Theologia Mathematica: I (ctd)

[a continuation of this]

            To return to the thought:  It might not have been the case that all the (roughly, macroscopic) wobbles and writhings of the natural world  should coalesce into an austere mechanical description of quite general validity, but it turns out that (to a broad extent) they do.  Nor that the insane exceptions at the quantum level (mostly microscopic, but probably much beyond this  as we learn more and more) should line up in a wholly, almost unimaginably different  but still orderly system: but they do, though in a way not even dimly anticipated before our own era.  So now:  do noëtic events (the “supranatural”) likewise cohere into some larger system?  (We don’t strictly know, and intuitions have broken both ways:  the existentialists glumly nursing their absinthe, and Christians ecstatically tasting of the Communion wine.)  And if so, does this system in any respect resemble what previous thinkers and theologians have imagined?  Nescio; but I’ll say this:  If it does, it does so (I imagine) by grace and revelation, not by any logical necessity  arguing simply from the world as we find it.  I’m pretty certain (in the practical sense that I have laid a wager with Providence, and am on the line for standing a round of beers, win or lose) that it does cohere;  but I am not so certain, not so certain at all, that the coherence has a description  even in principle comprehensible to ourselves – beyond some almost infantile inkling, like that of a baby, still unseeing, scenting the milk of the breast.

            This negative possibility  --  apophatic theology, the “via negativa” -- is familiar from theologians – Jewish, Christian, NeoPlatonist, and Muslim alike  -- holding the view that God is beyond all predicates – neither hot is He, nor cold, neither long nor short, bearded nor beardless …
-- Bohr's "complementarity" is a sort of dual to this:  Both wave and particle are they; both causal (psi-functions) and acausal (classical-positivistic, as chastened by quantum mechanics).

~

Sidenote on the “via negativa”:

Besonders characteristisch für die “negative Theologie” der spekulativen Mystik  is die Unzahl der Bildungen mit Vorsilben, die den Inhalt des Grundverbums  ins Gegenteil verkehren … entsinken, entwerden …

-- Fritz Tschirch, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1969, 2^nd edn. 1975), vol. II, p. 83

[more here]

Vox Omnium

One of the pluses of the blogspot technology, is the provision of stats revealing who saw which posts.  And it turns out, to our astonishment, that more Internauts are interested in penguins and hedgehogs and other Cute Critters  than in topos theory or Urysohn metrization!  Huda thunkit!

Well, vox populi, vox dei, as the (untrue) saying goes.  Yielding to massive popular demand (no really, several people), we here reprint a description of one of the most important developments in the noosphere of the last fifty years (along with the settling of the Poincaré Conjecture and the discovery of Dark Energy):  the Lolcats Phenomenon.

*

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

VOX OMNIUM

Aus dem Munde  der gemalten Personen  ließ man  auf alten Bildern  Zettelchen heraushängen, welche als Schrift   die Rede brachten, die  im Bilde  darzustellen  der Maler verzweifelte.

-- Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1899)

            The New Yorker, while politically always liberal, is institutionally (thank goodness) one of the most conservative publications in the world.  Since its founding in 1925, it has managed to preserve its look-and-feel, and a great degree of thematic continuity,  all along the heaving changes of the decades. It was founded as a sort of humor magazine, and although it is now one of the most serious, and often somber, witnesses to the great events of the day, it has never abandoned that mission, continuing to publish roughly the same number of single-panel cartoons as before, with similar themes and even similar drawing styles, and continuing to interlard its long thoughtful articles with funny one-pagers.   For long, it was very much an in-house sort of organ, the same stable of writers repeatedly appearing, and the same cartoonists.  If you happened to draw the world’s funniest cartoon ever, and mailed it in to them, they would thank you politely, and in a pinch even use (and pay you for) your idea; but the cartoon itself would have to be redrawn by one of their own artists.  That look-and-feel.

