Sunday Rambling: My New Hat

I bought a new hat yesterday for a buck. Let me tell you about it.

Last week I was riding on the Metro, and I noticed a woman waiting for the morning train. She seemed "foreign," that's all I can say, she had a round face and a ski-jump nose, blonde but with a Mediterranean complexion and an air of self-composure that Americans don't tend to have. Dressed nicely but not strikingly, in the understated way that women from certain regions of Europe adopt. She was riding by herself and I did not get to hear her speak, which is how you figure out where someone is from. I have seen her before on the platforms, well when you ride the Metro every workday for fourteen years you do start seeing people repeatedly.

In the evening we crossed paths again. I don't know where she got on, but she was on my car. I was sitting in the last seat on the train (which is what I try to get), and I was surrounded by a family speaking French. Beside me was a breathtaking adolescent girl with big dark eyes; her mother and little sister sat in front of us. Brother stood in the aisle -- I was amused to watch him try to tear a piece off a loaf of Safeway French bread, he may have wondered why they call it that. He shouldn't have been eating on the train, and that usually does annoy me, but it's tourist season and lots of people do things like that, eat on the trains, stand on the left, block the turnstiles. The family was all blonde, except the brother's hair was light brown and there was another sister, maybe fifteen, sitting across the aisle, who had dark hair and limpid dark eyes. I'll tell you, I'd like to get a look at her in four or five years. They were a lovely, well-behaved family, and if you ride the Metro during tourist season I think you know what I mean there. Not every glassy-eyed tourist is a Pure Pleasure to ride with, you might say, some are a pain in the you-know-what.

They were somewhat agitated, looking at the Metro map and then out at the signs of each station we passed through, so I asked them what station they were going to. The girl next to me and the brother immediately explained that they were going to Bethesda. They spoke perfect English and understood me perfectly. I asked them where they were from, and they said "France." I noticed that they pronounced it in the American way, and not "Frongs," like French people say.

The foreign lady I had noticed in the morning stood by the door of the car and watched them; it's funny how the locals sometimes look out for lost tourists in the Metro system. As the family jabbered among themselves I heard the phrase "Friendship Heights" several time, and I assumed they understood that their station was the one after that. I talked to them and realized they had no idea how far that was, so I told them about how many more stops it was and said I'd let them know when we got close. I was working on reviewing a paper on the train, which is typical, but I kept track of the stations for them. I pointed out when we got to Friendship Heights and they were up and ready when the train pulled in at Bethesda. The whole family was very gracious in nodding to me and thanking me for helping them. The foreign lady and I both got off at Twinbrook.

Yesterday morning my wife and mother-in-law (who is staying with us this month) and I went out to yard sales. We did pretty well, I found a couple of unusual Tarot packs and my wife bought a box of boxes of beads and sewing things. Also, we found a cane for her mom for two bucks, which was something she needed, it was a nice little short one, just perfect for her. At one house the guy seemed to know us, but I didn't remember him, he was like, "Oh, hi, how ya doing!" My wife thinks we knew him from the grade school, which would seem right, but that was a long time ago. He was collecting money for Haiti. At another yard sale there was a guy about my age (approx. 1 million years old) who plays drums. I yacked with him for a while and got his email address and phone number. I play with a bass player in the neighborhood, and it would be really cool if we found a drummer right here around the corner who could play with us. You might see us on Ed Sullivan someday, and now, a really big shoe, Gerry and the Atrics. What? Ed Sullivan's not on any more? Oh.

We went to another house where when I walked up I noticed a little drawing with deep red ink on a blue mat, it seemed to be a stylized seated woman with her head bowed. A young man and woman were minding the store, and I asked the guy if one of them was an artist. He pointed to the lady, she was in her early twenties I guess, I am tending to refer to her as a "girl" but that's because I am so old relative to her, and I asked her about the drawing. "Oh, that's my mother's," she said. "So your mother's an artist?" "Oh, no, my dad is the artist, but that drawing is one she got in Mexico."

