COINCIDENCE AND COSMOS

[The following is from a letter sent to a friend, who had reported a troubling coincidence, some years ago.]

~

COINCIDENCE AND COSMOS

I don’t see those two coincidences – yours or mine – as particularly startling.  But neither my being unimpressed, nor your being impressed, should weigh particularly heavily in the epistemological balance-pan.  For mankind is notoriously incapable of estimating probabilities in most instances.

One of the side benefits of faith is supposed to be  that it tends to preserve us from superstitions that might otherwise get sucked in to the vacuum where faith should be. (Chesterton was fond of emphasizing, and dramatizing, this point.)  Actually I was never superstitiously inclined, even before baptism; but now there is a warrant to just wave these things off – things superficially much more suggestive.   For, I don’t believe that God communicates via such hole-in-corner monkey-tricks.

Such incidents, when they crop up, are undeniably intriguing.  The appeal seems to be  that they hint at a pattern on the other side of the carpet, which we see only wrong-side-on.  But then, as theists, we already know that; we don’t need the occasional odd chiming of chance, to tell us so.  What is worthy only of Las Vegas, should stay in Vegas.

*

One of the things  I’ve been doing with my new-found, fiber-furnished bandwidth, is watching free online episodes of a TV series, “Lost”.   The whole thing is predicated on Baader-Meinhof phenomena.   

The problem with that  as the basis for a multi-year series, is that it is all too easy to conjure up.  Just as magic tricks are yawners if performed on television, which can always resort to special effects, so spooky coincidences are startling only if they happen to you.   It’s a very lazy genre.   For comedy to work, it has to be funny; and even a decent car-chase demands artistry to stage.  But any footling apprentice can have a stranger say (after you meet him in an empty stadium in Australia, and then part company), “See you in another life”; and then a few minutes later, a world away on a mysterious island, in a bunker far below the earth, you run into the same guy, now wild-eyed and bearded, and stammer, “Y-y-y-you….!”   Still, “Lost” not a boring show.  The whole art consists in having an artfully selected Bridge-over-San-Luis-Rey set of castaways  -- the pert freckled girl, the doughty doctor whose stubble is never shorter nor longer than a four-day growth, the Black guy, the Fat guy, the this-and-that guy – and send them through a minuet of interactions, spiced by tingly synchronicities,  so that the coincidences become tonal, as in music.

Featuring prominently among the guiding coincidences of the show is a short sequence of small integers, arranged in order.  Fat Guy overhears a mental patient (whom the numbers have driven mad) muttering them over and over, and with them, wins the lottery!  Woo-ooo!  But then very bad things start happening to everyone he goes near!! Woo-oo-ooo!  And then they turn up engraved at the entrance to that bunker!  Woo-oo-ooo-oo-oooo!  The sequence, unremarkable upon inspection…

Actually, I must confess at this point, that I am loath to write the sequence down, though it is only the whim of a TV show.  It is not superstition exactly; more like, “Get thee behind me…”  For, although God does not communicate by such monkey-tricks, the Devil might…  Anyhow, it contains an old favorite “23”.   An otherwise highly intelligent (though atheist) friend of mine  was mesmerized by this number, whose spectral footprint seemed to be everywhere.  It turns out he is not alone in his obsession; an entire movie was made (unfortunately, not a good one), about the eerie qualities of this integer.

*

There is one place where startling coincidences really are intriguing; and it is as far from Old Pagan or New Age spookery as possible.  I mean:  math and science.  For, the same underlying structures keep popping up in a variety of guises; the wild kaleidoscope of the world  appears, upon analysis, to be dreamed up out of a few symmetries  and a few bits of colored glass.

Here too it is possible to go astray, seeing significance where there is none.The great Eddington was much taken with the fact, that the Fine Structure Constant of physics (a dimensionless number, of course, otherwise its numerical value would be arbitrary) is very very close to 1/137 (or whatever the figure was).  Odd he should have noticed, this, actually; did he carry around reciprocals of all the integers in his head?  Anyhow, he hypothesized that the FSC was exactly 1/137; and busied himself attempting to explain the discrepancy as measured.  Well, it turned out to be mere gematria.  The FSC is not the reciprocal of an integer, and there’s an end to it.

The smaller the integer, the more it is likely to play a role in disparate structures essentially by happenstance.  Two is the king of them all – duality, binarism – and thus is indeed a very significant number, but rather in the way that water is a significant compound – you don’t get goosebumps when you discover another example.   Much more troubling are huge numbers, such as the ratio of the strength of the Coulomb force to that of gravity – how do you construct a cosmos out of such ill-matched yoke-mates?   Or, to take a recent example from mathematics, consider such apparently unrelated fields as the study of j-functions, and that of finite simple groups.  The first nontrivial factor in one of the series of the former is 196,884; the smallest number of dimensions in which the largest of the latter can operate, is 196,883.   A connection, or close but no cigar? 

~

Foot-note (tail-note, butt-note) anent the Dark Prince.

Two of my favorite Christian authors, G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis,  offer antithetical depictions of the Devil.  Chesterton’s is more romantic and medieval:

Roses are redder  when you believe in the Devil.

Lewis’s, by contrast, in the Silent Planet trilogy, in Screwtape, and in The Great Divorce, depicts what we might call the Trivial Devil (though no less dangerous for all that).  There is no romance to him; there is, we may say, Nothing to Recommend Him.  He is no Satanic Majesty, but more like a Satanic Misery,  a Satanic Minionism -- a Mere Mechanism.  And as a mechanism, he is given to chitter-chattery repe(titi)tition.

