Ill Will / Sick Light

I just finished reading an engrossing and intricate novel.  These snippets may either whet your appetite for it, or warn you off;  either reaction would be appropriate.

 

a fuzz of dust on the lampshades

that made the light seem dull and dirty

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

The pool emanated 

a chlorinated glow.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

 

Not a monostich (lacks the requisite rhythm and concision), but in the spirit of such depictions of dim/ill light:

 

There was a kind of dimness about northern Ohio light as it approached the winter solstice, a kind of suffocating lack of direct light.  On days like this, you could scope the sky for the sun, but couldn’t pinpoint its location, the cloud cover was so thick.  It made me think of the neurology class I took in college,  the professor talking about eigengrau -- intrinsic gray, brain gray.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

This queasy-swimmy novel itself  might be dubbed, not quite noir, but eigengrau.

 

Elective Acolytes

 

Not many are called, and even fewer chosen.

Tales from the Vienna Circle Woods

 

Vienna, 1927:

 

After several more appointments with Schlick alone, Wittgenstein had been persuaded to get together with a select group from the Circle, though he had never once attended an official Circle gathering.

Waismann began, subconsciously, to imitate Wittgenstein’s speaking-patterns.  Schlick began to attribute  some original ideas of his own  to Wittgenstein, though they had been expressed before he had even read the Tractatus.  Wittgenstein must have approved of this submissive attitude:  by the fall of 1929  he was choosing to restrict his discussions to Schlick and Waismann alone, usually at Schlick’s home.

 

-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 48-52

 

Though recalcitrant about joining, or even really following the lead of, the Wiener Kreis, Wittgenstein did attend their summer 1930 congress in Königsberg (the one-time hometown of Kant, who was the Circle’s Aunt Sally), which honored him with a presentation re “The Nature of Mathematics:  Wittgenstein’s Standpoint”.  Here he again encountered a couple who had known him as a teen:

 

Present too at Königsberg  were Professor Stanislaus Jolles and his wife, Adele.  They were the couple with whom Wittgenstein had stayed during his spell in Berlin, 1906-08.  Their relationship with their lodger had been affectionate;  Stanislaus felt protective and paternal toward “Little Wittgenstein”, as they called him.  But, as so often with Wittgenstein, there had been a rupture, and, typically again, it seems to have arisen from Wittgenstein’s perception that his hosts had fallen short of his exacting standards.

-- ibid, p. 97

 

It didn’t take much for the prickly master to cancel you (or, to use the term current among Berkeley lefty groupuscules during the 1970s before cancel acquired its later flavor among the Woke, to “break with” you).

If you did manage to remain in Wittgenstein’s good graces, it was a mixed blessing, for he tended to treat such scholars as acolytes or thuriféraires, rather than full colleagues.  Consider the case of Friedrich Waismann, mathematician and physicist, and a core member of the Kreis, who enjoyed the rare privilege of occasionally being closeted with Wittgenstein alone:

 

Waismann’s principal function was prompt and note-keeper.  One philosopher later described his relationship to Wittgenstein as one of “glove puppet to controlling hand.”  … There was something shocking about the degree to which he subordinated his interest to those of Wittgenstein, and the ingratitude with which his efforts were rewarded.
-- ibid, p. 101, 104

 

Bertrand Russell, a supremely well-established logico-philosophical panjandrum himself, could not be so scanted; yet “Bertrand Russell, according to Ayer, was now downgraded to being merely ‘a forerunner of the Christ (Wittgenstein)’.” (ibid, p. 109)

Russell himself was cordial to Wittgenstein, who had read Russell’s mathematical philosophizing, and who in 1911  showed up at Russell’s rooms in Cambridge, and soon formed a close relationship.   Russell had been a member of the Cambridge Apostles, cosily known to themselves as simply “the Society”;  and Wittgenstein received an invitation to join.  But once again, Wittgenstein held back from any circle whose multiplicity made them unwieldy to dominate as a whole.

In a letter of 1913, Russell wrote to a friend:

 

My friend Wittgenstein was elected to the Society, but thought it was a waste of time, so he imitated henry john roby and was cursed.

