Faulkner's Scientific-Poetic Dynamo

When William Faulkner arrived in Stockholm to receive his Nobel prize for literature he supposedly declared his occupation as “farmer.” (Inge p. 122) Which raises a question—what kind of farmer describes a road “heavy with sixty days of dust, the roadside undergrowth coated with heat-vulcanised dust … [standing] at perpendicular’s absolute in some old dead volcanic water refined to the oxygenless first principle of liquid” (Absalom, Absalom p. 143) ?

A farmer, I guess, who seeds his mind with much reading of literature and modern science and harvests a complex, allusive poetry—in this case informed by engineering, geometry, and paleobiology. The notion of an “oxygenless first principle of liquid” clearly refers to the scientific account of the origin of life, in which all was mineral, dead, and devoid of oxygen until several billion years ago, when the first algae-like organisms commenced photosynthesis, recombining carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates and oxygen. Though the King James Bible gave Faulkner his title Absalom, Absalom!, he called on the wonder of modern science to re-create the Bible’s sense of primeval magic.

For Faulkner, writing meant curiosity into human motives (Inge ed., p. 166). That is, he made a scientific study of human beings. But what is even more unique about Faulkner is that his poetical effects rely surreptitiously on scientific methods and ideas. Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying while working nights as a supervisor in the power plant of the University of Mississippi, the school where he’d ten years earlier done a brief stint at college. He told a newspaper in 1932, “I think the hum of the dynamo helped me.” (Inge ed., p. 28) Perhaps it was that “sound of science” that compelled Faulkner’s thoughts in a scientific direction.

Throughout As I Lay Dying, Faulkner seems to scrutinize familiar phenomena so minutely that the familiar becomes strange, as though he were looking into the familiar through a quantum microscope at a weird physics that we’d intuited but never fully understood. Inspired perhaps by modern physics, Faulkner re-sees reality and discovers in it new relationships and underlying properties.

Often he describes relativistic perceptual phenomena wherein motion imparts some new quality to a thing, much as motion influences observations according to both Galilean and Einsteinian relativity. Faulkner even words these descriptions a bit like a physicist witnessing some previously unknown influence in the physical universe.

Take this memorable example where Cash saws planks below his mother’s bedroom window to make her coffin:

He saws again, his elbow flashing slowly, a thin thread of fire running along the edge of the saw, lost and recovered at the top and bottom of each stroke in unbroken elongation, so that the saw appears to be six feet long…. As I Lay Dying, pp. 75-76.

By superimposing the saw’s various positions into one image irrespective of time, the saw elongates in the viewer’s imagination. If you’ve ever done any sawing, you may recognize the weird visual distortion Faulkner describes.

Later, Faulkner establishes the unsettling effect of buzzards by charting the uncanny effect of Galilean relativity on the perception of their motion:

Motionless, the tall buzzards hang in soaring circles, the clouds giving them an illusion of retrograde. p. 95

From Galilean relativity, he proceeds to an observation of a wagon’s motion that sounds blatantly Einsteinian in its linkage of time and space:

We go on, with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and [Jewel’s horse]. pp. 107-108

The Bundrens’ wagon soon passes a turn-off and the slow movement past the sign and the side road transfers motion to both:

a white signboard with faded lettering: New Hope Church. 3 mi. It wheels up like a motionless hand lifted above the profound desolation of the ocean; beyond it the red road lies like a spoke of which Addie Bundren is the rim. It wheels past, empty, unscarred, the white signboard turns away its fading and tranquil assertion. p. 108

All is still outside the wagon, yet through relativity the moving wagon imparts motion to the motionless signboard so that it turns. The wagon imparts motion to the road so that the road becomes a turning spoke in a wheel and is said to wheel past. Faulkner’s like an experimental physicist researching the relativity and associativity of perceptions.

