Armchair Notes: June 2024 - Armchair Notes

In being true to the name of this blog, here are a few notes about books I’ve finished this month. Along with a few initial impressions of my own, I’ve also included a quote to whet your appetite. In the comments below, let me know:

What you read last month? What you’re looking forward to reading this month?

§ The Odyssey by Homer

Last month I began working my way back through the classics with Homer’s Iliad. Naturally, the next stop on this tour would be the quintessential hero’s journey: The Odyssey. The last time I read this book was about a decade ago; since I was crossing Lake Michigan via ferry, I figured Odysseus would be the best companion to have, as the waves lapped our hull and breeze tossed my hair. Unfortunately, I forgot every time Odysseus gets on a ship, trouble is never far way—shipwrecks, monsters, men overboard, alluring Sirens, angry gods. In hindsight, I couldn’t have chosen a worse book to read on a boat. Thankfully, this time I read it safely on the shores of Lake Michigan during a brilliantly pleasant Fathers Day—my first Fathers Day in fact. As my son gleefully crawled along the hummocks of sand, I couldn’t help but read this story with a new set of eyes: I had forgotten that the first six books aren’t even about Odysseus—they’re about his son, Telemachus, venturing out from home to find his father. During this reading, the story ceased being about a generic hero overcoming random obstacles, and became the story of a father and son working together—even when they’re separated—to bring their home back into order. While I hope my wife is never swarmed by ravenous suitors in my absence, I do hope we can raise a son who can help me rid the house of such vermin, should the need ever arise. Still one of my favorite images is storm-tossed Odysseus finding a night’s sleep in the olive leaves:

Long-enduring great Odysseus, overjoyed at the sight, bedded down in the midst and heaped the leaves around him. As a man will bury his glowing brand in black ashes, off on a lonely farmstead, no neighbors near, to keep a spark alive—no need to kindle fire from somewhere else—so great Odysseus buried himself in leaves and Athena showered sleep upon his eyes. sleep in a swift wave delivering him from all his pains and labors, blessed sleep that sealed his eyes at last.
End of Book V, translation by Robert Fagles

§ A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

The first time I saw this play, my alma mater put on a Bollywood rendition of Shakespeare’s fantasy. The gods and spirits were clothed in vibrant colors, and danced across the stage while hopping on one foot and with the other in the air as their hands gracefully gesture various mudras. How else would a god move? In such a world, where a god could have the head of an elephant, why shouldn’t a man have the head of an ass? Before seeing that production, my main exposure to the Bard’s dream was Dead Poets Society: Neil Perry’s tragic recitation of Puck’s closing apology to the audience has haunted me ever since I was a teenager. After all these experiences—and after my recent reading of the Sonnets in May—I finally sat down and read the play in book form. Ironically, upon closing the book, I found out our local reproduction of the Globe theater had put on a performance of this play the previous weekend. (Don’t you have a local replica of the Globe theater?) In any case, this playful meddling of gods in the lives of mortals served as a refreshing contrast to more bellicose interventions I’ve been seeing my recent rereads of the Trojan epics. What a delightfully surreal evening of imagination this work offers.

More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
Theseus, Act V, Scene 1

§ Myths from Mesopotamia edited by Stephanie Dalley

Recently, I’ve been obsessed with bolstering my foundations in the classics of humanity. Shakespeare owes much to Homer, but Homer also owes much to Gilgamesh. On top of the that, the literary forms of the Bible owe much to the forms of Sumerian and Akkadian myths. Then again, this is easily said and easily disregarded. Most acknowledge this historical and literary indebtness with a polite doffing of their caps to Mesopotamian culture, but the gesture often comes off as dismissive and cold. Few take the time to actually sit down and experience reading these words, which inconceivably reach out to us from over 5,000 years ago. Through a few reed pokes in some dry clay, the people of Mesopotamia “make their voice heard” and we can find ourselves in a world of revolving around sacred beers and sacred cows, decorated in lapis lazuli and lion skins. Here we hear the tales of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, accounts of the world’s creation and its flood, descents into the Underwold, riding eagles to heaven. The stories seem to speak to us from the past in their motifs like a tourist who doesn’t know the local language—repetitively and emphatically, such that we don’t always know what they mean, but we know that whatever they’re saying is important to them, and it might be for us as well. Often, my edition lets me know that there is a “gap of about 72 lines” on a tablet, or there [ ] in the story [ which they sometimes try to ] fill in with their best guesses. Those lacunae were in some sense my favorite parts of the story; they invited me to take a breath and imagine what stories and people might live where cuneiform left off.

