"By Numbers" short story by Keith Oatley

Rosalind was inordinately beautiful. She was a high-school teacher of mathematics where, although there were geometry and algebra, in her classes, calculations came top. When shopping, she sought out bargains. Back home, she would take the receipts and, in a notebook, write in a 5-column list, which for her was of 1st importance: “Date,” “Item,” “Normal Price,” “Reduced Price,” “Saved.” The “Date” column had no verbal abbreviations such as “Sept.” It amounted only to numbers like “09.”

In additional transactions, Rosalind did equally: she based every problem she could on numbers.

A man across the street from where Rosalind lived had resided there since 1999. Like her, he had lost a spouse. He had the singular name, “Algernon.” They had met when Rosalind and her erstwhile husband moved in. The man told her that he preferred the designation, “Al.”

“Down from 3 syllables,” said Rosalind. “’Al-ger-non,’ to 2, ‘Al-gy,’ now 1, ‘Al.’”

The man looked at her. Was she joking? Negative. “Correct,” he said.

That was 3 years, 2 months and 23 days ago, now here they were at 11 o’clock on 29/01/2019 and Al was helping her 1 more time.

“Ceiling light inoperative,” she said. “Can’t solve it. Can’t change even 1 odd light bulb. Can’t do a fraction of what I should.”

“I’ll check it out,” said Al.

At 12 noon, that day, Al purchased 3 bulbs, returned, inserted 1, left 2 in the packet, which he deposited into 1 of Rosalind’s closets.

In a 2nd list, Rosalind had inscribed occasions on which Al had acted on her behalf, since her bereavement. They had increased exponentially because, except for arithmetic, her practical skills were approximately zero: 0. 

The night after the incident of the light bulb, the ambient temperature reduced to minus 18 degrees Celsius, and Rosalind’s garbage container which, every 3rd day of the week, had to be deposited near the road, was frozen to the slab on which it stood. So Rosalind called Al on his private number, which won’t be displayed here because it’s private. 

Rosalind inspected her list of what Al had done. If he put out the garbage container then, in the last 10 weeks, the count of things he’d completed would reach the integer 10.

Oh, she thought. That’s my number; I’m positive.

Al released the container, removed it to the verge. Rosalind stood with her door ajar, in her dressing gown. 

Then she said: “Can you come up here for 1 moment?”

What can I bestow? she thought. Show how infinitely grateful I am.

Al ascended Rosalind’s 3 front steps.

“Thank you,” she said. “So very much, 10 times more than I could ever say.”

She inclined towards him and kissed him, not on the cheek, not on the mouth, but on that little bit between the mouth and cheek, 1 time, 2 times. No, she thought, that’s not the equation. She vouchsafed a 3rd kiss.

Scripting Embodied Experience: Table Manners as Written in Linens (and playing cards)

Annie Smart's set design for To the Lighthouse, Berkeley Rep

Given my thoughts last week about how understanding experience as embodied can matter to the way we model interactions, I am returning this week to my ongoing project of mapping out food interactions. I attempt this through some food infrastructure that is at once inordinately mundate and evocatively mysterious: the supports for meals that usually take the supporting role in the food dramas we enact throughout the day, such as table linens and utensils. (These jive well with my usual underdog-cheering affection for place and setting in preference to character and plot in the analysis and construction of stories.)

I am here considering a series of lines directly quoted from Chapter 17, the dinner scene in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.  Each of these "playing cards" blocks out some movement, some table manner, some deliberate scripting of meal relationships--and I can imagine each being part of a deck of role-playing cards, for example, that might begin a compelling dinner party:

Skeptical science and parsimonious stories: Strategies for wrestling dialogue toward accountability

Two recent experiences of failing in attempts at public narrative have pulled me back into thinking about strategies for what to do when dialogue suddenly veers out of control into a realm of intractable slipperyness and discomfort. The first was an almost textbook case of theinternet commentitis I have become so fascinated by recently: I will not belabor it too far here, but the basic gist was that I was called out for a claim that a critic immediately identified as anti-science with calls for evidence and admonitions to read experts. When I provided the requested information along with an explanation of how the experts in question tend to produce normative explanations that do not account for, in this case, the likelihood that genetically modified seeds are improving the livelihoods of poor farmers, my explanations were met with increasingly hostile and charicatured characterizations of my argument (which was about the challenge of addressing indemnity requirements in the transfer of intellectual property regimes into humanitarian food aid domains) as misinformation – flawed, in large part, it appeared, because of the critic’s association of my argument with that made by people this critic found to be intolerably opposed to technology. No evidence I provided changed the response “this is not true,” even when it came from the “same side” of the argument as my critic – and my curiosity about how to productively engage with this persistent characterization of my argument eventually turned to frustration and disgust, as it became clear that directives like “You might also want to update your knowledge of the situation,” with pointers to very general and outdated information (explicitly discussed in the pieces I had provided) were largely just launchpads for associative critiques. It felt like an elaborate autocorrect problem, where I kept thinking I must have been misunderstood, or that my intended message had not been expressed – because surely THAT can’t be the response … for one thing, because how could someone become so hostile and defensive over something this obscure and nerdy, and especially when s/he has found someone else actually willing to discuss something so obscure and nerdy?!

My interest in this challenge of internet etiquette – and my persistent feeling that there must be SOMEthing that could be done to help frame a more accountable dialogue, where we were each actually responding to the other, for example – was further piqued in an in-person dialogue failure a week later. In a workshop on teaching food systems, some colleagues from animal science would, from time to time, point out how animal science was a significant gap in the study of sustainable agriculture. Everyone would nod in agreement and try to figure out what they could do to rectify that, and I became fascinated by this animal gap as a prime example of a corrective story that is easy to insert into a larger story – a parsimonious story that people understand.

