Legacy

Today I watched a long-delayed legacy materialise. At the end of it, I could only think that this was what some other franchise lacked. Ah, the constant recurrence of Hamlet in our cinematic experiences, like some subtle watery undertow aimed at poor dead Ophelia!

Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death —
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourne
No traveller returns — puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Gods, mortals, puny or not; playing or not; fantastic or not — I find the rich legacy of old William everywhere, and I realise that I wish the lost treasures of Cathay had been preserved as much.

Caesarean

The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Cæsar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Cæsar was ambitious;
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Cæsar answer’d it.

The famous lines from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, III, ii, capture the essence of my thoughts over the last 24 hours. The man who thought he was being described as Caesar did both good and ill; much of the good he did was public and the ill was private. But unlike the hapless Brutus, we should not forget Caesar's ambition produced good things that people remembered.

Input-Driven Education Systems (IDES)

It was just two weeks ago that I was mulling over the following oft-quoted passage from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The Family capo who sat with me was chortling over some curious similarities that he, a venerable and powerful individual, saw between the eponymous leader and a certain local educator. Let me supply the quotation first, before I tell you the rest. This is from Act I, Scene II.

Caesar:
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music,
Cry 'Caesar!' Speak; Caesar is turn'd to hear.

Soothsayer:
Beware the ides of March.

Caesar:
What man is that?

Brutus:
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

I pointed out to my associate that it was I who should have feared the ides of March, a year and a half gone. He shook his head. He said, "Well, you weren't assassinated. And besides, I think you should be in another play!" To which I replied, "No Prince Hamlet, I."

The conversation moved on. But I was made to recall how, in a fit of blatant stupidity, some people had actually been confused about the Church/State dichotomy expressed in the quotation, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." (See Matthew 22:15-22.) I was told that by quoting this line, I was making reference to that same local educator and calling him Caesar. Haha, it was one of the most Kafkaesque moments of my life!

But the way that this conversation turned towards that same man was rather instructive. Several episodes were quoted about how this person was running an institution without adequate spirit, innovation, intelligence, or attention to educational principles. It was pointed out that the only reason good results were still being produced was that the students were being culled early and often, so that only the best students were being allowed to take key examinations.

Alternatively, internally-moderated assessments were rigged to allow for better results to be posted; an assessment designed to be given once was thus carried out a second time for students who were deemed not to have met the minimum grade desired. This was defended as 'being good for the students', which of course was true in a grade-oriented sense but certainly was not something done in a spirit of fairness. Students were therefore graded not on the strength of their natural performances, but on the strength of the performances that the executives decided they should be producing.

The last episode quoted to me was one in which the CEO told students that if they did not meet the equivalent of a Cambridge admission grade in the middle of the second year of their secondary education, they would be dropped from the programme. This bar was raised even higher for the final examination.

What to make of such stories? I've seen these things happen for years, throughout the system, in isolated hotspots of chicanery. To my everlasting shame, I suppose I have been part of such things, though on the periphery, without making sufficient noise, letting off steam, or blowing whistles. A misplaced sense of loyalty can be a terrible thing.

Yet there are important lessons to be drawn from this kind of episode. The learning points become more obvious by analogy especially when looking back at economic situations like the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 (now more than a decade ago), and the more recent events of the year just past.

In the former situation, economic results were boosted by the extreme ratio of input-driven vs productivity-driven processes. Essentially, throwing effort into making more and more things, rather than making better things, or making things better, screwed up the system and brought about a crash. In the latter situation, borrowing based on imaginary money (well, more imaginary than usual, that is) eventually led to attenuation of belief, a crisis of disbelief, a failure of suspension of disbelief, and a hefty and terrible dose of consequent reality therapy.

I've seen both of these things developing for a while now. He who has ears, let him hear.

Thermodynamics & Computing

The one thing I have always had problems with in my pursuit of computing power is... heat.