-- The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (v. 1, 1951), p. 364

 

(The reference is to an earlier selectee, who disdained ever to attend the Apostle conventicles;  the miffed members promptly canceled him by decapitalizing his name for all eternity, and pronouncing a ritual malediction from time to time.)

 

~  ~  ~

 

In 1932, through the good offices of Gilbert Ryle, the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer  was introduced for the first time  to Wittgenstein at Cambridge.   Queried by the eminent Austrian  as to what was the most recent book he’d read (cocktail-party filler or ice-breaker, one would have thought),  Ayer replied, La Vida es Sueño, adding modestly that he hadn’t understood it very well.  That was actually owing merely to his shaky Spanish; but Wittgenstein apparently took it as trenchant skepticism, much along the lines of the logical empiricists protesting that they “didn’t understand” (i.e., considered as rubbish) a great many everyday non-scientific statements.  “From then on he treated me as a protégé.” (-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),  p. 120.)

 

In the same memoir, the mild-mannered Ayer recounts the brusque reception that met Waismann, who had so long sedulously served Wittgenstein, when they later became colleagues at Cambridge University:

 

Waismann was Jewish, and when Vienna fell to the Germans  he fled with his family to England.   He went to Cambridge, which was willing to accept him, but Wittgenstein did not desire that what he regarded as a deceptive echo of his own thought  should be audible in the same university, and therefore announced that anyone who attended Waismann’s lectures  would not be allowed to come to his.

-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),  p. 132

 

Horresco referens, but such petty and revanchist behavior reminds me of Tr*mp.

~

 

The incomparable logician Kurt Gödel  played a notably honorable role in this Kreis of often quarrelsome prima donnas.   While faithfully attending their gatherings, he was content so remain modestly in the background, and be taken for a subaltern, while all the time excogitating, leading to work more important more lasting than anything any of the others in the Kreis would accomplish.   Again, let the portraitist tell it:

 

Although almost all Circle members became convinced that, drawing on Wittgenstein and Ramsey, they had solved the problems of mathematics -- that mathematical truths were a type of tautology -- Gödel had sat quietly at Circle meetings  without believing a word of this.  He was a mathematical Platonist.
-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 148

 

Those affordances of the Circle, and of Wittgenstein in particular, were worse than useless: positively stultifying for the practice of mathematics.  [For our essays on the subject, consult

=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Platonism  

]

 

As for the excesses of acolytism, Gödel kept a level head:

 

While Schlick and Weismann revered Wittgenstein, Gödel was among several  bemused by the cult-like deference he inspired in his acolytes. … [And later, when Wittgenstein reigned at Cambridge:]  Many students became disciles -- who, like Waismann in Vienna, subconsciously came to mimic his mannerisms.

-- ibid, p. 149, 247

 

The socio-historian and polemicist Ernest Gellner  provides a glimpse of the Cambridge period of Wittgenstein’s ascendency.  There grew up

 

… the first set of ‘companions of the prophet’.  Initially, there was a small, carefully vetted, conventicle of devotees in Cambridge, in the years preceding the Second World War. … But the movement grew …

Maor premise:  all cultural cocoons, all forms of life, are valid and self-sufficient, and Wittgenstein has shown this to be the case.  Minor premise, never spelt out or discussed, but operationallly taken for granted:  only our cocoon is of any interest. … Entry to Wittgenstein’s seminar was restricted at the master’s whim, and the ideas circulated in privately-copied typescripts which Wittgenstein himself refused to have published.  This esotericism greatly enhanced the appeal of the ideas, which were treated as a major revelation by the adepts.

 

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), pp. 160-165

 

(Parallels from the history of linguistics  during the Chomsky years, could be adduced…)

~  ~  ~

 

Let it not be supposed that the field of philosophy is at all atypical  among academic specialties, as regards such interpersonal rugosities.  Parallels from the history of linguistics  during the Chomsky years, could be adduced.  As, the mathematician Mark Kac, father of the linguist Michael Kac, remarks in his memoir:

 

Linguistics is a strange field, full of cliques and fiefdoms, each fiercely attached to its staked-out territory, and consumed with enmity toward the others.

