Isomorphisms of expectation

Resolutely stuck in the 1960s as I am, I recently watched yet another programme about the Great Train Robbery of August 1963. Concerned mostly with the identity of an alleged gang member who was never caught, the programme also discussed how the raid was carried out. One of the crucial requirements for the robbery to succeed was that the mail train needed to be halted at the precise point where the ambush was to take place, in rural Buckinghamshire. The gang lacked the technical knowledge to tinker with the railway signalling system. How then to stop the train? The solution, accredited to gang member Roger Cordrey, was to stuff a leather glove over the green signal, and rig up a battery-powered red lamp nearby. The train driver, speeding along in the dark, would see the red light and apply the brakes. He would assume that the red light was the signal; he had no reason to think otherwise. A signal, green or red, was what he was expecting to see. I’ve always considered this a clever, albeit criminal, illustration of lateral thinking.

Also recently, I’ve been attempting to watch the second series of “Hold the Sunset”, about which the only good things are the theme tune (“Have I The Right ?” by the Honeycombs) and fragments of pleasant Thames-side scenery around Richmond and Twickenham. This dire series has progressed from being merely negatively amusing to positively annoying. It’s so sad to see the long and illustrious career of John Cleese being tarnished by association with this dismal offering. However, thinking of Cleese in his former glory, and  in particular thinking of “Python”, for no very good reason I today recalled an episode first shown in December 1969, in other words almost half a century ago. Actually not featuring Cleese at all, this sketch concerns a psychopathic blood-crazed barber (Michael Palin) with his customer (Terry Jones). Wrestling with his own homicidal tendencies and with his customer settled in the chair, the Michael Palin character switches on a reel-to-reel tape recorder which plays typical barber shop conversations – about the weather, the football, etc – with suitable gaps for his customer to respond, and also the sound of scissors snipping away. Apart from the total absurdity of the situation the customer has no reason to suspect that the sounds he is hearing aren’t those of him having his hair cut. His expectations are anticipated … and fooled. An early outing in the direction of virtual reality, I suppose.

That is, until he susses the situation, and Palin famously confesses, “I didn’t want to be a barber anyway. I wanted to be a lumberjack”. And we know what comes next.

Detecting analogies, finding structural similarities, patterns, isomorphisms across apparently dissimilar situations can be a route to creativity, it can be a symptom of hypomania or schizophrenia, and it can be extremely tiresome. But I wonder: the fake railway signal, the fake barbering sounds. There’s some sort of deep level similarity going on, but whether it’s worth anything, well, who knows. Are there other parallels to be unearthed in other walks of life, in other created works? I really don’t know. I never wanted to be a blogger anyway. I wanted to be a logger, leaping from tree to tree as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia … The giant redwood, the larch … 

And that’s probably quite enough for one very warm Bank Holiday Monday.

Heavy naming

For those lucky enough to become parents, the naming of offspring – though seemingly a joy and privilege - must be one of the hardest, and most pressing, creative choices they have to make. The infant so far has few personality characteristics of its own, no reputation for good or ill, is completely unfamiliar to everyone - but whatever it gets called has to last for a very long time, and must be right ! So far, the puling neonate doesn’t look or act like a Darren or a Kevin, a Piers or a Rupert, an Amanda or a Tracey, but in time it might do. Naming has unexpected implications and consequences. The existing names of relatives, currently popular first names, the names of infamous characters in public life, and a need to avoid unfortunate phonetic clashes or conjunctions of initials will help in determining choice, but otherwise the new parents are out there on their own: it’s a huge responsibility. Back in my day, males of my acquaintance were reliably named Richard, Michael, David or Christopher, with John as a default middle name, while females could expect Margaret or Elizabeth, Gillian or Christine or Susan, with a middle Anne. It’s harder now. Back then there was no temptation to name the newborn Mango Chutney, Headcase, EasyJet, or even Accrington Stanley. It was that kind of era, Middle England in mid-twentieth century. Unimaginative but safe.

