The Man Who Knew Absurdity

A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein (Yourgrau, Palle)

I encountered Kurt Godel decades ago, as a qualified engineer and software professional. For years, his theorems – how they were proved and what they implied – fascinated me no end (I have documented my fascination here) and I saw applications of Godel’s theorem everywhere – in day to day news items, in legal documents, in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in the paintings of Diego Velasquez, in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the art of Mauritz Escher (in the case of the last two, aided by Douglas Hofstadter). It was by reading Hofstadter, in fact, that I was able to even dimly comprehend the mathematics behind Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems, and whatever I understood filled me with wonder – how could this be serious mathematics? It felt playful, like solving a riddle or a children’s puzzle. Who was this man?

Along with the mathematics came a tiny bit of biographical detail. The eccentricity of the man, the bouts of paranoia, the eventual death from malnutrition from shunning food out of an irrational fear that he was being poisoned. The lovely story about Godel preparing for his US citizenship interview by reading the US Constitution, and telling a horrified von Neumann (or was it Einstein?) on the way to the interview, that he had spotted a couple of logical inconsistencies in the constitution and that he was planning to take it up with the officer.

Yourgrau’s book offers far more biographical color on Kurt Godel – his early life, his love life, his personality, his career in Europe and the USA, his friendship with Albert Einstein. The actual focus of the book is a paper he wrote in 1949 on the possibility of time travel in a universe in which Einstein’s theories of relativity worked, arriving at the outrageous conclusion that time (as we understand it) simply doesn’t exist.

Also unique (among people of his time) were the man’s beliefs. He believed in God in an old-fashioned way and believed he could prove His existence, using an extension of Leibnitz’s 17th century ontological proof. He believed in the real existence of abstract concepts (like numbers), outside the brains of people – another quaintly old-fashioned and much discredited philosophical theory – and yet he disproved both the existence of “intuitive time” and the possible completeness of mathematics as a body of knowledge.

I am not going to delve further into his mathematics – or indeed his physics or his philosophy. Even having struggled through the technical sections of Yourgrau’s book, I know I am not qualified to do so – you can Google for yourself, or better still, you can read Yourgrau. I only wanted to remark on something extraordinarily consistent about Godel, the man. Whether as a German migrating to the USA and commenting on the US Constitution, as a logician who came up with a devastating mathematical theorem, as a mathematician writing a paper on physics (and demonstrating a consummate understanding of relativity at a time when there weren’t too many physicists who could do that), or as a mathematician trying to contribute to the philosophy of time – Godel was the quintessential outsider, who demonstrated an astonishing ability to not just grasp the latest advances in any field but to point out logical absurdities that had eluded people who had lived and breathed that discipline their entire lives. He always did so by taking what they did, and consistently extending the argument until he arrived at an absurd conclusion.

The greatest tragedy of Godel’s life was that people were so annoyed by his ability to do this, that they found ways to exclude him, just shut his contribution out. As an Austrian logician, he wasn’t part of either the famous ‘Vienna Circle’ of logical positivists, or of the opposing school of Wittgensteinians. Despite his seminal contribution to relativity and time, physicists never counted him as one of their own, and as for philosophers, they have gone out of their way to attack him. His contributions to number theory exist as towering pillars that stand alone by themselves. At the end of his life, he was an oddity in small town America, his Germanness and eccentricities setting him apart from the local community; at the very end, when his wife, Adele, died, and Einstein was already gone, he was as lonely as any man has ever been.

Yourgrau’s book does not do for Godel’ s Time paper what Hofstadter’s did for his Incompleteness Theorems – in that it neither excited me with the implications nor explained the technical aspect of the paper in terms that laymen may understand. (Or perhaps it does, and I am that much older, and that much slower to pick up on intricate concepts than I was when I read Hofstadter). But it does a brilliant job of bringing out the poignancy of Godel’s life and the somewhat fitting paradox that a man whose weapon of choice was consistent application of method, was himself a non-conformist at so many levels; a man who reduced everything to absurdity was himself reduced to an absurd death, of starvation in solitude, right in the middle of a thriving and happy community.

Horrors of the Past

Classic Ghost Stories – Wilkie Collins, MR James, Charles Dickens and others (edited by John Grafton)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night (edited by Robert Arthur)

I was going through a slightly stressful period last month – we were in the process of relocating across continents – and so I decided to read books that are slightly less demanding of my attention and focus than my usual fare. I raced (by my tortoise-ish standards) through two of them in two weeks.

The first was a book on Classic Ghost Stories, mostly featuring the works of British authors from the 19th (or early 20th) century – Charles Dickens, RL Stevenson, Wilkie Collins and M.R. James being the most prominent.

The second was one of those mid-20th century anthologies of macabre mysteries spun out prolifically from the Alfred Hitchcock factory. Heavy-hitters like Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl and Evelyn Waugh have contributed tales to this book, and also included are Jerome Bixby’s ‘It’s a Good Life’ (which had filled me with existential terror long ago in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame) and George Langelaan’s ‘The Fly’ (the movie version of which causes my wife to still shiver whenever she sees Jeff Goldblum on screen).

M.R. James is the only author common to the two anthologies, and as someone who lived from 1862 to 1936, he probably straddled the generations covered by the two books.

And that’s the point. There is a generational divide between these two books. The older book mostly involved the paranormal, and sought to invoke a deep and dull foreboding in its readers. Many of the stories are first-person anecdotes, and what that gains in terms of immersing the reader in the story, it loses by taking away one possible ending from the story, as the narrator is obviously still around to recount the incident. The ghosts do not actually do much: the horror stems from the fact that they exist and can be sensed. The Alfred Hitchcock collection, on the other hand, relishes in giving us the grisly details: the menace is not just in the atmosphere, there is actual physical peril, and bad things happen.

