Nature Abhors the Vaccuum

[No one need bother me about the spelling of "vacuum/vaccum/vaccuum," as the word has three legitimate spellings. I go for the one with the most letters, of course.]

Aristotle was the one who said that nature abhors a vaccuum. The personification in the statement is interesting, because, as we now understand vaccuums, it is enough to say the noun to imply the activity. Vaccuums are absences, and thus all presences rush toward them. There is no need for any one or any thing to be horrified or angry.

When Christians imputed a directly intentional and affective value to forces in nature, Aristotle's statement had more profound rational and cosmological ramifications than a simple induction. First, his statement affirmed the plenum. (Contra the prior link, it was not "Descartes" who had the plenum. It was everyone. It was Newton, too. I hate scientists with heroes and villains stories to tell.) This cosmological outlook did not hold that the universe is varied and rich, but that it is so rich that there are no discernible gaps between orders and classes of living and non-living things. Creation is so full that there are infinite steps of quality and complexity between ranks and infinite ranks overall along Jacob's ladder. (Jacob's ladder, meanwhile, is not merely a metaphor for a vision Jacob had (Jacob sees angels of the Lord going up and coming down from heaven, and then that graduated ranking is described by means of a figure of speech, "ladder"), but a vision of the order of the universe (the universe is composed of moving ranks and graduations reaching from Heaven to earth) that is eternal and may be understood by multiple figures of speech.)

The plenum itself reflected God. This was not code, but rather nature. While the enlightened soul and those in a state of grace might contemplate God's love in the plenitude of creation or by imagining and constructing with art a microcosm/macrocosm, whereby the whole perceptible and spiritually experienced universe was, like a vast fractal, infinitely reproducing and consistent, the intent behind all things was love, being, and essence rather than a message. God is God, and the infinitely full universe might give intellectual delight or emotional solace, but the fullness was not there for a statement, but simply because of God's nature and creation.

The second effect of Aristotle's statement for Christians in the renaissance was that some popes (Leo X on, basically) grew so famously pleased with the coherence of the cosmology of the plenum that they made a Scribblerian mistake. Martin Scribblerus, hero of The Memoirs of Martinus Scribblerus, is a well read fool, and he consistently insists that whatever is logical according to deduction is true, no matter what evidence or reality says. So, too, these popes took a bold and brave stand against the vaccuum. Arguing against the real in favor of the logical is a losing proposition, but only in the end. Nobody likes to give up on logic just because some smart-Alec claims that Archimedes made a vaccuum pump.

It's grimly amusing that fractals these days make Fibonacci numbers look more and more like justification for the old faith in the plenum, but there's no irony in it. In the event, zero had enough of a reality to demonstrate, and soon scientists and mine owners began evacuating all over Europe. Volta guns and light bulbs would appear apace.

There was another kind of vaccuum that inventors played with. Boil your cabbage in a tin pot, and then seal it shut with solder. The molecules in the air will be very far apart, and, as the cabbage slurry cools, the air will compress. The can of cabbage can be sold to Napoleon, and he can take it to Russia, where it will be somewhat fresh three months after the cooking.

Canning started with Napoleon's army -- although they really began with bottles -- and that meant a need to find ways of holding seals and temperature. The Thermos bottle was the German patenting of a Scottish invention, and our Apollo rockets, like some of our missiles, are just grand Thermos bottles at heart (and you thought "Thermos" was an English word? Did you also think Robert Goddard invented rocketry?). Now we even offer to have super-cooled electrical transmission lines, and people propose liquid nitrogen in the field.

We never have found nothing, by the way, nor might we. A simple vaccuum of air is easy, and the pope could have kept his seat cushions untussled. A zero, though, is imperceptible by definition, and I agree with Kant that it's really a foul ball in intellect.

Loss, cooling, and vacuum seals are another matter. Them I believe in.

Before Christmas, during one of the freestyle bits of the liturgy, when the priest fills in the blanks ("May we, along with _____ and all your saints, be in your eternal kingdom"), he mentioned Saint Joseph, as he rightly would and should. Back in 2001, I heard a deaconess at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan talk about Joseph. She talked about his role as the patron of adoptive fathers, about the acceptance and humility he had. He did not reject Mary, and he went as a refugee to Egypt to protect her and the child that was not his. I have never since been able to approach Christmas without thinking about Joseph, or without why he stands out so.