Part of the problem with new names is that whatever is named probably doesn’t “look like anything” yet. Certainly it doesn’t look like what it’s “supposed” to look like.  Winston Churchill claimed that all babies looked like him, yet relatively few were named after him, and then not for reasons of facial or gluteal morphology. The problem of naming is maybe even more difficult with objects or places. What shall we call this, er, thingummy, this whatsit? Velcro? A Segway ? You must be joking. Newly discovered or conquered lands, lacking obvious features, may soon acquire settlements called New Amsterdam or Boston after old world departure points suddenly nostalged over, yet have little in common with them. Even in existing communities  a degree of self-conscious crudity starts to creep in once expansion happens and labels are required: Kingsbury begets Queensbury, while Surbiton and Norbiton can mock each other despite their claimed ancient roots. Head to other worlds entirely, and naming asteroids after the Beatles seems mildly absurd. Once you’ve used up the Sea of Tranquillity and the Lunar Alps you’ll soon be running out of the best ideas. Having the Brecon Beacons on Mars or Salisbury Plain on Uranus isn’t entirely plausible. Mind you, I’m old enough to remember a time when the name  Ringo was itself newsworthy.

In the end, it’s what you’re used to, and when it’s completely new, you aren’t used to it, and so it sounds daft or inappropriate. I’ve been reading Kit Chapman’s “Superheavy” (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2019), which describes how the elements at the heavy end of the periodic table came (in most cases transiently) into existence. These include the actinoids (or transuranic) elements, and the superheavies (or transfermium elements) that currently extend to element 118, oganesson. Considerable sections of this most enjoyable book – it’s, er, quite light reading - are devoted to discussions about naming, ultimately decided by the chemical officiating body IUPAC, but reflecting the locations of the experimental work (for a long time primarily in the US and the Soviet Union, and then Germany too, and increasingly elsewhere), claims and counter-claims about what was actually produced (many of these substances have been manufactured only in the tiniest of quantities, and with ultra-brief half-lives), as well as assumptions such as that they should not be named after living persons (seaborgium, element 106, named after prolific discoverer Glenn T. Seaborg, broke this rule).

Familiarity breeds not only contempt, but also acceptance. Through long familiarity we have no problem in recognising that, from the closing days of WW2, uranium was followed by neptunium and then plutonium (a slightly naff planetary analogy), while americium and californium were euphonious and obvious acknowledgements of their place of origin, the rather clumsier berkelium likewise. Curium, einsteinium and nobelium were named after scientists everyone had heard of. Fermium and mendelevium were less digestible to the man in the street, though every bit as valid to the historian of science.

Some quite odd elemental names crop up in everyday news and conversation – molybdenum, manganese, zirconium, barium, selenium, for instance – without causing too much excitement, but one suspects – or hopes - that when people begin to study chemistry properly they sit up and take notice of truly linguistic oddities such as krypton and xenon, dysprosium and ytterbium, protactinium and praseodymium. There will be a blur between the commonplace and the truly strange, but exposure has the effect of normalising what was once peculiar and difficult. As with any other news story, we soon learn to assimilate the initially exotic. What could be more natural and sensible than to have a British prime minister called Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson ? A man, clearly, with a chemistry of his own. But I digress.

I suppose technetium and astatine are always going to sound slightly fake, francium too, though not germanium. It’s what you know. But it’s only when one encounters the newish superheavies that an overwhelming sense of peculiarity strikes, especially, as in my case, if one has taken one’s eye off the ball for a decade or three. Oganesson, already mentioned, in the same group as the rare or inert gases (hence the –on ending), named after Yuri Oganessian, of Armenian descent, and tennessine, element 117, named after the state of Tennessee and with the “-ine” ending characteristic of the halogens (bromine, chlorine etc), don’t sound quite right. Not yet. Nor do the awkward-of-pronunciation darmstadtium (110) and roentgenium (111). Livermorium, element 116, symbol Lv, and named for Livermore near San Francisco, sounds improbable and rather unpleasant, while moscovium (for Moscow, 115) and nihonium (for Japan, 113) sound a tad too slick. But give us time and they’ll roll off the tongue as readily as neon or neodymium. 

