s pockets by giving them more bang—literally!—for their buck. The <i>Indominus rex</i>, the rogue Frankenstein’s monster, may well be the whole surfeit of giant-reptile movies and super-hero movies that have taken off in the last few years. <i>Jurassic World </i>the movie is the <i>T. rex</i>, the tried-and-tested favorite that has reptiles and heroes who finally succeed, and which has now become the <i>alpha</i> at the global box office.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And of course in both cases the amoral corporation survives, and even profits from the battle! Notice that the corporation in the movie is clearly multinational: a brown CEO with a vaguely Islamic-ish last name, an Asian-American chief scientist, a velociraptor trainer from what sounded to my ears like Francophone Africa. And of course the Hollywood system itself has gone global these days, designing its films to be as globally appealing as possible.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Still, did I get enough bang for my buck with <i>Jurassic World</i>? For sure. Bring on the sequel!</span></div>
Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-63611118893734149582015-06-23T13:01:00.000-04:002015-06-24T11:07:03.581-04:00Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar, part two<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This is the second of a three-part series of posts, titled “Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar”, interpreting the movie </i>Jurassic World<i>. The whole series of posts in order is the following:</i></span><br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla.html">An extended look at the role played by clothing</a> in depicting personal transformation in the movie.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_23.html">An expansion of our analysis</a>, from clothing through enclosures to social relations structured by power, understanding, and survival.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_24.html">An examination of survival, evolution, rationality</a>, and the (non-)distinction between the real and the virtual.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_75.html">An epilogue</a> defending my choice of title, and offering some final thoughts.</span></i></li>
</ol>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla.html">Last time</a>, we took a very close look at some of the significant ways in which clothing works in <i>Jurassic World</i>. I will avoid diving into such detail this time around, as I have a vast range of topics to cover. (Need I say that this will be <b>massively</b> full of spoilers if you haven’t seen the movie?)</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">2. Enclosures</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I’m thinking of enclosures fairly broadly here as any sort of covering that affords protection from the elements. In this sense, clothing is of course a kind of enclosure protecting human skin: the shedding of clothing is the discarding of a layer of insulation. But there are a number of other such enclosures in the film: the gyroball, for instance, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">literally encloses the two boys in a protective shell as they travel through the park—</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">even after they exit the protective enclosure (one more!) of the grasslands. In the jungle, they are attacked in the gyroball by the <i>Indominus rex</i>, whose teeth punch right through the gyroball. Indeed, the boys’ glass world is literally turned upside down and then shattered to pieces by the <i>Indominus rex</i>. This is such an obvious image that I trust I need to say nothing more about it!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Most of the enclosures in <i>Jurassic World</i> are designed to hold dinosaurs in, constricting them to different extents. As there is no way for humans to directly interact with the dinosaurs unless these barriers are somehow taken down, the logic of the movie demands that such enclosures all be taken down in one way or another. But the ways in which these enclosures are taken down are all different:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Indominus rex</i> tricks the humans into opening the gate through a masterful piece of subterfuge (indeed, one that would not have occurred to many humans in an analogous situation). That is, <i>Indominus rex</i> actively engineers the destruction of its enclosure</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The pterosaurs escape through the holes punched in the aviary’s dome by the <i>Indominus rex</i> and the helicopter. It is unclear how much of this was consciously planned by the <i>Indominus rex</i> and how much was accident.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The <i>Tyrannosaurus rex</i> stays inside Paddock 9—passively—until BDH opens its gates. (An important difference between it and <i>Indominus rex</i>.)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The velociraptors are released by humans from their cages, ostensibly in a way that would guarantee their being under control. (Yeah, right.)</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In contrast to all these, there is one creature that does not escape its enclosure directly: the mosasaur. It stays in its watery home, happily feasting on any creature of land, sea, or air that is unfortunate enough to penetrate <i>its</i> enclosure. This behavior of the mosasaur tells us something valuable about the nature of an enclosure:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">An enclosure is a membrane designed to seal off, as thoroughly as possible, hostile environments from individuals. In some cases, the individual to be protected is housed inside the enclosure (as in the gyroball); in others, the hostile environment is itself housed inside the enclosure. When this enclosure is eliminated, the chance of an individual being killed or seriously injured increase dramatically.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">However, as we saw with the clothing last time, the insulation of individual from environment can in fact be seriously detrimental to their wholesome development. Recall that both BDH and IK remove their jackets before embarking upon the most dangerous parts of their journeys. The enclosure must be removed for the individual to undertake the terribly dangerous journey of self-transformation. Not all will make it—and this, of course, is one of the most powerful motifs of myth and literature: the overstepping of barriers, the transgression of a sacred bound, the undertaking of a life-threatening but also life-transforming journey by doing so.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This dangerous journey happens to multiple individuals in the movie:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As we saw from last time, both IK and BDH remove their jackets before beginning the most dangerous parts of their journeys.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">CP’s dominance of the velociraptors is theoretical so long as he is up on the gangway yelling at them; only when he chooses to enter their enclosure to confront them is his alpha nature established.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Indominus rex</i> itself is emotionally and socially stunted due to its isolation from all other life inside its enclosure. It is of course terribly dangerous once it breaks outside this enclosure, but this is also how it manages to establish its own dominant position on the island. Furthermore, the outside world is also also terribly hostile to <i>Indominus rex</i>, and indeed ultimately fatal to it.</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Note also that such a transformative journey does not take place for two individuals: control-room guy and the mosasaur. Neither undergoes any sort of development through the course of the movie.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But what is it about an enclosure that gives it this significance? The answer to this lies in seeing the partitioning effect of an enclosure in a different way: not as an insulation of an individual from a hostile environment, but as a demarcation of the world into different domains. The first way of seeing an enclosure continues to regard it as a physical barrier of insulation; the second crosses over into social, psychological, and theoretical realms of being as well. The hostility of an environment to an individual in this broader sense is the inability of that individual to function at its optimal level in that environment, and thus to run the risk of being eliminated from that space entirely.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">3. Domains, Control, and Hierarchy</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Thus do we make the transition from enclosures to domains of control. A domain is any space—physical, mental, political, institutional, even intellectual—where one or more individuals can undertake certain actions and be subject to other actions from other individuals in the space or from the space itself in some way. Most domains are unequal: there are some individuals who have more freedom than others to maneuver, whose actions are more likely to succeed, whose aspirations are more likely to be met. These are the <i>alphas</i> of those domains. As we should know, these are typically multi-level hierarchies: there are <i>betas</i>, <i>gammas</i>, and so on as well.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Now just because an <i>alpha</i> is <i>alpha</i> does not mean it is guaranteed to always succeed. There are situations in which non-<i>alphas</i> have prevailed over <i>alphas</i>, or have at least managed to make their grievances heard. We usually call such situations “revolutions”.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Once we have this conceptual tool in our kit, we can redraw our mental map of <i>Jurassic World</i> to align with these domains:</span><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The whole island is of course a domain, whose top dog (at least initially) is the corporation that owns it. The corporation is able to control the behavior not just of the dinosaurs, but also of the employees and of the visitors who enter the island. Its headquarters is the control-room. The control room, as its very name suggests, is designed to have top-down control over the whole island: to see everything and everybody, and to know what is going on. The head of the control room is thus the <i>alpha</i> of all of Jurassic World. Its shutting down thus indicates an overturning of the hierarchy of power on the island, a true revolution.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The control-room itself is a domain, in which the <i>alpha</i> is Irrfan Khan (as the head of the corporation), and secondarily BDH. When CP tries to assert himself there, he is shot down explicitly for lacking control in that domain.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The lagoon is entirely the domain of the mosasaur. Nothing more need be said about it.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The air is the domain of the pterosaurs. The aviary that houses them is a human-built enclosure designed to prevent them from controlling the sky, because in the air they can outfly and outswarm all but the heaviest military gear.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The science labs are ruled over by B.D. Wong. But here there appears to be conflict: the money for the lab comes from Irrfan Khan, but the tech and security comes from InGen, and the brains trust comes from BDW and his research teams. This power play is of course a big part of why things go wrong the way they do.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Each individual on the island is also a domain, insulated from others by the physical enclosure of its skin and by the mental/psychological enclosure of its sense of individuality. When the corporation straps cameras onto its security forces and its velociraptors, it is this domain that they are violating. (And we will see more about screens and virtualization as a major theme later.)</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Note well what an enclosure does: it partitions off one domain from another, so that the <i>alphas</i> of one domain are unable to extend their control beyond certain boundaries to other domains as well. This tells us something fascinating—and paradoxical—about enclosures: many are likely built by non-<i>alphas</i>! More precisely, individuals who are non-<i>alpha</i> in one domain construct enclosures around that domain so the <i>alpha </i>of that domain is constrained: humans built the huge walls around <i>Indominus rex</i> and the colossal gates of Paddock 9 for <i>T. rex</i> because they were terrified of their unrestrained might. But precisely because these non-<i>alphas</i> are now able to constrain the <i>alpha</i>, they gain ascendancy over it: they are no longer utterly subject to its whims. In this sense, only true <i>alphas</i> can build enclosures. This may be a true <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia">aporia</a> (pun on “pore” intended), for I cannot think of a resolution to it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Note also that domains have natural boundaries, regardless of any enclosures others may try to construct. These may be physical boundaries (like the surface of the water for the pterosaurs) or socially constructed boundaries (like the domain of a first date, in which the corporate controlling mechanisms of itineraries and domination are unacceptable). They may also be domains of knowledge, as in the case of the little brother who cannot but help recite facts about the world: he is supposed to be a genius, but he also has something Aspergersy about him. When the world stops following the boundaries of his facts and figures, he is no longer the alpha but must turn to his elder brother or to CP, his father-figure.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Domains have hierarchies of power, although these may be very fluid in practice. Those who possess more power can exert more control over others. All of this seems simple enough. But as with the case of BDH being made fun of for being controlling on the first date, there are clearly situations which are not governed by hierarchies. What might these be? And what is the counterpart of control here?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">4. Familial Relations</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There is a whole set of social relations in the movie ungoverned by hierarchies. They are not necessarily relations between equals, but they are marked by the absence of control (at least in their ideal form). These relations, broadly, are the kinds of relations between family members. (Society would also have relations between friends, but those sorts of relations are curiously underdeveloped in the movie, being at the most relations of collegiality.