Frederick Turner’s Blog

That, in my humble opinion, is Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki mines all human myths, all genres, even our dreams. His peaceful flooded landscapes–Spirited Away, Ponyo–are the landscapes of the physical soul, where we can see the prehistoric fish of our own dreadful and beautiful submarine powers swimming calmly below the surface of consciousness. One third of our lives is lived below that surface anyway–the flooded landscape is everyday reality seen truly. Powerful and charming as Avatar is, Cameron’s philosophical imagination as regards nature, the environment, and the human role as technologist and maker is utterly outdone by Miyazaki’s The Princess Mononoke. Howl’s Moving Castle is as sophisticated a study of human sexual relationships, aging, war, and spiritual power as any current mainstream novel. And the animation is great art, amazingly fabricated out of the most vulgar materials of anime and children’s stories.

It’s very interesting that the best art of our time is very often in genres regarded by our elites as childish. What is going on?

I sent this little book–which contains my thinking about how natural law, both moral and legal, might be revived and put to use in the chaos following modernist and postmodernist attempts to generate binding principles of human conduct–to two publishers, one conservative, one liberal. The conservative one politely turned it down, though it had come recommended by a leading conservative intellectual. The liberal one offered me a contract and sent me a small advance. The publisher, however, overruled her very liberal editors because she found ideas in the book that she could not stomach. So I figured the book probably has things to say that might be of value and interest to the public at large. Here it is, then.

The “rinse and repeat” instruction line on shampoo bottles is a beautiful illustration of the tight interconnection of self-inclusion paradoxes, time, quotation marks, levels of abstraction, consciousness, and the evolution of the universe.

Very few people are found dead in showers, their heads rotted away by infinitely iterated applications of shampoo. But the instruction line on the bottle would if followed literally lead to this deplorable result. Idiots, we know, don’t know when to stop. Computers are brilliant idiots; every time one freezes, it is because it has run across the equivalent of the instruction line and gotten itself into an infinite feedback loop.

In fact it is difficult to see how the line could be amended to avoid the error. If one added “Stop” to the end of the line, the idiot (acting as a Turing Machine) might go on repeating forever and never get to the “Stop” instruction. Or if one added before the repeat command “stop after two repetitions”, the idiot might take the injunction to repeat as applying to the reading of the instructions as well as the lathering process, and on returning to the instructions would read, again, “Stop after two repetitions”, and reset its counter obediently to two. If it had a counter. And if it didn’t simply crash as a result of getting two contradictory commands.

A counter is one level up in abstraction; it implies an overview of the process, a summing-up rather than just the execution of the process. But even a simple counter won’t work in this case, as we have seen. Another level is required, to recognize and solve the self-inclusion paradox. The paradox is similar to Russell’s famous paradox of the village barber who shaves everybody in the village who doesn’t shave himself. Who shaves the barber? The issue is whether the command “repeat” applies to itself or not, and whether, if it does, its efficacy somehow ceases after the first iteration. Gödel’s even more intractable paradox, “This statement is unprovable”, contains the same implication, of a self-nested logic that goes on unendingly: “This statement: ‘This statement: “This statement: ‘….’ is unprovable” is unprovable’ is unprovable.”

The simplest components of the physical universe, quantum events, don’t seem to have a “repeat” command, which is what you need to have any kind of coherent time. But the moment enough of them reach a consensus to repeat, classical matter is born, and with it time as we know it. In the competition for survival in time between repeaters and non-repeaters, repeaters of course win, but they do so by idiotically repeating themselves into the future, rinsing and repeating, generating the next moment’s version of themselves as fast as time will allow as described by Planck’s constant.

It was only when higher forms of computational difficulty arose, from whose perspective mere repetition could be recognized and put a stop to when system survival dictated it, that higher forms of matter, especially living matter, and quintessentially conscious living matter, could begin to appear.

Which is why, except when we default to the old logic of OCD, we don’t go on lathering up.

There is now a better version of my Tang anthology.  I hope this works.

