[Vian's] heightened sense of the absurd reached its apotheosis when he joined the Collège de pataphysique, a prestigious circle of French writers and academics studying pataphysics, a virtual science invented at the end of the 19th century by the author Alfred Jarry.

They held absurd honours ceremonies with strange decorations. Vian was promoted to Transcendent Satrap, in charge of the Extraordinary Commission on Clothing. Along with illustrious French names like Raymond Queneau, Eugène Ionesco and Jacques Prévert, they engaged in serious, scientific discussion of stupid ideas, such as crossing Paris using land tides in a boat made of small holes.

“I am applying myself to thinking about things that I think people will not think about,” Vian said in a radio recording…

Emphasis mine, because it’s a great credo to live by. Thanks to Tosh Berman for the tip on this article and for turning me on to Boris Vian. We should all be so lucky as to cross Paris using land tides in a boat made of small holes.

The article continues:

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

That right there almost seems like a neurological explanation for the invention of religion (and art): The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.”

Read the full article — it goes on to cite a study where a group of test subjects who first read “The Country Doctor” by Kafka performed a letter-string matching test 30 percent better than a control group that read a more linear non-Kafka story.

This latest quest by science is trying to show that “nonsense makes sense”, which, paradoxically, would make it non-nonsense, right?

Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories [or religion -- a weeping Virgin Mary statue, anyone?], for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

That’s too bad — John Cage should be added to the school curriculum regardless of the prematurity of these findings.

Uh-oh, I feel the grip of the uncanny overcoming me as I type. Will the urge for odor satisfy itself with me?

Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.

I’ll think to that, ye uncanny drinkers!

Here is the editor’s introduction to the short short stories published in the New Yorker:

Born in St. Petersburg in 1905, Daniil Kharms was one of the founders, in 1928, of OBERIU, or Association of Real Art, an avant-garde group of writers and artists who embraced the ideas of the Futurists and believed that art should operate outside the rules of logic. In his lifetime, Kharms produced several works for children, but his writing for adults was not published. In 1931, Kharms was charged with anti-Soviet activities and briefly exiled from Leningrad. In 1941, he was arrested by the N.K.V.D. for making “defeatist statements”; sentenced to incarceration in the psychiatric ward of a prison hospital, he died of starvation the following year, during the siege of Leningrad. It wasn’t until the late nineteen-seventies that Kharms’s playful and poetic work began to appear in mainstream publications in Russia. Several books followed, as did festivals in Kharms’s honor and critical comparisons to Beckett, Camus, and Ionesco. The following texts have never been published in English.

Each of the pieces in the New Yorker is only at most a handful of paragraphs long. Here is one of my favorite passages, written in 1932-33, which eloquently describes and issue I deal with all the time in my own work — remembering ideas long enough to get them down on paper:

I suddenly had the impression that I had forgotten something, some incident or important word.

I painstakingly tried to remember this word, and it seemed to me that it began with the letter “M.” No, no! Not with an “M” at all but with an “R.”

Reason? Rapture? Rectangle? Rib? Or: Mind? Misery? Matter?

I was making coffee and singing to myself all the words that started with “R.” Oh, what a tremendous number of words I made up beginning with the letter “R”! Perhaps among them was that one word, but I didn’t recognize it, taking it to be the same as all the others.

Then again, perhaps that word didn’t come up.

Notes the Wikipedia entry on Kharms (italics are mine):

In 1928, Daniil Kharms founded the avant-garde collective OBERIU, or Union of Real Art. He embraced the new movements of Russian Futurism laid out by his idols, Khlebnikov, Kazimir Malevich, and Igor Terentiev, among others. Their ideas served as a springboard. His aesthetic centered around a belief in the autonomy of art from real world rules and logic, and the intrinsic meaning to be found in objects and words outside of their practical function.

By the late 1920s, his antirational verse, nonlinear theatrical performances, and public displays of decadent and illogical behavior earned Kharms—who always dressed like an English dandy with a calabash pipe—the reputation of being a talented but highly eccentric “fool” or “crazy-man” in Leningrad cultural circles.