-- Mark Kac, Enigmas of Chance (1985), p. 107

 

For an extended look at academic acolyte relations, pour yourself a brandy  and relax with these:

 

=> http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/02/chomsky-freud-and-problem-of-acolytes.html

and its appendix

=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-agony-and-acolyte_28.html

 

These include anecdotes about my fondly former Berkeley Doktorvater  in Rom. Phil.,  Professor Yakov Malkiel, including portraits of the (pro tem) Malkielitas, and one (canceled) Malkielito.  One will detect, in the telling, a Nabokovian tone;  which is only just, as the Malkiel family and the Nabokov clan  were BFFs in Berlin, back in the ‘30’s (while it lasted).

 

Fleetwood Nation

 

One of the finest passages in musical history, includes lyrics as follows:

 

            Dom dom, dom do dom, ooby do,

            Dom dom, dom do dom, ooby do,

                        (da capo  al fine del mondo)

 

The lead singer -- a guy named Gary, it turns out -- begins in a style that, in refined circles, is denominated "a capella" (from the Latin; literally, "in chapel style"), but which, in the doo-wop era, was known simply as "singing".  How it all came about:  This guy Gary (we learn from Wikipedia, which knows all) was waiting with this other bobby-soxer at a bus-stop, see, and they got to singing, and it was pretty neat, and so the girl, she had this friend, and so the three of them sang at school, and all the kids liked it, so they "formed a group" -- a process as simple then  as forming a collection out of a, b, and c, in set theory.  The group was called "Two Girls and a Guy", which really said it all.  Originally they were purely a-capella; later they added a rhythm section, consisting entirely of Gary's car-keys.

 

Then later, when they started to get famous, some manager changed their name to "The Fleetwoods", which is still a pretty neat name.  (Notice I do not say, "a cool name"; that would be beatnik.)  But they never forgot their roots -- in fact, the "Fleetwoods" were not so dubbed after the Cadillac of that description, but after their own telephone exchange (as in "Fleet-wood Four Five Seven Oh Nine").

 

The masterpiece referenced above was -- well, obviously, you had to be there, there and then.  The then and the there was American suburbia in 1959.   Back then I was even younger and even more completely clueless than in 1961, anno "Please Help Me I'm Falling" (**).  The Fleetwoods TOOK THE AIRWAVES BY STORM (to use a phrase  echoic of the late conflict, by then safely forgotten)  with a hit song called "Come Softly to Me".  Originally, at the sock hop in their high school gym, the song had been called, with better brevity, "Come Softly", but (again, Wikipedia) that same publicity-savvy manager made them change it, on the grounds that the original was... too... something called....  "risqué". (??!! Wh-wh-*what* ???????)  Anyway, it's a neat song, and if you listen to it, and tell your friends, they'll think it's really neat too.

 

*

 

You might gather from the above  that I am slighting this song;  if so, you gather amiss.  It was actually a major stepping-stone in my (thitherto minimal) musical education.

 

The poverty of our musical upbringing, on our little cul-de-sac  there in the suburbs, was astonishing.  If it were somehow translated into imagery, you would see a huddle of stricken children, wearing nothing but Keds, ribs showing, bellies distended, with the International Red Cross shaking their heads in the background, giving up the case as hopeless.  Later on, some kids had to take piano lessons, but I never did, and any music I was exposed to  came out of a little plastic slab, of the size, and essentially the function, of a cigarette pack. 

 

The song actually confused me, and I didn't like it at first.  But since it was NUMBER ONE, everyone wound up hearing it several dozen times a day.   It was almost my first introduction to multi-part singing -- songs like "The Little White Duck", till then the principle fare, tended to monody -- and my very first introduction to stretto -- the voices easing in and easing out, delicately overlapping like waves breaking softly upon waves.  And like, what was it up to?  It wasn't funny, like "Purple People Eater" or "The Chipmunk Song"; it didn't tell a story, like "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" or "Kisses Sweeter than Wine"; it didn't bounce up and down, like "At the Hop"; and it didn't have a simple "Hickory Dickory Dock" sort of tune, like "Rock Around the Clock".  And it certainly wasn't guy fare, like "Hound Dog". It was, you might say, kind of -- girly.