An example of what we could term a “diabolical” coincidence, in this Lewisian sense,  occurs in “The Matrix”, when a black cat (Satan in miniature, as it might be) passes, right to left, outside the doorway, and then, right after that, or sort of seguing into it, a -- a black cat passes, right to left, outside the doorway.   Neo remarks on the coincidence, merely curious, but his more seasoned team-mates are instantly more knowing and alarmed, for they recognize a revealing glitch in the diabolical master-program that runs the Matrix.   The faults and behaviors of the dark lords who run the place, are eminently mechanical, since they are, in fact, machines.

“Blindspot” post-mortem

I bailed out of this TV show during the first season, after a promising premise devolved into frenzied absurdity.  Yet, curious whether  by the end of the second  anything had been resolved concerning the overarching idea (entwining memory, cryptography, an Origins Myth, and the tabula rasa motif), I checked the episode-guide in that indispensable modern Baedeker, Wikipedia.

And, no, nothing came of it.  All the initial hints were red herrings.  A typical episode boils down to such as this (midway through the second season):

While with Sandstorm, Jane alerts the FBI that their attack is imminent and Weller's team raids Sandstorm's headquarters. Roman knocks Jane out. When she awakens, Shepherd reveals she has long known Jane is a triple agent for the FBI thanks to Sandstorm's mole, Dr. Borden. Flashbacks reveal Borden's wife was the doctor who nursed a pre-memory wipe Jane back to health in Afghanistan; after she was killed by a US drone strike, Jane recruited him into Sandstorm. In the present, Shepherd tells Jane she pretended phase two was underway to lure out Weller's team; when the FBI arrives at Sandstorm HQ, she detonates a bomb, trapping them in the rubble. Shepherd orders Roman to kill Jane; when he refuses, Shepherd tries to kill both of them, but Jane and Roman escape. Weller manages to summon help and rescue his team. While treating Roman's wounds, Jane erases his memory, hoping to give him the same second chance she had. Patterson recognizes Borden's ring, realizing he works for Sandstorm. When she tries to arrest him, he fights back and a shot rings out; it is not shown who was hit.

The phrase “jumping the shark” was coined in animadversion to TV serials that, running out of steam, gin up some gimmick  foreign to the program’s original raison d’être:  the screenwriters’ equivalent of a Hail Mary.   But the “Blindspot” farrago is not just one incident in one episode:  every episode is like that, simply a turn of the kaleidoscope  to let the same bits of colored glass  shift randomly to different positions.  It’s not jumping the shark;  it’s a shark steeplechase.

~

It is a familiar experience, that extensive taking-in of some dramatic production (whether visual or written) may, after you have gone on to other things, still leave behind a kind of vapor or atmosphere, through which you view in-principle-unrelated material.   As, laying down a novel of Dickens and turning to some quite different prose, you yet continue to notice what seem stray Dickensian notes.

And such it was in this case, after I had scanned through the synopses of the complete list of episodes.  With a sigh  I turned to the day’s news:  and there it was, in large type:

British model kidnapped in Milan was to be 'sold as a sex slave' and 'fed to tigers when her buyer got bored'

The 20-year-old was held captive by the Black Death Group for nearly a week in a remote farm house in Italy before they planned to sell her on the 'dark web'.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/british-model-kidnapped-milan-sold-10939716

 Like an out-take from “Blindspot”.

The Proto-Buffy

WDJ’s Department of American Incunabula  reports:

Hawthorne’s American notebooks from the mid-1840s  contain many brief notes for possible future stories, most of which he never got around to writing.  One such item he handed over to Longfellow, who turned it into the epic poem “Evangeline”.  Another fragment had to wait longer for its eventual embodiment:

To contrive a story of a man building a house, and locating it over the pit of Acheron.  The breath of hell shall breathe up from the furnace that warms it, and over which Satan himself shall preside.  Devils and damned souls  shall continually be rising through the registers.  Possibly an angel may now and then peep through the ventilators.

And thus it came to pass, that in our own day and age, a prophet named Josh Whedon did chance upon that manuscript;  and thus was Sunnydale, and Buffy, born.

Höllenschlund

An hideous hole all vast, withouten shape,
Of endless depth, o'erwhelm'd with ragged stone,
With ugly mouth and grisly jaws doth gape,
And to our sight confounds itself in one.
Here enter'd we, and yeding forth, anon
An horrible loathly lake we might discern,
As black as pitch, that clepèd is Averne.

-- Th. Sackville, “Induction”

Pellicular Wikipedia

To fans of “Blindspot”, it has by now become apparent, that those tattoos (like some Inca inscriptions)  purport to explain absolutely everything,  Present Past or (especially) Future:  like Wiki -- or rather, like Borges’s  Universal Library.  All that is known, or might ever be known,  imprinted upon her skin.

To the cold, hard core of “Memento” fans, that is disappointing.  But to the rest of Walmartamerica, that is good news.  So -- Here is how YOU can employ those iconographic indicators  to your own benefit.  Take it from me, my smiling wife Veronica and our faithful dog Spot!  Just in the past three days, we brought in  this:

* Puzzled husband:  “Someone’s been swiping tomatoes from our garden again!”

Loyal wife: “ A steganographic exploitation of the inkblot blocking the singed skin hidden beneath the bandaid on Jane’s left buttock reveals:  The perpetrator is none other than the neighborhood raccoon!”