            Relatively recently, the magazine introduced a new genre to their cartooning.  Not simply a new motif  (the desert island, the evolving fish, and all that), but a new way of going about the enterprise.  Namely:  the regular staff supplies an image, the readership comes up with a caption.  A halfway step towards vox populi.

            The results have been all that might be wished, and more.  The magazine evidently has many funny readers.  But the thing to note here is that, unlike most contests – for  the feature is so structured – the winner, as such, is of no interest whatever.  The kick of the thing is in the three finalists, published before the anticlimax of the “winner” is announced:  Three utterly unrelated takes on the challenge of the mute image, often all equally funny. It is a weekly illustration of the truth beautifully embodied in Chesterton’s story “The Honor of Israel Gow”:  There are many ways to connect stars into constellations.  And it is not without implications for epistemology.   (Or for ignorant criticisms of CT, for that matter.)

            More recent still  is a brand of humor housed exclusively on the ‘Net, which we may denote by the title of its entry in the Wikipedia (final arbiter of all things), as “lol-cats”, although not only cats are depicted – one finds also hamsters, hedgehogs, bunnies, and --quite  fruitfully, as it turns out – walri. (Or is it walres -- I can never remember.)  These consist of humorously captioned photographs. Lots and lots and lots of them -- as it were, the stage of the hemi-demi-semi-finalists.

            There is a pale precedent to this genre, in the series of gag books of the early 1960’s titled Who’s in Charge Here.  Those photographs were in black & white, and generally involved political figures.  The fad died, and left no progeny.  Lol-cat derives from other than this.

            The genesis of the lol-cat version of the genre  lies on the Web, probably in the posting of originally uncommented cute photos of pets, which were then typically festooned with a trail of enthusiastic pseudonymous comments, whose semantic content was generally basically “awww”.   (Such is cuteoverload.com.)  The next step was to add brief captions on the photographs themselves.  And with this came a crucial transformation.  Unlike the case with cuteoverload, the photographs as such did not have to be cute.  Many become cute when appropriately labeled; others become rather ironic or what not; yet others start out cute, then become, after captioning, both cute and something beyond that, as with the eerie classic “Headcat is just a head”.  (To see the creature, just Google the phrase.)  At the fringes, this leads to charming but also alarming eisegeses of what lies before our eyes: the “invisible bicycle” motif and its kindred.  As this way of thinking solidifies, trenchant captioned images arise which, only a few months ago, would have made no sense.   This point is crucial:   the art is evolving in tandem with its audience.  As that splendid photograph of a starkly empty room, its only witness a cat, and captioned, “invisible everything”.   Without preparation (as that of the Wu Li master), this makes no sense at all.  Yet the whole of Berkeley’s philosophy is there summarized, along with probably a fair chunk of Zen, and more than a smidgeon of Chestertonian Christianity.

            Further, the fact of naming allows certain cats to pass from the fleeting one-off of cuteoverload – or of life – into new and lasting characters, publically known.  (This essay could as well have been titled Ontologia onomastica.)  Thus, Headcat, Monorailcat, Ceiling Cat (watch what you’re doing when this one’s around), and a menagerie of others.  This result  then serves as input to the next stage of a process increasingly meta: It becomes a goal to uncover other instantiations of the archetype, among the corpus of photographs of actual cats. (Much as the traditional cartoonist strives to think of one more variation on the theme of the castaway on the desert island.)  Another set of meta-endeavors is the search for illustrations of certain snowclones (for which again see the Wikipedia, which knows all) – statement templates such as “I’m in ur X, Ying your Z “ (the most recent addition to the corpus).  The whole enterprise thus becomes richly layered and self-organizing, despite its anarchic origin among anonymous people unknown to one another  and probably residing in their parents’ basements.