Once people turned to this idea of how under-understood the role of animals is sustainable agriculture is, the degree to which the understanding that we DO have is schematic and cartoonish became very clear: although people may be able to characterize the basics of some of the questions that might be asked (how can shifting agroecological practices emphasize the value of pasture? can animal waste be a significant nutrient source to replace energy intensive inputs – and even traction?), thinking about these immediately highlights the schematic nature of most people’s understanding, even with a fair amount of prior thought: what would stocking rates need to be to replace synthetic fertilizers? What kind of labor to land ratios would switching to animal traction engender, and what kinds of additional labor do animals require? How can we adjudicate claims made in comparing impacts of confinement vs. pasture raised animals? None of the answers follow readily just by logic alone, and would require considerable study. Most people understand this. (The known unknownness of animals provides remarkable parsimony.)

In contrast, as I reflected how much there was an analogous situation with social science – the role of people is not very well theorized in the study of sustainable agriculture – it turns out that this is not a parsimonious story. It was as hard to hear as the direct answer (with law review substantiation) I had provided my intenet comments critic: partly because people ARE studying what people do, they may feel defensive when they hear the critique that they are not really dealing with issues of labor exploitation, the functions of capital (particularly the role of threatened and enacted capital flight in shaping regulations at the national scale), and power relations in general. In the same way that people have a very schematic and cartoonish idea of the role of animals in sustainable agriculture, though, I could quickly point to a number of examples of how schematic (or merely absent) these themes were from a wide range of situations: classrooms (where in hundreds of suggestions for improving the food system that students have presented to me in class visits in the past several weeks, almost none have been about policy, power, labor, or regulating capital), teaching workshops (where people seem to be aware of these issues, but not to have the vocabulary or categories to engage in such discussion, or to feel the need to make such issues a part of their research frameworks), and even in work with senior colleagues and their industry collaborators, who appear to have remarkably little to say about relationships between producers and industry and capital. All of this highlighting the considerable mismatch between the importance of people and the institutions they create and the emerging repercussions of those – and any sort of analysis of how these are working: why does it matter that there’s such capital flight into agriculture right now? (Or, rather, into the idea of the potential of agriculture and agricultural land?) What is the role of farmland ownership rules in places like Minnesota, and the rising influence of real estate investment trusts? What are the roles of other invisible institutions in constructing the parameters of what we’re able to do and the choices we’re able to make – far beyond the influence of corn syrup, something that does, mysteriously, seem to pique people’s interest.

Maybe corn syrup provides a parsimonious story. It’s a problem, though, if these more complex structural parts of food system stories remain intractable, things like the effects of financial rules on corn futures, or financialization of pieces of the food system.  For one thing, the daunting complexity (along with the bad news one is likely to encounter in learning to navigate this complexity) turns people off to analysis – which then sets them up to be seen (and to become, perhaps) anti-science and technology. And this seems important, because if science is supposed to be helping, and people say they don’t want to hear the science, rather than that it’s not capturing the values people have, or to make a difference in measures that matter to them (or how to account for things more thoroughly – like the inputs that go into feed and infrastructure) – then we are not building better science, we are just confirming the problem with skepticism about people who demonstrate skepticism about science itself.  

The problem with skepticism and the problem with this parsimonious story

What do we learn from how easy it is to say “animals aren’t included in sustainable agriculture” and apply it to the problem with making the idea more legible that people might not being adequately included? Part of my recent experience with aggressive skepticism (and this seems to be increasingly echoed in a particular social domain of skeptical science, as recent efforts to debunk the health claims of organics or to conspicuously enthuseabout Bangladesh’s adoption of commercial patents for genetic modification tobrinjal in tweets aimed at journalists promoting open source seed) suggests that part of the problem is slippage between what different parties think is interesting (and hence the focus of attention) in a particular problem space.

This makes it very hard to hold each other to the terms of what’s interesting. So for example, part of what I’ve been saying by asking the question of what would poor people’s genetic modifications of crops look like is that in food improvement discourses, genetic modification has been justified in terms of improving crops via tolerance to things like drought and salinity and resistance to blight. This is generally an adaptation kind of narrative – and there’s a whole critique of adaptation for resilience because it puts the onus of response on those already most vulnerable – however, in general, I don’t disagree with the argument that you want all possibilities on board, although I am concerned about the way this tends to dismiss systemic critiques and shift attention instead to a reactive set of practices which does reduces the power of the critique that the system itself needs to be significantly changed to build in more resilience. Monocultures could be a good illustration if you could actually have a dialogue about this, where you were having substantive agreement or disagreement. But it’s difficult to get to that kind of analysis of whether you’re having a substantive conversation because in many skeptical dialogues you’re not actually having something like a dialogue, you’re having something more like a volley. And arguably, a volley is better than a DUEL, where you’re at least exchanging shots and you could imagine it shifting from military metaphors to game metaphors. The current way it comes across seems so hostile.

There seems to be something important in this defensiveness, though. It is often expressed by people who set themselves up as identifying with the scientific perspective, who I might characterize as tending to look at one set of focal points more than at the larger discourse that gives them context: claims made about the healthfulness of organic produce make a good example here (particularly in contrast to attention to the ways these claims circulate in society – they are overrepresented, perhaps). But when skeptics lash out in a mythbusting “We’re going to set things right” kind of mode, which is very normal science, there seems to be a problematic kind of set up involved:

Mythbusting gets such an emotional reaction and the emotional reaction is part of what it seems likes skeptics are prompting – so they can demonstrate how much the kinds of decisions people are making are irrational and are not based on the kinds of criteria skeptics think are valid. So they’re prompting an irrational kind of argument, then they have been validated in their arguments that this is the wrong thing to be happening in an argument, not the basis they respect. And it also seems to make skeptics strangely impervious, as in my experience – because if they’re expecting an emotional kind of reaction, and then they get something that’s more like a science reaction (but that says, here are the limitations of that approach), this is not a narrative trajectory that they may be ready to engage in. (I remind you again that Popular Science just had to close down its comments section for more or less exactly this reason.)

You can’t necessarily argue, for example, for the benefits of, say, virus resistance, against the costs of seed company concentration if we haven’t had a chance to evaluate that very well because it’s not a question people have been willing to put into their models, or into their large-scale assessments, or, frankly, into practice, because most of the traits that are out there are NOT for blight resistance, even if I would like to hear more about those. It ends up being parallel to the frustration of the social sciences when people are not engaging with power.

