I am currently reading (finishing!) a book called "The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing. Having read the preface to the 1972 edition of the book (the book was first published in 1962) I have tried to read it purely as a novel. Not as a political statement, or a feminist manifiesto or a treaty on mental disease. I have found that for me (and this for me is very important, for apparently this book is about a different subject for each person who reads it) this book is about thinking and writing, and how what we think is not what we write. Writing about one's life is difficult. Not because you can't make a record of what you do, what you say, who you meet, but because that record is necessarily incomplete.
I have kept a diary since I was about eight years old. It is not a continuous diary, for I have never been able to be constant about what I write, but I write in it once every year, or every two years. My favourite thing about the diary is the object itself, the notebook I write it in. I still find it as beautiful as when I first bought it. It is a design of sheep flying around a light bulb, and it has something about counting sheep on it. It's blue, which is what probably attracted me to it in the first place. When I read back on this diary, I am always shocked that I recognize myself perfectly but that I rarely think "That's me". Even recent entries aren't me, and I don't even think that they were me when I wrote them. It is partly because I mostly write in the diary when I'm feeling sad or sorry for myself, or when I have an idea. Writing like this makes the diary very moany and one-sided. Another thing is that I jot things down of the real world, but not of the dream world, which makes it hard to remember what the dreams I mention in the pages were about. Not that I'm a dreamer. I rarely remember my dreams, and when I do it is mostly due to who is in them rather than to the strangeness of the dream. Once every few months, however, I have a dream from which I wake with a terrible sense of irreality. It's a terrifying feeling. The world is unfamiliar. People are unfamiliar. I feel like everyone is a stranger. It is a heightened sense of individuality, and I mistrust everyone. It's horrible, waking up knowing that no one, not my parents, not my best friends, not even my dog knows who I am, they're different from me. Why would they understand me at all? When they talk to me on these days I feel like they're trying to trick me, to lure me into a sense of familiarity that shouldn't be there: they're different from me, how can they ever understand me? But at the same time, I remember that just the day before I felt about them that they were close to me, that they knew me and understood me, that, in a way, they were home to me, and I miss the feeling and I want to be that person again. These days are horrible. They're doubled. The feeling slowly wears off, but doesn't go away completely until the next day. I hadn't recognized this feeling anywhere else until I read "The Golden Notebook".
The book is wonderfully written, but I would not recommend it. It is a painful book to read. It is hard. The main character is, if not incapable of happiness, at least very incapacitated for it. It is difficult for me to read a long book without any joy in it. My first experience of this was reading George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. This book depressed me so much I decided never to read a book by the same author again. Now I'm reading a different book, not as depressing because what happens in it isn't as terrible, but still a book that's taking an emotional toll on me. Why do I read these books, knowing that they're hard for me, that, as much as I enjoy reading them (perversely enough), they don't make me happy? I guess it's because they teach me. About feelings. About different types of feelings. But I prefer joyful books. And if I were ever a writer I would like to think I write joyful books. Midnight Children is a joyful book. It's not a happy book, never, but it's joyful. The characters take life by the storm. They live, and they live big, and I suspect they don't know any other way. This kind of book makes me happy.
Long ago, someone said to me (and I've heard it repeated infinite times since) that reading is a joy until you are almost finishing a book, and then you slow down, you want to savour it, you wish you'd read it more slowly. I know now this is not exactly true. This is true of joyful books. With books which aren't joyful, I read constantly, at a speed that will let me take the book in without breaking me down but fast enough that I know the book will finish. I enjoy the book, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't finish a book that I didn't like, but I also realize that part of me hates it. This doesn't happen with joyful books. Joyful books make me want to read on, at all time, until about ten pages are left. And then I stop. Read slowly. Go back. Try not to finish. But of course I finish. I like nothing better than a complete story. And it gives me the chance to start a new one.
Friday, 30 November 2012
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
On the origins of sitting
Sitting down. I wonder. Did prehistoric humans sit down? When did "sitting down" become a thing? And by "sitting down", I don't mean sitting cross legged (or in any other position) on the floor, I mean sitting down on a chair. So I guess the question is really to do with the origins of chairs then? When was the first chair devised? But then, no, people could sit down before chairs, on rocks or tree stumps of the appropriate size. So one assumes that sitting down must be an intrinsically human characteristic. Sitting down must first have occurred when the first human sat down, both things (sitting down and being human) being inextricably linked. Some may argue that this isn't necessarily true, and of course they'd be right. But why would humans spend 2, 3, 700, 8000 years not sitting down and then decide to sit? It's not an elegant explanation, that sitting down appeared after human beings. No: sitting down must have originated at the same time human beings did. Which of course leads me to the subject of this blog post: the origins of (not sitting) writing.
