Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Physics Solves Problem of Immortality, Again!

As I've said many times, I do my best here not to enter into the usual blogospheric disputations. But there is a certain kind of science writing that has irked me for years, and that is now much harder to avoid as a result of the proliferation of blogs, that I cannot refrain from briefly denouncing.

It is proliferated by scientists and science amateurs alike, but in both cases it seems to have roughly the same connection to science as Cosmo's sex-position tips have with Eros. Whatever concrete domain of science it addresses, its underlying message is: science is awesome. This genre works by a sort of magic, turning anything and everything that it takes to be of interest into 'science' by its simple attention: the way light shines through stained-glass windows, the way foods cooked sous vide affect the palate, and so on. This transformative power parallels that of the practitioner of yoga, who will claim that in virtue of her commitment to yoga everything else in her life is charged with yogic specialness as well. It is a presumption that, whether yogic or scientistic, must be resisted by intelligent people.

All this a fortiori when, on the basis of this presumption of the universal authority of the scientistic outlook, the science writer ventures into philosophical territory. A fine example of this was Sean M. Carroll's recent blog post for Scientific American on the impossibility of the immortality of the soul. Now Carroll is a friend of many friends of mine, and seems like a gracious and thoughtful person. I hope we can disagree non-crazily, as he would put it. But his post is simply bad: a pseudophilosophical conclusion, drawn from pure non-sequiturs, and based on nothing but the aura of authority with which his social status as a physicist is supposed to imbue his opinions.

At the heart of Carroll's argument is the un-argued-for presumption that souls must be the sort of entities that attach to particles, that they cannot exist without particle hosts, and, further, that since no empirical data about the host particles of souls has been forthcoming in the now-complete physics of everyday life, we are justified in assuming that whatever it is we think of as 'soul' dissolves with the death of the body.

Carroll believes that anyone who is committed to the existence of an immortal soul must answer the following questions:

If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

Now some philosophers have argued that souls must remain attached to or associated with particulate hosts (the Stoics, for example), but this is probably a minority view in the history of Western philosophy. There are varieties of soul, the vegetative and sensitive, that are generally held to be indissociably wrapped up with the body, and thus to perish along with the body. But these are generally contrasted with the rational soul: the soul that is capable of knowing the eternal truths of mathematics, etc., and that is ontologically independent of whatever biological host it happens to ride for a while. There is no reason to expect to find this soul stored after death in a physical substrate that can be accounted for in terms of the physics of everyday life: this soul is not the information stored by the brain, which would then after death be transmitted to some other physical storage unit.

Now I sure as hell am not going to argue for the existence of a soul, but I know that if I were to seek to argue against it, I would not suppose at the outset that what is meant by 'soul' is 'brain-stored information about the self'. There are other options in the history of human thought, options that have been well defended, and that require sophisticated refutations based on knowledge of the history of philosophy.

Since Carroll attempted to impress us all into agreeing with him by trotting out Dirac's intimidating-looking equation --it looks hard, the implicit message goes, therefore anyone who understands it must be able to answer our questions about life after death--, I think I'll reply in kind by citing a profound bit of philosophy in French and declining to translate it: où il n'y a pas un être, il n'y a pas un être. Don't worry about the details; what this says is that for deep metaphysical reasons, it is not possible that reality should consist in physical particles, let alone in congeries built up from physical particles. Whatever deserves to be called a being, is going to be absolutely simple, one, monadic, and this means, among other things, undetectable by the physics of everyday life.

Is it true? I have no idea. I am convinced, as are Carroll and Alva Noë, and as is pretty much everyone who qualifies as salonfähig in our era, that the best explanations are naturalistic, that is, that they are based on what is detectable. But it is one thing to circumscribe the domain of permissible explanations, quite another to dismiss an entire order of explanation as false. So again, I don't know whether reality is one and simple or whether it consists in clumps of particles, but I do know that the author of that French phrase thought at least as hard about the nature of reality as Sean Carroll has, and that if the phrase is not true its untruth will not be established by appeal to the current state of physical science. It is not up to the physical scientists, in other words, to refute it, and still less is it up to them to dismiss it. The fact that they are allowed by editors and readers to do so anyway is a matter principally of sociological interest. 