Since it seems clear from a political ecology perspective that you need to engage both with power and with ecology, I want to think about the power of political ecology (and particularly political agro-ecology) as a way to frame narratives to help create the space for dialogue and for figuring out what is the problem space – and are we asking questions that are mutually comprehensible before we start attacking each other for the ways that the evidence we provide doesn’t answer the question the other person is posing?

I think one of the keys to this may be more explicitly framing the relationship between things that already seem like common sense – like the idea that organic agriculture might be better not for the reasons people claim. But then they get attacked for attacking organics, even while they recognize that the claims that are being made are not really the point – they recognize, in this case, the commercialization of organics and discount that. But maybe they aren’t evaluating how strongly those ideas are shaping the larger political discourse and what it does. So this relationship that I’m arguing needs to be better fleshed out has to do with the way that people frame their motives for things. For example, I don’t think power is dealt with well enough. People could more explicitly state their tacit implicit knowledge, “everybody knows that power is a problem here” – and that might help us get to be able to much more explicitly and specifically describe the premise of what it is we’re looking at: we don’t necessarily mean just everybody’s everyday knowledge about the way power tends to work (although that may be a really good place to start), but also to acknowledge the patterns where we have good reason to believe that this kind of knowledge has tendencies to go wrong, to have systematic biases – and if we can acknowledge this, we may be able to also see where a more systematic approach might help us to identify heuristics that can help us with these biases, such as leaving out labor, control, and problematic power relations from our food improvement stories.      

Substance, Interactivity, and Navigability

As a geographer, I have a professional interest in maps -- and one of maps' most important features is how well people can navigate them. I have my introductory students read provocative texts like How to Lie with Maps and I put considerable effort into trying to make the associative chains of the work I do NAVIGABLE. But comprehensibility is a challenging concept. For one thing, as I have explored in past essays, there is the tension between coherence -- an arguably central part of making something comprehensibly navigable -- and correspondence, which could be condiered a crucial measure of the fidelity of a representation. How much fidelity is adequate is a question that nerdy people are probably unlikely to be able answer parsimoniously. And here lies a significant challenge in building successful interaction into the presentation of information.

As the editor least involved in the study of fiction on this site, I often think about the relationship between the various disciplines built into the crafting of fiction and the themes they share -- or do not share -- with non-fiction narrative. As a geographer, for example, I cannot help noting that the vast majority of fiction is far more coherent than most social science writing -- and this is, in many ways, precisely because there are limits to the number of ways one can navigate fiction. Even with all the background experience and interpretation a reader brings to a text, and even with all the "play" inherent in texts, the practice of science requires a radical interactivity to be available in the way a narrative is presented: the reader must be able to recreate the scenario described with adequate fidelity to try for replication of whatever the effects that are being described.

The problem, of course, is that a Science Frame of Mind makes people like me want to give my readers virtual blueprints for replicating the idea that I am following. In a map of a concept, for example, I am likely to include all of the lines of thought: and this is usually too many to make something navigably interactive.  

I am spelling this problem out because the tension between taking advantage of the possibility of laying things all out where someone can see them -- where someone can TRACE the lines of thought that might spark additional insight and add yet more fidelity to some model of what is going on -- and the disciplined practice necessary to make interactive navigation possible is difficult not to underestimate. Most of the "voila" moments I witness (in both myself and others) do not have corresponding "oh, I see!" moments; instead, they usually initiate an endless inching from one side and another, in best case scenarios, toward some meeting between the exciting ideas being laid out and what someone might be willing to explore.

In the case I'm currently inching through, for example, we are ninety-eight corrections into making an exuberant series of connections drawn by hundreds of people between parts of the food system (like this -- click images for the linked versions) 

into steps that allow someone to follow at least some of the trains of thought enough that they might be able to add some of their own thoughts in (maybe like this?).

And that seems like the holy grail of interactive narrativity that so little of the internet yet lives up to. (C'mon, comments, show me good examples that show I'm underestimating this! I want to believe in internet 2.0 in its visualization version...)

Inside a Blogging Mind

Much has been said about a novelist’s mind. Startling characters drop in uninvited; they live, suffer, love, argue, age, and sometimes die, while the novelist is perhaps having a breakfast. But a blogger’s mind? Is it very different from a tweeter’s mind?  Perhaps it is closer to the weekly columnist’s mind?  I don’t know. So, let me generalize from a sample size of one.

At the beginning, blogging is perhaps a revelation; the excitement of instant publication is amplified by years’ accrual of ideas too short for articles but too interesting for oblivion. It can be a refreshing, cathartic, cascade of ideas, interactions, explorations.

With time, though, a blogging mind may flag in energy, in excitement, in volume.  Anxiety peeks through, and one goes about having ideas and experiencing the world, all the while monitoring one’s meta-filter (or better, blogo-filter):  Is this good enough for the blog? Even when the idea arrives, it has to be handled quickly enough, for there is always a deadline, even if self-imposed.  Ideas are processed with the blog in mind, like deep-frying frozen potatoes.

I miss the simmering, slowly-released flavours of ideas unpressed, uncategorized, disorganized.  I miss having interesting thoughts without the blog popping up in my mind like an intruding waiter:  ‘Would you like to pay the blogging bill now or later?’  I miss having ideas that go nowhere, do nothing, and exist only to scent the inner garden of my mind.

I miss not being inside a blogging mind.

Silence

First I waited for the sounds
that cleave the silence.
Then I waited for the silence
that cleaves me.
But the chatter spread, and grew, and multiplied.
It deceived me.
Now I wait, once again, for the silence
to cleave me.

Talking Food, Consuming Silence: Mapping Food Movement Dialogues, Engagements with Justice and Power, and Problems Translating between Them

As many readers have noticed, my interest in the psychology of narrative has been engaged in some long-term public work on the way that people talk about food, and about the ways that this talk about food organizes ways that social interactions around food and feeding are conducted -- for example, in a series of seminars on the implications of the way that people talk about "feeding the world", or in a series of interactive food system games I've constructed and conducted as a platform for challenging dialogue at venues such as the Frozen River Film Festival or the Minnesota State Fair. There have been a couple of features of this work that I have particularly enjoyed, and that I'd like to mull over in the context of the OnFiction community. 

