Praxis

So we begin. Take a crystal of memory. There is no need to measure it against the feather of Ma'at, for all memories are of things past and carry no burden of their own without the matrix in which they reside.

Place it gently in the alembic wherein you added water of Lethe. There is no need to agitate, for memories instantly dissolve in such waters. That is why the Greeks call truth 'Aletheia' — that which is not forgotten.

You now have the solution for your cares, for if memory is gone, and yet remains in the water — if memory is gone, and cannot be regained — why, then your cares will be as gone, and your sins as colourless as the universal solvent.

But here I sit, and the wine I drink is dark, and it is the colour of molasses, and of blood as it wells from a pricked finger, and of the memory that does not go away. And the taste thereof is slightly bitter, and slightly sweet, and above all... it is scented with the redolence of ancient grapes, growing shrivelled on a hillside one long, long autumn's day in a land that is long, long lost.

Impurities (Part 3)

So is pure water water pure? Or does water carry the memory of its past lives? I have spent time thinking of how this can be, and my conclusion is that the memory of water, if such exists, must be heavily diluted by time and chance, for time and chance happen to every molecule.

Yet there are those, especially homoeopaths and dowsers, who contend that water remembers. And I should say, I believe that clay and other aluminosilicates can indeed remember, for all that memory needs is present in their most crystalline formations.

Today I had a conversation about that. Crystals and false-crystals, how they replicate memory at a distance. In the lunulae all of decayed bronze and gold, we see the moon; in the carbonaceous glitter of diamond, we see the stars. O, all the golden and silver apples!

Metal is the bane. Metals conduct, and in the sudden earthing of electrons, they wipe memories clean. Who knows what the clay knew, before heat-haze and electron-storm glazed it into the fired husk of itself? Yet the impurities that remain make it beautiful again, just as we humans are.

Pistachios

She always had possessed a certain place in his heart—not always a happy one, but one which was certainly hers, a sure and abiding portion. That was how he thought of her as the endless traffic streamed headlight-golden before him on a warm grey evening.

Purple came now, and dinner's last faint tang was swallowed and gone. He looked at the dim dial of his antique silver pocket-watch and began the long walk. It was his only hope of the moment that he might somehow encounter her once more before he left.

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What odd things one writes when one is young! And stranger still, that some things become heavier and more meaningful when one knows one did not mean it then, but has come to appreciate it now.

Then there is embarrassment and the urge to rewrite, edit, delete or obliterate. But if one did that with everything one wrote, would one then be lessened by it? It is bad enough that natural processes destroy the templates and emplates of memory daily.

And so, one keeps these somewhat quaint vignettes, bits of memory like the odd crumbs of pistachio that can be found in a block of nougat.

Privacy

Privacy has always been an illusion, but a necessary one. The word comes from Latin privus, which means "one's own". The idea that we can own something that nobody else can touch is what makes us persons; if everything we had was shared to some extent, then the only unique thing about us would be the specific configuration of things we shared.

But this age of free information flow is beginning to deprive (to separate, to alienate) us of privacy's illusion. The logical consequence of everything about you being shared to some extent by others is that you may no longer be a unique identity; your information can be duplicated and the sum of what you are may be shared.

Hold on, though. Most people would agree that a person is more than just a state of being, but a time-bound entity filled with memories and experiences. That, unfortunately, is more accurately described as 'an entity with the perception of being time-bound, filled with edited information purporting to be a record of past events, bearing the marks of experiences which are ill-defined and sometimes imaginary.'

The problem, as we have learnt over the last 20 years, is that our brains are always shifting. The curse of humanity, we have come to know, is not that our brains don't regenerate, but that they do, and they also shift configurations and modify memories and change the nuances of what we think, even before we know anything is there to be thought. We are the sum of mental processes we can't control, if we are the sum of such things at all.

In fact, some people have come to realise that the more people share a person, the more that person lives on in more dimensions. A person who is 'larger than life' is simply one whose total impact on others is much more than the usual. My grandparents, all deceased, live on in some legendary sense — people who were taught by them, who had experiences with them, tell me stories that seem true to me (and probably are true as far as those people know) about them. When we say that memories live on, that is true; but like living things, they change and mutate before reproducing again.

This is a problem of cultural anthropology and ethnography. You grow up in an environment. You tacitly learn its rules. You learn what you can say, what you should do, and so on. But if you don't commit all these things meticulously to another medium, it remains tacit knowledge, shifty and ill-defined. It becomes private knowledge, set apart only for you, and perhaps applicable only to you; in the extreme, there's something schizoid about it.

