Thursday, December 27, 2007

A year and a day

Often I read that all one has to do to find out some bit of information is to google it. Maybe I'm just not very good at phrasing my query properly, but more often than not all I get back is irrelevancy, triviality and repetition. My most recent attempt concerned the language in Gawain and the Green Knight. This is one of my favourite stories from the period of Grail literature. I was reminded of it because a number of articles in my regular readings brought it up. One of the writers described the language as moderately challenging. Hah! Here's how it starts, as nearly as I remember:
Sithen the assaut was sesed at Troye
The borgh brittened and brent to brandez and askes
The tulk that the trammes of tresoune there wrought
Was tried for his treacherie,
The trewest on erthe...

I can pretty well read it now, with good comprehension of maybe 60% of it, very poor comprehension of another 10% and of most of the rest I'm pretty shaky. I don't take to it quite as readily as to Chaucer who wrote about the same time. The dialect is different. Even today some English dialects sound like foreign languages, and the Gawain poet's language was far closer to Old English than Chaucer's. Old English really has to be studied as a foreign language and there aren't really that many texts to read. So I tried to find a source that would help reduce the opacity of the text. But all I found were essays like "Colonialism and the Green Knight," and the "Wicca symbolism in the Green Knight." Colonialism? In 14th Century English Midlands? Wicca, a bogus invention of silly Neopagans? Obviously departments of medieval studies have descended into triviality as much as classics departments.
So I gave up. I don't really enjoy playing with my computer like some people do. Too bad, because I love our English language, and I love the Green Knight story. I went through my Grail literature phase about twenty years ago and it's still a favourite of mine. Along with Wolfram's Parsifal it seems to stand out from all the others for its strangeness. The strangeness is more than a function of the differences between our modern world and the medieval period. It hints at cultural currents that have largely been ignored by mainstream histories, perhaps because of a lack of records.
One of the elements I find especially curious in most of the Grail romances is the significance of sisters' sons. There are no indications that either Germanic or Latin cultures would be interested in sisters' sons and in the medieval context it would not even make any sense. So why these references? My uneducated guess: evidence of a matrilineal succession of kingship. It would be an interesting way of doing it, changing the psychology of inheritance if a king's son does not stand to inherit the throne. On the other hand, which sister's son gets the nod? Might be bloody.
The story revolves around a strange visitor to Arthur's court at the celebrations for the New Year. But Arthur
"...Wolde never ete
Upon such a dere day, er hym devised were
of sum aventurus thyng an uncouthe tale,.."
And sure enough a giant knight, green of complexion and dressed all in green enters the hall on his horse and challenges the assembled company to deal him a blow. Poor Gawain gets the nod, and finds that it is his task to cut off the knight's head with one blow of the Green Knight's huge ax on the condition that Gawain himself will have to withstand a blow from the Green Knight.
Dutifully, Gawain agrees to the condition and lops off the man's head. At that, the Green Knight picks up his own head by the hair, mounts his charger, and enjoins Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year and a day to await the returning blow.
All very strange and mysterious, and I think worth the trouble of learning to read in the original version.
Happy New Year to all.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Oscar Peterson

One of my crow friends looks to have a broken a leg since yesterday. His left foot doesn't seem to work and he has to hop on one leg. That's life- and death- in the wild lane,and he probably won't survive long. I feel surprisingly sad about it.
In an online publication new to me, Prospect,the January issue has an article about Parmenides, an old philosopher who is also new to me. I haven't read the article thoroughly yet, but it seems Parmenides believed nothing new could come into this world. It had to previously exist in a different form. Maybe this is the kind of reasoning that led the Epicureans to come up with the concept of atoms, indestructible elemental particles out of which all things are made.
I happen to think otherwise. I think the universe is in a constant state of creation and destruction, and that what comes in to being, although seemingly made out of the same constituents over and over, is nevertheless unique and unrepeatable. Only the themes in philosophy repeat each other over and over, rephrased and dressed up in new outfits.
Oscar Peterson died yesterday. There was never before another Oscar Peterson and there will never again be another Oscar Peterson. Yet, by existing he changed the meaning of every musician of his time. Have a good crossing, Oscar, they're waiting for you in the heavenly choir.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Gaggle of crows

