DD60 – Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test

Sometimes I read something that comes to me from ‘out of left field’.  It’s an odd phrase, and, resorting to Wikipedia, I learnt the term was first used in the idiomatic sense of ‘from out of nowhere’ to refer to a song that unexpectedly performed well in the market.  Back in  1998, an American English professor reported that the phrase ‘out of left field’ was in use by 1953.  However, he added that it was clearly related to baseball, and according to the 2007 Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the phrase refers to a play in which the ball is thrown from the area covered by a ‘left-fielder’ to either home plate or first base, surprising the runner.

Things come out of left field when we least expect them, and the challenge we face is that our expectations can widely differ from those of others.  I might consider a lightning or meteor strike as truly amazing, something so rare as to be almost impossible.  An astronomer or climatologists might have a very different appreciation of their likelihood, and some other people might regard such activities as only to be expected when we live in troubled times, especially if they are fond of finding evidence of extra-terrestrials intervening in our world.

Marlene Zuk came to me from out of left field.  She’s an American academic, a biologist and a behavioural ecologist. I wouldn’t have known about her if I hadn’t picked up a book in the Public Library, titled Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test.  Who wouldn’t be tempted by a book with a title like that!  Once I borrowed it, I discovered from the inside cover she has had a distinctive focus on the unusual.  Given her interest in insects from a young age, when she went to university, and after majoring in English, she decided to switch to Biology.  Now an academic, she is based at the University of Minnesota.

Her approach is refreshing.  She works in a lab focused on emerging questions in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology:

“We use invertebrate systems to study the evolution of mating behaviour and secondary sexual characters in natural populations.  I and others in my lab seek to understand how natural and sexual selection pressures shape the behaviour, life history, and morphology of animals.  Currently, we are studying the conflict between sexual and natural selection in Pacific field crickets, Teleogryllus oceanicus, which are subject to an acoustically-orienting parasitic fly.  The fly uses the male cricket’s calling song to find a host, which means that natural selection favours reducing the same signal that sexual selection is expected to enhance.

What can a cricket do?  In some of the populations of the crickets, 50-90% of the males now exhibit a wing mutation that renders them silent, protecting them from the fly but posing a problem in mate attraction.  The mutation spread in fewer than twenty generations, remarkably rapid evolution.  How do the crickets deal with the loss of their sexual signal, and how was the trait able to spread so quickly?  This work has also led to a more general interest in rates of evolution and the role of behaviour in the establishment of novel traits.”

Interesting?  She goes on to comment that “In addition, like others who study sexual behaviour in animals, I have noticed that people like to apply what we learn to their own behaviour.  I am often contacted by journalists and other people asking questions like, ‘Is monogamy natural?’ or ‘Does homosexuality exist in non-humans?’   Clearly, she enjoys both interacting with other scientists as well as with the public on a broad range of topics.  She has written several books for a general audience about animal behaviour and evolution.

That’s not all this busy academic does.  In addition, she spends time in promoting women in science, on which she has made some very pertinent comments. In 2018, Zuk published an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times titled, ‘There’s nothing inherent about the fact that men outnumber women in the sciences’.  The article countered recurring suggestions that women are underrepresented in scientific fields due to inherent preferences toward the humanities.  By highlighting the inextricable relationship between nature and nurture, she points out the impossibility of attributing female underrepresentation in science to any inborn cause. Citing studies based on essential scientific integrity, she argues that “until boys and girls are raised under identical circumstances one could not possibly prove any inherent female leanings towards or away from the sciences.”

Once I had read Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, I was hooked.  Helpfully, it has an overview which explains her interests in relation to five key ideas.  In these blogs I usually avoid quoting another writer at length, but I can’t put her arguments better than she does:

1. The nature-nurture controversy is a zombie idea.

“When people think about behaviour in either humans or animals, they often want to know if that behaviour is genetic or whether it’s learned. That’s especially true when headlines are full of declarations like “Our politics are in our DNA.”

“This is the old nature-nurture debate. Traits as complex as intelligence or aggression have to be affected by both genes and the environment. And yet, we keep resurrecting this notion of it being nature or nurture. The nature-nurture controversy has become a zombie idea that keeps springing back to life but deserves to die once and for all.  The problem is that if people genuinely believe that, for example, men will always grow up with dominating tendencies because it’s in their genes, then interventions to prevent aggression are worthless. In reality, it’s the interplay, the entanglement, between genes and environment that’s important.”  …

2. Having a small brain doesn’t mean you are dumb.

“Many people have tried connecting brain size and intelligence, with the assumption that a big brain is a prerequisite for complex or flexible behaviour. But few have drawn this comparison out to its logical conclusion: are there animals that are so tiny that they are almost too stupid to live or do complicated tasks?”

“To figure this out, a scientist named William Eberhard studied extremely small spiders (including one kind that weighs less than a milligram) or about as much as an inch of sewing thread. Yet the spiders still produce orb webs, the silky wheel that entraps their even tinier prey. Eberhard measured whether the difficult process of weaving and adjusting a web was more of a challenge to the minuscule spiders than to three other kinds of spiders that weighed anywhere from 10 – 10,000 times more. The small spiders are just as capable as larger ones.”

3. Dogs are not exceptional.

“Dr. Stephen Lea is a brave man. An emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in England, he published a paper with Britta Osthaus titled, “In what sense are dogs special?” The conclusion was that they aren’t.  The reception to their work was not appreciative. “Your Dog Is Probably Dumber Than You Think, a New Study Says,” smirked a typical headline from Time magazine. Lea tried to pacify the dog people in an interview by saying, “Dog cognition may not be exceptional, but dogs are certainly exceptional cognitive research subjects.” No one seemed placated.  “All nervous systems, and all brains, are success stories.”  The study didn’t show that dogs were stupid. It asked whether they were smarter than you would expect.”

“To answer this, Lea and Osthaus picked three groups for comparison. First, they looked at other species that are related to dogs evolutionarily—members of the group Carnivora, meaning meat-eaters, including African wild dogs and cats. Then, they considered dogs as social hunters, alongside dolphins and chimpanzees. Finally, they examined horses and domestic pigeons, both of which are domesticated like dogs and which share characteristics like being subject to training. The result was that dogs do well at discriminating complex visual patterns, like telling human faces apart, but so do chimps and pigeons. Dogs are good at smells, but they are bested by pigs, which can even distinguish between the odours of familiar and unfamiliar people. Dogs are not especially skilled at what Lea and Osthaus term “physical cognition”—recognizing the consequences of manipulating objects like strings attached to food. Despite the heartwarming nature of movies like Homeward Bound, dogs aren’t particularly good at navigating over long distances”. …

4. 4. Animals can treat their diseases.

“Early humans used medicine and treated injuries such as fractures, but where did their knowledge come from? Do animals help themselves feel better when they are sick?

Yes. Chimpanzees in Africa eat a variety of plants, but some individuals have been seen to select the young shoots of one particular plant, stripping the stems of their bark, and chewing the bitter pith and juice. These individuals often seemed sick with diarrhea, weight loss, and a lack of energy. Researchers found that the use of the plant was associated with a drop in intestinal parasites. Chimps will also swallow entire leaves from a different plant whole (without chewing) and here the leaves had tiny hairs that seem to scrape worms from the gut and allow them to be expelled.”

“This kind of behaviour doesn’t necessarily require a sophisticated level of cognition. Animals have many ways of changing their behaviour to deal with infection, and not all of the animals that do so are those we consider “smart,” as we do apes. For instance, goats supposedly eat anything, from tin cans to laundry off the line, but they are remarkably sensitive foragers. If infected with roundworms, they will eat more of a shrub containing a chemical that fights the worms.” …

5. Animals get mentally ill too.

“Darwin thought that insanity in animals demonstrated how all living things are related, so he thought they did get mentally ill. On the other hand, some scientists think that animals can serve as models for us to understand mental illness, but don’t get the disorders themselves. Yet others think animals are only mentally ill when they are mistreated by humans.”

“I agree with Darwin, and one of the best places to see the continuity of mental disorders in humans and animals is in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD. People have noticed for many years that some characteristics of OCD are also seen in animals, particularly dogs. The disorder means doing normal behaviours—hand-washing, turning in circles before lying down—too much. In dogs, we call it CCD, Canine Compulsive Disorder, because we can’t know what dogs are or aren’t obsessing over.”

“A scientist named Elinor Karlsson and her team have identified genes that affect a dog’s risk of showing the disorder. These genes govern the way nerve cells communicate. But knowing a dog’s genetic makeup won’t tell you definitively whether or not they will exhibit the disorder. Dogs, like humans, inherit one copy of any particular gene from their mother and one copy from their father, so both can be the same or they can have one normal and one abnormal gene. Of the dogs with two normal copies, 10% have CCD anyway; of the ones with one copy of each type, 25% have it; and of the dogs with two abnormal copies, 60% show CCD, but not all of them. Knowing the dog’s genetic profile doesn’t tell you for sure whether the dog has the disorder.  This shows us two things. First, entanglement of genes and the environment because the gene doesn’t cause the disorder unless the environment favours it. Second, mental disorders can illustrate the common evolutionary roots in our brains and bodies that give rise to amazingly different behaviours.”

OK!  Have I convinced you her books are worth reading?  Here are a couple of quotes that help me make a different point:  often her writing is funny as well as informative.  On her theme that most changes are not exclusively ‘nature versus nurture’, but usually some combination ,of both, she quotes Patrick Bateson ”whole organisms survive and reproduce differentially and the winners drag their phenotypes with them”.  Well, if that seems a bit esoteric, how about another observation:  “Has a gull ever snatched a French fry from you, or made a dive at your sandwich?  Would you have been more, or less, annoyed if you found out that the bird knew exactly when you would appear and was in effect lying in wait”. This was from an English study on Lesser Black-backed Gulls.  Oh, and the researcher noted those same gulls knew at what times there would be fresh dumped garbage at waste centres.”

She also has a mischievous side.  :”Sea slugs are the rather more glamorous cousins of the shell-less molluscs you find in your garden.  Often beautifully coloured, they move sinuously through the water in oceans around the world.  Two species, called sacoglkossan sea slugs, were recently found to have an extraordinary ability:  they can decapitate themselves , and then grow a completely new body, including the heart and digestive organs, from the head alone.  The detached body does not respond in kind, and instead moves around in presumed bewilderment for several days to months before it expires, a scene that should surely be incorporated into a horror film at the earliest opportunity”. Yup, good idea?!   Weird?  No weirder than Mel Pennant’s recent murder mystery, A Murder for Miss Hortense, about a “retired nurse, avid gardener, renowned cake maker and fearless sleuth’ who lives in a quiet Birmingham suburb, and whose black West Indian) dialect is challenging, so say the least.  Zuk is like Pennant:  the subject might be different but the writing is unusually compelling.

Is she coming out of left field?  Certainly Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test presents many observations that are quite different from what I might have expected.  I’m not a biologist or a behavioural ecologist.  However, even if her observations are not quite about what I might have predicted, they aren’t surprising.  The reason why Dancing Cockatoos is such a compelling book is because it is  reassuringly sensible.  By the time I reached the end, I found myself constantly saying “of course”.  If you want to be reassured how alike we are to many members of the animal world, even to gulls seen spying on apparently available French fries, Marlene Zuk is very convincing.

To have an informative view of matters is often a function of perspective.  Pierre Ryckmans was a man with an enviable sense of perspective, one which allowed him to be writer, essayist, translator, art historian and especially a sinologist, as well as becoming a respected professor.  To have such a broad vantage point was the result of his life experiences, and they were both fascinating and complex.

Ryckmans was born in Brussels, his father a publisher, his grandfather a member of the Antwerp government, as well as anephew of the Pierre Ryckmans who was a governor general of  the Belgian Congo, and of Gonzague Ryckmans, a recognized expert of Arabic epigraphy and professor at the Catholic University of Louvain.  After first studying law and art history at university, his father died at an early age in 1955.  That year he was a member of a delegation of ten young Belgians who spent a month in China.   It was a transformative visit.  He returned having decided “it would be inconceivable to live in this world, in our age, without a good knowledge of Chinese language and a direct access to Chinese culture” (explained in an interview in China Heritage Quarterly, No. 26, June 2011).

It was the beginning of a time of moves.  He enrolled at the Fine Arts department of the Taiwan National University, carrying our research for what was to become his future PhD dissertation subject, the work of a Chinese painter, Shitao.  In 1960, he was called up for military service in Belgium but chose to become a conscientious objector.   He was able to take up a part-time student and teaching job Singapore’s Nanyang University,  but under suspicion of being a communist by the Lee Kuan Yew government, he had to leave and settled in Hong Kong.  During this time, and on his publisher’s advice, he decided to assume the pen name Simon Leys,  to avoid being declared persona non grata in the PRC.  In 1970 he moved to Australia, teaching  Chinese literature at the ANU.  From 1987–93, he was Professor of Chinese Studies at University of Sydney.  After retiring from that position, he returned to Canberra, where he lived until he died of cancer at 78.

During his life, he was a prolific writer, publishing in English, French and Chinese.  His books on China offered ‘scathing descriptions’ of the cultural and political destruction under the Auspices of Mao in mainland China.  He was equally trenchant in his critiques of  Mao’s  western defenders.  I found all his books both enlightening and persuasive.  He wrote regularly for the English-language press  and for the French-language press.  He was a fellow of Australian. Academy of the Humanities, an Honorary Commander of the French Navy (!!), and a member of Belgian Royal Academy of Literature.  He received many awards including the French Academy’s Prix Jean Walter, prix d’histoire et de sociologie, and other of their awards , as well as the Christina Stead Prize for fiction.

However, among the many books of his I have read and reread, one that was rather different was his 1966 Boyer Lectures, given on the theme ‘Aspects of Culture’.  The lectures cover five themes.  The first, Learning, addresses education and what he saw as its present crisis.  The second, Reading, is concerned with the role of books in our lives, and the role of literary criticism.  Next, in Writing, he deals with the creative experience.  Lecture four, Going Abroad Staying Home, is a series of reflections on the outside world and ‘otherness’, balanced against others concerned with inner life and contemplation.  Each of the chapters is humorous, insightful and memorable.

The flavour of Rickman’s approach is evident from the beginning.  Having first told the reader about Rousseau’s Confessions, in which the author reveals a time on which, tongue-tied for whatever reason, he failed to respond to a series of attacks, ones he easily could have refuted on another occasion.  This leads him on the reflecting on a failure of his own when, at a conference, he heard a young critic respond to a speech in such a way if prevented responses.  The critic’s address was as long as the original presentation and took up all of the airtime.  More to the point, in rehashing some of the slogans from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the critic was effectively denying the right of anyone to criticise another.  He was arguing value judgements  were a form of cultural arrogance.  This was to portray the realm of scholarly activity are mere social prejudice.