Notes the Wikipedia entry on the OBERIU group:

The great Russian artist Kazimir Malevich gave the OBERIU shelter in his newly created arts institute for a while, letting them rehearse in one of the auditoriums. It is reported that he said to the young “Oberiuty” (as they are called in Russian): “You are young trouble makers, and I am an old one. Let’s see what we can do.” Malevich also gifted a book of his own (“God Is Not Cast Down”) to one of the founders of OBERIU (Daniil Kharms), with the relevant inscription “Go and stop progress!”.

Go and stop progress! Beautiful.

From the Wikipedia article on Lettrism:

Lettrism (also referred to as Letterism) was an artistic style pursuing the hyper-minimalist refinement of art to its simplest and purest form. According to Jean-Paul Curtay in La Poesie Lettriste (Paris 1974), it was created in 1942 in Romania by Isidore Isou, when he was only sixteen years old. Lettrism was a response to what the Lettrists saw as Andr? Breton’s control of Surrealism, as well as an attempt to make poetry more popular. The Lettrists worked in a variety of forms including sound as well as graphic arts involving letters. Isou noted that Dadaism had chiseled art down to the word, while Lettrism was intended to refine it to the letter (hence its name). While Dada took art to a simple and implausible form, Lettrism aimed to refine it even more to its initial form. The stark simplicity of Lettrist art, while still very much abstract, stood in contrast to the sometimes meandering Surrealist movement; but both shared their roots in Dada.

Think about this next time you reach for another pot of joe to help you muddle through a particularly complex problem.

Of course, people are different from spiders, so the worst you might experience from coffee is

…restlessness, nervousness, excitement, insomnia, flushed face, diuresis, muscle twitching, rambling flow of thought and speech, cardiac arrhythmia or tachycardia, and psychomotor agitation, gastrointestinal complaints, increased blood pressure, rapid pulse, vasoconstriction (tightening or constricting of superficial blood vessels) sometimes resulting in cold hands or fingers, increased amounts of fatty acids in the blood, an increased production of gastric acid…mania, depression, lapses in judgment, disorientation, loss of social inhibition, delusions, hallucinations and psychosis….”

Then again, how bad can it be for you if your company brews it and your boss encourages you to consume all the free coffee you want?

Drink up!

About the only place I saw English used consistently was on T-shirts worn by young people, and (as Japanophiles here are well aware) this was a weird, jabberwocky form of English. “Don’t mess with juicy,” read one shirt. “Hurry up the cakes,” read another.

After a while, I began to collect these slogans in my journal. They were, I thought, a peculiarly addictive form of poetry:

“Why waste lucky?”

“Oh my goodness. Don’t scully me.”

“Mischievous blue rabbit skunk.”

“Oranges now!”

(My guess is that if a Japanese speaker saw the kanji characters tattooed on ankles and shoulder blades all over America, he’d find them equally nonsensical.)

Mute mammals being evacuated in the face of oncoming wildfire near Carson City, Nevada a few days ago.

HALBERSTADT, Germany — A relative rush of activity broke out this week in the world’s slowest and longest lasting concert as two new notes sounded in a piece of music that is taking a total 639 years to perform in its entirety.

The mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992) is entitled “organ2/ASLSP” or “As SLow aS Possible”. The performance began nearly three years ago on September 5, 2001, and is scheduled to last until 2639.

The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord — G-sharp, B and G-sharp — not sounding until February 2, 2003.

But things really got going yesterday as two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded.

The could be the soundtrack for The Long Now Foundation.

In A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books, 1988), Stephen Hawking tells the story of an elderly woman who confronted Bertrand Russell at the end of a lecture on orbital mechanics, claiming she had a theory superior to his. “We don’t live on a ball revolving around the Sun,” she said, “we live on a crust of earth on the back of a giant turtle.” Wishing to humor the woman Russell asked, “And what does this turtle stand on?” “On the back of a second, still larger turtle,” was her confident answer. “But what holds up the second turtle?” he persisted, now in a slightly exasperated tone. “It’s no use, young man,” the old woman replied, “it’s turtles all the way down.”

Stephen Hawking in BriefHistoryOfTime starts with the same anecdote. A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady atthe back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a gianttortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What isthe tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,”said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”

A Brief History of Time begins with a striking image and a wonderful true story: An elderly lady attended a public lecture given by an astrophysicist on how the Earth goes around the Sun and how the Sun circles about with countless other stars in our galaxy the Milky Way. During the question and answer session, the woman stood up and told the distinguished scientist that his lecture was nonsense, that the Earth is a flat disk supported on the back of an enormous tortoise. The scientist tried to outwit the lady by asking, “Well, my dear, what supports the tortoise?” To which she replied, “You’re a very clever young man, but not clever enough. It’s turtles all the way down!”

