In 1937, a long-lost Vermeer was revealed at auction, heralded by experts as one of the Dutch painter's greatest works. Only it wasn't a Vermeer at all. A man named Han van Meegeren had produced this and many other expensive forgeries. Once he stepped forward, their value dropped like the jaws on his customers. Why?

They were still the same paintings. Surely the art world has brainwashed us into shelling out for that intangible quality of authenticity. No, says Denis Dutton, a philosopher who has written on art and forgery. "The proper response to art is the response to human achievement, and this means responding to more than a pretty painted surface," he told me a few months ago. "Works of art are intrinsically intentional objects, and they embody thoughts, imagination, creativity, emotion, and intelligence." Further, "we are fundamentally hardwired to respond to human artifacts as intentional objects."

This last claim has found support in a paper published in Cognition in January 2008. An experimenter drew a circle while looking at one of two circular objects on display. After watching the act, 2-year-olds tended to say the drawing represented the object the experimenter had been eyeing. Apparently, we naturally read intention into the production of artifacts--we look at a sketch or a sculpture and wonder, "What was the creator thinking?" As for the van Meegeren case, Denis says, "we want a view into the mind of Vermeer and not a view provided by a third rate 1930's artist who is trying to explain how he thinks Vermeer must have seen the world."

That explains our dismissal of novel fabrications, but what about replications? Indistinguishable duplicates of real masterpieces? Denis says we can never be absolutely sure we're getting everything the original has. Maybe we can't tell the difference today, but what about tomorrow? Okay, I said, but that doesn't explain why a reproduction that captures more than 99% of the original will hold less than 1% of its value. He mentioned a Mona Lisa copyist whose reproductions were more like 99.99% accurate but who told an interviewer that he liked to make small changes. "For example taking the chill out of her smile," Denis said. "That .01% may make all the difference between genius and kitsch."

Small differences may have huge significance in some cases, but there's still a huge fetish factor in our fixation on pieces genuinely produced by the artist. A doodle Picasso made with a crayon sold in 2005 for $40,000, but posters of his greatest works sell at the mall for $10. And I imagine many people would pay more for a handwritten Jane Austen manuscript missing 10% of its words than a complete bound copy. Denis said, "in that case the person is more an autograph collector than a lover of literature," but he acknowledged that art collectors and appreciators have some autograph collector in them.

Have we been indoctrinated to value the personal effects of Very Important People, or are we natural fetishists? There's research here too (also published in Cognition in January, and, interestingly enough, also co-authored by Paul Bloom at Yale.) Here, kids ages 3 to 6 were fooled into believing the experimenters had a duplicating machine. The kids much preferred the option of taking home a spoon touched by Queen Elizabeth II than an identical copy. Apparently there is some nonphysical royal "essence" in the spoon that the replica lacked. When it was  covered in a study for Psychology Today last year, Susan Gelman of the University of Michigan stated  that essentialism (belief in essences) "explains why we prefer authentic things, including autographs, original works of art, and Britney Spears' chewed gum."

Essentialism lays the groundwork for sentimentality,  is a form of magical thinking. (Law 1: Anything can be sacred.) We believe inanimate objects can contain some of a person's essence, picked up through mere contact, which is why we value family heirlooms and why people say donning a sweater will make you friendlier but wearing a Nazi's jacket is creepy. (And I mention a woman who was asked for her autograph simply because she had touched the Beatles.)

Valuing artistic originals involves an extreme form of sentimentality. An original is not just an object that a celebrity or a genius has possessed or touched; it's a work that the artist has slaved over, and it physically manifests his creative insights and energies. The performance is in the product. As Denis Dutton said, intentional objects embody thought. And here we have the blending of mind and matter that defines magical thinking.

The family of Karl Wittgenstein, who was one of Austria's richest men when he died, in 1913, may deserve some gloomy sort of prize, the Palm of Atreus, perhaps. His youngest child, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once asked a pupil if he had ever had any tragedies in his life. The pupil, evidently well trained, inquired what he meant by "tragedy." "I mean suicides, madness, or quarrels," replied Ludwig, three of whose four brothers committed suicide, two of them (Rudi and Hans) in their early twenties, and the third (Kurt) at the age of forty. Ludwig often thought of doing so, as did his surviving brother, Paul. A budding concert pianist when he lost his right arm to a Russian bullet, in 1914, Paul was imprisoned for a time in the infamous Siberian fortress where Dostoyevsky had set his novel "The House of the Dead." Ludwig later claimed to have first entertained thoughts of suicide at around the age of ten, before any of his brothers had died. There were three sisters: Gretl, Helene, and Hermine. Hermine, the eldest child (she was born in 1874; Ludwig, the youngest, arrived fifteen years later), and the guardian of her father's flame, never married. Helene was highly neurotic, and had a husband who suffered from dementia. Gretl was regarded as irritating by most people, including her unpleasant husband, who committed suicide, as did his father and one of his aunts. Bad temper and extreme nervous tension were endemic in the family. One day, when Paul was practicing at one of the seven grand pianos in their winter home, the Palais Wittgenstein, he leaped up and shouted at his brother Ludwig in the room next door, "I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!"

All of this was before the Nazis got to work. The Wittgenstein children were brought up as Christians, but they counted as full Jews under the Nuremberg racial laws because three of their grandparents had been born Jewish and did not convert to Christianity until they reached adulthood. (The fourth, their maternal grandmother, had no Jewish ancestry.) After Germany annexed Austria, in 1938, the family money bought the lives of the three sisters—Paul had escaped, and Ludwig was safe in England—but at the cost of estranging several of the surviving siblings from one another. A few days before the invasion of Poland, in 1939, Hitler found the time to issue an order granting half-breed status to the Wittgenstein children, on the pretext that their paternal grandfather had been the bastard son of a German prince. Nobody believed this tale, but the arrangement enabled the German Reichsbank to claim all the gold and much of the foreign currency and stocks held in Switzerland by a Wittgenstein trust. The negotiations for this exchange seem to have involved a secret pact in which Gretl and Hermine sided with Nazi officials against Paul. After the war, Paul performed with his single hand at a concert in Vienna but did not visit Hermine, who was dying there; Ludwig and Paul had no contact after 1939; nor did Paul and Gretl. This was not a happy family.


Alexander Waugh, the author of "The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War"  is no stranger to family sagas. He belongs to the fourth generation of an English literary dynasty that includes the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who was his grandfather; his previous book, "Fathers and Sons," is a memoir of the Waughs. The publishers of "The House of Wittgenstein" compare the "novelistic richness" of its style to Thomas Mann's first novel, "Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family," which was published in 1901. In fact, there are more than stylistic similarities between the Wittgensteins of Vienna and Mann's invented north-German merchant dynasty. In Mann's novel, the vitality and the solid businesslike virtues of the Buddenbrook family are sapped by introspection, homosexuality, loss of interest in commerce, overindulgence in art, and illness. If Karl Wittgenstein ever read it, he must have nodded in recognition. In a memoir that Hermine wrote in the nineteen-forties, she noted the "lack of vitality and will for life" that set her brothers apart from their father, and described his bitter disappointment that none of them wanted to continue his work in business. Like his wife and his children, Karl was highly musical, but he found his son Hans's obsession with music to be morbid and strictly limited the amount of time the boy was allowed to play. Hans was a prodigy whose extraordinary musical perception became evident at the age of four; Gustav Mahler's teacher, Julius Epstein, called him a genius. But Karl insisted that he follow a career in industry or finance. Rudi and Ludwig were homosexual, and Hans may have been, too.

There the parallels end. Thomas Mann traced the decline of the Buddenbrooks through four generations, but the Wittgensteins rose and fell within the span of two. Karl more or less built the family fortune himself. He was no stolid merchant but an audacious risk-taker, and something of a rebel in early life. At the age of seventeen, he absconded to New York, where he arrived in the spring of 1865 with a violin and no money. He worked as a waiter, then, among other things, he played in a minstrel band, a gig that came to an abrupt end when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in a theatre and musical performances were banned. Karl was too ashamed to write to his family or answer their letters. It was only when he got a steady job as a teacher at a college in upstate New York that he recovered enough pride to agree to return.

His father was a land agent and a trader, and at first Karl was put to work on one of his rented farms. Then he briefly enrolled in Vienna's Technical University. After dropping out, he took a series of engineering jobs. Energy and intelligence got him into management, audacious deal-making took him higher, and some capital from his wife (he married in 1874) provided the first grains of powder for an explosive entrepreneurial rampage. Waugh says that Karl Wittgenstein was a chancer, whose enormous fortune owed as much to the favorable outcomes of his gambles as to his hard work and his skills. That is implausible; nobody has quite such a consistent run of good luck. Karl was adept at swinging the odds in his own favor, and he knew exactly which chances to take—in particular, he appreciated the significance of technology more keenly than his competitors did. Announcing his death, in 1913, The Economist wrote that "the Austrian iron and steel trade owes its rapid growth and development solely to him."

Newspaper articles by Karl Wittgenstein show that he believed in unfettered capitalism (though not in free trade) and was opposed to any legislation aimed at protecting consumers from cartels or fraud. Such laws, in his opinion, would interfere with the crucial work of vigorous entrepreneurs, who would ultimately raise the standard of living for everybody. An early master of the leveraged buyout, he no doubt cut some corners while assembling his ingeniously integrated empire of mines, iron- and steelworks, and hardware factories. He certainly reaped the benefits of monopoly wherever he could find them. In February of 1900, The Economist's Austria-Hungary correspondent reported from Vienna that Herr Wittgenstein would "soon have the power of fixing iron prices in Hungary also, as he fixes them in Austria."

Karl was no philanthropist on the scale of his American friend Andrew Carnegie. He was more of a patron—one of the main supporters of the Secession, Vienna's Art Nouveau movement led by Gustav Klimt (who painted a portrait of Gretl, which she did not like). But the family's cultural life really centered on the grand Musiksaal on the first floor of their main house. Brahms was a family friend. He dedicated his violin concerto to Karl's first cousin Joseph Joachim, whose famous quartet played in the Musiksaal several times each year. Richard Strauss came and performed duets with the young Paul. Schoenberg attended the soirées several times; Mahler, whose music Ludwig later dismissed as "worthless," once attended but was not invited again after he left before the end of the evening's entertainment.

Music was more than entertainment for the Wittgensteins, though, and more than art. For one thing, it became a store of value. Pages from the Wittgenstein collection of autographed musical manuscripts flutter through this wonderfully told story. Scores by Brahms, Schubert, Wagner, and Bruckner are stuffed in a potting shed by a quick-thinking servant while an art historian from the Gestapo rummages through Gretl's house. A Bach cantata, two Mozart piano concertos, a Haydn symphony, and one of Beethoven's last piano sonatas are smuggled to Ludwig in Cambridge, where he places them in a bank safe-deposit box. Gretl's younger son hides Schubert's "Die Forelle," Brahms's "Handel Variations," some Beethoven letters, Wagner's sketches for "Die Walküre," and more, under a pile of socks in his suitcase, and heads for the Vienna railway station. Music was also, Waugh writes, the only effective way in which the Wittgenstein children could communicate with their shy, nervous, and intensely musical mother. And music provided consolation and distraction from the tragedies of the family, about which they were mostly required to remain silent.

Sometime in 1901, Hans fled from his father and went to America, much as his own father had done thirty-six years earlier. In 1902, he disappeared, by most accounts, from a boat, which may have been in the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps on the Orinoco River in Venezuela, or in several other places. Wherever it was, no one doubted that he had committed suicide. Hans's disappearance was a banned topic. Rudi was a twenty-two-year-old chemistry student in Berlin when he walked into a bar on a May evening in 1904, requested a sentimental song from the pianist, and then mixed potassium cyanide into a glass of milk and died in agony. The suicide note left for his parents said that he had been grieving over the death of a friend. A more likely explanation is that he thought he was identifiable as the subject of a published case study about homosexuality. After Rudi's funeral, Karl forbade the family to mention him ever again. Waugh thinks that this enforced silence, which the dutiful Mrs.Wittgenstein supported, created a permanent rift between parents and children. The exact circumstances of Kurt's suicide, which took place on the Italian front in 1918, are unknown. He was generally regarded as cheerful, but Hermine recorded that he seemed to carry "the germ of disgust for life within himself."

Perhaps it was because Paul, after he lost his right arm, had the most tangible affliction in the family that he found the focus to remake himself. His determination to succeed on the concert stage was, in part, inspired by the example of Josef Labor, a blind organist and composer who was a favorite of the Wittgenstein family. Géza Zichy, a one-armed Hungarian count whose pianism had enthralled Liszt, was another encouraging model. Zichy wrote a self-help book for amputees, which explained, among other things, how to eat a crayfish and remove one's underpants with only one arm. Paul worked furiously and ingeniously to develop techniques that would enable him to perform. The training began while he was still recovering from the amputation in a Russian prison hospital, tapping on a dummy keyboard that he had etched in charcoal on a crate. Later, on a real piano, he often practiced for up to seven hours at a sitting.

At the peak of his career, in the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties, Paul's concerts drew wildly enthusiastic reviews from respected critics; the Grove Dictionary of Music describes Paul as having had "an amazing virtuosity which enabled him to overcome difficulties formidable even for a two-handed pianist." During Ludwig's lifetime, the pianist brother—his elder by just two years—was much the more famous of the two. It's also true that Paul continued to perform after his abilities had declined, and his reputation declined accordingly. He made few recordings, and Waugh, who is also a composer and a music critic, remarks that most of them are bad.

His most lasting significance comes from having commissioned one-handed works from at least a dozen composers, including Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, Paul Hindemith, and Maurice Ravel, whose Piano Concerto for the Left Hand remains widely performed. Strauss extracted a particularly large fee, and Britten, at least, affected to be in it just for the money. ("I have been commissioned by a man called Wittgenstein," Britten wrote to his sister. "He pays gold so I'll do it.") Paul often insisted on changes to the music, especially when he thought that the orchestra had been overscored and would drown out his playing. (Britten groused, "The man really is an old sour puss.") There was also a colorful dispute with Ravel, who complained for the rest of his life about his dealings with Paul. There was worse in store for poor Hindemith, who wrote his concerto in 1923: Paul couldn't understand the composition, so he filed it away. It was discovered eight decades later, in a Pennsylvania farmhouse that had belonged to Paul's widow, and given a belated world première by Leon Fleisher in Berlin in 2004. Paul couldn't fathom Prokofiev's concerto, either, and he shelved that, too. In 1950, Siegfried Rapp, a pianist who had lost his right arm in the Second World War, asked for permission to perform some of these works, many of which had been written a quarter of a century earlier. Paul usually bought exclusive performing rights for his commissions, and he said no. A few years later, Rapp obtained a copy of Prokofiev's concerto from his widow and went ahead, anyway, infuriating Paul.

It is hard to warm to Paul's refusal to let anyone else perform pieces that he wouldn't play himself. (He even felt betrayed by composers who wanted to rearrange his commissions to produce two-handed versions.) And, despite giving evidence of Paul's kindness and generosity to friends, pupils, and old retainers, Waugh makes no effort to conceal his hero's estrangement from the compromises that lubricate everyday life. Bertrand Russell once wrote of Ludwig that no one could be more "destitute of the false politeness that interferes with truth." This was at a time when Russell was still enraptured by the young Ludwig. Russell later grew less indulgent toward his erstwhile pupil, but he had identified a family characteristic: when they believed that an important principle was at stake—which, for them, was often—the Wittgensteins were not inclined to be nice.

Most of Paul's eccentricities were perhaps the normal ones for a loner who had been brought up amid vast wealth. He was a fiercely private man who liked to book entire railway carriages for himself, even when travelling with his family. His wife, Hilde, who was half blind and had been his pupil, bore him two children in Vienna before their marriage; the elder child had been conceived shortly after their first piano lesson, when Hilde was eighteen years old and Paul was forty-seven. Because Hilde was not Jewish, Paul was open to charges of "racial defilement," and in 1938 he fled Austria. When his wife and children arrived in the United States, in 1941, he set them up in a house on Long Island, which he visited on weekends from his apartment on Riverside Drive. Arriving in New York without a valet, he soon ran into trouble. When his clothes were stolen from a hotel—he had left them outside his room, presuming that someone would wash them—he sat around in bedsheets until a candidate for the post of personal assistant came up with the suggestion that more clothes be bought from a shop. She was hired. Another anecdote has him sallying forth into the street wearing a hat that was still attached to its box.

In the Wittgenstein family, it was not the philosopher who was the unworldly one. Ever since childhood, the last-born Ludwig had had a passion and a facility for mechanical things. At the age of ten, he constructed a working model of a sewing machine out of bits of wood and wire; while serving in the Austrian Army, he demonstrated a more dangerous practicality by improvising his own mortar in the field. After leaving school, Ludwig studied engineering in Berlin, specializing in hot-air balloons, and then moved to Manchester to work on aeronautical engines; in 1910, he patented an improvement in propeller technology. It was then that he heard of Bertrand Russell's work on logic and decided to study with him in Cambridge.