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Postscript, 30 May:

I realized quickly after hitting 'publish' one thing that I should have made clear, and that is that I am certainly not arguing for a strict division of labor between scientists and philosophers, with scientists holding forth on the features of the phenomenal world and philosophers uniquely qualified to speculate on what if anything is grounding the appearances. To argue such a thing would be to go exactly against the spirit of what I have been pushing elsewhere, as in my recent piece for The Stone, where I urge that what is most needed is a return to the era when science was constitutive of philosophy, rather than at best complimentary to it, or at worst antagonistic. But this reconciliation will not occur simply by allowing any scientist, trained in the way scientists are today, with no real awareness of their place in the history of natural philosophy, to hold forth on philosophical questions.

When I was 10 years old or so I came up with what I thought was a knockdown argument against the possibility of reincarnation: I called it 'the demographic argument', as it appealed to the fact that there are vastly more people alive today than in the past, and therefore only a small percentage of them could have a series of past lives going all the way back to the beginning of human history. This was intellectually satisfying, but it failed to grasp the alternative conceptions of history (roughly speaking, cyclical rather than linear), and of the scope of the shared community of beings (extending to all life forms rather than just to human beings), that make theories of metempsychosis make sense. Understood holistically, embedded in the total belief system of which it is a part, metempsychosis makes powerful sense, and it is only a ten-year-old know-it-all mentality that would rest content with an argument such as the demographic one, which imports all of the presumptions of our own contemporary philosophical (or weltanschaulich) predicament for the assessment of a theory that does not arise from that predicament. This is similar to what happens when scientists untrained in the history of philosophy swoop in to settle its millennia-old questions.

Homophonic Translation

Among the many games devised by the OuLiPo group of writers was a variety of translation that preserves not the semantic features of the original text, but instead preserves its phonetic features while altering its meaning.

This is something that can be done within a single language, or from one language to another. French seems particularly well suited to intralanguage homophonic translation, since there are so many different ways of combining letters to produce one and the same phoneme. To give the most obvious example, -é, -ée, -és, -ées, -ai, -aie, -ais, -aix, -ait, and -aient are all pronounced the same way (provided that we do not have to worry about elision with an initial vowel of a following word).

This feature of French makes it possible to come up with homophonies such as the following:

Queneau (Raymond), très haut pape, l'a répété:
Que nos raies, montrées aux papelards, aient pété.

That is:

Queneau (Raymond), most high pope, said it again:
That our rays, shown to the hypocrites, farted.

In the French version, the first line is pronounced identically to the second one, in spite of enormous differences of both spelling and meaning.

I have tried and tried, but I have never been able to come up with so much as a single pair of homophonous English sentences, both of which, however obscure, are at least syntactically correct and both of which at least mean something or other. If intra-language homophonic sentences are so difficult to come by, it might seem nearly impossible to produce a proper homophonic translation between languages. But OuLiPo managed to come up with a few of these as well. For example, Catullus's famous lines

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

can be rendered in French as:

O diète à mots couards! Raide face et âme forte acérée qui rit ce
N'est ce qui, ô cède fière, hisse, haute Io et tais ce que crus ci-hors.

At the level of meaning, there is nothing in common between the two sentences, yet they are nearly identical with respect to pronunciation (at least following the usual French conventions for Latin pronunciation, which Anglo-Saxon Latinists reject). The original text from Catullus can be translated (in the traditional sense) as follows:

I hate and I love. Why do I do it, perchance you might ask?
I don't know, but I feel it happening to me and I'm burning up.

The French, in turn, is so obscure, indeed is so near-nonsensical, that I can't translate it with any confidence. What's more, the homophony breaks down at at least one point ('sentio' is not homophonous with '-se haute Io').

The obscurity and difficulty of homophonic translation shows, I think, how restricted one's expressive range becomes when highly demanding formal constraints are placed on language. This restriction almost functions as an argument against working with such formal constraints, and so against the entire OuLiPo project.