But all cultures thrive on shared experiences and shared rules, no matter how untrue or unreal they are. That is how myths and legends define societies — in this day and age, none more so than the myths and legends of science and information technology. 'Privacy' used to mean 'deprivation' — it may yet come full cycle in this age.

Twenty-Five Years

Twenty-five years are like a morning gone in seconds. And yet, there are indelible traces; in 1987 I wrote this, but in 2007 I wrote this. In the first, I was sure of what I was writing when I was writing it; now, I am quite sure I didn't know what I was writing about, and the words seem weak. In the second, I wasn't so sure about the writing, but I was far more sure of what I was writing about, and I think the lines are stronger for that.

Yesterday, hearing at first hand about personal pain and sorrow, and the shaping of lives, I felt inadequate. My own burdens are lighter, spread out over time and now thinned by distance and the weakness of the mind's eye. But sometimes God does let you roll back the curtains of the theatre of memory, even though those revels are ended.

And there it is, the canteen with the creaky benches, the cracked cement floor, the noise and smell of breakfasts and lunches to be paid for and consumed. You see some details very clearly, and some not at all. The unicorn is still a unicorn, and that is a wonderful thing; the rugby lads are bankers and lawyers and teachers now, and who's to say what has been gained or lost?

Was it all worthwhile? Certainly not. Was some of it worth anything? Some of it was worth a lot, and very precious even, in its time and time thereafter. What we retrieved from the old ruins is what we have for now. There are old roses locked up in old rooms; old letters in old drawers — they fade and fall apart, and they blow away in the wind.

In the end, only a very few things abide. But friendship is one of those things that can brighten the pathway to that end, and I am glad for it.

Legacies in the Rain

It's one of those melancholic nights. You sit in the shushing rush of the rain around your cold walls and you sit in the warm light that does not warm you, and you ask if anything is left of you when all of you is gone.

And then, you read the little comments and traces from people like the Teaman and the Wyvern Girl, and the older ones from people like Wolfberry and the Dancer, and those that came in between and before.

Perhaps, at that moment, you feel a little happiness. It is not little in a quantitative sense, but it is small and compact and fits under your breastbone and will never leave you. It is more powerful than a pacemaker, it is more powerful than a Peacemaker. It is the little grain of faith that God gives you to tell you that at some point, you made a difference, and it doesn't matter if you are forgotten or not.

Because the memory that streams away in the cold and midnight rain is a nothingness, beside the fact that it is draining into the rivers of the world and all the after life of it. O God, I am so grateful!

Buried Memory

It's been almost fifteen years since my grandfather passed beyond the veil. I am reminded of this because I was digging. In my spare time, I have become an amateur archaeologist, sifting through the strata of the dig that is my parental digs.

In a stratum near the bottom of the area south of the big desk, I found a single sheet, preserved by some chemical accident. It was from my best friend from the old days. On that sheet, preserving a single email from a long-lost server, was his tribute to my grandfather. In it, he mentioned the first time he met my grandfather, and how the man had summed him up quickly and accurately but kindly.

But the funny thing was the connection between my best friend and my grandfather; it was summed up in terms of the school that all three of us called our alma mater. He said that it was that honour which linked us together, the older man and the boys. And he never forgot that.

Two Ravens

Over the last three days, by some strange synchronicity, several very different and probably unrelated people have expressed interest in the little project I designed and implemented at the end of 2004. It's an odd little project, combining as it does threads from C S Lewis, Neil Gaiman, various mythologies, modern technology and computer science, and half a dozen other peculiar things that have been known to run through my head.

The project revolves around two entities of dubious provenance who call themselves Huginn and Muninn, or Thought and Memory. On one level, they are the two ravens said to accompany Odin All-Father. On another, they are two angelic beings neither fallen nor unfallen; on a third level they are powerful archetypes and key elements of the universe in which we live. In fact, there are other levels, and part of the interesting thing about these levels is that Thought, of course, doesn't remember very well — and Memory sometimes lets Thought do all the thinking, or not.

The form is unusual; there is a short poem followed by two snippets of dialogue. This doesn't vary, although the style and shape of each triptych does. A lot of it probably requires explanatory notes, but it's more fun to just read through the whole thing in the way prescribed (that is, scrolling up from the bottom of the very long page). There are 180 proper entries. You can ignore all the embedded links if you want — they're not particularly interesting or important.