 

*

 

So once again I made the pilgrimage to Youtube.  And once again, learned something new and richly evocative, even though, again, I had remembered that song perfectly, note for note, for all those years.

 

Firstly, it turns out that Top 40 on a dirtcheap AM transistor radio (or, in the previous couple of years, off a little plastic crystal set that my dad put together from a kit, and that only got one channel) does not provide the full depth of musicality that one may derive  from either live performance  or some assemblage of digitized woofers and tweeters.  This little thin sound trickled out; and if the song had a good beat, you could hear the beat part, and sometimes make out some of the words.  The highest praise for a song was, "It has a good beat and you can dance to it"; only I couldn't dance to it, being shy and only nine years old.  As for "Come Softly", it wasn't clear how even teenagers could dance to it.  It wasn't jitterbug, but neither was it the sort of simple Slow Dance such as -- much, much later, when I was all of twelve -- we would dance to at Canteen, at the junior high, in gingerly contact with an individual of the opposite and complementary (and wholly unimaginable) gender,  simply rocking slowly from foot to foot until the music was over.  It was -- not syncopated exactly, more like... you couldn't put your finger on it.  It seems to have been scored for naiads.

 

Hearing it now, though only on the speakers of my PC, I realize that the kid Gary had a voice for which the gods sighed,  chins propped on hands as they listened, with eyes shut, over the clouds.  The song opens a capella, and you can hear why:  What accompaniment could possibly improve upon his voice?

 

Secondly,  learning the concrete matter-of-fact details  brings you up short.  Simply to learn that the trio is from an actual place (in the event, the state of Washington) is like a wake-up splash of water.  I don't know where I imagined singers came from, back then -- "from Hollywood" or "from Broadway", maybe.  But these three are from Olympia, not Olympus.  And they have just regular names, like other kids -- "Gary", not something made up, like "Elvis" or "Dion".  In fact their lead singer, whom I would have pictured, had I tried (though I did not, not being a girl), as a cross between Lord Byron and Apollo, turns out to look like somebody's kid brother (and his sidekicks might almost be his mother).  He has what I now recognize as a “bedroom voice”; but his babyface says rather, Tuck me in.  He looks like he just stepped out of a soda shop.

 

*

 

It suddenly occurs to me that soda shops no longer exist.  The younger among you can probably scarcely conceive what such a thing would even be -- the product-line seems strangely impoverished; as who should say, a "water shop", or a "bicarbonate of soda store". Yet for a teen in the years before the Great War, and then after the Great War, and then during the Big One that they had to give a number to, and then right on in through the 'forties and 'fifties, these constituted the principle cultural and anthropological institutions of the land.

 

No, I'm not being nostalgic. It was a time before either Google or Wikipedia, so that life was worth living only in a narrowly restricted and relative sense.  Still, its pop songs are even better than I'd remembered.

 

========

(**) Note: For “Please Help Me I’m Falling”, see:

 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/duet-at-distance.html

 

Circular Definitions in Newton

 

Re Time:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2025/08/sur-la-pluralite-des-temps.html

 

Re Matter:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/05/informative-tautologies-updated.html

 

Los Olvidados

 

 

The Sons of Mary  seldom bother,

for they have inherited that good part;

But the Sons of Martha  favour their Mother,

of the careful soul  and troubled heart.

 

And because she lost her temper once,

and because she was rude to the Lord, her Guest,

Her Sons must wait upon Mary’s Sons,

world without end, reprieve, or rest.

 

-- Rudyard Kipling, “The Sons of Martha” (1907)

 

 

Compare, re forgotten veterans:

 

“No, thank you, we don’t want food, sir;

but couldn’t you take an’ write

a sort of ‘to be continued’

and ‘see next page’  o’ the fight?

