A thought-and-a-half on knowledge and originality from the Quixote.

"There are some people who wear themselves out learning and discovering things that, once learned and discovered, don't matter one bit for our comprehension and retention."- Don Quixote, Vol 2 Ch. 22

This is an interesting moment in the Quixote. They are talking to a pseudo-scholar who is compiling a book of "who did what first." This college graduate is referred to as the cousin (primo) of a scholar they met earlier. Primo, of course, also means first! Sancho makes fun of the fake humanist and asks him who was the first man to scratch his nose, and tells him, "it must have been out father Adam." Then Sancho stumps the pedant by asking him "Who was the first acrobat?" Why, Lucifer, of course. Most Cervantes scholars think this is a sardonic interpretation of the decadence inherent to the compilation of data for its own sake, an accumulation that is then allowed to pass for erudition. But I think this chapter is really about originality. The scholar's knowledge of firsts is not only useless but mere compilation. Sancho's questions and answers are creative and original compared to those of the scholar, and of course, the squire's examples are closer to the original creation! Cervantes is also critiquing the use of "formulas" for composition, such as those used by his arch-rival Lope de Vega. If nothing else, the Quixote is unpredictably original.

My Barbara Ore Story

     I taught Drama for a decade at Sacramento Country Day School and Barbara was Middle School Principal for all that time. From my first day on, she was helpful and encouraging to me.

     One spring the Middle School Play was “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” It was a comedy/fantasy with political overtones. Basically, the Paris street people spread reports of vast oil deposits under the Madwoman’s house. This rumor lures all the greedy rich people into a sort of hell-mouth in the basement, and they close a giant trap door on them. The sun comes out, the birds sing, and the street people are happy.  A silly fairy tale, but a good show for a big cast and more than the usual good female roles.

    One afternoon we were rehearsing the play and Mrs. Ore walked in calmly and asked to speak to me.

      “I have read the play and I must tell you that I think we may have a problem” she said.  “Doing a play about sending rich people to hell may not go over well with the patrons of the school. I think we’ll get calls from parents once they know what it’s about and we’ll have to cancel. So, we probably should head off a painful last-minute cancellation and just cancel the play now.”

I was completely flabbergasted. I hemmed and hawed, “But, we’ve done things much more political than this and got no complaints…. I can’t believe this. Do you really think we’ll have to cancel?”

Barbara just sighed and said, “I think we should ask the students what they think.”

The kids had been sitting quiet as statues, looking down and feeling, I thought, embarrassed for me and disappointed, since they liked the play. I turned around to the entire class shouting, “April Fool.”

     It was April the 1^st and I was so busy with the play that I forgot. I fell to floor. The cast had asked Mrs. Ore to participate in this scheme, although I think it was mostly Tracy Minicucci. Barbara’s prank on me was the absolute best performance that year, and the best trick anyone ever played on me. I completely fell for it. 

We need a contemporary Cervantes

Like many returning veterans throughout history, Cervantes found his country unable and unwilling to help him return to society. He was a wounded war hero and was held captive for 5 years, during which time Cervantes experienced both the depravity and the humanity of an enemy culture. Ransomed at last, he regained a homeland that seemed to have forgotten his sacrifices and that was intent on covering the patent failures of its domestic and foreign policy with a patchwork of religious fanaticism and ethnic scapegoating. 

In a time and a culture ( early 17^th c Spain) when xenophobia was the national religion, when the poor were assumed to have deserved their lot, and when women were thought to be naturally subservient to men, Cervantes regularly wrote with compassion and humor to explore the feelings and experiences of religious and ethnic minorities, social outcasts, old people and women.

Who will be our Cervantes? We need one.

Conflict isn't Everything

Inspiration looks like madness from the outside and feels like madness from the inside.

When I found him, he was writing an avant-garde novel which I think was about the feeling of insects on your skin as a symbol for death. The feeling or the skin was the main character I think.

      Then he wrote a novel about what he wished the world and life had been like. No one would publish it though because there was no conflict. Everyone was creative and happy. People had empathy and took responsibility for others. Louis Armstrong was on the 4 dollar bill, Sitting Bull on the 20. History was similar to our dimension’s until the 20^th century. Jazz ended institutionalized racism much more quickly, and instead of two world wars, there were two extended world meals, in which every man woman and child on earth was fed. Buckminster Fuller had become the Engineer General and everyone had electric cars by the 1950s. 

Cultural Evolution of Narratives

So far, from all my research into and thinking about the cultural evolution of narratives and characters, a couple of things seem clear:
1. Stories do not belong to storytellers and story listeners, because all stories are reassemblies of fragments on loan and depend on shared narrative sources. That includes all "owners" of so-called trademarks and copyrights.
2. Though distinct, genres of stories depend on one another, for there is no such thing as a pure genre, and all tale types have a symbiotic relationship to one another.
Homer taught me this. Gilgamesh and the Bible taught me this. The Greek writers of tragedy and comedy taught me this. Beowulf taught me this. The Lancelot /Grail Cycle taught me this. Cervantes and Shakespeare taught me this. The 1001 Nights taught me this. Jean-Louis Desalles and Jack Zipes and Robert Irwin and Marina Warner and Marshall Poe and Terence Deacon and Mikhail Bakhtin and William Hansen and Arthur Frank and Michael Tomasello and Vladimir Propp and Albert Lord and Milman Parry and Walker Burkert and Marion Blute and Kate Distin and Stephen Shennan and Michael Drout and Melvin Konner and MANY more authors using our commons of the mind taught me this.

