in Sumerian, charmingly

The conference went off surprisingly well, and all declared it a success, though I'm suspicious of the number of conference organizers and panelists in the audience. I suppose that's how it goes for academic conferences, but in theatre you're in trouble if the cast is buying tickets. I'll have a video up soon of our panel.

First thing: Rick Kenney's poetry, which you should read. The first book's out of print, which is unfortunate, because it has this. But there are good ones in the new book, too, The One-Strand River; my favorite, "Epicycles", is like something Bradbury might have written if he'd been a much better writer.

In the course of preparing for my panel I read some of the panelists' work (once again, I do "academic" wrong; you're supposed to have read something about their work, I guess, and have a pocket full of brilliant and lyrical to sprinkle during introductions), and accidentally read the wrong book of Brian Falkner's: The Real Thing, a nifty YA novel about a Coke-formula heist and a New Zealand teen with a fantastic sense of -- well, all perceptions, but taste is most important here. International industrial espionage ensues. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and admired the way that he'd used science without ever getting sciencey. Food chemistry? Experimental setups? Just facts of life.

It turned out he was coming along to talk about The Tomorrow Code, which has gamma rays and computers and mutant viruses. Nothing wrong with that -- actually I think the book will make Brian's name in the US -- but I'd have been perfectly happy to talk about The Real Thing, just as I'd have been happy to talk about the use of things scientific in "In Spring". The use of science in both of them is conversational, is part of the mind of the person who wrote them, and I think this sort of thing gets lost in the rush to connect art and science.

The other thing that hit me in the course of meeting these writers -- only one of whom I'd met before -- was how large a subject "using science in literary arts" is. Even if you're talking about the sort of writing that stares straight at science, there's tremendous variety in the use. I'll post more about that after I get the video, since you'll be able to see how varied, even with only five writers, the flavors and intentions are, and how each of them is concrete about science. Five totally different animals, their work.

Rick said something, before the panel began, about wanting to be deep in the lineup so that he could choose poems that would work conversationally -- that would respond to the other panelists' work. I'll have to ask him why. I can see the panelish trouble with having "science pieces" so different from each other that they don't seem to talk to each other at all, but it also seems to me that this is fine, so long as the writers talk to each other.

Other new stuff: A review of Tania Hershman's short-story collection The White Road. The interview with Karl Iagnemma is coming soon.

Writing Science at the Writing University of Writers!

I'm not really supposed to make fun of the Pimp My Workshop theme the University of Iowa has going. However. The conference is set for October 7-10, with the program link here. I'm working on arrangements for a downloadable video podcast of the creative-writing panel. Fingers crossed also for a podcast of E. O. Wilson's talk on the 8th.

Argumentative? Living in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, or London, and you've seen or are planning to see John Adams' opera Doctor Atomic? You can argue with me if you read my review here. Shortly, meaning probably December, I'll also put up a review of Tania Hershman's sciency stories, which remind me of that Bjork video where an animated Bjork tears the chicken in half, and an interview with Karl Iagnemma, who isn't really a poultry-rending kind of guy.

The difficulty of approaching it

Well, I never did get the cigarettes. But I can announce the first science-in-creative-writing panel discussion at the University of Iowa, part of the much larger and pleasingly ragbag Writing Science conference, to be held Oct. 9-10 (unless it isn’t, because we’ve cleverly scheduled the conference to begin when Yom Kippur does). Despite the fact that I’m neither a university employee nor a serious student, they’ve handed me the panel to run. Here’s the lineup:

• Novelist Karl Iagnemma, author of On the Nature of Human Romantic Interactions and The Expeditions, MacArthur nominee and winner of enough literary prizes to look like an affirmative-action entry from Engineering. In his spare time, Karl’s the PI of the Robotic Mobility Group in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering department; his group works on robots for planetary exploration.
  
  
• Poet Richard Kenney, author of Orrery and The Invention of the Zero, Guggenheim and MacArthur fellow, and winner of the Lannan and Yale Younger Poets’ prizes. Rick teaches at the University of Washington.
  
  
• Playwright Lisa Schlesinger, author of Celestial Bodies, Harmonicus Mundi, and others. She's won commissions from BBC and the Guthrie, a Sloan fellowship, an NEA fellowship, and other prizes. Lisa teaches at Columbia College in Chicago.
  
  
• Essayist Amy Leach, who writes about Phobos and Eta Carinae, and whose work appears in the Wilson Quarterly, A Public Space, and the Iowa Review. She’s a graduate of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and teaches at Northwestern University.
  
  
• Possibly Definitely New Zealand children’s science fiction writer Brian Falkner, author of The Tomorrow Code and others, former comp sci student, and recipient of several prizes and awards.
  
  
• And me, not nearly as brass-ring-catching as the rest of this crew. I'm working on a history of the Calvin group at Berkeley in the 1950s & have an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I put in some time doing spectrophotometry experiments with acetylcholinesterase, but in general should not be trusted in a lab.
  

What'll we talk about? Most likely about craft and thematic issues that arise when we try to use science, and have scientist characters, in our work, such as:

• questions of audience and obscurity;
  
• the social and intellectual meaning and historical context of the science, and how they work with the rest of the story (or poem or essay);
  
• how right the science has to be and why;
  
• what kind of structures we use to put the science across and how they work;
  
• how far the artist is a science teacher, and how we avoid or use didacticism.

I’ll be interested to hear how the concerns might be different across the different forms -- for instance, how does a poet who normally trades in polysemy and the faces and angles of a word work with precisely-defined scientific language? In a story in which a character is a scientist, how can you make a scientist’s work, and his relationship to it, real if you never see him at work? How does one use science as a natural part of the world, without relegating it to scientists, labs, et cetera? Where are the traps and clichés? How do you handle theatrical drama without resorting to politics or scientist biography?