Russell found him to be a tormented soul, unsure of his own abilities and unsure whether to be an engineer or a philosopher. Russell soon decided that Ludwig was the most perfect example of genius he had ever known, and persuaded him not to continue with engineering. "We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother," Russell told Hermine. But he feared that his new pupil was on the brink of suicide, as he explained in a letter to his mistress, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Ottoline wrote back that hot chocolate would calm Ludwig's nerves, and enclosed a packet of cocoa tablets for Russell to give him.

If they ever reached Ludwig they did not do the trick. He continued to work with a feverish intensity on the problems of logic that he was discussing with Russell and to agonize about his life. The way those two topics were entangled in Ludwig's mind can be seen from his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," a gnomic masterpiece that he completed as a soldier in 1918. The "Tractatus" is a mixture of logical symbols and mystical remarks in which Ludwig attempted to delineate the limits of language. Certain things could be expressed in language, and these were best understood in terms of the logical techniques developed by Russell, he maintained. But others—and these were the most important things in life—could not be expressed in language at all. Hence the book's famous closing line: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." The problems of philosophy could thus be dispatched by being divided into those that could be perspicuously rendered into Russellian logic, and thereby answered fairly easily, and those about which nothing could be said.

Frank Ramsey, one of Ludwig's most brilliant friends, who had reviewed the "Tractatus" in Britain's main philosophical journal as an undergraduate, quipped that "what we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either." Ramsey meant that Ludwig seemed to be cheating by trying to specify exactly what cannot be said. As it happens, Ludwig—who, unusually for a Wittgenstein, seems not to have mastered any musical instrument as a child—impressed his musical friends with displays of virtuoso whistling. Several Cambridge dons recalled hearing him whistle the solo part of an entire concerto while a pianist played the orchestral part. Whether or not Ramsey had this curious feat in mind, the Wittgensteins were certainly in the habit of using music to express what they couldn't say in words.

After the "Tractatus," having thus exhausted all philosophical problems, and been exhausted by them, Ludwig took a break. He worked as a schoolmaster for six years and then as an architect, designing and obsessively supervising the building of a house in Vienna for his sister Gretl. During the First World War, he had read Tolstoy's "The Gospel in Brief" and other writings that extolled the wisdom of peasants. Resolving to lead a simple life, he gave his share of the family money to three of his siblings; since they were very rich already, he believed they could not be corrupted further by receiving his portion. Then, in 1927, his interest in philosophy was rekindled. This time, his view of language changed—the emphasis on Russellian logic was gone—but one key idea remained the same. Both his old and his new philosophy shared an inspiration that he had come across as a teen-ager in "The Principles of Mechanics," by Heinrich Hertz, a German physicist. Hertz had suggested a novel way to deal with the puzzling concept of force in Newtonian physics: the best approach was not to try to define it but to restate Newton's theory in a way that eliminates any reference to force. Once this was done, according to Hertz, "the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions."

Ludwig's big idea was to apply this method to philosophical problems. In his "Tractatus," he had tried to show that some philosophical questions were illegitimate because they tried to say the unsayable. The new approach was gentler and more therapeutic. By painstakingly examining how language works in everyday life, Ludwig now believed that one could be cured of the misconceptions that give rise to philosophical puzzles, and thus stop worrying about them. That is what he toiled on, mostly in Cambridge, until his death, in 1951.

Does this actually work? Curiously, it is hard to say, because Ludwig seldom dealt explicitly with classical philosophical problems. His writings hardly ever mention the great philosophers of days gone by, except in passing. So one has to work out for oneself what, if any, bearing his explorations of the workings of language have on the ideas of Plato, Descartes, or Kant. Ludwig intended his technique to be revolutionary: "Why should philosophy in the age of airplanes and automobiles be the same as in the age when people travelled by coach or on foot?" the former aeronautical engineer asked. It remains a point of contention whether he really found an honest way to dispose of philosophical questions or merely succeeded in changing the subject of conversation by the sheer force of his personality.

There's a telling description of genius by Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher of romantic pessimism, whose work was well known to Ludwig, Paul, Gretl, and Hans: "Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see." That seems to have been the Wittgenstein way: trying to hit targets that others could not see. But if ordinary mortals cannot spot the bull's-eye, how do they know whether it has been hit? According to Schopenhauer, they just have to accept the evidence of genius on faith, which is what Ludwig's admirers often did. When Ludwig attacked some of Russell's ideas, Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell, "I couldn't understand his objection—in fact he was very inarticulate—but I feel in my bones that he must be right." Other philosophers who met Ludwig reported the same feeling.

It's tempting to come away from the Wittgenstein saga with the thought that Karl, if only he had lived long enough, would have acknowledged the iron-willed independence of Paul and Ludwig as a reflection of his own, and given them his blessing. But that would probably be expecting too much of him. Tragic or not, no family has room for more than one Wittgenstein

If your bus is late, how long should you wait before starting to walk in the hopes that you'll catch it at the next stop? Mathematicians from Harvard University modeled the problem and determined that the optimal strategy is the "lazy" one: stay put and wait.

 The formula does break down in extreme cases, (Harvard's Scott) Kominers says, when the time interval between buses is longer than an hour, for example, and your destination is only a kilometre away.

 If you do choose to walk, you should make your decision before you start waiting, he says. You will still reach your destination later than the bus you'd have caught, but it will be much less frustrating than waiting for a while and then watching the bus shoot by.

see more at:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0801/0801.0297v2.pdf

In 1993, Icelandic singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir, better known just as Björk, recorded her album Debut, which kicked of her solo career after the breakup of The Sugarcubes. What few people know (OK, maybe not quite so few, as it is mentioned in the Wikipedia article and it even got a bad review on AMG) is that Björk's real debut came out 16 years earlier, a self-titled album released only in Iceland, at a time when she was 12 years old. Björk sings and plays flute, and the backing band is led by her stepfather Saevar Arnason on guitar. The album allegedly went platinum in Iceland (which means it sold more than 5000 copies), and though it never saw an official re-release, there are lots of bootleg CDs and even bootleg LPs in circulation.

Find the whole album at:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/03/bjrks_real_debu.html

This book reads like a set of notes, is full of thoughtful asides, though an underlying thesis also emerges: the present age feels unbalanced, witnessed to by everything from a culture of over-consumption to widespread individual unhappiness; the source of that imbalance is a high degree of material prosperity and low degree of spiritual prosperity.

By spiritual, Armstrong means a capacity for depth and sensitivity; an openness to that which is greater than ourselves, by which we ourselves become greater; and the intellectual expansiveness of real critique – all in all, a kind of largeness of soul. Depth, height and breadth you might say.

The result of our spiritual deficit is that we harbour barbarian and decadent tendencies. The barbarian Armstrong defines as possessing great strength with little ability subtlety to deploy it. (Think of the glass skyscraper that can dwarf a gothic cathedral, and look entirely crude beside it.) The decadent is a capacity for great subtlety but with only a floundering sense to which such sensitivities can be put. (Think of visiting a world museum, full of the artefacts of civilisations past, and beyond admiration, having little sense of what to make of the display. Or a visit to a contemporary art gallery, full of works exhibiting wit and playfulness, or echoes of shock, but that more often than not leave you with the nagging question of why it matters.)

Armstrong's solution to barbarianism is to deepen self-awareness. His solution to decadence is to generate hope that what we do does matter. Sensitivity and seriousness you might say.

Now, when dealing with such a Big Subject as civilization, especially in a short book (let alone a shorter blog), sweeping statements are inevitable. However, putting that concern to one side – in fact entirely ignoring it – I wondered whether Armstrong goes far enough. Reading the book, I had a growing sense that perhaps part of the problem with our civilization – and no doubt every civilisation has its problems – is that we have become almost exclusively our own project. We can pursue it with great strength (in our cities and consumption) and subtlety (in our science and culture). But it is because we are our own project that we can't work out how to escape our barbarian and decadent tendencies.

Apart from culture itself, Armstrong turns to business for aid too, arguing that the successful business of the future will be one that teaches us our real needs, as opposed to being one that fabricates artificial needs or panders to perceived needs. That thought made me nervous: I can't help but feel that business has had its chance, and that whilst business won't go away – and is desirable as the best generation and distribution method for the material goods that we have – spiritual goods can only be nurtured by a revival of ethics, politics and religion (each at their best, one should add.) None of these things find a natural home in the boardroom, for all that they might be present.

What ethics, politics and religion also have, at their best, is a capacity to organise individuals and generate a way of life that takes us out of ourselves, that points us to a project way beyond themselves – traditionally, the pursuit of the good or of God. (Note, this is different from an openness to that which is greater than ourselves, by which we ourselves become greater – the definition of 'height' – because it is an openness to that which is greater than ourselves, by which we get over or lose ourselves.) I felt that Armstrong does not give this transcendent element of civilization due weight.

The reason why I suspect it matters is that with it, a civilization finds the great purpose to which to put its great strengths and subtleties. Without it, the risk is that a civilization turns in on itself; it fails to connect everyday life with high ideals and so is left only with everyday life. (Again, you might think of the skyscraper alongside the cathedral: the first is a temple to everyday life; the second is a place in which everyday people connected with Christianity's high ideals – though they were no doubt partly intimated by the power of the prince bishop too, Christendom's barbarism, you might say.)

In other words, alongside depth, height and breadth – virtues that are essentially self-centred – we need community, charity and sacrifice too – the other-orientating virtues.

As I already tried to show, Heidegger seeks to reawaken perplexity about the question of being, the basic issue of metaphysics. In Being and Time, he pursues this question through an analysis of the human being or what he calls Dasein. The being of Dasein is existence, understood as average everyday existence or our life in the world, discussed in the last entry. But how might we give some more content to this rather formal idea of existence?

Heidegger gives us a strong clue in Division 1, Chapter 5 of Being and Time, which is a long, difficult, but immensely rewarding chapter and where things really begin to get interesting. The central claim of this chapter - which is deepened in the remainder of Being and Time - is that Dasein is thrown projection (Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf). Let me try and unravel this thought.

Heidegger tends to advance his investigation in concept clusters. One cluster contains three concepts: state of mind, mood and thrownness. State of mind is a rather questionable rendering of Befindlichkeit, which William Richardson nicely translates as 'already-having-found-oneself-there-ness'. OK, it's not particularly elegant, but the thought is the human being is always already found or disclosed somewhere, namely in the 'there' of its being-in-the-world. This 'there' is the Da of Dasein.

Furthermore, I am always found in a mood, a Stimmung. This is mood is the strong Aristotelian sense of pathos, a passion of the soul or an affect, something befalls us and in which we find ourselves. The passions are not, for Heidegger, psychological colouring for an essentially rational agent. They are rather the fundamental ways in which we are attuned to the world. Indeed, musicologically, Stimmung is linked to tuning and pitch: one is attuned to the world firstly and mostly through moods. One of the compelling aspects of Heidegger's work is his attempt to provide a phenomenology of moods, of the affects that make up our everyday life in the world.

This is another way of approaching his central insight: that we cannot exist independently of our relation to the world; and this relationship is a matter of mood and appetite, not rational contemplation.

Such moods disclose the human being as thrown into the 'there' of my being-in-the-world. As Jim Morrisson intoned many decades ago, 'Into this world we're thrown'. Thrownness (Geworfenheit) is the simple awareness that we always find ourselves somewhere, namely delivered over to a world with which we are fascinated, a world we share with others.

We are always caught up in our everyday life in the world, in the throw of various moods, whether fear, boredom, excitement or – as we will see in the next entry – anxiety.

But, Heidegger insists, Dasein is not just thrown into the world. Because it – we – are capable of understanding, we can also throw off our thrown condition. Understanding is, for Heidegger, a conception of activity. It is always understanding how to do something or how to operate something. Understanding is the possession of an ability (etwas können) and the authentic human is characterised by the ability or potentiality to be (Seinkönnen).

So, the human being is not just a being defined by being thrown into the world. It is also one who can throw off that thrown condition in a movement where it seizes hold of its possibilities, where it acts in a concrete situation. This movement is what Heidegger calls projection (Entwurf) and it is the very experience of what Heidegger will call, later in Being and Time, freedom. Freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept. It is the experience of the human being demonstrating its potential through acting in the world. To act in such a way is to be authentic.

The recent debate on free will at SPSP led to the realization that some of the ostensible disagreement, and perhaps most of the surplus emotion swept along with it, stemmed from misunderstandings. Many psychologists say it is important to uphold determinism - yet they do not really know what determinism is.

Determinism is more than belief in causality. The defining feature of determinism is a belief in the inevitability of causality. The essence of determinism is that everything that happens is the only thing that could possibly happen (given the past) under those circumstances. The category of the possible and the category of the actual are exactly the same. If you knew everything about the world today and knew all the causal principles, you could calculate everything in the future and the past with 100% accuracy. To a determinist, the universe is just grinding along as a giant machine with no uncertainty whatsoever. The future and the past are both set in stone, so to speak. Check any textbook or handbook of philosophy.

Many psychologists defend determinism thinking that they are defending the notion of causality itself. They think, science studies causes, and if we abandon causation, we cannot do science. But these fears are irrelevant. Everyone believes in causes. The important difference is between probabilistic causation and deterministic causation.

Determinism might or might not be correct. Determinism is impossible to prove or disprove. It directly contradicts the everyday experience of making choices and having multiple options, but everyday experience could be mistaken. In a similar vein, belief in divine or supernatural forces is possibly true, despite inconsistency with daily experience.

We wish, however, to point out some of the mental gymnastics one must go through in order to practice psychological science while maintaining faith in determinism. Let us return for a moment to choice, which has been an important topic of study in social psychology for decades. To a determinist, there is no such thing as actual choice, in the sense of having more than one possible option and making a selection that makes one option come true and makes the others cease to be possible. To a determinist, choice (in this sense) is an illusion, because only one outcome is possible all along. You subjectively believe you might choose A or B or C, but this belief stems from your ignorance. Causal processes are in motion outside of your awareness that will lead inevitably to make you choose B. There was never a chance that you would actually choose A or C. Your belief that A, B, and C are all possible is a mistake; only B is actually possible.

Statistical probability presents a difficult challenge to determinists. The notion of probability entails that different outcomes are possible, which violates the central point of determinism. To a determinist, there are no probabilities in reality. Again, the determinist must say that the seeming indeterminacy simply reflects our ignorance. For example, suppose that when you flip a coin, the outcome is 100% inevitable once the coin is spinning through the air, given the physics of angular momentum, distance to the ground, and so forth. You simply do not know whether it will be heads or tails, so it seems indeterminate to you. The uncertainty is only in your mind.

Notice, however, that this is not how we talk about statistics in our textbooks, courses, and journal articles. We discuss the probability of an event occurring (e.g., by chance), not the gaps in our knowledge. In determinism there is no such thing as chance. To be true to faith in determinism, it would be necessary to alter the way we think about and discuss probabilities and perhaps even to alter the way we use them. (We apologize to determinists for using the word "perhaps," which is itself incompatible with determinism.)

Counterfactual thinking is also incompatible with determinism. It is silly to think "If I had not said those things, we could have avoided the argument" if everything that happened was inevitable. To a determinist, people may think such things, indeed cannot avoid thinking them. Technically, such thoughts might be regarded as sound arguments from false premises. What the person said caused the argument, and so if the person had said something different, the argument might not have happened - but the person could not possibly have said something different, so the entire counterfactual thought process is an idle exercise in futility.

Laypersons often confuse determinism with fatalism, but this is a mistake. Fatalism means that the outcome would have been the same regardless of what you did. To a determinist, the outcome stemmed from what you did, and if you had acted differently, the outcome would have been different. (But, again, you could not possibly have acted differently.)

Some researchers say psychologists should believe in determinism in order to be like so-called real scientists. We believe this is also mistaken. Many natural scientists see the physical world as probabilistic, not deterministic. Quantum indeterminacy would entail that determinism is wrong, by definition. Indeed, as far as we know, there is no proof that there is any deterministic causation anywhere, in the sense that any event is 100% inevitable. Obviously, some causal events have extremely high probabilities, having been demonstrated over and over. But there is no way of knowing whether it is merely well above 99% or it is actually 100%.

The so-called "hidden variables" argument may paradoxically allow determinism to survive in psychology even if it becomes untenable in physics. Here is the issue. If we know everything (mass, velocity, etc.) about a tiny particle, we can predict with certainty where it will go. Every so often, empirical observation shows that it fails to go there. Is this because nature is indeterminate? Or is it because there are hidden variables affecting it, other than the variables we know?

In psychology it is easy to always assume hidden variables when a person's behavior does not conform to predictions, because there are endless additional things that possibly could be known about someone. But with a tiny subatomic particle, there is not much else that could be known, and indeed the set of variables known to physics does not have any room for mysterious other variables.

In conclusion, we think it is possible to maintain a belief in determinism, but it should not be obligatory for psychologists. In fact, psychologists who retain a faith in determinism must keep this an abstract belief and violate it in practice: They must act as if people really make choices, as if multiple possibilities exist for future life, and as if statistical probabilities refer to different possible events. Determinism is not viable in practice but is an elegant theory that people may find appealing as an abstract article of faith. The main alternative to it is a probabilistic universe, in which multiple futures are really possible and causes operate by changing the odds that something will happen rather than guaranteeing it.

Seven years ago Reginald King was lying in a hospital bed recovering from bypass surgery when he first heard the music.

