category: fragments

Art is a thought experiment

Art is a thought experiment that is communicated through some physical means to other people.

Describing the color white to a blind man

I have been searching for years for this story that’s been half-submerged in my memory, and I just found it in an old journal entry from June 8, 1985. It was cut out of a newspaper, but I have no idea which one, and I can’t find this exact version of the story anywhere:

Einstein bee drawingOne day Einstein was asked by a pesky reporter to describe his theory of relativity in a few simple words. He responded with the following story:

“A man was asked by a blind man to describe the color white. The man said, ‘White is the color of a swan.’ The blind man said, ‘What is a swan?’ The man said, ‘A swan is a bird with a crooked neck.’

“The blind man asked, ‘What is crooked?’ The man was becoming impatient. He grabbed the blind man’s arm, straightened it and said, ‘This is straight.’ Then he bent it and said, ‘And this is crooked.’

“Whereupon the blind man quickly said, ‘Yes, yes, thank you. Now I know what white is.’”

So there’s the first clue why I could never find this story online — I had thought it was one of John Cage’s zen stories, but it’s actually a story told by Einstein. This in itself is a good illustration of the fallibility of memory. Here is another version I just found, and this fits the pattern of all the references I found to this story:

Einstein and his blindfriend. This story shows how complex Einstein could be. Not long after his arrival in Princeton he was invited, by the wife of one of the professors of mathematics at Princeton, to be guest of honor at a tea.-Reluctantly, Einstein consented. After the tea had progressed for a time, the excited hostess, thrilled to have such an eminent guest of honor, fluttered out into the center of activity and with raised arms silenced the group. Bubbling out some words expressing her thrill and pleasure, she turned to Einstein and said: “I wonder, Dr. Einstein, if you would be so kind as to explain to my guests in a few words, just what is relativity theory ? ”

Without any hesitation Einstein rose to his feet and told a story. He said he was reminded of a walk he one day had with his blind friend. The day was hot and he turned to the blind friend and said, “I wish I had a glass of milk.”

“Glass,” replied the blind friend, “I know what that is. But what do you mean by milk?”

“Why, milk is a white fluid,” explained Einstein.

“Now fluid, I know what that is,” said the blind man. “but what is white ? ”

” Oh, white is the color of a swan’s feathers.”

” Feathers, now I know what they are, but what is a swan ? ”

“A swan is a bird with a crooked neck.”

” Neck, I know what that is, but what do you mean by crooked ? ”

At this point Einstein said he lost his patience. He seized his blind friend’s arm and pulled it straight. “There, now your arm is straight,” he said. Then he bent the blind friend’s arm at the elbow. “Now it is crooked.”

“Ah,” said the blind friend. “Now I know what milk is.”

And Einstein, at the tea, sat down.

Here is a similar version of the milk story, retold by one Omar Kureishi, with Einstein now completely out of the picture:

A blind man asks a young girl to describe milk. The young girl is astonished that someone can be so foolish that he doesn’t know what milk is. “Milk is white,” she tells him. The old man tells her that he is blind and doesn’t know what white means. The young girl tells him that this is very easy to explain and tells him that a swan is white. The old man tells her that a swan may be white, but he has never seen a swan. “It has a curved neck,” she tells him. The blind man says that he has no idea what ‘curved’ is. She lifts her arm, bends her wrists forward like a swan’s neck. “Feel it,” she says, “that’s curved.” The old man feels the girl’s arm, touches the girl’s wrist and exclaims joyfully: “Thank God. Now at last I know what milk is.”

What of this strange connection between the “white” things called “milk” and “swans”? Turns out that goes back to Hinduism and Sanskrit, according to the swan page on Wikipedia:

Swans are revered in Hinduism, and are compared to saintly persons whose chief characteristic is to be in the world without getting attached to it, just as a swan’s feather does not get wet although it is in water. The Sanskrit word for swan is hamsa or hansa, and it is the vehicle of many deities like the goddess Saraswati. It is mentioned several times in the Vedic literature, and persons who have attained great spiritual capabilities are sometimes called Paramahamsa (“Great Swan”) on account of their spiritual grace and ability to travel between various spiritual worlds. In the Vedas, swans are said to reside in the summer on Lake Manasarovar and migrate to Indian lakes for the winter. They’re believed to possess some powers such as the ability to eat pearls. They are also believed to be able to drink up the milk and leave the water from a saucer of milk adulterated with water. This is taken as a great quality, as shown by this Sanskrit verse:

Hamsah shwetah, bakah shwetah, kah bhedah hamsa bakayo?
Neeraksheera viveketu, Hamsah hamsah, bakah bakah!

(The swan is white, the duck is white, so how to differentiate between both of them?
With the milk-water test, the swan is proven swan, the duck is proven duck!)