I am uploading my collection of Tang period poetry in translation as a gift to my Chinese friends and to lovers of poetry everywhere. It is a unique translation among the many that have been attempted, since it is the only one that tries to reproduce the metrical form and sound and cadence of the original. The introduction explains how I accomplished this, how I worked with my very fine collaborator, a Chinese scholar, and something about the background and authorship of these extraordinarily beautiful poems.

See the page listed on the right.

Hot Days in Vietnam
A Travel Journal

Tokyo Narita Airport 7/6/09

So maybe old men ought to be explorers;
I sit among the naïve Nippon young
On my quixotic journey to Hanoi,
Hearing the birdsong of another tongue.

What are you searching for, for all these years?
Perhaps that ancient gasp of wonder you
Gave when you saw at dawn Ascension rise
Over the ocean sixty years ago.

The rain-clouds clear toward the West as we
Climb in pursuit of the still-fleeing sun.
This strange long day is like my restless life
Unending, but as always re-begun.

Cockcrow in Hanoi 7/7/09

Jetlag’s luxurious exhaustion shows
The city in its frank and open light.
The foolish fowl cries what he always knows
And the old man takes up the work of sight.

An Asian city under the monsoon,
A little French, with wrought iron and croissants,
Some new construction, hooting of a horn;
Again he must give himself up to chance.

What else has he to give his gentle hosts?
Somehow he left his poetry at home.
He must have given over all his ghosts,
To shape his life once more into a poem.

The River of People 7/8/09

At dawn the shutters open and the coals
Streetside glow under pots of pho,
Fig-roots, festoons of wire clog the poles,
On tiny stools folk eat before they go.

A maiden in a cone hat balances
Seventy pounds of melons in two pans;
Nothing’s as elegant as her passage is.
Fresh basil’s stuffed in empty coffee-cans.

Now motorcycles pour down Le Thai To
In a fresh torrent of humanity;
Young and clear-skinned, enthroned, they do not know
How perilous a single slip would be.

How could we have made war on such as these?
How could their parents think we meant them ill?
What fire is in these gentle Vietnamese?
What use to them is my delayed goodwill?

The Pale-faced Lady and the Full Moon 7/8/09

Our hostess sees, at dinner, my distress.
It is the night when Buddhists go to pray.
She leads us to the shrine. A dark recess
Holds a gold Buddha, seeming far away.

He glows against the crimson temple wall,
His lips composed in something like a smile
Of infinite compassion for us all—
I stand quite tame and humble for a while;

And then we turn a corner, and nearby,
Under the white moon’s blaze of bluish light
The old cathedral rises to the sky
As if its pillaged stones yearned to take flight.

One is a dwelling, one a pointing spire;
But they are neighbors, red shrine and the white.
One knows the root of suffering is desire;
One knows the fruit of suffering is light.

The Women of Vietnam 7/9/09

The singers in their purple silks so sway
As these green willows do in the warm wind.
Their slim hands modestly give all away,
Their voices, shrill as birds, are unrestrained.

Dawn in Halong Bay 7/10/09

A flock of dove-grey clouds drifts slowly through
A primrose sky that fades to eggshell blue.
A darker flock of islands silently
Lies on the levels of the silver sea.

The Poets 7/10/09 (for Hoang and Kha and Cuong)

Through all the politics, through all the grief
Of life, their tragic clownish faces smile,
Because they bear the great gift of belief
In a sweet hard truth that defies denial.

Partying 7/11/09

This road-trip’s getting stranger by the minute;
Suddenly we’ve all turned into hams.
Music breaks out—who knows what will begin it?—
The boss’s gorgeous daughter feeds me clams.

We’re lighting incense at a dead man’s shrine,
We’re scribbling poems in a traffic-jam;
We’re eating Haiphong squid with white moonshine,
We’re home now in poetic Vietnam.

Goodbye, Goobye 7/12/09

My poet friends come out to see me off.
Two of them fought us forty years ago.
To make us brothers, maybe it’s enough
To see a brave man’s simple tears flow.

I’m off to Hanoi tomorrow, to meet some old and dear acquaintances in the world of literature. I will be back in a week or so, and will blog it then.

If you happen to be in New York June 11-28 my play “Shooting Fish in a Barrel” is being performed on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays as one of 20 very very short plays by the Medicine Show (including 15 real zingers by William Saroyan). Here’s the announcement.