It began with a pop tune, and others followed. Mr. King heard everything from cabaret songs to Christmas carols. "I asked the nurses if they could hear the music, and they said no," said Mr. King, a retired sales manager in Cardiff, Wales.

"I got so frustrated," he said. "They didn't know what I was talking about and said it must be something wrong with my head. And it's been like that ever since."

Each day, the music returns. "They're all songs I've heard during my lifetime," said Mr. King, 83. "One would come on, and then it would run into another one, and that's how it goes on in my head. It's driving me bonkers, to be quite honest."

Last year, Mr. King was referred to Dr. Victor Aziz, a psychiatrist at St. Cadoc's Hospital in Wales. Dr. Aziz explained to him that there was a name for his experience: musical hallucinations.

Dr. Aziz belongs to a small circle of psychiatrists and neurologists who are investigating this condition. They suspect that the hallucinations experienced by Mr. King and others are a result of malfunctioning brain networks that normally allow us to perceive music.

They also suspect that many cases of musical hallucinations go undiagnosed.

"You just need to look for it," Dr. Aziz said. And based on his studies of the hallucinations, he suspects that in the next few decades, they will be far more common.

Musical hallucinations were invading people's minds long before they were recognized as a medical condition. "Plenty of musical composers have had musical hallucinations," Dr. Aziz said.

Toward the end of his life, for instance, Robert Schumann wrote down the music he hallucinated; legend has it that he said he was taking dictation from Schubert's ghost.

While doctors have known about musical hallucinations for over a century, they have rarely studied it systematically. That has changed in recent years. In the July issue of the journal Psychopathology, Dr. Aziz and his colleague Dr. Nick Warner will publish an analysis of 30 cases of musical hallucination they have seen over 15 years in South Wales. It is the largest case-series ever published for musical hallucinations.

"We were trying to collect as much information about their day-to-day lives as we could," Dr. Aziz said. "We were asking a lot of the questions that weren't answered in previous research. What do they hear, for example? Is it nearby or is it at a long distance?"

Dr. Aziz and Dr. Warner found that in two-thirds of the cases, musical hallucinations were the only mental disturbance experienced by the patients. A third were deaf or hard of hearing. Women tended to suffer musical hallucinations more than men, and the average patient was 78 years old.

Mr. King's experience was typical for people experiencing musical hallucinations. Patients reported hearing a wide variety of songs, among them "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" and "Three Blind Mice."

In two-thirds of the cases, the music was religious; six people reporting hearing the hymn "Abide With Me."

Dr. Aziz believes that people tend to hear songs they have heard repeatedly or that are emotionally significant to them. "There is a meaning behind these things," he said.

His study also shows that these hallucinations are different from the auditory hallucinations of people with schizophrenia. Such people often hear inner voices. Patients like Mr. King hear only music.

The results support recent work by neuroscientists indicating that our brains use special networks of neurons to perceive music. When sounds first enter the brain, they activate a region near the ears called the primary auditory cortex that starts processing sounds at their most basic level. The auditory cortex then passes on signals of its own to other regions, which can recognize more complex features of music, like rhythm, key changes and melody.

Neuroscientists have been able to identify some of these regions with brain scans, and to compare the way people respond to musical and nonmusical sounds.
Only a handful of brain scans have been made of people with musical hallucinations. Dr. Tim Griffiths, a neurologist at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in England, performed one of these studies on six elderly patients who developed musical hallucinations after becoming partly deaf.

Dr. Griffiths used a scanning technique known as PET, which involves injecting radioactive markers into the bloodstream. Each time he scanned his subjects' brains, he asked them whether they had experienced musical hallucinations. If they had, he asked them to rate the intensity on a scale from one to seven.

Dr. Griffiths discovered a network of regions in the brain that became more active as the hallucinations became more intense. "What strikes me is that you see a very similar pattern in normal people who are listening to music," he said.

The main difference is that musical hallucinations don't activate the primary auditory cortex, the first stop for sound in the brain. When Dr. Griffith's subjects hallucinated, they used only the parts of the brain that are responsible for turning simple sounds into complex music.

These music-processing regions may be continually looking for signals in the brain that they can interpret, Dr. Griffiths suggested. When no sound is coming from the ears, the brain may still generate occasional, random impulses that the music-processing regions interpret as sound. They then try to match these impulses to memories of music, turning a few notes into a familiar melody.

For most people, these spontaneous signals may produce nothing more than a song that is hard to get out of the head. But the constant stream of information coming in from the ears suppresses the false music.

Dr. Griffith proposes that deafness cuts off this information stream. And in a few deaf people the music-seeking circuits go into overdrive. They hear music all the time, and not just the vague murmurs of a stuck tune. It becomes as real as any normal perception.

"What we're seeing is an amplification of a normal mechanism that's in everyone," Dr. Griffiths said.

It is also possible for people who are not deaf to experience musical hallucinations. Epileptic seizures, certain medications and Lyme disease are a few of the factors that may set them off.

Dr. Aziz also noted that two-thirds of his subjects were living alone, and thus were not getting much stimulation. One patient experienced fewer musical hallucinations when Dr. Aziz had her put in a nursing home, he said, "because then she was talking to people, she was active."

There is no standard procedure for treating musical hallucinations. Some doctors try antipsychotic drugs, and some use cognitive behavioral therapy to help patients understand what's going on in their brains. "Sometimes simple things can be the cure," Dr. Aziz said. "Turning on the radio may be more important than giving medication."

Despite these treatments, many people with musical hallucinations find little relief. "I'm just living with it," Mr. King said. "I wish there was something I could do.

"I do silly things like talking to myself, hoping that when I stop talking, the tune will stop. But it doesn't work that way."

More studies may help researchers find new treatments. Prof. Diana Deutsch, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, is planning a new scanning study of musical hallucination on people who are not deaf, using functional M.R.I. Unlike the PET scanning used by Dr. Griffiths, functional M.R.I. is powerful enough to catch second-by-second changes in brain activity.

"It might be awhile before we have results, but it's certainly something I'm very excited about," Dr. Deutsch said. "We'll see where it takes us."

Dr. Aziz also believes that it is necessary to get a better sense of how many people hear musical hallucinations. Like Mr. King, many people have had their experiences dismissed by doctors.

Dr. Aziz said that ever since he began presenting his results at medical conferences last year, a growing number of patients have been referred to him.

"In 15 years I got 30 patients," he said, "and in less than a year I've had 5. It just tells you people are more aware of it."

Dr. Aziz suspects that musical hallucinations will become more common in the future. People today are awash in music from radios, televisions, elevators and supermarkets. It is possible that the pervasiveness of music may lead to more hallucinations. The types of hallucinations may also change as people experience different kinds of songs.

"We have speculated that people will hear more pop and classical music than they do now," said Dr. Aziz. "I hope I live long enough to find out myself in 20 years' time."

2005

For over seventy years, Babar has been the most famous elephant in the world—and the most controversial. He has been praised as a benevolent monarch, an ideal parent, and a model of family affection, loyalty, justice, good manners, and civilized living. He has also been damned as a sexist, an elitist, a colonialist, and a racist. It has even been proposed that he deserves to be burned alive: see Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert Kohl (1995). Clearly, a figure who arouses such intense and conflicting opinions must be more than the ordinary hero of a children's picture book: he must represent important and sometimes contradictory views of both childhood and society.

The complexity of King Babar's world, and some of its contradictions, are partly the result of the fact that his long life has been chronicled by two different biographers. Babar's history began in Paris in 1931, when the pianist Cecile de Brunhoff invented a bedtime story about a baby elephant for her sons, who were then five and six years old. The next day the boys repeated the tale to their father, the artist Jean de Brunhoff, who was inspired to write it down, expand it, illustrate it, and publish it in 1931 as The Story of Babar. Over the next eight years he wrote six more Babar books which, like the first, became immensely popular. When he died in 1937, at thirty-seven, the series lapsed. But seven years later his elder son, Laurent, then only twenty but already becoming known as an abstract painter, took up the story. Since then Laurent de Brunhoff has produced over thirty books about Babar and his family and friends, and six with other protagonists, of whom the most famous is a gentle and elusive little man called Bonhomme who lives at the top of a pink mountain.


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Babar, of course, both is and is not an elephant. Or rather, he is an elephant only in the sense that the characters in Aesop's and Jean de La Fontaine's Fables are animals. Essentially, all of them stand for human types and have the traits that humans, sometimes arbitrarily, have assigned to them. (La Fontaine's crow, for example, is vain and easily deceived, though real crows are neither conceited nor foolish.) As an elephant, Babar is traditionally strong and wise and has a remarkable memory. He is also naturally large and powerful, unlike many animal heroes of children's picture books, who tend to be smaller than humans. From the start, most original editions of the Babar books have appropriately been elephant-sized, just as Beatrix Potter's tales of rabbits and mice are very small.

Babar is not only both animal and human, he is both a child and an adult. His name makes this clear: it combines the French terms for father (papa) and infant (bébé). One sign of his ambiguous position is that, unlike the other adult elephants in the story, he and his wife, Celeste, have very small tusks even after they are married and have become parents. They rule a kingdom, but they also enjoy many childish pleasures, as the British critic Margaret Blount has noted in Animal Land:

Babar does what most small children would like to do—joins in the adult world on a child's terms, and gets away with it.... He can wear grown-up clothes, ride up and down in the lift, go fishing, drive a car, marry Celeste and become King of the Jungle all because his real self is hidden behind an animal hide and he is neither child nor adult but a bit of both....
Another part of the appeal of the Babar series seems to be that, after the first few books, they are about an ideal happy family in a nearly ideal world. Babar and his family visit distant places and even go to outer space, and sometimes they face trouble or danger; but everything always ends well. Their ideal universe also, very early in the series, becomes timeless. Babar is born, grows up, is educated, marries, becomes king, brings the advantages of civilization to his country, and has three children. After that, time stops. Over fifty years pass, and King Babar and Queen Celeste have a fourth child, but nobody grows any older or dies. Babar's cousin Arthur remains an adolescent, and the children never reach puberty. As Margaret Blount puts it, Babar exists "in a perpetual, infantile middle age."

In classic juvenile literature the protagonist is usually a child who leaves home and family, has adventures, and returns home (Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, Where the Wild Things Are). Sometimes two or more children are featured (Peter Pan, Mary Poppins), and occasionally the hero or heroine ends up with a new and better family (Anne of Green Gables, Harry Potter). In most of the Babar books, however, the family itself is the protagonist. It is an extended three-generation family, in which Babar's early patroness, the Old Lady, and his wise elderly councilor, Cornelius, play the part of grandparents. Arthur is the impulsive adolescent cousin, and Zephir the monkey his mischievous friend.

Babar goes out into the world alone in the first book, but from then on he is almost always accompanied by family members. Together they go to Paris, to America, on vacation to the seashore or the mountains, on hikes in the country, and to another planet. Sometimes one of the children is the center of the story, but the entire family is almost always present and involved, especially at the inevitable happy ending. In this, of course, the books are closer to the real experience of most of their child readers, which may partly account for their popularity.

The environment of Babar is that of the prosperous, well-educated, art-loving French bourgeoisie. Babar and his family go to the theater and hear concerts of both classical and popular music. They favor upper-middle-class sports: they sail, play tennis, swim and ski, practice yoga,go to the races, and camp and hike in the mountains. Good manners are important, and so are good clothes. Jean de Brunhoff's brother was the editor of French Vogue, and his brother-in-law a famous fashion journalist, and the costumes of Celeste and her daughters are consistently chic. The first thing Babar does after he is befriended by the Old Lady is to go to a large, apparently expensive department store, where he buys a bright green suit, a derby hat, and shoes. His first gift to his subjects is two sets of apparel each—one for work and one for play. Before they put them on the elephants walk on all fours; afterward they stand upright. In The Travels of Babar (1932), when Babar and Celeste lose their clothes and are stranded on a reef in the ocean, they also lose their quasi-human identity, and the captain of the ship that rescues them can sell them to a circus.


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Babar's is an ideal world, a kind of upper-middle-class French Utopia whose capital is literally a heavenly city—as its name, Celesteville, indicates. Its inhabitants have various occupations, but they only work in the mornings: the afternoons are devoted to sports and recreation, and to the arts. They live in identical grass-roofed cottages, except for Babar and the Old Lady, who have larger houses at the top of a hill, near public buildings that include a school, a library, a sports complex, and a theater. During the over seventy years since the founding of Celesteville the city has grown considerably: it now includes substantial mansions, skyscrapers, and a large art museum.

Though no one ages in Celesteville, modern inventions and modern attitudes gradually appear. Styles in fashion and car design change; motorbikes, television, helicopters, and hang gliders become visible, and computers and cell phones are surely on their way. Queen Celeste remains a traditional wife and mother who stays home and devotes herself to her children; her older daughter, Flora, is at first also conventionally feminine, passive, and fearful, but in later books she gradually gains in courage and enterprise. Her sister, Isabelle, is a thoroughly modern little girl, slimmer and more active than Flora. She wears in-line skates, listens to music on a Walkman, and is eager to explore the world. Eventually, in The Rescue of Babar (1993), she journeys to a strange civilization and helps to free her father from captivity.

As Ann Hildebrand, who has written the most recent study of Babar, points out, the ambiance of the books is generally Gallic. The illustrations show berets, Citroëns, Peugeots, crêperies, and croissants, and the signs on the buildings are in French. Babar and his family visit Paris, a seaside resort that suggests Normandy or Brittany, and a château in the Dordogne. Ariel Dorfman, in The Empire's Old Clothes (1983), has suggested that the attitude toward childhood in the early Babar books is also typically French. "Universal bliss is assured by grown-up figures who never make mistakes, and are unsusceptible to criticism." For Americans, he believes, childhood is an age for fun and adventures, an end in itself, whereas for the Frenchit is a period of probation. This may be so in the early Babar books, but as time passes (or rather stops) the implied message changes, and in the later books Babar's children and his cousin Arthur enjoy a perpetual happy and adventurous youth.

2.
In the Babar books, the kingdom of the elephants is not the only possible society. Besides the human world, containing recognizable places like Paris, New York, Chicago, and North Africa, there are separate civilizations of birds and monkeys and a planet in outer space whose inhabitants look a little like elephants. All these places have much in common with Celesteville. Their citizens are friendly to strangers; they live in comfortable and attractive dwellings under the care of a benevolent ruler, and they enjoy public events.

In Jean de Brunhoff's Babar and Zephir (1936), the Republic of the Monkeys is ruled by a president, General Huc. He wears a Napoleonic hat and has a fairly large but not very efficient army, whose uniforms suggest those of nineteenth-century France or Italy: his soldiers wear red pants, white jackets, and plumed kepis. The principal city, Monkeyville, is on the sea and in a temperate climate. The monkeys wear fashionable clothes and live in small but comfortable houses hung from trees: they have a railway station, cars, a restaurant, and a hairdresser. On a nearby island there is a collection of strange-looking but essentially harmless "monsters," whose greatest fear is boredom. Zephir manages to entertain them brilliantly, telling stories, dressing as a clown and doing tricks, and playing waltzes and polkas on his violin. The overall impression is of a Mediterranean seaside resort with an offshore island populated by eccentric and demanding tourists.

Laurent de Brunhoff's Babar's Visit to Bird Island (1951) portrays a simpler and more rural world. It is a strikingly beautiful and colorful book, and one of the author's favorites: according to him, it was inspired by childhood visits to Cap Ferret, south of Bordeaux. The island is roughly bird-shaped and ruled by a king and queen who resemble crested cockatoos. As in Babar the King (1933), the inhabitants all have different and appropriate trades: the pelican, with his large beak, is a postman; the pheasants are tailors; the long-legged flamingo and stork are dancers; the parrot and the peacock are actors; the vulture is a butcher; and chickens manage the dairy. There are no monsters, though at one point Babar's daughter Flora is threatened by an enormous fish. It is a freer and less organized society than that of the monkeys: entertainment and the enjoyment of life are foremost, and only Babar and his family wear clothes. The suggestion is of a small semitropical island, with colorful, pleasure-loving inhabitants of many races, where one can enjoy deep-sea fishing and outdoor banquets.

Twenty years later Laurent de Brunhoff took Babar and his family to outer space, in Babar Visits Another Planet (1972). This time the elephants were not politely invited, as with Bird Island and Monkeyville, but kidnapped. They were sucked into an unmanned rocket ship that took many days to reach its goal: a strange reddish planet where the ground is soft and mushy like caramel and all buildings are hung from red balloons. The inhabitants look like small, thin, pear-shaped elephants with curly ears; they wear clothes and walk on their hind legs. Civilization is highly developed, with indoor swimming pools, an automatic fountain that serves cakes and soft drinks, and a supermarket/shopping mall with motorized carts. It is a crowded urban culture, with an emphasis on competition and material goods, and the city has an Oriental appearance. Babar's children sleep in "little wall niches" that resemble the minihotels in Japanese cities, and the signs in the supermarket appear to be written in Asian characters. It is also a highly ordered and homogeneous society: the curly-eared elephants "speak as with one voice, which sounds like a clarinet."