If the fabled “island of stability” is reached, with superheavy elements that are long-lasting, able to be produced in significant quantities, and useful in the real world, then the initially profoundly odd may become part of daily life and common language. “Superheavy” suggests that eventually a total of more than 170 elements may be possible, or even that there is no upper limit, in which case we are in for plenty of novelties, with novelty names to get used to.

Nomenclature, itself an uncomfortable word, is crucial to the unambiguous nature of chemical science, and – for those of even the slightest poetical inclinations – part of its endless fascination. In the nature of things, it continues. It merely gets heavier.

Object synaesthesia

I’d forgotten Petula Clark. Until, that is, a couple of nights ago when I watched a superb BBC4 documentary about Cindy Sherman. There she was, Petula, that is, in a suitably noir-ish 1965 video, performing Tony Hatch’s “Downtown”, with its wonderful piano intro.

Back in the previous decade, in 1953, Petula had recorded a version of “Poppa Piccolino”, which was a Number 2 UK hit for Diana Decker in the December of that year. Yes, it's easy to mock, though part of the melody presages "Being for the benefit of Mr Kite". I was three years old at the time, and that song was a major component of my mental life for a significant part of my early childhood. Initially a favourite, as self-consciousness grew "Poppa Piccolino" became an embarrassment. In part, that was because it was far more important to me than just a song, and I shall return to this point in a moment.

A few weeks ago I posted a blog called “Implausible boundaries of association”, in which I considered how, when viewing a certain local thoroughfare, I always thought of Bournemouth, for no very good reason. Though peculiar, this is a kind of mental activity that has been reported by others, for example, by John Cowper Powys (who could be a little strange at times) who commented that he “thought with” the Nothe fort in Weymouth and other features along the Dorset coast, and also by the very sane Jonathan Meades in his “Encyclopaedia of Myself”, when he refers to a particular T-junction in Salisbury where he always used to think of the Duke of Edinburgh. In my earlier blog, I suggested that these sort of odd associations could be described (though not explained) by Douglas Hofstadter’s concept of the implicosphere. There are, it seems, few limits to analogy and association, although convention denies respectability, meaningfulness or even sanity to the more unlikely ones.

One species of analogy which has become fashionable in recent years, even to the extent of being claimed as a neuro-atypical conceit by some who don’t actually enjoy / suffer from it, is synaesthesia, the condition in which an input in one sensory modality is experienced, fully or in part, in another, hence “coloured hearing” or experiencing the letter M as pea green. An enormous number of such oddities have been reported in the literature, to the extent that synaesthesia must be considered “normal”. However, confusion arises because of the quasi-synaesthetic terminology  implicit in everyday language – so that we speak of a loud shirt, a warm relationship, a sharp cheese, a brittle voice, or bright prospects. There is a blur between genuine (physiological) synaesthesia and the dead metaphors of linguistic commonplace.

In the same way that senses merge or transpose in proper synaesthesia, it has been suggested that other cognitive or affective fusions or crossovers could take place, possibly leading to exceptional abilities or creativity – for instance the (unproven) idea that Einstein might have experienced some commonality, some blurring, of spatial and mathematical skills, to his advantage. We should also recall that many words attract private, subtle emotional auras, which probably help us to remember them, and motivate us to action. Association is normal. More or less. It’s what we do when we think.

Quite where the dividing line lies between clinical synaesthesia and the normal associational nature of thought itself, is unclear. A fascinating zone exists, a mental melting pot, where we encounter, for instance, the schizotypal thought processes of some creative people (as well as those with mania, autism or schizophrenia), and the (usually unexamined) associations that lead to phobias and sexual fetishes. Mental association lies at the rich and unpredictable core of what it means to be a human being.

The American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) famously referred to the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of babyhood, a time when nothing made sense, when there was no understanding of what was important or of what “went with what”; a time before thought as adults know it. While “normal” in infancy, unless we escape from this kind of proto-thought we will soon be in trouble, yet if we still retain traces of this ability into adult life, enhanced creativity may be a consequence. So often we need to break the mould, we need unexpected strategies that apparently lack rationality. Though without any evident  personal creative benefits, here we must return to “Poppa Piccolino”, and to the most ridiculous implicosphere and proto-thought complex that I can recall from my early childhood.