One thing I plan to ask Karl about has to do with what stories there are to tell about the relationship of scientists to science. The Expeditions took some hits from Nature reviewer Jenny Rohn, in part because she found it lite, without much science or compelling sense of science. As I understand it, the book involves a boy with a crush-from-afar on science; he signs up for a surveying expedition, and on this first date finds that science scratches itself, wears grandma undies, and believes it’ll win the Powerball jackpot. Disappointed, he abandons science. I haven’t read the book yet, and it may turn out that I agree with Jenny, but I think this business of an unrealistic crush on science is a serious one.

I can imagine a story, very close to the boy’s consciousness, in which only his delusional perception of science comes through at first -- maybe he's got a starry, clean, energetic romanticism. The boy finds his way to scientists, and the reader -- still very close to his consciousness -- gets his fascination and distaste for the surface of his heroes' habits and reasons. The boy interprets them, as he must, with just enough understanding to come to very wrong conclusions. You'd never get much from the adults, who chose science and loved it, or were trapped enough, to stay. You might know that the adults and their stories exist, might even hear them in some muffled way the boy's too callow to notice or appreciate, but this wouldn't be the scientists' book. The book would tell the story of the boy’s fumbling and disappointment, and what he did about it. That’d be a true story. That might not be the story Karl wrote, of course, but it’d be a reasonable story involving science and scientists that didn't give the reader a good feel for doing science; in the end the reader wouldn’t know the life of science any more than the boy did. What she'd know is the difficulty of approaching it.

Thirty White Horses

As promised in the last post, here's a link to "Thirty White Horses" (pdf). When I went back to clean it up, the science seemed muted, which was fine with me. The story's still got other problems, but I don't think "wheeling in Science" is one of them. I've also got a paper up about how (it seems to me) Richard Powers uses narrative structure to help get the science across Galatea 2.2 and The Gold Bug Variations. I still don't think they're good novels, but they've got a clever, pretty, operatic structure involving a tension between student and teacher that I haven't seen before, and it's a structure that I think could be useful to others. It's also nice that Powers tried it in two books, one where the student's essentially a wide-eyed undergrad, and one where the student's a strung-out RA, so you can see the pros and cons of the variation. Ordinarily I'm not a fan of academic fiction -- the settings become academic nowheres, tethered to nothing -- but it seems natural in Powers' books.

I missed SLSA '07 thanks to childcare issues, but organizer Aden Evens and panel chair Jay Labinger were terrific and generous in making sure my work got presented. For next year, I'll see if the organizers will call in some conference childcare.

I'm working on something to do with popular science illustration, but first I've got to get a 6th-grade social studies book out of the way. Who knew 11-year-olds needed to learn about trade barriers? I guess now they do. I hope the books come with a good world map, too. Meantime, enjoy the beautiful E. coli by David Goodsell.

Idling speculation

When I started this blog I was looking for ways to use science in literary fiction that didn't involve wheeling in Science, stopping the action to point at Science, and wheeling it off again. Or, worse, stopping the action to point at Science and then build some literary metaphor around it before wheeling it off. I wanted to use science the way it seems to me to exist in the world -- as an influential, incoherent, anonymous authority, one that has vivid images and partial flashes of explanation but no compelling story.

My first shot at this, "Thirty White Horses", showed me how easy it is to go wrong and veer off into SF or speculative fiction. The story takes place in a world where rapid population growth led to violence over gravesite scarcity; the political solution was to sell a mechanistic view of life. "Peace for the living," was the phrase. People soon corrupted this into a spiritual-mayfly view of ever-changing life and a sentimental, rather breathless idea of death as profound cleanliness. Nice people don't stop for it. The protagonist is a sixtyish woman who has an unreformed sense of life and death. The story begins with the death of her ex-husband, and she finds there's no longer any way to mourn him in a way she knows as meaningful, except in secret. Young people don't know how to mourn, and old people know better.

It's a failure because as soon I got interested in the science and the what-if, the story turned into into speculative fiction, which feels to me like a cheat. "Imagine a world that's like _______!" Except the world isn't like that, and there's already a perfectly interesting world with more complexity and sharp story than you're likely to come up with on your own. The only non-hard-SF "speculative world" stories I can think of that I've really liked turn out not to be speculative at all: 1984, for instance. Victory stew, still a reality in 1988, and I know because I ate some in East Berlin. (Without benefit of Victory gin.)

The other problem, of course, is that you're staring at the science. I tried steering away from that by focusing on the politics, and framing the social change in news reports and through the lenses of a sixth-grade history text and the woman's memory. I also wrote, and then took out, a chunk of science documentary that made the mechanistic view lively and appealing. But even without overt science infodumps, it seems artificial, too model-building. And I suppose that's because it isn't personal enough.

So how did this happen? I'm guessing the problem was right there at the start: asking myself how people could live with an idea of life as machine process, and then failing to notice how people already do this. For instance, in being willing to go to the hospital for transplants. Instead I took an easier route and built a future world. Which I completely enjoyed doing, but there's more to mine in real relationships, I think. Obviously there's a thinness in fake worlds. But since the story is essentially about a woman who has no licit way to mourn her ex-husband, the real story becomes the way history has left her behind and turned her into a symbol of something socially despised -- the old way of looking at death. While she's not at all responsible for that old-fashioned notion of burials and mourning, it really does animate her, and she genuinely doesn't understand the shift in attitudes. And that part's not new or fake at all; that happens every time an important social reality changes. There are always people left behind.

I think this is what bothers me so much in speculative fiction or sociological SF. You get a very dense social reality grafted to an exceedingly thin historical reality, and the effect is twee or odd. The density of the social reality -- in this case, the problem of living as a pariah -- demands an historical reality as rich and real, I think.

I'm looking for a way to post the story conveniently.