The reddish planet is in many ways more alien, and possibly more perilous, than the worlds of the monkeys or the birds—just as Japan is less familiar to French children than a French or Italian seaside resort. In Monkeyville and on Bird Island there was no language barrier, but here Babar cannot understand anyone until the end of the story, And though the curly-eared elephants are friendly and hospitable at first, they become very upset when Arthur accidentally breaks one of their red balloons, and Babar and his family are advised to return to Earth immediately to avoid danger.


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The most interesting though least agreeable alternative society in the Babar books is that of the rhinos. It also, unlike the other alien worlds, appears many times. The rhinos' territory borders that of the elephants, but though they are Babar's neighbors they are often opposed to him. They are large, clumsy, and subject to fits of aggression and impulsive greed. They have bad manners and no apparent interest in art or music. When they first appear they, like most of the elephants, walk on four legs and do not wear clothes, but later they too appear to have become civilized. They have very bad taste, however: they like vulgar patterns and silly hats. Their king, Rataxes, wears loud-print suits or comic-opera uniforms.

The city of the rhinos is a large metropolis, with square brutalist public buildings that seem to be constructed of gray cement in a semi-Egyptian style. There are no flower gardens, and most of the houses have the shape of square lampshades; the palace resembles an Inca temple crossed with a bunker. Rataxes' name is carved on each side of the palace steps, with a letter left off from the beginning or the end each time, so that it deconstructs into words that include TAXES, AXES, and RAT.

Some readers have suggested that the country of the rhinos—which is more or less next door, and whose army wears black helmets and black boots that recall the costume of German soldiers in both world wars—represents Eastern Europe, or even specifically Germany. Laurent de Brunhoff has denied this, but he agrees that the rhinos are essentially the opposite of the elephants, who are known for their peaceful nature, polite behavior, and love of beauty, flowers, recreation, and the arts. The rhinos, by contrast, are crude, impulsively aggressive, and prejudiced, lacking in both good taste and good manners.

We first hear of the rhinos in the second book of Jean de Brunhoff's original series, The Travels of Babar. While Babar and Celeste are on their honeymoon, their young cousin Arthur plays a trick on Rataxes, tying a firecracker to his tail. Though the wise old elephant Cornelius tries to make peace, Rataxes, who is "revengeful and mean," refuses his apologies and declares war. At first, the rhinos are victorious, and when Babar and Celeste return they find the countryside devastated in a manner that recalls the battlefields of World War I:

A few broken trees! Is that all that is left of the great forest? There are no more flowers, no more birds. Babar and Celeste are very sad and weep as they see their ruined country.
Many elephants have been wounded, and are being treated in an outdoor field hospital by nurses in World War I costumes. Meanwhile, Rataxes is preparing another attack. Babar saves the day by a stratagem: he paints eyes on the rumps of his biggest soldiers, and colors their tails red, while Arthur makes red and green wigs for them out of leaves. Now, when they advance backward, they look like monsters. The rhinos are terrified and retreat in disorder—essentially defeated by innovative fashion design.

The antagonism between the elephants and the rhinos increases in Laurent de Brunhoff's Babar and the Wully-Wully (1975). In this story, Babar's daughter Flora discovers a small, friendly, very rare creature with soft green fur. The Wully-Wully is so totally lovable and desirable that he is kidnapped by Rataxes and imprisoned in the city of the rhinos, from which he has to be rescued by Zephir. But almost as soon as the Wully-Wully returns to Celesteville, the rhino soldiers attack, "sweeping through Celesteville like a hurricane," and carrying off the Wully-Wully again. War is about to be declared, but Flora saves the day by going alone to see King Rataxes and persuading him that the Wully-Wully needs his freedom. Amazingly, he agrees, and the last picture shows Flora and Rataxes together, rocking the Wully-Wully in a rope swing,

In 1978, in Babar's Mystery, one of the most exciting stories in the series, another disagreeable rhino appears. This time he is the leader of a criminal gang of low-life crocodiles; he wears a loud checked suit and smokes cigars. (The crocodiles are equally inelegant, in shabby tailcoats and sneakers.) He hangs out at the seaside resort of Celesteville-by-the Sea, which seems to be located in Brittany, near Mont-St.-Michel, a picture of which appears in one double-page spread. The piano from the hotel is stolen, then Babar's red convertible, and finally the statue of an elephant from the town square. But in the end Arthur, with Babar's help, catches the thieves.


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Out in the human world, as time passed, borders came down, and both France and Germany joined the European Union. Laurent de Brunhoff's attitude toward the country of the rhinos also seems to have changed. "I wanted to show that not all rhinos are bad," he recently told me. The result was Babar's Little Girl Makes a Friend (1990), in which Babar's youngest daughter, Isabelle, meets the agreeable Vic, the little son of King Rataxes. But not all rhinos are good, either, and when Rataxes discovers the friendship he is furious. "We don't like elephants in Rhino City!" he shouts, and his wife is "terribly angry." "You cannot be friends with that little elephant," she tells her son. At the end of the story Rataxes is somewhat reconciled, but Lady Rataxes remains enraged and prejudiced. "Keep your daughter away from our son!" she says to Babar— but the next day, the children are back together. The moral seems to be that though adult rhinos are often aggressive and prejudiced, there may be hope for the younger generation.

In Babar's world, women are not necessarily more tolerant and peace-loving. A couple of years later, in Babar's Battle (1992), Babar remarks that Rataxes hasn't bothered the elephants for a long time. He is contradicted by Celeste, who says, "That could change in a second.... Rataxes has caused trouble before, and he could again. I don't trust him." And in fact a "rhino witch" named Macidexia, who lives in a cave underneath the lake near Celesteville, and has terrible taste in clothes, has been urging Rataxes to destroy the elephants for some time. She inspires him to drain the lake, causing fish and plants to die. Babar discovers the plot and telephones Rataxes to complain, but Rataxes replies by declaring war. The elephants and the rhinos prepare for battle, both sides wearing medieval armor, whereupon Babar challenges Rataxes to single combat. He wins by blinding Rataxes with the reflections from his shield: metaphorically, reflected aggression destroys the aggressor. Peace and order are restored—though (at least according to the illustrations) no rhinos are invited to the big swimming party at the end of the book.

3.
Though Babar does not apparently age after the first three books in the series, he does change. When he first becomes king, as Ann Hildebrand says, he is "a courteous, responsible adult, a benevolent, honest leader, and a faithful, caring husband and father." In the face of loss or danger he remains steady, rational, and capable. But in the Sixties, Seventies, and early Eighties, he does not always retain his calm self-confidence. In Babar Loses His Crown (1967) he also loses his cool: he becomes sad and disturbed and unable to eat dinner, and declares that he cannot go out in public. "What will it look like, this evening at the Opera?" he asks pathetically. "The king of the elephants, without his crown?" Later, in Babar and the Ghost (1981), he is baffled and confused by a mischievous spirit that only children can see. His children take advantage of the situation to become rude and play tricks on adults, and life in the capital city is disrupted by traffic jams and fender-benders caused by an apparently driverless car. It is not until the very end of the story that Babar manages to get the ghost to leave Celesteville.

A few years later, in The Rescue of Babar (1993), our hero undergoes what might be called a midlife crisis. Hidden within the crater of an extinct volcano not far from Celesteville, it turns out, is a beautiful city. Its steep hills and semiclassical architecture, Laurent de Brunhoff tells me, were inspired by Borabadur in Java—to me, however, the city resembles San Francisco. The elephants who live there have striped ears and wear togas. They are especially fond of the arts: Isabelle pays for a double ice-cream cone by singing "Happy Birthday."

Isabelle has come to this city alone to rescue her father, Babar, who has been kidnapped by the striped elephants so that he can tell them stories. He is imprisoned on a high ledge, where he sleeps in a hammock like the one he was rocked in when he was a baby in the first picture of The Story of Babar. But when Isabelle tells him "We have to get out of here, back to Celesteville," he does not want to go.

"What for?" said Babar. "It's very pleasant here, and the striped elephants treat me with the greatest courtesy. Their music is enchanting, their food is delicious, and they only want me to tell them stories. Why should I leave?"
"But you are King of the Elephants in Celesteville!" exclaimed Isabelle.
"Let someone else be king," said Babar, and he fell back asleep.
At this point Babar has apparently regressed to childhood, abandoning his responsibilities as a ruler. It turns out later that in fact he has been drugged by doctored watermelon smoothies, and when their effect wears off he is willing to escape and return to Celesteville. But in the picture of Babar sneaking away from the city of the striped elephants at night, with Isabelle and her three animal companions, he is the only one who looks back—and while they appear happy and determined, his expression is one of doubt and regret.

Some readers who know that a few years before this book appeared, Laurent de Brunhoff moved from France to America, have seen The Rescue of Babar as a roman à clef. The striped elephants, in this view, are the Americans whose enthusiasm for the story-teller is so great that they want him here among them, in a country isolated from the rest of the world by its geography. However, since The Rescue of Babar our hero has clearly regained his poise and self-confidence. Ann Hildebrand, in fact, connects this change to Laurent de Brunhoff's move to America and second marriage to the American writer and professor Phyllis Rose.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just as some fans of the Babar books have interpreted them as social, political, and personal fables, others have not hesitated to consider them as art and literature on the highest level. Nicholas Fox Weber, in The Art of Babar (1989), points out that both Jean and Laurent were art students and serious painters, and sees parallels between their work and that of classic European artists. There are comparisons to (in alphabetical order) Bonnard, De Kooning, Delacroix, Dufy, Jan van Eyck, Giacometti, Klee, Matisse, Pop Art, and Rubens. Laurent de Brunhoff says that in his view some of these comparisons "go too far." But it is also true that the landscape panoramas of Jean de Brunhoff's books sometimes recall the paintings of Dufy, and that the colors in many of Laurent de Brunhoff's illustrations— the intense reds and pinks and golden yellows, the flat greens—suggest those of Bonnard or Matisse.

Weber sees parallels between the original Story of Babar and the fiction of writers like Stendhal and Balzac. When Babar arrives in Paris as an adolescent, he is befriended by a very rich old lady. The Old Lady is "a maternal figure, whose role is to provide the younger generation with worldly amenities":

But she is also something more. In a way her presence in the Babar books likens them to every French tale in which a young man from the country has a liaison with an older, more worldly woman. Babar is a kept man, the Old Lady his contented provider.
Nicholas Fox Weber also speculates on the differences between the Babar books of father and son. Although Laurent "has upheld the tradition of Babar through its characters and settings and maintained its essential personality," he feels that his is "a new, lighter, brighter universe," "highly charged, fluid, and animated," in which "painterly qualities have become more important than narrative ones." He remarks perceptively that in Jean de Brunhoff's world the danger level is high. This is true: Babar's mother is shot by a hunter, the previous king of the elephants dies by eating a poisoned mushroom, and soldiers are wounded in battle. In Babar the King, the Old Lady is bitten by a snake and Cornelius is injured in a fire that destroys his house. That night Babar has his famous dream in which Misfortune appears in the shape of "a frightful old woman surrounded by flabby, ugly beasts"—Fear, Despair, Indolence, Sickness, Anger, Stupidity, Ignorance, Cowardice, Laziness, and Discouragement (a kind of long-nosed white pig). It takes twelve winged elephant angels to put them to flight. In Laurent's books, by contrast, "the worst sort of occurrence consists of a character getting temporarily lost of slightly injured.... Above all, life is a series of joys."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Though the Babar books have been read and loved by children everywhere for over seventy years, they have also recently met with severe criticism. For example, they have been called antifeminist. This attack, however, focuses on the early stories, written at a time when it was generally believed that women were essentially wives and mothers, whose careers should be limited to nursing, teaching, and the arts. Celeste dances in a circus, but only under duress, and once she has children she stays home and takes care of them. The Old Lady serves as a nurse and a teacher, and at one point is said to be writing her memoirs. Later on, however, the female characters, particularly Isabelle, are much more active.

Herbert Kohl, the author of Should We Burn Babar?, condemns the books, though reluctantly, as elitist. As a child he found them charming and wonderful; now, however, he sees that they glorify capitalism and the ruling class:

The Rich Lady has money, lots of it. The source of her wealth is unclear.... It is clear that in the book the use of money and the earning of it are two totally different matters, and that it is perfectly normal and in fact delightful that some people have wealth they do not have to work for.
Kohl deplores Babar's "malleability and the good humor with which he jumps into becoming a well-dressed rich person-like elephant." He also complains that when Babar is chosen king because "he 'has learned so much living among men.' ...All we are shown of his learning is that he knows how to choose clothes, order a meal at a restaurant, and add 2+2." Though his early exposure to The Story of Babar apparently did not turn Kohl into an elitist, he believes that "uncritical reading of the book is so potentially damaging that it should be withheld from children when possible."[7]

The charge of colonialism is made most strongly by Ariel Dorfman. According to him, Babar is the primitive African who becomes a European and returns to "build a utopia with the willing aid of his native brothers." But his effort "is none other than the fulfillment of the dominant countries' colonial dream." In this dream, "the new ruler must come from the outside, a native instructed in the ways of men." The Babar books, Dorfman believes, teach the false moral that if backward countries imitate the more advanced countries and import technological know-how, they will improve their lot. What is left out of the story is the "plundering, racism, undevelopment, and misery" that colonial policy often brings. This is of course true in a sense, but it is a charge that can be leveled at many utopian visions, and at almost all children's picture books, which normally portray a better world than the one we live in.

The accusation of racism in Babar rests largely on two books published before 1950. Today, the drawings of what the texts refer to as "cannibals" (The Travels of Babar, 1932) and "savages" (Babar's Picnic, 1949) seem shocking. When these books first appeared, however, much of both adult and children's culture was naively racist. White performers blacked their faces to resemble caricatures of African-Americans, and a recurrent cartoon situation of the 1930s and 1940s featured a pair of missionaries in a cook pot; Doctor Doolittle and Little Black Sambo were popular and much-admired children's books, and thousands of English and American children owned Golliwog or Mammy dolls.

Jean de Brunhoff had drawn caricatured Africans in The Travels of Babar, and they must have seemed a reasonable subject for his son Laurent, who was only twenty-three at the time Babar's Picnic was written. Soon, however, as people all over the world became aware of the hateful and harmful stereotyping of not only African but Asian and Native American people, Laurent was one of the first children's book artists to make amends and include realistic drawings of black people in his public scenes. In Babar Comes to America (1965) there are African-Americans on the street in Chicago, New York, and Detroit: they are shown building automobiles, fishing from a pier along with whites, and at a Hollywood party. While in New York, Babar goes to hear "Theodorus Priest" (Thelonious Monk) and his jazz quartet, which includes two white and two black players.

For a long time Laurent de Brunhoff has regretted his early drawings of African "savages"; he decided years ago that Babar's Picnic will never be reprinted. Yet Random House, the original publisher of Jean de Brunhoff, continues to issue The Travels of Babar, with its stereotyped black "cannibals," and some adult readers still complain of its bias: the description of the book on the current Amazon site calls it "as far from politically correct as you can get." Fortunately, this has not prevented millions of children—and adults—from enjoying the other Babar books, many of which are now being reprinted in beautiful new editions by Harry N. Abrams.

before reading play theme to be found at:http://www.coldcut.com/video/aa/sounds.html)

Part 1: The beginning

In thw beginning there was them and them and us and a bartender called Renee

and an explosion!

well, it was a small champagne fizz, coupled with a low moan(ing)

listen to it:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995092

"What is happening? We were aroused by the banging." - Maria & Yvette.

Of course there are theories that there was a
background before the bang -

Was the big bang really the beginning of time? Or did the universe exist before then? Such a question seemed almost blasphemous only a decade ago. Most cosmologists insisted that it simply made no sense - that to contemplate a time before the big bang was like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole. But developments in theoretical physics, especially the rise of string theory, have changed their perspective. The pre-bang universe has become the latest frontier of cosmology.
The new willingness to consider what might have happened before the bang is the latest swing of an intellectual pendulum that has rocked back and forth for millennia. In one form or another, the issue of the ultimate beginning has engaged philosophers and theologians in nearly every culture. It is entwined with a grand set of concerns, one famously encapsulated in an 1897 painting by Paul Gauguin: D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" The piece depicts the cycle of birth, life and death - origin, identity and destiny for each individual - and these personal concerns connect directly to cosmic ones. We can trace our lineage back through the generations, back through our animal ancestors, to early forms of life and protolife, to the elements synthesized in the primordial universe, to the amorphous energy deposited in space before that. Does our family tree extend forever backward? Or do its roots terminate? Is the cosmos as impermanent as we are?
Gabriele Veneziano
Scientific American May 2004

WARNING; At this point please play Jam Creative
presentation at the following

http://www.radiorewind.co.uk/Jingles_Gold.htm

Of course,before there is any organisation in the universe you have to have a plan, which is why we created radio stations and PR companies, because they do not run to any plan at all, just bask in the afterglow of cosmic harmony:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993963
or even the
Pattern of an individual pulse (1.56ms) of PSR 1937+21. Signal processed by Thierry Lombry. For more info about this microstructure see:
http://www.astrosurf.com/lombry/audiofiles-pulsar.htm

ONE MINUET LATER

Of course many think that then universe started as an accident.

"He fell out of a Gestapo car, over a bridge, onto a railway line, and was run over by the Berlin Express. It was an accident." - Herr Flick informing us that the forger he employed is no longer available. ....