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Although there may be some level of control between family members (younger siblings obeying elder siblings, parents getting kids to do things, etc.), the primary mode of interaction between them may be called trust or understanding. It is the recognition that we do not have power over the other person, but trust them to do the right thing—indeed, to treat them as persons.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Again, it is BDH who shows us the transition from domination to family. Her initial relationship with her nephews is marked by disengagement and a genuine confusion on her part: she is so used to dealing solely in terms of dominance and control that she is unable to adjust to the familial setting. Her tactic of using a hired hand to supervise the boys is precisely an attempt to manage the familial relation with a control mechanism—and this mechanism works about as well as can be imagined. Only when she abandons that tactic of control and embraces them as a part of her family do they also accept her and does she succeed in keeping them safe.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The <i>Indominus rex</i> stands at the opposite end of familial relations: it is a Kinslayer, a devourer of its own sibling. It is cursed to interact with the world solely through the relation of dominance.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">5. Conjugal Relations</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The line between familial relations and relations of dominance is not sharp but fuzzy: unhealthy familial relations show aspects of control (as in BDH’s initially distorted relation with her nephews). But there is also a certain kind of pseudo-familial relation that can develop outside a family as well (although in some cases they end up developing <i>into</i> familial relations): We may call these “conjugal relations” to be polite (this is a family-friendly blog after all).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So much has been written and pontificated about sex and power that I really have nothing to say on the matter. In the context of the movie, though, the closest we get to any depiction of, um, conjugation is when CP and BDH share a kiss after she saves him. The biological drive towards conjugal relations is part of the survival instinct (at the level of the genes, at least); in this case, their shared intimacy was because they survived by sticking together. This is also the last spoken line in the movie: “We stick together … to survive.” (Or something like that.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">BDH and CP’s success in this matter contrasts with the failure of three others:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The elder brother, who cannot bring himself to say “I love you” to his sweet back home, and who forgets about her selfie when he sees the mosasaur (entirely forgivable in my books!). He is clearly longing for female companionship throughout the movie, but never gets to say even a word to a girl. He doesn’t even get to rescue one, as his attentions are all focused on keeping his brother alive.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Control-Room Guy, whose attempt to be heroic in the eyes of Control-Room Girl come to naught because she is already in a relationship. He comes in for a kiss, is left stranded, and gets an awkward hug for his troubles. Again, this is in keeping with his being the opposite pole of CP: he doesn’t get the kiss that CP does, but that’s also because he doesn’t actually do any saving-the-damsel. Indeed, he vanishes literally into darkness when he turns off the lights in the control-room.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Our favorite <i>Indominus rex</i>. While other dinos love to do it, or so CP says, <i>Indominus rex</i> seems to lack the mating urge entirely. Even its gender is unspecified (unless I missed something). Its sole perspective on the world is dominance.</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The conjugal relation lies at the heart of evolution: it is how genes are transmitted from one generation to another, and sexual reproduction creates the genetic variation needed for evolution. But deciding who gets to mate with whom is a problem of control, and is thus subject to the usual issues of hierarchy and power.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There is a lot more that remains to be said about the movie, as we have only touched upon the margins of its broadest themes: evolution, nature versus nurture, real versus virtual. Those issues must therefore be left for the third (and hopefully final) post in this series.</span></div>
Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-9402022094624929902015-06-21T23:20:00.000-04:002015-06-24T11:06:43.484-04:00Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar, part one<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This is the first of a three-part series of posts, titled “Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar”, interpreting the movie </i>Jurassic World<i>. The whole series of posts in order is the following:</i></span><br />
<ol>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla.html">An extended look at the role played by clothing</a> in depicting personal transformation in the movie.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_23.html">An expansion of our analysis</a>, from clothing through enclosures to social relations structured by power, understanding, and survival.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_24.html">An examination of survival, evolution, rationality</a>, and the (non-)distinction between the real and the virtual.</span></i></li>
<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-revolution-in-isla_75.html">An epilogue</a> defending my choice of title, and offering some final thoughts.</span></i></li>
</ol>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I haven’t blogged for a regrettably long time, so I figured I would mark my return to the scene by reflecting on a movie that hasn’t done too badly for itself this summer: <i>Jurassic World</i>. Given my obsession with dinosaurs (par for the course for anyone who saw Spielberg’s original miracle), this experience was particularly fun for me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I suppose it needs no spoiler warning to say that <i>Jurassic World</i> is about (yet another) dinosaur going crazy on a theme-park island, with lots of humans dying gruesomely while the protagonists make it through with all body parts intact and with an increase in their wisdom. But what struck me even while watching the movie was that it very artfully sets up a number of structural polarities, only to dissolve some of them—but not all!—into an even more complex jumble. Postmodern neopaleontology? Bring it on!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">What I will do now is look at a few motifs that are repeated throughout the film, creating striking parallels and generating resonances.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> (Please bear in mind, gentle reader, that I’ve only seen this movie once, so I am working off my memory here!) The ones that immediately come to mind:</span><br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Clothing</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Enclosure</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Control and hierarchy</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Familial relations</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Conjugal relations</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Nature, evolution, and human “fiddling”</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Virtual versus real</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Corporations</span></li>
</ol>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I realize there is a good amount of overlap in some of these themes, and that some of them are much broader than others, but this is more than enough to start with.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">1. Clothing</span></b></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">“Clothes make the [wo]man”, and <i>Jurassic World</i> pays great attention to this. Among the many clothing-related incidents that I can think of, it is really Bryce Dallas Howard whose role is most pronounced. Indeed, with her we see a whole sequence of sartorial transformations that are clearly meant to indicate her personal transformations through the course of the movie.</span></div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">She starts in an immaculate white suit with crazy heels, showing us what a powerhouse corporate hotshot she is.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When she first goes to talk to Chris Pratt, she isn’t wearing her blazer, but rather has it wrapped about her, almost like a protective shell. And further, her not wearing the blazer perhaps suggests that she is not fully in her business element here (this is a mosquito-infested swamp-like area, after all).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When she and Pratt decide to chase after the missing boys and Pratt makes fun of her heels, she huffs and untucks her shirt, tying its tails together in the manner of the typical female jungle explorer. The theatricality of this moment is palpable, and it is immediately apparent to Pratt (and to us) that she does this because she decides to don this new mask instead.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When she and Pratt flee into the trees to avoid the escaping pterosaurs, her white clothes stand out distinctly amidst the greenery (although this does not seem to make her a target for the winged reptiles).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Only when she finally secures the boys inside the truck and gets into the driver’s seat does she finally discard her (by-then tattered) shirt. This is also when she begins to show her genuine emotions for the boys (assuring them that she will protect them) and comes to acknowledge her attraction to Pratt (who is off playing the hero). Her top is purplish, similar to (but darker than) Irrfan Khan’s shirt.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally, at the end of the movie, she is wrapped in a grey shawl or blanket of some sort. She is now safe from harm.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And of course, the constant through this are her heels! The meaning of that, at least, should be clear: heels represent and enhance female power by allowing women to negate men’s height advantage over them, while simultaneously changing their own posture so as to emphasize their physical characteristics. And contrary to Pratt’s warnings (and our own expectations), BDH’s heels don’t actually hinder her during her flight: she does not have to sacrifice her femininity to survive or to succeed. Thus, the focus on BDH’s heels struck me not as an objectification or a criticism of her incompetence, but rather as a way for us to challenge our own preconceptions of what femininity can mean and accomplish.</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The transformation of BDH’s clothes occurs in two dimensions: style and color. Each of these tells us something different about her. Her color sequence is spotless white to dirty stained white to purple to grey; her style sequence is powersuit to stylized jungle explorer to survival-oriented to recovering disaster victim. </span></div>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">We can contrast each of these with the appearance of other people throughout the film, which tells us a great deal about them and about BDH: </span></div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Irrfan Khan is also immaculately dressed throughout the film, in a perfectly tailored grey suit and silken mauve shirt. His power suit reflects, of course, his position as CEO of a huge corporation, just like BDH. His inner shirt is roughly similar to BDH’s too, and both of them reveal this layer of clothing by taking off their outer layers just as they both climb into the driver’s seat of different modes of transport. This again illustrates a resonance between them: they have concealed emotional depths and moral principles that encourages them to take charge in situations. But there are also two differences between IK and BDH: </span></li>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The first is that IK hands over his immaculate grey jacket to his assistant before getting into the helicopter, whereas BDH drops hers onto the ground. Now, of course, this can certainly be attributed to the fact that IK is still in charge of a functioning organization (and indeed is its head), whereas BDH is an exhausted survivor of a broken ragtag group. But it also tells us something else: IK still values such things as not getting his jacket wrinkled, while all BDH cares about is saving her nephews and herself. BDH has learned to become other-centered in a way that IK doesn’t quite seem to be.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The second is of course the color of their jackets: IK’s is grey, BDH’s is white (although her shawl at the end of the movie is also grey). What this may mean will be clarified presently.</span></li>
</ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">B.D. Wong, the chief scientist of the operation, is dressed all in black, and indeed in what I vaguely recall as being a Steve-Jobs-esque turtleneck. He is the chief designer of the <i>Indominus rex</i> that plagues the park, and is a bit of a caricature: the scientist who is more interested in his research problem than in the broader ethical issues. Actually, I take that back: BDW has in fact thought through his actions, but has gone through with them anyway. He understands exactly what it is that he has designed, and has no doubts in the matter. And this gives us a clue to understanding the monochrome color sequence:</span></li>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Black, worn only by BDW, is the color of clarity. This may seem strange: why not of evil? Because its contrast, white, is not obviously the color of good. And because BDW is not the only person who does evil in the movie. (And because Jeff Goldblum wears black in the first movie and isn’t exactly evil either!) It is the color of clarity because BDW knows exactly what he is doing, and why he is doing.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">If this is true, then white must be the color of obfuscation. So long as BDH is wearing white, she is concealing something—perhaps even to her own self. She does not understand what she has become in her quest to be the best corporate drone possible, and thus obscures herself from even herself. And of course, there is one other entity that is intrinsically white: <i>Indominus rex</i> itself: but does that make it obfuscation personified? And what about the fact that its camouflage allows it to melt into the shadows and totally obscure itself? Here is where <i>Indominus rex</i> is different from BDH even though both have white coats.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Grey then is what lies between black and white. It is what allows IK to lie to himself about the real monstrosity of Jurassic Park while still retaining enough humanity to want to retain his morals in the process. BDH’s transformation from white to grey then suggests that she has acquired greater clarity over the course of the film. Too much clarity, then, is blinding.</span></li>
</ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The control-room guy who wears the original Jurassic Park shirt throughout the movie also offers a different kind of contrast to BDH. (Indeed, he actually plays a very significant role in the movie in terms of serving as the opposite pole for a number of polarities.) Most obviously, his wearing the shirt is meant to foreshadow the events of the movie: what happened twenty years ago in Jurassic Park is guaranteed to repeat itself. But there are other aspects of his clothing that may be significant too:</span></li>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Unlike both IK and BDH, he goes through no jacket-removal scene. There is no metamorphosis for him into a butterfly—or hero, in this case. This additionally means that the Jurassic Park shirt remains half-concealed all the time: just like the old wreckage of the park remains scattered and buried amidst the new constructions. The past does not go away, but it is often overgrown by moss and half-eaten by entropy.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Again unlike both IK and BDH, his clothing is distinctly non-professional, even hipsterish. He is clearly no corporate power-broker, just small fry that sees the truth when the biggies can’t, or won’t.</span></li>
</ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The real foil for the control-room guy is, of course, Chris Pratt. Their domains are the polar opposites of each other (control room versus the wild outdoors), as are their physical appearance. But what they both share is a sartorial naturalness that stands in stark contrast to the affected power suit of BDH. Both of these men are comfortable in their skin, and in their unfashionable (and in the case of Pratt, smelly) T-shirts. Pratt also does not go through a jacket-removal, but that’s because he doesn’t <i>need</i> to: he is already the hero, he is the already-hero, he is the hero-ready-for-all. He is also no corporate jockey, but unlike the control-room guy, whose domain is dominated by the suits, his domain is the wilderness, which is dominated by <i>Indominus rex</i>. </span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">One last point about color: the raptors (which, contrary to the movie’s nomenclature, were actually modeled on <i>Deinonychus</i> and not on velociraptors, which were much smaller!) were all named after letters in the NATO alphabet (“Charlie”, “Delta”, “Echo”), except for the one called “Blue”. That is the only dinosaur named after a color in the movie that I can think of. And blue (a very light shade) is also the color of Chris Pratt’s shirt for a good part of the movie, thus illustrating their connection.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I have a lot more to say about <i>Jurassic World</i>, but this post has already gone on for far too long. I suppose that means this post calls for a sequel.</span></div>
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-7782213197062799522014-05-12T23:38:00.000-04:002014-05-12T23:38:15.469-04:00Guitar tuning and contravariance<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I’ve been fiddling around with a guitar for a few years now, trying to occasionally produce a few notes that sound mildly musical. Since I don’t usually get anything done unless I put immense pressure on myself, I decided to record myself playing and singing a song ("Daaru Desi" from the Bollywood movie <i>Cocktail</i>) that would force me to actually learn some chords.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There was only one minor hitch: the song is in G♯m.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The opening riff involves the chords G♯m and D♯, which have to be played with barre chords on the 4th and 6th frets of the guitar. This raised two issues:</span><br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">My barre chords are atrocious</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Whereas in the opening riff the D♯ is clearly lower than the G♯m, playing them on the 6th and 4th frets means the D♯ sounds higher than the G♯m.</span></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">After much shedding of sweat and tears (fortunately no blood), I was on the verge of giving up, when I accidentally played the chords on the 5th and 7th frets. This of course shifted the song up by a semitone, and resulted in me playing the Am and E chords (on the 5th and 7th frets). I was now out of tune with the original song, being too sharp by a semitone, but since I didn’t really care about that, I now had the option to play the Am and E chords in open position. This then had the further consequence of making the E lower than the Am—just as the opening riff demands.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I realized I had almost cracked the puzzle of the song. All that needed to be done was … what? Retuning the guitar so that the Am open position on the regular tuning became a G♯m instead, and the E open position on regular tuning became a D♯ instead. All I had to do was to tune every string a semitone flat. (This is apparently called the E♭ tuning.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">With this new tuning in place, I was able to play the song in the same key as the original—and was able to play it using mostly open position chords.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Now, if this were all, it wouldn’t make for a great story. What got me excited, though, was the fact that I had realized a deep truth about tuning and music:</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">an instrument’s finger positions contravary with its tuning</span></i></div>
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In plain English, it sounds commonsensical: if you lower the tuning of a string, you’ll have to play at a correspondingly higher position on the string to produce the same frequency earlier. Hmm, now it doesn’t sound that exciting at all. Oh well.</span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-30461581955696266212014-01-31T01:05:00.002-05:002014-01-31T01:07:19.963-05:00A meditation on mathematics as meditation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Following <a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2014/01/on-goals-systems-and-bhavana.html">the previous posts on <i>bhāvanā</i>,</a> bringing-into-being, and <a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2013/12/on-imagination-meditation-and-bringing.html">its role in meditation, literature, and human creative activity in general</a>, I couldn’t help but relate some of those ideas to mathematics.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Many (pure) mathematicians are content to take the mathematical structures they explore as givens, which they can figure out or manipulate in interesting and sometimes profoundly beautiful ways. This is a naïve version of <i>Platonic realism</i>, which grants to mathematical structures an objective existential status that lies beyond human beings. (This also means that sentient alien species should have exactly the same mathematical ideas as we do, that the Vulcans would accept that Euclid’s axioms generate the same results as us, and so on.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Philosophers of mathematics who are <i>formalists</i> of various stripes hold instead that mathematics comes down to playing games with symbols: pushing arrows and boxes and Greek and Hebrew characters around based on well-defined rules. (Cue Wittgenstein.) They reject the idea that mathematicians “discover” mathematical structures; rather, they formulate new rules and new symbols and manipulate them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">While it may certainly seem from the outside that this is all mathematicians do, and while Western models of logic separate formal syntax and formal semantics in a way that seems to encourage this line of thought, it does not gel with my personal experience of actually doing proofs. Seldom can a real proof be hit upon simply by pushing symbols around on a piece of paper. At least for me, thinking about a hard mathematical problem involved trying very hard to “see” what was going on behind the symbols: symbols barely came into it. Strangely enough, the harder the proof, the more I thought I was seeing something that was <i>already there</i>! And even in those cases when one does merely shuffle things around, there is a crucial psychological difference between staring at a bunch of symbols on a page and hitting the Eureka moment. The proof is complete, I would argue, only with the latter. (This is not a “proof” that formalism is wrong, but merely an observation that it doesn’t fit with the phenomenology of at least some mathematicians.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So where does <i>bhāvanā</i> come into the picture here? I would like to suggest (without proof, hehe) that what makes a proof a proof is precisely the fact that when(ever) it is understood correctly, it reliably and unfailingly brings into being in our minds a mathematical truth, in a manner that is at least intersubjectively valid, if not objectively. A proof is the <i>means</i> by which a particular mathematical <i>end</i> (a fact, a theorem, a lemma, or whatever) is attained. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I have been vaguely inclined towards this manner of thinking ever since I read one of the greatest math books written in recent times in my opinion, Tristan Needham’s <i>Visual Complex Analysis</i>. Needham takes perhaps the most aesthetically remarkable branch of modern mathematics and offers a fabulous tour of its key features and structures in a manner that emphasizes visual and geometric thinking over the algebraic. (That is, he encourages you to prove things not by pushing symbols on paper but by visualizing, rotating, and dilating mathematical structures.) Given my prior bias towards visualizing mathematical structures, this book has been particularly enjoyable to read. (Perhaps my favorite exercise in visualization is the one in which I had to “see” the complex logarithm multifunction twisting and lifting the complex plane into an infinite helix.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This process of visualizing a mathematical object is both deeply personal and yet objectively available. Two people who visualize a mathematical object will both agree on its key characteristics and its relevant properties, and may yet visualize it in ways that differ quite dramatically (and yet inexpressibly) from each other. To me, this situation bears a thought-provoking resemblance to Hindu/Buddhist meditative exercises in which devotees are asked to bring-into-being a particular deity in their minds, and are usually given elaborate visual descriptions of the deity’s characteristics to aid them in the process. Two different devotees may thus both bring-into-being very different versions of the same deity in their own minds, while yet agreeing fully on all of the key features possessed by this deity. The former half allows them to “take ownership” of the deity, in a sense; the latter half lets them participate in a shared conversation with others about the deity. Of course, by comparing meditative exercises with mathematical proofs, I intend to make neither religious claims about mathematical entities nor mathematical claims about religious entities!</span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-88536115515486665352014-01-05T00:07:00.000-05:002014-01-05T00:16:59.656-05:00On goals, systems, and bhāvanā<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">An article by James Clear called <a href="http://jamesclear.com/goals-systems">“Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead”</a> [Oh Upworthy, how I truly hate thee!] has been doing the rounds recently. It has received a lot of attention, but when I finally sat to read it a couple of weeks ago, I found myself deeply bothered by something I couldn’t quite get a handle on. It is only just now that I’ve realized what the problem was, and the answer came to me from Mīmāṃsā.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">What on earth does a nearly 3,000-year-old Hindu tradition of ritual hermeneutics have to do with any of this? As it turns out, a lot! Mīmāṃsā’s primary intellectual concern has been with the Vedic sacrifice: how it works, how its descriptions in various ritual texts cohere, how it is organized, and so on. To do so, it has developed a formidable arsenal of techniques and frameworks. One of these, the concept of <i>bhāvanā</i>, was widely used and taken up in disciplines far outside Vedic ritual exegesis, including literary theory and imagination / meditation. (See <a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2013/12/on-imagination-meditation-and-bringing.html">my prior post on imagination</a> for some other uses of the concept of <i>bhāvanā</i> in South Asia.) The time has now come to apply <i>bhāvanā</i> to yet another problem: motivating people to stay on track with difficult projects!</span></div>
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">What is <i>bhāvanā</i>?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">To massively oversimplify things, and with apologies to <a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/OLLWIB-2">Andrew Ollet’s excellent article</a>, a <i>bhāvanā</i>, a bringing-into-being, is a particular action (or a set of actions) designed to create something, undertaken by an agent. Every such <i>bhāvanā</i> has three essential components to it:</span></div>
<div>
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The desired end which the agent is trying to bring into being through this operation</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The instrument using which the agent is carrying out the operation</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The procedure which the agent is following with the instrument to bring about the desired end</span></li>