As a 21st century reader of the books, I found the Hitchcock collection reasonably hair-raising, while the older book barely raised a single follicle. I put this down to what I call the Jurassic Park effect. The first victims of the velociraptors that Spielberg unleashed, were older horror movies like Hitchcock’s own The Birds. Nobody who has seen a T-rex chew and swallow a man whole, and then bellow into the screen, can ever feel the same kind of dread at the sight of a thousand birds sitting quietly in a playground. Jurassic Park made The Birds unwatchable by the lay public, and set a new minimum bar for animal-based horror.

The fault is with the genre. It demands novelty. Readers like to be scared. But to paraphrase the ever articulate George W Bush, scare me once, shame on — shame on you. Scare me — you can’t get scared again.

You can’t scare the readers again and again with the same trick.

By the mid-20th century, dull foreboding didn’t cut it: readers bayed for actual blood. Descriptions were getting more graphic, too. Readers in the 19th century were probably better readers. They read with focus and imagination, and didnt need visual cues to summon up images evoked by the author’s words. Hollywood has spoiled us: we need help, now, to visualize what we are reading, and when we don’t get spoonfed, we tire soon.

(The other genre that suffers a similar fate, I suspect, is pornography. Viewers were once shocked and titillated by the sight of a shapely ankle, or a single come-hither look; in some cultures, the mere glimpse of a woman’s long hair was deemed enough to drive men into paroxysms of lust. From a cursory survey of today’s mainstream TV shows, this is no longer the case, and the mind boggles at what the future holds for us.)

There is a direct line from Classic Ghost Stories to Alfred Hitchcock’s Tales for Late at Night, which, when projected further, leads inexorably to the Texas Chainsaw Massacres franchise, and probably there is far worse in store for us in the future.

Now that’s a truly horrifying thought.

Watching a Horror Movie: Photo 182807952 | Horror Movies © Andrea De Martin | Dreamstime.com

Trouble in Paradise

From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean (1492 – 1969) (Williams, Eric)

Eric Williams served as the Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago from 1959 until the day he died in March 1981. His efforts to secure independence for his nation and his sure-footed guidance through its first decades have earned him the title ‘Father of the Nation‘. He was also a renowned historian – his Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944, is hailed as a classic on the history of slavery and of the African slave trade. Good histories have been written of the West Indies – CLR James comes to mind, and VS Naipaul – but arguably none more comprehensive and definitive than Eric Williams’ version.

The Caribbean is known to the modern world as a party place – a great place for vacationing, getting riotously drunk on rum, wearing floral-patterned shirts and dancing to exotic drum beats on picture perfect beaches, soaking in sunsets and seafood, snorkeling and sex: a veritable paradise on earth. But as a boy growing up in India, my friends and I knew of the Caribbean only as a place where brilliant cricketers came from, swaggering gum-chewing heroes who conquered the world in style.

Yet Williams’ historical account is as far from heroism and heaven as it is possible to imagine.

It starts with the Spanish conquistadores, of course, and their genocidal lust for gold: in Hispaniola alone, the native population decreased from over 200,000 when Columbus arrived, to 14,000 in two decades, until even the Spanish felt ashamed of what they were doing, and their priests piously called for some alternative labor force, so that the few surviving natives could be preserved. This heralded the advent of the African slave trade. The Spanish justified it in the name of morality (those poor Native Americans) and religion (it was better for the African’s soul for her to die a Christian slave, than a free pagan; they were doing her a favor, really).

In the 18th century came a more sophisticated variety of villain: the sugar plantation economies of the British and the French. The sugar trade needed a huge amount of hard manual labor. A disproportionate number of slaves were needed for running the plantation – Barbados, for example, had 18 slaves for each white inhabitant by 1698. The white population in the West Indies had only one job: to be slave masters.

Thus a triangular trade flourished across the Atlantic. British goods were dumped into Africa, bartered for slaves, who were then carried off to the West Indian plantations, and exchanged there for sugar, which was in turn, borne to Britain for re-export into Europe. It was a sweet deal for the British, in every sense. The economists loved it, the politicians loved it, the capitalists became rich, and the common man got employment and pulled himself out of poverty. Every white man who employed slaves in the Caribbean was providing employment for four Englishmen in England. The triangular trade transformed Liverpool and Bristol from drab fishing villages into vibrant centers for international commerce.

Gone by this time, were the theological and moral arguments in favor of slavery. They were replaced by the powerful logic of two new forces shaping the world: Nationalism and Capitalism. The competitive trade balance situation of the home country vis a vis its European rivals was a matter of national pride. And the need to maximize profits for his shareholders was proclaimed the highest ethic of the businessman. It was unfashionable to bring up morality when profits and patriotism were at stake.

It is undeniable, today, that the prosperity of Britain was built on a foundation of African blood. Williams produces all the figures, building a meticulous case as if he were a lawyer at the International Court of Justice. Taking into account the mortality in the slave ships, and the deaths in the plantations over the course of a century, Williams establishes that an average of 44 slaves perished miserably within three years for every 100 that boarded the ships against their will. Never has prosperity come at such an exorbitant cost.