But as I understand it OuLiPo's argument was always that formal constraints have been part of the poetic or artistic use of language all along (e.g., rhyme, meter), and that it is only a certain 20th-century laziness, associated in particular with the rise of surrealism and with the idea of 'the unconscious', that made writers and readers think that free expression of whatever flows out of a person might have some artistic value. For OuLiPo, such 'free' expression is simply operating under other, external constraints, of which the author is unaware; much better to set one's own constraints, to be the master of one's own limitations.

More generally, this particular game raises questions about our presumption that the conveyance of meanings is the supreme purpose of writing and in particular of translation. Why should the meaning of a sentence be the sole feature of it that one aims to preserve in translating from one language to another? What if meaning is just one of the features that might be selected to be conserved and made accessible to readers of another language? Doesn't the French sentence convey something of what Catullus said, to readers who have access to French but not to Latin?

Obviously, the preservation of non-semantic features in translation will be more important for poetry than for prose, and it's the overwhelming dominance of prosaic language in our age that gives rise to the presumption that translation can have only one aim: to carry meaning over.

The Flight of Curiosity

From the 'Stone' series in the online edition of the New York Times. To read the entire article, click here.

Today’s natural scientist easily distinguishes his own work not only from his hobbies, but also from the activity of his pseudoscientific counterpart. When we look back in history, however, it becomes difficult to keep this distinction in view, for it has often happened that false beliefs have produced significant experimental results and have led to real discoveries. It is no less difficult  to separate the history either of science or of pseudoscience from what I will dare to call the “real” history of philosophy, for until very recently, what we now call science was not merely of interest to philosophers, but was in fact constitutive of philosophy. In fact, it was not called science at all, but rather natural philosophy.

Thus, tellingly, among the articles in the Philosophical Transactions of 1666, the first year of the journal’s publication, we find titles such as “Of a Considerable Load-Stone Digged Out of the Ground in Devonshire,” and “Observations Concerning Emmets or Ants, Their Eggs, Production, Progress, Coming to Maturity, Use, &c.” Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, researchers studying the properties of magnetism continued to refer to their area of interest as “the magnetical philosophy,” and as late as 1808  John Dalton published “A New System of Chemical Philosophy.” A year later Jean-Baptiste Lamarck brought out his “Philosophie zoologique.” Yet by the early 20th century, this usage of the word philosophy had entirely vanished. What happened?

Les Bisous

I get some of my best writing done at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where I now sit.

I could use my time here otherwise; I could learn the layout of the place, something that after countless visits remains entirely mysterious to me. I've made out at least a vague resemblance to some coiled viper that has, at intervals, swallowed several large rodents, causing it to bulge in spots and to narrow in others. The whole snake surrounds a mass of concrete curly-queues, traffic roundabouts at various elevations, each serving its own class of vehicle. Everything is concrete: concrete slabs of ceiling supported on concrete pillars, concrete ramps blocked off by concrete barriers. The ghost of General de Gaulle himself haunts this grey mess. It sings of French third-way-ism, flimsy viennoiseries at certain narrowings along the viper's vertebrae, sad succursales of the Hippopotamus chain at others; the shells of abandoned Minitel cabins: all the sagging, unsustainable sadness of a half-Soviet hybrid. It looks to be on the verge of collapse, and indeed great chunks of it have collapsed. Scrap metal litters the runways and has been known to trip up Concordes. The arrivals screens have been seen to report as retardé what they might more accurately have described as disparu.

I sit and stare at my computer screen and write because, in truth, this place terrifies me.

But I'm sitting here, obviously, because I've been going around France again, which means also going around exchanging bisous. This is problematic for me, as I am an American, and even among Americans am exceptionally awkward when it comes to physical contact. But over the years I've practiced, and have now reached the point where I am able to kiss strange cheeks with passable elegance.

But why all this kissing, anyway?

