Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 9

two quotations on the effects of phones

Mary Gaitskill:

It is harder than it seems to accurately and evocatively “see” the world through a character’s eyes. It is even harder if your own eyes are so often fixed on a tiny screen that you barely register what is actually happening in front of you.  I have seen people walk into traffic while scrolling on their phones.  I have nearly walked off a sidewalk platform that suddenly came to an end because I was scrolling on my phone.  I know, everyone knows, that traffic accidents have happened because of people screwing around on their phones. 

But there are more subtle effects.  Fifteen years ago, even ten years ago, when I took a long walk, either in the city or in the natural world, it was a kind of mediation that happened without my trying.  I became wholly absorbed in what was around me, in textures and shapes, in the human imprint of buildings, sidewalks, backyards, grasses, trees, fungus, worn roads, crushed leaves.  It was a profoundly calming and rejuvenating reminder of the greater world and my own animal connection with it.  When I go for walk now, it is different: even if I only look at my phone once or twice, the experience, while still soothing, is not as deep. My consciousness is kept from full absorption in the physical world by its neurological attunement to the electronic portal in my pocket — or back in my house, if I didn’t even bring the thing with me.  My bodily connection to the environment is thus weakened.  And I cannot believe I am the only one being affected in this way.

Ross Barkan:

I think, watching these children from afar, that almost none of them are going to conceive the next Pet Sounds or Song of Solomon or Mulholland Drive. For all the obsessing modern parents do over the fates of their children, they’re happy to toss out an iPad or a smartphone or a Nintendo Switch and let their boys and girls melt, slowly, in the blue light. A person close to me once suggested that wardens should start giving prisoners iPhones because there’s nothing that will more rapidly pacify an unruly and restless population. If iPhones were teleported back in time to the twentieth century, would we have a twentieth century? Much of the mass culture then, high and middle, was birthed, with little exaggeration, in unremarkable New York City public schools. Here’s one era: Paul Simon (Forest Hills HS ‘59, with Art Garfunkel), Carole King (James Madison HS ‘58), Barbra Streisand (Erasmus Hall HS ‘59), Neil Diamond (Lincoln HS ‘58, and attended Erasmus with Streisand), Barry Manilow (Easten District HS ‘61), David Geffen (New Utrecht HS ‘60), and Tony Visconti (New Utrecht HS ‘60). Gerry Goffin went to the more selective Brooklyn Tech and graduated in 1957. Lou Reed grew up in the nearby Long Island suburb of Freeport and graduated Freeport High in 1959. If you’re looking for literary lions, the city public schools have a few, including Arthur Miller (Lincoln HS ‘32), James Baldwin (attended DeWitt Clinton HS), Cynthia Ozick (Hunter College HS ‘46), and Norman Mailer (Boys High ‘39). This is not an argument for sending your precious offspring to neighborhood New York schools — no school anywhere has magic genius fairy dust to make your child into a generational talent — but it is a reminder that these men and women all had parents who behaved very differently than today’s spiritual technocrats. All of these giants, in their youth, had time to dream — and dream grandly. What kind of time do children have now?

handwritten moods

One of things I most enjoy about doing archival research on writers is the discovery of their handwriting. C. S. Lewis wrote beautifully when he wanted to, though sometimes he was rushed and that affected legibility. But the Wade Center has Lewis’s copy of George Herbert’s collected poems, and in the back pages he has very carefully prepared a thematic index to the poems. It’s lovely to look at; perhaps Lewis felt that Herbert deserved his best. (And if you want to see how Lewis’s handwriting changed over the years, see this PDF.) 

Auden’s hand is at best difficult to read, at worst — in his poetic notebooks — absolutely illegible. Edward Mendelson, who knows that hand better than anyone alive, has told me that he thinks Auden sometimes wasn’t trying to be legible, even to himself: he was merely using the action of writing to clarify certain choices of word and phrase and rhythm. 

