Author: jimgclarke

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The Lost Philosophies of Loss

You might think that there would be a very large body of philosophical thinking on loss, but if there is I haven’t found it. Perhaps somewhere along the line, we lost it? If you know of any, I’d like to know more.

There is of course a lot of writing about grief, which is a subset of loss related to the process of dealing with our collective mortality, and the particular mortality of a loved one. Related to this is a certain amount of thinking that pertains to mortality itself, why and how it grants meaning to existence, the necessity of embracing rather than fearing it. And beyond that again, a lot of philosophies – one thinks in particular of Stoicism and Buddhism – address the importance of accepting change in general, not just the kind of change which results in the death of someone near and dear.

Outside the realm of philosophy (or perhaps within it, depending on how you view the relationships between things like psychology and philosophy, or various religious tenets and philosophy) again there is a large body of thought that considers the purpose of mortality, and how best one should encounter it. Some of this, like Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s highly popular five stages of grief model, is focused on practical rather than conceptual ways to address grief, and obviously for people experiencing the kind of seismic shock that a bereavement entails, this kind of approach can be enormously helpful in a difficult time for many.

But there seems to be a shortfall of writing about loss in general. It’s not only lives which are lost after all. There are many other kinds of losses, and while some of these might in part emulate the patterns of grief and bereavement, others do not. The loss of a friendship for example, or a love affair, the alienation of a close family member, or the emigration of anyone we are close to can come very close to the grief pattern and response, though since the critical component of mortality is missing, there are inevitable differences.

When we reach Kübler-Ross’s stage of acceptance, we incorporate into our daily existence the reality that whomever has died is not coming back. But if someone has not died, and has instead for whatever reason given or ungiven simply departed from our lives, then this stage can only be partially applied. There is always the unbidden hope, the fractional reality while all still live, of some kind of reunion or rapprochement, and this perpetually delays and impedes the possibility of acceptance in the Kübler-Ross mode.

There are other things too which can be lost which are no less damaging for being more abstract or less acute than the tangible company and love of another human, or indeed animal, companion. Many people tie up entire swathes of their identities in their work, for example, treating their job as a kind of mission or purpose, and they are often cynically encouraged by employers to do so, since they can leverage this ‘labour of love’ motivation into ever greater profit motives and margins.

We have evidence that the loss of such mission-perceived employments can have pretty devastating effects on well-being. The most acute evidence is probably the death rates of people in their initial phase of retirement, where many of those who dedicated their working lives to a particular career are as bereft as the bereaved when it is removed from their daily existence, resulting in a much-increased rate of death from stress and anxiety-aggravated conditions such as cancer or cardiac arrest.

One can lose anything that one can gain in this world of course. And ultimately that’s the point. We enter life and leave it with nothing. But in the interim, “wedged as we are in between two eternities of idleness” as Anthony Burgess once wrote, we accrue all manner of things, from possessions and relationships to feelings, skills, abilities, desires, ambitions, achievements, accreditations and awards, not to mention all manner of material items, almost all of which instigate a sense of attachment when obtained and a concomitant sense of loss if removed. This kind of loss can be especially aggravated if the item somehow becomes entangled with our sense of self, or our perceived status, or simply has grown familiar to us.

Some of these losses are generally acknowledged by society. It’s socially acceptable, for example, to grieve over the loss of a home where one has lived for a long time, plastering the walls with memories and meaning and belonging. Maybe less so, it’s still understood that people can form strong attachment to certain material things which provoke significant sense of loss if removed from that person’s life. Even a favourite mug, the Stoics warn us, is a risk. Let the mug be just a mug, they advise, lest in your growing attachment to it as a fetish or totem item it becomes a risk to your mental equilibrium, one clumsy elbow away from shattering a little bit of yourself on the hardwood floor. Buddhism too tells us that attachment (upadana) is the root of all suffering (dukka), ultimately.

