Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 21

Miss Marple? The Version Matters!

A central Christmas present for us, from Monique and John, was a Blu-Ray DVD which gave us access to streaming—from Netflix and others. A byproduct has been exposure to the turmoil in streaming. What up to now we’d barely have noticed is now Big News, thus, for instance the following web headline: Netflix is Yanking These Movies and Shows on February 1. Evidently a source’s list of titles is not a permanent but a dynamic sort of thing. Our access to Netflix in this new format gave us the means to see, again, the original Miss Marple series, 1984-1992, in which Joan Hickson is the lead character. That version, you might say matters. It is by every measure the very best. (Joan Hickson, incidentally, quite resembles my Mother in heradvanced years).
This series was then followed by Agatha Christie’s Marple where first Geraldine McEwan (2004-2009) and the Julia McKenzie (2009-2013) have the leading role. This second presentation illustrates how current culture, let us call it, can bend, twist, and deform a traditional body of work, that body being the 12 novels Agatha Christie actually wrote with Marple its main character. This series has 23 episodes in 11 of which Marple is, as it were, forced into other Christie plots by the latter-day dramatizers. Not only that. The plots of virtually every episode are updated by introducing new story lines, sometimes changing the “who done it,” and peppering up the characters so that, as carriers of the new political correctness, they will presumably appeal to more sophisticated modern viewers.
If we view these as three series, the Miss Marple figure is played by ever younger people. Hickson was 78 when she began Miss Marple in 1984, McEwan 72 when she began playing Marple in 2004, and McKenzie 68 when she took up the role in 2009.
There is here also a seemingly deliberate effort to “lighten” the mood of the series, loosening the manners, and making characters young—with the net effect that some do not fit the times that Christie was actually writing about.
If we wait long enough, Miss Marple will eventually morph into an actual (if probably digital) cartoon—in which she’ll be a teenage sleuth brandishing the most recent devices and apps to bring the crimi to justice.
The version matters. Check your birth certificate before ordering the stream—or the disk—if there is still a disk to be had. The older you are the more likely you’ll be to like he original series. Which, incidentally, will stop streaming from Netflix on February 1. Shame, shame, and double shame.

European Unity

Events in Greece in recent days—the election of Alexis Tsipras as Prime Minister followed by his party’s immediate actions to lift the policies of austerity still in place a week ago in Greece—reminded me of a trip I once took to Luxembourg to visit the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1956. I was in the U.S. Army in Europe then; the circumstances for this visit are lost. What does remains sharply imprinted on my memory were the presentations and graphics shown us in briefings. I saw projected there the first picture of a united Europe. That was roughly 58 years ago. The ECSC—made up of France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—was indeed the original of the European Union; the whole of it, as it eventually emerged, was already clearly visible to ECSC’s founders. The idea surprised me. I’d only been gone from Europe then some five years; now I was back. And the concept of a United States of Europe was right there, projected on a screen in Luxembourg.
The current news and related comments swirling around Greece are not exactly encouraging. Tsipras appears to think that the European Union will continue to bail out Greece in order to save the Eurozone. As for that, we shall see. The problem with the union is that it is only a fragile and partial unity, as I’ve argued on LaMarottethree years ago ( link ). Part of me inclines in a negative direction, meaning that Greece may be expelled; in most ways we are now living in an era of political decentralization , at least within the old Christendom. A part of me is still there in Luxembourg marveling at the vision of a greater collective. The ECSC was known, back in my time, as the Montanunion. Montan means “montane,” thus referring to mountains. The word in practice then referred to the industries of the mountain, namely the mining of metal ores and coal. Mountains don’t fall apart, but they can erode.
One of the most notable aspects of voluntary unions of nations is that they tend to hold together only while a very dominant state, in Europe’s case that is Germany, retains the effective clout (but without sovereign power over other members) to hold things together. When that power fails—whether from within or through counter-pressure from without—pieces start to fall off. How long will Chancellor Merkel be able to hold on?

