abavus niger

(Krull via darklyeuphoric on tumblr)

     "Nor do I care e'en to know an thou be white or be black."

               --Catullus (tr Richard Burton)

As a present for my birthday, one of my wife's best friends (Michelle R.) used her genealogical website memberships to do some research on my own ancestry. She has discovered that, on my mother's side of the family (from Louisiana), i have a great-great-grandfather (the Romans had a word for this: abavus) who was "a black man married to a mulatto"--though their daughter listed on the census as white. Which is funny to me, seeing as how i have so much Scandinavian ancestry (pure Norwegian on my father's side) & i sunburn very easily. But i really would be more surprised if anyone from Louisiana (or the Deep South generally) didn't turn out to have "mixed" ancestors somewhere.

Of course, the concept of race itself, as we now know (or ought to) has zero scientific basis. There are only traits. Still, because i am a word-junkie, i observe that the language contains terms for the various pseudo-mathematical combinations of "black" & "white", leftovers from when that mattered. I thought i would find out what the designation for 1/16ths black would be, & add "sesqui-" (1 1/2), for my 3/32nds... (The official Latin expression for this is: vncia & dimidia sextila & scripvlvm, according to the Latin fraction generator website. Not a useful locution, though they did provide a set of symbols, which i can't reproduce here.) Now i can--8/20--:)

                                    (via)

That proved no easy thing. There was a French writer of the 18c.: Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (thanx, Lauren!), & he apparently invented a racial taxonomy that differentiated combinations down to 1/128ths (over 7 generations), in his travel book on the pre-Haiti/Dominican Republic (the French western half of Hispaniola) (volume one here). The "free people of color" have an interesting history (written about by Anne Rice, among others, e.g. The Feast of All Saints) & include such writers as M. P. Shiel. An article on Wikipedia covers hypodescent, where i also learned that the 1/16th African (Moreau's "mamalouque" which he defines as ranging from 8 to 12/128ths black) was called mustefino or quintroon (i won't even consider hexadecaroon--). Which gives: sesquiquintroon. Nice reduplication there.

I see that these arcane topics are still wrixling some brows.

The deeper significance of this is twofold. First, Négritude--in the broadest sense, would be to acknowledge the Other in one's artistic practice, as much for Language poets to respect Cowboy poetry as for Caribbean francophone poets to adapt Surrealism to their post-colonial experience. And, though you may identify with one particular quartering of the rainbow, there will always be Others whose experience can enrich & enliven yours. Then, the concept of "passing" which exists in autism as well. --Undeniably useful, but is it right? For to benefit from privilege is to sanction the discrimination which is privilege's other face. Perhaps that day will come when the question whether one is neurotypical or autistic, & to what degree (counted in hemidemisemiquavers), will seem as ridiculous as to discriminate on the basis of ear length (long my favorite comparison).

Meanwhile...

lecture on the khazars

to break a butterfly upon a wheel

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a gift to be enjoyed." --Proverbs

I saw this on a "whiteboard" & it didn't seem right (too memey); sure enough, it wasn't. It turns up on a list of "God's Little Instructions," whence i'm sure it migrated to the forwarders. There it is referred to Psalms 118:24, which of course says nothing of the kind. Google, though, helpfully offers an alternate concluding phrase: "but a reality to be experienced"--& this is attributed to Kierkegaard. (Alternately, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Or else Jacobus Leeuw.) It does sound like K. in that form... I would like to know what Danish word he uses for "reality" (sandhed?). It's too much like "life" to be a first-rate aphorism.

But i rather know this as something i got from Jung: "...but a mystery to be experienced."(I copied it out myself; here someone refers it to Joseph Campbell, who may or may not have cited his sources.) It may not matter if Jung knew he was garbling Kierkegaard, or thought he was improving on him. The meaning of this he makes typological.

Life-as-problem = Thinking
Life-as-enjoyment = Sensing

[This is not a direct opposition, & it makes more sense to me as intended to valorize the majority Sensing-Perceivers, who are often impugned by intellectuals of less common types. Since it is, alas, quite characteristic of them to pick up proverbs, & not quite perfectly, i imagine that is entirely appropriate for this to have become a Plain Folk mantram.]

Life-as-problem = Thinking
Life-as-mystery = Intuitive

[Jung considered himself an Intuitive-Thinker, & this suggests he found his first preference not as useful as he tended to suppose.]