For Ryckmans, this was to remind him of the Mchael Leunig cartoon presenting a trendy modern cleric.  The caption we are told, read ‘Reverend so-and-So does not believe in God, but needs the job.’  It was funny, were it not for the fact that it was also a commentary on the postmodernists task of ‘deconstruction’, where anybody’s values are as legitimate as anyone else’s.  If Ryckman is terrified about the thought that universities might lose their fundamental grounding in agreed vales, he imagines the consequences:  “I should not be surprised if I were to learn that, right now, in the English Literature Department of [one of our] vanguard universities, (duly renamed Departments of Human Communications and Sociocultural Deconstruction) there are earnest candidates for a doctoral degree, hard at work on “deconstructing” the telephone directory.”

I smiled at the story and then stopped smiling:  as he goes on to note “Truth, in other words, is not in thought, , but … it is the condition for the possibility of thinking. … The view that Truth is not a conclusion, but a premise – and the very condition for any intellectual enquiry is important and profound.”  Ryckmans illustrates this idea by quoting a story about the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhi.  A couple of pages later we are pushed harder: “The trap of “seeing  through” things was best exposed by C S Lewis (in a conclusion to his essay on the defence of values):

“The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.  It is good that the window should be transparent because the street of garden beyond it is opaque.  How if you saw through the garden too?  It is no use trying “to see through’ first principles .  If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.  But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.  To see through all things is the same as not to see.”

Skilfully, we have managed to explore some key issues in the nature of higher education and the role of universities, gently confronting issues that are as relevant today as they were nearly sixty years ago.  In this first lecture, Ryckman ends by observing that the university “increasingly resembles the cardboard props that were used on the Elizabethan stage, or in the Peking opera, and on which was written in big characters “THIS IS A CASTLE’ or ‘THIS IS A FOREST’ – it amounts to little more than a symbolic signboard ‘THIS IS A UNIVERSITY’.  Can such a fiction retain credibility with the public?

In many ways this lecture in The View From the Bridge is an uncomfortable introduction to Bill Readings 1996 book The University in Ruins (Harvard University Press).  In his book Readings argues the university has outlived its purpose–a purpose he suggests made sense two centuries ago, when the nation-state and the modern notion of culture came together to make the university the guardian of national culture…What, Readings asks, “is the point of the University, if we realize that we are no longer to strive to realize a national identity, be it an ethnic essence or a republican will?” What happens when the culture the university was meant to preserve goes global and transnational along with everything else? This is an intriguing argument. And…it helps to explain much. From this perspective, for example, Readings is wonderfully insightful on the “culture wars” that have wracked universities and bewildered the public for two decades…

Of course, Ryckmans takes the argument as far as to lament what was happening.  Readings wants to go further, suggesting who live and work in universities as well as to those on the outside need to better understand the university’s position in a changing world, ‘to come out of our professional shells, stop pining for a lost world, and actively seek to construct something different’.

In his second lecture, Ryckmans addresses reading, beginning with a nice tale from China about the importance of text, and suggests Chines script is “at the root of Chinese civilisation in a way that has no real equivalent anywhere else in the world”.  Do we respect the written word as much as the Chinese di (and perhaps still do)?  Ryckmans goes on to describe that scene in Peter Weir’s film wen the students are told by their charismatic teacher that their poetry anthology was compiled and had an introduction by a ‘pompous moron.  The teacher tears the offending pages from the book, and, slowly at first, the students do the same, and the scene ends with a ‘joyous iconoclastic  frenzy’.

Ryckmans was horrified by this scene in a film he otherwise enjoyed.  Why?  Because it reminds him of the many other episodes of book destruction and book burning, acts of brutality and horror, from fascist mobs right back to the first Emperor of China.  Books have power.  As he observes: “The point is not that a book can be considered as to have as much value as human life, but that, simply, when a man is bent on destroying books, you know he is capable of anything, since his aim is not merely to kill people, but to kill their souls”.

In case we don’t get the point, he goes on to quote from Primo Levi, who writes about quoting from the Diving Comedy in Auschwitz.  In his memoir, Levi remembers a moment of sudden catastrophe  when his memory begins to fail, at the end of one stanza, unable to complete the Canto: “I have forgotten at least twelve lines … I would give today’s soup to know how to connect the last fragment to the end of the Canto.  I try to reconstruct it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers, but it is of no use, the rest is silence’.  Thirty years after writing that passage, Levi returned to it, in the last book he wrote a year before his death.  He concluded “When I wrote I would give today’s soup for know how to retrieve the forgotten passage, I had neither lied nor exaggerated.  I really would have given bread and soup – that is, blood – to save from nothingness those memories which today, with the support of printed paper, I can refresh gratis whenever I wish, and which therefore seems of little value”.

Ryckmans ends his comments on literature by rewriting a commentary by  Thomas Merton.  Merton was writing about religion.  In his transposition Ryckmans takes Merton’s world but replaces religious terms with literary concepts: “Literature is not understood.  Those who wish themselves cultured in order to admire themselves in this state are made stupid by literary studies.  What is need is to lose ourselves completely to literature;  what is needed is perfect silence. Literary theory has something revolting about it.”  Yes, just allow yourself to live in the world of great books.

When he moves to writing, Ryckmans becomes rather more critical.  He starts by addressing the strange desire to explain the ‘message’ of a piece of fictional writing, as if the writer was setting out some directional signs.  In response Ryckmans quotes Hemmingway: “When I need to send a message, I go to the Post Office”.  From here it is a short step for Ryckmans to address the importance of ‘inspiration’.  With his strikingly adept use of Chinese stories, Ryckmans finds an appropriate story to illustrate his concern.

“ Prince Yuan wished to have some paintings done.  Many painters came to his palace.,  Having bowed to the Prince, the began immediately to busy themselves with their work, licking their brushes and preparing their ink in front of him.  One painter, however, arrived long after the others, quite at leisure.  He made a casual bow and then immediately disappeared into a back room.  Quite puzzled, the Prince despatched one servant to find out where he had gone.  The servant reported back: ‘He has taken all his clothes off and sits there naked doing nothing.’  ‘Splendid’ the Prince exclaimed.  ‘This one will do, he is a real painter’.

If the point might seem a little subtle, Ryckmans goes on to report how great European painters were well known for their focus on inner discipline to precede and sustain practice.  He quotes from Vasari, who told the story of Leonardo da Vinci working on The Last Supper.  Apparently, he would often send as much as half of the day simply looking at what he had done.  When questioned, Leonardo is said to have replied ‘men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they do the least’.  The View From the Bridge is full of clever anecdotes and observations like these, all of which are intended to do what Ryckmans described as the practice of great painters – encouraging the reader to stop and think.

When he turns his focus to writers, and those who face a writer’s block, he quotes Philip Larkin:

“…. Don’t ask me

Why I stopped.  I didn’t stop.  It stopped.

In the old days, I’d go home at six

And write all evening on a board

Across my knees.  But now … I go home

And there is nothing there.

I am like a chicken

With no eggs to lay.”

          (In Philip Larkin, a Tribute, by George Hartley, Marwell Press, 1988).

Should I continue?  Books like A View From the Bridge are deceptive.  A written version of four lectures, relatively brief and offered for general consumption.  This isn’t a work of scholarship, but an easy to read and engaging overview.  There’s the trap.  To condense your views into four lectures, lectures aimed at an intelligent but non-specialist audience is a challenge.  The lecturer has to speak to a large (and unseen) audience.  The lecturer has to capture the interest of the listeners, using anecdotes, amusing stories and similar devices to create bridges into important topics to offer criticism and comment.

I think Pierre Ryckmans does it brilliantly, yet, if I want you to read the book, perhaps I could  entice you by offering a few more – hopefully tantalising – snippets.  He writes about the dangerous allure of exoticism, about behaving well in the face of death, and about the unlikelihood of a try insightful metaphor.  He reminds us that it’s a plum pudding book, and, like little Jack Horner, that suggests you should stick your nose (and brain) into the essays, and like Jack, find yourself pulling out some plums!

The older one becomes, the more we tend to reminisce with friends about past events – both achievements and failures.  Memory is tricky, in the sense that some things from the past stand out more than others.  I have a vivid memory of losing my wife’s purse when travelling on a bus in London, back in 1962.  Actually, what I remember is the lady who got in touch with me after finding the purse.  I went to collect it, and her face is stuck in my memory – almost as clear as the day it happen3ed:  she wasn’t a nice lady, and her appearance was more than a little off-putting.  Added to that, the returned purse was empty – the state it was found it, she assured me!

Memory is fascinating, especially as it seems there are some moments, like the one above, which seem permanently and readily retrieved, while much else is apparently lost.  To that moment when I retrieved a lost purse, some others are always easily recalled.  There was the time at Christmas when, perhaps aged 5 or 56 years old, I woke early and found a parcel on my bed, along with the large sock full of food goodies.  I opened the parcel quietly, as I was supposed to wait until after breakfast, and in the dark I found I have been given a shirt and shorts.  Clothes for Christmas!  I thanked my parents, only to discover, by their slightly odd response, that what I had uncovered in the half-light was actually a soccer shirt and shorts.  Ah well, perhaps that was a forewarning:  sport and I were never close.

I could continue with other examples of the odd moments that seem to be embedded in my memory, but close to hand.  Standing outside the headmaster’s office on my first day at grammar school, wondering how I’d ended up in trouble of my first day.  When the light above the door went green, I entered to discover the problem was my shoes were clean enough!  How about that moment in a tent in the garden when I lay upon the ground next to a girl I’d invited over (my first girlfriend):  I didn’t know what to do, only to be rescued by our being called indoors for afternoon tea.  How about bungling the beginning of a talk to some 300 people (now this was much later in life, probably aged 40 years old).  Or arriving at the airport for one trip overseas to discover I’d left my passport at home.

As I am typing right now, the memories that seem closest to the surface almost always seem to do with mistakes, embarrassment, or confusions.  Do I recall the telegram letting me know about my admissions to university?  No, although I still have the telegram.  I don’t recall my taking a driving rest at the age of seventeen, but I recall back my dad’s car into a tree as I was practising (fortunately making only a tiny dent to the bumper).  I can remember the nice waitress offering me extra glasses of wine to sample at a wine-tasting, but I can’t recall getting back home in my car (at which point I must have been seriously drunk).  It seems that often there has to be some emotional content to ensure that memories are clearly recalled.

Memory becomes even more elusive when you can remember an event clearly, only to be told by someone else that you have it wrongly recalled, sometimes quite badly so.  To say to a friend “I remember when …” is almost like an invitation to disagreement.  They reply “no, that wasn’t what happened.  What you did was …”.  How could I – or my friend – have got things so wrong.  In fact, it seems that every time I try to validate a recollection, someone pops up to contradict me.  Am I bad at recall?

Frederic Bartlett was a British psychologist whose major work, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, was published in 1932.  It was many years later I read it and began to understand that ‘memory isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’!   He suggested  that memories of past events and experiences are actually mental reconstructions that are coloured by cultural attitudes and personal habits, rather than being direct recollections of observations made at the time. Through a series of experiments, he was able to demonstrate that very little of an event is actually perceived at the time of its occurrence but that, in reconstructing the memory, gaps in observation or perception are filled in with the aid of previous experiences.

Central to his work was that people use ‘schema’, mental structures that an individual uses to organize knowledge and guide both their cognition and their   behaviour. People use schemata  to categorize objects and events based on common elements and characteristics and thus interpret and predict the world.   As a result, new information is sorted out according to how it fits into these mental structures.   People retrieve knowledge from various areas to draw conclusions about missing or non-evidential information, and develop schemata which represent and organise the ways in which the characteristics of certain events or objects are recalled, as determined by one’s self-knowledge and cultural-political background.

Bartlett developed the concept of schema Remembering.  He suggested  organized knowledge can be understood as an elaborate network of abstract mental structures that represent a person’s understanding of the world, and he studied the impact of one’s cultural background in rephrasing and memorizing certain events. For example, in one of his best-known studies, he examined whether subjects could recall events that strongly deviate from their own environmental background, and he showed that the more culturally different one’s own background was from that of the presented story, the less likely it was that participants could remember the story. Bartlett concluded that the participants distorted the presented story in favour of their own cultural stereotypes,  and that details that were difficult to interpret were omitted because they did not fit in with the participants’ own schemata

How does this work.  Bartlett’s model suggests schemata allow one to perceive the whole picture of an event or object based on partial information structures. This reference is possible because each schema has a main category, a so-called slot that connects different semantic networks. For example, the main slot “house” stores the information “wall,” “roof,” and “floor,” and, within a framework of ‘whole-part’ relationships, an individual can therefore infer that a house has a wall, a roof, and a floor. Moreover, each schema is developed in a way that helps to simplify drawing conclusions of a represented concept. For example, if one knows that an object is a door, then, according to the definition of a schema “door,” we can assume that it has a lock, a handle, and hinges.

His perspective has been influential.  In 1981, American researchers William Brewer and James Treyens studied the effects of schemata in memory. In their study, 30 subjects were brought into the office of the principal investigator and were told to wait. After 35 seconds, the subjects were asked to leave the room and to list everything that they could recall being in there.  Brewer and Treyens showed that the subjects could recall all those objects that fit into their schema of “office room,” and they had a much faultier memory of those items that were not a part of their schema.  For example, 29 of the 30 subjects recalled that the office had a chair, a desk, and walls, but only eight could recall the anatomic skull or a writing pad.  Interestingly, nine subjects mentioned that they had seen books, but, in fact, there were no books in the office. Being able to recall books when books were not among those objects present shows that memory of the characteristics of certain locations depends on schemata associated with those types of locations.

This approach leads to an interesting further stage.  It is possible to define certain strategies of simplifying schemata, including such organising principles we term ‘stereotypes’ and ‘archetypes’,  and a great deal of research has shown that these drive the decision-making process. Prior knowledge plays a role in cognitive processing, as pre-existing schemata often need to be activated to relate to new information. This is described in the literature as “stimulating recall of prior knowledge.” Teachers, for example, activate student’s prior knowledge through reading the heading and the title before starting a new subject related to it.  Teachers use analogies and comparisons to activate the learner’s existing schema in particular to help learners draw connections among already existing schemata.

