Ramcat Reads #17

Ramcat Reads #17

Alexander, Stephon.  The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link between Music and the Structure of the Universe.  New York: Basic Books, 2016.

                In her 2007 poem "In Search of Grace," Quo Vadis Gex Breaux makes an elegant plea for an enabling virtue.  Those lines which trigger my imagination are

I pray for grace, as I

dance on life's tabletops,

as I scale the stairs to my

mind's attic or descend into

its dark and eerie cellar.

The well-spun metaphors have the  simplicity that Stephon Alexander associates with "the very aesthetics of doing theoretical physics research" (54) in The Jazz of Physics.  He suggests

                An elegant equation is refined, slimmed down to the bare essentials, simple and concise.

                An elegant equation is tastefully written in the mathematical language of numbers, letters, and             symbols.  An elegant equation is superior in its ability to house within it other equations that can              be derived from it.  An elegant  equation is a beautiful thing. (55)

                Alexander's book demonstrates how grace can be  a distinguishing feature in an autobiographical discourse on science and art, on the multiple crises of knowing in his own dedicated explorations of quantum physics and the stern discipline modeled by such jazz musicians as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, Nicholas Peyton and Thelonious Monk.  Remarkably readable, the book invites us to abandon stereotypes.  Even if  one complains silently, as I do,  that Alexander doesn't overtly contextualize the history of physics within a larger, less optimistic history of human struggles, one admits that his narrative is a special achievement.  Alexander  doesn't engage some ethical failures in the practice of science, and that absence is the price a writer who focuses on craft must often pay.  But Alexander does make redemptive suggestions what can be exceptionally good in the dropping of knowledge in certain forms of hip hop intellectualism, particularly "in the form of battle rapping" (21).

                 It is sufficient that The Jazz of Physics excavates buried dimensions of African American genius and validates Albert Murray's contention that "antagonistic cooperation" is responsible for the superiority of jazz. (231) Alexander 's conclusion is an inspiring summation of dancing, climbing, and descending:

                My journey to reconcile jazz with physics serves as a living example of how a small group of     physicists, in the spirit of the jazz tradition, embraced me and allowed me to improvise physics                 with them, while challenging me to go beyond my limits (232)

Fair enough.  But what really needs to be transmitted to students and pondered by all of us who are frustrated by the motions of the universe is Alexander's elegance regarding education ----

                Present-day students are trained in the precise calculations bred from these ancient   philosophers ---the elliptical orbits of Kepler, Newton's gravitational laws, and Einstein's more       complex space-time calculations.  What students of the future will be studying is a complete     unknown.  Education, technology, and global interconnectedness are all developing at      enormous rates.  For the student to keep up, for the researcher to discover new truths, and for                 the professor to lend guidance and insight, it may take a combination of ideas from ancient and             modern-day philosophy, as well as creativity and improvisation, with the boldness to make               mistakes (84).

Yes, the quest for grace and  discipline of mind rather than applause for the gyrations of the  behind ought to fill our time and space.

Davis, Angela Y.  Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.  Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

                The three interviews and seven lectures in this book are timely blueprints.  However we conceptualize such abstractions as freedom and social justice (and use their names casually), they lack meaning if we do not struggle constantly, struggle to make the best pragmatic choices in conducting our day-to-day lives.  In the Age of Trump, well intentioned protest can so easily descend into abject trivia. Davis warns us that "our current mass actions are often subjected to a media process, a mediated process of becoming stale news" (122).  Look homeward.  Our mass actions are often less than effective because we minimize historical memory or allow our egos to soak in ponds of social media.  We can unwittingly become complicit in our enslavement and service to the ends of nation-states.

                If transnational solidarities (international efforts to resist terrorism, racism, colonialism, enslavement, and genocide) are to be something more than merely interesting discourses, if they are ultimately to become as necessary as air, we ought to use common sense regarding what collective actions are most crucial in the sites we inhabit; we ought to use uncommon sense in being skeptical about the smokescreens manufactured by nation-states 24/7/365.  Davis is on target in reminding us that blaming individuals is a rather weak gesture.  We have to blame systems and call them to account. The best use of "intersectionality" (whether the form is a matter of theory or a matter of local knowing) occurs in our minds and in our homes.  Let us applaud Davis as she continues to draw blueprints for possible enactment.