            Equally noteworthy is the emergence – the rapid emergence of what can only be called, in strict literary-folkloristic orthodoxy, a number of new motifs.  This is a very rich addition.  There are only so many motifs around, and most of them go back to Homer.  Thus to begin with:  A sort of ur-motif is the symbol of the transitory pleasures of what Aristotle would have termed the anima vegetiva – basically, your inner Wimpy – here embodied in the familiar cheeseburger.   (The premier lol-cat site, icanhascheezburger.com, is named for this item.)  Superficially similar, but upon analysis  richly different, is the bucket motif.  This had its origin in a pair of photographs, which anyone might have taken at some aquarium park, and which – prior to the phenomenon now under discussion --  would have been glanced at by half a dozen people in one of those how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation sessions, and quickly forgotten.  (You can view them here:

http://hamsterinthewheel.com/fatalfury/walrus-bucket/index.php?m=05&y=07&entry=entry070523-205512)

The former depicts an enormous walrus (one had forgotten quite how large those creatures are), clutching a blue bucket in its feathery-flippery forepaw (blue, as in the blaue Blume), commenting, “I has my bucket.”  In the latter, he appears again, now with a pink-mouthed expression of quite exquisite alarm, apparently being deprived of said bucket (though it is really only the caption, “Noooo, they be stealin’ my bucket!”, that gives rise to this interpretation).  The result has been the ongoing “Bucket Saga”, in which our hefty hero goes off in winsome and persistent search of the lost bucket. The title saga is well-earned, for it can stand with honor beside those of the Norse.  Indeed I shall go further, and declare, that it is the latest oiketype of that most precellent ur-motif, the Holy Grail (itself the resurrected body of the Golden Fleece), and as such it helps to re-enchant the world.

            What to make of it all?  The first thing to observe, at the merely atomistic-statistical level, is that there are a lot of funny people out there.  The next thing is that the resulting level of humor is a non-linear function of the individual inputs: It grows into something unpredictably greater than it began.   Next, the resulting corpus provides a wormhole-way-in to a number of other online miniverses, via  for instance  the use (in the caption context) of much of the shorthand that grew up in other venues (omg, wtf, ftw, kthnxbai), the which, if baffled, you can look up in the Urban Dictionary.  And finally, this phenomenon is one more instance of the Scissors Effect (so dubbed, I believe, with regard to  and during the era of Sovietization):  as the scissors widen, they widen most quickly at the tips.  For the rest of the world, it’s tragic.  Is there any equivalent to such a publically available embodiment of this (partially new) brand of humor, even a demi-buttocked mini-equivalent, in French – German – Arabic -- Vietnamese?   Assuming that, percentagewise, there are just as many humorous Frenchmen or Danes, as Americans… Actually I do not assume that.  The anglophone nations, and America increasingly in particular,  have long led the world  in certain areas  even before the Internet provided the snowball of synergy: cartoons (both humorous and political), children’s books, and possibly humor overall.  (Not, to be sure, in the genre of the witty epigram.  Several nations outdo us there.)  But even were there such percentages, the endogenous developments would lag: there might be individually brilliant quips, but the metalayer that grows out of the mass of contributions, ungoverned by any one individual, would be slow to accrete.

            Well!  There we are.  A day’s work done.  Time to relax with – Ceiling Cat, you get down from there!

[May 2007]

*

Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

[appendix  August 2007]

It is a bracing fact, that a lot of digital activity (whether online or on DVDs) is becoming in effect *more scholarly*.  You can no more understand the more recent lolcat captions without knowing the previous ones (along with a vast amount of popular phraseology, much of it, like "headdesk" or "wet willy", I first encountered on that site), any more than Chaucer's audience could catch it all without knowing their Homer and their Ovid. 

Likewise, the extraordinarily ambitious (and, what I've read of it, quite well done) lolcat Bible, would in many places not be funny, even make no sense at all, unless you knew the original.  It will literally have the effect of sending many people back to their Bibles -- but in a light-hearted frame of mind, appropriate indeed in this age when we have received the Good News.

[update March 2013]  The weekly New Yorker caption-this-drawing contest  presented a cat at a mousehole (the standard, generous entrance, in the shape of a semi-circular arch), confronted by a mouse with a pistol.   The readers had a couple of weeks to think about it.
And then, as usual, three entries -- but "one led all the rest":

Six bullets.  Nine lives.  You do the math.