I am not going to be as naïve as to suggest that writing has existed as long as human beings have. Even today (though it's becoming more and more rare) one can encounter human groups who have their own language but no writing system. No, writing did not originate at the same time as human beings did. However, I challenge anthropologists to find, amongst these groups of illiterate humans, a group where none of the members, upon being asked to explain how to get to a certain landmark, will crouch to the ground and draw a map on the earth. Philosophers (and linguists, of course) will argue that this is not writing, and they would be (theoretically) correct. Language, especially writing, is made of symbols, figures for which we have chosen either a meaning or a sound arbitrarily. Symbols don't hold a direct relationship with what they represent, they represent what they represent because we (humans) have arbitrarily decided that they should. A map is not composed of symbols, philosophers will argue, a map is composed of signals, it is a direct representation of the world. And for the most part I agree, there is a direct relationship between what is being drawn and what is being represented. However, at one point, this illiterate man who is drawing the map for me looks at me and says to me (of course I speak his language, this whole experience would make absolutely no sense if I didn't): "Here is the big fireplace", drawing a circle with an X inside, "and here, just beyond it is the muddy ford that becomes a river in the wet season", he says, drawing a few lines. These are symbols. They are not signs anymore. We have agreed on what these symbols mean, and no one else, unless we told them the code, would automatically infer what they mean. So is this writing? I don't know. I don't like to say yes, for writing is more complex than that. Writing is being able to explain something as fully with symbols as we would be able to speaking, but then, speaking is already symbolic. Which means that writing is simply a code over a code, a representation of a representation of the world. However, I don't like to say no, for this man and I, having agreed that a circle with a cross means a fire and that a few lines mean a ford, can now use this to communicate when we cannot talk to each other, the whole purpose of writing.
I personally like writing. I do it every day, and if others didn't write I wouldn't be able to read. Yes, to me writing is a great tool. However, when thinking about the origins of writing I need to think of the utility of writing. I believe, though I may of course be wrong, that writing did not first originate to please the sensitive souls who wanted to express their innermost thoughts but not tell everyone around them. No, writing originated, as most human things have, because it was practical. I can see several advantages to writing as opposed to speaking: being able to relay a message without it being corrupted by an intermediary, being able to have a record of an agreement, being able to recall something without spending the time to committing it to memory (although this works both ways, I find that people I know who have difficulty reading and writing have prodigious memories, and I suspect this is due to them using them on occasions when I would just write things down)... I don't see any of these advantages being needed in a small hunter gatherer group. You wouldn't need to relay messages through intermediaries, agreements between members of the group would be so necessary to survival of the group as a whole that they would be generally known and respected, and since small groups would usually remain together, there would be enough time for knowledge to be passed on, more than enough time to help someone commit to memory what they needed to know.
So what is the origin of writing? I see two possibilities: an increase in population and travelling. Probably both. I wouldn't be surprised if (when we are able to time travel, of course) the first records of writing are maps. Instructions for scouts or travelers first appearing when horse riding became more widespread and people started moving in larger radiuses. The other option is that, once groups started becoming bigger, probably after the Neolithic revolution, writing became necessary because agreements weren't kept as readily, since in bigger groups, there is less interdependence for survival, and small untrustworthy acts wouldn't be punished as severely as they might in a small group. In this situation, records would be needed to ensure that deals and agreements and laws were upheld. Then, of course, there is the possibility that both happened at the same time.
I personally find the first option more attractive, it being an active example of communication, arising from a need to help other people, rather than from a need to make sure that people are true to their promises, but I suspect that most linguists and historians will disagree with them.
Now, what really interests me about this whole discussion isn't the appearance of writing. What I really spend hours wondering is when writing started to be more than a tool and started being a reflection of thoughts and a vehicle for stories. Was it someone deciding to collect the oral stories? Someone deciding to record a story-tellers collection because they were leaving soon and there wasn't time to commit the stories to memory? Somehow I don't think so. I like to think that writing a story is different to telling a story. For one thing, when one tells a story, one needs an audience. This makes told stories less personal, less dark than some written ones. Writing is more of a reflective process. It is closer to thinking in that what you write does not have to be released to an audience. Many of us keep notebooks or diaries that no one reads, except (on occasion) ourselves. Writing is a way of recording our thoughts, of recording ourselves. It strikes me every time I read my notebooks, there is more there reflecting how much I have changed than I can remember.
