On My Mind IX

Narrative and Acting

My life and work are at best executive summaries. I cannot tell a long story, or keep one in mind. I do not have a novel in me. Nor have I acted in theater, albeit I am acting a role in life taking advantage of my well-recognized peculiarities, sometimes consciously so, to get on with life and getting along with people and the world.

            I am idiosyncratic, sometimes violating conventional rules (without quite appreciating the extent of my violation)—or so I am told. My North Star is internal, albeit I am sure it is much directed by the world’s expectations and norms. I am foolish but not reckless, idiosyncratic but not beyond the pale. In the end, I am quite ordinary, if smart and cute and adorable and handsome, so it is said to me, too much by a half.

            As for narrative, there is dialog and a story and an art. I might learn all this in a course. But I rarely recall or attend to dialog. The story becomes schematic and structural rather than time-based, and the arc strikes me as incredible (except in reading many a novel, where I am a sucker). Characters are real but their backstories and their integrity escapes me, they are not in mind. I have no urge to write a novel or play.

            As for acting, even after I read books about acting, I do not put myself into role that is other than myself. I have been clinical with my son, and I am careful with bosses. But this is just being appropriate, not being stupid and self-centered. I have not been tempted by improvisation or theater or fantasy.

            In effect, I lack fantasy and imagination. I am here, now, up to what I am doing, not much otherwise displaced. What would Moses do?, is never on my mind. What would Kant or Hegel do?, was once more familiar, to justify what I was doing, to inspire and to suggest.

            I am not living out the story of my life. I am forging my way through, shaping the world and my actions so as to move…forward.  That there is meaning to this story, some sort of ending to each chapter or volume is little on my mind, although I can provide, on the spot, such meaning and order. And as well provide second and third alternative beginnings for those chapters and volumes.

            What happened, and this is what happened, becomes chronology rather than meaningful history, although again I can provide lessons and meaning. I often say, Don’t do what I did!: too risky, too dependent on fortune and good luck, too demanding of invention and hard work just to survive comfortably (rather than to thrive or to succeed). There is, perhaps, a biography here, but not one I want to read, nor one I would recommend to others.

            Actors are always between gigs. They are always looking for the next role, the next job. I have had such periods in my life, from about 1968-1985, and done well with grants and fellowships and visiting positions and tenure-track jobs. The in-between periods are moments of anxiety and exhilaration, of invention and interest.

Models

About Models, Analogies, and their Sources:  Almost all the models I employ, even if drawn from mathematics and physics, are not meant to be studied quantitatively or formally as they might in their discipline of origin.  One might find data and some sort of relationship to test them out, but that is not my concern, at all. Rather, the models and analogies might be understood, stripped or abstracted of their origins in mathematics and physics, as suggestive and providing a vocabulary for thinking about the city, my ostensible field. However, the motivation for the language and sentences I find myself using does come from the technical realm. In other words, to describe the world in terms of these models is not an imaginative exercise; rather, it is reading the world in terms of well-developed models and analogies, developed elsewhere. I am giving away the secrets behind these ways of thinking. For those appreciating the technical background, the models are more supple and complex than if they were taken to be merely a way of speaking—or so is the case for myself. Whatever insights one might have, those insights come as much from understanding the origins of the models as in any deeper thinking on one’s part.

Sources

Ideas for my writing and research derive from casual and professional reading, seminars, conversations with colleagues (often in fields far from my own), my formative education in high school and at Columbia College both in the humanities and in physics. These ideas come to mind and to life because I have various issues and concerns already in mind, or what people say or write strikes me as wrongheaded. I do curiosity-driven research disciplined by scholarship and an awareness of the traditions. My curiosity is likely latent, wakened by an encounter through reading and conversation.

Here are some examples that come to mind. I am unsure of the precursors that set me on these paths.

            —My work on accurate archival surround sound documentation of urban life and ambience became actual when at a university meeting meant to encourage interdisciplinary work by the faculty, I mentioned that I could not get good sound recordings. Tom Holman, a professor of film sound, volunteered to help me, with equipment choices and with appropriate standards for such documentation.  

            —I was reading a two-volume introduction to probability by William Feller, and some of the theorems and notions applied immediately to my work on the probability of doom.

            —Augustine’s Confessions became a model of decisionmaking, not when I first read it as a freshman in college, but fifteen years later when I heard a lecture by John Freccero on Dante.

            —I met Jay Caplan (French, University of Minnesota) when I needed to find someone who knew about Derrida (~1975). And, earlier, the husband of a student who was doing a philosophy degree pointed me to Derrida.

            —When I was a post-doc, there was a doctoral student who had studied phenomenological philosophy for the masters degree. He told me I had to read some phenomenology since it would helpful. But it was my attending the lectures on Heidegger given by Bert Dreyfus at Berkeley that allowed me to see just how Heidegger’s account of everydayness would enable my description of applying social research to public policy.

            —When Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, he followed a path through elliptic curves, a path already suggested earlier. I wanted to understand a bit of what was going on, so I found Tony Knapp’s Elliptic Curves. His bibliographic notes pointed to Robert Langlands’ work.

            —The textbook for my graduate course in statistical mechanics, by Kerson Huang, had an appendix providing a solution to the Ising model. It seemed too forbidding at first, but I must have promised myself to understand it eventually.

            —In some casual reading of a book by Michael Reed, I found a mention of André Weil’s threefold analogy, originally due to Richard Dedekind and Heinrich Weber (1882), of arithmetic, algebra, and Riemannian ideas. In Weil’s Collected Works there is a letter he wrote to his sister, a philosopher, in 1940 where he tries to explain what he is doing and so explains the analogy.

            —As a graduate student in physics, for recreation I took a course on photography for social research, taught by Paul Byers, a collaborator of Margaret Mead.

            —At the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1973-1974, there were a number of anthropologists and they pointed me to structuralist work (Edmund Leach), kinship ideas, and notions of liminality in the work of Victor Turner.

            —Early on in my teaching career, I encountered conventional economic theory. I realized that it was about marginal changes and so the calculus. I wondered how such a theory would be useful in accounting for those anthropological notions, often about mixture and pollution.

Of course, there is lots more. Terms such as archaeology, archive, documentation, aural landscape, choreography of everyday life, screen language, the tissue of negligible detail, envelopment, and swarming come to mind. What is striking is in the recurrence of a few ideas and models in the work, such as marginalism and discontinuity, everyday life, purity vs. pollution, the Ising model, and conversion.