Fecundity out of repression

The title is from a thoroughly enjoyable essay by chemists Roald Hoffmann and Pierre Laszlo on scientific conversations:

Here is a question we believe probably one should not ask, especially a young scientist should not ask in a scientific conversation: "Do you understand?" On the face of it, what could be more honest and straightforward? The speaker, who may have just presented a difficult concept, or spoken too quickly, has sensed a nonverbal response on the part of his audience/ listener, and is stating that he or she is willing to explain things again. But the question, unless asked in just the right tone, and between people of equal status or confidence, may be just as problematic as the question "Do you love me?" If it has to be asked, it may be too late.

-"The Say of Things," Hoffmann and Laszlo, Social Research, Fall 1998

I had an interesting question put to me recently about how scientific and literary narratives differ. Since I'm unnecessarily literal and have never written scientific narrative, I went to the library and read some core works in the rhetoric of science. For those in the know, or whose idea of fun needs fine-tuning, that'd be rhetoricians of science like Charles Bazerman, Alan Gross, and Greg Myers, plus a couple of sociologists: Steven Shapin, Bruno Latour.

The reading suggests something interesting, I think, about why science doesn't show up more as an everyday part of conversation in literary fiction. All the writers focus on how scientific journal articles are argumentative, and the writers with a more historical bent look at why and how scientific journal writing developed that way.

The evolution, as these writers tell it, has 17th-c. natural philosophers beginning to argue in print with each others' remarks and suppositions about how nature works, and retreating to increasingly careful and precisely-described experiments to support their claims. Personality recedes in favor of experiment. After a few decades, the scientists leave the pedestrian world of "x works like y," the claims grow broader about the relationships between things in the natural world, and the experiments are designed to support these large statements. The arguments get fiercer, narrower, the scientists' "I" recedes far, far into the background; forms get more rigid, the audiences get more sharply defined. We land in the world of the zillion-endnotes Journal of Scientific Subfield article with heavy combat among referees, editors, and scientists on everything from punctuation to the permissable breadth of claims, given the scientists' place in scientific society.

Sounds like a reasonable enough progression to me, given a mechanistic conception of the universe. If you presume things work in some orderly, objectively explainable fashion, and you say, "It goes like____," someone else will likely argue, and you're off to the races. There can be no legitimate retreat from argument into subjectivity, no fuzzy "This is how I see it," (followed by jumble of half-baked historical references capped with assertion of the artist's absolute right to call it as he feels it). Which is what happens, I think, in worldview arguments in fiction.

So assume that's really how scientific narrative goes. Why, then, would such narratives be amenable to use in fiction? It seems to me that fiction deals mostly with public conversations that are not tightly constructed. What do you owe your mother? Who is a stranger? How is it possible to live with other people? Is there any such thing as a person? Loose ends, hardly anything but loose ends.

If the scientific story says, "X is true, supported by y, z, 3," then I wonder what the novel can do with it. (Particularly since the novelist is not placed to argue with this scientific statement.) The novel can blink and keep walking, which is, I think, what happens most of the time. Or it can say, "Oh, well, if X is true, then the social implications might be ______," which lands you in the realm of speculative fiction. Or -- if it is a more literary novel -- it can lift some aesthetically striking or resonant part of X, ignore the science, and attach social or psychological meanings to the scavenged bit -- the strange horrors of being subject to clocks, for instance. But in none of these is there really conversation between science and the novel.

I'm thinking also of scientific images that end up in mass media, which is where fiction writers generally see them. If scientific images are originally framed for use in argument, I bet it's unlikely the scientists doing external PR try to tear them down and reframe them for other kinds of conversation -- literary conversation, or loose public conversation. I would guess they try instead to repackage the images in either simplified-educational form or art-photo form -- consider Felice Frankel's work. Something that will sell, something that will be recognizeable as science. If this is how it goes, I see no reason to expect that the arguments and conversations implicit in the images -- however strange or beautiful -- would engage well with the world outside professional science's formal combat. Which may be why these images seem so curiously mute, and why they're so difficult to use in stories.

All of this brings me back to Hoffmann and Laszlo's essay, which is about kinds of conversations that go on in chemistry. They are impatient with the dispassionate journal essay, and describe with delight scientific conversations they've known as working chemists -- conversations with nature, conversations with students, conversations with other chemists. At the end they write:

Thinking about real value, if conversation is compensatory of repression—more open just because the written product of scientific work is so constrained—could it be that much more real discovery and creation takes place in conversations? We think so! It is the first place where one expresses understanding outside of the private confines of one's mind. The research group presentation is probably next, the writing of the paper the last, very important, place. The conversation—with a colleague, student to student—is where the ideas get expressed. And until they are expressed, in some way they are not real. The conversation reifies the idea; it selects in the mind of the researcher one possibility of many, it is the first existential act in science.

If these ideas are not already handmaiden to scientific argument -- if they aren't already constrained in the way of the journal article -- then maybe this is a place where novelists should talk with scientists. Maybe this would be more fecund than the novelist's seeing the carefully-produced images in the Tuesday New York Times. I wonder how that would be, and what sort of conversation might be possible.

The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not?

That's from Donald Hall's interview with Marianne Moore in the Paris Review, 1960. (Hall made much of her Nixon button.) She's talking about the similarities between poets and scientists:

Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision. As George Grosz says, 'In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist.' The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronowski says in the Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it's not established once and for all; it's evolving.

I'm thinking about 'fertile procedure' after reading Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2. I'll confess that while I like the book as an experiment, and get the impression that he's a remarkably civilized thinker, I don't think it does well as either a novel or an explication of the science to the uninitiated. I won't include spoilers here, but will say generally that there's a literary backstory (incl. character depth, literary musing, rich setting, believably complex emotional lives, even if it's got the liability of a feckless writer character at its heart) that's thematically connected to the SF story dealing with arguments in artificial intelligence. The SF story it's grafted to has markedly flatter character and motivation, and I don't believe that the ideas chewed over are genuinely moving anyone besides the author/protagonist. But. According to Daniel Dennett, he's made tremendously good metaphors for the AI concepts, and returned useful questions and images to scientists. It's also slow. While the science work described is feverish, the book itself is slow, irritatingly slow sometimes, and reflective.