I’ve looked through hundreds of letters written by Dorothy L. Sayers, and it’s been fascinating to note the ways her handwriting develops. When she was an adolescent schoolgirl at the Godolphin School in Salisbury, she had a somewhat cramped and upright way of writing; almost as soon as she got to Somerville College, Oxford that changed: she adopted a looser, more freely flowing style, one with a certain horizontal energy. 

Most of the surviving letters are to her parents, and she’s often apologizing for delay in answering their letters to her, and emphasizing her busyness. (She almost always addresses them collectively as “Dearest people,” and calls her mother simply “Mother”; her father, however, that dignified parish pastor in the Church of England, is to his only child “Tootles.” It’s interesting that when she wrotes only to her mother she is almost always more sober and serious than when she writes to the two of them, or to Tootles alone. I find it difficult to avoid the feeling that she is very much Papa’s girl.) 

Perhaps the rush of her life helps to explain the loose flowing lines of her letters to them, but one thing seems quite clear to me: the loose, flowing hand is associated not just with hurry but also with happiness. Vera Brittain, who knew her at Somerville, referred to her as a “bouncing exuberant female,” and that comes across in her handwriting when she’s happy. When she is going through harder times, through romantic disappointments or vocational uncertainties or just plain poverty, her handwriting is neater, more uniform, more under control. I wouldn’t be surprised if her parents could tell her frame of mind just from looking at a page of one of her letters, before they had read even a word of it. 

Sometimes she signs off with a huge sweeping “D.”

As she gets older her handwriting becomes much more consistent, no longer vacillating according to her mood. It is more like the “unhappy” hand of her youth than the “happy” hand, but I don’t think she was less happy as she aged. She just became slightly less exuberant, slightly more settled. Or that’s how I read it anyway. 

These are my interpretations, not the facts. They are based on more than feelings, though: one of those unhappy letters is signed “Yours in disgust, Dorothy” — and then, written below the signature, “What a cross letter!” 

And I can’t help thinking … Almost all of my correspondence — sent and received — has been typed. It is therefore informationally poor, lacking in richness and density, in comparison to the correspondence of the writers I work on. (Though it should be said that letters typed on a typewriter have more character than those printed from a modern printer or having a digital existence only.) I suspect that if I had big folders of letters from friends I’d look through them fairly often; searching Gmail does not promise the same reward. 

two quotations from The Economist on AI

Can people be persuaded not to believe disinformation?:

Dr [Thomas] Costello believes chatbots work where humans fail because they offer rational responses instead of letting emotions get the better of them. What’s more, they are able to comb through their extensive training data to offer precise counter-arguments, rather than the generalised ones humans often reach for in debates.

Researchers lift the lid on how reasoning models actually “think”:

When Claude itself is asked to reason, printing out the chain of thought that it takes to answer maths questions, the microscope suggests that the way the model says it reached a conclusion, and what it actually thought, might not always be the same thing. Ask the llm a complex maths question that it does not know how to solve and it will “bullshit” its way to an answer: rather than actually trying, it decides to spit out random numbers and move on. Worse still, ask a leading question — suggesting, for instance, that the answer “might be 4” — and the model still secretly bullshits as part of its answer, but rather than randomly picking numbers, it will specifically insert numbers that ultimately lead it to agree with the question, even if the suggestion is wrong. 

These stories were posted just a few days apart. It’s comical to me how many AI researchers act as though the hallucinations and bullshitting simply don’t exist. Also: LLMs are not rational or irrational or emotional or anything else that human beings are. They are the conduits, thanks to their corpora, of human rationality or irrationality or emotionalism. 

assumptions

Sam Kahn:

That is the real existential dread of our age, that the stable value of the book is breaking down and the continuity between eras is dependent largely on whether Apple chooses to keep updating the Cloud or whether posterity is able to play an mp3. For people who are serious writers or creators, that’s really the question at the moment — who are they writing for or trying to transmit to? — since the assumption, a safe assumption for a couple of thousand years, that the people of the future would be readers, is no longer so reliable. 

