varelse – Close Read

Writing itself is fantasy

The symbols may have been laid down on paper or the screen in whatever order but when we read, we read the words one at a time, one after another – linearly. Writing, especially of fiction, is an act of using the linear construction of meaning to tell a story whose message will be assimilated bit by bit into a larger whole that isn’t necessarily linear at all, and manages to evade cognitive biases (like the recency effect) that could trick the reader into paying more attention to parts of the story instead of the intangible yet very-much-there whole. Stories in fact come in many shapes. One of my favourites, Dune, is so good because it’s entirely spherical in the spacetime of this metaphor, each of its concepts like a three-dimensional ouroboros, connected end to end yet improbably layered over, under and around each other. The first four Harry Potter books are my least favourite pieces of good fantasy for their staunch linearity, even despite the use of time travel.

The plot of Embassytown struggles with this idea a little bit, with its fraction-like representation of meaning using pairs of words. Even then, China Miéville has a bit of a climb on his hands: his (human) readers consume the paired words one at a time, first the one on the top then the one on the bottom. So a bit of translation becomes necessary, an exercise in projecting a higher dimensional world in which words are semantically bipolar, like bar magnets each with two ends, onto the linguistic surface of one in which the words are less chimerical. Miéville is forced to be didactic (which he musters with some reluctance), expending a few dozen pages constructing rituals of similes the reader can employ to sync with the Ariekei, the story’s strange alien characters, but always only asymptotically so. We can after all never comprehend a reality that exists in six – or six-thousand – dimensions, much the same way the Higgs boson’s existence is a question of faith if you’re unfamiliar with the underlying mathematics and the same way a human mind and an alien mind can never truly, as they say, connect.

Arrival elevates this challenge, presenting us with alien creatures – the ‘heptapods’ – the symbols of whose communication are circular, each small segment of the circumference standing for one human word and the whole assemblage for meaning composed by a non-linear combination of words. I’m yet to read the book by Ted Chiang on which the film is based; notwithstanding the possibility that Chiang has discussed their provenance, I wonder if the heptapods think a complex thought that is translated into a clump of biochemical signals that then encode meaning in a stochastic process: not fully predictably, since we know through the simpler human experience that a complicated idea can be communicated using more than one combination of simpler ideas. One heptapod’s choice could easily differ from that of another.

The one human invention, and experience if you will, that recreates the narrative anxiety encoded in the Ariekei’s and heptapods’ attempts (through their respective authors’ skills, imagination, patience and whatever else) to communicate with humans is writing insofar as the same anxiety manifests in the use of a lower order form – linearity – to construct a higher order image. Thus from the reader’s perspective the writer inhabits an inferior totality, and the latter performs a construction, an assimilation, by synthesising the sphericity and wholeness of a story using fundamentally linear strands, an exercise in building a circle using lines, and using circles to build a sphere, and so forth.

Writing a story is in effect like convincing someone that an object exists but having no way other than storytelling to realise the object’s existence. Our human eyes will always see the Sun as a circle but we know it’s a sphere because there are some indirect ways to ascertain its sphericity, more broadly to ascertain the universe exists in three dimensions at least locally; the ‘simplest’ of these ways would be to entirely assume the Sun is spherical because that seems to simplify problem-solving. However, say one writer’s conceit is that the Sun really exists in eight dimensions and goes on to construct an elaborate story of adventure, discovery and contemplation to convince the reader that they’re right.

In this sense, the writer would draw upon our innate knowledge of the universe in three dimensions, and our knowledge and experience of the ways in which it and isn’t truthful, to build an emergent higher-order Thing. While this may seem like a work of science and/or fantasy fiction, the language humans use to build all of their stories, even the nonfiction, renders every act of story-telling a similarly architecturally constructive endeavour. No writer commences narration with the privilege of words meaning more than they stand for in the cosmos of three dimensions and perpetually forward-moving time nor sentences being parsed in any way other than through the straightforward progression of a single stream of words. Everything more complicated than whatever can be assembled with two-dimensional relationships requires a voyage through the fantastic to communicate.

The mad world

Kate Wagner writes in The Baffler:

What makes industrial landscapes unique is that they fascinate regardless of whether they’re operating. The hellish Moloch of a petrochemical refinery is as captivating as one of the many abandoned factories one passes by train, and vice versa. That doesn’t mean, though, that all industrial landscapes are created equal. Urban manufacturing factories are considered beautiful—tastefully articulated on the outside, their large windows flooding their vast internal volumes with light; they are frequently rehabilitated into spaces for living and retail or otherwise colonized by local universities. The dilapidated factory, crumbling and overgrown by vegetation, now inhabits that strange space between natural and man-made, historical and contemporary, lovely and sad. The power plant, mine, or refinery invokes strong feelings of awe and fear. And then there are some, such as the Superfund site—remediated or not—whose parklike appearance and sinister ambience remains aesthetically elusive.