There were some hats on a table and I tried one on and my wife said, "That looks good on you." Let's say, I don't hear that a lot. Also, it was my size, seven and three-eights, which is unusual. Also, it seems that in recent years the sun has figured out how to penetrate through my hair and burn the top of my head. Also, the hat was a dollar and appeared to be new.

Prominently standing on the table was a book of text and drawings by Antonin Artaud. This <adjective_has_not_yet_been_invented> Frenchman is not the kind of author you typically see at Rockville yard sales, I guess you could say. I pointed to it and said to the young lady, "Somebody here has cultivated tastes." She said, "That would be my mother."

It is really interesting to go to somebody's yard sale and see the things they have picked up in their lives, and the things they are willing to part with. Mostly, you know, you see the same old stuff, with some variations. Every house has some kind of surprise. This house had lots of surprises.

While I was looking at a piece of Mexican folk art, the young lady went in and brought her mother out. And wouldn't you know, it was the foreign lady from the Metro. I said, "I saw you on the Metro," and at first she looked at me like, everybody sees everybody on the Metro, Jack, you gotta do better than that! But then she said, "Ah, you were sitting with those French people." She explained (in a decidedly Spanish accent) that she is half Spanish and half French, and though she grew up in Spain she speaks and understands French, so she knew what they were talking about. After a few seconds I let my wife take my place in the conversation, talking about our trip to Spain and so on, and I looked over the treasures I had not seen yet.

I am trained in science, in the use of inferential statistics to identify causality, in the use of sample statistics to make estimates of population parameters. I know something about probability, about randomness and chance, I run with a crowd where we use the word "stochastic" in ordinary conversations. Never mind that, as a human being I find that it is important to me to let coincidences illuminate my life. Sometimes things happen and you don't know why -- like here's one: two different people last week talked to me about the Spirit album "Twelve Dreams of Doctor Sardonicus." I have not heard that album mentioned for decades, and then there it was, two entirely unrelated individuals mentioned it. When something like that happens, there is a part of me that tunes in and asks, what is the lesson here?

Science assumes that events cause other events, generally through physical contact. In recent years the trend has been to look at complexity, the effects of great numbers of causal forces acting simultaneously. The useful word in that discussion is "emergence," which is a phenomenon that happens when many lower-level causal interactions produce a higher-level phenomenon. A cloud, for instance, emerges from the change of state of gazillions of molecules under certain conditions. A human body develops out of a single fertilized egg though the actions of millions of genes directing the synthesis of proteins, many simultaneously, each one affecting the growth of the embryo and all of them together interacting in a way that is described as "the edge of chaos," that embryo growing and being born and raised in a society of similar beings to produce the living breathing emergent phenomenon we call a "person." The thing about truly emergent effects is that they are impossible to predict. You could never take a set of human chromosomes and say, this is going to be Johnny who likes Insane Clown Posse and is good at badminton and calculus. You could never map out a region of the sky and say "At 11:37.15 a cloud will form here."

Emergent things, when they happen in life, seem uncontrolled and surprising. Think about a game like billiards, or even chess, where you have a small number of pieces and strict rules about how they can behave (billiards will include the laws of physics and Euclidean geometry). Even with such a stripped-down set of possibilities, every pool game, every chess game, can be different. You play just to see what's going to happen. Possibilities in the real world, continuous in extension and unbounded in size, teeming with the multitude of objects and their combinations and movements, are uncountable, unthinkable. Even given the constraints of physical law, just about anything can happen, including amazing coincidences.

It seems to me there is another factor here, which is the mind. Scientists can talk about the world in empirical terms, and ordinary people do, too, we talk about what size nut you need for that screw, or describe what happened at the scene of the accident as if it were a real scene, but really all we have is some sort of representation of the world. The problem with solipsism is that it is not only absurd but correct. The same neurocognitive mechanisms that create a world out of sensory information create dream-worlds without it, and the dreamer rarely realizes his world is not the real one that is validated by social consensus. Since all we know is a representation, it cannot be proven that all this is anything more than a dream, and sometimes human life operates under a set of rules closer to dream-rules than physical ones.