That was funny, but more than that, it has the aspect of the solution to a puzzle -- like a chess-problem or mathematical brain-teaser.  Other funny captions could be invented, but none would fit the enigma of the picture  like a key in a lock.

ZOMG !!

Your favorite penguin-friendly ®  mathematical-Realist site  has now zoomed to the very first page of Google returns for the crucial phrase “humble woodchuck”!

In celebration  we offer this recently-unearthed Shakespearian fragment, believed to have been written when the Bard was yet a lad:

How humble is the humble wood-

chuck, always striving to be good!

God grant that we might be as hum-

ble as is he;  Thy kingdom come.

Theologia Mathematica: I

THEOLOGIA MATHEMATICA

 [Synopsis:

            Beginning with a parsimonious outset of only two Postulates,

            (1) Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht … [Kronecker]

            (2) …visibilium omnium et invisibilium [the Credo]

we conclude to the Realist position in mathematics, associated with Cantor and Gödel. We note the nice fit with theism.]

I

The great Laplace, having presented his Mécanique Céleste, and having been asked by the Emperor, "Mais où est Dieu dans tout cela ?", notoriously replied:

"Sire, je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse."

The cheese-eating atheist, feeling pleased with himself

(I am reminded of the austere style of his countryman Lagrange, who boasted that his Mécanique analytique contained no pictures to help make things plain; and later their compatriot Dieudonné, who in the preface to his celebrated Foundations of Modern Analysis, warns his audience that the tome will contain no such sweetmeats as pictures or diagrams, as that would only encourage the reader.)

            Perhaps people read too much into that oft-quoted remark (or in a sense, too little).  It is often taken, I suspect, as a dismissive, not to say smart-alecky reply:  a snook cocked at theists.  But really the context is both richer and more narrow.  The famous remark is more austerely analytical, I believe, and comparable to Newton’s celebrated “hypotheses non fingo”.

            Newton discovered the basic clockwork of the planetary scheme, but it was not at the time apparent, whether that system were ultimately stable under the various perturbations that mass is heir to.   And if it turned out in fact not to be so, then how to explain its evident stability over all geological time (itself of a vastness only recently appreciated – long enough to let *us* evolve, for instance)?  Before inertia was discovered (or, again rather, in a way more like posited, but still: based upon a more systematic survey of the phenomena), a  traditional perspective had angels impelling the planets in their paths by constantly puffing on them from behind (a pleasant thought); now it seemed as though these same angels might have to be called out of retirement, not to impel the planets, but to herd them from time to time, lest they wander off like lost sheep.  It was Laplace’s great achievement to prove stability by sheer mathematical means – as noble a use of the imaginative faculty  as ever graced the Sistine Chapel, and by no means a snub to the Watchmaker.  Laplace, in demonstrating that planets (‘wanderers’ in Greek) were (like the a-toms) misnamed,  proved we may dispense with the hypothesis of shepherding angels –  for this.

            But there is more beneath the firmament than the placid planets.  Beyond the deductive system of classical mechanics, there is the inductive panoply of actual life.  This too Laplace addressed, in his Essai philosophique sur les probabilités.  And again, he made no use of the supernatural.  But perhaps he took too much comfort from the pleasing and positive example of the stability of the solar system.  There was an overconfidence, a sunny bumptiousness, taken to task at length by Keynes in his Treatise on Probability (a work too little known, and which I commend to your attention).  Keynes descries a witless wizard behind the mathematical manipulations that pretend to deduce so much, and who ultimately throws us back -- surreptitiously -- on human intuition to make sense of events.  (Pay no attention to the man behind the screen.)