Which puts me in mind of some early-midcentury European novels, except that instead of the ideas and romances being grafted to political stories involving cartoon Communists, there's cartoon SF types. And all of a sudden I think I've been on the wrong track with this book. I'll come back to that, but the question I'll stop with is about who a novel like this is for. If the metaphors surrounding AI are too poeticized-fuzzy, in the novel, to give a clear sense of the arguments & mechanisms to the uninitiated -- and I think in general they are, in Galatea -- is it mainly for scientists, people in the field? I don't mean the question in the accusatory "you write only for the elite, you hate the common people!" Marxist-listmaker vein, but it hadn't occurred to me before that there might be literary fictions aimed mainly at scientists in the field. It seems to me a bit cramped, but maybe that's wrong and it's actually extremely useful, a narrow hall opening onto a vast expanse.

metafer

Yes, I know, it's 'metaphor', but after listening to Joseph Campbell talking for hours about metafers -- abstracted Jennifers, I'm sure -- that circuit's fried.

Anyway. I've been thinking about science metaphors and the agonies over poetic writers retailing bad metaphors. By 'bad' I mean scientifically inaccurate.

It seems to me there are at least two kinds of science metaphors, though, that we're talking about. One is the sort of metaphor that helps a scientist explain their work; for instance, nanotech people have conferences with illustrators so they can generate visual metaphors for the work. Something people can understand. So this is metaphor that's about what's happening in the lab.

But I think there is another kind of metaphor, one that's rather looser about the science, and it's to do with how science filters through in ordinary lives, in the way that Roberta experiences it, say. Updike did something memorable with it in Rabbit Redux, I think, where the elder Mrs. Angstrom is on L-dopa for Parkinson's, and there's a long dank frightening section involving the plumbing in her mind, and backed-up sewers. I'll find and quote it. I suppose you could call it the subjective experience of science as it's lived. If you wanted to be particularly boring about it. I think Updike did better, though, in creating an iconic turn-you-to-stone image in Toward the End of Time
: the half-built international space station, a ghostly, unshakable moon in the daytime sky, abandoned as war broke out, and those aboard left to die. A permanent reminder of Not Finishing and the cruelty. Let me see if I can find Updike's description, which is no doubt better:

...If the first occupies, like the sun, a half-degree of the celestial hemisphere's 180 degrees, this second is no wider than a sixth of a degree. It has a honeycomb appearance, with a pair of scarcely visible appendages, stubby dragonfly wings.

This moon was man-made -- a space station set in orbit three thousand miles above the Earth, one-hundredth of the first moon's distance, by men before the Sino-Aerican Conflict dissolved the governments able to maintain the shuttle ships. Earth abandoned its satellite, and the colonists marooned there survived for a time amid their tons of provisions and their solar-powered greenhouses. Then, as the world watched in horror the television broadcasts that were maintained with the generators' last volts of energy, the space-dwellers one by one died. This episode, beocme mythic, has inspired any number of bathetic retellings in the popular media, even if all of us who dwell on Earth are in a position exactly the same, if on a larger scale. Indeed, it is not impossible that the colony, in its giant honeycomb of hollow struts and exquisitely stretched sheets of insulating foil, still holds a few live crewpersons, surviving on protein tablets....

That's richer, anyway. I do think it's time for "watched in horror" to go away. I just used that in a mawkish lead-in to a piece on Feynman's Challenger O-ring demo, a piece on summarizing for a 9th-grade textbook. Funny thing, the K-12 ed biz, picking someone like me to teach summarizing. Illustrative of the problems, I'd say.

Anyway. It's nice, isn't it, that space station. Nothing new about ghost ships, but they're a little 17th-c, and lose meaning. Especially when they're not hanging in the sky every day. In this one you get the colonizing-space excitement, and the technical prowess, and their daily lived reality, while below the ordinary, dirty old Updike protag crunches around in his frozen Boston suburb, conscious of his age and the sense of having seen plenty, and not primarily concerned with outer space.

So what have scientists to do with all that? Well, I don't know. It seems to me there ought to be at least some looking back from good fictional science-as-it's-lived (SAIL) metaphor to fresh-from-the-lab (FFTL) metaphor. And some conversation between them. I bet there's some pretty good dissonance there, routinely. How would that be useful? Good question. Not sure yet. But it does seem to me that if the SAIL metaphor is going to be coherent and incisive – because one way or the other, I think, it’s going to be a critique, or fodder for critique -- it ought to envelop a crisp understanding of the FFTL metaphor and anything that’s crucial to understanding the science.

Land ho! Get your pants on.

You know, I don't like the obligatory blogger "sorry I'm late" handwringing. It'll likely go on for a while, though, since my husband's disability checks may stop abruptly next month, and I have no intention of putting our 2-year-old in fulltime daycare. The more I look at it, the less reasonable it looks to put a kid in institutional care for ten hours a day until the child's at least eight or nine. (Or 78. I don't want to be in institutional care either.) Eating's a nice hobby, though, so I may be busy selling our house in a few weeks, and finding us cheap digs. I've also got book proposal deadlines coming up, so expect the sporadic posting to continue.

I've been thinking that, as much as I enjoy the straight pop-science reading, it's leading me away from questions about how bits of scientific thought and assumptions permeate our ordinary consciousness. How people live with science day-to-day, misinterpreting what they've heard, having headlines lodged in their sense of how the world works, knitting mechanistic implications of medicine to bits of theology and philosophy and women's magazines, that kind of thing.