More soon.

The First Earth Day

I remember the first grainy, cheaply- printed, black and white, tube-mailed anti-pollution posters. They showed people wearing contemporary clothes but wearing gas masks. You could buy these posters at school through the Scholastic book service, which some of you may remember. I ordered one because I was seeing the air get thick and opaque in the years since since elementary school, from some of my favorite "staring-into-the-distance" spots. I thought maybe by the time I was grown-up the air would be clean, and I could once again see the moon rise over the Sierras from the hill near our house in Orangevale.

Study War No More.

After a decade of misconstrued (Iraq) and overextended (Afghanistan) wars, which saw thousands of young American men and women killed, maimed and psychologically damaged, not to speak of the many thousands of casualties on the other side, the American people are sick and tired of this series of military misadventures.

Barack Obama’s pirouette away from an unfathomable military adventure in Syria was, down deep, appreciated by the public, despite the torrent of propaganda from the Tea Party, with its undertones of racism and tinges of Confederate symbolism, depicting the president as weak and indecisive.

But Trumpolino is known for aggression rather than diplomacy. Even the Pentagon doesn’t ask for the kind of military budget he will be slashing public services and much needed programs to pay for. From war, you cannot expect peace of any kind other than that of the absence of life, the wind blowing through devastated cities and villages.

Selection Pressures in Cultural Evolution

Though a detailed description of social selection pressures may be as difficult as a detailed description of the ecological selection pressures acting on populations of organisms, the notion of selection pressure is a useful one. Its vagueness enables it to capture an otherwise ungraspable totality⎯an environment⎯of causal factors. Social selection pressures are indicated by their expression in memic functional adaptation, although this is not to say that the term selection pressure should be avoided because of suspicions of circularity. The vagueness of the term may be understood in terms of the problem of specifying whether a feature is a selected adaptation or the result of memetic drift. The concept of drift refers to the random component in descriptions of selection. This arises from our epistemic incapacity when it comes to identifying deterministic selection pressures. This incapacity is not only due to the difficulty of identifying past selection pressures. It is also due to the stochastic (and therefore temporal) character of the selection process itself: whether a pressure will turn out, in the long run, to be selective or non selective, is a fact that may only be decided after the fact.

A more telling problem, perhaps, for the description of selection pressures comes from another angle. An objection that is likely to be raised against the observation of selection pressures and the observation and functional analysis of memetic adaptations ⎯especially of social forms with latent, seldom recognised functions⎯is that the analysis may be accused of being ‘ideological’ rather than empirical. Such analysis might be accused of being an exercise in partisan cultural criticism. This criticism has some validity, because, in the reflexive science of sociology, the empirical observation of a functional trait is likely to be difficult given the heterophenomenological* nature of memetic functions. What one observer sees as a latent ideological function becomes, at another’s insistence, a mere trifle of popular culture. Ideology critique and cultural criticism have long recognised their predicament of semantic immanence ( Adorno?) For now I shall only say that, in the case of observing the self-serving functions of social features, we might not recognise them unless we recognise that, along with the selfish character of replicators, there are powerful, localised, social and psychological selection pressures selecting and maintaining them. I can only concede, however, that descriptions of selection pressures may well themselves be subject to the selection pressure of finding a description primarily to support one’s claims about a particular functional adaptation⎯a sleight of hand that can abuse the potential for circularity in adaptationist analysis. I might add that, given the ideological, memetic character of gender and sexual norms, this is a problem that also infects analyses of sexual selection in evolutionary psychology.

*Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another, not oneself") is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena.

The Aisle of Incontinence.

 The Aisle of Incontinence

     I used to be young. It wasn’t that long ago. Today I am pushing a loudly rattling grocery cart through Target, doing some shopping for dinner. I always seem to get the loudly rattling or squeaky cart or the one with the wheel that does not  turn at all and cuts you short in the belly when you try to change direction. Maybe I should mark them with permanent color markers. Red for rattle, sapphire for squeak, blue for wheel. This is my life now.

     Suddenly I find myself in an aisle I’ve never been down or even seen before. The shelves seem towering with stacked boxes and plastic packages of….incontinency supplies. Is this a sign? Just as I am thinking about getting old I turn down an entire supermarket aisle devoted to “Depends” and its competitors. Is the sheer in-stock volume of these senior diapers due to the Baby Boomers all getting incontinent at once?

     My speed leaving the Aisle of Incontinence made the cart squeak not only faster but louder. Trying to forget about this incident, I looked around in sporting goods and realized that I really needed to find the restroom.

Website

http://drcbdavis.wixsite.com/jazz

Cut and paste this. I am trying to remember how to insert a link here.

C.B. Davis, PHD: The Clown Raid

C.B. Davis, PHD: The Clown Raid