Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Compactification and singularity

On the train from Lausanne to Geneva Airport I recalled the way Polchinski introduces his chapter on toroidal compactification :

"In general relativity, the geometry of spacetime is dynamical. The three spatial dimensions we see are expanding and were once highly curved. It is a logical possibility that there are additional dimensions that remain small."
J. Polchinski, String Theory, volume I, CUP 1998 (p. 231)

My personal version of this argument is to say that in GR space can be curved and hence it is a "logical possibility" that there are dimensions so curved that they actually close on themselves. I find that it is a very seducing way to introduce the notion of extra dimensions that are hidden because of their compactness, since it follows from the well-established curvature of space-time.

Polchinski then goes on to explain Kaluza-Klein theory with a periodic dimension without further explanations. This leaves the following question open :

What kind of massive object curves some dimensions so as to make them compact while leaving other dimensions non-compact ?

I've been drawing a lot since then and realized a few things that amazed me for five seconds before revealing their complete triviality... Nevertheless, here are some of my reflections.


At first the idea that an object curves only some dimensions and not all of them seems bizarre. Imagine a toy universe that has only two dimensions so that one can envision curvature as the bending of an elastic membrane with a ball on it. This video which is part of a documentary about Hawking has a nice illustration of this after 3:00.




Now if some dimensions are to be so strongly curved that they become compact, this must be the effect of a very massive object. So let us give the ball a tremendous mass; the way I picture what happens is that the weight of the ball stretches the membrane in the form of an extremely long tube. So neglecting the extremities, the membrane has now the topology of a cylinder, which is the direct product of a non-compact manifold, a real line, with a compact one, a circle. What seems a bit weird is that the radial direction, which is curved by the ball, remains non-compact, whereas the angular direction, which is not curved, is compact ! But there is a fallacy here : to have an angular coordinate (with a finite range) does not mean there is a compact dimension. The plane is not any compacter in polar coordinates than in Cartesian coordinates...

I'd like to understand spaces that have a non-compact part and a compact part. For simplicity I'll take direct products of real lines and spheres. The simplest case is R x S^1. This is pretty clearly a cylinder if you think of it as an S^1 fibration over R, but you could also think of it as a R fibration over S^1, in which case one can see that is is also a cylinder by taking into account that the fibers must not intersect. In fact, only the topology matters here and the cylinder can be continuously deformed at will. The formal definition of this direct product is R x S^1 = {(x, theta) | x \in (-\infty, \infty), theta \in [0, 2\pi]}. So you just need to specify a couple of coordinates, one for the real line (x), and one for the circle (theta).

An interesting deformation of the cylinder is achieved through a conformal mapping, where one defines a coordinate z = exp(x + i theta). This can be thought of as a radial coordinate r = exp(x), and an angular coordinate theta. The radial coordinate ranges from 0 to infinity but at r=0 the circle degenerates, which does not correspond to the cylinder bounded by circles at both its extremities at infinity. In consequence, the origin has to be removed. So one ends up with the manifold R^2 (in fact the complex plane...) with the origin removed : R x S^1 ~ R^2\{0}. R^2 is non-compact but by removing a point you make it isomorphic to a space that is the direct product of a compact space with a non-compact space. There is thus an equivalence between manifolds with a singularity and partially compact manifolds !

Coming back to our latex membrane, we understand now that in order to obtain a compact dimension the ball must be so heavy that it produces a black hole singularity.

Now consider R x S^2. It is hard to understand as a fibration : is it some kind of solid cylinder ? I guess that a particle can move arbitrarily inside the cylinder but as it approaches the surface it is forced to move tangentially to it (?) It is much easier to think about it after a conformal mapping, which leads to R^3\{0}. Again, the origin is removed for the angular coordinates to be well-defined everywhere. (Notice that the manifold is not complex anymore, given that it is odd-dimensional...)

Another simple case is R^2 x S^1, which can be reduced to the first case by rewriting it as R x R x S^1 ~ R x R^2\{0}. We get a manifold R^3 with a line singularity along the third axis. This is nice because it means we can get more than just one non-compact dimension (the radial direction), namely the dimensions of the singularity itself.

We are ready to generalize : after conformal mapping, the direct product R^n x S^d gives a (n-1)-dimensional singularity at the origin of a (d+1)-dimensional space.

String theory requiring 10 dimensions for its consistency while we only observe 4 non-compact dimensions, we might try the direct product R^4 x S^6. However, according to our reasoning, this is isomorphic to R^3 x R^7\{0}, so that the fourth non-compact dimension differs from the others in that its boundaries at infinity are six-spheres... (how bad is that ?)

If this has to be avoided, one must rather consider R^5 x S^5 ~ R^4 x R^6\{0}. This is pretty close to what appears in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence ! There, the singularity would be black 3-branes and there would be a warping between R^4 and the radial coordinate to get AdS_5.


Remark :

The bending latex representation is misleading since it implies that the membrane is curved towards a third dimension. I don't think this is the proper way to view it, because otherwise the curvature of four-dimensional space-time would by itself imply the existence of extra dimensions... Rather, one should maybe picture a curved space by a density plot. The darker the color, the larger the curvature. The surface of the black hole would be a very dark circle. 

From the density plot the surface of the black hole is at a fixed radius, but from the curved membrane representation it forms a very long tube. It is folly to suppose the coordinate along the tube is the coordinate U = r/alpha' with r->0 defined by Maldacena.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Party String Theory

And of course you go to a party and of course someone asks you what you do and of course you say string theory and of course what is it ? and of course you don't know where to start. // Classic.

So it gets you thinking about how to present string theory and so you find one way and so you feel warm inside and so you post a post. // Classic.

A good way to introduce string theory is as a conceptual framework that unifies the two current pillars of theoretical physics : general relativity and quantum mechanics. To give a feel of what string theory is about, it suffices to focus the explanations on just one specific (but pretty central) aspect of each theory : black holes for GR, the uncertainty principle for QM.

1. The central result of Einstein's general relativity is that a very massive object -- or equivalently a very energetic object, remember E=mc^2 -- has the effect of curving the neighbouring space-time (which in fact implies gravity...). But there is a bound to this phenomenon, since if an object is too massive, it will curve space-time so much that it will end up tearing it apart and creating a black hole. (As an illustration, imagine space-time had only two dimensions, and think about it as a stretched piece of cloth ; putting heavy objects on it will curve it, and if an object is heavy enough it will make a hole in it.)

2. At the heart of quantum physics lies Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, according to which a particle cannot have both a precise position and a precise momentum (mass times speed). There is a tension between the precisions of those two properties : if the position of a particle is determined with great accuracy, unavoidably its momentum becomes very uncertain -- we know precisely where it is but not where it is going nor at which speed it is moving. And inversely, if the momentum is precise, it is the position which becomes uncertain, as if the particle were dissolved into some sort of a fuzzy cloud...

Now if you ask the philosophical question of knowing what is the ultimate building block of reality, and that you undertake to break objects down into little pieces, then in littler pieces, and then yet littler and so on, there will be a point where the piece you consider is so small that by the uncertainty principle its momentum (and so its energy) is so fuzzy that it can produce a black hole. From this point, the division process cannot be carried any further.

String theory aims at describing what is happening at this ultimate scale, where tiny black holes appear and disappear randomly by quantum fluctuations, and where the very notions of space and time lose their pertinence...

[Poetic suspension]

What we call "reality" is nothing but the surface of a chaos of black holes...

[Poetic suspension again]

And hence holography, AdS/CFT, and the like. Good.

*********************************************************

On a related note, people are usually amazed when I tell them that I switched from philosophy and art to physics. The most coherent explanation in my bag of tricks has to do with my interest in perception and the essence of reality, but I think I just found a new twist on it, as I was staring at the moon (beautifully speckled tonight). It goes something like this :

At some point in my early life it occurred to me that creation was the purest source of joy (this expression is in fact taken from my application letter to Oxford -- how naive I was...). So that might explain why I was interested in arts and why I even wanted to become a painter. But I was aware (I think) that the product of an artist's creation is not a work of art (although it is, don't get me wrong !), but rather a new perspective on existence.

[Which example could I find to illustrate that ??? I reckon that if you don't already know it, it will be quite impossible to convince you... For example when the Gothic cathedrals started to be built with thinner walls and with more light, it was not (even though maybe ingenuously it was) to make a "pretty" building, but to be in phase with the evolution of the societies from a feudal to a seigniorial organisation. (About this fascinating topic I recommend the brilliant book L'Art féodal et son enjeu social by André Scobeltzine.) But it is not a real good example, because the notion of artist was ill-defined at the time... Anyways !]

