Is anybody there...?

Coincidentally (following close on the heels of Ray Girvan's comment on my "Taking comfort where I find it"), BBC Radio Four's A point of view slot on Friday evening backed him up with A L Kennedy's outlook on unobserved honesty: "Someone to watch over me".

Starting with bourbon biscuits in hotel rooms (yes, I confess, I've been there...) it moves rapidly to social science investigations such as the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments.

Click to either download and listen to the mp3 podcast (about ten minutes) or read the transcript.

What are your thoughts?

“I used to think I was indecisive, but now I’m not so sure”. So runs one of the oldest entries in the bumper fun book of psychology jokes. It parallels one in the statistician’s equivalent volume: “statistics means never having to say you’re certain” (which, if you are too young to remember Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal^[1] in Love story, plays off the strapline “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”) And both have a serious echoes in professional practice: because psychology is an area in which data trees are always compromised by a forest of confounding factors, and samples can often be small. In most pure, classical psychology, to an even greater extent than in the physical sciences, only statistical analysis can (to mix metaphors) tease out the pure signal from the white noise with confidence.

Even in its pure and classic form, the concerns of even the most abstract psychological research are rarely far from pragmatic utility. Roland Bremond, a mathematical morphologist currently concerned with the very down to earth business of transport planning, neatly encapsulated the data analytic nature of the beast^[2] in Saussurian terms: “La «réalité», du monde des objets, en psychologie expérimentale, est définie statistiquement comme l’ensemble des propriétés perçues partagées par tous les sujets «normaux» ... ... ... Autrement dit, la réalité est une propriété statistique, sur une population...” (In experimental psychology “reality”, the world of objects, is defined statistically as the set of properties shared by all perceived “normal” subjects ... ... ... or, to put it another way, reality is a statistical property of a population...)

Not that pure classical psychological research is the only strand or even the most evident. Without straying too far into monist and dualist controversies it’s fair to say that complete separation of mind from body was abandoned a long time ago, and psychology interpenetrates deeply with neuroscience and biochemistry amongst many other physical areas.

In its classic guise, especially in combination with modern computerised statistics, psychology is one of the areas of science where real, useful, original research can still be done by the solitary researcher without institutional funding or resources. In my freelance consultancy life I regularly work with research psychologists and frequently encounter such individuals, most of them right at home in one data analysis software package or another. In the run up to this article several lines of thought came from lone workers including the occasional pre-university student. [More]

Superglued

I am standing in a shop, looking for superglue, when the ever present background music resolves itself into a song which I knew well when I was sixteen. As it happens, I recently saw the title in an internet jukebox listing sent to me by a friend, a couple of weeks ago; before that, I'd not thought of it for most of the 40 years since my teens ended.

I shall write more later, when I've time and space to think; for now, I'll just record the moment and then go back to finding that superglue.

[...time passes...]

And here we are again. It is later.

The song was by a group called Union Gap (which I always assumed, for no obvious reason that I can now justify, to be named after the place in Washington state, roughly equidistant from Seattle and Portland). Googling both song and group, now, I discover that memory is at fault: it was "The Union Gap, featuring Gary Puckett" (and, shortly after this one song which I remember, changed to "Gary Puckett and the Union Gap"). I have no memory whatsoever of Gary Puckett ... but then, I have rarely been good at knowing the names of individual members within a band.

Anyway ... to return to the subject ... the song itself was Young girl. In it, the first person voice is (to quote Wikipedia's delicately neutral wording) "a man distressed to find out his lover is under an acceptable age".

Perceptions change with time, age and experience. The reason I find it worthwhile to stop and think about this now is that, within the first few bars, I became aware of a sharp discontinuity in my own perceptions of this song between "then" and "now". What mix of time, age and experience, I am curious to know, accounts for that? What does it say about me, about the world, about the times?

When I was sixteen, we listened to Young girl often. In the youth club, on café jukeboxes, on the radio, on Dansette record players at home in our rooms... it wasn't in my usual line of musical preference (I was a folk rock sort of youngster) but it had a good, compelling tune and rhythm which got into my bloodstream and drove me along just as much as anyone else. The first two words, belted out loud but slow, guaranteed my attention ... and the next five, rattled off fast, held it:

YOUNG ... girl ... GetOutOfMyMind!