So I'm thinking it's time to talk with nonscientists who deal with large numbers of people and science. Politicians (think constituents' reactions to environmental/NIMBY projects, like power generating station near houses and water pollution), hospital chaplains (think patients trying to figure out why they're sick and what it means), psychiatrists (how do patients work out the relationships between brain and self?), dietitians (why do people believe they're fat?), teachers (how are their administrators looking at evolution and why?). People in that kind of position. I've got some chats arranged with a chaplain and a psychiatrist, and I'll let you know what they have to say.

I'm also thinking it'd be good to talk with some SF writers about the questions around which their own stories revolve.

I've been on a Malamud kick recently, and it strikes me that the book I'm reading now -- God's Grace -- involves the kind of consciousness of science in literary fiction that I've been talking about. The book begins with a nuclear holocaust and an almost-hapless survivor, paleologist Calvin Cohn, who was doing research at the bottom of the ocean when the bombs went off. Surfacing & climbing back onto his boat, he found himself the only survivor. This was verified by God, who apologized for the error & assured Cohn his time was up too. And then, for whatever His reasons, dragged His feet about knocking off Cohn. Cohn found he wasn't quite alone; there was an intelligent, proselytizing Christian lab chimp on his boat, and that's all the spoilers I'll give. But it's a literate book, and the focus does not appear to be on the science gear, important as it is to the story.

Science fiction means what we point to when we say it

What's literary fiction? What's science fiction?

My father's been reading Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, and tells me he found Einstein's apparent lack of filter, lack of ordinary sense of the reasonableness of ideas, very interesting. He said he thought every high school student should read it, if only to see the value of being so free, mentally, from ordinary constraints. When I think of Lightman, I think mostly of his book Origins, which I enjoyed very much, and of attending a small, awkward reading of Good Benito. I'd been surprised at the reading; the quality of the prose didn't seem to me very good, didn't seem to me to reflect the man's intelligence or subtlety of mind, which I think are easy to see in his nonfiction.

My father thought I was being a pain in the ass. He told me to get past the quality of the prose and look at the ideas, which is something I've been doing lately in reading recommended SF. It occurred to me that most of the conversation I've heard praising SF has indeed been about the ideas, often complex and powerful ideas, and often with a sense of clarity and cool interrogation that makes me think hypothesis. Poetry, a literate, sustained, fine-art sense of language and what it can do, doesn't seem to be a requisite part of the show, and I think it is very much in what I think of as literary.

There are enough disgruntled blog discussions of "what is literary" that I suspect it hasn't got a long life ahead of it as a genre. (See here and here, for example.) The question "what is art", though, attracts the same sense of frustration and annoyance, and I don't think it's going away. Wikipedia's prudent entry points out that the definition of "literary merit" is important legally, but otherwise doesn't want to get involved.

I wonder if the relative importance of ideas and poetry are real differences between literary and SF, and a reason why there's this low-grade antagonism. I wonder if champions of each are simply blind to what the others see as valuable.

an actual sign

The Koch poem:

One Train May Hide Another

(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line --
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another -- one Colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows,
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple -- this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by the mother's
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love or the same love
As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"
Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too; one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and
One song hide another song: for example "Stardust"
Hide "What Have They Done to the Rain?" Or vice versa. A pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you'd have preferred to talk with all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one.
It can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

the working skeleton of all our thought

Here is Searle on science v. art and social sciences, and you can see immediately why this kind of thing makes Midgley crazy. He's talking about how tough it is to explain minds in a physical universe, and this comes under "Psychological and Social Explanation":

One of the most disappointing features of the intellectual history of the last hundred years was the failure of the social sciences to achieve the rich explanatory power characteristic of the physical and biological sciences. In sociology, or even economics, we do not have the kind of established knowledge structures that we have in physics and chemistry. Why not? Why have the methods of the natural sciences not had the kind of payoff in the study of human behavior and human social relations that they have had in the physical sciences?

I say "science v. art" because there's no mention of art as richly, powerfully explanatory of human behavior and society. Nor do I see any mention of art (of any kind) or artists in the index. Searle might recognize this use of art in his other writings; I don't know. But I'll point out that the last hundred years saw the rise of a new kind of novel, the psychological drama, which is centered in the protagonist's minutely rendered consciousness and has crowded out nearly every other kind of story (to the exhaustion and irritation of many). The yield of modern archetypes includes Rabbit Angstrom, Stephen Daedalus, Yossarian, Holden Caulfield, among many others. A fictional archetype is a human model, widely recognized as true.

While novels aren't explanatory in the sense that you can nab a random passenger off the subway and use Holden Caulfield to explain how she'll behave, they do show, psychologically, how these types come to be in a mess, what the mess means, how they try to get out, and what that means. Psychologically, socially, philosophically, -ally. While allowing other, unwritten meanings.

Anyway. I think Midgley's cane-thumping reply to Searle's question would be that we already have impressive knowledge structures in nonphysical science, usually derided as folk wisdom. Here she is on that:

Consciousness is not something rare and exotic found only in experimental subjects or in scientific observers. Nor does it only show us a few special phenomena such as colours and dreams and hallucinations. It is not primarily an observation-station. It is the crowded scene of our daily lives. And the main dramas going on in it do not concern just observation or perception but quite complex, dynamic currents of feeling and efforts to act. If we mean to do justice to this complexity, we have to take seriously the rich, well-organised language which we use about it every day. That language does not just express an amateur 'folk-psychology'. It is the indispensable working skeleton of all our thought -- including, of course, our thought about science.

-p. 85, Science and Poetry

I think she'd also point out that in the last hundred years the social sciences have been deformed by the political power of modern physical sciences, with social scientists trying to do away with any smell of subjectivity. Often grotesquely.