OK so the point is that what I am doing currently, namely theoretical physics, is also a creative venture. And what the theoretical physicist creates [notice my emphasis on the "theoretical" bit ? ; )] is not an article, not even a physical theory (although it is, don't get me wrong !), but -- reality itself !

Just like the philosopher in fact... And like the artist as well in fact... I'm afraid I would have utterly lost my party interlocutors by this time in fact... Perhaps that explanation ought to be substantiated more substantially in fact...


Addendum : Well my basic intuition arises roughly from the following type of considerations. Before Galileo the earth was the centre of the universe. It's not just that everybody wrongly thought it was. Go back to Timbuktu : if nobody sees the Dalmatian in the picture then there is no Dalmatian in the picture. Peace.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Time thickening

On Sunday I went to a Coffee Concert by John Myewrscough (cello) and Lara Dodds-Eden (piano). They played various compositions among which the mind-blowing Cello Sonata n° 1 by Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998). Here I just want to talk about a thought that came to me during the concert.

The enjoyment of music increases with the ability to "grasp" with the mind a piece of melody as a whole -- at once. I mean as a unique entity rather than as a succession of individual notes (Husserl tried to explain the possibility of such a thing in his Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins). The broader the perception of a fragment of music, the deeper the pleasure (think about Mozart who was able to restitute an entire concerto after hearing it only once...). So listening to music encourages the development of the ability to grasp longer periods of time instantaneously, i.e. to have them "present" interiorly as sensations.

This is how music enriches our existences : by teaching us how to thicken our present time.

(The cellist's name contains the name "Myers", so I'll call that the timelike Myers effect ; )

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Schubert : Winterreise

I finally overcame my aversion for classical singing : ) I think the key factor was the realisation of the importance of the lyrics, without which the songs often sound like empty gargles to me.

I went to the Oxford Lieder Festival to hear Florian Boesch (bass baritone) and Andrew West (piano) play Schubert's Die Winterreise ("The Winter Journey"), composed in 1827, one year before his death at age 31. It is based on a cycle of 24 poems written by the (also short-lived) poet Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827).

The organizers had the presence of mind to distribute the full text of the poems, and I followed them closely during the entire concert. I only looked at the stage occasionally to see Boesch's raging face, which would have scared the most pitiless murderers. The story of Winterreise is about a man that has to leave the house of his fiancée -- for an unknown reason (the pre-concert speaker mentioned something about her getting married to a rich man...) -- and shouts out his anger and sadness as he wanders across wintry landscapes. He's going through a succession of phases from deep despair to vain attempts at cheering up, from a sparkle of hope to impatience for death. His journey finally leads him to a graveyard, but he's pissed off not to find an unoccupied grave and keeps on walking against the snow storm in an outburst of nihilist courage :

Lustig in die Welt hinein
Gegen Wind und Wetter !

Will kein Gott auf Erden sein,

Sind wir selber Götter !


The two last songs then appear as mysterious epilogues :

xxiii. Die Nebensonnen

Drei Sonnen sah ich am Himmel stehn,

Hab' lang' und fest sie angesehn ;

Und sie auch standen da so stier,

Als wollten sie nicht weg von mir.

Ach, meine Sonnen seid ihr nicht !
Schaut Andren doch in's Angesicht !

Ja, neulich hatt' ich auch wohl drei ;

Nun sind hinab die besten zwei.

Ging' nur die dritt' erst hinterdrein !

Im Dunkeln wird mir wohler sein.


xxiv. Der Leiermann

Drüben hinter'm Dorfe

Steht ein Leiermann

Und mit starren Fingern

Dreht er, was er kann.


Barfuss auf dem Eise

Wankt er hin und her ;

Und sein kleiner Teller

Bleibt ihm immer leer.


Keiner mag ihn hören,

Keiner sieht ihn an,

Und die Hunde knurren

Um den alten Mann.


Und er lässt es gehen
Alles, wie es will,

Dreht und seine Leier

Steht ihm nimmer still.


Wunderlicher Alter,

Soll ich mit dir gehn ?

Willst zu meinen Liedern

Deine Leier drehn ?



The picture shows a "Leier" ("vielle à roue" in French ; I remember my grandfather use to have one of those instruments that always fascinated me). In this last song, I understand it as a symbol of an implacable periodic cycle that transcends men's miserable finiteness. The organ-player looks weak and insane, an outcast, but it is the disguise of ultimate wisdom, whose concern is stretching beyond death.

The lover's misfortune should not be taken too literally but rather as an illustration of a more universal departure from a state of being where meaning was god-given (some sort of Garden of Eden) towards an absurd world depraved of unquestionable foundations (the speaker had presented Schubert as a predecessor of Nietzsche...). After having gone through all stages of despair, touching the bottom in the graveyard, he finds an unexpected solution : although life has lost the a priori meaning it use to have in more rudimentary periods, it is still possible (and necessary) to make sense of it by its representation in the arts [and sciences], and in particular music. The Leiermann is a symbol of the lover's creative drive.

The 24 songs properly form a cycle in the sense that they themselves are the response to the last question : "Willst zu meinen Liedern / Deine Leier drehn ?" By listening to them the empathic audience has participated in their transfiguration by acknowledging and validating their representational power.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Les deux clochers de Martinville

"
[...] Une fois pourtant,—où notre promenade s’étant prolongée fort au delà de sa durée habituelle, nous avions été bien heureux de rencontrer à mi-chemin du retour, comme l’après-midi finissait, le docteur Percepied qui passait en voiture à bride abattue, nous avait reconnus et fait monter avec lui,—j’eus une impression de ce genre et ne l’abandonnai pas sans un peu l’approfondir. On m’avait fait monter près du cocher, nous allions comme le vent parce que le docteur avait encore avant de rentrer à Combray à s’arrêter à Martinville-le-Sec chez un malade à la porte duquel il avait été convenu que nous l’attendrions. Au tournant d’un chemin j’éprouvai tout à coup ce plaisir spécial qui ne ressemblait à aucun autre, à apercevoir les deux clochers de Martinville, sur lesquels donnait le soleil couchant et que le mouvement de notre voiture et les lacets du chemin avaient l’air de faire changer de place, puis celui de Vieuxvicq qui, séparé d’eux par une colline et une vallée, et situé sur un plateau plus élevé dans le lointain, semblait pourtant tout voisin d’eux.

En constatant, en notant la forme de leur flèche, le déplacement de leurs lignes, l’ensoleillement de leur surface, je sentais que je n’allais pas au bout de mon impression, que quelque chose était derrière ce mouvement, derrière cette clarté, quelque chose qu’ils semblaient contenir et dérober à la fois.

Les clochers paraissaient si éloignés et nous avions l’air de si peu nous rapprocher d’eux, que je fus étonné quand, quelques instants après, nous nous arrêtâmes devant l’église de Martinville. Je ne savais pas la raison du plaisir que j’avais eu à les apercevoir à l’horizon et l’obligation de chercher à découvrir cette raison me semblait bien pénible; j’avais envie de garder en réserve dans ma tête ces lignes remuantes au soleil et de n’y plus penser maintenant. Et il est probable que si je l’avais fait, les deux clochers seraient allés à jamais rejoindre tant d’arbres, de toits, de parfums, de sons, que j’avais distingués des autres à cause de ce plaisir obscur qu’ils m’avaient procuré et que je n’ai jamais approfondi. Je descendis causer avec mes parents en attendant le docteur. Puis nous repartîmes, je repris ma place sur le siège, je tournai la tête pour voir encore les clochers qu’un peu plus tard, j’aperçus une dernière fois au tournant d’un chemin. Le cocher, qui ne semblait pas disposé à causer, ayant à peine répondu à mes propos, force me fut, faute d’autre compagnie, de me rabattre sur celle de moi-même et d’essayer de me rappeler mes clochers. Bientôt leurs lignes et leurs surfaces ensoleillées, comme si elles avaient été une sorte d’écorce, se déchirèrent, un peu de ce qui m’était caché en elles m’apparut, j’eus une pensée qui n’existait pas pour moi l’instant avant, qui se formula en mots dans ma tête, et le plaisir que m’avait fait tout à l’heure éprouver leur vue s’en trouva tellement accru que, pris d’une sorte d’ivresse, je ne pus plus penser à autre chose. A ce moment et comme nous étions déjà loin de Martinville en tournant la tête je les aperçus de nouveau, tout noirs cette fois, car le soleil était déjà couché. Par moments les tournants du chemin me les dérobaient, puis ils se montrèrent une dernière fois et enfin je ne les vis plus.