To Kurnugi, land of [no return],
Ishtar daughter of Sin was [determined] to go;
The daughter of Sin was determined to go
To the dark house, dwelling in Erkalla’s god,
to the house which those who enter cannot leave,
On the road where travelling is one-way only,
To the house where those who enter are deprived of light,
Where dust is their food, clay their bread.
They are clothed like birds, with feathers.
Over the door and the bolt, dust has settled.
Ishtar, when she arrived at the gate of Kurnugi,
Addressed her words to the keeper of the gate…
Opening of The Descent of Ishtar

§ The Gathas by Zarathustra

Immediately after finishing my collection of Mesopotamian myths, I picked up my copy of the Gathas by Zarathustra (or Zoroaster for you Greeks). Like Mesopotamian culture, I feel Zoroastrianism is also underrated. But the disregard is worse for the Zoroastrians. Whereas Mesopotamian culture survives largely as a collection of curious stories and charming artifacts from a dead civilization, Zoroastrianism is a living religion that still persists and is ignored to this day. Again, people will acknowledge that it is the “first monotheistic religion” with their right hand, but then will supplant the compliment with the left-handed caveat that “it’s really more of a dualistic religion.” In all my years of university studies of theology, I can’t think of any professor or colleague of mine who gave Zarathustra more time than a passing side note. (I admittedly didn’t.) There are many reasons why people don’t take Mazdayasna seriously—historical aversions of the West to anything coming from Persia, eclipsing of the religion by Islam in the Middle Ages, lack of consistent translations or scholarship in the Avestan language, lack of representation by the small scale of Zoroastrian or Parsee communities, etc. In any case, here we come face-to-face with an archetype: the Ancient Near East prophet expounding a moral system—bounded by light and dark, truth and false hood—in a poetic form, which encourages people to pursue “good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.” Without Zarathustra, would we have David’s Psalms or the Wisdom of Solomon? The prophecies of Isaiah or Ezekiel? Would we have the Sermon on the Mount? Naturally, Kahlil Gibran would be out of a job. But even leaving the Middle East out of the question, would we even have the Siddhartha Gautama? Much of the most fascinating work I’ve recently found on Zoroastrianism has come from India, where the Parsee community not persists, but finds itself in constant dialogue with the inheritors of Sanskrit culture. Many there are pointing out how the Avestan and Vedic languages are sister languages, with sister religions and sister cultures. If this is your first time approaching the Gathas, I’d note that the Velazquez translation above is less accessible; he leaves many of the ambiguous Avestan words untranslated and some of the words in between come across as vague. (And not in a mystical kind of way.) Instead, I’d suggest reading Irani’s translation for your first pass; it reads in a familiar and eloquent King James English, as well as being available online for free.

By Thy perfect Intelligence, O Mazda
Thou didst first create us having bodies and
spiritual consciences,
And by Thy Thought gave our selves the power of
thought, word, and deed.
Thus leaving us free to choose our faith at our own will.

§ Christ the Eternal Tao by Hieromonk Damascene Christensen

Readers of the blog will recognize the effect of this book on my writing this past month. The Taoist concepts of the Tao and wu wei have perpetually inspired me, but this book and its prolonged meditation on Taoism and Orthodox mysticism has laid the foundation of these thoughts in me anew. The first half is a retelling of the Gospel in the poetic form of the Tao Te Ching, and the second half is a compendium of mostly Orthodox mystagogical catechesis. The first half contains some very well crafted poetry that handles many philosophical and theological subjects in a simple yet evocative tone. The latter part is about eighty percent comprised of quotes from various elders. As someone who’s read many of these quotes before, I feel the second half could’ve been a more systematic synthesis—at times it feels if the author felt juxtaposing enough quotes from Lao Tzu and the Fathers would make the point by mere proximity. (In some ways, that approach succeeds in a way.) In any case, it served as a great jumping off point for my own reflections on hesychasm, wu wei, and dispassionate prayer which you can read here:

Beneath the clouds is the ground we call sorrow.
This sorrow is our earth, the dust of the ground,
The very substance of life.
Unlike the clouds, it is solid and firm.
Beneath the earth are hidden reservoirs of water,
And this water we call joy,
A joy deeper than the happiness of the clouds.
But this water may not come to the surface of its own accord.
Therefore one must labor to dig the ground of sorrow
In order to tap it.
Ennead 8, Chapter 72

§ Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis

This book gets better and better every time I read it. It’s probably the fifth time I’ve read it and I plan on reading it again many more times in my lifetime. As far as I’m concerned this is one of the best novels to deal with wrestling with God and oneself, having grievances against the world as it stands, religion and bitterness. My reading of Orual is both pathetic and sympathetic—she’s painfully miserable and unfortunately familiar. On this reading, I particularly enjoyed how Lewis identifies Ungit’s “old religion” of earth and bloody sacrifices and the “new religion” of Psyche’s (Istra) the rebirth through lamentations; the allegory with the Old and New Testaments is clear, but the context of the story allows for much meditation on how those two are different sides of the same story. If Orual is both Ungit and Psyche, I feel we are all Orual.