What intrigues me, I suppose, is the absolute ubiquity of loss compared with the relative silence of great thinkers on the matter. Every day we’re all losing something – our keys, a phone number, another thin hair or two maybe. Some days we lose something seismic, like a home, or a job, or a relationship which has been severed or destroyed. Some terrible days we lose to mortality a loved one we realise in shock we won’t ever be able to converse with again, except in our memories, or maybe these days in the pseudo-demonic facsimiles offered by “griefbot” AI technologies.

Every day, ideally, we’re all gaining things too, even if it’s just the awareness of additional loss, the experience and resignation of accepting that the inevitability of change often comes with a negative prefix attached. But life isn’t maths on that level, and perhaps we as humans suffer from a kind of positivistic fixation, wherein we delude ourselves that the things we gain will remain while the things that we lose can, in some way, be reversed or mitigated. Kübler-Ross calls this the bargaining stage of grief, but on a less conscious level it applies to all forms of loss.

So perhaps we feel more keenly the losses without necessarily accounting the gains the same weight of importance. There’s probably a familiarity bias to that phenomenon, I feel. Losses can sometimes feel like they mount up like amputations, one limb after another being lopped off, further disabling us, whereas the things we gain on any particular day don’t necessarily assume the resonance and importance they may ultimately hold for us for some time.

Also, it seems inherently inhuman or robotic to attempt to account for the gains and losses in life as if they were merely emotional analogues for P+L bookkeeping. We don’t do double ledger accounting in our hearts or souls.

And given this ubiquity of experience of loss, and its superimportance over gain in terms of lived human experience, I remain surprised that the greater topic of loss beyond the more limited realm of grief is not more frequently debated within the Western philosophical tradition. But I can’t and don’t claim to have read everything obviously. I may have missed out on good thinkers on this very matter. And if that’s the case, do please put me right and direct me towards some reading in the comments below.

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What’s the weather like in Mordor?

Among my interests is Speculative Geographies, an interdiscipline best described as the study of hypothetical, fictional or otherwise non-realist geography.

On the micro-level, it’s the study of how a wardrobe in ‘our’ world can open up into Narnia, or what it is about Prague that allows protestors to march into the sky in a Milan Kundera novel.

But one of the things I always yearned for was a macro-level. Something that went beyond the ‘spaces and places’ superficiality and attempted to encompass imaginary geographies in the whole. These days we have a technology which can do that, at least on a meteorological level, which is climate modelling, the same methodology used by climate scientists to model theories about where our own climate is headed.

So it was pleasingly inevitable that eventually someone would goof off between running El Nino frequencies or iceberg melt rates and plug in the maps of Middle-Earth and Westeros to see just how credible was the worldbuilding of two of our most lauded fantasy novelists. And the results are … surprising.

Tolkien’s hand-drawn and annotated map of Middle-Earth. Copyright the Tolkien Estate.

Why surprising? Well, firstly because neither J.R.R. Tolkien, nor his middle initials namesake George R.R. Martin are in any way renowned as climatologists. If anything, the opposite was assumed. Scientists have long looked at the famous map of Middle-Earth, with its famously rectangular mountains surrounding Mordor, and wondered if Tolkien ever left his study or lecture hall to look outside. (Reader, he did. He was an avid lover of nature, and a keen cartographer, as revealed in a semi-recent exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian and elsewhere.)

Furthermore, Tolkien’s cartography was such an affront to one scientist, the Russian arachnid expert Kyril Yeskov, that he spent the downtime during a quiet research break in Siberia writing a kind of realist correction to The Lord of the Rings.

The resulting text, which is free on the internet in English due to obvious copyright issues, moved swiftly beyond Yeskov’s irritation at what he felt was Tolkien’s dubious geographies, to examine more serious or worrying concerns – how the trilogy (or hexalogy to be exact) presents a good vs evil spectrum that mostly operates on a West vs East paradigm, and the not-very-well-hidden racist underpinnings that seem to arise from that.

Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer therefore is a realist text, written from the point of view of an orc (who in this version are merely more swarthy versions of humanity), which depicts the overthrow of an enlightened and scientifically focused multicultural Mordor by an imperialist, racist, fascist (ie Elvish) west. As counter-readings go, it’s magnificent. I once wrote a whole essay on it, which can be found here.

But Yeskov’s initial inspiration has proven to be somewhat untrue. Despite the square mountain range, Tolkien’s geography for Middle-Earth passes the climate modelling test. Tolkien once claimed that the Shire was located at the equivalent of Oxford whereas Minas Tirith in Gondor was the latitudinal equivalent of Florence in Italy in our world. The climate modelling roughly bears this out.

There’s been less criticism of George R.R. Martin’s geographical imaginings, perhaps because A Song of Ice and Fire still isn’t completed and perhaps because the TV adaptation seemed to disappoint a lot of fans in its closing season or two. But it still poses questions worth asking climatologists, such as how come it has such lengthy seasons.

Westeros – cute but nowhere near as sumptuous as the Game of Thrones opening credits

“Winter is coming” is no idle threat in Westeros. It lasts a lot longer than a couple of months. Like Brian Aldiss’s astonishing (and sadly neglected) Helliconia trilogy, Westeros has generally suffered from extensively elongated seasons. Aldiss, after consulting scientists, located his Helliconia planet in a complex binary star system, which results in seasons that are centuries long.

Westeros by comparison has shorter seasons, peaking at a few years, but a few years of winter is enough for anyone, even before you get to the ice zombies invading. Additionally, they are erratic and unpredictable. Is this even plausible, from a geographical or climate perspective?

The same study that vindicated Tolkien produced a theory to explain Westeros’s seasons, involving variable axial tilt of the planet. (It must be noted that many scientists are also fantasy nerds, and the cause of Westeros’s weather has been hotly disputed for many years, with various explanations proposed, but this seems to fit best.)

This doesn’t make Tolkien and Martin fastidiously scientific worldbuilders anymore than it legitimises Tolkien’s ‘East is evil, West is good’ morality, and it certainly does nothing to improve the finale of Game of Thrones. But it does suggest that a lot more consideration went into these fantastikal texts than is generally noted.

And to answer the titular rhetorical question, the weather in Mordor is pretty damn evil.

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My Heart is a Broken Clock

Turgut Uyar was of the same generation of İkinci Yeni (Second New) poets as Sezai Karakoç, whom I previously mistranslated. Their movement’s voices functioned like a kind of mini-modernist revolution in Turkish poetry beginning in the 1950s or so, introducing imagism, more vernacular language and a kind of domestic intimacy to the tradition.

Uyar himself was from an Ankara military family and grew up in a suburb of Istanbul. He attended military school as his father had, and joined the army again in his father’s footsteps. His family suffered somewhat because his father had refused to join in the War of Independence in Ankara, choosing instead to stay with his family. Uyar claimed to see both sides of the argument.

As a public servant, he spent his early adult life moving around from post to post, serving both in the far east near Georgia and on the Black Sea coast, locations which inform and appear in his earliest work. He married young and had three daughters with his first wife Yezdan Şener, before divorcing her to remarry Tomris Uyar (nee Gedik), a prominent and influential writer and translator from Istanbul.

For Tomris it was also a second marriage, the first having ended soon after the tragic death of a child. She was admired by a number of other writers in their social circle, which caused quite a lot of insecurity and anxiety for Turgut at times. Yet they had a son and remained together until his death from cirrhosis in 1985.

In one of his better-known poems, this sense of anxiety in love comes to the fore. The self-knowledge that his attachment is ‘broken’ in no way lessens his attachment. If anything it reinforces his resolve – not to change how he feels or attempt to fix it – but to live within his flaws, perhaps out of habit, perhaps stubbornly, but mostly out of fear that fixing it would serve only to break it further.