That Time of Night

Having just last night heard Miss Marple refer to a fortnight, made me curious about the origins of that word. I learned that its rooting is “fourteen nights,” with fourteen contracted. Evidently it was ancient Germanic custom to count time by nights. Sennight was also once used in English, meaning “seven nights”; but that word is now classed as—the direction in which fortnight appears to be trending. To be sure, while laboring at Gale Research, which had its roots in old-fashioned publishing, senior editors and such were required to file fortnightly reports… This made me nod. We have two choices: count time by day or by night. Sure enough, such is human diversity over time, once in Germanic lands nights were the basis of counting. Online Etymology Dictionary tells me that Tacitus (56-117) made a note of this back in his own time. Mankind has followed every conceivable conceptual path available. One that came up in our morning discussion was the fact that one branch of Mazdaism, Zurvanism, held that God was Time. Time is a mysterious enough experience to stimulate human innovation.

Placebo Humor

A while back, discussing the placebo effect ( link ), I came across another interesting usage of that word in Wikipedia’s article on the subject ( link ). The word in Latin means “I shall please,” as in the 9th verse of Psalm 114: “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum.” That is the Vulgate, the Latin version used by the Catholic Church. “I shall please the Lord in the region of the living,” usually translated as “I will walk before the Lord…” in English, there using Psalm 116:9. (How the verse wandered from 114 to 116 still remains unresearched.) Well, the Latin version was once recited as part of the Catholic funeral service, that phrase being a response by those attending. Now back in those days of yore, some people in no way related to the deceased—or to his or her family—used to arrive at funerals and claim such a relation strictly in order to take part in the funeral festivities and the meals there served. Such people were once called “placebos,” and in that context the word meant a “mooch.” — Which reminds me that, not quite as far back as that, mooches were also referred to as “nosebaggers” with reference to horses that, wearing a nosebag filled with oats, would worry and worm them avidly when they got to the bottom of the bag. I’m one of few people left alive who actually saw such “nosebagging” done by horses “parked” near a store somewhere harnessed to a cart…

Headlines

On December 2, 2014, Naturepublished a story headlined “European probe shoots down dark-matter claims”  ( link ). Reading such a headline, one is inclined first to ask, What exactly are “dark matter claims”? The first thought that springs to mind is the claim that dark matter exists. And if that claim has been shot down, why, that’s actually Big News. But that can’t be true, can it? If it was, the headline would be bigger—and even CNN might have mentioned it since December 2, 2014 (or even December 11, 2014, when the article was last revised).
The article concerns a news announcement, by the European Space Agency, that a full analysis of data on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), collected by the Planck spacecraft, is now being prepared for publication. Some highlights were presented on December 2.
 Reading the brief-enough article, one learns that despite the “shoot down” Planck data still “confirm that 26% of the total mass-energy budget of the Universe is made up of dark matter.” Therefore dark matter is alive and well. What that dramatically announced “shoot down” means is that some conjectures about dark matter—namely that excess positrons found in the CMB is explained by dark matter—has been shown to be false. So one conjecture has been falsified, but dark matter is still in the saddle. Had the headline signaled that, I wouldn’t have bothered reading the article.
Compare that headline to another published by Phys.Org on December 4 ( link ). It said: “Researchers report on data analysis from Planck spacecraft.” The substance of that story is essentially the same as Nature’s. Clever headlines capture readers, but dark matter lingers on.

A Cloud of Unknowing?