It is worth repeating here, that there were few protests in Britain. As if by mass hypnosis, the misery of the faraway Africans was an integral part of the picture that was simply invisible to them – and it isn’t obvious to us, centuries later. The weak rationalizations that were offered were blindly accepted. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume – revered the world over as great philosophers – were solidly in favor of slavery. It fell to James Beattie (have you heard of him? I hadn’t) to refute them all, to say the things that we would term basic human decency, but his words were completely ignored by the British of the day, and he is forgotten today. As is Britain’s role in the propagation of slavery.

Today, when it comes to slavery and the slave trade, Britain is positively seen as saintly in comparison with Confederate America. Williams’ greatest achievement – in this book and in life – is the unmasking of British hypocrisy in this matter. He points out that Britain only abolished the slave trade – not because it was morally wrong, but because after the loss of the thirteen American colonies, they didn’t need new slaves every year, and found that they were doing their French rivals a favor by selling them the slaves they needed to catch up with the British in sugar production. The men who had campaigned in Parliament for the abolition of the slave trade voted in favor of continuing slavery itself.

Eventually the British did ban slavery as well (in 1838), but largely because they had now figured out a smarter solution to their labor problem: a sort of ‘rent versus buy’ calculation that led them to conclude that using indentured servants body-shopped from their other colony (India) was more efficient than slave labor with its high mortality rates and the costs of having to look after older slaves who survived beyond their productive years. In any case, they soon transferred their attention from West Indian sugar to cotton factories in Manchester that ran on raw cotton grown by either black slaves in the USA or Indian farmers in India. (The Indians were forced to export cotton and import cloth, because a colony’s only purpose was for the improvement in economic conditions for the home population).

But Williams’s tale was still not done. The focus shifted to the United States of America in the 20th century, and the effect of sugar plantation capitalism on Cuba. By 1959, American corporations had colluded with corrupt Cuban governments to control 75% of Cuba’s arable land, 90% of its telecommunications and 50% of its railways. Sugar was 90% of what Cuba exported, but only brought in 33% of its income. And as for the common Cuban, 50% of Cuban rural dwellings had no toilets, 85% lacked running water altogether, 91% had no electricity. This was not a tenable situation.

While Cuba was an independent country at this time, and not an American colony, the forces of unfettered capitalism, and geopolitical power, twisted the country into the macabre shape of a virtual colony that worked to benefit the capitalists in another land, rather than to generate wealth and wellbeing for its own people.

Williams’ damning thesis is that it wasn’t Fidel Castro who forced communism on Cuba: it was American corporations, backed by arrogant American foreign policy, that triggered the people’s revolution that forced Castro and communism on Cuba. As a trained historian of colonization, and the president of a nearby country, Williams had both the academic framework and a ringside view of proceedings, so I am willing to believe that his is a valid narrative (even if not the only one).

Nationalism and Capitalism are not evil things, in and of themselves. In many ways, we do owe to them our modern world, and much of it is very nice, thank you. But we would be doing a great disservice to ourselves, and to the tens of thousands of black Africans who suffered inhuman tortures, if we do not recognize that without casting them into hell, nationalist pride and capitalism could never have brought us the paradise that we enjoy today. This, in essence, is Williams’ story.

They came to paradise: Photo 84885188 / Caribbean © Romolo Tavani | Dreamstime.com

Quietness and the Western Front

The Guns of August (Tuchman, Barbara)

I prefer books and movies about the First World War, to those about the Second. The popular narrative around WWII, fueled by Hollywood movies and Adolf Hitler’s psychotic personality, is thematically straightforward: Good v Evil, with Good triumphing at the end. It lacks nuance. The First World War, in its causes and its cast of characters, is a lot more subtle and ambiguous. There is sufficient doubt cast on the question of whether the war was ‘just’, and who, if anyone, caused it to take place. One might argue that the coalitions and calculations involved in the conflict had their roots in diplomatic and military exchanges between six different nations for many generations; one may argue that any “proper” analysis of the causes of the First World War should begin in the year 1648, in the German province of Westphalia, where a peace treaty was signed to end what we now call the Thirty Year War.

But then to do so would be “Proper History”, the study of history as the process by which the past became the present. The Proper Historian roots her every word in solid evidence and is wary of simplistic narratives, for fear of falling into the cardinal sin of selectively highlighting certain facts and suppressing other equally valid facts. They do find narratives, of course, but intellectual ones, cross-referenced with evidence and caveated with exceptions: Hew Strachan’s First World War, AJP Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (1848-1918), or Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism: books from which I have emerged exhausted, feeling far better informed on the subject than I was before, but also worried that I would not be able to explain what I had just learned, or even recall it in entirety, a few days after I finished the book.

I love and respect Proper History – I really do – but every once in a while, I like reading books like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, Vincent Cronin’s Napoleon, or Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandria: I emerge exhilarated from these books, with vignettes that remain etched in my memory for decades. These are books that put the “story” in history. They unabashedly prioritize dramatic narrative ahead of anything else. These writers have a keen eye and sharp ear for human drama, and a sensitive finger on the pulse of their readers. Their only fear is of boring their readers. This does not mean that their books are works of fiction or that they just make up stuff as they go along –  just that they trust certain kinds of sources, like contemporary first person accounts, far more than other sources, that Proper Historians use for corroboration.

But if the point of reading history is to understand what it must have felt like to have lived at a particular point in the past, or to have witnessed some seminal past event, Dramatic Narrative History is, in a visceral sense, truer, than its drabber, more Puritanical cousin, the one that is paradoxically so concerned with Historical Truth.

The Guns of August is undoubtedly a book of Dramatic Narrative History. Tuchman is very clear on this point. “I’m a writer first,” she has said, “whose subject is history”. She pities the academic historian, condemned to writing boring books because he has a captive audience in his students. Tuchman, on the other hand, has to work hard to find readers and to keep them turning pages, and this has earned her, not plaudits from pundits, but Pulitzer Prizes.