Uyar accepts his brokenness, even revels in it, and at the same time accepts that perhaps he ought not to. Yet within this cracked exterior is a very pure emotion which he frantically wishes to preserve, that of the love he bears for his wife. She functions as the operating centre of his existence, wherein even time is silenced. It’s a lot of pressure to put on a relationship, but Tomris seems mostly to have tolerated it.

My Heart is a Broken Clock

Everyone thinks you are you
without even knowing that you aren’t really yourself,
aren’t really you.
As I pass by,
I would say,
when they ask me the time;
it is “her past her” o’clock.
No one understands what I mean.
They say, you never fixed that clock of yours.
They never ask whether I want to have it fixed.

My heart is a broken clock that’s always stopped at you.

I can stop time in my heart,
because without you it passes,
and the hour hand resents the minute hand.
If this broken clock ever started working,
it would be the death of me.
You should know that if the hour hand passed the minute hand
my heart would give out.
So at least let’s leave it broken.

Because my heart is a broken clock that’s always stopped at you.

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How many times did humanity forget how to write?

Writing was invented independently on at least four different occasions according to historians – in Sumeria, ancient Egypt, China and Central America.

So it would not come as a surprise to discover that it had also been invented elsewhere beforehand and died out as a lost technology. After all, we still cannot replicate the techniques which made Samurai swords or Roman concrete. And other technologies like glass-blowing, central heating and seismography are attested to have been invented, lost and then rediscovered.

I think the Vinča symbols from ancient Serbia (which predate Sumerian cuneiform writing by millennia) are almost definitely an example of writing being invented then forgotten, for example.

This process may actually have occurred repeatedly before writing stuck, as it were, when the Mesopotamians discovered it five thousand years ago and shared the technology with their neighbours. What’s really interesting is when this process began.

Latest research suggests maybe up to 40,000 years ago. At least, there are artifacts covered in symbols dating to that period which have been discovered in caves in the Swabian Jura, in the South of Germany.

Scientists are currently reluctant to describe this as even a proto- or rudimentary form of writing, but instead are calling it symbolic external information storage. Which to me seems like a cautious way to describe writing. They’ve also insisted that they’re not trying to decipher the symbols. But you can bet your ass they are attempting exactly that.

Human history often seems like a very recent and rushed occurrence, and it is when viewed through the scale of the history of the planet (billions of years) or even that of complex life on the planet (many hundreds of millions of years.)

But it’s actually quite long and the perception that for most of it, people who were cognitively and physically similar if not identical to us spent their time sniveling in caves or chasing deer and berries is probably a serious underestimation of their abilities to conceptualise and to communicate.

Homo Sapiens as a species (never mind the other sentient hominids which preceded us) is perhaps 300,000 years old. Increasingly we’re beginning to realise that most of ‘prehistory’ (as it was formerly dismissed) actually contained thinking people who thought stuff and achieved things.

Many of those things are now lost to us of course. And some of those things may have included technologies and behaviours now considered inherent to the human experience, like music, ritual and yes, writing.

The tiny numbers and thin densities of populations predicated against some of these technologies and behaviours being sustained sometimes. That’s inevitable. As mentioned above, a number of technologies and behaviours have been repeatedly invented, as it were.

I predict quite confidently that the coming years will bring further archeological discoveries which will start to reinforce the idea that human history didn’t suddenly begin when the Mesopotamians decided to start writing down their grain quotas, but in fact stretches much further back than we might previously have considered.

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The loneliness of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Yes, it’s another, perhaps overdue, (mis)translation. There have been others which I didn’t feel did justice to their progenitors, so it’s taken this long to produce one I was prepared to release into the wild.
I really wanted to keep Pasolini’s own word solitude, not least because my favourite football stadium is also curiously called by that name. But it’s clear from the subject matter that what he’s discussing isn’t some kind of autonomous security so much as its opposite, a loneliness even within a crowd, and even when that crowd has an overtly amatory intent.