Reading FWH Myers’ own work ( link )—and reading about him—brought back to my mind a subject that once much puzzled and interested me, namely Carl Gustav Jung’s Unconscious. It has always puzzled me that anyone would associate a mental something, which the Jungian Unconscious surely is, with unconsciousness—and it has exercised my mind because, for me, the mental is above all, and almost by definition, consciousness. In this I am in good company because the modern psychologist I most respect, Erich Fromm, somewhere once called the Unconscious a mystification. All sorts of thought processes are going on in the body—because the brain produces them; of some we are conscious, of others we are not. My own very traditional view is that we have a soul; and it is the soul that is conscious of some things and not of others. In the modern view, namely that the entirety of consciousness is a brain structure pure and simple, and there is no soul at all, thus nothing separable from the body and therefore from the brain, the Unconscious is some major part of brain activity and consciousness simply another and much smaller part of the brain specialized in “attention,” or something like that.
Myers comes into this picture because he postulated something quite like the Jungian Unconscious in his notion of a Subliminal Mind. And, much like Jung, he saw in this part of our mind the same features of greater comprehensiveness and wisdom than the ordinary waking consciousness produces. From that level, in Myers view, “gushes up” (to use his phrase) the inspiration that makes the genius and artist; there reside healing powers and paranormal gifts like telepathy.
Now, to be sure, anyone involved in creative activities is surely well aware of inspiration—and will confess that the work of art, whatever its nature—or the invention, or the discovery—is not a personal achievement but a gift. It comes from somewhere and the artist/inventor/discoverer is merely an agent by means of which this (call it) energy is given some kind of tangible form. You might therefore say that the Unconscious or the Subliminal Mind is what creative people would call Inspiration—thus something separate from them but actually existing out there somewhere. And access to it is by one of the actual powers of the human mind, intuition.
Back when I was wrestling with Jung, I used to laugh and say to myself: “Here’s Carl Jung. He’s reinvented God again.” I said that because, functionally, the Collective Unconscious, anyway, had many features of the towering divine. God, for Jung was just an archetype, thus something in the Unconscious. No sooner had Nietzsche declared God dead than Jung declared the Unconscious alive and well. Their lives overlapped.
The phenomenon we all experience is something strange indeed—because inspiration is a strange thing, as are meaningful coincidences—as are precognitive dreams, experiences of telepathy, and so on. Those who give deep thought to these things give them names and thus in a way institutionalize them. And this has always been so.
Back in the fourteenth century appeared a slender book—which long ago I once had read—entitled The Cloud of Unknownig by an anonymous author. It deals with prayer. It counsels that we must let go of our ego and mind in prayer and enter the realm of “unknowingness” to experience what God is. My own thoughts about Carl Jung were thus grounded in an intuition. Whenever analytical knowledge fails us, we tend to discover some king of cloud of unknowing and project there what we think the answer might be. Dark matter serves that purpose in modern cosmology. The truth may be (to produce a projection of my own) that we are indeed surrounded by a vast reality of mind quite resistant to our effective grasp. And it is real enough—but it is not us, is not our mind. At different times through history we invent new names for it to explain what will not fit into our head.

Sound of Two Hands Clapping

While reading Irreducible Mind, by Kelly and Kelly et. al., I’m learning in painful detail how modern science has denied the existence of Mind because it cannot detect it in material ways. Today a good paper Brigitte passed me on cosmology documents the way modern science is absolutely certain of the existence of Dark Matter—which it also cannot detect in material ways. Are we dealing here with science or are we dealing with Faith?

Women in Symphony Orchestras

We chose seats in the second row of the Seligman Performing Arts Center yesterday for a concert by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The seats were so low, relative to the stage, that we were looking straight at the feet of the performers when looking dead ahead—so that John (of Monique and John and Patioboat fame) said that the way to discover how many musicians were playing, we might count the feet and divide by two.
Up close and personal. Oddly this nearness greatly enhanced our enjoyment of the performance, but a part of my mind went wandering during certain passages. It occurred to me that all that I was seeing—the people, the instruments, the sheets of music, everything would have looked pretty much the same way a hundred, hundred and ten years ago, dress-codes aside. During the intermission, I put the question to Monique. “Look at the orchestra,” I said, “and tell me what would have been different a hundred-and-ten years ago.” Monique thought about it for a while. Then she said: “The women.” And, of course, I nodded. It had occurred to me that a large proportion of the orchestra, particularly in violins, was female; and that that, 110 years ago, would not have been the same.