One more shock in this Searle book, so far:

The underlying impulse of functionalism was to answer the question, Why do we attribute mental states [like pain, or the conviction that Denver is the capital of Colorado] to people at all? And the answer was, we say they have such things as beliefs and desires because we want to explain their behavior.

Which is not, to my mind, a usual answer in art. There are questions about behavior in art, yes, but there are also questions of experience. What it feels like to be human, what it might be like for someone else (and through that, ourselves), or for ourselves in another life. I don't know whether Searle is being fair here to functionalists. If he is, I'd say it's a good reason for artists to go have lunch with philosophers.

as at a crossing, one train may hide another train

I'm very slowly pulling together some campus talk here at the University of Iowa on science, art, and literary fiction, which is part of why I'd started this blog. I wanted a space for hashing out related ideas with other people and looking for ways of having fruitful conversations among artists and scientists, and I hoped it'd change my mind about how to host real-life conversations.

I think that's happening -- I think this is softening me up. Originally I'd had a teacherish eat-your-veg view, where the lack of talk between scientists and artists disturbed me, and I wanted to sort of mash the two groups together. (The fascist preschooler in me is very hardy.) But thanks to conversations like this one, and articles on other two-cultures sites like Lablit, I'm starting to suspect we're better off if the artists who show up are already genuinely interested in science, scientists, the culture of science. Which shows I'm slow, but this is not new. Anyway, thanks to commenters.

I've started reading John Searle's Mind and it's made me suspicious of some of my favorite childhood thoughts. I spent most of fourth grade, which was less than engaging, studying my hands, peeling Elmer's glue off them, and wondering how it was I could move them just by wanting to. Searle raises that question in his introduction (minus glue) and points out that it assumes a distinct mind and body, and I see that at nine I assumed mind and body were separate. I don't anymore, so I have a feeling I'll sit by while he dismantles something I've got no stake in, but I'm curious to see what he's got to say about materialism and what he calls "emergentism as it is standardly conceived."

My daughter sounds like she's wrecking my bed as it is standardly conceived, so that's it for now. The poem is Kenneth Koch's "One Train May Hide Another"; I'll quote it later.

she will be bound with garlands of her own

Lablit.com editor Jennifer Rohn, writing about a science/art project at CERN, says:

[Physicist Rolf] Landua is a firm believer in the power of art to help science, namely when it serves as PR.

Which says to me the project is bound to disappoint, and at best be wildly inefficient. We've had a conversation recently on lablit about the expectation that young scientists must produce, chop-chop, or leave the bench, and why young writers aren't treated the same way. Neurograd wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but writing students pay their own tuition for the most part, right? So, if someone is willing to shell out the $150k for a writing degree, I would say that's their prerogative, and if they want/need to take longer to finish that degree, then so be it. But if I were a professor, department, or funding agency and I were paying for a student's tuition (plus a stipend to boot), I would expect that a reasonable level of productivity should be maintained.

Add that sense of responsibility to funding to a sense that people will be much friendlier to science if only they understand it, and I think there's a slow train wreck waiting to happen in any such sci/art programs.

I don't know that the scientists involved understand this is not work with reliable freelancers, people who get a contract and feel obliged to turn out a certain kind of product. That there's no knowing what an artist might do with exposure to science that's meant to enlighten them and turn them into champions. Yes, you might get something useful as PR out of it, though if it's any good it's unlikely it'll be useful PR for anything. It might also be entirely irrelevant to CERN or whatever other agency is involved; it might be openly hostile to the agency's projects; it might deeply misinterpret the work.

I think these projects are best off involving artists already seriously interested in science and philosophy of science. Even then, PR, no, the work's not likely to be PR. A helpful complication, maybe.

The poem is Keats' "On the Sonnet":

If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd,
And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet
Fetter'd, in spite of pained loveliness;
Let us find out, if we must be constrain'd,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of poesy;
Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain'd
By ear industrious, and attention meet;
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay-wreath crown;
So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her own.

so far beyond the casual solitudes

I'd written:

The essays I'm reading on science and myth all seem to have one thing in common: They go from molecules to politics without stopping off at the level of two people sitting and talking, each regarding the other. I wonder if it's because literary fiction -- which is at the level of two people sitting and talking -- largely ignores the molecules, but politics does not.

Doh. Of course the discussion skips the two-people-talking level. Two people talking is subjective. Deals with all that baffling, suspect "I" stuff. And, worse, "you". The eco/econ/international-relations policy level is objective and model-based, just like talk about molecules and organisms. In eco/econ/IR you're talking about masses of people, and what to do to and with them.

Btw, today's title is from Wallace Stevens's Re-statement of Romance:

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

I could hardly resist two lines from another poem, Bantams in Pine-Woods:

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.

But frankly I'm not that interested in chicken consciousness.

We've had tornadoes here. F-2 level, meaning winds over 150 mph, meaning enough wind to smash brick churches and cinderblock garages, snap 80-year-old trees, suck cars off the tops of parking ramps and drop them on the streets. (One car has not been found.) You can see pictures here. We're fine at our house, though. Closest tornado passed about a mile south of us. No damage here even to the tulips. The 2-year-old reckons our house is not actually strong enough to keep out tornadoes, and is troubled by it when she remembers, turning over how it might come out all right, remembering that broken houses get fixed and we can keep safe downstairs. She's very interested in watching the crews clean up and fix everything damaged.

I'm from weak-hurricane country, not tornado country, so I hadn't understood before why you want to be as deep inside, preferably under, the house as you can be. Especially if the house might fall on you. I hadn't counted on the missiles, like wood planks the tornadoes drive straight through house walls or four feet into the ground. Basements, yes, good idea.

if I were you and you were me

The essays I'm reading on science and myth all seem to have one thing in common: They go from molecules to politics without stopping off at the level of two people sitting and talking, each regarding the other. I wonder if it's because literary fiction -- which is at the level of two people sitting and talking -- largely ignores the molecules, but politics does not.