We (the teenagers around my age at the time ... or, more accurately, the teenaged boys around my age at the time), muttered to one another that the song was about Lindsey Cook*, a bubbly, vivacious and dramatically well developed fifteen year old in the class below me who spent all her free time with young soldiers (probably only a couple of years older than me) from the nearby military base. Looking back, I realise that this had less to do with moral judgment than with selfish envy: Lindsey, we felt, if truth be told, should be bestowing her attentions on us instead.

Now, four decades on, I find the song ... I can't think of a better word ... creepy.

Why is that?

Is it the result of working some of my time with vulnerable young people? Am I hearing echoes of two cases in which I saw young girls damaged by inappropriate relationships with older authority figures? Have I succumbed to that pernicious "bogeyman du jour", an obsession with fear of the pædophile behind every tree? Or have I just changed with the passing of time, become a boring old fart who has lost touch with his younger self?

Or all of the above, perhaps.

Whatever it is, I now feel my skin crawl when I hear the song (especially since discovering that Gary Puckett is still performing it today) – even as I find it impossible to eradicate the tune which, having been reheard, is now superglued into my neural pathways and won't ... “get out of my mind”.

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* Not, I should mention, her real name.

Grieve for the dead, but remember the living

Whenever there is news coverage of a mass shooting such as Hungerford, Dunblane, Beslan, Columbine or, yesterday and today, the Utøya summer camp, I am struck by the way that everything focuses on number of deaths.

For those who were killed, it was dreadful – in the literal sense of that too easily used word. I cannot begin to imagine the terror they experienced. For those close to them it continues to be dreadful and will stay so for the rest of their lives.

But my thoughts go to those who are described as "lucky to be alive" – the survivors.

By what earthly measure does anyone imagine them to be "lucky"? Those who survive will have to live their lives with memory of that same terror which, for their dead peers, ended. And not just the terror either; there is survivor guilt. One survivor of Utøya spoke of being trapped in a toilet cubicle while one a boy was shot outside the door. Another of playing dead and feeling the heat of the barrel close to his face; yet another of watching class mates who had tried the same ploy being shot in the head. And on, and on... They will be traumatised for life. Use of the word "lucky" is disgustingly facile.

And I'm not forgetting that there are plenty of places where this sort of thing is so commonplace that it's never reported. What happens on such occasions is not a change in the world; simply that a brutal reality which is usually elsewhere has come to a venue near me.

Nasties under the bed

Just found, in Games and culture...

“This paper explores the characterizations of enemies in military-themed video games, with special attention given to the games Conflict: Desert Storm and America's Army. I demonstrate how the public enemy of America's Army is one not confined to any nationality, ethnicity, or political agenda. This marks a significant departure from games such as Conflict: Desert Storm. I argue that the production of this abstract enemy--what I call the unreal enemy''--is significantly shaped by a biopolitical system that intertwines the military and electronic entertainment industries. This arrangement delocalizes power, distributing it through a network of institutions and subjects. Throughout, I use ethnographic examples that explore how this abstract enemy has been constructed and juxtaposed against more concrete and personal figures, such as the America's Army Real Heroes, individuals upheld as the embodiment of personal achievement in the U.S. Army. I conclude by asserting that the unreal enemy of America's Army is, ultimately, an enemy that is not exclusive to a video game, but one that exists as an anonymous specter, ever present in the militarized American cultural imaginary.”

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Late addition, 2011-07-19. The following is a comment to this post, by Dr.C, but seems worth promotion to full visibility here.

“I am not sure I completely agree with this. At the present time the generic "enemy" seems to be more of mid-Eastern extract. There are examples where people will refuse to fly in an airplane next to anyone who is swarthy. The irony is, of course, that we invaded "them" and not the opposite.”

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• Robertson Allen, "The Unreal Enemy of America's Army". in Games and Culture, 2011. 6(1): p. 38-60. DOI 10.1177/1555412010377321
  

How beautiful is the rain...

Rain streams across a hotel window and breaks the street outside into a rippling impressionist geometry.

Rain on a window unfailingly triggers in my bed the recitation of a single stanza from a poem, in a classroom forty nine years ago.

The sick man from his chamber looks
At the twisted brooks;
He can feel the cool
Breath of each little pool;
His fevered brain
Grows calm again,
And he breathes a blessing on the rain.

The poem is Longfellow's How beautiful is the rain! and this is the fourth stanza of eleven.

