An infinite stochastic novel

This is (probably) the start of an infinite stochastic novel.

The genre is not new – Italo Calvini writes them, but I’ve only just realised this.

Let me explain. A finite novel , the usual sort, has an end which is to some extent planned and predicted. You might not know when you start writing what it is, or how long the novel will be, but the idea of an end is always somewhere at the back of your mind. “The end” casts its influence over the writing. The novel will either get abandoned or it will get published, or it will fall into some sort of limbo in which .. . Ah! the infinite stochastic novel (ISN) is already starting to creep in and undermine the classic novel.

Let me try again to explain. Putting “infinite” and “stochastic” together speaks of something that might go on indefinitely, but with decreasing probability for an increasing length. So this ISN has, let us say, a probability of 50% of not getting beyond the end of this page. But it might be said to have a teeny weeny probability of getting to, let us say, 100 pages. It’s a liberating concept because I am freed from the tyranny of the end, hanging over enterprise like an executioners axe. I could write about “probability” means here (prior, Bayesian , frequency-defined …?) but that’s too much.

Of course an ISN has to be written in a blog, and now – at last – I start to see the point of blogs. You folks out there (none of whom, I suspect, are reading this) knew this all the time, of course. Because of its uncertainty, and the possibility of going back and editing it, it’s possible to start.

This whole enterprise, fizzling out or flaring up, began a few hours ago lying awake in bed wondering how the RailEurope website could so hopeless at delivering route schedules. You can type in any two places in Europe, and a date, press “Go”, and, Bingo! a message appears after about a minute telling you that there are no available routes for this; which in most cases you know is a downright lie. So how would I design the perfect RailEurope website? Obviously there would need to be a background process finding all sort so routes in the middle of the night and caching them to be retrieved when required. And the actual algorithm … ah, that’s occupied the last few hours nicely. It would probably be based on a finite recursive graph (a “graph” in the mathematical sense of something like a fishing net) where any node (i.e. knot in the net) could be expanded into a little net of its own. An then it would be extended in time, say at 1 minute intervals, to become a space-time graph. That’s where the possibility of infinite graphs came in. But the randomness, stochasticity, was essential. There’s surely a 50% (at most) probability that the human race will have become extinct in 1000 years – during which any train that might have been chugging round and round this network like a super-convoluted London circle line, would have fallen to pieces. But there again, it’s just conceivable otherwise.

It was in the small hours, and I kept realising it would be pleasant to go to sleep, and I used the techniques I knew, breathing, mantras, being wafted on the gentle sound of my partner’s breath … but these trains circling their recursive grids kept intervening. Back to meditation, and seeing by thoughts, as they were dropped one by one, building up into a pile of quite rich loam, suitable, perhaps, for growing cucumbers on, black like the mysterious gunge that surrounded the candle in the pub where we dined last night. MS Word doesn’t know “gunge”. So this ISN was starting to sprout from this compost heap even as I wafted into and out of sleep.

Yes, novels need characters. Though we could maybe stretch the point … I’m a character, and RailEurope. Hmm. The insidious solipsism of the mathematician starts creeping in here. And novels perhaps should be interesting. But – liberation! – only stochastically.  Maybe someone out there (out of the two that might glance at this) will have a non-zero probability of finding this interesting. After all, you’ve got this far already, though you’ve probably skipped en route. But we allow that in an ISN. You make the rules up as it goes along.

Most of my blogs so far have been thoroughly worthy. They have passed the obsessive moral code impressed indelibly by my mother that we are here to Do Good, and so have emerged, polished (to some extent) into the light of day. Might this be a different, subversive blog (a redundant phrase – I’m realising that it is the nature of the blog to be subversive: subversive of all the strictures of the ordinary novel: the requirement that parenthetical remarks have to be limited, terminated, stacked, is possible avoided. Hmm]

So the ISN, living in the present (except that the present is allowed to get up every so often and check out the past or future), freed from the trammels of plot, beginning and ending, can dig little holes and explore all sorts

of

formats to its heart’s content.

How many are the wars that have been fought over “land”: Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh … endless. I’ve just returned from a very brief trip to São Paolo, Brazil, which has left me thinking about land.

As I came out of the airport there, I felt a buzz of excitement at the unfamiliarity of it all – the trees, the birds, the language — all new and delightfully striking. Of course it could truthfully be said that I didn’t see Brazil at all. I didn’t visit its forests, its waterfalls, I hardly sampled its food, I didn’t dance with its people. I was a stranger. But its impression was still strong.