</ol>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">These three are respectively called the <i>kim</i> (the “what”), the <i>kena</i> (the “by what”), and the <i>katham</i> (the “how”). </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These three things are </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">very</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> different from each other. Confusing them can be fatal to understanding how things are actually supposed to work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The standard introductory Mīmāṃsā handbooks usually explain <i>bhāvanā</i> with an example from Vedic sacrifice. Here’s a rather different, much more quotidian scenario where the three components are nevertheless clearly distinguishable.</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">After a long, grueling day at work, you come home utterly famished. You don’t want to go out to get dinner, so you decide to make yourself a quick dinner. You have a microwaveable mac & cheese sitting in the freezer, so you take it out, read the instructions on the packet (you don’t really ever cook), stick it in the microwave, and a few minutes later, satiate your hunger with some piping hot coagulated carbs and fats.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In this scenario, it’s pretty clear that something new was created: the state of the world, and more importantly your own state, was transformed in this scenario. In not-so-technical Mīmāṃsā non-jargon, some sort of </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">bhāvanā</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> thingie occurred here. So what were the components of this </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">bhāvanā</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">? What was created?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It is tempting to think of the mac & cheese dinner as being what is created: after all, before you cooked it, it was just a frozen lump of carbs and dairy and preservatives, and it was your cooking it that transformed it into an (arguably) edible mush. However, this would be a major mistake, according to Mīmāṃsā: the mac & cheese was not the desired end of your actions. It wasn’t why you undertook all these steps. Instead:</span></div>
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<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">the real end, the <i>kim</i>, must be the resolution of your hunger. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">the mac & cheese is the means, the <i>kena</i>, by which your hunger is resolved. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">the way you resolve your hunger, the <i>katham</i>, is by following the procedure outlined on the packet to cook and serve the mac & cheese.</span></li>
</ol>
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Goals and Systems</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">If my quick overview of <i>bhāvanā </i>didn’t foreshadow it clearly enough, it should be clear what my beef with Clear’s piece is: he conflates <i>kim</i>s and <i>kena</i>s when talking about goals, and therefore overemphasizes the importance of systems (which are not quite <i>katham</i>s). To see how he does this, let’s look at the section where he distinguishes between goals and systems:</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What’s the difference between goals and systems?</span><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>If you’re a coach,</b> your goal is to win a championship. Your system is what your team does at practice each day.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>If you’re a writer,</b> your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>If you’re a runner,</b> your goal is to run a marathon. Your system is your training schedule for the month.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>If you’re an entrepreneur,</b> your goal is to build a million dollar business. Your system is your sales and marketing process.</span></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Look carefully at the four things he describes as goals: winning a championship, writing a book, running a marathon, and building a million-dollar business. And look carefully at the four types of people he describes as having these goals: the coach, the writer, the runner, and the entrepreneur. Now, many of us would agree with these things as being described as “goals” (which to me only reinforces the fact that we live in a deeply instrumentalist society). But are they really goals? Are they more like the mac & cheese or like satiating the hunger for a hungry person?</span></div>
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<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">For a coach who is hungry for a win, winning a championship will certainly satiate his hunger. But it is not obvious to me that people become coaches <i>in order to</i> win championships. It can be argued that the real <i>purpose</i> of being a coach is to, well, coach a bunch of players to the best of their abilities, so that they can perform superlatively on the field. If the team can do that consistently, then they may very well end up winning a championship. It seems to me that winning the championship is really just a means (a <i>kena</i>) to the real end (<i>kim</i>): the joy that comes from watching people do their best on the field. (It is possible to win a championship and yet be dissatisfied, because perhaps your opponent defaulted; it is possible to lose a championship and yet be pleased, because you did your absolute best and fulfilled your “duties”, so to speak.)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Writers don’t write in order to create books; they write books in order to do something else: tell a story, persuade their readers to act, create emotional states in their readers, convey some valuable information, or even simply feed their families. The book is clearly just a <i>kena</i>. The <i>kim</i> is whatever motivates the writer to write.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As with the example of the coach, it may well be that running a marathon is a real <i>kim</i> for some people. However, it is again quite likely that there are other satisfactions here: enjoying the endorphin rush, raising money for a valuable cause, staying in shape, or whathaveyou. In all of those cases, the marathon is just a <i>kena</i> that is subordinated to the more significant <i>kim</i>.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Again, it certainly is the case that some entrepreneurs are just in it for the money. In that simplest of cases, the business is the <i>kena</i> to their real <i>kim</i>: making a boatload of money. But <a href="http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ten-commandments-from-entrepreneurial-evangelist-guy-kawasaki/">as Guy Kawasaki has said many a time</a>: “make meaning, not money” is the heart of entrepreneurship. Whether your business is worth a billion dollars or a hundred, the real purpose should be to do something that creates meaning for you and for the people you engage with. In such a view, the mere instrumentality of the business is even more strongly pronounced.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">None of the four examples of goals here is clearly and precisely a <i>kim</i>: an end that people strive for and desire. Some of these could possibly be treated as <i>kim</i>s<i>, </i>but Mīmāṃsā argues </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(and Clear would agree with this, as he himself writes)</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> that to do so would be to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of each of these sets of actions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Clear has correctly identified one problem: <u>the so-called “actionable goals” he describes are notoriously bad at actually getting achieved</u>. The real reason for that is because <i>they aren’t in fact goals</i>: they are <i>means to other ends</i>. These other ends are the <i>real goals</i> we should keep in mind. In the absence of those real goals, people wouldn’t act at all!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The problem isn’t with goals at all; it is with the fact that Clear is using two terms (“goal” and “system”) to describe three distinct pieces (the [real] goal, the means to the goal, and the procedure; to use a different metaphor, the destination, the means of transport, and the particular path you navigate). Because of this conceptual blurring, he emphasizes “systems” more than they can bear: what he calls systems are just glorified procedures. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The real system is the the whole triplet that Mīmāṃsā describes, and this systems needs all three pieces to succeed: a real goal to motivate us to act, a means by which this goal can be achieved, and a procedure that can be followed (with all the useful tips that Clear provides). </span></div>
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">ADDENDUM</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">One of the subheadings in Clear’s piece gives the game away to the reader who is keyed into Mīmāṃsā: He describes one of the faults of the goal-based approach as being the fact that “Goals reduce your current happiness.” This is <i>exactly</i> what sets <i>kim</i> apart from <i>kena</i> in Mīmāṃsā! Take the typical injunction that Mīmāṃsā analyzes: <i>yajeta svarga-kāmaḥ</i>, “The heaven-seeker should perform a sacrifice.” Lots of Hindus have desired to perform sacrifices, and still do to this day. But Mīmāṃsā argues that the real end here, the real <i>kim</i>, here has to be heaven. The sacrifice itself is only the means by which this end is brought about. And one of the arguments is this: a sacrifice is a difficult, expensive, resource-intensive, and physically taxing undertaking. No rational (pleasure-maximizing, pain-minimizing) human would perform a sacrifice for its own sake. Therefore, a sacrifice must be the <i>means</i> to some other end: the promised result. To follow Clear’s line of reasoning, you would focus on the individual actions of a sacrifice (its procedure) but ignore the coherence of the sacrifice itself as an instrument, and altogether forget about the real goal, the heaven that is the result of the sacrifice!</span></div>
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-82652502884831373442013-12-21T00:22:00.002-05:002013-12-21T00:23:28.246-05:00The beloved who is near and hidden<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s been far too long since I translated any Persian, so here’s a poem by the master of masters, Mawlana Rumi, in the simple but beautiful <i>rajaz mu<u>th</u>amman</i> meter:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><br /></i>
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>ay bā man-o penhān cho del, az del salām-at mīkonam</i>.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">ای با من و پنهان چو دل از دل سلامت می کنم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">تو کعبهای هر جا روم قصد مقامت می کنم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Hey you, who’re with me and are yet hidden, like my heart—</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">my heartfelt greetings to you!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">You’re the Ka‘bah: wherever I go, I head straight for your place.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">هر جا که هستی حاضری از دور در ما ناظری</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">شب خانه روشن می شود چون یاد نامت می کنم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Wherever you are, you’re present, as the supervisor within us from afar;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The bed-chamber is flooded with light when I remember your name.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">گه همچو باز آشنا بر دست تو پر می زنم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">گه چون کبوتر پرزنان آهنگ بامت می کنم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sometimes I briefly alight, like a friendly falcon, upon your arm;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sometimes I head for your roof, like a pigeon fluttering its wings.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">گر غایبی هر دم چرا آسیب بر دل میزنی</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">ور حاضری پس من چرا در سینه دامت می کنم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">If you’re absent at every moment, then why do you injure my heart?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And if you’re present, then why do I try to ensnare you in my bosom?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">دوری به تن لیک از دلم اندر دل تو روزنیست</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">زان روزن دزدیده من چون مه پیامت می کنم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">You’re far from me physically, but there’s a window from my heart onto yours;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">From that stolen window, I send you a message, like the moon.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">ای آفتاب از دور تو بر ما فرستی نور تو</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">ای جان هر مهجور تو جان را غلامت می کنم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">O sun, from afar do you shine your light upon me;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">O you, who are life to all abandoned by you, I serve you as a slave.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">من آینه دل را ز تو این جا صقالی می دهم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">من گوش خود را دفتر لطف کلامت می کنم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I give to the mirror of my heart your lustre;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I make my ears a record for your delicate words!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">در گوش تو در هوش تو و اندر دل پرجوش تو</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">اینها چه باشد تو منی وین وصف عامت می کنم</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In your ear, in your mind, in your exuberant heart</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Whatever may be, you’re mine—</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">thus do I generally describe you.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-29362756480557086342013-12-20T22:25:00.001-05:002014-01-05T00:17:38.508-05:00On imagination, meditation, and bringing-into-being<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In <a href="http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2013/03/05/prayer-imagination-and-the-voice-of-god-in-global-perspective/">this fascinating interview</a>, Tanya Luhrmann addresses the tremendous importance of imagination in religious traditions such as American evangelism. The idea that religion is “belief”, the affirmation of the truth-value of some proposition, is a particularly Western, Protestant, understanding of religion, and is profoundly different from the religious experiences of people from, say, the dharmic traditions. (Or for that matter, from the experiences of Orthodox Christians.) Luhrmann says about kataphatic prayer:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">It makes what is imagined in the mind more real. In kataphatic prayer you are saying that certain of your mental images are significant, and you are making these images more sensorially rich, you are allowing yourself to imagine them more vividly. The demand of religion is to teach you that the world as you know it is not the world as it is—and to teach you the capacity to see the world as it is, as something good. So you’ve got to make what is imagined real, and you’ve got to make it good.