Dichtung und Deutung mitteleuropäischer Prägung

I was recently enjoying Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, in much the same way one enjoys a dish of ice-cream.  

The dust-jacket of this volume, handsomely produced by Mr. Farrar and Mr. Straus, ably aided by Mr. Giroux, is French-vanilla, with touches of peaches-and-cream.    The paper is like fresh butter.   The translation, by Mr. Franzen (with, one suspects, an occasional or possibly frequent assist from Messers. Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann[**], absent from the dust-jacket  but present in the notes to the text), is superb.  Really, truly superb.   Occasionally, the German original even reads like an awkward back-translation from the English, as “Der Gedanke ist ein Gefundenes, ein Wiedergefundenes” => “… a discovered thing, a recovered thing”.   (And later:  "erfindet das Gefundene" => "invents what he has found":  a perfect description of found poetry.)

Yet, rather than now praise it further (that for later),  I’ll now talk back to it a bit.

[**  This is the same Daniel Kehlmann who wrote the best-selling Die Ermessung der Welt.   We examine the film version here.]

Kraus (“Heine und die Folgen”), in the course of his long dismantling-job on Heinrich Heine, writes and quotes:

Kein Dichter ruft einem Fräulein, das den Sonnenuntergang gerührt betrachtet, die Worte zu:

Mein Fräulein, sein Sie munter,

Das ist ein altes Stück;

Hier vorne geht sie unter,

und kehrt von hinten zurück.

Franzen chimes in  in a footnote (p. 83):

Boy, does Kraus nail what’s wrong with Heine’s sunset poem.  And yet, when I was twenty, I found this poem hilarious.   … [And yet again:]  Heine’s poem about the girl and the sunset  is smart-ass.  It shouldn’t wear well as you get older.

Now, I cannot testify as to that, since this is the first time I read it.  But I found it -- mildly amusing:  and this, though fall’n into the sere, the silver leaf.   Certainly not worth making a fuss against.  Smart-ass? -- freilich;  but so is that indispensable reference-work, The Onion. 

Yet I wish to say something more substantial than to defend a limerick against the charge of not being an epic. 

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

* 

[Sprightly background music for this section:

  The Forellen-quintett, splendidly performed by some young Asian guys you never heard of.

The prejudice (as we watch young Asians take over, say, my meta-alma-mater, UC Berkeley) is:  Technical brilliance, to be sure;  but they can scarcely capture the echt Viennese Gspaß und Gemütlichkeit.  -- Only, they do.   They do not at all overdo the technique;  the performance is full of humor.  And -- like that quatrain of Heine -- as simple and silver as a fish.]

Let us take that rhyming trifle, not “on its own terms” (in the anemic way of New Criticism) but as having been written by a Man in Full, Heinrich Heine.  And the literalistic simplicity of the poem’s depiction of the eternal wheeling of the Sun, suggests an equally literal simplicity at the human level.  I had spent much of the morning reading  his Viennese countryman and contemporary Sigmund Freud;  perhaps that suggested this unchaste thought to my mind, but in any event:  Any red-blooded poet or artist,  beholding some buxom Mädchen waxing wet around the edges at the spectacle of the beauties of Nature, has only one natural reaction:   Invite her up to your Bude  “so that I may show you my etchings”.   Then -- vorne slides  the  Schlüpfer down;  while the frock comes up  behind.    

Following which instruction, the girl is certain to emerge with a more deeply  deepened appreciation of the cycles of Nature (even if her own might be somewhat disrupted by the aftermath).  The only point being, that while that “snatch” of doggerel (permit me the word) still falls sort of the Iliad, neither is it purely deflationary, but  on one natural reading  points forward and upward and inward, to a more fructuous development, which could even result in the birth of a child.

~

So much for the smutty reading.   But there is also -- as so often -- an anagogic, of a sort especially perceptible to the more contemplative elderly gentlemen, who are long past de-frocking Fräuleins.  For indeed, there is a subtlety here.

[Background music  for this part of the essay:

  Brahms String Sextet No.1 in B flat, Op.18  ]

This symmetry of the sun setting before us, and rising behind, is not an elementary fact of perception, but is a non-obvious cosmological hypothesis, and fallible as such.  Certainly, as a child, it never occurred to me to connect the two widely-separated events.   You see the sunset, you go to bed;  sleep happens;  you get up and eat your oatmeal, and run out to play;  the sun is already back in the sky, just as Mom & Dad are once again up and about.  What’s to explain?

