Reading Taliesin

Page from The Book of Taliesin

Taliesin was probably a real person who died around 575 AD. He was, according to our accounts, a famous bard who served British kings, notably the very historical Urien of Rheged.

Beyond that, everything we know about him is obscure, disputed, and based on sources that almost flaunt their unreliability. The Irish and Welsh had this annoying quirk in the way they recorded their history, which is that the more famous someone became, the less they cared about the reality of his life and the more they assimiliated him to various ancient myths. (See Arthur, Merlin)

Among the "sources" for the life of Taliesin is a peculiar manuscript, written down in the 1500s, called the Hanes Taliesin. This "biography" gives our bard multiple lives under multiple names. It attributes his great wisdom to his having spent time as a child in the home of the witch/goddess/hag/wise woman Ceridwen, who was brewing a potion of knowledge in the Cauldron of Wisdom. Taliesin was supposed to be tending the cauldron and not touching the brew, but three drops of the liquid fell onto his thumb, which he then stuck in his mouth because of the pain, thus acquiring all knowledge. Which is one of the oldest stories we know. So, yeah, a great source for Celtic myth but a lousy one for the life of the historical Taliesin.

One of the most important sources for the Welsh poetic tradition is a 14th century text called The Book of Taliesin. This contains 56 poems, of which about a dozen are agreed by authorities to date to the 500s AD and therefore may be connected with the historical Taliesin.

People have been obsessively reading these poems since the 1600s, seeking in them the key to Taliesin's history, Welsh myth, the Celtic Soul, the Secrets of the Druids, and so on. But that does not mean they agree on what they poems say. 

The bards, according to our sources, composed their works in a state of ecstatic inspiration called in Welsh awen. Awen was sometimes experienced while wandering the mountains, or in the midst of battle, but generally it happened when the bard fell into a deep sleep, or trance, from which he could not be woken until the right moment. Waking, he would have a poem ready to recite. He might freely confess that he himself did not fully understand his words; they came to him, not from him.

The bards pronounced various kinds of poems: poems of praise, genealogies, histories – presumably reciting these to various noble audiences was the main way they earned their keep – but also prophecy. The prophecies might not have been the most important works for the bards while they lived, but it was above all the prophecies that fascinated later generations. So most of the old bardic poetry that comes down to us has at least a hint of prophecy about it.

And you all know how prophecy works: the farther the bard looks ahead, the vaguer and more mystical the pronouncements become. 

Plus, the bards practiced a deliberately obscure way of speaking, full of riddling references that only the most learned were supposed to get. We, sadly, are not among those initiates, so we are often left wondering what, exactly these phrases mean. One of my favorite old Welsh poems is The Colloquy of the Two Sages, in which a young bard challenges an older man for his place in court. They ask each other questions and then answer them in a way designed to show off their knowledge of the tradition, like this:

Old Sage: A question, lad; whence have you come?

Young Sage: Not a hard question!
From a confluence of wisdom,
From perfection of goodness,
From the brightness of the sunrise,
From the nine hazels of poetic art,
From splendid circuits, in a land
Where truth is measured by excellence,
Where there is no falsehood,
Where there are many colors,
Where poets are honored and well fed.

Which is supposed to convey that he was trained by a wise bard who served a great lord.

So, yeah, not a genre in which clarity of speech was much prized.

Anyway. This week I have been reading a book about Taliesin by the Welsh scholar/practicing druid John Matthews. I came across a passage from one of Taliesin's poems (i.e., one of the poems in the Book of Taliesin that the authorities agree date to the 6th century). As translated by D.W. Nash, this really caught my fancy:

Seven score muses
There are in the inspiration of song
Eight score in every score
In the great abyss of tranquility
In the depths below the earth
In the air above the earth
There is recognition of it
What sorrow there is,
That is better than joy.

Already having an inkling that translations of this stuff vary a lot, I went searching for other versions of this passage so as to better understand it and perhaps craft my own version.

In the first alternative translation I checked, I could not find this passage at all. I eventually decided that this must be an abridged version, although it didn't say so, and moved on. John Matthews has this:

Seven scores goddeses
have shares in inspiration,
but of these scores, only one truly.

Anger will cease in the depths,
in the depths anger will swell,
in the depths, under the earth,
in the sky over the earth,
only one truly knows
what is the sadness
that is better than joy.

Which is recognizably the same verse, although Nash has nothing about anger ceasing or swelling, or about only one of the however-many-score muses really mattering. 

The Celtic Literature Collective has this:

Seven score Ogyrven
Are in the Awen.
Eight score, of every score it will be one.
In the deep it will cease from ire;
In the deep it will be excessively angry;
In the deep, below the earth;
In the sky, above the earth.
There is one that knows
What sadness is,
Better than joy.