Curious that an eleven year old should have felt such empathic pull from an image and an idea that meant nothing to him from his own experience ... and continue to feel it as a permanent and consistent association across the next five decades. I would have expected the opening line pairs from stanzas two and three to be the ones that stuck, because they are instantly recognisable – and stanza three ties very specifically to the visual image which I associate the poem:

How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoof
... ... ...
Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;

But the mind is its own master, and stanza four is what has stayed with me across the gulf between then and now.

(Possibly the fact that I learnt the poem in the classroom of the monstrous Mrs F has something to do with it. Mrs F was the class teacher from hell – literally, perhaps, to judge by her constant warnings of fire and torment in the afterlife. Maybe I sat in the whiff of sulphur and brimstone, imagining the release of cool rain? But no ... I suspect that this is a fancy constructed well after the event, a poetic rationalisation of the past from a psychologically aware adult future.)

The whole poem, to be honest, has little appeal for me as an adult ... I left it behind about five years after I first heard it ... but that single stanza remains mnemonically wedded to sight of rain flowing down window glass.

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If you want the whole Longfellow poem...

Heart to heart, for better or worse

A couple of days ago my brother referred me to a British Psychological Society Research Digest blog post, which in turn sent me to the full paper. The essence is that very low level social connectedness cues between individuals, such as being told of a shared interest, trigger physical empathy. (I ripped off the connected hearts image here from the BPS post.)

At one level, it shouldn't be a surprise. We've all experienced the feeling of loyalty to someone recently met in the face of conflict with a stranger. I once had a neighbour whom I disliked, and who went out of her way to be unpleasant to me, but to whose aid I unquestioningly went when I saw her being harassed by a third party. Every group, however temporary, exhibits ésprit de corps. And yet ... it's set me thinking since.

On the one hand, it seems hopeful that we so readily make connection with another. In a world where conflicts with the other are so devastating, the more readily connectedness with the other can happen the better. On the other hand, in a world where tribalism, factionalism, schismatic conflict are based on gut level "me and mine" alliances (and prominent figures associated with a Scottish football club identified with religious sectarianism has just received letter bombs), perhaps it's worrying that they can cohere around such tangential associations.

As so often in life, both are probably true ... a binary Manicheism that just has to be lived with.

Fascinating, though.

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• David Cwir, et al., Your heart makes my heart move: cues of social connectedness cause shared emotions and physiological states among strangers. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011. 47(3): p. 661-664. Abstract available here [ prepublication manuscript available here at time of writing]

Photograph: memento mori

“All those photographs broke Jackson's heart. Holiday snaps, birthdays, and Christmases, all the highlights of family life. Jackson found photographs unsettling enough at the best of times. There was a lie at the heart of the camera, it implied that the past was tangible when the very opposite was true.”

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• Kate Atkinson, Started early, took my dog. 2010, London: Doubleday. 9780385616997 (tpbk). ["Arcadia", §10:4e, p.261]

Room

Declan Hughes, reviewing Emma Donoghue's Room for the Irish Times, said that "this book will break your heart". Perhaps he's right ... but I think that it will also fill your heart to bursting point with fierce hope for the indomitability of the human spirit.

If you remember John Fowles' novel The collector, start there. If not, think of Natascha Kampusch. Either way, don't get too literally hung up on what is only a point of departure. The unnamed woman in Room is, like both of those women, victim of a kidnap. Like Miranda Grey in The collector, she was taken as a young adult; like Natascha Kampusch, she has survived eight years of captivity in the twelve foot square "Room" of the title; but she is neither or them. She is unnamed because the story is told entirely as interior monologue by her five year old son Jack, born in Room (he capitalises most nouns and uses them as names: Room, Rug, Wardrobe) as a result of repeated rape by her captor. Jack knows her (and refers to her) only as "Ma".

Both characters (Ma and Jack) are astonishingly powerful extended psychological pen portraits. Both are strong, resilient characters – and kept that way by mutual reliance, the depiction of which is a tour de force in itself. I have never known anyone who has been though this exact set of experiences; but I have known mothers in their twenties and their small children, trapped in or recently escaped from abusive relationships, who displayed exactly the same codependence portrayed here. Just from this perfectly realised portrayal, Room will amply reward the time you spend reading it.

In a larger sense it's about courage, devotion, freedom, love, loyalty, psychological toughness, resilience, self reliance, and many other things ... but also about the limits of those things, what lies beyond them, and what they cost.