Now, returning to the UK, walking through a cool overcast September day with a touch of drizzle in the air (weather the Irish call “soft”) and hearing the songs of the everyday birds – blackbirds, robins – I am elated in a different way. Not excited but enlarged, joyful and of course at home. So I started to wonder if this helped me to understand these wars, fought by people who would spill their own and other’s blood defending the integrity of a homeland.

When some time ago, I listened to a radio interview of a women from a contested country (I now forget which) I was startled by the passionate love she felt over her country, and how, in consequence, the thought of someone declaring it to be part of Russia (or Serbia or wherever), was an unspeakable outrage. My first reaction was astonishment – I could not imagine how I could feel that about my country. Now, however, I realise that, in a way, I do feel like that about my land. The difference is that, in the case my land (the land I walk over daily, across the common, through Hut Wood …) I couldn’t care less if someone were to declare it part of Russia. The trouble is that in so many places love of land (and for that matter love of language, love of traditions, and many other loves) are now all linked in with countries, and countries are large masses with rigid borders. The borders separate “us” from “them” and when pockets of “us” drift into pockets of “them”, or when “they” forcibly occupy parts of “us”, then all too often injustice raises its head and history and myth are brought in to fuel an escalating nationalistic tension.

In earlier times and in other places things were, I believe, more subtle. It appears that, even today, for the first peoples of Australia the land is one vast story-book and there is always a consciousness that “my land” is only a local chapter in this story: a necessary chapter, without which the whole would be incomplete, but a chapter that only makes sense as part of the whole. And among settled peoples there was surely still much of this awareness of continuity and connection, even though “my land” then had the stronger sense of the land where I and my forebears had planted olive groves and dug irrigation channels, land that I would indeed perhaps defend for the sake of the livelihood of my clan, but not for a myth of nationhood.

I wonder if it was only our separation from the land that led to unbridled passion for the country. When the empires of the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the rest arose with their centralising cities, their administrative cadres, their armies and their priestly cliques, then “my land” was the bread basket with its disempowered peasants. It was the elites who then constructed a passion for the country from stories of the past, often revolving around gods of the sky and the mountain tops, estranged from the rhythms of cultivation in the valleys.

I think it’s time we rediscovered the land and worried less about the country.

I have just walked through part of the ‘City of London’, from Finsbury Square to the Tate Modern gallery. I passed the hall where a couple of years ago I helped to organise a day conference on ‘Earth is Community’, and I recalled how, in the course of what was in fact an excellent conference lecture, Satish Kumar had causally referred to our surroundings there as a ‘concrete jungle’.

The phrase is normally reserved for a place of densely packed impersonal housing where harsh surroundings and lack of any social provision produce a breakdown into ubiquitous violence. Ironically, nothing could have been further from the truth with this conference venue. We were in ‘The Barbican’, a recently built complex integrating good quality housing, art galleries, concert halls, crèches and the well equipped school where the conference was being held, all surrounding a large ornamental lake planted with plenty of vegetation. It was a symbol of just how far London had come from an earlier time when a ‘concrete jungle’ was indeed encroaching.

Of course, there is still far to go. All cities (which we will need for as long as the world’s population is as high as at present) need to start providing their own food from their hinterland or from gardens within them; they need to move to architecture and waste systems that don’t squander energy; and above all they need to enshrine social equality. But nonetheless in London the concrete, of which there is plenty, is being put to inspiring use. The rebuilt courtyards around St Paul’s cathedral, where my walk then took me, reflect the dignity and proportions of that architectural masterpiece. ‘St Paul’s Churchyard’, in particular, carries in the arches of a surrounding colonnade a profoundly affecting sequence of carved angel heads by Emily Young. These elemental beings anciently stand forth from the rock strata that over aeons rose and fell around them. Now in this courtyard their mysterious presence carries a meaning beyond our seeing or hearing. Their otherness reminds me that the goal of love is love the other as other, as well as myself.