I am not going to be as naïve as to suggest that writing has existed as long as human beings have. Even today (though it's becoming more and more rare) one can encounter human groups who have their own language but no writing system. No, writing did not originate at the same time as human beings did. However, I challenge anthropologists to find, amongst these groups of illiterate humans, a group where none of the members, upon being asked to explain how to get to a certain landmark, will crouch to the ground and draw a map on the earth. Philosophers (and linguists, of course) will argue that this is not writing, and they would be (theoretically) correct. Language, especially writing, is made of symbols, figures for which we have chosen either a meaning or a sound arbitrarily. Symbols don't hold a direct relationship with what they represent, they represent what they represent because we (humans) have arbitrarily decided that they should. A map is not composed of symbols, philosophers will argue, a map is composed of signals, it is a direct representation of the world. And for the most part I agree, there is a direct relationship between what is being drawn and what is being represented. However, at one point, this illiterate man who is drawing the map for me looks at me and says to me (of course I speak his language, this whole experience would make absolutely no sense if I didn't): "Here is the big fireplace", drawing a circle with an X inside, "and here, just beyond it is the muddy ford that becomes a river in the wet season", he says, drawing a few lines. These are symbols. They are not signs anymore. We have agreed on what these symbols mean, and no one else, unless we told them the code, would automatically infer what they mean. So is this writing? I don't know. I don't like to say yes, for writing is more complex than that. Writing is being able to explain something as fully with symbols as we would be able to speaking, but then, speaking is already symbolic. Which means that writing is simply a code over a code, a representation of a representation of the world. However, I don't like to say no, for this man and I, having agreed that a circle with a cross means a fire and that a few lines mean a ford, can now use this to communicate when we cannot talk to each other, the whole purpose of writing.
I personally like writing. I do it every day, and if others didn't write I wouldn't be able to read. Yes, to me writing is a great tool. However, when thinking about the origins of writing I need to think of the utility of writing. I believe, though I may of course be wrong, that writing did not first originate to please the sensitive souls who wanted to express their innermost thoughts but not tell everyone around them. No, writing originated, as most human things have, because it was practical. I can see several advantages to writing as opposed to speaking: being able to relay a message without it being corrupted by an intermediary, being able to have a record of an agreement, being able to recall something without spending the time to committing it to memory (although this works both ways, I find that people I know who have difficulty reading and writing have prodigious memories, and I suspect this is due to them using them on occasions when I would just write things down)... I don't see any of these advantages being needed in a small hunter gatherer group. You wouldn't need to relay messages through intermediaries, agreements between members of the group would be so necessary to survival of the group as a whole that they would be generally known and respected, and since small groups would usually remain together, there would be enough time for knowledge to be passed on, more than enough time to help someone commit to memory what they needed to know.
So what is the origin of writing? I see two possibilities: an increase in population and travelling. Probably both. I wouldn't be surprised if (when we are able to time travel, of course) the first records of writing are maps. Instructions for scouts or travelers first appearing when horse riding became more widespread and people started moving in larger radiuses. The other option is that, once groups started becoming bigger, probably after the Neolithic revolution, writing became necessary because agreements weren't kept as readily, since in bigger groups, there is less interdependence for survival, and small untrustworthy acts wouldn't be punished as severely as they might in a small group. In this situation, records would be needed to ensure that deals and agreements and laws were upheld. Then, of course, there is the possibility that both happened at the same time.
I personally find the first option more attractive, it being an active example of communication, arising from a need to help other people, rather than from a need to make sure that people are true to their promises, but I suspect that most linguists and historians will disagree with them.
Now, what really interests me about this whole discussion isn't the appearance of writing. What I really spend hours wondering is when writing started to be more than a tool and started being a reflection of thoughts and a vehicle for stories. Was it someone deciding to collect the oral stories? Someone deciding to record a story-tellers collection because they were leaving soon and there wasn't time to commit the stories to memory? Somehow I don't think so. I like to think that writing a story is different to telling a story. For one thing, when one tells a story, one needs an audience. This makes told stories less personal, less dark than some written ones. Writing is more of a reflective process. It is closer to thinking in that what you write does not have to be released to an audience. Many of us keep notebooks or diaries that no one reads, except (on occasion) ourselves. Writing is a way of recording our thoughts, of recording ourselves. It strikes me every time I read my notebooks, there is more there reflecting how much I have changed than I can remember.
Always waiting...
I write this while getting back home on the tube after work. Since starting my job in September I spend approximately three hours on the tube every weekday. Most days, this doesn't bother me. I listen to music, catch up on reading (currently The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, not my favourite book but I have to admit it's fantastically written), catch up on work reading (this is an entirely different thing from reading as anyone who studies or works in a science related field can tell you) or write. I do some of my best writing in the tube, probably because it opens me up to different types of people that I might not see otherwise during my average day. Sometimes, however, I find myself reading Metro, tapping my foot annoyed at the content, or doing nothing at all. It's these moments that I start thinking, and I get worried.