Later, in school, or from our parents in a pedagogic mood, we learn abstruse suppositions about things called “East” and “West” -- not easily observable in themselves, and which go all cock-eyed the instant you race your bicycle around the corner, but in principle localizable via consultation of a completely magical and paradoxical little novelty-item called a “compass”:  you turn the thing this way and that way, trying to get the little needle to move, but it’s like herding hamsters.  Later still, they teach you poems to memorize:  “The Sun rises in the East, and sets in the West.”   (Or is it the other way about?   One can never remember.)   As with the Alphabet Song, and the one about Columbus and the Ocean Blue, knowing such poems is constitutive of becoming an educated grown-up.

And superficially, Heine’s ditty is bringing in that magisterial scientific description, with deflationary intent, to crush the girl’s vesperal (and vestal) sentimentalism.  But, note:  it does not.

It does not evoke a uniform isotropic curvilinear coordinate system in a comoving Lorenzian reference frame, together with (all the fixings):  Rather, it leaves the human perceiver  still planted in the center;  unbudging  from sundown to sunup, so that the great renewal of the diurnal earth  now sneaks up on her from behind, like a jack-in-the-box popping up to surprise you.  The bland planetary fact of a hemi-diurnal rotation  is here collapsed into a single poetic instant;  the sentient experiencer is at once  epiphanically aware of the unity of these mirror occurences, much like that of the right and left hand.  This vision is -- strictly mystical.   More fundamentally even than the astronometric account, this perspective succeeds in taking a literally quotidian fact of existence, and making it new -- making it strange.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for an epiphany,

this is what I would be reading: "

Murphy and the Magic Pawnshop

(Ich heisse Heinrich Heine, and I approved this message.)

[Kindle] [Nook]

~

Indeed, the Kraus-quoted quatrain  immediately called to mind one of Rilke, about Symmetry as observed by a mooncalf (we quote it as part of an essay here):

Ach was ist das für ein schöner Ball !

Rot und rund wie ein Überall.

Gut, dass ihr ihn erschuft.

Ob der wohl kommt wenn man ruft?

Superficially, in both rhymes, the language is naïve;  in reality, faux-naïf.  On the surface, rather unpleasantly, immaturity is being mocked, here in a simpleton, there in a Backfisch.   More profoundly -- Ah, but, it is difficult to plumb the profound.  I have simply circled around it, approached it from different faces and facets, in a series of poems and parables,  which you may sample via any of the following thematic labels:

epiphany  ~ round  ~  faux-naïf

And for an extravagantly anagogic take on a scatological joke, try this:
      http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/anagogic-jokes-re-upped.html     

Thoughts 'n' Things

  Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind, p. 38:

(**) Just as a rock is already in the Universe, whether or not someone is handling it,  an idea is already in the Mindscape, whether or not someone is thinking it.

This is itself a pleasant thought, recalling the ditty about God-in-the-quad; but in actual fact – I don’t think so.

(So you see—I am not an uncritical Platonist.  Platonic heaven must be so gerrymandered, as to exclude such things as cheese doodles and Sponge Bob Squarepants.)

The actual universe has (for example) -- whatever geometry it has:  regardless of whether there are rational creatures capable of understanding it, let alone deriving it.  Likewise the landscape of math.  But particular formulations of physics, and perhaps even of math – matrix mechanics v. wave mechanics, Cauchy analysis vs. non-standard analysis – do not exist in complete independence from their proponents.  They are, one might say, propositions, not objects.  The objects (or patterns, or whatever they are)  exist  even in the absence of  a person to spout propositions about them; but the propositions require a proposer.  – Nothing specially abstract here; the same thing is true of rocks.  This rock exists independently of any finite mind, but: “There lies a rock” and “Behold that rock!” and “What a rock that is!” must come out of some actual someone’s mind or mouth.

            The unbridledly idealistic view in (**) conjures up a skyscape of untethered thought-balloons.  It is pleasant to contemplate, in a comic-strip sort of way, but not to be taken too seriously.  For one thing, unlike the situation with mathematical truths, where anyone at any place or time might discover them, there is no way for a rational creature in another galaxy or dimension to reach out and grab one of those thought-balloons by the tail;  he is required to blow his own bubbles.  Whereas the structures of mathematics are like fixed landmarks, which one encounters again and again, from different approaches.  For instance:  Yang-Mills gauge theories, discovered by the physics expedition; and connections on fibre-bundles, discovered by the math team; and lo, they meet in the middle.  Likewise group-theory.  Different body-parts of this have been grabbed onto by matrix theory, algebra (symmetries of solutions to equations), geometry (the Erlangen program), particle physics (glad you could get here; meet Sophus Lie), and in time it becomes clear that it’s all part of the same elephant.  Whether they come from physics, or mathematics, or computer science, two such explorers may not realise that they have come upon the same mountain, till they have circled around it a bit and compared notes.  And this happens repeatedly.  We may summarize in an epigram:  The mindscape of mathematics is a multidimensional torus:  whatever direction you set off in, you eventually wind up back at Hilbert’s Hotel.