For those who are confused at this point I have some pictures for you:

http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/cobe/cobe_images/e90_123.gif

Of course if its pictures you dont want then after the big bang a little and a lot happened,as the American composer, John Adams, says.In the beginning there was D -

What key does she sing in?"
"I have never been able to determine." - Mimi asking Leclerc what key Edith uses.

and all was scatterd to the far end of the cosmos. Well the short bit some 10 -24 secs after the whoosh!

http://www.superstringtheory.com/cosmo/bang0.html

which then turned into tiny string shapes that resembled French villages and rather small German armoured personnel carriers that were designed by British TV studios in the style of the ones they saw on Hogans Heroes in 1968

PART 2:THE FALLEN MADONNA WITH THE BIG BOOBIES
OR THE SELF REPRODUCING INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE

If my colleagues and I are right, we may soon be saying good-bye to the idea that our universe was a single fireball created in the big bang. We are exploring a new theory based on a 15- year-old notion that the universe went through a stage of inflation. During that time, the theory holds, the cosmos became exponentially large within an in- finitesimal fraction of a second. At the end of this period, the universe continued its evolution according to the big bang model. As workers refined this inflationary scenario, they uncovered some surprising consequences. One of them constitutes a fundamental change in how the cosmos is seen. Recent versions of inflationary theory assert that instead of being an expanding ball of fire the universe is a huge, growing fractal. It consists of many inflating balls that produce new balls, which in turn produce more balls, ad infinitum.



Cosmologists did not arbitrarily invent this rather peculiar vision of the universe. Several workers, first in Russia and later in the U.S., proposed the inflationary hypothesis that is the basis of its foundation. We did so to solve some of the complications left by the old big bang idea. In its standard form, the big bang theory maintains that the universe was born about 15 billion years ago from a cosmological singularity--a state in which the temperature and density are infinitely high. Of course, one cannot really speak in physical terms about these quantities as being infinite. One usually assumes that the current laws of physics did not apply then. They took hold only after the density of the universe dropped below the so-called Planck density, which equals about 1094 grams per cubic centimeter:
a fella called Linde

which leads us very quickly to life(I skipped lots)

"Mama, when will the happy event take place?"
"As soon as possible after we are married; what a stupid question!" - Edith asking Fanny the key question.

so I decide this is hard stuff so here are some animations.
(well,give me a chance)

http://www.bioanim.com/CellTissueHumanBody6/index.html

"Are we a loon? I wish to tick with you." - Officer Crabtree

Of course evolution is to hard to explain easliy although most Star Trek fans know that it all began with a temporal anomaly in teh neutral zone that was initiated by Q and solved by the crew of Star trek,but I digress,so I asked the BBC(home of alloallo) to do it for me:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/beasts/evolution/evolution_game.shtml

and life begibns at the desktop:

http://www.jumbo.com/file/3080.htm

AND THEN THERE WERE FROGS!

http://pulseplanet.nationalgeographic.com/ax/todays_index.html
go to amphibian suite!

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Paris at Night

Trois allumettes une à une allumées dans la nuit
La premiére pour voir ton visage tout entier
La seconde pour voir tes yeux
La dernière pour voir ta bouche
Et l'obscuritè tout entière pour me rappeler tout cela
En te serrant dans mes bras.

Three matches,one by one, lit in the night
The first to see you face completly
the second to see your eyes
the last to see your mouth
And the darkness all around to remind me
as I held you in my arms

(my translation)

Le Jardin

Des milliers et des milliers d'années
Ne sauraient suffire
Pour dire
La petite seconde d'éternité
Où tu m'as embrassé
Où je t'ai embrassé
Un moment dans la lumière de l'hiver
Au Parc Montsouris à Paris
À Paris
Sur la terre
La terre qui est un astre.


The Garden

Thousands and thousands and years
would not suffice
to tell
of the little second of eternity
where you kissed me
where I kissed you
A moment in the winterlight
in the Montsouris park in Paris
In Paris
On this earth
this earth which is a star

(my translation)

Pour Toi Mon Amour

Je suis alle au marche aux oiseaux
Et j'ai achete des oiseaux
Pour toi
mon amour
Je suis alle au marche aux fleurs
Et j'ai achete des fleurs
Pour toi
mon amour
Je suis alle au marche a la ferraille
Et j'ai achete des chaines
De lourdes chaines
Pour toi
mon amour
Et puis je suis alle au marche aux esclaves
Et je t'ai cherchee
Mais je ne t'ai pas trouvee
mon amour

For you my love

I went to the bird market
and I bought some birds
for you
my love

I went to the flower market
and I bought some flowers
for you
my love

I went to the iron market
and I bought some chains
some heavy chains
for you
my love
and then I went to the slave market
and I searched for you
but I couldn't find you

my love

(my translation)

I now find myself in an awkward position. In my constant scan of what people have been saying over the years about Martin Heidegger's 1927 magnum opus Being and Time, it has become apparent to me that there is a rampant and thoroughly ingrained confusion about a central concept within Heideggerian philosophy. That people have gotten off on the wrong foot with the whole concept of Dasein is obvious if one takes even a cursory glance at contemporary Heideggerian scholarship. The meaning and significance that Heideggerian intended for the term has become lost in a lack of translation. By this I mean it seems that few people have taken the time to map the term Dasein onto a coherent conceptual framework so that Being and Time can actually become intelligible as a philosophical system. Some scholars instead choose to bury their heads in the sand and insist we should leave Dasein untranslated or at best, translate it literally as "being-there" or simply replace it with "being-in-the-world" or some such other term in Heideggerese. It is no surprise then that there has been a massive mystification and misunderstanding surrounding the whole project of Being and Time, with scholars arguing amongst themselves about what kind of transcendentalist Heidegger was, or to what extent he had failed to overcome Cartesian subjectivity through his contradictory usage of Dasein. Indeed, we have some like Tugendhat going so far as to say

    I cannot see how the introduction of the term Dasein has had any positive sense. It is only a stylistic device that has unfortunate consequences, and we can better appropriate Hiedegger's contribution to our complex of problems if we refrain as far as possible from the use of this term (Tugendhat, 1986, p. 152).

With Dasein translated literally, left untranslated, or simply abandoned as a concept, we become unable to read Heidegger on the deeper level he deserves and remain locked into a parochial reading of Being and Time. In linguistic terms, we have no source to guide us in our understanding of the target. Many Heideggerian scholars seem content to simply ascribe to Heidegger the very philosophical baggage he tried to shuck off in their strict assimilation of Dasein to "human existence" (Krill, intro to Basic Writings) or a Kantian sort of "structured awareness" (Braver, 2007)or or more confusedly, as something that "is neither people nor their being, but rather a way of life shared by the members of some community" (Haugeland, 2005, p. 423). These two definitions generally represent the two extremes of the secondary literature on Heideggerian thought: transcendentalism and normative pragmatism, respectively. The one side argues that Heidegger was a transcendental idealist in the tradition of Kant, re-asserting the priority of the subject in the determination of reality. The other side argues against this reading, claiming that Heidegger was an arch-pragmatist, doing away with all notions of subjective individuality in favor of an "institutionalized" group-think in the form of Das Man and the authenticity/inauthenticity distinction. We seem to have then an oscillation between seeing Being and Time as a transcendental enterprise spelling out the essence of human existence (the literal translation of Dasein) and a social-pragmatist manifesto that is supposed to redefine the human subject solely in terms of "average" public institutions and linguistic practices. I hope to show in this brief field guide to Being and Time that both readings are decidedly misleading and worse yet, prevent the contemporary philosopher from making sense of Heidegger in such a way so as to allow the assimilation of his thought, finally, into a progressive leap from both Descartes and Kant.

The Obscurity and Meaning of Dasein

In this paper I want to argue that both the transcendental and social-pragmatist reading of Heidegger unwittingly overlooks the most crucial distinction in Being and Time: the simple but profound difference between being and entities. For Heidegger, a Dasein is an individual entity with a special kind of being. On my reading then, Dasein is a term Heidegger coined to refer to average individual humans capable of normal cognitive activities such as introspection, object-recognition, intersubjective communication, and natural fluency of language. Throughout the entirety of Being and Time we see a distinction being made between the individual entity Dasein and the being of that entity. The text is practically saturated with descriptive accounts concerning the being of the entity that is Dasein.

    This entity which each of us is himself…we shall denote by the term "Dasein." (BT 27)

    [Dasein is] that entity which in its Being…(BT 68)

    In the question about the meaning of Being, what is primarily interrogated is those entities which have the character of Dasein. (BT 65)

    …it is possible to individualize [the question of the meaning of Being] very precisely for any particular Dasein. (BT 63)

    …Dasein is essentially an entity with Being-in…(BT 84)

    Dasein is an entity which is in each case I myself; its Being is in each case mine. (BT 150)

    One of Dasein's possibilities of Being is to give us ontical "information" about Dasein itself as an entity. (BT 228)

It seems obvious to me that this general distinction between the entity that Dasein is ontically and the being it has ontologically is the guiding thread running through Being and Time. I find this obvious because it is the only way I can make sense of what the text is saying. If we were to substitute "human existence" or "human way of life" for Dasein in any of the above quotations, the philosophical coherence of the ontological difference would be obliterated. "This entity which each of us is himself…we shall denote by "human way of life." "Existence is essentially an entity with Being-in." Etc. The immediate problem with these translations has become clear. By substituting "existence," "awareness," or "way of life" for Dasein, Heidegger can now be accused of repeatedly overlooking the difference between being and entities that he spent his career preaching against: "The being of entities 'is' not itself an entity" (BT 26).When the ontological difference between entities and the being of entities is not taken seriously, Heidegger becomes incomprehensible. No wonder so many people choose to leave Dasein untranslated!

That the above formulations are rendered nonsense as soon as one neglects the ontological difference illustrates nicely the absolute necessity of having a proper conception of Dasein for understanding Being and Time in a coherent fashion. A German dictionary will simply not help us to understand what Dasein refers to, although it points to it indirectly. Even Macquarrie and Robinson make this clear when they note on page 27, n. 1 that Heidegger goes "somewhat further [from the everyday usage of Dasein] in that he often uses it to stand for any person who has such Being, and who is thus an 'entity' himself." However, it must be made perfectly clear that Heidegger's decision to coin a new synonym for "human being" from an existential etymological connection was not arbitrary. In fact, by understanding why Heidegger chose this particular term to denote a member of the profoundly embodied-embedded species of Homo sapiens, we can begin to stitch together a coherent, non-Kantian, non-Cartesian philosophy of mind.

Overcoming the "Copernican Revolution"

Why "Dasein"? What philosophical point was Heidegger trying to make with this new coinage for human entity? From my understanding, and that of others, Heidegger was making a perceptual-epistemic move against the then dominant philosophical force of René Descartes, John Locke, and of course, Immanuel Kant. This trio had by Heidegger's day instilled an unshakeable dogma concerning what the nature of visual perception entailed, namely, a fallible, mirror-like relationship between mind and world. According to Richard Rorty, this widespread consensus concerning mind and knowledge led to absurd albeit implicit claims to the interlocking theses of internalism and foundationalism. To unabashedly quote the introduction to a favorite book of mine,

    Philosophy as a discipline thus sees itself as the attempt to underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art, or religion. It purports to do this on the basis of its special understanding of the nature of knowledge and of mind. Philosophy can be foundational in respect to the rest of culture because culture is the assemblage of claims to knowledge, and philosophy adjudicates such claims. It can do so because it understands the foundations of knowledge, and it finds these foundations in a study of man-as-knower, of the "mental processes" or the "activity of representation" which make knowledge possible. To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind; so to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to construct such representations. Philosophy's central concern is to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into the areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so).

    We owe the notion of a "theory of knowledge" based on an understanding of "mental processes" to the seventeenth century, and especially to Locke. We owe the notion of "the mind" as a separate entity in which "processes" occur to the same period, and especially to Descartes. We owe the notion of philosophy as a tribunal of pure reason, upholding or denying the claims of the rest of culture, to the eighteenth century and especially to Kant, but this Kantian notion presupposed general assent to Lockean notions of mental processes and Cartesian notions of mental substance. (Rorty, 1979, pp. 3-4)

It was the entrenchment of this indirect representationalism against which Heidegger was fighting in Being and Time. Only by understanding the deficiencies Heidegger saw in these representationalist accounts of perception can we get a grasp on what an "analytic of Dasein" entails. We can see this in how Heidegger sets up the whole definition of "phenomena" and "phenomenology" - central to the entire project of phenomenological-ontology as we will see. He starts by defining what a phenomenon is. A phenomenon is that which shows itself to us. "Phenomena are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to light – what the Greeks sometimes identified simply with [entities]." This much is clear and I imagine most people would agree to a similar definition. But then he continues: "Now an entity can show itself from itself in many ways, depending in each case on the kind of access we have to it. Indeed it is even possible for an entity to show itself as something which in itself it is not" (BT 51). Here, he makes a crucial distinction between a "phenomenon" and a "semblance." This is a simple but profound conceptual framework and understanding the force of Heidegger's argument here is central to understanding his entire shift away from Kantian transcendentalism.

As Heidegger defines it, a semblance is that which looks like something, but is not that thing e.g. looking at a shadow on the wall as a rabbit. The shadow (entity) is showing itself to us as something which it is not (a rabbit). However, as Heidegger points out, "Only when the meaning of something is such that it makes a pretension of showing itself –that is, of being a phenomenon – can it show itself as something which it is not; only then can it 'merely look like so-and-so'" (BT 51). In other words, in order to conceive of a perceiver-world relationship in which there can be symbolic, representational perception as in the shadow-rabbit example, there must already be a way for the representation to show itself as a representation of something else. This in turn implies that a double-meaning can be given to the term representation, which the Kantian tradition has readily taken advantage of. The Kantian wants to say that the totality of entities - the world which is presented to us - is but a mere semblance of a noumenal reality which we can never gain access to and see as itself. Furthermore, the Kantian must also say that within the phenomenal world of transcendental representation, there is another kind of representational-activity, wherein something can show itself as something it is not, as in the case of the shadow-rabbit. However, in these mundane examples, it is not logically impossible to gain access to that which is showing itself through something else (as with a fever and the underlying disease in Heidegger's example). We are beginning to see the germ of an argument against Kantian transcendentalism, which attempts to places a limit on the possibility of phenomenology as ontology. From the Heideggerian perspective, "If one says that with the word 'appearance' we allude to something wherein something appears without being itself an appearance, one has not thereby defined the conception of phenomenon: one has rather presupposed it" (BT 53). As William Blattner puts it,

    The worry that phenomena are appearances and hence unsuited for use in ontology rests on the covert assumption of Indirect Representationalism, because only if we are thinking of phenomena as a surrogate for a transcendent reality will we be inclined to exclude phenomenology as a method for ontology. To charge phenomenology with studying appearances, rather than reality, is to load the concept of a phenomenon with representationalist baggage that neither Husserl nor Heidegger accepts. (Blattner, 2006, pp. 28-29)

If the Kantian transcendentalist wants to be taken seriously on the phenomenological level, he must give an account of these everyday symbolic representations (shadow-rabbit, symptoms, etc.) and at the same time give an account of the transcendental, phenomenon-noumenon representational relationship. Can this be done in an intelligible manner? Heidegger, for good reason, thinks that it can not.

    Kant uses the term "appearance" in this twofold way. According to him "appearances" are, in the first place, the "objects of empirical intuition": they are what shows itself in such intuition. But what thus shows itself (the "phenomenon" in the genuine primordial sense) is at the same time an "appearance" as an emanation of something which hides itself in that appearance – an emanation which announces. (BT 54)

For Heidegger, if we are to think straight about representationalism, we need to be clear that when properly understood, "phenomena are never appearances" (BT 53). Accordingly,

    "Phenomenon", the showing-itself-in-itself, signifies a distinctive way in which something can be encountered. "Appearance," on the other hand, means a reference-relationship which is in an entity itself, and which is such that what does the referring (or the announcing) can fulfill its possible function only if it shows itself in itself and is thus a "phenomenon." (BT 54)

With this conceptual framework in place, Heidegger is ready to finally sweep the rug from under the Kantian "revolution," which had attempted to place a transcendental limit on the possibility of ontology. For Heidegger,

    Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible. In the phenomenological conception of "phenomenon" what one has in mind as that which shows itself is the Being of entities, its meaning, its modifications and derivatives. And this showing-itself is not just any showing-itself, nor is it some such thing as appearing. Least of all can the Being of entities ever be anything such that "behind it" stands something else "which does not appear." (BT 60)

Music surrounds us–and we wouldn't have it any other way. An exhilarating orchestral crescendo can bring tears to our eyes and send shivers down our spines. Background swells add emotive punch to movies and TV shows. Organists at ballgames bring us together, cheering, to our feet. Parents croon soothingly to infants.
And our fondness has deep roots: we have been making music since the dawn of culture. More than 30,000 years ago early humans were already playing bone flutes, percussive instruments and jaw harps--and all known societies throughout the world have had music. Indeed, our appreciation appears to be innate. Infants as young as two months will turn toward consonant, or pleasant, sounds and away from dissonant ones. And when a symphony's denouement gives delicious chills, the same kinds of pleasure centers of the brain light up as they do when eating chocolate, having sex or taking cocaine.