Pasolini, it is no secret to reveal, was an ardent, one might say addicted, pursuer of impersonal sex, especially among the back streets of Rome where, in the 1970s, such activity from a famous gay man could easily provoke a dangerous response. Indeed, it is generally considered, except by some conspiracists, that this is the way by which he met his horrific and premature end.

The poem I think speaks for itself, even when muffled and garbled by my mistranslation. There is little requirement for exegesis here, except perhaps in relation to the very final phrase, fratelli dei cane, which taken literally means brothers of dogs.

Decades on from Pasolini’s demise, I think he might appreciate the new acerbic allusion this phrase has accrued with the ascent of the right-wing Fratelli D’Italia party to rule in Italy. Their political opponents have, on occasion, used this as a term of abuse. It may even be the case that they are overtly quoting Pasolini. Solitudine is not, after all, an obscurely known text in Italy.

And if not this poem, it may be that they reference instead Pasolini’s Lettera del traduttore, or ‘translator’s note’ as we might say in English that he wrote to explain and introduce a (mis?)translation of his own – that of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. The whole letter is worth reading from the point of view of anyone interested in mistranslation or indeed translation. As this academic article indicates, it revolves around a central metaphor of a translator as a dog gnawing and worrying at a bone. Translators therefore are a kind of fratelli dei cane, he suggests.

Solitudine gives us another more personal meaning for that phrase, however, one embedded in the risky sexual practices he sought on those dangerous back streets of Rome in the years of lead, when political extremists like the Red Brigades and their right-wing equivalent, not to mention various mafias, brought continual terror to the country, a terror only compounded for a famous gay man in overt pursuit of anonymous sex in a devoutly Catholic nation in dark, windy, trash-filled alleys.

Pasolini captures the risk and the addiction, that such pursuit held for him, but also the inherent hollowness it left inside. I hope I have managed to convey a sense of his words, partly a confession but also a kind of mental dérive through his own sexuality.

Mostly I’ve preserved his somewhat unorthodox orthography. Finally, I am happy to accept the status he anointed both of us with, that of a brother to the dogs. I have gnawed at the bone of his poem as he chewed at the Oresteia. I hope that I have not disgraced him.

Loneliness (mistranslated from Solitudine, by Pier Paolo Pasolini)

You have to be really strong
to love loneliness; you need good, strong legs
and extraordinary resilience; you can’t risk
colds and flus and sore throats; you shouldn’t fear
theft or murder; if you must stroll
throughout the afternoon, even throughout the night,
you need to know how to do it without thinking; there’s nowhere to sit;
it’s some kind of winter; with a wind that cuts through the wet grass,
through the damp and muddy stones and rocks;
nowhere can comfort be found, there’s no doubt about that,
and besides, there’s a whole day and night ahead
with no responsibilities, no limits at all.

Sex is just an excuse. No matter how many encounters there may be
­- even in winter, when the roads are abandoned to the wind,
among the expanse of trash piling up against distant buildings,
there are many – they’re still only moments of loneliness;
warmer and more alive is the kind body
which anoints you then departs,
whereas the lover who deserts you is colder and more deadly;
this is what fills you with joy, like a miracle wind,
not the innocent grin or shady arrogance
of those who then depart; carrying away their youth,
so enormously young; and in this way it’s inhuman
because it leaves nothing behind, or rather, it leaves only
the same mark in every season.

A boy with his first lovers
is nothing less than the fertility of the whole world.

And the world comes to him like this, appearing and disappearing,
like a shapeshifter. Everything else remains the same,
but you could wander through half the city and never find it again;
the act is over, repeating it becomes a ritual. And so
loneliness grows bigger even if a whole mob
was waiting for their turn: the disappearances grow –
leaving is fleeing – and the next one looms over this one
like a duty, a sacrifice to the death wish.