In 1999, the children left for Rhode Island. I can't criticize. There are many gripes to gripe, but there is no point. When they left, I lost a deeper part of myself, a deeper connection, than a limb. I have a missing place where two children were, and it is permanent. That cavern is hollow, and there is no way to fill it. There isn't a way to reconnect, either, because I didn't lose friends. By 2003, I didn't mourn every day, but the stone was formed. I was a drum.

My mother's death is surprising. There are practical manifestations of such a loss. When the branch from which the leaves hang is gone, the leaves have no connection to one another anymore. Without children and wife to be interconnected, I am untied from the large mass that was family. Each holiday, therefore, sounds out against the hollows where once there was a messy complication of family.

Aside from that, when I am not working every day, I dream of her death's fact four nights a week, more or less. It might be dreaming of a tree in the backyard that is no longer the back yard. It might be neighbors casting paving stones at birds and killing the pileated woodpeckers. It may be having to drive my mother to see the family. It may show up in a dozen different disguises, but it's the same event, the same fact, the same concavity.

I wish to finish this essay soon, so that it will be nominally in 2013, because 2013 is its subject.

I'm lying. The subject of this essay is, of course, the surprising vaccuum. I have not changed, as I am as baffled by career as ever. I am as honest and friendly as before. At the same time, it is shocking that some things, some events, are not plastic, that some clippings and removals are permanent; they leave their profiles in consistent places that will never more be regained. When I am alone, when I hear my own thoughts, I don't regret anymore being alone. Instead, I regret the fact that there is no use in arguing with fact, that there is no use in complaining that things do not work out justly, and I have these resonating losses, this vaccuum seal, that moors me in zero.

Ennervation Never Knows

"I can endure my own despair,

But not another's hope." -- William Walsh

The child skins its knee, and the pain is the worst of its life. It moans and keens with all of its mind at the unending and raging pain. The adult cuts itself with a knife while doing a routinely dangerous task, sucks air between its teeth, curses, sends reason to caution the primitive mind, invokes time's wisdom to know that all pains end, rushes to find unguents, wraps the wound, closes its eyes in mastery, and controls the impulse of pain. The older person's night time undressing reveals wounds along the legs, dried blood smears like comet tails from punctures on the forearm or thigh, and fear, a dull fear, comes up, and the older person asks itself when these damages happened, which enemies had struck during the night, and how unprotected it is against the environment, and then its reason and sense of time, stronger now than the senses of touch, say that such things are predictable and inconsequential.

The teenaged boy jostles its friends. They slam dance to socialize, because the little demons that inhabit them will not allow stillness, and looking one another in the eye would be faggy, and they rate women. The most imaginary flaw could cause emesis or impotence, they claim. Else nothing could stop their mighty virility from accomplishing its mission, but they would demand that the waif lose weight and the buxom woman get enhanced.
Their oppositely arrayed army mourn the imperfection of all the boys and perfection of all the imaginary men. Those who breathe are vile, and those who shimmer on screens or reflect from pages have every desire locked inside them. These here are immature -- a just complaint if ever there were one -- but those. . . those understand. Those are prettier, kinder, and listen.

The older person fails to notice. The mate, even the child, was a formula solved some time earlier. Since that time it has remained an integer of certain quantity and an attribute of certain quality. Only the things that are jarring, disagreeable, unsolved show up, and these as things that will not rest, will not allow the natural process to go its way. The woman cannot believe that the man isn't taking things seriously, as he is happy all the time, which means that he is indifferent, and the man cannot believe that the woman can never be satisfied, as things are not in crisis, and they have both formed conclusions. It is now just a matter of time between fights and resolution.

Ahem.

Sorry about that. Rather grand sounding, isn't it? After all, it is the way of us to be fresh and then grow stale, to lose connection to our sense of each thing as time goes on. People speak of the senses growing dull. Ears, eyes, tongue -- each has its own diminishing returns. However, there is also a simple process of ennervation, whereby the nerves running to these senses decrease and our ability to feel decreases. Ennervation is aging, and all of our awareness follows the pattern of the physical.

"I've got a wild man wizard, and he's hiding in me.
Illuminating my mind." -- Harry Chapin, "Taxi."