Sans me dire que ce qui était caché derrière les clochers de Martinville devait être quelque chose d’analogue à une jolie phrase, puisque c’était sous la forme de mots qui me faisaient plaisir, que cela m’était apparu, demandant un crayon et du papier au docteur, je composai malgré les cahots de la voiture, pour soulager ma conscience et obéir à mon enthousiasme, le petit morceau suivant que j’ai retrouvé depuis et auquel je n’ai eu à faire subir que peu de changements:

«Seuls, s’élevant du niveau de la plaine et comme perdus en rase campagne, montaient vers le ciel les deux clochers de Martinville. Bientôt nous en vîmes trois: venant se placer en face d’eux par une volte hardie, un clocher retardataire, celui de Vieuxvicq, les avait rejoints. Les minutes passaient, nous allions vite et pourtant les trois clochers étaient toujours au loin devant nous, comme trois oiseaux posés sur la plaine, immobiles et qu’on distingue au soleil. Puis le clocher de Vieuxvicq s’écarta, prit ses distances, et les clochers de Martinville restèrent seuls, éclairés par la lumière du couchant que même à cette distance, sur leurs pentes, je voyais jouer et sourire. Nous avions été si longs à nous rapprocher d’eux, que je pensais au temps qu’il faudrait encore pour les atteindre quand, tout d’un coup, la voiture ayant tourné, elle nous déposa à leurs pieds; et ils s’étaient jetés si rudement au-devant d’elle, qu’on n’eut que le temps d’arrêter pour ne pas se heurter au porche. Nous poursuivîmes notre route; nous avions déjà quitté Martinville depuis un peu de temps et le village après nous avoir accompagnés quelques secondes avait disparu, que restés seuls à l’horizon à nous regarder fuir, ses clochers et celui de Vieuxvicq agitaient encore en signe d’adieu leurs cimes ensoleillées. Parfois l’un s’effaçait pour que les deux autres pussent nous apercevoir un instant encore; mais la route changea de direction, ils virèrent dans la lumière comme trois pivots d’or et disparurent à mes yeux. Mais, un peu plus tard, comme nous étions déjà près de Combray, le soleil étant maintenant couché, je les aperçus une dernière fois de très loin qui n’étaient plus que comme trois fleurs peintes sur le ciel au-dessus de la ligne basse des champs. Ils me faisaient penser aussi aux trois jeunes filles d’une légende, abandonnées dans une solitude où tombait déjà l’obscurité; et tandis que nous nous éloignions au galop, je les vis timidement chercher leur chemin et après quelques gauches trébuchements de leurs nobles silhouettes, se serrer les uns contre les autres, glisser l’un derrière l’autre, ne plus faire sur le ciel encore rose qu’une seule forme noire, charmante et résignée, et s’effacer dans la nuit.» Je ne repensai jamais à cette page, mais à ce moment-là, quand, au coin du siège où le cocher du docteur plaçait habituellement dans un panier les volailles qu’il avait achetées au marché de Martinville, j’eus fini de l’écrire, je me trouvai si heureux, je sentais qu’elle m’avait si parfaitement débarrassé de ces clochers et de ce qu’ils cachaient derrière eux, que, comme si j’avais été moi-même une poule et si je venais de pondre un oeuf, je me mis à chanter à tue-tête.

"

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Les délices de Proust

Dans une note précédente, je rapprochais inopinément le passage de la petite cuillerée de Proust d'un extrait des Paradis Artificiels de Baudelaire.
Que ce soit une allusion délibérée de Proust, c'est dur à dire, mais ce qui est sûr c'est qu'il tenait Baudelaire en grande estime, comme l'atteste son fameux questionnaire de 1889-90 :

"Mes poètes préférés. - Baudelaire et Alfred de Vigny."

De plus, un peu plus loin dans Combray Baudelaire est explicitement nommé :

"[...] cette sorte de tendresse, de sérieuse douceur dans la pompe et dans la joie qui caractérisent certaines pages de Lohengrin, certaines peintures de Carpaccio, et qui font comprendre que Baudelaire ait pu appliquer au son de la trompette l’épithète de délicieux."

On peut donc penser que dans le cerveau de Proust le mot "délicieux" est relié par un certain nombre de synapses à l'image de Baudelaire. Grâce à Wikisource c'est très facile de rechercher toutes les occurrences de ce mot dans Combray. Il apparaît notamment dans ce passage important où le petit Marcel, mortellement angoissé d'avoir été envoyé au lit sans que sa mère, retenue par des invités, ne vinsse l'embrasser, lui a envoyé un billet par l'intermédiaire de la domestique Françoise :

"[...] puisque cette salle à manger interdite, hostile, où, il y avait un instant encore, la glace elle-même — le « granité » — et les rince-bouche me semblaient receler des plaisirs malfaisants et mortellement tristes parce que maman les goûtait loin de moi, s’ouvrait à moi et, comme un fruit devenu doux qui brise son enveloppe, allait faire jaillir, projeter jusqu’à mon cœur enivré l’attention de maman tandis qu’elle lirait mes lignes. Maintenant je n’étais plus séparé d’elle ; les barrières étaient tombées, un fil délicieux nous réunissait. Et puis, ce n’était pas tout : maman allait sans doute venir !"

(C'est moi qui souligne [sic].) Sa ruse échoue mais il joue le tout pour le tout et descend surprendre sa mère une fois les invités partis. Elle veut le gronder mais son père est suffisamment clairvoyant pour s'apercevoir de sa détresse profonde et les invite, exceptionnellement, à passer la nuit ensemble [il y aurait beaucoup à dire sur les résonances œdipiennes de cet épisode...]. Voici comment Marcel relate la suite :

"Maman s’assit à côté de mon lit ; elle avait pris François le Champi à qui sa couverture rougeâtre et son titre incompréhensible donnaient pour moi une personnalité distincte et un attrait mystérieux. Je n’avais jamais lu encore de vrais romans. J’avais entendu dire que George Sand était le type du romancier. Cela me disposait déjà à imaginer dans François le Champi quelque chose d’indéfinissable et de délicieux. Les procédés de narration destinés à exciter la curiosité ou l’attendrissement, certaines façons de dire qui éveillent l’inquiétude et la mélancolie, et qu’un lecteur un peu instruit reconnaît pour communs à beaucoup de romans, me paraissaient simples — à moi qui considérais un livre nouveau non comme une chose ayant beaucoup de semblables, mais comme une personne unique, n’ayant de raison d’exister qu’en soi — une émanation troublante de l’essence particulière à François le Champi. Sous ces événements si journaliers, ces choses si communes, ces mots si courants, je sentais comme une intonation, une accentuation étrange."

Ce que je trouve intéressant dans ces passages c'est que l'épithète "délicieux" semble lié, chez Proust, d'une part à la figure de la mère, mais aussi, et surtout (en tout cas pour mon propos présent), à l'écriture et à la lecture : ce "fil délicieux" que sa mère "lirait" c'est le billet qu'il lui a écrit, peut-être une des premières choses qu'il ait écrites de sa propre impulsion, sans y être invité par un professeur, lui faisant soudain sentir l'importance vitale que peut avoir l'écriture. Mais la soirée est encore plus riche en révélations, car le petit Marcel va entendre de la bouche de sa mère adulée la lecture de son premier "vrai roman". Et ce qu'il trouve "délicieux", ce n'est pas, comme pour la plupart des enfants, le pouvoir captivant de l'histoire, le suspens, mais ce qui se cache derrière eux, de nature intrinsèquement littéraire, à savoir les "procédés de narration". Pas la surface du roman, mais bien sa structure interne, comme seul la verrait un écrivain. Et de fait c'est bien ce qu'il est devenu ce soir-là, notre petit Marcel, un écrivain, car il a fait lui-même l'expérience de la puissance de l'écrit comme vecteur de nos émotions les plus intenses.

La dernière phrase du second extrait, avec cette opposition "commun/étrange", fait écho à l'épisode de la petite madeleine, où une banale cuillerée provoque quelque chose "d'extraordinaire" en Marcel. Je vous le donne en mille :

"Un plaisir délicieux m'avait envahi, isolé, sans la notion de sa cause".

Cette cause qui échappe aux tentatives enfantines pour la découvrir, l'épithète "délicieux" nous la révèle cependant : c'est le plaisir littéraire ! Mais un plaisir littéraire ici à l'état bruto-brut. Je m'explique. La petite madeleine, gorgée de thé, est aussi gorgée de sens pour Marcel [oui je fais dans la métaphore facile -- un problème ? ; )]. Elle contient le souvenir du temps (et de l'espace !) où la tante de Marcel lui donnait des morceaux de madeleine trempés dans le tilleul, le dimanche matin, à Combray (c'est un roman ; c'est CE roman). Cette essence précieuse dont la madeleine remplit Proust ("ou plutôt cette essence n'était pas en moi, elle était moi.") n'est rien d'autre que la narration littéraire.