Near my grandparents’ home in Flintshire was, and is, the Queensferry Bridge. Back in the day it was heavily used by vehicles travelling between Manchester or Merseyside and the North Wales coast and was painted a serious “engineering” grey; today it is coloured a ludicrous bright blue, as befits the banality of our times, and is by-passed by an uninteresting structure carrying the A494 dual carriageway. The Ferry Bridge, as I and the locals called it, or what is now formally known as the Old Queensferry, Jubilee or Blue Bridge, has been granted Grade II listed building status since 2005 – and I should think so too. Designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson and built by Sir William Arrol and Company  between 1925 and 1927, it is a double bascule bridge of unique design, although a few fairly similar structures exist elsewhere, in Chicago, for instance.

For a considerable portion of my childhood much of my thinking was “with this” bridge, and “Poppa Piccolino” – the tune and lyrics, which start with “All over Italy ...” - were fused intimately with it. Along with, er, the colour grey, hair clippers, plasticine, fears of fish and thunderstorms, empty low loaders, and much else, now unfortunately (or mercifully) forgotten. A “blooming, buzzing confusion” it certainly was. As implicospheres go it was impressive and insane; it was in my brain – perhaps it was my brain. I was in it; it was me. If anyone ever posthumously dismantles my neuronal architecture someone will need to go out and stop the traffic, otherwise who knows what might happen. Cars might plunge into the tidal River Dee. Meanwhile I propose the term “object synaesthesia” for this kind of thought process.

Mayola

My visits to art exhibitions are usually alone, or with a close family member, and it’s rare that I’m accompanied by a friend. On Saturday, however, such was the case at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, and I found great pleasure in discussing what we liked and disliked, what worked for us and what didn’t, comparing thoughts and observations.

Over many years I’ve attended the Summer Exhibition, not infrequently leaving with the thought “never again”. Whatever one’s views on art, whatever one’s tastes, it’s always quite an event, it’s sure to be interesting, sometimes provocative and infuriating, and likely to be fun, as it was exceptionally so last year, when curated by Grayson Perry. Though my friend is a frequent visitor to traditional art exhibitions and collections, and even at one time produced a bibliography of pop art, he finds that modern art, so-called, too often leaves him (as it does me) with a reaction of “so what ?” This was his first visit to a Summer Exhibition.

This year there was an underlying animal theme, plus everything else one has grown to expect, from crude sociopolitical propaganda right through to the yawn-inducing must-have “pile of old rubbish on the floor” exemplar of the “pile of old rubbish on the floor” school of pretentiousness, plus the usual Academicians with their increasingly tired views of splotchy skies over the Channel or the Gove-haunted squares of South Kensington, on offer at pisstakingly egotistical prices. Quite remarkably blatant were parodic updates of Bruegel and Bosch, Hopper and Hamilton, Riley and Ruscha, in a show curated by Jock McFadyen, or as the sponsor’s preface in the catalogue calls him, Jock McFayden. Whatever his McMoniker, his evident painterly USP consists of large indifferent skies separated from large indifferent foregrounds by a thin horizontal band of decayed commercialised urbanised grot. What not to like ?

One of the purposes of art, allegedly, is to challenge the status quo, but this year’s show lazily endorses the assumed left liberal metropolitan stance on current subjects of concern and controversy, Brexit included, and could have been compiled by the BBC. This year there were more paintings on display than ever, climbing crazily up the walls well out of comfortable viewing range, and there was some carelessness in what we are now supposed to call the metadata. One work by George Shaw, of a wonderfully drab suburban back-lot (Coventry, presumably), is transposed with its neighbour in the catalogue. 

“Would I want it on my living room wall ?” and “would I want to sit looking at it ?” are criteria my friend and I share. Well, I adore tigers, but … “Does it make me dead jealous that I didn’t do it myself ?” is an additional conceit of mine, and this year there was only one such qualifying work. It didn’t grab me initially, but I photographed it, and only later did I get the “wow” moment of awe and envy. The painting is called “Mayola”, and is by Salvatore Fiorello. “Mayola” is an odd word; perhaps suggestive of a kind of pandemic of paralysis and depression induced by a protracted spell of prime ministerial uselessness, or alternatively a healthy brand of unsaturated fatty acid-enriched cooking oil. What can it mean ?