I suppose Ogyrven is the word Nash translated "muses." Notice that here the subject of the discouse is the Awen (inspiration): it is the Awen that gets angry and then loses its anger, etc. The second sentence (Eight score, of every score it will be one) must be completely obscure, since the various translations don't agree at all. Otherwise I think we can get a sense of what this might mean, although I do wonder who is it who knows the kind of sadness that is better than joy. The poet? Or is the subject just missing, the way Nash has it? (You could do that in Welsh, as in Latin.)

So I went looking for other passages to see what sort of variation there was. Consider these, from a very famous (because very druidical) poem called The Battle of the Trees:

I have been in a multitude of shapes,
Before I assumed a consistent form.
I have been a sword, narrow, variegated,
I will believe when it is apparent.
I have been a tear in the air,
I have been the dullest of stars.
I have been a word among letters,
I have been a book in the origin.
I have been the light of lanterns,
A year and a half.

I was in many a guise
before I was disenchanted.
I am a grey-cowled minstrel,
I believe in illusion.
I was for a time in the sky:
I was observing the stars.
I was a message in writing:
I was a book to my priest.
I was the light of the altar-horns
for a year and a half.

I imagine the minstrel/sword problem means there is an unreadable word in the manuscript. But does the next line mean the speaker believes in illusions or not? Was he a star, or observing them? Matthews, incidentally, mostly agrees with the first translation above but he has "brightest of stars." 

From The Spoils of Taliesin:

In manliness he will greet my trouble,
Should I be bled, I should evidently get better;
Truly I saw no one before, who saw not in me
Every indisposition, he will cultivate his business.
I saw a feeding about a lion for plants,
I saw leaves of luxuriant growth.
I saw a branch with equal blossoms.
Did I not see a prince?

My bravery emerges in time of stress:
If wounded, shall I recover strength altogether?
Verily I saw, before any, the oppression, which I did not escape.
Every feather-brain made my message of no account.
I saw a land, with pastures round the clearing and the court.
I saw a bird, which brings leaves from the deep.
I saw a branch, like thorns its blossoms.

This one puzzles me; were these two people reading the same poem?

Since nobody seems to agree on the details of these poems, I think I'll just render the passage I started from in my own way. How about this:

In the quiet of compassion
In the depths of anger
In the arc of the sky
The muses teach me
Of the sorrow that is 
Better than joy.

Pompeii, Images of New Finds

Fragments of painted plaster from recent excavations, showing how bright the colors are when they emerge from the ground. Sad that the ones excavated in the 1700s have faded so much.

More paintings.The lower one has acquired the name, Still Life with Pizza

Overhead view of a recently uncovered commercial bakery.

The Lararium of House X in Regio IX.

And the remains of the last offering in the Lararium altar: dates and figs burned with olive pits and pine cones as the fuel, topped with a whole egg.

Mural from the Baths.

Some delightful painted "wallpaper."

The Crane Bag and the Domestication of Myth

The Irish myths are really weird.

They are full of grotesque details, like, when the hero Cuchulainn went into his battle frenzy he had a fountain of frozen blood six feet tall sprouting from his forehead. They loop around in time, so that a man potrayed in one story as another's father will appear later as an infant in the house of his son. People keep being transformed into animals, or dying and being reborn. Sometimes gods create people, but in other stories people create gods. There is no beginning to the unvierse, and no end, just events that echo other events in a pattern more like a four-dimensional weaving than a linear narrative.

Nineteenth-century rationalists argued that this confusion meant the stories had somehow become "corrupted." Some thought this had happened in the course of oral transmission, while others pointed to the moment when they were written down by Christian monks. I subscribe to the view that, no, they were always like this. I think these stories reflect a view of time and the universe developed by the Druids around 500 to 350 BC, when Greek philosophers were also devoting a lot of attention to time and change. The Druids ended up teaching, I think, that linear time is an illusion, and that in a universe with no beginning and no end events keeping moving in cycles that echo, but do not exactly repeat, those of other times.

This brings me to the Crane Bag. In myth there is only one Crane Bag, with a story something like this:

The celebrated bag of Irish tradition was made by Manannán mac Lir and contained many treasures. Aífe [a famous woman] is transformed into a crane by a jealous rival, Luchra; she subsequently spends 200 years in the household of Manannán mac Lir. When she dies, he uses her skin to hold things precious to him. These included his knife and shirt, the king of Scotland's shears, the king of Lochlainn's helmet, the bones of Assal's swine, and the girdle of the great whale's back. At high tide the treasures are visible in the sea, but at ebb tide they vanish. 

Ok, so, on the one hand, this sounds like a bag made of bird skin, but on the other it holds the bones of an enormous whale. Also, it fills with sea water at high tide, and the treasures in the bag are "visible in the sea;" in fact there are a couple of points on the Irish coast that are supposed to be the place from which the treasures are visible.