It's a funny gap, anyway, and I'll have to look around to see what else lives on that level. Philosophy, maybe. Maybe religion. I'd say psychology, but what I've seen of the transactional variety is so model-bound as to be stupid about how people live and behave.

Anyway, if you've got reading suggestions, send 'em along.

when it is seemly and when one is fit to receive

The title's from James Lovelock's The Ages of Gaia; Lovelock is the English tinker-scientist who developed the Gaia idea while at NASA JPL. The quote in full:

When I first saw Gaia in my mind I felt as an astronaut must have done as he stood on the Moon, gazing back at our home, the Earth. Thinking of the Earth as alive makes it seem, on happy days, in the right places, as if the whole planet were celebrating a sacred ceremony. Being on the Earth brings that same special feeling of comfort that attaches to the celebration of any religion when it is seemly and one one is fit to receive.

(I don't know enough to have a position on Gaia, for or against or inbetween, so leave me alone with your crystals.)

What strikes me about the passage, and about other scientist/science-writers' excerpts in a strange little MIT texty-anthology called From Gaia to Selfish Genes, is that it does not carry a sense of breakneck speed. It's also literary. True, it's about ecology, and as I noted in my reply to Michael, ecology writing is the one place I've reliably found science writing that's slow and poetic. But the excerpt I've read so far in this book are from the 70s through the early 90s, and they're reminding me of other, older scientist-writers who are, or were, not so much ecologists as humanists: Jacob Bronowski, Roald Hoffman, Carl Sagan. Speed is not the great mark of their work, I don't think. So I wonder how far this current sense of speed is simply a recent fashion. Frankly, I wonder how much of it is in imitation of Feynman, who has a very quick prose and the kind of urging-on feel you get from people who are extremely bright, the kind who are impatient with the slowness of words and people who are slow to grasp the obvious. But I have never gotten the sense, reading Feynman, that he was agog at the science. I don't hear what Midgley calls the "mad cheerfulness" of Dawkins and many other contemporary science writers. Again, fundamentally, he sounded to me like a humanist, with a profound sense of human experience, and a sense that there would be no point to doing science or anything else without it.

The mad cheerfulness is, to me, still quite appealing. I like it in Dawkins and Brooks; I like in in Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic, too. There's a springiness and a sense of every day a birthday, and that's altogether lacking in literary fiction, which seems to require misery.

I am thinking of Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millenium, the lectures he was working on just before his death for the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in '85-86. They describe and support the literary qualities he thought important at the end of his life, and the five completed essays were on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity; there was to be a sixth on consistency. Mad cheer is not one of them, and neither is naive delight, but the recent popular science I've read does certainly strike me as either quick, light, and alert to multiplicity, or ploddingly trying for those qualities. I read the essays long ago and don't remember them; I'll have to reread them now.

all the little hatchets that came up

I've been listening online and on NPR to fiction writers/poets and scientists, trying to talk to each other about how science works in literary fiction and poetry. So far it's been a complete bust. Characteristic was an exchange between a poet and a quantum-computing guy on NPR on Friday. The poet, petulant, demanded to know how quantum computing was going to be fantastic and revolutionary and change her life, and the science guys were so excited a poet had called that they started grasping at how poetic quarks are. Once again: Poet talking about a person (even if herself); scientists talking about quarks.

Also characteristic was a discussion I had with an advisor to the University of Iowa's Literature, Science and the Arts program, during which he kept trying to hook me up with nonfiction and science-fiction writers -- anything that had to do with writing. The idea of literary fiction as a separate discipline wasn't really there. Towards the end he looked sort of baffled and said he didn't really hear much from non-SF fiction people.

It occurred to me that a primary quality of the science writing I've read, by scientists and nonscientists, is of breakneck speed. Terrific enthusiasm, terrific pushing-ahead, and a tangible sense that this is very exciting but there's a lot of work to do, and we're on our way to something. In what I've seen of science, too, there's pressing, pressing, pressing ahead, scheduling the experiments, at the edge of the chair for results for the next paper, the next conference. I don't see that there's time for chewing over the words and making perfect sentence. This is is not, as far as I've known, the mood of poetry and literary fiction writing. Both are contemplative and reflective, and demand perfect sentences, or as close as you know how to make them. And maybe this difference in how we work is a real impediment when we try to talk.

I'm looking at the little bookshelf in my office, and -- well, here are two science writers, two literary writers. John McGahern first, by way of memorial, from his novel The Dark opened at random:

You went the same road back, rage seething, and failure. People had to go among people, they needed other people, yet they couldn't be easy, all the little hatchets that came up. Wouldn't it be better for them to stay alone in the fields and rooms, and let the world come or pass in whatever shape it would? Why couldn't the Ryans listen to you tell them that Joan was leaving and no more, instead of driving knives at you, and why had you the same urge to knife them back? Then you couldn't think when you imagined that meek bastard alone with her in the bathroom.

And here is Wallace Stevens ("The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract"):

This day writhes with what? The lecturer
On This Beautiful World Of Ours composes himself
And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe,

And red, and right. The particular question -- here
The particular answer to the particular question
Is not in point -- the question is in point.

What's important there, the language, not just the vision but the language, because without having the language right the exactness and depth of the peculiar vision won't be there. Here by contrast is Dawkins, using language not to paint but to illustrate:

So what do we mean by a miracle? A miracle is something that happens, but which is exceedingly surprising. If a marble statue of the Virgin Mary suddenly waved its hand at us we should treat it as a miracle, because all our experience and knowledge tells us that marble doesn't behave like that.

(I was going to quote from a book called The Abacus, which a publisher's rep gave me years ago and which I've been carting around ever since, but it's terrible, and I see I ought to throw it out instead of inflicting it on you.)

