The Point of Illustration

This week the Guardian reported that a new illustrated version of Rowling’s Harry Potter books will be published this autumn.  It was welcome news:  I wish more stories and novels, particularly first editions were illustrated.  It also seems to me there never was a time when audiences were more receptive to it, unless it was the late 19^th century.

That hasn’t always been the case.   I remember when serious, literary fiction, whatever that is, was almost never illustrated.  John Gardner, the author of Grendel, commissioned illustrations for his book of stories and the idea had become sufficiently novel to draw media attention to his book for that reason alone.

Of course that set me to remembering lazy summer afternoons looking through the illustrated books in my grandmother’s little library when I was just learning to read.  One was “The Thrall of Leif the Lucky, A Tale of Viking Days” illustrated by Troy and Margaret West Kinney.  The bright images seemed a little stiff even to my four year-old eyes but they caught my imagination.  And a few years later I struggled through the novel and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Then there was an immense edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” illustrated by Gustave Doré.  I always was particularly fond of his image of Satan accompanying his great self-revelatory lines,

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly

Infinite wrath and infinite despair?

Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;

And in the lowest deep a lower deep,

Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,

To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

As a side note, notice that Milton uses the mathematical notion of recursion to define hell, which is wicked cool.  I’ve always wondered if this was the first appearance of the concept in science or literature.  And, I wonder if it’s possible to create a credible vision of heaven or hell without it.  I also still ponder why biblical villains always get to wear the best looking armor?

Pride of place for me was “A Boy’s King Arthur,” illustrated by the great N. C. Wyeth.  When we were living in Massachusetts, the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland Maine held a large exhibition of N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations and paintings and I recall the long drive, lunch and the museum that autumn with particular fondness.  Because of the vast memories it evoked and the immediacy of seeing the original art first hand I felt I was walking abroad “in a shower of all my days,” to use Dylan Thomas’ great birthday words.  My grandmother had several  editions of Mallory, one in particular that preserved the original late medieval spellings.  It had an illustration of the wounded and lifeless Arthur in bloody mail and white surcoat in the arms of a summery-tressed Guinevere that I loved and have never been able to find again.

Now, so many years later, I’ve decided those illustrations did me good service.  They educated my imagination, implicitly encouraging invention, elaboration and careful attention to detail.  Even now I believe that imagination works a little like a muscle and can be strengthened by exercise and practice, which is what great illustrations can help us to do.  It’s a “high” art if there ever was one.

Much, much later I came across Bauer’s illustrations of “Our Fathers’ Godsaga” by Viktor Rydberg and they were so good I imagined I’d seen them in my grandmother’s library, although I know I didn’t.

A Signal Exhibition

The signal events in our lives, a birth, a death, an accomplishment, moving to a new city or another part of the world, meeting someone new or an old friend again for the first time in years, sometimes have ironic consequences.  For example, upon the death of my uncle some years ago now, I found myself reading letters and an essay I’d never known existed.  The letters were written when he was a pilot in England during World War II.  The essay was a description of taking-off for a night mission.  He was twenty.  The writing was extraordinary.  It was painfully bittersweet unforeseeable gift during a period of terrible loss.

More recently, I had the great good fortune to reconnect with an old friend and his wife as a result of his efforts.  She’s an artist; she creates Bromoil images, an elaborate and delicate photographic process which transforms photographs, revealing the quiet, sometimes extraordinary beauty that can hide in the mid-range light.

Bromoils can be as witty as an Edward Gorey cartoon, or revelatory in spite of an apparent simplicity of composition.  Sometimes looking at a Bromoil is exactly like that moment in a great mystery novel when a seemingly innocuous clue transforms your view of the characters and provides the essential information to resolve the mystery itself.

They can affect you like those unexpected consequences of your life’s signal moments.

 
Our friend, Elise Lajeunesse, is exhibiting her work at the Finch Lane Gallery, 54 Finch Lane in Reservoir Park beginning this Friday, January 16.

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.

Predictor Corrector Methods

Since New Year’s eve of last year we’ve been managing  a minor, local cataclysm in the high-rise in which we live.  A high pressure fire control line near the top of the building froze as a result of the sub-zero temperatures and sustained gale force winds which created a wind chill of -23 F.  I walked into the stairwell a few minutes after it occurred and found it transformed into a raining, freezing environment that looked more like one of Bradley Garrett's explorations than the placid, quiet home we’re used to.  Roughly, a third of the buildings units were affected in minutes.

It felt like a scene in an old disaster movie.  I probably imagined myself as a heroic but doomed submarine captain on a sinking boat for a few seconds but didn’t find that particularly helpful.  More importantly, I found myself doing what you do in those situations:  continually prioritizing a large list of issues and attempting to respond appropriately.  As a result of continuous, pragmatic hard work since then by our resident manager and his wife, Lynn and the rest of us on the HOA board, a responsive disaster control company and our insurance agent the situation remains under control and we’re taking the right steps to mediate and repair the damage.

What makes it interesting and worth writing about is in the detail  of our small community’s response.  Not only are we doing everything required to restore the building, we’re also taking formal action, to study the building and take appropriate action to ensure we’re proof against another extreme weather event in the future.  In essence, we’re using the situation to predict a possible future event and then correct our existing infrastructure wherever required.

It’s a simple idea.  1900 saw the rise of what have come to be called “Predictor-Corrector” methods to solve difficult or even technically impossible problems in the mathematics of differential equations.  Russell and Whitehead, among others at about the same time, were showing that there were a vast set of mathematical problems that couldn’t be solved – exactly.

However, a very interesting and important set of those can be addressed by predicting an approximation of the answer, correcting it with a second step and then using that information to predict again.  In that way it’s possible to come as close to the answer to some “unsolvable” problems as is practically necessary.  Predictive-corrective methods are now part of the fabric of our technology.  It’s how our computers perform some of the most basic calculations and how a robotic craft can land on a comet.

We live in an age and cultures of systems and complexity.  I find it curious that some institutions, particularly political ones, have such slight interest in predictive-corrective strategies to solve problems when it’s probable they could be applied successfully to many of even our most controversial problems, even those of a moral character.