Morrison, Toni.  The Origin of Others.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

                Morrison's publishing her 1990 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of Civilization as  Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) was an event, a moment of gravity in discussions of how a considerable amount of "white" literature masked as  American literature dealt with or sought to avoid dealing with Africanist presence in the United States of America.  Her analyses were razor-sharp, surgical.  They modeled qualities of literary critical thinking one wished to absorb and pass on to one's undergraduate and graduate students.  If one could succeed, to some degree, in transmitting Morrison's insights, one helped students ( as well as oneself) to be more securely grounded in what mattered about history and the need to have  more thorough understandings of literature as expressions of ideology and politics.  The book was a positive disruption of American literary arrogance.

                By contrast, The Origin of Others (2017), the Spring 2016 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures is an occasion, a mellowed recycling of some main ideas from Playing in the Dark in order to focus on the universal actuality and too often debilitating consequences of cultural, social, and political expressions and uses of difference, the multiple constructions of the vexed Other of which one's Self is inevitably a part. Coming twenty-six years after the Massey lectures, the Norton lectures are less surgical and hefty, less effective in dealing with the vexed actuality of now.  To be fair, we must admit that The Origin of Others provides crucial insights about Morrison's evolution as a writer and the current status of her ability to critique forms of denial in twenty-first century global rule of madness.  The book positions us to assess and re-assess the enormous contribution Morrison has made to world literature, but it leaves us with the frustrating recognition that historical meditations on race and difference may produce limited enlightenment without  any benefit of redress and resolution.  The book is informed with self-commentary on Morrison's achievements, and that commentary might be used with profit in courses on literature and culture.

                Morrison does succeed, however,  in speaking with the  wry charm  of  the lower frequencies  about  "the destabilizing  pressures and forces of the transglobal  tread of peoples"(109).  In his foreword for The Origin of Others,  Ta-nehisi  Coates commends Morrison for understanding "the hold that history has on us all" and for providing "a welcome aid in grappling with how that grip came to be"( xvii).  I stand in polar opposition to Coates about welcoming such aid, because there is better aid to be had from ice cold discourses on the Others, discourses more akin to the work of Frantz Fanon.

                Playing in the Dark gave us radical dreams of agency; The Origin of Others leaves us with despair, with visions of how amoral gods kill us and all the Others for sport.  It is doubtful that we can muster any alacrity to pass on this negative wisdom to future generations.

 Prose, Francine.  Reading Like A Writer: A Guide For People Who Love Books And For Those Who Want To Write Them.   New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

                For people who have the need and/or the desire to find respite, however brief, from the disasters, death-oriented plots, and various terrors  of living, the study of accidental poetry has purpose. Prose has a point.   That quite "literary" point  is nicely complemented by Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel ( 2nd ed., 2012), a "cultural" study based on some findings of cognitive psychology. Prose and Zunshine would probably agree that  we can learn to craft languages,  to lose cares in bright moments. The human condition, the nature of existence, and the limits of psychology ensure that the moments of pleasure  have a short life. The way of the world demands that we give more sustained attention to the grim fiction of our non-fiction.  It is suicidal to live in dreams, either in the myth of the American Dream or its confirmation in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream."   Our survival depends, in part, on our dispassionate analysis of how thoroughly fictional non-fictions can be.

                Moreover, not everyone  is predisposed to seek  respite.  Indeed, a few people seek out agony. They batten on it, and try to persuade themselves and others that surviving it is some kind of wonderful.  Ideologues, politicians, journalists and television commentators devote considerable energy to the neo-conservative/neo-liberal games of deception that mark commerce with the fiction of non-fiction.  The world in which we live is saturated with deliberate poetry.  Agony begets agony because it loves company the way some American citizens love books.  It is o.k. to like books and to use them as the tools they are.  Loving books may suggest that we lack stable genius.

                If one wants to be intelligently  radical in the Age of Trump, one joins Tina Turner in singing "What's Love Got to Do with It?" rather than allowing oneself to be narcotized or driven stone blind by  Louis Armstrong's excellent rendition of "It's a Wonderful World."   January 20, 2018 will help us to take account of all -----I do mean ALL ----that has transpired in this world since January 20, 2017. And as we prepare to listen to a State of the Union address on January 30, 2018 (anticipate very great fire and fury and imaginative dissembling) , the fiction we should  explore for its sobering incorporation of both accidental and deliberate poetry is not American.  It comes to us from antiquity by way of superb satire attributed to one Petronius Arbiter ----the Satyricon.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            February 10, 2018