A blustery day in Victoria on Sunday, and the trailer at my construction site was arockin and arollin. A two foot length of 2 by 4 fell out of the sky while I was looking out over the scene, and a large moth fluttered by. Surprising. Made me think of the scene in Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up in her house and sees the witch riding by. I gave my flock of crows a can of sardines to go with their cat food today. They know me by now and follow me when I patrol the catwalk, one or two walking behind me and another one alighting on the railing ahead of me. They don't get enough from me to grow too dependent, but maybe it will be enough to tide some of them through the winter. And maybe in the spring they'll bring their fledglings over. I've always wanted to have a wild crow friend. He's got his own life, I've got mine. And I want to teach him to say, "F... off." I think they leave little gifts for me on the railing in front of the office. An old chicken bone, or one of the colourful foam earplugs that get tossed all over the site when the guys are finished with them.
I don't know these crows well enough to distinguish one from the other. Some are bigger, others smaller, some are bullies, others are bullied. I think they might be members of a single family. Crows are often thought of as birds of ill omen, presumably because they are feeders on carrion. In The Iliad being left on the field of battle to feed the birds and dogs is a disgrace. Crows, and all corvines, are considered the brains of ornithology, and obviously much smarter than gulls. Gulls are much bigger than crows and prey on their nestlings and push them off their food. However, I've seen a crow tease a gull by sneaking behind and pulling his tail feathers. Over and over again. Clumsy and stupid, the enraged gull could do nothing to rid himself of the pest. It was hilarious and I had the feeling the crow thought so, too.
One of my lifelong interests is evolution, and looking at the crows' beaks make me wonder about beaks and birds. Not all birds fly. Ostriches and their kin run. Different birds fly differently, soaring on updrafts like eagles, flitting through underbrush like finches, hovering like hummingbirds. But all birds have beaks. A myriad of birds live all over the world, filling every conceivable niche, varying drastically in size. Many navigate thousands of miles when the seasons change. They eat seeds, insects, nectar, grass, rotten meat, fish. Yet they all have beaks.
My first criticism of standard Darwinian theory was over the complexity of the ear. How could there be any advantage to an incremental mutation that had nothing to do with hearing to eventually become an ear, including the complex mechanisms that transfer air vibrations to the neurons. This is something I recently discovered has a fancy name: irreducible complexity. Compared to an ear or an eye a beak seems fairly simple, but I don't think it is. Without knowing anything about the anatomy of a beak I can see it has nerve endings, a nasal passage and all sorts of complexities. So what happened in the great long ago of cretaceous or jurassic times? Did a clutch of birdlike lizards suddenly hatch out of their eggs with beaks while all others around them in the colony had jaws and teeth? Because obviously, unless you are an amoeba, it takes two to have descendants. The complex of adaptations must occur twice before it can be passed on, and at the same time. What are the odds of all this occuring? You'll have to ask the statisticians, but it looks like a very poor bet to me. And yet there is no denying the facts of evolution.
However it happened, did it happen just once, and have all subsequent birds descended from that one mutant? Pretty hard to know, and a real mystery that has yet to be solved deepens the more you think about it. But what is evolution, anyhow? The word itself is inadequate. Incremental change over time through genetic variation (mutation) and adaptation to different habitats and life strategies (natural selection) is what evolutionary theory attempts to explain. It seems on the surface fairly logical that it might work until you realize that genetics is about chemistry- the chemistry of proteins. DNA is a chemical factory able to precisely produce chemicals with an almost infinite range of variation. A whole organism, like a crow, or even Prince Charles, must be at least as complex as the entire physical universe.
This complexity preexists life itself. As Wickramasingh and Hoyle point out in their book, The Cosmic Life Force " Enzymes are polymers or chains of smaller units known as the amino acids. There are enzymes to assist almost every basic biochemical process and without such enzymes biology as we recognize it could not exist...The random chance [of enzymes forming spontaneously] is not a million to one against, or a billion to one or even a trillion to one against, but p to 1 against, with p minimally a superastronomical number equal to 10 to the 40000th power."
But although life is based on chemistry, complete organisms like crows and Prince Charles are not just a collection of chemicals, they have form: wings, black feathers, a beak, in the case of crows, and a potential monarch of an island in Prince Charles. The relation of form to chemistry is something evolutionary biologists don't like to talk about. There is no obvious connection.
I bring Hoyle and Wickramasingh into the discussion because of their theory of panspermia, which argues that life, far too complex to have begun in the short lifespan of the earth, must be a cosmic phenomenon and that comets may be the means of transplanting it to earth. Their book is especially strong on the chemical basis of life, from the standpoint of one of the great physicists of the 20th century. It's well worth a read and I hope to say more about it in the future.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Victoria weather





For anyone who doubts that the global warming kerfuffle is anything but a swindle, I suggest reading about the wing ding in London recently where the Goracle got paid about $5000 a minute to deliver his spiel. Having won both an Oscar and a Nobel prize this year, he has become an even bigger ass than ever- a feat I would have thought impossible. Too magisterial to be bothered meeting with the lesser mortals, those guilt and angst ridden attendees who paid thousands of pounds to hear him pontificate were severely disappointed not to be allowed to see speak to him in private. If only they had known, they could have jumped in their personal jets and gone to Bali- the better to save the earth, of course.
My view is that we are far more likely to experience dramatic cooling than warming. I'm sorry about that because personally I think a little warming would be a pretty good thing. More biodiversity, y'know.
More and more I'm coming to the conclusion that 'environmentalist' and 'idiot' are synonyms.
Meanwhile, here in Victoria the fag ends of autumn have not been bad at all this year. It's been a little cooler than usual, with snow falling in some areas of the region from time to time, and the obligatory storm blowing down trees, disrupting ferry schedules and so forth. There have also been floods in Washington state and up Island. Nothing unusual. But we have also had a number of very beautiful days. Since November and December are usually the most miserable months of the year, often almost continual rain and gloom, I am optimistic for a pleasant January and February...but with periods of snow.
The lovely weather last week gave me the opportunity- nay, the duty- to provide photographic comfort to those caught in some of the less temperate climes of our great nation where it's snowing like hell and cold as a witch's bleep.