I used a Prime computer in the early 1980s; it needed air-conditioning to function well, and the whole room had less computing power than my old iBook. By 1986 I was using a Honeywell. That machine needed constant cooling, huge vents, and a dehumidifier. It was said that you couldn't get any work done over 290K, where the K stands for degrees Kelvin.

The problem seems to be that thinking is exothermic. Most of the energy consumed by my machines is emitted as waste heat. My friends tell me to use fans, coolants, all kinds of heat sinks. But that doesn't change the fundamental problem: heat has to be disposed of somewhere, and all those devices (which I've been using since 1980!) are just heat-transfer machines. They don't reduce the wastage, they just make you waste more energy elsewhere.

I suppose I could try to harness the heat flow to drive a turbine or something. But that would probably mean a loss of portability, and also a loss of convenience, elegance and simplicity. The coolness factor might go up a bit, but that doesn't reduce the heat.

Sigh. In such moments, I am drawn to the prophetic talent of William Shakespeare, who penned these lines, unforgettable since my schooldays:

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going,
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still...

Indeed, this is an apt description of life at the terminal end.

Statehood

A state is a description of all the elements in a specific set, sufficiently complete for the purposes of its informational context. My definition is deliberately broad in order to include such diverse entities as 'nation-state', 'state of matter', 'halting state', 'state of chaos', and 'state of mind'.

The thing to note, I suppose, is that informational context is the limiting factor in all our communications. This is because it is that context which determines how much data is sufficient for the purposes of effective communication, and hence how low a signal-to-noise ratio is minimally necessary for efficient communication.

For example, to convey a state of mind from one person to another is incredibly complex. My mental state, simply put, is the description of all the neurons in my brain: their number, individual characteristics and condition, possible combined effects, and probabilities of those effects. Yet, given another person whose mind is mostly able to interface with my own (i.e. we have some kind of understanding, or more specifically, a rapport), much of this description is superfluous or would generate too much noise in the process of transmission. A simple, "ARGHHHHH!!!!" might suffice, and additional data might lower the efficiency without increasing the effectiveness.

It is the same with any kind of state; a full description of state is the atomist's dream. Some speculate that a sufficiently complete description of state would change the universe; these are the people who think the world is nothing but information. This may be true, as countless books and movies have attempted to convince us. But at the same time, there may not be enough time for a complete description of state, since any sufficiently complete description of state is dependent on its context — a condition which might imply the necessity of describing the describer as well as the description itself.

No matter how impossible such things might be, they are interesting to think about. They are practical problems mixed with large-scale conceptual ideas. The difficulty in many communities of ostensibly thinking people is that they are intent on solving practical problems without dealing with the informational context at the larger scale. Solving problems without looking at the big concepts woven into and around them is like polishing gemstones in a crown without considering the importance of that crown as a whole.

Shakespeare was a master at describing the problems of kingship, a situation often obsessed about to the detriment of the state as a whole. In Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar and scores of other plays, a common theme is present: uneasy lies the head which wears the crown; how much worse the head which obsesses about the practical details of kingship (how to get it, how to keep it, how to use it) — forgetting that the king is the chief servant and key element of the state.

Learnt

I've just had a night out at King Lear, with a bunch of absolutely lovely people and with Ian McKellen acting the lead role. The Tragedy of King Lear is one of Shakespeare's most powerful and emotionally intense plays. It is elemental to the extreme; lightning and storm are used elsewhere in Shakespeare (as in the Scottish play), but never with the sense of overwhelming chaos, the overthrow of the natural order, that is found herein.

I've a few thoughts on this play, one of my father's favourites and a long-time staple of family discussions.

1. Lear is a mythological figure, an elemental source himself – he is originally Llyr or Leir, the Celtic sea-god. It is thus obvious why his insanity leads to the elemental disruption of the natural order.