Is that what Virgil assumed? And Augustine? And Dante? — That “the people of the future would be readers”? If Kahn had said “there would be readers in the future” he’d have been on safer ground. Since they lived in societies in which perhaps one percent of the adult population were sufficiently literate to read a long treatise or poem, none of them expected wide readership: serious literacy had never been common and there was absolutely no reason to think it ever would become so. (One percent is probably a high estimate.)  Milton’s hope, for “fit audience though few,” was the hope of every major writer until the 19th century.

N.B. Through much of the history of writing, “literacy” has been defined primarily as the ability to sign one’s name — something worth remembering when people talk about historical literacy rates. Take a look at this chart and try to figure out how it defines “literacy.” 

Kahn is one of many people who talk about our “post-literate age,” which is kind of funny when you reflect that right now literacy is more widespread than it has been at any point in human history. Just think about how many people in the global South who as recently as fifty years ago would have been illiterate agricultural laborers now read and write every day. And it wasn’t that long ago that many Americans were, generally speaking, only barely literate. During the Second World War, the U.S. armed forces had trouble finding enough recruits who met their basic literacy standards. The history here is illuminating. (Those of us who teach might find it noteworthy that the U. S. Army embarked on a kind of literacy boot camp that got 95% of the illiterate recruits up to speed in two months.) 

No, when people talk about living in a “post-literate society,” what they mean is this: Today a smaller percentage of Americans read books than did so in the two or three decades following the Second World War, when the G. I. Bill made high levels of literacy possible for millions of Americans who previously would have had no access to higher education. This is one of my old themes. I mean, going way back. And more recently too. 

Even in a period of relative decline in serious reading ability — and we do indeed live in such a time — writers have access to a larger audience, proportionally and not just absolutely larger, than any great writer of the distant past would’ve dared to dream of. And that’s something worth remembering. 

P.S. It would be a shame, wouldn’t it, if I didn’t point to something else Kahn says that I want to disagree with. He writes, “One can only imagine how much smoother poor Robert Caro’s life would have been if he could have started with the presidency of his subject as opposed to spending forty years chasing down the truth of Lyndon Johnson’s student council experiences and then waiting until his 80s to write down the meat of his project.” Assumptions again: Kahn assumes that Johnson’s term as President is the “meat of [Caro’s] project.” But surely anyone who has read the books knows that it isn’t so. What fascinates Caro is that a young man, indeed a boy, from one of the most backward and poverty-stricken parts of America desperately wanted great power, believed he could achieve it, and somehow did achieve it, becoming the most powerful person in the world. How this happened — starting with Johnson’s becoming a mover and shaker in the schools he attended, since that is where he learned how to manipulate people without needing to be liked by them — is the real meat of the story, and his experiences as President make for little more than a coda. If Caro never finishes the final volume I’ll be sad, but I won’t feel that I’ve missed anything truly vital. 

Kingsnorth’s Machine

I see that Paul Kingsnorth is publishing in book form his thoughts on The Machine. His writings on this subject have, I think, received more attention than anything else he has written, and yet I have not found them especially interesting or helpful — and I love some of Kingsnorth’s earlier work. 

As I read him, he’s basically restating what I have called the SCT: the Standard Critique of Technology. 

The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).

The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices (Borgmann) that embody those ends. A table becomes a center for family life; a musical instrument skillfully played enlivens those around it. Those healthier technologies might be referred to as holistic (Franklin) or convivial (Illich), because they fit within the human lifeworld and enhance our relations with one another. Our task, then, is to discern these tendencies or affordances of our technologies and, on both social and personal levels, choose the holistic, convivial ones. 

“The Machine” is Kingsnorth’s term for what Neil Postman calls “Technopoly,” but I don’t think his actual views are significantly different than those of his predecessors. But I’ll probably read the book and hope to be surprised. 