The Guns of August concerns itself with a small slice of time (beginning just before the war began in late July, and ending just before the First Battle of the Marne in early September), and mainly a small piece of real estate: Belgium and France to the North and East of Paris: the so-called “Western Front” for the German armies. There are many other dramatic stories to tell, even pertaining to the same time – the tragic story of the Russian First Army at Tannenberg (as narrated by Solzhenitsyn); the intense, urgent and ultimately unsuccessful diplomacy that preceded the commencement of hostilities (as recounted memorably by APJ Taylor), and of course, the conspiracy and assassination itself of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (as grippingly depicted in the recent German movie Sarajevo). But Tuchman restricts herself to just the one month, on just the one front: because a tight dramatic narrative demands close up and focus, not sweeping panoramas. But what Tuchman misses out in terms of comprehensive coverage, she makes up for with human interest. Tuchman’s tale is about human personalities – Sir John French of the British Expeditionary Force, Joseph Joffre, Joseph Gallieni, Charles Lanzerac and Franchet d’Esperey of France, Helmuth von Moltke, Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, Crown Prince Wilhelm, Erich Ludendorff and Alexander von Kluck on the German side. Each of them takes fateful decisions in the course of the first four weeks of the war, decisions with far-reaching consequences for their fighting men and their nations, decisions that were the product not just of their individual personalities, but also of the military traditions that they were part of.

The German generals, Tuchman reveals, had been given a fool-proof strategy, complete with implementation details and contingency plans. They were expected to execute these plans without needing further guidance – and they were trusted by their commander in chief to do so. He was barely in touch with them as they tore across Western Europe.

The French generals, in stark contrast, only had a broad idea of the strategy, and were expected to be imbued with elan, patriotism, courage and flair. They were expected to think on their feet and take operational decisions all by themselves in the heat of battle. And their commander in chief was in constant, daily, contact with them, reviewing their plans, giving direction, admonishing, praising or firing them as needed. He worried constantly that his men would lose their nerve in the face of enemy action, and he was prepared to replace any of them at short notice.

These very different leadership styles clashed on the bleak and dreary fields of Belgium and France, and remained entrenched and immobile, neither able to prevail over the other for four years. In Barbara Tuchman’s capable hands, the positives and negatives of both approaches stand out in sharp relief, and while she speaks of a single month in the war, her writing presages and explains the stalemate that we all know follows her narrative. In fact, her prose brings the war to life so evocatively that I can almost hear the big guns thundering and the whoosh of the shells, and the squelching of the boots in muddy trenches. A common motif emerges with Solzhenitsyn’s description of the Eastern Front: the general confusion, the unimaginable courage of the men in the trenches, the blunders and insecurities of the men on top, the highly preventable carnage.

Perhaps the reason I am so fascinated with World War I is my belief that we live in political times that are similar, in many ways, to the conditions that existed in 1914.

Then, as now, there were geopolitical blocs being calculated and debated, with no other moral imperative in mind than balance of power considerations. In many ways the nations of today with the more inclusive democratic traditions (Germany, France, Britain, USA) are arrayed against the nations with more autocratic leanings (Russia and China). Then, it was Britain, France and USA against the German, Austrian and Ottoman Empires. Tsarist Russia, though more of an autocratic monarchy than Germany of that era, fought on the Entente side, but that paradox unraveled catastrophically for them as a nation.

Study the early 20th century history of Serbia. A proud and ancient people, but a newly independent nation at the time, carved out of the dying embers of the Ottoman empire, they were governed by a pro-Austrian faction until 1903, but the government that took over in 1903 was more in touch with its Slavic roots, and aligned itself strongly with Russia. Austria-Hungary always believed it owned the Balkans, and crudely annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, leading to worsening relations with Serbia and Russia. Serbia had wanted Bosnia for herself, as a large population of the country were ethnic Serbs, and knew she was next on Austria’s radar. The virulent anti-Habsburg fervor this caused in Serbia spilled into conspiracy and assassination, and Austria eventually declared war in July 1914. Everyone knew this war was coming: Austria wasn’t going to stop at Bosnia, they wanted Serbia too, and they really didn’t care what the Serbians thought. Austria, as a staunch autocracy, didn’t think the feelings of the common Serb mattered in the least.

The parallels with Putin’s Russia and their war with Ukraine, are too stark to ignore, and the words of General von Moltke to his Kaiser in 1906 (which he duly chose to disregard) come to mind:

“It will be a national war which will not be settled by a decisive battle, but by a long wearisome struggle with a country that will not be overcome until its whole national force is broken, and a war which will utterly exhaust our own people, even if we are victorious.”

Vladimir Putin’s commander in chief could have advised him in exactly the same words, but even if he had, Putin might have dismissed his fears as contemptuously as Wilhelm II had. The war drags on, and other players – China, Iran, USA, Germany, Poland, Britain – all seem to be on the brink of getting dragged in, on one side or the other. History has every opportunity to repeat itself, and the peaceful quiet that had fallen on the Western front for seven decades would then be broken once more by the thundering of guns.