À l'appui de cette thèse, cette phrase de Baudelaire, toujours dans les Paradis Artificiels :

"le délire poétique ressemble à celui que m’a procuré une petite cuillerée de confiture [...]"

Et je ne résiste pas à citer encore un passage d'une beauté ahurissante, qui clôt la première partie de Combray :

"Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.

Et dès que j’eus reconnu le goût du morceau de madeleine trempé dans le tilleul que me donnait ma tante (quoique je ne susse pas encore et dusse remettre à bien plus tard de découvrir pourquoi ce souvenir me rendait si heureux), aussitôt la vieille maison grise sur la rue, où était sa chambre, vint comme un décor de théâtre s’appliquer au petit pavillon donnant sur le jardin, qu’on avait construit pour mes parents sur ses derrières (ce pan tronqué que seul j’avais revu jusque-là) ; et avec la maison, la ville, la Place où on m’envoyait avant déjeuner, les rues où j’allais faire des courses depuis le matin jusqu’au soir et par tous les temps, les chemins qu’on prenait si le temps était beau. Et comme dans ce jeu où les Japonais s’amusent à tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli d’eau de petits morceaux de papier jusque-là indistincts qui, à peine y sont-ils plongés s’étirent, se contournent, se colorent, se différencient, deviennent des fleurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnaissables, de même maintenant toutes les fleurs de notre jardin et celles du parc de M. Swann, et les nymphéas de la Vivonne, et les bonnes gens du village et leurs petits logis et l’église et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé."

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Timbuktu

Take a tower in a town.
Face it.
Compare the apparent widths of its base and of its top.
Notice the latter is smaller.
Conclude the tower is apparently trapezoidal.

In case you think it's a classical perspective effect (i.e. all lines seem to converge to a fixed point), repeat the experience, but now with a very broad building (a palace if you can ; or if you liked it when it was vertical, imagine yourself at the top of a tower adjacent to the 8:46 Twin Tower...), and compare the apparent height of its centre to those of its lateral extremities.
Notice the latter are smaller.
Conclude the palace is apparently an almond.


I remember reading in an art theory book (possibly by Gombrich) that this effect is merely an illusion because you actually have to turn your head to compare the different part of the building, so that in the end you're comparing quantities that shouldn't be... I was never able to make sense of this argument : even with my eyes fixed on the centre, my peripheral vision still allows me to perceive this almond effect.

Now most of the people would agree that the edges of the "real" tower -- not the apparent one -- are of course parallel (they would prove it by taking a ruler and measuring the width of the tower at different places). So this tells us something about the meaning of the word "real" : what is considered "real" is not what we perceive but rather an artificially reconstructed idealisation of the perceived objects, that is abstracted from an infinite series of representations acquired from different points of view.

In other words, to "see" a physical object, it is necessary to look at it from all possible sides, travelling across an entire virtual globe around it -- or rotating it in all possible ways in our hand. But in fact we quickly get so good at it during our formation years that just a few glimpses at an object (provided it is not too extraordinary) and we are able to construct a very efficient mental image of its "real" shape.

What about its colour ? Perhaps you would say its colour is what you see when it is lit with pure white light, but you have to take into account the particularities of your visual organs (imagine you're daltonian). The "true" colour of an object is naturally taken to be the colour that most of us would agree upon, i.e. it is defined intersubjectively. [Aristotelian philosophers referred to the colour as an example of "secondary quality" and opposed it to "primary qualities" such as the shape. Throughout history the number of primary qualities kept on decreasing, until it reached absolute zero with Hume (not quite in fact maybe...). My belief is that this distinction is not pertinent, that every quality is secondary.]

Go further : what does the concept of "liberty" "really" mean ? [yes, I know, I am not fully happy with my use of inverted commas myself...] It is also clear that the definition of any concept will require some sort of concertation between the individuals of the group within which the concept is in use. So let me formalize that in the following

Lemma 1.1 The "reality" of an object (either physical or conceptual) is determined by intersubjective agreement.


Keep that in mind, switch it off, and tell me what you see in the picture below. Nothing ? Sure ?


Still not ? What about now ?


Yes, no ? HA ! NOW you see the Dalmatian don't ya ? [Shit I start talking like Palin now ; )]
I saw this picture in an online lecture about cognitive psychology and the lecturer asked the lady that said "HA" the loudest what happened on the screen at that moment. She replied "On the screen nothing, in my brain something happened," which the lecturer, very pleased, repeated : "On the screen nothing, but in the brain -- I couldn't have said any better." At the time I found it rather obvious (selbstverständlich as the German say), but this morning when I woke up I realized it wasn't so. (I should have been alarmed by the fact that the expert's analysis coincided with the old lady's plain common sense, whereas one would expect that profound science would reach the extreme boundaries of common sense and beyond...)

It is NOT obvious that the "real" picture on the screen did not change before and after the realisation of its representational content. Just use Lemma 1.1 : once the entire audience has identified the representation of the Dalmatian in the picture (and you too, and me), it CANNOT be denied its share of "reality".


(Without elaborating any further, I suspect that this kind of considerations should reach their full flavour in the context of the foundations of quantum mechanics...)

(Rigid philosophers like Bertrand Russell would use arguments such as "The table I write on, I can touch it, so it exists, and it exists even if I close my eyes" etc. My impression is that he is under the same spell than the old lady, were she asked to "un-see" the Dalmatian once she's seen it. Very difficult to do, I'll have you know ! The only way I can get myself to do it is by focusing on a small fraction of the picture. That again seems to indicate that "de-realisation" effects are to be expected in the microscopic realm.)

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

La petite madeleine Reloaded

"
Et bientôt, machinalement, accablé par la morne journée et la perspective d'un triste lendemain, je portai à mes lèvres une cuillerée de thé où j'avais laissé s'amollir un morceau de madeleine. Mais à l'instant même où la gorgée mêlée des miettes du gâteau toucha mon palais, je tressaillis, attentif à ce qui se passait d'extraordinaire en moi. Un plaisir délicieux m'avait envahi, isolé, sans la notion de sa cause. Il m'avait aussitôt rendu les vicissitudes de la vie indifférentes, ses désastres inoffensifs, sa brièveté illusoire, de la même façon qu'opère l'amour, en me remplissant d'une essence précieuse : ou plutôt cette essence n'était pas en moi, elle était moi. J'avais cessé de me sentir médiocre, contingent, mortel. D'où avait pu me venir cette puissante joie ? Je sentais qu'elle était liée au goût du thé et du gâteau, mais qu'elle le dépassait infiniment, ne devait pas être de même nature. D'où venait-elle ? Que signifiait-elle ? Où l'appréhender ? Je bois une seconde gorgée où je ne trouve rien de plus que dans la première, une troisième qui m'apporte un peu moins que la seconde. Il est temps que je m'arrête, la vertu du breuvage semble diminuer. Il est clair que la vérité que je cherche n'est pas en lui, mais en moi. Il l'y a éveillée, mais ne la connaît pas, et ne peut que répéter indéfiniment, avec de moins en moins de force, ce même témoignage que je ne sais pas interpréter et que je veux au moins pouvoir lui redemander et retrouver intact, à ma disposition, tout à l'heure, pour un éclaircissement décisif. Je pose la tasse et me tourne vers mon esprit. C'est à lui de trouver la vérité. Mais comment ? Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que l'esprit se sent dépassé par lui-même ; quand lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur où il doit chercher et où tout son bagage ne lui sera de rien. Chercher ? pas seulement : créer. Il est en face de quelque chose qui n'est pas encore et que seul il peut réaliser, puis faire entrer dans sa lumière.
"

C'est là, tel quel, le passage cultissime de la petite madeleine Proustienne, situé à la fin de la première section de la première partie : Combray du premier roman : Du Côté de chez Swann (1913) de la volumineuse somme : À la Recherche du Temps Perdu de Marcel Proust (1871-1922) -- qui n'était pas le dernier des imbéciles.