Then again, it is an exhilarating intellectual journey: an intriguing, non SF example of what Ray Girvan describes as "conceptual breakthrough" fiction – and a new take on Ray's suggestion that such fictions peculiarly suit young protagonists. Jack has never seen the outside world, and believes his twelve foot by twelve foot Room to be the whole universe. The whole book showcases his dawning realisation that there is more reality than he can imagine.

But, before all of that, it is a gripping and beautifully told story.

[many thanks to David P for the recommendation]

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A couple of (possibly random) connections which may make no sense to anyone else: reading this book sent me back to two personal old favourites. First, a book which is at least superficially very different, The stolen child by Kevin Donohue (no "g", no relation) which I have mentioned previously. Second, Tanita Tikaram's song "World outside your window".

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• Emma Donoghue, Room. 2010, London: Picador. 9780330519021 or 0330519026 (pbk)
• John Fowles, The collector. 1963, London: Jonathan Cape. [newer edition: 2004, London: Vintage. 0099470470 (pbk.)]
• Keith Donohue, The stolen child. 2006, London: Jonathan Cape. 9780224076968 or 0224076965 (hbk.), 9780224076975 or 0224076973 (pbk.).
• Tanita Tikaram, "World outside your window" on Ancient heart. 1988, WEA. 2292438772.

Synchronicity, yet again...

My brother recently asked about the (social interaction) process by which I arrived at the "On the bench" photographs. (Several others have asked related questions.)

In the course of answering, yesterday morning, I made reference to portraiture as a joint enterprise between portrayer and portrayed (in this case, photographer and subject). While still thinking about that, I found the following Unreal Nature extract from Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image:

“… The author takes a step towards his characters, but the characters take a step towards the author: double becoming. Story-telling is not an impersonal myth, but neither is it a personal fiction: it is a word in act, a speech-act through which the character continually crosses the boundary …”

Which seems much the same thing ... and could apply as much to characters in a novel as in a film. Perhaps all arts are a similar contract. Perhaps social interaction itself is, too.

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• Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 : the time-image. 2005, London: Continuum. 0826477062. (Original: Cinéma II: L'image-temps, Collection "Critique", 1985, Paris; first English trans 1989).

Any which way but ... up

Well, well, well ... (three holes in the ground, as the old joke goes)...

The light hearted title of my last post ("And, best of all, the right way up") has been coincidentally taken up by Dr C (here and, in much greater detail, here), in response to an Unreal Nature post ... and Ray Girvan has (in the comments) tied it back to habitat theory, for which I have great affection and about which I have always intended to write (but never actually done so) here.

Interrogate your hi-heel sneakers...*

Unreal Nature and TTMF recently had an exchange about Ursula K Le Guin's take on high heeled shoes; TTMF also posted on the subject

I have, as I briefly noted in that run of comments, strong views on high heels which I have learned to keep to myself. I am not, personally, convinced by Le Guin's speculation that the fetishistic appeal of high heels is congruent with the eroticism of pain. High heels relate to Chinese foot binding only in the fact that both involve feet in sacrifice of well being to a local idea of beauty. The sacrifice in both cases is, however, real.

Unreal Nature points out that “women love their shoes” ... and I don't dispute it. But human beings are eternally capable of loving that which (or those who) will damage or even destroy them. Women love their shoes, I would suggest, because they have grown up in a society where they learnt that this was what they should do.

The usual explanation for the appeal of high heels is a biosocial one: they throw the weight of the body forward, resulting in muscle tensions which in turn produce visual signals interpreted by the male instinctive subconscious as indicative of sexual readiness. That may be true; I am not qualified to either endorse or dispute it, though it makes superficial sense. I suspect that there is an uglier instinct, too: a woman o high heels is completely unable to run effectively and, therefore, advertises vulnerability.

But there is another aspect: high heels are (in the semiotic sense) a sign. Watch a group of men whose inhibitions have been removed by alcohol, and you will see that there are a numbr of signs which will trigger whistles and suggestive remarks. They include long hair, fur coats, and high heels amongst many others. The woman inside the fur coat, bneah the long hair, perched on the high heels, is to a large extent irrelevant to the initial knee jerk response.

Though I differ from Le Guin's analysis of their fetishistic appeal, I personally believe that high heels are unpleasant and dangerous just on the vulnerability issue alone. It is not my place to decide what others wear; but I cannot ever approve of a social convention which places an individual at deliberate risk.