One of the Guns of August: The German “Big Bertha” howitzer

Meta Information

The Information – A History, A Theory, A Flood (Gleick, James)

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

TS Eliot

I’ve read some mediocre pop science books. I’ve spoken about several of them in these pages, and they are the reason I don’t read much pop science these days. But occasionally, I read one that is really good, and those few make up for all the rest. The really good ones take a single subject, and lay it threadbare for the uninitiated reader in simple terms, without either dumbing down the intricacies of the subject or being condescending to the readers, bringing out human historical drama, broad philosophical implications and scientific nuance in equal measure. I’m thinking about John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat, that explained 20th century physics, or Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way, that did the same for astrophysics, or Mitchel Waldrop’s Complexity: The Emerging Science At the Edge of Order and Chaos, or James Gleick’s own Chaos. The even better ones take a single thought and weave a magical narrative across time and space, drawing from various different disciplines – from the worlds of art, or philosophy – and demonstrating a resonance. Such books leave me with the satisfying, heady buzz of an evening spent in sparkling conversation with erudite, witty friends who share a passion with me but know so much more than I do. Here, I am talking about Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach for instance – or the book currently under review.

The title is somewhat cringeworthy, I must admit. “The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood” sounds breathless and ludicrous. Thankfully, the book itself is a tour de force of intellectual thought, sweeping across vast domains – psychology, computing, physics, electronics, logic, mathematics, genetics and business, literature – and yet managing to maintain a narrative that connects it all up.

In passing, he name-drops a bewildering number of intellectual giants: Millman Perry and his theory about scribal and oral cultures, TS Eliot, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, John Napier and his logarithm tables, James Clerk Maxwell and the second law of Thermodynamics, Samuel Morse and the telegraph, George Boole, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Godel (of course) and incompleteness, Alan Turing and computability, Claude Shannon and Information Theory, Charles Darwin and Evolution, Richard Dawkins and genes (and memes), quantum computing, Jorge Luis Borges and his strange self-referential tales, Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia…

The text is peppered with historical trivia, biographical detail and great science. And it ends really well too:

“The library will endure: it is the universe. …we walk the corridors, searching the shelves, rearranging them and looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of information.”

Like the library that he (and Borges) describe, James Gleick’s book is a vast mirror of the universe, with meaning, history, and the thoughts of all men, and mirrors, and information; just as they will endure, so too, I hope, will Gleick’s book.

Of Hippies, Hipsters and Art

Why your five-year old child could not have done that: Modern art explained (Susie Hodge)

I have been to the New York Museum of Modern Art many times over two decades – mostly, for a good laugh. Over time, I’ve tried to understand how to appreciate “Modern Art”, and I’ve learned to recognize and even love the odd Miro, Rothko, Picasso, Braque, Matisse or Mondrian. I am now familiar with the history and philosophy of the movements behind the origins of Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and many other isms, and so I get what these guys were trying to do, and why.

That said, a lot of exhibits at the MoMA (and at other similar museums around the world) are still good for a hearty guffaw, aimed at the exhibit (‘this is a piece of trash’), the artist (‘he thought the trash was worth showing off to people’), the critics (‘they conferred intellectual merit on this piece of trash’), the collectors or museums (‘they bought this piece of trash’) and all of us (‘they pay good money to stand in front of this trash, and pretend to be enthralled’). I look at some of the exhibits and go, ‘My five-year old kid could do this, but I’d have to blindfold him first’.

And so, when I spied this book at a museum store, I couldn’t resist buying it. Susie Hodge, art historian and educator, was going to take a hundred examples of modern art and tell me exactly WHY I have been wrong about each of them, and about my 5-year-old, and for so long (he’s 22 now). This was going to be interesting.

Except of course, Hodge does nothing of the sort.

Most of the time, she readily agrees that most five-year-olds , in fact, could produce the same output. But, she hastens to add, they probably would not do so, or, at any rate, they probably would not do so for the same reasons as the artist.

Thus, Gary Hume’s “dramatically simplified image of a bird” with smooth, slick paint bereft of depth or tone (Cuckoo in the Nest) is a masterpiece because he was “exploring literal and metaphorical connotations of the image” (and the average five-year-old, presumably, isn’t). Miro’s Hirondelle Amour, described as “several lines that resemble a child’s doodle…swirled over an unevenly painted ground”, is art because those scribbles “represent Miro’s inner feelings” (and the five-year-olds’ scribbles represent THEIR own – inferior – inner feelings). When Howard Hodgkin produced a ‘Room with Chair’, his flat brush-strokes were OK because the unsophistication was deliberate: he wanted to “inspire feelings and sensations, not convey solid ideas”.

Martin Creed’s “Work no. 227: the lights going on and off” consisted of a bare-walled gallery, in which lights were turned on and off at five second intervals. As a matter of fact, I did have a five-year old who did that, very briefly, until he was swiftly given to understand, by his mother, that his work of art was not appreciated. Creed’s work (or lack thereof), too, drew howls of protest, whereupon the maestro explained that THAT was his precise and deep point, about the nature of art.

Damien Hirst once said, “the hand of the artist isn’t important – you’re trying to communicate an idea.” He was utterly wrong.  In order to create his “Beautiful, Pop, Spinning Ice Creamy, Whirling, Expanding Painting”, Hirst placed canvases on a centrifuge and had his assistants pour cans of paint onto the surface. The colors splattered in random shapes and colors when they hit the spinning canvases, et voila! Il ya Art. As Hodge confirms, a child could do this – some unnamed lowly ‘assistants’ actually did do it – but it was Hirst, whose “examining the choices of ironies, pretences, falsehoods and desires that we face as we navigate through life” made it a work of art. So yes, contrary to Hirst’s words, Hirst’s words are the only important thing about Hirst’s art.

