Alan Emmins's Blog, page 3

The ice cream, the car and the desire to kick Socrates in the pellets

At the weekend I began reading Plato’s Republic, and was disappointed on many levels to find the narration, in the voice of Socrates, irritating almost beyond acceptance. I kept allowing the book to drop in my lap as I groaned and moaned about the pointlessness of what I was reading. Socrates was arguing with a local about justice and the just man. “What surprised me,” Socrates says to Thrasymachus, “was that you rank injustice with wisdom and excellence, and justice with their opposites.”

“Yet that is what I do,” Thrasymachus replies. As the argument went back and forth I was irritated on two levels. Sure, by all means spend some time in dialogue with somebody whose values are clearly flawed, but after 17 pages of meandering reasoning I found I had a desire to tap Plato’s Socrates on the shoulder and put a few questions of my own to him. Chiefly, “Why are you still talking to this fool?” There’s no helping the man. At the same time, I wondered which was more offensive, the ignorance of Thrasymachus or the smugness of Socrates. I found myself wanting to trade the tap on the shoulder for a swift kick in the pellets.

The narrator’s continually smug, holier than thou attitude to educating the misguided, along with his unappeasable appetite for analogy, did remind me of another, living philosopher that I once had the displeasure of coming across. He was arguing for the feasibility of cryonics – the study or practice of keeping a newly dead body at an extremely low temperature in the hope of restoring it to life at a later date with the aid of future, as yet undeveloped medical advances – on behalf of a company offering the very service.

The people of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation foresee a future where cryonics is a natural choice. Instead of being buried or cremated it will be just as natural to be packed into an arctic cylinder full of liquid nitrogen. Their booklet ‘Alcor Life Extension Foundation – An Introduction by Jerry B. Lemler, M.D.’ is packed with credible titles, filled with Ph.D. Tom and M.D. Harry, who are on hand to bring credibility to the topic. But alarm bells ring loud throughout the brochure. The first is the reference to Alcor members as being ‘Alcorians’. I am not about to accuse Alcor of being a religious cult (nor will I suggest their logo more fitting for a publisher of science fiction), but surely anybody alive in the last thirty years can name a few cults that sound uncannily like ‘Alcorians.’ The tag suggests that Alcor are aiming themselves at assorted nut jobs. And rich ones at that.

Dr Lemler is quick to list his acquainted Ph.Ds., but from where I sit it doesn’t take an eight-year education followed by five years of research to understand that by calling your members ‘Alcorians’ you are begging to be harangued and mocked.

But much worse than this little oversight is the use of philosophical twaddle.

Eminent Extropian Philosopher and Alcor Member Max More, Ph.D. uses a compelling analogy involving an automobile, writes Dr Lemler.

“If we say a car has the capacity to move at 110mph, we mean that it is currently in a state such that, given appropriate stimuli (such as gas, a foot on the accelerator etc), it will achieve 110 mph. The objection claims that we don’t mean that the car could achieve 110 mph given available technology, and we don’t mean that, given some empirically possible but non-actual technology, the car could achieve 110 mph. The problem with the objection lies in the fuzziness of the terms ‘capacity’ and ‘appropriate stimuli.”   

Mr. Eminent Extropian Philosopher and Alcor Member Max More, Ph.D. (who with such a name could also moonlight as a porn star and/or news anchor) just told us… well, nothing! What he did do was use an awful lot of words to promote his branch of death as an industry. He tried the old bamboozle technique. Say it, say it again and again and then slip in an analogy that, well, by the mere fact of it being so incompatible with what your talking about can’t really be called an analogy at all. He talks of disconnected wires, about how capacity can be restored by reattaching the wire. Sure, but how many human beings have you seen in the street immobilized by a loose wire? But the analogy gets thinner: what if the car is broken and there is no current technology that can fix it? “Further suppose that the manufacturer tells you that they are working on a new repair process that will restore function, a process that should be available a month from now.” Yes, I can further suppose until the cows come home, I just can’t get myself to further suppose all the way to accepting that a broken-down car is in anyway comparable to a dead body. The car is an inanimate object, and, aside from this Eminent Extropian Philosopher’s attempt to convince otherwise, the human being is not inanimate. Mr. Ph.D. rounds up with, “The car analogy, then, supports rather than undermines the case for basing a criterion for death on irreversible loss of capacity rather than currently irreversible loss of capacity.”