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The obvious response of the outsider to something like this is to describe it as clearly false, or “merely” imagined. And in a certain sense, the outsider is right: it is the believer who has imagined a particular religious experience into being, for which there is most likely no objective correlate. But Luhrmann argues that this attitude misses the heart of the experience as the insider experiences it: as something real, indeed as something more than real—because they create a new reality for the insider. It makes the insider more likely to feel loved, and thus to become more loving. Luhrmann thinks that something like this may even help reverse the erosion of social ties that people complain about today.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A number of Luhrmann's ideas squarely fit in with late medieval South Indian Hindu thought as is described in <i>More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India</i> by David D. Shulman.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Shulman focuses on the importance given in medieval South India to the force of imagination: to the fact that human being are at their core imaginative creatures, who shape reality by imagining it together. </span><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sometimes this imagination is internal to the person: Shulman tells the story of an impoverished devotee of Śiva who constructs in his mind a temple so beautiful that Śiva prefers to dwell there instead of in the vast granite temple that a king has built for him (said to be the Kailāsanātha temple of Kanchipuram). </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">At other times, this imagination is intersubjective: Shulman describes in great detail a performance from the Kūḍiyāṭṭam dance-drama tradition of Kerala, in which a solitary skilled dancer transforms an empty, prop-less stage into a story-universe through the combination of his gestures and through the shared imaginations of the entire audience. </span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Worship is imagined in the same way—by imagining our </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">iṣṭa-devatā</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">s in our minds and by that very act bringing them into being. The word used for bringing-into-being is </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">bhāvanā</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, a word borrowed from Mīmāṃsā ritual hermeneutics that refers to the power of a sacrifice to bring into being its fruit.[*]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Shulman points out that the philosophical and theological systems in which these systems developed in South India were staunch defenders of ontological realism, but of course not of physicalist, materialist reductionism. (Paradoxically, it was Advaita Vedānta that was fairly skeptical of the positive power of imagination.) He writes, comparing 16th-century India and Europe:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">In Europe, the ancient dichotomy of mind and matter hardened into a fully desubjectified theory, or evolving set of theories, about the status of objects within an external, natural world. In India, the dichotomy is itself questionable, and the metaphysics of inner and outer took another course. Broadly speaking, in one conceptual system the imagination became increasingly associated with pathology, while in the other it tended to be understood as therapeutic. (p. 278)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Suspension of disbelief is the wrong way to think about what's going on here (at least in the Indian context; it may well hold for Luhrmann's evangelicals). We don’t lie to ourselves about something being there when it isn’t; we construct it with our mental acts—and by doing so, we make it real.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And towards the end of the book, Shulman also touches very briefly upon Ibn ‘Arabī, in whose vast work <i>khayāl</i>, “imagination”, is profoundly related to the structure of the universe and to the relationship between man and God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">[*] This explains the use of words like <i>bhāvayāmi</i> in much devotional Carnatic music. The singer-devotee is trying to actualize the deity in the minds of all those present at the performance. </span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-89530940276729022832013-05-21T22:13:00.001-04:002013-05-21T22:13:59.934-04:00And the winner of the mostest ugliestest word goes to …<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">… “winningest”!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Seriously, who on Earth (or in America, to be precise, since to my knowledge nobody outside the US actually uses this linguistic abomination) thought that this word makes any sense? Did its coiner pause to reflect, even for a moment, about whether the structure of the word hung together in any coherent way? Or whether the meaning the word was intended to have (a) needed a single word to express it, and (b) was in fact expressed in some sensible way by this word?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And now, the <i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/why-basketball-wont-leave-phil-jackson-alone.html?ref=magazine">New York Times</a></i>, of all places, uses it. Admittedly, it’s only its Magazine section, but why oh why would someone use this horrid, cumbersome word at all?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">If there was an annual competition for “hideousest word of the year”, “winningest” would be the winningest word.</span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-5363537857622511782013-05-15T23:05:00.002-04:002013-05-15T23:05:47.683-04:00Grammar and God<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">One of the most famous verses in Sanskrit is the opening verse of Kālidāsa’s <i>Raghuvaṃśa</i>:</span><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>vāg-arthāv iva sampṛktau vāg-artha-pratipattaye</i> |</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>jagataḥ pitarau vande pārvatīparameśvarau </i>||</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here, Śiva and Pārvatī are seen to be inextricably intertwined like a word and its meaning.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Another verse I came across today expresses a similar relation, but between different pairs of <i>upamāna</i>s and <i>upameya</i>s:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>rāsa-vilāsa-vilolaṃ smarata murārer mano-haraṃ rūpam </i>|</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>prakṛtiṣu yat pratyayavat praty-ekaṃ gopikāsu sammilitam </i>||</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">May you remember that enchanting form of Mura’s Conqueror,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> dancing around playfully in the Rāsa-līlā,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> united individually with all of the milkmaids,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> like a suffix with flexional bases.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As may be imagined, this is the opening verse of a grammatical text: the <i>Prakriyā-sarvasva</i> of Mēlpattūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri, who is most famous for his composition of the <i>Nārāyaṇīyam</i> addressed to Kṛṣṇa. As to why Kṛṣṇa should be seen as a suffix (which, in English at least, sounds like it’s subordinate somehow to the word to which it’s added), it’s because the Pāṇinian tradition of grammar sees the suffix’s meaning as dominating the word’s meaning. Moreover, a suffix can be added to far more words than a word can take suffixes, and so it has greater “freedom of union” in that sense. Finally, and conveniently, the word for suffix, <i>pratyaya</i>, takes masculine gender, while the word for flexional base, <i>prakṛti</i>, takes the feminine gender.</span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-64069491417947544782013-04-29T01:34:00.000-04:002013-04-29T01:34:59.974-04:00Looking back in space and time<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The 17th-century Syrian poet Fatḥ Allāh Ibn al-Naḥḥās (فتح الله ابن النحاس) was regarded as one of the two best poets of his time. Although this particular period of Arabic literature has been ignored and disregarded as an age of decadence, prolixity, and baroque ornamentation (the so-called <i>‘aṣr al-inḥiṭāṭ</i>, عصر الانحطاط), it is becoming increasingly clear that this is a case of people selectively rewriting history by privileging certain parts and certain elements over others. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
I’m not taking a definite stance here because I don’t know enough about both sides, but after having read Ibn al-Naḥḥās’s beautiful <i>qaṣīdah</i> “He saw blame pouring in from all sides, and it scared him” (ِرأی اللومَ من كلِّ الجهات فَراعَهُ), I think we do ourselves a great injustice by writing off a giant period of time as entirely lacking in poetic merit. This one line, where Ibn al-Naḥḥās talks about how he is forced to leave Aleppo after a scandal involving him and his (male) beloved, is just gorgeous:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">فَرُحْتُ وَسَيْري خَطْوَةٌ وَالْتِفاتَةُ ❊ إلى فائتٍ مِنْهُ أُرَجِّي ارْتِجاعَهُ</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So I left; and every for’ard step was a glance backward</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Looking for a lost past, whose return was the thing I craved.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I’ve committed the cardinal sin of trying to emulate the rhythm of the <i>ṭawīl</i> meter in English, which I fear has straitjacketed my translation. But perhaps this may give you some sense of how cleverly, and poignantly, Ibn al-Naḥḥās is able to play with the ideas of looking backward in space—towards a city he loves, in which dwells the young man he loves, who has chosen not to come bid him farewell; and in time—towards a past when they were together, when all was well. And, perhaps most interestingly, with the idea that looking vainly backward in space for his missing beloved is also looking vainly forward in time for a lovers’ reunion that will never be. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-84637835137311349812013-04-26T00:53:00.000-04:002013-04-26T00:53:06.244-04:00Appayya Dīkṣita on figurative language<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(This post is a draft, and I will likely edit my translations below, multiple times.)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In his <i>Vṛttivārttika</i> (“An Explication of Linguistic Operations”), Appayya Dīkṣita briefly outlines his theory of semantics, focusing on the processes by which words give rise to different meanings. As befits a good <i>ālaṅkārika</i>, literary theorist, in the post-Ānandavardhana universe, he accepts three such operations: </span><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>abhidhā</i>, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“denotation”,</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>lakṣaṇā</i>, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“figuration” or something similar, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and </span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>vyañjanā</i>, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“suggestion”</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. </span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This work of his, though, only defines </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">abhidhā</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> and </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">lakṣaṇā</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. Does that mean the </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Vṛttivārttika</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> is incomplete? Or is it the case that Appayya wanted to focus only on these two, postponing discussion of the often-problematic </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">vyañjanā</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">? Things are unclear, but what we do know is that in his other works (see the many articles by Yigal Bronner on Appayya) Appayya wants to reduce the role taken up by </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">dhvani</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> in poetics, and it is possible that this also means he wants to give </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">abhidhā</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> and </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">lakṣaṇā</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> more importance than post-Mammaṭa </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">alaṅkāraśāstra</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> permits.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now, Appayya Dīkṣita argues that there are seven subtypes of <i>lakṣaṇā</i>. (This is one more than Mukulabhaṭṭa defines in his <i>Abhidhāvṛttimātṛkā</i>. One reason Mukulabhaṭṭa was so expansive was because he entirely denied the existence of a separate linguistic operation called <i>vyañjanā</i>, trying instead to bring it entirely under the domain of <i>lakṣaṇā</i>. I wonder what this says about Appayya’s intentions?) He offers examples for each of them, and some day I will try to list them all out systematically. For now, though, I restrict myself to his last two subtypes of <i>lakṣaṇā</i>, both of which he exemplifies using the single verse offered below.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">ā pādam ā cikura-bhāram aśeṣam aṅgam </span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>ānanda-bṛnda-lasitaṃ sudṛśām asīmam</i> |</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">antar mama sphuratu santatam antarātmann</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>ambhoja-locana tava śrita-hasti-śailam</i> ||</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><b>śuddha-sâropa-lakṣaṇā</b> yathā ‘ā pādam’ iti </i>| <i>atra bhagavad-aṅgeṣv ānanda-kāritvena ānanda-padasya sāropa-lakṣaṇā</i> |<i> ānanda-karaṇe itara-vailakṣaṇya-dyotanaṃ phalam </i>| <i> ānanda-kāriṇi viṣaya-nigaraṇena “ānando ’yam” iti prayoge <b>sâdhyavasāya</b></i><i><b>-lakṣaṇā</b></i> | <i>ānandâvyabhicāra-dyotanaṃ phalam</i> ||</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">From feet up to thick, curly locks,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">May Your entire body</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> shimmering endlessly with clusters of pure bliss</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> for those with blessed sight,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">shine resplendent eternally within me,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