Any uneducated passerby who happened to look up while walking down the Sistine Chapel would have her breath taken away by what she saw. Appreciation of art was once not contingent on a knowledge of the intentions, philosophy, biography or politics of the painter. But with modern art, Ms Hodge says, it is the context that gives the content its meaning. A piece of art does not have inherent value. If it was made by a five-year old, it is meaningless trash. If it was made by “an artist”, it can be the epitome of meaning and the essence of creativity.

Occasionally, this principle is carried to ridiculous extremes. Vito Acconci’s ‘Trademarks’ consist of photographs of himself in the nude, biting his own leg, with a closeup of the bite mark. John Latham borrowed an art book from a library, made students chew pages from it, dissolved the masticated pulp in acid, and exhibited this. Five-year-olds would know better than to attempt such things. As for Paul McCarthy, who, in 1976, splattered the walls of a classroom with ketchup and then “naked, threw himself violently around the room until he was dazed and injured…vomited several times and inserted a Barbie doll into his anus”, I would be seriously concerned about the mental health of anybody – child or adult – who behaved in such a manner. I would urge them to seek help, not egg them on with praise.

No doubt my ideas of what art should look like are antediluvian. I should myself be exhibited, at a  Museum of Natural History, next to the dinosaurs. But it is hard for me to shake off a notion that “good” art should either something that is inherently pleasing to the eye, difficult to conceive of and create, and meaningful. I am willing to concede that these definitions are subjective, but only to a degree.

It seems to me that there was once a justification for rebellious anti-art, that questioned social ideas of art, truth, beauty and meaning, that correctly mocked people like me with our restricted set of blinkered middle-class conventions. But after a point, rebellion itself became the convention, the fashion statement, even: rebellion IS the cause. In a way, the pioneers of modern art – Marcel Beauchamp, Pablo Picasso, Roy Liechtenstein, etc. –  were like the hippies of the beat generation, whose appearance and choices were associated with a subculture involving a rejection of convention. They were brave. The ones that have came after them – mentioned in this post above – are like hipsters, who follow the latest trends and fashions, by being regarded as shocking or outside the mainstream.

Life of a Bard

The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg – A Narrative Poem (Sanders, Edward)

I am – sadly – not a sophisticated man when it comes to the finer things in life. I struggle to appreciate art that isn’t ‘beautiful’ or ‘life-like’ in a shallow sense, and I struggle to appreciate poetry that isn’t lyrical or obvious in its meaning. I freely admit that the problem is mine, and not the poet’s (or artist’s). I will have more to say on the subject of art in a later post, but today, I will merely say that there is still a lot of what is called ‘modern art’ that I DO like. It is when the piece of art, however abstract, manages to evoke some kind of an immediate reaction in me. Piet Mondrian’s lines, for instance, or Henri Matisse‘s patterns. Some Rothkos and Kandinskys, some Picassos and Braques. But the artist that I am most reminded of, in connection with Allen Ginsberg‘s poetry, is Jackson Pollock. However unsophisticated one is as an art lover, one cannot but be affected by even a casual glance at Pollock’s output: the vivid energy is palpable, infectious.

Allen Ginsberg’s poetry is performance art, in a very similar way. To appreciate it best, one must not read, but LISTEN to his poetry being recited (ideally, by him) – and the visceral images will flow with every line, and while each individual word might not make perfect sense, as a composite whole (howl?) it is hard for one to not get infected with the poet’s emotions.

The book under review is a poem, too – but a narrative poem (unlike anything Ginsberg wrote) that tells the story of Ginsberg’s life in a pretty straightforward, chronological order, from birth to death. Ginsberg’s life – so very different from mine! – involved copious amounts of substance use, liberal sex with many partners of both genders, much nudity and scatological or profane talk, and yet, much spirituality too – lots of mixing it up with ganja-toting sadhus in the ghats of Kolkata, but also with Buddhist teachers of repute and stature, much chanting of Om, or from the Prajnaparamita Sutra, and also a deep resonance with Jewish tradition; overwhelming erudition about poetry and literature, but above all, a childlike naivete about the world and its dirtiness, its pettiness and its politics. An image that will stay with me for a long time is that of the Democratic Party convention of 1968, while there was pandemonium on the floor with politicians cursing each other, and anti-war protesters being tear-gassed outside, but Ginsberg stood in the galleries chanting “OMMMM” for five minutes.

As with Ginsberg’s poetry, there is a lot in Ginsberg’s life that I cannot understand the need for, but when I reflect on it, it is something – not necessarily to be aspired to or imitated, but definitely to be marveled at and meditated upon.

Ginsberg’s life, in that sense, was pure poetry.

Jackson Pollock’s action painting

Dates with Destiny

August 1914 (Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr)

August 1914 is a sad book, full of regrets, full of the bitter yearning of an old exile for a different country, a different time and a different turn of events. The country is far away, the times long ago and the events precipitously pivoted on the characters and actions of a few men.

The regrets are obviously deeply personal, but they aren’t for what happened to Solzhenitzyn himself – the events took place in the Russia he pines for, years before he was born in it. He lingers longingly on three moments in Russia’s history, dwelling obsessively on what happened, analyzing to death why they went down the way they did, and ultimately, who were to blame for the way they turned out.

What were these moments? There were three of them. To count them off chronologically: first, the assassination, in September 1911, of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin; then, the cascading events of 28 July-1 August 1914, as Tsar Nikolai Romanov attempted to avoid a looming war in the manner of a panicky helmsman aboard the Titanic seeing something large and cold straight up ahead; and finally, the battle of Tannenberg, that began on 26 August and ended on 30 August 1914, in crushing defeat for Russia’s 2nd Army and its headlong retreat from East Prussia.