Something needs to be done to inaugurate social interaction. There must be some signalling of a transition from each doing his or her own thing, to each participating in a shared moment. The Japanese mark this transition by a subtle bow, Americans by a handshake (or sometimes a half-assed 'hug', a concept to which I'll return shortly); bonobos mark it by genital displays. But the merely visual presentation of the Japanese does not seem transformative enough, and in the bonobos' case it seems to misread the character of the impending interaction (or at least to read it in a way that human beings would rather not acknowledge too soon). The American handshake is indissociably linked to commercial interests, to deal-making and to vulgar Mammonism. One needs, as the Europeans have understood, to get the lips involved, to make a little suction noise that announces that two human bodies are in the same place doing the same thing, in order to set a properly human encounter in motion.

Some etymological considerations. The verb 'to kiss' in many languages is formed by onomatopoeia. In Sanskrit the verbal root is chumb- (giving us the lovely syllabic redoubling of the third-person singular perfect form: chuchumba, 'she kissed'). 'Kiss' and 'küssen' hear the sound differently than their Indo-European ancestor, but somehow no less accurately. When the verb is not onomatopoeic, it often emerges from a semantic cluster that is even more revealing than the natural sound of a kiss. Thus the Russian tselovat' is connected to tsel', which is to say 'target'. And isn't that what kiss-compressed lips in fact are? Isn't that what bodily orifices are?

It is the orifical nature of the kiss that scares the Americans and the Japanese away, and that also inevitably associates it with other possibilities of greater consequence. Of excessive consequence for some is that sort of kiss that involves the meeting of two parties' lips. Think of the caricatured American puritan in Alain Resnais' wonderfully titled Pas sur la bouche --which is in turn an ecranization of some early-20th-century operetta-- who will permit labio-buccal contact with the sundry, implausibly desirous demoiselles, but not labio-labial. The association with greater possibilities is clear in French from the (presumably recent) semantic split between the noun baiser and the verb baiser. You can innocently give someone un baiser (n., masc.), but if you offer to baiser (v., inf.) them, you had better be prepared either to passer à l'acte or to endure a vigorous slap. In Spanish the verb besar retains the innocence of the French noun, though if your point of access to the Italic tongues is French, then that Schlager staple 'Besame mucho' will always sound rather less innocent than it should.

As I said, I've attained a certain elegance in the performance of introductory baisers --which perhaps we should keep diminutivizing as bisous in order to avoid any ambiguity--, though certain difficulties remain in respect of their application. I have to be cautious, for when I give them, I give them right. There will be no air-kisses, the two parties silently agreeing to remain strangers; nor will there be any bovine-materteral mmmuhs. There will be a sound, a proper high-pitched sucking sound, there will be mutual labio-buccal contact, and it will happen on both sides of each party's face. There will be no Mediterranean excess, no repetition of the bi-cheekal tour a second or third time, no grabbing of the back of the other's head, no tears.

That's the rough choreography of it. But when, precisely, will it happen? This question would be easy to answer if all meetings were with individual European women of roughly the same age and social status as I. But the problem is that one often (and often regrettably) meets groups, mixed company, some of whose members appear right away as appropriate tseli, others of whom one would rather avoid, and others still whom one must avoid whether one would rather or not.

The first rule is this: I will not exchange bisous with other men. There can be five-way, ten-way inter-sex and same-sex kissing going on, but I will stick to my rule: bisous for the women, handshakes for the men (or fraternal American bear-hugs for old friends: awkward but necessary). For the most part, the handshake reflects exactly the amount of intimacy I hope to have with men: practical intimacy, exchange of goods and services. If it is an exchange of ideas that I am after, then the kiss hardly seems initiatory to that either. There is in fact only one man in this world with whom I habitually exchange bisous upon meeting and parting, and in this particular case I think it has something to do with his religion. It symbolizes something transcendental and divine for him, though from my side it's like kissing sandpaper, and I give thanks to (his) God that he's the only one.

If there is any possible perception of an imbalance of power between me and the woman in question, I avoid the bisous, even in a group where these are going around freely. If the woman is older than I am and of a higher status, then I generally let her initiate it, and if she does I throw myself gladly into the gesture. No degree of desiccation, no striation or deathly pallidity, can repel me. As long as she is European, noblesse oblige.