Dans mon cas en revanche, je ne serais pas aussi assertif, étant donné que la première lecture que j'ai faite de ce passage était manifestement complètement à côté de la plaque... XP [Ceci n'est pas un smiley.]
Néanmoins ! cette interprétation erronée ayant suscité en moi un émoi de grande magnitude et fait se bousculer toutes sortes d'idées creuses et galipétantes dans mon cervelet, c'est d'elle que je vais parler ici.
Caveat (donc) : ci-dessous gît l'oeuvre du malin, car, comme qui dirait, ErrareHvmanvmEstPerseverareDiabolicvm !

Bon. Bien sûr ce sera ultimement pour des raisons psychologiques, à savoir que cette madeleine lui rappelle celles que sa tante lui donnaient lorsqu'il était plus jeune etc., et c'est très bien -- rien à redire -- même si la cause de son émotion ne lui reviendra que beaucoup plus tard, nous dit le narrateur (et à l'heure de la publication j'ignore encore de quoi il sera question...), mais moi ce que j'y ai d'abord lu, dans ce passage, est d'une nature plus abstraite. Je l'ai lu comme ça, à ma guise, parce que ça s'accordait avec des expériences qu'il m'arrive parfois de vivre. Des expériences qui, dans la morosité du quotidien, me ravissent l'âme sans grande cause apparente. La plupart du temps c'est à l'occasion d'une perception visuelle que je ressens cela : une quelconque perception visuelle ! J'entends par là que ce n'est pas l'objet de ma perception qui, par sa prodigieuse beauté, par ses qualités esthétiques extraordinaires, produirait cet effet sur moi (même si ça peut aider), mais bien l'acte perceptif lui-même. Le phénomène de la vision lui-même.

[Minute linguistique : après tout, ne dit-on pas d'une performance qu'elle est "phénoménale" ; ne lâche-t-on pas, sitôt le bout-en-train reparti, "Quel phénomène celui-là !" ? alors qu'en fait un phénomène c'est ce qu'il y a de plus banal, tout est phénomène... (si l'on veut bien)]

Ce qui m'éblouit dans ces moments-là, c'est la possibilité de la perception, de l'interaction entre l'esprit et la matière... Et aussi la "rondeur", la plénitude de la perception.

Il y a une scène du film eXistenZ (1999) de David Cronenberg qui illustre bien ce que j'essaie de dire. Le scénario tourne autour d'un jeu vidéo futuriste tellement perfectionné que les joueurs finissent par ne plus savoir s'il sont dans le jeu ou dans le monde réel (avec une technologie semi-organique, un "pod" aux allures de crapauds qu'on s'enfile dans la moelle épinière, faut pas chercher). Au milieu du film, l'héroïne, qui a conscience d'être dans le jeu, profite d'un moment de désoeuvrement dans une station essence pour admirer les qualités de réalisme du jeu. Elle ramasse un caillou et le jette sur la pompe à essence. Au moment où le caillou percute la pompe se produit un son, "kling". Elle sourit.


Pourquoi sourit-elle ? Ce dont elle jouit ce n'est pas le petit bruit produit par le petit caillou sur la pompe à essence (ce qui, somme toute, serait assez niais), mais la cohérence perceptive (visuelle, sonore, etc.) de l'univers artificiel dans lequel elle est immergée. Ce dont elle s'émerveille pourrait être exprimé (en parodiant Lacan) en une phrase condensée :

"Ça" fait sens.

Les geeks et les Neo-théologiens s'empresseront de dire que si Ça veut bien faire sens, c'est uniquement parce que les programmateurs du jeu l'ont voulu ainsi, et que donc, une fois la métaphore rapportée au monde "réel", c'est à l'infinie bonté du Créateur que l'on doit la présence de sens. A quoi je répondrais a). get a life ! et b). "[...] tout ce que dit la théologie chrétienne est absolument vrai à condition d'être appliqué non pas à un Dieu transcendant et imaginaire, mais à l'Homme réel vivant dans le Monde. Le théologien fait de l'anthropologie sans s'en rendre compte. " (Alexandre Kojève, 1947)
Après les avoir bien bien cassés de la sorte, je retourne pépère à mon propos.

A vrai dire, pas vraiment. Le fil de mes idées s'est rompu. Je repars avec autre chose :

La "cuillerée de thé où j'avais laissé s'amollir un morceau de madeleine" m'a soudain rappelé un passage des Paradis Artificiels (1860) de Baudelaire :

"
Voici la drogue sous vos yeux : un peu de confiture verte, gros comme une noix, singulièrement odorante [...] -- Voilà donc le bonheur ! il remplit la capacité d’une petite cuiller ! le bonheur avec toutes ses ivresses, toutes ses folies, tous ses enfantillages !
"

N'est-ce pas déroutant ?


[Note for self : L'an de grâce 1927 vit la parution de trois ouvrages d'une importance capitale :

1. Sein und Zeit de Heidegger (New College, 2007),
2. Les Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins de Husserl publiées sous la direction de Heidegger, (Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2005),
3. Le Temps Retrouvé de Proust (bien qu'il ne l'ait guère modifié depuis sa mort en 1922).

Moralité : 1927 = gros dossier "temps" !]

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Spider-scientist

I was absorbed in abyssal thoughts about my research when a little black spider landed on my left shoulder from totally nowhere!

I have been quite amazed with spiders recently: how do they manage to build their webs hanging between two unrelated objects? That don't make no sense to me! (Also, the other day when I went running - in fact it was this morning - I was thinking about the fact that spiders always seem to know where they can build their webs and where they don't, for example in a place with a high circulation; but then I thought it certainly is absurd to think about it that way...)

And so, plötzlich, it struck me that a researcher has something to learn from a spider, in fact. Just like the spider, he is flying through the air from one idea to the other, blown by the wind of his imagination, and like the spider, his ultimate goal is the construction of a large web of concepts (able to catch some juicy preys... for the SOUL nigga!).

[As an aside, I would put forth the comment that when Witten was saying string theory is a piece of the XXIst century mathematics (did he venture to say IIIrd millenium?) fallen by chance into the XXth century, that would translate in my metaphor into a spider web with positive slope, built with the help of a favourable wind.]

But that only works if the researcher keeps track of his own thought process. If the line breaks, it won't be possible to relate the distant concepts, and everything is lost. Which, as you may imagine, is just what happened to me that day when the little spider paid me an unexpected visit... She was clearly philosophical enough to know that sometimes when you want to get a message through you have to violate its spirit.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Orphée

Je me suis envoyé Orphée de Jean Cocteau (1950): pas transcendant. C'est plus proche du Testament d'Orphée (1960) que du Sang d'un Poète (1930) - remarque j'aurais pu m'en douter si j'avais un peu plus de jugeote... Plus proche donc d'un rafistolage de plaisanteries (méta-)poétiques d'un vieux Monsieur très convenable que des tâtonnements inspirés d'un amateur d'opium.

Une scène néanmoins a attiré mon attention, par la ressemblance qu'elle recèle avec mon travail de recherche. La Princesse de la Mort exhorte son chauffeur Heurtebise à faire usage de pouvoirs surnaturels pour renvoyer Orphée dans le monde des vivants, auprès de sa femme Eurydice. ("La Mort d'un poète," souligne Cocteau au passage, "doit se sacrifier pour le rendre immortel.") Heurtebise saisit la tête d'Orphée et ferme les yeux, concentré, tandis que la Mort l'encourage:

"
La Mort -- Travaillez, travaillez! Heurtebise je vous aide. Je travaille avec vous.
Ne faiblissez pas!
Comptez! Calculez! Acharnez-vous comme je m'acharne!
Allez: murez-le, il le faut!
Sans la volonté nous sommes des infirmes!
Allez, allez! Allez, allez!
Heurtebise -- Je ne peux pas.
M -- Il faut vouloir Heurtebise! Il le faut!
H -- Je ne peux pas.
M -- Vous travaillez mal. Ne me parlez plus. Enfoncez-vous en vous-mêmes.
Et quittez-vous! Courez! Courez! Volez! Renversez les obstacles!
Vous approchez... Vous arrivez! Je le vois.
H -- J'arrive.
M -- Un dernier effort Heurtebise. Faites-le. Faites-le! Y êtes-vous? Répondez-moi: y êtes-vous?
H -- J'y suis.
M -- Alors en route...
Remontez le temps! Il faut que ce qui a été ne soit plus!
(...)
H -- Je suis très fatigué..
M -- Je m'en moque! Travaillez! Travaillez je vous l'ordonne.
"
Ce genre d'encouragements serait tout à fait ce dont j'ai parfois besoin lorsque je me retrouve face à mon bureau recouvert de trois couches d'articles de physique théorique des hautes énergies...