            Since Keynes’ time, the problems of induction and prediction  have only grown worse – or rather, they remain the same as ever, but our awareness of their depth and paradox has grown.  We have now become familiar with examples of dynamical chaos, even within the heart of the classical theory; and learned that such systems are, theoretically, rather the rule than the exception.  Even that simplest paradigm of all, the fabled billiard table, affords examples.  There are tables so shaped that, given a desired degree of knowledge of the trajectory by some future time, one may attain it by sufficiently precise initial conditions, whose precision is in some sense reasonably related to that of the required precision of prediction;  and there are tables so shaped that one may not.  (That is, the relation of the intransigent epsilon to the hapless delta, is in one case that of a banker, with perhaps rather stiff interest rates, and in the other, that of a highway robber.) This directly refutes the Laplacian determinist vision, which once extended to the universe as a whole, and which now fails right in the pool hall.

[A note, since this essay is going out to a diverse audience:  The time is past, when an author need pull his punch, for fear some member of his audience may not have met this or that notion.  You are online, or you wouldn’t be reading this.  So if “dynamical chaos” is an unfamiliar term, simply Google it up in Wikipedia.  Wikipedia knows all that can be known to Man.  – Though incidentally this does *not* mean that we should actually *pray* to Wikipedia.  Just so you know.]

            So we are back to a paradox.  System after system is either itself chaotic, or is in contact with, and thus influenced by, chaotic systems:  The parson is a placid man, but he lives within the weather.  Why then does the center apparently hold?  Why does it not all eventually – spin out, or bubble down to a sort of porridge?  Does it, like the imagined planets, need a nudge from time to time, to get it back on track?  -- Well, whether it needs them or not, it gets them, but: from us.  For the nonce, let us leave God and the seraphim aside.  [Note: In what follows, we assume the three-level system of natural description which C.S. Lewis expounded in Miracles. Roughly: subnatural = quantum; natural = classical (including relativistic etc.);  supranatural = involving free will.]  For supra-natural intervention, we need look no farther than our own fingers – righting the wineglass that had started to topple, or pulling the baby back from the edge of the stage. (The paradigm case of supra-natural intervention is supernatural intervention, by ghosts or by God; but as a logical problem, this differs little from the intervention of human will, and thus may be dispensed with where parsimony suggests.)

            Most of what goes on the the universe is (let us call it) naturalistic – whether ruled by the (classical, relativistic) laws of the natural, or the (quantum, aleatory) laws of the subnatural, or some complexus of both. But most of what *we* experience, day to day – that is, experience in consciousness, as opposed to this or that enzyme oozing about – is generously admixed with the supra-natural.  I mean this in its familiar, almost ho-hum sense (except that, by dint of our ongoing ho-humming, we have become dulled to the fact that it is, strictly, miraculous.  Our simplest Saturday afternoon crackles with miracles like a fourth-of-July sky.)

            Now, this in itself need not point to God (let alone prove Him), any more than this or that billiard-ball impact proves classical mechanics, or some passing photon yields Maxwell’s equations.  Indeed, in so far merely as itself, it does not so much as indicate that this supra-natural capacity in ourselves is even rational or good:  picture (though only for a dreadful moment) a universe peopled exclusively by madmen and sociopaths, the free-willed equivalents of scorpions.  That is to say, an outside observer of our universe might detect its departures from plain (non-quantum, non-noetic) determinism, whether from sub-natural or supra-natural inputs; but lacking internal access to the lived experience, he could not tell whether these departures made sense.  Indeed, our hunch now is that the subnatural inputs do not “make sense” – that is, no moral sense, no sense beyond themselves.  It will all (within its own world) dutifully trot along in the path laid out by the Schroedinger equation, while its inputs to our world look to us like clowns piling out of an infinite Volkswagon: but it will not, pace philosophers from Protagoras to Penrose, supply or even heighten our humanity, our morality, our free will.  Indeed, from our present vantage, the subnatural is somehow even more alien to the noösphere, than is the shadow play of Newton, or the passion play of Darwin.  He who would seek the key to our humanity there, seeks the stars in a mudpuddle.