P. H:  “Ha-ha!  That furry rascal!”

* Puzzled husband:  “Omigosh, what shall we do?  Tomorrow’s our big picnic, and the weatherman is predicting thunderstorms !!”

Loyal wife: “A previously overlooked inscription  on the inside  of Jane’s eyelid  contains a cipher which, run through our Tordella supercomputers, breaks out to “21 Oct 2015”; which, according to the Old Style (Julian) calendar, breaks out to tomorrow!  And the graphic equates to an ideogram for the Egyptian sun-god Ra!  So:  It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiney day !!”

P.H.:  “Woo-hoo!  Packing the mayo !!!”

* Puzzled husband:  “Gosh, honey, I’ve looked everywhere!  Wherever can I have left my carkeys ???”
Loyal wife: “A p-adic attack on the recursively-enciphered left-armpit image from Jane reveals … (long technical discussion deleted) ….they're  in the right pocket of your gray overcoat!”

Procedurals: a Viewer’s Guide

Disappointed critics of the TV show “Blindspot”  have suggested that it devolved to a mere police-procedural.   Actually it is not that:  it is less than that, aspiring to be more than that.

A police procedural is of interest  only if it actually gives you a glimpse of the procedures of the police (or FBI, or whoever).   Tradecraft above all.  As such, the Police Procedural, as a genre, is inherently neither more nor less interesting than insights into any other walk of life, such as:

* Plumber’s Procedural

This week, we learn how to really unclog a toilet.

* Philologist’s Procedural

This week, we meet a ferociously irregular verb.

* Penguin Procedural

Last week, we mostly just stood around motionless, just like the week before, and the week before that.   This week, we finally go get some fish.

On “Blindspot”, we see no real police-work at all.  The solution is handed to the team on a platter, based on the tattoos plus less a four seconds’ worth of mumbo-jumbo.  And that is all as well.  If you’re not going to do it right, don’t do it at all -- don’t waste screen-time.   Forensically, each episode’s crime-of-the-week  is no more than a featureless pushpin on a wall-map.   The question is whether that wall-map will eventually develop  an interesting pattern.

~

As pure a specimen of a broadcast police procedural  as you might hope to find, was the old “Dragnet” radio series of the 1950s.  I used to savor its re-runs on “The Big Broadcast” (Ed Walker, God rest your soul).  Though one may doubt how closely the scripts hewed to actual LAPD cases, they were conformable in pattern, in that they were -- basically boring.   No moles, no Dickensian witnesses from the past, very little gunplay (the cops might be investigating some previous gunplay, but you didn’t hear it in flashback), no interesting intricacy of plot.  Just the sort of dumb crimes that the sort of dullards who become petty criminals  typically perpetrate.  It took a sort of heroism to stick with that formula, week after week and year after year -- just as the actual flatfeet on the beat had to do.   They did not save the planet weekly, in fiction or in fact, based on helicopter gunships and cool cryptic naked-lady tattoos.

~

[Update 3 November 2015]  As the series lazily unrolls, it becomes apparent that it owes less than nothing to the humdrum but workmanlike procedurals.   Unfortunately, the genre it most resembles is computerized role-player games.  As there, there are indefinitely many bad-guys to shoot, like ducks in a gallery:  you can always do it, despite the fact that they are armed with automatic weapons and you with just a service revolver, because they contain nor flesh nor blood -- unlike reality, they can’t really shoot back. In Episode 6, a refreshingly skeptical badguy comments, to the FBI team, astray in the greenwood:  “What is this, a scavenger hunt?”  Well, exactly. To your right, there lies a mailbox; or, a dwarf offers you a key:  in this case, the payoff was a trunk full of automatic weapons plus a treasure map that led to a fully-fueled spanking-new helicopter waiting for your convenience in a meadow, under a tarp.   A deux ex machina that probably went down very well with a generation that lives in daily expectation of having cool stuff handed to them free.

[Update March 2016]  I finally gave up on it.  The program having by now amply demonstrated that Tattoo Girl is far smarter and more capable than any of the men around her, is now reduced (by way of nearest variation) to demonstrating the similar superiority of what’s-her-name (which I forgot;  she is referred to only by a business-like surname, but of course otherwise has all the babe stigmata) to whatever straw-Man is standing around waiting to be put smartly in his place -- his Y chromosome dangling from his neck  like a leper’s bell.

At the latest such instance, I discreetly pushed a buzzer at my desk, and the whole show dropped disappearing through a trap-door in the floor.

[Update April 2016]  Curious nevertheless to see if any dots were getting connected, I glanced at Wikipedia’s summaries recent episodes.  They may be summarized thus:

In the next episode, the shark jumps the monkey, and then they have sex.

Additional dots for “Blindspot”

[Appendices to this essay.]

(A)  Viewers have remarked how odd it is, that FBI Guy ends every other sentence addressed to Jane Doe with “… , Jane.”   Odd especially since that isn’t even her real name.

Concurrently, by chance, I have been listening to an audiobook of Jane Eyre;  and there, Mr Rochester exhibits the same the same vocative quirk, towards his coworker/love-interest.

In both cases,  the phenomenon is striking, owing to the utter asymmetry in vocatives:  the senior man regularly recurs to this first-name address;  the woman protege, never.

There is a slight syntactic distinction: FBI-Guy postpends the vocative ("I'm so sorry, Jane");  Rochester  prepends it.

