n o i s e i s a r t

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by–
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”–
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”

-William Stafford

There’s something totally magical about seeing a band see the crowd. When you realize you’re watching the band realize that you (the audience) are completely in love with them.

Thomas Nagel wrote about Sexual Perversion in 1979… here’s how my old professor, Roy Soreson, describes what Nagel says:

“In addition to being aroused by Juliet, Romeo is aroused by Juliet’s being aroused, and Juliet’s being aroused by Romeo’s being aroused by Juliet’s being aroused, and so on.”

Something like that happens at a really great concert, between the crowd and the performer. It’s why we see live music – for the off chance that we might get to experience that.

Tonight I went to see a friend’s band, areyougone. He and I have talked a lot about music, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I liked the band – they were playing pretty exactly the kind of band I want to like: country-themed shoegaze. Apparently we’re calling it “Spaghetti Western” now.

Afterwards the guy from Highway had a solo acoustic set. I don’t have a lot of vocabulary to describe guys with acoustic guitars without bands, but he reminded me a lot of a Woodie Guthrie song I just heard again, and he was fucking great.

I talked for a bit with Colin, the bass player for The BJM after Highway’s set. Turns out he’s from Portland (I think I knew that) and playing in a Spaghetti Western band called Federale. I asked him about the heckling at BJM shows, and he says it’s died down a bit – that they’ve moved past that. Which is great to hear because as funny as the juxtaposition of super violent heckling and counter-heckling with slow sad love songs was, I’d really prefer to just hear the songs.

Then 1776 played. And the crowd totally adored them. It was amazing to be a part of. It was a tiny venue, and really not that remarkable, except for the moment after the first song where the band all kind of looked up in shock at the volume of applause. And they deserved it – they were great, and they killed it tonight. Kinks-esque rock, totally tight and with great songwriting.

Courtney Taylor*2 from the Dandys was there – Pete plays in Highway when they’re a band, and Courtney knew one of the guys in 1776. And I thought about the fact that seeing them in Amsterdam in 2001, and seeing them realize how apeshit for them the crowd was, made me understand why we see live music. I kind of regret not telling him “Your band taught me why we see live music.”

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

-W.S. Merwin

So I went to the buddhist temple last night for the first time in probably two years. After the meditation, this little old lady was walking out to her car. She asked me if I was Josh’s friend. When I said yes, she asked if I was a musician. I told her no. “Not even a bass player?”

Wow. Woken up this morning by a phone call asking for a counterexample to the claim ‘Knowledge is Justified belief’.

Seriously – when you’re an undergraduate philosophy major, they never really tell you that you may actually need to know this stuff.

I think I mentioned Gettier, but didn’t really explain what he did, since my friend was talking about I guess a prior stage of epistemology. Instead I think I had some weird ramble about unjustified true beliefs – thinking all black people are robots, and all robots are good cooks, then inadvertently pointing to a chef and saying ‘that guy’s a good cook’. (I did just wake up, remember).

But then I remembered what seemed like the perfect counterexample. The Titus-Bode Law was an astronomical law in the 1700s that governed the placement of the planets in orbit around the sun.

It correctly predicted the existence of the asteroid belt, and of Uranus. But then it turned out to have just been a coincidence, as the remaining planets aren’t even close to their predicted positions.

So the example works for the asteroid belt & for uranus (I know there is a planet orbiting the sun at whatever AUs distance – Hey, look! A new planet. I knew it!) – since the new planets were correctly predicted via an incorrect assumption.

And now I have this strange drive to read about Twin Earth, H2X, and ‘Twater’…

When I was a Junior in high school at Millbrook, a girl named Lissa Harris was in the class ahead of me. At her graduation, she read a poem that totally amazed me. I remember being so jealous (and I think I still am) – it was a ‘found poem’ from science texts, and I remember a metaphor involving atoms, eyelashes, and apple stems that I can’t quite seem to recreate.

Point being, it was an amazing poem that I still remember, and the stanza about Van der Waals is something I wrote, more then ten years later, trying to rip Lissa off.

3.

twelve-six potential, van der waals

attraction is the root of repulsion means

at a distance, particles are pulled

in proximity repulsed.

A few parameters approximate equilibrium

and things look simple and harmonic

where the energy is lowest

we find a comfortable orbit

but heat them up and they escape

evaporating into infinity and disappearing.

we spend more time in attraction

because repulsion is stronger.

Molecules can attract each other at moderate distances and repel each other at close range. … Van der Waals forces are… feeble; but without them, life as we know it would be impossible. Water would not condense from vapor into solid or liquid forms if its molecules didn’t attract each other. Intermolecular forces are responsible for many properties of molecular compounds, including crystal structures (e. g. the shapes of snowflakes), melting points, boiling points, heats of fusion and vaporization, surface tension, and densities. Intermolecular forces pin gigantic molecules like enzymes, proteins, and DNA into the shapes required for biological activity."(*,*)

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Billy Collins

So, I’m up late after dancing and can’t sleep and I’m thinking about this great article I read today about the Humanities, and how we as a society are slowly eroding their importance by forcing them to justify themselves in economic terms.

It was really good, but there was this one epigram about how nobody was ever killed for getting Hubble’s constant wrong. Which may be true, but math and science have their own martyrs – not just Galileo’s ‘eppur si muova’ or Giordano Bruno before him. They were killed for heresy, by people who believed them to be not just wrong, but so gravely wrong their ideas were too dangerous to allow.

My favorite math martyr is Hippasus (… of Metapontum, says Wikipedia). He was killed by the Pythagoreans because he was telling people that the square root of two is irrational. The thing is, the Pythagoreans knew he was right. They knew that he was right, and that the foundation of their religion (and thus their temporal power) was flawed.

Galileo and Bruno could be accused of being misled, or incorrect. Hippasus couldn’t – the proof’s so elegant that it’s impossible to argue with.

Suppose the square root of two were rational.

Then there would be a ratio of p and q, where p and q don’t have any factors in common (i.e., they’re mutually prime)
and p over q squared is two.

so p squared over q squared is two
so p squared is two q squared.
so p squared is even.
so there’s a number r, equal to q squared, where two r equals p.
therefore four r squared is equal to two q squared.
therefore two r squared is equal to q squared.
so q squared is even.
Therefore p squared and q squared have a factor in common
And so p and q must also have a factor in common
But we defined them as mutually prime.

Driving home the other night I was trying to think of how to express the mathematical idea of elegance. I think most peopl edon’t understand how mathematicians view math, or understand how much art there is to it. This idea of elegance – where somehow the means by which you arrive at a conclusion transparently illustrates that very conclusion – it’s so appealing and not really found anywhere else.

Which is to say, that proof’s one of the most elegant ones I know.