Cosmos 2014: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still

ltpatridge's avatar April 17, 2014

So I lost my internet connection for a day or two after Cosmos aired, but that’s not really the reason it took me so long to blog about it.  The reason is that it gets progressively harder to write about the series as it gets better, and this past week’s episode was, I believe, the best yet.


By what do I define this?  By the sense of wonder it evoked in me and that it must, correspondingly, have evoked in some child viewer.  It was Cosmos that originally taught me about the weak nuclear force, that allowed me to begin to understand the infinity of smallness within us.  The quarreling paramecium, the internal machinery of photosynthesis – this is instinctively weirder, I believe, than new ideas one collects about the stars and space, which are at least visible and visibly vast.

A poorly donned white coat

ltpatridge's avatar April 10, 2014

I just returned Hild by Nicola Griffith to the library, read about a quarter of the way through.  It’s a strong, dark novel, powerfully written, impeccably researched, historically grounded, and precisely what I like to read and to recommend.  Why did I return it so quickly?  
Because I did not care.  I do not care who, in this case, becomes overking of the Angles, or who is murdered trying to do it.  I do not care who marries whom, or why.  In another book, I might have been eager to find out.  But this is simply one of the legions of fine novels in which I do not care what happens to any of the characters.
How does this come about?  Every reader of fiction knows the experience: the wilting of anticipation, the careful rereading of a page one suddenly realized one has skipped without noticing, the attempt to be patient with the book, the doubting of one’s own taste and intelligence (if the book was very Highly Touted); and finally, the throwing up of hands.  
Why do we cease to care about one book, and not another?  It is certainly not a question of quality.  I would recommend Hild or any number of other books on the basis of good craftsmanship alone, but the fact remains that I can tear through a potboiler mystery faster than I plodded through what I did in Hild.  It certainly does not matter whether the main characters are good people, or smart, or otherwise worthy of success.  People love connivers and antiheroes.  It is not a question of storytelling skill, either, or good storytellers would only ever write fascinating books, a thing known to be untrue to the legions of us who slogged through Doctor Sleep.  
Is there, perhaps, some formula, some theorem that lies undiscovered that would allow us to determine why a book loses a reader’s interest even when it is well-written.  The results would differ from reader to reader, of course.  But if such a formula existed, it would have to look something like this:
Let F equal “whether or not this book is interesting enough to finish.”  F must be equal to or lesser than 50.
Let A equal “the human decency of the main character,” on a scale of 1 to 10.
Let B equal “the characterization of the main character” – self-determination, strength, history, and so forth.
Let C equal “the human decency of the surrounding characters,” up to and including the antagonist.
Let D equal  “the characterization of the surrounding characters,” as above.
Let E equal “the characterization of the setting” – does the setting itself, the location and the time period, serve as a character?  Does it dazzle the reader (as in a novel of ancient Egypt), or comfort her (as in the Precious Ramotswe novels), or overwhelm with horror (as in the work of Lovecraft)?  And how well is this accomplished?
Say then that A + B + C + D + E must equal F=50, and furthermore that no more than two of the above named variables can equal 0.  For example, you can have a character where all the characters are bastards, but all of them are very strongly characterized and well-drawn in a compelling, forceful setting.  This is interesting.  But if the setting is dull, or the surrounding characters just pathetic foils for the main, then the narrative lacks its drive.
This is, of course, an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and thus worthless.  Still, it might help me understand what it is that makes me set a book down, when it would seem I have no excuse otherwise.

Cosmos 2014: Hiding in the Light

ltpatridge's avatar April 8, 2014

This I have been slow to blog, because I was so pleased with it. In this delicate exposition of spectroscopy and the nature of color, we see an episode of the new Cosmos that had no exact parallel in the original series, yet had the most of the original’s spirit than any I have seen yet. There was wonder, history, sentiment, and no need for bristling at the unseen enemies of creationism or fundamentalism. Even they cannot object to the purity of light.