(B)  More musings on the motif of the Verhängnisvolle tattoos:

Compare palmistry (or phrenology)-- the notion that your character or fate are written in your fingerprints, or the lines of your hand, or the bumps of your skull.

(C)  Motivation for the master-conspiracy

One of the features I hated about “24” (which fortunately did not intrude to spoil the fun  until the final episodes of each season) was the bogus, ex-nihilo explanation of the vast, nation-destroying events, via a conspiracy by a tiny and ill-defined clique, whose motivation was simply unfathomable.  Often, all we learned about Mr Big  was that he spoke with a British accent (very suspicious!).

Oddly, and with a certain commendable candor, Episode 4 of “Blindspot” came forth with the motivation behind a horrendous global bioattack, right at the end of the episode in which it was introduced:  as a desperate, planet-saving move in the face of  Malthusian pressures.  To the average viewer, that must seem as far-fetched as the (even vaguer) motivations of the “24” arch-villains.   But actually, it is more firmly grounded in (at least psycho-social) reality than you might surmise.

(1a)  It is already a fact, that persistent, influential voices in Africa  aver that AIDS, and ebola, and probably much else, were caused -- deliberately -- by the West.

Similar conspiracy-theories thrive in much of the third world.

(1b)  Such fantasies have their American proponents as well. Thus, the P.C. anthropologists campaign against Napoleon Chagnon; or a certain tenured professor who toes the conspiratorial ebola-line.

(2)  In fantasy  though not in act, such ideas have indeed been entertained.

„Es zeigt sich, daß die ethischen Menschen nicht so viele Kinder haben und die Gangster sich unbegrenzt und sorglos weiter reproduzieren.“ Und: „… gegen Überbevölkerung hat die Menschheit nichts Vernünftiges unternommen. Man könnte daher eine gewisse Sympathie für Aids bekommen.“

-- Konrad Lorenz in einem Gespräch anlässlich seines 85. Geburtstags, in: Natur, Nr. 11, München 1988.

And, from a couple of years ago:

I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, “What good are you?”

Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”

[-- Rense.com]

Thus, the perpetrators of the “Blindspot”  terror-attack  were not so implausible, being  rather  analogs of the Oklahoma City bomber, or of Breivik

[Update 9 Nov 2015]   Takehome from the (otherwise unmemorable) Episode Eight:

Twofer is actually a Threefer (Urninde).

The iconic opening scene of “Blindspot”

In ads and trailers, prior to the series debut, NBC heavily marketed the opening scene, in which “Jane Doe” appears naked out of a carry-bag  in the middle of Times Square;  and wisely so.  For it contains a veritable mythologem.

In literature, the best-known birth-from-a-handbag is that of the titular character of Wilde’s “The Importance of Being E(a)rnest”;  he was discovered therein, at a railway station, provenience unknown.

The next-most-famous Railway Station birth, is that of Paddington Bear.

For “Paddington Station”, the American update is “Times Square”.  (Note, by the way, the universal appropriateness of that name.)

Now, if Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank had put their heads together, they would doubtless have deemed this motif  a wish-fulfillment reworking  of the Birth Trauma.  The Newcomer appears suddenly in a bruising world of blooming-buzzing confusion (as each we must);  but as compensation, this rude Awakening is Immaculate, ex nihilo, with none of the dreadful ickiness of having been whelped by one’s parents, Mom and Dad, via some penis-and-vagina action too terrible to contemplate.

It is a satisfying fantasy;  thus Minerva, born from the brow of Zeus.

~

But now there is a twist;  and it deepens things.  Born from a bag, as though from empty space, she nonetheless comes “with baggage”, in the form of intricate enigmatic tattoos.  Like "Memento"s Leonard, alone in his hotel room, having his (latest) very-first moment of conscious self-awareness. Born with a mission.

He awakens each day  to a world new-made; he spots the writing  with the same surprise  that Crusoe spotted footprints in the sand.  He cannot really recognize it as his own: even those he wrote himself, he stippled into the skin – it won’t resemble his normal cursive – and others he left to the tattoo-artist.   The writing must therefore confront him like that at Belshazzar’s feast.  It is otherwordly.  He is wreathed in cryptic admonitions, some penned in a Gothic script like that of Scripture.  He might almost be forgiven for fancying himself a prophet.  And yet – for here the story is bleakly modern.  He pays no mind to the source of these writings, just takes them for granted.  He simply takes the next step forward, in his appointed task.  That Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin  has no resonance, divine or diabolocal.
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/moreismenitto.html

Born with a mission.

The show so far is stupid;  but I am probably going to watch another episode, simply from the power of this underlying motif -- this motivating motif.   For it applies very broadly:  These amnesiacs, with their strange “Thou must” inscribed scrolls, are like each one of us, adrift in the randomness of this sublunary life, yet with a sense, that somehow, all of it somehow means something.

Weiteres zum Thema:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/09/blindspot-and-memento.html

Tattooed Chinese linguist saves the day!

As a linguist ourself, it warms our heart when we hear real-life tales of the exploits of these mighty beings.   Some of them we have documented here:

   Navy linguists save the day!

   Arabic linguists save the day!

   Forensic linguists save the day!

I never thought I’d post one with the title “Tattoo’d Chinese linguist saves the day”, but hey,  this is America.  (As for what that’s supposed to mean:  it doesn’t mean anything.)

Our newest example is unfortunately fictional (indeed, as we shall see, lame even as fiction), but what with all the attention lavished on celebrities and sports-stars, we take such scraps as we can get.