2. The folkloric idea of a powerful solar or elemental deity who distributes his powers among his womenfolk is a fairly common one. So also are the fairy-tale tropes of the youngest daughter who is mistreated while actually being the most loyal, and the faithful and talented servitor who attempts to defend that daughter and is exiled.

3. When I am old, I hope the god-daughter doesn't mind helping to look after the decrepit ruin I will by then have become. Sigh.

The Company were wonderful. The company was wonderful. I am thankful for all I've received from the Great Hand.

Macbeth

The 'Scottish Play' (as some call it) chills me to the bone and yet exhilarates me with its fire and doom. It is one of the few Shakespearean tragedies (the only one, perhaps?) in which the protagonist never comes to any saving self-awareness before the end. From the moment he encounters the Weird Sisters upon the heath, he is doomed. Is he?

I have seen several versions of Macbeth. I think the version with Ian McKellen as the protagonist and with Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth is one of the most starkly horrifying ones that I've seen. Hardly any props or stage, just psychological drama, torment and death. Kurosawa's Throne of Blood is another powerful take on it (actually, his Ran is also a pretty effective version of King Lear).

An old literature teacher of mine recommended TV versions and even taped the play for us. I remember going to sleep with the audio in my ears and waking up the next day to score a top grade for English Literature. I learnt a lot from Macbeth, and later on, from Lear. Great men, subtle temptations; often, the greater the man, the easier the workings of the subtle snare.

I have seen this too, that a well-intentioned monarch of lesser strength be overtaken by his ambitious protegé and removed. I have seen it again, in waking dream and nightmare. Shakespeare wrote in such deep-veined thrombosis that it is impossible not to be moved (no matter what kind of clot you are) to extremes of disgust, pity, and vicarious terror. Right now, I am thinking of such things because the Folio Society is offering a limited Letterpress edition (1000 copies only!) of that play at GBP245 only. Or you can get Macbeth, Lear, Othello and Hamlet for only GBP1030! That's only about the price of a notebook computer...

Heh. Venality.

This Island Race

Yes, I've been reading a lot of Churchill these days. A quintessential leader for dark times, his caustic wit and declamatory style burn through the fog like a beacon on a hill. It was he who appropriated the phrase 'this island race' for the British, he who said, "Do your worst, and we shall do our best."

I am a man of two parts, geographically and literarily; born on one island and living on another, I find the poetry of the first almost sufficient for all things and the poetry of the second infuriatingly sparse in resonant metaphor. Which island is it that goes with 'race'? It might seem a trivial issue. But listen to this, taken from Shakespeare's Richard II, II(1):

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands, –
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Who could read this, born upon the 'sceptred isle', and not wish that it were true in every detail? Then again, my second island too has poets. One of them wrote these lines:

Peoples settled here,
Brought to this island
The bounty of these seas,
Built towers topless as Ilium's.

They make, they serve,
They buy, they sell.

Despite unequal ways,
Together they mutate,
Explore the edges of harmony,
Search for a centre;
Have changed their gods,
Kept some memory of their race
In prayer, laughter, the way
Their women dress and greet.
They hold the bright, the beautiful,
Good ancestral dreams
Within new visions,
So shining, urgent,
Full of what is now.

It is hard to choose between one island race and another, at times. One has a surfeit of history, a long and tangled tale told in dark rooms; the other has an earnest of history to come, but the shadow of doom upon it, that it might fade before that earnest comes to pass. It is hard; it is hard. Sometimes, though, it is worse.

Days Of Our Lives

We're all days, and this is a truth from the beginning. As the temperament of a day goes, so too are there people to go with it; the Bard himself has remarked, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate." (Sonnet 18)

Cultures from all over the world have their counting-rhymes for the days and seasons; it is that tradition which has given us that infamous blight and self-fulfilling prophecy of the day of the week which is said to control the destiny of a child. (For the record, I was born on Vendredi, or Freya's Day.)