Spalding (speaks): Well I’m certainly grateful for this magnificent washout, eh, turnout, and, eh,
now I’d like to say a few words…
(sings) Hello, I must be going.
I cannot stay, I came to say I must be going.
I’m glad I came, but just the same I must be going.

Mrs. Rittenhous: For my sake you must stay.
If you should go away, you’ll spoil this party I am throwing.

Spalding: I’ll stay a week or two.
I’ll stay the summer through.
But I am telling you that I must be going.

Mrs. Rittenhous: Before you go will you oblige us
and tell us of your deeds so glowing?

Spalding: I’ll do anything you say.
In fact, I’ll even stay!

All: Good!

Spalding: But I must be going.

IN OTHER NEWS: Reader Bill Coffin shared with me a lovely advertising leaflet from Croatia. It began with a quote from Alain Dover, a person known neither to Coffin nor me:

“During the day, into an incomparable marine scenery, which is a live and genuine ‘pastime’. When the stars come closer by, a sweet fragrance is gently touched by the saltish of the surrounding seawaters: ‘lovers do vibrate’ while the mermaids lull a song into this marvelous ancient sea.”

Almost Prufrockian, isn’t it? But there’s more:

“As the Alain Dover’s rhyme says (the artists wanted to stop at the legendary ‘Capri’ restaurant). An ambiance genuine plus full of life. Among the joyful people’s whispers, large and equipped rooms, verandah by the sea within restaurant, fragrances and flavours made of an enchanting cuisine and pizzeria . . . (Not to be forgotten, prices are contained toward rigorous quality, thanks to a smart management) . . .

“At the evening, a slender smooth music discreetly is played when the moonlight beams out. Saturday night ‘dance.’ Trustfully recognized under every profile.”

Slender music! Fragrant stars! I’m so there.

One can only imagine the ambiance of the joyful people’s whispers at the Saturday night “dance.”

The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the ’50s and the ’60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made — from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late ’60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy — you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the ’60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society — the society of contemporaries.

And more a little later:

The main thing is Americans don’t like art, they won’t pay for art, they don’t deserve art. That’s just a fact. This is a Puritan republic in which nobody gives a shit about art. When I came to the art world, there were maybe 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they got payed or not. Today there are about 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they get paid or not. That’s fine, those 2000 people created Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop, and Post-Minimalism in its early days. There have been now for 30 years people working for salaries administering the art world, and what have they done? Art can have public consequences, but it’s not very educational.

I keep challenging people, “Tell me one thing that you’ve learned from art.” It is not an educational activity. But we like education, and we like things that go away. You don’t need to know anything to understand good art.

OK, one last quote before I go / one last cup of words ‘fore I go / to the valley below:

I am interested in works in which something happens when you look at them. And also I am interested in works that have either the simplicity or the complexity to change their meanings. Good art, to survive, must change its meaning. If we still had to think about a Pollock the way he thought about it, we would hate it. He was crazy, he was an asshole. He thought he was doing Jungian Expression or something. Works of art have to be free enough in the culture to sustain reinterpretation over the years, and they have to continue to happen, and that’s very difficult. Works of art don’t have messages. They don’t have determinate meanings. They’re not just formal objects.

Deleuze has a book about Lewis Carroll, The Logic of Sense, which is exactly about the way we perceive and sense things. Lewis Carroll has lines that don’t mean anything, but they have meaning. And that’s how art works. A Pollock doesn’t mean anything, but it has meaning, we can find meanings for it, if we care to. I am really not concerned with what the artist meant. It’s totally irrelevant. I have written a lot of fiction, I don’t know what it meant, I know that the story doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. Artists don’t know what they’re doing, so why ask them? What matters is, what the consensus of opinion of what the work means on a particular moment. And it really matters that a work of art can survive the changing of its meanings.

I am very concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning; I am not really concerned with thought or with what things mean. Works of art, according to TS Elliot, are objective correlatives; they are things in the world that we use to correlate our opinions about. That’s not meant to discount the artist. It’s meant to free the artist, so they can do what they want, because they don’t know anyway.