(It’s noteworthy, by the way, that almost every critic of technopoly, including me, looks for some way to capture the sense that it is an it — some unimaginably massive nonhuman thing with a nonhuman will of its own. There are multiple versions of this insight, or maybe it’s just a feeling, across cultural domains: for instance, when people talk about the core assumptions of the American national security establishment as The Blob, or when Eric Raymond contrasts the two forms of software development as the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Timothy Morton is groping towards a general account of this kind of idea in his concept of Hyperobjects, but his obfuscating writing style makes his account less than helpful.) 

My own view continues to be that we really don’t need more diagnoses of our situation. We know what afflicts us. Caitlin Flanagan: 

The internet did not arrive like a wave, allowing us to take time to think about our humanity before we put our toes in the water; it arrived like a flood, and we’ve been drowning in it for more than a quarter century. It keeps taking our souls away from us; every passing year, we’re less of who we were. Soon there won’t be much of us left at all. The only thing that can save us is a great unplugging. But we’ll never do that. We love it down here under the dark water. 

This is correct. A fraction of one percent of us will be willing and able to choose something other and better. Those are the people I write for. We live in what, many years ago now, George Steiner called a “post-culture.” I used to call this blog Snakes and Ladders, because it documented the ups and downs of culture. Now I call The Homebound Symphony, after the Traveling Symphony in Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, because I think we’re living in the aftermath of a slow-motion cultural and moral apocalypse. I really do. I’m trying to keep some beautiful things alive for the people who are willing to encounter them and maybe even to love them. 

Perhaps we keep on re-diagnosing, and describing the same diagnosis in slightly different terms, because we don’t know what to do. (Some people, of course, know what to do: they opt out. And that’s why we don’t hear from them: we remain in the places that they’ve opted out of.) We should, I think, be alarmed that our condition was properly and thoroughly diagnosed by a series of important thinkers half-a-century ago — and yet our malady has only progressed. 

a correspondence

Here at the Wade Center, I’ve been working through some of Dorothy L. Sayers’s correspondence, for which “voluminous” is not adequate as a description. “Torrential” maybe.

In midlife one of her closest friends was Helen Simpson, who, had she not died in 1940 at age 42, probably of cancer, would surely have remained a major figure in Sayers’s life. There’s an interesting period in the mid-Thirties when Sayers sends to Simpson some letters she has been receiving from a gentleman in Rapallo, Italy — she’s not sure quite how to respond to them.

The gentleman was Ezra Pound.

Ezra Pound’s letterhead when he lived in Rapallo

Pound had just read one of Sayers’s detective novels and had concluded that “you are manifestly NOT a complete idiot” (high praise indeed!) and now thinks that she should turn her talents to More Important Things. So he addresses her with exquisite politeness: “Dear Miss Sayers or Lady Peter W. or whoever you now are” — and goes on to suggest that she should think less of murder and more of mass murder, the mass murder inflicted on us by our economic system, and especially the practice of USURY (as he usually capitalizes it in his Cantos). “MONEY … is the root of so much Krrrrime.” And if any one individual is going to be murdered, he thinks it should be the British Prime Minister. (“OR how to kill off all the god Damn Nevils Chamberlains.”) He signs off — he’s writing on 27 December 1934 — “With the seezunz greetinz.”

Sayers politely demurs at his suggestion: “Poor Neville Chamberlain!! Indeed I will not have him murdered. If carefully cherished, he may some day take another sixpence off my income-tax.”

Pound will not be deterred. Sayers writes to Helen Simpson, “A mild and brief reply addressed to Mr. Ezra Pound has now elicited a tremendous epistle. Three sheets long & full of Quaint Devices, & accompanied by a (very badly) printed questionnaire about Volitionist Economics, whatever they are.”

He reads a second Lord Peter novel: “I hav bin readin anuther ov ’em and it WONT DO.” Also: “We are under a secret and damngerous REAL gov’t.” And: “Nobody understands ANY history, without econ/ there is a lot in my cantos/(condensed ).” When Sayers apparently — only one of her letters to him seems to have survived — declines to accept his view of things, he replies, “Thet m’eh de’h ge’l ( as yr/ grandfather wd/ ? have pronounced it ) is because you have not read my estimable writings.” He is unfamiliar with the place in Essex where she lives (“Where is Witham.?”) and hints at a possible meeting: “I spose you get to London nown again?”