Bartlett is persuasive.  On the topic of what we recall, he addresses such key factors as a person’s key interests, their temperament, and even their character.  Of particular interest is his revealing view that “What is beyond dispute is that remembering, in a group, is influenced, as to its manner, directly by the persistent tendencies of that group” (page 267).  That he suggests has three elements.  In loose groups without any dominant interests, so memory tends to be rote and recapitulatory.  When there are strong and persistent social characteristics, so remembering is likely to ‘appear’ direct.  Finally, where people are subjected to some kind of forcible control, recall is more likely to be constructive, inventive and even assertive.  If memories are social reconstructions, so, he proposes, the nature of that reconstruction is, in turn, to be influenced by a person’s broader social context.

Today, Bartlett has been relegated to interesting history.  In large part this is the consequence of an increasing focus on memory as a storage and retrieval of data, where it is understood as an information processing system, with all those concepts taken from the computer world – processors, short-term or working memory, and long term memory. It is as if we are talking about a computer system when it is proposed the brain has a sensory ‘processor’ which  allows information from the outside world to be sensed in the form of chemical and physical stimuli and attended to at various levels of focus and intent.

The next concept is that of working memory.  This is seen to serve as an encoding and retrieval processor. Information in the form of stimuli is encoded in accordance with explicit or implicit functions by the working memory processor. The working memory also retrieves information from previously stored material. Finally, the function of long-term memory is to store through various categorical models or systems.  In this model, ‘explicit memory’ is the conscious storage and recollection of data, either ‘semantic’, memory encoded with specific meaning, or ‘episodic’, information that is encoded along a spatial and temporal plane.  Yes, this is the brain as a computer!

However, current research suggests memory is not a perfect processor (notice the terminology!) and is affected by many factors. The ways by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved can all be corrupted. Pain, for example, has been identified as a physical condition that impairs memory, and has been noted in animal models as well as chronic pain patients.   The amount of attention given new stimuli can diminish the amount of information that becomes encoded for storage.  Further to this information processing model, the storage process can become corrupted by physical damage to areas of the brain that are associated with memory storage, such as the hippocampus.   Finally, the retrieval of information from long-term memory can be disrupted because of decay within long-term memory.   The brain is a squishy electronic processor, characterised by normal functioning, decay over time, and with the added fillip of brain damage

It is conventional today to distinguish forms of memory.  Sensory memory holds information, derived from the senses, less than one second after an item is perceived. The ability to look at an item and remember what it looked like with just a split second of observation, or memorization, is an example of sensory memory. It is out of our conscious cognitive control and is an automatic response. This type of memory cannot be prolonged.  Short-term memory allows recall for a period of several seconds to a minute without rehearsal. Its capacity, however, is very limited. In 1956 experiments showed that the store of short-term memory was 7±2 items (adopting in this case a reference to that “magical number seven”).  However,  modern perspectives estimate the capacity of short-term memory to be lower, typically on the order of 4–5 items,

The storage in sensory memory and short-term memory generally has a strictly limited capacity and duration. This means that information is not retained indefinitely. By contrast, while the total capacity of long-term memory has yet to be established, it can store much larger quantities of information. Furthermore, it can store this information for a much longer duration, potentially for a whole life span. For example, given a random seven-digit number, one may remember it for only a few seconds before forgetting, suggesting it was stored in short-term memory. On the other hand, one can remember telephone numbers for many years through repetition; this information is said to be stored in long-term memory.

The transition of a memory from short term to long term is often described as memory consolidation.  Despite ninety years of work since Bartlett wrote his book, it remains the case that little is known about the underlying physical (or physiological)  processes involved.  In a very complicated field, researchers distinguish between recognition and recall. Recognition memory tasks require individuals to indicate whether they have encountered a stimulus (such as a picture or a word) before. Recall memory tasks require participants to retrieve previously learned information.  For example, individuals might be asked to produce a series of actions they have seen before or to say a list of words they have heard before.

All this analysis seems far away from Bartlett and his work on memory.  The use of information theory and the view the brain is a computer has proven fruitful.  We have learnt a great deal about remembering and forgetting, and the importance of distinguishing between the short term memory system, and that for the longer term.  It is, however, very mechanical.  In our lives, memory is fascinating, and at an individual level, a matter of delight, regret and confusion. Talking to a friend about a past event can be a source of real delight, in some sense ‘remembering’ a past event, even if it is clear that the other person doesn’t appear to get it quite right!  At the same time, the friend can recall some aspects of that past situation which you have forgotten:  we often regret not holding on to an image, a conversation, a sight that seemed so important at the time.

However, the real challenge in day-t-day interactions is confusion.  How many times have you found yourself in a conversation when you utter that dangerous phrase “Do you remember when …”. Sometimes we are horrified to discover another person contradicts your account, and even it’s meaning.  Then another friend joins in, and the only parameters of agreement centre around place and date (usually agreed), but little else about what who said about what topic.  Some of the time we are willing to set aside confusion, and somewhat lamely observe we “don’t really remember it that well.”  Other times we retreat, clinging on to our version of events, and veiling our disagreement with another.  Perhaps the last words should go to Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier in Gigi, singing I Remember It Well’.  They disagree on evert remembered item, but end remembering their love for one another

It was nearly fifty years ago that Robert M Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance appeared.  I bought my copy a year later.  Picking it up recently, I noticed that just after the title page, there is an ‘Author’s Note’.  It reads “What follows is based on actual occurrences.  Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact.  However, it should in no way be associated with the great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice.  It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either”.  Rereading Pirsig’s book, I wonder if I paid attention to that Note in 1975.  I doubt it, yet those three sentences convey so much:  they orient the reader, and at the same time they betray a slightly mischievous sense of humour.  To reread the book is an opportunity to indulge in nostalgia.  It is also an invitation to think, and to dwell on what was missed before.

Road travels provide a helpful framework for a story.  Five years earlier the movie Easy Rider took us from hippie California to the racist South.  This biker road trip, from east to west, is undertaken by Pirsig and his son.  It takes them through a complex mosaic of experiences and reflections during the course of their seventeen day journey from Minnesota to California.  John Sewell’s art on the front of the dust jacket illuminates the key themes:  a person in black and white is sitting on a motorbike, feet on the ground.   One hand wearing a glove, holding a spanner, while his head is resting on the other.  He’s looking thoughtful:  a classical figure, wearing a Roman toga, the head stylised like a Roman sculpture, but out of his head a tulip is growing, the green leaves the only bit of colour in his portrait.  The rest of the cover is in black and yellow.  Pirsig’s name is in green.

If Hopper’s movie, Easy Rider was about America and its character, that cover makes clear Pirsig’s progress  across the States is only incidentally concerned with the geography or character of the country.  It’s an intellectual journey, about philosophy, relationships, and the author’s past.  It sold like hot cakes:  50,000 copies in three months, and more than 5m since.

Pirsig is with his older son, Chris.  There is a third person on the journey, Phaedrus, who we realise is Pirsig’s alter ego, prior to his having a mental breakdown.  Many aspects of Pirsig’s early life appear throughout the novel.  In 1958, he had been appointed  a professor in the Bozeman campus of Montana State University.  He suffered from schizophrenia and spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals between 1961 and 1963, his treatment including electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).  Before 1961, he had taught creative writing, and became a technical writer, working on computer manuals.  Technology is a key theme in the book.

We learn he is rather reclusive, happy to fix a minor problem with the engine of his motorbike, a Honda Superhawk CB77, and less willing to spend time in idle conversation.  When he does speak, he often launches into a long, complex, and occasionally rather unclear expositions on the issues he has been considering as he travels along.  When it comes to personal matters, he reverts to being spiky, unclear, and even rude at times.

Pirsig as narrator seems to live in three rather separate worlds.  There is the practical world of mechanical engineering, often fixing his bike as the duo travel, skills derived from his first degree in science.  Accompanying this is the world of philosophical explorations, a series of examinations which appear to take place almost entirely in his head:  Pirsig had studied philosophy in India and the US.  Finally, there is the world of people and relationships, one in which he appears to be something of a dab hand in saying the wrong thing, often ignoring or misunderstanding others!

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance appealed to the ex-hippie ex-student population of the 1970s.  How could it not.  It was about motorbikes, about travelling to California (still the home from home for many self-respecting radicals and free thinkers), and about the challenges of understanding life.  Written in the midst of social change, many of the messages of the book struck home for its readers.  .  I suspect it was a man’s book, too, where bikes and the elusive meaning of ‘quality’ grabbed attention, and any stuff about women’s views was, as I saw it, pushed aside after a few sentences

One of my US students, studying for a degree in the UK, exemplified Pirsig’s world.  He had a motorbike, talked wisely about how deal  with such problems as excess carbon on sparkplug points!  But he also loved the exploration of  philosophical issues, debating the distinction between the romantic and the classical; between living in the moment, and trying sort out problems when they arose, as opposed to living life with an analytical fervour, checking, diagnosing and fixing every bit of equipment – and every person – around him.

It was a book for a troubled and confusing time.  In the US, Richard Nixon was coming to the end of his presidency (it ended in 1974), with all the dramas of break-ins and taped conversations.  The Cold War had taken a bad turn with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, followed by Brezhnev’s subsequent claim Russia had the right to violate the sovereignty of any country, in order to ‘safeguard socialism’ in the face of expanding enthusiasm for capitalism.  If all that wasn’t bad enough, the activities of OPEC (the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) began to take a more interventionist turn.  In October 1973, the Arab majority of OPEC announced major production cuts and an oil embargo against the United States and other nations supporting Israel in their war with a coalition of Arab states, the Yom Kippur War.  Oil prices quadrupled, rationing was put in place, all of which was compounded in the UK by a lengthy coalminers’ strike.

Both Nixon in the US and the hapless Heath in the UK were replaced in 1974, but observers sensed this was only one step in a process of change.  They were right, as Harold Wilson was replaced by Jim Callaghan, and then, in 1979, ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher was elected leader.  In the US Nixon was replaced by Gerald Ford, then Jimmy Carter, and in 1981, Thatcher’s ally, Ronald Reagan was elected President.  The slow decline of left-wing radicalism ended as the conservatives took over.

By the time the book appeared, it was clear Pirsig was a troubled man.  He had recovered from his ECT treatment a decade earlier, but was still trying to come to terms with the person he had been.  Back then, his interest in philosophy had been with the analysis of ‘quality’, which he saw as a concept that could neither be explained by Plato’s theory of ideal forms nor Aristotle’s empiricism.  He had attempted to resolve this, and, as the journey described in the book progresses, he keeps returning to this issue in a series of reflections.  He found riding his bike as a way to free his mind, both from the travel but also from interactions with people, especially his friends who are with him for the first part of the trip, and his son, who is with him throughout.  He saw understanding quality as central to developing a new path in contemporary philosophy.  Maintaining his bike was an important way for him to explore this, contrasting the mechanical tasks of maintenance and problem solving with viewing his bike as a realisation of ideas, a conceptual space as much as a physical one.

Like many critics, I find some parts of the discussion opaque and confusing, which may reflect my own limitations.  The use of the word ‘Zen’ in the book’s title is a little hard to understand.  Certainly, the narrator’s practice is built around reflection, but his examination of the nature of mind and substance do not rely on any traditional meditative practice.  It contrasts with Eugene Herrigel’s book, Zen and the Art of Archery, which had been published in 1953, and from which Pirsig had surely taken his title. Under the guidance of a Zen master, Herrigel accepts and develops skills through what he calls an unconscious control of outer activity, rather than the western belief that mastery can only be obtained through conscious control and direction. A central theme in Herrigel’s book is that through years of practice, a physical activity becomes effortless both mentally and physically, as if our physical memory (what today we might call our ‘muscle memory’) executes complex and difficult movements without conscious control from our mind.  This seems to mirror Mihalyi Cziksentmihalyi’s concept of flow, the zone in which physical activity becomes unthinkingly effortless (I’ll return to Cziksentmihalyi in a moment).

Rereading the book now, it is clear maintaining his bike offered one way for Pirsig to to step away from day-to-day interactions.  However, even if this was a kind of Zen practice, it is reflection rather than meditation that is at the core of the trip, as he attempts to link back to the person he was before his illness and the discussions he had with colleagues and teachers, while also trying to reframe his connection to his son.  In retrospect, it is not easy to grasp why the book was so popular when it was published.  Was it the attraction of the physical journey across the US, or the complexity and often unresolved interactions with his son and others, or the sometimes extensive and often rather unclear ramblings through various philosophical issues?  In uncertain times, his self-absorbed, jumbled journey might have helped – or encouraged – other muddled people.

Going back to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an odd experience.  Even more obvious than was the case when I first read it, it is a curious assemblage of parts, some of which are deeply personal reflections on relationships, while others are often incomplete examinations of key issues.  When he was an academic at Montana State University, he witnessed various attempts by the state legislature to control the institution, or even close it down.  Involved in protests, and speaking with students, Pirsig (as Phaedrus) observes “The real university is not a material object”.  He went on to add:

“The real university … has no specific location.  It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues.  The real university is a state of mind.  It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University.  The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.”

This was a manifesto of the free university movement.  That alternative to traditional higher education began in 1964, with the University of California Berkely’s Free Speech Movement.  Students and staff set up a variety of organisations offering unaccredited public classes without imposing restrictions on who could teach or learn.  Through the 1960s, hundreds of ‘free universities’ appeared within formal universities and outside them, in the USA to begin with, but eventually in the UK and Europe, too.  Some were also sources of support for underground activism and political education.  Variously labelled experimental colleges, open education exchanges, and communiversities, they proliferated into a wild variety of structures (wild not just wide!).  However, as student activism started declining towards the end of the 1960s, so free universities moved away from the grounds of bricks-and-mortar university campuses and developed into various kinds of  forums for lifelong learning.  In many ways they encouraged and sustained current lifelong adult education endeavours.

Another part of the book addresses what Pirsig calls ‘inner peace of mind’, achieving unselfconsciousness and a “complete identification with one’s circumstances”.   He explores it best when he is talking about working on his motorbike, “just fixing” as he describes it, where a duality between self and environment disappears, and everything ‘follows naturally’.  It is an example of what made Pirsig’s book so engaging, and yet frustrating.  You could see what he meant by inner peace of mind, you might even have experienced moments like that, but just as he grabs your focus, Pirsig changes topic and returns to the task he was engaged in in fixing his bike engine.  What are you supposed to do?  Buy yourself a motorbike, and travel across America.  Wasn’t that what Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper did in Easy Rider, and didn’t that come to an unfortunate end?  For many, that film was a commentary on the doomed end to the counterculture of the 1960s, not a path to enlightenment.