In Monday’s pilot of the lustrous though ludicrous new series, “Blindspot”,  concerning a  shapely unclad tattooed Special-Forces polyglot female amnesiac with superpowers (go back and read that again slowly:  yes, that’s what it says) a situation arises in which, for reasons too complex or rather too contrived to go into, the FBI needs to decipher instanter some emails in Chinese,  or else Very Bad Things will happen to Gotham.  The agent in charge barks:  “Get me all the Chinese linguists!”

That conjures up a fairly comic image, in which several dozen Sinophiles  are clustered around the screen displaying the email,  translating in unison, in a sing-song chorus,  “Dear sir or madam:  I am an imprisoned Nigerian prince …” -- However, there’s a reason for the broad-sweep order.  On television, to show decisiveness and leadership, the floor-boss barks (or “snaps”):

“Check these prints against the files of every police department in the country!”

or

“Scan the footage from every security camera in the city for the past ten years!”

or

“Seek a match in the dental records of every adult male going back to the Neanderthals!”

Still, we forgive all that, since it poses the question which so many have asked and so few answered:  “Where’s a linguist when you really need one??”

But now the screenwriting takes a turn for the absurd.  None of the Bureau’s chinoisisants are up to this task, for, as we are instantly informed (by a non-linguist), the dialect variety in question is, um, Wen Zu (how could she possibly know that?), commonly known to other Chinese speakers as “the Devil’s language”.  Omigosh, then Gotham is doomed!

Where did that come from? -- Simply to set matters up so that the mnemonically-challenged Wonder Woman (who can’t remember her own name, but who remembers every language she ever studied, to the last detail) can pipe up pertly and pluckily :

“I know Wen Zu !”

At which point the program’s full agenda stands revealed, as clearly as had it stepped naked out of a hold-all in Times Square.   So far from being mere eye-candy for men, as P.C. critics were objecting before the show even aired (her déshabille is never more than partial, with the best bits left out), this show is the latest media sacrifice upon the ever-higher-towering altar of Feminarcissism.   This is the new paragon of womanhood:  the rocket-scientist-cum-brain-surgeon-cum-astronaut-cum-poetess-cum-Black-Belt, the woman who can Have It All, Do It All, as well as men or rather better, all without smudging her makeup.

Scenes from future episodes:

Hapless FBI guy:

“O noez, the only way to find out what these superintelligent but fusedly-confused brain-joined Siamese twins know before the bomb goes off, is to perform a neurosurgical separation, and here we are with them in a rowboat, without oars, and  far from any hospital.  Whatever shall we do?”

Wonder woman:

“I can perform the operation!  I’ve done it many times under battlefield conditions, with no equipment but a tongue-depressor -- one of which I happen to have right here in my right breast pocket, just above my right breast!”

and

Hapless FBI guy:

“Curses, the only way to save humanity is to solve the Riemann Hypothesis, pronto!  And me without my pencil!”

Wonder woman:

“I can provide the solution!  It follows as a direct corollary from a more general theorem which I have already proved!”

and

Hapless FBI guy:

“Oy veh!  Here we stand stranded with the doom-timer ticking, at the bottom of a sheer five-thousand-foot cliff, at the top of which lies the remedy, and I forgot my climbing shoes!  We’d have to fly!”

Wonder woman:

“I can fly!”

Now, there is a wrinkle here, which will likely strike no-one but linguists.  The puzzle is an e-mail -- i.e., in written, not spoken Chinese.  And Chinese is ideographic, not alphabetical.  Which means that the various dialects, which vary from village to village and which are sometimes mutually unintelligible, still are written in basically the same way.  The email would thus be intelligible to all.

(And after all that, the episode never even made use of her marvellous skill, so far as I can tell.  Of course, I may have blinked, and missed the content of the email -- the pilot tried to pack a season’s worth of flim-flam into forty-five minutes, so as to cater to those with short attention-spans.  Instead, the key to it all turned out to be a cryptic phrase they’d heard earlier but now suddenly cryptolinguistically decrypted:  “mother of exiles”:   Aha, the Statue of Liberty! -- Cf. the crossword-puzzle motif in “Rubicon”.)

~

Anyhow, even though NBC may in this case have stretched the facts a bit (indeed, racked the fiction), we appreciate the shout-out.  Linguists really are rather godlike beings.  For starters, we’re taller than other people.

Here are some actual portraits from our archives:

Archie the Arabist

Gertie the Germanist

Rickie the Russian-maven

.

Blindspot (and "Memento")

NBC has announced a new series, “Blindspot”, about an amnesiac whose body is covered with recent tattoos, each of which is a cryptic clue.   Those of us who do not ourselves suffer from amnesia, will immediately recognize a ripoff and recycling of the movie “Memento”.  However, it’s none the worse for that:  the movie was intriguing, and well worth recycling.  Moreover, the concern with original plots is quite modern;  no-one from  Euripedes to Shakespeare ever gave it a thought;  rather the contrary.

"Look into my eyes ... *Eyes*, I said, dammit!"

The trailer is promising, though not without TV-typical doofusness, like the yokel horror of a cop in Times Square quavering “It’s …. alive …. !”  NYPD officers are actually considerably cooler than that, and more composed.  The series does add a very promising premise -- that one of the tattoos names a specific FBI agent;  who, however, has never met her.  “Complications ensue.”

