Ventiak
an island somewhere in the brain
'That's unbelievable!' Outrage is Amanda's stock in trade. 'You mean to say that you read one of the greatest novels in the English language and all you could do was count the colour words?'
Rupert looked sheepish but he was not about to bow down before this accusation. 'I didn't count. I didn't need to. I couldn't get past three.'
'And you had no sense of the power of the story, the brilliance of the characterisation, the irony and wit, the sheer beauty of the whole thing?'
'I don't do beauty,' Rupert replied. 'That's not my field. Elegance, now, that's another matter. I could see the elegance.'
'Elegance? What is this?'
Rupert, as he often does in these kinds of situations, took this question literally.
'Well, I think it's a sense of the approriateness of a form or expression. It's to do with simplicity and economy and I don't know quite what... an extra something? Sorry, I'm being incredibly vague here but...'
'Simplicity? Economy? What are you? Some sort of effete toad?'
I felt I had to interrupt. Amanda's assault was getting out of hand. 'You're not normally this upset over matters of aesthetics.'
'Aaarhgh!' She threw up her hands in dismay (or horror). 'This is Pride and Prejudice and he's treating it like a balance sheet or a lab report .'
Interesting that Amanda could get so passionate about something. She was starting to sound like Felix.
'I think he appreciates it in his way,'I said.
She ignored me, rounded on Rupert again. 'Didn't you use to play the violin?'
'The viola,' he said.
'So? Don't you think music is beautiful?'
'Elegant,' he told her. 'The viola is a very elegant instrument. Not the way I played it, though.'
'Incredible!' Amanda stormed away.
Rupert looked at me and then poured himself another gin.
Rupert has been reading Pride and Prejudice. Well, to be more precise, he has been plumbing the book for data.
'You were absolutely right,' he said. 'There is almost no specific information there. For example, there are almost no colour words. At the beginning of Chapter 3, it says that Bingley rode a black horse and wore blue coat but other than that...'
'I think the soldiers have red coats', I said.
'Yes, of course. But is that a physical description or a category? Either way it's a pretty miserable offering if you are looking for physical specificity. There is no mention of eye or hair colour or ladies fashions or the countryside or the way houses are decorated. At least, I don't think so. I could conceivably have missed something because, a couple of times, I got caught up in the story.'
'A trap for young players,' I said.
'Quite.' Rupert accepts the admonition but he is eager to puruse the implications of his findings. 'So what do you reader's do? Do imagine the colours?'
'No I don't think so,' I answered. 'As I said the other day, I think readers operate without specific pictures. So, when we say that a movie is different from what we imagined while reading the book, I don't think we are talking about two different pictures. The movie seems strange because it is specific rather than non-specific. Text is visual open and stays open. While movies are closed.'
'Hmmm.' Rupert thought about it.
'In fact,' I went on, 'it probably has to be that way. Suppose you were reading a novel and you constructed a detailed picture of a character as soon as they appeared on the scene. You imagine a person with red hair, green eyes and wearing a white shirt and blue jeans. A few lines later, the writer tells you that the character has dark hair and then a bit later that she's got blue eyes and then that she's wearing a dress covered in red roses. Reading would be a very annoying experience.'
'I wonder if it is annoying for people with eidetic memories?' he asked.
'Good question.'
'One thing I did notice about P and P. When the action moves to D'Arcy's house... what's it called... Pemberley, then there's a change. There is suddenly much more specific detail and, I think for the only time, she actually writes about food, right down to saying there were grapes and peaches and nectarines.'
'That's interesting. That's the point at which Elizabeth falls in love with D'Arcy. And, as you say, the writing has much more physical description. And the food? Yes. Just a touch of sensuality, maybe?'
'You mean it's a Jane Austen sex scene?'
'You could put it that way,' I said.
We are still discussing the merits of pictures as against words. I think is was Janice who raised the case of movies that are based on books. In her view these were always a disappointment because they were never quite what you imagined when you read the book.
'For example?' Trevor asked.
'Well, Pride and Prejudice,' Janice said. 'That's my favourite book. I've read it half a dozen times. Then I saw that TV version and it was quite different.'
'How?'
'The characters. They didn't look right.'
'How did you imagine them?' Trevor asked. 'Elizabeth Bennett, for example, how did you imagine her?'
'Well...' Janice looked a bit nonplussed.
'Was her hair dark or blonde? Did you picture blue eyes or green or brown.'
I could see what he was getting at. 'When you say you imagine the characters, that kind of implies you have a specific picture in mind. What Trevor's suggesting is that it isn't specific at all. I think I agree. At least, what I imagine isn't specific.'
'Yes,' Janice looked puzzled. 'That's weird isn't it. I feel I know Eliza like she was my own sister but I don't have any picture of her.'
'How specific is your picture of your sister, though? Could you say what colour her eyes were? Or her hair?'
'Knowing my sister her hair could be any colour. But her eyes? Well, brown, of course. Like mine.'
'Did you see her when you said that?'
'No,' she said. 'Not really. Weird, eh?'
'Some people picture things very accurately,' Rupert said.
'That's... what's-it-called... eidetic memory, eh? But that would be really rare. I mean I don't think I know anyone who's like that.'
'How would you know unless you asked them?' Trevor said.