Thursday, August 21, 2008

First Live Citation

On Monday appeared my paper written with He and Lukas, entitled "An Abundance of Heterotic Vacua" [I tried to put forth something more irreverent like "Get Your Fill of Heterotic Vacua," playing on the full/empty contradiction, or "Heterotic Bundles All Over the Place," to convey the image of some kind of orgy, but some of my collaborators were not so hot about it...]. Given that Ron Donagi was giving a talk on Tuesday at Strings 08 about "Heterotic Standard Models," the eventuality that he would mention our paper was non-negligible. Indeed, his last slide contained a reference that slightly differed from the other by its typography, indicating its late addition. It was just cryptically reading: "[GHL]." Ron undertook to enumerate the authors: "He, Lukas, and... [I was getting excited]... errmmm... I can't remember, never mind."

Great! Thanks Ron! Two thumbs up! :-P
So close to my first live citation, and yet so far...

However I got my revenge today, during Hermann Verlinde's talk on "Holographic Gauge Mediation." I arrived late to that talk because I had already heard it at Eurostrings, so I wasn't following with great attention. I suddenly woke up when I saw my name on the screen: "cf. Gabella, Gherghetta, Giedt." My first paper from my Master project in Minneapolis!

That was a pleasant feeling to have the impression to participate to a collective research effort. (My joy was soon to be a bit tempered by the fact that he then kept referring to us as "some phenomenologists" (in which he wasn't completely wrong, I have to confess...)).

Linde's speech at Strings 08 banquet

The task of entertaining the audience at the end of the Strings 08 banquet at UniMail was accomplished with spirit by Andrei Linde. He started by saying that he was going to make a discourse in the Georgian-Russian fashion, but maybe it was not appropriate... He said that after our visit at the United Nations on Monday, he was seeing two goals of utmost importance: 1). world peace, and 2). experimental evidence for string theory.

Given that we live in an expanding universe, in a few billion years the galaxies will be beyond each other's horizon, and so there will be no intergalactic war any more. First problem solved.

He addressed the second problem with a succession of anecdotes from various famous physicists. One of them was about a Russian scientist (something in Z... I forgot) that once told physicists which were discouraged by the absence of experimental evidences in favour of baryon asymmetry that the fact that parallel lines do not intersect was actually an evidence (he quickly explained what he meant but I couldn't get it). "That is another type of evidence," Andrei said.

Then he talked about Murray Gell-Mann who asked one of his students to measure the height of a tower with a barometer. One week later the student came back and said that he had found three ways of doing it: The first option was to go to the top of the tower, attach a rope to the barometer, slide it down, and then measure the length of the rope. "Myeaaah. What is the second way?" Murray asked. The second option was to go to the top of the tower, throw the barometer down, and count the time it takes to reach the ground. "That is not really what I expected..." The student's third way was to go to the superintendent and tell him: "This barometer is worth about 30 €. It is yours if you tell me the height of the tower."

Andrei's point was that in order to get evidence for string theory, we need to use the barometer in a clever way (measuring the pressure difference at the top and bottom of the tower). There
is no straightforward way to do it (like the first two solutions of the naive student), and all the superintendents left the universe about 13.7 billion years ago (that is, at its creation).

And this clever way is to think about dolphins (not fishes: dolphins!). Dolphins live in water because it is the place where they can live, just as we live on the ground because we can live here. The tiny value of the cosmological constant can be explained in this way, but only at the condition that there exist a huge number of possible universes with different values of it. (Huge as in 10^500, which journalists, as they cannot typeset exponents, write as 10,500... "Anyway: big number.") Yes: anthropic reasoning. [I thought about David Gross at that point, who certainly won't miss on Friday to repeat his warning of last year's conference in Madrid: "Do not give up!"]

Andrei ended his discourse by saying that he could have proposed a toast for the LHC, the biggest machine ever built -- but that would have been too banal. Then for string theory -- not surprising enough. He had to be surprising (Georgian-Russian style!). He finally drank a toast to "You, the people that are making string theory, because we enjoy working together and learning." I found this apparition of a human, relational factor indeed quite surprising in such a context (although it would have been completely trivial in many other contexts).

In summary, Andrei's discourse operated two shifts:
  • A shift from the dream of a unique and unambiguous explanation of everything to the acknowledgement of the relevance of environmental determination.
  • A shift from a machine or a theory to mutual enjoyment.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Baroque Bach

Only once in his lifetime did Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) pose for a painter but it is known that, being a busy man, he actually left the workshop before the end of the session! So even though Haussmann's painting (1748, right) is the best we have, it remains very unreliable. This could have been the end of Bach's iconography, but it is not. In 1895 Bach's body was exhumed, and a sculpture made from his skull (below; recently, a Scottish anthropologist made a computer-modeled reproduction of Bach's bust, shown on the right below).

Imagine that: you come out of your mother's womb, you do your thing, you die. So far so good. But 145 years after your burial, someone removes your body from your grave in Leipzig to look at the shape of your skull and try to figure out what you might have looked like during your time! You'd agree that would be surprising.


But in fact, in the case of Bach, there was a catch: when I said he did his thing, that would be an euphemism to say that was an euphemism. After his death, even though he never thought his music would survive him, but rather that other composers will simply replace it by their own compositions, he came to be considered as the greatest composer that ever lived by such people as Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Debussy, etc.

Bach's musical involvement was absolutely permanent. Jack Gibbons (the pianist-lecturer of that evening) used the -- somewhat dubious -- image that if you were to copy every note he's ever written, you wouldn't achieve it in your lifetime ("Think about it for a minute," he added with humour). Bach must have been mostly writing in one throw, without any correction. Add to this his numerous administrative duties (he even had to teach Latin during his last position in Leipzig, where he was taken only as a third choice!), his immense family of twenty or so children, and you have the picture of an extremely productive composer sleeping barely a couple of hours every night.

Bach's family was so musical that they had it in their blood: a usual Sunday afternoon leisure was to improvise fugues on popular themes, an very technical exercise! (The last of the Goldberg Variations is an illustration of these "games.") The word "Bach" was practically a synonym for "Musiker" (By the way, the equivalence in England was the Gibbons family -- and Jack Gibbons to add that it is not known if there are any living descendants nowadays... (I can think of Beth Gibbons at least.))

I've admired the effects of such a pure dedication to music in a documentary about Ravi Shankar. I had been struck by the fact that most (if not all?) of his children decided to become musicians (his daughter Anoushka Shankar who plays the sitar too, and also of course Norah Jones). The intensity of his passion was powerful enough to diffuse to his children. The documentary had a magical scene where he gives a concert with Anoushka and during his solo you can see her face illuminating by delight and surprise.

[There I saw the beauty of the (rather old-fashioned) tradition of a family business: the son of the baker become a baker and so on. It is sad if this continuation is due to some kind of inertia, but it can also be due to a sincere love of work, a proudness and joy of creation, which acts as a positive force (rather than a negative constraint) on successive generations... The example of Ravi Shankar is less ambiguous here, as his own parents were not musicians, so that the choice of becoming musician was less automatic than in Bach's family.]

Bach's first wife died as he was on a trip, and he found her buried when he came back. He was however to find love again in Anna Magdalena, which was 17 years younger than him. They had a very joyful marriage, as JG illustrated by playing one of the French Suites, if I remember correctly. He said Anna was also an accomplished musician (which is a bit in contradiction with the technical ease of the Notebüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach...). Their passion for music was so fusional that Anna ended up having the same handwriting than her husband, for the greatest confusion of modern musicologists.

The second part of the lecture-concert was devoted to the famous Goldberg Variations (1741). Bach composed them by the request of a Russian Ambassador, Count Kaiserling, who wanted to be distracted during his long nights of insomnia. Goldberg was the name of the Count's personal musician (his Hi-Fi set in some sense), who must have damned Bach every time he had to get up in the middle of the night to play those amazingly hard variations. It is fascinating to imagine the sleepless Count meditating on the infinite depths of the Variations in the darkness of his luxurious room...

Bach died of the sequels of disastrous eye surgery operations. As his blindness was keeping him away from his work, he decided to precipitate a second operation very shortly after the failure of the first. Several months later, he suddenly recovered his full vision for a few hours and then died.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Chat-brole, True/Faux, God::Art !

A note about the French Nouvelle Vague.

In Paris of the late 50's, a group of film critics from the famous Cahiers du Cinéma decided that it was about time to revolutionize the way of making movies. The most prominent ones among them were Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol. They were the kind of guys that could watch ten movies and read ten books every week (specially JLG in fact); that could love american movies and pop culture religiously but stand up in the middle of an academic movie to say "C'est de la merde!" (again, JLG). And so they went on shooting four or five movies every year (yes, mostly JLG).