In youth, a fantasy strikes, and it fills up the horizon, fills in the holes of the heart left by disappointment in strength, attention, love, accomplishment. In youth, we can devote days to exploring our other selves: the knights, the shield maidens, the saviors of D-cup desperate women wearing thin their leather bikinis, the neglected beauty of the realm of power discovered by the lovely man, the radioactive scientist, the battle hardened soldier of either sex, the gang star, the respected woman who wins all she desires by her fire-hardened femininity and toughness, the cowboy, the Indian, and we can write it out in dreams -- visual, poetic, waking, sleeping, and prose.

"Julie Daydreaming," by Berthe Morisot

  As adults, we toy with our psychic familiars, pulling them from the closet in times of stress, embarrassed to be seen in public with them. Older still, we cannot capture even a half hour of what was once whole days of fascination, and we have no patience for reading or seeing another person's dreams realized. 'Oh, that fantasy book series is treacle for teenagers,' or 'That series on HBO is some middle aged guy's fantasy life; whoopee for him,' we say. The truth is that we feel guilty looking in at what we had.
I do not mean to complain of time's many gifts.

"Death and the Girl," Ego Schiele, 1915

 Our greatest desire, when young, and we do not know it, is to be free of the "insane and furious master" lashing us (Republic 329), lust. Our greatest desire as adults is to cease being the half-persons that everyone since Aristophanes has said is the way of sex (Aristophanes says, in Symposium that we were one ball, and we were trying to be gods, so Zeus split us in half, into male and female, and now we spend all our lives trying to reunite). In age, we can call on lust unreliably, but it's there, and the raging fire becomes a steady flame.

When young, a disappointment leaves us screaming our nights away as surely as the scraped knee left us howling as toddlers. Anger goes to destruction. We wish we could escape our own ability to feel so deeply. Time takes care of that, at least for a while.
By practice and discipline, we can tame the winds of youth. There is less to help us feel again when the nerves no longer connect. And, at last, when they reach no farther than the mind itself, there is no place for feeling to go but to the mind itself, and we go back again to our impulse, desire, and wish.

Unmoved

"...my interest in most things lies in the nominal rather than the phenomenal aspect. Some fine day I intend to try to get to the bottom of WHAT'S GOING ON HERE -- the real world here, rather than the world of seeming. Are we all liars and humbugs and if so, why not?" -- Myles na gCopaleen

If the average person exists, then the average person in the United States has a smudge where the meaning of “paradox” should be. Of the persons who know the word without its -ical handmaiden (“It's paradoxical that so many people know the adjective and so few the noun”), the Liar's Paradox and Zeno's Paradox must be the only occupants of the set. Oh, “set of all sets” and other strangers wave from beyond the margins at certain professions, but Zeno's paradox of motion far outweighs the argument he made that there is no pain, and Cretans lie (aren't Cretins the only ones fooled by the Boolean trap, or do we hold out for prepubertal viewers of "Star Trek" like me, too?).

For me, Zeno's paradox has been something of a haunting presence. I have never been satisfied with the answers that I have gotten to it, except the answer of my senses (those flying turtles hurt). Furthermore, I am haunted by the fact that we have somehow managed to go about our business, playing Math and Physics for centuries without getting a good answer to the paradox. Not only that, but I am molested, every time I consider this, with just how pleasant the people are who believe that they have solved the 'problem.'

My reader is an above average reader in every way, and so my reader already knows all there is to know about the paradox itself.

[Above Average Reader Of Note: Yeah, but we want to hear you say it, so we can make fun of how much you get wrong, later.]

Well, Zeno was slaloming in between the pillars and posts of his porch, wondering when the Romans would come make it all intramural, and I'm told he was ranting about how much Parminedes bothered him. Parminedes's paradox of time and motion, he said, was stubborn. “The way I heard it,” he told his students, “Usain Bolt and Rafael, the teenaged mutant ninja turtle, were going to have a race. Because it was unfair on the face of things for Usain Bolt to race a fictional character, he decided to give the turtle a fifty yard head start. However, when the race began, Usain Bolt discovered that he could not win, because he was unable to pass the turtle.” “This is because the turtle is a poorly conceived cartoon character, isn't it,” one of Zeno's students asked. “No,” Zeno replied, “but because Bolt, to pass the turtle, had to cross half the distance between himself and it. He then had to make up half the remaining distance. After that, he had to make up the very slight half distance remaining, but only to discover that there was as much distance to go. He crossed half of that, but then there was half again remaining. Of this half, he crossed half, and then saw that he could only cross half of the remainder. This would go on, as it turned out, forever, or for as long as there were divisions and numbers, and Bolt simply could not pass the turtle.”

[Aaron: That's not how we heard it.]