That topic of inner peace of mind was to come to the fore several years later, in 1997,  when Mihaly Csikszentmihaly published Finding Flow, a book concerned with what he described as “ that state of effortless concentration and enjoyment called ‘flow’.”  As Csikszentmihaly book explained:

“Imagine you are skiing down a slope and your full attention is focused on the movements of your body and your full attention is focused on the movements of your body, the position of the skis, the air whistling past your face, and the snow-shrouded trees running by. There is no room in your awareness for conflicts or contradictions; you know that a distracting thought or emotion might get you buried face down in the snow. The run is so perfect that you want it to last forever.   If skiing does not mean much to you, this complete immersion in an experience could occur while you are singing in a choir, dancing, playing bridge, or reading a good book. If you love your job, it could happen during a complicated surgical operation or a close business deal. It may occur in a social interaction, when talking with a good friend, or while playing with a baby. Moments such as these provide flashes of intense living against the dull background of everyday life.”

Does Csikszentmihaly do a better job of explaining inner sense of peace?  I’m not sure, but it is clear that in some ways Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance reads more like a biography-cum-novel than as an enquiry into epistemology.  The book is mainly very readable, yet immensely frustrating at times.  What was that phrase again:  ‘like a curate’s egg, good in parts’!!  It was a book of the time, loved by students, hippie revolutionaries, and vaguely frustrated older adults.  It spoke to something more than it actually achieved, always teasing its readers with the promise of insights about themselves and the world around them, but never quite getting past the limits of its autobiographical core.

Pirsig’s book is one in a series of significant books built around a journey.  In recent times (as opposed to all those wonderful classical tales), there is Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Jostein Gardner’s Sophie’s World, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.  Some have found Paulo Coelho’s fable The Alchemist very satisfying (but not me).  I will add Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh (OK – too light-hearted for you?).  Journeys of discovery are important for us:  they allow us to follow a path of increasing understanding, even if there are times when we get so swept up by the events we miss points, or swallow silly stuff without noticing.  They work because the metaphor of the journey is also a framework for our personal development:  it is both reassuring to think we have been finding out more as we grow older, even if it is slightly disquieting to think that we might never get to the end and find those elusive ultimate answers.  The response to that is easy, of course.  Buy a motorbike!  Keep reading!

Transitions

I first read about ‘rites de passage’ back in the 1960s.  I was a student, enrolled in a social anthropology course, and Arnold van Gennep’s book Les Rites de Passage was listed.  It had appeared in an English translation back in 1960.  A key text, it described the process through which a person or a group goes through a change in social status.  Van Gennep explained that rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation.

In the first phase, people are withdrawn from their current status and prepared for the move from one social status to another. “The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behaviour signifying the detachment of the individual or group … from an earlier fixed to point in the social structure.”  There is often a detachment or ‘cutting away’ from the former self in this phase, which is signified in symbolic actions and rituals. One of the examples Van Gennep uses is the cutting of the hair for a person who has just joined the army.  He or she is ‘cutting away’ the former self:  the civilian.

The transition (liminal) phase is the period between stages, during which one has left one place or state but has not yet entered or joined the next.  “The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous.”  I’m not sure why this example came to me, but this is a bridegroom on a stag night or bride at a ‘hen do’.  This is a sanctioned time when misbehaviour is permitted – even encouraged.

In the third phase (reaggregation or incorporation) the passage is “consummated [by] the ritual subject”.   Having completed the rite and assumed their ‘new’ identity, the individual re-enters society with anew status. Re-incorporation is characterized by elaborate rituals and ceremonies, like debutant balls and college graduation, and by outward symbols of new ties: thus “in rites of incorporation there is widespread use of the ‘sacred bond, the ‘sacred cord’, the knot, and of analogous forms such as the belt, the ring, the bracelet and the crown.”

Anthropologists like to observe these rites de passage in societies, as they are often insightful:  they demonstrate the markers of social status, and the symbolism is a guide to other rituals in behaviour, both on special occasions and in more mundane activities.   This perspective received considerable impetus with the development of the sociological theory of symbolic interaction, peoples’ use of shared language and rituals to create and reinforce symbols and meaning.  It’s a frame of reference that helps us better understand how individuals interact with one another through symbolic worlds, worlds that shape individual behaviour.  For theorists symbolic interactionism was a framework that helped understand how society is preserved and created through repeated interactions between individuals. It is the shared understanding and interpretations of meaning that shape many of the significant interactions we see between individuals. Individuals act on the premise of a shared understanding of meaning within their social context.  People live in both natural and symbolic environments.

I wasn’t a sociologist, but I was interested in this perspective.  However, that interest grew significantly once I met Anselm Strauss .  Anselm was a short, slightly overweight and quietly spoken man, a professor of sociology at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco.  I think the best word to describe him was gentle.  He loved music, played the piano at home, and had a fascination with kinetic sculptures.  From when I first met him at the end of the 1960s, I realised he was the teacher I aspired to be, never lecturing but always asking questions, and by that means revealing understanding and insight.  He set a standard for how to be a university professor that remained my goal for the years I worked in academic institutions, a standard I longed to meet, but one which was always just beyond my grasp.  If you think about it, that’s always the best thing to aim for, something that is almost there, encouraging to strive to be better.

Perhaps there is no better way to explain what he was like than to quote from the introduction from an Anselm Strauss’ festschrift, written by Roberta Lessor in 2000 (in a supplement to Sociological Perspectives):

Anselm Strauss was the most unpretentious academic I have ever known. In his nearly sixty years of working and publishing, Strauss advanced symbolic interactionist theory and method remarkably, yet he was soft-spoken and unassuming. His dress and demeanor mirrored his personality. He preferred open-collared shirts and his trademark pullover sweaters to coats and ties, and he was even known to carry drafts of whatever he happened to be working on in a plastic bag—much lighter and easier on the back than a briefcase. He lived most of his life with chronic illness and worked the small necessities of self-care into his daily routine. Totally the sociologist, he used his experiences both in and out of the hospital as data, observations of “medical work” from which he could draw insights. This was a life lesson I took from Anselm: observe what life hands you as data for a sociological analysis. It makes life more interesting, you may improve your analytic skills, and it may even help your situation. Sometimes Anselm needed to take a short rest, and if he were working with students in a seminar, he would give a characteristic, almost dismissive, small wave of his hand and say, “just go on, I’ll be right back.” That might mean his reclining on the bench beside the fireplace in the Third Avenue Victorian (which housed the sociology program) while we went on with our seminar for twenty minutes. Or it might mean his closing his eyes as he sat in his chair, to return to the conversation in a few minutes with a smile and his full attention.

I had first met Anselm on one his early visits to the UK.  Initially I saw him as some variety of kind uncle, enquiring about what I was doing.  As he would draw me out, wondering about why I had mentioned something, querying what I meant by the words I used, initially I didn’t ‘get it’.  It took some time before I realised how extraordinarily effective he was as a teacher.  Indeed, he was never a ‘teacher’, but rather a friend on a journey, who appeared to know something about the territory, and would every so often point out a possibly worthwhile detour, or a reason to stope, reflect and reconsider.  At my first acquaintance, I didn’t realise he was a wonderful guide:  I suspect I imagined that, back in the US, he gave lectures like everyone else did.  It took a visit to see him in beloved San Francisco for me to understand how he was helping me learn.

He also wrote several insightful books.  Time for Dying is one of these (it was preceded by Awareness of Dying).  As he explained in the preface, he and co-author Barney Glaser (a researcher in the department) saw the book as directed to two audiences.  ‘Because we wish to contribute toward making the management of dying – by health professionals, families and patients – more rational and compassionate, we have written this book, first of all for those who must work with and give care to the dying.”  The second audience was social scientists, a contribution to exploring the “temporal aspects of work”, a group  that included those with interests in many areas, some far from interested in health care and hospitals.

Time for Dying was published in 1968.  My copy is hand dated 1971.  Reading it more than fifty years later was a shock:  not because it wasn’t the book I had thought it to be, but because its underlying approach has become so firmly embedded in the way I have worked.  Anselm Strauss described his approach as ‘grounded theory’ in a book published a year earlier (The Discovery of Grounded Theory, also written by Strauss and Glaser).  They made it clear they had had several goals in mind when writing about their approach to developing theory.  They wanted to:

• to legitimise qualitative research;
• to criticise the functionalist school in sociology;
• to demonstrate the possibility of building theories from the data, instead of choosing to rely on ‘ethnographic’ description (what a man from Mars would see).

My copy of Time for Dying still has the original paper wrapper cover – which shows eight people, all in medical whites, standing together and clearly discussing a case.  At the bottom of the cover we read the book is “a detailed analysis of the reciprocal effects of patients, staff, and institutional structure in the management of terminal patients in institutions”.  The Introduction makes it clear that the book was written ‘first of all’ for people who have work with and give care to individuals who are dying.  It notes that in 1963 53% of all death in the US were in hospitals and nursing homes.  I suspect the figures are higher today:  a 2019 Australian study found 51% of deaths were in a hospital/medical service area, and 29.5% in residential aged care facilities (although this is a wider category than nursing homes.  This is, of course, an indicator of how far death is managed ‘out of sight’, with a little under 15% taking place at home.  As the Introduction made clear (and must be even more the case today), “outsiders to the family have been delegated responsibility for taking care of dying during their last days or hours”.

Time for Dying focusses on the ‘temporal features of terminal care’.  It is an important perspective, as we often are encouraged to think about the psychological or ethical aspects of behaviour towards a dying individual.  However, they want to remind us that this is also about ‘work’, both routine, around meals, drug administration and the like, and the less predictable, including tests, interventions and responses.  It is a complex work management process, especially as many patients approaching death may be heavily drugged, temporarily comatose or even unconscious, and typically having little conversational interaction with the staff.  Inevitably, while many staff may be involved when there are critical incidents occurring, for much of the time attention is limited and relies on impersonal monitors as much as on staff observation.

As Glaser and Strauss point out in their Preface, “the training of physicians and nurses equips them principally for the technical aspects of dealing with illness.  Medical students learn not to kill patients through error, and to save lives through diagnosis and treatment.  But their teachers put little of no emphasis on how to talk with dying patients; how – whether – to disclose an impending death; or even how to approach the subject with wives, husbands, children and parents of the dying”.

In 1971, I arrived at the University of Edinburgh, where one of my interests was looking at ways in which the social and behavioural sciences could be introduced into the medical school curriculum.  The two books on dying had made an impact on me, although not just in relation to the dying:  as I saw it, medical students needed a better appreciation of sociology and psychology to be able to fulfill their roles effectively.  I continued to look at ways to enhance student understanding of these issues for the next ten years, in Scotland and then in Australia.

Fifty years later, an appreciation of the social sciences is now a standard part of the medical school curriculum, and nurses and doctors are much better prepared to deal with the families and friends of patients.  Inevitably, some will be more able to deal with social and psychological issues than others.  Individual differences will always be evident.

When my wife was dying some years ago, the contrast between her two principal doctors was vivid.  Her medical oncologist was open and helpful as he explained progress, and later the lack of progress to me and my children.  He explained his strategies, and his enthusiasm for measures, his warmth, and his devotion was evident.  So was his distraught appearance as it became clear that the measures he was trying were failing.  His colleague, the surgical oncologist, was clear, direct, and basically impersonal.  It was only after an unexpectedly long surgery, that the other side of his character emerged:  he was tired, frustrated, and – although he couldn’t bring himself to say it – defeated.  He knew the prognosis was bad, but he couldn’t find the words to explain.  He left that to his colleague.  To be clear, I don’t mean to imply any criticism:  both dealt with what they knew and communicated well, but their approaches were a reflection of personalities that were intrinsic.

That time illustrated an important lesson about transitions.  Van Gennep was an astute observer of rites de passage.  However, describing social process and symbols is an account that is essentially de-personalised.  It is concerned with identifying the underlying ways in which we manage changes in social status.  It influences the way the ‘work’ is executed.  However, at the level of specific transitions, variation is enormous.  In that sense, ‘real’ status passage in a task that involves many participants, each one of whom contributes to shape the process.  Perhaps I can best explain that by example.

Marriage is a very important kind of status change.  While occasionally the bride and groom might feel it is all about them, they are one, albeit important, part of a complex process of negotiation.  In addition to the couple, others who take part, and often have important parts to play as well as very real interest in the outcome, can include parents, other family members, friends, colleagues, officers (whether priests or delegated officials), not to mention musicians, choirs, caterers, waiting staff, and so on.  In some cases, the cast can be hundreds!

I have managed to get married three times.  On the first occasion, it was essentially a ‘family’ business, with several family members on both sides.  The next time, it was a tiny group, little more than my wife and I, a few members of her family, one child, and a few others.  The third time around, it was largely an event for friends.  Each time around, it was a time of transition:  a brief interlude before becoming a married couple.  However, the symbolism, the process, and the participation of others varied enormously.  To return to Anselm Strauss, he would observe that this is a matter of ‘work’.  People have roles and tasks, for a short-term project.  There is a clear outcome, and certain rules that shape the way the work is undertaken.  But each marriage was undertaken in its particular way.

Strauss and Glaser on dying describe this feature of status passage brilliantly.  The two books, and especially Time for Dying, capture both the characteristics of the underlying process, while carefully noting variations and unpredictable alternatives.  However, as is also true of some other major rites de passage, success is determined by all the participants in the process feeling ‘it was done right’, respecting the unique elements of the event, while also knowing that the appropriate social proprieties were respect.  We are all involved in social transitions, and we want to feel good about how they were accomplished.

Here and There – Cambridge

For the eight years I lived in Cambridge, I was both ‘town’ and ‘gown’.  Gown was the university, the colleges, and I think there were only two students in my undergraduate year who didn’t live in the college.  We were both married, but the other was both married and ‘mature’ (which I seem to recall meant aged over 25 years old).  So I lived in town for my undergraduate years, close to the city centre and the railway station. It was where my first two children were born (they were born at home), and then for the remaining years we lived outside the city, first in a satellite town, and then in the middle of nowhere!  It was a half-and-half life, with activities centred on the college, and everything else centred on my home.

Let’s go back to the beginning.  On October 1, 1963, the first day of Michaelmas Term, I had joined a throng of new students, all there to collect a copy of the Cambridge Reporter from outside the college dining hall, to discover where classes would be held and at what time.  Unlike the others gathered by the dining hall entrance, I was about to be married.  I wasn’t entirely clear as to how the college and university system worked.  I wouldn’t be eating in college every day, I wouldn’t be worrying about meeting young women (of which there was a shortage in the university back then!), but I would have to find somewhere to live, surviving on the income from scholarships which were intended to cover life in term time only.  Perhaps it was a form of avoidance but I focussed on what I had to do in the short term:  the longer term would have to look after itself.  It was a habit of mind that has never left me.