I think we may assume that Sayers did not acknowledge this hint. Rather, she says, “I will reserve my wrath for those who commit mayhem upon English spelling and syntax — a subject on which I feel strongly. Would you like something lingering, with boiling oil in it?”

A fascinating and strange non-meeting of the minds! I was at a loss to account for it until I did a quick Google search for “correspondence of Ezra Pound and Dorothy Sayers,” and got:

Mystery solved! And wow, do I need to revise my account of her adolescence.

The Box

I wrote: 

In Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold there’s a good bit of concern about something called The Box: 

This Box was one of many operating in various parts of the country. It was installed, under the skeptical noses of Reginald Graves-Upton’s nephew and niece, at Upper Mewling. Mrs. Pinfold, who had been taken to see it, said it looked like a makeshift wireless-set. According to the Bruiser and other devotees The Box exercised diagnostic and therapeutic powers. Some part of a sick man or animal — a hair, a drop of blood preferably — was brought to The Box, whose guardian would then “tune in” to the “life-waves” of the patient, discern the origin of the malady and prescribe treatment.

The Box becomes one of the foci of Pinfold’s paranoia. 

It also plays a significant role in Agatha Christie’s 1961 novel The Pale Horse, and in his book on Christie Robert Barnard says of the novel, “Also makes use of ‘The Box,’ a piece of pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus fashionable in the West Country in the ‘fifties….” But what the hell is this thing? Because it’s simply called “The Box” it’s impossible to search for on Google … have you heard of it? 

I might add that my interest in all this is twofold: 

The Box as an amalgam of Science and Magic (an old theme of mine, borrowed of course from CSL): when three “witches” place a curse on someone in The Pale Horse, they use (a) old rural magic, the sacrifice of a white cockerel, (b) modern spiritualism, and (c) The Box to accomplish their ends. As one of them says, “The old magic and the new. The old knowledge of belief, the new knowledge of science. Together, they will prevail…” In both The Pale Horse and Pinfold The Box is presented as something techno-magical, but it turns out to be mere jiggery-pokery, obscuring for a while the ultimate and thoroughly disenchanting explanation: people are being poisoned. (Pinfold accidentally by habitually taking medicines that shouldn’t be used in tandem, and various people in Christie’s novel intentionally by someone who knows how to use thallium.) 

Pinfold is maybe the worst Waugh book I’ve read, but The Pale Horse is one of the best Christies — interesting more as a novel of ideas than as a tale of detection. 

Yours with curiosity, 

Defeated 

And the indefatigably resourceful Adam Roberts replied: 

I believe this is the Dynomizer, the invention of the curious Dr Albert Abrams, who believed the basis of all life was electrons. There were plenty of electrical therapeutic devices around in the 19th and early 20th century (devices of no actual medical benefit) but the Dynomizer is the piece of kit where you bring a piece of hair or a drop of blood, put it in the machine and it diagnoses what’s wrong with you. 

It’s great to have Adam as a friend. I’ll be writing more about The Box in due course. 

the sanctuary lamp

This is a nice essay by Henry Oliver on Evelyn Waugh, but I want to call attention, as one does, to something I believe is missing. Oliver describes a scene near the end of Brideshead Revisited in which Charles Ryder is visiting the chapel at Brideshead. Here’s what Waugh writes: 

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame — a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones. 

Oliver says that Waugh’s point here is that “what animates modern civilization is the way the lights burn and the bells ring as they have done throughout Christendom in the one true church.” He goes on to say, “There is only one light left burning at the end of this book of shadows: not the lights of Oxford, not the sparkles of diamonds, not the candlelit beauty of Brideshead house, but the lamp in the chapel.” 

What Oliver may not know is that this is a sanctuary lamp: the candle lit next to the tabernacle, that is, the receptacle (usually in a niche in a wall) where the consecrated Host is kept. It is typically, though not always, distinguished from other lights in the church by being placed in a red glass chimney, thus the “small red flame.” 