One line from my education years that I think will always stick with me was uttered, perhaps in throwaway fashion, by an excellent teacher nonetheless moving on to a larger point: “Ugliness is marked by erasure.” Wagner’s lines above suggest our need for beauty extends even to landmarks of peacetime disaster, such as abandoned factories, railway stations, refineries, etc. because their particular way of being broken and dead contains stories, and lessons, that a pile of collapsed masonry or a heap of trash would not. Apparently there is a beauty in the way they have failed, contained in features of their architecture and design that have managed to rise, or stay, above the arbitrary chaos of unorganised disaster. They are, in other words, haunted by the memory of control.

But as Wagner walks further down this path, in search of the origins of our sense of the picturesque, I’d like to turn back – to an older piece in The Baffler, by J.C. Hallman in September 2016, that questioned the role and purpose of tradition and the influence of scholarship in creating art (as in paintings and stuff). His subject was ‘art brut’, “variously translated as ‘raw,’ ‘rough,’ or ‘outsider’ art” and which stresses “that the work of individual, untutored practitioners trumps all the usual conventions of artistic legacy-building, including the analytic categories of art criticism.” After a helpful prelude – “I prefer dramatic chronicles of the shift from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience” – Hallman elaborates:

… [the painters’] stories … seem calculated to undermine the steady commercial march of art as depicted in high-end auction catalogs[.] In lieu of a stately succession of movements, schools, and styles, art brut gives us an array of butchers and scientists and soldiers and housewives who suddenly went crazy and then produced huge bodies of work—most often for discrete periods of time, three years or eight years or fourteen years—before falling silent and eking out the rest of their isolated, artless lives.

He then draws from the notes of Jean Dubuffet, the French painter, and William James, the American psychologist, to make the case that if only we sidestepped the need for art to be in conversation with other art and/or to respond to this or that perspective on human reality, we could be awakened to shapes, arrangements and layouts that exist beyond what we have been able to explain, and reveal a picture unadulterated by the humans need for control and meaning.

Could this idea be extended to Wagner’s “infrastructural tragedy” as well? That is, whereas a factory embodies the designs foisted by dynamic relationships between demand and supply, and motivated by the storied ambitions of industrialism – and its abandonment the latter’s myopia, hubris and impermanence – what does a structure whose pillars and trusses have been spared the burden of human wants look like? It’s likely such a structure doesn’t exist: no point imposing the violence of our visions upon the world when those visions are empty.

But like the art brut auteurs in Hallman’s exposition, I’m drawn to the question as an ardent world-builder by what I find to be its enigmatic challenge. Just as the brutists’ madness slashed away at the web of method clouding their visions, what questions must the world-builder – the ultimate speculator – ask herself to arrive at a picture whose elements all lie outside anthropogenic considerations as well as outside nature itself? I suppose I am asking if, through this or a similar exercise, it would be possible for the human to arrive at the alien. Well, would it?¹

1. This proposition, and the sense that its answer could lurk somewhere in the bounded cosmology of my psyche, inspires in my mind and consciousness an anxiety and trepidation I have thus far experienced only when faced with H.R. Giger’s art.

Debating the business of beauty in ‘Dreams of a Final Theory’

In his book Dreams of a Final Theory, Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg discusses the various aspects of the journey toward a unifying theory in fundamental physics. One crucial aspect is the aesthetic of such a theory, and Weinberg’s principal contention is that a unifying theory must be beautiful because if it weren’t beautiful, it wouldn’t be final in every sense. However, thinking so presupposes all scientific pursuits are motivated by a quest for beauty – this may not be the case. More importantly, beauty in being a human construction can be fickle and arbitrary, and interfere with the pursuit of science.

We are trained to expect nature to be a certain way and we call that beauty. As a result, we strive for solutions that are beautiful, i.e. commensurate with the way we see nature to be. But if the physicist confesses to you that the problems he chooses to solve are so beautiful, then that implies he thinks the problem is beautiful in its own right and independently of its solution’s beauty. Does this mean problem-solving in fundamental physics is dominated by a selection bias: whereby scientists choose to solve some problems over others because of the way they appeal to their aesthetic sense? Weinberg thinks so, and presents an example of scientists going after an ‘ugly’ problem – the thermal demagnetization of iron and critical exponent associated with it (0.37) – in the hope that it will have a beautiful solution. He writes,

Why should leaders of condensed matter theory give the problem of the critical exponents so much greater priority? I think the problem of critical exponents attracted so much attention because physicists judged that it would be likely to have a beautiful solution.