I think it is possibly one of the best pieces of work I've ever created. Some of you will realise from this how limited I am, while others might be kind enough to say nice things. But it's mine and I like it. So there. Heh.

Yesterday Once More

I spent yesterday evening at a refurbished shophouse. Actually, it wasn't so much refurbished as restored. I walked in and was struck by the odd dissonance of seeing old things made new. The chairs were just as they were in the days that my grandfather had his clinic on the borders of Chinatown, the windows, the carvings, the floors, the details... they were my childhood come again.

But somehow, when you take the past and make it live again, it doesn't seem quite right. It wars with your memory and you begin to doubt your sense of history. I appreciate the excellent work done to bring it back to life though; the curators and experts were actually very clever in NOT restoring certain things so that you could see what time had done and compare it with what they had done to time.

It was not quite like that when I came to the new campus of the College of Wyverns, after having spent a large and memorable chunk of my adolescence on the Hill of Dogs. Somehow, everything had changed and was not the same. It was a new thing, with none of the old, and over the twelve years I spent in this new place, I grew more and more to realise that you could never have some things back again.

Sometimes, old things pass away and you behold the new; sometimes, old things fade away and you see the desperate attempt to keep them new. And sometimes, you get insidious forces of darkness telling everyone that the new things are the old things come again; it was like that with the Big Institute of the Southern Ocean, and it seems almost that way with the new wyvern nest.

At least, some of the hatchlings are real wyverns. And I hope they will find their wings.

Shrediting

I spent most of yesterday morning and this morning shredding documents — piles and piles of them. It occurred to me that about 80% of what is shredded is part of 'defensive shredding'. This is stuff you don't need to keep but which you feel you don't want to have running about outside, probably because if people got their hands on it, they'd spam you with subscriptions for odd magazines and advertisements for (haha) unit trusts or property.

About 20% of it, however, can be truly tempting. Minutes of institutional meetings at which people discuss sensitive things, archival data which you know some future historian would give his right arm (or at least a finger) for, innocent statements by incautious people which you could someday take out of context and use... thank God I am not exposed to such documents on a regular basis.

Then it struck me that what I was doing was limiting the future options for other people. By destroying material which I knew would never otherwise see the light of day, material which probably was the last of its kind, I was protecting some people from future harm, protecting unborn people from having opprobrium visited upon their ancestors, protecting an image of the past by editing it, sculpting it, trimming it.

I was shrediting. I was making sure that innocent pieces of information never got the chance to be dangerous. They would never grow up and become part of some narrative tapestry, but remain forever threads, smaller and smaller, dustier and dustier, motives into motes.

I wonder if my memories are going to go that way too.

Finding

I spent the night listening to Clannad. What remains haunting me is the the theme from 'Last of the Mohicans', a piece titled 'I Will Find You'. Here it is.

Hope is your survival
A captive path I lead

No matter where you go
I will find you
If it takes a long long time
No matter where you go
I will find you
If it takes a thousand years

Nachgochema
Anetaha
Anachemowagan

No matter where you go
I will find you
In the place with no frontiers
No matter where you go
I will find you
If it takes a thousand years

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It evokes the best and worst of all my times, this song. Absolutely chilling.

In Meme-oriam

Here's a meme that's propagated from two pearls of great price...

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don’t speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want — good or bad. When you’re finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

Heh.

Another Look

A reply (though not a rebuttal, nor even a rejoinder) to Second Class.

Sometimes, I suspect visual metaphors for knowledge come with too great a facility to the sons of men. From a literal looking back, as in my post this morning, people think of looking into the past. That's not necessarily the case, but let's consider both possibilities, and one more for the fun of it.

The literal act of looking back, the need to turn one's head to look, is of use only if one is going backwards, or if one is using that act to fix in one's mind the visual image of something one has already turned away from. We've heard phrases like 'to look back in anger' or 'to look back in regret'; these are metaphors engaging the visual aspects of memory, and not the optical aspects or the associated cognitive and perceptive aspects of using one's eyes. When Lot's wife and Orpheus looked back, the act was a prohibited one, not the thought; the physical look, not the memory.

The second case is the Second Class viewpoint. To look back at the past is an honourable occupation, and a wise one; without knowledge of the past, one is doomed to a meaningless present and an implicitly useless future; after all, if your future is not engaged with your present, why are you looking forward to it? It would have no relationship to you at all (or you do not think that relationship is important), since in the future, you would not be looking back to the 'you' of now. I agree with the gist of that post, although I don't think it is quite a rejoinder, but a complement.