            Whereas we, in our priviliged observatory of our own shared experience (though of nothing else), can report:  Yep, it makes sense.  It’s often in practice too f***ed-up for words, but we’re not just ensouled scorpions, we’re … possibly fallen, anyhow substantially tattered angels.

Addendum:

 A distant kin to the imagery of the ushering angels, impelling the planets and keeping them on course, cropped up again in 1925, with de Broglie’s idea of “pilot waves”, guiding the electrons in their rounds while orbiting the proton; revived again in another context by David Bohm, in his hidden-variable theory of quantum mechanics.

[continued...]

OP WOODCHUCK: Humility holding steady

The position of TWoDrJ in the hitlist for the crucial phrase “humble woodchuck”  has now moved up to page *two*, next to a hit which we are delighted to have as neighbor, and which quotes:

Praise the Lord for the humble woodchuck, praise the Lord for the mouse and mole,

praise the Lord for the backyard visits that sustain the soul.

Bonus couplet:

    Q:  What do woodchucks like to eat?

    A:  Humble Pie.

THEOLOGIA MATHEMATICA

 Synopsis/Zusammenfassung/ précis :

            Beginning with a parsimonious outset of only two Postulates,

            (1)   Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht … [Kronecker]

            (2) …visibilium omnium et invisibilium [the Credo]

we conclude to the Realist position in mathematics, associated with Cantor and Gödel. We note the nice fit with theism.

Der hlg. Cantor

Der hlg. Gödel

More broadly, we distinguish the Truth of mathematics, from human mathematical practice.  Our Realist position applies only to the former;  our view of mathematical praxis is historical.

In parallel, our view of the Creator is Realist, but we take a historical position as regards the practice of the various religions.

It is not our goal, as José Ferrerós remarked regarding Hilbert’s program, “to employ Kroneckerian means for a justification of modern, anti-Kroneckerian methodology” (in Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 151)  First, we could scarcely hope to succeed where the Hilbertians failed.  More to the point, our argument is essentially epistemological, rather than deductive, constructive, or even properly mathematical.  We contend, and hope to make plausible, along a meandering path of insights and fables, that our knowledge of the (eternal) truths behind the (contingent) practices of mathematicians, is not discontinuous in kind from the way in which we come to know anything which we know not directly or experientially but only inferentially:  the reality of atoms -- of quarks -- of Mars -- of Novosibirsk -- of the Pelopponesian War -- of Other Minds -- or … coffee cups.

[To begin the thread, click here.]

The Penguin Passion

Checking again the dashboard, we notice a disturbing trend.  Plenty of pageviews from most of the continents (including Africa -- from Egypt), but… none from the great state of Antarctica!   This is intolerable!!

Accordingly, we here provide a review of my favorite film.  (The reference to the “Passion” concerns the Mel Gibson film that came out around the same time -- and which I also reviewed, if anyone is interested.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

HUT two three four (the penguin "Passion")

            A very good movie has managed to make it past the Cerberus of masscult-- and this despite the added stigma of having been originally French.  In the original it was called "La marche de l'Empereur"; it now is actually better, dubbed as "March of the Penguins".  The plural is important, as is the lack of all Imperial pretension.

            Nature photography has reached such a pitch of excellence in our time, that even the odd bit stumbled across while channel-surfing may be memorable and riveting.  But Hollywood does not trust it at feature length.   One of my fondest cinematic memories from childhood is the Disney film, "The Living Desert", yet it has had few progeny.  In 1971, some fine footage of insects made it into the theatres, but under the meaningless title of "The Hellstrom Chronicles"; it was given an  overheated pseudo-sci-fi wraparound, as though the public could not be trusted to take nature plain, but it must be sugar-coated, or rather  smeared with NutraSweet.