It turns out that Shing-Tung Yau likes this montane metaphor as well.  Cf. The Shape of Inner Space (2010), p. 103:

A mathematical proof is a bit like climbing a mountain.

And he nicely outlines the Yang-Mills case (p. 290):

The physicist Chen Ning Yang was similarly astonished to find that the Yang-Mills equations, which describe the forces between particles, are rooted in gauge theories in physics  that bear striking resemblances to ideas in bundle theory, which mathematicians began developing three decades earlier, as Yang put it, “without reference to the physical world”.  When he asked the geometer S. S. Chern how it was possible that “mathematicians dream up these concepts out of nowhere,” Chern protested, “No, no.  These concepts were not dreamed up.  They were natural and real.”

            Contrast the case with “thoughts”.  Supposititious entities of the mindscape, even some popular thought-balloon, tethered to a billion different heads, need never be rediscoverable by another explorer, nor acknowledged as real should he simply be grabbed by the lapel by one of the thinkers, and treated to an exposition of same.  For example, the notion held dear by countless generations of schoolboys around the globe, of the uniquely funny nature of flatulence, will never appear among the gravely ellipsoidal thought-balloons of the solons of Fdrmrphlandia; even “funny”, for them, is not well-defined, and not particularly worth defining.

Now, probably Rucker meant to restrict the realm of “ideas” to just some of them.  Not, “Wouldn’t it be fun to dip Suzy’s pigtail into the inkwell!”, but things like “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.”  Fine; but careful, here.  The Pythagorean theorem has  as its basis  a fact about Euclidean geometry, in every possible world; just as Fermat’s Last Theorem expresses (in a possibly somewhat contingent and imperfect way) a fact about the natural numbers.   But a fact is not the same thing as an idea.  As a matter of fact, there is a coffee stain on this shirt; but “the idea of this coffee-stained shirt” is no strut or girder of God’s architectonics.  An idea concerning a fact of mathematics, in a finite mind,  may bear – must bear -- but an imperfect relation to the fact itself (‘fact’ here used broadly: it may refer to a wildly transfinite complexus of relations, some of them perhaps perceptible only to angels).   Most people’s ideas of mathematical truths bear as much relation to the truths themselves  as does a crayon scribble to the Sistine Chapel  which it might (based merely upon memory of a fleeting ill-lit glimpse) attempt to depict.  To posit that all truths of mathematics exist as Ideas in God’s mind, is logically allowable, but really adds nothing, and is in any case unknowable. To identify these truths with the neuronal states of the pitiful meat-wads sloshing around in our half-cracked crania, is to add nothing at all, but is rather to detract.

[Appendix]  Karl Kraus apparently entertained a notion of independent or pre-existent thoughts.  He speaks of someone being

von der Präformiertheit der Gedanken  überzeugt, und davon daß der schöpferische Mensch  nur ein erwähltes Gefäß ist; und davon, daß die Gedanken und die Gedichte da waren  vor den Dichtern und Denkern.

-- “Heine und die Folgen”, reprinted in J. Franzen, The Kraus Project, p. 88

The whole ‘meme’ idea (itself a meme) is similar -- not that the various Chiclet-thoughtlets were truly Platonically pre-existing, but that, once hatched, they lead a promiscuous existence, wandering into people’s minds  like pollen into our air-passages.

~

Footnotes from the 19^th century:

Dedekind … allowed his philosophy of mind  much reign, with a ‘proof’ that “there are infinite systems”;  for he gave  as evidence “the totality S of all things, which may be objects of my thought”, since  as well as any of its elements s,  it contained also “the thought s’ that can be the object of my thought …This ‘proof’ did not gain a good reception.”

-- Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870 - 1940 (2000), p. 105

For Frege,

In contrast to subjective ‘ideas’ (Vorstellungen), ‘thought’ was intended in an objective sense, rather like state of affairs, sharable among thinkers  and indeed independent of anyone thinking then.

-- I. Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870 - 1940 (2000), p. 190