It turns out that I was quite wrong. The high proportions are a fairly recent phenomenon in large metropolitan symphonies. But using pictures back to the early 1900s, I discovered here one, there two, sometimes three women in the symphonic orchestras even then—and not just playing harps. And by that time, women had already reached high visibility in regional symphony orchestras like the Battle Creek, MI, symphony, shown here courtesy of the Willard Library in Battle Creek ( link ). The picture dates back to about 1905.

From the Age of Letter-Writing

A while back now, I got a volume titled Women’s Letters, America from the Revolutionary War to the Present, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler (Dial Press, 2005). Many of the figures in that volumes were well-known or relatives of the well-known. Their letter-writing skills, therefore, might be attributed to education and standing in society. The letter I’d like to reproduce here was written by an ordinary woman; she was the wife of a major serving in Britain’s Army in India. It was originally published in Phantasms of the Living (vol. ii, p. 239), and I came across it in Myers’ Human Personality, hence its subject matter. Now there are many, many such letters, equally well done, in that work and the Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research; hence, in a way, we are looking at the “average” of middle- and upper-class writing in the nineteenth century. Herewith the letter:In the month of November 1864, being detained in Cairo, on my way out to India, the following curious circumstance occurred to me: -Owing to an unusual influx of travellers, I, with the young lady under my charge (whom we will call D.) and some other passengers of the outward-bound mail to India, had to take up our abode in a somewhat unfrequented hotel. The room shared by Miss D. and myself was large, lofty, and gloomy; the furniture of the scantiest, consisting of two small beds, placed nearly in the middle of the room and not touching the walls at all, two or three rush-bottomed chairs, a very small washing-stand, and a large old-fashioned sofa of the settee sort, which was placed against one-half of the large folding doors which gave entrance to the room. This settee was far too heavy to be removed, unless by two or three people. The other half of the door was used for entrance, and faced the two beds. Feeling rather desolate and strange, and Miss D. being a nervous person, I locked the door, and, taking out the key, put it under my pillow; but on Miss D. remarking that there might be a duplicate which could open the door from outside, I put a chair against the door, with my travelling bag on it, so arranged that, on any pressure outside, one or both must fall on the bare floor, and make noise enough to rouse me.We then proceeded to retire to bed, the one I had chosen being near the only window in the room, which opened with two glazed doors, almost to the floor. These doors, on account of the heat, I left open, first assuring myself that no communication from the outside could be obtained. The window led on to a small balcony, which was isolated, and was three stories above the ground.I suddenly woke from a sound sleep with the impression that somebody had called me, and, sitting up in bed, to my unbounded astonishment, by the clear light of early dawn coming in through the large window before mentioned, I beheld the figure of an old and very valued friend whom I knew to be in England. He appeared as if most eager to speak to me, and I addressed him with, “Good gracious! how did you come here ? “ So clear was the figure, that I noted every detail of his dress, even to three onyx shirt-studs which he always wore. He seemed to come a step nearer to me, when he suddenly pointed across the room, and on my looking round, I saw Miss D. sitting up in her bed, gazing at the figure with every expression of terror. On looking back, my friend seemed to shake his head, and retreated step by step, slowly, till he seemed to sink through that portion of the door where the settee stood. I never knew what happened to me after this; but my next remembrance is of bright sunshine pouring through the window. Gradually the remembrance of what had happened came back to me, and the question arose in my mind, had I been dreaming, or had I seen a visitant from another world? - the bodily presence of my friend being utterly impossible.Remembering that Miss D. had seemed aware of the figure as well as myself, I determined to allow the test of my dream or vision to be whatever she said to me upon the subject, I intending to say nothing to her unless she spoke to me. As she seemed still asleep, I got out of bed, examined the door carefully, and found the chair and my bag untouched, and the key under my pillow; the settee had not been touched, nor had that portion of the door against which it was placed any appearance of being opened for years.Presently, on Miss D. waking up, she looked about the room, and, noticing the chair and bag, made some remark as to their not having been much use. I said, “What do you mean?” and then she said, “Why, that man who was in the room this morning must have got in somehow.” She then proceeded to describe to me exactly what I myself had seen. Without giving any satisfactory answer as to what I had seen, I made her rather angry by affecting to treat the matter as a fancy on her part, and showed her the key still under my pillow, and the chair and bag untouched. I then asked her, if she was so sure that she had seen somebody in the room, did not she know who it was ? “No,” said she, “I have never seen him before, nor any one like him.” I said, “Have you ever seen a photograph of him?” She said, “No.” This lady never was told what I saw, and yet described exactly to a third person what we both had seen.Of course, I was under the impression my friend was dead. Such, however, was not the case; and I met him some four years later, when, without telling him anything of my experience in Cairo, I asked him, in a joking way, could he remember what he was doing on a certain night in November 1864. “Well,” he said, “you require me to have a good memory;” but after a little reflection he replied, “Why, that was the time I was so harassed with trying to decide for or against the appointment which was offered me, and I so much wished you could have been with me to talk the matter over. I sat over the fire quite late, trying to think what you would have advised me to do.” A little cross-questioning and comparing of dates brought out the curious fact that, allowing for the difference of time between England and Cairo, his meditations over the fire and my experience were simultaneous. Having told him the circumstances above narrated, I asked him had he been aware of any peculiar or unusual sensation. He said none, only that he had wanted to see me very much.
E. H. Elgee.
1864 was firmly in the Age of Letter-Writing. Quite often on Masterpiece Theater, we hear characters excusing themselves because “I have to catch up on my correspondence.” No. That is not a simple ruse to get the character off-stage. They did then write lots of letters. And this sample shows how spending time and effort, produces skill that seems effortless. It flows from the fingers to the paper—and via pens regularly dipped into a bottle of live ink at that…