Many modern interpreters, going back to the eighteenth century, have argued that what the bag actually held was the letters of the Ogham alphabet. There are some obscure verses that may say the form of the letters was copied from the positions of a crane's legs, and some clever person figured out how to connect the objects in the bag (knife, shirt, shears, helmet, pig bones, girdle) to the first six Ogham letters. Well, maybe, but it sometimes seems to me that with a little work you can connect anything in the Irish stories to literally anything else, which, again, may be part of the point. Plus, these clever commentators have not been able to explain why a bag holding the alphabet has tides.

Which brings me to yesterday, when I did a quick search for Crane Bag. (Don't ask.) What I found was, not references to this arcane tradition, but ads from crane bag sellers (the one above could be yours for $75) and instructions on how to assemble the contents of your own. These are, the ads assure me, "traditionally carried by druids."

Here's one example:

My Crane Bag is the size of a small messenger bag and holds some personal spiritual talismans, a few stones and crystals that help me focus, a couple of acorns, a feather, some shells and a few odds and ends. Because I like to strike out into unpopulated spaces, I’m practical, so also carry a Swiss army knife, compass, always a notebook and a couple of pens and pencils and a pencil sharpener since words are my system of divination. The best part? There’s still enough room for my keys and wallet. I’m prepared wherever I go and don’t need to take anything else. This leaves my hands free, so I can touch trees and stones and whatever else draws me.

This is an entirely modern tradition; there is in Irish myth only one Crane Bag, and it was not carried by a druid. I am not sure when this habit of making and carrying these bags developed, but so far as I can tell it is post-World War II. The obvious source for this kind of thing is Native American spirit bundles.

Here's a modern Druid who at least understands that this is a distortion of the myth:

Symbolically speaking, the Crane Bag isn’t a bag to hold things. The concept is actually closer to the Irish version of the Grail. According to legend, it appears and disappears, shifts guardianship and even shifts worlds – from sea to land, from god to hero. The crane is associated with death and rebirth and the labyrinth path between the worlds. So when you think on that, basically, the concept encompasses all the realms and planes and really becomes a representation for the interconnectedness of everything and the unity and harmony between all things in one.

Now, I don't want to tell other people how to be spiritual, and really what they choose to carry in their $75 bags is none of my business.

But I wanted to comment on this because it represents a human tendency that I think constantly gets in the way of understanding myth: taking things literally. You know, Plato tries to tell a story about an imaginary perfect city,  and the next thing you know people are diving off the Azores and claiming to find pieces of it. The Voyage of Saint Brendan is a distorted narrative of an actual journey to America. Robin Hood was really [insert the historical Robert you prefer]. 

The basic structure of this discourse is: X is really Y. 

One of the most common forms in this genre is the search for the oldest form of a myth, the most authentic form, which is sometimes dubbed the "original" version. If there are five different stories about the great magician Math son of Mathonwy, in some of which he is clearly human, in others apparently immortal, well, there must be an original version in which he was one or the other. 

Caesar tells us that the Druids refused to write down their doctrines. I understand their thinking, because as soon as you write something down, even something as bizarre as the old Irish myths, somebody comes along as says, "Oh, you really meant this." Or, "Why is your teaching so garbled? It must have gotten corrupted. Here, let me help you reconstruct the original version."

(The druids throw up their hands and stomp away, muttering, We had better rebel against this Caesar fellow before he and all the other rationalists ruin Gaul. Call Vercingetorix.)

Sometimes X may actually be a distorted memory of Y; that happens a lot in myth. But that doesn't in any way imply that you can understand the meaning of X, to the person who told the story, by reference to Y. 

After forty years of thinking about Celtic myth, and myth in general, I believe more and more that the details of the stories matter very little. When you are presented with half a dozen similar stories about similar-sounding people, you should probably not obsess over the differences. Don't try to put them in order; don't try to figure out which is more authentic. Don't try to arrange the characters in a neat family tree. If a story makes no sense to you, maybe rather than trying to "figure it out" you should step back and ask what kind of feeling it evokes, just as it is. Let the words wash over you; let the story shock you and move you.

Don't, whatever else you do, try to put it in a bag.

The History and Afterlife of Malaga Island

Malaga Island is a small island on the coast of Maine, south of Bath in Casco Bay. It was an obscure place, and then in 1908-1912 it was briefly a rather famous place, and now it is a famous place again for the opposite reason.

Sources differ on when the Malaga Island community got started. Some accounts say the first modern resident was Benjamin Darling, a freedman from the West Indies who bought Horse Island nearby in 1794, and whose descendants seem to have lived all around the area. Other accounts say the community was founded by Henry Griffin after the Civil War. But whenever it got started, by 1880 the island was home to 27 people; by 1900 the population and grown to 40. Most were black, but one family, that of Scotts-Irish fisherman James McKenney, was white. The islanders were poor, but, most observers say, not much poorer than their neighbors. They fished, dug for clams, gathered berries, and raised small gardens in soil made from sand, dung and compost. A few worked off island.

Photographs like this one certainly don't make them look especially impoverished; their houses and clothes seem pretty normal for rural Maine. According to the archaeologists who have lately been poking around the site, they had the same sort of stuff as their neighbors.