There is nothing wrong with fetishism, nor with social persistence of convention; but there can be very much wrong with the impact of either on individuals and their well being. In the case of high heeled shoes, the harm is both physical and psychosocial. If individuals wish to accept harm as a price for something else, they should be aware that they are doing so − and should not do so under social duress.

On a broader stage, much of this can be generalised to fashion in general. As Le Guin says in the same essay:

“And fashion is a great power, a great social force, to which men may be even more enslaved than the women who try to please them by obeying it.”

...or, to quote myself in somewhat more melodramatic mode,“...in my opinion ‘fashion’ is a terrible, terrible thing for the freedom of the individual ... a dead hand on the control levers of the individual psyche of which dictators with huge propaganda machines can only dream ... another word for constant, universal, low level mob behaviour.”

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• *Tommy Tucker, Put on your hi-heel sneakers. 1964.
• Ursula K Le Guin, The wave in the mind : talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination., "Discussions and opinions: About feet". 2004, Boston: Shambhala. 1590300068 or 9781590300060 (pbk.).

Locked in, locked out

Most new research doesn't make it to the general news media. This week's publication of a paper describing two-way communication with patients who had been believed to be in a persistent vegetative state, via functional magnetic resonance imaging, is an exception: it captures the imagination and horrifies to an irresistible extent.

As part of the spill-over from that story I overheard, on a passing radio in a crowded place, fragments of an account by someone who had been in this locked-in state for more than two years. (I can't, unfortunately, locate a reference for the radio programme.) As I listened to the bits I could hear, I was most struck not by the science or technology involved but by the calm, rational phrasing of the interviewee.

I am a person who considers myself able to cope well with isolation. I have, on occasion, spent weeks or even months on end without human company and (so far as I know; perhaps I delude myself and others think differently) suffered no ill effects. But I cannot imagine that, after two years in which I was fully aware of the world but unable to communicate with it, I would still be in any sense sane – never mind able to construct rational discussion of the experience. I know, from experience, that human beings are incredibly tough ... but thinking about this situation raises my amazement at the degree of that toughness by several orders of magnitude.

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• M M Monti et al., "Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness" in New England Journal of Medicine, 2010: p. NEJMoa0905370. Available from: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/reprint/NEJMoa0905370v1.pdf. (accessed 2010-02-05)

Photesia

I was led to Riley and his story by a post on Unreal Nature, and spent several hours there or with the downloaded PDF. I spent some of that time crying.

Since I am stealing Julie's discovery, I'll make an exception and not give a reference to the site; you can get there via her post: "Concrete reality".

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Update:

Just over a month later I posted the above, the balance of obligations has changed.

For the long term, here is the URL for Riley and his story:
http://www.rileyandhisstory.com/

Weighed in the balance

Coming through the railway station, an hour ago, I paused to check train times.

Suddenly, there was a small boy in front of me. About four years old, very serious expression on his face. Head tilted right back to look up at me.

“Are you a good man?” he asked.

How do you answer that?

“I hope so,” I replied cautiously, “I try to be.”

He nodded, still serious.

“OK” he said, and skipped off to join his parents.

I've been wondering, since, where on earth that question to a stranger might have come from.

Inside/outside (revisited)

Unreal Nature's Julie Heywood (from whom I borrow my post title) commented, last month, that “Felix Grant often includes people and surroundings in his photographs of other people's art.” That was an entirely valid observation in the context, but it was a different viewpoint from my own and, therefore, made me think (always a good thing).

Jim Putnam of TTMF has, on more than one occasion, described himself as an “inveterate people watcher”. I would describe myself in the same way. Though my online showing doesn't suggest it, if I had to identify one aspect of my photographic work that is key and core, it would be "people watching" (which was, as it happens, the title of my physical joint summer show with Kevin Jones in 2004).

(As an irrelevant aside: finding those two links made me aware that Jim, Julie and I place different weights on the importance and placing of search facilities)

Since reading Unreal Nature's comment, I've been more than usually observant of my own photographic practice, psychology and habits. Julie made specific reference to a Growlery post about a student show and, looking back at it, I have to conceded that on balance they show art rather than people dominant. To me, nevertheless, seen from within my own head looking out, the first two examples are pictures of people in an art environment rather than of art accompanied by people. To other viewers, I concede, it probably looks different – and the text of my post shifted the balance still further.