The last case is the peculiar one of modern heraldic interpretations. I've been resident on the island of Singapore for some time now, a city-state which in some historical accounts was founded by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. One of his legacies is an educational institution, which has a version of the Raffles arms bearing a two-headed gryphon, which is said to be looking back to the past and forward to the future.

This is clearly wrong; the two-headed eagle is a symbol of Empire, looking both east and west with rapacious eyes and greedy claws. That the Rafflesian eagle was made into a gryphon (an even hungrier, horse-eating beast) is merely tribute to the meaning of 'Singapore': 'Lion City'. In this case, the eagle is now grounded in a lion; the Raffles Institution has claws firmly planted on the island, never to take off again (as Raffles used to do, frequently).

If the modern Rafflesian interpretation is correct then, to be consistent with the trappings of Empire that the school still uses (Latin motto, baronet's helm etc) on its heraldry, the two eagle heads must symbolise a Western past and an Eastern future. It looks back into the West, just as Tolkien's elves do. It cannot let go of its colonial past. That's why it needs two heads.

Looking Back

If you look back, it is never a good thing; Orpheus did it, unable any longer to withstand the gloom of the underworld on his own, and he lost his wife Eurydice forever. Lot's wife, whose name we do not know, turned back to look upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and was turned into a pillar of salt. And who knows what happens to pillars of salt who turn back? Perhaps they become sea water, and their identity is lost forever.

Fading Ghosts

For three years, the battalion was senior to all the rest. They had occupied the same barracks for a large part of that time, and as the former major walked along the company lines, he could not help but feel a twinge of emptiness. He was used to taking the salutes from certain faces, the tactful avoidance of others; he could not help but feel unease when those salutes came from soldiers he did not know.

"But their names are known to God," he told himself. And so, he steeled himself and learnt the new names. He could not help, on occasion, but to draw comparisons between those who had marched off never to return, and those who were their replacements. It was odd, strangely dissatisfying. He had not felt that way for many years.

And slowly, a little at a time, he learnt to be trusted and to give trust again. He learnt the names. He read them as he used to read their seniors. While at times he would see the ghostly vanguard or the spectral knights, and once even an Arthurian wraith, he learned to carry on, giving the old lecture with new jokes, teaching the new equipment as he had taught the old.

Very slowly, he blended with his craft. In time, though he did not know it, he would himself become one of them, a fading memory on a field of blue and gold.

Meritocracy & Mnemosyne

If you want to be a teacher, I suppose it would help to have a teaching philosophy – and the implicit love of learning about teaching and education that must come with it. Over the last decade, advancements in neuroscience have made our blindfolded guesses about some aspects of education a little clearer. The ramifications of this are simple: 1) we need to upgrade our teaching habits, 2) these practices must be based on cognitive neuroscience, 3) they need to be part of the progressive development and upgrading of the learner's brain and not work against it.

Here are some simple points related to education then.

Capacity: The human brain has a finite and self-limiting capacity for perception, interaction, content development and memory. When it exceeds this capacity, it will overwrite, transform, or otherwise alter its data structures. In fact, this happens all the time. This is why we now know that eye-witness accounts can never be accurate although they can be extremely precise in detail – the brain has an outstanding ability to manufacture and maintain illusory memories. In another sense, the brain has practically infinite capacity for storing things – it's only a problem of establishing permanence and recalling specific information which has been established. The same datum can be stored in several different and redundant ways, which are reassembled or reconstructed on demand, and then reproduced in a form that is unique each time.

Content: The brain doesn't store data in equivalent bits. This might sound strange, but in this age of largely digital information, the tendency is to see data as blocks of uniform chunks (bits, bytes etc). The brain creates holographs, which for a time we had no other way to represent except as 'pictures'. Hence, there was a well-intentioned but not very useful move towards mind-mapping. The brain really stores content in multidimensional structures with no easily quantifiable chunk size or shape. The structures interlock and change frequently. You cannot say 'a memory' usefully when each memory is just a temporary focal spot in a microcosmic universe. Can you remember the number that comes after '3'? You can? What do you remember it as? And was there any sidetracking or interference? Did anyone think of pi instead?