MEDICINE SHOW presents
MAKING MONEY
AND NINETEEN OTHER VERY SHORT PLAYS
by WILLIAM SAROYAN,
a belated WORLD PREMIERE

- fifteen of the original 20 plays, with works written especially for these performances
by Kitty Chen, John Gruen, Lella Heins, Brian Murphy, Frederick Turner

Making Money, and Nineteen Other Very Short Plays, by William Saroyan, with additional playlets by contemporary authors Kitty Chen, John Gruen, Lella Heins, Brian Murphy and Frederick Turner. Opens Thursday June 11 at 8:30, all other performances 8:00 pm, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday through June 28. Tickets are $18; you can charge them at www.smarttix.com or by calling 212 868-4444. No one is turned away for lack of the ticket price; if you need a hard times special, call the theatre at 212 262-4216.

Though Saroyan’s series of plays was published in 1969, and probably written in the early 60s, they have never been produced before, so this is a belated WORLD PREMIERE. They are a free-wheeling look at American society from a comically skeptical perspective; and embody a time between the horrors of WWII and the Korean War and before the escalation in Vietnam. It was a time of restlessness, when the adult population was stuck in their ways and the youth trusted no one over 30. Saroyan’s plays question the belief system imposed upon the “common man.” They see us all as stumbling toward some kind of truth.

WILLIAM SAROYAN: His play The Time of Your Life (1939) won a Pulitzer Prize, which he refused on the grounds that commerce should not judge the arts; he did accept the Drama Critics Circle Award. Serving with an army film unit in WWII, Saroyan narrowly avoided a court martial when his novel, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, was seen as advocating pacifism. His major novel The Human Comedy led to a disastrous film adventure at MGM, and he remained one of the bad boys of American literature. Some other works are The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, Places Where I’ve Done Time (novels), My Heart’s in the Highlands, Hello Out There, The Agony of Little Nations, The Cave Dwellers.

Making Money, and Nineteen Other Very Short Plays are again remarkably relevant. Saroyan wrote them out of the same period that led to the experimental theatre of the sixties. Medicine Show’s Artistic Director, Barbara Vann, who was also a founding member of the Open Theatre, says “We developed visual and vocal theatre techniques because we distrusted the word; we believed everyone in the ‘establishment’ was telling us lies.” Medicine Show presents fifteen of the original 20 plays, with contemporary works that were written especially for these performances.

Making Money, and Nineteen Other Very Short Plays – June 11, 8:30; June 12-14; 18-21; 25-28 all at 8:00 pm. Cast: Candice Fortin, Félix Gardón, Jason Alan Griffin, Beth Griffith, Renée Hermiz, Norma Hernandez, Richard Keyser, Eva Nicole, Ward Nixon, Ariel Pacheco, Henri Reiss-NaVarre, Charles J. Roby, Peter Tedeschi, Greg Vorob.

Tickets $18; charge them at www.smarttix.com or 212 868-4444, or make a phone reservation at 212 262-4216 (cash or check.) 549 West 52nd Street, 3rd Floor (between 10th & 11th Aves.)

I’ve just finished reading a novel–Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, a very talented British novelist. It came heavily recommended by much admired literary friends, and it tries to do something that I believe few mainline fiction works do at all. That is, engage really major philosophical/scientific/social issues in a way that enlists and expands the very form of the novel itself. The fact that they don’t is the reason why I don’t read contemporary mainline fiction much at all–that, and the related problem that I never meet characters that I’d really like to know and be proud to know.

I mostly read science fiction, which almost always engages major issues, often in original ways, and sometimes has characters I respect and whose inner lives I actually don’t mind exploring. It’s not that I don’t think contemporary mainline fiction writers are stupid (though they’re very often pretty ignorant about anything except fiction writing and the stuff they researched for their novel); it’s just that I don’t see why the author has to have a monopoly on the intelligence and originality in a book. Shakespeare, by contrast, created characters that may have been even smarter than Shakespeare himself–Hamlet, Falstaff, Rosalind, Cleopatra.