            Nothing of the sort  mars the present offering.  Indeed it is remarkably spare in its treatment, even classical.  The focus is relentless on the central fact of survival against odds, during a frigid and exhausting trek across the ice, in a dogged attempt to obey the commandment, Be fruitful and multiply, though one perish in the attempt.  It is not a popcorn movie.  It is a good date movie, but only with someone you are serious about. There is a complete abstention from the trivializing Wild 'n' Wacky World of Animals point of view.  Once, it is true, one of the pilgrims slips and falls, eliciting a laugh from the light-minded.  But in the stark context of this forced march along this frozen Via Dolorosa, it is rather as wrenching as those stumbles that mark the Stations of the Cross.  Though the movie deals in, and does not flinch from,  birth and death and love and grief and sacrifice and even madness, it has the delicacy and dignity (sorely missed) of early Hollywood, when faced with certain things that should be known, but yet not shown.  (Sex was what one imagined might have happened between the kiss and the cigarette, never depicted but only inferred.)  And despite the ever-present menace of death, we are spared the actual sight of blood.   As in the early days of cinema, before the rot of slasher movies, a killing was the more sobering for being seen as the wrenching of a soul from its moorings, rather than a mere mashing of meat.  This restriction required of the director, and of the audience, some artful indirection.  Here  the killer is the leopard seal, sliding along morosely under the ice; and the image that sticks with you is that of a succession of penguins escaping back through the one small hole in the ice -- pop! pop! pop! pop! until one, just p- p-- ahh... only the head emerges, then he slips back forever.

Nor, despite appearances, is the film truly or fully a science film, though it is factual, even soberly so.  Except as regards the great central ritual of the pilgrimmage, the film is sparing with information.  Where exactly on the continent are they nesting?  What is known of their evolutionary history, back to a flightless state?  (And were there prehistoric penguins as big as dinosaurs?) How long do penguins live? How many are there?  Are there other species of penguin, and do they all act – do they act at all like this? What species of sea-creatures do penguins eat?   And what is that bird that eats (or means to eat; mercifully we are not shown the meal) the clueless chicks?  (The folks sitting behind us hazarded it was a "condor"; the film never mentions the word "skua" or "gull".)   The movie lacks the wide-ranging interests (and thus distractability) of the amateur naturalist, pursuing each butterfly into the bush; in its single-mindedness it is almost more like Mel Gibson, resolutely excluding most of the Gospels  so as to focus on his one big theme.

In the memorable and defining opening shot, it is not even clear that we are dealing with a nature film at all.  We first see a handful of figures at a shimmering distance, like a mirage, as though this were  not snow  but baking sands.  The species is not discernable, nor the genus, nor the phylum even; we do not know if we are dealing with humans or with the jinn. (Much indeed as the eponymous protagonists of L’île des Pingouins first presented themselves to Saint Maël (on whom be peace), who baptised them, deeming them men.)  The dark shapes resemble nothing so much as the "black moving objects" in abaya-ridden Arabia: and the long slow patient annual ritual march that follows, has echos of the Hajj.

It is indeed, finally, a nature film, but it has been flavored with some other genre, which at first I could not quite place. The knee-jerk response is "Greek tragedy", for its sobriety and its sense of implacable destiny:  but really it is far from that.   For one thing, it lacks a hero, having rather unsung several thousands of them.   And there is no tragic flaw, but a collective trial.  One point of comparison does suggest itself -- and it too is Greek.   Namely, the march of the Ten Thousand, in the Anabasis of Xenophon.  There too, their agony was over  when they at last could cry, "The sea! The sea!"

*

There is something in the plight of penguins  that turns the contemplative mind to theology.  Simultaneously dignified and risible, vertical yet chained to the earth, soldiering on in their icy exile, devoid of every luxury and of every distraction from, as it were, the eternal questions.  The cineasts who made this film  will have been familiar with that work of their countryman, Anatol France, "L'ile des pingouins" (1908), which explores this theme at book-length.  We may ask: Whence comes this resonance?