“Mayola” (detail), Salvatore Fiorello

Oil on linen, on sale for £700, and featuring the backs of houses, it’s very much my kind of thing. Since the catalogue no longer lists the addresses of contributors – presumably in case enraged viewers want to get at them and do them harm – there’s no clue as to where Signor Fiorello resides or operates, and googling him elicits little. Like so many contributors to the Summer Exhibition over the years, it appears that he’s conspicuously talented but relatively unknown. My initial impression was that the subject of the painting was somewhere in London, most probably East, just possibly South, an outside chance of somewhere else. Pure guesswork, though informed by a lifetime of wandering around such locations with their characteristic domestic vernaculars and subtly unique ambiences. I took a gamble and consulted the A to Z. To my slight surprise and considerable delight the index lists a Mayola Road in Clapton, E5, not far from where my paternal grandmother spent part of her childhood. Yes, that would fit, absolutely, spot on, although, as I say, it’s only a guess. There’s no other Mayola in the capital. 

It would be great if the artist in question were to read this blog and to contact me. I’d certainly like to know more about him and see some of his other work. Once upon a time one used to read, sprayed onto walls and railway bridges, that ‘Clapton is God’, but for me, this year, and wherever it’s supposed to be, “Mayola” was the star of the show.

Implausible boundaries of association

Last week I was in the Potteries, famously dubbed by Arnold Bennett “the Five Towns”, of Hanley, Burslem, Tunstall, Fenton and Longton – but ironically not Stoke-on-Trent, the most well known of them all, the lazy synonym for the whole area. Hanley, not Stoke, is what counts for the “city centre” round here. Nor, among the official Five Towns, is Newcastle-under-Lyme, despite being less than a couple of miles up the hill from the centre of Stoke, a bustling node of commercial activity in its own right, and situated well within the overall built-up area of North Staffordshire.

Newcastle u/L is one of those towns that feels as though it should be somewhere else; there is absolutely no sense of it being in the Potteries. Arriving there, one has crossed an invisible but profound mental divide somewhere along the Hartshill Road. Psychologically it’s west-facing, and one feels the pull of rural dairy-farming counties like Cheshire or Shropshire, and even a sense of the Welsh hills, surely somewhere over there in the blue yonder. 

We must all have come across other localities that feel misplaced – to cite just three metropolitan examples: Greenwich, which should be detached from south-east London and re-attached to Portsmouth or somewhere else bluff, breezy and naval; Woolwich, which seemingly belongs in a particularly nasty part of the Midlands; and Croydon, another increasingly unpleasant wasteland, which surely is an escapee from greater Manchester, and should be towed there, becoming one of those grim high-rise satellite hubs whence operate child murderers and serially homicidal medics. Newcastle u/L is another of these place-out-of-place specimens, though a charming and uplifting one.

Intriguingly - often annoyingly if we are inclined to go on about it to our companions - places frequently remind us of other places, or we detect similarities or commonalities, analogies and the like. That’s one of the techniques we use for remembering and making sense of places. So Wisbech attracts mention of Leiden or somewhere else watery and Dutch; Whitstable with its Thames barges prompts recall of Maldon (Essex); we detect factors (visual as well as conceptual) that connect Sheffield and Pittsburgh; Coney Island improbably suggests New Brighton, and vice versa; Coventry and Plymouth (or even Dresden and Düsseldorf) contain layouts, designs and zeitgeisty aspirations which mentally we connect in a hazy kind of manner. The reasons are usually tangible or even obvious, and relate to architecture, tradition or function, industry or historical circumstance, to geographical arrangement. Brooklyn to Manhattan will always act as the role model for Gateshead to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, or Birkenhead to Liverpool.

Slightly less tenable are the associations we make with places for what we might call “public” reasons (such as a catastrophe, or the birthplace of someone famous), or “private” ones (we once missed a train there, heard some bad news there, or went to college with someone who had grown up there).

Thus we can consider a spectrum of more or less sensible reasons why our geographical environment should be psychologically – though very subjectively - wired up the way it is. 