Cosmos 2014: A Sky Full of Ghosts

ltpatridge's avatar March 31, 2014

This episode on light, relativity and gravity paralleled the original in its thought experiment of “turning up / turning down” the gravity in New York City.  In the original (“The Lives of the Stars,” I believe) that experiment was carried out not on New York, but on Alice in Wonderland’s tea party with the Mad Hatter.  It was far less sophisticated animation, but more charming, and deeply sinister.  There is no point in my saying that I prefer the bright, handmade imaginings of painters Jon Lomberg and Don Davis on the old Cosmos to the CGI work of the new series.  It is, again, not for such as me.

The light leaving 1980 shows us a different world.  Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was a slower, more grownup affair – a Personal Voyage, not a Spacetime Odyssey.  Sagan could make a show aimed at all ages, including adults, and those adults could be presumed to be willing to think as adults.  With only mass media and a few underground networks for specialists, there was no one who could complain about Carl, outside of Jack Chick tracts and church on Sunday.  There were fewer people in the public sphere who would openly boast that they did not believe in the age of the universe, in evolution itself.  

The new Cosmos is full of spark, dash and energy because it is – because it has to be – a siege weapon in a culture war.  That is why Tyson had to pause in this episode to note that, if the world were only around 6000 years old, the Crab Nebula would be as far away as we could see.  Celebrity voices, fresh funding, new science and new animation are needed to catch a generation assaulted on every side by Youtube and Twitter and Facebook, a landscape of utterly levelled public opinion.  Sagan, I think, would recognize the urgency.

Henbit deadnettle

ltpatridge's avatar March 28, 2014

Henbit (Lamium amplexicaule) is not much of a flower.

Image

It grows wild most everywhere it can in the Southeast. It does not have a floral scent, although it smells pleasant in a green sort of way if you push a bunch up to your nose. It is edible in a pinch, and it supplies bees for honey-gathering, but its main use is to turn untended greenspace a purplish color in the early spring.

This past week, I visited my home in Mississippi again, where, for two glorious days, I did not need a jacket. I became obsessed with gathering henbit in the great, wet, squelchy fields, a new bouquet each day. For a mild form of therapy, I recommend it. No one is going to run out of henbit.

Henbit is an unwatched hope. Nobody waits for the henbit, as they do for the crocus or daffodil. Yet each year it arrives without fail or fanfare. I never knew I missed it dearly, and aspired to be surrounded by as much.

Cosmos 2014: When Knowledge Conquered Fear

ltpatridge's avatar March 24, 2014

This last episode was a combined update of the original Cosmos episodes/chapters “The Harmony of Worlds” and “Heaven and Hell.” The episode reminds me that, in a real sense, the new Cosmos is not for me; it is for people who need it more.

Some complain about the quality of the animated sequences, but I find their starkness and stiffness intriguing. What troubles me is the cliched dialogue and the broad-stroke portraits, especially the one of Newton. Newton was very probably on the autism spectrum, and the portrayal of Newton as merely sensitive, instead of inexpressibly odd, takes a great deal from the human heart of the story. And why tell this story, if it is not to impress the viewer with how much one strange, flawed man is worth to us all?

I, personally, was left a little cold by this episode, at least after the sequence where Tyson picked up the baby, which won all of our hearts. Perhaps next week’s episode will move me more. But it is important to understand that the new Cosmos is not a cover album. It is for young people, for passersby who have never heard these amazing stories for themselves. A truncated animated tale is not the worst way to reach such an audience.

Cosmos 2014: Some of the Things That Molecules Do

ltpatridge's avatar March 16, 2014

The March 16 episode focuses on the principles of the theory of evolution.  When I was little, Sagan’s original Cosmos on this subject, the episode / chapter entitled “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue,” taught me why a grandmother might kill her own grandchild.  

In order to demonstrate the effect of artificial selection, Sagan related the story of the Heike crabs, the crabs traditionally believed to be the reincarnations of Heike samurai killed at the Battle of Danno-ura.

The Heike were badly outnumbered and outmaneuvered.  With their cause clearly lost the surviving Heike warriors threw themselves into the sea and drowned.
The emperor’s grandmother, the Lady Nii, resolved that they would not be captured by the enemy.
What happened next is related in “The Tale of the Heike”: “The young emperor [only seven years old at the time of the battle] asked the Lady Nii, ‘Where are you to take me?’ She turned to the youthful sovereign with tears streaming down her cheeks and comforted him. . .  The Lady Nii took him in her arms, and with the words: ‘In the depths of the ocean is our capital,’ sank with him at last beneath the waves.