This concrete and quarried stone reminded me of an essay on technology by the philosopher  Heidegger that I’m currently reading. He is insistent both on the spiritual dangers of technology and on its importance to the nature of being human. Its importance comes from its essence, which lies in humanity’s election, as a species, to ground its being in making things – in the manipulation and ordering of our surroundings, so that they become ‘environment’. The danger of technology, according to Heidegger, is that we forget this essence of technology in ourselves and become blind to the presence of the multitude of other beings that make up our ‘environment’. Everything then seems to be a human construct. “It seems,” he writes, “as though [humans] everywhere and always encounter only [themselves].” We see this delusion today in those astronomers who, blind to the ‘other’, ask “are we alone in the universe?” and set their radio telescopes to look for traces of humanoid beings in other stellar systems.

We are fortunate indeed to have artists like Emily Young who’s spirit is guiding us to a wholesome appreciation of our place in the universe.

Last night I had been listening to a news report on the politics of Rwanda which charted the way in which good intentions had started to be undermined by corruption and repression – a drift into the camp of countries like USA, Iran, Israel … who commit the worst possible crime: that of destroying the nature of law itself. Law is the means by which society breaks the cycles of vengeance which otherwise drag us into chaos. I am convinced that the transition from vengeance to justice was the greatest step in human history. It can be seen in the Jewish development of the concept (tsedeq) as it starts to appear in the Psalms (perhaps 7th century BCE), stressing the establishment of a right order of things in which the poor were protected. And for me it finds a definitive statement for the Western world in the Eumenides of Aescylus in the fifth century BCE. But some 2500 years later, after Jesus had moved even further with his teaching on love, the majority of newspapers in the UK are filled with vitriolic articles putting forward vengeance in the name of justice, as if we had learnt nothing since the dawn of humanity.

So I drifted to sleep with pessimistic thoughts and awoke under a weight of awareness of human viciousness. I thought of the way in which, as law recedes from the collective consciousness, so violence in the support of greed (and of addiction and despair) flows in. Well meaning systems, both religious and secular, have held back this threatened tide with rational legal structures, but rationality is a weak thing in the face of the deeper parts of our mind. And that is where spirituality lies. The prophets, both recognised and unrecognised, of each age and each community call their people to open their eyes, to see the vision of rightness both in the fabric of the universe and inside themselves. Rightness/justice is not “fairness”, nor the absence of suffering, but a living consciousness of the intrinsic value of every being, from the scores of baby frogs emerging from our pond this month, most of them destined to perish in the weeks ahead, to the mountains of Wales which we shall be visiting soon, with their roots sinking deep into the crust, surviving humanity’s tearing at them for slate and no doubt destined to outlive humanity when our species goes to extinction like all others. All are wonders at which we can rejoice. And, unlike the frogs and mountains, we can if we wish then bring in our amazingly powerful rationality to help maintain this justice, this right order, in our planet.

Earlier this week I was scanning a series of quoted letters giving opinions for and against holding Tai Ji classes in a church hall. For some, Tai Ji was a covert conspiracy to ensnare Christians into evil; for others it was a healthy exercise of mind and body, entirely appropriate for a church hall offered for community use.  It was fascinating to see how both sides were using the same methods of handling language. The Christian fundamentalist group looked at words associated with Tai Chi to demonstrate that Tai Ji was linked with them and therefore bad, while the liberal Christian group did the same thing to demonstrate that it was linked with us and therefore good.  One writer, for example, affirmed (on what grounds?) that Tai Ji contained a hidden teaching, that the word “occult” also meant “hidden”, and that “occult” was a label for some non-Christian practices. So, putting all this together, Tai Ji was to do with them and evil. Rational thought, evidence or experience hardly got a look-in.

It was apparent that here language was no longer a way of conveying or discovering information. It had broken free from the actual world and had become a collection of symbols for distinguishing an in-group from an out-group.

Sadly, a great deal of God-talk is just this; free-wheeling language serving only to give the hearers a cozy feeling of being in rather than out. Which is why it is so refreshing to go on a retreat and listen, either from dedicated teachers or from readings of the classics, to people who are talking about what they have experienced, and who for evidence are calling on the intimations of spirituality that we all have in our own experience.

Much of being human seems to be to do with keeping our language (whether spoken inwardly to ourselves or outwardly to others) in contact with our experience, with our genuine knowing. When language looses touch with experience and becomes a tool of our emotions, the result is chaos or even warfare – within ourselves or within society.