O Indweller of my soul,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lotus-eyed Lord </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> who lives atop Elephant Hill!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
<i>Śuddhā sâropā lakṣaṇā</i> is exemplified in the verse that begins with the words <i>ā pādam</i>. Here, the word <i>ānanda</i> (“bliss”) refers to the Lord’s limbs through <i>sâropā lakṣaṇā</i>, because of their being causers of bliss. The result is the illumination of the impossibility of any other thing being an instrument of bliss.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The word <i>ānanda </i>refers to a causer of bliss through <i>sâdhyavasāya-lakṣaṇā</i> via the usage “it is bliss”, because in that case the topic at hand (i.e., the causer of bliss) gets wholly subsumed by the description (i.e., bliss). The result of this is the illumination of the total non-deviation of bliss from the causer of bliss.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What Appayya Dīkṣita does not mention is the source of his example verse. It turns out to be the 105th, and last, verse of the <i>Śrī Varadarāja Stava</i>, his long, highly poetically ornate praise-poem dedicated to Lord Varadarāja, the form of Viṣṇu manifested in the temple icon at Elephant Hill in the city of Kanchipuram, Appayya Dīkṣita’s hometown.</span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-5294654300733363032013-04-20T15:57:00.000-04:002013-04-20T15:57:28.732-04:00“Two things stand like stone”<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The words of the Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon ring especially true in these times:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Life</span> is mostly froth and bubble;</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Two things stand like stone—</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Kindness in another’s trouble,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Courage in your own.</span></div>
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-64833141518761796432013-04-08T18:57:00.000-04:002013-04-16T22:34:30.900-04:00“Practical” Universities<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">David Brooks has a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/opinion/Brooks-The-Practical-University.html">new column</a> out in the <i>New York Times</i> in which he argues that online education will force a transformation of universities. Drawing on Michael Oakeshott, he argues (or really, just states) that universities today offer two kinds of knowledge: <i>technical</i> (the <i>what</i>) and <i>practical</i> (the <i>how</i>). Brooks claims that, because technical knowledge can easily be transmitted online, we will see people gravitating towards MOOCs where they pick up “just the facts, ma’am” from star online teachers. However, since practical knowledge can only be picked up from experience, he thinks that universities will shift increasingly towards offering this sort of irreplaceable knowledge.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
Leaving aside the merits and demerits of Brooks’s piece, I am quite intrigued that he ignores another, crucial, kind of knowledge that universities offer: the <i>why</i>. Now sometimes this knowledge seems like <i>anti</i>-knowledge from the outside, because it is about limits, about ends, and about asking the right kinds of questions. But these are critical issues to think about—admittedly, not for everybody, but for society as a whole. A city full of carpenters, or of philosophers, is not a city but an unnatural monoculture.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
This is all the more surprising because a threefold distinction of knowledge was known to Aristotle, who called them <i>epistemē</i>, <i>technē</i>, and <i>phronesis</i>. (Of these three, <i>phronesis</i> directly overlaps with Brooks’s <i>practical</i> knowledge; while <i>technē</i> seems to largely make up, but not exactly correspond to, <i>technical</i> knowledge.) A <i>polis</i> needs all three to flourish. I am curious to know where Brooks thinks <i>epistemē</i> will be found in his post-MOOC world.</span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-40226373625158865132013-04-03T09:25:00.001-04:002013-04-03T09:27:11.630-04:00On deduction, induction, and abduction (aka “Sherlock Holmes and the Mysterious Case of Fat Ted”): Part One<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I had a mini-meltdown in my favorite bookstore last night. “Never judge a book by its cover,” or so they say, but when <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mastermind-Think-Like-Sherlock-Holmes/dp/0670026573">a book by an academic psychologist claiming to help us become more like Sherlock Holmes in our reasoning</a> states on the inside flap that Sherlock Holmes used “logical deduction” to solve his cases, I jolly well reserve the right to judge the book by its inside flap. Yes, I realize that these things are seldom written by the authors themselves; and it is almost certain that some harebrained editor probably wrote that absurdity; but the Amazon reviews make it clear that the author herself is quite confused about the differences among deduction, induction, and abduction. Worse yet, there are now reviews of this book in places like the <i>Boston Globe</i> that continue to perpetrate this abominable deception that Holmes used logical deduction. Really, if you want to teach people to reason correctly, you’d better start with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names">rectification of names</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I have no time right now to flesh this out, but I most certainly will get to this in the next few days. Once my hands stop trembling. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">(Bonus points if you can “logically deduce” where I’m going with this series of posts based on its title!)</span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-19822263282477000972013-03-21T02:10:00.000-04:002013-03-21T02:10:00.689-04:00Lightness and heaviness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Re(re)ading Gwendolyn Lane’s translation of Bāṇabhaṭṭa’s </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">masterpiece</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Kādambarī</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, I suddenly recalled a fascinating anecdote about how Bāṇa decided to permit his son Bhūṣaṇa to complete the work. I fear I cannot remember the source of the tale.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The story goes that Bāṇa was on his deathbed without having completed the <i>Kādambarī</i>, and wished to entrust one of his sons with the job of finishing it. But how to decide which one would be worthy of the challenge? He called them both to his bed, and, pointing to a small stack of firewood nearby, asked them to describe it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The elder son (whose name escapes me, and perhaps history too) said: </span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>śuṣkaṃ kāṣṭhaṃ tiṣṭhaty agre</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">“A dry piece of wood stands in front.” </span></div>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The younger, by name Bhūṣaṇa, came up with this: </span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>nīrasa-tarur iha vilasati purataḥ</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">“A sapless tree manifests itself before me.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Both statements are factually correct, but only Bhūṣaṇa’s possesses the lightness (<i>lāghava</i>) and multiplicity of meaning that Bāṇa so prized in his work. Specifically:</span><br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The two statements are both 16 morae long, but Bhuṣaṇa’s version crams 14 syllables in by using light syllables throughout (except at the beginning and the end). His brother’s, on the other hand, uses 8 syllables, each one heavy.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The elder brother’s statement attempts to repeat <i>ṣ</i> in three consonant clusters, but two of these are the same, being the heavy and somewhat unattractive <i>ṣṭh</i> cluster. Bhūṣaṇa does not have any clusters at all, but lightly dances amidst repetitions of <i>s</i>, <i>t</i>, <i>l</i>, and <i>r</i>.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bhūṣaṇa’s first word, </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">nīrasa</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, evokes the literary concept of </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">rasa</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (about which Amazons’ worth of paper and Superiors’ worth of ink have been spilled).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bhūṣaṇa’s statement can be understood as referring not just to the firewood that his father has asked about, but also to his elder brother who lacked literary judgement but who stood before him in time and in the hierarchy of the Indian family.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Bhūṣaṇa was given the privilege of completing Bāṇa’s work. Scholars hold, however, that his effort lacks the mastery of his father’s. History is the harshest critic of all.</span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-62336306728462547602013-03-20T02:00:00.002-04:002013-03-20T02:00:32.595-04:00Grammar and enclitic pronouns<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>natvā sarasvatīṃ devīṃ śuddhāṃ guṇyāṃ karomy aham</i> |</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>pāṇinīya-praveśāya laghu-siddhānta-kaumudīm</i> ||</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Having bowed down to Goddess Sarasvatī,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> pure and virtuous,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I compose the <i>Laghusiddāntakaumudī</i> as an introduction to the Pāṇinian system.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">With this invocation to Sarasvatī, Goddess of Knowledge, does Varadarāja begin his <i>Laghusiddhāntakaumudī</i>, the “Brief Moonlight of [Grammatical] Principles”. Varadarāja’s work is an annotated, abridged version of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s <i>Siddhāntakaumudī</i>, which rearranges the whole of Pāṇini’s <i>Aṣṭâdhyāyī</i> into a format that is pedagogically usable by the student. The English translation of the invocation to Sarasvatī does not capture an interesting ambiguity in the original: the adjectives “pure and virtuous” could [and therefore did!] describe the <i>Laghusiddhāntakaumudī</i> itself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Much can be said about this work, but for now I wish to note just one pair of verses from its <i>haL-anta-puṃliṅga-prakaraṇa</i>, the chapter on (the declension of) consonant-final masculine nouns:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>śrîśas <u>tvâ</u>vatu <u>mâ</u>pîha dattāt <u>te</u> <u>me</u> ’pi śarma saḥ</i> |</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>svāmī <u>te</u> <u>me</u> ’pi sa hariḥ pātu <u>vām</u> api <u>nau</u> vibhuḥ </i>||</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>sukhaṃ <u>vāṃ</u> <u>nau</u> dadātv īśaḥ patir <u>vām</u> api <u>nau</u> hariḥ </i>|</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>so ’vyād <u>vo</u> <u>naḥ</u> śivaṃ <u>vo</u> <u>no</u> dadyāt sevyo ’tra <u>vaḥ</u> sa <u>naḥ</u> </i>||</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">May the Lord of Śrī protect you and me;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> may He give delight to you and me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">That Hari is the master of you and of me;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> may He, All-Pervading, guard you two and us two.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">May the Lord grant happiness to you two and to us two;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> for Hari husbands you two and us two.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">May He defend y’all and us;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> may He bestow auspiciousness to y’all and to us;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> He is to be served by y’all and us here.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Why would this verse show up in a grammar text? Because the <u>underlined</u> forms are the enclitic forms of the first- and second-person pronouns! This verse contains examples of the enclitic pronouns for the second, fourth, and sixth cases, in the singular, dual, and plural, in that order. These optional forms are permitted by a small set of Pāṇinian sūtras:</span><br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>yuṣmad-asmadoḥ ṣaṣṭhī-caturthī-dvitīyāsthayor <u>vāṃ</u>-<u>nāv</u>au</i> [Pā 8.1.20]</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>bahuvacanasya <u>vas</u>-<u>nas</u>au</i> [Pā 8.1.21]</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><u>te</u>-<u>may</u>āv ekavacanasya</i> [Pā 8.1.22]</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><u>tvā</u>-<u>ma</u>u dvitīyāyāḥ</i> [Pā 8.1.23]</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Pā 8.1.20 permits the use of <i>vām</i> and <i>nau</i> in place of the regular second- and first-person pronouns, respectively, in the sixth, fourth, and second cases. (As stated, this is a general rule, <i>utsarga</i>, that applies to all these pronominal forms regardless of number.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Pā 8.1.21 then carves out an exception (<i>apavāda</i>) to this rule, saying that in the plural, the forms <i>vas</i> and <i>nas</i>, respectively, should be used. [These are indeed cognate with Spanish <i>vosotros</i> and <i>nosotros </i>and French <i>vous</i> and <i>nous</i>.]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Pā 8.1.22 carves out another <i>apavāda</i>, saying that <i>te </i>and <i>me</i> should be used in the singular. (Thus, taking these two exceptions together, we automatically restrict <i>vām</i> and <i>nau</i> to the dual.) But this rule, while being an <i>apavāda</i> to Pā 8.1.20, is in itself an <i>utsarga</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Pā 8.1.23 is the <i>apavāda</i> to Pā 8.1.22 in turn, saying that <i>tvā</i> and <i>mā</i> should be used in place of <i>te</i> and <i>me</i> for the second-case forms of the singular pronouns. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is an extremely brief look at one of the ways in which the Pāṇinian system works, by creating <i>utsarga</i>s and <i>apavāda</i>s. One of the side-effects of this is that <i>no Pāṇinian rule can be understood in isolation from all other rules</i>, for everything interacts with everything else. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">To know the whole, know the parts; to know the parts, know the whole.</span></blockquote>