Whereas Julie sees me including people and surroundings in my photographs of art, I would describe myself as including art as part of the surroundings in my photographs of people. Neither is wrong; neither is right; they are simply views of the same thing from different places. Radically different views, from radically different places, but only because through the eyes of radically different people. seeing both viewpoints expands my understanding of both ... a bit like looking at a Picasso portrait.

With that in mind I went though a new set of photographs [slideshow here], taken earlier this week during my third visit to a Banksy show. To me, they are people watcher photographs, pure and simple. But I do, now, also see them overlaid with an external view a photographs of art with people in them.

Interesting. And I'd be interested in anyone else's perceptions.

Lucy in the sky with violence

Since I posted "The South", three weeks ago, I've had a trickle of enquiries about one peripheral comment: “I didn't know what racism or race were ... until I was 14. ... I lost that innocence not in the US south but in a smallish UK market town”. Only a trickle, but a constant one which hasn't yet shown any sign of abating. So, here is a tidied up and recycled account lifted from an email to friends a few years back along.

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I know now, as an adult, that most of us grow up to a certain point without knowing what racism is. We just assume that our own attitudes and those of the world around us are normal – until such time as the two (our own and the surrounding world's) come to differ in some way. One of the oddities about my early upbringing was that I didn't know what race was. Fat, Buddhist, thin, Baptist, white, tall, Jewish, short, black, friendly, Hindu, antagonistic, dark brown, kind, Moslem, cruel, Taoist, light brown, open, Baha'ist, distant, English speaking, French speaking, Arabic speaking, Cantonese speaking, clever, Shintoist, clumsy, olive, young, Catholic, old, pagan, middle aged ... that was just the way people were ... it genuinely never occurred to me that any of these things were relevant to anything else at all until I was 14.

At that age I found myself listening to class mates at a British school talk and make jokes about "wogs". Like any 14 year old, I was reluctant to admit ignorance ... so, just as I had four years earlier when other boys talked about sex, I pretended I understood: I laughed when others did, but said little and tried to puzzle it out.

This unwitting collusion ended after about three months. I had had my first kiss. Well, first adult kiss; there had been snatched playground kisses but not the full real beautiful thing. Now that had changed. Lucy, who lived up the road and was a pupil at the Sec Mod school, (with whom I had for some weeks been taking long and unnecessary detours on the way home, talking earnestly about deeply meaningful issues which now escape me) suddenly dragged me off the road into a patch of bushes by the rec, put her arms round my neck, and ... well, the world was wonderfully changed.

The next day, at school, other boys were looking at me and sniggering. I didn't particularly notice; I was lost in my own selfish haze of eternal undying love for Lucy. At lunch break, though, I was rudely awakened by being thrown in the ornamental fish pond and held under.

My crime, apparently, was being seen "kissing a wog". I was at a loss. The only person I had kissed was Lucy. Was Lucy a wog? I didn't know; but obviously she must be. After that, I couldn't stay innocent for long. I found out what the word meant (for US readers, the approximate equivalent of "nigger") and with it the whole existence of race and racism.

And there's no closing the door once opened. It's like original sin. When we know what racism is, we become, ipso facto, racist ourselves. It's like original sin, Because it's not possible to be aware of something and not have it in mind when looking at the world. Similarly with sexism, or any other prejudicial ism. At thirteen I simply wouldn't have noticed a black/white couple; at fifteen, I would note it with approval – and that is racism. I became aware that race affected advancement ... so I would cheer a black footballer though I had no interest in football – and that is racism. Even my passionate following of the gradual, painful civil rights triumphs in the US and in Ulster (and gravitation to friendships with those who shared those politics) was racism. Heart in the right place racism perhaps; but racism nonetheless. As Jim Putnam has more than once commented over at TTMF, we will know that racism is no more when every race can have its scoundrels as well as its heroes – and without comment on their race, in either direction.

Flow

Luke Palmer, aka AcerOne, wrote yesterday: "...working together is a fundamental graffiti ethos ... Talking thing over ... discussing styles, composition, colours, shading, 3D ... you learn ... produce new art. I think the ‘flow’ of graffiti art is born of people just doing graffiti..."

He's right ... but not, in my opinion, just about graffiti. I don't see a lot of difference between one type of artist and another, nor between artist and scientist or anyone else who feels impelled to do something (anything) by an inner urge.