First, and perhaps most successfully, as part of the method I have used to help construct these opportunities for narrating food experience in new ways, I have deputized "discursive referees" -- people who are given a public mandate to stop the conversation at hand if, for example, it falls into well-trod ruts that it might be more interesting to step around, or, even better, to examine as themselves objects of inquiry. Discourse referees have been one of my favorite parts of treating narratives as exploratory games -- many referees have been wonderful: sparing, generous, and yet stepping in gently just at the moment a conversation starts to derail and providing enough reference to help rewind to the point of derailment and to help construct possible ways around the stumbling point. This approach has been lucky, I realize, but I'd like to continue to try it out and to consider some of the ways that some of what works so well about it is the way it marries some of the best parts of our experience of written and spoken language.

   

A second aspect of "talking food" that I have found so compelling is the way this careful attention to narrative experience (such as with the development of discussion contexts welcoming to refereeing) has led me to mapping discursive and epistemological terrains. I am, after all, a geographer, and studying various representations of food system conflicts has brought me repeatedly to thinking about what it might be like to map the geography of knowledge terrains. 

I am, of course, particularly interested in spaces of ambivalence, where people might wander around lost and buffeted by winds of contradictory motive -- but I am also fascinated by different positions kept incommensurate by growing mountains of misunderstanding or widening chasms of disdain, fear, or defensiveness. As a geographer, I have been hung up on how to subvert geo-coding data to represent epistemological space. And I have already started importing geographic concepts that help organize the narrative space: territorial metaphors such as “realist geopolitics” (contained / sovereign / given) versus “critical geopolitics” (intertwined / constructed) give me ways to consider and treat the boundary conflicts between different knowledge cultures!

Despite having spent the greater part of an artists' residency this summer thinking about how to model food system discourses in a game narrated in State Fair Vernacular, however (as well as the transformative transition from a landscape artist into a geographer during a long stint of sculpting cartographic symbolizations), it wasn't until I was repeatedly zoomed across Stephen Colbert's Tolkienesque map of New York (above) during his immensely nerdy Hobbit week that I considered less technologically geo-referenced cartographic techniques for thinking about the shapes of politically contentious food narratives. I could draw them out.

And so, over the next year, I will provide monthly installments in a series of "narrative maps" sketching out patterns in the ways people represent their experience the food system. 

In addition to depicting these representations, I hope to use my maps to reflect, exhibit, and interpret people’s engagement with the patterns I play with -- to see how well they capture the way people imagine themselves to be connected with the eco-social processes and cultural knowledge that constitute the food system, and various people’s hopes for sustainable and transformative food systems. My ambition for this modest series of maps is that it will provide the armature on which I might build a gradual public process for assembling tools existing oral history projects and community food assessments (and other publicly generated food system knowledge tools) and transforming them into a navigable public learning domain -- both online, and in the series of games and tours I will continue to develop.

Stay tuned for the February installment: 1. Introduction: Mapping Discourses through Food.

Stories Christmas Cookies Tell: Holly in the Windows and a Warm Fire Inside

On my first trip out of North America in my early twenties, I traveled far up into the arctic circle to chase the midnight sun. Once I was so far north, experiencing the somewhat disorienting exhilaration that comes with no respite from sunlight, I became very curious about what the seasonal inverse must be like. My kind hosts in Norway invariably responded to my concerned inquiries about winter with the protest "but we have Christmas," a response I found mysterious, if charming. I had been raised in a fairly Christmas-intensive household, where I was allowed and even encouraged to have my own tree in my bedroom -- probably as a strategy to keep me from sleeping under the family tree -- but despite knowing that my parents keep their tree alive and decorated from November to February, I still felt that a holiday celebrated for a week or so seemed a feeble stay against such a long dark.

Now that I live in the Scandinavian territories of the United States, however, I am beginning to learn how to take this celebratory approach to winter dark to heart. On the day after American Thanksgiving, I found myself gathering up my christmas lights and cards, lighting candles in the windows, and mixing the first of the batches of Christmas cookies to send off to my family for St. Nicholas day. I had a good backdrop for thinking about the significance of the way Christmas is performed. At the time I was unearthing my  whole set of seasonal props (and mine are extraordinarily modest, especially by either family or North American standards), I happened also to be reading literature on "socially engaged art" in preparation for my teaching next term, while being inundated with endorsements for buy nothing day  "because only in America, people trample others for sales exactly one day after being thankful for what they already have."

Especially seeing as my christmas cookie recipient list is so short (4-6 boxes get mailed in a good year), my card sending so sporadic (most cards have at least two to three years of top-up stamps since the first was attached when I had the impulse to send them), and my decorating so functional (although someday I will once again have a tree, no doubt, I have not had one in almost twenty years, and the central theme of all ornamentation except for the calendar and cookies is light provisioning), I felt prompted to consider in some detail why I still, nonetheless, find so much satisfaction in my stripped down holiday observance. 

The idea of socially engaged art has a lot to do with the ways that getting people to do things in certain ways imbues their performances with certain social narratives. In the darkest days of winter, as my mother in law places holly springs in all the windows to keep the dark out--a practice she learned from Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series--and people struggle to tell each other comforting stories amidst bad news, I am struck by the deep if implicit narratives attached to the cookies we keep churning out. After rounds of macaroons, Dan Savage's mom's cookies, rosemary pine nuts, shortbread, molasses cookies, and the alternate universe chocolate chip cookies pictured above, today we will build log homes out of gingerbread biscotti and thumbprint cookies with jam from this summer, and we are cheered to hear that friends have finished the pizelle, the anisettes, the ginger stars, the almond moons--cookies that each have their own trails of stories and traditions. We will eat these cookies to punctuate the celebration of the season, but will we also send these cookies to our families and friends and colleagues and neighbors as they struggle with health issues, with finances, with depression, and both in the practices of performing our care for them and in their receiving this care, we are reinscribing our recognition of the need for extra care and cheer while the light is thin and our social bonds needing extra warming.  