But as time passes, fatigue makes itself felt,
especially just after dinner time,
yet for you nothing changes: you just about manage not to scream or cry;
and it would be serious if it weren’t just fatigue,
and maybe a little hunger. Huge, because that would mean
that your desire for loneliness could not be more satisfied,
so what’s waiting for you if something no one calls loneliness
is the true loneliness, the kind you could never accept?

There’s nothing in the world you could eat or drink,
no possible satisfaction that’s worth this endless walking
through these poor streets, where you have to be both strong
and disgraced, a brother to the dogs.

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AI is a horse with three legs

A lot of people are extremely concerned about the prospect of AI superintelligence, and the possibility that it could supersede and perhaps even destroy humanity.

I spent a lot of the past four years or so researching this exact topic.

But increasingly it’s coming to look like AI is actually shit. In other words, it’s not going to take over the world and send Terminators to kill us (what I call the Skynet Complex). And nor are we going to luxuriate in Star Trek-style indolence while AI does all the heavy lifting.

AI can replace *some* human performance, but as we are learning, it’s usually inaccurate, unreliable and expensive. Most companies who’ve used AI have lost money on it.

But as Cory Doctorow notes, AI is an enormous danger. It’s going to destroy our global economy as it eats up all the investment and provides almost nothing except environmental degradation and water shortages in return.

It’s a combination of the world’s biggest nothingburger, tulipmania for the digital age, and the displacement of people in work by unreliable, fantasising, digital plagiarists.

We should stop AI now, not because it might kill us like Terminators, nor because its creators stole all their training material, nor because it’s an environmental disaster. But because we’re betting the global economy on a horse with three legs.

See what Cory says here.

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Where exactly did the Roman Empire end?

Like a lot of questions about history, this is both superficially straightforward and on closer reflection highly philosophical. I have a very straightforward answer for you, one that I have never seen referred to in print or pixel before, but let’s take the complex route first.

We’d need firstly to define what we mean by Roman Empire. The Ottomans, the Germans, the Venetians, the Bulgarians, the Russians and a whole host of other civilisations all considered themselves in one way or another to be true heirs of Rome. Should we consider them as true continuations or not?

Then we’d need to consider what we mean by where. Where is a subset of when in this instance. If we define the Roman Empire as ending with the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in 410 CE, then obviously the empire fell at Rome itself. But Alaric was dead within a few months, and there was still an emperor in Rome over 60 years later.

And what of what we now call the Byzantine Empire, but which knew itself as the Roman Empire? Founded in Anatolia in the fourth century due to a split of the Empire into Eastern and Western administrations, the empire based in Byzantium (later Constantinople, later Istanbul) continued until it was overran by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century just as its Western twin was overrun by the Ostrogoths in the fifth.

For me, as for themselves, the Byzantines were Roman. Greek-speaking, yes, but Roman all the same, with a continuity of culture all the way back to the founding of Rome as a city state in the eighth century BCE. So if we consider the Byzantines to be the last vestige of the Roman empire, then surely it fell when Constantinople was captured by Sultan Mehmed II (known understandably as ‘the conqueror’) in May 1453 CE?

Close but not quite. Some of the Byzantine empire still stood even as Constantinople was sacked and burned. One standout was the Maniot territory in the Peloponnese in Southern Greece, which at the time Constantinople fell was under the command of the wonderfully named Despotate of Morea, which in practice meant two Byzantine leaders (who promptly fled.) The Maniot people did not flee however, and the Ottomans didn’t bother invading this mountainous and difficult territory until 1770 CE. But with the departing despots so also departed any vestiges of ruling Byzantine (and hence Roman) culture. This was a Maniot defiance of Ottoman rule, not a Byzantine one.

Then there was the principality of Theodoro, which was a sliver of Crimea under Byzantine rule sandwiched between the coastal Genoese colonies and the inland Khanate of Crimea. Technically again, this was Byzantine territory. But in reality, it was populated by Goths.