The result of their selection bias is the emergence of a dividing line between what needs to be studied and what doesn’t, between what knowledge is codified in the form of principles and what knowledge remains as individual facts. There is an obvious conflict with objective rationality here, which guides the fundamental investigations of nature and excludes unreasonable judgments like those backed by one’s sense of beauty. It seems, according to Weinberg, we are all motivated only to discover a beautiful universe – one that appeals to our preexisting convictions of what the universe ought to be – as if we are defining the beauty we feel we are bound to abide by. What else are we doing when we reject ‘ugly’ solutions but rejecting a form of the truth that doesn’t appeal to our sense of beauty²? By Weinberg’s own admission, what constitutes beauty¹ has been changing with the discovery of more truths: just as beauty was a universality among the dynamics of forces in the early 20th century, beauty in the 21st century seems to be the presence of symmetry principles.

Therefore, by making such decisions, we are actively precluding the ‘existence’ of certain kinds of beauty because we are also forestalling the discovery of certain truths. Weinberg defends this by saying that if aesthetic judgments are working increasingly well, it could be because they are applicable – but the contention he does not address at all is that it is an arbitrary mechanism with which to arrive at the truth. We are simply consigning ourselves to understand beauty in different eras as new deviations from previous definitions of beauty, and removing opportunities to understand other³ (i.e. seemingly unrelated) kinds altogether. For example, the physicist who decides that the ‘ugly’ critical exponent of 0.37 must belong to a more beautiful, overarching theory is immediately pigeonholing other seemingly random exponents to the same fate. What if such exponents are indeed ones of a kind – perhaps even part of a much larger renormalization framework that researchers are desperately seeking to make sense of the many ‘fine-tuned’ constants in high-energy physics, rather than buoys of apparently hidden symmetries themselves that lead nowhere?

There are three additions to this discussion (referenced in the paragraph above):

1. Has beauty always been the pursuit of science? Elegance is definitely a part of the pursuit – if not more – because the elegance of natural phenomena is sure to reflect in the natural sciences, to paraphrase Werner Heisenberg. At the same time, Weinberg goes to some length to mark a distinction between beauty and elegance: “An elegant proof or calculation is one that achieves a powerful result with a minimum of irrelevant complication. It is not important for the beauty of a theory that its equations should have elegant solutions.” That said, the answer to this question is unlikely to be short or general for it questions the motivations of scientists over many centuries. At the same time, some of the greatest scientists – typically Nobel Prize winners – have said the quest for beauty has constituted a significant part of their work simply as an abrogation of randomness. Here is Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar writing about the work of Lord Rayleigh in his book, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science:

… after a scientist has reached maturity, what are the reasons for his continued pursuit of science? To what extent are they personal? To what extent are aesthetic criteria, like the perception of order and pattern, form and substance, relevant? Are such aesthetic and personal criteria exclusive? Has a sense of obligation a role? I do not mean obligation with the common meaning of obligation to one’s students, one’s colleagues, and one’s community. I mean, rather, obligation to science itself. And what, indeed, is the content of obligation in the pursuit of science for science?

2. We started with the assumption that beauty is what we have learnt nature to be. Therefore, by saying a problem or a solution doesn’t appeal to our sense of beauty, it only means it doesn’t appeal to what we already know. This attitude is best characterized by the tendency of well-entrenched paradigms to not give way to new ones, to not surrender in the face of new knowledge that they can’t account for. An example I am particularly fond of in this regard is the story of Dan Shechtman‘s discovery of quasicrystals, which went against the grain of Linus Pauling’s theory of crystals at the time.

Before introducing the third point (which is optional): While it is clear that Weinberg is enamored by the prospect of beauty legitimizing the study of fundamental physics, all of science cannot afford to be guided by as fickle a metric because beauty is what we expect nature to be – according to him – and that signifies a persistence with ‘old knowledge’ while discovering ‘new knowledge’. That deprives the scientific method of its objectivity. Also, the classification of knowledge impedes what scientists choose to study and how they choose to study it as well, and judging the legitimacy of knowledge based on its beauty lends itself to a mode of classification that is not entirely rational. Finally, that scientists also wouldn’t reject new knowledge if it was ugly but that beautiful knowledge would find acceptance faster and scrutiny slower is not… proper.

3. Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead provides an interesting way to understand this ‘otherness’. It describes a so-called hierarchy of foreignness to understand how alien a person or object is relative to another, in four stages (quoted from the book): Utlänning, “the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country”; framling, “the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world”; raman, “the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species”; and varelse, “the true alien … which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it.” Similarly, the ‘other’ kinds of beauty we stand to lose, according to Weinberg, are varelse, while we stick to the more fathomable (utlänning, framling and raman) kinds.