John Betjeman, in his poem “In Willesden Churchyard,” evokes the same mystery. Walking through that churchyard, he realizes that “the Blessed Sacrament / Not ten yards off in Willesden parish church / Glows with the present immanence of God.”

Now, to be sure, Waugh thought that because Betjeman’s Catholicism was Anglo rather than Roman he was going to Hell — and often told him so. (“Awful about your obduracy in schism and heresy. Hell hell hell. Eternal damnation.”) But that’s not the point here.

The point here is that the light that Waugh invokes at the end of Brideshead is not just any old religious candle — any old light in a church, even in a chapel of the One True Church — but the light that marks the presence of the consecrated Host, the bread transformed into the flesh of Christ, “the present immanence of God.” This is why in many churches people do not pass the tabernacle, when the candle it lit to indicate its contents, without bowing. This, we may infer, is what Charles Ryder does that morning in the Brideshead chapel. 

spirits of discouragement

N.B.: Spoilers for Gaudy Night ahead.

As legal obstacles to women’s full participation in British society were gradually removed in the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth — starting with the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870 (with subsequent revisions) and culminating in the Representation of the People Act in 1918 (with subsequent revisions) — certain forms of resistance remained, and primarily took the form of interruptions and discouragements.

So in the opening pages of A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf is thinking about her upcoming lectures on “women and fiction” while walking across the lawn of an ancient Cambridge college; her thinking is promising; she is drawing in a little fish of an idea; but then:

However small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

One may consider the Beadle as a kind of personification of Resistance to women’s full freedom to participate in society as they wish.

Another such personification is Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse, whose insistance that “Women can’t write, women can’t paint” is often in the mind of Lily Briscoe when she picks up her paintbrush. And in Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women” we get a voice from the other side of the division between the sexes, the Angel in the House — via Coventry Patmore — who is always telling Woolf to subordinate her own interests and energies to the service of the men in her life:

I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all — I need not say it — she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty — her blushes, her great grace. In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: ‘My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.’ And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money — shall we say five hundred pounds a year? — so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must — to put it bluntly — tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

These varying personifications of dark forces, these imps of interruption and discouragement, seem less like human beings than … well, than like demons, that is, concentrations of malign power into individual form. The Beadle, for instance, is not a simple human being but rather an apparition: “a man’s figure rose to intercept me” — like a zombie rising from an open grave. It is Charles Tansley’s disembodied voice that whispers to Lily as she paints. The Angel in the House is a “phantom.” These personifications of resistance are not just bad but also eerie, spooky, uncanny.

Which brings us to Sayers’s Gaudy Night. Harriet Vane returns to her alma mater, Shrewsbury College, Oxford — an alternate-universe version of Sayers’ own college, Somerville — for a Gaudy, during which she reconnects with some old friends and former teachers. But something goes wrong.

Someone is pursuing an unpleasant campaign of insult, mockery, and threat — the threats being implicit at first, but later increasingly explicit. The overall message is this: Shrewsbury College is comprised of a bunch of dessicated old maids who hate men and (perhaps more to the point) are usurping the social place of men. Only the women who are married or engaged are spared the vitriol of the campaign, which escalates into vandalism and, eventually, attempted murder.

It is only at the novel’s end, of course, that we discover who’s behind the campaign of hate, and even though I noted above that there would be spoilers here, I am reluctant to say more. (Just go read the book, for heaven’s sake! It’s quite fascinating.) In any case, the point I want to emphasize here is that the women of the College come to call the perpetrator the Poltergeist. They don’t mean it literally, they know that it’s all being done by a person, but it’s noteworthy that they fall back on the language of supernatural agency — as though this is one more in a series of Interrupters and Discouragers who personify misogynistic forces. (“Poltergeist” is also a less threatening word than “Demon,” but that’s fitting in that it takes a very long time for the depth of the Poltergeist’s malice to be revealed.) In each case the enmity feels not like something human but rather something precipitated from the ambient hostility to women’s equality.