Life is short, or so they say, and I like to think that I'm taking advantage of my time, but the truth is that I spend countless hours just sitting, doing nothing much. Procrastinating. It's one thing to procrastinate from work (during exam time I've been known to produce 20000 words of fiction in one day, just to avoid revising), but it's a completely different thing to procrastinate from life. Of course, sometimes you need a break, I completely get that. Five minutes to see what friends have been up to on Facebook, or skimming through Metro in the morning, especially if you've had little sleep and concentrating on anything more complex than footballers' love lives seems impossible. The problem is the amount of time I spend sitting on my desk refreshing Facebook even though I know there's going to be nothing new since I last refreshed it five seconds ago, or reading Metro cover to cover. Or just the time that I spend sitting on the tube staring blankly out of the window. It's depressing. Especially when I think of the amount of time I already spend on useful but "non-constructive" tasks, such as changing clothes, putting shoes on (I hate the amount of time I spend putting shoes on and off, I were there were an all purpose shoe), paying the bills, checking my internet allowance... Small things that I worry about but that all in all don't have an impact on my happiness. Wouldn't this time be better spent hanging out with friends, or listening to music, or playing?
I try to minimise wasted time commuting by reading, listening to music, and lately, writing. It's more productive than sitting on the tube staring blankly at the person in front of you. Yet so many people seem to sit for hours in the tube staring blankly at each other. I wonder if they just never think of the amount of time they're wasting? Or have they just come to the conclusion I refuse to think about: that it doesn't matter what we do in the tube, or at work, or in our lives, because we're all mortals, and death is the same for all of us? I hope they haven't. It would make the world a darker place. And it follows that if life and what you do with it doesn't matter, then why live at all? No, I'd rather not think about it. I may privately believe that life has no point, but come on! It can be so much fun, it has to be worth making the most of it.
Life is short, or so they say, and I like to think that I'm taking advantage of my time, but the truth is that I spend countless hours just sitting, doing nothing much. Procrastinating. It's one thing to procrastinate from work (during exam time I've been known to produce 20000 words of fiction in one day, just to avoid revising), but it's a completely different thing to procrastinate from life. Of course, sometimes you need a break, I completely get that. Five minutes to see what friends have been up to on Facebook, or skimming through Metro in the morning, especially if you've had little sleep and concentrating on anything more complex than footballers' love lives seems impossible. The problem is the amount of time I spend sitting on my desk refreshing Facebook even though I know there's going to be nothing new since I last refreshed it five seconds ago, or reading Metro cover to cover. Or just the time that I spend sitting on the tube staring blankly out of the window. It's depressing. Especially when I think of the amount of time I already spend on useful but "non-constructive" tasks, such as changing clothes, putting shoes on (I hate the amount of time I spend putting shoes on and off, I were there were an all purpose shoe), paying the bills, checking my internet allowance... Small things that I worry about but that all in all don't have an impact on my happiness. Wouldn't this time be better spent hanging out with friends, or listening to music, or playing?
I try to minimise wasted time commuting by reading, listening to music, and lately, writing. It's more productive than sitting on the tube staring blankly at the person in front of you. Yet so many people seem to sit for hours in the tube staring blankly at each other. I wonder if they just never think of the amount of time they're wasting? Or have they just come to the conclusion I refuse to think about: that it doesn't matter what we do in the tube, or at work, or in our lives, because we're all mortals, and death is the same for all of us? I hope they haven't. It would make the world a darker place. And it follows that if life and what you do with it doesn't matter, then why live at all? No, I'd rather not think about it. I may privately believe that life has no point, but come on! It can be so much fun, it has to be worth making the most of it.
Sunday, 25 November 2012
Working in science
It's Sunday morning. What was a beautiful day a few hours ago, when I first opened the blinds, has turned into the usual grayish London day, and I've just realized I've been procrastinating for a few hours. So why not start the blog? At least that way I won't feel so guilty about not processing the images for my lab meeting in two weeks time (two weeks!).
I have to do a presentation on the work I am doing at my lab in the NIMR. I am a sandwich student there, and (as a scientist) it's an amazing place to work. Demanding, sure, but people are there for the science, they know what they're talking about and they are happy to explain even quite complex stuff.
I've learnt more in the past couple of months than in some modules at Imperial College, but that's the whole point of doing a year in research. You see what it's like to work in a real lab, you see what it's like to do research in the real world (as opposed to undergraduate labs, which are just a matter of following a protocol and are not at all creative).