Seriously!? Appropriate stimuli indeed!? If the “problem lies” in the “fuzziness” of the terms “capacity” and “appropriate stimuli,” Mr. Eminent, I suggest you don’t use the terms capacity and appropriate stimuli, they were, after all, if I am not mistaken, your own words.

Even without such stupidity in branding and philosophy, I would need to see some radical improvement in human behavior before I ever thought this planet worth a second stint. If I could be packed off somewhere else, never heard of, never seen, for better or worse, it would be worth a gamble. But the way planet earth is going? Meh! No, thanks!

The only reason would be to see how the kids are doing. But what if you don’t come back for 200 years, which from where we stand now would appear an optimistic time frame? The children will be long gone. Sure, one would hope for a generational trail, but what are you going to do, knock on the family home and announce, “I used to live here!”?

Can you imagine the scene? Some couples find it hard enough to accept each other’s in-laws in the now, but imagine if said in-laws were several hundred years old.

The chances of your actually being wanted in 300 years’ time are slim. Sure, you’ll be wheeled out at first for cocktail parties and after-dinner speeches, but what of you then? Once the novelty value wears off you’ll be cast aside like any other aging fool. Only it will be easier to dispense with you because nobody will have any emotional connection to you. You never bounced them on your knee or took them out for ice cream. For the last 300 years you were a fucking ice cream. All you did was thaw out one day and turn up.

What other reasons could there be for coming back? A loved one? You could be vitrified together and reborn together. But most people can barely keep a marriage together for one lifetime, so two lifetimes of marriage to the same person? I fear there would be no surprises left.

Nah! I think myself, and luckily the Extropian Philosopher too, will only be getting one innings. And, I suppose now I have got this rant out of my system, I shall return to Plato and his Socrates and attempt to learn something that might be useful as I meander towards my end. At least Socrates keeps it simple. He does get there in the end, and it is very hard to disagree with him. I just wish he wouldn’t toy with his prey so much. It’s like watching one of those zombifying wasps plunge its stinger through a cockroach’s exoskeleton and into its brain. Only Socrates is not doing this so he may lay his larvae inside Thrasymachus, where his hatched philosopher offspring will eat Thrasymachus from the inside out. Any ‘just’ motive Socrates has, if we are to examine his technique and tone, appear secondary. Socrates slowly maneuvers Thrasymachus for the kill. I can’t help but imagine him flashing a wry smile to his friends that are gathered for the scene. The 'just man' indeed.

Luv from Oregon

It has been a long time since I received a handwritten letter, but today, upon opening my mailbox, that is what I was greeted with. The sight of it made me smile instantly. I didn’t pick it up straight away, but leaned in for a closer look. Two things struck me: the dirty stains on the right hand side of the envelope and a small 3D heart surrounded by the words ‘luv from Oregon’ in the top left corner.

The letter is from a guy whom I met while recently travelling from San Francisco to Chicago on the Zephyr Line. I wrote to him six weeks ago because I would like to pay him a visit and write a story about him. He is somewhat of a troubled soul, overwhelmed by a life of grief, yet still adventurous and warm. I won’t talk about what he was doing on that train. I will save that for when I write the story. I will say that it took only a few seconds to recognise he was a rare character indeed. His letter was also surprising. The simplicity of his words was artful, capable of generating intrigue and speculation.

My trip to New Jersey was quite an adventure. Things did not go like I’d planned.

Two wonderful statements: quite without drama, pomp or elaboration. Knowing what he was doing on that train I can guess that the lack or elaboration is due to the adventures not being the kind of things you commit to paper. Not in your own hand. Not when you are supplying a return address. Still, in these two simple sentences he does not try to convince me of anything. He has resisted all temptation to romanticise and oversell. I am hooked. I want to board a plane and sit with him at a bar.

The letter goes on to discuss that which is essential to all hand written correspondence.