But some of them were poor enough that they sometimes applied to their town for relief; poor relief; like most other governmental functions, was in Maine the job of the township. Some citizens of the town of Phippsburg resented this. Bad enough, they thought, that black people insisted on living in their town, but that they wanted relief was intolerable. 

The 1890s were a tough economic time in Maine. The traditional industries of wooden shipbuilding and fishing declined, and not much had come along to fill those places. Phippsburg started a long campaign to prove that Malaga Island had never really been part of their township, and therefore that they were not responsible for its inhabitants. In 1905 they succeeded, and the state had to take direct control of the island. 

As I said, this was a rough economic time for Maine, but there was one bright spot: tourism. People from New York and Boston began flocking to the Maine coast every summer. The islands around Casco Bay were scenic enough, and the local authorities were trying to drum up vacation business. They decided that the unsightly poverty of Malaga Island was an impediment to economic development.

Eason Family in Fron of their House

And then the do-gooders got involved. This was at the height of the Progressive movement, and I am retelling this story mostly to ask some questions about the whole business of making other people's lives better. Public health experts from Boston and New York looked at the people living on Malaga Island and saw a sad situation: dirt, ignorance, illiteracy, substandard housing, unmarried couples raising children out of wedlock.

They associated these problems with isolation. This was the same era when we got the stereotype of inbred hillybilly clans in isolated mountain hollows, for which Progressives suggested the same remedies they would be suggesting for Malaga Island: forcibly ending their isolation by public schooling, public health, and other state measures, if necessary driving them out of their tiny "inbred" communities and out into the world. (I have never seen any evidence that mountain communities were particularly inbred in 1900.)

This was also the height of the American Eugenics movement, and some people thought the root of the problems on Malaga Island was in the mixing of races. At this time people began describing the inhabitants, previously considered just plain black under the one-drop standard, as "mixed race." 

In response to all of this a group of progressive Christians founded the Malaga Island Settlement Association to bring aid to the island. In 1909 they constructed a school on the island. The teacher, Evelyn Woodman, was on the one hand committed to helping her students, but on the other had a habit of asking for help by decrying how bad their situation was. This turned out to be a dangerous approach.

In 1911 the governor of Maine made a much publicized visit to the island, "calling attention" to the problems there. A reporter for the Boston Transcript covered the visit in a story titled, "Ignorance, Shiftlessness, Filth, and Heathenism—A Shameful Disgrace That Should Be Looked After at Once." By "heathenism" he meant, first, that the inhabitants didn't regularly go to church, and, second, that some of the couples were not legally married.

(If you ever wondered why leftists of the 60s and 70s defended unwed motherhood so loudly, it's because attacking unmarried parents was an old theme in America, and taking their children away in the name of cleanliness, order, child welfare, and Christian morality used to be routine.)

The eventual result of the dual pressures on Malaga Island – the desire to prettify the neighborhood for tourists, and the desire to improve the lives of the inhabitants – was a campaign to somehow get rid of the place. The local leadership backed an ownership claim to the island pressed in court by one of Phippsburg's founding families. In 1912 a judge ruled for the family and affirmed their ownership of the property. They then evicted the 45 inhabitants. The state demolished the buildings and even exhumed all 17 graves, moving them to the mainland. One whole family was committed to the state's School for the Feebleminded. After passing through several private owners, the island was acquired by the Maine Coastal Trust as a wildlife preserve.

Various people declared this to be a great victory for humanity. But then, very quickly, the story was hushed up. Its rapid disappearance makes it look like some folks were ashamed about what had been done. It was certainly shameful, but I mention this to make the point that some people thought so in 1912. Americans were every bit as divided in 1912 as they are now.

So far as people can tell from 2023, the first public complaint about what happened on Malaga Island was made in 1980 by a newspaper reporter who said people refered to it as "a story best left untold." Then nothing for another decade. There were a few notices in the 90s, and then around 2000 people began to take a greater interest, and over the past 20 years there has been a deluge of publications about Malaga Island and the events of 1912. In 2005 a young adult novel about the Malaga Island story was a Newberry Honor Book.

Which is great; this is exactly the sort of historical event I think people ought to reflect on. But, of course, most accounts one sees these days make no attempt to be balanced; in our discourse this is just a crime committed by a racist state, wielding Progressive rhetoric to destroy another black community.

So let me ask this: if we see children being raised by illiterate parents who had no interest in sending them to school, living in shacks without plumbing or electricity, what should we do? What if the parents are mentally retarded? 

This is not a theoretical problem, but happens in America every day. Today most writers seem to think that the authorities were exaggerating the problems on Malaga Island as an excuse to evict the inhabitants, and maybe so; as I said the pictures make it look like a pretty normal place. But that doesn't mean that nobody is America has raised or is raising children in a way you and I would find appalling. It is now fasionable to think that the people from Malaga sent to the School for the Feebleminded were just being oppressed in another way, but the only testimony we have is from the state officials who thought otherwise.