That October day I had no clear idea about what I was going to do for the next three years, and no sense that my life was to continue to change in dramatic and unexpected ways.  For the first eighteen years of my life, it was as if I had been travelling up a series of escalators.  Each one had narrowed my vision of life, and my interests.  At each landing, several people left, while, in a smaller group, I continued up.  Now I was about to study for a science degree, in geology, which would lead to an academic career.  My mother, my geology teacher and my school headmaster had pushed me along, relieved I had made it so far, and almost certainly worried about what would happen next.  They weren’t concerned about my academic  progress, so much as to what else might eventuate.  Whatever expectations they had entertained, by the end of those three years they would turn out to be confounded.

I should be more precise.  In fact during the first month of Michaelmas Term I did live in college.  It was an illusion, of course, and my real life in Cambridge was yet to begin.  After one month in a college room, I went back down to London for my wedding!  We left London on our wedding day, caught a train and then a taxi to stay one night on the Norfolk Broads before arriving ‘home’.  We were carrying two suitcases, which were packed, not with clothes but with wedding gifts!  In those days, little use was made of the ‘registry model’ to help guests choose wedding presents.  I think we scored no less than five casseroles.  We spent a fair bit of that first honeymoon night unpacking all that we had been given.

In my first year at King’s, I studied Chemistry, Geology and Mineralogy and Crystallography.  The Cambridge system was, and probably still is, hard to understand.  A student applies to a college, and a place in a college is a place at the university.  At the same time, each student is enrolled in a course of study in a discipline area (UK education is narrow).  The formal teaching is offered by staff in the relevant faculty and takes place in the departmental teaching spaces.  Since Chemistry was a separate department from Geology, there was always a chance timetables would conflict, but, luckily for me, it worked out.  The teaching department sets the exams at the end of each year:  back then, there was no continuous assessment, except lab work was marked.  At the end of the first or second year you would take a major exam, with several papers to be completed, Tripos Part I.  At the end of the third year, you would take Tripos Part II, the exams this time determining your final class of degree.  Tripos?  That was the name of the three-legged stool on which a student sat for oral examinations – centuries earlier!

How does a college fit into this system?  Each college has senior members, fellows, or dons as they are known, many of whom also held a position in one of the university departments.  Within the college, a student would have a tutor for each area of study, usually one of the college senior members.  Some tutors were members of a department, but not all.  Tutors were key to learning, setting essays, discussing lectures, and extending your understanding.

The system was archaic in many ways.  Colleges at that time had a curfew, and the gates were locked.  It was an offence to have a visitor in your room after lock-up hours.  However, as with so many things, the rule was followed by exception.  Many young women would be in the College after hours, a fact that was ‘studiously’ ignored.  However, the accepted informal protocol required they needed to be away before the morning.  No women at breakfast time!  Since the front gate was locked, the only other exit from King’s was out via the ‘backs’, the land that ran alongside the River Cam at the back of several colleges.

How could a young woman get out?  There was a locked gate, but it was possible, with a little difficulty, to clamber around the gate while carefully avoiding the risk of falling into the small stream below.  If you happened to be in that part of town in the early hours of the morning, you could catch the sight of at least one or two young women (and young men?) climbing around.  However, it wasn’t easy, and one day a student wrote to the College Council to complain.  He pointed out that this means of exit was not just risky, but expensive.  Each time his girlfriend had left, she had laddered her stockings on the metal frame.

Without any announcement being made, the College arranged to have a small ledge attached to the barrier on either side of the gate.  It was now easier to exit, and far less likely to incur outrageous costs!  The ledge was still there when I was back visiting Cambridge in 2011.  As I was writing this, I used Google to look at the back gate, and it’s still there; although no longer needed, that cost saving thin ledge is just visible.

Back in the 1963, Cambridge was a world of traditions and rituals, from wearing gowns at dinner in college and outside in the town, to being able to buy superb wines at rock bottom prices in the Pantry, thanks to the College’s astute wine committee.  For much of the 20^th Century my college had been a safe haven for homosexuals, of whom E M Forster had been one of the best known.  I met Forster just once, early in my time at King’s.  Standing outside the Porter’s Lodge, admiring a fine old vintage car, parked on the forecourt, I saw another figure, transfixed by the same sight.  ‘Fine car”’ I said (betraying my amazing insight and wisdom!).  “It was”, said E M Forster, and he walked off into the college!  My first brush with someone really famous:  even if it was rather brief.

Traditions and rituals?  King’s had a reputation for nurturing new ideas and new thinkers, people like Alan Turing and John Maynard Keynes; writers like Rupert Brooke, J G Ballard, and Steven Poliakoff; political analysts like Anthony Giddens and Tony Judt; and musicians, of course, from Orlando Gibbons to David Willcocks, together with John Eliot Gardiner, Simon Preston and Stephen Cleobury in more recent times.  At the same time, it was a hothouse of radicalism in the time I was there, with debates and resolutions thrown around the Junior Common Room as freely as the beer flowed.  We wanted an open university, we wanted a free university, we wanted to overthrow the bourgeois rulers of the country, we wanted … we wanted so many things, and some who left King’s around that time were to go on to make changes along the lines we had discussed.

In terms of my undergraduate studies, that first year wasn’t a good one. The chemistry lectures were to a huge group. Even the lab work was undertaken with so many other students that I began to feel disengaged.  That feeling was aggravated in Lent Term  when my first daughter was born, and my attention wandered on to more personal matters.  I knew I had passed my exams, but I knew I hadn’t tried as hard as I could or should have done, nor did that seem so pressing at the time.  At the beginning of my second year, I transferred to Social Anthropology, and never looked back.

Let’s abandon gown and get back to town.  Childbirth in England in the 1960’s was mostly at home.  An expectant mother had a midwife allocated, who would visit regularly, and was ‘on call’ for when the child was about to be born.  The father-to-be was expected to organise equipment, and, on the day, boil prodigious quantities of water (it was a good way to keep him out of the way).  My wife started contractions on 19 April, and our daughter was born on the morning of the following day.   The midwife was great, although she did need to pop out regularly for a quick cigarette;  our doctor came by later in the morning, briefly inspected the newborn, and seeing all was good left a few minutes later.  She weighed just 5 pounds 9 ounces, right on the edge of requiring transfer to hospital on weight grounds.

We had been to ante-natal classes, but I can still recall our worries when my wife and I were left with our daughter for first night.  The book we had, Dr Spock’s famous guide to baby and child care, advised that after the birth mother and daughter would sleep peacefully for at least 8 hours.  Who was he kidding?  Yes, our daughter slept, but my wife was caught in an agony of worry.  I must have looked every ten minutes to check our tiny baby was still breathing!  She, and we, survived, and within a couple of weeks, we had settled down into a routine.

I’m sure you don’t want to read about my years of study, nor even about the time my wife and I went to a ‘May Ball.  However, after a couple of moves, our final home in Cambridge (well, fairly close by to be precise) was a house in the Gog Magog Downs, about a mile off the road to Wilbraham, and about a mile away from the other houses at Wandlebury Hill. The top of the hill is now known as Wandlebury Country Park, a nature reserve owned by Cambridge Past Present and Future.

Wandlebury was already inhabited in the Bronze Age and 2500 years ago there was an Iron Age hill fort there, now known as Wandlebury Ring. “The hill fort once had concentric ditches and earthen walls which were kept in place by wooden palisades. Although the fort has vanished, the ditch (the Ring) dug around the edge can clearly be seen and walked along, being as much as 5 metres deep in places and offering an adventurous route along its edge. There is no evidence that it was ever used in defence.” (Thank you, Wikipedia!)

Wandlebury House originally stood within the ring:  at one stage it was the home of Francis Godolphin, a graduate of King’s College, and an earl, who eventually became Lord Privy Seal. The house had been demolished long ago, but the monumental stable block remained.  This was an important landmark, as it was where the famous Godolphin Arabian horses were stabled, although by now it was used for accommodation. The grave of a horse, the Godolphin Bard, one of the three that founded the country’s thoroughbred racehorse bloodstock, is under the archway leading to the stable block, which was converted into rather smart apartments, (the horse died in 1753!).

The road to our house was a dirt track, and there was just a narrow path that took us up to the homes at the top of the hill, where the warden of the complex lived.  Our house had about an acre of land around it, together with a donkey.  Jack the donkey lived in a small stable on one edge of the property, one wall of which was an old upright piano, which he was slowly eating.  This wasn’t like our previous homes: we were out in the country and that was brought home to us in the first few days when we discovered the house was full of mice.  I recall my wife wasn’t too pleased.  We found the holes in the walls that allowed the mice in, and eventually by stopping up the holes I was able to ensure we saw them no more.

The house itself had a small round room, the original 17^th Century cottage, with a fireplace in the centre.  Over time, the first addition had been a kitchen, complete with a massive Aga cooker, and a large living room.  A more recent addition was an upper floor, with four bedrooms, probably completed about fifty years earlier.  A rambling house in the country.  The gate to the house and garden faced a long straight walking track, an old Roman road, that joined up with a much longer Roman road that ran all the way from Cambridge to Haverhill, a popular walking track some 16 miles long.  A great home for two adults and three children.

It was an idyllic home in many ways.  Off the beaten track, set among the woods at the bottom of the Gog Magog Hills, it was peaceful.  Well, most of the time.  Unfortunately, the back of the house faced on to a popular walking track.  At the weekend and in good weather, on most Saturday and Sunday’ afternoons we would have to put up with the noise of a steady stream of people passing by.  As well as their noise, we made ourselves unpopular with many walkers, and especially children, by trying to discourage them from feeding Jack.  Despite my grumbling, it was one of the best places in which I have lived, second only to Pfafftown 40 years later.  We were lucky.  When we lived there, it was still a quiet place, despite those weekend walkers.  Indeed, for a young family, it was close to idyllic.  Now Wandlebury Country Park is a site for weddings, lunches, festivals, and other events.

Jack was more like a thorn in my side than a lovely pet!  I was told that he would allow the children to ride on his back as we went up the track to the old stables to collect our post and milk.  He hated going up the hill, and often refused to budge if a child was on his back.  Returning was a different matter, and he would almost fly back down.  We had to watch Jack, as he could sense the brief period when the gate to the property was open and would shoot out and be gone in no time at all.  Once escaped he would run, usually down the Roman road.  The outcome was always the same.  His collar had an identifying brass medallion.  Within a few hours the phone would ring.  “Er, do you have a donkey called Jack?”  “Yes, where is he?”  Usually in someone’s garden; once, famously, in the centre of Cambridge eating flowers at the entrance to Addenbooke’s Hospital.  I would get in my car, drive to where he was, tie a rope to his collar and the other end to the back bumper of the car, and slowly, slowly, drive him back to Wandlebury, often to the scandalised expressions of onlookers!

Perhaps all that is enough on Cambridge.  After eight years, we moved to Edinburgh, and nearly five years later went on to Australia.  I loved my years in Cambridge, but it was a case of “the right place at the right time”.  I didn’t want to be a traditional academic.  As I’ve confessed in other blogs, I have always been something of a wanderer.  However, Cambridge gave me a strong basis in and appreciation of research, teaching, innovation, and exploring challenging ideas, and they’ve remained, wherever I’ve ended up.  Great foundational years.

Pale Fire

Sometimes I imagine Alice Liddell became Vladimir Nabokov when she grew up.  As a child in ‘Wonderland’ she was able to shrink and grow and engage in complicated word games with everyone she met.  In the same way, Nabokov is the 20^th Century’s paragon of transformation and word play.  But no, Alice was far too pragmatic to have written a book like Lolita.  Alice enjoyed listening to the twists and turns in Dodgson’s story, and the games he played with language, but Lolita is a different matter.  It’s a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, well described by Dorothy Parker in 1958 as “the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls” and Lolita “a dreadful little creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered”  (Sex – Without the Asterisks, Esquire, October 1958).  However, Nabokov was fond of the works of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian. He even called Lewis Carroll the ‘first Humbert Humbert’, (according to Appel, in Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, OUP, 1974).

However, stunning book that it is, I am not going to write about Lolita, much as I would like to do so.  The novel is so tangled up in layers of moral outrage, peverse misunderstanding, and half-baked realisations on the screen that it is almost impossible to retrieve.  Instead, I want to look at Pale Fire, the fifth of Nabokov books in English (Lolita was the third).  Published in 1962, the novel comprises a 999-line poem titled ‘Pale Fire’, written by one John Shade, preceded by a brief epigraph, and followed by a lengthy commentary and index written by Shade’s neighbour and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote.

If that isn’t complex enough, we’ve hardly begun!  There’s that epigraph.  When one appears at the front of a novel, it is rather like a preface, intended to both to set the tone for what follows, and to convey additional information.  In the case of Pale Fire, the relevance of the epigraph is pointedly obscure.  Re-reading it recently, now I think it’s like a clue in a mystery novel, as capable of misleading as it is in clarifying, and it certainly manages to turn my thoughts into a rather suspicious frame of mind, not just creating the state of confusion I experienced when I first read it:  “This reminds me of the ludicrous account he gave Mr. Langston, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. ‘Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats’.  And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, ‘But Hodge shan’t be shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be shot’.”  The quote comes from James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.  Get it?  No, nor did I: but it sets the tone of this extraordinary novel, making it clear that what you are about to read is going to contain some, no, several confusing puzzles, non-sequiturs, links and thoughts, enough to keep any serious reader engaged for a very long time!

It is hard to convey how absurdly involving this novel becomes.  The poem is long, and it is hard to keep focus for those 999 lines.  The first time I read Pale Fire I just charged through the poem with little understanding or appreciation.  I’d read Lolita previously, an engaging and conventionally structured story, if a very dark and disturbing one.  In contrast, the poem was like reading something by T S Eliot:  strange, unsettling, and unclear, relying on images and ideas tossed out like a postmodern assemblage of bits and pieces.  Then I read the commentary on the poem.  If I had thought Nabokov was a really good novelist before, now I was hooked.  Pale Fire the poem had become the source for an extended, personal, often funny, and sometimes frightening collection of comments and reflections.  And it grabs you.

In trying to offer an overview, I think Shade’s poem seems to describe aspects of his life, albeit confusingly.  Canto 1 includes his early encounters with death and glimpses of what he takes to be the supernatural.  Canto 2 is about his family and the apparent suicide of his daughter, Hazel Shade.  Canto 3 focuses on Shade’s search for making sense of the afterlife, culminating in a ‘faint hope’ in higher powers ‘playing a game of worlds’ revealed by apparent coincidences.  Canto 4 offers some details on Shade’s daily life and creative process, as well as thoughts on his poetry, his approach to trying to understand the universe.