A note on genre:

A movie  has to be tight.  A TV series  can roll on, and on.

To be trapped in the mindset of an amnesiac  is potentially suffocating.  “Memento” (as a movie) pulled it off;  but “Blindspot” wisely offers us  a second center of deixis (namely, FBI-guy.  Cf. Jack Bauer and Chloe.)

Anyhow, for our essay on that ...  memorable (!) movie, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/redismembering-memento.html ]

~

The girl, as the viewer will not be surprised to learn (this being, largely unlike “Memento”, straightforward mainstream entertainment), turns out to be a superspooky kickass-ninja special ops chick, who retains all her special superpowers, but who does not consciously remember her training, or who she is.  In this motif, “Blind Spot” is ripping off, not “Memento”, but “The Bourne Identity”.  In each case, when the hero is suddenly confronted with mortal danger, (s)he reacts instinctively, and with deadly force.

More trivially, the motif Older-male-counterterrorist-has-special-bond-to-younger-apparent-neophyte-female-coworker-who-bears-a-mysterious-scar-from-her-murky-past-and-who-oh-yes-BTW-is-amnesiac (Stith-Thompson tale type #13482b) is boldly borrowed from NBC’s own “Blacklist” (hey, all in the family;  plus the resonance of the shows’ names).

~

The visual/mnemonic premise of “Blindspot”, which is, superficially (epidermally, as it were), similar to that of “Memento”, clearly has the field wide open, in which to go;  whereas “Memento” was monomaniac -- gaining, however, thereby, in depth and intensity.

“Blindspot” begins in the middle of a crowded Times Square;  “Memento”, in a bare, spare, windowless hotel-room, vacant except for the protagonist -- and he himself is a kind of vacancy at this point.   All he has to go by -- to direct his life -- are the cryptic messages on his skin.  Ditto for the girl, only, she is not confronted with that baffling, existential task -- “I have people who do that for me.”   That makes life much easier for the screenwriter (at that point, he can recycle pretty much whatever conspiracy/thriller material he likes), but at a cost of relative triviality.

In “Memento”, the messages concern a mysterious crime.  And they accumulate with time.  Each new hot impression pains his integument, but leads him (hopefully) closer to finally catching on.

This scenario has its classic embodiment in Kafka’s profound allegory, “In the Penal Colony”.

It is the contention of Kafka, and of psychoanalysis, that we do, in our innermost depths, have a picture of the nature of our sin, of what is making us ill, but that, we have a blindspot for it.

The canvas of shame:

the guilty skin.

~

There is a further subtlety, or underlayer, unexplored in the “Strafkolonie”, nor explicitly hinted-at, but implicit:  namely, the strangely endogenous nature of the cryptic messages.

In “Memento”, this is explicit:  the protagonist (somehow) knows  that he himself has written these uncanny, these otherworldly messages. 

[Actually, there is a potential aporia here, though the movie does not exploit it.  Namely:  logically speaking, the tattoo’d man cannot know, which of the messages he himself wrote (and then forgot), and which might have been impressed upon his skin (himself held down, screaming, but soon forgetting everything) by his enemies, or by some prankster. -- Nay further, that prankster may have been himself:  He could write a message known to be false, deliberately to manipulate his future self into some behavior.  (Cf. Ulysses and the Sirens, although there it is a matter of manipulating himself into a future of not doing what he otherwise would do.)]

Furthermore, there is uncertainty as to who committed that nebulous murder of the wife -- quite possibly it is the protagonist himself, a case of uxoricide.   (The revers de la médaille of Oedipal incest.)

 

~

Once again we reach, or at least approach, the bedrock (or the nebulosity) of the Unconscious:  our spade is turned, or seems to strike into empty space.  We are up against Ananke, and unconscious self-punishment -- the mystery of masochism, where the inner bourreau is outsourced to the dominatrix, projected from some depths within the self: into-whence, however, the figure was presumably, originally, somehow introjected.  Oder doch inborn?

The dreadful discovery:  The hand, or paw, that plies the tattooer’s needle, and pens its excruciating message, is nonetheless part of our own mind.   “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

A punitive superego  is like an auto-immune disease.

~

Ah well.  Here I have gone and written a whole post without so much as seeing the pilot of “Blindspot”.   Plus I no longer even own a television.

Likely, alas, being network TV, it will not live up  to the possibilities of its premise -- like the gross misuse of “Jack Bauer” in “Touch”, or the wasted opportunity of an IDA-style SCIF in "Rubicon".   (That was back when I owned a TV.)

Yet already, before the pilot has even officially aired, there are useful reviews and quite entertainingly observant and snarky readers’ comments, e.g. here:

http://www.avclub.com/review/nbcs-new-crime-drama-has-blindspot-character-devel-225518

[Update 23 September 2015]  OK, watched it.  NBC lets you do it online for free, a day after broadcast.

It’s moderately watchable if you’re not overparticular and have enough wine inside.  But it’s depressingly evident how the thing was patched-together by committee from earlier shows, under the watchful eye of lawyers and diversity-consultants.

More anon.  For now, check out this one aspect:

     Tattooed Chinese linguist saves the day

~

The commonest criticism of the pilot, on the fan-site linked-to above, was that all the baffled mystery about the woman’s identity was silly if in fact she’d been a Navy SEAL.  There aren’t a lot of them;  a simple phone-call could have cleared things up.   Plus, there aren’t any female SEALs.