The most awkward of all possible combinations is the one I call 'the cosmopolitan': when I find myself in the mixed company of Europeans and Americans. Now nothing would be more affected, more pompous and artificial, than for two Americans to exchange bisous à la française. We just don't do it. When we were teenagers we exchanged dumb diagonal hugs, one arm over the other's shoulder, the other arm beneath the armpit and towards the middle of the back; perfunctory, insincere, the gestural equivalent of 'How's it going?' And now everyone is all grown up, and everyone is someone else's 'partner' (are they shaking hands?), and we all know deep down there's no point in preserving this adolescent ritual that never had any significance to begin with, and certainly holds no promise now.

Allow me to denounce the hug a while longer. It is significant that one of the alternative ways to speak of kissing in French is the verb embrasser, which is in its composition identical to the German umarmen, i.e., 'to hug'. Both verbs, when broken down, literally mean 'to en-arm', yet while the German word signifies exactly what it says, the French is a euphemism for something else, and indeed something more. Could this be a case of uncharacteristic Gallic prudishness? It is likely that embrasser means something more than what it says for the same reason the verb baiser does: 'to hug' means to kiss and 'to kiss' means to fuck. There is a general inflationary process going on here, one that probably has more to do with the art of understatement than with pudicity. The act of en-arming itself doesn't register in the French lexicon at all (except for the negligible étreinte, which connotes constraint or compulsion as much as it does embracing).

Anyway, the question remains: what to do when, going down a line of same- or senior-status, coeval or elder European women, doing the sincere, physical, hopeful, two-cheek thing, all of a sudden I land upon a concitoyenne, an amerikanka, a countrywoman who knows I'm American and knows I know she's American? I've just kissed a gauntlet of Europeans. What am I supposed to do now, raise my hand meekly and say 'hi'? Revert back to adolescence and give a mere hug? Acknowledge the awkwardness of the situation and mutter 'the hell with it, let's just pretend for a moment'? Or am I to put on a show, and allow myself to cut that most ridiculous figure: the American who pretends he is not one? I usually go for one of the last two options, and am never comfortable afterwards. My lips tingle with after-awkwardness the way a child's butt tingles with fore-pain when it knows it's in for a spanking (in fact, mine still does, decades after any real possibility of such a response, when I've been caught doing something wrong).

All my blood relations are American, so fortunately I do not have to kiss them. Diogenes cautioned against overuse of slippery-slope arguments by facetiously inferring that to touch one's mother's foot is already to commit incest, since from there everything else differs only by degree. But I think there is really something to this argument, at least if bisous are substituted for digito-podal contact. And this is the very same thing that makes non-familial, intercontinental bisous such a perfect gesture: they are a slippery slope, an opening-up through nothing more than an opening, to another human being, with all the hope and danger that implies.

Roissy-en-France, May 22, 2011.

Sandhi and Literacy

In a recent Vanity Fair article a certain influential rhetorician notes, in the course of treating an entirely different matter, that Henry James and Joseph Conrad dictated their later novels, rather than writing them out by hand, "which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time."

This would however put these two fine novelists ahead of the author(s) of the Odyssey and the Iliad, ahead of the comparably masterful raconteurs of Balkan, Caucasian, West African epic masterpieces which by chance never had their Homer to crystallize oral narrative tradition into a textual object. Much of what we think of as 'literature' in fact has its origins in 'vocal achievement'. In some cases, the transcription of the oral was seen as a compromise, a degradation, to the extent that true language is speech (or, perhaps more accurately, the breath that powers the speech), and the works that we think of as books were in fact, in their original, vital phase, recitations. The books that we have left over bear roughly the same relationship to the works themselves as video footage of a dance performance has to the performance itself.

Homer was crystallized in text fairly early, and for complicated reasons this transformation came to fit in the Hellenic world with a growing attribution of significance, and of priority, to the written form of language. This priority seems to have only been strengthened by the appearance of the Abrahamic faiths, which is to say by the various 'peoples of the Book' with their insistence on punctilious attention to every last diacritical mark supposedly dictated by God himself in the composition of scripture.