My point tonight is that I've been watching a few movies by Truffaut (Jules et Jim (1962)) and Chabrol (La Rupture (1970), Poulet au Vinaigre (1985), Les Noces Rouges (1973)), and I really cannot put them on the same level than the Godard's masterpieces such as A Bout de Souffle (1960) and Pierrot le Fou (1965). I find them unquestionably inferior.

Take Jules and Jim: it seems to me that it is nothing else but the work of someone who is very much willing to overcome old-fashioned ways of conceiving existence, but that is unfortunately unable to come up with something fresh and interesting to replace them, and ends up reproducing them in a transvestite way. (A bit like a rebellious kid who cannot go beyond his anger at his parents is doomed to recreate what he hates in them so much...)
Also, I could find a lot of cinematographic ideas that have been properly stolen from A Bout de Souffle. For example, Jeanne Moreau is saying at one point "Avant de vous connaître je ne riais jamais. J'étais comme ça..." and she makes faces that are frozen on the screen for a few seconds each time. It is of course directly inspired by the sequence of ABdS in which Jean-Paul Belmondo is looking at his face in the mirror and takes various exaggerated expressions...

Also, the supposedly "tragically beautiful" ending, is just stupid, pointless, and nihilist in comparison to ABdS's ending. At least, when Godard goes into tragic, he does it with the pinch of ironic ambiguity necessary to make it more than the banal expression of an existential mal-être: Lying on the street mortally wounded by the police, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) mumbles something like "chvraiment dégueulasse" ('mreally disgusting), and dies. But Patricia the American did not get it, and a man interprets (freely) what Michel said: "Il a dit: vous êtes vraiment une dégueulasse!" She looks inside the camera and says: "Qu'est-ce que c'est, dégueulasse?" FIN.
Alive, Michel and Patricia couldn't understand each other ("Je te parlais de moi, et toi tu me parlais de toi; alors que j'aurais dû parler de toi, et toi de moi..."), and death comes not as a resolution to this tension (like some kind of electric earthing), but on the contrary it comes to exacerbate the misunderstanding: his mea culpa degenerating into an accusation, and the very meaning of the words vanishing into interrogation dots... FIN.

In my sense, Truffaut takes himself way too seriously. He seems to believe that there is something edifying in the portrayal of a pathetic surrender to fatality. Godard knows that just the contrary is true: "La morrt ne peut jamais zêtrre une solution!" (Fritz Lang in Le Mépris (1963)). The passionate suicide at the end of Pierrot le Fou transcends the personal misery of Ferdinand by resorting to ancestral quasi-tribal (shamanic!) rituals: he paints his face in blue, and wraps it with a first layer of yellow dynamites and then a second of red dynamites. He climbs to the highest mountain, lights the wick, but suddenly realizes: "Après tout, chuis con! Merde, merde..." Too late: Boum! By going through the immemorial ceremonials that symbolize the travel to the other world, this individual comes to a more global perception of his life, and understand how it can still be preserved in this wider context. (Or is it just me being silly?)

[Here you might think: But hey, you were fustigating Truffaut for reproducing old values, and now you make the apology of Godard for going back to ancestral paganism?! And you would be right; in some sense. But I'd say that although I find it pretty sad to bluntly copy what the previous generation was used to do, recreating the magical actions that must have been going on inside prehistoric tribes where the collective unconscious has its roots is damn fine with me!]

I have also been rather disappointed by Chabrol, which I nevertheless learned to love through movies like Le Boucher (1970), another one in which Isabelle Huppert savagely murders an entire bourgeois family (La Cérémonie (1995)), and also some of his latest movies like Merci pour le Chocolat (2000) (even though I left the first time I saw it at an open-air cinema. I remember being deeply moved when, after the final rape/murder scene, the old auntie who killed both her parents with impunity in her youth says to her niece: "Le temps n'existe pas ma chérie. C'est un présent perpétuel"...).
La Rupture is kind of interesting, but again there is a very simplistic portrayal of the society, with the bad rich guys that want to crush the weaker ones, the nymphomaniac, the old ladies, etc. The only fascinating scene is the LSD deus ex machina at the end (but it comes a bit too late to be visionary, 1968 is already behind...). Les Noces Rouges is quite nicer, and almost brings Chabrol's redemption, as it could be seen as a satire of the fake adventurousness of bourgeois lovers, which can bring themselves to kill the weak wife and the strong (decidedly too modern) husband, but not to conceive that they could have just left their beloved little town altogether instead... The last image is a close-up of their handkerchiefs as we hear the voice of the commissioner who just arrested them ask them: "But I don't understand: Why didn't you simply leave?" - "Leave?? ... No, we never thought about leaving." All they could think about was to change this or that disturbing detail in their usual picture, but to start afresh with an entirely new canvas was just inconceivable...

Monday, August 11, 2008

Unbelievable Franz Liszt

So I went to one of the conferences-concerts given by the pianist Jack Gibbons the other day, and that one was about Franz Liszt (1811-1886). He started by saying that if someone was ever to make a movie about Liszt's life, and keep to the facts with the highest strictness, then he would indefectibly be accused of exaggeration. Nice image - though not so original of course (unlike the 1841 daguerreotype above).

But first a word on the pianist-lecturer. Born in 1962, Gibbons apparently started to play piano at 10 but already at the age of 15 he was giving his first professional performance. And in fact it was in that very same Holywell Music Room ("the first purpose-built concert hall in the world" (1748)), with that very same Sonata in B minor by Liszt, on which he ended that night! It was very touching to see this (I wouldn't say old, let's say mature) pianist come back to the exact same circumstances in which everything began for him (even more so by taking into account that in 2001 he almost died in a car accident). He recorded many CDs and is a world-authority on Gershwin.

So that night he played about ten pieces by Liszt and told stories about his life between them. Here is what I recall:

Liszt, just like Mozart before him, was a child prodigy, and him tour the entire world with his father, amassing a huge fortune that was to ensure his wealth until the end of his life. He had such a magnetic personality that people treated him as a rock star, collecting his cigar stubs and glasses he'd drunk in. Beethoven himself was so impressed by his playing that he came on stage to kiss him - although by the time he was already profoundly deaf... Liszt was the first pianist to give concerts alone, without any other musicians, and the word piano "recitals" was coined after his kind of performances. His concerts were actually quite free, as he often stopped his playing to start chatting with members of the audience for a while. He also had a number of tricks that he loved to play on the audience: for instance he would engage in an impossibly fast Tarantella, which, at the precise instant where he couldn't possibly finish what he had started, he would suddenly interrupt to rescue a lady in the first row (his accomplice) that had fainted (the day the lady forgot to faint at his signal, he had no other option than to faint himself...).

During his youth (and after) he was perpetually falling in love with ladies and religions, that he feverishly worshiped one after the other. He was both deeply romantic and religious.
He was to find his soul mate at 36 in the person of the immensely rich Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein (any connection to Ludwig?). She persuaded him to dedicate himself to composition, and he entered the second phase of his life, much darker and tempered by doubts. In spite of all their efforts, Rome would not allow Carolyne's divorce, which would eventually lead her into madness: she locked herself into a cell, smoked obsessively, and produced a 24-volumes critics of the catholic church...

Liszt's compositions did not receive a warm welcome; he was eclipsed by the genius of his son-in-law Richard Wagner. He considered it a duty to teach everything he learned about piano, and never charged any of his numerous students. He was so generous that he gave money to his friends until he consumed his entire fortune. He died ruined, alone and insecure.

Among the most admirable pieces played by Gibbons that night were Funérailles, written a few days after Chopin's death in 1849, which begins by an astonishing repetitive sound of funeral bell; Nuages Gris, a premonition of Debussy's impressionism; and of course the most famous Sonata in B minor, basically constructed around four small musical ideas.
Liszt is also well-known for having transposed a lot of other composers pieces, and for his first bis Gibbons chose a transcription of Schumann (the second bis was his own composition, apparently to make sure that it would be the last...).

I was hoping that he would also play the transcription of Bach's Prelude BWV 543, that Yvonne Lefèbure played so gorgeously well, but that didn't happen. Maybe at Gibbons' next conference-concert on Bach this Wednesday!

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Le Père Goriot

Le Père Goriot, publié en 1835, est souvent considéré comme la première concrétisation des intentions de Balzac de composer sa Comédie Humaine (appelée d'abord plus crument Etudes Sociales), un ensemble de récits décrivant la société de son temps à travers une panoplie de personnages récurrents.
L'origine de l'intrigue trouve sa source dans une brève note télégraphique dans son album:

"Un brave homme - pension bourgeoise - 600 F de rentes - s'étant dépouillé pour ses fille qui, toutes deux, ont 50 000 F de rentes - mourant comme un chien."