The weather here has been about normal: a foot of snow, a bit of rain mixed in with a few timely days of sunshine. The temperature has been between 20ᵒ and 55ᵒ for the past few weeks.

If somebody were to ask me if I would like to hear about the weather in Oregon I would leave them with few illusions on the matter. If somebody were to skip the enquiry and go straight to broadcast I would likely push them in a puddle and be gone. Yet in a letter, not only is a description of the weather on some far distant plane acceptable, it is essential. This particular description I find quite charming, as it seems to cover the full spectrum of possible weather patterns. It commits to nothing, other than to say that the weather is capricious. I have read it 20 times and still I am not done with it. Not by a long shot.

I really enjoy this understated style of writing. I enjoy the calmness of it. In the hands of the masters the undersold leaves your brain free to conjure clear images, to draw on an archive of visual references. It's the ability of great writing to trawl the reader's mind for images that makes books the original interactive media. Gabriel Garcia Márquez: His clothes were smeared with mud and vomit. J. M. Coetzee: Petrus has emptied the concrete storage dam and is cleaning it of algae. Balzac: Goriot went on eating mechanically without knowing what he ate.

I will now make a fresh pot of coffee and write a response. I will ask confirmation for a trip to Oregon sometime in April. I will not sit frustrated because my new pen pal has no email address, or because he seems reluctant to give me his telephone number. I will be patient, and check my mailbox (not my inbox) regularly.

 PS: Life is short. Live it well and say hi to Sacha for me.

365 Days, 365 points of view

This is a really nice project run by run by Len Kendall and Daniel Honigman out of Chicago. It is a two minute read, so please take a gander, repost, tweet, share. It was fun to sit down last night and work out what part of my day was going to get written about...

READ IT HERE >>>  365 Days, 365 points of view

So you wanna be a tough guy!?

< An extract from the new book >

Cornelius Vermuyden comprehensive school was a raucous place, full of loud mouth yobs and girls showing the first signs of breasts. I was smitten by both. I was also, fuelled by another summer of the Dirty Dozen and karate lessons, starting to fancy myself as a bit of a tough guy. I was no longer interested in my uncle's American trucks. I was interested in trying out my moves.

“D’ya think you can have Terry Saunders?” Simon, a neighbourhood kid asked me while we played football in the school field. He was a nice, sweet kid, with a well-hidden tinge of comic malice.

“Of course I can,” I spat back as I blasted the football into a wire fence, enjoying the ease with which I felt I could impress the wee lad.

Barely had the ball thumped to the ground when I got a tap on the shoulder. I turned and saw the face of a boy I had never seen before, much shorter than me and with blond cropped hair. We stood, for a fleeting moment, examining one another. I say fleeting, because my vision was quickly obscured as his fists began punching me repeatedly in the face.

It didn’t once occur to me to block him, punch him, kick him or scream like a cocaine fuelled banshee, all of which I had been practicing at my karate classes. I was simply stunned by the speed of the bugger. I couldn’t see anything, The only reason I knew he was still there was because my head kept snapping back from the impact of his fists. Apparently, this was not a pastime he bored of easily. As time meandered on I considered begging. I was down on the ground anyway. But it was somebody else’s words that brought the thud of knuckles on face to an abrupt end.

“Stop hitting him. Stop hitting him,” an unfamiliar voice said, and there was an immediate reprieve.

Thank God for that, I thought to myself.

But then the same unfamiliar voice spoke again, “Let me have a go!”

And a new set of fists began pounding me furiously in the face, until, after a few moments had passed, I was asked, “Had enough?”

Indeed I had.

“Yes,” I whimpered, and as I shook my dazed head I watched the backs of the two boys walk away, laughing, as they were free to do, across the field.

I turned to little Simon, who, with a ridiculous grin on his face, said, “That was Terry Saunders…” and then, after a pause and an audible chuckle, added, “and his mate.”

I couldn’t be upset with Simon. What I had just received was a humiliating but much needed lesson. When Simon had asked me if I could ‘have’ Terry Saunders, I had never even heard of the boy. Of course, it was with a cruel timing that Simon asked me while said Terry, unbeknown to me, was walking behind me.

Laughing at me still, Simon said, “You alright? ‘Cause that looked like it hurt.”