Unreal Nature recently drew ("The Russian Sense Of Blueness") on one of Nabokov's essay series “The art of translation”, from the archives of The new republic. I haven't read that for many years (so long, in fact, that I had completely forgotten it) so was glad to have it brought back to me. Additionally, it happened by chance that the title of that post pulled at me in a particular way.

I am, and have always been, a complete failure at learning foreign languages; an embarrassment in a family which otherwise shows aptitude in that area, and a definite disadvantage in life. Oh, I can scratch along. I can rapidly accumulate fistfuls of nouns, verbs and adjectives that permit survival level communication; I can decode written expository text, given a good dictionary and a grammar book; but I cannot converse, never mind create. Nabokov, who despite his "thin" English (his word, in the essay) managed to write sublime and luminous prose in his second language which I could never dream of producing in my own native tongue, is a wonder to me – as are my Italian students who display a deep understanding of Alice in Wonderland or Joyce's Ulysses.

So when, at one point in the distant past, I spent a lengthy period of intensive time in close contact with a particular group of Russians, communication was a hard fought business. Their English was the same sort of utilitarian grab bag of essential words as my Russian, and with the same lack of grace. Both they and I had similarly poor (but not necessarily coëxtensive) scratched together collections of French, German, Arabic and Tigrinya words. Every simple exchange of nonessential conversation became a philosophical and linguistic adventure. And one of the things I learned, to my everlasting wonder, was that "blue" meant different things to them and to me. In particular, they saw different blues as at least two different colours and not, as I did, variants on one.

A couple of days after Unreal Nature's post, a Polish friend gave me a copy of Cosmos and Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz.

I say "by Witold Gombrowicz", but of course these are English translations – because I cannot read Polish. My admiration for Stanislav Lem (also Polish) is also based entirely on English translations. I did, as a teenager with dictionaries in hand, battle my way through some Dante, Proust, Chaucer, and so on, in the original; but in some ways (and Nabokov makes clear why), I get closer to the truth of the original when I don't understand the words at all than when I seek to decode them: the rhythms and sounds come through more truly than the content – I listen to the songs of Sevara Nazarkhan in the same spirit.

I knew nothing of Gombrowicz when I started reading (the English translation of) Cosmos. I read it at face value, and was captured by the play with language: not just the language of words, but of gesture, physical juxtaposition, visual symbol, and so on. He reminds me (in translation) of Flan O'Brien's The third policeman.

Whose language am I reading, when I read a translation? The translator's, of course. And yet, discussing Cosmos with Agnieszka who gave it to me and who herself knows it in her native Polish, I find that my impression of that play is the same as hers. I will never know whether the play I am hearing is the same as the play she hears, but I do know that we both hear play.

Over the past few months, Agnieszka has also been discussing T S Eliot (particularly "Gerontion") with me – in English, my language and also Eliot's but not hers. I have learnt a tremendous amount in the process: and have gradually realised that reading in a second language is giving her a new set of insights generated by the process of crossing the language barrier itself.

This may seem irrelevant to visual imagery, but it is not. Different cultures accrue different visual associations. Moreover, the process of crossing into another mind is as radical in its way as (perhaps even more so than) crossing into another language.

When I posted the Today 090607 image (shown here on the left) used as an example by Jim Putnam (see "Catch as catch can"), I received an email response from painter Gayle Reynolds: "I found a whole robin's egg in my new garden two days ago and this looks just like it." Then Unreal nature's Julie Heyward posted an "equivalent": a fractured blue eggshell on grey stone. Both responses taught me a great deal about what I had and had not seen; but together they taught me much more than twice as much.

When I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I joined camera clubs. They were, to be honest, inhabited by people I would now find tedious ... but also very kind and generous in sharing with me what they knew. I learned a lot of craft from them, as well as what I did not want to do or be, and I am grateful to them. Now, many years on, what Luke calls "flow" is, though not under that label, vital to my continued growth. The flow is not limited to one area of endeavour, nor to one kind of interaction. Agnieszka, J S Bach, Elisabeth Louise Vigée-le-Brun, Dr C, Gayle, Jim, Julie, Luke, Ray Girvan, Ivor McGillivray, Sevara Nazarkhan, W Eugene Smith, Chris Waller: my interaction with them, and with many others, is in some cases face to face, in others virtual, or both, and in many zones of life from mathematics or science through business to the arts (often all at once). With every book I read or image I see or song I hear, the interaction is only one way – but no less part of the "flow", and no less so if it is either not in the original or not in a language I can read transparently.