And also in the context of the posada story of great heros born on the generosity of strangers, although we care particularly for those we know are ours in times of challenge, the festival spirit of excess may also (if more faintly) remind of not just of the salving charity stories of the King Wenceslases, but in the very things that holidays encourage us to push out of our minds we might find traces of goals we could better explore to make the new year something that could retain more holiday warmth.

Travelogue: Viking Mystery

In the medieval history of Europe, we think of the Vikings as people who came from what is now Scandinavia, who had ships and swords, who raided the coasts of northern Europe, settled down and founded towns with names like Grimsby (Grim's Village), did dairy farming so that they could make Jarlsberg cheese, and had blonde-haired children called Anderson, Ericson, Johnson, and so on.

I am writing this during a visit to Iceland which, we are told, was settled by the Vikings in the ninth century. Today, the country has a population of just 320,000. All of them, I am told, consider themselves descendants either of the original Viking settlers, or—if they are a bit more dissident—of Celtic slaves the Vikings brought with them. An Icelander, Leif Ericson, was the first European to discover the Americas (not the tardy Columbus, 500 years later). The Icelandic Sagas are episodic prose stories, written between about 1200 and 1400. The language has changed little since then, so the Sagas can be read in the original by speakers of modern Icelandic. They are the source of much of what is known about medieval Viking society. They depict family conflicts, and the exploits of prominent men who often combined raiding and farming who lived two or three hundred years before the Sagas were written down.

Icelanders look to the Sagas in the same way that Italians look to Dante, and the English look to Shakespeare. Egil's Saga was recommended to me, so I have been dipping into it. Egil is good at seeing how things may turn out in the future. He can be both kind and breathtakingly cruel. "Very human," said my informant!

I am trying to formulate my idea of the prototypical Icelandic male. He's five-foot-ten and burly. He draws on the idea of the Vikings, so he wears an anorak and he has a beard. One style of beard displayed by the younger men is a six-day stubble while the other, which gives an impression of permanence, is trimmed to about a half-an-inch in length, grizzled with a whitish patch on the chin. This prototypical man gives the sense that he's not to be put upon. I imagine him having a sword stashed away somewhere at home in a wardrobe.

The prototypical female wears a woolly jumper and three-inch heels, not of the slender variety but chunky so that they can be marched on. My initial theory was that the function of these heels was to enable the wearer to have her eyes at the same level as those of any male she might meet without the annoying effect of sexual dimorphism. But when I asked some women about this, they agreed that the chunky heels were characteristic but they laughed and said, "It's nothing to do with being at the same height as men."

Among my duties on this visit was to give some lectures at the University of Iceland, one of which was on the emotions. "It's a novel topic for us," said one of the women who invited me, "because we Icelanders don't have emotions or, if we do, we certainly don't talk about them." When I asked someone else whether it was true that Icelanders don't have emotions, he said "Yes, it's perfectly true. Instead, we have sheep."

Although Iceland is ringed with volcanoes and glaciers it does have sheep, one-and-a-half for every Icelander, so that may explain the prevalence of woolly jumpers.

The books say that around the year 1000 Christianity came to Iceland. When I talked with people about this I said that it wasn't clear what Icelanders made of it, since they seemed to prefer the Sagas. "That's right," they said. "We're still not sure what to make of it. If you want Christianity, you have to go to Norway."

I'm not quite sure whether I'm on the right track, but perhaps I've made a start on the Icelandic personality: friendly, humorous, not as politically correct as the Swedes, not quite as jokey as the English, independent-minded.

Although Iceland has abundant electricity from hydroelectric and geothermal sources, and although most heating is provided from hot water which is conveniently provided just under the ground, I've read that there are almost no natural resources and hardly any manufacturing. But there's an abundance of cars from Germany and Japan, of furniture from Sweden, of computers from America, and so on. I kept asking people to explain how, despite ups and downs, Iceland remains so prosperous. They've been unanimous in their replies. "It's a mystery," they said.

Image: Egil, from a seventeenth-century manuscript

Yearning for Dante's Hell

I wonder if we should worry that when we die we’ll go to hell populated with all of our least noble desires – like a giant shopping mall with AC and fluorescent light that throws unflattering light on all different kinds of sweaters and socks, pods and pads, that used to promise something and now taunt us by indifference. And we, the cursed shoppers, will meander up and down the corridors and escalators, sickened by the chill and the light and the gaudy displays. Or rather, I worry that before we die we’ll be in hell populated by…well, you know. I worry that we might not deserve Dante’s hell.

Travelogue: Conducive Buildings

Café Kapelli is a long glass pavilion, built in the 1860s and extended in the 1880s, which stands at the eastern end of a long garden with walkways that lead down towards the harbour in Helsinki, Finland. The building's central part is a classical entrance with Ionic pillars. Its wings are greenhouses that contain people instead of plants. The windows are of delicately leaded glass, in a diamond pattern. Perfect. One wing is a restaurant, the other a café. In the café wing, people sip coffee with a friend, perhaps have a sandwich, or tap on their Mac laptops. Here are bookshelves with novels in several languages. And, in case you've come during inclement weather, here also are coat stands. Over there is a piano. The most favoured positions are in the corners which are made of vertical glass cylinders some two-and-a-half metres in diameter, within each of which three of four people can sit on padded benches around a circular table.

The atmosphere of the café is that of a summer cottage by a lake, but far more convenient because it is in the centre of town. If one had this place to come to, for a coffee, or lunch, or to meet a friend, would one ever need anywhere else?

It is possible to make ratings of beauty, for instance on a scale of 0 (the ugliest) to 10 (the most beautiful). Although it is not grand in size or function I would give Café Kapelli a 10. (So that you can get the sense of this scale: to my eyes the most beautiful building in the world, to which I would give an 11, is the Alhambra, in Grenada, in Spain.)

When it's possible to make buildings that are conducive to human life and purposes and also beautiful, why don't architects say to themselves: "Ah, yes! Now I see how it can be done?" There are towns where this effect has occurred, where builders have taken up the spirit of buildings that have gone before. Venice is one such. Amsterdam is another.