 

We think that someone has blundered,

an’ couldn’t you tell ‘em how?

You wrote  we were heroes once, sir.

Please, write:  we are starving now.”

 

-- Rudyard Kipling, “The Last of the Light Brigade” (1891)

 

 

These themes are treated in the context of the very beginning of the Christian story, here:

 

=>  https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/04/stabat-mater.html

A.I. in Ancient Times

 

Our roving reporter weighs in:

 

An experimental bot called Delphi, designed to answer ethical questions, said that genocide is fine  if it make people happy, and that it’s acceptable to eat babies if you are “really, really hungry”.

-- Patricia Marx, “Bot Meets Girl” (The New Yorker, September 15,  2025)

 

By metaverse standards, that “really, really hungry” is actually rather strict.  Shop around and you’ll find other bots to give you leave for such a meal  so long as you are simply “feeling peckish”.

 

Some people, born yesterday, imagine that such advice is an innovation of our present troubled times.   But those who dubbed their bot “Delphi” knew better:  questionable counsel from non-humans  goes back at least to the ancient Greeks.  Consider the family drama in the House of Atreus:

 

Thyestes learned from the Delphic oracle  that only be begetting a son by his own daughter  could he avenge himself.  He ravished her at night, unrecognized.

-- The Reader’s Encyclopedia

 

In a later incident, Orestes avenged the murder of his father Agamemnon  by his mother and her paramour, by killing them both.   For this, he had prior approval from the Delphic oracle.  Unfortunately, the tale has no happy ending, since the Erinyes -- rival suprahuman authorities -- were of a different opinion, and pursued poor Orestes without mercy.

Illuminations from Sister Wendy

 

While living in Princeton in the 1990s,  I sometimes resorted to a telephone service that offered succinct sketches of current movies, from Catholic commentators.   This, both to help determine which films might be suitable for family viewing, and for my own guidance.   I wasn’t looking for religious instruction per se (this was prior to my own baptism), but knowing that the reviewers stood on firm moral ground was reassuring, e.g. in learning whether an “R” rating had been bestowed owing simply to a naughty word (no obstacle in my view), or in light of a production’s cynicism, nihilism, or depravity (which themselves might not suffice, in the teeming marketplace, for that monitory majuscule).    Such distinctions were not guaranteed from purely secular critics:  my favorite in the ‘60s and ‘70s was Pauline Kael;  but some of her raves sent me to movies I walked out of with a shudder.  (As, “Last Tango in Paris”, which she praised as the best movie in a quarter-century.)

 

Later, something like such concerns formed a (subsidiary ) part of my appreciation for Sister Wendy’s The Story of Painting.   Her perceptive appreciations and graceful style   are a perfect fit for art produced during the high Christian centuries;   more problematic are the effluvial emissions of our own time, which yet find praise among the arty crowd, and high prices from oligarchs at auctions.   These I shun  like dreck on a sidewalk, and think of them no more;  but  was curious to see how Sister Wendy would deal with them:  her history begins with the cave-paintings of Lascaux,  and it would be structurally awkward to simply lop-off developments since the Dadaists et ilk.  She gamely wades into this boggy terrain;  but prefaces her chapter on the twentieth century  thus:

 

It has been calculated that there are more artists practicing today  than were alive in the whole Renaissance.  But … there is no mainstream.   The stream has flowed into the sea.

 

Accordingly, “The story of painting now loses its way.”

 

We find a similar assessmen from the later critic Peter Schjeldahl, lamenting having to review a prestigious retrospective exhibition of the egregious Francis Bacon (in The New Yorker  for June 1, 2009):  “Francis Bacon has long been my least favorite great painter of the twentieth century.”  Yet Bacon’s postumous reputation continues to swell (to become more swollen), and Schjeldahl must acknowledge:

 

But I’m aware that the scorekeeping applies to a game not won or lost, but called on account of rain:  proliferating points of view  that have swamped all would-be authoritative accounts of art history, along with those of history, period.

