Achilles & Aristotle

Terse Verse

If music be the food of love
Is poetry a bowlful of life?

A question crossed my mind the other day – do I only spontaneously write poetry when I’m cross about something? I’m sure I’ve written happy poems, but the impulse to bash out some verse seems to come more often than not through irritation, stress or annoyance. And often banal and mundane at that – from flat tyres to ineffective dishwasher tablets. Take this one:

Duzzit doesn’t

Rare to see such disinformation
In a modern formulation
Dishwasher tablets are all the same?
But Duzzit is to blame
No discernible cleaning
A film all over my pots
Unilever and P&G may be pricey
But their brands leave no spots.

This set me thinking. I read a few months back that musicians live longer, poets die sooner. Is it a bit like comedians? Making people laugh is – by all accounts – a sad person’s trade.

Perhaps it varies from person to person. But, for me, I think poetry comes more often as a venting of steam than a bucolic breeze. Still, better out than in.

Life

Of Sheds

Montaigne offers a top tip for he (or she) who would keep themselves sane:

That man, in my opinion, is very miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself, where to entertain himself alone, or to conceal himself from others.

When at home, I a little more frequent my library, whence I overlook at once all the concerns of my family.

Surely this is why men have sheds. A man needs his ‘domain’ however small. Given our postage stamp-sized garden, the kitchen by night largely serves for me. But a shed one day would be nice. As for a library, a man can dream. Lucky old Montaigne.

Life, Work

ProductiviDad

Working in South America nearly 20 years ago, I made a breakthrough discovery: if you know an English word ending in ‘ity’, you know the Spanish word if you replace it with ‘dad’.

This increased the variedad and utilidad of my conversations 100%. Sometimes the necessidad to find an opportunidad to use a ‘dad’ made esponteneidad a dificultad. But new vocabulary had opened a new world of possibilidades.

Now I am a Dad, the combination of children, work and life makes productividad an absolute necessidad. And blimey I’ve been productive this week. School runs, presentations, objectives, appraisals, cooking, cleaning, mowing the lawn. Phew. But with hindsight not enough time for thinking, reading and friends.

It’s all very well being ‘ProductiviDad’ but the good life needs a bit of ‘contemplación’ too. All work and no play makes Juanito a dull boy.

Children, Life, Odysseus

April Showers

Rain rain go away
Me and the boy set out to play
Driven back by hoods a dripping
When we should have been a skipping
Two straight weeks of being soaked
Is now getting beyond a joke.

Me and the boy set out for a day trip today. We got as far as the bus stop in a downpour and then couldn’t get on one. The Number 12 was all steamed up and no seats to go.

On the way back up the hill for a consolatory hot chocolate he suggested a step forward – ‘We could make an umbrella out of Lego!’ Necessity is the mother of all invention.

Life, Science, Work

Chaos and Complexity

I typed ‘Where does complexity come from given entropy?’ into Google this morning. Why? Because my life and work are in pretty good order, so a law of physics which threatens to mess them up is most inconvenient.

Given how hard it is to get anything done at work, given how fragile our lives and life’s works are and given the formidable obstacles to multicellular life a – how on earth do we get from chaos to complexity.

Before Googling, I’d read in the New Scientist that Precambrian alkaline oceans may have forced floppy-walled cells to get a shell – to keep the toxic alkalinity out. Alkaline oceans would also have promoted calcification. A problem and a solution jostling together.

I also read E.O. Wilson, the Harvard sociobiologist, explaining that the simplest way to understand complex human motivations, is the constant competitive/cooperative interplay between our loyalty to ourselves and that we pay to tribes and collectives -which give us faith, identity, mythologies and protection.

Speaking of which, high up the Google list of answers to my complexity vs entropy question was our old friend God. If the second law of thermodynamics demands increasing entropy, then a creator and His constant intervention seem to some like our only hope.

But I’m reminded of the classic sociological example I cited at work this week, in favour of not planning big things too much. You’re never more than five minutes from fresh bread in chaotic Paris but couldn’t get it anywhere in centrally planned Moscow – ecosystems are too complex to plan or design.

Instead of God, I preferred a great paper, which came top of the highly evolved ecosystem which is the Google search rank. MIT physicist Michel Baranger writes that the 20th century ‘certainty’ of scientific analysis has given way to the chaos of fractals and non-linearity.

Baranger admits complexity still defies a simple definition. But it does have these six features:

1) Complex systems contain many constituents interacting chaotically.

2) The constituents of a complex system are interdependent.

3) A complex system possesses a structure spanning several scales. (cell, leg, person; building, district, city)

4) A complex system is capable of emergent behaviour. (properties emerge at a higher level which are more than a description of the constituent parts – consciousness, life, society, culture)

5) Complexity involves an interplay between chaos and non-chaos. (if it’s all chaos nothing happens, if there’s no chaos nothing happens either)

6) Complexity involves an interplay between cooperation and competition for resources (the big one – drives reactions, feedback loops, religion, ethics, moral dilemmas, kindness and cruelty)

Fully embracing the messiness of chaos and complexity opens up the possibility that we might come to better understand the biological and social systems which drive us, and which we in turn drive.

The answers won’t be in neat models. But they would be a small step towards what E.O. Wilson calls a ‘New Enlightenment’. An Enlightenment built not on the determinism of Newton’s calculus and Adam Smith’s pin factory. Or on the individualism and reductionism of pure ‘survival of the fittest’. But one recognising that complexity comes from the jostling of chaos and order, competition and cooperation, small scale and large and interdependence of the whole.

What does that mean for my efforts to maintain a well-ordered life? Accepting a meteorite could flatten our house. That disagreements at work and at home are probably the drivers of progress. And that the competing demands on me create, yes, chaos; but also new complexity and the spur to creativity.

A reminder then that chaos and change can’t be avoided – you can only ride the waves not hold back the tide.