There is something which calls to us from the nature of a day - its fresh and dewy beginning is like a baby's innocence, while its parched and richly darkening end is like the complicated diversity of our various and separate drawings-down of blinds. In the noonday of one's life, one might think of Apollo and Mithras, of the Sun in Splendour, or of le Roi Soleil.

In the North of the world, where the days are often far longer or far too short, people are at their sunniest and gloomiest - bright fair people with grim sagas; it reminds me of what the Good Book says - "As your days, so shall your strength be." (This last speaks to my heart in particular because my late grandfather's last words were an exact quotation of verse 27 of that passage.)

The days of our lives are threescore and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore, all their strength is suffering - so says Moses from the elegiaic height of his disappointment, as he contemplates the failing of his sixscore years with no hope in this life of entering the Promised Land. His advice is probably sound; all we can do in the end is to number our days aright, and do our best with what we have.

On a lighter note though, here is a song from that odd and entertaining group, the Bee Gees...

Ooh you’re a holiday, such a holiday
Ooh you’re a holiday, such a holiday

It’s something I think's worthwhile
If the puppet makes you smile
If not then you’re throwing stones
Throwing stones, throwing stones

Ooh it’s a funny game
Don’t believe that it’s all the same
Can’t think what I’ve just said
Put the soft pillow on my head

Millions of eyes can see
Yet why am I so blind
When the someone else is me
It’s unkind, it’s unkind

de de de de de de de de de de de de de
de de de de de de de de de de de de de

Yet millions of eyes can see
Yet why am I so blind
When the someone else is me
It’s unkind, it’s unkind

Ooh you’re a holiday, ev’ry day, such a holiday
Now it’s my turn to say, and I say you’re a holiday
It’s something I think's worthwhile
If the puppet makes you smile
If now then you’re throwing stones
Throwing stones , throwing stones

de de de de de de de de de de de de de de

=====

Yes, indeed. And just in case he feels left out, I shall dedicate this post to my one student whose name sounds suspiciously like the day on which we have chapel services in school. You (now) know who you are; be at peace with your nature, OK?

Crown Imperial

Sometimes for a solace and a coign of vantage, I sit here enmeshed in the mastery of the Bard. Shakespeare, the first humanist of the literate arts, wrote plays to stir the minds and hearts of all who would follow after. Here, for example, is a section from my reading tonight, from Henry V, Act IV, Scene I.

=====

We must bear all. O hard condition,
Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath
Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel
But his own wringing! What infinite heart's-ease
Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!
And what have kings, that privates have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?

And what art thou, thou idol Ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents? What are thy comings in?
O Ceremony, show me but thy worth!

What is thy soul of adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?
Wherein thou art less happy being fear'd
Than they in fearing.

What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,
But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,
And bid thy Ceremony give thee cure!
Think'st thou the fiery fever will go out
With titles blown from adulation?
Will it give place to flexure and low bending?

Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee,
Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,
That play'st so subtly with a king's repose;
I am a king that find thee, and I know
'Tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running 'fore the King,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous Ceremony,--
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave...

=====

And here I am, reassured in my contentment. Uneasy is the head that wears a crown, indeed!

Transparency

"On a clear day you can see forever," as the old and visionary line goes. But as Shakespeare says in Macbeth, "Hell is murky." Chaos and order, light and darkness; radial, diametric or conceptual opposites - all things come together, and if things can be clearly seen (in the light of reason, in the harsh glare of morning) then it is good. And if unclear and murky, bad.

So why is the system so intent on keeping information in chains? It is as if the free market were to be touted to all, but open to none. The paradox is that those running the system benefit the least - resources must be spent on keeping the information cribbed, cabined, confined. The other members of the system will still tunnel around the obstacles, like stainless steel rats. The opacity will slow them down, make them less efficient, but they will survive.

Meanwhile, the information jailers ossify, and eventually become odd and touristy relics, like the beefeaters at the Tower of London. Their main job is, of course, to feed the ravens.

And on a clear day, some day, we will see forever.