But then there are those locational private associations for which no reliable logical explanation can be found. Associations that make no sense and offer no useful information. About a mile from where I live is a long road, popularly used as a commuter rat run, called Boundary Road. It’s quite hilly, goes up and down a bit, is lined by fairly expensive housing, has a few shops and a school, but is otherwise unremarkable. As far as I know it celebrates no political boundary, although until the last few decades or so was right on the edge of the built-up area. Oh, and one other thing. For as long as I can remember there’s one particular stretch of it that invariably makes me think of Bournemouth. 

Not much like Bournemouth, is it. The only reason I can find for this apparent absurdity is that, when I was ten, I suffered from pneumonia, and afterwards went on holiday to Bournemouth to help with my recuperation. Bournemouth acquired very exciting and positive attributes in my young mind (most of those attributes have now vanished, thanks to experience), and it may be that Bournemouth was the topic of conversation on an early post-illness walk with my parents along Boundary Road – which in those days would have been largely devoid of motor vehicles. Other than that explanation, it’s not a reasonable association to make, and even when claimed as some sort of location-based analogy for healthful recovery it’s completely bonkers. But, yes folks, that’s how we are. Bonkers – that’s the beauty of human thought.

In his 2006 work “The Human Touch – Our part in the creation of the universe”, the playwright, novelist and translator Michael Frayn remarked that “there’s no limit to the volume of analogical traffic that our thinking can bear, to the layers of sense that can be read into something …” Growing up in suburban Surrey he may have had his own version of Boundary Road to savour, but in any event his is an assertion with which I can agree. Anything can remind one of anything. And occasionally does.

Association is the process by which we think, how one thought leads to another. When hypertext first became popular, people noticed that it represented something that we do all the time. They said “it’s so natural, it’s how we think”. No longer restricted by the formality of sentences we were able to let rip exactly as we felt inclined, for the mind is a minefield – a mindfield – of potential “hot links”. Boundary Road to Bournemouth is an implausible but, clearly, valid exemplar of this principle. Just try popping it into a classification system, though, and its converse, an information retrieval system, and see what chaos results. You would think that there should be a limit on what associations are sensible. Well, you might be right to think that, but in practice, there’s no such thing. And for that we should be grateful, for if it were so, genuine creativity would be even more elusive than it already is

.

Douglas Hofstadter – famously, gloriously - is a polymathic American cognitive scientist who has investigated the processes of analogy and creativity more deeply than just about anyone. His core ideas can be found in several major volumes, one of which is his 1997 classic, “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies”. One crucially relevant contribution that Hofstadter makes to our discussion here relates to what he calls the implicosphere, a multidimensional conceptual space, which allows the placing of concepts with their blurry edges, and the mapping of one mental structure onto another. This has potential for explaining some kinds of creativity, and also for linking Boundary Road and Bournemouth. Simply put, it’s word association taken to its limits of plausibility, to the region of extremely thin semantic atmospheres, to the outer suburbs of meaning where homegoing office workers zip along avoiding the congestion on the ring road.

Most of our concepts are wordless, claims Hofstadter, gathering around a conceptual skeleton that - somewhat paradoxically – traditionally had no name of its own. Therefore to rectify this deficiency he coined the term "implicosphere" to mean all the potential (infinite, indefinable, unpredictable) concepts which can be fused or attached to such conceptual skeletons, all those terms or ideas which have the potential to be seen as possessing similarity to a core concept. Here, I suppose, the core concept is “Boundary Road”.

Selection of valid candidates for inclusion in an implicosphere appears to be more or less subjective, being effected unconsciously and automatically. It involves a very rapid, instinctive, complex and multifaceted kind of indexing, analogy-formation, and classification by association, and the principle is not restricted to words per se. Thoughts about places – atmospheres, imagery – can also be relevant. Thoughts about anything.

Hofstadter states that the implicosphere surrounding any idea is capable of expanding far beyond initial expectations, and though there must be a blurred limit where it no longer works realistically, it is difficult to specify where that horizon might lie. Therefore, somewhere in the long tail of associations one might make with Boundary Road, lies “Bournemouth”. Which is a long way from the Potteries, where we started.