Most accounts of Malaga Island play up the racism angle. It seems to me, though,exactly like what Progrressives did to white folks throughout the mountain South, evicting them from homes designated "substandard" to build dams or national parks or whatever else the Progressives thought the country needed to progress.

This same issues come up in the history of the Scottish Highlands, where the culture of the crofters was destroyed partly because middle class Victorians thought conditions in highland homes were simply intolerable. They come up over the question of Indian boarding schools in the US and Canada. Who is responsible for children, and their future? Is it just and always the parents, or does the state have a role?

If a way of life looks, to us, horrible and awful and intolerable, should we intervene to save children from growing up that way? 

What if the people are starving, as the Highland crofters did in 1846-1851, requiring millions in aid from city folks? Do people who have asked for assistance on that scale still have a right to go on living as they did?

Yes, there is something cruel and dismissive about the dismantling of Malaga Island. It's a perfect American horror story, set at the intersection of racism, tourism, and real estate speculation. But it seems to me that the whole business of helping other people is often mixed up with assertions of superiority, and that a superior pose can easily be turned into an attack on a people and their way of life. This happened in the Highlands, and on Indian Reservations, and in many other places. It probably still happens. Black intellectual John McWhorter just wrote a whole book aruging that woke anti-racism is an attack on black people, portraying them as weak victims who can't survive wthout white help.

We can, of course, imagine better, less authoritarian ways to help people than evicting them from their homes. But I am not comfortable with foisting all the crimes that have been part of creating the modern world onto racism, classism, and governmental evil. Sometimes, people who really want to help end up doing harm; on the other hand, maybe some ways of living are not very nice, and you can understand why people want to take children away from that sort of world and raise them in a gentler and safer place.

**********

Excellent article by high school student Margo Pedersen.

Good newspaper article.

Historic images of Malaga Island, from the state museum.

Hour long radio show from WMPG and the Salt Institute, A Story Best Left Untold.

Links 8 December 2023

Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavík, Iceland

Via Scott Siskind, an obituary for Chuck Feeney, who made billions as a pioneer of duty-free shopping and gave away nearly every penny, living his last years in modest obscurity. If you have heard of him it was probably as a major funder of the Irish peace process, throwing millions around to compensate anyone in Ireland who felt threatened by the pending deal.

Interesting renderings of historical figures in modern garb. I think it is a bit literal, not taking sufficient account of past techniques of portraiture, but some are a lot of fun.

The DeepMind team says they have discovered 2.2 million possible new possible inorganic crystals, 380,000 of which should be stable enough for synthesis. Now if only the AI can tell us what they will be good for. . . .

Chinese archaeologists explore a Ming Dynasty porcelain kiln.

A star system has been identified with six planets, all orbiting in resonance with each other. (NY Times, CBS News)

One of Bologna's last remaining medieval towers is in danger of collapsing.

Some seriously wacked-out biology involving cellular "nanobots" that fuse into "superbots" that heal damaged nerve tissue.

The Carmelite Monks of Wyoming are building themselves a new gothic monastery using computer aided design and computer-controlled stone-cutting machinery, which they operate themselves. (Carmelite web site, online article, Youtube)

How Nonconsumption Can Turn Ordinary Items into Perceived Treasures

The northernmost population of scorpions in the world lives on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, England, where there are more than 10,000. These yellow-tailed scorpions, native to southern Europe, probably arrived in the 1700s aboard Royal Navy ships coming to the Sheerness Dockyard. As a bonus, wikipedia has a great article on the dockyard.

Finalists for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year people's choice award.

Excavations near Carlisle, England have uncovered a Roman bath house.

More evidence that immigration boosts Republicans: "An inflow of migrants equal to 0.4 percent of the county population boosts the Republican party vote share in midterm House elections by 3.9 percentage points." Via Marginal Revolution.

During the pandemic, test scores declined for students in all US states, regardless of whether they closed their schools and for how long; now Kevin Drum reports on international data that shows the responses of different countries also had no effect and how far behind students fell. So, strangely enough, pandemic learning loss seems not to be related to whether or how long schools were closed. What was the cause?

This 24-minute video will bring you up to date on the US military's staggering array of new drone programs; the goal is to field so many aerial vehicles that they completely overwhelm enemy defenses, "blocking out the sun like Persian arrows."

Hoard of Bronze Age axes found in Poland; these axes seem to have been used as a sort of money, or perhaps for high-status gifts, since more than half of those that have been found were never used.

The residents of Christiana, an old hippie sort-of commune in Copenhagen, have agreed by consensus to invite the state in to solve their problem with violent drug gangs. (NY Times)

Something else to worry about: the American Great Plains are being invaded by Eastern Redcedar trees, turning more than a million acres of grassland to forest monoculture. The main reason is the decline of fire. (NY Times, Eastern Redcedar Science Literacy Project)

And now anti-immigrant riots in Ireland (NY Times). Around the world it becomes increasingly clear that what drives right-wing extremism is immigration, and especially accepting refugees. How pro-immigration, pro-democracy people should react to that is unclear to me.