Kinbote’s notes on the poem include three stories all muddled up with one another. One is his own story, including reflections on his friendship with Shade. We learn that after Shade was murdered, Kinbote acquired the poem’s manuscript, together with some variants, and oversaw it’s publication, advising readers that it lacks line 1000.  Kinbote’s second story deals with King Charles II, ‘The Beloved’, the deposed king of Zembla.  King Charles aided by supporters has escaped imprisonment by Soviet-backed revolutionaries, using a secret passage in his castle.  Kinbote tells us he inspired Shade to write the poem by telling him of King Charles’s escape, which is the reason it includes allusions to the king, and to Zembla, especially in the rejected drafts, although you can’t find any explicit reference to King Charles as you read the poem.  Kinbote’s third story concerns Gradus, an assassin dispatched by the new rulers of Zembla to kill the exiled king. Gradus makes his way from Zembla through Europe and America to New Wye, suffering various comic mishaps. In the last note, on the missing line 1000, Kinbote explains how Gradus killed Shade, apparently by mistake.

Towards the end of the narrative, Kinbote all but explicitly claims that he is the exiled King Charles, living incognito; however, enough details throughout the story, as well as various statements of dubious sincerity made by Kinbote towards the novel’s end, suggest both King Charles and Zembla are both fictitious.  Perhaps we are to conclude Kinbote is delusional, and he has built his elaborate picture of Zembla, even including its unique language, as a by-product of his insanity; similarly, Gradus might simply be an unhinged man who had been trying to kill Shade from the start, his backstory as a revolutionary assassin a fabrication.

Confused?  Perhaps I should start with an example.  In Canto 2 of the poem, we read:

There was a time in my demented youth

When somehow I suspected that the truth

About survival after death was known

To every human being:  I alone

Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy

Of books and people hid the truth from me.

Kinbote’s comment on the final line (it’s line 172 of the poem), opens “His and my reader will, I trust, will excuse me for breaking the orderly course of these comments”, a somewhat surprising suggestion since the preceding 40 pages of ‘notes’ cover the imprisonment and escape of the King of Zemblan during a revolution, while the poem up to that point had only covered fragments apparently describing images from Shade’s childhood?  Without any comments on these six lines, we move to a description of Professor Pnin ( a character in another of Nabokov’s novels), and then on to teaching Shakespeare at the college level.  We are told Shade considers himself benevolent teacher, except he would always give very low marks to anyone who used the words ‘simple’ or ‘sincere’ in describing an author’s work.

Shade concludes his comments on this line by adding: “when I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity, I know either the critic or the author is a fool”.  Kinbote replies (even though this is his commentary, he appears in third person: “But I am told this manner of thinking is taught in high school”.   Shade replies, “That’s where the broom should begin to sweep.  A child should have thirty teachers to teach him thirty subjects, and not one harassed schoolmarm to show him a picture of a rice field and tell him this is China because she knows nothing about China, or anything else, and cannot tell the difference between longitude and latitude.”  Kinbote replies:  “Yes, I agree”.  Still with me?  The next note, on the following line, discusses the day the specific stanza was written, and then we are reading reminiscences about Shade’s birthday, one to which Kinbote wasn’t invited, but waited by the telephone for a last minute call, clutching his present.  Just to add to the sadness of that moment, we’re told it was Kinbote’s birthday also.  And so the commentary continues, with insights into insects, birds, and a discussion of the Red Admiral butterfly.  Even I know that Nabokov was a lifelong lepidopterist, often claiming this was his true passion.  Then, a few lines later in the poem, the commentary returns us to the King’s adventures, now travelling in disguise.

Have I said enough to make it clear that Pale Fire is both fascinating and frustrating.  Today it would be described as ‘meta-fiction’.  While Kinbote’s commentary comprises notes linked to the lines of the poem, it would be an understatement to add that the notes do little to add to or explain the poem.  Rather the notes contain key elements of those three related stories, the pieces following some kind of logical sequence, but embedded in various other discussions and reflections.  A while ago I read that the novel can be read in one of two ways, either ‘unicursally’, straight through, or ‘multicursally’, jumping between the comments and the poem.  As a sad reflection of my limited appreciation, despite trying both approaches, I have largely discounted the poem, and focussed on the notes.  That might imply I end up in a muddle, but that’s not the case.  Rather Nabokov’s style, hopping between commentary and story, is both engaging and satisfying.  I don’t feel disappointed when we lurch off on one tangent or another, but rather enjoy the jumping about – because each part is so satisfying.

One of my recent times reading Pale Fire was just after I had read a novel in which one of the key characters was a philatelist, flipping between pages of stamps from various countries, and occasionally focussed on one year, one country, and the stamps of that era.  It was an image that stuck in my mind as I read Nabokov’s novel:  it was as if I was examining the pages of a history, slightly muddled up, but each section important and valuable in its own right.

However, in going through Pale Fire this last time around, another analogy became even more pertinent.  It was as if I was studying butterfly wings, alternating between the overall pattern on each species’ wings, and the links between members of the same family, and then suddenly focussing down on the details of one specimen.  From the internet I discovered: “Butterfly wings are made up of two chitinous layers (membranes). Each wing is covered by thousands upon thousands of colourful scales and hairs.  These wing scales are tiny overlapping pieces of chitin on a butterfly or moth wing. They are outgrowths of the body wall and are modified, plate-like setae (hairs).  Most butterflies have different patterns on the front and back of their wings.  Scent scales are modified wing scales on the forewing of male butterflies and moths (on the costal fold) that release pheromones.  These chemicals attract females of the same species.  The scent scales are also known as androconia.” (from australianbutterflies.com/what-are-butterfly-wings-made-of).  A novel of a thousand parts?

Finally, I should add that there is a nice ‘academic’ feel to this.  Interactions between Kinbote and Shade take place in the fictitious small college town of New Wye, Appalachia, where they lived across a lane from each other, from February to July 1959.  Kinbote writes his commentary from then to October 1959 in a tourist cabin in the equally fictitious western town of Cedarn, Utana. Both authors recount many earlier events, Shade mostly in New Wye and Kinbote in New Wye and in Europe, especially the ‘distant northern land’ of Zembla.  The structure makes the reader feel, at least part of time, he’s reading an academic critique.

There are enough clues in the book to sustain this perspective.  Characters are slippery.  Some critics have argued Charles Kinbote is the alter-ego of the insane Professor V. Botkin, a delusional yet compelling faculty member at Wordsmith College (Wordsmith!).  Nabokov encouraged this view in an interview in 1962 (the year Pale Fire was published), suggesting Pale Fire “is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find. For instance, the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman” (quoted by Maurice Dolbier, New York Herald Tribune, June 17, 1962, on Books and Authors: Nabokov’s Plums).  He implied the novel’s complicated cross-references can lead the acrostic-minded reader to discover this ‘plum’.  If you want a further clue, the Index to Pale Fire includes an entry for a ‘Botkin, V.’, describing this Botkin as an “American scholar of Russian descent”, which then takes us to line 894 of the poem where a character suggests Kinbote is “a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine”.

Did I mention this is sometimes described as meta-fiction.  It is more than that, it is a rich, complex, multi-layered collection, with stories, commentaries and allusions all thrown together, creating a world of possibilities for the reader.  Yes, you can read it straight through.  If you do that, you emerge at the other end somewhat baffled, but with enough sense of the underlying story of Charles, King of Zembla, and his pursuer Gradus, even though it all ends in confusion towards the end of the book when Gradus kills the wrong person (or did he?).

You might agree with some commentators who try to tie the story back to various real events and places.  It has been claimed that Zembla is a deliberate corruption of Nova Zembla, a western simplification of the Russian island Novaya Zemlya.  As in his other books, the story includes exaggerated or comically distorted versions of Nabokov’s life, who was the son of a privileged White Russian before the Russian Revolution and his subsequently exile.  A key murder in the novel might reflect the murder of Nabokov’s father, assassinated by mistake!

Plums, puzzles and word games: here’s one more.   In his interview with Maurice Dolbier, Nabokov suggested the title of John Shade’s poem is from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens:  ‘The moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun’ (Act IV, scene 3), a line often taken as a metaphor about creativity and inspiration.  In Pale Fire, Kinbote quotes the passage but does not acknowledge it, as he says he has access only to an inaccurate Zemblan translation of the play, and later, in another note, he complains about the common practice of using quotations as titles.  Why is it Nabokov keeps reminding me of quotations, and especially that wonderful line from The Communist Manifesto: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’?  Very Nabokovian.

Nabokov is a word magician.  I’m going to break my opening promise by quoting almost the entire first chapter of Lolita:

“ Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.  My sin, my soul.  Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.  Lo.  Lee.  Ta.  She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.  She was Lolita in slacks.  She was Dolly at school.  She was Dolores on the dotted line.  But in my arms she was always Lolita.  Did she have a precursor?  She did, indeed she did.  In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl child.  In a princedom by the sea.  Oh when?  About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer.”

Yes, he’s a compelling, fascinating, dangerously entrancing word magician.

Virginia Woolf

In writing about Virginia Woolf, I’m going to take the easy way out.  I will avoid talking about her novels.  It’s a decision which will save me from having to explain the power of Mrs Dalloway, a novel about a day in her life, told first person as she moves between tasks and recollections, a day that ends with a dinner party.  I won’t have to cover the series of extraordinary conversations over the course of a day by the beach that take place in The Waves.  I can sneak past To The Lighthouse, covering moments in the lives of the Ramsay family, especially two visits, ten years apart, to the Isle of Skye.  I’m no literary scholar.  All I can say about her novels is that Virginia Woolf wrote about people ‘from the inside’, and her stream-of-consciousness books are among the most compelling I’ve ever read.

In this blog, my plan is to avoid her fiction entirely.  Instead, I want to explore two of her nonfiction essays, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.  However, a little background first.  Encouraged by her father, Woolf had begun writing professionally in 1900 when she was just eighteen years old.  As I’m sure you know, her family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury in 1904, where she, in conjunction with her brothers’ intellectual friends, formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group.  She married Leonard Woolf, and they founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish many of her books.  A Room of One’s Own appeared in 1929, and Three Guineas in 1938.

Virginia Woolf lived a life with debilitating challenges.   From the age of 13, she suffered periodic mood swings, going from severe depression to manic excitement, as well as occasional psychotic episodes, which her family referred to as her ‘madness’.  However, she wasn’t mad, but she did suffer from and struggled with illness for much of her life.  As Hermione Lee put it , she was  a woman of  “exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism, who made the best use and achieved the best understanding she could of her illness” (in ‘Virginia Woolf’, 1999).   For most of her life, she suffered recurrent bouts of depression.  Any mental, emotional, or physical strain was likely to lead to a reappearance of her symptoms, starting with a headache, followed by insomnia and thoughts that started to race.

In 1940, a number of factors appeared to overwhelm her. Her biography of Roger Fry  had been released to a disappointing reception. That depressed her, and then in September and October her two London homes were destroyed in the Blitz.  Finally, she completed her novel Between the Acts in November, and was exhausted.  Her health collapsed.  59 years old she died by drowning herself in a river close to her home in Sussex on 28 March 1941.

Back in 1928 Virginia Woolf had given two lectures at the University of Cambridge, one at Newnham College, and the other at Girton College.  They were to form the basis of A Room of One’s Own, which is really an extended essay.  It’s 149 pages long in my Oxford paperback edition, but it could be less than a hundred pages in a standard book format.  Written more than ninety years ago, it is an extended critique of the challenges and slights that disempower women.  While it addresses social, educational, and financial issues, it is especially concerned with the lack of women writing novels.  As the title suggests, it rests on the assertion “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”.  She weaves her commentary around the problems faced by many women authors, including the Brontës, George Eliot and George Sand, some who chose to ‘hide’ using a male persona.  Jane Austen, who published using her own name, was given as a striking exception.

One chapter of Woolf’s essay begins with a simple proposal: “Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.”  After describing what little was known when she wrote about Shakespeare’s life, she continues to contrast Judith’s experience with his:

Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home.  She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was.  But she was not sent to school.  She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil.  She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages.  But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.  They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter–indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye.  Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them.  Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler.  She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father.  Then he ceased to scold her.  He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage.  he would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes.  How could she disobey him?  How could she break his heart?  The force of her own gift alone drove her to it.  She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London.  She was not seventeen.  The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was.  She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words.  Like him, she had a taste for the theatre.  She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said.  Men laughed in her face.  The manager–a fat, loose-lipped man–guffawed.  He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting– no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress.  He hinted — you can imagine what.  She could get no training in her craft.  Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight?  Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways.  At last — for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows–at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so–who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? — killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.

As I turned to that section once again, I thought how much had changed in the western world.  Many women artists have the resources and the space to flourish.  Then I re-read the story about Judith.  I scarcely need to comment how uncomfortably close that is to today’s world.  Yes, many women have a room of their own, but many do not.  If women in the arts are empowered in a way that was almost unimaginable a hundred years ago, but there is so much still to be done.  At the same time, as Virginia Woolf might have added, there are other marginal and disempowered groups in relation to whom these comments are all too apposite.

Incidentally, Shakespeare did have three sisters.  One, Joan, died in infancy, and another, Anne, died when she was eight years old.  His other sister, another Joan, lived until she was seventy-seven, and lived in Stratford-on-Avon.  There was a Judith in his life, a second daughter, the twin sister with his son Hamnet, younger than his other (more favoured) daughter, Susanna.  Judith was probably illiterate.  All of this goes to show that Virginia Woolf had a marvellous skill in intertwining fact with fiction!

For a long time, it was A Room of One’s Own that stuck in my mind, and Three Guineas was almost forgotten.  Now I can see that Three Guineas both embraced and developed the views in the first essay but added so much more.  The entire essay is structured as a response to an ‘educated gentleman’ who had written a letter asking Woolf to join his efforts to help prevent war.  The possibility of war was evident in 1936, and the question was particularly important for Virginia Woolf, a committed pacifist.  In the letter (the author is never named), she is asked for her opinion about how best to prevent war.  In reply she offers some practical steps.

Woolf opens her response by stating first, and with some slight hyperbole, that this is “a remarkable letter—a letter perhaps unique in the history of human correspondence, since when before has an educated man asked a woman how in her opinion war can be prevented.”  Despite the ‘remarkable’ nature of the letter, Woolf had left it unanswered for more than two years, commenting that as the daughter of an educated man, without access or place in the public world of professions, universities, societies, and government, she feared that there are fundamental differences that will make her “impossible for [educated men] to understand.”  Yes, she had received what she rather nicely termed a remarkable letter, but Three Guineas is far more remarkable.  Clever, moving, snarky, aggressive and above all a beacon throwing searching and at times astonishing light on life for women in 1938.