In other places, this idea seems not to have caught on. Hampstead, in London, for instance, has some buildings that get a 10 (on my rating) such as the eighteenth-century houses in Church Row. Pevsner says of Church Row that it is: "the best street in Hampstead, and was better still before the wretched Gardner Mansions were built" (p. 195). Then there is the 1934 modernist Isokon building on Lawn Road (click here) which, although some of its reinforced concrete is slab-like, gets I think an 8.3 for verve. It embodied the idea of people being able to live comfortably, close together in small and convenient apartments. At the same time there is some unpreposessing stuff, worse than Gardner Mansions. I am holding a competition for the ugliest buildings in London NW3. Among contenders is the Tavistock Clinic at the corner of  Fitzjohns Avenue and Belsize Lane. (I'll be happy to hear of other contenders.)

What about the idea that buildings should be conducive to life, should have a social function (in the way Pevsner believed)? If we stretch ourselves mentally, we might think that the Tavistock Clinic, a centre for psychoanalysis, has an unsightly building to remind practitioners and patients, as they enter, of the unseemly nature of the unconscious.

Nikolaus Pevsner (1952). The buildings of England: London except the cities of London and Westminster. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Image: One end of Café Kapelli, from Google Maps.

Between Words

I don’t love you, nor you me,
Yet when within each other’s reach,
Whispers of eternity,
Slow the clocks and hush the din,
Make our words like senseless leaves,
Falling awe-struck from a tree.

No matter that the meanings flee,
News-stained words, the passing themes,
It is our silences I seek,
Sweeter than the sweetest lips.

I don’t love you, for love is,
Misshapen word, disrobed by fears,
Its power waning, its light dimmed,
With each untruth, so kindly meant.

And if it happens that it must be,
For words to lose to their fragrances,
Watch me lose, I’ll lose gladly,
To win our silences between.

The Fugue

You sleep as I measure,

Two inches from my heart,
To the prison of my ribs,

Two inches from my ribs,
To the softness of your back.

And three long steps more
To the chamber of your heart.

And if my beat ever lost
Your flowing counterpoint,

What sad fugue would that be,
What sad melody?

Reading Poetry

I love my stubborn ache,
Though it spawns some insolent guesses.

Like, maybe

You read in your chair,
Examining each verse,
Looking for a clue.
Words rushing and then slowing,
Your mouth barely moving.

You may not know it,
But here, far from your book
I found a way
To hold the world still
And mouth them with you.

The Final Metaphor

I am on a prowl for poetry. I search for offset, italicized lines, not excited as one would presume, but an apprehensive, hesitant hunter. I feel, in advance, not that the poem will disappoint me, but that I will disappoint it.

This time I may be in luck. One-stanza poem by Wislawa Szymborska (NYRB, LVII, 17), that begins, So long as that woman from Rijksmuseum / In painted quiet and concentration/ keeps pouring milk day after day / from the pitcher to the bowl… Here I try to remember, faintly familiar mode of the image, Vermeer, it must be, because it is the title of the poem. But my memory is fickle. So I turn the computer on, and Google Vermeer images. Of course, there it is, the second image. Just as I thought I had remembered, a girl pouring milk. I try to get back into the poem / the World hasn’t earned / their world’s end. I wait, to feel something. Nothing. I’m not cultured enough.

I turn a few more pages. A whole article about a poet, Seamus Heaney, and I’m reviving my desire to be touched by a poem. The first lines I see… A rowan like a lipsticked girl / Between the by-road and the main road… A rowan? I go to my computer again, and Google rowan images. It’s a tree with red berry-like cluster. In my mind I thought it was a bird. Well, I can see it, a rowan like a lipsticked girl, that’s good. I can see it, but I feel nothing again. I skim through other stanzas here an there, like a choosy window-shopper, but again, all I see are words that I need to Google – kesh water, sphagnum moss, immortelles. I am not natured enough.

It almost makes me want to cry – the futility. I turn my computer off. I don’t want to Google image my poetry any more. But then, what do I do? Become more cultured, natured? Or give poetry up? And then I remember. This time I go to my bookshelf. Neruda. Naked, you are simple as a hand / Smooth, earthly, small… transparent, round / You have moon lines and apple paths; / Naked, you are slender as the wheat… I stop, and look around. My room is silent, the computer screen black, no longer panting for yet another thing to be looked up. I look back at the poem. Naked, you are tiny as your fingernail / Subtle and curved in the rose-colored dawn…, and I feel quiet, just the kind of quiet I was hoping for.

A relief - that for the uncultured, unnatured brutes like me, there still remains the final metaphor.

Two Eyes

Two eyes decapitate me.
Headless, full of joy, I wonder,
Are they my own?
I can no longer tell.

Long strong bones they break,
While keeping the snake of my spine,
Delicately intact;
Each vertebra timed just right,
Not too close, not too far.

Two eyes bleed me,
Until I am light.
Is it ruin they beget?
I cannot tell.

I hope the destroying never ends.

Travelogue: Amsterdam

Early on a Tuesday morning in July, before the tour boats had started their rounds, I left the hotel at which I was staying in Amsterdam, and walked along canal-sides and little streets. Amsterdam is one of Europe's most inviting cities. It's not too large, and it has everything one could want in a city. The people are decent and, for foreigners like me, extra decent in that as well as Dutch they all speak other languages, like English. The canals constantly remind one of Holland's seafaring. Like many other great European cities—Paris, Lisbon, Venice, London—Amsterdam prospered from its colonies, and as I look along the canals at the wonderfully shaped Dutch houses, each with its beam and hook at the peak of its roof to haul up furniture that would be too wide for the stairs, I imagine each house being built by a merchant who was successful in importing and exporting, spices, cotton, diamonds, tobacco, mahogany, or other kinds of goods that enabled Europe to prosper. Such goods, of course, were good for the Europeans, not so good for the Africans, Americans, Indians, and Chinese from whose countries they came.