I confess I’ve had a problem with people wearing dark glasses or niqabs. In the past I’ve always given passers-by at least a quick glance in the eye, which is my way of acknowledging that they are fellow humans like me and welcome in my world. But a month or so ago someone pointed out to me how culturally-bound this was, and that in some cultures looking in the eye was as intimate as going up and embracing them in our culture. Ah! now I realise … So it makes a lot of sense to cover your face, if you don’t want to be visually hugged all the time but are proud to declare your faith.

I was reminded of this just now when jogging across the common. This is new for me. In the past I’ve occasionally tried it (recognising my woeful state of fitness) and – because this is the first deliberate “exercise” I’ve ever done in my life – I started gradually, alternately running and walking. Since the other occupants of the common at 7.30 am were all either dog-walking or jogging I always felt uncomfortable engaging in an Unrecognised Activity. A couple of weeks ago, however, it clicked what jogging was (as opposed to running) : modest steps so that you could turn the energy up or down at will. In addition I donned a T-shirt and sweat pants, and Yea!! I’m one of them. Yes, I know I’m a bit paranoid, and no one else could care less because they were all listening to their I-things anyway; but I put on my temporary identity and felt fine.

I’m lucky in having a very fulfilling and pretty weird main identity (mathematician-cum-philosopher with strong interests in mysticism and circle dancing) which I’m perfectly happy with. Now these thoughts are making me aware of the difficulty of those whose off-the-peg identity is starting to get a bit threadbare.

This raises thoughts about the “real self” – what’s left after you’ve taken off all these garments. But I’m inclined to agree with Ibsen’s metaphor in the play “Peer Gynt”. Taking off identities is like peeling the layers off an onion: when you’re finished, there’s nothing left.

Spare a thought for us self-tortured intellectuals. While many Christians are unencumbered by the need to pin everything down clearly, I am constantly perplexed in reconciling the resonant symbolism of Christianity with my vocation to engage the rational mind as well.

Take the “Jesus Prayer”, which I’ve already referred to in an earlier post, with the (abbreviated) Greek words “Kyrie Iesou Christe, eleison”: “Lord, Jesus Christ have mercy”, where the word “mercy/eleison” is tempered by its traditional (but unevidenced) association with “anointing”. What, for a scientist, is the relation between the universal Christ-consciousness (kyrie) and the in-dwelling image of the human Jesus? (The central paradox of Christianity.) It occurred to me this morning that there was a clue in the well known story by the 12th century Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar of the “Conference of Birds” (or, as Anne Baring renders it, “The Flight of the Birds to Union”). The punch-line of the story [scroll away here if you intend to read it and don't want the ending to be spoiled] occurs when a party of thirty birds finally finish their arduous pilgrimage to visit the King of the Birds, the Simurgh. Exhausted, starving and almost featherless they drag themselves into the audience chamber of the Simurgh, to find it empty. Empty, that is, apart from 30 birds, or in Persian “si murgh”. They have in fact found what they sought, and know it as themselves.

This helped me to touch the core of this Christian paradox, that the universal  Christ-consciousness is the same as the ultimate essence of humanity hidden way down in myself, and the same as the more-than-human which, in moments where reality breaks through, is present in a community. Indeed, you might even say, creator, infant and spirit, respectively.

William Blake’s poem Auguries of innocence begins:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

I was reminded of this today while chanting the “Magnificat” (the song of Mary). Each interval between the pitch of one note and the next is up for exploration by me: a fraction larger, a fraction smaller, and the emotional quality of the chant shifts between light and dark like the shadows of thin clouds passing the sun.  In addition there is the shape of the note’s sound: its variation in intensity, pitch and emotional quality from start to finish. Each successive note that arrives opens in offering a little universe of possibility, and is succeeded by another such universe.

It is the same when sitting still out of doors gazing at the wild vegetation before me: seeing the diversity of plants, then the diversity of the shapes of each leaf and stem, the varied communities of insects swarming over each one, and continuing in imagination into the endless layers of microscopic detail that we know are there: the inner cosmos of the world “out there” calling to the world “in here”, in me. And, as the religious traditions remind me, these worlds are ultimately the same world: “that art thou”.

Hope is starting to dawn for me. Hope in the sense of what emerges “beyond optimism” (the book title by the political Buddhist Ken Jones), when optimism has been unmasked.