Solzhenitsyn’s dramatic retelling of each event talks, in graphic detail, not only about what happened but how easily it could have turned out differently. Each event has heroes: Stolypin the great reformer, champion of the Russian peasant, courageous beyond words; General Alexander Samsonov, commander of the ill-fated Second Army, the dutiful career military man who was betrayed from both above and below; above all, the God-loving, hardworking Russian peasant and the brave foot soldier. The events have villains as well: the corrupt, self-serving generals and police chiefs, the vacillating Tsar and his incompetent uncles, the anarchist assassin who was either a double or triple agent (only he knew which). The unnamed elephant in the room is, of course, the communist revolution of 1917: Solzhenitsyn seems to be saying, if Stolypin had lived, he might have helped the Tsar avert war; if the war had been averted, the calamity at Tannenberg, the first and most shocking of several reverses that demoralized the nation could have been avoided; if the mood in the country had not been of defeat and frustration, the hail of bullets in a basement room at Yekaterinburg that ended a dynasty and took Russia (and the 20th century world) down a particular path might never have happened.

Solzhenitsyn started writing the first few chapters of the book in 1936. The idea survived World War II, imprisonment in the Gulag, and exile in America, where he finally completed the book. He has been called a right-winger, a traitor, and an anti-Semite. But on the evidence of the book, I could only make out that his love for Mother Russia was the love of the common people of the land, not for the Tsar, for the Orthodox religion or for an imagined glorious past. He has no love lost for Stalin, of course, but he doesn’t seem entirely unsympathetic to the cause of most of the anarchists and revolutionaries who protested the Tsarist autocracy of the time.

August 1914 represents a perspective into Russian history and World War I that isn’t commonly known outside Russia, or propagated as official history by the Soviet communists. Closely researched facts are interwoven with fictitious narrative to recreate the smoke and fog of the East Prussian battlefields, the waffling at the Winter Palace, and the mind of an assassin; Solzhenitsyn combines the painstaking attention to detail of the court reporter with the decisive pronouncements of a judge to create a mammoth but eminently readable book, as vast in scope as the country it describes.

Victory over the Russians at Tannenberg: from the German point of view

Sunbeams and Cucumbers: A Brief History of a Question

The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo Aryan Migration Debate (Bryant, Edwin)

The idea that Europeans had a common set of ancestors came from the Bible, of course, but also from philologists who noted that many European languages were very similar to one another, to Latin and ancient Greek, as well as to Iranian and Sanskrit: and out of all this evolved the Indo-Aryan migration theory. It morphed into a question of the origins of Indians, too. Did a race of warlike, light-skinned, fire-worshipping pastoralists riding horse chariots with spoked wheels and wielding iron weapons either smash their way or trickle in peacefully, into India, through the north western mountain passes? Did they displace the original inhabitants to the east and south, and eventually become the ancestors of most modern Indians? Or were they always in India?

The book under review is not the first I’ve read on the topic (see here and here) but it is by far, the most comprehensive I’ve read in its coverage of the question. Its aim is not to answer the question of the origins, but to trace the history of the question itself, to document the various theories and counter-theories on the subject since the 1700s.

One depressing lesson from the book is that there is no disinterested quest for knowledge here. Almost everyone who has attempted to answer the question has had an agenda, driven by affiliation or opposition to some form of nationalist, racial or religious group. They are polarized into colonizers or colonized, Aryan or Dravidian, Hindu or otherwise, patriot or foreigner, communal or Marxist secular.

Underpinning the academic conflict is a theological clash between the Bible and Puranic scripture on the antiquity of the world. The Bible says the world dates back 6000 years. By Puranic reckoning, that’s not even a blink of Brahma’s eye.  The 19^th century European writers could not conceive of the Genesis being false; the truth in the Vedas is similarly axiomatic for many Hindu writers even today.

Thanks to the Evangelical orientalists, India’s historical narrative changed from “ancient source of civilization”, to “beneficiary of Western largesse”. And the seeds of suspicion were sown in the minds of Indian writers, of the Western scholars who used “science” to perpetuate a prejudiced and malicious view of India. Some Indians, in turn, concocted fanciful stories of how Aryans originated in India and went around colonizing Europe, spreading light, wisdom and Sanskrit in their wake. The Dravidian political movement in South India, on the other hand, pounced gleefully on the Indo-Aryan invasion theory as proof that their constituents were the original settlers of India, and that the hegemons from Delhi had been persecuting them ever since.

A Harappan seal: if we could only read what it says, how much we could learn!

But if these theories were driven by religious sentiment, racist hatred, political opportunism and unscientific superstition, where does the science itself lead? All over the place, it turns out. Over the last 200 years, the original Aryan homeland has been placed by various writers in Bactria, Sogdiana, Scandinavia, the Russian Steppe, Finland, the neighborhood of the Oxus river, between the North Sea and the Urals, Southern Russia, Babylon, the Baltics, Lithuania, Hungary, Germany, Asia Minor and West Turkestan. They based their theories on Indo-Iranian literary material, the Bible, geological evidence, astronomical calculations, philological and archaeological arguments, pottery and art, loanwords from various languages, number systems, linguistic paleontology, flora and fauna and weather patterns, graves, the skeletons of horses, grammatical arguments, and the names of rivers. The ‘scientific experts’, apparently, are even less united than the religious whack jobs. American Sanskritist William Whitney called it a futile attempt in extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.

We live in a truly post-modern world: all truth is subjective, and there are no undisputed facts, only conjectures and refutations, selective data and convenient interpretations. Theories are all we have of the past or the future. These theories are breathtaking, though: flights of spectacular speculation, woven intricately on flimsy evidence. The more intellectually beautiful a theory has been, the easier it has proved to poke holes into, and no single theory to date has managed to fit in every fact.