The "flow" has not been limited to the local since writing was invented. It has never been limited to one direction or one modality. But, with time, it gets ever richer and more multi threaded.

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• T S Eliot, "Gerontion" in Collected poems, 1909-1962: London : Faber, 1963 (2002 printing). 0571105483 (pbk.)
• Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos and Pornografia: two novels. (Trans: Eric Mosbacher & Alistair Hamilton)1985, New York: Grove Press. 0802151590.
• Vladimir Nabokov, "The art of translation" in The new republic,
• Flann O'Brien, The third policeman. 1967: London, MacGibbon & Kee (hbk).
  Most recent edition (at time of writing) – 2007, London: Harper Perennial. [978]0007247172 (pbk.)

Catch as catch can

This is slightly adapted from a comment left earlier this morning on TTMF's "Extended moments" post, which took Unreal Nature's "Catch and release" as a starting point and used my Today 090607 as an illustration.

Jim (at TTMF) is writing about the back story which grows in the viewer's or reader's or listener's mind, using the unknown spaces around what an artefact or its author provide.

I'm delighted and flattered to see an image of mine used as illustration; I'm also (artistically, intellectually, philosophically) extended by seeing my own artefact through other eyes. I, of course, know what it was that I photographed (and, in fact, assumed that the viewer would immediately know too), but have had many emails in which the sender did not know what it was, chose to see it in a particular way, or knew (but differently from me) what it was. I was pleased that Jim didn't know what the object in the hole was ... and I won't spoil anyone's extended back story potential by naming it.

One of the most powerful "author is dead" aspects of a text (taking "text" to include anything from musical score to photograph, film, sculpture, whatever) is that the "writer" (photographer, musician...) may (though may not) know exactly what the back story is, while the "reader" (viewer, listener...) certainly cannot. In that diffence lies one facet of the magic which art offers.

Belling the cat

In comments to his "Cross purposes" post on the swastika's wilderness years, Ray Girvan and I agreed that continued vilification serves to bolster its potency as a symbol for the neofascist far right.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, though. I can well see why those of my parents' generation (both inside and outside Germany) felt, in the late 1940s, the need to suppress a symbol around which might accrete resurgence of an ideology which had so recently been survived at such cost. The aftermath of total war does not provide ideal conditions for the flowering of reason and nuance (see JSBlog's post "Law and the Potter mythos", discussing Aaron Schwabach on "a society which has made imperfect laws in the confused aftermath of a war").
The generation which followed was mine. We had no memory of Nazism, but our formative years were spent in its shadow. We were the babyboomers who, despite our rebellions in many ways, carried the fears forward. I certainly, despite my intellectual recognition of the case for defusing the symbol through rehabilitation, feel reluctance to have anything to do with it.
The Nazi swastika was probably the first massively successful global logo branding exercise, and we are still living with that fact.
The result is a common phenomenon both socially and physically: a pressure cooker whose lid nobody dares touch. Efforts against coastal erosion can sometimes generate a spit of land which defies and distorts currents for miles around, leading to a choice between sacrificing a community upon it or continuing to subsidise destruction of others ... until eventually it becomes impossible to maintain. (Shooting off at a tangent: Joanne Harris's novel The coastliners is built on much the same idea: theft of a sand beach, and associated tourism driven prosperity, from one community by another, by construction of a harbour component.) The present dire situation of Isra'elis and Palestinians is the direct result, years down the line, of pragmatic spur of the moment decisions made in the after math of the same war which gave us swastika fear. Some buildings which utilise highly tensioned support components are very difficult to demolish safely.
Temporary action against the swastika as Nazi symbol, at a time of postwar turmoil, has built up exactly that sort of head of steam. If I am reluctant to have anything to do with the swastika, I shouldn't be surprised that politicians have no wish to destroy their careers by messing with it. To dismantle the taboo would be the sensible thing to do; but nobody wants to be the one who bells the cat.

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Joanne Harris, Coastliners. 2003, London: Black Swan. 0552998850 (pbk.)

Schwabach, A., Harry Potter and the Unforgivable Curses: Norm-formation, Inconsistency, and the Rule of Law in the Wizarding World. Roger Williams University Law Review, 2006. 11(2): p. 309.

Art Spiegelman, A.M. Spiegelman, and A.M. Spiegelman II, Maus : a survivor's tale. 2003, London: Penguin. 0141014081 (pbk)