Therein lies an intriguing biological mystery: Why is music--universally beloved and uniquely powerful in its ability to wring emotions--so pervasive and important to us? Could its emergence have enhanced human survival somehow, such as by aiding courtship, as Geoffrey F. Miller of the University of New Mexico has proposed? Or did it originally help us by promoting social cohesion in groups that had grown too large for grooming, as suggested by Robin M. Dunbar of the University of Liverpool? On the other hand, to use the words of Harvard University's Steven Pinker, is music just "auditory cheesecake"--a happy accident of evolution that happens to tickle the brain's fancy?



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Why is music--universally beloved and uniquely powerful in its ability to wring emotions--so pervasive and important to us?
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Neuroscientists don't yet have the ultimate answers. But in recent years we have begun to gain a firmer understanding of where and how music is processed in the brain, which should lay a foundation for answering evolutionary questions. Collectively, studies of patients with brain injuries and imaging of healthy individuals have unexpectedly uncovered no specialized brain "center" for music. Rather music engages many areas distributed throughout the brain, including those that are normally involved in other kinds of cognition. The active areas vary with the person's individual experiences and musical training. The ear has the fewest sensory cells of any sensory organ--3,500 inner hair cells occupy the ear versus 100 million photoreceptors in the eye. Yet our mental response to music is remarkably adaptable; even a little study can "retune" the way the brain handles musical inputs.

Inner Songs
Until the advent of modern imaging techniques, scientists gleaned insights about the brain's inner musical workings mainly by studying patients--including famous composers--who had experienced brain deficits as a result of injury, stroke or other ailments. For example, in 1933 French composer Maurice Ravel began to exhibit symptoms of what might have been focal cerebral degeneration, a disorder in which discrete areas of brain tissue atrophy. His conceptual abilities remained intact--he could still hear and remember his old compositions and play scales. But he could not write music. Speaking of his proposed opera Jeanne d'Arc, Ravel confided to a friend, "...this opera is here, in my head. I hear it, but I will never write it. It's over. I can no longer write my music." Ravel died four years later, following an unsuccessful neurosurgical procedure. The case lent credence to the idea that the brain might not have a specific center for music.

The experience of another composer additionally suggested that music and speech were processed independently. After suffering a stroke in 1953, Vissarion Shebalin, a Russian composer, could no longer talk or understand speech, yet he retained the ability to write music until his death 10 years later. Thus, the supposition of independent processing appears to be true, although more recent work has yielded a more nuanced understanding, relating to two of the features that music and language share: both are a means of communication, and each has a syntax, a set of rules that govern the proper combination of elements (notes and words, respectively). According to Aniruddh D. Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, imaging findings suggest that a region in the frontal lobe enables proper construction of the syntax of both music and language, whereas other parts of the brain handle related aspects of language and music processing.

Imaging studies have also given us a fairly fine-grained picture of the brain's responses to music. These results make the most sense when placed in the context of how the ear conveys sounds in general to the brain. Like other sensory systems, the one for hearing is arranged hierarchically, consisting of a string of neural processing stations from the ear to the highest level, the auditory cortex. The processing of sounds, such as musical tones, begins with the inner ear (cochlea), which sorts complex sounds produced by, say, a violin, into their constituent elementary frequencies. The cochlea then transmits this information along separately tuned fibers of the auditory nerve as trains of neural discharges. Eventually these trains reach the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe. Different cells in the auditory system of the brain respond best to certain frequencies; neighboring cells have overlapping tuning curves so that there are no gaps. Indeed, because neighboring cells are tuned to similar frequencies, the auditory cortex forms a "frequency map" across its surface.

The response to music per se, though, is more complicated. Music consists of a sequence of tones, and perception of it depends on grasping the relationships between sounds. Many areas of the brain are involved in processing the various components of music. Consider tone, which encompasses both the frequencies and loudness of a sound. At one time, investigators suspected that cells tuned to a specific frequency always responded the same way when that frequency was detected.

But in the late 1980s Thomas M. McKenna and I, working in my laboratory at the University of California at Irvine, raised doubts about that notion when we studied contour, which is the pattern of rising and falling pitches that is the basis for all melodies. We constructed melodies consisting of different contours using the same five tones and then recorded the responses of single neurons in the auditory cortices of cats. We found that cell responses (the number of discharges) varied with the contour. Responses depended on the location of a given tone within a melody; cells may fire more vigorously when that tone is preceded by other tones rather than when it is the first. Moreover, cells react differently to the same tone when it is part of an ascending contour (low to high tones) than when it is part of a descending or more complex one. These findings show that the pattern of a melody matters: processing in the auditory system is not like the simple relaying of sound in a telephone or stereo system.

Although most research has focused on melody, rhythm (the relative lengths and spacing of notes), harmony (the relation of two or more simultaneous tones) and timbre (the characteristic difference in sound between two instruments playing the same tone) are also of interest. Studies of rhythm have concluded that one hemisphere is more involved, although they disagree on which hemisphere. The problem is that different tasks and even different rhythmic stimuli can demand different processing capacities. For example, the left temporal lobe seems to process briefer stimuli than the right temporal lobe and so would be more involved when the listener is trying to discern rhythm while hearing briefer musical sounds.

The situation is clearer for harmony. Imaging studies of the cerebral cortex find greater activation in the auditory regions of the right temporal lobe when subjects are focusing on aspects of harmony. Timbre also has been "assigned" a right temporal lobe preference. Patients whose temporal lobe has been removed (such as to eliminate seizures) show deficits in discriminating timbre if tissue from the right, but not the left, hemisphere is excised. In addition, the right temporal lobe becomes active in normal subjects when they discriminate between different timbres.

Brain responses also depend on the experiences and training of the listener. Even a little training can quickly alter the brain's reactions. For instance, until about 10 years ago, scientists believed that tuning was "fixed" for each cell in the auditory cortex. Our studies on contour, however, made us suspect that cell tuning might be altered during learning so that certain cells become extra sensitive to sounds that attract attention and are stored in memory.




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Learning retunes the brain, so that more cells respond best to behaviorally important sounds.
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To find out, Jon S. Bakin, Jean-Marc Edeline and I conducted a series of experiments during the 1990s in which we asked whether the basic organization of the auditory cortex changes when a subject learns that a certain tone is somehow important. Our group first presented guinea pigs with many different tones and recorded the responses of various cells in the auditory cortex to determine which tones produced the greatest responses. Next, we taught the subjects that a specific, nonpreferred tone was important by making it a signal for a mild foot shock. The guinea pigs learned this association within a few minutes. We then determined the cells' responses again, immediately after the training and at various times up to two months later. The neurons' tuning preferences had shifted from their original frequencies to that of the signal tone. Thus, learning retunes the brain so that more cells respond best to behaviorally important sounds. This cellular adjustment process extends across the cortex, "editing" the frequency map so that a greater area of the cortex processes important tones. One can tell which frequencies are important to an animal simply by determining the frequency organization of its auditory cortex.

The retuning was remarkably durable: it became stronger over time without additional training and lasted for months. These findings initiated a growing body of research indicating that one way the brain stores the learned importance of a stimulus is by devoting more brain cells to the processing of that stimulus. Although it is not possible to record from single neurons in humans during learning, brain-imaging studies can detect changes in the average magnitude of responses of thousands of cells in various parts of the cortex. In 1998 Ray Dolan and his colleagues at University College London trained human subjects in a similar type of task by teaching them that a particular tone was significant. The group found that learning produces the same type of tuning shifts seen in animals. The long-term effects of learning by retuning may help explain why we can quickly recognize a familiar melody in a noisy room and also why people suffering memory loss from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's can still recall music that they learned in the past.

Even when incoming sound is absent, we all can "listen" by recalling a piece of music. Think of any piece you know and "play" it in your head. Where in the brain is this music playing? In 1999 Andrea R. Halpern of Bucknell University and Robert J. Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University conducted a study in which they scanned the brains of nonmusicians who either listened to music or imagined hearing the same piece of music. Many of the same areas in the temporal lobes that were involved in listening to the melodies were also activated when those melodies were merely imagined.

Well-Developed Brains
Studies of musicians have extended many of the findings noted above, dramatically confirming the brain's ability to revise its wiring in support of musical activities. Just as some training increases the number of cells that respond to a sound when it becomes important, prolonged learning produces more marked responses and physical changes in the brain. Musicians, who usually practice many hours a day for years, show such effects--their responses to music differ from those of nonmusicians; they also exhibit hyperdevelopment of certain areas in their brains.

Christo Pantev, then at the University of Münster in Germany, led one such study in 1998. He found that when musicians listen to a piano playing, about 25 percent more of their left-hemisphere auditory regions respond than do so in nonmusicians. This effect is specific to musical tones and does not occur with similar but nonmusical sounds. Moreover, the authors found that this expansion of response area is greater the younger the age at which lessons began. Studies of children suggest that early musical experience may facilitate development. In 2004 Antoine Shahin, Larry E. Roberts and Laurel J. Trainor of McMaster University in Ontario recorded brain responses to piano, violin and pure tones in four- and five-year-old children. Youngsters who had received greater exposure to music in their homes showed enhanced brain auditory activity, comparable to that of unexposed kids about three years older.


Musicians may display greater responses to sounds, in part because their auditory cortex is more extensive. Peter Schneider and his co-workers at the University of Heidelberg in Germany reported in 2002 that the volume of this cortex in musicians was 130 percent larger. The percentages of volume increase were linked to levels of musical training, suggesting that learning music proportionally increases the number of neurons that process it.

In addition, musicians' brains devote more area toward motor control of the fingers used to play an instrument. In 1995 Thomas Elbert of the University of Konstanz in Germany and his colleagues reported that the brain regions that receive sensory inputs from the second to fifth (index to pinkie) fingers of the left hand were significantly larger in violinists; these are precisely the fingers used to make rapid and complex movements in violin playing. In contrast, they observed no enlargement of the areas of the cortex that handle inputs from the right hand, which controls the bow and requires no special finger movements. Nonmusicians do not exhibit these differences. Further, Pantev, now at the Rotman Research Institute at the University of Toronto, reported in 2001 that the brains of professional trumpet players react in such an intensified manner only to the sound of a trumpet--not, for example, to that of a violin.

Musicians also must develop greater ability to use both hands, particularly for keyboard playing. Thus, one might expect that this increased coordination between the motor regions of the two hemispheres has an anatomical substrate. That seems to be the case. The anterior corpus callosum, which contains the band of fibers that interconnects the two motor areas, is larger in musicians than in nonmusicians. Again, the extent of increase is greater the earlier the music lessons began. Other studies suggest that the actual size of the motor cortex, as well as that of the cerebellum--a region at the back of the brain involved in motor coordination--is greater in musicians.

Ode to Joy--or Sorrow
beyond examining how the brain processes the auditory aspects of music, investigators are exploring how it evokes strong emotional reactions. Pioneering work in 1991 by John A. Sloboda of Keele University in England revealed that more than 80 percent of sampled adults reported physical responses to music, including thrills, laughter or tears. In a 1995 study by Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University, 70 percent of several hundred young men and woman polled said that they enjoyed music "because it elicits emotions and feelings." Underscoring those surveys was the result of a 1997 study by Carol L. Krumhansl of Cornell University. She and her co-workers recorded heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and other physiological measures during the presentation of various pieces that were considered to express happiness, sadness, fear or tension. Each type of music elicited a different but consistent pattern of physiological change across subjects.

Until recently, scientists knew little about the brain mechanisms involved. One clue, though, comes from a woman known as I. R. (initials are used to maintain privacy), who suffered bilateral damage to her temporal lobes, including auditory cortical regions. Her intelligence and general memory are normal, and she has no language difficulties. Yet she can make no sense of nor recognize any music, whether it is a previously known piece or a new piece that she has heard repeatedly. She cannot distinguish between two melodies no matter how different they are. Nevertheless, she has normal emotional reactions to different types of music; her ability to identify an emotion with a particular musical selection is completely normal! From this case we learn that the temporal lobe is needed to comprehend melody but not to produce an emotional reaction, which is both subcortical and involves aspects of the frontal lobes.


An imaging experiment in 2001 by Anne Blood and Zatorre of McGill sought to better specify the brain regions involved in emotional reactions to music. This study used mild emotional stimuli, those associated with people's reactions to musical consonance versus dissonance. Consonant musical intervals are generally those for which a simple ratio of frequencies exists between two tones. An example is middle C (about 260 hertz, or Hz) and middle G (about 390 Hz). Their ratio is 2:3, forming a pleasant-sounding "perfect fifth" interval when they are played simultaneously. In contrast, middle C and C sharp (about 277 Hz) have a "complex" ratio of about 8:9 and are considered unpleasant, having a "rough" sound.

What are the underlying brain mechanisms of that experience? PET (positron emission tomography) imaging conducted while subjects listened to consonant or dissonant chords showed that different localized brain regions were involved in the emotional reactions. Consonant chords activated the orbitofrontal area (part of the reward system) of the right hemisphere and also part of an area below the corpus callosum. In contrast, dissonant chords activated the right parahippocampal gyrus. Thus, at least two systems, each dealing with a different type of emotion, are at work when the brain processes emotions related to music. How the different patterns of activity in the auditory system might be specifically linked to these differentially reactive regions of the hemispheres remains to be discovered.

In the same year, Blood and Zatorre added a further clue to how music evokes pleasure. When they scanned the brains of musicians who had chills of euphoria when listening to music, they found that music activated some of the same reward systems that are stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs.

Overall, findings to date indicate that music has a biological basis and that the brain has a functional organization for music. It seems fairly clear, even at this early stage of inquiry, that many brain regions participate in specific aspects of music processing, whether supporting perception (such as apprehending a melody) or evoking emotional reactions. Musicians appear to have additional specializations, particularly hyperdevelopment of some brain structures. These effects demonstrate that learning retunes the brain, increasing both the responses of individual cells and the number of cells that react strongly to sounds that become important to an individual. As research on music and the brain continues, we can anticipate a greater understanding not only about music and its reasons for existence but also about how multifaceted it really is.

Murphy's Law - "If something can go wrong, it will" - is popularly held to underpin many unhappy phenomena, from being caught in rain without an umbrella to tumbling toast landing butter-side down. Orthodox scientific opinion, however, seems to be that Murphy's Law is merely an urban myth based on selective recall of unfavourable outcomes of events which can go either way. So sceptical an attitude has become somewhat harder to maintain following a recent analysis of the tumbling toast phenomenon [1]. This showed that toast sliding off a table or plate is indeed more likely to land butter-side down under a wide range of realistic conditions. Furthermore, it emerged that the origins of the phenomenon can ultimately be traced to the values of fundamental physical constants set shortly after the Big Bang. As well as confirming popular opinion, this result highlights the dangers of dismissing widely-reported phenomena as imaginary, nonsensical or trivial. Uncovering the truth can require detailed experimental and theoretical analysis. In what follows we analyse another widely-experienced manifestation of Murphy's Law: the proliferation of odd socks in drawers. Again, we find that popular experience is confirmed, and that the explanation has surprising depth.


http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/rajm/sockfull.htm

In 1978 Phil Dick wrote an introduction to his anthology, "I hope I shall arrive soon". Here it is in all its glory, sf writing, the universe and and the whole damn thing:

Philip K. Dick - How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later (Essay)
written 1978, from "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" Home

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First, before I begin to bore you with the usual sort of things science fiction writers say in speeches, let me bring you official greetings from Disneyland. I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles from it -- and, as if that were not enough, I once had the honor of being interviewed there by Paris TV.
For several weeks after the interview, I was really ill and confined to bed. I think it was the whirling teacups that did it. Elizabeth Antebi, who was the producer of the film, wanted to have me whirling around in one of the giant teacups while discussing the rise of fascism with Norman Spinrad... an old friend of mine who writes excellent science fiction. We also discussed Watergate, but we did that on the deck of Captain Hook's pirate ship. Little children wearing Mickey Mouse hats -- those black hats with the ears -- kept running up and bumping against us as the cameras whirred away, and Elizabeth asked unexpected questions. Norman and I, being preoccupied with tossing little children about, said some extraordinarly stupid things that day. Today, however, I will have to accept full blame for what I tell you, since none of you are wearing Mickey Mouse hats and trying to climb up on me under the impression that I am part of the rigging of a pirate ship.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. A few years ago, no college or university would ever have considered inviting one of us to speak. We were mercifully confined to lurid pulp magazines, impressing no one. In those days, friends would say me, "But are you writing anything serious?" meaning "Are you writing anything other than science fiction?" We longed to be accepted. We yearned to be noticed. Then, suddenly, the academic world noticed us, we were invited to give speeches and appear on panels -- and immediately we made idiots of ourselves. The problem is simply this: What does a science fiction writer know about? On what topic is he an authority?

It reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just before I flew here. SCIENTISTS SAY THAT MICE CANNOT BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE HUMAN BEINGS. It was a federally funded research program, I suppose. Just think: Someone in this world is an authority on the topic of whether mice can or cannot put on two-tone shoes, derby hats, pinstriped shirts, and Dacron pants, and pass as humans.