In trying to understand what it is that sets 'Eastern thought' apart from 'Western', we might do better, rather than looking at different temperaments, different rationalities, and so on, to look at differences in the way writing is taken up over the course of the past four millennia or so, and the way it is conceptualized in contrast with oral language. In the Indian tradition, writing was long seen as a sort of crutch, an aide-memoire for lesser minds that could not absorb the real work, the oral work, without the assistance of arbitrary signs. The great works of early Indian literature are not books at all, but only became books gradually, and perhaps regrettably. The 6th-century grammarian Pāṇini 'composed' the 3,959 sutras of his Aṣṭādhyāyī --the definitive work on Sanskrit grammar and phonetics, for which no equivalent exists in the Greek or Latin corpus-- by having various of his students memorize various chunks. Pāṇini is called the 'author' of the Aṣṭādhyāyī, though he would have thought of authorship in our sense as beneath him.

Accordingly, speech is often exalted as not just a handy skill, but as a cosmic principle, even tantamount to existence itself. My favorite passage from the Rig Veda illustrates this nicely (Doniger's translation):

I do not know just what it is that I am like. I wander about concealed and wrapped in thought. When the first-born of Order came to me, I won a share of this Speech (1.164, 37).

The primacy of speech over text seems to leave a trace in one of the most well-known, and, for the learner, challenging features of written Sanskrit: sandhi, the system of rules governing the spelling of word endings depending on the initial letter of the subsequent word (this is only 'external' sandhi; I'll perhaps treat internal sandhi another time).

'Sandhi' is now the accepted term in linguistics for this phenomenon as it occurs in any language, and not just Sanskrit. In English we have just a very little bit of vestigial sandhi, as for example when the indefinite article 'a' becomes 'an' in cases where it precedes a vowel-initial word. We could have taken it much further. For example, the possessive 's' suffix can be pronounced in vastly different ways depending on the word that follows it. If written English were more influenced by sandhi, we might have written of the eggs that come from hens as 'henzeggs', or of the collected works of a certain Renaissance French author as 'Rabelaizoeuvre'.

Now in Sanskrit such transformations in writing are all-pervasive. Thus, to take the simple sentence 'The king lived in a certain city', the proper translation, in Devanagari script, is:

कस्मिंश्चिन्नगरे ऽवसद्राजा ।

Prior to sandhi analysis, the transliteration of the Devanagari is:

kasmiṃścinnagare 'vasadrājā

After sandhi analysis --that is, after the individual words are separated out and their 'proper' spelling is restored--, we get:

kasmin cit nagare avasat rājā.
[(In) a certain city lived king.]

This is a very simple example, and perhaps not the most interesting one, but it gets the point across: in Sanskrit, writing bends itself to speech, rather than the other way around.

Ordinarily, in the modern West we tend to think of ourselves as 'literate' to the extent that we anchor our spoken language in some potential or imagined written version of it. I can see in my mind the strings of letters that form the sentences as I speak them. I can get off course, I can go argotic and start speaking in a way that would be difficult to transcribe, but I sense this is a deviation, and I know how to pull myself back to proper language, which is to say writable language, language anchored in writing. Chomsky or perhaps someone else said that a dialect is a language without an army, but one might more appropriately say that by our standards a dialect is a language without a regulatory body, without an OED or a Duden to settle the matter of whether one is using the language correctly or not. In spite of recent attempts to crystallize them, creoles remain for the most part pure speech, and are thus, literally (by which I mean literally literally), unanchored.

But what if the sense of propriety came from speech in the first place? What if we had a sense of the correctness of what we write in virtue of its fit with what we know, as if a priori and naturally, to be the proper way of speaking? That would be to conceptualize language very differently, and it could be at the root of a lot of what we take to be the Weltbild differences between 'East' and 'West'.

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Reading Ada, or Ardor

I am only now realizing the extent to which I was indirectly caused to buy into the party line as concerns Vladimir Nabokov. When I say 'party line' I mean nothing other than the Soviet Communist Party, which of course took his work to fall entirely outside of anything that might be considered a part of the history of Russian literature. He was a White Russian, an aesthete, and a bit of a pervert. What's more, he wrote mostly in English. And this was not as when, say, a grudgingly exiled Brodsky makes forays into English; this was a full métamorphose américaine, as he described it at some point. For Nabokov, English had the phonetics and the vocabulary to make it --again, in his words-- the most valuable linguistic treasure at his disposition.