My first conclusion after working for two months in a real lab is this: as much as I enjoy my job at times, I prefer my life as an undergraduate student. I like the flexible hours (the option of staying in bed when you really should be in lectures disappears the moment you have a job), the long holidays, the slight unawareness of the world of taxes. More than anything, I like the student atmosphere. PhD students and postdocs are people who have decided to dedicate their career to science, but sadly they are also people who are not fascinated by the idea of science anymore. I'm not saying they don't like science, and I'm not saying they are not at times fascinated by it, if they weren't they wouldn't be where they are, but they lack the absolute incredulity of undergrad students when they first understand something, or when they first hear of a technique that does exactly what they'd been thinking about. There are rarely conversations about the possibilities of something or other when you are working in research. These turn into more calm discussions, because by the time people go into research they are jaded. They have realized it is very unlikely that what they will do will make a big difference, that they probably will spend their whole lives working and producing huge amounts of data, but that, most likely, their work will not be recognized. They are still passionate about what they do, and, especially when they are explaining something, there is a glimmer of the undergraduate hunger for science as a whole, but generally, they are specialists in one area, and they don't think that much of it. It's a pity, but I guess it's difficult to maintain a high level of passion for something over ten years, especially when you're doing it every day. Especially when you realize it's a lot slower and a lot harder than you thought it was when you were sitting in your lecture theatre, daydreaming about organizing a house party on Saturday when really you should be listening to that explanation of transcriptional initiation mechanisms.
I guess what I'm saying here is that working is similar for everyone. Scientists are lucky in that once in while they get a result and it's perfect and it lights up what they have been trying to do for weeks, or months, or even years. But most days, it's grind of the mill, just like for everyone else. The difference is, these people who now don't seem that passionate about what they're doing are the exact same ones who could spend hours thinking about a subject back when they were undergraduates, the same ones who were awed by the simplicity of certain reasonings or proofs once they understood them. They went into science for that, and, even if it's just once every few weeks, or every few months, or every few years, they can have that feeling back, for a day or for a few days or for a month. For these people, that's more than enough.
I have to do a presentation on the work I am doing at my lab in the NIMR. I am a sandwich student there, and (as a scientist) it's an amazing place to work. Demanding, sure, but people are there for the science, they know what they're talking about and they are happy to explain even quite complex stuff.
I've learnt more in the past couple of months than in some modules at Imperial College, but that's the whole point of doing a year in research. You see what it's like to work in a real lab, you see what it's like to do research in the real world (as opposed to undergraduate labs, which are just a matter of following a protocol and are not at all creative).
My first conclusion after working for two months in a real lab is this: as much as I enjoy my job at times, I prefer my life as an undergraduate student. I like the flexible hours (the option of staying in bed when you really should be in lectures disappears the moment you have a job), the long holidays, the slight unawareness of the world of taxes. More than anything, I like the student atmosphere. PhD students and postdocs are people who have decided to dedicate their career to science, but sadly they are also people who are not fascinated by the idea of science anymore. I'm not saying they don't like science, and I'm not saying they are not at times fascinated by it, if they weren't they wouldn't be where they are, but they lack the absolute incredulity of undergrad students when they first understand something, or when they first hear of a technique that does exactly what they'd been thinking about. There are rarely conversations about the possibilities of something or other when you are working in research. These turn into more calm discussions, because by the time people go into research they are jaded. They have realized it is very unlikely that what they will do will make a big difference, that they probably will spend their whole lives working and producing huge amounts of data, but that, most likely, their work will not be recognized. They are still passionate about what they do, and, especially when they are explaining something, there is a glimmer of the undergraduate hunger for science as a whole, but generally, they are specialists in one area, and they don't think that much of it. It's a pity, but I guess it's difficult to maintain a high level of passion for something over ten years, especially when you're doing it every day. Especially when you realize it's a lot slower and a lot harder than you thought it was when you were sitting in your lecture theatre, daydreaming about organizing a house party on Saturday when really you should be listening to that explanation of transcriptional initiation mechanisms.
I guess what I'm saying here is that working is similar for everyone. Scientists are lucky in that once in while they get a result and it's perfect and it lights up what they have been trying to do for weeks, or months, or even years. But most days, it's grind of the mill, just like for everyone else. The difference is, these people who now don't seem that passionate about what they're doing are the exact same ones who could spend hours thinking about a subject back when they were undergraduates, the same ones who were awed by the simplicity of certain reasonings or proofs once they understood them. They went into science for that, and, even if it's just once every few weeks, or every few months, or every few years, they can have that feeling back, for a day or for a few days or for a month. For these people, that's more than enough.
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