Anyway. The difference between illlustration and painting might not be a terrible metaphor. Maybe the closest analogue between science writing and literary fiction might be when the science is new and exists only in the mind of the scientist. At that point the scientist is not trying to illustrate something that's already out in the world and understood, if understood in various ways, but is trying to paint some reality which, at that moment, only he can see.

nerve pills and Ted Chiang

Before I apologize for the Midgleython: I did read some stories of Ted Chiang's, and enjoyed them, but I don't think they're literary. The prose is lively, he's got some good natural swing, he's clever and has some interesting ideas, but I don't feel the power of the English language in his writing. It's neither poetry nor fine rhetoric. Which is no tragedy, but I don't think his writing should be held up as an example of literary science fiction. And it's possible that he's got more literary work than what I've read, but I don't think literary writers generally turn it on and off like that; I think you're a poet or you ain't. Which, again, is fine. I'm reading one of Asimov's autobios, and he's got this to say about literary writing:

The trouble with writing poetically is that if you hit the target, the result is beautiful; if you miss, it is rotten. Poetic writers are usually uneven. A prosaic writer like me, who consistently misses the heights, also avoids the depths.

I think that's true. On request, though, just because I'm a pedant, I'll do a side-by-side comparison of literary and Ted, and then people can get hysterical about that, if they want to. But I think it's probably not worthwhile.

(What kind of a snobby reader am I, anyway? The kind that largely agrees with Harold Bloom about Harry Potter, but mostly likes Bloom's headline: "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes." There, now I've alienated all six of you.)

Anyway, about Midgley: I hadn't meant to turn this into the Mary Midgley Hour, but she writes seriously, and without appeals to God, about why we shouldn't believe Rodney Brooks (remember Rodney Brooks?) when he says we're machines and no different from any other kind of biological machines, possibly no different in any important way from any other kind of machine, period. And why Dawkins is wrong when he says that science is the only way we have of understanding the world. So I'm taking my time reading her book, and doing something that's unusual for me, scribbling arguments all over it. I don't usually write in books, but hers needs a conversation.

Hang on, I've got to go tell the shrink I don't want any more Xanax. Half a pill and I felt like one of those things you poke with a stick and it doesn't move. To think people build an empire on this.

the narrow throne of reality

Midgley on why talk about the self sounds flaky and unscientific:

Metaphysical materialism [the idea that the biochemistry is all there is to life] got into European thought in the first place as a weapon used, first by the early atomists and then by political campaigners such as Hobbes, against the dominance of religion. In modern times the prime motivation behind it was horror and indignation at the religious wars and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its main target was the notion of the soul as a distinct entity capable of surviving death....this social and political motivation was quite close to that of the ancient atomists, who were also moved by outrage at disastrous religious practices.

This motivation was a suitable one for forging a weapon in campaigns against the churches. But it was much less able to provide a balanced foundation for the whole of science, let alone for a general understanding of life. For that wider understanding, change and interaction needed to be seen as intelligible in their own terms and the first-person aspect of life had to be taken seriously as well as the objective one.

Descartes notoriously saw this last problem and made a magnificent attempt to deal with it by making mind or consciousness the starting point for his systematic doubt. He did succeed in getting subjectivity finally onto the philosophers' agenda, but for a long time they were puzzled about what to do with it. Descartes still described mind ontologically, not as a first-person aspect or point of view but as a substance, something parallel to physical matter but separate from it and not intelligibly connected with it.

This kind of dualism had the fatal effect of making mind look to many scientists like an extra kind of stuff, not like one aspect (among many) of the real world but like a rival substance competing with matter for the narrow throne of reality. This vision inclined scientifically-minded people to sign up for an ideology called materialism, meaning by that not just allegiance to matter but in some sense disbelief in mind. The idea of the two as rivals for the status of reality persisted. Mind was seen as an awkward non-material entity which perhaps ought to be removed with Occam's Razor, one which was certainly too exotic meanwhile to deserve serious scientific attention. And alarm about it went particularly deep in the social sciences, which were becoming increasingly sensitive about their scientific status.

This is why, through much of the twentieth century, scientists, both social and physical, in English-speaking countries were extraordinarily careful to avoid any mention of subjectivity and particularly of consciousness....

Which sounds grand and sensible, but I'm still waiting for Midgley to admit that the physical stuff generates mind, rather than saying, "These are aspects of human life which must be considered together in understanding what we are." I understand her impatience with the idea that we're windup toys, and that we're helpless to our biological fate. I like her attempt, later in the book, at arguing that mere physical state does not push our actions; our own conscious thought does. But the thoughts must come from somewhere, and must be part of the physical system somehow. As important as the subjective experience is, and as real as I consider it to be, her arguments do not, so far, persuade me that it drives us as powerfully as other parts of the chemical machinery do. Or that mind is a special kind of emergent property, different from all others, and more important in its effect on the organism. Which is saying something, since I've spent most of my adult life writing fiction, or contemplating subjective experience.

Last week I tried Xanax, a benzodiazepine prescribed for anxiety. Subjectively: It's an abomination, emotional Botox, but it sure does work. I took half the minimum prescribed dose and within half an hour had a heavily anesthetized gut feel. No adrenaline, not even in the middle of a quarrel with my husband -- which I made up by saying, "Was this really so important?" No spring in the feet, no fight. The drug left me with an overwhelming sense of Whatever, and I can't imagine that under its influence I would, say, mount a political campaign, or bother flossing my teeth, or find television inane enough to turn off.

I mention this because it's a dramatic example of what seems to me an ordinary reality. While my thoughts influence my action, so does my gut feel, my physical sense of excitability, dread, paralysis, calm, anesthesia. It seems to me obvious that the biochemistry influences this physical sense and the thoughts and action that stem from it, and so far I am not seeing Midgley account for this ordinary experience.