Sagan recounted the hypothesis that these crabs came to resemble samurai because crabs that resembled samurai were thrown back by fishermen, rather than killed and eaten, and that therefore their accidental resemblance to samurai was developed through artificial selection.  This hypothesis has since been shown to be very unlikely.  But I never forgot it.  More than that, I never forgot the notion that a grandmother might love something else – an idea, a principle, a throne – more than the life of her own grandchild.

Since the story of the crabs no longer holds water, Tyson explains the theory of artificial selection using the story of domestic dogs, which is much more solid, and certainly cuter.  It lacks the little horror of Lady Nii at the Battle of Danno-ura, but the universe is full of little horrors, and this one may be allowed to pass by.

Tyson recapitulates the theory of evolution with a joyful clarity, borrowing strongly from Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable.  But it is no accident that Tyson hosts this show and not Dawkins.  Unlike Dawkins, who is clearly on the edge of exasperation at every moment at the very idea that some idiot has the audacity to disagree with him, Tyson speaks with patience and kindness.  When I was little, I did not understand that there was still war between science and God; and I listened to Sagan with open wonder, and no siege mentality.  If I were little now, I could listen to Tyson in the same way.

The #cosmos hashtag, as widely mocked, will show you many young-earth creationists and other know-nothings sneering at Tyson’s explanations of cosmology, geology and evolution.  And yet, I no longer feel irritation to see the tweets of such people; instead, I feel warm sadness, even a kind of kinship.  They too are creatures that are behaving in an adaptive fashion.  They use the hashtag and the snark to signal to their packmates that they are part of a social network (as it were), that they share beliefs and are willing to defend a common territory against interlopers.  How else do complex organisms maintain their societies? 

But the interlopers here are nothing less than the depth and breadth of Time itself, the immensity of the universe.  And so it is that some people, even now, are willing to throw themselves and their children overboard and say, “In the depths of the ocean is our capital,” rather than contemplate the totality of our existence.

The dead escort me from one area of the brain to another

ltpatridge's avatar March 11, 2014

If I promise not to tell you the story of my dream, will you promise to read about it?  Stay with me, here.  Why are other people’s dreams invariably so boring?  They constitute the most intimate glimpse of the interiority of another person, and yet we would rather chew off our own sleeves than hear about them.  

I will make it brief, then.  In my dream of the other morning, I had joined the army, for some reason, and a soldier was assigned to show me around an enormous barracks.  That soldier was a girl I had known in college, named Lyn. 

Lyn has been dead for ten years.  I had not thought of her from then until yesterday.  We were not close.  There was nothing unsettled between us.  She had simply arrived to induct me into the army of the dead.

All that morning, I was unnerved.  Like many hard-minded, skeptical people, I am superstitious.  Superstitiousness has nothing to do with the quality of your brain or the clarity of your thought; it is implanted in you as a child, and if it takes root, there is nothing for it.  The best you can do is act as if you did not notice that you walked under a ladder, or that you just left a penny lying on the ground.  Superstitiousness, on that lowest level, has no truck with belief.  That is why it disturbed me that a dead woman, a person I barely remembered, stepped out of the past to escort me through a huge, unfamiliar place, another world.  I do not believe in omens, and yet I had seen one.  

How did I come to understand this, later on?  By triangulation, and by my browser history.  In the morning, I could see that the last thing I had been trying to look up – before I fell asleep with the iPad lying next to me – was “tsubotsubo.”  That is to say, actually – takotsubo myopathy, or broken heart syndrome.  Just before I managed to sleep, around 1 am, my last thought was: I wonder if I could die of that thing that gives you a heart defect so that you actually die of a broken heart.

Lyn died of a heart defect.  That was all that I knew.  That was all that my brain needed to present me with an anxiety dream.  Somewhere in the memory palace of the medial temporal lobe, the concept of “heart defect” was cross-indexed with Lyn; the self unseen looked up “heart defect,” and produced her.  And her image was juxtaposed with the image of joining – of joining with her in what she did, i.e. have a heart defect, and die.