He observes a similar perceptual relativity in the way that objects derive their shape from their surroundings: “Beyond the unlamped wall,” Darl says, “I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours….” (p. 80) Later, Faulkner describes the shape of the wagon according to the air around it, and suggests an influence that absent things exert over the place they previously occupied, a poetic physics: “[I]t begins to rush away from me and slip down the air like a sled upon invisible snow, smoothly evacuating atmosphere in which the sense of it is still shaped.” (p. 98)

The two types of Faulknerian relativity—of motion and shape—appear together when Darl and Cash and Jewel try to pilot the wagon across the river. Darl looks at his father, sister, and little brother standing on the riverbank and says:

[it is] as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice. Yet they appear dwarfed. It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us…. [The mules] too are breathing now with a deep groaning sound; looking back once, their gaze sweeps across us with in their eyes a wild, sad, profound and despairing quality as though they had already seen in the thick water the shape of the disaster which they could not speak and we could not see. pp. 146-147

The doomed mules in the river are indisputably real and somehow emblematic of the human condition. As I think of them, I can hear the humming of Faulkner’s dynamo, the scientific-poetic genius apparatus that created them.

Leviathan

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes reminds me, in a good way, of the ape who learned to act like a human being in Kafka's hilarious short story, "A Report to an Academy."  The Kafka story begins:

Honored members of the Academy!  You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape.  I regret that I cannot comply with your request to the extent you desire.  It is now nearly five years since I was an ape, a short space of time, perhaps, according to your calendar, but an infinitely long time to gallop through at full speed, as I have done, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors, good advice, applause, orchestral music, and yet essentially alone....

Hobbes trains his attention on our primate nature, a nature prone to quarreling from three principal causes, as he sees it (p. 185, Penguin Classics ed.): Competition, Diffidence (i.e., fear), and Glory.  And we are motivated in our quarrels accordingly, says Hobbes, by the objectives of Gain, Safety, and Reputation.  I hear ya, brother, give me some of all that.  He sure is preaching to the ape.

Many people think of Hobbes as a cynic with a low opinion of human beings.  But that's wrong.  On the contrary, Hobbes is very sympathetic with us hungry beings in need of food, safety, and respect.  He is far more sympathetic to innate Desire than St. Augustine, for example:

"But neither of us [Hobbes himself and the average man who locks his doors at night] accuse mans nature in it.  The Desires, and other Passions of man, are in themselves no Sin.  No more are the Actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them...." (p. 187)

Another reviewer expresses hatred for Hobbes because of his supposed endorsement of the reign of Christendom.  There is a late section in Leviathan on "Christian Common-Wealth," and I confess I haven't read very much of that part, but what I did read was nothing other than an attempt to compel people with Christian morals to see that the Bible does not invalidate or supercede his rationalist political and moral philosophy.  In Part II, "Of Common-Wealth," which I have read thoroughly, he makes it pretty clear what he thinks of religious claims to political authority (p. 230):

"And whereas some men have pretended for their disobedience to their Soveraign, a new Covenant, made, not with men, but with God; this also is unjust: for there is no Covenant with God....  But this pretence of Covenant with God, is so evident a lye, even in the pretenders own consciences, that it is not onely an act of an unjust, but also of a vile, and unmanly disposition."

All righty then.  His revolution was the systematic application of reason to the planning of society; he derived his conclusions from first principles of human passions that he didn't intuit but observed, in others and also in himself--he exhorts us (p. 82), Nosce teipsum: Read thy self.  Supposedly he knew Descartes and Galileo and was influenced by them; like them, he is one of those Leviathans of rationalist, humanist Renaissance thought who laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment.  He was less imaginative than John Locke, it's true, when it came to the possible forms of political representation, but it was he, before Locke, who described government as a social contract between men by which those men defend themselves from each other and from their own passions; it was Hobbes who described government as a representative of its citizens and not of God.

It's impossible not to love the engraving on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition, which comes from the frontispiece of the original from 1651.  Across the top it reads, "Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei," meaning "There is no power on earth which can be compared to him."  That's a quote from Job about a "big, ugly monster" as my three-year-old would say.  But Hobbes means something different: he means the monarch who embodies the interests and security not of God but of human beings.