The Public Square

One of the curious consequences of modern technology is that it causes distortions to Time and to Space as these are ordinarily experienced. What they are is a philosophy, natural and other, keeps examining. I emphasize modern technology because its uses demand very dense and ample forms of energy; the availability of such energy really dates to the mid-nineteenth century.
When we speak of the “public square” these days, we no long literally mean a place. Long ago and far away, however, when the Greek agora and the Roman forum were such centrally located and large open spaces, space in the ordinary sense was very important for any kind of meaningful public assembly. The spatial aspect of public communication had not yet been (call it) virtualized. That virtualization began with the rise of the newspaper, was intensified by radio, and became exhaustive with the dawn of television. Since then—if we must absolutely find a space for this public square—we find a part of it in every living room; it is the part were communications are directed at the public. The response to these communications has been institutionalized as polling; it is from polling that we get public opinion—rather than from the shouting, yelling, or clapping in an actual, physical forum. The geographical reach of the old agora was also limited maximally to a 100-mile circle. Our media are influential everywhere.
The time dimension in ancient times was limited to the speed of travel by horse or by ship. Events in China taking place back then on a given day could not—could never—reach people in Italy on the same day. Today we’ve annihilated Time as well or, to be more precise, the speed at which electronics waves travel is the new limit.
So where do we fit the Internet? Is it yet another extension of the media? Does it enlarge that public square? In an ambiguous way— perhaps. It enlarges the public square for those who are willing to use it for that purpose—but it is generally much slower than media-capped-by-TV. The Internet is also only potentially public. My favorite analogy is that posting something on the web is analogous to typing out a sheet and pinning it to the back of one’s garage. If the garage backs onto an ally, some potential readers might see it…. In fact it isn’t quite as bad as that because the Internet has multiple searchable indexes, the big one being Google. But the Internet, like all modern technology, annihilates space and time to the extent now possible. It is the Great Library. You can find virtually any kind of take on reality there, from the absurd on to the exalted. But it does not oblige you to go to any building anchored in space. Consulted with mobile devices, it is everywhere. And its speed is very fast. Ah, the 1950s. All those trips to the library—and up and down all those stairs there….