Some used geographical hints from Sanskrit texts (the names of rivers and mountains mentioned and omitted). Some counted loanwords from Dravidian languages, and saw them trend upwards over time. Some unearthed clues from Sanskrit words connected with agriculture and animal husbandry, and from the archaeological record of Indus valley crops. Some found the language in the earliest Zoroastrian gathas to be identical with Vedic Sanskrit. Some constructed grand theories around how the spread of language resembles the evolution of biological species. Tilak found clues in the precise location of a certain star in the eastern sky, and calculated when and where the verses might have been composed.

Each of these convincing arguments contains flaws: where the facts aren’t in question, the interpretation is; when neither is in doubt, the logic has been disputed, or alternative equally plausible explanations offered.

Even archaeology has been contested. They discovered pits at Harappa, that looked to some like Aryan ‘fire altars’ but to others like cooking pits. Some judged the Aryans too primitive to build cities like Harappa but simultaneously held that their metallurgical knowhow was more sophisticated than evidenced in Harappa. Others disagreed.

At the end of the day, the linguistic theories are clever – some even compelling – but they cannot be conclusive without archaeological support. And there simply isn’t unambiguous archaeological evidence that the Aryans came into the country from outside, went out of the country, or that they occupied (or interacted intensely with others who occupied) a very large area between the Caspian and Arabian seas.

Yet in balance, as Bryant points out repeatedly, it takes fewer assumptions and convolutions of logic to justify the hypothesis that migration did take place into India, of a people who brought in different technology, culture, language and gods. And while the “indigenous Aryan” school of thought isn’t populated exclusively by bigots, it has now been usurped by the nationalist right wing, which is using its version of a glorious and unchanging imagined past as a political weapon. The battle lines are firmly drawn.

Edwin Bryant maintains a painfully evenhanded position between the two sides. At some level, it is admirable: very few people can find positive things to say about both sides of this debate. But I empathize with the unknown previous owner of the second-hand copy I possess, who has underlined the words that opened Bryant’s concluding chapter: “So where has all this led?” and has annotated them thus: “Yes, where?”

Outdated History

True Brit (The Toughest 12 Commando Comic Books Ever) (Selected and with an introduction by George Low, Commando Editor)

When I was a boy in 1980s Kolkata (then called Calcutta), I loved the concept of war, and this puerile passion was fueled by Commando comics. They were easily available to me – not to buy, of course, because my parents would never have stood for such frivolity, but to borrow and read. The comics would be heavily dog-eared, patched up with tape, scribbled on, and often a few of them would be bound together into an amateur anthology. I never knew who the original owners were, but they’d pass from boy to boy, as part of a highly liquid currency that included Marvel and DC comics, Tintin, Asterix, Archie Andrews, Richie Rich, and a wave of Indian equivalents that held their own against their foreign counterparts – Indrajal, Amar Chitra Katha and Twinkle. These transient libraries were acquired, efficiently digested, and traded away gainfully, by a vast network of boys between the ages of 10 and 15; they constituted a large chunk of my world, for those years.

Commando Comics were unique, among all these. For one, the art was unique: black and white, pen and ink stuff where all else was in garish color. For another, it was set in the recent past – the second World War was barely a generation ago – and it combined history and fiction in a way none of the others did. And of course, our age made us particularly susceptible to emotions like courage, magnanimity, loyalty, patriotism, gallantry and soul-stirring sacrifice. We craved our daily dose of manly, clean-shaven, square-jawed, light-eyed young men machine-gunning others with ugly, stubbly faces twisted in a grimace of pain as they shrieked, “Ach! Schweinhund! Gottim Himmel! Schnell!”

It didn’t bother us then that mutilation, mayhem and murder were never more than a couple of panels away at any point. We were only dimly aware of the geopolitical issues and moral arguments that led to the war – everything was reduced to an calculus of kill or be killed. All the heroes were white men – women were almost entirely absent (did the illustrators know how to draw them?) and any brown or black characters were supervised, protected and treated with avuncular fondness by heroic Brits: that didn’t faze us, either.

Over time, the love for war comics morphed into a love for war novels by Alistair Maclean, then military history, then history in general, then social history and cultural traditions, and somewhere along the way, I grew up into an adult and a pacifist.

So when I came across this collection of Commando Comics, while browsing a bookstore in London in 2006, I bought it for nostalgia’s sake, but I wasn’t sure I would actually enjoy the stories. And sure enough, I winced at phrases like ‘Here’s some of your own medicine, slant-eyes!’ National stereotypes were reinforced crudely – something that was funny, perhaps, in the innocent 70s and 80s, but now, in the age of Brexit and Trump, it isn’t funny any longer.

There is some accurate history, of course – in the descriptions of things like the 3.7 inch howitzer, the Tribal-class destroyer, or the chronology of the North African campaign of Erwin Rommel. And of course, there are a few honorable and valiant German and Italian characters, and quite a few cowardly, mean-spirited or mealy-mouthed British ones. It brings me some ironic satisfaction to note that a German company prints the comic these days, but it is shocking that new commando comics are being written even today.

At the end of the day, Commando comics glorify war too much for my liking, and I’m not sure I will be introducing these books to my children. I’d rather we teach children other definitions of courage and patriotism than in terms of the violent hatred of non-compatriots. I think they are the opposite of what the world needs.

This book will serve merely as a reminder for how much the world has changed – or how much I have evolved – in the last forty years.