A ce stade, il était encore loin du chef d'oeuvre achevé, mais bref l'essence est là. (Je trouve très émouvant de voir l'idée littéraire de Père Goriot dans un état de telle concision, comme d'admirer la petitesse de la graine qui a donné naissance à un immense arbre...)

Les dernières pages du livre, qui décrivent la lente mort du Père Goriot et les désistements de ses filles, m'ont profondément touché; la dernière phrase m'a cependant laissé songeur.

"(...) Le jour tombait, un humide crépuscule agaçait les nerfs, il regarda la tombe et y ensevelit sa dernière larme de jeune homme, cette larme arrachée par les saintes émotions d'un coeur pur, une de ces larmes qui, de la terre où elles tombent, rejaillissent jusque dans les cieux. Il se croisa les bras, contempla les nuages, et, le voyant ainsi, Christophe le quitta.

Rastignac, resté seul, fit quelques pas vers le haut du cimetière et vit Paris tortueusement couché le long des deux rives de la Seine où commençaient à briller les lumières. Ses yeux s'attachèrent presque avidement entre la colonne de la place Vendôme et le dôme des Invalides, là où vivait ce beau monde dans lequel il avait voulu pénétrer. Il lança sur cette ruche bourdonnante un regard qui semblait par avance en pomper le miel, et dit ces mots grandioses: "A nous deux maintenant!"

Et pour premier acte du défi qu'il portait à la Société, Rastignac alla dîner chez madame de Nucingen. "

J'ai d'abord été déstabilisé par cette pirouette finale, de laquelle je ne parvenais à tirer aucun sens: comment Eugène irait-il tranquillement dîner chez une des filles de Goriot (de laquelle il était amoureux) après une pareille tragédie? Soit il lui en veut terriblement de ne pas s'être montrée à l'enterrement et il y va pour lui faire des reproches, soit il s'avère qu'elle était dans l'impossibilité absolue de s'y rendre et il y va pour partager sa tristesse déchirante. Mais en aucune façon ne paraît-il pouvoir s'agir d'un "dîner" ce soir-là!

J'ai lu dans la préface notamment que cette dernière phrase témoigne de l'arrivisme d'Eugène. Ses sentiments provoqués par la mort de Goriot seraient bien vite évacués en faveur de sa volonté de pouvoir social. Je rejette cette interprétation, je crois ses émotions sincères, et l'emploi du plus que parfait ("avait voulu") indique bien que ses ambitions sociales ne le tourmentent plus.

Ce à quoi j'aboutis est qu'Eugène entreprend désormais de détruire la "Société" de l'intérieur, faisant siens les principes du forçat Vautrin. Il se lance dans une guerre vengeresse contre elle non pas de but en blanc, ce qui serait désespéré, mais en s'y infiltrant comme un virus pour la pourrir.

Cette méthode me paraît d'une efficacité douteuse... Je découvre un Balzac bien plus radical et belliqueux que je ne l'avais imaginé. Une telle hargne destructrice me fait venir à l'esprit (sans nuances) quelques autres défricheurs sans merci comme le Marquis de Sade, Stirner, Schopenhauer, et consorts. J'estime ces auteurs, j'apprécie la nécessité de leur oeuvres dévastatrices, mais enfin après tout, je ne peux pas en rester là. Je me pose la question: Une fois la mauvaise herbe ratiboisée, que comptez-vous planter Messieurs? Quelles nouvelles valeurs inventez-vous pour remplacer les déchéances?

Ce n'est pas que je veuille sous-entendre "Vous n'avez rien de mieux à proposer, donc ne touchez à rien!", ce n'est pas ça. Au contraire, comme je l'ai dit, j'applaudis tous les dégâts qu'ils ont pu faire. Seulement, s'arrêter là, au creux de la phase destructrice, et ne pas envisager comment recréer du relief à nouveau, ça me paraît un peu court.
A première vue.

A mieux y regarder, je me demande si je ne suis pas un peu trop positiviste sur ce coup-là. N'est-ce pas naïf d'imaginer qu'on puisse, comme ça, débarquer avec des nouvelles valeurs fraîchement moulues, et en faire offrande à la communauté pour la plus grande félicité? Ca ressemble suspicieusement à un des buts les plus niais des doctrines religieuses...

Question: Balzac ne propose-t-il vraiment rien comme alternative à l'hypocrisie de la haute société parisienne?

Autre question: A supposer que c'était le cas, en se contentant de peindre ce qu'elle a d'inacceptable, n'induirait-il pas tout de même chez le lecteur la volonté de se détacher de ses façons odieuses, et donc d'en embrasser de nouvelles?

A la première question je répondrais qu'il est possible que Balzac veuille promouvoir des attitudes courageuses et solidaires, comme celles d'Eugène et de l'étudiant en médecine Bianchon au chevet de Goriot agonisant (ou celle de Mme de Beauséant). Sans doute oppose-t-il la sincérité à la superficialité vénale, mais tout le monde est d'accord là-dessus, non, si?

La seconde question me plaît bien. J'aime l'idée qu'il suffise de décrire quelque chose, de la mettre sous les feux de la conscience, pour fournir à la fois le pouvoir de la faire changer. Je reviendrai sans doute sur cette idée et ses nombreux avatars.

Je termine cette note confuse sur une réplique de Rastignac qui m'a particulièrement surpris:

"(...) Les deux étudiants, frappés de ce terrible éclat d'une force de sentiment qui survivait à la pensée, laissèrent tomber chacun des larmes chaudes sur le moribond qui jeta un cri de plaisir aigu.
- Nasie ! Fifine ! dit-il.
- Il vit encore, dit Bianchon.
- A quoi ça lui sert-il ? dit Sylvie.
- A souffrir, répondit Rastignac."

Souffrance et joie ne s'opposent pas, et enrichissent. Mais ça, les servantes qui aspirent au bonheur monolithique ne peuvent pas le concevoir.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Shakespeare's As You Like It

I went to see a play by Shakespeare the other day, entitled As You Like It. 'twas in the beautiful garden of Trinity College! Taking into account that Shakespeare's language could be quite awkward, especially for a non-native speaker, and that I was sitting completely on the side behind a big guy with a broken neck that was hiding most of the scenes to me (I ended up quite liking him nevertheless, as he and his wife were among the most strongly laughing people in the audience), it isn't hard to imagine that some small subtleties (say 60 per cent of the play) escaped my understanding.

From what I gathered, the play is about the son of a banished duke, Orlando, who gains the love of her cousin (?) Rosalind by beating up in a formal fight the wrestler hired by his brother to kill him. He falls in love too, but unfortunately is forced to flee. Her love is also banished, and decides to take the disguise of a man (for some reason, which the guy in front of me must have understood thoroughly). They meet again in the forest, but she stays under cover (did he break his neck in a car accident?). So naturally the rest of the play for Rosalind consists of testing the loyalty of his love to her and finding the way to reveal her true identity to him---and to the foolish girl who fell in love with her. The play ends in a happy quadruple wedding, celebrated in an uninhibited orgiastic dance. Not the deepest of Shakespeare's plays, nor the most brilliant actors either, but rather fun in any case.

What really interested me was the short epilogue written for the actor playing Rosalind (I emphasize):

It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue;
but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord
the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs
no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no
epilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes,
and good plays prove the better by the help of good
epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am
neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with
you in the behalf of a good play! I am not
furnished like a beggar, therefore to beg will not
become me: my way is to conjure you; and I'll begin
with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love
you bear to men, to like as much of this play as
please you: and I charge you, O men, for the love
you bear to women--as I perceive by your simpering,
none of you hates them--that between you and the
women the play may please. If I were a woman I
would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased
me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I
defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good
beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my
kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

Exeunt



So we have sweet Rosalind, who spent more than half of the play pretending to be a man which we spectators knew was really a woman, speaking to us not as a character, but as the comedian playing her---a man in Shakespeare's time! (although it was a proper girl that day in the gardens.) Funny Will is just messing up with our gender preconceptions here:

During the play did you, if you're a man, fall in love with the beautiful Rosalind, or did you, if you're a woman, fall in love with the spiritual man she's been faking?

In either case what do you say now that Rosalind shows you what's really under her dress?

This kind of Brechtian distanciation effect was quite visionary.
(The last I saw was in Cassavetes' Opening Night (1977), specially at the moment where the perturbed actress asks for a light from the stage to the backstage to light her cigarette.)