And I think that’s true in an especially uncanny way in Gaudy Night because the person responsible seems to know some odd things. For instance, the Poltergeist tears some pages out of a novel — this novel — and once we know the identity of the culprit … well, a knowledge of those pages in that book seems highly unlikely in this person. It’s as though the Poltergeist is absorbing and then emitting information from that ambient hostility. It’s a kind of ideological respiration perhaps.

It strikes me that this is a pretty accurate way of describing how feelings, especially hatreds, circulate in society. It was to try to describe that phenomenon that I wrote this essay.

the reducing valve and the therapeutic index

Recently I wrote about Aldous Huxley’s blame-the-victim attitude towards people who have bad trips. I want to expand on those thoughts. In The Doors of Perception, after describing one of his first trips, Huxley quotes a 1949 paper by C. D. Broad:

We should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

Huxley’s commentary:

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been bornthe beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

The “reducing valve” is a helpful metaphor. Huxley goes on to say that some people seem by nature to lack this valve, or have an ineffectual one. These are the natural mystics — Blake, for instance, who was quite aware that other people did not perceive what he perceived:

What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty….

But most of us, whose reducing valves are in good working order, need some external power to inhibit the working of that valve, to relax it so that more information from the Universe can stream in. This may be achieved in various ways, but Huxley prefers drugs, which are easy and efficient in comparison to old-fashioned techniques like prayer and fasting.

Huxley’s essential assumption is that almost everyone would benefit from opening their valves (AKA “cleansing the doors of perception”). Yes, some have bad trips, but that’s because they are bad people. For the rest of us, tripping is a reliable path to enlightenment.

Setting aside the question of means — Are mescaline and LSD safe and appropriate ways to open that valve? — I’d like to ask a couple of questions about ends. First of all, how does Huxley know that what he perceives when tripping is a more adequate representation of the whole of reality than what we see when our reducing valve is in good working order? Can we be sure that increased perception is increased perception of the real? It may to the tripper feel real, but how reliable are our feelings in such matters?

This is an especially important question because Huxley wants us to believe that the sense of bliss that he experienced is a genuine encounter with the Real, while the horror that others experience is a projection of their own internal disorders. As I said in my previous post: Isn’t it pretty to think so?

In evaluating these experiences, we face four possibilities:

The bliss is real, the horror is false — call this the Huxley ThesisThe bliss is false, the horror is real — call this the Lovecraft ThesisThe bliss and the horror are equally realThe bliss and the horror alike are mere projections of our own inner states

Given the mixture of Good and Bad that we experience in everyday life, it seems to me clear that the third and fourth possibilities are far more likely that either the Huxley Thesis or the Lovecraft Thesis.

And if that is so, then I strongly question the assumption — made not just by Huxley but by our current apostles of Enchantment — that an increased openness to the Ultimate is better than life with a functioning reducing valve. I don’t think everyone is prepared for what they might see when the doors of perception are cleansed. (“You can’t handle the truth!”) This is true whether what’s perceived is radical evil — see The Exorcist — or the glories of Creation — see Job’s abashed response to God’s self-proclamation in the final chapters of his story. “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exodus 33:20).

When evaluating the uses of certain drugs, scientists employ an important criterion: the therapeutic index. Some drugs have a very narrow therapeutic index, that is, the difference between the amount that is therapeutically useful and the amount that is toxic is small and difficult to calculate. Conversely, a drug with a broad therapeutic index can be administered without fear of an overdose.

My belief is that there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy (Hamlet I.5), but few of us are prepared to perceive them without incurring damage: the therapeutic index of any given strategy of re-enchantment is exceptionally narrow. Our reducing valves may well be the mercies of God, and the Christians of old were wise to embed the opening of our minds and hearts within structures of rigorous spiritual discipline. People advocating an easy re-enchantment may well be, like the snake-oil salesmen of old, prescribing poison.