In medieval times, the Christians of Europe knew that, since the Fall, they were all born into sin. There was nothing they could do by their own efforts to escape this state. The only salvation was to recognize their sinfulness and to allow themselves to be saved. It was an individual matter of grace, which means gift: between God and each of (capital H) His creatures. Since the Enlightenment, and the since the last convulsions of internecine war between the colonizing nations of Europe, the Fall seems to have become less a matter of the individual and more of society. The moment one puts on almost any piece of clothing, one takes part in a nexus in which what has gone into making the clothing has involved someone on the other side of the globe working for wages not far removed from slavery. None of us, producers or consumers, can free ourselves.

How do Amsterdamers deal with the societal sin of Western consumerism? Perhaps there is a clue in their favorite form of transport: the bicycle. Along the canal sides and in the special bicycle lanes that run along almost every street one sees people pedaling: women in cotton skirts, men in white trousers, elderly people in elderly-looking clothes, all going at exactly three times walking pace. This morning I saw one man with a largish upturned table on his handlebars. Some people take passengers, either young children in child-seats, or people perched side-saddle on the pannier-carrier at the back. Cars are in a minority, and there are no SUVs. The cars one does see seem to have got the idea of being small and quiet, not congregating in traffic jams, and not annoying pedestrians or cyclists. As a society the people of Amsterdam may be as sinful as city-dwellers elsewhere in the West, but they sin in a modest way.

Sunless and Stillness, by Tessa Overbeek

Last Thursday and the Thursday before we described the competition among people registered at the recent conference in Utrecht of the International Society for Research on Literature (IGEL 2010) for an essay on the concept of stillness. The competition was organized by Frank Hakemulder and Emy Koopman. "Stillness," said the invitation, "signifies the counterweight against our hectic, stressful everyday existence. To give a preliminary definition we would say that it is an emotion of calmness and/or reflection which can be evoked by beauty. But of course, you are free to give your own, diverting, thoughts on the matter. For the contest we would like you to respond to the following question: What particular piece of fiction (novel, short story, movie, play) contributes best to ‘stillness’ according to you and why?"

The essays for the IGEL competition were all rather different, and the organizers awarded three equal first place positions. Each winner read his or her essay to a plenary session at the conference, and an arrangement was made to publish their winning essays on OnFiction. The essay we present this week is by Tessa Overbeek of the University of Groningen.

An extra piece of information, published with the invitation and relevant to Tessa's essay, is that the idea for the competition came from the Yann Martel’s project, What is Stephen Harper Reading? Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister of Canada.

Here is a quote from Martel's website:

"Who is this man? What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares little for the arts.

"But he must have moments of stillness. And so this is what I propose to do: not to educate—that would be arrogant, less than that—to make suggestions to his stillness.

"For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website (click here)"

Sunless and Stillness

“All I have to offer is myself.” Chris Marker 1997

This quote by the famously unfamous Chris Marker seems like the second best way to introduce this reclusive French filmmaker. The best way would be to show you his films. Marker is what could be called media-shy. He does not do interviews or publicity. But what better way to let himself be known than to make art?

His film Sans Soleil (Sunless) inspired me to write this essay, but describing it could not possibly do it justice, even if I had a billion words at my disposal. I can only hope that a reflection on my experience of it will encourage others to go and see it for themselves.

Seeing Marker’s Sunless felt like being inside his head, looking through his eyes, following his train of thought, or trying to. The gaps between ideas may have been small in his mind, but required a giant leap in mine. This made watching it quite challenging, yet at the same time makes this film great. My understanding grew with each viewing, and it felt like that process would never stop.

By now you must be thinking: “That sounds like hard work, wasn’t this essay supposed to be about ‘stillness’?” It is, although I would like to make a few changes to this definition of it: “an emotion of calmness and/or reflection which can be evoked by beauty.” What I would want to challenge most is the last word. There is a lot to be said about beauty, which I think is a very important phenomenon when studying literature and other media (which from here on out, I would like to call “the arts”). But not all great art is necessarily beautiful.

Yann Martel’s inclusion of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in his list of books for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (and his motivation of this choice) shows that he means something more when he uses the concept of stillness. I would also like to erase the “or” from the definition, because I think great art makes calmness and reflection occur together, although not always simultaneously.

What seems very accurate in the introductory text to this contest, is the statement that stillness can be a counterweight against our stressful everyday existence. It is my hypothesis that experiencing art entails roughly the same processes as making art. I would like to propose that it has more to do with creativity than with beauty (which are both not restricted to art).

The Brain Book, a recent and comprehensive guide to the human brain by Rita Carter, states that creativity depends on two things: the first is a certain state of “idleness,” the second is a foundation of knowledge. The bombardment of stimuli we have to endure in our daily lives forces us to ignore a lot of information. In order to function, we only consciously perceive what is relevant to what we are doing at that moment.

Creativity, however, requires a different state of mind, which is more open and relaxed, or calm, if you will. On EEG scans, this state can be recognized by slow alpha waves. In this state we do absorb information that we usually shut out, and are able to let it resonate with our memories (or reflect on it). According to Carter, this results in the generation of new thoughts and ideas that can be novel and useful.

This is a definition of creativity that closely resembles my (slightly altered) definition of “stillness.” There is calm and there is reflection, plus it is a state that is different from the one that is usually dominant in our daily lives. I would like to call it an “open mind.” It goes without saying that when something is open, things can both enter and leave it.

Which brings me back to Chris Marker, Sunless and my experience of it. It truly felt like someone had opened his mind to the world, had mixed what entered with what was already there, and had finally opened up his mind to me. Because he was in this special mental state, he could be more open than he could ever be in an interview.

Opening my own mind in return seemed like the only right thing to do. At first, I could not take it all in, and some things escaped my attention. What I did absorb engaged with my memories and must have been appropriated by that process, as if it was converted into my knowledge. This enabled me to see new themes and motives with every viewing, and this helped my interpretation of the film, which by that time was probably as much my own construction as it was his. I followed his associations as well as I could, but could not help but add my own.

The memory of that experience resulted in this essay. Could creativity lead to more creativity? I would not dare to compare mine to his, but something new was created nonetheless. Creativity does not only occur in art, but in science and leadership as well. New ideas can change the world, so anything that can stimulate their occurrence must be encouraged.