I know. That's why I told it differently. The point is that “time and motion are both illusions,” like Parminedes said, except, of course, that they're not, no matter what you've heard to the contrary.

Aristotle said that the problem with Zeno's paradox is that he presupposes and infinite amount of space to cross, but not an infinite amount of time to do it in. If we segmented time just as infinitely as movement, then the turtle would be in the soup. Something or other to do with the definition of time or the definition of motion or something. I usually agree with Aristotle – which is to say that I usually understand Aristotle – but in this case I'm still left with that “infinite division” thing. Worse than him, though, mathematicians have told me that Zeno's paradox is not only not a paradox, it isn't even a problem. While all of us were sliding off our seats drunk at a wedding reception after-party, a mathematician told me that I was just confused because I hadn't realized that some infinities are larger than others. The infinity of fractions is larger than the infinity of whole numbers, sez him, but they are contained within the whole numbers, and so we were just playing a game with sets... or something... or one infinity overtook or ate the other. I thought it was drink talking until a sober mathematician (speaking of poorly conceived fictional characters!) attempted to tell me something very similar.

Ever since I received those explanations, I have used them as a test of soul, as a Procrustean bed. If Aristotle has it right, then you, Madam, are clearly meant for a physicist. If, on the other hand, new groom Bill's cousin the mathematics professor had it, then, Sir, you may be fit for any number of jobs, but you are no humanist. Both results are, of course, to your credit and health. You will, I have no doubt, sleep better at night, and your horror scope indicates that you will be able to accomplish deeds surprising and proficient.

[Aaron: Yes, very amusing, in a 19^th century Gentleman's Magazine sort of way, but not a humanist? Exaggeration is one thing, but insult is another!]

I mean it, every word. Well, I mean the words I mean, but not the words that are meant in jest or gesture (watch carefully). However, the people who agree with Aristurtle or the math folk are not humanity centered, not placing the human reality at its proper position -- which is the center of all possible perception. This is not egoism, nor species egotism, but rather knowing one's place and recognizing that it's a great deal better than it might be otherwise. Let me explain.

[Aaron: And now he's asking permission? Where's my pouch of Red Man?]

The new groom whose wedding we were dunking till drunk went on to get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. I would like to say that he's one of my life's friends. However, his doctorate was in analog signals, and this was in the middle of the 1990's. “I thought the point is that everything is, uh, digital,” I said to him one day, “so why analog signals?” “Because,” he answered, “at the high end, digital signals begin to act like analog.” I thought about this for a few moments, made no progress, and then went on to worry about chain marks in bibliography class or some other important problem. I still needed, after all, to distinguish between late 17^th century usages of “lampoon,” “burlesque,” “satire,” and “parody.”

I was so ignorant then!

Sometimes a fact will wedge in the soil of the mind, and layers of information, passion, misdirection, reconnection, and agitation will eventually force it back up. The process is not vegetative. People have been speaking of ideas “growing” in the mind since at least Charlemagne, and probably ideas do grow, send out rhizomes, cross-pollinate, and need pruning, but facts do not. Facts are like colored glass beads to the magpie mind. They go into the nest. In the course of the seasons of straw, hatchlings, and matings, the bead will turn up again in a new context where it will – by itself still only a bead – become part of a new mosaic. So it was with the fact that digital becomes analog analogy for me.

Right now, I have iTunes playing in the background. It is playing a song recorded by The Ventures in monoaural in the 1960's that was converted to stereo, pressed onto an album, converted to a digital CD, purchased by me (I buy CD's, and not because I'm old and bewildered, either), and then converted to the super-magic iTunes format, and now it is playing. I am enjoying it, too, in case you were wondering. However, the way those lovely surf guitar sounds were made and recorded was analog.

In analog recording...

[Aaron: Sheesh! Now you're going to explain analog? Plug it in and go.]

...voltage went to a microphone beneath the strings and one in front of the amplifier, and an electromagnet recorded increasing and decreasing voltage continuously that was then recorded, continuously up and down on magnetic film. [I know! 'To learn more about analog recording, consult your local library.'] The vinyl record was a cut groove that continuously reflected the pushing of a stylus in response to voltage increases. The digital, on the other hand, is based on sampling. A computer is told to capture sound levels and take an exact picture of all voltage levels on all microphones and to write this data down. It will do this a number of times a second. It might do it sixteen times a second (low quality) or thirty-two times a second (standard) or one hundred and twenty-eight times a second. Regardless of how many times a second the computer is taking a 'snapshot,' it is still taking a “sample,” which is an audio record of all values, at discrete moments.