In responding to the letter, Virginia Woolf had faced a dilemma.  On the one hand, this was an invitation to step out, to leave her encompassing private life and home and take action to help prevent war, an aim that Woolf clearly shared with her unnamed correspondent.  On the other hand, the invitation of the letter was compromised by her unwillingness to simply do what was being suggested, and ‘fit in’ with the public world of men. “Behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed.”  No wonder she thought about it for nearly three years.

In the course of responding to the writer’s questions and practical suggestions, Virginia Woolf turned to two other letters: a request for funds to help rebuild a woman’s college and a request for support for an organisation set up to help women enter the professions (to begin a professional life).   What she had to say gave me a shock.  First, I learnt that for years students at the two women’s colleges at Cambridge were not allowed to cite their degrees, they could not add BA to their names.  Even when that was grudgingly allowed, they remained unable to be part of the university.  Responding to a letter seeking a loan to make a newly acquired house useable by the college, she comments “the colleges for sisters of educated men are, compared to their brothers’ colleges, [are] unbelievably and shamefully poor”.  While the rest of the university was affluent, loaded with bequests and donations for men to pursue their research, there was no similar support for Newnham and Girton, which were left scrabbling for small donations to maintain basic support services.

Twenty-five years later I was at the university, in one of those rich colleges.  I was aware of the huge imbalance of numbers:  around 12-15% of students were women, the rest men.  That was the basis that I and many others fought to get men’s colleges to go co-educational.  To my shame, I hadn’t understood this wasn’t just about the balance of numbers, even though that was obviously important.  It was also about broader access to resources, and on that front I was ignorant.  Today the world Virginia Woolf knew is long gone.  Women comprise 47% of the undergraduates, comparable to most universities in the UK.  In the last decade the university has raised £2.2 bn, and much of that money is going into programs for women, for other categories of disadvantaged people, as well as much needed research on many social issues.  Many of Virginia Woolf’s concerns have been addressed, but I probably don’t need to add that real equity in terms of gender, let alone on so many other divisive issues, still faces several challenges to be overcome, eighty years after Three Guineas was published.

There is so much more about education packed into Virginia Woolf’s essay.  She doesn’t just want women to have fair access but uses the opportunity to set out a critique of both the education system but also of the professions.  It is a critique that nicely illuminates how the system before the war encouraged and sustained the very attitudes that lead to Fascism both at home and abroad.  This was the time of Mosely and the black shirts.

Very appropriately, she both supports the value of education and of committing to public service, but she goes further, suggesting the influence of values and priorities “which the daughters of educated men will need to heed if they are to prevent being corrupted by the public order”. She imagines, for example, a new kind of college that avoids teaching the tools of ‘domination and pugnacity’, “an experimental college, an adventurous college…. It should teach… the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds…. The teachers should be drawn from the good livers as well as from the good thinkers.”  In this, as in so many other ways, we seem to be slipping backwards today.  Perhaps we could have an updated edition of Three Guineas, modified to include some more contemporary examples.  I imagine it might be titled Three Dollars, or even Three Bitcoin  Oops, those might be totally worthless.

At the end of Three Guineas, Woolf moves on from education and the professions to the larger question of preventing war and some practical measures she suggests for so doing. In it she argues that although she agrees with her correspondent that war is evil, she suggests she and he must try to eradicate it in different ways: “since we are different,” Woolf concludes, “our help must be different.”  The value of Woolf’s opinion and suggested approach on how to prevent war lies in its radical difference from the views of the letter writer.  “Its impossibility of being completely understood is, then, the condition of its usefulness.”

As for the title, the writer of the letter was seeking support for the war effort.  Well, Virginia Woolf decided to give to three causes.  One guinea goes to rebuilding at a women’s college.  The second is a donation to “help the daughters of uneducated women enter the professions’.  The third, after careful analysis, is given to the letter writer to use as he thinks best.  She concludes “the three guineas, you will observe, though given to three different treasurers are all given to the same cause, for the causes are the same and inseparable”.  For Virginia Woolf, that broader aim was ensure the rights of everyone, men and women, to “the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty”.

One of the benefits that comes from writing a blog about a person, in my case usually a writer, is that to do so I need to reread the author’s works.  In the case of Virginia Woolf, I had forgotten how brilliantly she wrote.  If the two essays present powerful claims for redress given the centuries during which women were treated as secondary citizens, or not even citizens at all, she does so like a builder constructing a house.  Each brick is carefully examined, its place considered, its value weighed.  Once in place, it may be replaced later or given further support.  The result of the process is strength, the house stands firm.  This is the approach of these two essays, and especially Three Guineas.  Eighty years ago, it should have been regarded as providing a convincing and sufficient basis for equality.  Today, if some of the issues are dated and some expectations have been met, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas remain powerful and relevant, while their agendas remain far from finished.

Here and There – China – Shanghai

I first went to Shanghai for work in 1998.  I had been to China several times before, my first visit back in 1984, but this was different.  Heading a graduate management school, I was to meet my opposite number, a professor at Fudan University, dean of their School of Management. To say my opposite number is rather misleading.  Fudan University was one of the top five universities in China, a leading global institution, and their school of management offered courses for hundreds of students at the undergraduate and postgraduate level, had a major PhD program, many staff, and a range of research activities.  The Graduate School of Management at RMIT in Melbourne, had a handful of staff, taught a small MBA program, a pipsqueak in comparison.  Today Fudan is one of the ‘Double First Class’ universities in China, a member of the Universitas 21 consortium of leading universities worldwide.   As of 2022, Fudan University is ranked 3rd in China, 7th in Asia and 31st globally according to the QS World University Rankings.  A little more prestigious than RMIT!

I was going to Fudan because back in the early 1980s a wealthy Hong Kong industrialist had donated $HK10m to create the Ma Kam Ming International Management Centre, the money to be shared between Fudan and RMIT.  Why RMIT was included with Fudan was a mystery to me, although I was aware a very entrepreneurial group at RMIT was spending time in China looking for collaboration possibilities.  This was one that had worked.  Almost worked.  I was going to a meeting at Fudan University to get the project back on the rails, as little had happened for a couple of years.  As the new head of RMIT’s graduate school, I wanted to see the project finished, and the university’s share of the donation safely in the coffers.

Back in Melbourne, the Ma Kam Ming Centre existed.  That might be considered a rather generous description.  There was a small room, with a suitable sign on the door for the centre.  However, there were no dedicated staff, just a room with a table, chair, and hope!  The reasons for this state of affairs were still unclear to me as I got off the plane at Shanghai’s Hongqiao International Airport .

Today Hongqiao is one of the two international airports for Shanghai.  Almost all international visitors will arrive at Shanghai Pudong Airport, but in 1998 it was yet to open (that happened a year after my Fudan visit).  Today Hongqiao Airport mainly serves domestic and regional flights, although it’s schedules do include some international flights too.  In 1998, it was the only place to go, and it was old!  I can remember being rather stunned by the poor quality of the buildings, the furnishings, and just about everything else.  It had opened seventy years earlier.  It served to reinforce what I already and mistakenly believed that China was still far behind the western world in development.

Twenty-five years after my arrival in Shanghai for that visit to Fudan University, it is hard to recall what the city was like then.  I remember the roads were crowded, gridlock everywhere, and the network of raised motorways was only partially developed.  I’d been to Shanghai Hongqiao airport before, which was famous for delays and disappearing flights (aircraft would be taken out of service for no apparent reason).  On one occasion I watched as a group of men arrived in a limousine, stopping beside the plane waiting at the gate for my flight to Hong Kong. They embarked, and it left:  the departures indicator suddenly changed and advised there was a four-hour delay because of the late arrival of the incoming flight:  my plane had been ‘hijacked’, commandeered to take a group to … Beijing, perhaps?

The university was crowded, many buildings were old, but new towers were appearing.  I discovered that Fudan had a room with a sign on the door for the Ma Kam King International Management Centre, and inside and table a chair!  I was told negotiations with the Ma family had stalled, as they expected that their generous donation would lead to their name placed in very large characters on the side of one of the new buildings.  If you visit China, you will know this kind of recognition is common.  Progress over the donation had stopped because Fudan wasn’t going to stick the Ma name on the side of a building for such a paltry sum!

They had prepared a nice brass sign, possible a metre wide and 40 centimetres high, with the name of the Centre and the donor, which they planned to place in the entrance to one of the buildings, along with others identifying other similar links.  Prominent among these was the Nordic Centre in Shanghai, which offered Fudan a joint platform for research and education with 14 universities from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.  Fudan also had a joint Master of Management with the BI Norwegian Business School, the first such external program at the university.  There must have been signs for other links which I don’t recall.

Discussions continued over the next couple of years.  Eventually, a small ceremony was held to unveil that brass sign, which was still where I had first seen it.  Fudan received their share of the donation.  Did RMIT receive their money?  Yes, but it turned out that a ‘substantial’ amount of the funds had already been expended in attempts to build further partnerships in China.  I haven’t checked to see what happened to the sign on the office door in Melbourne, but in its new premises I don’t think there is a room for the Centre.  It was a long time ago.

Some time after my first visit, RMIT received a delegation from Fudan, led by the Party Secretary.  To explain, as was the case for many institutions in China, there was a dual hierarchy in the university, one academic and one party based:  the party Secretary and the President were the two leaders of the institution.  At Fudan, as in many other universities, they managed different areas of the operation, although one or the other was acknowledged as being the senior (a case of primus inter pares?).  The academic head was the senior of the two at Fudan.  At one point in the discussions, I was asked to take the group around RMIT.  The Party Secretary and his colleagues seemed rather uninterested in touring the campus.

A couple of years later, I learnt they had paid a visit to the University of Melbourne, another partner with Fudan University.  Apparently, the Vice Chancellor had greeted them, and almost immediately sent them off on a tour led by a junior staff member.  At least we held our meetings first!  They were shown the latest buildings, including a ‘high-tech’ lecture theatre.  The President of Fudan University told me the group had been angry about the way they had been treated, as if they were a group of students’ parents, but he told me they enjoyed one element of what they saw.  That came from seeing that lecture theatre because, as he told me, the technology was far behind what Fudan had been installing!

Twenty-five years ago, it was still quite easy for Australian universities to build links, joint programs and exchanges with leading Chinese universities, as they sought to establish their networks and their credibility.  However, like Hongqiao Airport, that world has been passed by.  Today Fudan’s Handan campus is huge, littered with modern large buildings.  The Handan Road, that used to run in front of the entrance, was diverted underground, the tunnel some 500 metres long, and part of the university has spread to the other side of where the road once ran.  Too large for that one site, the university now has three other campuses.  It absorbed the Shanghai Medical University in 2000 and has 17 affiliated hospitals. Selective, prestigious, there is little to remind a visitor what it looked like on my first visit.

I was last in in Shanghai in 2018.  I didn’t go to Fudan University.  I was working with a luxury hotel.  In my free time, the first thing I did was to go to People’s Square and the Shanghai Museum.  Completed in 1996, it is a stunning building:  modern, spacious, yet designed around the shape of a ding, the traditional bowl or cauldron standing on three legs, (a design from 4,000 years ago).  Inside, the Shanghai Museum is still one of the great delights of the city.   Each time I have been there, I have spent time looking at calligraphy (one half of one of the five floors), and paintings (another gallery taking up half a floor).  Then a quick drink in the cafe (no, not a cafe, a teahouse), before going to the very tempting museum shop.  The only very familiar limitation was that I would have to carry what I bought there.  I’ve found posting shopping a little unreliable!

I had arrived at Pudong International Airport.  Up until 1992, Lujiazui (Pudong) comprised underdeveloped farmland, wharves, and warehouses on the east side of the Hangpu River, and had a bad reputation.  It was where sailors would visit, looking for drink and women when on leave, but in 1993 Lujiazui was designated a Special Economic Zone.  It is now one of the most important development centers outside of the complex of zones in Guangdong Province.  If you look across from the Bund, the traditional centre of Shanghai on the western side of the Huangpu River, you see a new Manhattan in the making.  The array of massive buildings matches the confidence of the people:  Shanghai is marching forward.

One of those buildings is the Jin Mao tower, 88 stories high, housing the Grand Hyatt on floors 53 to 87.  It has a wonderful Shanghai style restaurant, on level 86, the Club Jin Mao.  Like the museum, the building is emblematic of China’s ability to merge tradition with the modern, as the tower is designed on the theme of a tiered pagoda.  “The 88 floors … are divided into 16 segments, each of which is 1/8 shorter than the 16-story base. The tower is built around an octagon-shaped concrete shear wall core surrounded by 8 exterior composite supercolumns and 8 exterior steel columns.”  Now, you did know the number 8 was considered lucky in China didn’t you, a number for prosperity, success and even joy?

Just one time I was invited to dinner at the Club Jin Mao, by the President of Fudan.  Looking back, an incident that evening was rather symbolic.  The meal was wonderful, the company fascinating.  It could have been a perfect evening, except I managed to put my foot in it!  Behind our table was what appeared to be a rather unusual wallpaper.  However, when I looked carefully, I realised it was pieces of Chinese calligraphy, overlapping and densely written, the whole looking rather like a palimpsest on some kind of parchment or stone.

I asked about the fragments of text .  Were they poetry, or historical tracts, or a commentary of some kind?  The President got up and took a look.  He asked a colleague to join him.  They called over the maître d.  Soon several people trying to decipher what was there.  It turned out that the characters were very old, and the text was largely unreadable and clearlyimpossible to translate.  My host was embarrassed he couldn’t answer my question; I was embarrassed I’d asked it; and by the end half the restaurant was embarrassed at this collective failure in assisting a guest.  With hindsight, I can look back and say it was a moment that captured the change in Shanghai.  Pudong was the new Shanghai, and Pudong stood on top of the old ways, gradually being erased.  Old text was decorative, but nothing more.  As Chinese Emperors had done many times over 2,000 years, you step forward by obliterating the past.

To look at how things had changed, in 2018 I went back to Yu Yuan (the Yu Gardens).  Twenty five years ago, the Garden’s teahouse was a major visitor destination, surrounded by tourist shops.  However, if you wandered into the side alleys you found shops offering silk and leather goods:  at the back of many there would be a not-quite-hidden treasure trove of other tiny stalls selling branded goods, watches, and DVDs, but all were copies.  Some were cheap fakes, but others appeared indistinguishable from the real articles, quite often made in the same factories during an illegal elongated production run.  Bargaining was essential:  you started at a twentieth of the price suggested and worked to a compromise:  you soon learnt which were the quality items.