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-77577418868343231162012-12-22T23:31:00.001-05:002012-12-22T23:39:07.964-05:00On hunting birds and God<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I just came across Galway Kinnell’s beautiful <i>To Christ Our Lord</i> on <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/jacobs/galway-kinnell-to-christ-our-lord/">this blog post by Alan Jacobs</a>:</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The legs of the elk punctured the snow’s crust</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And wolves floated lightfooted on the land</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Hunting Christmas elk living and frozen;</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Inside snow melted in a basin, and a woman basted</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A bird spread over coals by its wings and head.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Snow had sealed the windows; candles lit</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Christmas meal. The Christmas grace chilled</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The cooked bird, being long-winded and the room cold.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">During the words a boy thought, is it fitting</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To eat this creature killed on the wing?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">He had killed it himself, climbing out</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Alone on snowshoes in the Christmas dawn,</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The fallen snow swirling and the snowfall gone,</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Heard its throat scream as the gunshot scattered,</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Watched it drop, and fished from the snow the dead.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">He had not wanted to shoot. The sound</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Of wings beating into the hushed air</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Had stirred his love, and his fingers</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Froze in his gloves, and he wondered,</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Famishing, could he fire? Then he fired.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now the grace praised his wicked act. At its end</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The bird on the plate</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Stared at his stricken appetite.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There had been nothing to do but surrender,</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To kill and to eat; he ate as he had killed, with wonder.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">At night on snowshoes on the drifting field</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">He wondered again, for whom had love stirred?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The stars glittered on the snow and nothing answered.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Then the Swan spread her wings, cross of the cold north,</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The pattern and mirror of the acts of earth.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Reading it on the first clear night after the first real snowfall of this winter, I could not help but think of the beginning of the <i>Rāmāyaṇa</i> and of the birth of poetry in Sanskrit. The great seer (and composer of the <i>Rāmāyaṇa</i>) Vālmīki witnesses a hunter killing one of a pair of birds mating. Appalled, and overtaken by grief, he curses the hunter with what forms the first poem in Sanskrit:</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhāṃ tvam agamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ</i> |</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>yat krauñca-mithunād ekam avadhīḥ kāma-mohitam</i> ||</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I wrote about this poem and about its ingenious re-reading by the medieval Śrīvaiṣṇava commentator Govindarāja <a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2012/05/birth-of-poetry-in-sanskrit.html">earlier on this blog</a>.</span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-76002188611943740972012-12-21T00:17:00.002-05:002012-12-21T00:18:07.370-05:00The moral lessons of The Hobbit<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-fanboy-defends-hobbit.html">After having defended Peter Jackson’s <i>Hobbit</i> from some of its most common critiques</a>, I shall now turn to some of the things I enjoyed the most about the movie. Most of these come from Tolkien’s <i>Hobbit</i>, but again, just because a story sounds good in one mode does not automatically mean that it will “click” when told in a different mode.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The great challenge in a visual depiction of the Quest of Erebor is this: this is an event on a much smaller scale than the War of the Ring. For viewers who are looking for epic set-piece battles (or as a little birdie put it to me, for those “who don't necessarily share the love for the books and just walked in to see Orlando Bloom buckle his swash”), there really isn’t anything in the Quest of Erebor that provides this, except for the climactic Battle of the Five Armies. Even the One Ring, which is mildly important for the War of the Ring, plays a minor role here. Its importance wasn’t even recognized by most people at the time of the Quest!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But as Tolkien repeatedly tells us, small does not have to mean insignificant, and this applies to everything, from the hobbits to the Quest itself. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We see this embodied most clearly in Jackson’s <i>Hobbit</i> in the figures of the three Istari—Curumo, Olórin, and Aiwendil, better known as Saruman, Gandalf, and Radagast, respectively. [This is one reason I thought his depiction of Radagast was actually well done.] Saruman seeks to strive directly with great evil, for which he seeks great power; Radagast seeks to avoid all conflict, and devotes himself to the most helpless little animals and birds of Middle-earth; Gandalf strikes a balance between the two. He does not forget at any point the size of the evil confronting them, but neither does he forget about the little things and the little folk who prove essential to the successes of the great powers. There lies a deep lesson in this: </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">From small seeds may grow mighty <i>mellyrn</i>.</span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Quest is perhaps the most significant event of the Third Age after the Disaster of the Gladden Fields (in which the Ring was lost); although small, it forms an essential link in a vast chain of events that leads, ultimately, to the eucatastrophe at the climax of the War of the Rings. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Peter Jackson thus faced an extremely difficult balancing act, especially since he had already depicted the War of the Rings: he had to portray the Quest of Erebor in a manner befitting its (relatively) small scale, while at the same time depicting its essential function as a link between the events at the beginning of the Third Age (nearly three thousand years before it) and the War of the Ring (which lies sixty years in its future). And of course, the whole plotline of the One Ring is in fact incidental to the Quest itself!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">One thing that I thought Jackson did exceptionally well was to situate the events of the Quest of Erebor in the greater context of the Third Age of Middle-earth. He pulled these off with flashbacks to a reworked Battle of Azanulbizar and to the halcyon days of Erebor and Thrór as King-under-the-Mountain. The latter, in particular, was spectacularly done: we got to see the full glory of the Dwarven kingdom of Erebor, and the gradual gold-madness overpowering Thrór, before everything ended with the coming of the last of the great fire-drakes, Smaug. This was absolutely brilliant: without ever seeing anything more tiny glimpses here and there of a darting wing, of glistering golden scales, and of tawny flames, we witnessed the utter destruction wreaked upon the most powerful Dwarf-lord in Middle-earth <i>by a solitary dragon</i>. But as a <i>battle</i>, it’s a bit of a damp squib (if anything near Smaug can be described that way), for the dwarves are immediately put to flight (again, begging Smaug’s pardon) and forced into exile.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And thus is set the scene for one of the most powerful themes of all of Tolkien’s legendarium: </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Home and Away</span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This occurs over and over and over again, at every level of the entire cosmos:</span><br />
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<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The birth of evil occurred when Melkor chose to “exile” himself from the Music of the Ainur, and thus from the harmony of creation itself; although he would likely not have thought of it in these terms.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Valar originally dwelled on the island of Almaren at the center of the world, but this was destroyed in their battles with Melkor, and they then left for Valinor in the far west.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Elves awoke far to the east, at Cuivienen, but a large portion of them were brought to Valinor, away from their place of birth and from some of their kin, by the Valar, in what was intended to be an act of compassion.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Noldor departed in rage from Valinor in pursuit of the Silmarils, and were then exiled by the Valar from ever returning to Valinor.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Among the Noldor in Middle-earth, the tales of glorious kingdoms established and destroyed, sometimes from without by force, but usually from within by corruption and decay, are too many to list.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Dwarves of Middle-earth lost virtually every single one of their ancestral homes: Gundabad (where Durin the Deathless first awoke, and where the orcs now breed their “pet” wargs), Khazad-dûm or Moria the Black Pit, and Erebor being but three of them. Gundabad was conquered by Sauron’s orcs at his peak power, but both Erebor and Khazad-dûm ultimately fell due to greed.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Among Men, Elendil and his sons—the Dúnedain—were forced to flee the destruction of Númenor and to come to Middle-earth.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Dúnedain of the North led the lives of wandering exiles, Rangers of the North, after the destruction of Arthedain.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Among individual Men, the greatest example of a homeless exile is Turin Turambar, who led a most pitiable life.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Gollum too suffered enormously, being exiled from his people, his home, and most tragically, from his own good-natured side, by his own actions, amplified by the Ring.</span></li>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Quest of Erebor is but one more instance of this principle: a group of exiles, trying to return to the Promised Land. Unlike Moses, Thorin walks into his ancestral kingdom; like Moses, he does not live to see it re-established. (Of course, <i>An Unexpected Journey</i> hasn’t arrived at this point yet.)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This pattern is terribly important because Bilbo Baggins, unlike anybody else I can think of in the entire legendarium (including his nephew Frodo), chooses entirely of his own volition—unmotivated by any evil or any desire to undo evil—to leave his comfortable armchair, well-stocked larder, spotless handkerchiefs, and pipeweed and to “go on an adventure”. There is enough of the Took in him to motivate him to go a-wandering, but as I read it, his real reason for going is his full and implicit faith in Gandalf. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Gandalf doesn’t mislead Bilbo about the real dangers of the journey—death from decapitation or evisceration or incineration, yes, but also alienation, <i>Sehnsucht</i> followed by <i>Wanderlust</i>. Once you leave home behind, voluntarily or involuntarily, you can never go back to being the way you were. You are no longer that which you were before you undertook the journey; whether you grow or shrink during your journey is a consequence of the actions you take and the choices you make along the way. Bilbo shrinks from this at first, but then decides to go ahead. It is possible he does it because he does not comprehend the ways in which he will change; but he does undertake the journey, and he does transform in the process.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This, incidentally, allows me to respond to the “violence” critique by bringing up the “moral” aspect. It is utterly false that Bilbo comes to be accepted by the Dwarves because of his skill with the sword. His incompetence with Sting remains clear at all points: first, in his lucky attempts to parry with the orc in the cave of the Goblin-king; second, in his inability to pull his sword out of the warg (which is the first time he has clearly killed in this fashion); third, in his brave-but-futile efforts to fight off Azog’s orcs. (Yes, this scene would not have fit into Tolkien’s <i>Hobbit</i>, but it is a violation of the letter and not of the spirit of the work.) </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bilbo is accepted by the Dwarves for two reasons: First, because he finally begins to comprehend their reasons for undertaking the Quest—because he realizes that <i>if he were ever exiled from Bag End and the Shire the way these Dwarves have been from Erebor, he would do anything to get back</i>. Second, because he demonstrates “loyalty, courage, and honor” in rushing to Thorin’s defense. What makes this second reason so powerful is because Bilbo has just had two encounters with violence: first, his killing the warg (almost by accident, but it still counts); and second, his sparing Gollum. Bilbo has learned first-hand the real lesson a sword teaches you: it is “easy” to casually mete out death; it is profoundly difficult to know <i>when</i> to take a life. There is no place for pacifism in Tolkien’s legendarium; homes are to be defended, hearths are to be protected, hordes of evil are to be defeated. There is no place for rank sentimentality; not all those who are good survive, and not all those who survive are good. But there is, as there always will be, a place for compassion; wisdom lies in knowing when, and upon whom, to exercise it. </span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-74969116839245314582012-12-20T00:01:00.001-05:002012-12-20T00:01:49.866-05:00A fanboy defends The Hobbit<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Anybody who knows me knows of my obsession with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s legendarium. This is not the place to enumerate the reasons for my obsession. My goal is far narrower: to explain why I loved Peter Jackson’s <i>The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey</i>.</span><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Critiques</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In good Indic fashion, I begin with the <i>pūrvapakṣa</i>, the opponent(s’|’s) view. A number of criticisms have been leveled against Peter Jackson’s <i>Hobbit</i> enterprise. At the root of many of them is his decision to split the original book into <i>three</i> three-hour films, only one of which has been released so far. (His <i>Lord of the Rings</i> runs close to twelve hours, but then it covers nearly a thousand pages of text.) This opened him up to criticism from multiple directions, even before the movie came out:</span><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that his motivation is purely financial; that, since fanboys of Tolkien are going to watch whatever he serves up, why not make <i>three</i> times as much money by making <i>three</i> movies?</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that the original story is far too thin to support nine hours of film, which will force him to draw out some scenes interminably and possibly to add extra plotlines</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that his intended demographic is no longer the demographic that Tolkien targeted with his original book</span></li>