The idea of an artificial human-level intelligence, or of “uploading” a personality, becomes increasingly more unbelievable to me.  The inexplicability, the ungovernability, the layers of a single unremarkable human brain – with what chaos and what symmetry can we reproduce it?

Cosmos 2014: Standing Up in the Milky Way

ltpatridge's avatar March 10, 2014

I will be blogging each episode of the reboot of Cosmos.  As I have mentioned, in the insufferable way of former prodigies, Carl Sagan’s original book was in my hands when I was so young that I wrote in it with crayons.  In the early 1980s, when I saw the show for the first time, the world Sagan illuminated was limitless in its magic and wonder to me.  Now it is 2014, and nothing is illuminated to me.  I am no longer a dandelion seed in the sunshine, but a mote that has blown away into the darkness.  All hope that is in me is in the deep future, the far past, the distant reaches of space.  How will this new show touch me, in ways that the first one did or did not?

The new show is meant to be the new, not simply more of what it was.  Neil deGrasse Tyson is not Sagan, nor could he be – there was only one Sagan – but he is, I think, a worthy successor to the unofficial position of First Scientist of the American Public.  One major difference between the styles of Tyson and Sagan is one that you may not often see noted: the influence of marijuana.  Sagan, as his biographies make clear, was an inveterate stoner, and the vast, contemplative gentleness of his narrative voice owes at least something to that.  Tyson’s upfront, sharp, immediate presence does not owe itself to anything besides perhaps caffeine.  It is appropriate that the Ship of the Imagination in this reboot is not a drifting dandelion seed, but a sharp, silvery, metallic cell.

The majestic animation in this first episode would, I think, have pleased Sagan very much, especially in this sequence tying the discovery of astronomy to the discovery of writing.  The martyrdom of Giordano Bruno is retold in another stunning sequence that lacks much narrative subtlety.  What the animation loses there, it gains in its magnificent evocation of the Flammarion engraving to show the breathtaking infinitude of Bruno’s revelations.

The episode ends on a far more personal note than any of the original episodes could have, because it is a story of Tyson meeting Sagan himself, of how generously Sagan spent his personal time to encourage a seventeen-year-old boy from out of town.  Sagan, the great connector, would have understood the significance of that story, of the fact that Tyson even had a copy of Sagan’s day planner to show the day he had been expected.  There are a dozen more episodes to go, but already, the show kindles a little light for me, even in this demon-haunted world.

A heart without a screen

ltpatridge's avatar March 9, 2014

Yesterday, I treated myself to a day without looking at a computer screen.  Instead, I ran errands, napped with a dog, and reread Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin.  Over a decade ago, I had shortlisted it among my favorite books, but I had not read it since then.

This book of a civilization of 50,000 years in a future Northern California is not exactly a novel.  Instead, it is an anthropology of the future.  It is, as others have said, a Silmarillion for the Whole Earth Catalog crowd.  There is no end to the worldbuilding of it.  It is not a book for everyone.  But it teaches me now as it taught me then, and as I promptly forgot – we are supposed to be in more time than this.  

Those who want fighting, let them smoke tobacco.
Those who want excitement, let them drink brandy.
Those who want withdrawal, let them smoke cannabis.
Those who want good talking, let them drink wine.
I don’t want any of those things at this moment.
Early in the morning I breathe air and drink water,
because what I want is clarity and silence
and one thin line of words on the white paper
drawn around my thoughts in clarity and silence.

(p. 258)

In Always Coming Home, a kind of internet exists – a computer network of data – but it is little used and not much desired, except by specialists.  There are, apparently, no lolcats, no reason to spend more time on the computer network than is needed.  Most people spend their lives working with their hands and with each other.  As with most utopian SF, this policy is both wiser than we currently arrange matters, and totally unrealistic.

The internet – the whole world of screens we have built for and about each other – is talking.  It is nothing but talking.  Although some of it discourses on very grand subjects, there is no getting past the fact that in the end there is nothing for us but nattering here.  For those of us who are introverts by nature, the screen is exhausting to the mind.