I guess the ancients required empirical evidence to distinguish a swan from a duck, a task the many modern humans can perform with relative ease.

Of all the versions of this story that might be floating around the universe, I like the original one I clipped from an unknown newspaper 25 years ago, because to me the idea of describing the color white to a blind person is much more abstract and interesting than describing what milk is, since milk, after all, is a substance that can be discerned by other senses. But how can you possibly describe “white” without referencing other things? Such is relativity.

Seething Bay

Sneath Seething Bay, rapping in foglines, clutching its pieces before the shallow tempest.

Emerald breakfast. Tripping on tripe, and sniping at the memory, long in the tooth, of car salesmen in gabardine reciting the company code as gospel on their way to another after-work alcohol tasting ceremony.

The bird in the Ballet Mechanique

The bird in the Ballet Mechanique:

There is a single sequence of a few frames in Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique that seem to sum up both the intention of the film and its mystery. At exactly two minutes and fifteen seconds into the film a bird appears. It is a parrot (perroquet, a cockatoo) turning to face the camera and then turning away. It disappears in a flash of light and is not repeated.

Oranges now! And hurry up the cakes!

From a recent column in the SF Chronicle by John Flinn, Culture shock still souvenir of Japan, comes the following excellent examples of Japanese T-shirt English, which I have made bold:

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.)

Benjamin Fry – Data Visualization

Beautiful visualizations by Benjamin Fry: “There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. My research focuses on developing approaches to such data, in particular, the human genome.”

Waiting to Skewer Badgers on Sticks

Leo Kottke’s liner notes on the back of his 1979 album, Balance:

We live on the edge of town with a big front yard. I get up in the morning about noon and make my way through the dogshit to the mailbox to get the mail.

I often pause to think at this point, but then, the dog is emblematic of civilization and, without civilization, we could be riding on horses without umbrellas and spending our lives waiting to skewer badgers on sticks.

With civilization we bring actual animals with voices like saxophones right into our homes where they defecate at will. And then we blame the animal for being so dumb.

At Christmastime, trees, as well as living animals, are brought into the house. Little silver balls are hung from the tree. And food. Popcorn, cranberries and candy canes rotting in the forced-air heat.

But what can compare to seeing that first sled under your tree in Oklahoma, where it hasn’t snowed for the last eight years.

Actually, my sled was not under the rotting Christmas tree but, for some odd reason, hidden in the kitchen stove with its rear end protruding from the oven door. “Go in and get it, Leo!” my parents said, delighted with that wide-eyed look their kids always got at Christmastime.

But often times, standing at the mailbox, none of these musings will soothe, and, in a bathrobe at noon, with my right hand deep in a mailbox and left foot buried in turd, I succumb to despair.

Watch out for the smelly pile of despair; most of us seem to have one foot in anyway.

Randomizing The Brothers Karamazov

From Jon Carroll’s column in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, wherein Jon describes a recent road trip he took with his wife and what they listened to:

Listening: We took our iPod along for the ride. We loaded it with 700 of our favorite songs, we selected the “random” option, and we let fate choose our music, Diana Krall followed by Mavis Staples followed by Waylon Jennings. We also downloaded some non-music: Adam Gopnik at the Commonwealth Club, David Sedaris at Carnegie Hall and, because we knew we’d never read it any other way, “The Brothers Karamazov.”

“The B.K.” is a very long book — Dostoevsky never uses one adverb when three will do — and is interspersed with long speeches about the existence of God and the meaning of consciousness. My mind tended to wander in the soft hum of the highway, so sometimes I was confused as to who was speaking to whom. The book is about the activities of about 10 people in the same Russian town, so there aren’t a lot of signposts for the inattentive listener. Still, I was liking it.

“Isn’t it interesting,” I said to Tracy, “how experimental this seems for a 19th century novel? Notice how everyone talks about Dimitri, but we never actually see him.”

It was not until Pennsylvania that we realized that we had neglected to turn off the “random” feature of the iPod, so we were getting chapters in arbitrary order, the plot entirely in the mischievous hands of fate.

We loved the part at the beginning, where everybody died.

Hello, I Must Be Going

Groucho Marx, as Captain Jeffrey Spaulding, in Animal Crackers (1930):

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.

Sings About Not Remembering

My brother Jack just emailed me this:

A Native American elder was asked to sing the old hunting songs for a documentary. But he doesn’t remember the words and instead sings about not remembering the words and about being filmed.

He says he got it from an LA Times about ten years ago. I couldn’t find any references to this online, but it might be a Laurie Anderson story. Sounds like one.

Anyway, I like it a lot. Seems to capture quite well our media mad culture. And even though I can’t remember the source, I’ll sing about it.

Croatian Advertising Leaflet

A funny bit from a Croatian tourist leaflet in a Jon Carroll column from 1999:

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.”