Invisibility, Urban Exploration, An Old Department Store

Last week Lynn and I went for a morning walk in the city that ended at a rambling old bookstore.  I’ve always liked morning city walks; they can be unexpectedly memorable.  A particular favorite is a walk I took in Paris in April after a night of rain.  I left my tiny hotel off the Arc de Triomphe and ended with café au lait at the Café Deux Magots in La Place-de-Saint-Germain on the Left Bank; neither the beginning nor the end was remarkable as beginnings and endings sometimes are.  But during the walk I observed the city assembling itself for the day, not just in obvious things like street washing, garbage collection and deliveries of everything from dresses to baguettes, but, more interestingly, in people’s faces.  Sometimes the morning expressions people have as they’re walking to work, or waiting for a shop to open, or encountering someone unexpected, are more revelatory than the more practiced expressions later in the day.  I expect that people who run in the morning (I do not) may have a similar experience although I never feel as observant when I’m running as I wish I did.  There’s much to be said for morning walks in the city.

Last week as we were walking we passed an abandoned department store that had once been one of the most exclusive in the city.  At street level it was all graffiti’d, boarded-up windows; the many stories above were only a blank, dirty-white fascia.  It was unremarkable, for all practical purposes, invisible.  But I remembered going there with my mother as a young child at Christmas, the window displays, an aunt who worked there operating a wrought iron mechanical elevator while she was in college.  She always had to wear white gloves.  I wondered what it was like inside now.  Was it empty?  Or perhaps it was full of the detritus of its decades as a store?  Was it a suitable subject for some minor Urban Exploration?  I imagined contacting a real estate agent, requesting a tour for a future investment.  We walked on.

In 2010 my cousin Robert and I attended a lecture by Professor Graeme W. Milton on “Cloaking,” or as he put it, the science and maths of making something invisible like a Romulan space ship in Star Trek.  He discussed new research into bending light and even cancelling light waves, just as waves on a pond can cancel each other; it’s the same strategy that used in noise canceling headphones.  I was intrigued, not so much because of the possibility of invisibility but because it might also solve one of the most important problems for space travel itself:  gamma radiation.  If gamma rays could be bent around a space ship, the occupants wouldn’t be forced to travel in uncomfortable lead cocoons, or something equally implausible, to avoid being slowly roasted.

This week in the New Yorker Kathryn Schultz picked up the topic of invisibility again, discussing the manifold variations on the idea, literary precedents back to Socrates, and alluded to some novel applications.  One of the most intriguing is urban planning and architecture.  Why not blend light around a building or a part of it?  Imagine the cityscapes that could be created.  (It certainly could be used to address the sight-line issue I’ve addressed earlier in the context of medieval Bologna and modern London.) Naturally, that sent me off on a web search and I discovered that invisibility is a developing theme in architecture and that architects are already working to achieve various kinds of invisibility without the assistance of particle Physics.

Bradley Garret and the Urban Exploration subculture came to mind and I imagined a group of them at some time in the imaginable future attempting to explore a building or even an entire city, interesting portions of which were invisible.  It’s good science fiction story material I think.

In her article, Ms. Schultz observes, “almost everything around us is imperceptible, almost all the rest is maddeningly difficult to perceive, and what remains scarcely amounts to anything. Physicists estimate that less than five per cent of the known universe is visible—where “visible” means only that we could, theoretically, observe it, given the right instruments and sufficient physical proximity.”  Of that five percent, how much is invisible simply because we’re indifferent to it or it’s in too common a context?  Invisibility, that innocuous white building we passed and my personal memories associated with it make me think Urban Exploration has at least as important a role to play for historians as geographers.

We arrived at the bookstore and I was fortunate to find a book long out of print discussing Hopi culture, some of which now may be hidden away from view.

(A note on my Malory research:  a careful look at the life of Sir Humphrey Stafford, 1^st Duke of Buckingham is proving more challenging than expected.  A  study of Parliament in the 15^th century has provided a few, possibly pertinent insights but I’m awaiting the arrival of a Stafford biography that may offer more clues.)

A New Paper by Stephen Lekson and Paris the week of January 7, 2015

As I’ve alluded earlier I’m working on a large project which involves, in part, the ancient south western US.  As part of that endeavor I’ve just read a new paper by the noted southwestern archaeologist, Stephen Lekson.  The paper’s perspective is large and archaeological but implicitly poses several questions which are pertinent to this week’s tragic events in Paris.

The archaeological record tells us that humans have been around in their current form for 200,000 years.  During almost all of that time we were hunter-gathers; the agricultural revolution is extremely recent.  It began 10,000 years ago but has only been in consistent, wide practice for 3-5 thousand years.  Yet we know that with rare exceptions,  our physiology, including our brains, evolve very slowly.  Hence, we have the same brains as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and because of the vast amount of time we pursued that way of life it’s probable that our brains are optimized for it.

For the most part, hunter-gatherers appear to live and work in 2 social structures concurrently, “bands” of around 25 and  “tribes” of 500-1,000.  With the agricultural revolution came cities, technology and now the high population densities and rapid change that characterizes contemporary life.  What’s a poor guy with a brain equipped to deal with a band of 25 and a tribe of 1,000 to do?

Innovate.  We’ve applied precedence and hierarchy to social organization, for example.  But there are many others.  Indeed, it’s interesting to look at everything, from modern political systems, to religious organizations, to digital technology and ask how they facilitate (and enable) adaptation to that larger and more complex world.

Consider, how many “bands” and “tribes” you belong to, how they interact, why you’re a member of them.  Which ones are successful?  Which ones are in conflict?  How do we as individuals manage them, practically, philosophically, morally?  How do they work?  Can they work better?

Perhaps our institutions (there’s a difficult, at least abstract, concept for a hunter-gatherer brain) could benefit from looking at the problems they face daily, in that context.

John Gardner, the novelist who wrote “Grendel,” retells a myth about the God Odin.  Odin finds himself exhausted and overwhelmed by the work of keeping the dragons and giants in check, arbitrating humanity’s nitty, sometimes tragic problems, in general keeping chaos and entropy at bay and the universe in balance.  He  visits Loki, the god of fire and other things, and tell him his problem.

“I know the answer,” Loki says, tentatively.

“What is it?”

“The answer is of such great value, is so important and so difficult it merits a great price.”

“What is it?”

“I will give you the answer in exchange for one of your eyes.”

It is a terrible price but Odin so loves creation, that he suffers the terrible pain and partial loss of vision.  He removes one of his own eyes and gives it to the trickster god.  “Now, tell me, what is the answer,” he demands.

“Keep both eyes open.”

Steven Lekson’s paper is entitled “Cross Cultural Perspectives on the Community” and is published and available on academia.edu.