'They're often quite unusual people,' Rupert answered.
'How do you know that? I mean, there's a bunch of unusual people who have eidetic memories. But that doesn't mean there isn't a whole bunch of ordinary people who have the same sort of pictorial accuracy. In fact, maybe we're the only people in the world who aren't like that?'
Rupert almost responded. I could see the word 'Rubbish' forming on his lips but he restrained himself.
'Felix is unusual,' Janice said. 'Do you think he has an eidetic memory?'
'No,' I said. 'Felix is unusal for different reasons.'
Monty the Libertarian has challenged my approach to this blog. He maintains I need to go the video way. Text, according to him, is dead. His remarks provoked an interesting discussion. Amanda thinks Monty is an idiot but she has a positive and, indeed, optimistic view of the promise of technology. Felix, on the other hand, is temperamentally inclined towards Monty's principles but thinks that television and video are vile pollutants invading our culture as didymo is invading our watercourses.
'Words!' he said. 'Words are the carriers of all that is best in human beings!'
'And worst,' Trevor said.
'But think of the immediacy of the visual image.' Monty is almost as passionate as Felix when he gets going. 'So much can be said. So much can be got across in the blink of an eye.'
'I can see the point in diagrams,' Rupert answered. 'But pictures, in general. They lack precision, in my view.'
'One word is worth a thousand pictures!' Felix raised his hand in a gesture of defiance.
'Pictures are real, though, aren't they?' Janice responded. 'I mean, in some way. They show real things.'
'Like in movies?' Trevor asked.
'Well, they're real actors, eh?'
'What's more trustworthy, then? A video or a description?'
'A video.'
'Are you sure?'
'What exactly is the problem here?' I asked, trying to get the conversation back on some sort of track.
'I thought we were trying to decide whether the blog should include video,' Amanda said.
'Impact!' Monty declared. 'That's what you need. Impact and visibility!'
'I'm not sure I want impact,' I told him.
'Here we go again,' Amanda said.
'In any case,' I said. 'I don't have a camera. I wouldn't know what to do with one.'
'Throw it in the lake!' Felix answered.
We had a power cut last night, which lasted for about two hours. It is interesting how people respond to such a situation. Do they revert to type?
In our case, it went something like this: Janice called her friend Monty the Libertarian on her mobile and talked to him for the duration. Amanda retreated into her Teach Yourself French lessons, sitting in the dark with her earphones on, listening to a battery operated CD player. Felix went out into the garden with a bottle of red wine and sang Irish folk songs to the moon. Trevor went to bed. Rupert and I sat on the verandah and discussed the biological basis of empathy. At least, Rupert discussed this topic, describing to me an experiment that had been conducted a few years ago at the Institute of Neurology in London.
Apparently, 16 couples were involved, they put the female partner in a machine that measured brain patterns while they gave electric shocks either to her or to her male partner. She could not see him but she could tell from an indicator how strong the shock he received was. The scans of her brain, it seemed, were the same when she got the shock as when her partner got the shock, with one exception. The somatosensory cortex (I think that's the term Rupert used) was only active in the case of the real pain. In other words, according to Rupert, the emotional response was the same in both cases but only in the case of the real pain was there also a physical response.
I'm not sure what conclusions I was meant to draw from this. Perhaps that love or empathy involves feeling another person's pain almost in a literal sense. An interesting finding, no doubt, although I have to say that I found it hard to concentrate on what Rupert was saying. The strains of Danny Boy drifting in from the shrubbery, Amanda's comme il faut-ing from the living room and Janice's joyful laughter as she wandered about the house giving Monty the benefit of her appreciation of his jokes (which I know from experience are appalling, by the way) all served to distract me from serious intellectual endeavour. It did wonder, too, why Rupert was talking about people experiencing an excess of electricity when we were suffering a serious deficiency.
Ah, well.
The column on religion in the local paper talks about a book entitled Why God Won't Go Away? Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. Rupert knows this book. In fact, he is strong supporter of its central thesis - that religious experiences have a biological foundation.
It seems that when people, in a state of prayer or meditation, experience certain transcendental states (states which are often associated with God or religious figures) there is a corresponding pattern of neurological activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe of the brain. Apparently neuroscientist Michael Persinger has designed a helmet that uses magnetic fields to stimulate the brain in such a way that these experiences of the divine are induced in around 80% of subjects.
Aha! says Rupert and the other atheists. This demonstrates that there is no God at all. Religious experience is nothing but a function of our biology and religion persists because we inherit this capacity from our parents.
Not so fast, says Graham Davidson, the author of the column. Just because we can stimulate the brain to create an effect does not mean that, in its normal operation, the brain is responding to nothing. Say we can use magnetic fields to induce a smell of fresh coffee. That does not mean fresh coffee does not exist. A neat point the Rupert has been mulling over.
He should also be mulling over Trevor's further point. If belief in God is biological, then it is genetically based. It must, therefore, have arisen as an adaptation to the environment, in fact for the gene to have survived, the people who possessed it must have had a reproductive advantage. What could that advantage have been? One possibility is that the gene put people in touch with God and people who are in touch with God have a better chance of getting by in the world.
Of course, Trevor does not believe in God any more than I do (which is not much). He just likes winding Rupert up.