True; but unfair, since that point did not escape the screenwriters. The FBI folks themselves  mention the (thitherto) presumed non-existence of female SEALs, and wonder aloud why, if she’d been one, her fingerprints aren’t on file.  Answer (completely acceptable in televisionland, and not implausible in any case):  these would not be available if she had been in a “black” program under the umbrella of the SEALs.

And no sooner does that episode air, then fiction becomes prospective fact.   Nor is this development evolving out of internal military necessity, but rather is in response to social pressures such as (precisely) the sort of gynocentric fantasies catered-to by “Blindspot”:

Navy SEALs ready to open doors to women

Losey states upfront that putting women in the commando jobs is not expected to increase the units' ability to fight in combat. In fact, he said, the effort to integrate the units and change the culture "will channel focus and energy away from core combat readiness and effectiveness efforts."

He said that while there may be "external" pressure to adjust the standards so that women can successfully pass, it's not likely that would succeed. The standards, he said, have been honed over the past 50 years, and that 70 percent of men fail.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-navy-seals-women-20150925-story.html#

~

Whack-a-Male

[We continue with our analysis of the “Blindspot” pilot.]

An obstacle towards guys’ enjoying the show is the grating Twofer Boss.  Her role is to serve as the mallet in Whack-a-Mole -- the moles being the males.  As:

(1)

* Labcoated Science Guy quickly discovers what pharmaceutical is responsible for Jane Doe’s amnesia.  Briefing his boss and FBI Guy, he pronounces the long chemical name, and adds “commonly known as” (the acronym).   Impeccable. But she slaps him down:  It may be “common” in the hoity-toity circles you move in, “doctor”, but for the rest of us… Against all plausibility, the dramatic logic somehow has the male doctor wrong-footed.

(2)

FBI Guy tools off to the Statue of Liberty, which (as he has figured out) is about to be bombed by a terrorist.   In any approximation of reality, the Bureau along with the NYPD would deploy dozens of agents and officers for this op;  but the program sets it up so that FBI Guy is seemingly about to go in alone.  -- Now, that is the annoying scenario so frequently recycled by masscult so that the male hero can do some heroics heroically and not have to share the limelight with anyone;  it is the narcissistic/solipsistic Rambo motif, and it appeals to eight-year-old boys (and to the less intelligent among the nine-year-olds).  In recent years, the tired trope has been retooled with a sex-switch;  it is supposed to appeal to grown women.

But, interestingly, neither of these flavors of that motif are the goal here.

FBI Guy is not quite alone;  over his own objections, he brought along Jane Doe, at the insistence of his Twofer Boss.  Still, he tells Jane to wait back at the car (the patriarchal  beast!) while he singlehandedly Saves the Day(**); but again, Jane insists, and accompanies him into the Statue.   They meet up with the perp, and, in an extremely badly choreographed bit of sciamachy, the screenwriters maneuver FBI Guy, helpless and unarmed, into the grip of Perp, and only a head-shot by Jane saves his life and his bacon.

[**Footnote to laypersons and residents of Mars:  SWAT teams, Special Forces, and FBI on a takedown-attack  do not actually bring along tourists, bystanders, or embedded journalists along for the ride, regardless of the relative genders.]

Now, simply as an action sequence, that was incredibly inept, and likely to disappoint an average audience (let alone a more instructed one);  and yet a large well-funded team of producers and writers had plenty of time to craft the scene just-so, to help define the series in the pilot.  To make sense of it, we must proceed precisely as does a Freudian confronted with a Fehlhandlung:  as a symptom of something deeper, not as a random goof.

And the Trieb here finding expression is soon seen to be:  Feminine Revenge.  For:

* Back at headquarters, he reports to Twofer:  Jane saved his life, plus captured the perp.  Yet then, in an astoundingly implausible switch -- really, like a rift in the screenplay, as though someone had forgotten to delete his immediately previous remarks -- he shends his boss, saying Jane is our most valuable asset ever, and you almost wasted it by letting her go out into the field.   Why ever would he say that?  So as to set up the comeback: Twofer then acidly replies:  “She saved your life.”  As though Guy had been unaware of that, or had been churlishly ungrateful.

It reminds me of softball for the Pee-Wee League, where the kids are too young to hit a pitch.  You position the ball motionless atop a rubber pedestal, and let the kid take his time and swing.  Only, here the softball is FBI Guy’s head.

With this perspective, we revisit (1).  Here, it is beyond possibility to imagine this scene, the female boss’s putdown of the male boffin, with genders reversed, in modern Medialand.  (Just try to run such a scenario as an experiment in your head;  you will shrink back as from a hot stove.) Moreover, the putdown is truly gratuitous, and indeed off  (acronyms being in handy breezy use among laymen).  So what is the meaning of this exchange, absurd on the face of it?   An analyst refuses to accept things as merely, meaninglessly absurd. Again our Freudian:  It makes perfect sense on the underside of it.  It is revenge for an (imagined or remembered) scenario with genders reversed.

For exposition of a similar gender-squelch, cf. this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/09/res-ipsa-loquitur.html

~

The commercials chosen to accompany this show online, bear out the analysis.

In one, a demure, appealing, somewhat mousy carrot-top sits in a droning business meeting.  Suddenly, a cowgirl-clad mini-persona of herself leaps out of the laptop and starts vociferously twerking:  Eve Black to the original’s Eve White, in the classic fantasy “The Three Faces of Eve”.  Her twerking booty then knocks over a coffee-cup into … a guy’s lap (take that, you nasty phallus);  then she hits another guy in the eye (one of a twinned pair of sensitive round organs; to the reader we leave the rest) with her lasso.  Neither, of course, remonstrates or even reacts:  they are there to be abused by one of Eve’s daughters;  to take it, and like it.