Creativity: The brain iterates, reiterates and associates among all its nodes. Sometimes, this is called reverie, or dreaming. Sometimes it is something else. Certain numbers tend to be associated with certain things – patterns, structures, designs. This is because the brain favours symmetry and proportionality, as these take up less 'space'. The brain respects asymmetry and disproportionality because they require greater processing effort, and hence 'attract attention'. This is why it automatically creates patterns (and why pattern is comforting to humans), while at the same time, it focuses on what is different. Human creativity therefore is a combination of making things fit in place and making things that don't fit. It is somewhat analogous to the margin between chaos and void in patterns like the Mandelbrot set.

Conclusions: It is therefore important for an educational system to develop the effective use of the natural modes of the brain. No point excessively stressing linear thought, recall, non-linear thought, verbal expression etc. Rather, if we had to design a system of education from scratch, it should be as broad and random as possible while maintaining a few constraints. You would have to develop ways of teaching which include the following:

1) Give the brain some overarching concept which is visually symmetrical and has enough elements to engage it while not having enough to confuse it. Think of hexagons and triangles and other simple data structures.

2) Show parallels and patterns which share data elements. Obvious examples: {seven dwarfs, seven samurai, seven days of the week, seven colours of the rainbow}, {blackbirds, ravens, crows, jays, rooks, magpies, jackdaws}.

3) Teach learners how to express non-linear data as a linear communication. Conversely, teach learners to unpack linear communications into non-linear structures. The main thing is to train the brain to pack and unpack efficiently and effectively. Examples include poetry writing and poetry analysis.

4) Allow for creativity within strict limits. This sounds odd, but it is the norm – consider sculpture (material and mass limits), painting (chromatic and size limits), music (equipment and harmonic limits) and so on. There is no such thing as lack of creativity; there is only a problem with contexts in which creativity is minimally useful or too diverse to be processed.

5) Develop learner ability to create and define tasks and task sets, weave them into plans, and carry them out. In the long run, letting students decide what homework to do and entrusting the choice to them will prepare them for the real world.

6) Enforce random and gruelling assessment with periods of recovery, rest, and relaxation in between – and equally enforced. This is what most of the world is like!

A philosophy of education would simply have to be a collection of coherent ideas and thoughts developed systematically from these principles and deployed in the service of learning. Future cohorts of teachers should think long and hard about this. Actually, present cohorts of teachers should too.

Thought And Memory

Thought and memory are both functions of the brain. Each of them uses nodes in what is a massive but finite biological environment. And so, as 21st-century neurophysiologists have confirmed, you can have thought or memory, but not often large amounts of both at the same time. And if you do have both in large amounts, social interaction is probably the next thing to go.

This is probably why Odin, the All-Father of Norse mythology had two ravens named Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory) on his shoulders. And yet, even with those two powerful adjunct assistants, he could not see enough of Ragnarok to save his people or his world. He attempted sacrificing one eye (sensory deprivation can focus other modes of thought) and even hanging on the world-tree to the point of death (privation, ditto). Thought and Memory are insufficient in the end.

Thought and memory, sight and insight; the human brain encompasses the universe, and that not of itself.

History Stole My Date

It's the day after Valentine's Day. And I, as often happens at this time of year, am drawn to remember two very specific Valentine's Days.

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1977. I am a curious and energetic little ten-year-old kid. I am running around outside school, a little steamed from playing football in dangerous places. Then... I bump into my grandfather, who is coming out of Bible House on Armenian Street. He has an odd expression on his face, and a big bright smile.

"Hi, Grandpop!"

"Hi, young man. Your mum's doing well in hospital. Guess whether it's a boy or a girl?"

At ten, one tends to guess 'boy' just to spite the other sex. I was wrong. And that is the story of how Valentine's Day first became important to me - it was my sister's birthday.

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1986. I am a curiously energetic infantry recruit. I am stuck in camp. I am hoping like mad to get out of camp to spend some time with the girl who is at that time the love of my life. I don't know it yet, but it is going to be a very long time before I have another happy Valentine's day again. A very very very long time, indeed.

I spend the next two years writing poetry for money. Most of it is for fellow servicemen trying to impress their girlfriends. I have become mercenary about love and other human affections and affectations. I'm good. I can charge $2 a line. It gives me a kind of... perverse joy. At about $10 per verse, or more.

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And in between, there are agonizing and embarrassing ones, and those that are sweet and quiet, and those that are tiring and exuberant. At this point in my life, all of them are fond memories, and I thank all those who made such memories possible and indelible. God bless you all, wherever you are.