Martel’s plan may make his prime minister a better leader, and it may even lead to more funding for the arts, which seems to be the writer's second objective. If politicians would feel what I felt when experiencing Sunless, would they be more willing to invest in art? Possibly, although perhaps some people are more open to hard facts, presented in a more straightforward manner.

This is where the empirical study of arts comes in. Technologies that allow us to study the brain are becoming more numerous, and with the right methods we can hopefully soon prove what we already feel: that art can stimulate our minds in a way that is not only pleasurable, but also useful.


Rita Carter et al. The Brain Book. An Illustrated Guide to its Structure, Function, and Disorders. London: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2009.

Chris Marker, director. Sans Soleil (Sunless). Argos Films, 1983.

Tessa Overbeek

The Road Back to Social Engagement, by Howard Sklar

Last Thursday, we described the competition among people registered at the recent conference in Utrecht of the International Society for Research on Literature (IGEL 2010) for an essay on the idea of stillness. The competition was organized by Frank Hakemulder and Emy Koopman. "Stillness," said the invitation, "signifies the counterweight against our hectic, stressful everyday existence. To give a preliminary definition we would say that it is an emotion of calmness and/or reflection which can be evoked by beauty. But of course, you are free to give your own, diverting, thoughts on the matter. For the contest we would like you to respond to the following question: What particular piece of fiction (novel, short story, movie, play) contributes best to ‘stillness’ according to you and why?"

The essays were all rather different, and the organizers awarded three equal first place positions. Each winner read his or her essay to a plenary session at the conference, and an arrangement was made to publish their winning essays on OnFiction. The essay we present this week is by Howard Sklar of the University of Helsinki. It appears below. The other winning essay will appear here in a week's' time.

The Road Back to Social Engagement:

The Effects of Stillness and Solitude in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Betrayals”

Ordinarily, when we think of “stillness” we conjure images of a solitary person, legs crossed, overlooking a placid valley. Or quietly meditating on a mat in a silent room. Or “lost in a book,” securely cloistered from the mad rush of the world around him. Undoubtedly, these activities often promote a sense of quietness, of stillness, a feeling of slowing the world down.

But I’d like to look at what we’re slowing down to: What, in fact, is the point of this stillness-seeking? After all that stillness has been sought and gained, where does it lead us? I’d like to suggest that one of the aims of isolating ourselves from others is to discover, ironically, that we are intimately and inherently interdependent with everyone else on the planet. In stillness comes the recognition that all things are one. In solitude comes communion.

This is the underlying “message” of a work of fiction that has been very meaningful to me: Ursula K. Le Guin’s novella “Betrayals.” In this narrative, we discover that there’s a social consequence to the act of seeking solitude: By isolating ourselves, we are not immediately attending to others. At the same time, there is a personal consequence to that stillness-seeking: By isolating ourselves, others cannot attend to us. This is not to suggest that we do not need “alone time,” but, ultimately, our moments of stillness must lead us back to engagement with the world. Indeed, it is in such moments, perhaps, that we are most able to recognize how interdependent we all are.

“Betrayals” centers on the experience of Yoss, a woman who has come to live in a vacant house in the marshlands after her daughter and granddaughter have decided to move to another planet. From the first paragraphs we discover that she has chosen to live in a form of spiritual isolation on the marshlands, but we gradually realize that she considers herself inadequate to pursue the inner peace that she craves. She tells herself:

[W]hat a fool I was to think I could ever drink water and be silent! I’ll never, never be able to let anything go, anything at all. I’ll never be free, never be worthy of freedom. Even old age can’t make me let go. Even losing [my daughter] Safnan can’t make me let go. (5)

At the heart of Yoss’ sense of loss is the realization—at least, as Yoss sees it—that her daughter has rejected her: “They left me and I am dead” (11). As a result, she has come to live in the marshlands, a setting that seems to reflect her inner state, her intense loneliness. The lands contain “useless people on useless land. The freedom of desolation. And all through the marshes there were lonely houses” (9). This “desolation” reflects a greater sense of “uselessness,” of self-contempt, to the extent that those who go there to live essentially intend to die. As Yoss thinks, “I came here to be dead” (11).

Also living on the marshlands is one Abberkam, the former leader of the World Party. Yoss describes the crimes of which he had been accused and the feeling of betrayal that these acts engendered in his people. Yoss also expresses her own contempt for him. Perhaps due to the shame of this betrayal, Abberkam also appears to have come to the marshlands to die.

Thus, both seekers find in the marshlands a stillness that is bereft of meaning, devoid of love. Yet it is also this stillness that allows them, gradually, to notice each other and thereby attend to each other’s needs. Despite her initial contempt for Abberkam, Yoss realizes that he is suffering from an illness that, if left untreated, will kill him. Her patient tending of his illness penetrates Abberkam’s embittered heart, and draws him out of his own malaise to consider Yoss’s needs and concerns. This becomes evident during a particularly cold period, when Yoss needs to go to the town to buy some supplies, and leaves a fire burning in the hearth to keep her house warm. The fire spreads, and Abberkam, noticing the blaze and thinking that Yoss is inside, hurriedly enters the house. Inside, he finds only Yoss’ cat, which has been trapped there. Abberkam rescues the cat and, upon Yoss’s return, tells her how terribly worried he had been.

These gestures of active sympathy, these attempts to extend the self to the concerns of the other, turn Yoss and Abberkam from seekers of stillness as isolation to practitioners of the healing that can come from the quiet and still awareness that our lives are inevitably and beautifully intertwined with the world and creatures and people that surround us.

Note

Portions of this essay have been adapted from Sklar (2008). Permission to reprint is hereby granted by Paradoxa. For more information write to info@paradoxa.com.

Le Guin, Ursula K. (1995) “Betrayals.” In Four Ways to Forgiveness. New York: HarperPrism.

Sklar, Howard (2008) “Sympathy as Self-Discovery: The Implications of Caring for Others in ‘Betrayals.’” Paradoxa: World Literary Genres 21: 184-203 (special issue on Ursula K. Le Guin).

Howard Sklar