So when I was a student of Russian literature Nabokov was certainly not on the list of required reading. They had us reading Sholokhov and Gorky and crap like that just because, at least at the time, the syllabi of American university courses on Russian literature continued to echo the Soviet conception of the canon. So we had the most dreary and predictable sotsrealizm, stuff that may be of interest to the political historian but with absolutely no value as literature, rather than the most talented Russian author of the 20th century, whose language of choice was only one, I think relatively minor, reason for his exclusion.

It strikes me now that in fact Nabokov was drawing more on the richness of the Russian language when he was writing in English than the party-sanctioned authors were when they were writing directly in Russian. Ada, or Ardor, in particular, is a trilingual novel (French being the third, and certainly lesser of the three components), and to say that it was written in English doesn't really do justice to Nabokov's project. It was written through English, mostly, but there would be nothing left of the endeavor if the Russian and French vocabulary, along with the interlinguistic jeux de mots that straddle more than one of the three languages, were to be eliminated. It is through English, but it is about the way different natural languages connect up or fail to connect up with one another. It is about the way language limits expression, and it is an attempt to push through those limits.

One thing Nabokov makes me think is this: it is ridiculous that I, myself, should continue to attempt to string words together at all. I can't even tell a story, but to write an entire novel in which every single word seems simultaneously to be playing the role of vehicle for moving the narrative along as well as being exquisitely selected for its poetic qualities and its multiple layers of signification: that's quite as far beyond my reach as advanced mathematics.

There is a well-known, perhaps apocryphal story of the advice given by Nabokov to a Cornell student who sought tips on how to become a good writer. Learn the names of trees, Nabokov said. This makes me think that Nabokov is writing through English, but that what he's really after is something like what in the early modern period was conceived as 'the Adamic language': the original, perfect system of words, words that zapped right into the essences of the things they named. The cross-linguistic play of a novel like Ada is a sort of exploration, to see which corrupted language brings us closer to the original Adamic one. If there is one thing that Nabokov loves more than language it's the world itself: the proliferation of instances of nature's infinite variety of kinds. As, for example, butterflies.

Working back to the world through the perfection of language: that's real realism for you, and I would be willing to impose it, if I could, as the party line for literature.

But of course in Nabokov there is also the famous work of synaesthesia, which doesn't seek the real names of things, but instead makes private connections between things, connections that we can't expect other people to see. We all do this, most of us more in childhood than later on (I still place Thursday, the color brown, and the state of Tennessee in the same private drawer), but Nabokov cultivated it and built complex worlds out of it throughout his life (coding colors with letters, for example). This seems impossible to square with the realism I just identified, but I think Nabokov may have believed that he, himself, was getting at the genuine correspondences between things, that his private synaesthesia was at the same time a recovery of the Adamic language. Again, the multilingualism of the project is just part of the method of recovering the 'right' word through cross-linguistic comparison. Repeatedly, Nabokov offers examples of the process of corruption in action, of the rate of drift from the Adamic essences of things as we move carelessly from one language to the other (rather than with care, as he moves). Thus for example he has Ada say:

--the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into 'the sky's bed' instead of 'bed ceiler.' But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d'or in that collection of fouled French is the transformation of souci d'eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine 'care of the water' -- although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, maybubble, and many other nicknames associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.

I suppose that Nabokov saw Russian very differently than I do; for him, Russian, English, and French were familiar already in the crèche; for me, they are the impossible objects of an adult learner's struggling. They are too late. 

Cross-linguistic playfulness with Russian seems particularly difficult to me because Russian continues to appear as an entirely closed system. Even to see it transliterated into the Latin alphabet is to see something that ought not exist, an impossible adaptation. One of the jokes of Ada, which takes place in another possible world that is mostly like ours except with respect to certain of its geographical, chronological, and linguistic features, is that the Cyrillic alphabet was abandoned at some earlier point in history, and now Russian speakers are unable to so much as read old texts with the backwards 'R's and the letters that look like beetles, such as the one that begins the very word for beetle in Russian: Жук.