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

§ Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

Despite the fact that I finished nine books this month (while also reading others), I have to admit reading did not come naturally to me. Drawing and music were my interests as a kid, and I’ve always accumulated books faster than I can read them. Even when I want to read, sometimes it comes off as a chore; it can take a couple pages for me to screw my reading brain on. This book did a great job of reminding me that even if reading is a ubiquitous phenomenon, it’s not a natural one. Our brains orchestrate various mental systems to pull of the act of reading: the scanning of the eyes, the deprioritizing peripheral visual information surrounding the page, the physical and neurological stimulation of the imagination, the spatial-temporal storing of these experiences in the memory. All of these psychological functions exist in nature. But books don’t. Reading is one of the most fascinating adaptations we humans have ever pulled off. (Instrumental music might be other top candidate on my list.) In this book, Wolf covers a lot of ground in the opening chapters concerning neurology, the history language and the book, orality and literacy, memory, and imagination. Her specialization in dyslexia makes up much of the latter half, which I might boil down to this startling thesis: since reading is an unnatural habit, the dyslexic person is actually the natural one—the reading brain is one exercising an abnormal adaptation after all. On top of all of that, this work is also a commonplace quotes from great authors and thinkers on reading and the mind. Upon closing it, I’m particularly inspired to read Socrates’ critiques of the written word and Proust’s reflections on reading and his own bookish arts in Days of Reading.

There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain’s astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. Underlying the brain’s ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. […] we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs.

§ The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens by Philip Ball

As someone who studied cognition in his graduate studies, I’m very excited to see philosophy of mind be such a hot topic of conversation these days. The advent of large language models and the scripts and algorithms which we are tempted to call “artificial intelligence” have everyone wondering: what exactly is a mind? Ball has done a great service to this conversation buy giving a comprehensive survey of the current status quaestione: Uexküll, Dennett, Damasio, Koch, McGilchrist, Hofstadter, Hart, Nagel, Asimov, Bergson, Turing, Darwin—even Lucian of Samosata. In many ways, mindedness comes off as a question of degree, and those degrees find themselves laid out across a spectrum. In these cases, Ball employs a useful diagram to map out the “Space of Possible Minds,” which might include properties like Experience on the Y axis and Agency on the X axis. A fetus and a frog might be midway on experience but low in agency; a robot may be midway on agency but low on experience; dogs and infants are high in experience but low in agency; God is high in agency an low in experience. (All that impassibility and such.) Meanwhile, we rank ourselves—of course—the highest in both agency and experience. But Ball measures the Space of Possible Minds with different values and expands this space to account for other seemingly minded beings, covering everything from octopodes to aliens. (Assuming they are, in fact, different things.) However, not everything is a question of degree for Ball. While he seems quite ready to attribute consciousness of some sort to any biological entity, he’s not a panpsychist who would say that rocks have their own a way of thinking. Above all, he is emphatically not one of those futurists who thinks that robots, algorithms, or anything we might call “artificially intelligent” can be said to have a “silicon-based consciousness.” My main takeaway from Ball’s Book of Minds is that consciousness is a quality of life, it is a reflective quality of living beings navigating their environments, reconstituting themselves and growing through autopoiesis. (Thus, his most recent book, How Life Works, is high on my list of books to read next.) Since machines are assemblages of disparate parts, lacking any intrinsic or vital unity, they cannot have that encompassing center where we find experience. Likewise, since machines are animated from without—being subject to the external forces of electrical impulses and or other inputs—they lack the self-moving agency which would give them a mode of being in a world. It is precisely that “way of being like something” which Ball identifies as consciousness.

Lets be dear: every robot and computer ever built (on this plane) is mindless. I feel slightly uneasy, in asserting this, that I might be merely repeating the case against animal minds that I have so deplored in the earlier chapters. All the same I think the statement is true, or would at least be generally regarded as such by experts in the field. Siri and Alexa do not feel bad when you are peremptory to or mocking of them, because they are not personalities but just Al algorithms. Today’s robots do not need rights or moral consideration. If we throw them on the scrapheap, the only guilt we should feel is at the waste of materials and energy that went into making them and despoiling the planet in the process.

§ Der, Die, Das: The Secrets of German Gender by Constantin Vayenas

This should be an essential book for any German student. Vayenas lays out some very consistent categories that help organize nouns: inland bodies of water and precipitation are masculine; things having to do with authority or time are feminine; colors and materials are neuter. But its the patterns of morphology and sounds that were the most interesting part to me. For example, if it ends in –auch or –aum, it’ll be masculine (der Bauch, der Baum, etc); if it ends in –icht, it will be feminine (die Sicht, die Licht, etc); however, it will be neuter if it has the Ge– prefix (das Gedicht, das Gesicht, etc). A lot of these patterns I’ve intuited, but it’s so handy to have a clear compendium that brings so many of them together in one book. If you’re a student of German at all, buy this book and save yourself years of fumbling.

The German brain has, therefore, been programmed to assign a gender to German nouns, based on years of exposure. They don’t why their brain comes up with allocating a gender to fake words, which is the same gender that most of the others are also selecting – they just do it. They can’t explain what determines gender, they just know it. This book familiarizes you, the foreign student of German, with the what, the why, and the how of gender, i.e. with the “coding” by which the German brain selects gender for words.