German museum asks Italy to return a classical sculpture to them, on the grounds that Mussolini sold it to Hitler in a completely public way, for a lot of money, which should make it entirely different from stuff the Nazis stole or forced people to sell.

The Transformation of Le Plessis-Robinson

Le Plessis-Robinson is a suburb of Paris with about 30,000 inhabitants. The town has become a sort of parable of a possible alliance between conservative politics, aesthetics, neotraditional architecture, and urban renewal to create a better form of modern life. All of this fits together; the backers of Le Plessis-Robinson see public housing in concrete apartment blocks as a dehumanizing, oppressive, immiserating, destructive of real community and local identity, etc., and see beautification using forms drawn from local tradition as the path to a more human future.

An old village, Plessis-Robinson began to change in the 1920s when a couple of large "garden city" condominium complexes were built (above). 

Then, after World War II, a communist local government oversaw the construction of a whole bunch of concrete apartment blocks. By the 1980s the place was in terrible shape: 80 percent of the residents lived in public housing, and street-level shops had a 70 percent vacancy rate. Those concrete towers, some less than 25 years old, were in dismal shape. Crime was high. 

Then in 1989 a new mayor was elected, a neo-conservative named Philippe Pemezec. Asked to describe his plan for the town in one word, he said "beauty;" one of his fist acts was to order the planting of flowers around the center of the town.

Soon afterward he brought in architect François Spoerry, the inventor, leader, and possibly at that point the sole member of a movement he called l'architecture douce; soft architecture. Spoerry created a master plan for the town. The plan emphasized the building of new parks and a new central city, le Couer de Ville, which would be constructed in a neotraditional style which would reference older buildings in the Isle de France. 

The Couer de Ville measures 12 hectares, or 30 acres, and has a density of 69 people per acre, higher than the concrete blocks it replaced.

This was all financed via 1) public/private partnerships with developers, and 2) by allowing tenants in public housing the opportunity to buy their apartments, which could then be converted into housing in the newer buildings.

The design of the new town center draws on tricks widely used in the new urbanism, including resurrecting an old stream that had largely gone into culverts and turning it into a public park.

One point emphasized by Spoerry was eliminating what he considered ambiguous spaces; the lawns around the older apartment blocks were not really public spaces but they weren't private either, which he thought led to their abuse, since nobody was responsible for them. In the new design there is much public space, in the form of parks, but the rest is resolutely private.

Not everyone was happy with all of this, especially the converstion of public housing to privately owned condominiums and the involvement of private developers. But in a showdown election held in 1995, Pemezec defeated a communist candidate by more than 2 to 1, and rebuilding stormed ahead. 

The demolition of a group of college buildings from the 1950s created space for another new neighborhood, called Bois de Vallees.

In answer to critics of this project one can say: the population of the town has grown – it was 21,000 and declining when Pemezec became mayor, but is now 30,000 and rising – and grown more dense. Twenty percent of the new housing is public. The number of jobs has risen by 50 percent. Crime is down. Not a single person was forced out of public housing to make it happen. I haven't found out anything about how the people who took the deals to become owners of their public flats made out, and I know there was a lot of grumbling in England about rising interest rates and so on. But if there have been problems they haven't showed up in the public mood, which is much more positive than before, or in politics, since Pemezec was re-elected twice more by landslides.

And whatever you think of architecture like this (the cultural center), I think it beats more concrete blocks. In fact Plessis-Robinson has become a tourist center of sorts, people traveling hundreds of miles just to see this town's rebirth.

To me the political angle is actually the least interesting. I wrote here last summer about a new urban project in England that was entirely socialist, and I also thought that was great. To me what matters is: paying attention to what people want, which is overwhelmingly not concrete boxes; caring about beauty as a value it itself; being pragmatic about funding and planning; and thinking in the long term. We can make our world better if we put our minds to it, and we will reap the benefits of that in many ways.

Short article 1, short article 2, 13-minute video.

Daniel Immerwahr on Deepfakes

Wonderful article in the November 20 New Yorker about deepfake technology. In it, Daniel Immerwahr notes that although the technology exists to create convicing videos of people doing things they never did, or saying things they never said, this has yet to have any impact on our politics.

First of all, almost all the high-end deepfake videos made so far are porn: "Able to depict anything imaginable, people just want to see famous women having sex." (Asked if she were going to pursue legal action to get such vidoes of herself off the internet, Scarlett Johansson said she wouldn't bother, because "the Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.")

Immerwahr goes on to question whether fake political videos would have any impact even if they were made. He notes that you don't need video to convince people of false things. There was never any evidence that Catherine the Great had sex with a horse, or that Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake," or that Barack Obama wasn't born in America, or that Covid-19 was fake, or that Trump really won the 2020 election. We repeat such things "because they affirm our fundamental beliefs, not because we've seen convincing videos." 