The transliteration scheme of this fictional Latinized Russian is based on English orthography; thus, я хочу comes out as 'ya hochu', rather than as 'ja hotschu', as it would be in a German-based system, or 'ia hotchou', as it would be if one's starting point were French (and there's no good way of handling the aspiration there, so for all intents and purposes one may as well write 'ia otchou').

Russian, I mean to say, cannot be transliterated, at least not without anchoring it to some other language that can have no claim to authority over an unrelated East Slavic tongue. But to the extent that it is not transliterated, it cannot really be made to play with English or French. Nabokov does his best, but I wonder if he had any sense of this barrier to cross-fertility, or whether it's just my own problem.

Perhaps my favorite Anglo-Russian play on words, as being the most successful, involves the name of the title character, which in the nominative case (Ada)  is identical to the genitive of the word, a masculine noun, for 'hell' (ad). One possibility that Nabokov declines to pursue here arises from the fact that ad also has an unusual ending in the prepositional case, an -u rather than the more usual -e. Thus 'in hell' is v adu, which as it happens is identical to the accusative construction v Adu, which is to say, 'into Ada'.

I don't know what work this might have done for Nabokov in the novel, but he could have made it work if he wanted to.

Let me finish with a long and stunning sentence that to my mind summarizes all of the points I've been making here. In it, Nabokov urges the return to nature's richness through the mastery of language, he moves through several languages, and the only moments at which this motion seems to stall are, I think, at those clunkily, Anglocentrically transliterated fragments of Russian:

The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact-- that among these billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes.

On Spotting a Rainbow while Waiting at Rite-Aid

I took this picture while waiting outside a pharmacy in Plainsboro, New Jersey, as the Rutgers-trained apothecary prepared my prescription for antidepressants. I don't know why it takes them so long to count out thirty pills and slide them into a little plastic bottle, but from years of experience I know when I go for a refill that I will have to put in a good hour. Sometimes I take my blood pressure; sometimes I pass the time in admiration of the collection of Russell-Stover chocolate gift boxes; sometimes I wander through the makeshift grocery section, and speculate as to the criteria that determine which grocery items belong in a CVS or Rite-Aid (Chef Boyardee, definitely; Lean Cuisine, probably; Manischewitz, no), and which by contrast are meant only for the shelves of a proper Wegman's or Shop-Rite.

This time I decided to go outside. It was the last day of a series of days of rough storms, which I, being from dry California, always think of as 'tropical'. These storms in the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast were the distant and final echo of the same weather system that had, two days prior, killed several hundred people in Alabama and neighboring states. The rainbow seemed to be saying, on behalf of the sky: Sorry for killing all those people. Sometimes I just, you know, lose it.

Over the years I've returned again and again to the metaphor of storm systems in explaining clinical depression to those who know nothing of it. If in my soul I remain Californian (which is to say that I respond to the vegetation and the topography and the sky and the light there as fitting and proper for a creature such as I), in my neurochemistry I am at this point entirely of the East Coast. My brain is like a May storm in the mid-Atlantic, with its menacing cumulonimbus and its hazy instability. The darkness and the thunder appear suddenly, and for no reason, and just as suddenly give way to half-ass rainbows of apology, which to me, at this point, look like nothing so much as portents of the storm's return.

The water cycle makes sense to me in a way that the process of natural selection that produced brains such as mine does not. A recent study showed that well-exercised mice are more likely to anxiously cower in the corner of their cages than lazier ones. A scientist jumped in to caution that we should not extrapolate too much from them to us, since they are prey animals, and it is advantageous to not be excessively at ease. But I am not a prey animal, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what natural utility such a neurometeorological profile could possibly serve.

But that's just how it is, and there's something undignified about dwelling on it overmuch. One doesn't want to let it become the kind of person one is, in the way that Foucault argued so many new kinds of people came into existence in the last few hundred years.

But still, the timing of the rainbow deepened my sense that in the end meteorology and psychology (or psychiatry; whatever) are but two branches of the same science.