Well, I will tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can't claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics which fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly -- and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog's extrapolation was in a sense logical -- given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness.

I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story... which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups -- and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And -- cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe -- and I am dead serious when I say this -- do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating next step to this line of thinking: Parmenides could never have existed because he grew old and died and disappeared, so, according to his own philosophy, he did not exist. And Heraclitus may have been right -- let's not forget that; so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and therefore, according to Heraclitus' philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right, since Parmenides fulfilled the conditions, the criteria, by which Heraclitus judged things real.

I offer this merely to show that as soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately real, you right away begin talk nonsense. Zeno proved that motion was impossible (actually he only imagined that he had proved this; what he lacked was what technically is called the "theory of limits"). David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I see Hume's point. It was all just talk. The solemn philosophers weren't taking what they said seriously.

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real -- that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans -- as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride -- you can have all of them, but none is true.

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.

In Plato's Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?

We would not be aware of this tranformation, since we were not aware that our world was an illusion in the first place. This technically is a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a religion which embraced Jews, Christians, and pagans for several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do. At one time I would have been burned. But some of their ideas intrigue me. One time, when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the Aspects of His Nonexistent Universe, an idea which reduced me to helpless laughter. What kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn't exist, and how can something that doesn't exist have aspects? But then I realized that I'd been writing about these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there is a lot of latitude in what you can say when writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank.

Of course, in science fiction no pretense is made that the worlds described are real. This is why we call it fiction. The reader is warned in advance not to believe what he is about to read. Equally true, the visitors to Disneyland understand that Mr. Toad does not really exist and that the pirates are animated by motors and servo-assist mechanisms, relays and electronic circuits. So no deception is taking place.

And yet the strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title "science fiction" is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star system, as depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of that film never intended for us to believe it. Or did they?

And, more important, if they did intend to state this, is it actually true? That is the issue: not, Does the author or producer believe it, but -- Is it true? Because, quite by accident, in the pursuit of a good yarn, a science fiction author or producer or scriptwriter might stumble onto the truth... and only later on realize it.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.

And -- and I say this as a professional fiction writer -- the producers, scriptwriters, and directors who create these video/audio worlds do not know how much of their content is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an author into correctly labelling his product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label... you cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn't if he himself does not know.

It is an eerie experience to write something into a novel, believing it is pure fiction, and to learn later on -- perhaps years later -- that it is true. I would like to give you an example. It is something that I do not understand. Perhaps you can come up with a theory. I can't.

In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.

Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy - this was after I had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a restauant together, Kathy stopped short and said, "I can't go in." Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. "I have to tell you the truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with him."

Certainly, these are odd coincidences. Perhaps I have precognition. But the mystery becomes even more perplexing; the next stage totally baffles me. It has for four years.

In 1974 the novel was published by Doubleday. One afternoon I was talking to my priest -- I am an Episcopalian -- and I happened to mention to him an important scene near the end of the novel in wich the character Felix Buckman meets a black stranger at an all-night gas station, and they begin to talk. As I described the scene in more and more detail, my priest became progressively more agitated. At last he said, "That is a scene from the Book of Acts, from the Bible! In Acts, the person who meets the black man on the road is named Philip -- your name." Father Rasch was so upset by the resemblance that he could not even locate the scene in his Bible. "Read Acts," he instructed me. "And you'll agree. It's the same down to specific details."

I went home and read the scene in Acts. Yes, Father Rasch was right; the scene in my novel was an obvious retelling of the scene in Acts... and I had never read Acts, I must admit. But again the puzzle became deeper. In Acts, the high Roman official who arrests and interrogates Saint Paul is named Felix -- the same name as my character. And my character Felix Buckman is a high-ranking police general; in fact, in my novel he holds the same office as Felix in the Book of Acts: the final authority. There is a conversation in my novel which very closely resembles a conversation between Felix and Paul.

Well, I decided to try for any further resemblances. The main character in my novel is named Jason. I got an index to the Bible and looked to see if anyone named Jason appears anywhere in the Bible. I couldn't remember any. Well, a man named Jason appears once and only once in the Bible. It is in the Book of Acts. And, as if to plague me further with coincidences, in my novel Jason is fleeing from the authorities and takes refuge in a person's house, and in Acts the man named Jason shelters a fugitive from the law in his house -- an exact inversion of the situation in my novel, as if the mysterious Spirit responsible for all this was having a sort of laugh about the whole thing.

Felix, Jason, and the meeting on the road with the black man who is a complete stranger. In Acts, the disciple Philip baptizes the black man, who then goes away rejoicing. In my novel, Felix Buckman reaches out to the black stranger for emotional support, because Felix Buckman's sister has just died and he is falling apart psychologically. The black man stirs up Buckman's spirits and althought Buckman does not go away rejoicing, at least his tears have stopped falling. He had been flying home, weeping over the death of his sister, and had to reach out to someone, anyone, even a total stranger. It is an encounter between two strangers on the road which changes the life of one of them -- both in my novel and in Acts. And one final quirk by the mysterious Spirit at work: the name Felix is the Latin word for "happy." Which I did not know when I wrote the novel.

A careful study of my novel shows that for reasons which I cannot even begin to explain I had managed to retell several of the basic incidents from a particular book of the Bible, and even had the right names. What could explain this? That was four years ago that I discovered all this. For four years I have tried to come up with a theory and I have not. I doubt if I ever will.

But the mystery had not ended there, as I had imagined. Two months ago I was walking up to the mailbox late at night to mail off a letter, and also to enjoy the sight of Saint Joseph's Church, which sits opposite my apartment building. I noticed a man loitering suspiciously by a parked car. It looked as if he was attempting to steal the car, or maybe something from it; as I returned from the mailbox, the man hid behind a tree. On impulse I walked up to him and asked, "Is anything the mattter?"

"I'm out of gas," the man said. "And I have no money."

Incredibly, because I have never done this before, I got out my wallet, took all the money from it, and handed the money to him. He then shook hands with me and asked where I lived, so that he could later pay the money back. I returned to my apartment, and then I realized that the money would do him no good, since there was no gas station within walking distance. So I returned, in my car. The man had a metal gas can in the trunk of his car, and, together, we drove in my car to an all-night gas station. Soon we were standing there, two strangers, as the pump jockey filled the metal gas can. Suddenly I realized that this was the scene in my novel -- the novel written eight years before. The all-night gas station was exactly as I had envisioned it in my inner eye when I wrote the scene -- the glaring white light, the pump jockey -- and now I saw something which I had not seen before. The stranger who I was helping was black.

We drove back to his stalled car with the gas, shook hands, and then I returned to my apartment building. I never saw him again. He could not pay me back because I had not told him which of the many apartments was mine or what my name was. I was terribly shaken up by this experience. I had literally lived out a scene completely as it had appeared in my novel. Which is to say, I had lived out a sort of replica of the scene in Acts where Philip encounters the black man on the road.

What could explain all this?

The answer I have come up with may not be correct, but it is the only answer I have. It has to do with time. My theory is this: In some certain important sense, time is not real. Or perhaps it is real, but not as we experience it to be or imagine it to be. I had the acute, overwhelming certitude (and still have) that despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.

Parmenides would be proud of me. I have gazed at a constantly changing world and declared that underneath it lies the eternal, the unchanging, the absolutely real. but how has this come about? If the real time is circa A.D. 50, then why do we see A.D. 1978? And if we are really living in the Roman Empire, somewhere in Syria, why do we see the United States?

During the Middle Ages, a curious theory arose, which I will now present to you for what it is worth. It is the theory that the Evil One -- Satan -- is the "Ape of God." That he creates spurious imitations of creation, of God's authentic creation, and then interpolates them for that authentic creation. Does this odd theory help explain my experience? Are we to believe that we are occluded, that we are deceived, that it is not 1978 but A.D. 50... and Satan has spun a counterfeit reality to wither our faith in the return of Christ?

I can just picture myself being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, "What year is it?" And I reply, "A.D. 50." The psychiatrist blinks and then asks, "And where are you?" I reply, "In Judaea." "Where the heck is that?" the psychiatrist asks. "It's part of the Roman Empire," I would have to answer. "Do you know who is President?" the psychiatrist would ask, and I would answer, "The Procurator Felix." "You're pretty sure about this?" the psychiatrist would ask, meanwhile giving a covert signal to two very large psych techs. "Yep," I'd replay. "Unless Felix has stepped down and had been replaced by the Procurator Festus. You see, Saint Paul was held by Felix for --" "Who told you all this?" the psychiatrist would break in, irritably, and I would reply, "The Holy Spirit." And after that I'd be in the rubber room, inside gazing out, and knowing exactly how come I was there.

Everything in that conversation would be true, in a sense, although palpably not true in another. I know perfectly well that the date is 1978 and that Jimmy Carter is President and that I live in Santa Ana, California, in the United States. I even know how to get from my apartment to Disneyland, a fact I can't seem to forget. And surely no Disneyland existed back at the time of Saint Paul.

So, if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable, and all those other good things, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judaea in A.D. 50. The idea of Saint Paul whirling around in the giant teacups wile composing First Corinthians, as Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens -- that just can't be. Saint Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not.

But somehow that biblical material snared my unconscious and crept into my novel, and equally true, for some reason in 1978 I relived a scene which I described back in 1970. What I am saying is this: There is internal evidence in at least one of my novels that another reality, an unchanging one, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change, and somehow, in some way, perhaps to our surprise, we can cut through to it. Or rather, a mysterious Spirit can put us in touch with it, if it wishes us to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes, thousands of years pass, but at the same instant that we see this contemporary world, the ancient world, the world of the Bible, is concealed beneath it, still there and still real. Eternally so.

Shall I go for broke and tell you the rest of this peculiar story? I'll do so, having gone this far already. My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was released by Doubleday in February of 1974. The week after it was released, I had two impacted wisdom teeth removed, under sodium pentathol. Later that day I found myself in intense pain. My wife phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a knock at my door: the delivery person from the pharmacy with the pain medication. Although I was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to answer the knock on the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young woman -- who wore a shining gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. For some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming golden fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign.

"What does that mean?" I asked her.

The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, "This is a sign worn by the early Christians." She then gave me the package of medication.

In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis -- a Greek word meaning, literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.

For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black prisonlike contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation was boundless.

Isn't it odd that this strange event, this recovery of lost memory, occured only a week after Flow My Tears was released? And it is Flow My Tears which contains the replication of people and events from the Book of Acts, which is set at the precise moment in time -- just after Jesus' death and resurrection -- that I remembered, by means of the golden fish sign, as having just taken place?

If you were me, and had this happen to you, I'm sure you wouldn't be able to leave it alone. You would seek a theory that would account for it. For over four years now, I have been trying one theory after another: circular time, frozen time, timeless time, what is called "sacred" as contrasted to "mundane" time... I can't count the theories I've tried out. One constant has prevailed, though, throughout all theories. There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit which has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans, even without their awareness.

In the writing of Flow My Tears, back in 1970, there was one unusual event which I realized at the time was not ordinary, was not a part of the regular writing process. I had a dream one night, an especially vivid dream. And when I awoke I found myself under the compulsion -- the absolute necessity -- of getting the dream into the text of the novel precisely as I had dreamed it. In getting the dream exactly right, I had to do eleven drafts of the final part of the manuscript, until I was satisfied.

I will now quote from the novel, as it appeared in the final, published form. See if this dream reminds you of anything.

The countryside, brown and dry, in summer, where he had lived as a child. He rode a horse, and approaching him on his left a squad of horses nearing slowly. On the horses rode men in shining robes, each a different color; each wore a pointed helmet that sparkled in the sunlight. The slow, solemn knights passed him and as they traveled by he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.
Felix Buckman let them pass; he did not speak to them and they said nothing to him. Together, they all moved toward the house from which he had come. A man had sealed himself up inside the house, a man alone, Jason Taverner, in the silence and darkness, without windows, by himself from now on into eternity. Sitting, merely existing, inert. Felix Buckman continued on, out into the open countryside. And then he heard from behind him one dreadful single shriek. They had killed Taverner, and seeing them enter, sensing them in the shadows around him, knowing what they intended to do with him, Taverner had shrieked.
Within himself Felix Buckman felt absolute and utter desolate grief. But in the dream he did not go back nor look back. There was nothing that could be done. No one could have stopped the posse of varicolored men in robes; they could not have been said no to. Anyhow, it was over. Taverner was dead.
This passage probably does not suggest any particular thing to you, except a law posse exacting judgment on someone either guilty or considered guilty. It is not clear whether Taverner has in fact committed some crime or is merely believed to have committed some crime. I had the impression that he was guilty, but that it was a tragedy that he had to be killed, a terribly sad tragedy. In the novel, this dream causes Felix Buckman to begin to cry, and therefore he seeks out the black man at the all-night gas station.
Months after the novel was published, I found the section in the Bible to which this dream refers. It is Daniel, 7:9:

Thrones were set in place and one ancient in years took his seat. His robe was white as snow and the hair of his head like cleanest wool. Flames of fire were his throne and its wheels blazing fire; a flowing river of fire streamed out before him. Thousands upon thousands served him and myriads upon myriads attended his presence. The court sat, and the book were opened.
The white-haired old man appears again in Revelation, 1:13:
I saw... one like a son of man, robed down to his feet, with a golden girdle round his breast. The hair of his head was white as snow-white wool, and his eyes flamed like fire; his feet gleamed like burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.
And then 1:17:
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me and said, "Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, and I am the living one, for I was dead and now I am alive for evermore, and I hold the keys of Death and Death's domain. Write down therefore what you have seen, what is now, and what will be hereafter."
And, like John of Patmos, I faithfully wrote down what I saw and put in my novel. And it was true, although at the time I did not know who was meant by this description:
... he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.
Indeed he was a king. He is Christ Himself returned, to pass judgment. And this is what he does in my novel: He passes judgment on the man sealed up in darkness. The man sealed up in darkness must be the Prince of Evil, the Force of Darkness. Call it whatever you wish, its time had come. It was judged and condemned. Felix Buckman could weep at the sadness of it, but he knew that the verdict could not be disputed. And so he rode on, without turning or looking back, hearing only the shriek of fear and defeat: the cry of evil destroyed.
So my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as the sections from Acts. Deciphered, my novel tells a quite different story from the surface story (which we need not go into here). The real story is simply this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge rather than victim of unfair judgment. Everything is reversed. The core message of my novel, without my knowing it, was a warning to the powerful: You will shortly be judged and condemned. Who, specifically, did it refer to? Well, I can't really say; or rather would prefer not to say. I have no certain knowledge, only an intuition. And that is not enough to go on, so I will keep my thoghts to myself. But you might ask yourselves what political events took place in this country between February 1974 and August 1974. Ask yourself who was judged and condemned, and fell like a flaming star into ruin and disgrace. The most powerful man in the world. And I feel as sorry for him now as I did when I dreamed that dream. "That poor poor man," I said once to my wife, with tears in my eyes. "Shut up in the darkness, playing the piano in the night to himself, alone and afraid, knowing what's to come." For God's sake, let us forgive him, finally. But what was done to him and all his men -- "all the President's men," as it's put -- had to be done. But it is over, and he should be let out into the sunlight again; no creature, no person, should be shut up in darkness forever, in fear. It is not humane.

Just about the time that Supreme Court was ruling that the Nixon tapes had to be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba Linda, the town in California where Nixon went to school -- where he grew up, worked at a grocery store, where there is a park named after him, and of course the Nixon house, simple clapboard and all that. In my fortune cookie, I got the following fortune:

DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A
WAY OF BECOMING FOUND OUT.
I mailed the slip of paper to the White House, mentioning that the Chinese restaurant was located within a mile of Nixon's original house, and I said, "I think a mistake has been made; by accident I got Mr. Nixon's fortune. Does he have mine?" The White House did not answer.
Well, as I said earlier, an author of a work supposed fiction might write the truth and not know it. To quote Xenophanes another pre-Socratic: "Even if a man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances" (Fragment 34). And Heraclitus added to this: "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself" (Fragment 54). W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, put it: "Things are seldom what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream." The point of all that is that we cannot trust our senses and probably not even our a priori reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who have been blind from birth and are suddenly given sight are amazed to discover that objects appear to get smaller and smaller as they get farther away. Logically, there is no reason for this. We, of course, have come to accept this, because we are use to it. We see objects get smaller, but we know that in actuality they remain the same size. So even the common everyday pragmatic person utilizes a certain amount of sophisticated discounting of what his eyes and ears tell him.