What? Yes, in fact the Ostrogoths had been in Crimea for over a thousand years, since the FOURTH CENTURY CE! Byzantine rule (following the fourth crusade) was merely yet another imperial vassalage for the Goths of Crimea. At various times they had fallen under the nominal rule of a bewildering range of imperial powers, including the Huns, Khazars, Mongols and Genoese. Ultimately, they were merged into the neighbouring Khanate in 1475 CE, and became part of the Ottoman empire. So, not exactly the last stand of Rome.

Which brings me to my own answer to the question, where did the Roman Empire end? The Empire of Trebizond was a secessionist state of the Byzantine imperium. Formed during the fourth crusade as an opportunistic power grab by a local potentate, the Trebizond empire sustained only a little longer after the fall of its parent state at Constantinople. The Trebizond secessionists were if anything even more aggressed by the combined threat from Turkmen and Ottoman forces than the Byzantines were. Throughout the 1440s and 1450s, they repelled repeated attempts at invasion.

The end finally came in 1461, a mere eight years after the fall of Constantinople. There is a wonderful, almost contemporaneous painting depicting the departure of the Byzantines from Trebizond following King David’s surrender to Mehmed II:

So what happened exactly? Mehmed swooped in from the west to isolate Trebizond and place it under siege, which continued for a month. To achieve this, his forces had to go into the high hills immediately behind the coastal city and outflank it, so that they would be unable to receive either reinforcements (which David hoped would come from Christian Europe) or supplies via the harbour.

Trebizond was a high walled city located between two freshwater sources flowing into the Black Sea, so a physical attack was ill advised. For Mehmed, it was easier to maintain negotiations while besieging the city. And the inhabitants were well aware of what had happened to Constantinople for refusing to negotiate.

This map, take from Wikipedia, gives a good sense of the geography of the time:

The formal surrender would of course likely have taken place in the citadel or the palace (both currently under archeological exploration at the time of writing.) However, this followed an agreement between David and Mehmed for a negotiated surrender. With their forces primarily located to the east of the city, adjoining the freshwater river that is now only a dry river valley in the modern city, it is possible that Mehmed’s forces first entered the city via the lower gate closest to the harbour and market, but more likely that they entered through the double gate closer to the citadel.

Amazingly, this gate is still standing, entirely unremarked upon, and can be found down a narrow cobblestoned alleyway strewn with graffiti and with children’s laundry drying at head height. There is no plaque or commemorative item of any kind to inform you that this place was the geographic spot where over 2200 years of continuous Roman culture came to its final end. And yet, that’s exactly what it is:

The inner gate of Trebizond’s double gate, where 2,200 years of Roman culture came to an end.

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To be everything and more

I recently came across Jonathan Frantzen’s tribute to David Foster Wallace (written in the usual compelling Frantzen style, and interwoven with a trip to Robinson Crusoe’s island).

Buried in there is one of Frantzen’s typical hidden gems: “To be everything and more is the Internet’s ambition, too.”

As AI looms, I concur with his concern that the virtual world is rapaciously eating away at us all. Perhaps we all need to go outside more, though maybe not as far as an inhospitable island off the coast of Chile.

Many bytes have been spilt over this ongoing encroachment. Is it a bad thing? Is it an inevitable thing? Is it dystopian? Is it dystopian but will eventually become utopian?

The general public seem to harbour suspicions. Courting reduced to swiping instantly on a phone app cannot but feel like some kind of awful diminution and commodification. And yet according to research, a tenth of straight people and a quarter of gay people have met their partner online.

This is the kind of efficiency and scalability and global connectivity the internet rightly boasts about. But it doesn’t seem to make most people as happy as it makes the tech oligarchs who profit from such seismic societal change.

We could look at Wikipedia too, the extraordinarily ambitious project to get the world to collaborate in collating the sum of all knowledge. Obviously they haven’t achieved that, but such an overweening ambition drove the project to where it is today, having displaced encyclopedias like Britannica early on, and spoiled many a pub argument by providing instant answers to disputes of an esoteric nature.