Mind you, it isn't that fake political videos are not being made. They are, all the time, but they are not made to look convincing: "if by 'deepfakes' we mean videos produced using artificial intelligence that actually deceive people, then they barely exist. The fakes aren't deep, and the deeps aren't fake." Instead of realistic videos designed to fool us, we get Dark Brandon shooting lasers out of his eyes. Immerwahr:

There is something gratifying about having your world view reflected visually; it's why we make art. But there is no need for this art to be realistic. In fact, cartoonish memes, symbolically rich and vividly expressive, seem better suited for the task than reality-conforming deepfakes.

Fretting over new kinds of evidence gets us once again back to the fundamental problem that most of our beliefs seem radically undermotivated. Why we believe things is a very hard problem, and sometimes evidence of any kind seems to have little part in the process. That, not deepfake videos, is our real problem.

Léonard Misonne's Photographs that Don't Look Like Photographs

Belgian photographer Léonard Misonne (1870-1943) was best known for taking photographs that look like paintings. He somehow found trees that look just like the trees in Romantic landscapes and clouds that looked just like painted clouds and photographed them in a dreamy way. It took me quite a bit of staring to convince myself that Stormy Weather (1924) really is a photograph, but it is.

Sometimes his photographs were even printed on grainy paper that enhanced the illusion of brush strokes, as in this example.

This amazing work, Leaving Namur Station (1938) is what first drew me to Misonne. Brings out the apocalyptic side of twentieth-century industry.

And a bunch more.

More on Talking Too Much about Mental Illness

Two from Scott Siskind, first a link to a study I already referenced:

Study: teaching dialectical behavioral therapy (a set of emotional regulation skills) in school leads to worse outcomes (although most of these dissipate quickly). I think this fits nicely with other evidence that making healthy people too aware of their mental health is potentially bad.

Second, from this book review:

I was more interested in a sort of sub-thesis that kept recurring under the surface: does naming and pointing to a mental health problem make it worse? This was clearest in Hong Kong, where a seemingly very low base rate of anorexia exploded as soon as people started launching mental health awareness campaigns saying that it was a common and important disease (as had apparently happened before in Victorian Europe and 70s/80s America). But it also showed up in the section on how increasing awareness of PTSD seems to be associated with more PTSD, and how debriefing trauma victims about how they might get PTSD makes them more likely to get it. And it was clearest in the short aside about the epidemic of neurasthenia in Japan after experts suggested that having neurasthenia might be cool, which remitted once those experts said it was actually cringe. A full treatment of this theory would go through the bizarre history of conversion disorder, multiple personality disorder, and various mass hysterias, tying it into some of the fad diagnoses of our own day. I might write this at some point.

Of course, the null hypothesis is that there are lots of people suffering in silence until people raise awareness of and destigmatize a mental illness, after which they break their silence, admit they have a problem, and seek treatment. I am slightly skeptical of this, because a lot of mental health problems are hard to suffer in silence - if nothing else, anorexia results in hospitalizations once a patient’s body weight becomes incompatible with healthy life. Still, this is an important counterargument, and one that I hope people do more research into.

All of this points to a potential explanation for the poor mental health of young Americans, because our whole society, and social media in particular, are full to the brim with talk about mental illness.

Links 1 December 2023

NY Magazine compiles a list of "Every Single Lie Told by George Santos."

This years Comedy Wildlife Photography winners.

In Italy, the high price of white truffles has led to a violent struggle in which truffle-sniffing dogs are regularly poisoned with strychnine-laced meatballs.

On land, datacenters are hard to cool and use a ton of water. A few years ago Microsoft hit on a possible solution, puting shipping-contained-sized computing units on the sea floor 100 feet down. This has not become common but interest continues. (2020 post about Microsoft's first big test, Project Natick; new article about Chinese deployment of the technology; summary article about the pros and cons)

Some weird bits of feudal law that still endure in England. 

From Ella Standage, a poem titled "Faithful" about love and translation.

Human Rights Watch finally gets around to reporting that the projectile that hit a Gaza hospital on October 17, triggering anti-Israel riots across the globe, was likely a misfired Palestinian rocket. 
OSINT guys on X figured this out within 48 hours, but I guess it's good that HRW finally released this finding.

Maya cities had no sewers or privies, and nobody knows what happened to all their human waste. Funny that after reading about the Maya for fifty years I am just now discovering this.

The insane process of choosing the books for the NY Times Ten Best Books of the Year list, which begins in March and includes dozens of meetings with impassioned presentations on behalf of the editors' favorites. (NY Times) Personally I find the 100 Notable Books list much more useful.

Scathing review of Costin Alamariu's (=Bronze Age Pervert's) dissertation : "It’s like saying that philosophy has something to do with fish, because people study philosophy in school and there are schools of fish." But the writer concludes that while nothing Alamariu writes makes philosophical sense it does make you want to live more fully.