First, Antarctica is itself, almost literally a fallen world.  Time was, it floated in milder climes, where the broad sun ripened the grape and vine, and the creatures of the forest  feasted thereon. Then, like Atlantis, it sank -- or rather slipped, tectonically, winding up (in a process that took longer than that angel's fall from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell) at the -- oh, *no*, not *this*! -- South Pole.   The sense of dismay is pungently summed up by the penguin mariners of the recent animated movie "Madagascar", who after an extended catabasis to their ancestral continent, standing in the gloom with no sounds but an ill wind, at length exclaim: "This sucks!"

Further, penguins are, almost literally, fallen birds.  Fallen from the sky, where, in despite of their bird-nature, they can no longer fly.  To see them trudge clumsily, mile after mile, on their little feet (they seem to have legs no more than wings), is to sense, what is true for us also:  We are not made for this, but for a better world.  (A truth that is obscured amid the glitter and blare of the malls, but stark upon the blinding ice.) 

And yet there is something prelapsarian about the penguins, a thing that indeed tugs at us  like a magnet  the filings, we in our fallen state.  We may quote the saint:

“Habitants de cette île, quoique vous soyez de petite taille, vous semblez moins une troupe de pêcheurs ... que le sénat d’une sage république. Par votre gravité, votre silence, votre tranquille maintien, vous composez sur ce rocher sauvage  une assemblée comparable aux Pères-Conscrits de Rome…”    

Ipse dixit.   They live in a world  at poles from Eden, yet a world stripped of all temptations, devoid of all, save necessarily of Him who is never absent, silent though He may be.  – I cannot resolve the contradiction.

The penguins have had no Messiah, so far as we know; they are still, it appears, waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting.  Yet there are echoes of Christian themes.   The most poignant scene in the movie is the lament of a mother over her dead chick: a penguin Pietà.  And we get  even a glimpse  of what might possibly be meant by the strange dogma of the resurrected body, when the coffle of mortals  in their gravitational chains  at last reach, and plunge into, the aqueous element,  and -- fly, fleet and unfettered, ----- utterly transformed.

*

I am fond, despite all, of that old hoaxster of an epigram, that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing".  What the epigram may mean, or what the hedgehog may know, I know not (though it is pleasant to have any occasion to be reminded of  the hedgehog, our modest and seldom-celebrated friend).   Yet having witnessed the life-cycle laid out here with such care, we are obliged indeed to affirm, that the penguin  at any rate  does know one gigantic thing, -- knows it single-mindedly to the possible exclusion of all else:  a thing as vast as the sky that overarches his little trajectory of life, a thing as wide as the ice which he must traverse with unrelieved weariness, always either starved or gorged, and as deep as the sea which renews him when it does not slay him:  and that is, fidelity.   Fidelity to the mate whom he feeds and is fed by; fidelity to the band with whom he huddles against the whipping winds, taking his turn at the periphery where there is nought to turn its lash; fidelity to the chick for whom he well may give his life, and over whom he grieves  if the cruel chill claims it.  - - And fidelity, philologers instruct us, is the etymon of faith; as it might be, the egg of it.

            St. Francis, it is said, preached to the fowl.  Had he managed to journey to that white world, he might have found a most attentive audience.

[© 2007  David B. Justice. -- article to appear in American Penguin (Oct 2036); reprinted with permission]

Operation Humble Woodchuck: a progress report

Thanks to all of you who sent in lengthy dithyrambs about our chubby forest friend.  We won’t Publish them all, lest the Googlepolice suspect we’re trying to game the system.   If they catch you doing that, they suspend you from the Crawler, and you shrivel up and die.  So we must proceed ve-ry sly-ly and unobtrusively -- like our buddy of the underbrush, the Humble Hedgehog.

Anyhow, so far, not so good.  A search on “humble woodchuck” does not bring up this site on the first page, nor the second, nor the third… Worse, right in the middle of the very first page we find a hit with the title “Is this a Premature Ejaculation Problem?” , together with a most baffling snippet of text, “the woodchuck is using you for sex”  (don’t wanna know).

And so, comrades, we shall have to strive harder.  And remember:  The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog -- heck, the hedgehog’s cute, he don’t need to know nothin.