We are coming into an important presidential election. Two guys want you to vote for them in November, and they're doing all they can now to win your vote. You could decide based on real-world features: how does each candidate feel about the war, the environment, the economy, privacy and citizens' rights, and so on. A "campaign" could just be the publication of a list of positions, and people would have their own beliefs and they could go down the two guys' lists and see who comes closest to doing what they want.

People don't do that.

Apparently the appeal of George W. Bush, when he had appeal, was that he was a guy you'd want to sit down and have a beer with. He's the last kind of obnoxious frat-boy I'd ever want to have a beer with, but apparently a lot of people felt that way about him. Importantly, a lot of people who feel that way would actually cast their vote for the individual to run the entire country based on which candidate they'd most like to have a beer with.

See, we're not in a world of causation any more, where decisions are made by creating logical links between facts. We are now under the rules of the dream-world. They took this buffoon, put him in a flight suit, posed him on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and took his picture. The Commander Codpiece picture represented a nice heroic archetype, that's the way you win votes in the dream world! Do you remember when the President was wearing those weird uniforms, back at the start of the war? Do you remember all the photographs where the Presidential seal or some other round illuminated object was behind his head, so it looked like a halo? The guy was marketed as a dream character and that worked.

Several hundred years ago some philosophers had the insight that you could live your life by the laws of logic. You could put some effort into gathering accurate facts, you could study the chains of causation and learn how to produce desirable effects and avoid undesirable ones. There was an assumption that people would prefer the good over the bad, we'd prefer to live in comfort rather than misery for instance; though sometimes those things were hard to define, it seemed that you could make conscious decisions based on known facts that would guide your life toward prosperity and happiness.

The idea caught on, with many results. The young United States were organized around these kinds of principles of reasonable living, the explosion of technology and science of the past two hundred years or so is a direct consequence of the shift from dream-world thinking to Enlightenment thinking. But it never caught on entirely. First, I think it is possible that the purely rational life leaves something to be desired. Everybody needs love, adventure, thrills, rock and roll. Everybody needs a break in the routine.

But there's more than that. We could rationally build "escape valves" into our social world, and maybe that's what we do with art and music and war and other things. But it would be best to develop a theory of causality that included human behavior, including the tendency to act irrationally sometimes. There is nothing rational about a war, about going into people's houses and raping their children and then killing the whole bunch of them, about bombing city blocks of buildings full of innocent people, but we do it, the American people accept it, in fact nearly half of us think it's a terrific idea. Do we have a way of understanding this sort of thing? How did we accept that an entire country was "evil?" It seems that everybody lives partly in the dream-state and partly rationally, with some people favoring one more than the other, and some societies or Zeitgeists favoring one over the other.

In a rational world language would be algebra. Symbols would be applied to discrete things, verbs would describe their actions and interrelationships, sentences would be formulas. But language is not algebraic, not much at all. Words are not rationally assigned, words come to have meaning and the meanings evolve with time. The words we use today come down from the Romans and the Vikings, they reflect the sounds of our cultural ancestors more than any logical scheme for encoding the world and the things in it. You wouldn't want to speak in algebra, the perpetuation of culture through spoken and written language is not only fun but it is essential to us as persons in ways we can hardly understand.

So rationality has the disadvantage right from the start. Romans and Vikings, great. It seems to me we have to find a way to make rational decisions that take into account the phenomenological richness of real existence as irrational human beings, there's no joy in pretending to be robots but we can use logic to fortify the structure of our lives and to help us make important decisions. There will be catchy archetypes and irresistible images, and there will be rational discussion of the implications of seeing things a certain way.

America has polarized into dream-world people and real-world people, and it is impossible for them to talk to one another. The keyword for the dream-world is "faith," which means "belief without evidence." People who live in that dream-world see a battle between good and evil raging around them, they blow their leaders up into mythical heroes, they see their opponents as disgusting subhuman creatures -- just listen to Anne Coulter talk about "liberals" sometime. I don't know how this happened, but I can see it won't be resolved through discussion and debate; you can't debate a person who clings to beliefs without evidence. In the long run, the superiority of the reasoned life will be demonstrated, I think, and in the short run we just have to fight for what's obvious and right.