~

In ads and trailers, prior to the series debut, NBC heavily marketed the opening scene, in which “Jane Doe” appears naked out of a carry-bag  in the middle of Times Square;  and wisely so.  For it contains a veritable mythologem.

In literature, the best-known birth-from-a-handbag is that of the titular character of Wilde’s “The Importance of Being E(a)rnest”;  he was discovered therein, at a railway station, provenience unknown.

The next-most-famous Railway Station birth, is that of Paddington Bear.

For “Paddington Station”, the American update is “Times Square”.  (Note, by the way, the universal appropriateness of that name.)

Now, if Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank had put their heads together, they would doubtless have deemed this motif  a wish-fulfillment reworking  of the Birth Trauma.  The Newcomer appears suddenly in a bruising world of blooming-buzzing confusion (as each we must);  but as compensation, this rude Awakening is Immaculate, ex nihilo, with none of the dreadful ickiness of having been whelped by one’s parents, Mom and Dad, via some penis-and-vagina action too terrible to contemplate.

It is a satisfying fantasy;  thus Minerva, born from the brow of Zeus.

~

But now there is a twist;  and it deepens things.  Born from a bag, as though from empty space, she nonetheless comes “with baggage”, in the form of intricate enigmatic tattoos.  Like Leonard, alone in his hotel room, having his (latest) very-first moment of conscious self-awareness. Born with a mission.

He awakens each day  to a world new-made; he spots the writing  with the same surprise  that Crusoe spotted footprints in the sand.  He cannot really recognize it as his own: even those he wrote himself, he stippled into the skin – it won’t resemble his normal cursive – and others he left to the tattoo-artist.   The writing must therefore confront him like that at Belshazzar’s feast.  It is otherwordly.  He is wreathed in cryptic admonitions, some penned in a Gothic script like that of Scripture.  He might almost be forgiven for fancying himself a prophet.  And yet – for here the story is bleakly modern.  He pays no mind to the source of these writings, just takes them for granted.  He simply takes the next step forward, in his appointed task.  That Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin  has no resonance, divine or diabolocal.
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/moreismenitto.html

Born with a mission.

The show so far is stupid;  but I am probably going to watch another episode, simply from the power of this underlying motif -- this motivating motif.   For it applies very broadly:  These amnesiacs, with their strange “Thou must” inscribed scrolls, are like each one of us, adrift in the randomness of this sublunary life, yet with a sense, that somehow, all of it somehow means something.

[Update 6 Oct 2015]  Literary triviabit

Viewers have remarked how odd it is, that FBI Guy ends every other sentence addressed to Jane Doe with “… , Jane.”   Odd especially since that isn’t even her real name.

Concurrently, by chance, I have been listening to an audiobook of Jane Eyre;  and there, Mr Rochester exhibits the same the same vocative quirk, towards his coworker/love-interest.
In both cases,  the phenomenon is striking, owing to the utter asymmetry in vocatives:  the senior man regularly recurs to this first-name address;  the woman protege, never.

There is a slight syntactic distinction: FBI-Guy postpends the vocative ("I'm so sorry, Jane");  Rochester  prepends it.

[Update 9 Nov 15]

Pellicular Wikipedia

To fans of “Blindspot”, it has by now become apparent, that those tattoos (like some Inca inscriptions)  purport to explain absolutely everything,  Present Past or (especially) Future:  like Wiki -- or rather, like Borges’s  Universal Library.  All that is known, or might ever be known,  imprinted upon her skin.

To the cold, hard core of “Memento” fans, that is disappointing.  But to the rest of Walmartamerica, that is good news.  So -- Here is how YOU can employ those iconographic indicators  to your own benefit.  Take it from me, my smiling wife Veronica and our faithful dog Spot!  Just in the past three days, we brought in  this:

* Puzzled husband:  “Someone’s been swiping tomatoes from our garden again!”

Loyal wife: “ A steganographic exploitation of the inkblot blocking the singed skin hidden beneath the bandaid on Jane’s left buttock reveals:  The perpetrator is none other than the neighborhood raccoon!”

P. H:  “Ha-ha!  That furry rascal!”

* Puzzled husband:  “Omigosh, what shall we do?  Tomorrow’s our big picnic, and the weatherman is predicting thunderstorms !!”

Loyal wife: “A previously overlooked inscription  on the inside  of Jane’s eyelid  contains a cipher which, run through our Tordella supercomputers, breaks out to “21 Oct 2015”; which, according to the Old Style (Julian) calendar, breaks out to tomorrow!  And the graphic equates to an ideogram for the Egyptian sun-god Ra!  So:  It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiney day !!”

P.H.:  “Woo-hoo!  Packing the mayo !!!”

* Puzzled husband:  “Gosh, honey, I’ve looked everywhere!  Wherever can I have left my carkeys ???”
Loyal wife: “A p-adic attack on the recursively-enciphered left-armpit image from Jane reveals … (long technical discussion deleted) …. in the right pocket of your grey overcoat!”

[Footnote:  funny]
http://io9.com/this-week-on-blindspot-the-team-solves-police-brutalit-1741786544?trending_test_b&utm_expid=66866090-62.YkETBcIMTk2uX1oytHipyg.2&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com