Yes, I’ve been having a gloomy time. Hardly a day goes past without a reminder of the continuing, and at times growing, presence of “climate denial”, fuelled by an amazing ignorance of what has been established in the vast body of climate research over the last 15 years, the widespread feelings of fear and mistrust that lead people to believe charlatans rather thinking for themselves, and a culture of self-seeking greed. I found myself deciding, in the face of this, that the best the human race could for, after the first wave of mass population deaths, was the decline of Homo Sapiens into a minor species scratching a living in a few fertile patches. I had reconciled myself to such a fade-out, while not ruling out continual cycles of expansion through greed and ingenuity followed by collapse and self-destruction. The problem is fundamental: most popular religion is spiritually bankrupt; in its place we think we can force through the changes needed by controlling and dominating each other and the world, while failing to see that it is impossible for humans to live while ignoring the non-rational part of our nature.

Yet (as I argued in my last post) this part of us is not only the source of violence or insanity but also the source of love and wisdom. So we need to paint a picture, tell a story, of what the earth could be like if we turned back to the times and places in our history when the intuitive and the rational (right brain / left brain, implicational system / propositional system) worked together. In the past such windows of grace were limited to a particular class in a particular region — Classical Athens, Ashoka’s India, the Renaissance … Now it can be global; indeed with what we now know and can do there is no other way. We have a few pictures of what might be, but they are idiosyncratic and partial (e.g. Ben Okri’s Astonishing the Gods, Sally Gearhart’s The Wanderground). So we need to start dreaming, beginning with dreaming  a new relationship with Gaia, who can teach us much of what we need to know. We have immense capacities to love, to love each other and the Earth.  I think we can now start to dream our way forwards in the hope that this can give us.

This information has been rediscovered every generation or so for at least the last 2500 years. Each culture has expressed it in different ways, and so their commonality hasn’t been recognised, but now I think it’s time that it became fully recognised and taken into account. It concerns a basic polarity in ourselves, in how we come to know the world and hence in how the world appears to us.

I’m going to name some significant landmarks in this process:

St Paul (who was very hung up on morality) expressed it in terms of “flesh” and “spirit”: “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh and these are contrary the one to the other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” (Galatians 5:17 and many similar instances.)

Mediaeval Western thought expressed it in terms of “body” and “soul”, though this was confused by not knowing what came under which of these headings, and where to fit “spirit” into the picture. Descartes (1637 etc.) tried to tidy it up with res extensa (physically extended stuff) and res cogitans (thinking stuff) — trying to grasp the same thing, but still not really getting the point.

In 1945 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, developing a strand of philosophy called phenomenology, formulated this polarity in terms of the interaction between our rational thinking and our immediate sensory immersion in the world, mediated by our body. In 1997 David Abram wrote The Spell of the Sensuous emphasising  the importance of uniting with the world  holistically, through our senses; and he linked the progressive weakening of our ability to do this to human cultural change from spoken to written language. In 1998 Leonard Shlain in The Alphabet versus the Goddess argued that this cultural/linguistic shift corresponded to a shift in emphasis from the way the right hemispheres of the brain views the world to the way the left hemisphere views it, though this was based on a very narrow range of experimental data regarding the hemispheres.

Meanwhile, understanding of our ways of knowing the world increased with the advance of experimental psychology, and in 1993 John Teasdale and Philip Barnard (in Affect Cognition and Change) derived from this experimental work an effective (though necessarily highly simplified) model for how the human mind functioned. It was as if  the mind was run by two independent meaning-making systems, which they called the “Implicational” and “Propositional” systems.

Most recently, in 2009, Ian McGilchrist in his monumental The Master and his Emissary has brought the whole thing together, drawing on a vast body of research into the the two hemispheres of the brain and into cultural change. This isn’t the last word (in particular, the post-1960 work just alluded to needs linking more closely with McGilchrist’s work), but it is now clear that there is a fundamental polarity built into human knowing, and expressed in the nature of the world as it appears to us. This polarity can, and often does, reach the point of a disabling internal conflict within the individual and within society. The two poles involved are, very roughly:

1. Rational — language-based, precise, analytic, thinking sequentially, divorced from immediate experience (left hemisphere, propositional system).

2. Intuitive — sensation-based, holistic, integrating experience in parallel, rooted in relationship with the world and with other beings (right hemisphere, implicational system).

Humanity is in extreme peril because Western culture leads us to divorce these two ways of human knowing, leading to a collective insanitiy.