 

~

 

Yet nota bene:   Precisely because Sister Wendy understands what is sacred and central to human life, she is not in the least prudish.   As, she presents a canvas from ca. 1537  by Lucas Cranach the elder, depicting a recumbent nude.  In the upper left corner is a superscription “Fontis nympha sacri”; in the lower right, next to her feet, a couple of birds.  And behind her, a cavern releasing a thin stream from a rather urethral-looking aperture towards its upper arch.   That caught the attention of the Old Adam, for which I somewhat blushed.

Not so the Sister.  The section is titled “The seductive nudes of Cranach”:   

 

These coy creatures have the rare distinction of fitting in with modern tastes, being slender, free-spirited, and even kinky.  A distinctly diaphanous wisp of silk  draws attention to her loins by ‘covering’ them.  She is clearly only pretending to be asleep. 

 

Seeing more than I had, she identifies the birds as “a pair of partridges (the birds of Venus)”;  and as for that problematic micturating cavern, she names it plainly, as  a symbol of   “the female hollow”.

 

~

A term I learned from her discussion of Braque:  papiers collés, meaning the art of collage -- scraps of this and that, assembled and recontextualized.     That is basically what I have been trying to do, with far-sought sentences or phrases, rather than with images, in the “found poetry” posts on the blog.   And lo, her own can contribute some snippets to that effort:

 

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2025/08/sister-wendy-fiat-lux.html

 

Sur la pluralité des temps

 

[With apologies to Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686). ]

A historian writes, that our modern sense of Time is no older than the industrialism of the United States;  though Time, to be sure, itself is rather older.

How does this fit in with the Bergsonian dichotomy of temps vesus durée (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889) ?

 

~

Note:

Newton himself, not concerned with psychology,  conflates the two:

Absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself and from its nature, without relation to anything exernal, flows equally; and its other name is duration.

-- Principia Mathematica

 

In histories of science, that passage may be cited in distinction to Einstein’s relativistic doctrines.  But one historian notes a caveat well prior to relativity:

 

Somehow Newton failed to see the circularity of this definition.  It has become clear since his day  that his concept of uniform (“equal”) flow of time  was redundant, since it is impossible to give any meaning to such an assertion of uniformity  unless the concept of time is already established.

-- Lloyd Taylor, Physics: the Pioneer Science (1941)

In the context of Relativity, self-standing Time  is abolished altogether:

 

“Raum für sich  und Zeit für sich  sollen völlig zu Schatten herabsinken, und nur noch eine Art Union der beiden soll Selbständigkeit bewahren.” (Minkowski, 1909)

(“Independent Space and Time  must sink into the shadowland”.)

 

~

Temps (the usual word for ‘time” in French) is a feature of physics;  durée (lit. ‘duration’), a feature of lived experience, of the mind.

The former experienced its own bifurcation into (absolute) Newtonian time, and (relative to the observer) Einsteinian or Relativistic time.  Though cognitively uncomfortable to the many, at the time of its introduction, after a bit of familiarity  it all fits comfortably into basic math and physics, the former being simply a limiting case of the latter.   (Similarly, the intelletual scandal of the discovery of Non-Euclidean Geometry  was eventually digested, with the Euclidean being a sort of limiting case of the Spherical and the Hyperbolic.)

So now (per our historian) we must wrestle with a new entity:  Taylorized time -- time cut into lengths by the stop-watch brandished by a steely-eyed time-and-motion man, seeking to squeeze the last ounce (excuse me -- millilitre) out of the workforce.

Since that has nothing to do with physics, it is no contribution to our understanding of temps, but is rather a new take on durée, varying historically and culturally.

~

Footnote:  I have always been a bit puzzled by Proust’s title A la recherche du temps perdu.   How shall we characterize his use of temps here?  One subtlety:  its implications and connotations evolve in the course of the novel.   A literal translation, In Search of Lost Time, sounds trivial, terrible.  Translator Scott-Moncrieff neatly skirted the problem with his resort to the Shakespearian Remembrance of Things Past.

~

For further pensées concerning Time, from both literature and from physics, try these:

=>  https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/time