Little of what Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we do have is obscure, but Fragment 54 is lucid and important: "Latent structure is master of obvious structure." This means that Heraclitus believed that a veil lay over the true landscape. He also may have suspected that time was somehow not what it seemed, because in Fragment 52 he said: "Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child's is the kingdom." This is indeed cryptic. But he also said, in Fragment 18: "If one does not expect it, one will not find out the unexpected; it is not to be tracked down and no path leads us to it." Edward Hussey, in his scholarly book The Pre-Socratics, says:

If Heraclitus is to be so insistent on the lack of understanding shown by most men, it would seem only reasonable that he should offer further instructions for penetrating to the truth. The talk of riddle-guessing suggests that some kind of revelation, beyond human control, is necessary... The true wisdom, as has been seen, is closely associated with God, which suggests further that in advancing wisdom a man becomes like, or a part of, God.
This quote is not from a religious book or a book on theology; it is an analysis of the earliest philosophers by a Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Hussey makes it clear that to these early philosophers there was no distinction between philosophy and religion. The first great quantum leap in Greek theology was by Xenophanes of Colophon, born in the mid-sixth century B.C. Xenophanes, without resorting to any authority expect that of his own mind, says:
One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that.
This is a subtle and advanced concept of God, evidently without precedent among the Greek thinkers. "The arguments of Parmenides seemed to show that all reality must indeed be a mind," Hussey writes, "or an object of thought in a mind." Regarding Heraclitus specifically, he says, "In Heraclitus it is difficult to tell how far the designs in God's mind are distinguished from the execution in the world, or indeed how far God's mind is distinguished from the world." The further leap by Anaxagoras has always fascinated me. "Anaxagoras had been driven to a theory of the microstructure of matter which made it, to some extent, mysterious to human reason." Anaxagoras believed that everything was determined by Mind. These were not childish thinkers, nor primitives. They debated serious issues and studied one another's views with deft insight. It was not until the time of Aristotle that their views got reduced to what we can neatly -- but wrongly -- classify as crude. The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level -- call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material. Much of this view reaches us through the Logos doctrine regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.
Thus if God thinks about Rome circa A.D. 50, then Rome circa A.D. 50 is. The universe is not a windup clock and God the hand that winds it. The universe is not a battery-powered watch and God the battery. Spinoza believed that the universe is the body of God extensive in space. But long before Spinoza -- two thousand years before him -- Xenophanes had said, "Effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind" (Fragment 25).

If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.
It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself:
I am the brand name.
Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as:
When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.
It would seem that I not only bring you greetings from Disneyland but from Mortimer Snerd. Such is the fate of an author who hoped to include theological themes in his writing. "The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him." So it goes with noble ambitions. Let's hope God has a sense of humor.
Or should I say, Let's hope the brand name has a sense of humor.

As I said to you earlier, my two preoccupations in my writing are "What is reality?" and "What is the authentic human?" I'm sure you can see by now that I have not been able to answer the first question. I have an abiding intuition that somehow the world of the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from our sight, but available to us by revelation. That is all I can come up with -- a mixture of mystical experience, reasoning, and faith. I would like to say something about the traits of the authentic human, though; in this quest I have had more plausible answers.

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

The power of spurious realities battering at us today -- these deliberately manufactured fakes never penetrate to the heart of true human beings. I watch the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realize, They can't be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child's ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge quantities of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell endless numbers of unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart beats firmly, unreached and unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I turn to them.

One day while my son Christopher, who is four, was playing in front of me and his mother, we two adults began discussing the figure of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Christopher turned toward us for an instant and said, "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." He was playing with a metal lantern which someone had given me, which I had nevel used... and suddenly I realized that the lantern was shaped like a fish. I wonder what thoughts were being placed in my little boy's soul at that moment -- and not placed there by cereal merchants or candy peddlers. "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." Christopher, at four, had found the sign I did not find until I was forty-five years old.

Time is speeding up. And to what end? Maybe we were told that two thousand years ago. Or maybe it wasn't really that long ago; maybe it is a delusion that so much time has passed. Maybe it was a week ago, or even earlier today. Perhaps time is not only speeding up; perhaps, in addition, it is going to end.

And if it does, the rides at Disneyland are never going to be the same again. Because when time ends, the birds and hippos and lions and deer at Disneyland will no longer be simulations, and, for the first time, a real bird will sing.

Thank you.

Today I sat and listened to two albums, one classic, one not-so-classic, that sprung up in 1968..At the same time I skimmed through a book I hadn't read in 35 years -Marshall Mcluhan's "The Medium is the Massage"; his media101inJohnBoormanpsychedelia version of the 1964 tome, "Understanding Media", and I began to realise (after all those words) that there were several forces at work in the late 1960's that ruined what was an accelerated dream of a new media.....In fact there really wasn't a new media at that time, just the dream, because the theorists, Mcluhan included, believed that the new media was self contained in the old media - radio and television and the press.. It must have come as quite a shock to discover that the new media was to come in the form of something smaller than a Motorola, because he forgot that the centripetal force of information contained in old media exploded outward with the invention of the personal computer...
In 1968 the computer was as large as an office and there was no method of communicating across media and the flow of information was inwards whereas today we sit in front of our screens and direct information outwards..Messy, but silently effective!

Oh, by the way the two albums I was listening to were,"The Crazy World of Arthur Brown", a self destructive world that Arthur Brown had invented for himself and the score to "Hair" - still being performed at a high school near you...............

..Information, moves in and out!

As Mcluhan quotes of James Joyce in his "Medium":

"What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. (Joyce 1999: 482.31-483.1)...."

Because yesterday's medium is today's slide show!

Http;//www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/mmp/metaphor.ppt

Our anti-hero sits, despondent. He is alone, both physically and emotionally. He is alienated from his peers. He is fearfully awaiting a punishment for his actions. In desperation, he looks to God for comfort and hope. Instead, his angst overwhelms him, and manifests itself as physical pain. There is no comfort to be found.

Poor Charlie Brown. He waits outside of the principal's office, waiting to hear what will become to him. He offers up a little prayer, but all he gets is a stomach ache.

When we are exposed to something every day we can eventually lose sight of its brilliance. Newspaper readers have been exposed to Charles Schulz's comic strip 'Peanuts' for over half a century. Even now, a few years after Schulz died, many newspapers continue to carry reruns of his strips, and bookstores offer Peanuts collections. His characters are featured in countless advertisements, and every December networks dutifully show the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Is there any philosophical insight that can be gleamed from such a mainstream and common source?

There has been much discussion concerning Peanuts as a voice of conservative Christianity, including several books such as the 1965 work The Gospel According to Peanuts. This is not without reason; even a cursory glance at a Peanuts anthology will reveal enough scripture references to fuel a month's worth of Sunday school classes. However, to suggest that Schulz's philosophical insights didn't make it past the church door would be a mistake. While Schulz had a great interest in the Bible and the teachings of Jesus Christ, he was also highly suspicious of dogmatic pious beliefs. In a 1981 interview, he refused to describe himself as religious, arguing that "I don't know what religious means". Charlie Brown was no comic strip missionary, blandly spreading the word of organized religion. Upon reflection, the trials and tribulations of the little round-headed kid provide deep and moving illustrations of existentialism.

This mixture of Biblical teaching and existential thought is not uncommon. The Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was one of the first existentialists, and his religious beliefs impelled his philosophy, rather than limiting it. Kierkegaard was forced to confront his deeply held belief in the existence of God with the tremendous empty silence that returns from the prayers of humans, and the results were his vital and compelling theories of faith and freedom.

It should also be noted that while Schulz did not consider himself religious, neither did he refer to himself as an existentialist. In fact, he was unfamiliar with the term until the mid 1950s, when he stumbled across a few newspaper articles about Jean-Paul Sartre. He was certainly not formally schooled in philosophical works. And yet, his simple line drawings provide illumination into the questions and problems raised by existentialism.

In order to identify examples of Schulz's philosophy, a bumper-sticker version of existentialism should prove helpful. In his seminal 1946 work L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme, Sartre outlines some of the core aspects of his theories. A key aspect is the idea of abandonment. Kierkegaard felt that there was an unbridgeable gap between God and Man. Sartre goes even further, and argues that even if there is an unknowable and unreachable God, it wouldn't make any difference to the human condition. Ultimately, we exist in an abandoned and free state. We are responsible for our actions, and since Sartre argues that there is no God to conceive of a human nature, we are responsible for our own creation.

How does this apply to Peanuts? Like the existential human in a world of silent or absent deities, Schulz's characters exist in a world of silent or absent adult authority. In fact, the way the strip is drawn (with the child characters taking up most of each frame) actually prevents the presence of any adults. Schulz argued that, were adults added to the strip, the narratives would become untenable. While references are sometimes made to full-grown humans (normally school teachers) these characters are always out of frame, and silent. The children of Peanuts are left to their own devices, to try and understand the world they have found themselves thrust into. They have to turn to each other for support – hence, Lucy's blossoming psychiatric booth (at five cents a session, a very good deal).

An ideal example of abandonment is the relationship between Linus and The Great Pumpkin. Every Halloween, Linus faithfully waits by a pumpkin patch, in the hopes that he will be blessed with the holy experience of a visitation by The Great Pumpkin. Of course, The Great Pumpkin never shows up, and He never answers Linus' letters. Despite this, Linus remains steadfast, even going door to door to spread the word of his absent deity. Does The Great Pumpkin exist? We can never know. But from an existential point of view, it doesn't matter if he exists or not. The important thing is that Linus is abandoned and alone in his pumpkin patch.

Sartre did not deny the existence of God triumphantly. Instead, he considered it "... extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven.". Without God, everything we do as humans is absurd, and without meaning. Certainly, spending all night in a pumpkin patch would qualify as embarrassing as well. In the absence of any parental edicts, the characters in Peanuts have had to become very philosophically minded in order to establish for themselves what is right and wrong. When Linus gets a sliver in his finger, a conflict erupts between Lucy's theological determinism (he is being punished for something he did wrong) and Charlie Brown's philosophical uncertainty (when the sliver falls out, Lucy's position crumbles). At Christmas time, Linus dictates a letter to Santa, questioning the validity of Santa's ethical judgments regarding the goodness or badness of the individual child. "What is good? What is bad?" asks Linus. Good questions.

Another key aspect comes from this monstrous freedom that abandonment allows, and this aspect is despair. In a nutshell, we are created by our actions. We are responsible for our actions. Therefore, we are responsible for our creation. What we are is the sum total of what we have done, nothing more and nothing less. But why should this cause despair? To answer this, Sartre examines the characteristics of cowardice and bravery. When Sartre describes the position that opposes his own, we can see how it may be comforting to not be responsible for one's creation:

    If you are born cowards, you can be quite content, you can do nothing about it and you will be cowards all your life whatever you do; and if you are born heroes you can again be quite content; you will be heroes all your life, eating and drinking heroically. Whereas the existentialist says that the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always the possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero.
    (Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism 1957)

It is this very possibility that causes despair. Why does Charlie Brown tear himself into knots over the little red-haired girl? The very possibility that he could go over and talk to her is far more distressing than its impossibility would be; he must take ownership of his failure. When she is the victim of a bully in the school yard, Charlie Brown's despair threatens to leap right off the comic page. He isn't suffering because he can't help her, but because he could help her, but won't: "Why can't I rush over there and save her? Because I'd get slaughtered, that's why..." When Linus helps her out instead, thereby illustrating his freedom of action, Charlie Brown only becomes more melancholic.

In order to combat despair, Charlie Brown succumbs to bad faith, which is to say, he denies his freedom: "I wonder what would happen if I went over and tried to talk to her! Everybody would probably laugh ... she'd probably be insulted too ..." It is only by falsely denying his freedom that Charlie Brown can overcome his despair. But by hiding behind bad faith, he does himself no favours. Another lunch hour is spent alone on a bench with a peanut butter sandwich.

Existence is problematic and disturbing. In one weekend strip, Schulz succinctly describes the horror of discovering one's own existence in the world:

    Linus: I'm aware of my tongue ... It's an awful feeling! Every now and then I become aware that I have a tongue inside my mouth, and then it starts to feel lumped up ... I can't help it ... I can't put it out of my mind. ... I keep thinking about where my tongue would be if I weren't thinking about it, and then I can feel it sort of pressing against my teeth ...

Sartre devoted an entire book to this experience – his 1938 novel Nausea in which his character Roquentin is alarmed to discover his own actuality. But Linus sums the point up very well in a few frames.

Existentialism has been accused of being defeatist and depressing (and Sartre didn't help his cause with terms like 'abandonment', 'despair', and 'nausea'). But Peanuts also demonstrates the optimism of the philosophy. Why does Charlie Brown continue to go out to the pitcher's mound, despite his 50 year losing streak? Why try to kick the football, when Lucy has always pulled it away at the last second? Because there is an infinite gap between the past and the present. Regardless of what has come before, there is always the possibility of change. Monstrous freedom is a double edged sword. We exist, and are responsible. This is both liberating and terrifying.

Schulz should be considered part of the generation of authors who saw active duty during World War II; he is in the company of writers such as Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and of course Sartre himself. It is foolish to disregard literature simply because it appears in the funnies section of the daily paper. Schulz's simple line drawings and blocky letters contain as much information about the human condition as entire shelves full of dry books.

While it is difficult to say what Sartre would have thought of Peanuts, we do know what Schulz thought of Sartre: "I read about him in the New York Times, where he said it was very difficult to be a human being, and the only way to fight against it is to lead an active life – that's very true." If any character has shown us the difficulties in existence, it is Charlie Brown

n a dusty town
a clock struck high noon,
Two men stood face to face.
One wore black and one wore white,

But of fear there wasn't a trace.
Two hundred years later

two hot rods drag race
through the very same place,
And a half a million people,
moved in to pick up the pace.
A factory full of people,
Makin' parts to go to outer space.

A train load of people,
They were aimin' for another place.
Out of town people.


There's a man in the window
with a big cigar,
Says everything's for sale.
The house and the boat
and the railroad car.
The owner's gotta go to jail.

He acquired these things
from a life of crime,
Now he's selling them
to raise his bail.

He was rippin' off the people.
Sellin' guns to the underground.
Tryin' to help the people,
Lose their ass
for a piece of ground.

Rippin' off the people.
Skimmin' the top when
there was no one around.
Tryin' to help the people.



He was dealing antiques
in a hardware store,
But he sure had a lot to hide.
He had a backroom full
of the guns of war,
And a ton of ammunition besides.

Well, he walked with a cane,
Kept a bolt on the door
with five pit bulls inside.
Just a warning to the people,
Who might try to break in at night.
Protection from the people,
Selling safety
in the darkest night.

Tryin' to help the people.
Get the drugs
to the street all right.

Ordinary people.

Well, it's hard to say
where a man goes wrong,
Might be here
and it might be there.
What starts out weak
might get too strong,
If you can't tell foul from fair.

But it's hard to judge
from an angry throng,
Of hands stretched into the air.
The vigilante people.
Takin' law into their own hands.
Conscientious people.
Crackin' down on
the druglord's land.

Government people.
Confiscatin' all
the dealer's land.
Patch-of-ground people.

Down at the factory,
they're puttin' new windows in.
The vandals made a mess of things,
And the homeless
just walked right in.
Well, they worked here once,
and they live here now,
But they might work here again,

They're ordinary people.
And they're livin' in a nightmare.
Hard workin' people.

And they don't know
how they got there.

Ordinary people.

And they think that you don't care.
Hard workin' people.
Down on the assembly line,
they keep puttin'
the same thing out.
But the people today,
they just ain't buyin'.

Nobody can figure it out.

Well, they try like hell
to build a quality end,
They're workin' hard
without a doubt,

They're ordinary people.
And the dollar's
what it's all about.

Hard workin' people.
But the customers are walkin' out.

Lee Iacocca people.
Yeah, they look
but they just don't buy.

Hard workin' people.

Two out of work models
and a fashion slave,
Try to dance away
the Michelob night.
The bartender poured
himself another drink,
While two drunks sat
watchin' the fight.
The champ went down,
then he got up again,
And then he went out like a light.

He was fightin' for the people,
But his timing wasn't right.

For Las Vegas people,
Who came to see a Las Vegas fight.
High rollin' people,
Takin' limos
though the neon night.
Fightin' for the people.

And then a new Rolls Royce
and a company car,
They went flyin' down the street.
Each one tryin'
to make it to the gate,
Before employees manned the fleet.

The trucks full of products
for the modern home,
Set to roll out into the street,
Of downtown people,
Tryin' to make their way to work.

Nose-to-the-stone people,

Some are saints, and some are jerks.
Hard workin' people,
Stoppin' for a drink
on the way to work.

Alcoholic people,
Yeah, they're takin' it
one day, one day at a time.

Out on the railroad track,
they're cleanin' up number 9.
They're scrubbin' the boiler down,
well, she really is lookin' fine.
Ah, she's lookin' so good,
they're gonna
bring her back on line.

Ordinary people.
They're gonna bring
the good things back.
Nose-to-the stone people.
Put the business back on track.

Ordinary people,
I got faith in the regular kind.
Hard workin' people.

Patch-of-ground people.

Neil Young

Somehow how or other the thought that a piece of music exists outside of a context seems to be not only silly but a fallacy that leads one to believe that all music is idealistic,if not epiphenomenal. Every piece of music we hear in a concert hall has been constructed - within a society, within a framework, within the mind and the hand of the composer who LIVED. It's all to easy to believe that we can listen without intention but we are ALWAYS listening with intention - with regard to the signposts that make music credible. A programme note is more than a guideline, it actually draws us to the music like a cartographer and a map and although we musn't confuse the map with the territory we also like the map to show us where to go and sometimes how to go.
It is an aide memoire, a gentle reminder that the past is in the music and the music is (perhaps) in the past.

It is pride that makes us stop before the programme note. we do not know everything and every day I find out new things about music, not just by listening but by reading