In my view, of course, there are as many worldviews as types (16, or maybe 256)--none of them more true than the others... Hence the irrelevance of such a blanket pronouncement. (Far better is the Taoist's "Those who say, don't know; those who know, don't say.") For a saktra, or aspie, life is usually very problematic, not all of which problems come supplied with the wherewithal to solve them. Then it is perhaps a tolerable expedient to accept that patience-in-the-face-of-mystery marks one's most intelligent path.

Lojban LE SE DJUNO BEZI'O is how i would translate "mystery". E.g. that which cannot be known. (Or: understood SE JIMPE.) "Knowledge" in the Quran includes this: "And they will never compass anything of His knowledge except that which He wills." (2:255) Thus all lesser mysteries resolve in the single Greater.

.IUNAI

Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky and Me

(via mutha dot com)

Hawthorne wrote staring at the Great Stone Face across whole years; half my life--off & on-- i have had a similar enigma to guide me, or deride me, whatever: the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox (as Wikipedia would have it, though it remains in memory the other way round--E/R/P).

I was 21 & taking "20th Century Physics" a year before the advent of Raygun. I had been reading all kinds of weird shit: Plato, Gurdjieff/Ouspensky, Jung, Bateson, Patañjali, Wittgenstein, John Lilly. Simone Weil. I wanted to understand.

It's hard now to say just what sort of explanation would have suited me. Certainly the quasi-Hegelian mysticism i ended up with (for a very short while) did not. The truth is, i did not really know how to reason yet. I read the Einstein-Born letters like a correspondence between two poets. (And who was to say it wasn't?)

My college class entirely consisted, no kidding, of endless purple-mimeo sheets of expansions of the Schroedinger Wave Equation (i still have them somewhere), which my instructor laboriously explicated in messy transparencies upon an overhead projector. This led me to wonder just what would have been proven, once we had all ascertained there weren't any errors in the math. And what did it all mean?

I began cutting classes; finally, not coming at all. I had a little bit of mild pot, which i would smoke in a Portobello Road pipe out on the 2nd floor balcony with a view of the interurban sprawl known as Arlington, off in the distance. I had the xerox'd article on EPR from a physics journal i had actually tracked down on my own. It very much appeared that clown-headed Uncle Albert, who had revolutionized the world with a single quinquefoliate equation, was mistaken. --There wasn't any THERE, there.

Sometimes i would think of it as the Yin/Yang symbol. Identity was more like a stain than a circle. More of it lay close by, but some was mixed with the farthest lights in the sky. And all men were indeed brothers. And the stones beneath our feet partook of our very being.

That's rather a lot to read into what was basically a quibble over how to apply only the latest approximation of mathematical truth. I grew weary of overt paradoxes. One day a new, more comprehensive integration would sweep this one aside. The philosoraptors would have to go back to their self-consistent axioms, without the aid of theoretical physics. Strings, dark matter & darkling energy arrived trendily & i remained unmoved. I saw it as part of a publishing phenomenon, a contemporary career requirement. Truth, perhaps, must needs evade such succinct capture.

It was in the late 90's, internet days, that i heard of it again. E-P-R settled for good? After i had seen Jupiter's moons reached & the human genome spelled, 2 (or was it 3?) of the great math stumpers of all time defeated, & Continental Drift go from a controversial hypothesis to scientific orthodoxy, this might not have come as the shock it did. But did i care anymore?

I believe there is more than one possible mathematics, as there is more than one possible geometry. Nothing is harder to see, than an alternative that leads to the same outcome; yet paradoxes like this, which would insist on us subscribing to absurdities, are surely the signifiers of such a need. That's the rational side of me speaking. The other answers with Francis Bacon: "For, if the Grand Architect had acted a human part, he would have ranged the stars into some beautiful and elegant order, as we see in the vaulted roofs of palaces; whereas, we scarce find among such an infinite multitude of stars any figure either square, triangular, or rectilinear; so great a difference is there betwixt the spirit of man, and the spirit of the universe." --On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning IV, iv.

neurotypical privilege

i've always had trouble with people giving me complicated sequences of verbal instructions. early on, i started carrying paper & pen so i could write it down & refer to it (for, the way my mind works, either the later part of the instructions will erase the earlier part, or some new thought of my own will cause me to forget part or all of it), and now, even though i seldom have the same need, i still write a lot of things down that i think most NTs would count on being able to remember.

there has never been a job i've worked at, that did not favor verbal instructions over written. (sometimes they even associate having to read something written down, as punitive.)