Cloud Atlas is stylistically a tour de force–it’s made up of six interwoven stories, each in a different genre, and ranging in setting, style, language and worldview from the nineteenth century to several hundred years in the future. I suppose one could call it science-fiction overall, but only two of the stories are in that form (and those are profoundly different from each other–an account of a pre-execution interview in Korea and a first-person tribal tale from a last survivor of a technological apocalypse). The other forms he uses are the nineteenth century traveler’s journal, the British epistolary novel, the American West Coast conspiracy thriller, and the comic media anecdote. What’s especially interesting is that the tales begin in order of time, and then are completed in reverse temporal order, creating a chiastic or palindromic sort of shape.

With these fine technical devices, and the grand theme of the destruction of civilization by human greed, we have the ingredients of something very special. But the novel fails and disappoints, for many reasons. It has the same ignorance of economics, political science, natural science, and technology that marks most contemporary writers and artists. It demonizes the business corporation in a way that is becoming a weary cliche. It is simply superstitious about nuclear technology in a way that is already dated–these days it is coal that is the villain, not nuclear–and proposes using biotech to darken people’s skin as a protection against radiation, for instance. But worse–it seems to want to have the fading cachet of existentialist angst while sentimentally weaving in a spiritual message embodied in a miraculous birthmark suggesting a mysterious providence–a providence that is signally ineffective, since the “good” characters are as helpless against the western phallocentric colonialist capitalist villains as fish in a barrel.

An author who takes on major world historical themes owes it to his audience to do his homework, which Mitchell has not done. Science fiction writers are often pretty ignorant of economics, business, finance, etc–who invests in those splendid starships and pays the workers and votes for the project and staves off the political opposition?–but usually they know their science, and create characters that know something too, and can win the reader’s respect for that at least. I think Mitchell has a chance of becoming a great novelist if he takes ten years and some graduate courses in his missing disciplines, and reads a list of great books in the natural and social sciences.

I’ve been thinking recently that maybe there’s an elegant way of describing Time simply as difficulty. Mathematicians now have a charmingly naive term, “hardness,” for describing the relative knottiness of a calculation problem. If asked to give an explanation to a layperson, they will often say something like: “Well, suppose you had a perfect computer. A hard problem takes it more time to solve than an easy one.” If you have a problem like the “traveling salesman” puzzle–given n cities, how do you figure out the shortest route by which he can visit all of them–it’s really easy if you have three or even five cities, but if you have a few hundred, no computer in the universe, using the fastest theoretical algorithm, could solve it in less than a billion years, by which time the salesman would long ago have moldered into atoms. These algorithms are called “NP hard.” There are even more difficult problems still, ones that ask, for instance, whether it is possible to prove whether or not a given problem has an algorithm to solve it at all–i.e. problems that can only be solved by the emergence of as-yet-undiscovered further problems that will require unimaginable algorithms of the future if they are to be solved.

If we describe the universe as a computational system–and the fact that all science expresses its conclusions in numerical terms strongly suggests that science “votes with its feet” for that hypothesis–then we can see all entities in the universe as the workings of problem-solving algorithms. The ones that are easily solved have been solved already and have stopped, and constitute the eternal constants of physics that are true at every instant through all time, like the instantaneous coexistence of the probabilistic quantum world described by David Bohm. The ones that are a bit harder but still solvable are the deterministic processes in nature that Newtonian science describes. The ones left over constitute the whole world of change and becoming, ranging from chemical reactions through self-cloning living organisms to ourselves, arranged in a nice pyramid of emergent temporal features as described by the great philosopher J. T. Fraser.

If time is a river, there would be nothing to indicate the passage of time unless some parts of the river were flowing faster than other parts. “Hardness” gives us a nice way of measuring which ones are faster and which ones are slower.

Here’s a nice thought-experiment to prove this idea. The increase of entropy (thermal disorder) is usually recognized by physicists as a reliable marker of the passage of time. Thermal disorder is what we call heat. If I am right, a large amount of local computation should be the same thing as a large amount of local time; and a large amount of time should be correlated with an increase of heat. If you are using a laptop, and it’s actually on your lap, you can feel the heat of computation generating time on your thighs.