You can see now what I did not see, I am sure. The super high end samples will begin to act as if they were continuous. Bright man, my friend Bill.

[...And yet you want to connect this to Zeno's paradox by …]

Quiet you! I do not. I may not be as clever as Bill, but I'm not as clumsy as that.

You see, the digital music that I am listening to right now, which, incidentally, is Pink Floyd, is tricking me. [Pink Floyd? I thought the air smelled a little sweet!] It is playing back thirty-two separate clips of music per second, and I am too sluggish of thought to hear the silences between them. [Yep. That's what happens.] This is because I am a man – sufficient reason to be miserable, as the Greek said. However, if it were slower in its clips, would I still perceive the music? Think about watching television with your dog. Your poor dog never liked your old analog television set, because it emitted a high pitched whine and because he couldn't see a picture. That is because there wasn't a picture. Only a third of the screen was lit up at a time,and the third rolled from bottom to top, and not that quickly, either. If you took a picture of a television screen, all that you saw, in the old days, as a third of the screen. Well, that's what your poor dog saw when you tapped the glass and said, “Look, Rufus! Another doggie!”

A movie is twenty-four frames per second of pictures showing in sequence. A cartoon is a sequence of drawings flipped past the eye. There is nothing continuous in any of these three things. The old television, the movie, the cartoon: all of them were discrete objects that we insisted we experienced as continuous, as analog. Digital music is therefore no surprise.

They call the human blur/blend illusion the Phi phenomenon. Phenomenologically speaking, one can see where this is going – which is around and around, like a fly in a Coca-Cola bottle on Wittgenstein's lectern.

[I really must object! That's neither funny nor necessary.]

They laughed at Heidelberg.

[Yeah, but not at Heisenberg. No one could tell where the punchline was.]

There is always the possibility that Zeno's was 'right,' as it were, or that Parminedes was, and that we don't move, that motion is a phenomenon, a Phi phenomenon. Perhaps analog is digital, and, if we were to look at that “continuous” electrical charge going up and down in a microphone line, it would be made up of greater and lesser infinities of incremental measurements. It's just that there sure seems to be a difference. It sure feels different. Actual movement, with persistent objects, really seems to have some distinction against representations presented sequentially, no matter how rapidly.

If, though, you have enough of a humanist in you to think, as I do, that there is something about the world, about living, that is different, and even superior, to super-rapid sequence, then we're right back at Zeno's question: Where is it? If the digital acts like analog when chopped finely enough and the analog can be chopped into digital, where is the whole number?

You see, the answer to Zeno's paradox that does not require phantasms of infinity or time is to declare that there is an indivisible unit of space. If you deny infinity itself, then Zeno has to stop cutting the space in half. If you say that “there is no more distance,” then Usain Bolt finally gets to the finish line and the autograph seekers. The alternative is to say that a mystic Something Happens whereby the infinities surpass one another in a glibly invisible and imperceptible leapfrog as we move in whole numbers, unmindful of the limitless fractions we toss by. In either case, the skeptic (or Eleatic) has the right to ask you, “Ok, Buck, so tell me where it is.”

It is to avoid that question that everyone else seeks purely logical, non-mystical answers, no matter how much they hurt the brain.

I don't have a bead on the answer. As I said, Zeno's paradox keeps giving me the bad touch when I least want it. I was wondering, though, the other day, that we are so happy to ask no questions about another impossibility. We mumble and mutter along every day with circles and other oddities and their attendant irrational numbers. Pi, like movement, lodges like a pretzel in our windpipes. It just won't go away, even though it is generally a simple expression. What's more, like running around in a circle, it is infuriatingly rooted in the real! We know that the circumference of a circle is pi multiplied by the squared radius. That means that we get pi always from every danged circle. If circles are actual (real, existing), then so is pi. Well, that's simply intolerable.

Is pi proof that there has to be an irrational or a-rational or suprarational answer to the question of divisibility of space, time, and motion? I'm not that juvenile. Pi floats out there, infinitely, and waves at us from beyond our capacity to limit and define, just as motion does, just as the difference between the infinitely divided and the continuous does. All of these weave from the margins of our minds, producing a garland of phenomena and rational limit. They humble us. They insist that we are products of reality and consequently can never judge it entirely.