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Simplicio and Salviati

Who could dislike a book on math with a chapter inside it called "High School Geometry: Instrument of the Devil"?

This is a radical and subversive work in the best sense; it's brilliantly and comically irreverent toward that which is inane. What this particular author finds so inane is the standard K-12 math curriculum, and in a very concise and lucidly clear little treatise, he tells you why in surprisingly convincing terms. I say that as someone who liked my math education, who felt that calculus helped to show me the beauty of the universe--but Lockhart made me rethink the way I'd been compelled to spend much of my time up until that epiphany in calculus. He made me wonder if I might not have seen the same beauty or more beauty without so much time burned up in the acquisition of basically trivial skills.

More than anything else, A Mathematician's Lament is a wholesale attack on learning by rote. "By concentrating on WHAT, and leaving out WHY, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell," Lockhart writes. "Mathematics is THE ART OF EXPLANATION.... Math is not about following directions, it's about making new directions." Lockhart anticipates all the objections he's likely to encounter as he assails the math education of "accurate yet mindless manipulation of symbols" (where students are trained to perform mathematical operations they don't really understand and will not likely use ever again). And he dispenses with these objections in a Socratic dialogue between "Simplicio" and "Salviati," who, not so coincidentally, are also the fictional interlocutors in Galileo's 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. In Galileo's dialogue, Simplicio clings to the (then) traditional Ptolemaic view of the heavens, and Salviati advocates for Copernicus. In a way, the revolution Lockhart proposes feels just that radical and that necessary. It's an argument that makes you feel very engaged with intellectual battles of our own moment in time. I hear the gears of intellectual history turning as I read Simplicio asking questions in defense of traditional education and Salviati answering them in a way that's often hilariously blunt:

SIMPLICIO: But don't we need people to learn those useful consequences of math? Don't we need accountants and carpenters and such?

SALVIATI: How many people actually use any of this 'practical math' they supposedly learn in school? Do you think carpenters are out there using trigonometry? How many adults remember how to divide fractions, or solve a quadratic equation? Obviously the current practical training program isn't working, and for good reason: it is excruciatingly boring, and nobody ever uses it anyway.

Lockhart certainly has the credibility to make any argument about math he wants. He's a published mathematician and he's lived his iconoclastic creed; he dropped out of college after a semester and, on the basis of his independent mathematical investigations, was admitted to graduate school at Columbia, from which he received a PhD in 1990.

I am a little puzzled by the extent of Lockhart's hostility to applied math. I do understand that pure math research can or perhaps must proceed with the sole object of deducing new and interesting principles from propositions and definitions. But Newton invented calculus as a very precise language for describing the laws that govern change in the real world--i.e., for describing physics--and I think physics is pretty damn beautiful and awe-inspiring and important. Even the much-maligned "quadratic formula" is beautiful to me, because it describes the parabolic motion of projectiles under the influence of gravity. Furthermore, what's so wrong with getting excited about the POWER that math gives to human beings to do interesting things, like walking on the moon or predicting how fast a drug will clear from the bloodstream. Finally, at the risk of exceeding my philosophical depth, I want to ask whether it's really possible to pose mathematical problems and to consider abstractions without ANY reference to reality. Lockhart mentions an abstract problem of finding the shortest path from a point to a line and on to another point; but isn't the whole notion of a "shortest path" inspired and given value by the experience of literally moving through space and caring when you get where you're going?

But all in all, the degree of emphasis placed on applications (and the pedagogical value of real-life examples) is probably not as important as Lockhart's bigger point. He wants us to witness truth and beauty, to enjoy creation and discovery, and to cease indulging those authorities who give us hoops to jump through simply because it makes their jobs easier. "I will not serve," as Stephen Dedalus says!

Check out the book that, according to NPR's math columnist, "is already a recognized landmark in the world of mathematics education" and you may get the same feeling Paul Lockhart gets from the "art" of pure mathematics—a feeling of penetration to what really matters.