Does it matter that Wiki pages about Marvel’s cinematic universe are much more detailed than pages about ancient philosophy? Yes and no. The open source model panders to the interests of the editors not some abstraction of relative importance. But perhaps their interests also reflect (broadly) those of the general public.

And with the ‘internet of things’, one by one the appliances in our own homes and environment are becoming dully sentient, speaking to one another, integrating with systems we rarely if ever see or comprehend.

This is convenient, apparently. It is convenient for our fridge to order our shopping, for the heating in our homes to decide when and how much heat to provide, for our cars to drive themselves, leaving us all feeling that strange combination of privilege as passenger, and cargo without control.

As with all societal change of this scale, or at least all that we’ve been experiencing since the industrial revolution two centuries and more ago, the technology changes the world so quickly that it unnerves many. We never asked for this. We are unsure how it will change our lives. The promises of the techbros often come with dystopian undercurrents, as we see with the online dating revolution.

No wonder then that people like Frantzen might want occasionally to step out of that and into a former world, one of no surveillance, one where dangers can be fatal, one which somehow feels more adventurous and alive. I think many of us harbour similar desires, however hazily constructed.

But as he writes, the internet wants to be everything and more. And its rapidly growing offspring AI wants that even more and may at some point even be able to achieve it.

The irony of Frantzen’s argument is that in seeking to escape the world, he found he missed it deeply. The parallel he draws between the physical island of Selkirk/Crusoe and the mental island on which his friend Wallace was trapped is not unreasonable.

As usual, binary thinking won’t help us. Let’s leave that to the technology which thrives on ones and zeroes. We will need to find a new, tech-enabled way to engage with the world and each other. I wish the tech oligarchs would ponder that possibility a bit more.

I don’t wish to be stranded on either a desert island nor a digital one. I would like to be able to connect with people. The internet both does and doesn’t permit this, because it wants to be everything and more. It interpolates itself between us. And that, I fear, will likely cause many more people to end up on that third type of island, the one which David Foster Wallace was tragically unable in the end to escape.

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Think in 5-D: Learn a Language

There are around 140 language families on the planet. Nearly half of all people speak a language from only one of those families as their native tongue, never mind all those who speak them as second or subsequent languages.

That family is Indo-European, and it includes English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian and some other very big hitters in terms of global speakers.

As the world continues to globalise, we will inevitably lose languages and even entire language families. Some projections suggest we might be down to only five or six major languages by 2500. Of those, only probably Arabic and Chinese stand a chance of being non-Indo-European languages spoken by anyone.

Once upon a time, I scoffed at learning my national language, Irish. What’s the use? Who gives a shit about old myths? Anyhow, it was all tied up with politics and my limited brain could only just about accommodate French.

Now I regret that decision, like I regret not maintaining my knowledge of Attican Greek and Latin, not properly learning Italian, Russian or Turkish, and being so scared by Hebrew and Arabic that I gave up on day one.

Because languages aren’t just interchangeable modes of communication. Each one expresses an entire culture, and even more, a wholly unique way of conceiving of the world. To speak more than one language is to see the world in multiple dimensions at once.

I envy my five year old his bilingualism. It’s a gift I intend to jealously defend for him, and no doubt on occasion even against his future wishes.

If you want to save culture and add literal dimensions to your brain, learn a language. Start today.

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Spy Wednesday

A little late but a quick poem for the day that’s in it.

Spy Wednesday

We had the guy on camera since the weekend.

How could we not? The crowds alone had triggered

warning levels demanding our attention.

His known associates were mostly no ones.

Hookers and fishermen, small time farmers,

with nothing much to lose. Not radicals

but enough of a concern to warrant action.

Phone masts tracked him. A website signaled.

He’d booked dinner for his friends on Friday night.

We had him now. So when one approached us

and tried to sell him we could afford to laugh

at the demand for crypto and escape. We’ll send

our men to seize him in the garden. Perhaps

he knows we’re already onto him.