Now Yu Yuan is a cleaned-up attraction.  The shops and the teahouse have hardly changed, but the illegal stores seemed to have gone, although I might have a few hidden away when I looked carefully.  Buying and selling fakes is illegal; police are more in evidence.  However, the biggest risk for the unwary is from pickpockets and handbag snatching.  Crime flourishes, but it is the same crime you face of the streets of Barcelona or Rome.  Twenty five years ago, the ornate teahouse in the centre of the inner garden was well worth a visit:  today, it is packed with tourists, and now seems rather gaudy, another spot for a selfies on your iPhone.

I don’t want to mislead you:  there is a reverence for the past and traditions in this city.  You see it in in the various collections in the Shanghai Museum.  You see it as you walk along the new pathway beside the river:  the grass is still getting established, but the rocks are already there, some with characters, silent testimonials to the past through the carefully managed combination of permanence and weathering those stones reflect.

To escape tourists, I went to some of the new modern art museums in Shanghai.  The four I visited were all exciting and innovative, but the best was the Power Station of Art which, like London’s Tate and Sydney’s Powerhouse, is situated inside an old riverside power generating plant.  Much to see, and on the top floor the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art had assembled ‘A Beautiful Elsewhere’, with works by leading Chinese artists and others from overseas (including one Australian, Ron Mueck).  The Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art was holding its Animamix Biennale: the whole building was a gaming experience, with mini games to be played (and to get out from the exhibition you had to find four hidden numbers!).  Challenging, invigorating, thought provoking art at the leading edge.

Shanghai is a rich business city.  It glows with confidence, even on grey weather days.  Early in the morning, people keep fit by running by the river, jogging appears more popular than Tai Chi.  That was telling:  the Shanghainese are somewhat reserved and individualistic, lacking the sense of warmth you feel in Hong Kong.  Wealthy, the traditions of family and community are less obvious.  Walking up the Nanjing Road pedestrian street, hoping to avoid the beautiful, expensive but characterless shopping centres, I saw luxury brand stores, a couple of Chinese department stores and a random mixture of coffee shops, souvenir stalls, a McDonald’s, a KFC, a Starbucks, and a selection of antique shops for tourists.  You could still find some of the old city if you turned onto one of the side streets.  After a few blocks, you can find noodle shops and old-style dumpling restaurants, in between banks and luxury western hotels.  Higgledy-piggledy, but even there the old is being pushed out by the new.

As Cities become wealthy, they become more alike.  Each city has its own attractions, but the sense of the city becomes more universal.  Melbourne is a fine city, but in comparison Shanghai is great city, loved by the central government.  Charles Dickens’ words seem almost apposite: “It was the best of times, it was the epoch of belief, it was the season of light, it was the spring of hope, we had everything before us, we were all going direct to Heaven”  Heaven?  Even in China, it is the heaven of Mammon.

Theodore Roszak

The intellectual world in the late 1960s and early 1970s was vibrantly polemic.  While their students were taking to the streets in the US, England and the Continent, academics were embroiled in often savage disputes as many sought to demolish what they saw as the pseudo-objective pretensions of the so-called social sciences, especially in the fields of history, sociology, psychology and social anthropology.  Like many students at that time, I was fascinated, energised and probably rather dazzled by the flood of books and articles, all of which seemed to be throwing previous decades of theorising up in the air.  Much of this was centred around a Marxist analysis of capitalism and its weaknesses, often with large chunks of structuralism, psychoanalytical theory and postmodernism thrown in.

One of the key writers was Herbert Marcuse, whose book One-Dimensional Man was published in 1964.  Rereading it today, I am overwhelmed by its prescience, if not by all of its arguments.  In it, Marcuse sees modern ‘industrial society’ as a means of social control, achieved through a consumerist lifestyle.  Indeed, rather than just being concerned about an industrial society, and its technological basis, he describes its further development into an ‘affluent society’, where day-to-day comfortable living hides an exploitative and controlling system.  In such a society, a small number of people shape perceptions and expectations, encouraging people to believe the path to happiness comes from consumption.  In such a society, people consume more than they need, and in doing so encourage waste, inflict ongoing environmental damage, and focus priority on material items at the cost of social and psychological well-being.  His analysis went on to examine the influence of advertising in creating a consumerist society.  He said that sixty years ago:  if anything, it’s worse today.

Following his initial study, Marcuse became interested a broader social critique, and in so doing became a key figure in the student movements of the 1960s.  He was described in the mass media as the ‘Father of the New Left’.  In 1965 he published an essay, Repressive Tolerance, in which he argued capitalist democracies have totalitarian tendencies, and launched a whole new set of concerns.  He claimed genuine tolerance does not allow any room for ‘repression’ since if it did,  marginalized voices would remain unheard.  The tolerance of repressive speech was ‘inauthentic’, and he advocated a form of tolerance that is intolerant of repressive (or right-wing) political movements.  Clear?  This was clever.  ‘Liberating tolerance’ in his view would mean toleration of movements from the Left, and  intolerance against movements from the Right.  This  would include the withdrawal of both freedom of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promoted aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that opposed the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.  Yes, clever.

Views like Marcuse’s spread out in many directions.  As one illustration, at my university Robert M Young wrote a critique of Darwin, Mind Brain and Adaptation, arguing all facts are theory-laden, all theories are value-laden, and all values occur within an ideology or world view. Scientists and technologists pursue agendas; they have philosophies of nature, world views usually tacitly held.  In looking at a broad spectrum of disciplines he claimed that our culture is disastrously divided.  It is characterised by sharp dichotomies, each and every one of which is false or, at least, overdrawn, and yet our beliefs in them preclude any unified deliberations about the scientific and the moral.  Fragmentation rules, the humanities opposed to science, qualitative opposed to quantitative methods, values opposed to facts, and culture opposed to nature.  If that sounds familiar, it mirrors the divergence C P Snow wrote about in The Two Cultures, back in 1959.  A divided world – sounds familiar!

Out of all this analysis, a whole new world of communitarian experiments emerged.  In 1968, even I had succumbed to this new way of thinking (new?), living in a mini-commune in the hills outside Cambridge.  Others were far more adventurous, especially in California where there were cults, spiritual entrepreneurs and competing new-age psychotherapies, a process to be captured in 1969 by Theodore Roszak as creating a counterculture, in The Making of a Counter Culture (TMCC).  The term counterculture was adopted by rebellious university youth, especially in San Francisco and Berkeley in the late 1960s.  The concept has stuck.

Contrary to what many believed, Roszak, a professor of history at California State University, was far from being a hippy.  A sober, career-aware academic, he saw himself an observer of the explosive social changes taking place at the time.  While he admitted to being a ‘leftist’, he was predominantly an analyst, although he made it clear he rejected ivory tower isolation and promoted political engagement, in his case against the Vietnam War and the cold war.  He foresaw a collapse in industrial society and wanted to accelerate concern over ecological problems, in a world he saw facing an environmental crisis.  In 1992, he invented a new term, ‘ecopsychology’ based on the view, “Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person and person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the person and the natural environment.”

Roszak was a self-proclaimed neo-Luddite but not a supporter of anti-science.  Broadly, his concerns ranged over the abuse of power, and various forms of dictatorship, control and manipulation.  His overarching theme was that the ‘logic of progress’ should be questioned and cited various examples, such as the development of the nuclear bomb.  He feared the pursuit of progress (in relation to affluence, scientific knowledge, and technology) had resulted in the development of increasingly destructive processes and devices.

It was Roszak who used ‘technocracy’ to refer to the regime of technical and professional expertise that he saw had taken root to dominate American culture.  In Frontiers of Capital Annelise Riles, Professor of Law and Anthropology at Cornell University, wrote “Roszak’s technocracy offers a way to describe the power that is generated from a system of knowledge creation … within this system, those who govern justify themselves with an appeal to experts.  Then, those experts justify themselves with an appeal to scientific forms of knowledge … [and] beyond the authority of science there is no appeal.  Roszak’s technocracy offers a form of knowing the world and managing the world that is inherently abusive of power”.

Roszak saw power in the counterculture movements of the 1960s, arguing “if we want to change society, we must first be able to imagine a playing field where it is possible to fight. We must be able to understand and see ourselves with some measure of power”, (TMCC page 201).  In The Making of a Counter Culture, Roszak described youth as searching for alternatives to the status quo by dropping out, learning about Eastern faiths, and taking on new lifestyles.  While he saw this as positive, he was critical of many ideas, including a “youthful fixation on introspection, examining their motives and behavior” in a way that results in a “final appeal to the person (individualism) and not the doctrine” (op cit: page 62).

Roszak was a romantic, arguing a “poet’s experience is defined precisely by the fact that [s/he]…does not go beyond” the social and human tools of seeing (page 253). By using a different logic to engage with the world, “the validity of the experts can be questioned”.  He explains the 1960s youth movements, not only in relation to resistance to contemporary issues but also by tracing their philosophical roots to romanticism. Not to detract from the important rights being fought for during this period in history and despite Roszak’s somewhat loose adherence to the standards used by historians, his book addresses how the ‘look and feel’ of youth rebellions are in some ways shaped by historically specific forces.  The Making of a Counter Culture was an important contribution a time characterised by considerable questioning and dispute, and the concept of the ‘counterculture’ was one of the key ideas in the debates between critics and supporters.  Going back to the text, it is surprising to realise he was rather critical of student activists and many of their proposals for the future.  He wrote from a romantic tradition, and he made it clear his preference was to encourage a return to a smaller scale, more humane and more ecologically sustainable world.

For me, one of the particularly interesting contributions he made was back in 1986, with the publication of The Cult of Information, a review of the dangers he saw in the rapidly developing world of information technology.  Living close to Silicon Valley, he commented he “did not buy the hype”.  He had already expressed concerns about technology in The Unfinished Animal, in 1975, where he explained his concerns: “As for technology, which was meant to serve as the engine of progress, it becomes a compulsive and self-defeating pursuit of total dominance over society and nature …urban industrial society is doomed to lurch from crisis to crisis, emergency to emergency… the final act of this unhappy scenario [is] a global wasteland where a bandit elite of corporate profiteers, commissars and technocrats…enjoy the dwindling riches of the Earth, while the impoverished billions starve without even clean air in which to draw their last breath.”  Overstated?  Fifty years later, surrounded by climate change, pandemics and other crises, with seven of the world’s top ten most valuable companies being technology enterprises, I think he was soberly prescient.

It is almost impossible today to understand what the world was like before information technology began to hold us tightly in its hands.  If McLuhan observed ‘the medium is the message’, the updated version of that might be ‘the information is the idea’.  We hardly ever stop to ask whether there are more than computer analogies to how the brain works, as the information processing model become the quintessential way to explain how individuals made decisions:  the brain ‘processes’ its data inputs, with these inputs providing the stimulus to generate responses.  Data in, data out.  In other words, humans are information processing machines, complex certainly, but that is an increasingly trivial issue as computers grow (grow?) increasingly powerful in terms of data manipulation capabilities and operational speed.  We no longer talk about a post-industrial world today, but an information society.

It is a focus on the dangers of substituting machines for human minds which underpins The Cult of Information.  In his introduction Roszak observes  “…mind has never been dependent on machinery to reach the peaks of achievement” (page xx).  The Cult of Information has a subtitle – A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking.  In fact, his book begins with a passionate defence of what he calls “the naked mind”.  However, for most of the analysis, it is a dark vision of what computer technology was achieving through replacing thinking with data management and information systems.  The early chapters describe how so much of work, business and life was being transformed into information, data to be managed and processed, and in so doing intelligence downgraded to digital processing.  After a middle section where he reminds us that ideas precede data and information, that software is process and not thinking, he explains how the counterculture is attempting to arrest this takeover of the human mind, and finally adds that it is failing!

One easy way to understand the range of his concerns is to look at the section of the book that addresses education, and the role of  libraries.  In a section on ‘The Library’s High-Tech Identity Crisis’ he comments: “In the era of the electronic book, the neographic text, and the virtual library, librarians have understandably begun to wonder: maybe libraries no longer need walls, maybe walls no longer need libraries, maybe librarians no longer need books, maybe libraries no longer need librarians. Maybe librarians need a hot new identity. Maybe they should become Information Managers-Scientists-Brokers, Data Surfers, Digital Gurus, Info-shamans, Cyber-hypertext-punks.” (page 181).  If that was meant to be witty, the humour falls flat in today’s environment, although I do see signs of librarians fighting back.

His comments on libraries raise many issues which are as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. Roszak quotes from the Library of Congress’s general reference librarian’s summation of why libraries can not and should not go fully digital, and should not even attempt it. These include “the combination of essentially unbudgeable legal, economic, preservation and psychological impediments”. The legal impediments are primarily copyright issues, which publishers and authors are even more concerned about today than they were back then. The economic and preservation impediments are the cost of digitising in the first place, and then of maintaining access to the material as machines wear out and need replacing, and new software has to be purchased and constantly updated. The psychological impediments were not as well-researched then as they are now, and include what is currently known on the ways in which humans read differently on screens than on paper, and retain and understand what they get from books better than what they learn from looking at screens.

Roszak has a lovely way to capture points.  Sections of the book cover ‘Electronic Alzheimers’ and ‘Literacy Imperiled’, before he ends with a heartfelt appeal to real librarians, whom he calls ‘ecologists of the mind’, people who understand the relationships between sources of knowledge, and can help readers and researchers find both what they already know they want to know, and also – and just as importantly – what they did not even know was there to be found.  Would Roszak be relieved to see that libraries still hold physical books, that they are home to seminars and discussion groups, and library staff are often engaged in conversations about ideas and their relevance?

It’s possible I am just as much a romantic as Roszak.  When I go into my local library branch, which is almost every day, there are always people borrowing books, people taking part in discussions, as well as meetings of book groups, programs for young readers and much more.  There are people reading magazines and newspapers.  Why, there are even people using computers!  Despite the variety of activities, the sight that never ceases to please me is that of piles of books being returned, books being shelved on hold, and people walking out with a collection of books to read.  It seems that I am not the only one who likes to hold a book and be able to read it in the quiet of my own home, absorbed, free from other distractions, happy I can easily flip back to an earlier page when I get confused or forget a character.

Fifty years after Roszak’s critique, what do we see?  With increasing access to databases and digital repositories and with a higher level of education and training, the amount of soft information (that is, words, numbers, pictures) has exploded. Societies are becoming ever more complex and the conventional wisdom, as well as popular culture’s vision of the future, is of an information society where the very few provide the tangible and physical necessities of life and where the majority will be processing information as the core of their work tasks, only absorbing information in their leisure time, using sources curated to the needs of each individual.  As information technology has become more pervasive, we no longer use the term ‘the cult of information’:  today, that would be like referring to the cult of living.