--this is just a tiny example--

i won't even go into the massive inequality experienced in school where socialization is mostly not given via explicit instruction, at a time when acceptance is compulsively withheld for infinitesimal departures from the norm. what's weird is how little this situation gets described here in terms of privilege, instead of as a "struggle to fit in" (skin-lightening potions, anyone?). privilege is political, it's politics you can't change the channel from. it's barbed wire & attack dogs.

being naturally adept at lying & negotiating a swarm of variously-sincere statements is like being born with a swimming instinct; then some kid who doesn't know how (doesn't even guess that he doesn't know how) is thrown into the pool to sink or swim--a pool he will remain in for the rest of his life. the seeming adaptation of learning to conceal one's true feelings & opinions is at best a stricture, & at worst a kind of self-deception (they can see right through you, nine times out of ten).

--but the cruellest form of NT privilege is political theater. they use the language of ideas as if they mean something; it's all about tribes & belonging & rivalry, & anyone who wants to actually examine cause & effect in public affairs (look at Dennis Kucinich's presidental bid) is ridiculed & ignored by the media--just like the treatment in junior high.

The Right Word

As Confucius says (Analects 58): "If terms are incorrect, language will be incongruous; and if language be incongruous, deeds will be imperfect... Hence, a man of superior mind, certain of his terms, is fitted to speak; and being certain of what he says can proceed upon it."

Awhile back i encountered the German term Verschlimmbesserung--an "improvement" that makes things worse (via BetterThanEnglish dot com). This seems very much of our times, when tamper monkeys not only have seized control of the means of production, they also seem infected with a restlessness entirely disconnected from any awareness of the consequence of their actions.

I thought about finding an easier to remember word. Clearly, abprovement & deprovement (rather than simply mux up et al) retain the turn of wit upon the original. As it happens, the latter has already occurred, as well as the slightly more clumsy disimprovement...--Nor unprovement, nor antiprovement.

Investigating the roots brings us to the antonym ameliorate (from Latin ad + melior) & thus, the rare pejorate. A word that survives only in a adjective pejorative--& a meaning not quite what i was thinking of. (Besides, i can't imagine using pejoration in a colloquy!)

Too, some of the same territory is covered by exacerbate (the word i would use in a formal essay), as well as the old meaning of aggravate, before it started dissolving into "irritate"... Alas, you can't really distinguish the noun of the thing-improved from the act of improving, with either of these.

The need is felt. Unless Vulcan or Lojban (malxauzmagau isn't right, though something could be done with the attitudinals .ianai or je'unai; nardragau seems closer still) can come to our aid (okay, in Esperanto you can say plibonigacxo), we may just have to settle for disimprovement.

(Update.) As a thing to symbolize it, the CD (or as i call it, "disco compacto") fits the bill. And most of the real Verschlimmbesserungen we see come as memos, so maybe that will come to be their new meaning... Then, going back to the original idea, we do have bungle & misrepair (too much like disrepair). Better: MISFIX.

"Imagine a country. A royal command is issued to all the office-bearers and subjects, in short, to the whole population. A remarkable change comes over them all: they all become interpreters, the office-bearers become authors, every blessed day there comes out an interpretation more learned than the last, more acute, more elegant, more profound, more ingenious, more wonderful, more charming, and more wonderfully charming. Criticism which ought to survey the whole can hardly attain survey of this prodigious literature, indeed criticism itself has become a literature so prolix that it is impossible to attain a survey of the criticism. Everything became interpretation—but no one read the royal command with a view to acting in accordance with it. And it was not only that everything became interpretation, but at the same time the point of view for determining what seriousness is was altered, and to be busy about interpretation became real seriousness. Suppose that this king was not a human king—for though a human king would understand well enough that they were making a fool of him by giving the affair this turn, yet as a human king he is dependent, especially when he encounters the united front of office-bearers and subjects, and so would be compelled to put the best face on a bad game, to let it seem as if all this were a matter of course, so that the most elegant interpreter would be rewarded by elevation to the peerage, the most acute would be knighted, &c.—Suppose that this king was almighty, one therefore who is not put to embarrassment though all the office-bearers and all the subjects play him false. What do you suppose this almighty king would think about such a thing? Surely he would say, 'The fact that they do not comply with the commandment, even that I might forgive; moreover, if they united in a petition that I might have patience with them, or perhaps relieve them entirely of this commandment which seemed to them too hard—that I could forgive them. But this I cannot forgive, that they entirely alter the point of view for determining what seriousness is.' " --Kierkegaard, “For Self-Examination,” qtd in: Parables of Kierkegaard (1978)