Mummies and other cool archaeological finds from a Wari site near Lima, Peru.

Kevin Drum says young men are doing fine.

Russia's Supreme Court declares the global gay rights movement to be an "extremist group," which effectively criminalizes all gay activism in Russia.

Neural net Artificial Intelligence is famously a "black box," that is, we don't have a clue about the details of its reasoning process. In this post, Scott Siskind reads some recent work that tries to understand how AIs reason. One fascinating discovery is that they function by simulating much larger AIs; in one of the toy examples, a two-neuron AI works by simulating a five-neuron AI. So a 100,000-neuron AI is probably simulating an AI with millions or billions of neurons, connected in multi-demensional arrays.

Immigrant neighborhoods probably existed in the very first cities.

Libertarian Alex Taborrok reviews The Big Fail, a new book about pandemic response. Like most others, the authors find that lockdowns, social distancing, and masking had little effect; the only important thing was vaccination. Speeding up the vaccines by five weeks (which we could have done) would likely have saved more lives than all the other measures combined.

Tyler Cowen interviews philosopher John Gray, much about pessimism.

Life on earth is staggering. A new study finds that there are a million trillion trillion living cells (10 to the 30th) and that life has a huge, geological-scale impact on the plant, among other things collectively fixing 250 billion tons of carbon per year. As the authors note, this gives us a way to look for life on other worlds, because life like ours is pretty damn obvious. (NY Times, original article)

Good summary on X of some issues that might follow if Venezuela tries to annex Guyana. Wikipedia has the historical background.

Some remarkable drawings by the artist known as Faith XLVII.

The most powerful cosmic ray particle ever detected was the "Oh-My-God Particle" of 1991. This particle, probably a proton, had an estimated energy of 320 exa-electron volts (eEv), roughly equivalent to a baseball traveling 100 kilometers per hour (63 mph). For a long time it was by far the most powerful particle ever detected, but now there is another in the same range: the Amaterasu particle, detected on May 27, 2021. This had an estimated energy of 240 eEv. Exactly how particles with this much energy could be generated has never been explained, so there was always a nagging suspicion that the measurement of the Oh-My-God Particle was messed up somehow. This second example in the same range is therefore important confirmation. Like the Oh-My-God Particle, the Amaterasu Particle seems to have come from an empty region of space.

Short video showing what looks like an American AGM-88 HARM missile destroying a Russian SAM system, which means Ukraine has figured out how to fire these very effective missiles from its existing jets.

RIP Henry Kissinger

To my mind Henry Kissinger's existence was dominated by two things: his intelligence, and his worship of power. He craved power for himself, and for his country, and he always bristled at anything he saw as a threat to either. He would lie, steal, and murder to protect American interests and his personal prominence. During his years at the top I always thought he secretly preferred dictatorship and believed that totalitarian states had a vital advantage in competition with democracies. I don't think anybody would say that Ronald Reagan was smarter than Kissinger, but Reagan understood a fundamental thing that Kissinger missed: that dictatorships had their own weaknesses, and that the Soviet Union in particular was riven with contradictions that would eventually bring it down.

Kissinger pretended to be a wise man taking the long view, justifying his crimes by pointing to the judgment of history. But he was wrong. From the 21st century we can see that history does not justify him but says, clearly and repeatedly, that sticking to principles is what works, and that few crimes ever end up being excused because their outcomes are so good. Perhaps his worldview was shaped too much by World War II, when horrible violence seemed and seems justified. But the Cold War, as it turned out, was something very different, a conflict in which the moral high ground was the vital territory. That, it seems to me, was a truth that Kissinger, for all his brilliance, could never understand.

Some words about Kissinger from others:

Gerald Ford: I think he was a super secretary of state, but Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he implemented, in retrospect he would defend. . . . Henry publicly was a gruff, hard-nosed German-born diplomat, but he had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.

George H.W. Bush: Kissinger is an extremely complicated guy. . . . He is ungracious, he yells at staff, he is intolerable in terms of human feelings. Dictatorial. ‘Get people here.’ ‘Have those people here.’ ‘Where are they?’ ‘Why do I need these papers?’ ‘Where are my papers?’ And yet all those petty little unpleasant characteristics fade away, when you hear him discussing the world situation. . . . He is like a politician with the roar of a crowd on election eve or the athlete running out at the 50-yard line just before the kickoff. The public turns him on.

Bill Clinton: He always sounded like God with a German accent.

Barack Obama really hated Kissinger. Here is one sample: We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II, and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell. [I am still]  trying to help countries remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids.

Spencer Ackerman: Not once in the half-century that followed Kissinger’s departure from power did the millions the United States killed matter for his reputation, except to confirm a ruthlessness that pundits occasionally find thrilling. America, like every empire, champions its state murderers.

I'm going to give Kissinger himself the last word, two lines that I think sum up his worldview:

There is no reason for us to stand by and let Chile go Communist merely due to the stupidity of its own people. 

and

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.