</ul>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I made some of these criticisms myself, while also recognizing (only slightly ruefully) that I fall squarely into Jackson’s target “sucker fanboy” demographic.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now that “Episode I” is out, critics have duly rehashed all these critiques. They claim that the movie plods along interminably; that it should really have been trimmed down to 100 minutes (which would have the added benefit of making it more accessible to children); that a number of changes have been made to the plotline that simply make no sense other than adding screentime (<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">stone giants!</span> Jar-Jar Binks, I mean, Radagast!), and so on. They have also made two additional critiques:</span><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/12/peter-jacksons-violent-betrayal-of-tolkien/266294/">the movie is far more violent than the book</a>, and thus violates Tolkien’s vision (among other things)</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that the story has been changed fundamentally, in ways that are completely unnecessary (in particular, referring to the alteration of the Battle of Azanulbizar and the survival of Azog)</span></li>
</ul>
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My Response</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I loved every minute of the movie. There wasn’t a single instant when I was bored. Part of this is certainly because I’m a fanboy, but I also didn’t go in expecting to love it. Frankly, after having all these criticisms, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I loved it because of Jackson’s decisions, because of what he had added, and because of the changes he had come up with. Part of this post is me trying to reason out why these things matter to me, but not to other critics, fans, and critic-fans. I suspect at least part of this is that I explicitly hold the following view, which some of these critics may reject:</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Peter Jackson’s <i>Hobbit</i> is not Tolkien’s <i>Hobbit</i>. And that is an entirely good thing.</span></blockquote>
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<a name='more'></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Before I proceed, I should deflect criticisms from a whole new universe of irate lovers of Tolkien’s first really successful book. I do not at all mean that Tolkien’s original book is bad; on the contrary, it is a wonderful children’s tale. However, there is a distinction to be drawn between the “actual” story that takes place (which I shall refer to henceforth as the Quest of Erebor) and the particular narrative form it takes in Tolkien’s book for children. After all, he retells the same story in highly compressed form in the prologue to the <i>Lord of the Rings</i>, and in some more detail in its appendices and in “The Quest of Erebor”, published by his son Christopher Tolkien in <i>Unfinished Tales</i>.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Why does this matter? It matters because it reminds us that it’s not just the <i>story</i> that counts but the <i>mode</i> in which it is told. Tolkien’s <i>Hobbit</i> book tells us of the Quest of Erebor in a mode suitable for children—but we ought not to assume that this means the Quest itself is a children’s story. (For those who care about historiography, which this relates to in the sense that the Quest of Erebor is a real historical event within a fictional universe, I was led to this by <a href="http://pearlsatrandomstrung.blogspot.com/2010/10/history-fiction-myth-narrative-social.html">Hayden White and his<i> Content of the Form</i></a>. I am definitely overdue a post on him!)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thus, the critiques that assume the movie is “too long” because the original book was a 300-page children’s tale entirely miss the point. Tolkien intentionally skips over details in the book that would not have considered appropriate for children in the first half of the 20th century; that does not mean they didn’t happen!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To be fair, I too made the same critique of Jackson’s decision (and the fact remains that we still don’t know if his motivations were primarily pecuniary) before I saw the movie. But having seen it, I realize now that Jackson’s <i>Hobbit</i> speaks in a different mode than Tolkien’s. His decision to do so may be critiqued, but to assume that he set out to film Tolkien’s book in a children’s mode and then somehow “failed” to do so because he wanted to stretch the story out is, frankly, stupid.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Indeed, the very manner in which Jackson begins the movie—on Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday—tells us a little bit about who the story is meant for. It’s not a tale meant for children; it’s a story from an old man to a young man that is meant to draw him into adulthood. There is absolutely no reason to assume that Bilbo would have narrated the story the way it is told in Tolkien’s <i>Hobbit</i> if Bilbo were telling a young-adult Frodo the story of the Quest of Erebor. Incidentally, this is also smart considering that Jackson first made the <i>Lord of the Rings</i>; this way he provides an entry into the universe for viewers who may be unfamiliar with <i>The Hobbit</i>.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Another issue, related to the mode of narration, has to do with the character who forms the lens through which we view the action. For Tolkien’s <i>Hobbit</i>, this is clearly, and almost exclusively, Bilbo Baggins. (I don’t have my book on me, so I cannot, erm, “skim” through it to verify this, but I’m quite certain it’s true.) This has its benefits: for one, the reader can identify quite closely with the figure of Bilbo. The fact that it was written as a children’s book, and that Bilbo exhibits a number of “child-like” features, including the obvious one of being in a world that is, literally, too big for him, can only assist in the process. Another benefit is that Tolkien is able to skip over an entire scene that would likely be far too violent and disturbing for a child—the Battle of the Five Armies, in which Thorin, Fíli, and Kíli all die—using the simple expedient of knocking Bilbo unconscious early on.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But once we change the mode of narration to an “older”, more “epic” one, it no longer makes sense to restrict narration to Bilbo’s person. He is still central to the Quest, of course, but now other agents and their motivations begin to emerge from the shadows. Some of these, like the events of the White Council at Rivendell from Gandalf’s perspective, are spoken of in “The Quest for Erebor”; others, like Radagast’s visit to Dol Guldur and Azog seeking revenge on Thorin for cutting off his arm, are additions to the tale. These “story-emes” fill out the story for us, whether or not we know of every detail in the legendarium. They tell us something about the choices individuals made, and about their motivations for these choices. They foreshadow the darkness that will fall over much of Middle-earth by the time of the War of the Ring. And they offer opportunities for “embellishing” the story.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This leads us to a different critique of the movie, one made by those familiar with Tolkien’s <i>Hobbit</i> and perhaps with other books in the legendarium. They hate the fact that Jackson has made a few basic changes that are unnecessary in their opinion and disruptive of the flow of the story. The biggest such critique is made, of course, of the flashback to the Battle of Azanulbizar. Any true fan knows that:</span><br />
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<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thrór was killed by Azog well before this Battle—indeed, it was Thrór’s torture and killing and the subsequent desecration of his body by the orcs of Moria that sparked off the War of the Dwarves and Orcs that culminated in the Battle of Azanulbizar on the doorstep of Moria</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">At the Battle of Azanulbizar, it is Náin, nephew of Thrór and first cousin once removed to Thorin, who is killed by Azog.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It is Náin’s son, Dáin Ironfoot, who beheads Azog in revenge. (Yes, Azog dies at the gates of Moria.)</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thorin does use an oaken branch as a shield at this battle, but he is not near the heart of the action when Dáin kills Azog.</span></li>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Instead, in the movie:</span><br />
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<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thrór is killed by Azog at the Battle of Azanulbizar.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thorin gains his nickname during his fight with Azog.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thorin cuts off Azog’s arm in the battle, sending the orc fleeing back into Moria.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Azog survives, and is filled with personal hatred for Thorin.</span></li>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It is clear that this second version is better-suited for a cinematic tale: it is more compact, eliminates characters who have a minimal role to play in the Quest of Erebor, and injects an element of revenge-seeking that motivates the relentless orcine [if that’s not a real word, it should be] pursuit of the hapless dwarves.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I have little sympathy for those who would critique such reshapings of a story. As Gandalf himself says in the film (but not in the book—the horror! the horror!), “Every good story deserves embellishment.” Stories and legends grow around the telling and retelling of events, although we in our Instagram- and Twitter-driven era are accustomed to a sad, magic-bereft, literal recapturing of events as they occur. Even the chroniclers of medieval Europe had more taste than that—but I digress.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This brings me to the last critique of the movie, that it is too violent. There are two aspects to this, a modal one and a moral one. I shall only take up the former here. Any person with the slightest imagination—even one whose ability to enter into a different realm of the mind has been forever tarnished by exposure to the confining, constricting limits imposed by modernity—should be able to tell that the Quest would have involved considerable violence. It is true that certain choices Jackson made, such as his choice of the mode of narration, his injection of Azog into the story, and his use of flashbacks, certainly made it possible to depict more violence in the film than Tolkien’s <i>Hobbit</i> showed. But as I have endeavored to argue above, there are good reasons for him to have made these choices, and once they were made, they naturally had certain implications that had to play themselves out.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To me, this modal defense of the violence in Jackson’s <i>Hobbit</i> is actually weaker than its moral defense. I shall not, however, tax your patience any further, Gentle Reader, for you must be weary after first reading Tolkien’s <i>Hobbit</i> and then watching Jackson’s <i>Hobbit</i> and finally making it this far. Who would have imagined that I could write at such great length upon a topic that surely could not sustain a long debate? I shall spare you more pain for now, and shall grant my fingertips and eyes the good rest they deserve before embarking on yet another journey to <i>An Unexpected Journey</i>.</span><br />
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-389827268845687660.post-28812674684977689092012-12-13T15:13:00.002-05:002012-12-13T15:13:17.590-05:00Boredom<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When asked to define “boredom” recently, I came up with this ‘masterpiece’:</span><div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Boredom: an external symptom of the deeper inability to be at peace with oneself, characterized by restlessness and by discontent at the inability of external stimuli to permanently fill a soul-shaped void in one’s life. </span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(Yes, I did tag this <i>wisdom</i>. Tags don’t always mean what they mean; their <i>vācyârtha</i> can be overriden by a <i>lakṣyârtha</i>, and sometimes they suggest a <i>vyaṅgyârtha</i> over and above and/or alongside that.)</span></div>
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Gokul Madhavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994536910959635268noreply@blogger.com0